Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art 9780812204995

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Haunted Visions

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Haunted Visions Spiritualism and American Art

Charles Colbert

university of pennsylvania press philadelphia

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colbert, Charles, 1946– Haunted visions : spiritualism and American art / Charles Colbert. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4325-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Art, American—19th century. 2. Spiritualism—United States—History. 3. Spiritualism in art. I. Title. N6510.C65 2011 701'.08—dc22 2011001800

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction: The History and Teachings of Spiritualism

vii 1

Chapter 1. Who Speaks for the Dead?

21

Chapter 2. Reenchanting America

61

Chapter 3. Revelations by Daylight

92

Chapter 4. Ghostly Gloamings

122

Chapter 5. Land of Promise

153

Chapter 6. Romantic Conjurations

182

Chapter 7. The Critic as Psychic

210

Chapter 8. Lessons in Clairvoyance

233

Postscript

250

Notes

257

Selected Bibliography

303

Index

315

Acknowledgments

321

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Illustrations

1. “Psychic State,” from Davis, Magic Staff

5

2. Paul, Evangelist Campmeeting

7

3. “Fowler’s Phrenological Head”

9

4. Carter, “Col. Matt Clary and Attendant Spirits”

13

5. Tombstone of Mary Barber

22

6. Milleson, “Apotheosis”

24

7. Tombstone of Hannah Chapman

25

8. Tombstone of Stella Heywood

27

9. Mrs. Blair, “Bouquet of Flowers”

28

10. Barber (attr.), “From Holy Mother Wisdom to Elder Ebenezer”

30

11.

31

Anderson, “Spirit Carrie Miller”

12. Dexter, Bust of Theodore Lyman

33

13. Powers, Mary Sargent Duncan

39

14. Powers, Proserpine

41

15. Powers, Elizabeth Gibson Powers

42

16. Powers, Martha Endicott Peabody Rogers

43

17.

44

Powers, Cornelius Vanderbilt

18. Hosmer, Puck

48

19. Hosmer, Will o’ the Wisp

51

20. Bowman Mausoleum

54

viii

Illustrations

21. Giovanni Turini, John Bowman

55

22. Interior of Bowman Mausoleum

56

23. Bowman House

57

24. Apport, “Old Roman lamp”

59

25. Story, Libyan Sibyl

63

26. Powers, Fisher Boy

71

27. Powers, America

74

28. Powers, California

76

29. “Mental—Spirituelle”

79

30. Quidor, Money Diggers

80

31. Hosmer, Oenone

87

32. Mount, “Spirit Drawing”

95

33. William Mount, “Portable Studio, Diary”

101

34. William Mount, Long Island Farmhouses

104

35. Shepard Mount, Old Double Door

106

36. Lane, The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe

112

37. “The Sun of the Universe”

113

38. “Norman’s Woe”

114

39. Church, The Wreck

118

40. Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 2

128

41. Whistler, Arrangement in Black: Lady Archibald Campbell

131

42. Whistler, Arrangement in Black: Senor Pablo de Sarasate

134

43. Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac

137

44. Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver

141

45. Tintoretto, Origin of the Milky Way

146

Illustrations

ix

46. Inness, Valley of the Olives

156

47. Residence of O. S. Fowler

158

48. Inness, Lake Nemi

160

49. Inness, Ampezzo Pass, Titian’s Home

163

50. Photograph of Portrait of Ella Leamon-Leach

168

51. Inness, Sundown

174

52. Inness, Home at Montclair

176

53. Johnny Appleseed

181

54. Fuller, Fedelma

191

55. Fuller, Winifred Dysart

193

56. Ryder, Joan of Arc

197

57. Ryder, Jonah

199

58. Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens

201

59. Heidelberg Electric Belt

203

60. Ryder, Toilers of the Sea

205

61. Ryder, Moonlit Cove

208

62. Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold

220

63. Sarcophagus or large urn with cover

221

64. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin

223

65. Corot, Balmy Afternoon

226

66. Jarves, James Jackson Jarves

230

67. Henri, Laughing Child

239

68. Henri, Spanish Gypsy Mother and Child

241

69. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre

252

70. Rimmer, Interior/Before the Picture

253

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Introduction

The History and Teachings of Spiritualism

The flourishing of Spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with a growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high esteem. The simultaneity was not entirely fortuitous. Puritan austerity and republican simplicity seemed increasingly passé to the consumer culture that emerged in the Victorian era. But old mores had to be replaced with new ones that endorsed the pleasures commodities now offered. Painting and sculpture were especially problematic in this context because they seemed purely decorative; what greater purpose could they possibly serve? Spiritualism resolved the quandary by identifying them as the loci of psychic energies. Those intent on particularizing the enthrallment art exercised over its newfound devotees found an explanation in these magnetic powers. The sanctification implied was a ready resource for proponents of Modernism who sought to extol art as the last refuge of authentic experience in a society beguiled by commercialism. Faith and aesthetic theory commingled and proved an important motive in the advent of Modernism in this country. Modernism’s identity continues to spark debate. It was long associated with the logic that prompted Max Weber to proclaim the “disenchantment of the world.” According to this outlook, the triumph of the scientific method obliges the rational individual to recognize that in the social and physical environment “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” This principle was given its aesthetic formulation in Clement Greenberg’s famous dictum about Modernism being an exercise in self-criticism, but in recent years scholars have begun to question whether the nice precision of such schemas comes at the cost of accuracy. This book takes its cue from Alex Owen’s remarks about the intellectual climate in Britain at the end of

2

Introduction

the nineteenth century. We must recognize, she contends, “that a significant constituency of modern-minded women and men were engaged in a dialogue with spirituality that involved the recuperation of modes of thought that rationalism dismissed as irrational.” She goes on to propose that conventional “definitions of post-Enlightenment modernity that assume the unambiguous meaning of secularization” need to be reexamined. Similar considerations apply to American culture where, then as now, faith has generally been a more pervasive arbiter of lifestyles than across the Atlantic. This inclination led many thoughtful individuals to adopt what George Cotkin calls “reluctant modernism,” an attitude that embraced technological innovation and current efforts to govern by means of professional bureaucracies while also seeking to preserve religious values.1 An understanding of Spiritualism’s place in this context requires a familiarity with its principles and history. The synopsis of these that follows concludes with a brief review of the chapters and the reasoning behind their sequence.

Spiritualism On its birth in 1848, Spiritualism was promptly cast into an arena of sectarian strife. Fierce competition raged among the diverse religions in America for the loyalty of citizens who were free to choose the denomination that most suited their inclinations. For decades, the mainline Protestant churches had had to contend with the Evangelical and millennial movements spawned by the Second Great Awakening. The formalism of the former vied with the emotionalism of the latter, but not everyone was satisfied with these alternatives. There were those who hoped to rise above the fray by appealing to an impartial referee: science. Spiritualism attracted such individuals because it vowed to test its claims by empirical means. The idea took, and soon trance speaking and séances spread throughout the nation as growing numbers sought to establish direct, and supposedly verifiable, contact with the dead. Other factors contributed to Spiritualism’s popularity. It coalesced with the cult of domesticity by conducting its services in the dining room or parlor. With Romanticism and the feminization of culture came a heightened appreciation of the ties of affection; Spiritualism promised to maintain these beyond the grave. In a country where traditions were weak and mobility great, its practice of communing with the dead offered a sense of continuity and community, especially to those who had left their ancestral homes

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

3

to answer the call of the frontier. Underlying all these enticements, however, was Spiritualism’s promise of personal survival after death. In making this claim, it enshrined bourgeois ideals of individuality at a time when the middle class had impressed its stamp indelibly on American culture. Much of the sway mainline churches held over congregants derived from their governance of the rituals that ushered the dead into a world beyond recall. This control would be greatly compromised, however, if that realm was not as inaccessible as upholders of the established creeds maintained. The challenge posed by Spiritualism was part of a larger debate about authority abroad in Jacksonian America. Just as ordinary citizens were demanding a greater voice in the corridors of power, so there were those determined to have a say in matters pertaining to the afterlife.

The “Rochester Rappings” Young Kate Fox precipitated the events that led to the advent of Spiritualism when, late in March 1848, she resolved to discover the source of the mysterious noises that had resounded for several weeks through her home in western New York. Addressing the entity presumed responsible for the disturbance as “Mr. Splitfoot,” she commanded it to “do as I do.” The elevenyear-old then clapped her hands, and to the astonishment of her parents, John and Margaret, and her elder sister, Margaret, thumps equal in number to the claps responded immediately. When repeated experiments brought the same results, the neighbors in their hamlet of Hydesville were called in to witness the strange goings-on. A code was quickly improvised, and those assembled learned that the unseen visitor was one Charles B. Rosna, a peddler who had been murdered in the house some five years earlier by a previous tenant.2 The disturbances in the Fox household were hardly unprecedented; disgruntled spirits had been banging on walls to acquaint the living with their grievances for centuries. The novel factor in this case was a penny press ravenous for sensational news. Soon millions were reading about the strange happenings in Hydesville, but determining the number who actually became votaries is problematic due to the want of precise criteria that defined membership. Many in the traditional Protestant denominations wove the doctrine into their received beliefs; some adopted it temporarily in times of grief; others ventured out on their own while maintaining their faith in Christ; and still others abandoned Christianity entirely. Some estimates have

4

Introduction

put the number of believers as high as eleven million, though this seems excessive. One reliable contemporary, Robert Dale Owen, mentions three million, while Nancy Rubin Stuart recently cut that figure by two-thirds. Perhaps we are best served by Ann Braude’s characterization of Spiritualism as a ubiquitous feature of antebellum society; its influence, especially in the artistic community, extended well beyond those who unequivocally identified themselves as devotees.3 Thanks to such modern marvels as the telegraph and steam powered printing press, word of the Fox wonders quickly reached the remotest corners of the nation, but the entire incident might have been passed off as an oddity had there not been a public prepared to deem it worth consideration. The Second Great Awakening was the seedbed of this development. In western New York this was especially true because the rapid settlement that followed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 left much of the population beyond the reach of the traditional churches. Residents were obliged to find salvation wherever they could. In the early 1840s, for example, they f locked to William Miller, a minister whose predictions of an imminent apocalypse galvanized many to abandon their worldly possessions and ascend the mountaintops. Others were drawn to the revivals organized regularly by itinerant preachers, and the enthusiasm characteristic of the region led to its reputation as the “burned-over district.”4 Kate and Margaret Fox stirred this hornets’ nest anew when they agreed in November 1849 to demonstrate their powers to call up the dead on stage in Rochester. The sensation of what became known as the “Rochester rappings” spawned rumors of witchcraft and led to the family’s expulsion from the Methodist church for having consorted with the devil. Suspicions of a different kind arose after a group of physicians in Buffalo examined the girls and concluded the raps were produced by subtle movements of the toe and knee joints.5 While this report animated skeptics, Spiritualists pointed out that the sounds originated at a distance from the children and divulged information about persons, living and dead, whom the sisters did not know. Charles B. Rosna had taken it upon himself to alert the Foxes of the wrong committed in their house, but the spirits were not always so eager to initiate contact with mortals. A dependable means of communicating with the dead had to be devised before a faith premised on this practice could succeed. Mesmerism, which had become a fad in the United States in the late 1830s, answered this need. In the eighteenth century, Franz

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

5

Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) proposed that an ether, which either resembled, or was identical with, such “imponderable fluids” as light, electricity, and magnetism, pervaded both interstellar space and the human body. Disease arose whenever this fluid was unbalanced in an individual, and it was the practitioner’s task to restore health by infusions of the energy, or “animal magnetism,” he possessed in excess. Subsequent investigators encountered behavior unanticipated by Mesmer. Subjects who went into a profound trance, known as the “superior condition,” often conversed with the dead as their souls swam in currents of a cosmic ether (Figure 1). Americans were fascinated with the tales these travelers told, and by the 1850s, Robert Fuller notes, the Mesmeric trance “had entered into the common stock of ideas from which many took their religious bearings on life. Its theories and methods promised to restore individuals, even unchurched ones, to harmony with the cosmic scheme.”6 Spiritualism adopted the theories and practices of Mesmerism, an act that constituted an implicit criticism of the violent movements and clamorous outbursts associated with revivalism. The Methodists took the lead in these matters, devising a “shout” tradition to emulate the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and thus sanctify the ground on which believers gathered. Jeremiah Paul’s illustration of one such gathering includes a

Figure 1. “Psychic State,” from Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 5.

6

Introduction

number of incredulous spectators on either side who reflect the aversion outsiders often felt toward these practices (Figure 2). Such viewers complained that the emotional displays represented a willful capitulation of the rational faculties to a dangerous “enthusiasm.” Spiritualists inherited from philosophical Mesmerism (in contrast to the sensational performances often enacted on the popular stage) a preference for quietude; hence they joined the ranks of those who stigmatized the Evangelicals as enthusiasts. Much of the new religion’s appeal rested on its advocacy of a moderate mysticism; like the Methodists, it sanctioned an experiential relationship with the supernatural, but in doing so sought to avoid the “excesses” of ecstasy.7

Andrew Jackson Davis and the Doctrine of Spiritualism Such theological niceties were not the invention of the Fox sisters, who remained largely indifferent to the implications of the movement they inaugurated. The theoretical framework that propelled Spiritualism beyond the sensations of the Rochester rappings came from Andrew Jackson Davis. Widely celebrated as the “Poughkeepsie seer” for the alacrity with which he fell into the superior condition, Davis set down in a series of volumes, dictated while in this state, the principles that generally guided believers. Davis began publishing his pronouncements in 1847; they were, then, already in circulation when the events in Hydesville commenced. Much of his inspiration came from conversations with the spirits of Galen (130?–200?) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). The Greek physician’s communications underline the importance Davis and most Spiritualists attached to health as a condition crucial to personal equanimity in this world and the next. Swedenborg, the Protestant mystic, was in many respects the progenitor of Spiritualism and had much to impart to his American disciple.8 It was Swedenborg who provided the essentials for a faith premised on communications with the deceased. His contentions that heaven resembles earth (with houses, streets, parks, and the like) and is populated exclusively by the souls of deceased mortals proved especially influential. Davis integrated these ideas with Mesmeric notions about magnetic fluids as a means of achieving regular access to the dead. From science came the conviction that gradual progress, such as exemplified in the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) governed the nature of existence. It follows, Davis concluded, that death entails neither radical transfiguration nor bodily resurrection at a Last Judgment. Personal proclivities

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

7

Figure 2. Jeremiah Paul, Evangelist Campmeeting. n.d., Billy Graham Center Museum, Wheaton, Illinois.

and appearances are transferred from one realm to the next, where they improve continuously. Everyone is destined for heaven, or what he calls the Summerland, a world much like our own but free of its travails. Sin is merely an absence of virtue: it is not inherited from Eve. The doctrines of total depravity, predestination, and vicarious atonement are replaced by arguments proclaiming humanity’s innate innocence and unlimited potential. Eventually, everyone will communicate with the dead, but the spirits are still evolving, Davis warns, and should not necessarily be considered infallible. So compelling is the evidence relating to the integrative function of the “imponderable fluids,” Davis announces, that the supposed dichotomous relationship between mind and body no longer holds. Instead, the two exist on a continuum, one that encourages the believer to adopt an attitude of moderation towards matters metaphysical rather than view them in terms of antitheses and conflict. Physical well-being affects one’s mental constitution, and the latter never entirely transcends its corporeality, even on entering the Summerland. After all, only a spirit possessed of some physicality could rap on walls and move furniture. In order to amplify these tenets, Davis turns to phrenology, the popular cerebral physiology of the day. The invention of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and Johan Gaspar

8

Introduction

Spurzheim (1766–1832), phrenology began to filter steadily into America at the end of the Napoleonic wars and became a pervasive part of the culture during the Jacksonian era (Figure 3). It was founded on the premise that the brain could be studied much like any other bodily organ. In pursuing this insight, Gall hoped to dispel the fog of metaphysical and philosophical speculation surrounding the study of the mind. He would do so by replacing inductive reasoning with empirical methods. Evidence was gathered by measuring the heads of different personality types to determine the correlation between character and cranial form. The diversities that appeared, Gall contended, were due to the various faculties, or organs, of the brain. Each was devoted to a specific mode of cogitation and, like a muscle, exercise caused each to expand and modify the configuration of its osseous shelter. When the diverse “bumps” were compared, an “objective” reading of an individual’s psychological orientation resulted. This theory, now discredited, permitted Victorians to reify their values by projecting them not only on the shape of the skull, but also, by virtue of the brain’s influence on the organic constitution (according to the mind/body principles discussed above), on the entire figure. As a discipline dedicated to the exposition of a transcendental anatomy, phrenology’s influence on the visual arts went deeper, and is more specifiable, than any Transcendentalism devised in Concord. It appealed to Spiritualists because it affirmed their contentions about the integration of spirit and matter by illustrating the dependence of the mind, or soul, on the physical and temperamental peculiarities of the individual. And since these survived in an attenuated form in the afterlife, so did the phrenological organization; without such continuities, one would be unrecognizable to those left behind. Spiritualists were further encouraged by phrenology’s advocacy of a progressive view of human nature, one also unencumbered by belief in original sin and kindred doctrines. As Spiritualism evolved, it was seen to epitomize much of this thought, and in calling for a reassessment of its importance Page Smith notes that it served “as a kind of organizing ‘center’.” Without it, he contends, diverse reform movements such as phrenology would not “have acquired the feeling of a common purpose that seems to be an essential ingredient in what we might call sustainable reform.” In Davis’s case, phrenology allowed him to locate the soul’s exertions with great precision. When a particular faculty was in use, the energy it emitted could be detected by clairvoyance. While observing a woman in mourning, for instance, he perceived “a soft ethereal light playing just above her head, [which signaled] action in the organs of hope and veneration.”9 These sentiments, however refined, were anchored in the

Figure 3. “Fowler’s Phrenological Head,” frontispiece from O. S. Fowler, The Practical Phrenologist (Boston: O.S. Fowler, 1869).

10

Introduction

physical structure of the brain, and while traditional metaphysics saw only antipathy between mind and body, Davis found harmony.

Spiritualism Evolves Spiritualism’s determination to make the world anew allied it with a wide range of antebellum crusades intent on perfecting humanity. In addition to phrenology, it embraced abolition, temperance, vegetarianism, and dress reform.10 Feminism proved to be an especially close partner. The Fox rappings were still echoing through Hydesville when delegates to the first women’s rights convention gathered some twenty miles away at Seneca Falls. Like the members of this assembly, Spiritualists pressed for equality in marriage and property rights. They were also instrumental in encouraging women— mediums—to address public assemblies. It is not coincidental, for example, that the first woman to run for the presidency, Victoria Woodhull, was a Spiritualist. And when a trance speaker such as Cora Hatch called on the spirits to provide a topic for one of her lectures, they often obliged by airing their grievances about the oppression of women. She provided the model for Henry James’s Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians, and its characterization of a meeting Verena attends as a rendezvous of “witches and wizards, mediums and spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals” encapsulates much of contemporary sentiment on these matters.11 Inspirational speakers of Hatch’s ilk were avidly followed in the 1850s, but the séance emerged as the preferred method of contacting the dead at this time. To create an inviting environment, the sitters at such sessions had to observe certain conditions. Although allowances could be made, eight was the preferred number of attendees; their arrangement around a table was dictated, whenever possible, by the alternation of positive and negative temperaments (usually male and female) in order to enhance the circulation of psychic currents. Women constituted the majority of mediums, and phrenologists identified the best as possessing a nervous-bilious temperament. Shades were closed and lights dimmed. Good ventilation enhanced the electrical content of the air. Songs might be sung at first, but usually a state of anticipatory silence was maintained. The participants indulged in neither the petitionary prayers given by members of the mainline sects nor the bodily gyrations of camp meetings; instead, they cultivated a meditative attitude which, as we shall see, could be readily transferred to the contemplation of art.12

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

11

As the movement gained momentum, efforts were made to organize believers. As early as 1851, a conference of the faithful assembled in New York, and within two years regular Sunday services were inaugurated. Although some historians have claimed that interest waned toward the end of the decade, all agree that it surged during the Civil War as families yearned to contact those fallen on the battlefield. Perhaps it was the urgency of events that prompted followers to convene their first national gathering in 1864. This took place in Chicago and was followed by similar meetings in Philadelphia in 1865 and Rochester in 1868. Although groups claiming to represent nationwide constituencies arose, they struggled against the deep-seated distrust of organized religion Spiritualism inherited from the antinomian strains in American culture.13 The history of Spiritualism is less about the building of institutions and the tensions such developments breed than about the personal initiatives taken by a wide array of individuals scattered over several continents. Although raps of the kind Charles Rosna employed to contact the Foxes remained a staple at séances, the years following the Rochester rappings witnessed a prodigious growth of techniques intended to invoke the dead. Not content to spend laborious hours tapping out codes, some spirits began to move furniture, ring bells, play instruments, and speak through the medium or use her hand to write messages. Soon the more determined among them commenced materializing portions of their bodies, and floating heads and hands started flitting around the sitters. In 1860, the first “full-form materialization” arrived at the behest of Leah Fox Fish Underhill, the older sister of Kate and Margaret Fox. Such manifestations became increasingly popular in the 1870s with the introduction of “cabinet séances,” a practice that entailed the sequestration of the medium in a curtained corner where she coaxed a phantom to appear. The entities who emerged from behind the drapery were usually female (skeptics thought them remarkably like the medium) and frequently given to wearing long, white gowns. Speculation about these manifestations led to a consensus that they were produced either by psychic emanations from the medium or from the spirit’s power to condense the universal ether sufficiently to permit visibility. Both explanations call attention to an assumption central to the understanding of Spiritualism and its influence on art. Traditional angels and devils, one early historian of the movement notes, existed outside the human order. They entered the material realm by rending the fabric of time and space. In contrast to these sudden, miraculous appearances, Spiritualist manifes-

12

Introduction

tations emerged gradually out of the environment, a process that usually required a propitious alignment of the temperamental traits of the sitters with the psychic forces operating in the universal ether. Because the latter caused such phenomena, they occurred within the natural order. Ether created the continuum between spirit and matter mentioned above, it constituted a pervasive potential, a spiritually fecundating constant which only required a fertile mind to engender the desired results. Nature, not a remote, inscrutable deity, was responsible for the events that earned Spiritualism its renown.14 God rarely enters Spiritualist discourses; when he does, the discussion is generally about first causes or sustaining energies, and the notion he intervenes to enforce a covenant with his chosen people finds no support. When searching for purpose in the universe, believers lowered their sights by directing all inquiries to the spirits. Mention of ether raises the issue of the time-determined vocabulary of Spiritualism. As we will see, ether is one of a number of terms fraught with implications in the nineteenth century that have largely dissipated over the years. It is often necessary to review aspects of the phraseology artists and critics sympathetic to the movement employed in order to follow their reasoning. In discussing gender conventions prevalent during the Gilded Age, Griselda Pollock offers a precept equally applicable to the study of its religious beliefs: “If we acknowledge the difference of history, that even ways of thinking and using common words may vary from our present usage, we need to read the past, to examine its inscriptions as if we were deciphering the monuments from a lost civilization whose alphabet we can hardly yet decode.”15 No Baedeker exists for those who embark on this undertaking, and one is best served by remaining as alert as possible to the pitfalls involved in the parsing of certain words and phrases. If spirits could materialize, couldn’t the camera capture them? Thoughts to this effect must have occurred to William Mumler when he began to experiment with spirit photography in 1861. The events that followed his decision to translate this idea into a commercial venture, first in Boston and then in New York, where he moved in 1868 and was tried for fraud and larceny in 1869, stand as one of the most celebrated, or notorious, episodes in the history of Spiritualism, and of late have received considerable scholarly scrutiny. Here we need only touch on the few particulars relevant to this study. Mumler’s example served as an inspiration for photographers across America and Europe who discovered their psychic powers enabled them to achieve

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

13

similar results. In Mrs. Carter’s portrait of Matt Clary, for instance, the subject looks forward, seemingly unaware of the disembodied heads floating around him (Figure. 4). These heads belong to spirits who are drawn to the sitter because he thinks of them fondly. Distances in the celestial sphere are measured by affections, not miles. The potential presence of spirits is constant; they respond to even the slightest sympathetic ripple in the ether. Mumler asked his clients to concentrate on the individual they most wished to see, assuming the magnetic attraction of such remembrances would contribute to a successful photograph. Those so invoked, however, only appeared during the developing process, hence Clary’s unawareness of the beings circling him.16

Figure 4. Mrs. L. Carter, “Col. Matt Clary and Attendant Spirits,” Gallery of Spirit Art, and Illustrated Quarterly 1 (1883): opposite 88.

14

Introduction

Spiritualists considered these images as irrefutable testimony of an afterlife and therefore a rebuke to materialists. The perils of atheism troubled believers from the beginning, but during the 1870s this threat seemed all the more menacing with the advance of Darwinism and the new prominence of what Alan Gauld calls “the cock-sure school of Empiricists.” For members of the generation that came of age in this decade, Gauld continues, “it must indeed have been no trivial affliction to find that the faith which had from childhood guided one’s actions and sheltered one from the cold fear of death was in danger of crumbling utterly away.” Instead of being the handmaiden of theology, science now seemed intent on usurping all authority in matters of ultimate meaning.17 In response to the pervasive pessimism these developments engendered, a number of distinguished intellectuals in England established the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Their course was followed three years later by a similarly-minded group of Americans. Neither society was a Spiritualist association in the strict sense: they charged themselves with determining the truth about such phenomena as apparitions, telepathy, automatism, haunted houses, and trances, and were prepared to go wherever the evidence led. Devoted Spiritualists often rejected their findings, claiming they were overly scrupulous in assessing data, but their imprimatur gave international prominence to a new crop of mediums, including Eusapia Palladino (although controversy surrounded her manifestations) and Leonora Piper. Indeed, one historian has labeled the years between 1880 and 1920 as “The Era of Great Mediums.”18 As noted above, Spiritualists did not view the Civil War as a hiatus; if anything, they redoubled their efforts in response to the fatalities caused by the hostilities. These activities continued unabated in the decades following the conflict. Within twenty years of its advent, then, Spiritualism had become an established, if somewhat diffuse, feature in the religious landscape of America. Utopian communities of the kind created in the antebellum era continued to be founded, and these often included summer camps that welcomed skeptics and believers alike to test the resident mediums. The most renowned of these, Lily Dale, opened in 1879 and continues to this day to be a major tourist attraction in western New York. These were the halcyon days of Spiritualism, but with prominence came scandal and controversy. A report issued in 1887 by the Seybert Commission, a committee of professors at the University of Pennsylvania tasked with evaluating Spiritualism, created a stir when it dismissed most of the principles the faith professed. Again, believers complained the evidentiary standards set by the investi-

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

15

gators made the results a foregone conclusion. While the findings were a source of distress, greater consternation arose a year later when Margaret and Kate Fox admitted they had produced the raps that won them acclaim by snapping their joints. This declaration confirmed the views of the Buffalo physicians and caused great rejoicing among the faith’s detractors. In the following year, 1889, the sisters recanted, attributing their lapse to monetary incentives offered by unscrupulous individuals. It is unlikely Spiritualists considered these events quite as consequential as did their adversaries; the girls had turned to alcohol as a means of coping with celebrity and were rather marginal figures by this time. These events were still fresh in everyone’s memory when the National Spiritualist Association of Churches was organized in 1893, but it flourished despite the negative publicity surrounding the sisters and emerged in the twentieth century as one of the most influential organizations within the movement. Spiritualists did not speak with one voice, hence it is difficult to generalize about their outlook at the end of the century; nevertheless, many remained decidedly optimistic, contending theirs was the faith that would supersede all others in the near future. A new era seemed imminent, one in which the spirits would be more palpably present.19 This scenario was actively promoted by Thomas Gold Appleton (1812–84), an artist and philanthropist whose charities included generous support for the fledgling Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His long interest in psychic phenomena led him to conclude, according to his biographer, “that the spirit-world is ever close to the world of matter; and that, with the advance of time, the slight barrier between them may be broken down.”20 Whether or not the reader is inclined to agree, there is no avoiding the fact Spiritualism is still with us. It is a prominent component of what Eugene Taylor calls the “shadow culture,” a collection of “New Age” beliefs intent on establishing “an experiential interpretation of higher consciousness.”21 If television, for example, is any indicator of the place a particular movement holds in the contemporary scene, then Spiritualism must rank high. One need only consider the number of prime-time hours devoted not only to fictional dramas based on the teachings of Spiritualism, but also to the several shows that purport to provide tangible, scientific evidence of its truth. Such circumstances incline one to ask, as Molly McGarry does, whether “magic decline[s] or [if] . . . it just seem[s] that way to academics.” The secularizing bias of historians she identifies as having led them to marginalize Spiritualism finds its counterpart in histories of art, where the

16

Introduction

religious beliefs of Americans are often treated summarily and Spiritualism hardly at all. In recent years, scholarship has begun to address this issue, and it is the aim of this book to continue the dialogue.22

A Brief Review Members of the mainline churches often profess their creeds simply because they were habituated to do so from childhood. Sunday services are part of a routine, and routines tend to excuse those caught up in them from scrutinizing their motives. The process allows one to locate belief apart from vocation; an artist might look elsewhere than faith for inspiration. One advantage of studying Spiritualism resides in the fact that the individuals who adopted it made a deliberate decision to do so. The sculptors considered in the first two chapters, Hiram Powers, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, and Henry Dexter, as well as the painters in those that follow, came to Spiritualism as a consequence of an event, usually a brush with the paranormal, that shook their beliefs to the foundations and caused them to forsake their received religion. Such experiences are likely to permeate one’s entire outlook, and the statuary reviewed here tends to bear this out. Identifying the Spiritualist theme, however, is not always a straightforward proposition; it often resides beneath the ostensible subject. Sculpture is a costly, often risky, undertaking, and those who create it cannot afford to alienate large numbers of potential clients by choosing subjects many would find objectionable. A figure readily associable with Spiritualist teachings could do this; hence, when not executing portraiture (where the content could be negotiated with a single patron), these sculptors turned to literary and mythological subjects. They tended to avoid an explicitly Christian imagery that would preclude the kind of readings they encouraged among their coreligionists. Those tied to the old dispensation, then, could see the work as a conventional illustration of popular passages in, for example, Shakespeare or Tennyson, but those who shared the sculptor’s beliefs could look deeper. In doing so, they would have every reason to suppose the image focused their thoughts in a manner that allowed them to channel the sentient energies present in the environment. This text is arranged in a roughly chronological order, and from four sculptors whose careers emerged in the antebellum era we turn to two paint-

The History and Teaching of Spiritualism

17

ers, William Sidney Mount and Fitz Henry Lane, who also flourished in these years. Mount is unavoidable because he documented his Spiritualist activities so extensively; unfortunately, the one painting created under the guidance of spirits, The Tease, is no longer locatable. Nevertheless, inferences can be drawn about existing works based on concerns that appear repeatedly in his Spiritualist diaries. Despite the clear evidence regarding Lane’s allegiance to the new faith, art historians persist in aligning his aesthetic with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson; what happens, this inquiry asks, if we shift the focus to beliefs we know the artist entertained. The fourth chapter begins the consideration of artists who matured after the Civil War. James McNeill Whistler compared the dark’s capacity to conjure revenants to its ability to cause changes in certain chemical compounds. In other words, he did not regard ghosts as miraculous, but, like the Spiritualists, considered them the consequence of natural processes that are constantly unfolding. What insight does this belief provide about the gloom that pervades his compositions? In proposing that contemporary ideas about ether assist in answering this question, the discussion also identifies Tonalism as a mode especially apt to express these concerns. Beyond its aesthetic appeal, the style made possible the conviction that art was not simply a substitute for religion; it inspired a higher state of consciousness, one that is repeatedly invoked in the criticism of Whistler’s work. Ether and Tonalism continue to figure significantly in the next chapter, which is dedicated to George Inness. Contemporaries mention the artist’s particular attachment to the spirit of Titian, but the consequences of this belief remain unexamined. Spiritualism legitimizes speculation about the possible mentoring the American received from the Italian master. Inness also favored the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and by viewing these in light of the economic theories propounded by Henry George (another preoccupation of the artist), we gain insight into the teleological implications of Inness’s compositions. His hazy landscapes provide a glimpse of a worldly environment in the process of evolving toward the sort of spiritual perfection only fully realizable in heaven. Two more Tonalists, George Fuller and Albert Pinkham Ryder, offer further variations on these themes in Chapter 6. Fuller’s late style, which exhibits the painterly approach that is largely responsible for his reputation today, matured at a time when he was frequently involved in Spiritualist activities. The heavy impastos he employs to enliven compositions that

18

Introduction

might otherwise seem routine embody notions about the artist’s power to impress his own psychic substance into the oils. Ryder, also a champion of the loaded brush, relies on the technique to capture nature’s therapeutic energies and transfer them to his audience. Viewers attuned to the beliefs both men shared might sense the spiritual emanations they not only illustrated but also sought to introduce into the material substance of the painting. The discussion shifts to criticism in Chapter 7, where James Jackson Jarves furnishes the example of a writer whose outlook was deeply influenced from childhood by his encounters with the departed. His survey of earlier civilizations and modern culture relies heavily on the assessment of their relative success in incorporating similar encounters into their imagery. In addition to illustration, the possibility a particular piece also harbors spiritual energies enters his evaluations. Jarves promoted the acquisition of original paintings because they permitted the viewer to enter into a rapport with the artist that could not be achieved with a copy. His writings summarize many of the issues reviewed in previous chapters and clarify how they arose in response to impulses within both Puritanism and positivism to devalue the art experience. In sanctifying the latter, Jarves sought to channel the conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age into socially beneficial enterprises. Robert Henri, the focus of the final chapter, brings these considerations into the twentieth century. The virtues of clairvoyance are repeatedly extolled in his lectures as a means of appraising materials and models. He took these words to heart, and his many images of children and other picturesque types are best understood as the consequence of a rapport that developed between the artist and sitter. Similar considerations underlie the principles Royal Cortissoz expounded in several books and in the numerous reviews he provided for the New York Herald Tribune. He resorts to clairvoyance as a means of implanting the aesthetic experience in the deeper recesses of the soul. Reliance solely on empirical analysis deprives the viewer of this intimacy because it makes the encounter an entirely external affair and therefore a superficial one. If art were to exercise any influence of consequence, if it were to possess a transformative potential, it had to touch the inner being. The ramifications of this outlook appear in William James’s theory of radical empiricism, which was engendered by similar concerns and likewise sought to project the mind into the environment. James, a philosopher sympathetic to the aims of Spiritualism, epitomizes the sentiments that led to the formation of reluctant modernism, and it is in this context that Henri’s oeuvre finds its home.

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Conclusion The works reviewed in this book do not resort to older “gothick” representations of phantoms and terrified mortals because such conventions involved notions about the sublime that seemed outdated. The psychic content of late nineteenth-century art resides beneath the surface and implies an existence that usually operates beyond the threshold of the senses. An observer attuned to this possibility enters a meditative state at the behest of these intimations and resonates sympathetically with them. His or her vision may also penetrate further into the physical matrix of the piece to divine the residuum of spiritual essence left by the artist. Spiritualism’s encouragement of an elusive, difficult content combined with its ideas about materials absorbing the identity of those who handled them to anticipate some of the central concerns of Modernism. But, again, its principles were never intended to abolish thoughts about the afterlife, rather they were regarded the last and most effective defense against a secularism devoid of faith. Because America had neither an established church nor a governmentally sanctioned academy, the need for a militant avant garde to oppose these institutions was less urgently felt here than, for example, in France. There, entrenched interests could only be overturned by the aggressive promotion of ideologies calculated to undermine their foundational beliefs. The strident Realism (including Impressionism) and materialism suited to French circumstances seemed less consequential on this side of the Atlantic. Reluctant Modernism acknowledged the possibility of attaining a higher level of consciousness while promoting a social agenda that was generally liberal in orientation. While Spiritualism was hardly alone in complying with similar directives (Transcendentalism and Eastern religions, among others, followed parallel paths), its particular virtue resided in its powers of persuasion. It did not dictate doctrine but asked the interested to consult their experiences. In artistic terms, this could mean meditating on a Tonalist landscape and feeling the inner stirrings this exercise engendered. This process had less to do with the elaborate literary programs often devised by Symbolists (which constitute one of the more retrogressive features of that movement) than with visceral sensations that bypassed their cerebral formulations and anticipated the prerogatives of abstraction. These attitudes contributed significantly to the campaign that wrested painting and sculpture from their marginal status in nineteenth-century

20

Introduction

America. Spiritualism’s ecumenical ambitions and notions about sentient energies capable of impregnating objects provided compelling reasons for sanctifying the arts. So elevated, they offered a means of uniting a diverse population dispersed across a vast continent. Here was a source of spiritual uplift, it was argued, that eschewed the doctrinal bickering prevalent among the traditional denominations to enlighten all who were willing to discard their prejudices. The story that follows, then, is one about the channeling of psychic forces into an aesthetic that would resonate harmoniously with the needs of an American society in the throes of urbanization and industrialization.

Chapter 1

Who Speaks for the Dead?

Spiritualism grew out of, and joined in, the debate about the nature and legitimacy of privilege that roiled Jacksonian society. The liberal orientation of believers generally set them against religious orthodoxy and the traditionalists who painted a dismal picture of humanity’s prospects. Conservatism posited power in an anointed few, persons of superior breeding capable of reining in the anarchic instincts prevalent among the common run of humanity, but Spiritualism valued the potential of each individual to imbibe wisdom from the psychic energies of the cosmos, no matter how lowly his or her station. One way these differences played out in matters of religion, as noted earlier, involved control over access to the dead. Was the memory of those who had passed on to be confined to the churchyard tombstones and like monuments sanctioned by the mainline clergy? Clearly, the Spiritualists did not think so; adopting a populist position, they were determined to let the dead speak for themselves. The ramifications of this stance are the theme of this chapter. In his novel about Spiritualism, The Undiscovered Country, William Dean Howells subscribes to conventional understanding when he has one of the characters remark about the death of another that it is all we can now know about him, “and neither he nor all the myriads that have gone that way can tell us anything more.”1 The task of devising a memorial for the deceased was left to the surviving family and friends, who tended to follow rather prescribed formulae. The Federalist-era grave of Mary Barber, for example, combines a colonial angel with a Neoclassical urn and willow trees (Figure 5). She was, the inscription laments, “with every grace supplied / unequal to a world of grief, [and hence] she died.” The Mary Barber who actually experienced life’s brief joys and sorrows is lost in these bland phrases, and as the century progressed, such epitaphs were increasingly disparaged. One observer remarked that the admonishment to “prepare for death and follow me” tended to weary people “to death, or within

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Figure 5. Tombstone of Mary Barber, 1796, Newton, Massachusetts. Photo by the author.

an inch of it, by reading [the line] . . . for the hundredth time.” No one was more resolute in decrying these customs than James Jackson Jarves, the critic whose Spiritualist beliefs will be discussed in another chapter. “We wag our heads,” he states, “as we go by grave-yard epitaphs, knowing them to be as great liars as the old Cretans. If one could always see the true epitaph in letters of fire shining within the outward one, he would be aghast at the difference.”2 These complaints suggest one source of Spiritualism’s popularity: it furnished the clairvoyance necessary to read “the true epitaph,” the words that expressed the deceased’s actual sentiments. The dead need no longer be bound by convention; they could speak freely, telling kith and kin precisely what was on their minds. If, as many complained, their communications were often trivial, they were also personal and hence likely to seem authentic. Heard at a séance was a remark or joke shared in bygone years with one close acquaintance, and the impact of this experience was often so profound as to make all the traditional epitaphs, and all the disquisitions on death delivered by learned clergymen, seem hollow by comparison.3 The angels that grace colonial tombstones represent transfigured souls: they depart the worldly sphere with no regrets to enter a realm of “total

Who Speaks for the Dead?

23

otherness,” one where the eternal adoration of God eliminates any prospect of reunion with family or friends. An enraptured husband, for example, would not even be aware of the wife who had been at his side for eons. But the spirit’s fate between the corpse’s internment and the Last Judgment remained problematic for Protestants; their abandonment of purgatory prompted many to claim that the soul slept until the apocalypse. John Calvin dismissed this idea and asserted instead that it rested, not slept, knowing itself to be in the presence of the divine. Only at the end of time, however, did it participate fully in God’s glory. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theologians sought more palatable alternatives by proposing an entry into paradise shortly after death. In the nineteenth century, further modifications fitted paradise with the comforts of the Victorian household.4 While the Summerland likewise abounded in domestic felicities, these constituted an environment quite distinct from that envisioned by orthodoxy. It not only welcomed all but also assigned each a station best suited to accommodate the character traits brought over from mortal existence. The Spiritualist case is ably articulated by Robert Dale Owen, the social reformer who became an ardent proponent of the faith. He notes that Christians view death as a hiatus, one in which a person’s animating essence ceases to exist. How then, he asks, could the entity who arose bear any resemblance to the one who died? Total annihilation, however brief, must imply total transformation. In this formula, death destroys the old human being and severs completely any connection with the soul that ascends to the celestial sphere. Is it not more reasonable to suppose, Owen asks, that death is merely a transition to another stage in what is a continuous life? This argument seeks to preserve individual identity, the sine qua non of Spiritualist immortality. The very fact that the departed communicated with the living suggested to another author that they were not in the state of torpor or suspended animation imagined by Calvinists and their orthodox allies. Andrew Jackson Davis’s experiences while ministering to the terminally ill confirmed these contentions. His clairvoyant powers enabled him to witness the birth of the spirit, briefly trailing an umbilical cord of vital electricity, at the moment of bodily death. The being that arose was an improved but recognizable version of the one who had just passed on.5 In S. Milleson’s rendering of the process, the soul departs the body at the moment of death and joins the awaiting spirits of friends and relatives (Figure 6). Nothing in this scene is explicitly Christian, and its emotional tenor is remote from the dread of death cultivated by contemporary Evangelicals, who, although they had dropped the doctrine of predestination, kept the hell fires burning.6

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Chapter 1

Figure 6. S. Milleson, “Apotheosis of the Passage of the Spirit from Earth to Spirit Life, Gallery of Spirit Art 1 (1883): opposite 92.

Hopedale Spiritualism’s optimism assured it a warm reception in such utopian societies as Oneida, Modern Times, and Hopedale. Members of the last of these, for example, were already devoted to Mesmerism, phrenology, temperance, hydropathy, abolitionism, and feminism when they read of the “Rochester rappings.” Although Adin Ballou had established the community in 1842 as a Universalist enclave, Spiritualism soon entered the register of favored reforms. Its teachings were put to practical use when the residents decided to create a garden cemetery in the late 1840s.7 We might expect the tombstones located in these bowered acres

Figure 7. Tombstone of Hannah Chapman, 1865, Hopedale Cemetery, Milford, Massachusetts. Photo by the author.

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Chapter 1

near Milford, Massachusetts, to display variations on the winged countenances employed in the colonial era since these soul portraits would seem to answer the needs of Spiritualists: such is not the case. Hannah Chapman’s grave, which depicts an attenuated triumphal arch above a roundel with clasped hands bridging the gap between heaven and earth, is typical of Hopedale’s imagery (Figure 7). An inscription urges the terrestrial hand to “Come Up Hither” and states that Hannah was “translated” in 1865. Other than her husband’s name, we learn little about her. This economy contrasts noticeably with the effusive lines engraved on Mary Barber’s stone. Hannah Chapman has been “translated,” changed from one form to another while remaining the same, not transfigured into a glorious member of the heavenly choir. It is her hand, we presume, that descends from above to grasp ours. The motif is not merely symbolic of the ties that bind heaven and earth, during séances; actual, palpable spirit hands often touched the faces and hands of those attending. 8 Chapman is not awaiting some apocalyptic event to usher her into a blissful existence; her death was a “birthday,” a time not to mourn but to celebrate an effortless entry into a new life.9 Stella Heywood’s stone, also in the Hopedale cemetery, states she “entered the life immortal” in 1871 (Figure 8). Carved beneath the framing Gothic arch is a bouquet, hardly a novel notion in funerary imagery, but flowers featured prominently in Spiritualist practices. Some clairvoyants specialized in depicting the bouquets brought by spirits (Figure 9), while others often mention them among the gifts offered by celestial visitors. Especially dramatic were the living flowers dropped on the table during séances by spirits who wished to announce their presence. Objects so delivered were known as “apports,” and while diverse artifacts arrived in this manner, flowers topped the list. Victorians endowed flowers with specific meanings to express love, friendship, and similar sentiments, but the sources relating to apports rarely mention this symbolism. Materializing out of the thin air, they articulated no profound philosophy; their very appearance assuaged humanity’s deepest fears.10

Shaker “Gift Images” The implications of apports come into relief when they are compared to the “gift images” created by the Shakers. From its beginnings in the late

Figure 8. Tombstone of Stella Heywood, 1871, Hopedale Cemetery, Milford, Massachusetts. Photo by the author.

Figure 9. Mrs. Blair, “Bouquet of Flowers,” Gallery of Spirit Art and Illustrated Quarterly 1 (1883): opposite 94.

Who Speaks for the Dead?

29

eighteenth century, the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” commonly known as the Shakers, encouraged members to commune with the spirit world. This practice, however, reached an unusual degree of intensity in 1837 when girls from the Watervliet society in New York began dancing and singing under the inspiration of angels. Other communities followed Watervliet’s lead in an episode purportedly prompted by the spirit of Mother Ann Lee (1736–84), the faith’s founder. What came to be known as “Mother’s Work” involved a series of communications sent over more than a decade by members of the first generation of believers to those who were too young to have known them in the f lesh. In its trance episodes and instigation by young girls, “Mother’s Work” anticipated the Rochester rappings. The dancing and singing were followed by drawing and painting, activities that resulted in elaborate compositions often addressed to specific individuals whose waywardness warranted attention. Miranda Barber’s “gift image” from Mother Ann to elder Ebenezer Bishop features the former riding a chariot in the right corner (Figure 10). Also depicted are trumpet-blowing angels from Revelation, soul-birds, flowers, harps, “Father Joseph’s Desk,” and diverse other furnishings. Unlike apports, these spiritual gifts did not materialize; they are schematic images that illustrate the treasures of heaven that are also attributes of an obedient soul. God, who rarely enters the imagery of clairvoyant artists, is present in the form of an all-seeing eye borrowed from the Masons. A cross alludes to vicarious atonement and personal mortification, doctrines the Shaker’s retrained from traditional Christianity. Barber’s narrative of the tribulations endured on her visionary journeys before she climbed the “Narrow Path” epitomizes these beliefs.11 Rarely narrow were the paths traveled by Spiritualists; they were bestrewn with flowers dropped by spirits who had little desire to admonish, and ascent was made less arduous by the heavenly hands ready to assist anyone who wished to grasp them. Moderation, not martyrdom, was the byword. Wella Anderson’s portrait of the spirit of Carrie Miller, made during a trance, also highlights the differences between Spiritualist and Shaker beliefs (Figure 11). A strong chiaroscuro endows the figure with a rotundity that contrasts markedly with the spare forms designed by Miranda Barber. The latter’s linearity is consistent with the austerity of the Shaker system, while Anderson’s manner reflects the gradualism of the Spiritualists. Worldly attributes survive in the afterlife, and one can imagine Miller

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Chapter 1

Figure 10. Miranda Barber (attributed to), “From Holy Mother Wisdom to Elder Ebenezer.” 1840s. Philadelphia Museum of Art; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Zieget.

stepping on a scale much as the other materialized spirits who had been weighed.12 To these dissimilarities in style can be added those of technique. Shaker paintings claimed to reproduce images seen in heaven; only after the visionary had returned from her transport—the interval could be as long as weeks—did she commit them to paper. Preparatory drawings were often employed in a process that required much calculation and time. For Spiritualists, these procedures drained a work of its authenticity. Their favored approach was automatism, the practice of remaining passive while otherworldly powers moved the hand. A portrait of the guiding spirit usually resulted, but this claim had to be verified, and several tactics were devised to achieve this end. If relatives or friends of the deceased recognized the likeness, then the matter was generally considered settled. If the medium worked so rapidly that she seemed to surpass the capacities of mortal hand

Who Speaks for the Dead?

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Figure 11. Wella P. Anderson (Spirit Artist), “Spirit Carrie Miller,” Gallery of Spirit and Illustrated Quarterly 1 (1883): opposite 69.

and eye, then supernatural intervention was deemed responsible. If someone thought to have no talent produced refined compositions during a trance, then her ability was ascribed to the spirits. Neither spontaneity nor the conventional criteria of aesthetic quality entered into the Shaker production and appreciation of “gift images.”13 The likeness of Carrie Miller that resulted from these methods was

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presumably recognizable to acquaintances. An assessment of her unique character is facilitated by a hairdo that leaves the upper and lateral portions of the head uncovered. Phrenology was largely responsible for this peculiarity. In the 1840s, women began to eschew coiffures that involved teasing the locks into artificial protrusions that obscured the profile of the head. As phrenology attained wide popularity, fashion favored a tightly tied bun that allowed the intellectual, spiritual, and domestic faculties to exhibit their prowess. While Anderson’s portrait is not quite in accord with this practice, it was sufficiently revelatory to inspire an admirer to venture an analysis of the particular phrenological “organs” as well as the personality that emerged from the ensemble.14 Needless to say, no such response is possible in Barber’s schematic depiction of Mother Ann. Dr. Boynton, the leading proponent of Spiritualism in Howells’s novel, urges the Shakers to embrace a new version of their religion, one “which shall be devoted to the development of spiritualistic science.”15 His statement calls attention to the proximity of the two faiths but also to the fact that the one he professes endeavored to incorporate modern science into its teachings, an ambition epitomized by the phrenological reading of Anderson’s image. Shakerism sought to transform Christianity by putting Mother Ann on a par with Jesus, while Spiritualism pursued a similar agenda, it replaced the seeress with science. We need not delve into the specifics of Miller’s cranium to realize that the examination’s greater purpose was to demonstrate that traits of character cultivated in this world continue in the next. Spiritualism’s sanctification of middle-class notions of identity led, according to Bret Carroll, to a “radical individualism.” “The highest end of man’s existence,” one Spiritualist argued, was “to ultimate an individualized immortal spirit.”16 This message further underlines the differences that set the works of Spiritualists apart from the “gift images” that preceded them; while the former celebrate personal autonomy, the latter were intended to instill conformity to communal standards by reiterating in symbolic form the obligations necessary for salvation.

Henry Dexter and the Burned-Over District Henry Dexter’s bust of Theodore Lyman celebrates an individual who, in addition to enjoying a reputation as an author and philanthropist, served as the mayor of Boston (Figure 12). Two plaster casts were originally sent to

Figure 12. Henry Dexter, Bust of Theodore Lyman. 1850 (modeled in 1842), marble, 22 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 10 3/4 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Mrs. Henry Lyman.

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Chapter 1

charitable organizations funded by Lyman, but in 1850, one year after his death, the family commissioned a copy in marble. This decision prompts a question that will be pursued in the pages that follow: what meaning emerges from such works if we suppose the intended audience was not the sitter himself but posterity? I begin with Dexter because he grew up in the burned-over district, the same environment that fostered the Fox sisters, and because he furnishes a narrative of the psychic give-and-take that constituted a significant factor in composing likenesses at mid-century.17 This process did not involve the skills of the raconteur who might, like Gilbert Stuart, engage his sitter in a lively conversation in order to prompt an animated expression. Such momentary responses would have seemed superficial to Dexter, who sought to probe the soul’s depths by means of clairvoyance and phrenology. The household of Dexter’s youth was governed by an intense religiosity common among impoverished residents of western New York. His mother regularly warned her children that the Day of Judgment was at hand. It would come, she foresaw, in a downpour of hailstones. When the appointed hour finally arrived, she herded her family into the house, only to release them when the torrential apocalypse failed to meet expectations.18 The boy’s dreams of becoming an artist were discouraged by his mother’s insistence that the calling only favored those born under a particular alignment of the stars. Ignoring this admonition, Dexter made his way to Boston, where he earned a living carving busts. In 1859 he hit upon the idea of taking the likenesses of the governors of all the states. This venture entailed extended travel, but on arriving in Illinois he discovered that its chief executive had recently died. What was Dexter to do? He managed to acquire a daguerreotype and hat worn by his intended sitter. The latter might seem incidental to his purpose, but phrenologically inclined artists often examined the band to ensure an accurate account of cranial form. In addition to these aids, the artist visited the governor’s home “to gather from the intangible atmosphere of . . . [the] man’s daily surroundings a knowledge of his inner being.”19 The straightforward account available in a photograph required the additional input supplied by the aura the subject impressed on his rooms and possessions. To these sources, Dexter added the revelations of character provided by the phrenological faculties. Dexter once explained “that he was so keenly receptive to the spiritual atmosphere of his sitters that if one chanced to be mercenary or unprincipled he was unable to drive away the antagonistic and disagreeable impressions

Who Speaks for the Dead?

35

produced, which proved a serious hindrance to his work; whereas if the sitter had a lofty fine nature, he felt exalted and seemed to catch visions of beauty hovering about the head.”20 Clairvoyance figures significantly in this report of the artist’s formulations. His remark about glimpsing beauty around the head, for example, recalls Davis’s claim to perceive an aura emerging from the phrenological faculties. Such considerations often influenced accounts of the relationship between artists and their sitters. Henry Tuckerman remarks that Seth Cheney had to be “en rapport” with a subject for the portrait to succeed. From the same source, we learn that Charles Loring Elliott captured his subjects instead of being “magnetized” by them. Washington Allston’s particular success in this field, the critic notes, was due to a singular ability to render the “magnetic principle, . . . divine glow, and, as it were, atmosphere of the countenance.”21 Tuckerman’s observations may seem elusive and excessively abstract to modern readers, but a little perseverance enables us to recognize the principles he seeks to articulate. He discerns in Dexter’s busts a “wisdom, power, and subtle intellect” that is at odds with recent evaluations of the sculptor’s work. His portrait of Theodore Lyman, for instance, is described by one scholar as wanting in “psychological complexity.”22 This marble, however, was the end product of a quest for character traits that eluded casual scrutiny. It involved processes that might initially seem incompatible; measurements with calipers ensured that the finer phrenological nuances were not neglected, but the artist also relied on his intuitive—psychic—response to the emanations of personality.23 Only patience could coax the visage to reveal the spirit integrated into its organic constitution. Dexter would have relied on both his instincts and analytic acumen to identify the expression that conformed most accurately to the temper revealed by the mental faculties. Individual identity, the eternal soul, was a reality confirmed both by Spiritualism and phrenology; each charged the sculptor with the duty of depicting it objectively. Neither the facile rendering of some momentary expression nor the simple inventory of features provided by a photograph achieved this end. If Lyman was reserved by nature, then there was no point in rendering him otherwise; indeed, to do so would contravene inspiration. This sort of inspiration bore little resemblance to old-fashioned notions about ecstasy: it was, rather, a blend of intuition and science (phrenology). Tuckerman considered these notions a salutary alternative to studio conventions. The

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modern viewer, however, is unlikely to be familiar with the sitter’s particular disposition and may attribute to want of insight or technical ability what contemporaries ascribed to discipline. Dexter’s approach was designed to capture the verities of character that would enable posterity to sense the “intangible atmosphere” associated with the prototype. This process could only be hindered by virtuoso displays that simply fed the artist’s vanity and allowed it to obscure the image’s spiritual content.

Portraits by Hiram Powers Hiram Powers became a Swedenborgian in the early 1820s, a choice that motivated him to cultivate an interest in psychic phenomena prior to the advent of Spiritualism. Around 1840 (he is not entirely precise about the date), for example, his bedroom was illuminated one night by a brilliant light that revealed two figures, male and female. They gazed down on his sleeping baby for several minutes before suddenly vanishing. Powers believed that both sleep and internal sight opened the mind to communications from the dead, and this apparition, he repeatedly claimed, constituted a reality greater than the one he encountered in his daily routine.24 He initially expressed reservations about the Rochester rappings because he, like many Swedenborgians, thought them the blandishments of malevolent beings.25 These doubts eventually subsided, and by the 1850s, his house in Florence, where he had moved in 1837, hosted Swedenborgian services and séances held by Daniel Dunglas Home, the most accomplished medium of the day. During one of the latter, the sculptor’s wife, Elizabeth, was touched by her dead son’s materialized spirit. She was also the object of unwelcome advances by the twenty-seven monks who haunted their home, a former monastery. Powers’s own efforts to call up the dead in 1852 were unsuccessful, but he was often enthralled by the achievements of others in this field. These events suggest that the domestic environment and religious practices of his family furnish clues to the content of his portraits.26 David Morgan notes that during the antebellum era “home religion and the domestic altar became the watchwords in Protestant advice literature.” The household, he continues, was “the archetypal site” for molding the character of children.27 These remarks, made in reference to Evangelical practices, apply as well to those whose beliefs took them beyond the pale of traditional Christianity. What would their altar be, and how would it influence the family? For the Spiritualists, a bust of the paterfamilias or mater-

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familias on a mantel or table could function as a shrine. Powers’s portraits identify this purpose more precisely than Dexter’s, and their intent is best understood by viewing them as something other than monuments to the egotism of patrons. They could provide a means of communing with one’s progeny. These children, however, were not especially the infants or adolescents trained by Evangelical practices but the adults who survived after their parents had passed away.28 Powers often reminded patrons that their portraits were to remain untouched and covered with gauze when not being viewed to protect them from dust and fly specks.29 Such objects, then, acquired an aura that elevated them above most artifacts in the interior. The prohibition against physical contact enhanced the mystery of these veiled visages whose uncanny presence would have recalled the materializations witnessed in séances. When Kate Fox conjured up the wife of one sitter, for instance, her head, appearing “as if covered by a white veil,” emerged from the darkness.30 Beyond this similarity, the astute observer could hardly have ignored the symbolic nature of having to remove the veil, for, as the sculptor remarked, only “the merest film separates our eyes from a view of . . . [the spirit] world.”31 The act would have been especially meaningful if the person portrayed had passed on to the Summerland; thoughts about that individual’s present circumstances would have mingled with fond memories as this ritual before the household shrine was performed. The widow of one of Powers’s patrons placed near his bust a transcript of a phrenological examination taken from it, and this act suggests that the experience prompted by raising the veil entailed prolonged meditation.32 An informed eye could survey the features for evidence of the unique traits of character that were not extinguished at death. Carrie Miller’s likeness confirmed the validity of this approach, and Catherine Crowe, author and close student of phrenology before she turned to Spiritualism, conjectured that the face would be an even more accurate index of the mind in the next world than in this. Swedenborg’s celestial journeys enabled him to confirm this belief, and we can imagine Powers operating on this assumption regardless of the preferences of his sitter.33 On the arrival of his wife’s portrait, another patron wrote that their child exclaimed it was mama as “white as snow.”34 The purity and brilliance of the best Italian marble intimated more than they imitated. “You may find a block of marble without a flaw or blemish,” an acquaintance remarked to Powers, “but man is veined and stained all over with passions and infirmities.”35

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Comparisons of this sort were especially meaningful to Spiritualists, who were apt to liken the improved appearance of materialized spirits to statuary. In one instance, the sitters at a séance asked a shade to expose her arm. An involuntary gasp arose in response to what one later described as “a perfect model for a sculptor,” being “gracefully rounded [and] dazzlingly white.”36 Powers’s portraits offered an analogous experience, a distinct individual, exhibiting the faculties that divulged his or her unique personality, was nevertheless translated and ennobled in a manner consistent with accounts of the celestial realm given by Swedenborg and Spiritualism. 37 Mary Duncan’s apparent allegiance to Swedenborg and her negotiations with the sculptor about arranging her hair in a way best calculated to feature her phrenological organization compounded the above considerations (Figure 13). The Swede’s theory of correspondences, the notion that exteriors mirror interiors, was often cited by phrenologists to support their contention that external appearances disclose mental orientation. This, in effect, was what Powers meant when he announced his intention to unveil the soul by means of art. These implications were further enriched by the sunflower petals that encircle Mary Duncan. They allude to Clytie, the mortal whose dedication to Apollo caused her to gaze at the sun. As a reward for her devotion, she was transformed into a sunflower, a heliotrope symbolic of constancy. This connection would have been especially meaningful to Swedenborgians because, for them, the sun corresponds to God.38 Clytie’s sunflower could also symbolize an apotheosis, and the sum of these devices endows Mary Duncan’s portrait with a lesson clearly intended for the benefit of posterity.39 “Here is a soul,” it states, “visibly formed and made unique by life’s experiences, which, on ascent into heaven, will bask eternally in divine light.” Set on a mantel, this altar was bound to elicit devotion. Powers’s ideal works share many of the concerns expressed by his portraits and warrant examination here for this reason. One customer, for example, was eager to acquire a bust of the Greek Slave because both he and his wife thought it a “likeness of our departed one.” 40 A response of this sort would seem to contradict the Spiritualist insistence on individuality discussed above, but the heart’s judgments are not necessarily those of reason. The generalized features of ideal pieces often proved to be an asset because they permitted viewers to read their own preoccupations into them. Descriptions of the spirits that materialized during seances frequently comment on their ideal beauty. In one case, the face was thought to be “of pure classical design”; in another, the figure was considered

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Figure 13. Hiram Powers, Mary Sargent Duncan. 1868, marble. Willard B. Golovin, Germantown, New York. Photo courtesy of the owner.

worthy to model for the Graces. A third account notes that, while the shape was clearly distinguished, the individual forms were difficult to perceive.41 Small wonder, then, that anxious sitters in a darkened room would insist that a materialized form resembled a relative or friend. Sometimes several people made this claim on a revenant despite their disagreement about the identity, or one would see the similarity and another, equally familiar with the deceased, would find nothing particularly like. All these reactions are

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symptomatic of the heightened suggestibility likely to prevail in a charged environment.42 Though Powers’s ideal heads were viewed in far more tranquil circumstances, they benefited from this mental proclivity. One such beneficiary was his Proserpine; her meditative gaze creates an aura of otherworldliness that enhances the poignancy of her plight (Figure 14). After Proserpine was abducted by Pluto, Jupiter granted her the right to return from the netherworld for six months each year. Her arrival brought the spring, and the wreath that encircles the bust signals the seasonal change; by depicting acanthus leaves, emblems of immortality, Powers deepened the meaning. This meaning reflects the artist’s decision, as one critic noticed, to depict the moment of Proserpine’s reappearance in the terrestrial sphere rather than the ravishment popular in the Baroque era. Powers initially modeled the piece in 1843, only a few years after experiencing a visitation, and recollections of this event likely influenced his decision to create a work about crossing the gulf between the living and dead. Such a passage would prompt the “spiritual musing” the above reviewer discerned in the tilt of her head, and the symbolism of the wreath indicates the nature of these musings. As with the portraits, patrons were advised to protect the marble with gauze; hence the gesture of unveiling would again have been especially meaningful for those who wished to invoke a deceased wife or daughter (perhaps one who was never portrayed in life and thus fully enjoyed the indulgences memory grants appearances) by ordering a copy of Proserpine.43 One critic’s mention of Proserpine’s “rich mental endowments” suggests that, like the portraits, the ideal pieces were subject to phrenological scrutiny. This proposition was taken quite literally by a patron who invited a phrenologist to conduct just such an examination. Notions of carrying one’s personal identity into the next life seem to have been expanded in this instance to include the ideal. The artist enriched the implications of these beliefs when he placed a bust of his wife, Elizabeth Gibson Powers (Figure 15), next to one of Proserpine. They “both have a story to tell,” he wrote, “one is general without particulars—the other is general with every particular.” Those particulars, in the case of Elizabeth Powers, tell their tale to an observer prepared to study the disposition of mental faculties that have been formed by years of mortal joys and travails in ways Proserpine’s have not. The act of arranging a comparison between the two was meant to imply that Elizabeth, like her ideal counterpart, shares the destiny granted all mortals, not merely of eternal life but also of returning to this realm when

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Figure 14. Hiram Powers, Proserpine. 1844 (carved after 1873), marble, 24 x 21 x 12 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource NY.

circumstances permit. Proserpine’s fate made her an apt expression of this belief, while her mythological identity allowed the artist to skirt issues of Christian doctrine. She represents not only those who have passed over but also, as the moment chosen from the narrative emphasizes, those who come back. By association, Elizabeth can also be expected to return and comfort those she has left behind. Powers indicated as much when, in a playful

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Figure 15. Hiram Powers, Elizabeth Gibson Powers. 1858, plaster, 26 1/4 x 18 7/8 x 9 7/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY; museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson.

reference to Proserpine, he wrote of imploring her “to bring me forth on her next annual visit to earth,” to “haunt” a patron.44 The acanthus leaves that frame Martha Endicott Peabody Rogers (Figure 16) and Anstiss Derby Rogers Wetmore (1848, marble, New York, Dr. William H. Gerdts) likewise assure their immortality. They also turn their heads as Proserpine does, and by the logic of phrenology, which claimed such poses revealed mental inclinations, we may suppose that

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Figure 16. Hiram Powers, Martha Endicott Peabody Rogers (1845, marble, 22 3/4 in. Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

they too are engaged in “spiritual musing” about an eventual return to the terrestrial realm. And again, at the risk of redundancy, this message must have been intended for posterity. Few Powers portraits, however, are as explicit in alluding to these issues, and other approaches must be devised if similar inferences are to be drawn. In the case of Cornelius Vanderbilt, for instance, biographical data provide significant clues (Figure 17). By far the wealthiest person in America when he died in 1877,

Figure 17. Hiram Powers, Cornelius Vanderbilt. 1853, plaster, 24 1/2 in. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph courtesy of Vanderbilt University.

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Vanderbilt advised others that the key to success was to “do as I do[,] consult the spirits.” He thought this best accomplished by constantly having likenesses of the dearly departed near at hand. To this end, he kept a miniature of his mother, Phebe Hand Van der Bilt, in his pocket, while another image of her (artist unknown, formerly in the collection of William H. Vanderbilt) presided over séances conducted in the family mansion by Victoria Woodhull. He even offered the famed medium one hundred thousand dollars if she would bring back the ghost of his father and describe it with sufficient accuracy to enable an artist to render a portrait.45 Nothing came of this proposal, but we can surmise from these circumstances that he intended his own bust to assist descendants in conjuring up his shade after he had taken up residence in the Summerland. It exhibits a remoteness appropriate for this purpose and differs in this respect from the frenetic expression seen in John Calhoun (1836, plaster, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). The latter was intended for public viewing, and Powers captures in it the combativeness requisite for partisan electioneering in the Jacksonian era rather than the politician’s immortal aspect. A sincere longing to commune with the deceased was often sufficient cause to bring about the desired end. Powers alludes to this belief in a letter to Edward Greenway, the patron who bought a bust of the Greek Slave on the basis of its resemblance to his deceased daughter. The sculptor mentions his wife’s “hopes that among the spirits yet in the land of the living who sometimes leave their bodies [you might] come over here to sooth [sic] her.”46 In this instance, the wish applies to the living, but it is based on concepts equally applicable to those who had departed the mortal sphere. While Powers’s Swedenborgian and Spiritualist convictions allow us to identify his motives in these matters, those of his patrons are less easily surmised. There were many who did not share the artist’s views, and even those who did—Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example—did not always consent to the inclusion of symbolic attributes that would specify their sentiments. Nevertheless, a strain of pensiveness that suggests patient anticipation runs through much of Powers’s portraiture. These images are less “speaking likenesses” than silent reminders; instead of the momentary expression associated with familiar conversation (a disincentive to meditation), we are given the individual’s immortal aspect, one that engenders the fond memories necessary to bring him or her into our presence. The words of one prominent Spiritualist illustrate the notions that inspired the artist to create, and some patrons to commission, such domestic altars:

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The gift of ubiquity would be a glorious one—it may be among the attributes of our future eternity of happiness. To be at the same time in the presence as well as the hearts of our dear friends, to feel space no barrier, but to pervade the universe, and wherever there is a throb of affection for us to be present to enjoy it, would make life indeed glorious and every moment golden.47 Amid the copious furnishings and knickknacks found in the Victorian parlor might stand a marble bust that kept a silent vigil over the household. Here the occupants stored their treasures, made safe not from moth and rust but from fly and dust, by gauze veils whose lifting revealed an unblemished version of an individual they were likely to know or have known intimately. The flow of emotions commenced by this ritual could readily join the flow of cosmic energies that permeated the environment if the viewer were attuned to this possibility; since the spirits tended to gravitate to their former abodes, they were “not far away” and simply awaited a throb of affection to make their presence known.48 In a dim, curtained interior, the brilliant marble glowed with an otherworldly aura, enkindling the filial devotion that encouraged the dead to speak.

Harriet Hosmer’s Sprites Born in 1830, Harriet Hosmer came of age just as Spiritualism was entering its first wave of popularity. She was afforded ample opportunity to contemplate the enigma of death in her early years, losing a mother and sibling to consumption (tuberculosis). Her father practiced medicine in the Boston suburb of Watertown and raised her in a tolerant environment attuned to the reforms promoted by phrenology. These tendencies were reinforced in 1847 when she entered Elizabeth Sedgwick’s progressive academy in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. On returning home and choosing sculpture for a vocation, she could find no physician willing to instruct her in anatomy. This circumstance obliged her to travel to St. Louis in 1850, where she was instructed by Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell.49 Dr. McDowell, who had also mentored Powers and Shobal Vail Clevenger, was well known in Spiritualist circles for having wielded the scalpel in an attempt to discover evidence of the soul within the body’s viscera. Ambitions of this sort were bound to impress Hosmer, who, according to a close friend, had exhibited psychic tendencies since childhood. This inclination

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appears in Hosmer’s description of an event she witnessed while horseback riding one evening in the summer of 1851. She was approaching a fence when one of the rails “moved around to the outside of the post, a distance of several yards, and then stood upright.” She concluded the incident was not “a joke, but a solemn fact, in which light I most religiously view it.”50 These remarks attribute solemn significance to an episode apparently devoid of meaning much as the Spiritualists dismissed criticism of the triviality of spirit communications by explaining that the phenomenon itself was more important than the message conveyed. Hosmer’s departure for Italy in 1852 did nothing to interrupt her affiliation with the spirit world. Indeed, an incident involving the death of her maid Rosa received considerable coverage in the press on this side of the Atlantic. A serious illness had obliged the maid to leave Hosmer’s employ and return home. The next morning the artist awoke at five o’clock when Rosa opened her curtained canopy and announced, “Adesso sono contento, adesso sono felice (Now I am content, now I am happy).” Hosmer sprang from bed but found no one in the room. News of Rosa’s demise soon arrived, however, and placed it at the very time of the visitation. Convinced she was no victim of a delusion or prank, Hosmer declared herself “a firm believer in apparitions.”51 Personal charm, talent, and ability as a writing medium gained Hosmer an entrée into the Browning circle in Florence. And it is Elizabeth, a devotee of Spiritualism and the séances given by Daniel Home, who relates the details of an uncanny occurrence that befell Hosmer in the spring of 1854. The artist was “entering her bedroom [when] a spirit, some three feet high, exquisitely formed, came running, dancing to her from the furthest end of the room close up to her knees, and when she stooped towards it, it vanished.”52 This encounter was bound to impress “a firm believer in apparitions,” and the creation of Puck, a frolicsome, exquisite youth whose height compares favorably with the spirit’s, must be linked in some manner to these events (Figure 18). Described by one contemporary as “a laugh in marble,” art historians have rarely regarded Puck as much more than that. It has usually been discussed as a fanciful conceit based on the “merry wanderer of the night” who breezes through Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.44). Seen in its contemporary context, however, Puck joins a wide array of imps and fairies created in response to “the Victorian interest in the preternatural, the psychic, and the occult.”53 No passage in Shakespeare’s work places Puck on a toadstool grasping a

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Figure 18. Harriet Hosmer, Puck. 1856, marble, 30 1/2 x 16 5/8 x 19 3/4 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY; gift of Mrs. George Merrill.

beetle and lizard. When commissioned to illustrate the play, Joshua Reynolds painted Puck (1789, Executors of the Tenth Earl Fitzwilliam) holding the flowers he intends to blend into a love potion. Hosmer deliberately eschews such specificity, a fact noted at the time, and instead cultivates ambiguity.54 Like Powers, she sought to remain true to her own convictions by choosing subjects that invited diverse readings; as a character from Shakespeare, Puck could be appreciated simply as a bit of whimsy, but as a poltergeist who

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also embodied the tenets of modern spirit theory, he acquired far different implications. Long before Shakespeare adopted him, Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, had figured in Nordic folklore, where he played pranks on unsuspecting victims. He might sour milk, tip a vase over, or administer a sharp pinch. In both his Shakespearean and earlier incarnations, Puck lent himself to the purposes of Spiritualists. Half the people who died in New York City at mid-century, for instance, were infants. Hardly a family escaped this grim statistic, and many sought consolation by contacting their departed darlings. The gradualism advocated by Spiritualists meant that children who passed on continued to behave much as they did on earth: a perfectly angelic child was an unrecognizable one. Boys in particular were wont to continue their mischievous ways, a trait that earned them their characterization as “tricksy elves, [and] sprites, [who are] full of pranks and levities,—a sort of Pucks.”55 Poltergeists had long pestered humanity, but Spiritualists demonstrated that such phenomena were benign in intent and governed by laws similar to those that guide normal human conduct. Whether or not Hosmer had heard of Natty, a child spirit whose “Pucklike pranks” caused a commotion in Boston just as she was preparing to leave for Italy in 1852, his case furnishes insight into the environment that would soon welcome her works. Natty, the son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Young, began to attract the attention of a number of female clairvoyants following his death. They decided to have an artist render his likeness based on their descriptions and recruited one C. L. Fenton for the task. He depicted a handsome infant with curly hair accompanied by his “Uncle Charles’s favorite dog,” a feature requested by the sitter. The full-length book published to chronicle these extraordinary events complies with the Spiritualist view of death as a gentle transition by maintaining a celebratory tone throughout.56 Hosmer takes a similar approach to Puck, and this may have contributed to the misperception that the piece is simply frivolous in intent. As in the case of the Greek Slave, the idealized form of Puck was likely to prove more an asset than a liability because it permitted viewers to read into the generalized features what they most hoped to find. This predilection appears in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s account of a friend who “had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country house,—bow, arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking

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pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house ‘if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?’”57 Puck was not made as a portrait, but he must have become one in the eyes of some beholders. In addition to the idealized form, the attributes of Puck likewise enable the viewer to read the piece either as a figure from mythology or a deceased infant. While the bat wings, scallop-shell chapeau, chameleon, and beetle symbolize Puck’s fugitive, nocturnal nature and may have been devised by consulting Shakespeare’s references to these animals, the acanthus plant rising from the base provides the same intimations of immortality seen in Powers’s portraits. 58 Further, the alighting of a traditional fairy on a toadstool would hardly cause it to split in the manner seen beneath Puck’s foot, but the imponderable f luids of modern spirits endowed them with sufficient avoirdupois to produce such a feature. A group of mortals who drink a brew concocted “to reduce specific gravity” in one of Hosmer’s futuristic comedies, become as “light as Puck and Ariel.”59 Their weight, although greatly reduced, would likely be sufficient to cause the sort of damage Puck inf licts should they choose to follow his example and land on a mushroom. The beetle and lizard grasped by Puck indicate that modern spirits, like their predecessors in the poltergeist community, are able to interact with the material world. Natty, for instance, enjoyed the company of his uncle’s dog. One review of Puck mentions that he is about to throw the beetle, and this report would have brought knowing nods from Spiritualists.60 Here was an apport in the process of being delivered to a séance. Its arrival would surely incite the sort of wonderment Hosmer experienced when she watched a fence rail move on its own. Will-o’-the-Wisp was created to complement Puck; hence it includes bat wings, horns, and pointed ears to allude to boyish mischief (Figure 19). Again a fungus serves as a stool, and beneath it are the skunk cabbage, cattails, and flowers that flourish in swamplands. In this environment, marsh gasses and decaying vegetable matter emit the phosphorescent lights that mislead travelers and give their name to false hopes. This “foolish fire,” or “will-o’-the-wisp,” is symbolized by the torch, while its fugitive, nocturnal nature is suggested by the Phrygian cap, an emblem of freedom, and the owl perched atop the figure.61 Spiritualists would have viewed these features much as the protagonist of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha does when he paddles into a marsh and finds the water

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Figure 19. Harriet Hosmer, Will-o’-the-Wisp. 1858, marble, 32 1/2 x 16 3/4 x 17 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY.

Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o’-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, In their weary night-encampments.62

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And in words far less mellifluous, one would-be poet praised Hosmer’s “clairvoyant eye [which] doth see Will-o-the-Wisp by tarn and tree.”63 Just as foxfire flits over field and fen, so spirits arrived at one séance as “a phosphoric light [that] shot from side to side over our heads.” Similar reports often emphasize the specter’s “luminous or phosphorescent appearance.”64 Further, a debate about the identity of what were called “corpse lights” or “corpse candles” alerts us to other possible readings of Will-o’-theWisp. These terms referred to the mysterious, luminescent glow that often hovered over graves, especially those of the recently interred. They were usually seen only by clairvoyants but at times they were visible to all. Baron Karl von Reichenbach (1788–1869), the famed German scientist, attributed them to exhalations from the body of the “od” or “odylic force,” an imponderable fluid whose discovery he claimed. Spiritualists were especially intrigued because such lights often assumed the form of the deceased.65 Any witness to such phenomena, or believer in them, would likely view Hosmer’s piece in a manner consistent with the artist’s own convictions. Commentators who regard Will-o’-the-Wisp simply as an allegory of natural processes fail to explain why Victorians would want a personification of swamp gas—or, for that matter, false hopes—in their parlors. In an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly, Hosmer discloses how such works might operate within the home. After relating the circumstances surrounding Rosa’s appearance, she asks whether the electricity of this world might not correspond with spiritual magnetism. With the approach of death, the latter may become concentrated and then transmitted as a vision to those persons dearest in the dying individual’s regards. Her conclusion applies not only to her own work but also encapsulates the function attributed earlier to Powers’s portraits: the spirits are nearest when our thoughts are occupied with them. This would account, she continues, for the belief that the dead return on the anniversary of their demise. 66 An image made with the intent of attracting spirits by stimulating memory would eschew emblems that emphasize the finality of death. It would avoid an explicit Christian iconography and instead allude to apports, corpse lights, and other phenomena cultivated by Spiritualists. It would remind the viewer of the close proximity of the dead and of their readiness to communicate; it would, in short, resemble Puck or Will-o’-the-Wisp. The artist herself experienced something akin to the response these statues were intended to encourage when she worked on her colossal bronze of Thomas Hart Benton

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in 1860. Several clay sketches were made, but, she remarked, a satisfactory solution was only reached when “his ghost . . . inspired me.”67

The Bowman Mausoleum Henry James satirizes the Spiritualist expectation of an immanent commingling of the terrestrial and celestial spheres in “Maud Evelyn,” a short story about a young man, Marmaduke, who takes Maud, the long departed daughter of the Dedricks, as his spirit bride. Her presence has been maintained over the years by visits to a medium and the preservation of her “relics.” These objects decorate rooms lovingly furnished by the parents and occupied by Marmaduke following the nuptials. The suite, called both a “museum” and a “temple,” becomes a retreat from the living, a place where the seemingly endless postponement of the nuptial’s consummation—the much anticipated intercourse between mortals and spirits—slowly drains his emotional and vital resources until he ultimately succumbs to a wasting disease.68 The close association James makes between relics, museums, and temples in his fictitious tale finds its real-life counterpart in the mausoleum John Bowman built for his family in Cuttingsville, Vermont (Figure 20). A prosperous tannery owner in New York, Bowman returned to his native state and commenced the memorial shortly after the deaths of his wife Jennie and his daughter Ella. Another daughter, Addie, who had died in infancy in 1854, was also commemorated. The structure’s granite and marble battered walls, its frieze, pediment, and acroteria all exude an air of permanence and good taste. Holding keys to the tomb in the right hand and a wreath in the left, a statue of Bowman gazes through the open door (Figure 21). This piece, and the busts of John and Jennie, as well as a full figure of Addie located within, are the work of Giovanni Turini (1841–99), an Italian American sculptor who inscribed his name and the date, 1881, near the entrance (Figure 22). For a decade, the living John Bowman emulated his marmorean doppelganger by meditating nightly before the tomb for an hour or more. During these years, he resided in a Queen Anne/Eastlake house across the street (Figure 23). The aim of all these endeavors was to bring wife and children back. Although Bowman proceeded without drawing up an agenda, he apparently intended to create a setting conducive to the materialization of spirits and preserve it in perpetuity by establishing a trust fund of fifty thousand dollars. One stipulation obliged the caretakers to set the table each evening

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Figure 20. Bowman mausoleum, Cuttingsville, Vermont, 1880. Photo by the author.

in anticipation of the Bowmans’ return. This ritual continued for sixty years until the funds were finally depleted.69 An air of eerie domesticity hovers around the Bowman enterprise. Inside the tomb, the busts, mirrors, sconces, tiled floors, and marble columns recall the décor of an opulent Victorian interior. Little Addie sits on a cushioned table and reaches toward the image of her mother reflected in a mirror, the disembodied counterpart of the marble portrait located behind the child. Above, an inscription indicates the infant is on “A Couch of Dreamless

Figure 21. Giovanni Turini, John Bowman. 1881, marble, Cuttingsville, Vermont. Photo by the author.

Figure 22. Interior of the Bowman Mausoleum with busts of John Bowman, Jennie Bowman, and a statue of Addie Bowman by Giovanni Turini. 1881, marble, Cuttingsville, Vermont. Photo by the author.

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Figure 23. Bowman House. c. 1880, Cuttingsville, Vermont. Photo by the author.

Sleep,” not a bed but a sofa, a parlor piece unfit for prolonged rest but quite adequate for a quick nap before heading out for dinner. Fully furnished, the house remains prepared for this eventuality and, along with its counterpart across the street, confirms the emphasis Spiritualists placed on the home as an environment particularly inviting to otherworldly visitors.70

Conclusion Historian David Sloane notes that the art museum supplanted the cemetery in the late nineteenth century as a favored locale for leisurely, morally uplifting activities.71 The short step from the Bowman mausoleum to museum was taken by Leyland and Jane Stanford when they created the Leyland Stanford Junior Museum, an institution established to grace the university they founded in honor of their son, who had died in 1884. Shortly after his son’s demise, the elder Stanford was reported to have had a dream, or vision, in which his boy appeared and urged the grieving father to abandon despair and instead “live for humanity.” Another version from a witness present at the time claims the message instructed the bereaved to “build a university,” an account bolstered

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by Jane’s characterization of the event as the “vision or visit” that instigated their founding of a school of higher learning.72 Whatever the circumstances behind the university’s motivating moment, shades of Maud Evelyn and the Bowmans run through the narrative of the museum. Its cornerstone was laid in 1887 on Leyland, Jr.’s, birthday, May 14, and his collection, beginning with Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, and extending to objects from around the globe, was constantly enlarged by his mother, who served as the de facto director of the museum until her death in 1905 (Leyland, Sr. died in 1893). That she was impelled by emotions encompassing more than a disinterested curiosity or love of beauty is suggested by her decision to replicate in the building the two rooms of the family mansion where her son had originally stored his trove. To this sanctum sanctorum Jane often retired alone—for she alone had the key—to meditate.73 Where did her thoughts wander? In her later years, she felt the departed were so close that she had only to extend her hands to “clasp the hands of dear ones longing for [her] to join them.”74 We can imagine one of these hands as belonging to Leyland, Jr., whose effort to contact his mother would follow the scenario depicted on Hannah Chapman’s tombstone. In pursuing her vision of the museum, Jane Stanford received moral and material support from her brother-in-law in Australia, Thomas Welton Stanford. The death of his wife in 1870 seems to have spurred a devotion to Spiritualism that led him to assemble “the largest and finest collection of apports in the world.” These he sent to Jane, who considered placing them in the museum. To ensure the apports were granted a proper reception, Thomas also donated fifty thousand dollars for the establishment of a chair in psychical research. Nor did his generosity end there: at various intervals between 1897 and 1918, he dispatched the important paintings by Australian artists he had acquired.75 All these artifacts, from apports to artworks, would, in his mind, have existed on a continuum. Along its expanse one would find, for instance, what purports to be a Roman lamp encrusted in mud (not unlike the objects Leyland, Jr., collected), which, despite its presumed fragility, fell on the séance table and landed intact (Figure 24). Its undamaged state was evidence that no human chicanery was involved, while its materialization assured mortals of the presence of spirits. Although Jane’s intention to display such artifacts was never implemented (perhaps due to her unexpected death in 1905), their exhibition would have cast an aura over the palatial interior and the treasures it housed. Both Jane and Thomas worried that the “soul life” of students would be imperiled by the “materialist professors” hired to instruct them.76 A mu-

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Figure 24. Apport, “Old Roman lamp.” Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

seum/temple could go a long way in allaying these fears. As the students wandered through its corridors, vague sensations might overtake them, ones akin to those caused by psychically energized artifacts. Whatever they had heard in their classes that day might then fade before the realization that there were “more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in . . . philosophy.” Beyond a scholarly familiarity with the masterpieces of the past and present, the Stanfords’ institution endeavored to nurture feelings that went deeper than intellectual understanding. An article in The Crayon about one woman’s recovery from a long infirmity provides further insight into this process. Confined to a room in which several paintings are hung, she develops “a strange and powerful fascination” for a likeness of Charles II after gazing at it “hour after hour, day after day.” Eventually it becomes “a fountain of health and life . . . capable of emitting vitality.” The “constant communion” with the monarch leads her “to believe in the saving virtues of talismans, crucifixes, and madonnas . . . to believe that the real and supposititious virtues of saints and martyrs, can and do pass through images and paintings into the souls of devotees.”77 The favorable assessment of relics presented in this seemingly fictive account illustrates the affinity between Spiritualist attitudes toward art and

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those of Catholicism. Images focus the mind; vital energies are not dissipated but directed toward the person represented. The narrator comes to an appreciation of “crucifixes . . . and madonnas,” not because they are instruments of traditional dogma but because they, like the portrait she has been viewing, channel the “imponderable fluids” coursing through the universe. Such beliefs, arising from Romantic notions about the confluence of energies flowing from mind and matter, challenged the Kantian concept of the “thing-in-itself,” the inaccessibility of objects to human consciousness, and the principle of disinterested viewing that accompanied it. Spiritualism replaced this aesthetic with one that posited an engaged relationship between the observer and the work of art premised on an active imagination capable of projecting itself out into the environment. The upshot of this faculty, of this clairvoyance, was a condition that permitted the dead to speak for themselves; painting and sculpture facilitated the process by creating a locus where psychic forces could gather and manifest their powers.

Chapter 2

Reenchanting America

Those “materialist professors” in the previous chapter who so discomfited the Stanfords were undoubtedly proponents of Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” mentioned earlier. While academics still tend to adhere to its agenda, the Stanfords’ preferences resemble those of the American public in general, which, then and now, has persistently relied on religion to make life meaningful. Again, Spiritualism endeavored to bridge the gap by reconciling science and faith. The discussion that follows examines how William Wetmore Story, Hiram Powers, and Harriet Hosmer adopted this agenda to advocate the virtues of reenchantment. Their reenchantment abjured the folkways that summoned or placated supernatural forces by reciting time-tested incantations. The continued belief in witchcraft during the nineteenth century, for example, stands as testimony to the longevity of such lore.1 “The old popular superstitions, brought hither by our ancestors,” Orestes Brownson wrote at midcentury, “still live in the heart of the people, and in forms as gross and as revolting as in the seventeenth century.” To dispel these superstitions, he continues, one resorts not to “skeptical science,” which denies the spirit world, but to a religion that “teaches us to draw accurately the line of demarcation between genuine and counterfeit spirit-manifestations.”2 The religion that taught Story, Powers, and Hosmer to make these determinations was Spiritualism. The testable nature of paranormal phenomena convinced believers that proponents of positivism would have to expand their standards if they wished to remain abreast of progress. Differences of opinion about clairvoyance illustrate the logic of the contending parties. Rustics were likely to attribute it to witchcraft of the Salem kind; skeptics dismissed evidence in its favor as the product of disordered minds; reenchanters rejected the first explanation but did not deny the possibility that numinous powers were

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involved. To ignore the ample testimony available, they argued, was to indulge in the sort of blinkered mentality common among rural folk. Inspired by this conviction, the works considered below were generally designed to alert viewers to the wisdom of attending to otherworldly tidings. Their design for public exhibition and accompanying didactic content distinguish them from the domestic destination and intimate nature of the pieces discussed in the previous chapter. While the latter circumstances encouraged channeling, this response figured less significantly (although not inappreciably) in the calculations that governed the former.

Story’s Sibyl The scion of a distinguished Boston family, William Wetmore Story practiced the law but nursed an ambition to become an artist. His chance arose when a committee charged with commissioning a statue of his father, a noted jurist who died in 1845, decided the son’s talents and familiarity with the subject best qualified him to create a fitting memorial. William took the plunge, resolving to change professions and move to Rome, where the facilities necessary to pursue his new calling were more readily accessible than in America. He settled there in 1856, but labored in relative obscurity until his Libyan Sibyl (Figure 25) and Cleopatra (1858 Los Angeles County Museum of Art) won wide acclaim at the 1862 International Exhibition in London.3 Before departing for Rome, Story had joined the First Church of Humanity, also known as the Religious Union of Associationists, an organization that flourished in Boston under the leadership of William Henry Channing from 1846 to 1854. Meetings, which were sometimes held in Story’s studio, included lively discussions about phrenology, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism. Presiding over these gatherings were an altar and an empty chair, the latter intended to symbolize “the Invisible Presence.” We can surmise that Story absorbed much from this environment, for his commitment to Spiritualism grew noticeably in the years leading up to the creation of the Libyan Sibyl and Cleopatra. He attended séances, attempted automatic writing and table turning, and mesmerized associates, all with the intent of making reenchantment a viable stance in modern society. Séances, he asserted, demonstrated that the days of magicians had not passed.4 Story’s measured defense of Spiritualism in Conversations in a Studio, a product of his aging, more ruminative self, rehearses familiar arguments. Yes, communications from the spirits are often trivial, but that is because

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Figure 25. William Wetmore Story, The Libyan Sibyl. 1861, marble, 53 x 27 3/4 x 45 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY; gift of Erving Wolf Foundation, in memory of Diane R. Wolf; photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

we take our personalities with us to the next life, and many who pass over lack acumen. Yes, there are numerous charlatans driven solely by monetary considerations, but not every medium is so disposed; anyone desiring to make an unbiased evaluation of the faith must seek out the latter. Yes, much that occurs under the aegis of Spiritualism resists precise codification, but only a wait-and-see approach can be applied to such phenomena: the task

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of creating a theoretical construct should commence only after authenticity has been proven. And, consistent with the pleas reenchanters addressed to the scientific community, Story counsels patience in the presence of events seemingly incompatible with conventional evidentiary standards.5 Modern scholarship tends to view Story as a learned amateur, one as inclined to dabble in poetry as apply himself to sculpture. Out of this judgment emerges a rather complacent individual who is content to make the most of family connections and repeat the superannuated formulae of Neoclassicism. But this evaluation ignores his mystical side; he seems occasionally to have fallen into trance-like states that collapsed the barriers of time and brought him into the presence of the long departed. Italy nourished this propensity. On entering Dante’s home in Florence, for example, the present faded away and Story found himself in the Alighieri household. In Rome, even the air retains “a sort of trail of . . . old deeds.” Passing the Castel Sant’Angelo, one hears “the groans of Beatrice Cenci.” The city’s “ancient habitations” harbor the “ghosts” of previous residents. “Vague voices” call from the ruined tombs along the Via Appia, while “invisible companions” accompany one’s rambles through the streets of Pompeii. “The past,” he concludes, “hovers like a subtle aura around the present. Places, as well as persons, have lives and influences touching our natures to mysterious issue.”6 All these prospects rise above mere posturing because the author actually believed in them. Like the sculptor himself, the brooding seeress encountered in The Libyan Sibyl possesses the ability to peer through time. Antiquity placed great confidence in the sibyls’ divinations, but the Enlightenment ridiculed them as exemplary of the superstitious nature of paganism. Reenchanters proposed that such women possessed clairvoyant powers that doubtless endowed their pronouncements with a kernel of truth: skeptics would do well to consider the verifiable prophecies of modern mediums, often called sibyls or pythons, before disparaging their sisters of yore.7 Story makes this case by including among the sibyl’s various attributes a necklace ornamented by interlocking triangles. Their upward and downward orientation symbolizes the integration of the terrestrial and celestial spheres that enabled diviners to journey from one to the other and thus peer into the future. The principles and possibilities inherent in occult geometry fascinated the artist and led him to write a book dedicated to recovering the lost wisdom of Egypt and the Jewish Cabala. From these and other traditions, he devised a mystical theory of human proportions, whose

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inspiration, he claimed, came in a flash as he was waking one morning. The experience must have been another of those revelations that granted him a personal insight into the sibyl’s talents.8 Story was ever alert to such revelations and urged contemporaries to follow his example. Because the phenomena associated with Spiritualism may obey laws not yet fully understood, he proposes, “it is quite possible that we have subtle powers and faculties which have escaped our observation, and that are exercised at times unconsciously or only in certain abnormal conditions. . . . What are you going to do with second sight and ghosts, apparitions and premonitions? Will you reject them all?”9 The sibyl poses the same question, but what so troubles her vision? She casts her gaze “into futurity,” Story states, “and sees the terrible fate of her race. This is the theme of the figure—Slavery on the horizon, and I made her head as melancholy and severe as possible.”10 The idea arose during a conversation with Harriet Beecher Stowe about Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), a noted black abolitionist. Stowe later published an article about her encounter with Truth, and we can infer from it the thoughts she shared with the sculptor. Even before the author spoke to this “full blooded African,” she was impressed by Truth’s bearing and dignity, which called to mind the silent, subtle power of a work of art. In elaborating on this impression, Stowe resorts to “modern spiritualistic phraseology” to describe her “as having a strong sphere.” Truth herself was a Spiritualist who combined a flair for public speaking with the powers of a visionary. One can almost see The Libyan Sibyl in Stowe’s account of a reverie in which Truth’s “great gloomy eyes and . . . dark face seemed to work with some undercurrent of feeling.”11 Story’s ability to convey this sense of presence, to create a “strong sphere” for his melancholic seeress, must come in part from a conviction that the premonitions he mentions above could not be dismissed peremptorily. And whence the authority that validates her oracles and those of her modern counterpart if not the whisperings of spirits? Although art historians tend to locate Story’s style in the domain of Neoclassicism, he would not have been entirely satisfied with this classification. He thought the “Ideal school” of sculpture had become vague and untrue in its calculated efforts to surpass nature. Guilty of greater sins than these, however, was the realist school; its members imitated the model indiscriminately, ignoring those features that made the figure truly naturalistic. They failed to understand that the imagination must subdue fact and subordinate it to an exalted vision. This was possible because there hovered around every form “an essence that spiritualizes it.”12

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Story could maintain this stance, one that governed his entire career, because, in addition to his activities as a medium, he had personally experienced the “subtle aura” exhaled by the persons and places of Rome’s historydrenched environs. This essence elevated the body above the contingencies of its physical existence and authorized his continued reliance on standards reminiscent of Neoclassicism. Story does not resort, however, to the inhuman perfection he discerned in his predecessors; his subjects, while exhibiting refined features, retain qualities of form and character that tie them to the flawed, passionate persons they once were. They recall residents of the heaven envisioned by Spiritualists, improved versions of individuals who are not so greatly transformed as to be unrecognizable.13 Attaining this mean, Story admitted, was not easy, but it was just the sort of ambition an artist accustomed to Spiritualism’s physical metaphysics would endorse.14 Its moderation inhibited both an excessive allegiance to theoretical formulations and an undisciplined copying of appearances. The Libyan Sibyl joins Story’s other statues in presenting a lofty image of humanity but one resistant to the equanimity associated with classicism. Instead, his figures are in the throes of their commanding passions, emotions so strong they continue to resonate through the ages. Just as the artist could hear “the groans of Beatrice Cenci,” a woman unjustly condemned to death more than two centuries earlier, as he passed the Castel Sant’Angelo (the place of her imprisonment), so he invites the viewer to cultivate similar sensibilities: to “hear” Cleopatra’s laments, for example, when her image stirs distress about her plight. The clairvoyant aspect of reenchantment made this a viable position in the late nineteenth century and deflects some of the criticism leveled at the sculptor for being simply an antiquarian with a literary bent. Among those who did not subscribe to Weber’s worldview were many who thought one had only to meditate on the famous or infamous dead, the “speaking ghosts of the past, . . . [for whom] time and distance are nothing,” in order to conjure them.15 Statues so conceived anticipate Symbolism as much as they reflect Neoclassicism. The Libyan Sibyl acquires yet another dimension from this aesthetic. The spiritual law that transports our temperamental proclivities to the celestial realm, Story explains, further implies we are creating that realm while still residing in worldly sphere.16 The consequences of slavery, the sibyl suggests, will continue to plague the perpetrators far more than the victims long after both have ceased their mortal toils. This may be just another way of saying that enforced servitude warps the characters of all involved. But beyond its

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purely sociological implications, Spiritualism located this dictum in a system of eternal justice befitting the moral crisis then engulfing a nation on the brink of civil war.

Hiram Powers and the “Supernatural Economy” Hiram Powers found a fertile source of inspiration in folk customs, dreams, childhood memories, and ideas about consecrated places. He justified the transformation of these beliefs into the imagery of his art on the principle of reenchantment, explaining to an interviewer that we are now at the threshold of a new era of discoveries, very unlike the past—that is to say—we have thus far for the main part been examining the outside of creation. The material part in short, but now we are to enter in gradually to the spiritual part or as it were the soul of the universe where causes exist.17 These considerations color Powers’s account of a dream that repeatedly haunted his childhood slumbers. In it, “a [naked] female figure . . . [that] did not seem alive” stood on a pillar beside the stream that flowed through Woodstock, Vermont, his hometown. Only after he began to model clay did this recurring vision cease.18 A brief visit by the nude figure of his Greek Slave to Woodstock during her American tour in 1850 stirred these memories anew and gave them added meaning. Powers was convinced his premonitions had been fulfilled.19 His speculations on the subject bear quoting at length: When a child in Woodstock and for years afterwards in Ohio I was haunted in dreams with a white figure of a woman white as snow from head to foot and standing upon some sort of pedestal below Uncle John’s house on the opposite side of the Quechee. I could not get near to it for the water which seemed deep and roaring[,] but my desire was always intense to come nearer. The figure seemed most lovely but not of a living person. At the time I knew nothing of sculpture nor had I ever read a word about it or even formed an idea upon the subject. I doubt if I had ever even seen a doll’s head. This dream ceased when I began to model—and you know that a white figure of a woman has since been seen in Woodstock and answering in some respects at least to

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the vision of my childhood. I know not when I first conceived the idea of the “Greek Slave.” I only know that it was on my mind long before I began it, just as you have seen it—and the dream occurs to me whenever I think of it. Did the swollen river signify the Atlantic which I should cross to produce it? And did the dream cease after I had taken the first steps as an artist because it was no longer necessary to stimulate me on the way I should go?20 Such musings reflect his belief that oracular episodes were often not readily understood by the individuals to whom they were granted. Past, present, and future were all one to God, Powers surmised, but mortals enjoyed no such omniscience because they were so deeply immersed in the flow of time.21 Only with the return of the slave to the site of her preexistence did all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. From this belief arose a predisposition that might be called retrospective precognition: the murmurings of fate were frequently heard, but their precise significance was often only recognized after the event to which they alluded had occurred. The dream narrative attributes spiritual significance to Woodstock, and Powers was deeply moved in 1837 when, after an interval of twenty years, he returned to Vermont and revisited the scenes of his childhood. Although he never repeated this experience in body, he did report that his ancestral home was a “dear old place which comes up in my dreams oftener than any other spot of this earth that I know of.” During sleep, he wrote, “fancy lends to me wings at night and I seem to fly along the banks of the Quechee over the dear village and the meadow around.”22 What sort of hold did this locale have on Powers? An answer appears in a disquisition on the phrenology of animals Powers delivered to visitors gathered in his studio. Bestirring himself from a deep meditation that resembled the attitude assumed by trance lecturers prior to their performances, he at last said, “This sense that we have now, what shall I call it”? “A sense of latitude and longitude! a sort of power, like that of a magnet which draws creatures towards their old haunts and homes when carried far away . . . it is simply impossible for them to take a wrong direction, because they would then be going against, as it were, this magnetic sensation.”23 In Swedenborg’s heaven, distances are determined by spiritual affinities; affectionate thoughts unite kindred souls. The above quote echoes the Swede’s mention of the homeward migration of birds as evidence of spiritual

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causes having their effects in the material world. Others claimed a “mesmeric sympathy” guided dogs home, while the Spiritualists attributed the uncanny attraction exercised by “consecrated places” to the workings of a psychic, or “odic,” residue left at the site by visitants.24 The tug of these “magnetic sensation[s]” must also have drawn the sculptor to the place of his nativity and influenced his ideas about the fluidity of time and space. The ramifications of these ideas are best studied in context. In 1785, the Land Ordinance mandated a systematic survey of the United States. Boundaries prior to this year were usually determined by brooks, trees, and similar features, all of which proved unreliable with the passage of time. The government’s decision to map its territories “laid on the entire nation a geometric grid that imposed the Enlightenment’s vision of rational order, irrespective of the meandering flow of rivers and the unyielding features of the terrain.” 25 This conception of space as a uniform commodity whose worth was measured by monetary value generally displaced other visions of the landscape. But the latter, which encompassed both the haunted hollers and groves sacred to folklore, and then the “consecrated places” of the reenchanters, continued to exercise a hold on the American imagination. In explaining this impulse, proponents of the imponderable fluids maintained that spiritual energies were not evenly distributed across the land; some areas were more richly endowed than others. It did not fall to surveyors to make these distinctions. One such concentration of forces enabled the slave to make her pilgrimage to Woodstock. But her success required the assistance of fate, and determining its contribution often entailed divination. Powers pondered these issues and concluded There are links in every man’s life, which form the chain of his destiny, on looking forward we see no connection, but a backward view presents the ties which connect events and things apparently accidental often form prominent features in the whole. Groping in darkness, we seem to have stumbled upon the right path and are led out of the labyrinth by the thoughtless hand of chance. But in reality there is no such thing as accident, nor is any thing, however small, suspended upon the hair of chance.26 If all was predetermined, then whatever befell his statues was not attributable to mere happenstance. As a consequence, the meaning of a piece was

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not fixed at a particular point in time; it could expand and accommodate the diverse circumstances the work encountered once it left the studio. An individual blessed with clairvoyance might discern the implications of such events more readily than most, but the prospect down the corridors of time was rarely unobstructed. We find Powers struggling with these concepts after his statue of Daniel Webster went down in the wreck of the Oxford in 1857. He was sure the disaster was part of “the great scheme of the Creator,” without, however, being able to specify what that scheme might be.27 Despite such quandaries, his belief in the possibility of transcending time and space by means of spiritual insight persisted throughout his life. These issues were addressed somewhat tentatively in Fisher Boy (Figure 26), the representation of a youth who rests his hand on a tiller while holding a conch to his ear to listen to the pounding surf. When he conceived this motif, Powers thought the lore about foretelling inclement weather by hearkening to shells was confined to his native land, but visitors to his studio assured him the practice was widespread. Allied to issues surrounding the custom’s universality is the sculptor’s description of the immature figure as “a kind of Appollino,” one attuned to ideals of male comeliness but also respectful of contemporary mores and religion. This aim was achieved, Powers adds, by eschewing the absurdities of pagan mythology, but how, precisely, are the religious considerations he mentions acknowledged in an imagery that initially seems so mundane?28 Hints of a deeper purpose appear in Powers’s description of the face as betraying “doubts[,] he is not satisfied at the omen. He fears an approaching storm, a superstition that the sound of the conch denotes the state of the sea.”29 Indeed, the expression is far more sober than that of the smiling fisher boys created by Francois Rude and other sculptors down to the end of the century. The gist of Powers’s assertion concerns the boy’s dismay about— but not disbelief in—the omen because it warns against setting out on waters that will soon become turbulent. Powers added elsewhere that the figure was intended “To represent this peculiar superstition [of sounds in a shell] (if indeed it be all superstition).”30 The studied ambiguity of this statement is reminiscent of the stratagems discussed in the previous chapter. A statue had to be different things to different viewers; some could see the Fisher Boy simply as a depiction of quaint customs and peoples, but those who shared the sculptor’s convictions would discern more profound implications. The antiquity and universality of a belief or folkway weighed heavily in its favor

Figure 26. Hiram Powers, Fisher Boy. 1844, plaster, 57 1/2 in. high. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/ Art Resource NY.

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when Spiritualists came to judge its validity.31 Persons of this persuasion, who understood that the oracles of seashells were widely consulted, could discover in the youth’s quizzical look the indications of a presentiment that was not “all superstition.” Henry T. Tuckerman discerned in the boy’s pensiveness an “air and aspect suggestive of the mystery of life that connects its outset with eternity.”32 Thomas Cole addressed a similar theme in his series The Voyage of Life (1839– 40, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N.Y.), but he counsels a resignation before the decrees of the divinity that is at odds with the lesson taught by the Fisher Boy.33 The latter values the powers of intuition as a means of mitigating the fury of the elements and other perils that endanger both physical and moral well-being. By listening to his inner voice, the boy can comply with the intimations Providence deigns to convey and escape the harsher blows fate might otherwise deal him. Contemporaries who shared this conviction perceived their age as shaking off shackles forged by both the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the determinism of Protestant belief. Such individuals were likely to consider vulgar incredulity even more reprehensible than vulgar credulity. It was the mission of such reenchanters “not to make science mystical but to bring the mysterious within the bounds of science.”34 Powers knew something of these matters and their consequences firsthand. In the summer of 1850, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, famed author and Transcendentalist, drowned in a shipwreck just off the shores of Fire Island while returning from Italy. Reflecting on her demise, the sculptor remarked that “Madam Ossoli—the last time I saw her—appeared gloomy and thoughtful—as one who had a presentiment of evil, and from some cause or other, I know not what. I have been unusually anxious about her and the others who accompanied her on board.”35 Powers had thought the Elizabeth, the ill-starred craft chosen by the Ossoli family, seaworthy at the time of embarkation, but retrospective precognition now alerted him to clues he had failed to appreciate fully. We can imagine Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s mood resembling that of the Fisher Boy and wonder if the tragedy could have been averted had she heeded his example. The issues surrounding retrospective precognition contributed significantly to the unfolding meaning of America (Figure 27). Conceived as the centerpiece for the Capitol rotunda, the original marble, completed in 1855 but destroyed in a warehouse fire a decade later, and the surviving plaster model testify to Powers’s belief in fate. He expended the considerable time and effort required for the preparation of a more-than-life-size figure with-

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out a firm commitment of support from the government. While statuary is often designed to grace a specific site, Powers occasionally designated a destination prior to obtaining the consent that would assure a successful outcome. Higher powers, he assumed, would intervene on his behalf to bring about the desired end. More than just an ability to prognosticate, this belief entertained the possibility that events were actually influenced by magnetic currents emanating from the brain, and willingness to execute a statue for a particular locale was a powerful first step in aligning it with the energies capable of achieving that end.36 We encounter analogous thinking in the sculptor’s response to Edward Everett’s telegraph informing him he had been commissioned to carve likenesses of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson for the Capitol (1861–62, 1860–62, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.). Powers wrote that his “wife dreamed of receiving the dispatch. She dreamed also of receiving several letters,—one of them from you stating that all had been arranged.”37 Were such dreams merely premonitions, or did they actually set in motion forces that could realize them? In either case, chance was an illusory concept perpetuated by materialists; dreams, visions, and all the intuitive powers of the soul allowed one to anticipate and even influence the future. Powers’s own reserves of intuition, however, were apparently inadequate to anticipate the objections to America Franklin Pierce would raise. Much of the imagery, including the heavenward gesture indicating the source of freedom, the crown of thirteen stars symbolizing the original states, and the laurel-draped fascis celebrating the invincibility of union, was quite conventional and passed without comment. It was the manacles beneath the left foot, intended to signify the triumph of democracy over despotism, that met with the president’s disapproval. He and other politicians worried that this item might be understood as a reference to our “peculiar institution” and offend constituencies from the slave-holding states. All the denials and disavowals of abolitionism Powers could muster failed to reverse this judgment, and the government never purchased the statue. 38 Powers saw matters differently, however, when the Civil War was drawing to a close in the early months of 1865. Now the manacles could symbolize slavery, and in again urging Congress to acquire his work, the sculptor promoted an America with broken chains of slavery under foot, the union unbroken and crowned with victory and herself thanking God for all. It may turn

Figure 27. Hiram Powers, America. 1848–49, plaster, 46 x 1 1/8 x 1 3/4 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY; useum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson.

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out in the end that the rejection of this statue by President Pierce and Buchanan was providential. The time for it had not come. It represents our country with her foot on slavery, broken and destroyed forever. It is quite true that I did not comprehend our slave system purposely in the design. The broken chains referred to the way in which we got our national liberty. But the statue itself fully comprehends both. I claim no merit by fore-knowledge, for its present signification.39 Powers, in effect, had become an instrument of providence, creating symbolism that commemorated the outcome of the nation’s trial by fire without comprehending entirely the implications of his undertaking when he commenced. The presentiment in this instance was decidedly retrospective, but it was consistent with the sort of teleological reasoning fostered by Swedenborg and the Spiritualists. In a conversation about the prospects of flying, for example, Powers argued along these lines, claiming the possibility would arise only when “the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied.”40 Likewise, the true implications of America only emerged when humanity had attained an improved moral condition. There was a time and place for everything, and an intuitive capacity to sense the workings of fate best enabled one to know when and where. The sources of meaning discussed to this point, including sanctified sites, childhood memories, dreams and folk customs, the workings of fate, and the mind’s power to influence the outcome of events, all come together in California (Figure 28). Like America, Powers “took the risk” of modeling this figure on his own initiative, and again the sculptor had a clear idea where it should be placed. He repeatedly expressed the expectation it would be erected at Sutter’s Mill, or, as Powers called it, “Sutter’s run,” the stream where gold was first discovered in 1848.41 There the marble Native American would personify both the risks and rewards associated with the gold rush. She expresses the latter by holding a divining rod that dips toward several enormous quartz crystals, the geological formation Powers thought most likely to harbor the greatest deposits of gold. But all is not what it appears, for in addition to the promise of riches, she clasps behind her back the thorns that symbolize the disappointment awaiting most fortune hunters. One can only imagine how these adventurers would have received the statue had it been placed on the banks of Sutter’s Creek, a brook one contemporary described as flowing “in a little valley settled by miners. A number of tents were pitched along the stream and some log houses for the winter were in the process of erection.”42 The

Figure 28. Hiram Powers, California. 1850–55 (this carving, 1855), marble, 71 x 18 1/4 x 2 3/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY; gift of William Backhouse Astor, 1872.

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rudimentary nature of this settlement makes all the more extraordinary Powers’s ambition to grace it with a work of fine art. In addition to the external attributes California exhibits, Powers’s interest in phrenology assured that her bodily form would reinforce the content. These implications appear in his remark that the face was “broad at the temples, the head small and round.”43 Roundness was a positive attribute of the female skull, where no excessively protruding faculties were desired because these would indicate devotion to a single trade or profession, and this orientation was decidedly a male prerogative.44 The mention of a diminutive head was a feature of the ethnic identity of California. Phrenology considered size to be a measure of strength, and by this gauge the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent could not match the prowess of European settlers. During the antebellum years, large collections of skulls were assembled, and analysis of them confirmed that the smallness and shape of Indian crania boded ill for the prospect of their ever embracing the blessings of “civilization.” 45 Size alone was not the sole test of mental capacity; the phrenologist also had to weigh the relative power of the “intellectual” faculties in the forehead against the “animal” functions located in the nether and posterior regions of the brain. In this matter, one authority spoke for most his colleagues when he asserted that “the Caucasian race is superior in reasoning power and moral elevation to all the other races, and accordingly, has a higher and bolder forehead.”46 Powers resorted to this assumption in his Last of the Tribes (1867–72, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), the depiction of an Indian maiden fleeing the arrival of settlers, to reinforce its theme. “She is hopeless and knows not whither to turn,” one critic surmised, and a rapidly retreating forehead portends her headlong flight from, and incompatibility with, the harbingers of progress.47 A more auspicious organization marks the brow of California; it “is broad at the temples” despite her Native American identity. This departure from the usual racial calculations merits further attention. The broad forehead California exhibits indicates she is susceptible to the prompting of the divining rod. Low-browed persons lacked the sensitivity necessary to feel the attraction exercised on this instrument by imponderable fluids emanating from metallic substances. One contemporary noted that the virtue resided in the person wielding the rod, not in the twig itself.48 This realization was made explicit in Powers’s sculpture. “Spirituality,” the faculty governing intuition, was often amply developed in the AngloAmerican forehead, especially that of women (Figure 29), where it added a

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winsome angularity to the outer edges of the brow, but members of other ethnic or racial groups were rarely so propitiously endowed. California was an exception. Reports about one gifted clairvoyant state she had only to grasp a nugget from California to be placed “en rapport with the ‘diggins’ whence it was taken, and she would go on to describe them in detail.”49 D. M. Cook, a successful prospector, attributed his good fortune to the “interior promptings” he experienced in dreams. Experiments soon convinced him “that the same prescient faculty exists in many other individuals, and is available for like purposes.”50 And an account of a “rodsman” features his “full, broad forehead, the mark of intellect.”51 Powers could hardly ignore these considerations if he wanted viewers to believe his figure capable of responding to subtle exhalations arising from the earth. To do otherwise would constitute an acknowledgment that chance played a role in such affairs, and this possibility he was unwilling to concede. Despite the contribution of personal sensitivity to their enterprise, many aspiring prospectors were also scrupulous about acquiring the kind of branch best able to transmit metallic emanations. Depending on the criteria chosen, a rod could cost twenty-five dollars or more, no small sum for a forked twig.52 Its status in California is akin to that of the conch in the Fisher Boy: each was an object whose claim to channel supernatural powers was supported by a venerable lore. The divining rod was yet another example, one Spiritualist noted, of a device summarily dismissed by an earlier generation and now restored to use due to the results it yielded.53 Powers’s knowledge of the subject would have commenced during his years in Woodstock. There the rod was not only used to locate wells but also to find pirate loot and gold mines. Despite the improbability of Captain Kidd or Coronado ever having traveled to the remote regions of New England, their treasures were avidly sought in the early decades of the century. In Windsor, a village near Powers’s native town, one resident claimed he could name some five hundred men who believed “immense treasures” lay hidden in the Green Mountains. Their excavations, and those of likeminded men, made the hills resemble the goldfields of California, according to one witness. Powers remained in this element even after he moved to Cincinnati because Ohio was a popular destination for migrating Vermonters in the 1820s.54 Childhood experiences, which figured so integrally in the conception and display of the Greek Slave, again proved inspirational for California. In his study of treasure hunting, Alan Taylor notes that its upsurge in

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Figure 29. “Mental—Spirituelle,” from Nelson Sizer, Heads and Faces, and How to Study Them (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1887), 25.

the backwoods of Vermont was an outgrowth of frontier conditions that released marginal members of society from the surveillance of their more respectable neighbors. Puritans shunned the practice of magic, and devotees of the Enlightenment cast a jaundiced eye on “superstition,” but, as populations spread after the Revolution into regions previously uninhabited, social restraints weakened and folkways flourished. Rural Yankees increasingly revived practices that had never quite disappeared. Commingled with the desire for riches that would release the treasure hunter from the hardscrabble existence of northern New England was a yearning “for a religion that . . . could [be] experience[d] physically. For some, no experience with the supernatural seemed more tangible than the pull of a divining rod.” However mixed the motives, sincere feelings of reverence were involved in what Taylor calls the “supernatural economy.” It drew on traditional notions about wealth as a sign of God’s favor and enlisted folk customs in the effort to elicit his approbation.55 A quasi-religious fervor prevailed when it came time for the rodsman to “swear the rod.” As he embarked on his quest, “he raised the talisman before him, and looking reverently upwards, administered in a solemn tone the usual form of an oath; directing it to tell him the truth to such questions as he should ask.” The treasure hunter’s tribulations were by no means at an end, however, when the rod actually dipped downward. Malevolent spirits, usually the tormented souls of persons murdered by pirates and buried with

Figure 30. John Quidor, The Money Diggers. 1832, oil on canvas, 16 5/8 x 21 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley.

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their booty, kept an eternal vigil over the site, ready to remove the trove should the protocol governing its retrieval be violated. John Quidor’s Money Diggers depicts a scene from the Tales of a Traveler in which Washington Irving satirizes such beliefs (Figure 30). We witness the moment when “the visage of the drowned buccaneer, [appeared] grinning hideously upon” Wolfert and his companions as they pursue their quest for wealth. The drama unfolds at night, the time most conducive to the workings of magic, and a blazing fire reveals a divining rod and book of incantations. 56 In Irving’s narrative, the specter is actually a mortal interloper whose sudden entry precipitates much of the farce. Quidor’s painting, despite its humorous intent, manages to convey a sense of the nervous excitement that prevailed during these ventures, which were taken quite seriously by participants in the nation’s “supernatural economy.” Their earnest endeavors offer a contemporary context for California: she, also, is a sprite who stands guard over untold riches, offering and withdrawing her favors with a capriciousness equal to that of her counterparts in traditional folklore.57 The reenchanters transformed this “supernatural economy” by discarding its incantations and gothic tales of buried bodies while attributing the success of the divining rod to the activity of imponderable fluids. An article titled “Wands, and the Divining Rod” explains that “every form in being, whether found upon the human, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral, or the cosmical plane of existence, is surrounded and pervaded by an imponderable element of a nature corresponding to the tangible material itself, in all its parts.” This “peculiar magnetism or soul essence” of things enables persons of a “peculiar nervous or physical susceptibility” to locate veins of ore “by means of a forked stick cut from a hazel or peach tree.”58 As California doubtless knew, this vital element was highly concentrated in “distinct and large crystals” that produced, “though less powerfully, the same effects as magnets, or as the human hand.”59 Spiritualists sought to put such phenomena to practical use: whenever they perceived “the mineral emanations that rise flame-like, and . . . the wave-currents of magnetism that sail like sheeted clouds over given districts of the country,” they would endeavor to “find the treasure” and thereby “vindicate the truth of spiritualism.” The wealth so accumulated would enable “the erection of halls . . . [and put] into the field more lectures upon the Spiritual Philosophy.”60 This mindset did not regard the divining rod California holds as a vestige of outdated folk practices but as an instrument capable of quickening the pace of progress by reconciling science and religion.

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Powers’s devotion to these principles deepened his determination to have California placed at Sutter’s run. There her divining rod would have dipped toward the mother lode with its immense concentration of imponderable fluids. For the sensitive visitor, these pulsations were more potent than the associations the site might bestir in those with a bent for history. Removed from this site, the rod lost its profound connection with one of the nodal points in spiritual/material evolution of the Republic. Such considerations would certainly cause California to find her way to Sutter’s Mill just as the Greek Slave managed to return to Woodstock. Powers’s outlook had been influenced by Swedenborg’s teachings on influx and the power of spiritual affinities to surmount the obstacles of time and space. In this world, such obstacles were overcome, however imperfectly, by imponderable fluids, which endeavored to effect the mind’s purposes when these were aligned with higher ideals. Powers committed his statues to “the soul of the universe where causes exist,” firmly believing that the “Divine Laws which rule the Heavenly bodies in their grand revolutions descend into the minutest particulars—and human affairs are not left out.”61 Fate heeded the “sense of latitude and longitude” that operated throughout creation with a “power like that of a magnet”; hence the magnetic attractions of the goldfields would prevail over all adversities posed by the rudimentary locale because it was the manifest destiny of California to reside there. Destiny of a somewhat different kind enters into the pose assumed by California. Instead of pointing, she might, for example, have clasped a nugget behind her back, offering a choice between tares and treasure. This gesture, however, would have altered the meaning considerably. Powers explained that “The gold in California glittered at the feet of the inhabitants for a century or more without being seen—no one thought of looking for gold in the earth and therefore no one saw it.” He then asserts that discoveries are made not by the eyes alone but require the soul’s participation as well.62 This understanding of fate’s workings governed his views about the gold rush and the statue designed to commemorate it. California does not grasp the gold nor does she claim the riches of the land for her people. They had heedlessly wandered over the goldfields for generations and thus relinquished their right to them. Instead, she gazes toward her Anglo-American “friends,” a race equipped with the spiritual faculties capable of recognizing the true worth of her bounties. These same people made up the sculpture’s intended audience, and Powers even mused they might adopt his work for the state’s coat of arms.63

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Ideas of this sort were in the air; one contemporary wrote, for example, that the Jesuits had kept their knowledge of the gold secret because they could find no way to make it benefit the church. The account continues by delineating the racial characteristics of the prospectors, describing “the swarthy Mexican, the seemingly passionless and phlegmatic Indian, and the energetic, persevering, go-ahead descendant of the Anglo Saxon.”64 Only the last of these appears to be imbued with the innate capacity to prevail. Similar notions of race govern California, which achieves a remarkable union of the “supernatural economy” with Manifest Destiny. The figure asserts, in effect, that Anglo-Saxons are entitled to the gold because they know best what to do with it.65 Self-serving as this argument may seem, advocates supported it unabashedly because they considered acquisitiveness (a trait sanctioned as an innate attribute of the soul by having a phrenological faculty devoted to its governance) the foundation of spiritual growth.66 Powers’s figure embodies these notions far more comprehensively than the many illustrations of incidents associated with the gold fields. Rather than document specific events, it encapsulates current thinking about American expansionism with greater finesse than any other contemporary image. Believers in the Rochester rappings tended to connect them with the gold rush because both commenced in 1848. The two developments seemed to announce the advent of a new era in which the old ambition of Protestantism—and that of such offshoots as the supernatural economy— to unite spiritual and material well-being now appeared to be within the grasp of all. The same year saw revolutionary discontent spread across Europe. Powers viewed this development with alarm and contrasted the chaos he anticipated would overtake the Old World with the growing harmony and prosperity of the New.67 America and California articulate his response to these events. The former gestures upward to remind legislators in the Capitol that the blessings of union and liberty were heaven-sent and not to be trifled with in the manner of European anarchists; across the continent, the other figure completes this lesson by pointing downward to signal the importance of material prosperity in fulfilling the decrees of providence. Neither was commissioned for the site designated by the sculptor, but the omens were auspicious and seemed to portend a successful outcome for both ventures. Proponents of this outlook regarded it as consistent with the dictates of a higher kind of science, one that would rescue modernism from the

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“implacable materialism” of skepticism.68 Their dedication to a moderate modernism also put them at odds with the practitioners of folkways. Of the latter, David Bjelajac notes that treasure hunters tended to be drawn from the ranks of small, penurious farmers who ignored recent improvements in agricultural technology. 69 This mindset, with its reliance on archaic modes of conjuration rather than technological innovation as a means of acquiring wealth, was on both counts alien to the reenchanters, who embraced progress while seeking a rational explanation of the forces responsible for the successes achieved by amulets and incantations. Powers’s dedication to Swedenborg and Spiritualism, for instance, was accompanied by the disposition of an inveterate tinkerer; when not carving marble, he was wont to apply his creative energies to some apparatus calculated to lighten his labors or those of his countrymen, an enterprise he would regard as complementary to the enlightenment his statues offered.70 California uses a rod, a device of great antiquity, but it now acts at the behest of those quantifiable “mineral emanations that rise flamelike . . . over given districts of the country” discussed above. And, as noted, certain districts were more amply charged with these psychic energies than others. This belief provided a modern counterpart to old notions about the haunting of tarns and fens by pixies and elves, while also offering an alternative to the topographic disenchantment of the nation. In seeking the greater spiritual reciprocity between the land and its inhabitants that this stance implied, Powers neither opposed economic development nor consigned his busy, profit-minded countrymen to lives of “quiet desperation.” His vision is more tolerant of material comforts, and consequently more sanguine about the impact of California gold on the national psyche than Henry David Thoreau’s. In one form or another, similar sentiments circulated widely throughout America; an article in The Crayon, for instance, investigates at length the proposal “that earth and man act and react magnetically on each other.” The author goes on to describe “the silent, secret nature of the forces that bind the life and soul of some in an invisible chain to certain localities.”71 Both Powers and Thoreau concurred with this view, but whereas the latter would have read the remark about chains metaphorically, making it the prerogative of each individual to designate a site of especial significance as it pertained to his or her enlightenment, the former would interpret “chain[s]” more or less literally, understanding the term to encompass the actual tug of spiritual forces in nature, forces whose existence science would eventually demonstrate.72

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Harriet Hosmer and Space Travel Harriet Hosmer’s gender opened to her modes of expression that were scarcely accessible to her male counterparts. Their representations of the female figure, the subject most favored by American Neoclassical sculptors, were hardly apt vehicles for autobiographical expression. She, on the other hand, could identify with her heroines. In doing so, she was bound to consult Spiritualism since it was integral to her sense of self. But the vision her faith inspired eventually evolved to a point where working in marble seemed an encumbrance. This development was, to some degree, the outcome of her disposition; she, like Powers, was a tinkerer and devoted more and more time to gadgetry in her later years. Indeed, she confessed she “would rather have . . . [her] fame rest upon the discovery of perpetual motion than upon . . . [her] achievements in art.”73 In reorienting her career, it will be proposed, Spiritualism inspired an attempt to close the gap between manufacture and sculpture by devising an alternative to the Ferris wheel. If successful, her invention would reenchant the leisure hours of those whose lives were increasingly governed by the routine of wage labor and bestow on this population greater blessings than her more conventional sculpture could confer. Beginning, then, with Hesper (1852, Watertown, Massachusetts, Watertown Free Public Library) her initial essay in the classical style, the message is one of reassurance about the prospects of an afterlife. Joy Kasson identifies Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (CXX) as its inspiration and speculates that the poem’s presentation of Hesper as the evening star (Venus) and the bust’s drowsy expression may relate to the Spiritualist tendency to illustrate the benignity of death by comparing it to falling asleep (at twilight). This interpretation becomes more meaningful, however, when considered in connection with Hesper’s other role as the morning star, Phosphor. Tennyson wrote “In Memoriam” in response to the death of a close friend and the meditations on mortality this event initiated. Seeking to quell his doubts, he tested the claims of Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, and Spiritualism. His verse reflects this effort and stands as one of the most celebrated attempts in Victorian literature to probe the boundary between the living and dead. Its refrain claiming “Hesper-Phosphor [is a] double name / for what is one . . . thy place is changed; thou art the same” must have caught Hosmer’s attention. She doubtlessly recognized its compliance with Spiritualist beliefs about the soul’s remaining the

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same after death despite its change of place. Drowsiness, then, can also be read as an awakening, for with Phospor “comes the greater light.”74 Tennyson’s “Oenone” provided the idea for Hosmer’s first full-length figure, a seated woman of the same name who assumes an attitude of despondency (Figure 31). By relating the thoughts of this nymph from Homeric legend as she contemplates suicide, the poet narrates the tragic story of her marriage to Paris. In closing, Tennyson alludes to Oenone’s prophetic ability by mentioning the “burning fire” she sees in “earth and air,” a premonition of the destruction of Troy she does not entirely comprehend. A review of the statue comments specifically on Oenone’s visionary powers and explains that they permitted her to foresee the catastrophic consequences of Paris’s meeting with Helen of Troy. Her warnings go unheeded and later, when he is wounded in battle, she refuses to administer the cure known only to herself that would save him. Hosmer depicts Oenone contemplating the crook Paris employed as a shepherd when the two shared matrimonial bliss; is she now contemplating suicide or vengeance? The answer depends on the viewer’s outlook. Those not attuned to Spiritualism could empathize with her feminine vulnerability, a popular theme in Victorian art. One suspects, however, that Hosmer (seemingly never the victim of unrequited love) was attracted by her gift of clairvoyance; in this reading, Oenone is a woman of great power, capable of righting the wrongs she has experienced.75 Such gifts, Hosmer knew well, were not simply the stuff of legend. Once, after withdrawing from dinner to take a nap, her repose was troubled by visions of a carriage accident. On mentioning these to a friend, the latter dismissed them as the vagaries of dreams. Ten minutes later, a commotion in the street below drew both women to the window, where a frantic effort to extricate passengers from an overturned coach was in progress.76 While hardly as dramatic as the flame-consumed towers of Ilium, such premonitions, which apparently occurred through much of her life, confirmed Hosmer’s sense of sisterhood with Oenone. According to the testimony of another friend, Lydia Maria Child, Hosmer employed these powers to envision figures dormant within marble. She describes how the sculptor’s “strong young arms chiseled out those forms of beauty, which her clairvoyant soul saw hidden in the shapeless mass.” 77 This account resembles those given of Michelangelo’s creative efforts, and the Neoplatonic mentality implied doubtlessly influenced Hosmer’s stylistic evolution. Despite the comparison often made between her work and that of Powers and Thomas Crawford, she was respectively

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Figure 31. Harriet Hosmer, Oenone. 1854–55, marble, 33 3/8 x 34 3/4 x 26 3/4 in. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis; gift of Wayman Crow, Sr., 1855.

twenty-five and seventeen years younger than these Neoclassical artists. Her precise contemporary was John Quincy Adams Ward, a pioneer of the naturalistic sculpture she disparaged for its failure to excite the imagination. Only an eye capable of perceiving the “highest beauty of form,” she proposed, could aspire to rival the Greeks. No doubt Hosmer’s early training with John Gibson, himself a proponent of classical ideals, explains the initial preference, but her continued allegiance to the style was

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not simply based on theoretical deduction: it drew heavily on personal experience.78 The latter included her encounters with the supernatural and the inclination these fostered to see humanity cloaked in the “subtle aura” of its immortality mentioned by Story. Hosmer’s standard, however, was not the unchanging world of Platonic archetypes. For all her reticence in matters of style, she remained an enthusiastic proponent of technological innovation, confessing a wish to return to earth in a hundred years to “see what has been going on in flesh while we have been going on in spirit.” The nature of these expectations can be gathered from her utopian fantasy “1975 A Prophetic Drama.” A dialogue about electricity prompts the observation that in the nineteenth century “the manipulators of that mysterious agent had already appeared. They were called mediums, but it was left for the 20th century to understand and to utilize their peculiar gifts.” This is achieved by a “patent composite reflector,” an instrument that permits the transmission of thought. One day, these devices will endow everyone with the powers presently available only to psychics. The point behind all these speculations appears in one character’s declaration that the greatest impediment to progress is a mind unwilling to confront its own vast potential.79 Consistent with the aims of fellow reenchanters, Hosmer believed science would eventually penetrate the spiritual world and explain its laws.80 This conviction and the waning taste for classicism led her to turn from sculpture in an effort to probe the secrets of perpetual motion. Beginning in 1875, she spent two decades working on an engine to be powered by a “permanent magnet.” Since her Puck was propelled on his daily gambols by the same imponderable fluids that kept the cosmos on its eternal rounds, why not tap these forces to run a motor that could usher in a millennium of prosperity? In 1854, the same question spurred John Murray Spear, a Spiritualist who lived near Lynn, Massachusetts, to create a perpetual motion machine that would harness “the electric life-currents of the universe.” Along similar lines, another tinkerer-cum-Spiritualist, Thomas Edison, toyed with the idea of building a device that would permit long-distance calls to the Summerland.81 These were the aspirations of kindred minds, ones undaunted by the prospect of exploring their own vast potential. In the quest for that potential, Hosmer pursued a vision scarcely realizable by the conventions of sculpture practiced in her time. While her colossal plaster figure of Queen Isabella for the World’s Columbian Exposition

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of 1893 testified to an undiminished (if rarely exercised) capacity to create statuary according to those conventions, this new project was conceived on a scale that dwarfed all her previous works. Had it been undertaken, it would have towered over the same fairgrounds. Her plan called for a tall shaft topped by a glass sphere illuminated from within by an electric light. Rotating around this artificial sun were a series of cars affixed to long, metal arms. These represented the planets, and the idea was to offer passengers “the sensation of inhabiting other worlds than our own and of viewing our own planet, Earth, from a new point in space.”82 The overseers ultimately chose George Washington Gale Ferris’s design, which consisted of a gigantic wheel that whirled passengers around while providing panoramas of the fairgrounds. Whatever disappointment Hosmer experienced when the decision was announced must have been compounded by her sense that the committee had failed to consider the importance of edifying riders. Rapid industrialization after the Civil War granted even members of the working class some free time, but how to spend it remained problematic. Summer outings, professional sports, amusement parks, and just plain idleness were among the many available alternatives. But tenacious strains of Puritanism in American culture insisted that all waking hours be devoted to productive pursuits: what purpose could be served, for example, by the repetitive circling of Ferris’s wheel? 83 In place of its meaningless motion, Hosmer offered a teleology based on the prospect of interplanetary travel Spiritualists envisioned as the vehicle of progressive enlightenment in the afterlife.84 Her plan combined leisure and instruction, satisfying the demands of fairgoers and moralists alike. By integrating Sunday’s amusements with Sunday’s devotions, she proposed to reenchant what the entertainment industry had profaned. Hosmer’s conviction that the phenomena associated with séances and materializations could be attributed “to some hitherto unrecognized natural law” induced her to address the issues surrounding clairvoyance in the person of a pagan woman.85 The natural laws Oenone embodies were universal; any reference to Christianity, which entailed adroit navigation around the shoals of doctrinal differences, might obscure this point. As noted above, Hosmer’s gender facilitated identification with her heroines, and the modernity of Oenone was vouchsafed by the sculptor’s own psychic experiences. Despite this advantage over the likes of Story and Powers, she seems eventually to have found the constraints imposed by working in

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marble too great to encompass the prospects opened by her understanding of technology’s potential to accelerate human evolution. Mechanical invention offered an enticing alternative to carving stone. The trajectory of this reasoning points to the Chicago tower, which, had it been constructed, would have overshadowed all her figural pieces. It is questionable whether contemporaries would have regarded the device as a work of fine art; nevertheless, it epitomized ambitions she had pursued throughout her career. Once aboard, passengers could careen through the solar system with all the abandon of Puck and gaze on the terrestrial sphere from the vantage of Hesper.

Conclusion The artists reviewed here all relied on reenchantment to validate their imagery: Story did so to establish a lineage for Sojourner Truth’s pronouncements; Powers to sanction the appropriation of Mexican lands; and Hosmer to resist the commodification of leisure. In adopting this strategy, they joined the many Romantics who expressed their dissatisfaction with the license granted capitalism and positivism to run roughshod over the finer sentiments of humanity. Modern scholarship has anointed Transcendentalism as the most conspicuous representative of this tendency in antebellum society. Thoreau’s ideas about sanctified sites mentioned above indicate that a broad range of views existed among the dissatisfied. He and his colleagues regarded the Spiritualists, for instance, as obliged by their scientific predilections to adopt an inflexibility, a literalism, that robbed experience of its dearest quality: its protean nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, exercised his faculty of vituperation to the fullest when addressing the subject. The novel faith, he proclaimed, was a “rat-revelation, the Gospel that comes by taps in the wall & thumps in the table-drawer.” Those drawn to such teachings ignored the fact that in nature “each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of mater circulates in turn through every system.”86 For them, all could be explained by reference to the imponderable fluids, a stance that seemed to preclude any flights of fantasy. The reenchantment advocated by Transcendentalism involved elaborate literary devices and metaphors. It was a highly cerebral undertaking calculated to gratify those whose college education equipped them to recognize the many arcane references proponents were wont to employ.

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Most Americans were not so equipped. Spiritualism offered them (as it did the educated individuals who adopted it) a more visceral approach to experience in which the believer resonated sympathetically with the sentient energies circulating in the environment. One did so not as the “transparent eyeball” of a remote Platonism, but as an individual anxious about personal survival after death. The often banal communications heard during séances offered such persons greater reassurance than all the highfalutin rhetoric coming out of Concord. The populist aspect of this approach was not without its perils, but if Powers’s celebration of Manifest Destiny, for example, seems less than benign, this must be weighed against the generally liberal orientation of Spiritualism seen in the work of Story and Hosmer. In reading recent histories of nineteenth-century American art, one might suppose avid followers of Emerson and Thoreau were common in the artistic community, but the evidence supporting this proposition is generally quite negligible. By contrast, artists often declared their allegiance to Spiritualism. And in examining the ramifications of reenchantment, this text heeds David Reynolds’s words when he explains that “Emersonian Transcendentalism, never a popular movement, was in retreat by [the 1850s] . . . , while . . . [Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Harmonialism] were gaining millions of adherents.”87 Among these millions were the artists who are the subject of this book.

Chapter 3

Revelations by Daylight

We tend to think of ghosts as nocturnal beings, but what might the day reveal of their existence? This question underlies the analysis of William Sidney Mount and Fitz Henry Lane that follows. The golden glow that pervades their stilled settings implies a state of heightened consciousness, and scholars who have searched for the inspiration behind their formulations usually cite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on the transformative powers of light. Neither artist, however, was particularly interested in Emerson’s ideals. They were believers in psychic phenomena, and this preference sanctions the use of Ockham’s razor: if the teachings of Spiritualism account satisfactorily for the content and style of their works, what need is there for Transcendentalism? Although the images reviewed in this chapter rely heavily on the suggestive power of light, its meaning remains elusive. Light, being pervasive and devoid of incident, is less forthcoming about its significance than, for example, the scenarios enacted by Mount’s figures. Conjecture cannot be entirely removed from our analysis; however, if all components of a painting contribute to a unified content, then speculation about light’s role can be diminished by linking its qualities to other, more readily identifiable features. And, if those features possess Spiritualist associations, then we may assume the light does as well.

William Sidney Mount and Rembrandt Mount’s childhood was enthralled by the occult powers that visited his home. Lore had it, for instance, that an old violin, long a family treasure, announced an impending death by cracking in several places. Great consternation arose when the instrument shivered and then split after William’s

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uncle, John Henry Mount, was kicked by a horse and remained bedridden with three broken ribs (the injury did not prove fatal). Edward Buffet, who wrote an account of Mount’s life based on information gathered from the artist’s diaries and interviews with individuals old enough to have remembered him, mentions that his kin continued to be “preoccupied” by psychic phenomena long after William’s death.1 Like Hiram Powers and Henry Dexter, Mount inherited a folkloric outlook and then transformed it by means of Spiritualism. The not entirely reliable prophecies of an ancient violin, for example, were superseded when raps from the spirit world accurately foretold the demise of three neighbors. Such raps, he asserts, came from the “electro-nervous flued” that governs both mind and matter. In other words, natural law replaced the vagaries of traditional belief in a manner consistent with the principles of reenchantment.2 As was often the case with contemporaries, Mount forsook the mainline churches not out of disbelief but as a means of keeping the inner flame of faith alive. The Rochester rappings must have seemed providential in this regard, and an upsurge of religious speculation appears in his journal at the time they were captivating the nation.3 He describes, among other phenomena, his personal conversations with the dead, the touch of ghostly hands, objects moving on their own, and letters delivered by unseen agents. One such missive came from Thomas Rowlandson, the famed English caricaturist, who included a portrait with his communication.4 None of these manifestations possessed quite the sublimity of the biblical miracles Mount had depicted prior to the advent of Spiritualism, including Christ Raising the Daughter of Jairus (1828, The Museums at Stony Brook) and Saul and the Witch of Endor (1828, National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution), but for an artist who subsequently devoted his career to genre painting, they likely reinforced his belief in the significance of seemingly commonplace events. Rowlandson’s apport differed in nature from the one artifact that does survive from these Spiritualist activities, a small drawing of Rembrandt that Mount presumably rendered by means of automatism (Figure 32).5 While this likeness joins the gamut of automatist representations produced by Spiritualists—we have already examined one of Carrie Miller—it surpasses most in its sophistication of technique and intent. Rendered with vigorous pen strokes, it resembles Rembrandt’s etchings both in size and spontaneity of execution. These prints were more available to Americans than the

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paintings, and the sketch could be ascribed to the tendency of an entranced mind to revert to the familiar when obliged to create. Mount would surely have rejected this explanation and instead insisted that the style and content were attributable to Rembrandt’s active participation in the design. Although scholars have associated with Spiritualism the portraits of deceased neighbors and acquaintances that Mount was repeatedly requested to provide, several features distinguish them from Rembrandt’s likeness and indicate they were created for different reasons. These icons, as Phoebe Lloyd notes, were commissioned by surviving family members and usually depict children or young adults, persons whose lives were cut short, with symbols of mortality.6 No such tokens adorn the wizened Rembrandt, nor does his quizzical expression recall the tranquility of the other renderings. Furthermore, the spontaneity of this drawing, a consequence of automatism, contrasts markedly with the meticulousness of the mourning portraits. It was not commemorative of an individual who was beyond recall and instead probably accompanied letters Rembrandt sent Mount. The advanced age, unusual because the soul was supposed to assume the appearance of early maturity when it departed the body, can be understood in the context of the letters. They furnished the seasoned wisdom that comes with experience. The words of a youthful, jovial Rembrandt would carry less weight than those delivered by the individual who appears in the drawing, a man familiar with all the triumphs and reversals his profession had to offer. Beyond the issue of age, however, is the question of likeness; the visage does not especially resemble the round-faced, bulbous-nosed, roughhewn, wide-eyed person who appears in Rembrandt’s many self-portraits. The features in the drawing are delicate, the nose aquiline, the eyes narrow, and the beard far longer than the five-o’clock shadow occasionally sported by the Dutch master. These changes surely reflect the contention, advanced by physiognomic and phrenological theory, that an artist should exhibit a bodily refinement commensurate with his genius. The beard derived its justification from doctrines about hair as a receptacle of the “electrophysiological vital power” generated by the body. Shaving, Mesmerists and Spiritualists contended, depleted this precious resource and deprived the brain of its full measure of power. Mount encountered these notions in 1848 when Charles Loring Elliott volunteered to paint his portrait provided he grow a beard. In commenting on this offer a year later, Mount reveals why Rembrandt, or any aspiring soul for that matter, would have benefited by forsaking the razor:

Figure 32. William Sidney Mount, “Spirit Drawing” of Rembrandt. 1854, ink on paper, 3 3/4 x 2 1/4 in. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, New York.

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I believe that if Sir Joshua Reynolds is permitted to know what is going on in this world, he quite regrets not having supported a flowing beard while President of the Royal Academy, knowing as he did that the early painters and sculptors wore beards—but the fashions of his time cheated him of that luxury. Place two portraits of two different Gentlemen side by side, one bare faced and the other with a full beard, and nature speaks with a trumpet tongue in favor of the latter as being the most natural. A man with a beard no matter what color is nature in her glory. The reference to Reynolds in the present tense bespeaks a Spiritualist outlook and furnishes compelling evidence of Mount’s having embraced the faith by this early date. While the English artist may remain indifferent to the virtue of covering one’s chin with luxuriant locks, the Dutch painter exhibits no such reticence. Both spirits are sustained by the same vital forces that nourished their physical and mental health during mortal existence; why not maintain those powers at peak capacity? As a man renowned for his “devotedness to nature,” Rembrandt could be expected to seize any opportunity to reveal her glory.7 Personal growth does not cease at death; it actually accelerates in the Summerland, opening the possibility that Reynolds would eventually attain the level of enlightenment exhibited by his famous predecessor and follow his example. If we assume, as seems reasonable, that Mount channeled the image of Rembrandt, then its relationship to the two letters purportedly composed by the Dutchman in 1855 is problematic. Mount states in the first of these that he copied it from an original handed him at a circle, and this suggests someone else wrote both. But this conclusion is undermined by their content, which often repeats ideas Mount expressed earlier in his notebooks. Speculation on this matter is unlikely to yield conclusive results, and we will proceed on the assumption that the drawing and documents were created in a trance and express concerns he entertained on several levels of consciousness. The challenges do not end with this resolution, however, for the texts themselves are rambling and inconsistent, characteristics, incidentally, that argue in favor of automatism rather than premeditation.8 Nevertheless, the several recurrent themes that do emerge from the welter of precepts and observations afford us a valuable glimpse into the mindset that governed much of Mount’s later career.9 At the outset, Rembrandt applauds Mount’s ambition to fashion com-

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positions of a truly national character, noting he has already surpassed his contemporaries in this respect. Then, after chiding his colleague for a complacent “sameness of design,” he acknowledges the originality of many works. Originality begets genius; “Rembrandt,” states the author of the letter, was no servile imitator of others, he represented nature “untrammeled by the formalities of conventional rules of elegance.” To do so, however, requires an unwavering belief in one’s abilities; the “desponding artist,” he warns repeatedly, will never rise to eminence. These words touched on a number of issues that preoccupied the letter’s recipient. Rembrandt’s pronouncements trumped the authority of Washington Allston, who, in an often reprinted letter, encouraged the young Mount to strengthen his color and chiaroscuro by studying such Dutch genre painters as Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen. Charles Lanman, an acquaintance of Mount, includes this advice in his biography and then records the artist’s resolve to draw inspiration from nature alone. Rembrandt confirms this decision as the measure most likely to foster originality.10 The slighting of “rules of elegance” likewise appears to be a pointed defense of Mount’s stylistic preferences. John Vanderlyn had advised him to arrange clusters of dark figures against a light background, but Rembrandt can find no merit in “the groupings in works of the masters [which appear] artificial, and [savor] too much of theatrical display.”11 This maxim vindicated Mount’s intermittent inclination to isolate or loosely associate figures in defiance of academic standards, a practice seen, for instance, in Loitering by the Way (1865, The Museums at Stony Brook). Behind these urgings lurk apprehensions about received formulae; their tendency to corrode the integrity of one’s personal vision could only be reversed by constant reference to nature’s example. Rembrandt’s mention of the “desponding artist” and the need for confidence reflects the repeated expressions of self-doubt that run through Mount’s journals. In adopting a profession still widely viewed with skepticism, he embarked on a career that offered little security and ample incentive to question the basis for his choice. “Try, Try,” he fervently implores, “we do not know ourselves until we try.” But how could he know what to try in an era when the traditional means of entering a vocation were rapidly disappearing? Spiritualism joined phrenology in providing answers to individuals perplexed by the great array of options industrialization and urban growth made possible.12 Mount continued to mull these prospects over, writing some three years after the letters arrived: “Have confidence (says Rembrandt) in your ability, if you wish to shine as a painter.”13

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Rembrandt provides many tips on technique, but it is his urgings on the use light as a means of creating forceful compositions that ties his letters to the principal theme of this chapter. His own recognition of the expressive possibilities of light began, he remarks, during childhood with the observation of beams filtering through a trap door in the basement of his father’s mill. He stationed himself there, “and with a curious scrutiny observe[d] the various play of light illuminating the stained stone walls, and the striking relief which certain Jew merchants, clad in their habiliments of brown cloth and Caps[,] . . . [displayed when visiting] the gloomy chamber in order to purchase flour of my father.”14 Rembrandt’s talent, the spirit implies, matured under such circumstances, which instilled a preference for placing strongly illuminated figures against a dark background. Less than two weeks prior to the letter’s delivery, an account of Rembrandt’s career in The Crayon included a narrative remarkably similar to the one Mount received. The article attributes the Dutch master’s style to his youthful contemplation of a “single ray which penetrated that old mill, descending through a dusty atmosphere—falling strongly on the slouched hats of peasants, casting strong shadows on their faces.”15 Combined in this passage, and in the variant received by Mount, are the naturalistic predilections of nineteenth-century criticism and Romanticism’s dedication to the purity of infantile vision. Mount’s commitment to these principles, to nature and childhood as the wellsprings of creativity, was apparently so ingrained that it prompted him during a trance to retrieve snippets of an article that propounded them. To adopt this program was to shun even the imitation of Rembrandt, a logic his spirit affirmed. In bold script, he declares that Mount’s “style of painting is thoroughly unsuited for those Brown and somber tints and broad masses of transparent shadow in their various grades with which I was accustomed to characterise my works.” A paragraph later, he repeats the admonition, claiming his own style was “Too Brown to be incorporated with yours” (emphasis in the original).16 These words did not go unheeded: a review of The Tease, an unlocated work Mount executed in the late 1850s, states it exhibited a “clearness of tone that is due to hints furnished by Rembrandt from the Spirit world.”17 Although the painting’s disappearance makes this report difficult to assess, it does suggest that Mount was adjusting his palette to avoid the browns that were uncongenial to his genius. The scene involved a flirtatious conversation between a young man, who held a letter in his left hand, and a woman.

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In Mount’s paintings, such dalliances tend to occur indoors, and some idea of its likely appearance can be had by considering Winding Up (Courtship) (1836, private collection). This piece depicts a beau holding a skein of yarn while his intended winds it into a ball, the obvious inference being that the courtship will soon also reach the desired outcome. While The Tease must have borne some resemblance to this work, it likely replaced the latter’s somber setting with a brightly illuminated interior.18 Although the circumstances surrounding the creation of The Tease were unusual, Mount’s effort to lighten his palette complied with a larger agenda he set for himself in his later years. Rembrandt’s discourse sanctioned several preferences Mount repeatedly considered in the years before receiving the letters. Of these, the most persistent was the challenge of depicting light accurately. The praise Rembrandt lavishes in the second letter on the “crispness of touch” of (David) Teniers (the Younger, 1610–90) must have caught Mount’s attention. A year earlier, he had claimed that the Flemish master’s success in imitating the qualities of outdoor light was achieved by greatly diminishing the chiaroscuro.19 Mount himself had received similar encomiums at the outset of his career when critics compared the “golden tonality” and deft touch in his Long Island Farmer Husking Corn (1833–34, The Museums at Stony Brook), for instance, to the style of Teniers. This scene sets a farmer out in a field beneath a strong, diffuse light that filters through a brilliant sky and penetrates in among the cornstalks, minimizing the shadows in this region. Mount considered the heightened naturalism a consequence of his having worked outside, a step he believed himself the first among Americans to have taken, and Rembrandt must have had this measure in mind when he warned against a reliance on murky browns.20 While Mount exerted himself to capture the intensity of sunlight early in his career, he seems to have drifted away from this ambition in the 1850s. A year before Rembrandt expressed his concerns, Mount lamented the time spent painting indoors and proposed traveling for three to six months each year to renew his acquaintance with nature. “Teniers,” he adds, “did not paint altogether in his room, but out in the open air. Some of his best pictures were done in that way. That is the way I painted in 1831 and 1833. I must do so again.” Since a confined interior precluded the fulfillment of such aspirations, “the painter should have his carriage to paint in, to take views from, not exposed to the wind and rain.”21 Urgings to this effect reached Mount not only from the other world—they were also a regular feature of

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his private musings—but the spirit’s sanction of ideas intermittently entertained over extended intervals of time provided a compelling incentive to realize them. One such notion involved the fabrication of a mobile studio, a vehicle that would permit him to combine the virtues of nature directly viewed with the comforts and convenience of a traditional workspace. In discussing this venture, we will pay particular attention to the contributions made by Spiritualism. Evidence that Mount’s self-proclaimed shortcomings had some basis in his work appears in his Coming to the Point (1854, The New-York Historical Society). It suffers by comparison to Bargaining for a Horse (1835, The NewYork Historical Society), the earlier version of the subject. In both, two men negotiate the sale of a horse in front of a barn, but the earlier piece exhibits, most obviously, a more consistent spatial diminution. The relation of the men to the buildings is readily discernible, while in the later work their position vis-à-vis the structures is ambiguous, an ambiguity enhanced by the awkward articulation of the horse. Adding to these deficiencies is the rather flaccid modeling seen throughout the landscape, a fault especially apparent in the faces.22 Mount’s proposed remedy was to return to the crisp touch and outdoor light present in such works of the early 1830s as Long Island Farmer Husking Corn. Twenty years separate it from Coming to the Point, and in the interval he had developed a rheumatism that, in its more painful episodes, obliged him to cease painting.23 This condition doubtlessly contributed to the lapses, but his solution, painting outside, would expose him to the very elements that exacerbated the affliction. A carriage fitted out with the tools of the trade would resolve the impasse, and in 1852 he began contemplating a mobile studio. The project only came to fruition nine years later when he hired a carpenter to build a room mounted on wheels (Figure 33).24 Spiritualism’s encompassing contribution to the project involved the strengthening and sanctifying of an established, though dwindling, appreciation of nature. Now the obligation to shield it from the profanation of studio conventions became a religious duty. This, and a yearning to restore the stylistic prowess of his youth, prompted Mount to contact the carpenter. As Spiritualism experienced its precipitous rise in the 1850s, the journal entries given to reflections on the environment invoke the supernatural to a degree not seen in earlier decades. He remarks in 1854, for instance, that before the wonders of the world artists should “lift up their hands with thankfulness. They should be so spiritualised that envy [of other artists] could not enter their hearts.” In the same year, he reasons that if God were

Figure 33. William Sidney Mount, “Portable Studio, Diary, November 17, 1852.” 1852, ink on paper, The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, New York.

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confined to one locality, he could only hear prayers in one place, but since he is everywhere, there is no need to worship in church. God is not restricted to the Bible; hence “the Sun shines and his light will continue to illuminate the world.” Some years later, when writing about the knowledge of light and shadow requisite for painters, he urges a policy of depicting “everything under the sun”; do so, he adds, and “God will help you.” Romantic notions about childhood join these ruminations when he reminisces in 1854 about catching rabbits and skimming stones during youth; “those scenes and impressions,” he observes, “led me on to look at nature for a higher purpose. It seems we are a progressive animal—who goes step by step, endeavouring to perfect ourselves, which makes this world so pleasing to the true lover of nature.”25 This sort of thinking was common among the orthodox and unchurched alike, but it was Spiritualism—in the form of communications from Rembrandt and kindred spirits—that transformed what was otherwise abstract speculation into the kind of personal experience that leads to taking concrete measures. The studio was designed to forge a closer bond with nature, and in doing so took into account not only issues regarding its representation, but also those concerning the mind/body relationship reviewed above in connection with Rembrandt’s beard. It was the second of these considerations that made the ventilators installed at either end of the room so important. The approximately eight-by-twelve-foot chamber was provided with a small stove, which kept the interior cozy in inclement weather but also posed the threat of overheating. By including ventilators, Mount not only removed the potential for discomfort, but also ensured that the inspiration received within was genuine. An incident during the creation of the Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride (1830, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) acquainted him with the perils of working in a sealed interior. As a charcoal fire consumed the oxygen in the room, he became drowsy and watched the figures in his work come to life and dance before his eyes. Death, Mount recalls, stood over his shoulder, and disaster was only averted when he roused from his slumber and opened the door.26 Reformers of the antebellum era repeatedly decried the American habit of stoking iron stoves until they glowed; debilitation or even death by asphyxiation, they cautioned, were the consequences of this custom.27 Mount could testify to the truth of their warnings and to the propensity of an oxygen-starved brain to conjure false visions. Contrast this experience with one that occurred on an April night in 1854: Mount woke from a deep sleep with a “loud scream” when, he reports,

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a sharp concussion exerted a force of fifty pounds on his chest. The door was locked; hence there was no possibility some prankster had invaded the premises, but the window was “raised about two inches—which is my practice, to have my window open both winter and summer—for fresh air.”28 The telling detail here is the open window; by including it, he affirmed that the event actually happened, that it was not the fantasy of a distressed mind. Less than a month earlier, he had attended a Spiritualist conference in which a participant asked those presiding how an invisible power had managed to place the pressure of a hundred and fifty pounds on his foot. The explanation offered proposed that spirits could solidify a column of air and cause the sort of sensation felt by the inquirer.29 Mount had experienced something analogous, and while he was not anxious to repeat it, the fact that his window had been opened confirmed its authenticity. By ventilating his studio, he created an environment conducive to true inspiration; there he could attain the ideal advocated by the spirit of Rev. Samuel Dean when, with Mount in the audience, he commended art for harmonizing the soul by lifting “it up into the clear sunlight of nature’s God.”30 How art might achieve this end will be tested by examining Long Island Farmhouses, a work executed in the portable studio a year after its construction in 1861 (Figure 34). Painting outdoors has enabled the artist to render the light filtering through the clouds with remarkable fidelity. The intimacy with nature that had long eluded him finally seems to have returned as a result of his investment, but to understand the expressive implications of the sky, we must begin with the structures below. They comply with no fixed iconographic program; instead, their significance emerges from a fairly consistent set of associated ideas the artist culled from Spiritualism. What results is a composition based on affiliated beliefs about the paranormal powers that inhabit the worldly sphere. Long Island Farmhouses is a confessional venture undertaken by an aging artist who, by merging personal reflections and aspirations, seeks to locate himself in society and the cosmos. His eschewal of the didactic and emblematic features of his earlier genre pieces in favor of a loose assembly of ruminations makes the content all the more compelling. Prominently featured in Long Island Farmhouses is the Brewster house, a saltbox Colonial; behind it stands the equally aged home of Robert Nelson Mount, William’s brother.31 Spiritualist beliefs were deeply woven into the artist’s feelings about houses of some antiquity and reveal his likely motivations for rendering them. He listened intently, for example, to the stories

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Figure 34. William Sidney Mount, Long Island Farmhouses. 1862–63, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY; gift of Louise F. Wickham in memory of her father, William H. Wickham, 1928.

children in Stony Brook repeated concerning the haunting of “an old, old house, a tragic ruin.” His uncle, John Henry Mount, was fond of telling the tale of his encounter with the “lady in black,” an apparition that drifted through the old Searing home in Glen Cove despite the bolted doors.32 And a young nephew’s lisped murmurings about “an old man in the parlor” caused Mount to marvel at the intimate relationship children seemingly enjoyed with their “spirit friends.”33 He also knew that the Od, or “Spiritod” force, an agent of mind and of disembodied intelligence, “evolved more favorably in certain localities.”34 One of these was the home, a place where the residue of emotions and memories that accumulated over time was especially inviting to otherworldly visitors. William Wetmore Story understood this; old houses, he remarks, exercise “an influence over the family.” “The walls themselves,” he continues, “retain the insensible impressions of the spirits that dwell in them, and influence even the new inhabitants in some subtle way.” When spirits return to this sphere,

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another believer adds, they generally prefer to visit their old abodes. Spiritualists turned to the theory of psychometry to explain such phenomena; according to its teachings, every person (indeed, every living thing) leaves traces of its animal magnetism on whatever it touches. The intense concentration of these energies in a particular domicile attracts revenants and permits sensitives to retrieve the personalities of those who once lived there.35 This notion stands behind Shepard Alonso Mount’s rendering of the family home in Stony Brook, another colonial structure, and the poem he wrote to accompany it, both entitled The Old Double Door (Figure 35). The painting, with its straightforward depiction of a door and windows framed by an arbor, is far less dramatic than his brother’s Long Island Farmhouses, but this humble façade, the verse discloses, harbors wonders that answered both men’s yearnings. Shepard’s thoughts often drift to memories Of those golden hours so long gone by; Of that sweet sleep I shall know no more At the sunny side of this old hall door; The Old Double Door, the broad panel door, And the long iron hinges it turned on of yore. The home of my childhood, is home to me still Though shadows have passed o’er the time worn sill; The faces have vanished that made it dear, And lights have gone out that once shown here. Yet all is not darkness, while loved ones are nigh To look out with me on the deep solemn sky, And commune with the dead on that far off shore, Now gone forever from our old hall door.36 Although the poem, like the painting, situates us on the “sunny side” of the door, the sunlit setting apparently represents no obstacle to “commun[ing] with the dead.” And the lines about “loved ones” contacting the departed are no mere conceit. William claimed every family possessed at least one member capable of becoming a medium; that individual’s powers were enhanced, he added, when assisted by relatives.37 He seems to be speaking from experience, and one wonders if Shepard’s works were inspired by a particularly successful conjuration. In one conversation with those “now gone forever” (through a medium who was, however, not part of the

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Figure 35. Shepard Alonzo Mount, The Old Double Door. n.d., oil on canvas, 7 3/4 x 9 in. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, New York.

family), William learned that his mother resided in the sixth sphere, while his grandfather, Jonas Hawkins, was a tourist, wandering through New Zealand to satisfy his “curiosity about the sublime and beautiful.”38 As Shepard’s life was drawing to a close some five years after painting The Old Double Door, he exclaimed “how beautiful” in the presence of his brother, who surmised he was already gazing into the spirit world, and then on expiring added, “I am coming.”39 Where was he going? To New Zealand perhaps, but a message of consolation William sent a friend whose husband had recently died indicates what both brothers probably anticipated for themselves. “He is now in the spirit world,” William wrote of the deceased, “where he can carry out his plans of a country life to perfection.”40 The Summerland was an extension of the world we know, not the bejeweled city celebrated in the Bible, and the afterlife was determined by one’s worldly disposition. In anticipating his own destiny, Mount would likely

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have commenced with the sort of “country life to perfection” seen in Long Island Farmhouses. The individual who emerges from his Spiritualist diaries is one who surveyed the landscape not only for the facts of mundane existence but also for features that corresponded to his spiritual orientation. During moments of recognition, when setting and self resonated together, eternity would have intimated its essence. One feature likely to prompt such moments was the farther of the two buildings, the house of a brother with whom William was united by strong ties of affection. At the time the painting was executed, the artist resided within. There he would expend the emotional and spiritual energies that sanctify a home, and there he would eventually draw his last breath. Its hallowed environs, including the Brewster residence, which was the ancestral home of Robert’s wife, Mary, are forcefully illuminated by a burst of golden light that invests all with associations akin to those evoked by The Old Double Door. And by advancing those associations further, he could imagine a celestial abode similarly situated, one also provided with a mobile studio where he could work untroubled by the aches and pains that shadowed his mortal days. It was an eternity he considered far “more rational than . . . sit[ting] and sing[ing] psalms.”41 The northward prospect in Long Island Farmhouses affords a glimpse on the right of Setauket Harbor and Long Island Sound, sites frequently featured in Mount’s paintings and recollections of childhood. Because the locale is identifiable, the long shadow cast by the gnarled tree in the foreground can be specified as tilting westward, indicating the sun has yet to reach its zenith. Mount commenced this work on his fifty-fifth birthday, November 26, and may have wished to allude to the specific time of his delivery, 11 a.m., since such data fascinated him.42 Long Island Farmhouses resonates with the ruminations birthdays often engender. Its author is taking stock of a career that began with the landscape on the right and has settled in the one on the left. Unfolding before his eyes as he sat in the mobile studio was the panorama of his life. It was also a presentiment of the life to come. With Mount in attendance, one Spiritualist lecturer encapsulated this philosophy by reminding listeners that “from the hour of our birth to the hour of our death our lives should be spent progressing, in order that the hereafter may be spent profitably.”43 Furnished at last with the apparatus he had long contemplated, the ailing artist could anticipate a renewal of his progressive impulse, one that combined the uncorrupted vision of youth with wisdom gathered from the

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spirits. The outcome in the case of Long Island Farmhouses displays a remarkable originality born of the conviction that heaven is not the creation of an untrammeled fantasy (his opinion of orthodoxy), but the consequence of actual experiences that prove particularly moving (Spiritualism). This sentiment, it has been argued here, was a compelling incentive for Mount to seek a more intimate relation with nature in his later years. His deteriorating health and failing imaginative faculties, however, seem to have prevented him from sustaining this vision and the level of creativity it required. To connect Mount’s luminist style with his Spiritualism, Barbara Novak forges a chain whose links include Transcendentalism and a passing mention of Emerson. This chapter proposes that the writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow often furnish more telling similarities with the art of contemporaries than the ideals professed by the Concord philosophers. The latter were committed to the superiority of the written word over visual imagery when tracing the deepest stirrings of the spirit and, consequently could be quite oblivious to current artistic developments.44 Longfellow was far more flexible in his outlook; his letters and journals reveal a keen interest in art, one he maintained by cultivating close relationships with such important talents as Eastman Johnson. We will examine the poet’s favorable views on Spiritualism anon, but here the opening lines of his “Haunted Houses” seem especially appropriate: All houses wherein men have lived and died. Are haunted houses.45 Mount relied on such sentiments to anchor the otherwise evasive symbolism of light in the more specific implications of houses. The latter is delineated in Shepard’s Old Double Door, with its verbal and visual conjurations of departed dear ones. By depicting edifices of equal antiquity in Long Island Farmhouses, William likewise suggests that these “old, old, house[s]” invite visitors from “the deep solemn sky.” The evocative, radiant drama that unfolds above ultimately transcends its natural appearance to include what he called “the light from the spirit world.”46 His painting unites Spiritualism’s understanding of light as a quasi-material, vital fluid, with its belief in the home as a magnet that (quite literally) attracts spiritual energies. In addition to these implications, the arrival of a birthday must have served as a forceful reminder to Mount of his mortality. As a bachelor with no children of his own, he was eager to forge a relationship between genera-

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tions living and dead by reenchanting his environment. Long Island Farmhouses does so by merging the narrative of his own life—the horizontal unfolding of the composition—with that of those who had gone before— the vertical descent of light and associated psychic forces. These ideas can be culled from the artist’s writings and offer a clue to thoughts that must have occurred as he was painting a very personal composition. It was noted above that they arose from affiliated meditations rather than a preconceived program. Nevertheless, if obliged to synopsize, Mount might have proposed that “this is the landscape of my life; it features several ancient houses that bespeak the importance of home; such edifices preserve family ties even with those who have passed on, and the comfort these beliefs provide affords a presentiment of things to come.” Finally, Long Island Farmhouses may be Mount’s most enigmatic work. Although it includes figures, they are unobtrusive and refrain from enacting the tidy plots characteristic of his genre scenes; while it might be considered a landscape, the cluttered, unprepossessing backyard, with its outbuildings and rail fences, is far less conventional than the set pieces of the Hudson River School. Even the Mount House (1854, The Museums at Stony Brook), which depicts the family home framed by trees, is routine in comparison with the naturalism of Long Island Farmhouses. Unfettered by formula, the latter is the culmination of ambitions rekindled in the 1850s but often unfulfilled until the mobile studio made them realizable. This naturalism, however, did not entail simple imitation, for the spirits informed Mount that Spiritualism, being more than ghostly apparitions, was also “nature itself.” 47 Long Island Farmhouses reveals what he understood by this remark.

Fitz Henry Lane and Norman’s Woe A persistent strain in the scholarship devoted to Fitz Henry Lane seeks to identify the debt his imagery supposedly owes to Transcendentalism. This discourse generally ignores, or only notes in passing, what is the most forthright evidence regarding his belief, a statement by an unidentified contemporary, included in the recollections of the artist John Trask dictated in 1888, which asserts Lane “was a strong spiritualist.” Apparently this anonymous source thought the matter sufficiently important to record for posterity, and we have no reason to doubt his or her veracity. Indeed, several circumstances testify to the likelihood of the claim. In his will, Lane bequeathed money and a “diamond breast pin” to Horace B. Wilbur, a companion

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whose conversion to Spiritualism led him to become a trustee of the New England Spiritualists’ Association in 1854. And William Mountford, an associate who presided over Lane’s funeral in 1865, had some twelve years earlier abandoned his pulpit in the Unitarian church to become a Spiritualist. Lane’s close friend Joseph L. Stevens, Jr., made a concerted effort to bring Mountford back to Gloucester from Boston to deliver the eulogy, suggesting the matter was of some consequence to the artist and his associates.48 This evidence, and the dearth of documents affirming Lane’s allegiance to Transcendentalism, makes the latter an unlikely contributor to his aesthetic formulations and urges a reliance on Ockham’s principle. Of course, there is no way to preclude categorically a possible affiliation with Transcendentalism. As a member of the board of directors of the Gloucester Lyceum in the 1850s, for example, Lane would have had ample opportunity to meet Emerson, who often addressed this assembly. But claims about Lane’s devotion to a philosopher who expressed an antipathy for Spiritualism are difficult to reconcile with the parsimonious course pursued here.49 In 1849, shortly after Lane became one of the directors of the Lyceum, it inaugurated a series of lectures and debates about phrenology, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism. James Craig astutely sees Lane’s hand in this agenda, but these were movements Emerson routinely vilified. Furthermore, William Henry Channing received his first invitation to address the Lyceum at this time; while Craig places this speaker among the “transcendental thinkers” who addressed the organization, it bears recalling that Channing’s Religious Union of Associationists paid serious attention to Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and phrenology. Lane had joined this group in 1847, and it is difficult to imagine he would have done so had he found these topics uncongenial. During services he, like William Wetmore Story and other members, must have gazed for prolonged periods at the altar with its candelabrum and empty chair “symbolizing the Invisible Presence.”50 What happens when we bring this information to bear on the paintings? Does a Spiritualist perspective yield more consistent results than an Emersonian? Proponents of the latter tend to make their case by means of stylistic analysis, but wanting any supporting symbolism, this approach is decidedly malleable, tending to confirm whatever the researcher sets out to prove. The equivocality of this venture can be diminished by choosing works depicting sites whose historical associations would likely provide a key to the content. One such work is The Western Shore with Norman’s

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Woe, the rendering of a landmark famed in the age of sail as a peril to shipping (Figure 36). The artist was certainly aware of this fact and would have used it to introduce a nuanced reading of the light that envelops the outcropping of rock. It is Lane’s brilliant light, after all, that prompts the comparison with Emerson, but how does this light relate to other elements in the painting? Continuing the approach employed with Mount, it is assumed that all the components of a composition contribute to a relatively harmonious whole and that the more defined features relate in a meaningful way to the less determinate portions. Lane’s affiliation with the organizations and associates mentioned above coincided with Andrew Jackson Davis’s articulation of the principles of Spiritualism. These principles include the integration of Mesmerism and phrenology into Spiritualism and suggest his name may have been bandied about in the discussions of those subjects attended by the artist. Whether this was the case, Davis’s ideas about light provide a convenient point of entry into Lane’s aesthetic. All those tendencies Emerson decried as materialism disguised in the garments of spirit converge in Davis’s spiritual science. Its “Sun of the Universe” combines the gradualism characteristic of this discipline with a vision of light that finds its counterpart in Lane’s late style (Figure 37). Davis asks us to “imagine a Sun large enough to fill all space;” in the center is the “Sensorium,” or Omnipotent Mind, which is surrounded by the Sixth Sphere, the Summerland. Beyond it radiate those imponderable fluids in whose undulations mind and matter mingle. All this corresponds to the light emitted by the sun of our solar system, and a person of Lane’s persuasion would readily have recognized in such tenets the potential for expanding the implications of his landscapes.51 The publication of Davis’s clairvoyant revelations in the closing years of the 1840s coincided with a turning point in Lane’s career. In paintings such as Ten Pound Island, Gloucester (1850–51, Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts), the light is brighter and far more pervasive than it had been just few years earlier. Time seems suspended, making the ships and people virtually immobile, and the busy, anecdotal detail that previously filled the foreground is greatly reduced. As the 1850s progressed, these tendencies grew until, by the end of the decade, as Craig observes, the “skies . . . [become] but empty expanses devoid of all but the wispiest of cirrus clouds and . . . light.” Is this the consequence of Transcendentalism as often proposed, or do notions similar to Davis’s “Sun of the Universe” play a part?52

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Figure 36. Fitz Henry Lane, The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe. 1862, oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 35 1/4 in. Cape Ann Historical Association.

As noted above, Lane’s silence about his intentions has caused scholars to peruse the pages of Emerson for pertinent passages. In lieu of the artist’s own pronouncements, contemporary sources can be especially helpful in illuminating shades of meaning the modern observer might otherwise overlook. Is there an author whose imagery and beliefs bring us closer than Emerson does to the world occupied by Lane and Davis? An interest in the expressive possibilities of light would certainly be an important trait of his or her writings, but we would also be gratified to encounter there a concern for the historical landmarks of New England—Gloucester especially—and a greater openness to the claims of Spiritualism than exhibited by the sage of Concord. The candidate who answers all these specifications is Longfellow. Regarding the first, for instance, one critic, in seeking to evoke the golden atmosphere Longfellow paints in verse, cites the example of Albert Cuyp (1620–91), the Dutch artist whose radiant prospects anticipate luminism. Also telling is this reviewer’s assertion that beneath Longfellow’s skies “things in themselves most prosaic are flooded with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul.”53 Before returning to issues of light, the other items on the list of affini-

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Figure 37. “The Sun of the Universe,” from Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 318.

ties between Lane and Longfellow merit brief consideration. Among the historical sites that sparked the imagination of both men, none was more conspicuous in terms of their creative output than that treacherous rock in Gloucester’s harbor, Norman’s Woe (Figure 38). It features prominently in “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” one of Longfellow’s most celebrated works. Scarcely a literate person in the English-speaking world would have been unacquainted with the concluding lines of this elegy to the fair-haired, blueeyed maiden who drowns when the ill-fated ship founders on the notorious outcrop: Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

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Figure 38. “Norman’s Woe,” from S. B. W. Benjamin, “Gloucester and Cape Ann,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 51 (September 1875): 471.

Although Longfellow invented his narrative, he did so based on research conducted into the very real perils faced by those who shipped along New England’s coast.54 The inhabitants of Gloucester were all too aware of these perils. Between 1833 and 1873, a period that encompasses and extends just less than a decade beyond Lane’s adult life, some 296 vessels from the town, and 1,437 of its sailors, were lost at sea, an average of seven ships and thirty-four lives annually. Many perished on Norman’s Woe, which, along with Kettle Island opposite it, made entry into the outer harbor during inclement weather a hair-raising venture.55 The particularly notorious rocks along the coast were named after the ships or individuals who had come to grief on them, leading one au-

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thority to remark that “hazards are grave markers, gigantic headstones remembering gruesome horror, sudden or drawn-out death.” This horror was especially distressing in the case of Norman’s Woe because it was in sight of land. Many townspeople would, at some time, have numbered among the helpless spectators who witnessed this kind of tragedy. Such circumstances endowed Lane’s renderings of this and similar reefs, including Brace’s Rock, with powerful associations for natives of the region.56 To these individuals, Lane’s cemeteries of the sea possessed an elegiac quality that was far more immediate and poignant than we are likely to surmise from the occasional abandoned boat that appears in his scenes. Both Lane and Longfellow, then, arrived at Norman’s Woe as a consequence of their quest for sites in the New England landscape whose historical associations would add an extra dimension to their work, an enterprise they began in earnest in the 1840s.57 The third pursuit that likewise set their thoughts along parallel paths was Spiritualism. It appears regularly in Longfellow’s journals and letters, and despite moments of skepticism, he usually responds favorably to psychic phenomena. In 1853, for instance, he describes in a straightforward manner a haunting then occurring in Boston and dismisses an apparatus devised by Michael Faraday, the British scientist, to discredit mediums as a “little plaything [that] does not explain the very beginning of the mystery.” A visit in 1855 by “[John Rollin] Tilton, the painter,” occasions a “long talk on art, artists, poetry and spiritualism.” While a lecture given in 1857 by Cora Hatch, the famed “trance medium,” elicits a rather noncommittal response, the phenomena, including knocking, that arose during a séance presided over by Catherine Fox in 1865 are recorded without imputation of fraud. Longfellow’s response to reports of a haunted schoolhouse in Newburyport in 1873 epitomizes his position: they were, he hopes, “all true, as a vindication of the Spiritual elements now so submerged by the Materialistic elements of our day.”58 In several important ways, then, Longfellow’s outlook approached that of Lane, and this prompts us to ask what they would have thought about rocks, especially rocks whose identity was closely intertwined with the fate of people they encountered daily, rocks like Norman’s Woe. Among the “ghost-haunted crags” of nearby Nahant, Longfellow earnestly implored “the ghost-haunted houses . . . [and the] ghost-haunted sea sands . . . [to reveal] the forms of those who walked with us here of yore.”59 In a similar vein, a writer for The Crayon proposed that “of all the features in a landscape, rocks seem to have the most daguerreotype force.” They endure in a way

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vegetation does not, and this property leads the author, an apparent devotee of psychometry, to populate such features “with the loved, either living or dead.” Given Lane’s convictions, his worship, for instance, before the empty chair that symbolized the “Invisible Presence” in Channing’s church, it is easy to imagine him gazing at Norman’s Woe and reciting something like the summons Longfellow addressed to his Puritan ancestors when he called on them to “rise . . . ye shapes and shadows of the past / rise from your longforgotten graves at last / . . . [and] revisit your familiar haunts again.”60 Although the port of Gloucester was rapidly changing at this time, the reefs that breached its waters remained unaltered, constantly reminding inhabitants of the price of prosperity. Rising ominously in the busy harbor, they were nodal points in the emotional and spiritual life of the community. They symbolized all the hazards associated with seafaring and provided residents of the town with an imagery analogous to the tombstones and weeping willows that appeared in the mourning scenes then so popular with their landlocked countrymen. Those who perished beneath the waves rarely left mortal remains to be interred; their graves, insofar as they had any, were such as the stark, granite reefs provided. Norman’s Woe and Brace’s Rock were the sea’s cemeteries and, like their inland counterparts, welcomed the congregation of spirits. The portion of the citizenry given to Spiritualist beliefs—and Gloucester possessed an active community of believers along with many more who, no doubt, professed only in private—would have regarded them as the familiar haunts of those whom the sea had claimed.61 Norman’s Woe, then, was not a neutral feature in the town’s panorama, and Lane would have wanted to align the implications of his luminous light with those of objects it encompassed. In addition to lamenting victims of the sea’s fury, he would also wish to intimate their ascent to a better life. The brilliant atmosphere does this: in passing to the Summerland, one believer wrote, we are all drawn “toward the sun, and the shadow of our burden falls behind us.”62 A destiny devoid of shadow is also evoked by the virtually cloudless heavens Lane depicts; they flood “things in themselves most prosaic . . . with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul.” The tranquility of his scene, with placid waters reflecting placid skies, is consistent with a religion of universal salvation in which natural laws prevail in heaven much as they do on earth. Revealing in this respect is the contrast between Lane’s eschewal of Christian symbols and their use by his student Mary Mellen in paintings that otherwise closely resemble those of her mentor. Her husband, C. W.

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Mellen, was a Universalist minister, and the importance of Christ (rather than natural law) in his scheme of redemption clearly contributed to Mary’s preferences. Or we might consider the imagery of a far more doctrinaire believer, Frederic Church. His Wreck shares with Lane’s representations of Norman’s Woe ideas about shipwrecks and salvation, but Church features a stranded vessel whose mast forms a cross that rises heroically above the horizon (Figure 39). Light bursts from behind the clouds of a troubled sky, promising eternal life to all who embrace the example of Jesus. The drama that plays itself out in the upper portion of the composition, an instance of what Novak calls “a baroque ecstasy in the heavens,” does not correspond to what appears below with the same mirror-like reciprocity Lane employs. Instead, it is fraught with notions about the prospects of a future existence that stand in stark contrast to those implied by Lane’s serene settings. 63 One artist evokes a religion where grace is experienced as an irresistible influx that produces strong emotions (the sudden spotlight amid dark clouds); the other invokes a faith that favors a universal gradualism based on natural laws, a stance that engendered skepticism about impulsive, violent conversions precisely because such events were premised on the incompatibility of earthly and heavenly existence. The natural laws that united heaven and earth, light and matter, are discussed at some length by Davis, and one scans the pages of Emerson in vain to find anything comparable to the following formulations: Chemistry will unfold the fact that light, when confined in a certain condition and condensed, will produce water, and that water thus formed, subjected to the vertical influence of light, will produce, by its internal motion and further condensation a gelatinous substance of the composition of the spirifer, the motion of which indicates animal life. This again being decomposed and subjected to evaporation. The precipitated particles which still remain will produce putrified matter similar to earth, which will produce the plant known as the fuciodes.64 This terminology, which describes the transformation of light as it descends and becomes increasingly palpable until it is “condensed” into water and then earth, owes its orientation to the Spiritualist preference for merging, a tendency epitomized in its model of the mind/matter relationship. The claim that light turns into water is especially suggestive when compared to

Figure 39. Frederic E. Church, The Wreck. 1852, oil on canvas, 30 x 46 in. James M. Cowan Collection of American Art, The Parthenon, Nashville, Tennessee.

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the almost imperceptible transition of one into the other in Norman’s Woe. Whereas Emerson’s language is exceedingly agile in its effort to conceptualize the correspondences operative in nature, Davis simply cuts the Gordian knot by means of chemistry. The spiritual science that licenses such sweeping gestures aids in the evaluation of Lane’s style. Davis’s emphasis on the condensation and palpability of light, for example, may answer Novak’s well-known characterization of the luminist sky as “a mirror-like plane that both disappears and assumes a glasslike tangibility” more satisfactorily than any passage in Emerson.65 The latter’s impatience with the literalism characteristic of Davis and his followers in such matters was reviewed in the previous chapter, but it merits further elaboration in this context. We have seen that such scientism riled Emerson because it failed to realize that “all symbols are fluxional”: what is true for a moment “soon becomes old and false.” But the protean side of nature this stance revealed was more suited to literary expression, where one stalked one’s quarry by means of allusion and metaphor, than to the visual arts, which depend more decidedly on a set of expectations shared by the creator and the audience. Light may dance and dart in the pages of Emerson, but it plods along a prescribed path in those of Davis because he has chosen science as the model of his methodology. Light will always follow the sequence he delineates, and this knowledge enabled the artist to communicate ideas with some precision. In Lane’s case, it meant he could paint a scene filled with light and anticipate that the viewer’s thoughts would turn to imponderable fluids and thence to metaphysics. To Emerson, all this smacked of the “foolish consistency” that stifled whimsy, the muse who presided over his efforts.66 Further, the abstract nature of Emerson’s moral injunctions could distress even the liberal theologians of the time. His dicta, they protested, provide little incentive for compliance compared to that offered by a personal deity who is attentive to the spiritual well-being of every individual. Emerson hardly assuaged their doubts when, in “The Over-Soul,” he disparaged the “low curiosity” of those who sought to envision the rewards that awaited in heaven. Their speculations, he added, were “a confession of sin.” This is the ascetic side of his theory, the price we must pay for living in the eternal present. Aesthetically, according to promoters of the Emersonian strain of Lane’s art, it translates into the dissolution of the ego by luminist light.67 But in works such as Norman’s Woe, the obduracy of the harbor’s rocky reefs

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stands as a reminder of the ineradicable individuality of the soul—contemporaries could hardly gaze upon the scene without recalling the real people they knew who had succumbed to the ocean’s perils. In turn, the brilliant sky invited such viewers to contemplate the felicities presently enjoyed by those so lost. These thoughts readily comply with the implications of Longfellow’s “ghost haunted crags” and Davis’s quasi-tangible atmosphere. It is this Janus-like quality of Norman’s Woe, its gaze backward to specific historical events and forward to the boundless eternity awaiting each unique soul, that distinguishes the tenor of its expression from Emerson’s emphasis on the “now.” Lane is not so austere: the diverse components of his compositions unite in an elegiac tribute that is at once ruminative and celebratory. Whether the scenes of the Maine coast, for example, invite a similar response is beyond the scope of this inquiry to determine. Present in most of the later works, however, is a combination of intense light and shimmering water similar to that found in Norman’s Woe. While these features have their origin in marine painting of the seventeenth century, Lane was not simply rehashing old conventions. The novel aspect of his imagery is usually attributed to Transcendentalism, but both the documentary evidence regarding Lane’s faith and the content of his paintings point to Spiritualism.

Conclusion In this reading of works by Mount and Lane, certain features of the landscape become freighted with meaning by virtue of the psychic energies that cling to them. With the former, they adhere to colonial houses, for the latter, to the reefs of Gloucester’s harbor. The light that illuminates these sites further reenchants them, and this process obliges the observer to engage in something other than suspended disbelief. We are asked, in effect, to join Shepard Mount and family at the old double door and “commune with the dead on that far off shore.” Longfellow’s words to this effect suggest the appeal of such sentiments to a substantial segment of the population: he reminds his broad readership that We have no title deeds to house or lands; Owners and occupants of earlier dates From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands, And hold in mortmain still their old estates.68

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These lines acquire new meaning when it is recalled that the poet believed in hauntings. Likewise, the uncanny qualities of Long Island Farmhouses and The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe come into focus when we learn that their creators were Spiritualists. The sublimity of these works has nothing to do with the spectacular scenery favored by their contemporaries in the Hudson River School. It derives instead from the cultivation of inner powers that enabled one to resonate harmoniously with the sentient energies present in the environment. A Raphael Madonna will mean something different to a practicing Catholic than to a nonbeliever, but if the latter wants to understand the range of implications embodied by the work, he or she must study the attitudes assumed by the former. Much the same can be said of the paintings by Mount and Lane. Consigning them to the realm of Transcendentalism satisfies modern preferences because Emerson still holds a place in the pantheon of American literature. A little venturesome probing, however, produces Longfellow and Davis, persons whose talents were widely celebrated in their day. They offer a perspective on Mount and Lane that does not make them over in our image. Symptomatic of this tendency is one scholar’s proposal that the Rembrandt letters “are not spiritualistic but rather are part of Mount’s need for congratulations and recognition in the annals of art history.”69 The critical notice that ties Rembrandt with The Tease gainsays this assertion; it also suggests that Mount’s Spiritualist inclinations were known to a considerable portion of the artistic community. Finding our way back into this community and its standards of value is essential if we are to appreciate the complexity and diversity of the visual culture of antebellum society. Sometimes a painting must become a little strange before it can become familiar.

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Ghostly Gloamings

Our focus now shifts away from the sun-drenched landscapes of luminism and toward the muted urban scenery rendered by James McNeill Whistler. The uncanny qualities of his Nocturnes and portraits, it will be argued, derive from a palpable atmosphere that alludes to ether and the numinous properties it purportedly possessed. Whistler was a committed Spiritualist and shared with the artists who will appear in the chapters that follow the feeling that Tonalism served his expressive aims in ways Impressionism, for example, could not. The latter’s want of similar evocative powers was noted by G. K. Chesterton in the early 1890s, a time when he was a student of art at the Slade School and a devotee of both Spiritualism (prior to becoming a Catholic) and Whistler’s work. Chesterton’s response to Impressionism reflects sentiments shared by a wide range of thoughtful observers; it was, he explains, “skepticism in the form of subjectivism . . . [lending] itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all.”1 Persons of this persuasion would find much to value in Whistler’s dark imagery. On one level, Whistler’s compositions intimate the presence of psychic powers within their gloomy settings; on another, sensitive viewers claimed they were affected by the energies such works emanated. To appreciate these possibilities, artist and audience assumed an attitude that, in certain respects, resembled the reverential demeanor requisite for séances. Silence and intense concentration were among the practices intended to oblige the work to divulge its secrets, and only initiates were likely to succeed in this endeavor. Their reward was access to a heightened consciousness, one thought subversive of the commercialism endemic to the late Victorian world. Since this approach emphasized the importance of ether to the reenchantment of modern society, a further review of ether’s place in nineteenth-century thought is warranted.

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Ether Whistler’s career coincided with an era when the hypothesis of ether as the best means to explain certain phenomena present in the universe was attracting wide interest. Both specialists and the public were drawn to the possibilities inherent in the subject due to the experiments conducted by British physicist James Clerk Maxwell and two American researchers, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. Their efforts in the 1870s and 1880s were engendered by ideas that originated in the seventeenth century when it was determined that sound could not travel through a vacuum. Following this logic, scientists argued that the transmission of light obeyed similar laws: it required a medium, an ether, to convey its rays across space. Vibrations had to have something through which to undulate. From this mechanistic conception of energy came a belief in a pervasive ether and the attempts to identify it that culminated in the work of the scientists mentioned above. Only Einstein’s theories about relativity, which simply proceeded without the hypothesis of this single absolute, began in 1905 to dislodge the older conjectures. Earlier, however, as one historian notes, Victorians viewed ether “to be one of the surest and most certain things in the Universe,” taking comfort in the notion that it possessed a stability that transcended the fleeting quality of perceived phenomena.2 No great distance separated the purely physical substance postulated by Maxwell and his colleagues from Mesmer’s psychic fluid. Their proximity encouraged many to merge the two doctrines as a means of refuting materialism. One such individual was Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), a prominent British physicist who joined the Society of Psychical Research and began in 1883 to investigate the paranormal with the goal of integrating his findings into those he had achieved in the field of electricity and thermoelectricity. His stated purpose was to determine whether “the ancient doctrine of a possible intercourse of intelligence between the material and some other, perhaps ethereal, order of existence” could be confirmed. Lodge became a forceful advocate of a spiritualized ether and its corollary: continuity. A meaningful universe was one without gaps; through its ether circulated entities who communicated across vast distances by means of vibrations, much as music fills a room or sunlight bathes the earth. According to Lodge’s biographer, ether was “the fundamental physical entity in terms of which everything else in the universe would ultimately have to be explained. He suggested, indeed, that there was nothing but ether in various states of rotational motion and carrying all manner of periodic waves.”3

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Given the public’s familiarity with ideas about ether, we can surmise that most viewers of Whistler’s art would have entertained ideas about it—however imperfect—and that some—likely a substantial portion—would have shared Lodge’s interpretation of it. In Whistler’s case, his membership in the latter group can be surmised from the assurance he offered the Pennells about night’s engendering psychic phenomena because, as “everyone knows, there are certain chemicals that act only in the darkness. Why should it not be the same with spirits?”4 This statement has not received the attention it deserves: it identifies the basis of Whistler’s thinking about darkness and hence is crucial to an understanding of the portraits and especially the Nocturnes. Although an indifferent student of chemistry at West Point, Whistler, like Lodge, proposes spirits possess physical properties that make them subject to conditions in the environment. The sun’s setting lures them to the sublunary realm, and one can hardly ignore the possibility they are lurking out there in the dark. Whistler’s reliance on scientific principles resembles both Lodge’s promotion of ether and the logic Spiritualists employed when justifying the dimming of lights during séances.5 The gradual unfolding of materializations and related phenomena, as noted earlier, was unlike the sudden, unexpected miracles of Christianity. While the processes involved in the latter were incomprehensible to mortals, psychic events arose naturally from the configuration of ethereal energies that were constantly present. It was this property that made the onset of darkness particularly meaningful to Whistler. For persons of his persuasion, as well as for Christians, these differences were matters of great consequence, and in terms of aesthetics, the significance of the obscurity that prevails in his compositions is most likely to register with individuals prepared to appreciate the distinctions.

James McNeill Whistler and Spiritualism Given Spiritualism’s advent and wide popularity in America, it is difficult to imagine Whistler was unacquainted with its premises during his time at West Point (1851–54). The knowledge he took with him to France in 1855 probably increased after his arrival. By then, mediums from the United States had been performing abroad for three years. The most celebrated of their number, Daniel Dunglas Home, caused a sensation, first in London and then in Paris, with his spirit voices and levitations. Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie were among the sitters at his séances. Across the Channel,

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Queen Victoria joined the many luminaries of her realm who attempted to commune with the world beyond. So great was the anticipation these developments excited, one observer wrote, that “all classes, all sects, [feel] . . . the world stands upon the eve of some great spiritual revelation.”6 A second wave of mediums, called “the American invasion” by an early historian of Spiritualism who intended to focus attention on European perceptions of the faith as a recent import, began in 1859 with the return of Home to London. This date coincides with Whistler’s move to England, and it must have been a source of no small pride for this expatriate, who ostentatiously maintained his American ways, that the New World was now instructing the Old in matters of faith.7 The next twenty years witnessed the religion’s rapid spread in Great Britain as homegrown mediums increased in number and matched the manifestations offered by the Americans. Decades later, Whistler’s memories of these events remained vivid; the Davenports, he told the Pennells, manifested “inexplicable things” that continued to be a source of wonderment. These brothers, Ira and William, had journeyed from their native Buffalo to England in 1864, astonishing audiences with performances that featured music played by instruments that floated through the darkened hall while the pair sat tightly bound to chairs.8 When questioned by the Pennells in 1900 about his belief in Spiritualism, Whistler emphatically affirmed his allegiance. So engrossing was the topic, he added, it could consume a lifetime, but there were canvases to be painted. Despite this obligation, the Pennells assert that Whistler was “something of a medium.” Mortimer Menpes, an Australian who joined Whistler in 1881 to oversee the publication of his etchings, confirms the Pennells’ testimony, claiming the artist “was a Spiritualist, and for years he pottered with tableturning and spirit-rapping.”9 Whistler’s commitment apparently had deepened in the early 1860s when he and Dante Gabriel Rossetti attended séances together. Many of these took place in Tudor House, Rossetti’s home, with Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s model and mistress, presiding. Whistler recalled that “wonderful things happened” during these sessions. On other occasions, he conducted séances with only Jo attending. In one of these, held in the room of “the White Girl,” a deceased cousin from the South “told him much that no one else could have known.” And once, when leaving the studio, he asked Jo to place her hands on a table; raps followed almost immediately. When inquiries established that the entity was malevolent, it was ordered to depart and the table discarded. Yet another account from the Pennells has the artist scoffing at their skepticism and again professing his faith while recounting

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“the wonderful evenings he and Jo spent with the planchette, the forerunner of the present ouija board.”10 From the late 1870s to the early 1880s, Alan Summerly Cole reports on Whistler’s involvement in these matters. By then, Maud Franklin had replaced Jo in the artist’s affections, and Cole’s journal for 1876 records a dinner where talk turned to Spiritualism. Whistler expressed his belief, and the three attempted to conjure the dead but failed. A conversation with Lord Coutts Lindsay in 1877, in which Lindsay claimed to have photographed the vibrations caused by the rapping of spirits, must have peaked Whistler’s interest. Such evidence of the physical emanations associated with psychic phenomena would have confirmed his convictions regarding the relevance of science to faith. During a soirée held in 1876, Whistler joined a heated debate about Napoleon III, the Commune (which Whistler favored), and Spiritualism; and at a gathering in 1881, the participants discussed magic and Spiritualism.11 While Cole discloses little about these exchanges, Whistler’s sentiments on the latter topic must have been informed by ideals akin to those advanced by proponents of reenchantment. Similar reasoning appears in the assurances about the existence of spirits Whistler offered the Pennells. These included, he maintained, “the very fact that man, beginning with the savage, has always believed in them is proof enough.”12 However brief this review of Whistler’s activities may be, it indicates they ranged widely and constituted a serious attempt to test the claims of Spiritualism. In addition to conversing frequently with associates, he attended séances and public demonstrations. Both he and his mistresses were mediums who conjured physical manifestations ranging from raps to tableturning. When not relying on raps, he employed a planchette. To ensure the messages he received were indeed from the otherworld, he asked questions only the deceased could answer. All of the above were standard practices among Spiritualists, and all sources that address the subject affirm Whistler’s unwavering allegiance to the faith.

Portraits Just when these ideas began to filter into Whistler’s art is a matter of conjecture. The critical reaction to Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl (1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington) suggests contemporaries were picking up on something despite Whistler’s warnings against reading too much into the subject. Some described the seemingly entranced woman in a

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flowing dress as “a white apparition,” a “vision,” and a “portrait of a spirit, a medium.” Even Gustave Courbet, the avowed confuter of supernaturalists, thought the figure “une apparition du spiritisme.”13 More definitive evidence of Whistler’s intent to introduce allusions to his faith appears in Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl, an interior with Jo gazing wistfully toward a blue-figured Oriental vase and “a red lacquered box” of Japanese origin on the mantel (Figure 40).14 The latter item answers Whistler’s description of “a lacquer box, a beautiful Japanese box” he and Jo clasped in order to conjure marvelous manifestations.15 The presence of this artifact can hardly be coincidental; Whistler surely included it to signal the integration of his artistic endeavors with those he pursued as a medium. Persons given to anti-materialist views found much to favor in Japanese art; Charles Caffin, for example, asserted that the best of it came from periods when “religion and art were inseparable.” And Sadakichi Hartman thought “the mystical intimations of spiritual existence” captured by Japanese artists an important source of Whistler’s style. Kathleen Pyne has ably reviewed these tendencies in contemporary criticism and demonstrated that Whistler’s aestheticism was viewed by Americans as a means of bridging the divide between East and West; an emerging world culture would unite the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and G. W. F. Hegel with those of the Buddha.16 The theory of psychometry evident in Whistler’s conjurations provides yet another context for these developments. Algernon Charles Swinburne, a member of Whistler’s inner circle, was among the contemporaries who came under the spell of The Little White Girl. So beguiled, he wrote the artist to praise the “sad and glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all other things seen by their phantoms.” The comparison of the face reflected in the mirror with the materializations of Spiritualism was apt because they often entailed a disembodied head floating over the sitters at a séance. More difficult to decipher is the phrase about “other things seen by their phantoms.” Its meaning becomes apparent, however, in light of psychometry’s teachings on spirits lingering around objects that pleased them during their mortal years. Whistler must have related to Swinburne the same story about the Japanese box he would later tell the Pennells, and this tale apparently prompted the poet to allude to the “thing” seen by its phantom, the box and the associated spirit who had returned at its behest. Although Whistler did not identify the spirit associated with the box, Menpes states he communed with Hokusai and other Japanese artists.

Figure 40. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl. 1864, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 in. Tate Gallery, London.

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Along these lines, Charles Lang Freer also believed that by holding Oriental artifacts, or even contemplating Whistler’s works, he could tap into their energy and connect with the world beyond. And some thirty years after Whistler conducted his experiments, F. Holland Day, another aesthetecum-Spiritualist, took to rubbing a lacquer box from Japan as a means of contacting the spirits. Kristin Schwain writes of Day’s practice that it “required an active viewer or willing participant to generate meaning. In effect, [it] . . . needed believers, people who shared a common set of tenets and practices that structured how they interacted with objects and understood their functions.”17 Something like this happened with Whistler. His relationship with certain prized possessions, and the appreciation of his work by initiates, operated similarly: the uplift art promised was closely tied to expectations created by Spiritualism. Such expectations were perceived to make art more compelling, more immediate, than theories that made appreciation solely a matter of disinterested contemplation. This process appears in Swinburne’s allusion to the mirror’s power to capture a “phantom.” He elaborated further on its ability to do more than reflect the material world in a poem that has the White Girl ask her doppelganger: Art thou the ghost, my sister, White sister there, Am I the ghost, who knows? One might regard this inquiry as mere literary posturing were it not for psychometry: objects, including mirrors, retained the psychic traces of those who passed before them. Indeed, Whistler, who sanctioned this notion by having the poem attached to the frame, must have addressed the box he and Jo grasped (or the table he discarded) in a manner akin to Swinburne’s questioner. In turn, Whistler’s works could act as a magic mirror and disseminate energy into the room where they were displayed. A particularly notable outbreak of these powers occurred during the showing of the “Second Venice Set” of etchings in 1883. Whistler had devised an innovative décor for the gallery, employing a white and yellow color scheme enlivened by his butterfly monogram. So striking were the effects, Deanna Bendix reports, that some visitors worried about “being enclosed too long in an atmosphere of super-abundant Whisterlian yellowness.” Beyond the design considerations that governed the interior, Bendix continues, was an ambition to extend

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the exhibition experience into realms that included Spiritualism. Reviewers picked up on the theme, claiming “that sensitive guests felt threatened by the haze-suffused atmosphere, as though they might be overwhelmed by the ether rising in the room—possibly the psychological essence of Whistler himself.” Arthur Symonds encapsulated this response when he suggested “the aim of Whistler . . . to be taken at a hint, divined at a gesture, or by telepathy.” In a similar vein, one writer wondered about the spell the artist’s spiritual energy might have on future inhabitants of his house given the theory “that some influence or emanation of the departed tenant pervades forever.”18 Some viewers, then, believed Whistler’s work radiated psychic energies. Those less inclined to exercise this option, however, could search for Spiritualist meaning in the illustrative content. The lacquer box in The Little White Girl provided such content for individuals whose close association with the artist furnished them with the requisite narrative. As Whistler’s affiliation with the faith matured, however, he relied less on emblems of this nature and more on the ethereal aspect of his muted colors to convey his message. His audience responded: by the 1870s, for example, critics regularly referred to the portraits as “‘specters’ and ‘apparitions’.”19 This development can be pursued further by conceiving Whistler’s imagery in terms of an aesthetic of anticipation, one engendered by mutual expectations that arose between artist and audience along the lines of those mentioned above. This approach entails a somewhat different response to the portraits than to the Nocturnes: in the former, we surmise the wraithlike figure is about to disappear, while with the latter, we await the arrival of visitors from beyond. In each case, the dense atmosphere prompts this reaction by evoking the ether, the constant condition that enables phantoms to materialize. Whistler’s “arrangements in black,” his Tonalist depictions of (usually) full-length figures, invited analysis in Spiritualist terms.20 His Arrangement in Black: The Lady in the Yellow Buskin—Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, for instance, places the subject in a gloomy, indeterminate setting (Figure 41). She looks over her shoulder and pulls on a glove. Is she about to step into the street? If so, where is the door, and what is the source of the dim light around her? No features define the environment; the ground blends gradually with the surrounding darkness in a manner that precludes an architectural reading. Much is left to the imagination. These circumstances led one critic to describe the figure as one of those “half materialized ghosts at a spiritualistic séance. I cannot help wondering

Figure 41. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black: The Lady in the Yellow Buskin—Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell. 1882–83, oil on canvas, 86 x 43 1/2 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art; purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1895.

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when they will gain substance and appear more clearly out of their environing fog, or when they will melt away altogether from my gaze.” These words evoke the anticipation mentioned above; Lady Campbell resembles a “half materialized” ghost who emerges from, and will fade into, the “environing fog” because she and it are composed of the same stuff, ether. One is just a more highly organized form of the other. Whistler has hit on a remarkably original concept for portraiture. It is one that has the subject about to disappear, not step out of the frame as a mortal might nor vanish miraculously in the manner of Christian angels but gradually dissolve into the imponderable fluids that originally delivered her. This darkness possesses the power to conjure spirits according to natural laws just as the artist insisted it could. And, instead of viewing the background simply as negative space, we are obliged to regard it a vitalistic—almost living—entity deserving equal billing with the figure.21 Joris-Karl Huysmans responded similarly to the likeness of Lady Campbell, commenting initially on Whistler’s ability to draw “forth, from the flesh, an elusive expression of the soul.” This remark appears in a review published in 1889 that characterizes “the mysterious, slightly ghostly painter” as a “spiritualist.” In elaborating on his claims, Huysmans proposes “one cannot indeed read the more or less truthful revelations of Dr. Crookes concerning Katie, her female form embodying both tangible and fluid forms at the same time without thinking of Wisthler’s [sic] portraits of women, those ghost-portraits which seem to want to retreat, to sink into the wall.” Like Lodge, Crookes was a prominent British scientist who pronounced himself a proponent of Spiritualism. He did so in 1874 after embracing Katie King, a nubile spirit who appeared at the behest of medium Florence Cook. Following the procedures usual for materializations, Cook would confine herself to a cabinet from which Katie then emerged into the shadowy interior surrounded by a faint light. At the end of the session, she would retreat back into the cabinet as the light around her faded, a circumstance that recalls Lady Campbell’s situation.22 Huysmans elaborates on the notion that Whistler’s spectral figures are about to disappear and, by mentioning their “tangible and fluid forms,” refers to the palpability of the imponderable fluids. Lady Campbell would certainly have concurred with these interpretations. She was, one art historian notes, “a dreaming Bohemian aesthete, [and] an ardent experimenter in spiritualism.” This preference explains Oscar Wilde’s allusion to her as “the beautiful wraith” in a letter written to Whistler at the time he was painting her portrait. The phrase suggests

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both men regarded her in this light. In turn, she confirmed her faith when assuring Beatrice Whistler, the artist’s wife, that she (Campbell) had not defaced a book she borrowed, swearing to this effect “before this world & the seen and unseen witnesses of the other (in which I believe).” And five years later, in 1895, she wrote Whistler to commend him for having represented the “moi-je” and not simply Lady Campbell. Admittedly, her wording through much of this note is exasperatingly obscure, but in concluding that the likeness captured “L’esprit de moi je” (the spirit of me, I), she seems to be saying the artist revealed her spirit and not the public person who is Lady Campbell.23 Such otherworldly qualities appear in those works where a rapport arose between the artist and the sitter. Shared beliefs strengthened the bond; in Lady Campbell’s case, they extended to a mutual devotion to Spiritualism, but not everyone resonated so sympathetically while posing in the studio. Although Whistler exhibits considerable compassion for the aged sitter in Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1872–73, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum), for example, the connection seems not to have extended to matters of faith, and we see none of the wraithlike aspect present in the “black” portraits. Critics who were generally unimpressed by the “ghostly, ‘insubstantial’” quality of Whistler’s likenesses, John Siewert notes, tended to praise that of Carlyle for its substance and seriousness.24 This distinction dovetails with the interpretation offered here and suggests that personal affinities (or lack of them) found their counterpart in stylistic formulations. Whistler’s friendship with Pablo de Sarasate, one deepened by an appreciation of the latter’s virtuosity, contributed to the rapport we sense when viewing Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Senor Pablo de Sarasate (Figure 42). Like Lady Campbell, Sarasate seems about to be swallowed by the environing obscurity. Responding to this drama, one reviewer found the gloom “as deep as that of a dark Van Dyck, but blacker, fresher, less mellow . . . [it presents] a large, empty vibrating space, where everything is defined mistily as objects seen through water.”25 This characterization of Whistler’s space includes the sort of undulating palpability we have associated with ether. Camille Mauclair, the nom de plume of critic and author Camille L. C. Fausti, makes his case for ranking Whistler among “the true spiritualists who evoke the astral form from the visible one” by praising the artist’s ability to intimate the “effluvium,” “the moral and magnetic atmosphere” that surrounds persons and things. In Spiritualist lore, the astral body (often

Figure 42. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Senor Pablo de Sarasate. 1884, oil on canvas, 90 x 48 in. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; purchase.

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called the etheric double) resembles the individual from whom it emerges precisely but is composed of attenuated matter, ether. Capable of gliding through ether wherever it wills, this entity accounts for the apparitions of living persons.26 While Mauclair only mentions Sarasate in passing, he nevertheless includes him among those who answer this description by temporarily casting off their mortal trappings to provide—in this case—the portraitist with authentic likenesses of their souls. These souls seem, in effect, to interpose themselves between the artist and the sitter. Mauclair then surrounds them with an “effluvium,” or “magnetic atmosphere,” an ethereal aura that glows through the vibrating space mentioned above. Similar considerations guide Alfred de Lostalot’s description of Sarasate as “a sort of apparition of the celebrated violinist called up by some medium in a séance of spiritualism.” And hints of the séance parlor also appear in Royal Cortissoz’s description of the portraits as “lovely apparitions, alluring visions of charming women gliding through some place of dim lights and hovering shadows.”27 Again, such accounts weigh darkness, and the prospect the figure has emerged (has been “called up”) from it, heavily in their assessment of the imagery. In Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenac, an aesthete and Spiritualist who fancied himself a poet, Whistler found yet another kindred spirit (Figure 43). Their shared interests made studio sessions an intense experience, with the French aristocrat claiming the artist’s “fixed attention . . . was emptying him of life, was ‘pumping away’ something of his individuality.” This confession resembles the melting of personal identity described by those subject to the magnetic gaze of the Mesmerizer, an encounter that permitted the superior will of the latter to absorb the character and vital energy of the former. Whistler’s presence was often reported to have this effect.28 The painting that resulted from this charged encounter exhibits the same limited palette, indeterminate space, and dense darkness seen in the other black portraits. Critics remarked on the figure’s emergence from the obscurity, one calling it, for instance, an “apparition . . . [that] seems to escape from the shadows and come forward toward you.” This imagery again makes the background an integral part of the subject’s being: somehow this being has coalesced with the shadows and now must “escape” them to pose for the artist. Such claims suggest the reviewer was attuned to principles akin to those Whistler enunciated when he proposed that darkness summoned phantoms. The artist often greeted sympathetic critics at his exhibitions and discussed his intentions with them; we can at least conjecture,

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then, that the similarity of responses recorded above may in part be due to Whistler’s own opinions on the subject.29 For those who subscribed to these principles, murky depths contributed significantly to the expressive and moral content of the likeness. Mauclair indicated as much when he declared shortly after Whistler’s death in 1903 that the artist had receded into the mysterious shadows he loved to paint. Darkness reigns in the portraits, but it is not accompanied by the strong raking light seen in Baroque art. The latter created a dichotomy between light and dark that Whistler sought to avoid for several reasons. Compositionally, it set the figure against the background, making the latter subordinate. Morally, it signified an antithesis between the two that contradicted the Spiritualist commitment to a continuum of existence and the moderation it implied. Scientifically, it ignored the theory of ether and the concept of natural laws that extended into the spirit sphere. To achieve a satisfactory solution, Whistler employed a frontal light that diminished the contrasts significantly and permitted the figure to meld into its surroundings. Mauclair divines the intent of this device when he attributes Whistler’s success in “spirit evocation” to his mastery of subtle light effects. In this gloom, Mauclair continues, there “is neither dusk nor night-time: it is shadow pure and simple, a thing apart from time and in which an existence unfolds itself, wholly distinct from everyday life.”30 Sadikichi Hartmann explores a different dimension of Whistler’s twilight realm. Modern technology, Hartmann asserts, has made the depiction of light problematic. The Old Masters relied on the candle, oil lamp, torch, and fireplace to bathe their subjects in a warm glow that produced picturesque contrasts of light and dark. Before a Rembrandt or Hals, we are inclined to dream and “invent some psychical annotation to the figures represented.” Gas and electricity, to say nothing of plate-glass windows, now illuminate interiors so intensely they have “killed all the old ideals.” In response, many artists have capitulated to the light and adopted the chromatic extravagances of the Impressionists. Not one to approve this development, Hartmann searches for an alternative and finds it, curiously, in urban pollution. The smoke from factories and coal fires that darkens the skies of modern urban centers proves the unlikely ally of those in search of a new suggestiveness. Whistler took advantage of this circumstance to express “the inner life of things” by means of “tone and light.” His light, then, is neither as blanching as the Impressionist’s nor as focused as Rembrandt’s. Its diffuse, subdued quality drains the figures of the

Figure 43. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. 1891–92, oil on canvas, 82 1/8 x 36 1/8 in. The Frick Collection, New York.

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corporeality seen in Renaissance paintings. Their vague, uncanny presence represents more than a technical achievement, Hartmann states: it entails “a new way of thinking” that (in accordance with the aesthetic of anticipation mentioned above) causes them to “resemble apparitions which have suddenly taken shape in the greyness of life only to dissolve again into shadows.” The apparition of Sarasate, then, can be seen as haunting his likeness, and the “solitary light passage” that falls on face and shirt enkindles “all the glamour of romance and poetry that light can yield in our prosaic age.” In anticipation, then, Hartmann contemplates one of Whistler’s “enigmatic figures receding into the vague shadows” (he does not identify which) and entertains a notion that may be either a poetic conceit of the kind cultivated by fin-de-siècle aesthetes or a prescriptive passage intended to guide readers through modes of viewing that will deepen the appreciation of art. Perhaps it is a bit of both. Falling into a trance, the critic is transported through time and space to the Escorial. He catches a glimpse of Velazquez standing at a window, gazing down absent-mindedly on a woman holding a rose whose petals waft in the breeze and scatter across the pool of a fountain in one of the palace’s “sunless courtyards.” She is, the author tells us, Whistler’s muse, whose purpose is to remind us “that the splendour of light and shade composition of the Old Masters has faded, that we know nothing of its fervour that rose from the depths of a more picturesque age, and that all we can do is scatter a few colour notes across the darkness of space.” Hartmann’s discussion of the skeptical nature of modern civilization clarifies the implications of his parable. We no longer find emotional nourishment in religion, he states, but our intuition requires spiritual support, and this comes from those experiences that mystify and raise us above humdrum routine of daily life. In sum, the dogmatic beliefs that built the palace/ church of Philip II and ruled his domain by means of the auto-da-fe have waned with the waxing of Reason’s authority. Velazquez and the artists of his age saw matters in terms of black and white; their strong chiaroscuro embodies a “picturesque age” in all its glory and horror. This logic implies our sources of inspiration are far more evanescent (mystifying rather than accosting us); they emerge from the penumbral obscurity of existence only to fade before we can quite grasp them, much as do the pale apparitions in the portraits Hartmann describes. If the spirituality of our time is more equivocal, is chastened by a moderation that refuses to impose its standards on unbelievers, it is also, in Hartmann’s view, more humane. The ecstasies of Baroque saints fail to cap-

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ture our imagination, and the critic finds little that is “jubilant and passionate” in Whistler’s art; the calm “profundity and . . . dreaminess” one does encounter there, however, compensates for the loss. Returning again to Sarasate’s face and white shirt, they can now be seen as illuminated by a “phantom-like” light and constituting one of those “colour notes” that stand out against “the darkness of space.” These changes, Hartmann argues, do not merely involve matters of technique; they also reflect new ways of conceiving “spiritual qualities.” The “subtler” style that emerges from this venture “will drive deeper into our soul than the cold correctness of older forms and emblems.” Whistler’s spectral, mist-enshrouded figures inaugurate this development. They represent the dawn of a “new era of light,” one in which the commingled qualities of spirit and matter, suspended in a medium of ether (smog), displace the older, picturesque values of chiaroscuro. Consistent with this view, Hartmann stresses the importance of the sitter’s individuality and its implied assertion of personal worth in contrast with “emblems,” the outward symbols of social rank, favored by Baroque art. Whistler has “revived and rejuvenated” Velázquez’s style, adapting it to the “etherealized, modernized and individualized” priorities of the contemporary world.31 No wonder, then, that Henry James heard Whistler’s works spoken of as “‘ghosts of Velazquezes’.”32 They were, however, modernized Velazquezes, ones made so by the ethereal qualities that feature the unique characteristics of the individual soul rather than the indices of social rank. Since preservation of individual identity through eternity was central to Spiritualist beliefs, Whistler’s figurative works project an aura of spirituality in this context. Thoughts of this nature dictated the placement of The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1864–65, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution)—admittedly not a “black” painting—in an arch flanked by open arches during the memorial exhibition held in Boston in 1904. There, according to Lee Glazer, it became “the central panel of an aestheticist triptych.”33 Beyond sanctifying beauty, such works (especially the “black” paintings) could also remind viewers of vitalistic forces that determine the destiny of mortals, and perhaps even induce the more sensitive to conjure either the work’s creator or the individual represented. These notions prompted Mauclair to describe the portraits as silhouettes filled with shadows expressive of spirit, beings whose “psychical radiance” contributes to a style whose modernity is due to its “fluidic” (i.e., imponderable fluids) properties.34

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We need not trouble ourselves, however, about the precise status of the sitters; it is, in the end, fruitless to debate whether they were meant specifically to be spirits or merely persons whose spectral aspect implants thoughts of the otherworldly in our minds. As one critic proposed, the viewer is given “a choice between materialized spirits and figures in a London fog.”35 In this formulation, the alternatives are interchangeable, and much of the allure the paintings offer derives from this ambiguity. It nudges our thoughts away from mundane matters and, recalling a séance, perhaps inclines us to hear the faint tinkling of bells or catch a whiff of incense. Without idealizing his subjects, Whistler manages to evoke their higher identities by means of the aesthetic of anticipation.

Nocturnes In Nocturne in Blue and Silver, the duskiness that hovers over the figures in the portraits now threatens to engulf the entire composition (Figure 44). The restrained tonalities and blurred features create a somber mood. A broad expanse of the Thames wends its way diagonally across the canvas, its surface rendered with finely nuanced gradations of thinly applied colors. Smokestacks, a pile of industrial waste, and several identifiable buildings loom on the river’s opposite bank.36 In evaluating such Nocturnes, commentators regularly cite the vision of the city veiled in mist famously evoked in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: “the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us.”37 But these words may fail to persuade the viewer who has gazed into the almost impenetrable obscurity of the scene and sensed the “stygian gloom” of London much as Whistler himself did in his less ebullient moments.38 If his public persona speaks in The Gentle Art, his private thoughts reach us in his correspondences and the conversations recorded by contemporaries. The individual encountered in these sources believed, as we have seen, that darkness invited visitors from beyond. It is this sense of anticipation, of awaiting the possible arrival of a numinous entity, in contrast to its imminent departure in the portraits, that endows the Nocturnes with much of power to fascinate. The testimony of several contemporaries reveals that Whistler’s statement about the dark’s conjuring otherworldly entities was no mere caprice: it arose from deep-seated convictions. Menpes recounts, for example, an in-

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Figure 44. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver. 1871–72, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 23 3/4 in. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.

cident that occurred when the two were chatting one night. A rap resounded at the window, and knowing his companion’s “weakness for ghosts,” Menpes decided to fool “the Master” by pointing to his cane, implying that it had been used by a revenant to make the sound. “For heaven’s sake,” Whistler exclaimed, “don’t say that, Menpes!” Fearing further manifestations, he importuned Menpes to stay until dawn. Others witnessed similar behavior. Theodore Duret claimed in 1896 that on several occasions he had to stay and comfort the artist after dark because he had visions of ghosts and feared being alone. This report indicates that phantoms were yet another phenomenon Whistler encountered as a Spiritualist, a circumstance that lends personal validation to the imagery of his apparitional portraits. Further, both accounts greatly enhance the significance of Whistler’s remark to the Pennells about there being a clear distinction between spirits and ghosts. He did not elaborate, but the difference was widely known. The former were beings called up at séances to deliver messages of consolation; the latter, by

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contrast, were coarse specters who wandered the earth only because they knew no better. Unsummoned, they could appear anywhere, haunting houses, delivering death warnings, and generally making themselves noisome. Even accomplished sensitives often felt the unease in their presence that Whistler experienced.39 Their potential presence in Nocturne in Blue and Silver licenses a viewing consistent with the aesthetic of anticipation, one that diverges dramatically from the “fairy-land” metaphor of The Gentle Art. Reviewers often respond to this aspect of the Nocturnes. In the crepuscular landscapes, Hartmann observes, “all objects appear shadowy and weird against a glimmering sky.” Another critic remarks on the “weird and ghostlike gloom” of Nocturne: Dance House, a scene etched in Amsterdam in 1889 whose obscurity is relieved only occasionally by lamplight. An early biographer is enchanted by the “haunting . . . half-revelation” Whistler detects in the “mystic twilight.” According to the Pennells, the artist’s fascination with the enigma of night drove him to pursue an unexplored imagery; in the obscurity of his settings, they perceive “ghostly sail[s] [sometimes] moving out of [the] shadows.” Such boats, they write elsewhere, are “ghosts fading into the ghostly river.” In Whistler’s “silvery and golden gloom,” Mauclair descries “such mystic apparitions as the light of day might offend.” The landscapes, he further contends, are as much “soul transfigurations” as the figural pieces. Even those not favorably disposed to the Nocturnes resorted to this terminology; one writer, for instance, calls them “manifestations” and compares their effect to the jejune prophecies delivered by slate-writing during séances. Beyond noting these uncanny qualities, some critics endeavored to identify ether as their source. Christian Brinton, for instance, claims Whistler’s art involves a “continuous process of etherealization.” Charles Caffin goes even further, describing the evocative silence of Nocturne-Bognor (1872/76, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution) as being “penetrated with . . . elusiveness; phantom shapes [are seen] glimmering in [the] misty, ethereal light [of] a spirit picture.” 40 To convey the qualities of ethereal light and make Nocturne in Blue and Silver an enticing spirit picture, Whistler again relied on London’s smog. It was his genius, Hartmann proposes, to realize that grayness was the hallmark of modern life and to achieve a suggestive luminosity by taking advantage of the “dust-laden, misty atmosphere” of the city. In doing so, he proved that “where there is harmony of colour there is vibration of atmosphere, and therefore, the illusion of light.” The resulting “uncertainty in form” is “mystic in tendency, but [also] suggestive of atmosphere, depth and space.”

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London’s choking, miasmatic fog is transmuted into a “mysterious atmosphere . . . (from which solid forms emerge or recede into)” by featuring “the significance and mystery that lie hidden in blurred objects.”41 Mystery, vibration, and indistinct forms dictate the mood prevalent in Nocturne in Blue and Silver. The viewer encounters a condition more than a place: Nocturne nocturnans. A thick broth of smog mixed with nighttime gloom envelopes the river and buildings; outlines blur and dance as vague forms loom ominously. We seem to reside on the floor of an “ethereal ocean.” The environment resonates with a palpable energy, while substances are drained of their solidity. The adamantine aspect of Victorian materialism dissolves, receding before what Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) identified as the “accepted fact in physics that ether, that imponderable fluid by which all space is supposed to be filled, extends through all solid bodies, and that even in the densest minerals the atoms do not touch each other, but float, so to speak, in ether.” From this “fact” he concluded “that mind, force, [and] matter are all different manifestations of one and the same entity, an entity which our senses do not perceive.”42 To evoke this imperceptible essence and make his city “float,” Whistler resorted to polluted atmosphere and made it an expression of the ether whose nightly transformations invited ghosts. Although reviewers do at times suggest that specific forms in the Nocturnes exhibit a ghostly aspect, it is also possible to see the night itself as the vaguely menacing environment Whistler regarded it. From this perspective, the entire composition is fraught with supernatural energies that may at any moment coalesce into an apparition. He did not need to resort, as Rossetti had done in How They Met Themselves (1851–60, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), to illustrations of wraiths terrifying mortals; the palpable air of mystery he created was sufficiently evocative to achieve the desired effect. And again, the critics divine his intentions. It is his ability to suggest the “interpenetration of the material world with its ideal” that catches the attention of William C. Brownell. Charles Caffin remarks on his “habit of evolving from material appearances their essence, the intangible element in them—in fact, the spirituality inherent in matter.” In an extended analysis, Royal Cortissoz praises Whistler for blazing a trail between Impression and Symbolism. The former style, he states, lacks “spiritual insight.” Being simply an “ocular synthesis” derived from “the baldest visual experience,” it represents “a step in the wrong direction.” On the other hand, the Rosicrucians (Josephin Peladan’s religious/artistic movement exemplified, in Cortissoz’s opinion, the excesses that were the inevitable outcome of the a priori

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predilections of Symbolism) resort to “arbitrarily enigmatic propositions” that ultimately prove hollow. Whistler surpasses both by binding intuition (clairvoyance) and experience (naturalism) “into one symmetrical totality of spiritual and material effect.” These judgments constitute the aesthetic equivalent of one Spiritualist’s assertion that the faith maintained the middle ground between French materialism and Hegelian idealism by holding the territory where “sense and soul touch and unite.”43 The few lights and dim shapes in Nocturne in Blue and Silver actually serve to emphasize the gloominess, suggesting an alternate way of viewing the Nocturnes. Instead of seeking to peer through the darkness to identify the locale (the usual goal in the analyses of these scenes), we should gaze at it, savoring the beguiling depths and evocative modulations. One review advocates this approach, noting “the air might be said to be visible, so dense is the deep, warm twilight which obscures all things here.” That air, it continues, is “so mysteriously wealthy in tints, that its richness is not fully suspected until the observer selects a portion of the canvas and endeavors to analyze the execution.”44 In a sense, such compositions have a proto-Rothko quality about them in the way they suspend an almost tangible veil in the foremost plane. And like Mark Rothko’s work, they are imbued with the utmost seriousness of intent, one that, in Whistler’s case, challenges the detachment often ascribed to Aestheticism. The nightly activation of ether, which Whistler both feared and embraced, casts its spell, making the scene an expression of the age’s anxiety about the social and scientific implications of materialism. Crucial to the articulation of this message were the technical innovations devised to express it. Whistler preferred coarse canvases but was parsimonious with paint. “It should be,” he once remarked about the latter, “like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” Hartmann is again insightful on the subject. He observes that the canvas shows through the colors and produces a “vibrating quality,” a feature, as we have seen, that caught the attention of other critics. The many minute variations in the tints caused by rubbing the oils across the warp and woof of the fabric create “subtle vibrations” that compellingly emulate the night’s shimmer, a shimmer that incorporates, he repeats, a “vibratory movement.” We have associated such dynamics with the imponderable fluids, and the paradox of a spiritual substance found its counterpart in the exploitation of the canvas’s physicality to dissolve the surface and make it transparent. This middle ground, where rough linen and refined brushwork meet and merge, becomes a site for the

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Spiritualist integration of “sense and soul.” If, in Nocturne in Blue and Silver, the night summons sentient, palpable energies, it is at least in part due to the artist’s discovery of the stylistic means necessary to fulfill his stated ambition of viewing nature “through the spiritual eye.”45 A comparison of Whistler’s London with Canaletto’s illustrates the contribution this spiritual seeing made to the critique of materialism mentioned above. The latter’s city exhibits the “uniform, infinite, isotropic space that differentiated the dominant modern world view from its various predecessors, a notion of space congenial not only to modern science, but also, it has been widely argued, to the emerging economic system we call capitalism.” This approach, Martin Jay proposes, employs a “Cartesian perspectivalism” to express the “dispassionate cognition” of Enlightenment thought. A far more engaged mindset informs the uncanny nocturnal world of Whistler; it is premised on the existence of a higher consciousness that ostensibly (or ostentatiously) eschews both the calculating mentality associated with capitalism and the “objectivity” of a scientific method devoid of spiritual intent. His art, Caffin asserts, does not depict “what the average man sees” because such individuals rely solely on an “ocular vision.”46 In place of such remote, disinterested gazing, Whistler spiritualizes the environment, endowing it with a vibrant immediacy, a tactility, that challenged conventional epistemologies of the time by toppling ocular vision from its place of primacy in the cognitive hierarchy. These considerations contributed to Whistler’s appreciation of Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way, a work he judged “the greatest picture in the world” (Figure 45). He was joined in this opinion by Beatrice Godwin, the woman he married in 1888. Not wanting to rely solely on his trips to the National Gallery to view it, he hung a large photograph of the piece in his studio. Sources do not disclose the reason for this adulation, but it must have been inspired at least in part by the spirituality that pervades the Venetian’s compositions. His imagery frequently involves the entry of he supernatural beings into the mundane realm in a manner not entirely inconsistent with the principles of Spiritualism. It was likely an appreciation of these visionary powers that motivated Inez Bate to alert Whistler to the importance of spending one’s life “trying to see [the] ‘beautiful’ like Tintoretto.”47 One further assumption about the attraction exercised by The Birth of the Milky Way enables us to pursue this subject further. Why did the Whistlers favor this particular painting and give it a place of prominence in

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Figure 45. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way. Ca. 1575, oil on canvas, 148 x 165.1 cm. National Gallery, London/Art Resource NY.

the studio? It must have been in some way emblematic of aspirations they shared. The pair of peacocks that serve as attributes of Juno would have caught their attention. Peacocks were the second of Whistler’s totems, ranking just behind the butterfly and, as such, featured prominently in the room he decorated for Frederic Leyland (Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876–77, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution). There Whistler appears as the beleaguered bird beset by a niggardly patron who is also represented as a peacock. Beatrice, or “Trixie,” was also fond of exotic birds. On learning of this liking, Charles Freer sent her a Shama Merle, an Asian magpie renowned for its sweetness of song and splendid plumage.48 The allure of Tintoretto’s painting doubtlessly had other sources as well. Since Whistler had planned to write a guide to the National Gallery, he likely knew the narrative. Jupiter, seeking to guarantee the immortality of

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Hercules, his son by the mortal Alcmene, brings the infant to suckle at Juno’s breast while she is asleep. In doing so, he initiates one of those tangible encounters with the supernatural where “sense and soul touch and unite,” much as mortals and immortals made physical—often sensual—contact in séances. Tactility trumps “ocular vision” in this quest for spiritual affirmation. Juno awakes suddenly and spills her milk in two streams, one forms the Milky Way and the other engenders lilies on descending to earth. All this is witnessed by two peacocks we might call Jimmy and Trixie. The image is, in one sense, a Nocturne, with the quest of immortality taking place among the stars. Uniting the beauty of the world (lilies) with that of the firmament (the stars) is the sensuous figure of Juno; she embodies both the Spiritualist understanding of the cosmos as sentient and responsive to human aspirations and its belief in a palpable middle realm.49 In his writings, Whistler often personifies nature as a woman and characterizes himself as her son. He might even be Hercules, for the “Gods,” he claims, set the artist apart “to complete their works, [and in response] he produces that wondrous thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all they have contrived in what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel.”50 This is, of course, a literary conceit, but it reflects a mindset sympathetic to archaic modes of thought, one Whistler endorsed when he affirmed the validity of Spiritualism based on its antiquity and universality. Frederic Myers, a prominent psychic researcher of the era, put the matter succinctly when he asked, “Is the universe friendly?” After investigating paranormal phenomena extensively, he claimed it was; when gazing at Juno, Whistler, whose belief system located heaven in proximity to the Milky Way, surely came to a similar conclusion.51 The question of a friendly universe became especially urgent after Trixie’s death in 1896. Whistler was devastated by the blow but believed her spirit lingered nearby.52 A letter about “the wonderful bird” she received further reveals Spiritualism’s place in the events that followed her demise. He informs Freer that When she went—alone, because I was unfit to go too—the strange wild dainty creature stood uplifted on the topmost perch, and sang and sang—as it had never sung before!—A song of the Sun—and of joy—and of my despair!—Loud and ringing clear from the skies! and louder! Peal after peal, until it became a marvel the tiny beast, torn by such a glorious voice, should live!—

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And suddenly it was made known to me that in this mysterious magpie waif from beyond the temples of India, the spirit of my beautiful Lady had lingered on its way—and the song was her song of love—and courage—and command that the work in which she had taken part, should be complete—and so was her farewell.53 Trixie’s spirit controlled the magpie she so loved, but this is not reincarnation, for she lingered only briefly on her journey to the Milky Way. Spirits could do this; they could instill in birds a sense of purpose that would facilitate their contacting those still confined to the material realm.54 Whistler would have known about these beliefs from his early investigations with Rossetti. The latter attended séances conducted by Mrs. Guppy, a medium who specialized in avian communications, and would surely have informed his coreligionist about the results.55 These circumstances point to another source of Tintoretto’s appeal: the Renaissance master’s depiction of an enchanted environment, one where spiritual and animal energies freely commingle, expressed beliefs that, in paintings such as Nocturne in Blue and Silver, sent Whistler’s signature butterfly-self (a creature who, since antiquity, had symbolized the soul) out into the gloom to reenchant industrial London in a manner that paralleled and updated the Venetian’s formulations. Thus, Whistler’s presence in the urban setting not only diverges from Canaletto’s but also from the Impressionists’. The latter devised strategies to suggest the viewer is walking through the city and encountering its spectacle of random events in a manner that implicates him or her in the life of the streets.56 Turning to the Nocturnes, that same viewer, one almost hesitates to say, floats like a butterfly over the Thames. In place of the physicality cultivated by the Impressionist, Whistler intimates a disembodiment akin to the otherworldly outlook presented by Tintoretto. Further, if Whistler believed the spirit could actually possess a bird, then the identity of his totems assumes a new significance, suggesting, in their broadest interpretation, that the artist’s essence could permeate the painting. Uniting the disparate currents of Whistler’s engagement with the spiritual is an aesthetic of anticipation that transfers the expectations that prevailed during a séance to the viewing of portraits and images of the Thames at night. These considerations integrate his faith into what Robert Fuller identifies as a strain of “esthetic spirituality” that runs through American religious thought from Jonathan Edwards to William James. Its priorities subordinate matters of moral conduct to an appreciation of the

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beauty that arises from living in harmony with supernatural forces. This theology of immanence, which draws on “some prerational dimension of the human personality,” is not pantheism but does insist that all meditation “should begin by focusing on the point of contact between the divine and human spheres.” Believers in Spiritualism—Whistler included—did this by quieting themselves at the outset of a séance; in the dark, sitters remained attentive, awaiting some slight signal from the spirit world that would announce the greater manifestations to follow. Prior to commencing a canvas, Whistler likewise engaged in a period of “contemplative silence” in order to attune himself to forces that were imperceptible to others. Followers of the “Master” (as Whistler’s devotees called him) would have behaved similarly before a painting in anticipation of succumbing (either literally or figuratively) to the spell its uncanny imagery cast, its darkness being an interface between two worlds.57 Because spectators were prepared in advance to entertain such thoughts, even the frame’s protective glass could engender them; one reviewer, for example, remarked that the reflections of visitors looked “like troubled ghosts in the mysterious gloom of the ‘Nocturnes’.”58 An image, or the decoration of a gallery, could provide a “point of contact,” as the enthralled viewers of the Venetian etchings could testify. This concept found its emblematic counterpart for Whistler in the body of Tintoretto’s Juno. Much of the above bears directly on Whistler’s advocacy of art for art’s sake, a doctrine that had its origins in the writings of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, and thence influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne. It divorced art from conventional morality and proclaimed the self-sufficiency of beauty; justification by reference to a higher existence, when it appears, tends to resort to generalities about truth and God. Whistler was indebted to these theories, but in the “esthetic spirituality” of Spiritualism, he also nurtured a homegrown (American) version of them that possessed the additional attraction of locating the eternal order within the material universe. While Gautier genuflects perfunctorily before abstract metaphysical ideals, Whistler depicts an environment populated with discarnate entities whom he knew from experience. 59 Without an awareness of this distinction, one is likely to conclude, as Roy McMullen does, that the Nocturnes offer “nothing more substantial than moods and allusiveness.”60 But it is not allusiveness that defines the tenor of Nocturne in Blue and Silver as much as anticipation. This mode of thinking extended from theory to practice, prompting

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Whistler, as noted earlier, to steer a middle course that favored a heightened sense of surface values while preserving the illusionism that Post-Impressionism and related movements increasingly eschewed. He expressed little patience with such “absurdities” as Pointillism, claiming its proponents “seem to [have] thrown all tradition and discipline to the winds in the crazy hope that something else shall take its place.”61 Integral to this stance and its artistic expression was a belief in an ether (the stuff of the middle way, continuity, and moderation) that served as a vehicle of spiritual communion in the manner delineated by Lodge and Flammarion. Because Whistler did not regard matter and spirit as antithetical in the first place, he did not have to struggle to reconcile them in the manner of Fernand Khnopff, Joséphin Péladan, and other Symbolists of this ilk. Their undertaking seeks to achieve this reconciliation by employing the type of occult imagery that critic Royal Cortissoz, as noted above, dismissed. In contrast, Whistler achieved his ends, in Sadakichi Hartmann’s words, by introducing “the significance and mystery that lie hidden in blurred objects.” And, just as his works retain a perceptual immediacy and want of explicit stylization that distinguishes them from Pointillism, they also have no need of the sphinxes and kindred creatures Khnopff depicted to articulate his arcane oracles.62 Whistler’s Modernism—his adversarial stance and avantgardism—arose in no small degree from a rejection of “Cartesian perspectivalism” and its presumed reification of capitalism. In cultivating a vision that avoided the detached objectivity of traditional illusionism, he was, however, unwilling to indulge in the “absurdities” the younger generation employed in pursuit of similar ends.

Conclusion Many of these issues find their counterpart in the writings of William James (1842–1910), a philosopher whose youthful ambition to become an artist made him more responsive to the varieties of aesthetic experience than most his colleagues. Indeed, they were inclined to attribute the acute visual sensibility that characterizes much of his theory to this early training. Between 1858 and 1861, he studied with William Morris Hunt and befriended John LaFarge, associations that tinctured his views with Tonalism. When commenting on the difficulties that arise in choosing between contending alternatives, for example, James proposes that “Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness.” He is also a proponent of ether,

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stating that, like time and space, it “soak[s] through all things.” And his sympathetic response to Spiritualism makes him especially relevant to this argument and those presented in the pages that follow.63 James shares many predilections with Whistler and the Spiritualists. Like them, he favored continuity in several forms; continuity in time meant that long established ways of thinking were not discarded whenever a novel theory appeared. Continuity in space implied that this world gradually merged with the next. The latter of these concepts he employed in a review of Frederic Myers’s philosophy of Spiritualism. Conventional epistemologies, James states, contend that the next thing adjacent to a surface experience is the realm of eternal essences; Myers, however, managed to grade down such discontinuities and, in doing so, filled the environment with spirits. Whistler achieved something similar: he does not seek the surface appearances rendered by Courbet and Realists of this persuasion (and, needless to say, not the idealism of Jean-Auguste Ingres) but, rather, a reality that exists just behind surfaces and accounts for their identity.64 James’s philosophical Tonalism comes to the fore in his analysis of the mind’s activities. Our waking state, he asserts, constitutes but one kind of consciousness, “whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” Art’s purpose is to see through that film and “fetch there vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit.” 65 While it seems unlikely Whistler ever read the philosopher, one source of the affinities between his imagery and such precepts is certainly Spiritualism’s promotion of an ether-filled environment where spirits mediated between mortals and the supreme being. These ideals find their larger context by turning again to George Cotkin’s discussion of “reluctant modernism.” The priorities encompassed by this phrase were particularly popular among American intellectuals (including James), who persevered in their struggle to preserve spirituality while dealing “with the demons of modernity” because they believed “that between the precipice of modernity and the certitude of Victorian ideals lay a comforting middle ground.”66 Whistler occupied this region as well; by rendering the being behind being, the condition where spirit and matter converge, he offered a stylistic counterpart to this “middle ground,” a site of permanence in a world otherwise threatened by the loss of all stability. James’s belief in ether and the paranormal demonstrates the high intellectual pedigree these concepts enjoyed at the end of the century. He played,

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as David Bjelajac explains, “a key role in shaping America’s Modernist culture of perpetual experimentation and innovation.”67 Whistler explored similar territory, pioneering Modernist principles of art appreciation in the process. In a certain sense, the aesthetic of anticipation is not about what is happening in a particular composition, but what will happen next. When will the figure fade away? When will a revenant emerge from the London fog/ether? This attitude obliges the viewer to meditate in silence for a prolonged period before a painting in order to appreciate fully the potentiality implied. We have seen that the resemblance of this process to the practices that prevailed at a séance was not a matter of coincidence. Furthermore, the observer who attentively waited with the proper expectations might also be rewarded by emanations of the artist’s personality, impressed into the materials according to processes explained by the theory of psychometry. In sum, such principles sanctified the work of art, again foretelling the sort of commitment Modernists would require of their audience. The Tonalism that embodied this sensibility experienced a loss of popularity during the early decades of the new century. To Kathleen Pyne’s discussion of the reasons behind this development, which includes the breakdown of an Anglo-American cultural hegemony based on ideals derived from Transcendentalism and Herbert Spencer, might be added the decline of the ether hypothesis in the years following Einstein postulations.68 Tonalism’s failure to attract younger painters in the early twentieth century was at least in part the result of its loss of this important justification. While Spiritualism would continue to flourish, it did so without the inspiration consequent on a vision of the universe made responsive to human longings by means of a pervasive, attenuated substance.

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The beliefs George Inness (1825–94) professed have long intrigued and frequently baffled admirers. This puzzlement is not the consequence of the artist’s reticence to explain himself; on the contrary, he was ever forthcoming to anyone who would listen, but his remarks are often so vague and arcane they tend to engender more questions than answers. His reliance on Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences, for instance, has been the source of considerable commentary and controversy. Much of this perplexity can be banished, it will be argued, by taking a more comprehensive approach to the range of phenomena governed by this doctrine than hitherto attempted. To date, scholars have applied it to individual objects within a setting (a horse, a cloud, a tree), but the task becomes more manageable when the entire landscape is evaluated in this manner. In other words, we want to know how the social arrangements governing the disposition of the land correspond to the communities of heaven. This question cannot be answered fully without a consideration of the reforms advanced by Henry George (1839–97), an economist whose “single tax” theory also proved irresistible to the artist. If Swedenborg delineated the ideal, George outlined the measures that would enable this world to approach it. Inness had to find a means to amalgamate the two. Like James McNeill Whistler, he did this by enveloping the countryside in an ether that found its counterpart in Tonalism. Given Inness’s temperament, such stylistic formulations could not be conducted without reference to the paranormal. Spiritualism came to his assistance in this matter, providing the spirit of Titian to guide his hand and brush. Governing the deliberations that follow, then, is Elliott Daingerfield’s observation that Inness made “Art, Religion, and the Single Tax Theory . . . one and the same thing.”1 Spiritualism appears in biographies of Inness as the shadowy doppel-

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ganger of his Swedenborgianism. Nevertheless, dramatic testimony of the artist’s attendance at séances serves to remind us that his devotion to the Swedish mystic was not unalloyed, a tendency Hiram Powers and others also exhibited. One report, for example, claims Inness entertained “an unquestioning credence of the grosser ‘manifestations’ of the mediums.” He did so, we learn, on “the assumption that supernatural visitations were as credible as the police-court news.”2 His son, George Inness, Jr., adds that his father never adhered strictly to the dictums of Swedenborg, a statement that suggests adjustments were made to accommodate Spiritualist beliefs. 3 Just when and where Inness first turned to Spiritualism will probably never be known. The contending Baptist and Methodist allegiances in his family may have made the ecumenical claims of the new faith especially attractive. His study of numerology prior to traveling to Europe in 1850 indicates an early affinity for the occult, and evidence that he was drawn to Spiritualism quite early in his career appears in Charles Caffin’s claim that Inness’s “craving within himself after the psychical and spiritual propelled” him toward Swedenborg.4 His entry into the Swedenborgian flock is better documented but still the subject of some discussion. Uncontested is the account his son provides, which has the artist moving to Eagleswood, a military academy and erstwhile utopian community, where, in 1864, he meets William Page (1811–85), a painter whose enthusiastic endorsement of the mystic converts his companion. But Adrienne Baxter Bell has recently noted that Page was already a devotee in 1851 when Inness occupied an apartment adjoining his in Florence; the two surely met; and given the metaphysical inclinations of both men, Swedenborg must have entered their conversation. Elements of the mystic’s doctrines, Bell proposes, may have found their way into Inness’s aesthetic by the mid-1850s.5 Whatever the sequence, both artists managed to reconcile Swedenborgianism with Spiritualism; hence Page’s activities can shed some light on his colleague’s more recondite pronouncements.6 For the sake of chronology continuity, we will postpone momentarily a review of Inness’s Spiritualism, which makes its initial appearance in the works executed during his European travels in the early 1870s, and turn instead to the commission that engendered the first overt references to Swedenborgian ideals. This occurred when three men—Fletcher Harper, a founder of the Harper Brothers publishing establishment; Chauncey Depew, a railroad magnate and politician; and Clark Bell, president of New York’s Medico-Legal Society—ordered a

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set of allegorical paintings. None of the patrons were Swedenborgian, but the interest they did take in Spiritualism suggests the proximity of the two faiths. Begun in 1866, the three works—The Valley of the Shadow of Death, The Vision of Faith, and The New Jerusalem—were completed within a year. Swedenborg and John Bunyan furnished the ideas about spiritual pilgrimage and regeneration that run through the series; we will focus solely on the third painting because its imagery is especially pertinent to the themes explored in this chapter.7 Damaged in 1880, The New Jerusalem (the name also given the Swedenborgian church) had to be cut into pieces to salvage the intact portions. The three remnants are now entitled the Visionary Landscape (1867, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. James M. Myers, North Carolina), the Evening Landscape (1867, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois), and The Valley of Olives (Figure 46). Originally, a Holy City nestled in a pastoral landscape, repeating in its architectural shapes those of the heavenly Jerusalem that hovered near the horizon and projected its forms into the clouds. The composition proclaimed the New Jerusalem Church (hence the title) to be the worldly counterpart of the celestial realm. A pamphlet written (probably by Inness) to accompany an exhibition in 1867 describes the scene as embodying the “state of peace and rest” that accompanies personal enlightenment. Viewed in Swedenborgian terms, the regenerated individual corresponds to the “peace and rest” that prevails in a just society. And a well-ordered society, with all its diverse communities acting in concord, mystically assumes the form of a well-ordered human body, with all its organs functioning harmoniously. In turn, these correspond to the celestial Grand Man (heaven) further up the continuum. These implications were expanded in one review that describes the heavenly city as “descending into the clouds.”8 When translated into teleological terms, the composition declares that both the individual and society approach perfection (bring heaven closer to earth) when they pacify and populate the wilderness within and without. Intimations of this ideal state, the circular contends, appear in the “landscape, where no part is left uncultivated, but all is made subservient to the pleasure and happiness of its residents.” Such is The Valley of Olives. Both the painting and its description warrant greater attention than hitherto granted because they reveal much about the artist’s abandonment of the Hudson River School celebration of the untrammeled wilderness. Among the motivations behind this decision was the Swedenborgian principle of plenitude, which contends heaven was designed to be populated by the spirits of

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Figure 46. George Inness, The Valley of the Olives. 1867, oil on canvas, 30 1/16 x 45 1/16 in. Photo copyright The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

mortals and vast portions of it remain unoccupied, awaiting the myriad souls yet unborn. The Celestial Man corresponds more closely to the divinity as he is completed by the souls that migrate to him; hence, as “each heavenly community increases numerically every day . . . it becomes more perfect.” The ways of heaven are the ways of earth; society advances as it grows (especially in numbers) and more closely resembles—again, in a mystical sense—the human form. Emptiness—wilderness—might in some respects correspond to spiritual principles but never so effectively as a “landscape where no part is left uncultivated.” In addition to reading about this doctrine, Inness and Page must have discussed it. The latter, for example, could well have heard Powers (the individual instrumental for Page’s conversion) expound on the subject, for the sculptor informed another associate that the “great object of Divine Providence” was “to produce the greatest number of lives.”9 Whatever Inness’s source, he, as a Swedenborgian, would have joined other reformers of his day in taking the directive in Genesis to increase and multiply as the first and most fundamental of all the commandments. The New Jerusalem also furnishes valuable insights into the vexed issue of Inness’s reliance on the Swedenborgian theory of correspondences. In its

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most expansive application, this doctrine applies to everything under the sun: thoughts, buildings, insects, rocks, etc., all correspond to a celestial (moral) counterpart, and Michael Quick offers some useful parameters for the researcher in pursuit of their meaning. Any determination, he proposes, must be acknowledged as tentative since no definitive means of verification exists. Further, any one feature must be consistent with the tenor of the others as they apply to Swedenborg’s teachings. Quick’s analysis of Sunset (1893, present owner unknown), for instance, regards the woman in the scene as corresponding with the Church, the child with innocence, the lamb with the innocence of infancy, and so on. All this relies on Swedenborg’s determinations as he published them. The difficulties arise, however, when we realize that there were no limitations in the application of this procedure: does this pebble or that twig in a foreground also have spiritual implications? Nor does the matter end there; the Church permitted believers to go on finding correspondences on their own. Swedenborg knew nothing, for example, of railroads, but a believer in the nineteenth century was entirely justified in seeking to identify their symbolism.10 All this leads to an excess of potential content, which is also, paradoxically, not especially ascertainable. A way out of this dilemma appears in The New Jerusalem; without denying that individual features can be subject to this reading, it proposes that the entire landscape may also correspond to a heavenly prototype. In this instance, a terrestrial setting in its most advanced state mirrors the spiritual world. As we will see, one has only to eliminate the overtly allegorical approach adopted here to discern the likely implications of Inness’s late landscapes. Page’s activities in the mid-1860s bear comparison with the message delivered by Inness’s painting. Shortly after leaving Eagleswood and moving to Staten Island, Page built an octagon house, a plan popularized by Orson Fowler, the phrenologist, in A Home for All (Figure 47). Greatest among the many virtues of this shape was its potential to usher in a worldly paradise by lowering the costs of construction and permitting everyone to own a home. In addition to being economic, it was compact, enclosing a larger interior while occupying less land than a comparable square or rectangular building. These considerations would become increasingly important, Fowler maintained, as populations grew and made greater demands on raw materials and space. He foresaw a densely inhabited nation, its numbers rising to forty-five billion, in which octagon houses would accommodate several families and still leave enough room for the intense cultivation of crops.

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Figure 47. Residence of O. S. Fowler, from “Residence of O. S. Fowler,” American Phrenological Journal 18 (1853): 120.

Inspired by Swedenborg, Fowler considered these developments integral to the creation of a perfect environment, one that would be “the heavenly vestibule of entrance upon another state, as infinitely higher than this can possibly become, as this, infinitely adorned by the fostering culture of man is to yonder primeval forests, or miasmatic swamp, full of reptiles and beasts of prey.”11 In erecting his octagonal house, Page was offering a vision of a utopian future premised on many of the same values that contributed to The New Jerusalem and its anticipation of the imagery of Inness’s late paintings mentioned above.

Spiritualist Influences Inness’s years of religious study culminated in 1868 when he was baptized into the New Jerusalem Church. In joining a faith that valued both the scientific and the mystical, he acquired a systematic framework for his intuitions of the spirit world. By the time he departed for Europe in 1870, he possessed a more settled understanding of the relationship between his beliefs and his calling

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than had prevailed earlier in his career. While many of the works from this sojourn (1870–74) are rather routine productions designed to gratify a taste for the picturesque, some reveal deeper strains that portend the profundity of the late style. One of these is Lake Nemi, the rendering of a site celebrated for its power to enchant (Figure 48). A temple dedicated to Diana had been erected there in antiquity, and its ruins prompted Henry James to linger one evening “to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads” who haunted the locale.12 This may be an offhand observation, but what might a more ardent soul such as George Inness have felt as he rambled along these shores? The setting sun illuminates a hazy atmosphere that caresses the gentle hills and declivities of an environment where time seems suspended and the past whispers in the sympathetic ear. This is just one of several works from this period, perhaps the most famous being The Monk (1873, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts), in which Inness indulges a Romantic taste for ruins and eerie lighting while evoking a Gothic or pagan past.13 How did Swedenborg and Spiritualism encourage this strain? In Italy, Inness exchanged the company of Page for that of Elihu Vedder, an artist who had dabbled in the occult since the 1850s. Vedder had, for example, befriended Kate Field, the journalist and author, during her Florentine sojourns, and her Planchette’s Diary, a book published in 1868 based on revelations divulged during séances in the preceding years, is indicative of their mutual interests. Furthermore, Vedder examined Swedenborg’s books closely during the early 1860s. He claims to have read “about a yard of them,” no mean feat and certainly not the behavior of one whose curiosity about their content was only casual. A series of small drawings executed toward the end of the decade were described by a friend, William Davies, as “noteworthy for the serious spiritualism which is in them.” Influenced by the cavalier attitude Vedder adopts in such late writings as The Digressions of V., scholars tend to picture him as a bon vivant with no deep convictions, but as Joshua Taylor remarked some years ago, “for all his flamboyance and high spirits, there was always an unexpressed depth of seriousness in Vedder that early showed itself in his work.” One cannot imagine him being fired with the degree of devotion that inspired Inness, but neither was he a materialist; instead, he seems to have nurtured the ambivalence of one who wants to (and sometimes does) believe.14 A professing atheist would scarcely have gotten along so swimmingly with Inness, and the vaguely disquieting scenery of Lake Nemi, The Monk, and like compositions, where more is implied than depicted, suggests the influence of Vedder’s own preference for the uncanny.

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Figure 48. George Inness, Lake Nemi. 1872, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 44 7/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of the Misses Hersey.

Michael Quick, who comments on this aspect Inness’s Italian work at length, also notes that his style evolved at this time, relinquishing the smooth glazes employed in the Eagleswood period in favor of richer applications of thick paint. Quick attributes this tendency, which continued to the end of the decade, to Vedder’s influence, but another possibility arises in Inness’s longstanding interest in Titian discussed by Adrienne Bell. The agitated marks and scrapes that model the hill in Lake Nemi diverge from the fluid brushwork Vedder employed. They result from running the wooden end of the brush or a fingernail through the wet oil. These marks, Rachael Ziady DeLue notes, represent an initial trial of a practice that would become frequent after 1880.15 However tentative, they explore the expressive potential of an immediate, indexical relationship between the artist and his work, a practice Titian pioneered to much renown centuries earlier. It is as if the American, equipped with a depth of spiritual wisdom he did not possess on his previous two trips to Europe, were enlisting the Renaissance master in his efforts to capture the enchantments of the Italian countryside. To appreciate the implications of this development, we return to Inness’s

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relationship with Page. When the two men first met in Italy in the early 1850s, the elder was embarking on a study of Titian that would continue through his career. He not only copied the old master’s compositions but also endeavored to replicate his techniques. The latter undertaking involved the superimposition of glazes in order to reproduce the richness and depth of hue for which the Venetian was famed. In delving further into the subject, Page had had Robert Browning translate relevant passages from Marco Boschini’s La carta del navegar pitoresco (1660) into English. There Page encountered, in addition to discussions of glazing techniques, descriptions of Titian’s wizardry with the brush, and he must have shared these with Inness, either at Eagleswood or earlier. Whichever the case, they seem to have enthralled Inness, for, as Bell notes, there is remarkable similarity between accounts of Titian’s frontal assaults on the canvas and those of Inness at work in his studio. Inness was not satisfied simply with the painstaking procedure of glazing; to this he eventually added ever more liberated applications of paint that introduced a pronounced personal element into the composition.16 The fact that the initial stirrings of this tendency emerge in the works done during the third European sojourn, after the relative restraint of the Eagleswood period, suggests an urge to establish a new degree of intimacy with Titian. Inness’s religious convictions likely influenced his evaluation of the Venetian. He praises Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (1515, Borghese Gallery, Rome), for example, when defending the propriety of the nude in art, but cannot find equal virtue in the more overtly erotic works such as the “Venus” (presumably The Venus of Urbino, 1538, The Uffizi, Florence). More pertinent to this discussion is Daingerfield’s testimony that “he was fond of thinking it was Titian he most resembled, and the spiritist mediums, finding this out, were forever telling him that Titian stood at his elbow.” Since Inness considered their statements to be as factual as any he read in the newspapers, his activities in Italy—and especially the pilgrimage in 1873 to Pieve di Cadore, Titian’s birthplace—acquire new significance when viewed from this perspective. Members of Vedder’s circle had been extolling the sublime scenery of the locale prior to Inness’s trip, but Daingerfield’s remark provides another motive for the journey.17 George Inness, Jr., writes that his father’s “romantic streak” drove him to search out the birthplaces of famous men, and on arriving in Rome, he rented a studio purportedly used by famed seventeenth-century landscapist Claude Lorrain. He may have experienced at this site some of the sensations

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associated with psychometry. William Wetmore Story, as we have seen, was whisked into the presence of Dante during a stay in Florence, a consequence, he maintained, of the tendency among “great spirits” to linger in the places they inhabited. He claimed the studios of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorwaldsen also retained similar vestiges of their former residents. The issues arising from visits to the birthplaces (or workrooms in the case of Claude) of famous men, contended a writer for The Crayon, were not unlike those of viewing a painting. An unknown might produce a work with the aesthetic merit of a Titian, but for those who revere the latter, it was an object of little consequence. Likewise, were the original wood to be replaced in Shakespeare’s house, few would be especially eager to journey there. In both cases, “the magnetism of genius by which whatever it has touched becomes charged with a mysterious virtue . . . has a certain influence on us.” This “magnetism” enables those of sufficient sensitivity to “feel the artist” in his products. While the author flirts with psychometry, Inness encountered its ardent proponent in the person of Page, who once claimed, for example, he had been “healed, as I felt virtue come out of ” a death mask of Shakespeare.18 Such beliefs warrant consideration in any review of Claude’s influence on Inness. The one painting Inness specifically identified as depicting Titian’s house includes several buildings in a verdant mountain pass (Figure 49). No obvious clues identify which of them sheltered the budding genius. My own candidate is near the center of the composition; its white wall is confined between two dark tree trunks that, by the contrast, give it greater prominence than the other structures. Neither the somberness nor the dynamic brushwork in the more monumental images created during the Italian interlude are evident here. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the commission; executed for an American patron several years after Inness had returned home, it was intended to accompany two other views, Lake Trasimeno and Lake Albano (both 1876, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon), in a series more attuned to picturesque values than inspired by the artist’s deepest aspirations. Nevertheless, Inness endeavored to sanctify Pieve di Cadore by placing it on a par with two sites famed for their historical associations. (Hannibal defeated the Romans at Lake Trasimeno, while Lake Albano was the site of a papal residence and several ancient temples.)19 In this triptych, Titian’s home holds it own among settings that loomed large in the culture of the West. Given Spiritualism’s teachings about sacred sites and the relationship

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Figure 49. George Inness, Ampezzo Pass, Titian’s Home. 1876, oil on artist’s board, 12 1/8 x 18 1/16 in. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; gift of Henry F. Cabell.

Inness had cultivated with the spirit of Titian, he would have had every reason to sense an uncanny presence at Pieve di Cadore. Contemporaries, in turn, understood he drew inspiration from such circumstances. One claimed, for example, that he gazed on the world “with eyes more clairvoyant than our own.” Endowed with such abilities, the author continues, Inness relied on “the whole cosmology of inner spirits [that] superintends the creation of the pictures.”20 These words recall traditional notions about demonic possession, but Inness’s muses were not the anonymous angels of old. Both the Spiritualists and Swedenborg conjured individuals noted for a particular talent. Just as Andrew Jackson Davis consulted Galen on matters of health and Swedenborg on spiritual subjects, so Inness adopted Titian as the demiurge most capable of overseeing his creative life. What, after all, would Gabriel know about the manipulation of paint? Titian was best suited to furnish the proper instruction in such matters, making the influx from above not simply a bright flash of nondescript inspiration but an energy replete with specific information. It seems the Italian environment, charged with specters from its fabled past, stirred the first inklings

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of this realization in the American artist even before his visit to Pieve di Cadore. This influence may have contributed to the thicker impasto and looser brushwork employed at this time, but the more specifiable evidence of his communion with the Venetian appears in Lake Nemi, where Inness resorted to the wooden end of the brush, and even his fingers, to scrape the wet paint. Contemporaries recognized his debt to Titian, and Bell discusses the connection by citing Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Marco Boschini’s informant, in his celebration of the Venetian’s dexterity with the brush. Unnoticed in these accounts, however, are Palma’s concluding remarks on his mentor’s techniques: “in the last stages he [Titian] painted more with his fingers than his brushes.” Page could have alerted Inness to this passage as early as 1851, or later at Eagleswood, but Inness seems only to have acted on its implications during his third trip abroad. On one level of consciousness, this knowledge would have guided his examinations of the originals now surrounding him in such abundance, but in his deeper meditations, it must have encouraged a rapport with Titian that facilitated a spontaneity unattainable by routine studio practices. The bold brushwork he employed at this time, Bell notes, “had not yet fully entered into the pictorial vocabulary of American artists.”21 But we can posit a relationship between the two that resembled William Sidney Mount’s to Rembrandt when he adopted the latter’s style to execute the Dutchman’s portrait: channeled inspiration allowed an artist to proceed with great abandon knowing the overseer would never permit the outcome to be eccentric or inconsequential. I have emphasized Inness’s direct physical contact with paint because it announces something new in his work. He had resorted to expressive brushwork before, for example, during the Medfield period (1860–63), but that style seemingly never entailed the use of his fingers. It was followed by the more deliberate approach cultivated at Eagleswood, where Page persuaded him to superimpose glazes, but this technique inhibited the spontaneity and textured surfaces he came to cherish in the 1870s.22 As suggested above, another way of thinking about Inness’s improvisatory tendencies is to merge them with contemporary notions about automatism. His mindset propelled him beyond the niceties of Vedder, whose work looks positively academic by comparison, to a place where he stood more or less alone. Virtuoso brushwork can readily lapse into convention, but one’s fingers resist formulaic application and instead encourage an intense empathy with the materials that vanishes the second the mind wanders. This realization began to grow

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on Inness when he arrived in Italy, the land of Titian and a place where Americans—Story, for instance—were enthralled by the presence of the past. There must have been instances, however brief, when Inness sensed Titian was not merely “at his elbow,” but in his hand, and the reverberations of such moments would have continued long after the sensation ceased. By pursuing these intuitions, he realized that the act of painting itself, and not merely what he depicted, could align him with the higher powers operating in the universe.23 After tentative experiments in Italy, Inness relied increasingly on these innovative techniques, and contemporaries testify to his use of the palette knife, the butt end of the brush, and his fingers to supplement the fluid brushwork. “Taking his thumb,” Frederick Lamb, one of several witnesses, writes, “he drew the color together with a few marvelous sweeps—as was often his habit.” The rapidity and ease of his gesture suggest he had become as adept in this practice as Titian once had been. In works such as Early Autumn, Montclair (1891, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware), a wide array of strokes, culminating in a particularly liberal application of paint in the large tree, exhibit the consequences of this approach.24 Again, we need not search for Titian behind every tree to postulate his role as an instigative force that permitted Inness to adopt the method more or less at will. But why not consider the similarities simply a matter of conscious emulation on Inness’s part? Wouldn’t it be easier to attribute all this to a penchant to imitate an esteemed predecessor? Such questions ignore the high value Inness placed on spontaneity and originality. Automatism sanctioned the reliance on methods akin to those employed by Titian because it removed the element of deliberation from the process: one remained true to a personal vision. Indeed, Inness’s penchant for falling into states of rapture confirmed his status as genius among those who witnessed such episodes. Before the easel, Daingerfield writes, he entered into “those impetuous moods which so often possessed him.” Darius Cobb describes an almost demonic individual who seemed “charged with electricity . . . with the dark eyes throwing their intense light through his glasses into mine.” With eyes beaming, this “magnetic” artist began “painting like one mad.” And Henry Eckford witnessed him “working in that rapt condition of mind during which the lapse of time is not felt.” But if he were “possessed,” “magnetic,” and “rapt,” who or what was the cause? George Inness, Jr., alludes to this issue when he notes his father developed “a breadth and technique in his work which closely corresponded to the breadth

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of his mental and spiritual unfolding.”25 To understand this statement, we must consider the implications of “spiritual unfolding” in context. In the logic of Swedenborg and Spiritualism, influx was, again, not a vague feeling of exhilaration granted by a remote divinity; it filtered through the specific spirit best qualified to translate the message into terms comprehensible to the recipient. In this case, contemporary testimony, as well as timing and circumstance, converge on one candidate: Titian. He was the entity who oversaw Inness’s breadth of technique, ensuring that the rapid gestures of his hands and fingers would remain the agents of an elevated content. To reject this reasoning, one must contend that, while Spiritualism identified a special affinity between the two artists and while Inness repeatedly resorted to Titian’s techniques, even his most idiosyncratic ones, no significant connection between these two facts ever occurred in Inness’s mind despite his belief in the descent of inspiration from above. Further evidence of Inness’s mindset appears in his habit of remarking “that his forms were at the tips of his fingers, just as the alphabet was at the end of the tongue.” Again, what we may be inclined to read as a routine figure of speech might actually entail a meaning that goes deeper than its interpretation as a metaphor implies. Just as the Mesmerist emitted vital currents from his fingers, so the “magnetic” artist might project his creative energy directly onto the canvas by a similar procedure. There was an impulsiveness about Inness’s approach, a desire to impress himself unequivocally into his compositions, that made him impatient with such intermediaries as the brush and, ultimately, even with paint itself. Montgomery Schuyler seems to have divined this aspiration when, in praising the “living,” “vibrating” colors of Inness’s compositions, he was led “almost [to] think that the very life-currents of the man had commingled themselves with the tints he made use of.” In reminiscing about visits to Inness’s studio, where his host’s intensity was so great that his eyes “would bulge from his head and his hair would stand on end,” S. C. G. Watkins claimed the artist placed “his soul on that canvas.” Inness became, in effect, a magnetic magus around whom electricity crackled and whose hair stood straight up; his eyes, in Darius Cobb’s telling, threw out light, an apparent reference to the ancient theory of extramission and the magic powers associated with it.26 The cumulative effect of this vocabulary was to suggest that the oils and canvas were impregnated with the artist’s essence while anointing him as an exceptional individual wielding powers inaccessible to mere mortals. The sorcerer who emerges from these tales bears a resemblance to the

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one conjured up in contemporary descriptions of Whistler. In both cases, the artist participated in the creation of much of this imagery, and the public granted it diverse shades of credence. Even those who resorted to such tropes purely as a means of expressing their admiration of talent, however, were, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in currents of metaphysical speculation endemic at the end of the century. And as a Spiritualist himself, Inness must have believed psychometry enabled him to transmit psychic energy directly to the canvas, a process that ultimately favored touch over brush. A yearning to explore expressive possibilities beyond the pale of earthly conditions led him to exclaim: “Oh, to paint a picture, a sunset, without paint! To create without paint!” He bemoaned the fact he was “limited to paint” and anticipated that “after we get to heaven, we shall find some other medium with which to express our thoughts on canvas.” Such speculation was rife among Spiritualists because they believed eternity was passed by pursuing those interests that most captivated the soul during its worldly sojourn. In the celestial sphere, talents would blossom and progress well beyond their worldly accomplishments, a concept that led one follower, for example, to foresee “Raphael . . . [painting] pictures [in heaven] outdoing all his works here.”27 Inness envisioned even more dramatic possibilities: freed from the material constraints of his trade, he might eventually fill the canvas with the imaginings that flowed from his fingertips. These musings would not have seemed farfetched to Spiritualists, for among their numbers were those still in the mortal sphere whose images answered Inness’s aspirations for the future life. Lizzie and May Bangs, two sisters from Chicago, acquired a reputation for creating portraits of the deceased without resorting to automatism: each woman simply held a corner of a canvas while the likeness materialized, often within a half an hour. In the portrait of Mrs. Ella Leamon-Leach (Figure 50), we are told, “No pigments or colors were furnished. No human hand, agency, mechanism, or contrivance rendered any assistance to the spirit forces executing the work.” One Bangs sister confessed to Hamlin Garland that it was the “spirits of artists” who assisted.28 The rather prosaic quality of the image argues against Titian’s assistance in this case, but the sisters exemplified the kind of thinking current among believers that doubtlessly spurred Inness’s speculations. Analysis of Inness’s debt to Titian has consistently ignored the religious dimension it entailed. Resolutely committed to idealism, Inness did not believe style begot style: spirit begot style. “The true use of art,” he proposed, “is, first to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” Titian helped him

Figure 50. Photograph of the spirit-painted Portrait of the late Mrs. Ella Leamon-Leach, Produced in the Presence of the Bangs Sisters, from James Coats, Photographing the Invisible (1911; New York: Arno Press, 1973), 308.

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fulfill this dictum, one that engendered a teleology of technique that bridged the gap between this world and the next by creating a continuum of ever expanding expressive possibilities. Spontaneity, the engine of this progress, made the polished surfaces of William-Adolphe Bouguereau an anathema to Inness; they were the consequence of a “spiritual inertia” that precluded further growth. “No great artist,” he opined, “ever finished a picture,” at least not in this world.29 In the next, however, he and Titian might, like the Bangs sisters, collaborate and create something that would astonish their celestial colleagues. By coupling the logic of Inness’s religious convictions with evidence available in documents and the paintings themselves, the consequences of his acting on his beliefs begin to appear. Hence, by means of Spiritualism (aided by Swedenborg), Titian found his way into Inness’s deliberations in a manner that supplemented, rather than supplanted, the more conventional influences—the Barbizon, for instance—that also contributed to his style. In granting Titian his due, we need not suppose Inness conjured spirits every time he approached the easel. As mentioned above, they must have been sensed (but not likely seen) under certain propitious conditions, and the experience—those intervals of trance-like behavior witnessed by acquaintances—would have continued to resonate within, invigorating the more routine acts of picture painting, long after its cessation. Spiritualism licensed an experimental approach that released him from the proprieties prevalent at the time and prompted the maturation of a painterly style equaled by few contemporaries. Finally, by establishing Spiritualism as a significant strain in his creative formulations, we reach a suitable jumping-off place to address the other issues raised by Daingerfield’s contention that art, faith, and the single tax were inextricably bound in Inness’s thought.

The Civilized Landscape Inness’s words about the “civilized landscape” provide a good transition to these larger considerations, and since his avowal of the concept reveals much about his aesthetic, it merits quoting at length: The highest art is where has been most perfectly breathed the sentiment of humanity. Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hill—side, the sky, clouds—all things that we see—can convey that sentiment

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if we are in the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, every thing of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been. In Italy I remember frequently noticing the peculiar ideas that came to me from seeing odd-looking trees that had been used, or tortured, or twisted—all telling something about humanity. [The] American landscape, perhaps, is not so significant; but still every thing in nature has something to say to us.30 These enigmatic lines require a brief review if we are to align their meaning with the concerns mentioned by Daingerfield. The initial remarks about rivers, streams, and the like reflecting the “sentiment of humanity” is a straightforward presentation of the principles underlying the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences. Influx descends from above and, having passed through the human mind, spreads out into nature, where it becomes an imperfect mirror of human, and ultimately divine, thought. Inness never questioned or modified this contention, and this fact is another compelling argument in favor of regarding his landscapes as terrestrial and not, as many have claimed, the image of Swedenborg’s celestial realm. What the artist does not furnish, either with regard to these rivers and streams or with respect to the objects that bear the “marks” of human “effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, [and] love,” are the specifics. Other than the “tortured or twisted” trees of Italy, which somehow reveal them and are therefore more consequential than trees in the American wilderness, we are given no insight into the spiritual implications of these correspondences, into the “peculiar ideas” that occurred as he observed them. His mention of the “civilized landscape,” however, offers an alternate approach, one consistent with the method discussed above: instead of searching for the symbolism of a particular plant or animal, we can follow the logic present in Inness’s The New Jerusalem and regard the entire landscape as a moral exemplar. Given Inness’s devotion to the ideals of Henry George, and given the latter’s dedication to something like the “civilized landscape,” we can consult the economist’s theories for clues about the

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artist’s efforts to find a worldly counterpart to Swedenborg’s teleology and principle of plenitude. Henry George was driven to write Progress and Poverty (1879) by the injustices he witnessed as a journalist in California. Speculators had acquired large tracts of choice land for a pittance when the state was sparsely populated and reaped a windfall as settlers arrived and the value of real estate rapidly escalated. Such profits were, to George’s mind, unconscionable because they were unearned; land was a gift of God to all humanity and should only be appropriated for personal gain by those who were willing to work it. This, the most fundamental premise of George’s philosophy, constituted the basis of its appeal to Inness: matters of social inequity are couched in religious terms. Indeed, one historian characterizes Progress and Poverty as “the only work on economics that ends with reflections on the immortality of the soul. It was a theological tract as much as an essay on economy.”31 Given the artist’s consuming interest in matters metaphysical, he was bound to latch on to this text as a panacea for the troubles afflicting a nation in the throes of rapid industrialization. George tasks himself with solving what he views as the defining paradox of modern life: why, in an age when manufacture and agriculture are increasingly productive, are the ranks of pauperism outpacing this growth? The answer can be found in the social structure presently governing economic evolution. When a particular locale experiences rapid development, it attracts more and more people; the resulting competition for habitable quarters boosts rents at a faster rate than wages. Despite the enhanced productivity that accompanies population growth, laborers and farmers alike are swept into a vortex of debt and poverty. George’s solution is to introduce a confiscatory tax on unused or rented land. This “single tax” would replace all other means of funding the government. Being equal to rents collected, it would act as a disincentive to become either a landlord or a speculator. Workers would, George contended, reap the benefits of their toil without having to support the lifestyle of those who made no positive contribution to the prosperity of the community. The logic of his argument obliged George to celebrate the blessings dense populations bestow. He may, like Page, have been propelled on this course by an early interest in phrenology, but as an economist, he had ample reason to maintain it. Through much of the nineteenth century, the discipline had been beguiled by Thomas Robert Malthus’s grim prognostications, which imposed a law of diminishing returns on population growth. A seemingly irresistible

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urge among humans to beget children regularly exhausted the capacity of the land to feed them; famine and pestilence were nature’s ways of thinning the ranks and restoring a balance. George regarded such reasoning as a ploy designed to advance the interests of the landed gentry. Human suffering was the outcome of maladjustments in society; nature’s intentions were entirely benign. There was virtually no limit to the numbers the planet could support because in agriculture, as in industry, more hands meant greater efficiency and, consequently, a higher per capita output. Since matter could neither be created nor destroyed, whatever was consumed one day could be recycled the next: hence “the earth could maintain a thousand billions of people as easily as a thousand millions.”32 George urged capitalists and laborers to recognize the landlord as their mutual adversary. The single tax would gently purge this parasite without causing the body politic undue distress. Although not ill-disposed to either cities or industrialism, George’s future was largely defined by the perceived virtues of rural life. His early experiences in California led him to believe that independent farmers were best accommodated on lots ranging from forty to eighty acres. From such environs, a race of rugged yeomen would rise to serve as the guarantors of freedom; “society would,” George proposed, “approach the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy.” The retrospective direction of his gaze led one scholar to remark that “his ideal society seemed to be one in which a working man could establish himself on a small farm and make a living. In that sense he was looking backward at a Jeffersonian agrarian democracy and not ahead at the problems of industrial society.” In delineating the possible consequences attending the failure to adopt his system, George turned to the example of Rome. Its liberties had been born on “the four-acre farms of the Italian husbandmen,” but the latifundia of the later Empire were a sure sign of superannuation. On these great estates labored the enslaved hoards captured in foreign wars; independent farmers, unable to compete, were obliged to join the legions or the urban proletariat. The ensuing decay of the empire’s physical and moral fiber ensured the ultimate triumph of the barbarian tribes. Did the development of vast “machine-worked wheatfields of California and the Dakota” portend a similar fate for modern society? George wondered. 33 From his perspective, the vicissitudes of history could be charted by the relation of peoples to their land: America stood at a crossroads. Swedenborgians flocked to the “single tax” movement in numbers disproportionate to their place in society. Their faith, as suggested above,

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attuned them to the reformer’s vision of an egalitarian, populous nation. When Inness first read Progress and Poverty in the early 1880s, he had lost his taste for the overt allegorical symbolism seen in The New Jerusalem but not for the views underlying it. Georgian theories offered a means of grounding this belief in the economic realities of the day. In Sundown, for example, we encounter a setting dotted with farms at intervals that answer the reformer’s call for moderately sized properties workable by their owners (Figure 51). While Inness was not absolutely systematic on this point, nevertheless, he tends to follow this formula in the late paintings, including houses, fences, cattle, and people in relatively close proximity to testify to the civilized nature of the landscape and thus to the confluence of Swedenborgian and Georgian ideals.34 This merging endows the setting with teleological implications; Sundown exhibits an environment where humanity is evolving toward the perfection possible in the material sphere. In turn, this condition corresponds to an even better state, the heavenly prototype for social reform. Inness implied as much in a speech given at a dinner in George’s honor in 1890 when he declared “the ideal is ever the precursor of all that is done.” This statement not only complies with the metaphysical bent of George’s system, but it also recalls the message delivered in The New Jerusalem, where the celestial landscape appears as a model for its worldly counterpart. Inness further tied these threads together by contending that a single tax majority would evolve toward “the ideal as I desire to have my picture developed, naturally, by attending [to an] . . . approaching . . . ideal.” The two realms, however, would never fully unite, for as the artist also informed his audience, “that proposed ideal can never be absolutely attained.” Nevertheless, just as George based his system on a belief in the progressive nature of humanity, the artist told his listeners that “without that ideal no progress can be made.”35 These words again remind us that Inness always distinguished between the mundane and celestial realms. The latter was not the place to present George’s ideas, which were about changes necessary to improve this life. A few adjustments in the Valley of the Olives, however, could align his religious beliefs with the single tax system. Sundown accomplishes this transformation; its architecture and surroundings are more humble than those seen in the earlier work, but both deliver the same message. It was, as Inness explained, that “we must work our way to Paradise,” and central to this task was the reordering of the landscape in ways that met the needs of humanity.

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Figure 51. George Inness, Sundown. 1894, oil on canvas, 30 5/8 x 45 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY.

On the verge of the twentieth century, a Jeffersonian yeomanry is proposed as the best tonic for the ills besetting the Republic.36 When Inness rented a house in Montclair in 1878, he entered a Georgian environment of small farms in proximity to a city before the economist published his theories. His purchase of the Dodge estate in 1884 reflected his concurrence with these theories. The pear orchard located on the property entitled him to claim yeoman status: on his acres, God’s bounteous gift would not go fallow. Inness asserted he could plant an easel in his grove and find inspiration for scores of works. His lands, then, not only contributed to the nation’s material economy, but also boosted its corresponding cultural GNP.37 The Garden State was a hotbed of single tax agitation, with Montclair hosting a club dedicated to George’s crusade during the very years the artist was creating his most profound compositions. This convergence of personal and political developments sustained and even amplified the earlier Spiritualist and Swedenborgian strains in his work. 38 Those Swedenborgian correspondences that otherwise prove so elusive, for example, are now given (social) substance by reference to an emerging ideal of equality and cooperation fostered by Georgian principles; the entire setting usurps the role of

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isolated features (although these might also be consulted) in functioning as a correspondence with heaven. We have no way of calculating the precise contribution each of these beliefs made to any particular work, and perhaps the best approach is to remain alert for clues relating to all three while acknowledging that such inspiration would not have been uniformly constant (or, in some cases, even present at all). These considerations provide a framework for an examination of Home at Montclair, a deeply personal composition whose expressive immediacy makes it a compelling example of Inness’s “signature style” (Figure 52).39 Nestled in a setting of wintry beauty, its house evokes feelings of domestic felicity. A rustic fence of tree trunks and branches divides the composition with an emphatic diagonal symptomatic of the artist’s concern to demarcate terrestrial space clearly. It also foregrounds the issue of property, in effect declaring, “behind this barrier stands the domain of Inness.” The estate may not be vast, but it is well tended and answers the physical and spiritual needs of its owners. Spiritualist influences appear in the dynamic brushwork that synthesizes feeling and paint. Diverse strokes and scratches, especially evident in the left corner, contribute to a “scraffito” characteristic of the “signature style.”40 This feature returns us to the qualities Inness identifies as characteristic of the “civilized landscape.” The latter’s significance derives not only from the acts, labors, and efforts of man, he remarks, but also from his “suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, [and] love.” Allowing for some ambiguity in this statement, it is nevertheless possible to read it as involving psychometry; these emotions—not physical things—leave the imprint of humanity on the environment, a mark readable by those attuned to its energy. The “civilized landscape,” then, is more significant than its untamed opposite because it resonates with the “sentiment of humanity” not only in the sense of Swedenborgian correspondences but also as a consequence of the psychic energies Spiritualists delineated. Environments become more meaningful as they accumulate this psychic residue, which is notably absent in the wilderness settings favored by the Hudson River School. But Inness also leaves his own “mark” on the landscape by introducing a direct, indexical record of the influx he may have channeled through Titian. By this means, he alludes to the possibility of responding to his images, and to their physical/psychical content, much as one would to the “sentiment of humanity” mentioned above. This integration of Spiritualist, Swedenborgian, and single-tax sentiments enriches the implications of Inness’s Tonalism. The artist acknowledged this

Figure 52. George Inness, The Home at Montclair. 1892, oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 45 in. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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possibility when he proposed that art embodied “spiritual principles” and was “founded upon laws which are analogous to the laws of life.” Unity and harmony stood preeminent among these principles and were “fundamental” to “all Art,” but how might these ends be achieved? To begin with, one had to study “things not for themselves but for their relations one to the other.”41 Symmetry, balance, proportion, and like devices all contributed, but the Tonalism he created by filling the compositions with a glowing mist was the most effective means of fusing diverse features and consuming disruptive detail. It finds its spiritual dimension or law in Swedenborg’s reformulation of the seventeenth-century concept of ether. He explains that “light and heat going forth from the Divine Sun cannot go forth in nothing, that is, in a vacuum, but must go forth in a containant” (an ether). In the mundane sphere, he contends, the prevalence of this same ether meant “there is a wave of effluvia constantly flowing forth out of man, also out of every animal, likewise out of tree, fruit, shrub, flower, and even out of metal and stone.” These waves operate much as “imponderable fluids” and psychometry do for the Spiritualists. George’s argument for an afterlife follows like reasoning: we mortals, he states, recognize only a small portion of “the vibrations of matter which give the sensations of light and color.” It is therefore unreasonable to insist that the data collected by the senses encompass all that is knowable. This other, environing dimension “is the heart of all religions, . . . the poets have sung it, [and] the seers have told it.” Inness chimed in on this point, noting that “seeing” involved more than what the eyes reveal.42 There is no compelling reason, therefore, to equate, as is often done, the misty settings Inness depicts with the subjective space of Swedenborg’s otherworldly realm. The comparison is based on a flimsy analogy between subjectivity (inner vision) and haze, one that can scarcely stand before the seer’s statement that in heaven he saw “things exactly as I have seen things in the world, so vividly that I had no way of knowing that I was not in the world.” Residents of that sphere see “actually with far more clarity, crispness, and vividness” than we. Inness’s Tonalism evokes the ether and associated noumenal entities promoted by the thinkers and faiths he most cherished.43 Seeing this substance required a heightened vision, one the artist possessed and could evoke by depicting a dense atmosphere whose muted glow signals, as Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., notes, something other than fog.44 He renders a terrestrial environment where the coalescence of material and spiritual forces generates, as it did for Whistler, a powerful integration of style and content.

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An article from the New York Evening Post about The Sign of Promise (1862, unlocated) comments on this process. Reprinted in a pamphlet that accompanied the painting’s exhibition in 1863, it likely reflected Inness’s thinking because he oversaw the publication and presumably selected the material included. In discerning “that subtle essence which merges the spiritual and the material,” the reviewer praises the composition for creating a “wondrous unity which pervades the whole scene.”45 Although these words can no longer be tested against the image, they are significant on several counts. If we accept the standard chronology of Inness’s conversion to Swedenborgianism, that it occurred after his arrival in Eagleswood in 1864, then the discussion of subtle essences visibly uniting spirit and matter would seem to involve the functioning of imponderable fluids we have repeatedly encountered in Spiritualist discourses. It was suggested above that the artist’s interest in this faith may have preceded his devotion to the Swede’s doctrines, but it is also possible that the fundamentals of the latter were imbibed during his first trip to Italy in the early 1850s. We need not be excessively scrupulous on this point because Swedenborg’s “effluvia” bore a close resemblance to the Spiritualist’s imponderable fluids, and either could account for the effects the critic mentions. Subsequent efforts—even by the artist himself—to describe the atmosphere that becomes increasingly dense in the later paintings often adopt a similar approach. One reviewer remarks, for instance, that the misty setting of Nantucket Moor (exhibited 1885) seems “to live and vibrate before our eyes and to stretch palpable, breathable depths between us and the gray walls of the distant buildings.” Another praises the “ethereal and tender” light he discerned in the artist’s work. We can surmise the intent of these responses by viewing the living, palpable ether that absorbs the detail and sanctions diverse, quite often unorthodox, methods of paint application in Sundown and Home at Montclair. Inness’s belief that art was founded on laws analogous to those of life prompted him to claim that “art is a subtle essence. It is not a thing of surfaces, but a moving spirit, harmonizing the discordant by rejecting the excess of the sensuous cravings of the intellect.” The harmony so achieved entails more than issues of style; from the “subtle essence which exists in all things of the material world . . . [emerges] an atmosphere about the bald detail of facts,” which, Inness adds, speaks of “that which is unseen.” Such statements constitute an aesthetic formulation of a doctrine we have encountered often: the demonstrability of imponderable fluids, or effluvia, by means of clairvoyance made possible a scientific confirmation of faith

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in the world beyond. The correspondences that bound the two realms in The New Jerusalem and the later landscapes were, consequently, based on an actual—rather than metaphorical—relationship between heaven and earth, one achieved by the extension of an ethereal substance from this world to the next. And the artist’s call for “a spiritual science” premised on the flow of “inspiration from or through the religious mind into the scientific mind” was founded on this understanding.46

Conclusion The analysis offered in these pages was guided by Daingerfield’s contention that art, religion, and George’s economic theories were closely allied in Inness’s mind. Spiritualism made Titian a collaborator in the more spontaneous performances and joined Swedenborgianism in generating ideas about ether (what the artist calls a “subtle essence”). The latter fostered a Tonalism that relieved the artist from the drudgery of rendering all the minutia of nature. Out of these deliberations arose landscapes that reenchanted an otherwise commercial environment (New Jersey truck farms) and located its residents within the scheme of salvation. That salvation entailed not only filling Swedenborg’s heaven but also populating a corresponding Georgian world. The yeomen who inhabited the latter would eventually create a Jeffersonian society and banish the prospect of a dystopian America governed by agribusiness and land speculators. Viewed from this perspective, Inness’s works exhibit a powerful synthesis of teleological beliefs and stylistic innovations. All this is dependent on resolutely viewing the landscapes as worldly. To regard Inness’s vision as transcendent, as a direct glimpse into a realm where time and space are malleable according to the mental state of the viewer, is to disregard the artist’s declared aim of depicting the “solidity of objects and transparency of shadows in a breathable atmosphere through which we are conscious of spaces and distances. By the rendering of these elements we suggest the invisible side of visible objects.”47 That “invisible side” was made accessible by the imponderable fluids and psychometry of Spiritualism, as well as the effluvia and influx of Swedenborg. Further, the latter’s correspondences only function from an earthbound perspective; the correspondence of the heavenly Grand Man with the divinity is another matter entirely. Were we already established in that Grand Man, there would be little need for the Georgian reforms. These distinctions are clearly made in Inness’s remark, included above,

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about depicting an “approaching ideal” that could not “be absolutely attained” (at least in this sphere). Another outlook on this subject is gained by comparing Inness’s work with that of two other renowned Swedenborgians of the nineteenth century: Johnny Appleseed and Daniel Burnham. John Chapman (1774–1845) earned his sobriquet by traversing the wilds of the Ohio River Valley and planting apple seeds whenever he encountered a promising, picturesque site “such as an artist or a poet would select” (Figure 53). When settlers arrived, they had only to transplant the saplings to establish an orchard that would soon yield fruit. In a gesture that corresponded spiritually to the act of sewing seeds, Johnny divided the Swedenborgian texts he had on hand and presented portions of each to those he encountered on his travels. Within little more than a generation after he had roamed the forests, they began to resemble the cultivated lands Inness was wont to depict. In designing the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Burnham (1846–1912) was inspired by Swedenborg’s descriptions of the heavenly Jerusalem to design an environment that would not only awe fairgoers but also serve as a model for city planning in the United States. And in the “City Beautiful” movement that followed the example of the White City, his ideals greatly influenced America’s transformation from a rural to an urban society.48 Their faith inspired all three men to favor the civilized landscape; what Inness depicted on canvas, the others sought to actualize in the world around them. George’s agrarianism, however, kept Inness from advocating the urban environment promoted by the architect. But this reservation did not prompt him to opt for the wilderness scenes depicted by members of the Hudson River School: their prospects were devoid of “human sentiment” and hence required civilizing before they could mirror the destiny God had in mind when he created heaven and earth. In viewing Sundown and Home at Montclair as a culmination of ideas that were developed earlier in The Valley of Olives, we best understand how Inness joined his coreligionists and single taxers in anticipating a time when, untroubled by the unruliness of nature or that of impoverished humanity, the nation would present a smiling countenance of gardens and comfortable homes that corresponded to the benevolence reigning in the hearts of its inhabitants.

Figure 53. Johnny Appleseed, from n.a., “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 18 (1871): 830.

Chapter 6

Romantic Conjurations

George Fuller and Albert Pinkham Ryder managed to combine elements of late Romanticism with those of an emergent Modernism to create oeuvres that figure prominently among the lasting accomplishments of Gilded Age culture. Their subjects, which include beautiful waifs and storm-tossed ships, look back to motifs in circulation long before their careers commenced. These, however, are rendered with broad brushstrokes and heavy impastos in a manner that anticipates the abstraction of the impending century. Uniting these seemingly disparate currents is the ambition to deepen Romantic teaching about the power of symbols by allying it with psychometry and affiliated tenets of Spiritualism. All this is accomplished in a context of a Tonalism intended, again, to induce a meditative state similar to that adopted during séances. Romanticism reacted against the perceived contrivance and artificiality of entrenched literary traditions by advocating the creation of profound symbols whose depth of feeling would fuse one’s emotions with the prototype. Allegory, the villain in this scenario, was accused of concocting its attributes out of prolonged intellectual deliberations that would inevitably strike those tasked with decoding them as arbitrary and tedious. According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and other proponents of this theory, authentic symbols arose when the artist identified completely with the object of his or her attention. Unlike allegory, then, symbols possessed a ready accessibility and required no rehearsal of all the calculations that originally contributed to their creation; they were, as Sarah Betzer remarks, “regarded as instantaneous and unmediated.”1 The psychic emanations and clairvoyance of the spiritual sciences promised to enhance this immediacy while also explaining the psychological mechanisms that accounted for it.

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The artists reviewed in this chapter translated these precepts into a working proposition by employing the indexical properties of painting we have discussed with regard to James McNeill Whistler and George Inness. Fuller addressed the challenge of transforming conventional content into a highly personal symbolism somewhat tentatively but eventually marshaled the technical resources necessary to surmount the routine nature of his subjects. Less bound by social proprieties, Ryder translated his own preoccupation with physical and mental well-being into an imagery that enjoyed considerable resonance in an age when Christian Science and the mind cure epitomized the thinking about health entertained by a considerable portion of the population. His own formulations, it will be argued, were influenced by a Spiritualism that opened a path to a Modernism uncharted in either Max Weber’s thesis or its aesthetic counterpart as delineated most memorably by Clement Greenberg.

George Fuller George Fuller’s career is usually divided into three segments. The first, from 1842 to 1859, encompasses his training and emergence as a competent, if undistinguished, portraitist; the second, from 1859 to 1875, was precipitated by his father’s death and the obligation it placed on him to put down the brush and pick up the plow to save the ancestral farm; the third was heralded by a trip to Boston that led to a succession of well-received shows. Fame and fortune, formerly strangers, now became boon companions. During this last period, which ended with his death in 1884, his interest in Spiritualism found its way into his art. It appears in a series of ideal figures whose wraith-like aspect and moody surroundings call up otherworldly associations. Critics dilated on an allure that seemed to transcend the bounds of mortal beauty. Several were so smitten with these doe-eyed adolescents that they seem to fall into a rapport with them. Fuller eventually endeavored to deepen this engagement by suggesting in one painting, Fedalma, that the psychometric properties of the image harbor its deepest meaning. This work exemplifies ambitions that appear in varying degrees elsewhere. By all accounts, the storied environs of Fuller’s native Deerfield had a lasting influence on the impressionable youth. A frontier outpost during the early history of Massachusetts, the town had been sacked repeatedly during the French and Indian Wars; add to this the preservation of its appearance as a snug colonial settlement, and you have all the ingredients required

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for Romantic fabulation. These Fuller employed in a childhood essay about dispossessed Indians, which recounts, for instance, the midnight “waleings [sic] of those spirits whose bones have been turned up by [the] sacreligious [sic] labors of the white men.” While these words possess the formulaic quality of juvenilia in general, their possible implications for the direction of Fuller’s career are implicit in one critic’s reference to the Indian raids of yore and “the menace of midnight attack [that] seems even now to the wanderer in the darkness to burden the air” of Deerfield. While Fuller did not resort to an imagery of violence, the writer proposes “no place could have furnished more potent suggestion to the art-idealist than this.”2 An early appetite for the sublime drew Fuller as well to Washington Allston’s Saul and the Witch of Endor and Belshazzar’s Feast, works replete with the awe and terror specters strike in mortal hearts. Nature could also engender such sentiments, and during a journey west, Fuller responded to a prairie fire that spread across Illinois in 1837 by reflecting on “the great power of a Superior Being.”3 These unremarkable attitudes evolved as Fuller matured under the pressure of adversity, embodied most distressingly in his family’s susceptibility to consumption, into deep emotions formed by life’s travails. His mother succumbed in 1845. On learning his brother Elijah was also stricken, the artist financed a trip to the West in hopes the dry air would restore his health. This measure failed, and the tone of Fuller’s letters and journals becomes increasingly anxious; cures are sought, but he also endeavors to reconcile himself to the seemingly inevitable by supposing his brother will experience “a real translation to a happier existence.”4 The use of “translation” in this context suggests an affiliation with Spiritualism, and a report in 1856 about the success of “some spiritual manifestations,” which George describes as “wonderful” despite the antiquity of the subject, indicates the two men were testing its principles in anticipation of Elijah’s demise.5 Just prior to this event in 1859, George rendered his brother “dying of consumption” in an unlocated portrait that exhibited “the drooping figure, the brightening eye, [and] the hectic cheek” associated with the final stages of the disease.6 Given George’s faith, he likely commenced the painting believing the widespread opinion that viewed such symptoms as evidence the afflicted was already gazing into the celestial sphere. Such an experience would certainly have moved him to regard art as a vehicle of feelings about human destiny and not simply an instrument of routine aesthetic enjoyments. Fuller’s interest in Spiritualism and related movements found various

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outlets. In 1858, for instance, he received a letter from Linus Yale, a close friend, with an enclosed document entitled “Psychometrical Reading.” This analysis, the text explains, was conducted at Fuller’s request; he had delivered a letter written by a third party to the reader (presumably Linus’s wife, Katherine) who states she placed it on her “head and had my eyes bandaged—I felt a strong and startling magnetism at one point of [the] reading.” The author of the letter, according to the clairvoyant, was a well-balanced woman but one wanting in vitality. Offering many other insights, the reading concludes by describing the subject as possessing a pleasant personality though “not earnest enough for you at present—but capable of being.”7 If the reader was correct with regard to gender—and we must assume she was since the examination was preserved—then this exercise was apparently conducted to determine whether the subject (her name is never mentioned) might make a fit partner for the artist. Given that much of Fuller’s later reputation as a portrayer of intriguing young women was founded on the virtues viewers believed they discerned in them, this document assumes a significance beyond the immediate concerns of the interested parties. It indicates he believed the mind’s emanations were impressed into objects that could later release them in a sudden magnetic jolt followed by an extended psychometric reading. As we will see, critics adopted a similar approach to the figures Fuller rendered. Phrenology offered another means of assaying character, and Fuller also sought its counsel. Two readings survive from the late 1850s. The first of these was conducted in 1856 and scored a number of “hits” that must have impressed the sitter. He was told, for example, that he exhibited “a good deal of Spirituality and gives much thought to serious things.” Among the other virtues discerned were liberality of opinion and delicacy of taste.8 The second, given in 1859, was undertaken in the Fowler and Wells establishment on Broadway. Fuller forked over the three dollars necessary for the most comprehensive examination, which included a verbatim record of Nelson Sizer’s analysis in addition to a chart marked by Fowler with the size of the diverse faculties. Only the former survives, and, again, a number of pronouncements must have perked Fuller’s interest: he was told he loved women “almost to idolatry” (Amativeness), and though religious, he found “it difficult to accept a creed unless it is rather philosophical and liberal” (Veneration).9 If Fuller acted on these findings, and the high price paid to acquire them suggests he did, we can surmise he would have chastened his ardent affection for members of the opposite

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sex by viewing (and representing) them in a manner consistent with his philosophical and liberal views on religion. The relative quiescence of the Deerfield years ended in 1876 with the success of his one-man show at the Doll and Richards Gallery. Thereafter, Fuller worked from fall to spring in Boston while spending summers in Deerfield. Being the epicenter of Spiritualism, Boston afforded ample occasion to pursue an interest in psychic phenomena, and letters to his wife, Agnes, who remained in Deerfield, indicate he became a regular at séances.10 This was also a time of transition to the Barbizon-influenced Tonalism for which he is best known today. Accompanying the moody, crepuscular landscapes characteristic of this change was a shift away from the straightforward portraiture and genre of his early career toward subjects of a more poetic nature, including an array of witches and solitary damsels who enhance the mystery of the setting. We need not be overly scrupulous with regard to chronology in this matter; just as aspects of the French style appear prior to the Doll and Richards show, so evidence of Spiritualism predates his move to Boston. From the late 1870s into the early 1880s, however, the two gain significant momentum, a development that hardly seems coincidental. If Fuller did attend séances in Deerfield, they would be undocumented since there was no need to write home about them. The letters from Boston (all written in 1878) indicate he was taking full advantage of the opportunities the city offered. On April 15, for example, he saw and talked with spirits at a “materializing circle.” Two, an old woman and a young one, claimed to know him. Despite having found the evening “interesting,” the fact that his erstwhile acquaintances’ faces were not especially visible was a source of disappointment. The account closes with assurances he is “no enthusiast” (nor, as a Spiritualist, should he be). At a “dark circle” three days later, objects moved and participants felt the touch of spirit hands. Voices addressed the sitters, leading Fuller to conclude “it was all very strange and interesting.” On April 29, he “went to 50 cents worth of Séance at Mrs Boothby,” finding the manifestations “more surprising[,] if possible[,] than at Mrs. Lords.” He writes on May 2 that the “light Séance” he attended the previous night was “more than interesting to me.” Having been “Spiritually told” on May 26 to be assured that all was well at home, Fuller asks his wife if she has been ill, inferring from the message that something must have happened and was now on the mend.11 In sum, he was doing precisely what the Spiritualists recommended: test various mediums and judge which results are satisfactory. No one denied there were mercenaries whose only aim was to make a

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dollar, but their motives did not invalidate those of legitimate practitioners. Fuller’s sampling ranged from questionable manifestations to ones that were “more than interesting.” In light of these events, William Dean Howells’s reflections on Fuller’s Spiritualism, included in a tribute to the artist published after his death, warrant attention. Howells explains: In those latter days his thoughts turned much to the other world, and it need not be surprising that in the growing spirituality of his nature he regarded spiritualism with curiosity, or that he confessed some of its mysteries inexplicable. He never went further than this in any of his talk with me about it, but he had seen too many that his tender heart held dear pass into the impenetrable shadow not to falter, at least with momentary interest, before the seers who professed to explore it. This quote confirms the particular relevance of Spiritualism to Fuller’s later years but ignores the fact that he had maintained an interest in psychic phenomena for decades. Further, we must consider the source whence these reports come. Howells was a determined opponent of Spiritualism and consequently characterizes the devotion to it as a faltering, “momentary interest.” Knowing the author’s views on the faith, Fuller would likely have refrained from praising it in his presence. Such was not the case, however, among the sympathetic listeners he encountered at a tea in Brookline; there he joined an extended conversation “on spiritual matters” that no doubt included an account of the “surprising” manifestations he had recently witnessed.12 Like Whistler and Inness, Fuller’s involvement with both Spiritualism and art caused contemporaries to view him as a visionary or seer. Linus Yale extols his powers, asserting that “an illustrious, although invisible company are within [the] . . . atmosphere” when he paints. Along similar lines, one critic proposes Fuller is “a true artist,” due to his “sensitive, clairvoyant” abilities; these had led, the review continues, to his canonization among “the incense-[b]urning Bostonians.” Thanks to “the magic of his supersensitive mind,” another critic writes, he was able to capture “the perception of color [which] comes from vibrations of colored rays corresponding to millions on millions of pulsations of the ether” and produce “a profound suggestiveness of form in reciprocal relation to his color.” With “a spirit attuned to revelations of beauty,” yet another reviewer opines, he attains “that

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spiritual finesse of perfection” that removes his art from “all commercial vulgarities.” Fuller’s avoidance of an explicitly religious iconography, then, is compensated by a clairvoyance that channels the intimations of spirits and alerts him to the resonating ether; such gifts ensure that his motives are not mercenary. These notions explain why one reviewer concludes that a “more spiritual art than that of Fuller would be hard to find.”13 Indeed, Agnes Fuller, who apparently did not fully share her husband’s predilection for psychic phenomena, worried in 1878 that reviewers were associating his works too closely with Spiritualism.14 In the case of Psyche (1882, formerly The Art Institute of Chicago) it is easy to see how this affiliation might have developed since traditions dating back to antiquity made Psyche a symbol of the soul. Instead of simply accepting this convention, however, contemporaries were apt to view the figure as a stimulus to meditation consistent with the ideals of Spiritualism. Katherine Yale pictures her “on the very threshold of heaven” and attributes the figure’s otherworldly appearance to the artist’s visionary powers. One critic resorts to “translated” (a term Fuller favored, as we have seen) to describe the viewer’s feelings of being “etherealized” and divested of the “grosser elements” before the image; from this perspective, one might experience vicariously what would actually happen as the soul ascended to the Summerland. The same reviewer regards the butterfly in the upper left corner, also an emblem of the soul, as “symbolizing our new awakening” (presumably in heaven).15 Fuller’s late style encouraged like responses. A comparison of Psyche with a work from the previous decade, Girl with Cloak (1870–76, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design), illustrates the changes mentioned above. However charming the face of the earlier image, it makes no pretense of invoking a higher existence. Psyche, on the other hand, is rendered with painterly brushstrokes that tend to dematerialize the body, causing it to merge with the dark, enigmatic backgound and relinquish a portion of its palpability. Critics inferred from the results that the viewer was afforded a glimpse into a superior reality. Fuller’s women, Sidney Dickinson writes, are enwrapped in a “veil of etherealism and mystery,” a consequence of the artist’s desire to transcend “the revelation of his eyes alone.” In pursuing this goal, “he painted not places, but the influence of places,” accomplishing by this means “a strange and reciprocal mood” between the figure and its surroundings. Under these conditions, as Sarah Burns notes, psychic powers are bound to seem imminent.16

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Psyche is typical of Fuller’s ideal images in that it exhibits a diaphanously clad woman standing close to the central axis. While this arrangement might seem rather routine, thick impastos gouged by the wood-end of the brush achieve a dynamic surface pattern. What appears transparent from a distance, confronts the viewer with all the physicality of its texture when approached.17 In such devices we encounter the artist’s effort to rise above the conventionalities of the figure’s emplacement and symbolism. He does so by exploring the expressive possibilities present in the tension between the material identity of oil paint and its ability to create illusion much as seen in the work of Whistler and Inness. The resulting “etherealism” arises out of an impasto formed by gestures whose indexical powers rehearse the artist’s own paranormal experiences. A commingling of intuition and psychometry guides the critics cited above away from the impulse to engage in a dry, dispassionate analysis of the literary and stylistic components and toward the principles of Romantic symbolism mentioned earlier. They invoke the entities conjured by mediums rather than the elaborate mythology surrounding the Psyche of antiquity. Fuller’s Priscilla Fauntleroy (1881, Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Connecticut) derives its subject from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, but the artist originally had intended the figure to represent Elsie Venner. The latter is the wild child of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s novel by that name, a venomous creature who is the antithesis of Hawthorne’s, sweet, demure Priscilla. We do not know what motivated the change, and the best we can surmise, as Burns explains, is that the latter name prevailed because it corresponded more effectively with the imagery.18 The timorous being who stands before us possesses a decided affinity with the “ghost child” whom Hawthorne describes as never able, even in her densest moments, of making “herself quite visible.” Much of the analysis offered by contemporaries contented itself with citing the novel, and the inclusion of two such passages makes clear their likely appeal to the artist. Priscilla, we learn, “sometimes talked of distant places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them. Hidden things were visible to her . . . and silence was audible.” This is a wonderfully succinct account of clairvoyance, and those who shared Fuller’s faith would have readily linked the passage to the figure. The next sentence in Hawthorne’s text makes a strong claim to being the reason behind the renaming: “In all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla’s timid and melancholy eyes.” Those are the eyes that

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confront the observer, not Elsie’s scowling visage. Further, Priscilla’s powers were the source of much gossip, and the two women conversing in the background identify this feature as the theme of the composition.19 Fuller, then, reverses the process of viewing that usually takes place before a painting; we are the ones being scrutinized, indeed, enthralled, by the penetrating powers of Mesmeric emanations. Some reviewers use Hawthorne’s words as a base from which to venture out and explore their own intuitive reactions. One applauds the artist for having “made the spirit visible” by revealing the mind as completely as his material medium permits. Spiritualist notions about a continuum bridging the two levels of existence enter Katherine Yale’s claim that the figure “has neared the limit where matter becomes spirit.” These and kindred observations tend to interpret Hawthorne’s description of Priscilla literally and ignore his jaundiced insinuations about the credulity of believers. The author’s darker views of humanity were in many respects incompatible with the “etherealized imagination” contemporaries attributed to Fuller; for them, his was a vision that “veiled his subtle fancies in an atmosphere of spiritual light.”20 That same etherealized light pervades Fedalma, a representation of the heroine in George Eliot’s “Spanish Gypsy” (Figure 54). Fuller began this work certainly intending to employ the poem’s imagery to explore issues relating to psychometry. Fedalma, a beauty apparently orphaned in childhood, is about to wed Don Silva, a member of the Spanish aristocracy. As a token of his devotion, he gives her a chest of jewels that includes the gold chain seen in the painting. Of all the glittering treasures, she repeatedly grasps this one, not quite knowing the source of its allure. The reader later learns it belonged to her father, a gypsy king who was captured and stripped of his possessions by the Spanish. For the moment, however, haunting reveries unsettle her as she handles the heavy chain. “Why,” she exclaims, “it is magical! . . . [It] bring[s] a message from the dead, dead past” and wonders if “I lived before / In some strange world where first my soul was shaped.” When her father finally manages to contact her and reveal both her true parentage and the origin of the chain, she understands its messages: she is from a strange world that shaped her soul. Shaken by the revelation, she abandons her aristocratic lover and returns to that world, the chains of lineage being more precious than those of gold. To ensure that the psychometric reading will be authentic and uncompromised, Eliot has Don Silva assert he has never worn the chain. Had he done so, of course, the psychic energy left by Fedalma’s father

Figure 54. George Fuller, Fedalma. 1883–84, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 30 3/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY.

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might have been weakened to the point of irretrievability. The figure’s wideeyed gaze indicates she is transfixed by the chain’s powers.21 And so might be the viewer; its thick impasto now secures that convergence of symbolic and psychometric energies mentioned at the outset of this chapter. The indexical properties of the paint assure us that, like the gypsy king’s, the artist’s essence permeates the materials and endows them with a legibility that both complements and surpasses the literary content. The narrative prepares us to undertake this deeper investigation of the image, and for those able to empathize with Fedalma’s expression, the work provides revelations about its creator much as the letter he submitted for a psychometric reading divulged the character of its writer. Only the initiate, however, is likely to feel the “strong and startling magnetism” necessary to acquire this insight. In a sense, the finely crafted, opulent, unctuous texture of the chain becomes an expression of the possibilities inherent in painting and hence a manifesto of the artist’s aspirations. The viability of those aspirations was tested by Winifred Dysart (Figure 55). She resembles her sisters in many respects, but in this case, the artist invented the name instead of consulting a literary source and thus enlisted the observer even more actively in the task of appreciation. Despite the want of clues, reviewers discerned Spiritualist implications consistent with the logic discussed above. Mariana G. van Rensselaer, for example, was less fascinated by the beauty of Winifred than by her “psychical charm.” Fuller allows us, she continues, to see what he “divined” of the model’s “inner nature as well as her outer nature,” revealing in the process “a spiritual emanation which shines from her face and form, and from the artist’s every touch.” Here the critic takes the jump from the emotive qualities of the figure to a psychometric reading of the technique. Similarly beguiled, one critic proclaimed the painting “the herald of a great dispensation.” 22 These responses to Winifred Dysart, then, exemplify the inclination to view Fuller’s misty settings, wistful women, and thick impastos as the harbingers of psychic phenomena; since the painting possesses no literary foundation on which to elaborate, the principles of Romantic symbolism became particularly relevant. In addition to the brushwork, critics given to this approach tended to endow the figures with the heightened sense of presence we have encountered repeatedly in these pages. After attending an exhibition, one wrote, “The personality of these people looking down upon us from their frames is something real. Winifred Dysart is a person, the Romany girl is alive. We do not think of these characters as pictures. Fuller has triumphed by making us forget the

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Figure 55. George Fuller, Winifred Dysart. 1881, oil on canvas, 50 7/16 x 40 1/2 in. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts; museum purchase.

base material out which these living creatures are formed.” From such formulations arose reactions akin to those provoked by Whistler’s work. Hence, a reviewer sensed in Fuller’s “ideal conceptions . . . the high spirit breathed out of [them] . . . which seizes and holds the attention and makes itself so felt that it becomes almost oppressive.”23 This energy, which expands beyond the frame into the gallery, makes detached analysis an obstacle to a comprehensive assimilation of a painting’s virtues.

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Fuller employed several strategies to encourage this reaction. The isolation and seeming vulnerability of his enchantresses prompted an instinctive desire to protect them. This impulse was further animated by the gloomy, haunted landscapes in which the subjects stand, settings that may draw on Deerfield’s fabled past. Presiding over these scenes is a Tonalism that called to mind ether and its diverse emanations. Finally, the placing of the threequarter-length figures near the central axis resorts to well-worn formulae that might seem tired were it not for Romantic intuition. To stimulate the latter, the composition is pared down, eschewing the usual sequence of weighing one area against the other requisite in a rational evaluation of art. Instead, we are invited to take the image in a single coup d’oeil and then slowly savor the reverberations as they filter into the soul. It is an immediacy that inspires intimacy, a process that asks us, for example, to appreciate the piece viscerally rather than cerebrally. The former response is prompted by the power of the figures’ gaze and the ability of the brushwork to energize the space between the viewer and the painting. In this manner, Fuller was able to feature the psychometric possibilities of his art. Crucial to these formulations were his personal encounters with the paranormal; much of the expressive impact of his work stems from the conviction such experiences were central to one’s being.

Albert Pinkham Ryder Albert Pinkham Ryder was a generation younger and far more immune to Victorian proprieties than George Fuller. He lived a bohemian or eccentric existence and was licensed by the cosmopolitan society of New York at the end of the century to push the limits of style and content further than his elder colleague. Temperamentally, Ryder was averse to making unequivocal professions of faith; he seems, however, to have cobbled together a personal creed that combined elements of a nondoctrinaire Christianity with other progressive beliefs then in circulation.24 Prompted by Spiritualism and Mesmeric notions of animal magnetism, he devised compositions calculated to reveal, in the manner of Frederic Myers, the benign countenance of the cosmos. If we sense a greater urgency in his works than in those of the more facile Fuller, it is due to the association Ryder made between his physical well-being and the therapeutic powers of a friendly universe. He expressed the latter by means of pulsating compositions whose two-dimensional patters brought his work into the orbit of Modernism.

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Spiritualists formed parentheses around Ryder’s career. Just before 1870, William Marshall, a painter and proponent of the faith, instructed the younger man in the fundamentals of his vocation, impressing on him the importance of wielding the brush in the service of higher ideals. Beginning in the mid-1890s, the artist struck up a friendship with Charles and Louise Fitzpatrick that lasted the rest of his life. They often attended to the worldly needs of their unworldly neighbor, and he in turn adopted Louise as his only pupil. She was also a Spiritualist, and the resemblance of her works to his must derive, in some degree, from instruction that went deeper than technical matters; her readiness to rank Ryder alongside Christ as benefactors of humanity suggests their relationship was one of prophet to disciple.25 In his letters and statements of purpose, Ryder often delineates aspirations consistent with the tenets of Spiritualism. The artist, he maintains, must be attuned to the creative powers at large in the environment if he hopes to succeed; hence, “he does not choose his subject. It comes to him.” A passive receptivity to these powers also underlies his advice on remaining true to one’s dream: do so, he states, and “it will possess” one’s work. Possession in its daemonic sense is necessary because the artist’s “eyes must see naught but the vision beyond.” But Ryder does not cast himself as the genius transfixed; he is, rather, an inchworm at the end of a twig, who “revolve[s] in the air, feeling for something” beyond his footing. His emphasis on patience, on the inchworm’s slow ascent in testing the world outside its grasp, resembles the inclination of Spiritualists to favor the gradual uplift offered by their faith over the revelations received during episodic ecstasies. Likewise, the metaphor of reaching upward bodily implies a quest for an almost tangible source of inspiration, one having, perhaps, the properties of animal magnetism.26 Much of Ryder’s imagery lends itself to a Spiritualist reading. Even so seemingly orthodox a piece as his Resurrection (1883–85, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), for instance, was regarded as “modern” because it rendered “Christ as a suspended spirit” rather than a weighty figure. The Spiritualists invested much in the distinction; bodily resurrection, the last judgment, and like miracles were inimical to notions about imponderable fluids as the agents of spiritual life. Reports of Christ’s ascent from the tomb, advocates of such fluids maintained, were actually based on a materialization akin to those that occur in séances, and, just as he spoke with his disciples, so “the spirit of the departed can walk by the wayside—can talk with the loved.” The reviewer quoted above seems determined to persuade

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readers that this difference is discernible in the rarefied figure of Christ and constitutes “the spiritual import of the incident.”27 A few examples from the whole gamut of paintings that might be examined in this light suffice to demonstrate that Ryder’s revisions of traditional iconography were designed to allude to the spiritual forces he and likeminded contemporaries encountered in the modern world. Ryder chose an historical figure dear to Spiritualists when he rendered Joan of Arc (Figure 56). He does not depict the militant saint girding her armor before battle, but the peasant girl of Lorraine who abandons her flock at the behest of voices urging her to rescue France. In Jules BastienLepage’s Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine address the maid, whose extended left arm probably influenced the gesture Ryder employs. He surely saw the work in 1882 when it was exhibited in New York but has pointedly omitted the saints who would link the imagery to Catholic doctrine. Joan walks through a dark, windswept landscape and receives the sort of “psychopathic greetings . . . on the air” Ryder sent in a letter to a friend. “Psychopathic” seems to be his own combination of psychic and telepathic, and however unfortunate the conflation, it manages to specify further the description of the “visions . . . [Joan] sees / and voices [that] come to her on the breeze” included in a poem he dedicated to the saint. 28 Such passages commingle matter and spirit in a manner that recalls the breezy landscape where Joan, with outstretched hand, feels telepathic communications carried by the wind much as an inchworm might. Like Christ and Paul, one prominent Spiritualist averred, Joan’s voices were conveyed by natural laws not yet fully understood. Her narrative, another maintained, was once ridiculed by the likes of Voltaire, but our present grasp of psychological phenomena now allows us to distinguish its element of truth from the fabulous qualities of medieval legend. A clairaudient Joan, one who met the criteria of reenchantment, was, in the eyes of many Americans, a figure who transcended national boundaries and the passage of time to speak forcefully to the modern world. The same divine messengers who enabled her to save France, it was asserted, formed “a cloud of witnesses and a shield of defense” about the soldiers who fought for the North during the Civil War. And Victoria Woodhull’s devotion to Spiritualism and feminism made her, in the eyes of followers, the “Joan of Arc of the Women’s Movement.”29 Ryder’s modernity derives from his integration of Joan’s one supernatural attribute, the illuminated cloud (or perhaps the moon), which forms

Figure 56. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Joan of Arc. 1889, oil on canvas, 10 3/16 x 7 1/8 in. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts; bequest of Mary G. Ellis.

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an aura or halo behind her head, with the other elements of the landscape. The agent of natural laws, Joan effected positive change without compromising spiritual purity, a formula calculated to appeal to those disillusioned by the excesses of the Gilded Age. In Ryder’s Jonah, God’s outstretched wings merge with the clouds and unite his being with the turbulent forces of nature (Figure 57). Below, Jonah has been cast overboard and is about to be swallowed by a rather loopy whale as punishment for his defiance of divine will. Ryder’s thoughts about the scene can be gathered from a conversation he had with Elliott Daingerfield, a painter and critic who knew Ryder at the time he was working on Jonah. Daingerfield related how, during a childhood ramble, an ominous storm brewed over the countryside. Suddenly the clouds rolled away to reveal “a figure, majestic, calm and very gracious—the hair was in long, curly billows about the face, the face itself turned full upon us [and] looked out from great eyes . . . .[It was] the figure of the Savior! There could be no mistake. It was not an illusion made by cloud forms . . . .All about it was intense light, and...the right arm was raised in a commanding gesture.” Much of this description recalls the God in Jonah, but what makes it especially relevant is Ryder’s response to the account: he “begged” Daingerfield to make a painting of it, all to no avail.30 More important than any possible influence this narrative may have had on Jonah, then, is the likelihood that in urging his companion to record his vision, Ryder was voicing his own convictions. Hence, representing this Old Testament scene was not just a venture into the subject matter favored by the academy; it permitted the artist to investigate his own thoughts about God’s relation to the material world. The divinity was truly up there in the clouds; his immediate presence in Jonah permits us to trace the undulatory rhythms of nature back to their undulatory divinity. These vibrations are more evident than the subtle scintillations of Whistler’s nocturnes, but in both they serve to express ideas that transcend purely aesthetic considerations. Ryder’s famous account of the moment he found his own style reveals him to be a devotee of vibratory sensations. Abandoning the effort to represent all the minute details of the landscape, he squeezed “big chunks of pure, moist color” from the tubes and applied them with “great sweeping strokes.” Nature sprung to life on the canvas, and the composition “was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation.” Art bears the mental impress of its maker, Ryder adds, and “the least of a man’s original emanation is better

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Figure 57. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Jonah. Ca. 1885, oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x 34 3/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY.

than the best of a borrowed thought.” The choice of “emanation” to express the power of creativity suggests Ryder was attuned to principles resembling those of psychometry. Reviewers were wont to resort to similar premises. One, for instance, noted Ryder’s ability to discern “the real truth—the essential spiritual, vital force of nature,” while another remarked on the “inner radiance” that glowed from his pictures. And Ryder’s Sheepfold (late 1870s, The Brooklyn Museum) was praised for recreating “in a magical way the vibrating mystery” of moonlight. Tentatively, then, we can propose that this vocabulary of vibrations, emanations, radiations, and vitalism finds its counterpart in Spiritualist claims about the undulations of thought expanding out into the physical environment. If we ventured to put this tenet in the terms employed above, it would be as follows: the “original emanation” the artist impressed into the painting left it “vibrating” with an “inner radiance” that resonated in consonance with the “spiritual, vital force of nature.”31 Like Fuller, this sequence promised to endow his personal imagery—God’s

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dissemination of imponderable fluids in Jonah—with an immediacy that intensified Romantic aspirations to identify completely with the imagery. Such considerations culminate in Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, a scene from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Figure 58) in which three nymphs hail the hero and demand his ring, warning that it is cursed. Ryder attended the opera in 1888, and on returning home, he relates, executed the work in a burst of creative fervor. His excitement was common among auditors, whom witnesses often describe as being enthralled during performances. Around the composer arose a cult that thrived on the intense spiritual experience his music offered, one that provided the sort of comfort and inspiration usually associated with religion. Ryder achieves a similar uplift by animating his composition with rhythms designed to foster the sort of magnetic and psychic energies opera-goers relished. The darkened auditorium he and other attendees encountered was an innovation that shared some similarities with the lowered lights of a séance. Stillness reigned, and a “trance-like worship” prevailed while “the content of the music that was pouring into these increasingly quiet assemblies was itself infused with mesmeric and mental physiological themes.” Reviewers were moved to extol the music’s “magnetic” and “electric” qualities.32 Out of these experiences arose a belief that the operas exercised therapeutic powers. Their blending of mythic themes with music of extraordinary symphonic richness was thought to restore the physical and spiritual health of weary urbanites. In effect, the composer transferred psychic energy on a grand scale much as the Mesmerist did in the more confined settings of his treatment room. Ryder’s dynamic rhythms embody similar convictions, ones that encompass his understanding of vibrations and vitalism discussed above. Pulsations in the universal ether instigated by psychic activity resembled those in the atmosphere caused by music; in Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, these diverse strains come together in a particularly compelling synthesis. Its dynamism recalls, for instance, the testimony of one sitter at a séance who reported being struck by a “strange psycho-automatic force [that] shook me like a gust of fierce wind through a tree.”33 The full moon presiding over the setting is a frequent performer in Ryder’s dramas. Its spell owes much to the Spiritualist endorsement of Franz Anton Mesmer’s assertion that the sway celestial bodies exercise over the destiny of mortals derived from their influence on the cosmic vapor. Particular attention was devoted to the moon; its positive rays caused impressible individuals to feel sensations of warmth. The effect was identical, some asserted, to the

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Figure 58. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens. 1888–91, oil on canvas, 19 7/8 x 20 1/2 in. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Andrew W. Mellon Collection.

magnetic force the healing hand emits. Such emanations “render[ed] practically available all the great and mighty powers at work in nature’s laboratory, so that a man may learn to strengthen himself with all the force of the entire universe.” One did so by drawing upon the magnetic energy present in the environment.34 In making this energy visible, Ryder more than illustrates an operatic motif: he envisions and engages psychic forces comparable to those contemporaries found so potent in Wagner’s music. Ryder’s legendary nighttime strolls along the New Jersey heights and elsewhere are usually attributed not only to his interest in capturing the effects of moonlight more accurately but also a desire to alleviate his ailments.

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While the consequences of the first aim appear in his many nocturnal scenes, the implications of the second are less easily identified but warrant consideration. Ryder suffered from rheumatism, what he called “poor man’s gout,” and, according to Charles Fitzpatrick, claimed his moonlit rambles relieved the malady. One might propose the exercise was healthful, though walking would surely aggravate the joint and muscle pains caused by the affliction. And one could argue the lunar light merely provided a needed illumination, but in this case wouldn’t it have been simpler to walk in the day? A more encompassing explanation proposes he sensed the healing, “psychopathic” transmissions of the moon (a placebo effect to nonbelievers). During these sojourns, Ryder once remarked, he “soaked in the moonlight” that later shone in his paintings, and the absorptive metaphor is at least suggestive in this context. Further, reports about the straw and cold oatmeal he stuffed into his shoes prior to commencing his peregrinations may provide a clue to his intentions. While we may never know the precise reason for his adoption of this measure, the fact that believers in vital fluids feared their escape through the feet suggests Ryder’s practice derived from the various precautions others took to prevent this eventuality.35 Straw and oatmeal may have been an insulation meant to preserve the moonbeams he had “soaked in.” The prominence given the moon in his compositions, then, would be more than a poetic device; it makes the painting a votive offering to the celestial body responsible for easing his discomfort. Evidence in support of his literal belief in the therapeutic effects of vital forces akin to those of moonbeams comes from his decision in 1898 to cure his “nervous debility” by wearing an electric belt invented by one Albert T. Sanden. These devices, which became widely popular after the Civil War, offered an alternative to the drugs and painfully invasive procedures prescribed by allopathic physicians (Figure 59). The thinking behind such belts derived from a growing conviction that the organic processes were governed by electricity or magnetism; nerves, not blood, were the conduits of vitality according to the purveyors of electric belts, and health prevailed when one’s bodily condition mirrored the equilibrium that governed the divine order of creation. A want of balance promoted disease, and the boost these devices provided offered an antidote to the enervation brought on by the quickened pace of modern life.36 Electricity was another of those imponderable fluids that enabled the individual “to strengthen himself with all the force of the entire universe.” Much of this reasoning was familiar to believers in Mesmerism, and electric belts took

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Figure 59. Heidelberg Electric Belt, from The 1902 Edition of The Sears Roebuck Catalogue, intro. Cleveland Amory (Avenal, N.J.: Outlook Book Co., 1993), 476.

their place among the many forms of alternative medicine that relied on metaphysical principles either postulated by Spiritualism or by the doctrines it endorsed. Although Ryder adopted the electrical belt a decade after he commenced Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, his decision to do so was symptomatic of preferences entertained throughout his career. The vitalistic philosophy and its vibratory consequences discussed above find their expression, for

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instance, in the zigzag bolts that emanate from the advertised belt. Similar rhythms, made curvilinear and often radiating from the moon, run regularly through Ryder’s later compositions where they embody a fundamental component of his aesthetic. Perhaps the implications of this rhythmic energy, beyond its association with the moon’s powers to heal, are best summarized by Camille Flammarion, whose expertise in astronomy qualified him to discourse authoritatively on ether and its function in interplanetary space. “Is it in any way inadmissible,” he asks, to assume “that this ether, which is known to penetrate our brains in vibrations, should also transmit currents from a distance which enter our brains and establish a true exchange of sympathies and ideas between sentient beings; between the inhabitants of the same world, or even it may be across space, between earth and heaven?”37 Mesmerized by the music cascading around Siegfried and the Rhine maidens, Ryder must have left the opera feeling he had been touched by Wagner’s soul. He would, in turn, want to encourage his viewers to experience something similar before his paintings. By sweeping all the components of a composition into an undulatory rhythm, he signals an ambition, like Wagner’s, of expanding the continuum of Spiritualism to include the space between the audience and the work. Charles de Kay, Ryder’s close friend, alluded to this possibility when he remarked that the Curfew Hour (early 1880s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), a deeply resonant, crepuscular landscape, affected the nerves “like slow organ music.”38 The melodious quality of this painting, and presumably the more deeply symphonic ones such as Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, might restore frayed nerves much as Dr. Sanden’s belts did. Ryder resorted to similar principles in his Toilers of the Sea, a work that borrowed its title, seemingly as an afterthought, from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name (Figure 60). Although the painting does not intend to illustrate any particular passage in the narrative, its turbulent waters and eerie moonlight create an almost mythic setting similar to the one evoked by the writer. Hugo’s protagonist, Gilliatt, is a mariner and mystic whose strange habits, like those of Ryder, have his neighbors asking why he “walk[s] abroad at evening and sometimes at midnight, on the cliffs?” They conclude he intends to converse with the evil spirits who frequent the seashore at night, a refrain that runs through much of the text. When Gilliatt wonders, for example, if the atmosphere is populated with invisible beings, the narrator answers by expounding on the “phantom creation [that] ascends or descends

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Figure 60. Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Toilers of the Sea. 1880–85, oil on wood, 11 1/2 x 12 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource NY; George A. Hearn Fund, 1915.

to walk beside us in the dim twilight.” Dreams, he avers, are “only realities invisible to those who walk about the daylight world.” Those realities include “the vast supernatural world . . . [of] apparitions, ghosts, phantom faces vaguely distinct, [and] masks [that appear] in the lurid light.” The many passages of this kind in the text were not the idle musings of a disinterested party; the author was a follower of Spiritualism when he published The Toilers of the Sea in 1866, having been converted after his deceased daughter contacted him during a séance some thirteen years earlier. Consistent with its teachings, he regards the phantom world a “continuation” of the one we live in and not “supernatural” in the sense of representing an abrupt cessation of known natural laws. The affinity between

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Ryder’s painting and Hugo’s tale, the reason the title of the latter so readily fit the former, derives from the belief both men maintained in a continuity between this world and the next. Instead of depicting an identifiable scene from the novel, Ryder’s work evokes the principles underlying its haunting narrative. This is evident in the palpable light radiating from the moon and the energized patterns coursing through the clouds and waves. Confirmation of “the spiritual world . . . all around us,” one believer proposes, can be found in “the realm of light, the immense ocean of electricity, and the constant currents of magnetism . . . [that play] the most wonderful parts in the economy of the world, each of them far more powerful than the ocean, the earth and the rocks.”39 Viewers sympathetic to this outlook would discern in Ryder’s Toilers of the Sea the operation of forces greater than the waves that toss the lone boat as it plies its course. In adopting the title of Hugo’s work, Ryder signaled that his night, like that of the novelist, was fraught with paranormal powers. This content was obviously available to viewers who had read the novel. But habits of thought, widespread at the time and now largely lost to us, likewise maintained that beings remote from one another might communicate by means of psychic vibrations in the ether, a phenomenon made comprehensible, Flammarion proposes, by recalling “the influence of the moon on the sea.”40 Reference to these elemental forces allowed contemporaries to conceptualize doctrines that might otherwise seem abstract and arcane by endowing them with an immediacy comparable to that Ryder achieved in his energized patterns of thick paint. Louise Fitzpatrick, Ryder’s guardian and student, offers another perspective on this subject by alluding to psychometry. Her remarks come from within the very small circle that surrounded the artist, and if they do not reflect his ideas (which they likely do), then at least they reveal how his images were appreciated by ardent devotees. A decade after his death, she urged the mother of Philip Evergood to encourage her son to gaze at Ryder’s works and “feel the mystic spirit of his soul . . . [for it] is there[,] let him converse with him and let him soar above one in fellowship.”41 These somewhat jumbled remarks apparently imply that Evergood could actually enter into a dialogue with Ryder’s spirit, experiencing before one of his paintings a communion of souls akin to the one Whistler’s admirers claimed to feel in the presence of his works. Similar to the Nocturnes, Toilers of the Sea was especially apt to inaugurate such conjurations because it was also the kind of subject that put the mind in a receptive mood conducive to the arrival of visitors from

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beyond. Meditation on the supernatural set in motion the natural law of affinities that drew spiritual energies, including those of the artist, to the person so engaged. Ryder’s Moonlit Cove employs a different tactic to instigate similar cogitations (Figure 61). It portrays an abandoned boat on a beach illuminated by a full moon, a subject that was neither novel nor especially spiritual in its implications. This bare description, however, scarcely does justice to the experience the painting offers; the scudding clouds, looming precipices, and lolling surf resonate with the dynamic currents circulating through them. Ryder has transformed features his predecessors depicted as threatening— impending storms and beetling cliffs—into a scene that invites calm contemplation. This inversion of expectations results, one suspects, from the congenial familiarity with the forces of nature he achieved during his moonlit sojourns. The same vibratory energy that animates the landscape, exercised a healing influence on the ailing artist. Moonbeams and electric belts fortified a body threatened by the demands of an urbanized society, and his images exude an air of gratitude, an acknowledgment of the blessings they showered on their votary. From Charles de Kay, and more particularly Louise Fitzpatrick, we learn the viewer might enter into a similar relationship with the paintings themselves.

Conclusion Ryder’s disregard for the usual conventions of paint application figures prominently in the assessment of his contribution to Modernism. According to these conventions, the thickness of the oils should vary across the surface, with the thinnest layer being reserved for the most distant objects. Ryder’s impasto, however, maintains a uniform, “painty” thickness over the entire canvas. In many respects, this approach anticipates the “all-over” style of Abstract Expressionism, and it is hardly coincidental that Jackson Pollock identified Ryder as “the only American master who interests me.”42 Before we attribute this quality of Ryder’s work simply to an ambition to develop a critique of painting as a material object, a logic Clement Greenberg related to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in his famous formulation of Modernism’s advent, we would do well to consider the artist’s own motives.43 A paint that scarcely differentiates between substances, one that consumes all in its viscous flow, has much in common with ether as it was conceived at the time. Flammarion’s words suggest how these peculiarities

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Figure 61. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlit Cove. early to mid-1880s, oil on canvas, 14 1/8 x 17 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

of style could be aligned with widely shared values. There may exist, the astronomer speculates, “a single principle belonging to intelligence, force, and matter, embracing all that is actual and all that is potential—a first cause and a final cause, the differentiations of which are only different forms of movement.”44 It is this movement that winds its way through Moonlit Cove, sweeping up stone, sea, and sky in its all-encompassing dynamic. Ryder relies on a textured impasto to create this effect, to express a principle he discussed as “psychopathic greetings . . . on the air.” These principles apply with a particular relevance to Ryder’s depictions of the moon, where he reverses expectations entirely by employing dense strokes on this remote body. Its prominence in this context must embody the priorities given it as an agent of healing. It takes on an aspect similar to Fedalma’s chain by effecting a convergence of style and symbol. Like the chain, it is a powerful site of psychic energies, both for what it represents

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and how it is represented, but unlike the chain, it has no immediate literary source. Ryder depends on the viewer’s familiarity with the concepts discussed above, and perhaps more immediately with the emanations filling the room, to understand the work’s ramifications and respond in a manner consistent with the Romantic ideals discussed at the outset of this chapter. The moon becomes his symbol, the epitome of his aesthetic, not only to answer his Romantic aspirations but also to comply with an era when Spiritualism, along with Christian Science, the mind cure and “new thought” movements, had established a cult of healing premised on the manipulation of magnetic forces by the exercise of a positive mental outlook.45 The moon became Ryder’s symbol of this outlook; it achieved this status based on the artist’s experiences, not on any speculative calculations (and certainly not those of Kant). Viewers of Moonlit Cove might also attain a similar insight by experience. Theoretical deliberations could only impede this process, and the audience best prepared to appreciate it resembled those moderns identified by Alex Owen, individuals who, despite their secularism, were not prepared to embrace uncritically the priorities laid down by Max Weber.

Chapter 7

The Critic as Psychic

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, James Jackson Jarves (1818– 88) ascended to a position of prominence in the American art world attained by few other critics. His authority derived from a familiarity with current critical literature, John Ruskin especially, and a knowledge of the history of art garnered during the decades he lived in Europe, Florence especially.1 In addition to writing perceptively about modern art, he pioneered the study of art history among his countrymen and assembled an important collection of early Italian paintings. These activities have caught the attention of modern scholars, but his belief in Spiritualism, which weaves phrenology into a philosophy of the afterlife in a manner reminiscent of Andrew Jackson Davis’s writings, remains largely unexplored despite its centrality to his theories. By attending to this aspect of Jarves’s aesthetic, we encounter an especially articulate proponent of the psychic energy that has constituted the leitmotif of the previous chapters. Jarves’s place in the era’s mainstream owed much to the defense he mounted on behalf of collecting objets d’art at a time when the robber barons were importing vast stores of treasure from Europe. It was an age of conspicuous consumption, but Jarves proposed this predilection could be turned to good use if properly cultivated. This attitude was common among a class of wealthy patrons who regarded it as their civic duty to use the arts as a means of creating a consensus about an emerging national culture. In Jarves’s view, Spiritualism was crucial to this process because it elevated the discourse above the level of mere political and social calculation and placed it instead within the universal truths that were the domain of faith. Not only would the refining of American sensibilities secure the Republic a preeminent place in the community of civilized nations, but it would also ensure that its citizens would be welcomed in the preferred spheres of the celestial realm.

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Phrenology Jarves’s views in such matters were no doubt influenced by a childhood filled with the privileges and opportunities wealth affords. His father, a manufacturer of pressed glass, indulged his son’s penchant for collecting, an arrangement that continued into his adult years. Shells, minerals, coins, and the like poured into the household, but it was phrenology and its requisite specimens that gained a lasting hold on the boy’s fancy. While studying anatomy at Harvard, for instance, he removed the head from the corpse he had been assigned to dissect and brought it home. After boiling the flesh away, he added it to the phrenological cabinet in his bedroom, where it sat “in the society of sundry other crania and a mummy from Peru.” This interest earned him the sobriquet of “pokanaka,” or “skull man” among the natives of Hawaii when he traveled there in 1837. He mined their ancient burial grounds with the intent of restoring his diminishing funds by selling the finds in America. Boston was in the throes of a phrenological mania during these years, and such hopes were not entirely farfetched, but the enterprise crumbled when his father heedlessly donated the skulls to a local phrenologist.2 Jarves laces his texts with a phrenological terminology that is likely to escape the reader unfamiliar with the discipline. “Ideality” appears repeatedly because the presence of this faculty in the human brain provides physical/ spiritual evidence that the appreciation of art is innate. Hence, he remarks, “the general term used to designate the faculty of mind particularly devoted to the reception and appreciation of Beauty, is Ideality.” Puritan asceticism is the “annihilation of ideality,” but beauty is essential to religion, and a “paralysis of [the] soul” overtakes those who fail to seek “the employment and consequent enjoyment of ALL our faculties.” Here again, Jarves makes a central principle of phrenology, found in Orson Fowler’s warning that “no faculty was created for naught . . . [hence,] none can lie dormant without creating a great mental hiatus . . . which enfeebles and deforms the whole mind,” crucial to his reasoning. The exercise of Ideality, then, is part of a regimen designed to maintain mental health and not simply an intermittent appetite to be sated in leisure moments. Jarves identifies the tenet’s enduring blessings by combining it with Spiritualist notions about the continuum between heaven and earth: Another powerful argument for the cultivation of the ideal faculty exists in the fact—I speak of course to believers—that both nature

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and revelation assert that through all eternity we maintain or follow the direction given by our earthly identity; that is, we remain always ourselves. Progress or retrogression there may be, but the principle “as the tree falls so it lies,” is in the main a solemn truth; one that should stimulate to the exertion of all our faculties for the knowledge and comprehension of Him who bestowed them.3 It is not a question of salvation, for that is the prerogative of all, but of making the most of possibilities available in the next life by activating Ideality regularly while still in the mortal sphere. Herein resides the ultimate purpose of art, one that is delineated and confirmed scientifically by a faculty psychology. Jarves’s frequent references to the faculties, then, oblige us to recognize their prescriptive nature. His remark about Puritanism’s “annihilation of ideality,” for example, is not a vague, metaphorical expression but entails actual consequences in the real world: it is intended to draw attention to the virtues of collecting art. His devotion to Ideality also tends to make him responsive to art that is beautiful in a conventional sense and less inclined to favor those images whose unrelenting realism he associates with the vulgar materialism of Emile Zola’s novels. Further, it constitutes the core of Jarves’s crusade to remind Americans of the obligation to cultivate their often dormant aesthetic sensibilities. “No nation,” he claims, “has ever been in so favorable a position as the United States of America for the complete development of those ideal faculties of which Art is the language.” Here is a version of Manifest Destiny whose signet is impressed on the skulls of citizens, and if this notion seems odd, it helps to recall that a similar logic constitutes a significant strain in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.4 These ideas were a pervasive part of the culture.

Spiritualism Spiritualism was, of course, another of these ideas. Like phrenology, it was a belief Jarves embraced in childhood and pursued throughout his life. Its initial stirrings were prompted by a yearning for refuge from the Calvinist teachings of a maiden aunt whose warnings about the fate of sinners filled his dreams with images of being scorched by “the hot breath of fifty Beelzebubs” in a hell paved with the skulls of infants. The alternative she offered, a heaven of eternal hymn singing, seemed equally dreadful. Jarves recapitulates in these thoughts the reasoning many followed in choosing to abandon the re-

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ligion of their forbears, but he seems to have reached this decision intuitively. Before he was ten, he tells us, the ghost of a woman appeared at the foot of his bed and silently gazed on him. A second visitation involved the return of a playmate who had recently drowned; he resembled his former self but was “handsomer and happier.” The shade explained that “the difference [between this world and the next] was not so immediate and great as we had always supposed.” Reflecting on the encounter, Jarves surmises “the affections and pursuits which had been most clear to him on earth still influenced him; he was the same Bob, only with much more knowledge and better off.” The revenants who continued to drop in on the young Jarves were, he insists, “not dreams.”5 They were, however, clearly part of a strategy designed to steer his imaginative life away from the austerities of Puritan Boston. Its guiding principle involved the belief that the faculties we cultivate in life determine our orientation in the afterlife; this mantra Jarves repeats, as we have seen, whenever he wants to emphasize the importance of the arts. His aesthetic outlook was also formed by an understanding of “certain conditions” that “put us in positive relations with the unseen world.” During rare moments, “a mutual correspondence, or meeting, as it were, [takes place] in which some intercourse is possible.” This condition cannot be reached by importuning the spirits; rapport only comes about when the mind has dispelled fugitive thoughts and become passive. This takes time. Arthur Conan Doyle noted, for example, that a quarter to half an hour of attentive silence on the part of sitters at a séance was required before manifestations might occur.6 Something similar happened, Jarves contended, when gazing at a painting. One could not badger a work into divulging its secrets; patient anticipation, however, usually proved successful. These values had become second nature when Jarves settled in Florence and commenced the study of its treasures in 1852. The advent of Spiritualism in the years just prior to his departure for Europe in 1851 engendered a public discourse that allowed him to revisit the issues surrounding his childhood encounters with ghosts. Once abroad, letters and publications from his parents, who were sponsoring Daniel Dunglas Home, kept him apprised of the latest developments. In 1855, they financed Home’s trip to Europe where he joined their son. Enthralled by Home’s conjurations, which included dancing tables, spirit hands, and ghostly voices, Jarves sought to replicate these phenomena in his own séances. As his commitment to Spiritualism grew, so did the conviction that it constituted the strongest available bulwark against materialism and atheism.7

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The Cultural Custodians Art Hints, Jarves’s first foray into art history, often reaches conclusions based on these experiences. In one instance, he recounts legends about the assistance Dante’s spirit supposedly provided Giotto as he worked on the frescoes in church of St. Francis in Assisi. In rehearsing these tales, Jarves does not intend to use them to comment on the fabulous character of artists as they come down to us in the literature of the late Middle Ages but to suggest such old stories actually contain a kernel of truth. He specifies this point elsewhere when repeating the same narrative; it is, he remarks, “strikingly analogous to many well authenticated marvels which modern spiritualism is pressing home upon the present materialistic age.” The exercise of such psychic powers by Giotto and his confreres also enabled them to discern “the spiritual constitution of things” in “dumb” matter by employing “the clairvoyant eye of . . . artistic imagination.”8 These lines divest notions about artistic inspiration of their usual vague, suppositional nature and instead explain them in terms of a Spiritualist psychology. Influx from above reaches Giotto by means of an identifiable spirit, that of Dante (much as George Inness turned to Titian), while that from below, from objects and their relations to one another, comes through psychometry. The ideas set out in Art Hints formed a basis for the analysis offered in Jarves’s many other books, which likewise adopted its mission of introducing Americans, many of whom had never seen an Old Master painting, to the intricacies of art appreciation. Jarves had an ulterior purpose for pursuing this objective; he had assembled an impressive array of Italian paintings dating from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and by creating an audience for these works, he hoped to persuade some city—Boston preferably—to acquire them as the foundation for a museum. His efforts remained unrewarded until Yale advanced him twenty thousand dollars in 1867 and kept more than a hundred works (at a third of their assessed value) as security. These remained with the college and became the nucleus of a gallery when Jarves defaulted on the loan in 1871.9 Jarves the writer, then, was motivated by ambitions that also animated Jarves the collector: both sought to refine American sensibilities. This project is best approached by viewing Jarves’s career in context; he was hardly alone in his ambitions, and a broader perspective of them delineates the social dimensions of his enterprise. Jarves’s aspirations affiliate him with the “cultural custodians,” a term coined by George Cotkin to describe mem-

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bers of the northeastern elite who regarded an idealist culture a “palliative for the narrow materialism associated with American capitalists and workers.” Frustrated by the crassness of politics, they turned to the arts as a means of influencing a nation that was becoming increasingly diverse ethnically. The cultural custodians endeavored to unify what they considered a fragmented and fractious citizenry by persuading it that the fine arts were uplifting and expressive of universal values. Edward White fleshes out this picture by noting that members of this class were the descendants of merchants and landholders who tended to abandon the occupations of their fathers and engage instead in recreational and intellectual pursuits. While they believed one could attain wealth by persistent application, they suspected the effort diminished one’s sensitivity to the good and beautiful. Their elevation of aesthetic values above those of business constituted an indictment of the vulgarity of wealth. One such individual was James Jackson Jarves, son a prosperous manufacturer. In this capacity, he urged the creation of art schools and galleries as a means of assuring the tranquility and security of the Republic by broadening the cultural horizons of its citizens.10 Someday someone will tote up the debt modern museums owe such persons, but here we consider just one more of their number: Thomas Gold Appleton, a benefactor of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Six years older than Jarves, he was also a devotee of Spiritualism, phrenology, and art. Unlike Jarves, he nurtured his inheritance judiciously and never experienced similar pecuniary embarrassments. Freed from financial constraints, he pursued painting, writing, and collecting with varying degrees of success. In doing so, however, he could never quite shake the suspicion fellow Bostonians regarded him an idler; he reconciled himself to his fate by reasoning that, although he lacked the habits requisite for business, he would manage his assets “so as to satisfy a little the natural demands of society upon me.” An account of his daily routine suggests why busy neighbors might have looked askance at his lifestyle. Breakfast was followed by a perusal of the newspapers, an hour or two at the easel, and then a stroll that might include a visit to a fellow artist’s studio or a tour of the local picture shops, bookstores, and carpet warehouses; home for lunch, a cigar, a nap, some reading, and perhaps dictation of letters or essays after dinner. How might he justify (at least to himself) this rather leisurely schedule when others filled their hours with gainful employment? The answer was to opt out of the Protestant ethic and embrace that of Spiritualism; it sanctioned art as a means of communing with the supernatural and instilled a

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sense of calling elsewhere than within the usual economic/religious strictures of the community. We might consider Appleton a wealthy Thoreau; both men saw a purpose in idleness, but the latter’s austere Transcendentalism was replaced by psychometric doctrines that enabled the former to exercise “the happy faculty of enjoying his own possessions, and especially his pictures.”11 Individuals of the ilk of Jarves and Appleton were sufficiently prominent in the social scene to have caught the attention of novelists. William Dean Howells portrayed one such individual, Phillips, in The Undiscovered Country. He has also inherited a family fortune and, relieved of the obligation to work, indulges a passion for collecting. Paintings are among his interests, but he is especially partial to colonial knickknacks. He also attends Egeria Boynton’s séances and is prepared to believe in the authenticity of her conjurations, manifestations that his counterpart, Ford, derides as fraudulent. The latter is a journalist who disparages bric-a-brac and exhibits a manly bravado that contrasts markedly with the diffidence of the former. In keeping with the era’s stereotypes, Phillips’s artistic disposition exudes a faint air of femininity, inclining him to prefer the company of woman. A conversation between the two men effects a remarkable conflation of Spiritualism with connoisseurship: “He is a brother dilettante,” Ford remarks of another character, adding “he dabbles in ghosts as you dabble in bric-a-brac. He believes as much in ghosts as you believe in your Bonifazios. They may be genuine; in the mean time, you like to talk as if they were. Upon the whole, I believe I prefer blind superstition.” But, with regard to Bonifazios (Bonifazio Veronese), is “superstition” (presumably, the unconfirmed, undocumented attributions handed down over the centuries by tradition) to be preferred? What place did Phillips’s sensibilities, which Howells hints are tinged by clairvoyance, have in the process of attribution?12 The question was particularly pertinent to the emerging discipline of Renaissance scholarship, where divining the correct author of a panel or statue entailed substantial monetary consequences. Everyone, of course, agreed on the value of consulting original sources and examining as many substantiated originals as possible, but this approach went only so far; there were still large numbers of works that obliged the expert to fall back on his or her own intuitions. Jarves recognizes the limitations of tests based solely on materials and techniques and recommends these methods be supplemented by

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the mysterious test of feeling; which takes cognizance of the sentiment of an artist, his absolute individuality, by which he is himself, and none other; that which cannot be exchanged or imitated; the soul-power which defies alike his cleverest pupil and most unscrupulous imitator. To attain this quality of judgment the critic must have an affinity for the motives and understanding of the artist as sensitive as the wire to the electrical current.13 Only when these sensations pervade one’s being could pronouncements on a work’s authorship be made with some degree of assurance. The process, Jarves informs readers, is reliable; when conducted conscientiously it is far from a blind impulse, or a vagary of unordered taste, it is a guide to truth, a delicate chord which, fastening itself upon the surface of things, penetrates their interiors, and illuminates them with the light of sympathetic understanding. Those who are obtuse to this faculty of testing character are wont to deride it as sheer infatuation. Nevertheless, as a special gift, it does exist at times disturbed by physical causes, often dormant, but when aroused, as reliable as pleasurable, and always suggestive of those surer and quicker means of knowledge which await the spiritualized existence of those who have diligently improved the talents committed to their charge in this.14 Mention of penetrating into interiors identifies psychometry as the principle behind such endeavors. Jarves reiterates this point in describing a European scholar who, when viewing a great work, “quivers with delight and most tersely and truly interpenetrates its spirit.” By this means of appreciation, an artist’s “spirit lingers in our midst,” while we enjoy “a spiritual tonic, electrifying our entire being with fresh currents of immortality.” Jarves takes the opportunity so offered to make the personal acquaintance of so many distinguished artists of the past, entering into their lives so as to feel them bodily present as friends with whom I hold rich converse, believing I may continue in another life the intercourse begun here, reckoning the intervening centuries as naught, this supreme satisfaction which has cheered and sustained me through many vicissitudes, cannot be imparted

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to another. If I had not had the spiritual communion with generations gone, through the medium of what they have left behind visible to our senses, it would have been impossible to have written this book.15 In remarking on ghosts and Bonifazios, Ford touched on issues pertinent to Jarves’s ideas on the authentication of Old Master paintings. If art were merely the expression of material forces operating in the environment, the evaluation of technical matters would suffice in determining an attribution, but Jarves knew that the truly significant core of experience did not yield itself to conventional means of measurement; something else was involved. However evasive or indeterminate that something might be, it constituted the quintessence of the aesthetic experience. In seeking to define it, he resorted to what he knew of the human mind; it was not imprisoned in the brain as materialists maintained but flowed with the spiritual energies coursing through the environment. In channeling these powers, the artist modified them according to personal predilections; consequently, character traits radiated from the work, enabling it to speak “as by disembodied spirits.”16 Hence, in Jarves’s reckoning, the relation between Spiritualism and connoisseurship was far more intricate and demanding than Ford’s bons mots would imply. For Jarves, all men are “either spiritualists or materialists.” The latter, however, encounter “so many snares in the exercise of the spiritual, creative, or interpenetrative faculty [(Ideality)],17 that they seek to confine themselves to the direct fact of nature.” On the other hand, idealism, the alternative to “matter-of-fact realism,” “awakens that inner consciousness of things which responds with telegraphic alacrity to the spiritual faculties [(Spirituality)].” Jarves shared these convictions with the many thoughtful persons who were dismayed by the widespread influence of Alan Gauld’s “cock-sure school of Empiricists.” Persons of this persuasion, Gauld remarks, were likely to dismiss clairvoyance and all related phenomena as delusional on the basis of reasoning that was dogmatic and often absurd. Spiritualists, in contrast, were among those in the Anglo-American world who pioneered the study of what we would call the subconscious. Their explanation of human nature in all its dimensions was immensely appealing to those cognizant of the limitations of empiricism’s simplistic notions about the tabula rasa in addressing this subject. Groping for a way to account for the subjective factor involved in identifying works of art, Jarves fell back on beliefs he had entertained

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since childhood. By characterizing clairvoyance both as a rare gift (but one that would become increasingly prevalent) and a requisite talent for connoisseurship, he identified the aptitude that sanction the activities of cultural custodians such as himself, Appleton, and Phillips. They were not just conventional do-gooders; their charge came from the highest of authorities, one ready to endorse their “idleness.” Judging from the accolades posterity has lavished on the acuity of Jarves’s eye, he must have hit on something.18 As with other callings, the novitiate involved certain rituals and trials, for art “must be approached reverently, studied intently, and pursued earnestly.” Jarves was particularly impressed, for example, by an American he encountered in Venice who, “regardless of personal discomfort,” lay on his back in Santa Maria della Salute for an extended period in order to view the ceiling paintings advantageously. Around him swarmed throngs of tourists who exhausted their capacity for admiration within five minutes, “wantonly disregarding the teachings of noble minds, the outpourings of soul, lavished in art-language.”19 The period of quiet contemplation noted above as requisite for both art appreciation and a successful séance entailed in the former case a fixed gaze capable of ignoring any distractions the environment offered. Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen suggests this is best achieved by surrounding oneself with art (Figure 62). The Japanese screen and prints that vie for the sitter’s attention were, as we have seen, just the sort of artifacts Whistler employed to conjure spirits. His image, with its subject intensely absorbed in the act of viewing as the preliminary stage to a possible transcendent experience, is the visual counterpart to Jarves’s directives.

The History of Art These priorities also enter into Jarves’s scheme for the history of art. Although he covers much ground, four traditions—the Etruscan, late Medieval and Renaissance, Japanese, and contemporary (since the beginning of the nineteenth century)—epitomize the potential of art as a transformative enterprise. In each case, he seeks to demonstrate how spiritual inspiration and personal vision contribute equally to the creative undertaking. “Thought,” he declares, “come[s] from the Unseen, and, with the force of an electric current and the sagacity of magnetism, find[s] homes . . . in various Minds, who become mediums through whom the new “Word” is delivered with prophetic fire to all men.”20 What follows is a brief review of these notions as they played out through time; Jarves’s status among Americans as

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Figure 62. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen. 1864–65, oil on panel, 19 3/4 x 27 1/8 in. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; gift of Charles Lang Freer.

a leader in the field of universal art history makes his views a touchstone of the era’s aesthetic temper. Although Jarves surveys a wide range of early Mediterranean civilizations, his interest gravitates toward the Greeks and the Etruscans. Phrenology persuaded him that the Romans operated chiefly at the behest of their “lower faculties” (a conclusion reached in part by his reading of their busts) and hence produced a “matter-of-fact” art as “pitiless” as the daguerreotype. The beauty of Greek art, unfortunately, was increasingly devoted to gratifying sensuous appetites and hence is viewed with a measure of disapprobation. Etruscan art never experienced this drift because the “Asiatic ancestry” of its creators made them “extremely susceptible to spiritual influences from unseen powers.” Validation of this point comes from their sarcophagi; there the departed reclines half upright on the lid (Figure 63), declaring, in effect, “I am still my identical self, called to a new part in life, but retaining every experience which made me what I was;

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Figure 63. Sarcophagus or large urn with cover. Etruscan, late third-century b.c., limestone, 40 15/16 x 29 1/2 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912.

any change depends on the processes of growth and development analogous to those which constituted my personality on earth.” The deceased is not slumbering in the manner of Medieval art (a troublesome concept for Spiritualists), nor is she simply dead, according to the preferences of modern art; rather, her pose implies that “the degree of enjoyment hereafter [is] to depend on the right use of present gifts,” a sentiment Jarves finds “salutary and hopeful” because it confirmed the message delivered by the ghost of Bob, his childhood friend. Jarves could only conclude the

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Etruscans based their imagery on similar experiences. Their art exhibits a “spiritual clairvoyance” far in excess of any achieved by their neighbors, and the resulting “insight into our spiritual being” is of greater consequence than the mere idealism the Greeks concocted.21 Throughout much of Jarves’s narrative, the term Etruscan is virtually synonymous with clairvoyance. Although psychic powers are primarily a property of blood, and hence race, they are also nurtured by climate and geography. Jarves’s experiences while on vacation in the hills of Tuscany, which, along with Umbria, was the home of Etruscan civilization, confirmed his convictions. Invigorated by the countryside, where breezes, arriving “fresh from ethereal regions,” are “untainted by human foulness and crime,” he finds himself ensconced in “a moral as well as a physical ozone which imparted . . . the finer elements of character and temperament.” In these environs, he feels a “soothing exhilaration which elevates the senses into a more spiritual apprehension.” No wonder, then, the inhabitants of this favored region would undertake the revival of art after a millennium of stagnation imposed by the Romans and their Church. The unleashing of human energies brought on by the rise of independent city city-states at the end of the Middle Ages was a lesson in the relationship between freedom and creativity Americans could ill afford to ignore. Across the peninsula swept “the impulse of the great mental wave that was swelling higher and higher, and gathering momentum on the ocean of thought.” Original minds were now prepared to partake of “the moral vibrations of the times,” and out of these circumstances arose the great age of Italian art.22 Fra Angelico typified these developments. By eschewing the dogma of the Church, he attained a depth of expression comparable to that of his Etruscan ancestors. Being “under the dictation of his spiritual faculties,” he was able to “eliminate material grossness and leave a clear apprehension of spirit-life.” In his Coronation of the Virgin, for instance, Christ scarcely touches the crown; he simply “wills” it to rest on his mother’s head much as modern mediums command objects to levitate (Figure 64). Such similarities suggest Angelico was not one of those artists who relied on whim or fantasy for his imagery: he rendered supernatural scenes as they “must have appeared to his ecstatic vision.”23 Other artists of the era are evaluated according to similar criteria, and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are all accounted Etruscans. But the Medici tyranny of the sixteenth century did much to initiate a decline that continued to cast its pall over the creative powers of Europe for the next

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Figure 64. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin. Ca. 1440–45, fresco, 67 3/8 x 59 1/2 in. Museo di S. Marco, Florence, Italy.

three centuries. This development reached its nadir during the reign of Louis XIV.24 In searching for an alternative tradition to illustrate what the arts might contribute to modern civilization, Jarves turns to Japan. Jarves’s appraisal of Japanese art is closely linked to his evaluation of the religions its population observed. Buddhism and Shintoism garner his approval, but the latter’s devotion to nature and ancestral spirits offers the West a particularly compelling example of the blessings bestowed by an

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enlightened faith. Among them are the absence of a paid priesthood, idolatry, and dogma. Instead, a “Spiritism” prevails in which the dead are evoked “by professional mediums or diviners.” As a consequence, household shrines are more venerated than temples, and within the home “each family . . . set[s] up its own altar and cultivate[s] its own rites without external interference.”25 Hiram Powers’s busts were designed to facilitate similar domestic rituals, and Jarves’s account of Shintoism was surely written with an eye to alerting his countrymen to the benefits that would accompany the widespread adoption of like practices. Nurtured on these benign beliefs, a “native of Japan sucks in with his mother’s milk a . . . keen and clairvoyant [sense] in respect to ornament.” How like they are, Jarves contends, to “their ethnic kinsmen of remote antiquity,” the Etruscans. Hoffksai’s (Hokusai, 1760–1849) use of deft, simple touches in rendering the figure confirms the kinship by allowing us to believe we “have a clairvoyant insight into the consciousness of the actors.”26 These accomplishments make Japanese art especially meaningful to those who are troubled by Western materialism. Japanese depictions of death, for instance, include the soul’s hovering over the corpse, much as modern “mediums declare.” And Jarves sounds positively Whistlerian in his evocation of the “starlit gloom of darkest night” rendered by Japanese artists: there, a stygian murkiness “welcome[s] . . . weird visitors from the spirit world and the noisy tug of noontide life.” These scenes, he proposes, “excite our senses by forcible suggestions of the unseen things in the universe.” Ruskin’s failure to recognize the virtues of suggestion, Jarves continues, represents a serious shortcoming. One does not arrive at the spirit of things by depicting “the facts of things,” and the Englishman’s championing of Pre-Raphaelitism simply exemplifies the drawbacks of his aesthetic. The movement’s “wearisome literalness” in its approach to nature prompts Jarves to opine, “if that be the profoundest art which suggests rather than imitates with the least perceptible effort, then the Japanese are our teachers.” In addition to these virtues, the best Japanese art also satisfies the criteria associated with psychometry, which, when allied with the requisite properties of style, “take[s] possession of our spirits in . . . [a] quiet, interpenetrative way, and for the moment [fills] us with blissful consciousness.”27 The stable, salutary traditions of Japan made all the more apparent the desultory nature of Western art; since the Renaissance, it had lost its moral compass as society careened between rigid atheism and rank superstition.

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These circumstances continued to hold sway in the nineteenth century, but they had not yet extinguished the creative spark entirely. England exhibits signs of health and, in the person of William Blake, true inspiration; his “Etruscan compositions” depict spirits just as clairvoyants describe them. The French are capable of greatness but are also prone to an intellectualism that promotes the very materialism and dogmatism responsible for the enfeeblement of European culture. While Jarves wonders occasionally whether the art of his day is devoid of every spiritual impulse, he also anticipates an ethical awakening that will open fresh heavens to mortal eyes and provide “a model for a new sacred art, far exceeding in beauty the departed.”28 Readers eager to envision that beauty might begin by considering the suggestiveness of Japanese art. Modern landscapes also conform to spiritual law when they employ large forms to capture nature’s mystery and “suggestiveness”; these qualities are to outward sight what hope is to the religious faculties. “Spiritual truth,” Jarves adds, “can only be suggested, and not represented.” Among living artists, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) best understands this principle. His evocative scenes offer the vision of a “clairvoyant, seeing the spirit more than the forms of things” (Figure 65). The muted colors, simple shapes, and hazy atmosphere of his works imply more than they depict. These judgments become especially meaningful when seen in the context of Tonalism and its frequent association with the properties of ether, but Jarvis has other reasons as well for promoting this style. In effect, Corot does not say, “this you must believe”; rather, he provides intimations of the invisible and asks the viewer to weigh the evidence against his or her own experiences (much as one evaluates a medium). Here, then, is a religious imagery that achieves its ends without importuning the observer with the demands of dogma. Given the importance Jarves ascribes to ending sectarianism and evolving a universal spiritual faith based on principles akin to those of Shintoism, Corot emerges as the Fra Angelico of the nineteenth century.29 Perhaps the momentum of art was leaving Europe and migrating to a new arena where audiences were less jaded. America’s invigorating climate and favorable intellectual milieu, “well fixed in religious and political truths,” seemed destined to make it the site “for the complete development of those ideal faculties of which Art is the language.” Such a transition could take place, however, only at the cost of reputations enjoyed by some of the nation’s most prominent artist. Members of the Hudson River School were particularly vulnerable; their devotion to detail foreclosed any possibility of

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Figure 65. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, A Balmy Afternoon. Ca. 1865, oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 32 7/8 in. Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon; gift of Bishop and Mrs. G. Bromley Oxnam.

nuanced expression. The exotic scenes favored by the likes of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, for example, were, “to the spectator who thinks, or has the spiritual faculty, . . . not worth the cost.” Jarves’s sensibilities reflect the general aesthetic shift then transforming American taste, and consistent with this stance, he finds in “the passionate glow of suggestive color of Inness” the harbinger of things to come. And those things are of no small consequence, for Jarves foresees a time when “we shall finally ripen into an aesthetic and worshipping race.”30

Conspicuous Consumption That time was still some ways off; Yankees are eminently practical beings, but they now need to broaden their perspective to include the arts. The founding of schools of design would train artists, but without an audience eager to

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see and acquire their products, this measure was nugatory. Museums were the best means to stimulate the art feeling in the public, and Jarves reminds potential patrons of the manifold benefits their generosity would bestow. In addition to raising the cultural standards of the nation, such institutions offer a needed alternative to the “haunts of vice” that plague modern cities and debase their inhabitants. Jarves’s allegiance to the values engendered by phrenology’s union with Spiritualism enables him to enumerate further the blessings of art based on the mental physiology fostered by this convergence. Phrenologists, we noted earlier, were ever anxious to exercise all the faculties: all had been implanted by a wise deity, and to disregard any was to disobey his commandments. Jarves warns that the tendency of Americans to neglect Ideality and the adjacent faculties also relevant to the aesthetic experience (these include Sublimity, Spirituality, and Imitation) has contributed to the prevalence of classes whose stunted development predispose them to crime. Art would “enlarge their faculties” and inspire them to lead more productive lives. Without attending to “the whole range of human needs and faculties,” we are “in danger of losing our mental and physical equilibrium.” Into the turmoil so generated creep the purveyors of alcohol and tobacco; their blighting influence could be forestalled, however, by museums dedicated to the principle that “art is the employment provided by God for the complete expansion of human faculties.”31 In assuming the role of cultural custodian, then, Jarves embarked on a priestly mission that entailed promoting the era’s penchant for conspicuous consumption. With over a hundred paintings, he was himself prominent among those who made a display of their wealth, but this collection had, ostensibly, a higher purpose: its images from the centuries that witnessed the rise of the independent Italian city-states were designed to illustrate the close relationship between cultural and political freedom he delineated in his publications. The Medici tyranny in the sixteenth century brought an end to the glories of Florence, and the moral was obvious to Jarves: when freedom is the denied, the faculties wither; when the faculties wither, the soul decays; and when the soul decays, the prospects for a meaningful eternity diminish. These eventualities could be avoided, however, by making possessions—art especially—a source of spiritual insight; “material objects,” Jarves avers, “then become gracious accessories instead of being the imperious principles of life.”32 By taking possession of paintings, one raised the prospect of being possessed by those same paintings. As noted earlier, the ritual of prolonged

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viewing made possible an acquaintance with the artist, which in turn enhanced the likelihood of renewing this friendship in the celestial realm. The ultimate goal of Jarves’s collection, then, was to ensure his countrymen enjoyed the greatest possible consequences of their Manifest Destiny: acquiring and meditating on refined artifacts granted them access to the preferred regions of paradise, just as they were presently occupying the choicer portions of the globe. Mention of “conspicuous consumption” brings with it the issues raised by Thorstein Veblen, the economist who coined this phrase in his Theory of the Leisure Class. He did so to express a rather jaundiced view of the acquisitive propensities exercised by the moneyed classes of his day: what good was served by amassing things far in excess of any possible use one could make of them? The mindset of persons inclined to this behavior was permeated by instincts inherited from our remote (male) ancestors, who accumulated wives, slaves, and booty as a means of advancing their status within the tribe. Whatever value this penchant may have had in earlier times, Velben argues, vanished in a world where an industrial economy of abundance had supplanted one of scarcity. Had Jarves been confronted with this analysis (which appeared long after his death), he would doubtlessly have responded that his collection was intended to serve the public interest. But more cogently, he would also have reverted to his idealistic vision of history and proposed the return to archaic traits as a commendable course. Spiritualism was one of the most laudable components of our primitive mental constitution, one that made objects (regardless of number) the “gracious accessories” of a moral life. On the other hand, when the urgings of the moral faculty (Spirituality) were ignored, all activity effectively entered the domain of materialism even when undertaken by the most ascetic of individuals. 33

Pepero The relentless advance of capitalism made consumption a matter of controversy. Critics decried its enervating influence on urban populations and linked it with another kind of “consumption,” the disease presently known as tuberculosis, but then named for its tendency to weaken, or consume, the victim’s vital functions. Modern bodies seemed less resilient than those of yore because they were less self-reliant; supplied with every need, they were enfeebled and made susceptible to disease. Consumption, which appeared endemic to nineteenth-century society, flourished in these circumstances.

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The bacilli that actually caused the malady were only discovered in 1882, and the preceding decades witnessed much mythologizing about this remorseless slayer of youth. Romantics were especially taken by the pale skin and yearning expression that lent sufferers an otherworldly aspect and suggested their purity made them unfit for the travails of sublunary existence. They appeared to be peering into the celestial sphere, and when the afflicted exhibited an artistic ability, it was attributed to this circumstance. 34 Among those so viewed was James Jackson Jarves, Jr., the critic’s son who contracted consumption in 1876 at age seven (Figure 66). A sharp tongue earned junior the nickname Pepero—peppercorn— among the household servants, and it is this sobriquet that served as the title of the biography about the boy written by his father. Grief drove Jarves to commemorate his lost son, but a larger purpose also emerges as the narrative unfolds. Pepero’s precocious talent as a draughtsman, his father states, came as “a revelation in my eyes of the possibilities of our coming school of American art; . . . an art which should harmoniously combine reason, imagination and religion.” Among the traits that led the author to this conclusion was his son’s preternatural appreciation of “the supernal character and profounder imagination displayed by Michel Angelo, [qualities which were] joined to a more mystical train of thought.” The aspiring artist to whom these words are addressed learns from this report to emulate more than the outward style of his illustrious predecessors: their deepest cogitations, which were inevitably religious in nature, hold the key to originality. Pepero’s early understanding of what usually comes only to one “in the maturity of his faculties” made him a model for American youths about to embark on a career in the arts. 35 As if in compensation for the brevity of his earthly pilgrimage, Pepero was granted wisdom beyond his years. Pepero’s conspicuous consumption made his biography instructive. His ability to plumb the depths of Michelangelo’s mind, for example, arose because he, like the Florentine, set “his dark, earnest eyes gazing into futurity out of the soul’s prison of flesh.” Such prolonged gazing, Frances Trollope wrote Jarves in 1854, was characteristic of those in “the last stages of pulmonary consumption.” Trollope adds that the startling displays of intelligence children stricken by the illness often exhibit were due to their dual existence; still of this world, they touch “that region just above us . . . occupied by the souls of men about to be made perfect.”36 Jarves’s system of art appreciation followed a similar sequence: intense, patient scrutiny may lead to familiarity

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Figure 66. James Jackson Jarves, Jr., James Jackson Jarves, Drawn by Himself. 1884. Pencil drawing reproduced in James Jackson Jarves, Pepero, the BoyArtist: A Brief Memoir of James Jackson Jarves, Jr. by His Father (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), frontispiece.

with the spirits of those who produced the object of one’s attention. The imminence of death hastened Pepero’s knowledge of principles that usually came only after years of dedicated application. Pepero drew on this knowledge when celebrating Michelangelo’s birthday, an event that involved the erection of a shrine reminiscent of those Hiram Powers provided. Around a bust of the Florentine were photographs of his various works illuminated by eleven candles. When Charles Heath Wilson, the author of a biography of Michelangelo, was ushered in, he assured the boy that “the spirit of Michael Angelo is looking down on you and appreciates what you are doing in his honor. He will be the first of kindred spirits to welcome you above.” Undaunted by the seemingly Catholic nature of Pepero’s altar, Jarves thought it appropriate to an enlightened age where everyone was obliged to select their own martyrs.37 In the short span of years allotted him, Pepero had managed to meet many of the conditions his father had declared requisite for the appreciation of art. The insight granted by precarious health enabled him to recognize

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that true veneration involved communion with the spirits of artists whose company he could expect to enjoy more fully in the next life. And like his father, he realized this knowledge was, for the foreseeable future, the domain of a privileged few. For this reason, he declined to invite his young friends to his chapelle ardente, claiming they neither understood nor cared for Michelangelo.38 None of the paraphernalia on the altar was fashioned by Michelangelo’s hand, but this circumstance was dictated by the scarcity and expense of such artifacts, not the wishes of its assembler, who would doubtlessly have embraced the prospect of making an even more intimate connection with his guardian spirit. In a similar vein, we have seen how significantly psychometry figured among Jarves’s motives for collecting original paintings, and he identifies Michelangelo as one “whose spirit lingers in our midst to instruct or delight.” Indeed, in the presence of his works, we sense the “divine flow [which] has quickened our higher natures and exalted our faculties . . . [inducing] an acuter appreciation of spiritual . . . life.” In seeking to acquaint Americans with paintings from distant times and places, Jarves hopes fellow citizens will experience like sensations. It was an aspiration that, in discouraging the common practice of exhibiting copies of famed masterpieces (images with a confused psychometric pedigree), anticipated the vogue for authenticity that would lead in the early 1870s to the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.39

Conclusion Jarves junior, then, joins Jarves senior in exploring the various dimensions of conspicuous consumption. Consumption, the disease, was freighted with a symbolism Pepero made conspicuous by pursuing the spiritual vision his exemplary suffering induced. He was the bud nipped by a spring frost, but his father trusted others would flower as the younger generation realized it must also approach the artistic calling with a due degree of reverence. The elder’s consumption, the amassing of possessions, was conducted (even prior to his son’s illness) with the intent of ensuring this eventuality. By making his collection conspicuous, by publicizing it in books and arranging exhibitions with the aim of finding a permanent home for his paintings, he could contribute to a renaissance in America that would learn from, and ultimately surpass, the one inaugurated by the revival of Etruscan sensibilities in Italy.

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The net effect of these formulations, ranging from Jarves’s reliance on psychometry for the practice of connoisseurship and appreciation of original works of art to his endorsement of Etruscan sensibilities as the touchstone of quality, was to endow the cultural custodian’s calling with a ministerial air. The conspicuous consumption of such individuals would forge the bonds that could keep the United States united by founding museums designed to foster a collective identity for a diverse citizenry. Jarves’s own accomplishments in this respect represent an important contribution to the emergence of the modern museum in this country. Such institutions accompanied and assisted to the rise of Modernism; but as envisioned by Jarves, their presence would foster the religious impulse implanted in the minds of humanity, not replace it. The museum’s hallowed halls offered a premonition of those waiting in the Summerland; there one explored the collections in the company of the masters who created them. (Oh, to be a fly on the wall—if flies there be—when Inness confabbed with Titian!)

Chapter 8

Lessons in Clairvoyance

Concluding a book on Spiritualism with a review of Robert Henri might seem incongruous given his place among the principal proponents of American Realism in histories of art. It helps to recall, however, that he began formulating his aesthetic during the 1890s, when Symbolism captured the imagination of the rising generation. He emerged from the decade with the understanding that meaning resides beneath surface appearances, an attitude that endured to influence both his art and teaching. Henri’s concentration on picturesque individuals, then, looks back not only to Édouard Manet’s types, but also to Walt Whitman’s effusive embrace of a humanity engaged in fulfilling its Spiritualist destiny.1 Never quite the dedicated flaneur John Sloan was, Henri’s preferences place him among George Cotkin’s “reluctant moderns.” Henri entered the perennial debate about the source of art’s affective powers by making the values associated with psychometry and clairvoyance central to the aesthetic experience. He was joined by many contemporaries who regarded this kind of seeing more consequential than the disinterested, scientific approach to connoisseurship that also flourished in the late nineteenthcentury. Royal Cortissoz’s views included below offer another perspective on the subject, one influenced by the need to provide a validation for the vocation of critic, a career he pursued with considerable distinction. The chapter concludes with an examination of the “radical empiricism” professed by William James; his reasons for devising this theory shed much light on the larger intellectual environment behind the formulations of Henri and Cortissoz.

Robert Henri: Artist and Teacher We can follow Henri’s reasoning in some detail because his lectures were gathered and published in 1923. In them, he urges students to become their

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own best teachers by casting off the shackles of conformity and consulting their own souls. So prepared, Henri proposes, one could commence developing a rapport with the sitter and, even more comprehensively, with the materials of the craft. In a sense, he was pushing concepts associated with antinomianism to their logical conclusion. That system maintained that believers were innately prepared to recognize the workings of God’s grace within themselves or in others and thus did not require the assistance of an institutionally sanctioned minister to instruct them in religious matters. Spiritualism aestheticized this doctrine by permitting the viewer to identify the workings of spirit within an artistic creation. Psychometry expanded the scope of this analysis to include the physical properties of a painting. Even the title of Henri’s famous treatise The Art Spirit tips his hand in this respect and reveals an ongoing interest in matters occult and Spiritualistic. 2 In 1887, Henri’s quest for spiritual understanding led him to copy the illustrations in William Rimmer’s Art Anatomy, a work that derived its transcendental teachings from phrenology, Spiritualism, and Swedenborg. The Swedish seer was also a frequent topic of discussions with other students when Henri attended the Pennsylvania Academy in 1888. These exchanges contributed significantly to his religious outlook, which viewed orthodox Christianity with skepticism and found its alternative in a God whose bible was the book of nature. Evidence of his interest in Spiritualism appears in letters sent from England while traveling there in 1907. Among the sights that caught his fancy was the house where Laurence Sterne wrote Sentimental Journey; despite its historical importance, the structure had been abandoned for two years and was in considerable disrepair. In a dispatch to Sloan, Henri relates the story then in circulation about a ghost, “a little man in a black top hat,” who wafted through the building. One might regard the account simply as another instance of the whimsy that often appears in their exchanges, but there are reasons to think otherwise. Henri reports he waited until dusk, scaled the garden wall, and then scoured the grounds in search of the elusive specter. Although none was seen, these measures are hardly those of someone who regards the whole subject of hauntings as nonsense. This narrative, and its repetition in a second letter to Sloan (with the mention as well of another revenant—a “slender lady in gray”—also unseen), suggests it was recounted by an individual who had more than a passing interest in the topic. He would test its veracity when the opportunity arose but would not necessarily be discouraged if positive results did not materialize immediately. Henri counsels others to “join no creed, but respect all for the truth

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that is in them,” advice unlikely to be delivered by a materialist bent on opposing all creeds. It suggests instead an openness to the sort of ecumenical views Spiritualism promoted.3 Henri’s riveting personality caused associates to describe him in terms similar to those used for Whistler. He was “a hypnotist” according to some and “magnetic” in the opinion of others; Guy Pene du Bois designated Henri “one of our highest priests in art,” and Jo Nivison called him “a great prophet of our age.” Such was the religious fervor in the classroom, one student asserted, that everyone “received from him a terrific push toward the spiritual, as directly opposed to the material, view of life.” Nothing in Henri’s teaching would have discouraged these responses; The Art Spirit repeatedly urges students to go beyond the material and “give the spirit.”4 This approach distressed William Merritt Chase, the founder of the New York Art School where Henri taught from 1902 to 1909. Both men were proponents of slashing brushwork, but the elder practiced an exquisite virtuosity, while the younger proceeded with abandon. For Henri, the stroke was a “trace” or a “footprint” that embodied the artist’s emotions at the very moment of its application, and any effort to make it graceful or ingratiating compromised integrity. Instead of seeking to capture surface appearances by means of manual dexterity, the student should learn to invent new techniques in accord with “the spirit of the things” he or she wished to depict. No “seer” could be expected to rely on a “ready made” style; ever the advocate of an Emersonian self-reliance, Henri cautioned against imitation, even of himself. Such pronouncements, with their disparagement of the bravura manner practiced by Chase, must have struck the elder man as an assault on the values he most cherished, and in the confrontations that arose, the Henri faction carried the day. Chase felt compelled to depart in 1907; two years later, Henri left to start another school. He remained true to his vision to the end of his career.5 Many passages in The Art Spirit crackle with the urgency of prophetic declarations: we inhabit a “colorless, materialistic age,” Henri announces, but the millennium draws nigh as the art spirit expands beyond the making of pictures to encompass both business and recreation. Artists are destined to lead this movement; they belong to a “Brotherhood” whose “members do not die.” From this fraternity comes the “real change” that advances “the evolution of man.” The mention of a brotherhood entrusted with the welfare of humanity recalls the terminology and concepts Theosophists used to rank their hierarchy, and William Innes Homer calls attention to the

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resemblance between aspects of Henri’s ideals and those of this occult faith.6 Whatever his allegiance may have been, it is the artist, rather than the initiate into arcana, who emerges as the agent of progress. Membership in this “Brotherhood” is open to all who encounter the great masters of the past within themselves; those so disposed “may meet Greco nearer than many [living] people.” To demonstrate his point, Henri exhibited a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci (presumably a copy) and explained how he saw the Florentine “at work and in trouble and I meet him there.” Henri can find no higher praise of a student’s draftsmanship than to remark that it seemed “Rembrandt’s very spirit . . . pushed the inked stick around for him.” The result he finds far superior to those produced by the intellect alone. While these statements suggest psychometry and automatism, they do so with a degree of ambiguity that permits the reader to take them either metaphorically or literally. Given the highly charged atmosphere of Henri’s classes, however, it is easy to imagine there were listeners who chose the latter alternative. And Henri sounds entirely straightforward when proposing “the hand must obey the spirit”; in attaining this ability, he continues, the student “will become clairvoyant of means, will seize and command them.”7 Behind this advice stands the conviction—also unambiguously advocated—that excessive cerebration cuts one off from the intuitive— clairvoyant—sources of creativity. A context for these notions appears in Henri’s discussion of the fourth dimension. This concept was formulated in the 1870s by Professor Johann Carl Friedrich Zollner of the University of Leipzig when he witnessed Henry Slade, a medium, make objects appear and disappear with the assistance of spirits. Seeking a rational explanation for such phenomena as apports, apparitions, and even the afterlife itself, Zollner and his followers turned to geometric theorems to argue by analogy. Beings confined to a two-dimensional world would develop mental habits based on their limited environs; if a cube placed on its point were to pass through their plane, its entry, and the sequence of shapes it inscribed on the surface, from a dot to a triangle to a square, would seem miraculous; likewise, its withdrawal would seem equally mystifying to the flatlanders. Our space is defined by three axes— length, width, and depth—all at right angles to one another in an arrangement that precludes the drawing of a fourth line at a right angle to the other three. Now, taking their clue from recent developments in non-Euclidean geometry, proponents of the fourth dimension argued that finding a fourth axis capable of fulfilling this condition would be tantamount to discovering

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a new dimension, one whose inhabitants would be as free from the restrictions of space and time as we are from the confines of the flat world. (This hypothesis did not make time the fourth dimension, as Albert Einstein later proposed.) Such entities would be composed of ultrarefined matter (some contended ether constituted the interface between the two domains) and could appear and disappear at will before our eyes. This realm, many proposed, must be the destination of individual consciousness after death, and dying could be conceived simply as a stepping from the third to the fourth dimension. “Seeing” those who stepped back into our world required the cultivation of an inner vision such as possessed by clairvoyants. Proponents of a secular interpretation of the concept were also to be found, but Mable Dodge gives a sense of its importance in artistic circles when, reflecting on the excited discussions that attended the opening of the Armory Show in 1913, she states, “Men began to talk and write about the fourth dimension, interchangeability of the senses, telepathy, and many other occult phenomena without their former scoffing bashfulness, only they did it with what they were pleased to call a scientific spirit.”8 Her testimony suggests that what is often viewed as the inaugural event in American Modernism was regarded by many contemporaries in terms attuned to the concerns of reluctant modernism. Henri’s mention of a line that runs through the figure and off the finger into space as leading to the “fascinating fourth” dimension seems to be an artistic adaptation of the fourth axis discussed above. Clearer is his elaboration of “the mysterious fourth” dimension by reference to a “deeper consciousness” (or, conversely, an “unconscious”) “which is blocked too much now with an eye-seeing vision of material things.” These things pale in significance when compared to “that ultra something which has always engaged your interest more than mere facts.” Having attained an insight into the “proportions” that exceed “the obvious three,” the artist is able to capture “the inner meaning of things.”9 This discourse again underlines his aversion to materialism and the sort of Realism advocated by Gustave Courbet; like the idealist proponents of the fourth dimension mentioned above, Henri downgrades the significance of data drawn solely from ocular experience. Following the logic of Henri’s theory, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart attributes the timelessness and universality of his portraits to hints of “the mysteries of the fourth dimension” found in them. By intimating those mysteries, the artist captures something of the spirit residing within the sitter. To amplify

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this reading, we turn again to Henri’s discussion of clairvoyance. When body and soul are dedicated to a certain expressive ambition, he states, “you will have clairvoyance” and see the relevance of techniques already in your grasp, as well as ones newly invented. The usual “tricks” of the trade will then seem trivial, for with a great desire “to say a thing comes clairvoyance.” In addition to this guiding principle, the virtue of patience figures importantly in the process; one must be able to wait and then recognize the pregnant moment “when we seem to see beyond the usual—become clairvoyant.” Giving the spirit “control over mentality” so that it may know “the value of revelation,” then, grants access to “life’s great moments,” those intervals when one enters another dimension. Having done so, the next challenge is to express them artistically.10 The actual painting, however, is merely a by-product of an enterprise whose true aim is “the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence” (emphasis in the original). This state, the consequence of a compulsion to give free reign to the creative impulse, makes one “clairvoyant.” Ultimately, one paints to initiate this condition, what Henri identifies as “a trance of memories,” however transitory it may be. Although his remarks on clairvoyance and entering the fourth dimension would probably have baffled Emerson, Henri relies on something like the philosopher’s wisdom in promoting such states as the quintessence of the well-lived life. Emerson proposes “our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.” For Henri, painting is a particularly effective means of engendering these life-enhancing moments; it is not the only means, though he makes no mention of the “transparent eyeball” and instead leaves to each the “question as to whether one shall live in and deal with his greatest moments of happiness.”11 A certain rapport between artist and subject must exist for such moments to occur; on the former’s part, this entails “moments of revelation,” and with the latter it consists of “moments when we see in the transition of one part to another the unification of the whole.” Momentary transitions constitute the theme, for example, of Laughing Child, where, by means of dynamic brushwork, “the body [is] . . . laughing as well as the face” (Figure 67). By working rapidly and relying on his memory to hold the expression, Henri has captured a fugitive moment, presumably while he was in a higher state of consciousness. And what does he see? He has peered beneath the surface and found the beauty that arises when the “spirit shines

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Figure 67. Robert Henri, Laughing Child. 1907, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

through, and art is great as it translates and embodies this spirit.” Such visions of the body made radiant and transparent by the emanations of the soul were largely the prerogative of clairvoyants; Andrew Jackson Davis employs a similar vocabulary, for example, to describe encounters with glowing, illuminated individuals during his trances.12 To appreciate the rewards art bestows on the viewer, we must turn to Henri’s concept of the “trace.” Each brushstroke, he maintains, “carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at the exact moment into the

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work.” Those able to “read such signs,” then, have access to the artist’s mind. Henri’s elaboration on this idea recalls the doctrine of psychometry; thus, the things an individual “touches receive his kind of impress, and they afterwards bear the trace of his passing.” Because such traces reveal the possibilities of a higher existence, because “traces of greater living . . . inspire [us] to living,” there is a strong incentive to retrieve them. Further, his assertion that this process is “natural—not supernatural” was, for those who chose to interpret it so, entirely consistent with the Spiritualist stance on the phenomena that came within their purview.13 They would have regarded these notions as an expansion of Henri’s remarks about contacting El Greco and Leonardo. Some indication of the consequences of these principles for the appreciation of art can be gleaned from Henri’s comments on Spanish Gypsy Mother and Child (Maria and Consuelo) (Figure 68). While admitting the image did not quite capture the woman’s “very foreign nature,” he still thought it “something pretty good.” Bringing the painting to class, he asked those who gazed on it to “get into a trance” so they could be “carried away by her character.” Although he does not state precisely how this would happen, the logic delineated above suggests the exuberant brushwork bears the traces of the rapport he established with the sitter. In addition to the illustration of character through physiognomic traits, we also encounter her through the clairvoyant insights he impressed into the very texture of the paint. Henri catalogued at length the emotions that might be so conveyed: strokes could be, for instance, “icy, cold, hard brittle, timid, fearsome, apologetic, pale, negative, vulgar, lazy, common, puritanical, smart, evasive, [and] glib.”14 Presumably, the students who participated in the exercise were the kind who could “read such signs” and emerge from the trance believing the gypsy a stranger no more. The cultivation of this approach, however, raises the troubling issues of class and gender that accompanied the practice of Mesmerism and clairvoyance. Submitting to the Mesmerist’s ministrations entailed the surrender of one’s will and individuality, a measure well-bred Victorian women often thought compromising; clairvoyance likewise involved an intrusion into the subject’s private life that blurred the boundaries of personality and invited unwelcome intimacies. Undaunted by these prospects, Henri declared “human faces are incentives to clairvoyance.” His gender and the sitter’s low status permitted an encounter involving what he called a “penetrating vision” (the term itself is not without gender implications).15 In painting the likes of Maria and Consuelo, the rules governing polite behavior and the

Figure 68. Robert Henri, Spanish Gypsy Mother and Child (Maria and Consuelo). 1906, oil on canvas, 78 x 38 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; gift of Mrs. Olga N. Sheldon. Photo copyright Sheldon Museum of Art.

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personal distance they promoted could be jettisoned in favor of the Mesmerist’s deep gazing into the subject’s eyes to discover the secrets of the soul. Just where and when Henri may have abstained from this approach cannot be precisely determined, but his nudes generally (though not always) refrain from the directness that makes Maria’s gaze so disconcerting. Perhaps the intimacy so implied would have been excessive in the case of an undraped figure. Edna Smith (1915, The Regis Collection, Minneapolis), for example, glances sideways and offers her disrobed torso as an opportunity for formal analysis. In such cases, Henri was more likely to experiment with theoretical systems, such as the color program devised by Hardesty Maratta, than seek to establish a rapport with the subject. If professional models who posed naked constitute one end of the spectrum, then the other, where an immediacy comparable to that in Spanish Gypsy Mother and Child (Maria and Conseulo) prevails, is occupied by laborers, exotics, and children.16 Between these extremes exists a wide range of society portraits and kindred images that commingle the motives found at either end. Our particular concern is with Henri’s likenesses of the lowly because, as he confesses, it was easy to establish a rapport with them. The singers and dancers of Spain, he claims, possessed a wit and vivacity that had been suppressed by convention and religious conservatism in the “good” women. For similar reasons, he found Irish peasants, who became a preoccupation after he voyaged to their land in 1913, a constant source of inspiration. We have no reason to doubt his expressions of sympathy for these people were genuine; but, again, once the issues pertaining to clairvoyance and Mesmerism are introduced, considerations of class and power arise. Experimenters with Mesmerism, for instance, regarded the Irish poor so devoid of culture and gentility as to possess neither the capability of resisting the practitioner’s powers nor the ingenuity to dissimulate while in a trance. Persons of good breeding usually stood higher on the social ladder than the mesmerizer and were likely to rely on the codes of their class for the “moral and intellectual superiority” necessary to defy the magnetizer’s influence.17 Henri’s partiality toward marginal types (especially the Irish) and children as the most appropriate subjects for his penetrative vision and clairvoyance suggests his assumptions resembled those of the experimenters. Henri’s conceptual framework, with its reliance on notions about brotherhoods, the fourth dimension, clairvoyance and the like, was intended to awaken the “spiritual sight” dormant in the aspiring artist. Although he is often associated with Realism, it is difficult to reconcile his agenda with

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the ambition to depict “the bare truth, stripped of all transcendental meanings and metaphysical implication” that Linda Nochlin identifies as the movement’s credo. His maturation coincided with the rise of Symbolism and much of what he practiced and professed had to do with its search for inner truths. These he translated into a form congenial to the mental habits of his countrymen, an undertaking that entailed borrowings from the vocabulary and beliefs of Spiritualism and kindred systems. Such formulations oblige us to divine the soul of the sitter from the expression, and, more intricately, from the nature of a brushwork that also bears traces of the artist’s own character. What we learn of the person so rendered is only half of the story, however, for Henri claims faces signify “realities not yet attained.” In other words, there is a teleology uniting all the living souls he rendered: art’s purpose is to chart “the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.” Being only sensed, he cannot divulge the specifics of this future, but it entails a “peace and freedom” brought about by an “equalize[d] opportunity” consistent with his anarchistic leanings. This “spiritual revolution,” he continues, must be willed, and willpower “is a very personal thing in each one.”18 His sitter’s faces intimate these yet-to-be-attained realities because their moments of transition constitute traces of the soul’s peregrinations.

The Criticism of Royal Cortissoz Henri’s teachings were hardly idiosyncratic; they find their counterpart, for instance, in the writings of Royal Cortissoz. Born in 1869, Cortissoz joined the staff of the New York Herald Tribune in 1891. His career, then, parallels that of Henri, whose achievements, however, he could not endorse entirely because he thought them compromised by a facile brushwork. A litany of the critic’s likes and dislikes appears in the opening pages of his American Artists. Here he openly professes to being conservative in his tastes, stating his opposition to Modernism based on its disregard for the “fundamental laws” of art. Primary among these laws is beauty, not that the subject need be attractive in the usual sense, but the artist must “see beautifully.” This occurs when he “sees and feels with a supernatural intensity” and passes “the rapture of his vision” on to the viewer. Citing sources as diverse as Socrates and Emerson, Cortissoz integrates their idealism with what he calls a “sane vision of nature.” These criteria permit him to tolerate—barely— aspects of Post-Impressionism, but thereafter sanity vanishes. In Cubism

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and affiliated movements, he discerns malignant foreign ideologies analogous to those carried on the waves of immigration washing over American shores. Shallow and egotistical, “Ellis Island art” ignores “the wisdom of centuries” and deserves to be quarantined whenever possible so as to protect the natives from the infection of alien ideas.19 Written in 1922, these remarks mirror the frantic efforts of Congress at this time to stem the tide of immigration, but they have their immediate source in the author’s convictions about the spiritual mission of art. Much of the vocabulary employed to articulate this mission has a familiar ring. John LaFarge, a favorite of Cortissoz, appears as a “necromancer,” one whose conversation flung out “a myriad invisible tentacles of understanding, electric filaments.” Persons in his presence felt “a curious magnetism, the curious power to enthrall.” This “clairvoyant . . . creature” possessed an uncanny familiarity with events that predated his birth, and indeed, his “wisdom, and . . . clairvoyance . . . made him free of all the real things.” For Cortissoz, “the true artist” has access to “the highest natural magic” by means of his “clairvoyance and . . . creative power.” “Inspiration,” he adds, is a “divine, imponderable force.” Someone like Cézanne, however, possessed none of these gifts; he was “a rather crotchety man of talent” whose paintings exhibit no “esoteric mystery.” The only mystery is why such a fuss is made over his work.20 Throughout Cortissoz’s writings, “clairvoyance” serves almost as a byword for creativity or inspiration. Among the artists who exercised its powers are Elihu Vedder, Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, Abbott Thayer, and Edward McCartan. In the past, artists as diverse as Sassetta and Diego Velázquez likewise benefited from its promptings.21 While these designations are somewhat routine, Cortissoz’s discussion of clairvoyance becomes more interesting when he undertakes to explain its place in the processes of critical analysis. There have been some, he states, who have sought to make criticism into an exact science. Giovanni Morelli, for example, endeavored to remove the guesswork from attribution by identifying certain specific traits in the rendering of the ear, nose, or hair that were peculiar to one artist and found in no other. When discerned, one could affirm the author without equivocation. But Cortissoz finds this approach wanting; it lacks what he calls “flair,” or “instinct,” adding, “art criticism is nothing if not, with all its other resources, clairvoyant.” Yes, one must consult historical sources, provenance, and the like, but ultimately there is something, that “spiritual thing,” which that eludes such

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methods. When Bernard Berenson states that a particular painting hasn’t “the severity of a true Leonardo,” we are left to divine what he means. No Morellian details, no quantifiable features, will resolve the quandary; we must feel our way into the image, and clairvoyance makes this process possible. Consequently, attributions often change simply because the original designation no longer feels right even though no new pertinent facts have been uncovered. In one passage, an authority on Rembrandt is belabored for his excessive alacrity in removing works from the master’s oeuvre, a tendency Cortissoz attributes to a sensibility “untouched by paintings from which greatness emanates with a kind of tangible electric force.” The scholar in question simply does not understand “the magic of Rembrandt.”22 These remarks represent an effort to discover the psychological mechanism capable of responding to the finer nuances of expression, and in pursuing this approach, the author has employed concepts and terms associated with Spiritualism. The endeavor allowed both Cortissoz and Henri to regard the making of art as part of an elevated discourse, one unsullied, for example, by the materialist assumptions of Freudian hermeneutics. Instead, we find a closer analogy in the theories associated with the “New Psychology” that arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

William James and Radical Empiricism In the mid-1880s, a group of distinguished philosophers, including John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, and William James, began to postulate theories about the dynamic functioning of the mind. Their investigations led to the New Psychology, and among its aims was one dedicated to integrating thought with the environment more intimately than hitherto attempted. Dissatisfied with the tendency of British empiricism to view experience as a series of discrete sensory events and equally disapproving of rationalism’s attempt to straightjacket the varieties of experience by means of conceptual categories, proponents of the New Psychology sought “to find connections that would make subject and object, knower and known, cohere.” All three men entered this undertaking with the expectation it would reinforce religious values.23 For our purposes, James’s doctrine of “radical empiricism” provides the most rewarding insights into the relationship between New Psychology and the spiritual aesthetics reviewed in this book. Radical empiricism pictured mental operations in terms of a dynamic coherence that rejected both

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Cartesian notions of abstracted cogitation, and, again, traditional empiricism’s inclination to parcel sensory data into separate packages. Thinking engages the memory of previous experiences, the environment of the thinker, and the objects meditated on; the mind is not simply a passive receptacle of data but instead actively selects and focuses in a process James calls the “stream of consciousness.” An event, then, occurs when mental proclivities merge with external circumstances; my experience of thunder, for example, consists not only of the sound itself but also of the silence—or other sounds—that prevail in my consciousness before and after the rumble. Radical empiricism implies “thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are”; it occurs, as Linda Simon indicates, when “knower and known . . . [become] inseparable components of . . . [an] experience.” This state, however, is short-lived; soon conceptualization takes over and finds words and intellectual constructs to encapsulate the incident. Previous philosophers, James contends, have favored the latter; he is attempting to elucidate the former because it is richer than the categories we devise and constitutes the true substance of reality.24 To postulate an engaged mind aware of its presence on a continuum leading to the external world is to enter into something like mythmaking, and in pointing out this similarity, Bruce Wilshire also calls attention to the shamanistic aspect of radical empiricism: both systems project the persona out into the environment, albeit in different ways. These considerations, Wilshire continues, prompted James to worry such speculation was “too spook haunted to interest an academic audience.”25 He proceeded nevertheless and, by incorporating telepathy and related psychic phenomena into his studies, commenced reenchanting many of the principles then being formulated to establish psychology as a science. As we have seen, James was ever ready to draw on his knowledge of art to illustrate points of philosophy, and he does so tellingly in making the case for the nature of experience as delineated by radical empiricism. It could be compared, he states, to paint in a paint-shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of “consciousness”; while in a different

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context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective “content.” In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective at once.26 Henri’s promotion of the brushstroke as a means of exteriorizing the artist’s inner mental condition at the moment of its application bears a more than casual resemblance to James’s theory. As Henri conceives it, the stroke is simultaneously physical matter and a vehicle of consciousness, “subjective and objective at once.” Indeed, he seems prepared to push this concept further than the philosopher, for it is not just the stroke as a instrument of representation that advances the “spiritual function,” it is also the palpable texture of paint qua paint that achieves this end. He commits himself, then, to the indexical properties of oils, to what he calls a “trace” or a “footprint” in his advocacy of expressive brushwork. Like James too, Henri recognizes that the instant of integration, in his case not only with the paint but also with the model, fades quickly and evolves into systems, categories, and rules. To escape convention, he urges students to remain true to a particular moment of insight, eschewing the excessive cerebration of academic training. Both men are committed to an agenda based on the engaged mind. Neither a passive gatherer of data nor a prisoner of a rigid rationalism, this entity values spontaneity and molds its own personal code of conduct out of experience. In searching for a term to encapsulate its properties, Henri, like Cortissoz, falls back on “clairvoyance.” Its proximity of James’s radical empiricism suggests Henri’s usage is not simply a throwback to eccentric strains in Victorian thought but the expression of deep currents in American culture. For these reasons, he represents an appropriate conclusion to this book.

Conclusion This text began by proposing that Spiritualism’s contention the dead could speak for themselves arose as a response to egalitarian agitation in the young Republic. In seeking succor, believers bypassed Christ and instead contacted residents of the Summerland. To avoid the “enthusiasm” such experiences might encourage, they applied the corrective example of scientific study. The disposition of the phrenological faculties, for example, extinguished fears of the soul’s possible waywardness by identifying the mind’s moral regulators.

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In consulting such disciplines, Spiritualists also rejected the anti-intellectualism (the disdain of book learning) charismatics espoused. On the other hand, the experiences that resulted from contact with the higher spheres were rarely as cerebral as those described by Emerson. He deplored the chatty conversations Spiritualists held with visitors from beyond, but followers found comfort in messages tailored to their individual aspirations. Having toppled the judgmental deity of Protestantism as well as the remote entity who presided over Transcendentalism’s universe, Spiritualism was well positioned to make a significant contribution to the visual culture of America. Spirits were familiar, tangible, and, according to psychometry, present in objects. If that object were a work of art, it need not illustrate a spiritual subject to embody paranormal powers. The artists reviewed in this and the preceding chapters understood they did not need to depict revenants in order to invoke them; this could be achieved by the suggestive integration of subject and style. So configured, an image could alert the viewer to numinous forces circulating in the environment. It was this capacity to initiate thoughts of a specific nature (as might happen, for instance, before a portrait of a deceased spouse or child) that set art above such objects as a table or a vase. This mode of appreciation could diminish, even collapse, the distance between the observer and the thing observed. Spiritualism’s cultivation of individuality facilitated this process; like the sitter at a séance, the viewer was encouraged to meditate and then trust that whatever intuitive stirrings followed were verifiable signals from sentient energies and not simply the freaks of a self-induced reverie. In James’s radical empiricism we encounter the encompassing philosophical concerns behind this sort of thinking. Royal Cortissoz found them useful when seeking to make the emerging profession of criticism something consequential. Spiritualism enabled him—and James Jackson Jarves before him—to account for the mind’s ability to enfold an artifact and vice versa. Being a privileged artifact, a work of art was not just something “out there”; it also had to be “in here,” in the soul of the viewer, a process clairvoyance and psychometry explained. In doing so, they made art not a substitute for religion but a place where religion happened. Henri’s altercation with Chase recapitulated a debate that began in colonial America with the appearance of antinomianism.27 Chase thought he had something to teach his students about technical procedures and style (much as Harvard set itself against the antinomians), while Henri regarded himself a facilitator, one who simply practiced strategies designed to enable

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the novice to discover the artist within. In this schema, the ability to detect the spirit’s operations applied not only to oneself but also to its movements in the sitter and the processes of paint application. Henri’s advocacy of this doctrine reenchanted both his work and classroom, carrying well into the twentieth century an impulse that found its initial sanctification among the young girls of Hydesville.

Postscript

Another way of thinking about Spiritualism, one that should tie up the threads woven through the preceding chapters, is to view it as a response to the quandaries many Protestants, Calvinists especially, experienced as they endeavored to comply with teachings of orthodoxy. Among the obligations urged on them by their pastors was the cultivation of a sense of abasement, a step designed to foster an eventual regeneration and reconciliation with the Lord. After much earnest soul searching, however, there were those who could not discern within themselves the innate sinfulness implied by the doctrine of total depravity; what were they to do? Release from this dilemma could be had by abandoning the faith of one’s fathers and seeking a creed more sanguine in its assessment of human proclivities. Spiritualism was among the most prominent alternatives then available to those who had embarked on this pilgrimage. Much of this has been reviewed earlier, but a different perspective on the subject comes from Christopher White’s recent research. We learn from it that those who made the transition did not cease their introspection. Instead, they turned to phrenology and Spiritualism to bring the inner operations of the psyche to the surface and there subject them to scientific examination. What previously had been attributed to the mysterious workings of the divinity could now be explained by natural law, making straight the hitherto tortuous path to enlightenment. If pursued rigorously, this method promised to rid faith of all the harmful doctrines and ceremonies that had accumulated over the centuries. Instead of being beholden to a priestly caste, believers would enjoy an original relationship with the powers that governed the universe.1 We have seen that these sentient powers possessed a degree of palpability that enabled them to operate within the material realm. Indeed, White proposes that “‘Thoughts are forces’ . . . might serve as an adage of the age.” He goes on to cite a proponent of this outlook, who, in 1910, summarized its teachings by claiming “thoughts are things, and their power for good or ill

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can be accurately weighed and measured.”2 But if thoughts were things, was it also true that things were thoughts? This was the logical consequence of belief in psychometry and clairvoyance; Spiritualism’s relevance to the arts rested heavily on the viability of these doctrines. To revisit the implications of these ideas, we turn to two artists, Samuel F. B. Morse and William Rimmer, who addressed the issues relating to looking at art from either side of the divide that separated the old dispensation from the new. Both men created paintings that depict people in the presence of paintings: what do their poses tell us about the assumptions they embody? Morse maintained the Calvinist beliefs he acquired in youth throughout his life; they made him a determined foe of Catholicism and its practices. He could find no particular value, for example, in placing paintings in churches and regarded as rank superstition the Italian custom of adorning their homes with images of the Virgin in order to ward off malevolent entities.3 When he traded the career of an artist for that of an inventor in the late 1830s, he again resorted to his religious convictions to identify the implications of his work. In seeking governmental support for the telegraph, he was disheartened to hear politicians compare the electromagnetic forces employed with those of Franz Anton Mesmer’s animal magnetism. No doubt, he contended, God created the former as a means of advancing human welfare, but, as his biographer notes, “he would scarcely dare to compare spiritual with material forces.” Their relationship was one of analogy, not integration, and his efforts were bent on celebrating God’s glory.4 Even the first message sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1842 seems to have been intent on making this distinction. The quote “What hath God wrought!” was selected at the inventor’s behest by Annie Ellsworth from the Book of Numbers. Its deeper ramifications appear in the full passage: “Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and Israel, What hath God wrought!” The message so sent was not the consequence of the “tricks” (enchantments and divinations) of Mesmerizers but of powers which, though wrought by God, were separate from his being.5 How do these beliefs find their way into Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (Figure 69)? In rendering the Salon Carre, the artist removed the works of contemporary Frenchmen and filled the walls with paintings by the Old Masters. Many of these illustrate religious subjects according to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but what interests us is the response of the visitors, including Morse in the center, who fill the gallery.6 They busily occupy

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Figure 69. Samuel F. B. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre. 1831–33, oil on canvas, 73 3/4 x 108 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago, 1992.51.

themselves in copying the masterpieces but are not enchanted by the objects of their attention. Exemplary of this attitude is the family of James Fenimore Cooper in the corner. Father and mother look on as their daughter turns from her easel in a gesture that implies the group is engaged in some sort of conversation; no one, however, actually gazes at the images on display. Given the participants, the discourse is likely to be elevated, touching, no doubt, on the principles of taste to be imbibed in this exalted environment. It was just such principles that Morse sought to delineate in his lectures. In this forum, he endeavored to refine the sensibilities of his countrymen much as he hoped to do when painting the Salon Carre. Both ventures sought to ward Americans away from the sensualities they seemed so inclined to sample and turn them instead toward the intellectual pleasures art had to offer. So inspired, they might follow the example set by the Coopers and enter into edifying discussions about the diverse virtues of art. For Morse, these virtues attained their epitome in history painting, a claim symptomatic of the didactic nature of his undertakings. Shaping his mission was an ardent nationalism common among members of his generation;

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Figure 70. William Rimmer, Interior/Before the Picture. 1872, oil on academy board, 12 x 9 in. Collection of Richard L. Feigen, New York.

under its promptings, he filled the Salon Caree with Americans and thus championed his country as the inheritor of the great traditions of Western civilization the Louvre preserved.7 In contrast to the rather cerebral considerations that govern looking in Morse’s image, William Rimmer promotes a far more intimate mode of appreciation in Interior/Before the Picture (Figure 70). This painting transports us to the very heart of Victorian bric-a-bracdom; every horizontal surface in the crowded room is graced by a vase or statuette. As if

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to stress the “thingness” of things, the furniture is placed at odd angles to the wall, preventing the diverse pieces from coming together in a unified ensemble. Amid this seeming disarray, a woman examines a painting intently. Even more than the figure in James McNeill Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, she performs the sort of sacred gazing James Jackson Jarves encouraged. Notable in this respect is the way the painting she considers rests on a bureau and thus mimics a Catholic altar. Prolonged attention is suggested by the pose; the subject’s leaning indicates she has been there for a while and will remain for some time to come. She neither casts a furtive glance nor offers to a companion the chatty observations that occupy the Coopers; silence prevails in this temple of conspicuous consumption. Before its most venerable feature, a painting that may harbor the energies of its creator, she stands enthralled. These observations acquire particular relevance when it is recalled that Rimmer subscribed to all the doctrines discussed in this book; he was a Spiritualist, a Swedenborgian, and a phrenologist. When not engaged in artistic endeavors, he was a physician who, according to a contemporary, “cured his patients with his hands and sympathy, rather than medicine.”8 This approach certainly entailed the transfer of his own energies to the afflicted, and we can imagine something analogous occurred when he set his hand to clay or pencil. In other words, he would have been open to the notion of psychic exchange, to the reciprocity between the viewer and the thing viewed, that has served as a leitmotif through much of this text. His leanings also aligned him with the emerging protocols of New Thought, a healing system that likewise regarded thoughts as “things” that could be extracted from their mental matrix and studied scientifically.9 All this takes us back to White’s argument about the methods religious liberals devised in response to the austerities of Calvinism. Their intent was to externalize the enigmatic divagations of the soul and harness them to a “rational” agenda. Spiritualism accomplished this by means of trances, séances, apports, psychometry, materializations, automatism, and the like. These processes all entailed the integration of matter and spirit in a manner peculiar to the faith, and the net outcome was a mindset especially favorable to the visual arts. In essence, the arts became for the aesthetically inclined another means of externalization, another site where psychic energies could be evaluated. Art had traditionally been viewed as a means of mediating between the mundane realm and some kind of higher existence, but for much of America’s early history, it was decidedly subservient to literature in this

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respect. Puritanism, with its logos-based outlook and emphasis on the Bible, contributed significantly to this situation. By claiming thoughts were things and things were thoughts, Spiritualism helped turn the tide. These notions culminate in Robert Henri’s pronouncements. One can hardly read them, however, without noting their similarities to the celebrations of the spontaneous gestural stroke that accompanied the rise of Abstract Expressionism after World War II.10 We seem to hear echoes of the older artist in Jackson Pollock’s assertion that he was not aware of what he was doing when he was in the painting. Harold Rosenberg’s statement that “the act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence” likewise recalls a central premise of The Art Spirit.11 Of course, Surrealism’s reliance on automatism stands immediately behind these attitudes, but even the proponents of this aesthetic had to acknowledge its debt to the automatism of Spiritualism. Like Henri and his predecessors, Pollock and Rosenberg see painting as a means of drawing out hidden motives. Both men grew up in an America where Spiritualism and its latter-day associates (including Henri and William James) continued to exercise an important influence on the culture. It contributed to an environment where the efforts of action painters and their supporters would attract favorable attention. Neither Pollock nor Rosenberg was (to my knowledge) a Spiritualist, but an awareness of the faith’s persistent presence may assist in assessing the seriousness of contemporary responses to their claims. Dating the advent of postmodernism is still a matter of some disagreement, but surely the appearance of Pop art in the early 1960s constituted a significant factor in its rise. The practitioners of Pop replaced the hot, animated qualities of Abstract Expressionism with a cool, impersonal content. What had previously been exceedingly individual and intense—the brushwork of the older generation—was supplanted by the younger’s bland rendering of readily accessible imagery—Brillo boxes and soup cans. Accompanying this change, Arthur Danto notes, was a shift of the museum’s status “from a temple of beauty into a kind of cultural fair. Larger and larger numbers of persons, surprisingly informed about art by the mass media, [now] troop[ed] through these transformed institutions with attitudes very different from that awed reverence which once overcame the visitor to the tempular museum only a few decades ago.”12 Romanticism permeated the Modernism of Pollock and his colleagues, and vestiges of this aesthetic account for Danto’s references to the “awed reverence” that once “overcame” spectators. Spiritualism contributed to the

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sanctification such terms implied because it affirmed more definitively than any other faith that a canvas could harbor paranormal powers (again, it is telling that Albert Pinkham Ryder was the one American artist Pollock praised).13 It also claimed such powers were not the exclusive possession of any traditional creed or doctrine— hence, the (self-proclaimed) universalism that Jarves thought would make the tempular museum possible. Many factors beyond the scope of this brief review contributed to the decline of Modernism and the accompanying outlook that sanctified art in manner amenable to Spiritualist ideals, but postmodernism’s “incredulity toward meta-narratives” did much to deflate the pretensions of its predecessor.14 This little phrase sounded the death knell for the teleological aspirations entertained by the cultural custodians. Their notions of the museum as a instrument of refinement that would wean arriving immigrants from the religious loyalties they brought from their native lands and deliver them over to the ecumenical principles cherished by America’s liberal Protestant and post-Protestant elites could not readily withstand the scrutiny of postmodern theory. According to Stephen Prothero, academics assumed their adoption of the dictums espoused by Max Weber and kindred thinkers would be followed by mass conversions to this outlook on the part of the general public. No such transformation occurred; in America, religion shows no signs of abating.15 But the making of art and the curating of exhibitions are increasingly conducted by individuals who have spent large portions of their lives within the confines of academe. The outlook of such persons has been shaped in ways that foster an impatience with any of the lingering notions cherished by George Cotkin’s reluctant moderns. The latter’s contributions, however, warrant attention when evaluating the tempular museum and notions surrounding the appreciation of Pollock’s style, to say nothing, for example, of Ryder’s. Devout believers, even devout Spiritualists, are all around us, but they seem to wield little influence in the institutions that presently govern the production and display of art.

Notes

Introduction: The History and Teachings of Spiritualism 1. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 139, 155; Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 308–14; Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 13; George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992). 2. The Origin of Modern Spiritualism (1848; SAM INC., 1979); Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1926) 1: 61–64. Recent literature on Spiritualism includes R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Owen, Darkened Room; Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998); Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999); Robert Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco: Harper, 2004); Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005); Todd Jay Leonard, Talking to the Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship (New York: iUniverse, 2005); and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 3. For earlier instances of raps associated with hauntings see R. C. Finucane, Ghosts (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1996), 111, 133. On the relationship of Spiritualism to the newspapers see Emma Hardinge (Britten), Modern American Spiritualism (New York: Published by the Author, 1870), 66, 71; Basham, Trial of

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Woman, 110; and Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge, 1968), 10. On the diverse class and religious affiliations with Spiritualism see Owen, Darkened Room, 91. For the estimate of eleven million followers see Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 273; for that of three million see Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860), 37. Stuart states that the religion had a million followers; Reluctant Spiritualist, 1; Braude, Radical Spirits, 2. 4. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (1950; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). 5. Stuart, Reluctant Spiritualist, 20, 84–87. 6. For Mesmerism see Robert Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Alison Winter, Mesmerized (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); William Gregory, Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and Its Phenomena, intro. M. A. Oxon (1909. New York: Arno Press, 1975), 40–43, Fuller quote on 104. 7. On the solemnity of Spiritualism and its gatherings see Andrew Jackson Davis, The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse, Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1855), 26–28; Carroll, Spiritualism, 99; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 12, 112–211. 8. Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 1: 91; Russell M. Goldfarb and Clare R. Goldfarb, Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), 30. 9. The quote is from Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 335. For more on the life of Davis see Doyle, History of Spiritualism 1: 42–59; and Harding, American Spiritualism, 23–28. A summation of Davis’s ideas can be found in Davis, The Great Harmonia: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe, 2 vols. (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1851); Davis, Spiritual Intercourse. See also Oppenheim, Other World, 208– 10. For the relationship between Spiritualism and phrenology see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 283. 10. Braude, Radical Spirits, 3. 11. For feminism and Spiritualism see Braude, Radical Spirits, 78–136, and Goldsmith, Other Powers, 48–49. The quote is from Henry James, The Bostonians, intro. Daniel Aaron (1886; London: J.M. Dent, 1994), 5. 12. Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 42. Theodore Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology, trans., and intro. Hereward Carrington (New York: Harper Brothers, 1911), 43. 13. McGarry, Ghosts, 34. 14. On materializations see Frank Podmer, Modern Spiritualism, 2 vols. (1902;

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New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), 1: 3. See also Pearsall, Table-Rappers, 92–101. 15. Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 32. 16. For spirit photography see Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Clement Cheroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 17. Gauld, Psychical Research, 353, 64. 18. For a review of the Society for Psychical Research see Gauld, Psychical Research; Oppenheim, Other World, quote from Leonard, Talking, 62. 19. Doyle, History, 1: 296. 20. Susan Hale, Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 322. For his support of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts see 343. 21. Taylor, Shadow Culture, 3. 22. McGarry, Ghosts, 13, 5. For a discussion of the scholarship on religion and American art see Sally M. Promey, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” Art Bulletin 85 (September 2003): 581–603. Chapter 1. Who Speaks for the Dead? 1. William Dean Howells, The Undiscovered Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), 391. 2. Dealings with the Dead by A Sexton of the Old School, 2 vols. (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1856), 1: 30, a compilation of a series of articles that appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1848; James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869), 327. 3. For a discussion the importance of trivial messages to Spiritualism, see Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1926) 1: 229; 2: 86; Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 207; Planchette; or The Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 148. 4. On Calvinism, see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 176–85, 204–5, quote 176. 5. Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860), 488–505. The other author cited is Planchette, 315. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe, 2 vols. (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1851), 1: 167–69. For more on the gradual emergence of the soul, see J. Hewat McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse: Its Theory and Practice (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), 53. 6. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 36. 7. For the adoption of Spiritualism by utopian communities, see Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),

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Notes to Pages 24–34

163–64. This discussion of Hopedale draws on the following sources: Adin Ballou, History of the Hopedale Community, ed. William S. Heywood (Lowell, Mass.: Vox Populi Press, 1897), and Autobiography of Adin Ballou, comp. and ed. William S. Heywood (Lowell, Mass.: Vox Populi Press, 1896). 8. Clasped hands were a fairly common motif on Victorian tombstones; whether these were employed solely on Spiritualist graves remains to be determined. See, for example, Scott Baird, “Language Codes in Texas German Graveyards,” Markers 9 (1992): 216–55. For a discussion of hands at séances, see Planchette, 134. 9. Emma Hardinge (Britten), Modern American Spiritualism (New York: Published by the Author, 1870), 58, 278. 10. For a discussion of apports, see Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 2: 214; and McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse, 108–9. 11. Sally M. Promey, Spiritual Spectacles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); John T. Kirk, The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), 156–83. Much of what follows is from these sources. For Miranda Barber’s gift images and a discussion of crosses and tribulations, see Kirk, Shaker World, 168, 176– 77. On Miranda Barber’s narrative, see Promey, Spiritual Spectacles, 99. 12. Histories of Spiritualism do not indicate when spirit portraits began or who initiated them. On the weight of spirits see Doyle, History, 1: 265. For an account of spirit drawings in England see Rachel Oberter, “Spiritualism and the Visual Imagination in Victorian Britain” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2007). 13. For further analysis of the differences between Shaker and Spiritualist images, see Promey, Spiritual Spectacles, 116. On automatism, see also McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse, 101. For the significance of speed and quality in Spiritualist art, see Planchette, 56, 254; and Doyle, History, 1: 134. On the recognition of relatives, see Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 94. 14. “Biographical and Sketch of Carrie Miller, Written by Mrs. M. A. Gridley, Through the Psychometric Interpretation of Her Writing,” Gallery of Spirit Art, and Illustrated Quarterly Magazine 1 (1881): 65–67; Prof. Berthollet, “Phrenological Analysis of Portrait of Carrie Miller,” Gallery of Spirit Art, and Illustrated Quarterly Magazine 1 (1881): 103. On phrenology and preferred arrangements of hair for women, see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 79–80. 15. Howells, Undiscovered Country, 237. 16. Carroll, Spiritualism, 35–37. The quote is on 35. See also Joel Tiffany, Lectures on Spiritualism (Cleveland: J. Tiffany, 1851), 267; John W. Edmonds and George T. Dexter, Spiritualism (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853), 40, 366. 17. Dexter was born in Madison County in western New York. John Albee, Henry Dexter: A Memorial (Cambridge, Mass.: Privately Printed, 1898), 11. This account of the bust of Theodore Lyman is based on Jan Seidler Ramirez, “Henry Dexter (1806–1876),” in Kathryn Greenthal, Paula M. Kozol, and Jan Seidler Ramirez, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), 42.

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18. Albee, Dexter, 19. 19. Albee, Dexter, 39, 79–92, quote 92. For a discussion of phrenology and hats, see Colbert, Measure, 177. The plaster busts of governors executed by Dexter do not seem to have survived. 20. Albee, Dexter, 92–93. 21. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1867), 430 (Cheney), 300 (Elliott). For Allston, see Henry T. Tuckerman, Artist-Life, or, Sketches of American Painters (New York: D. Appleton, 1847), 44. 22. Tuckerman, Book, 588; Ramirez, “Dexter,” 42. 23. On Dexter’s measurement of the forehead of Charles Dickens, see Albee, Dexter, 65. See also Colbert, Measure, 170–72. 24. On Powers as a Swedenborgian, see “New Church Worthies,” New Church Messenger, February 18, 1885, clipping from the Cincinnati Historical Society (hereafter CHS) mss qP888, 6RM, box 6. Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, Sept. 2, 1852, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA) 1136/173–74; Hiram Powers to Mr. Tower, March 8, 1864, AAA 1142/416; and Hiram Powers to Mrs. Wise, May 25, 1865, AAA 1142/1201. 25. Marguerite Beck Block, The New Church in the New World (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 131–33. 26. Hiram Powers to Ben [Powers] March 24, 1858, AAA 1139/1704–5; Hiram Powers to Mr. Hazard, March 27, 1859, AAA 1140/3; and Hiram Powers to Mr. Wilkie, May 1, 1852, AAA 1138/434–35. See also Howard Kerr, Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature 1850–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 61; Katherine H. Porter, Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), 77. 27. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 195. 28. Much of this chapter and this book is modeled on David Freedberg’s discussion of animism and the numinous power of objects in Western art. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For the use of photographic portraits in household shrines, see Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 49. 29. Hiram Powers to Thomas Worcester, November 12, 1851, AAA 1135/2337. 30. Planchette, 57. 31. Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, January 12, 1853, AAA 1136/432. 32. Colbert, Measure, 209. 33. Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, intro. Colin Wilson (1848; Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986), 210–11. On Crowe and phrenology, see Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 153. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, trans. George F. Dole (1758; New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1984), 355–56.

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34. George W. Hughes to Hiram Powers, November 20, 1844, AAA 1132/822. 35. Robert C. Winthrop to Hiram Powers, May 3, 1869, AAA 1144/631. 36. This séance took place in 1874; see Earl Wesley Fornell, The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 137–38. 37. For more on the symbolic implications of Powers’s use of marble, see Donald Martin Reynolds, “The ‘Unveiled Soul: Hiram Powers’s Embodiment of the Ideal,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 394–414. Charles Colbert, “Spiritual Currents and Manifest Destiny in the Art of Hiram Powers,” Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 532–33; see also Colbert, Measure, 288–94. 38. Colbert, Measure, 190–97. Much of the above and what follows draws on this source. Powers’s own bust of Clytie (1865–67, Marble, National Museum of American Art) includes a tiara of sunflowers that allude to her virtues. 39. On Clytie as a symbol of an apotheosis, see William Wetmore Story, Conversations in a Studio, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 1: 62–63. 40. Edward M. Greenway to Hiram Powers, June 7, 1851, AAA 1135/2044. See also Charles Colbert, “Harriet Hosmer and Spiritualism,” American Art 10 (Fall 1996): 42. 41. James Coats, Photographing the Invisible (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 48; Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21; Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 2: 207. 42. Hereward Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 52, 256; Basham, Trial of Woman, 112–13. 43. Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, 2 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 2: 187–89. On the symbolism of Proserpine, see “Powers’ Proserpina: An Account of This Work of Art Once Owned by Edward L. Carey” (note by H. C. B. (Baird) dated 3/18/06), which indicates that the account was written by Mrs. Griffith. Edward L. Carey Papers, AAA P24/172. The critic mentioned is quoted in “Local Intelligence,” newspaper clipping, n.d., CHS, MSS q P888, Box 6. On using gauze for Proserpine see Hiram Powers to F. Surget, March 5, 1854, AAA 1137/101. See also Wendy Jean Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 167–71. 44. The critic appears in “Thoughts on Powers’ ‘Proserpine,’” newspaper clipping, n.d., CHS MSS q P888 Box 5. See also Colbert, Measure, 200; Hiram Powers to George P. Marsh, April 3, 1862, AAA 1141/894. On the haunting, Hiram Powers to Mrs. Hennen, March 11, 1853, AAA 1136/563, 45; Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998), 156–62, quote 162. I would like to thank Joseph Mella and Lyle Lankford of Vanderbilt University for information pertaining to the portrait of Phebe Hand Van der Bilt. 46. Hiram Powers to Edward Greenway, September 11, 1851, AAA 1135/2266. 47. Susan Hale, Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 79.

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48. Samuel Watson, The Religion of Spiritualism: Its Phenomena and Philosophy (1850; New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1884), 170. 49. Colbert, “Hosmer,” 30. Much of what follows relies on this source. On Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, see Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 354. 50. Harriet Hosmer to Cornelia Carr, July 1851, quoted in Cornelia Carr, Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), 14. 51. Quoted in Carr, Hosmer, 128–30. See also “Woman’s World: Marvelous Experience of Miss Hosmer with an Apparition,” Terre Haute Gazette, October 23, 1877, newspaper clipping, Harriet Hosmer Papers, Schleisinger Library, Radcliffe College (henceforth Hosmer Papers), M 60, box 3. 52; Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Henrietta Cook, March 4, 1854, in Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830–1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 91. On Hosmer as a writing medium, see Russell M. Goldfarb and Clare R. Goldfarb, Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), 114. 53. For the critical reception of Puck, see H. Nichols B. Clark, A Marble Quarry: The James H. Ricau Collection of Sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art, with an essay by William Gerdts (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997), 218–20. See also Sherwood, Hosmer, 118–19. The quote is from Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century European Art (New York: Prentice-Hall and Harry Abrams, 2003), 317. 54. On the recognition by contemporaries that Hosmer was not illustrating Shakespeare, see Watson’s Weekly Art Journal, 69, clipping, Hosmer Papers, M60, box 3. 55. On the deaths in New York, see Braude, Radical Spirits, 53. The quote is from Owen, Footfalls, 212. For more on Puck and Spiritualism, see Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 39; Planchette, 89. 56. See Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 42; and especially Allen Putnam, Natty, A Spirit: His Portrait and His Life (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1856), 3, see also 80. 57. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858; New York: Airmont, 1968), 98. 58. Colbert, “Hosmer,” 36–37; Clark, Marble Quarry, 220. 59. Harriet Hosmer, “Seti; or the Magic Mirror,” adapted by Charlotte Pendleton (1889), 39, Hosmer Papers, M60, box 2. 60. “Water Colorer,” “Statues by Miss. Hosmer,” The Crayon 4 (February 1857): 56. 61. See Clark, Marble Quarry, 221. On Will-o-the-Wisp as a companion to Puck, see “The Artists of America,” The Crayon 7 (May 1860): 136. 62. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, in Selected Poems (1855; New York: Gramercy Books, 1993), 87. 63. Woodbury, “To Harriet Hosmer,” poem, Hosmer Papers, M60, box 3. 64. Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 1: 221; McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse, 41. 65. Crowe, Night-Side of Nature, 107–9, 329; William Gregory, Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and its Phenomena, intro. M. A. Oxon (1909; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 114.

264

Notes to Pages 52–62

66. “Spirits,” Atlantic Monthly 55 (May 1862): 582–83; clipping, Hosmer Papers, M60, box 1. 67. Harriet Hosmer to Mr. Crow, November 23, 1860, quoted in Carr, Hosmer, 168. 68. Henry James, “Maud Evelyn,” in The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, ed. and intro. Leon Edel (New Burnswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1948), 598–629. 69. Margaret M. Coffin, Death in Early America (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1976), 112–14. 70. On the Victorian home as a place to cultivate religious sentiments, see Braude, Radical Spirits, 24. See also McDannel and Lang, Heaven, 275. 71. David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 7. 72. For an account of the Stanford Museum and associated issues, see Carol M. Osborne, “The Stanford Family Collection,” in Carol M. Osborne et al., Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art, 1870–1906 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Museum of Art, Stanford University, 1986), 23–91. 73. On the Leland Stanford, Jr. Museum, see Osborne, “Stanford Family,” 52. For a discussion of the circumstances relating to Leland Stanford, Jr.’s collecting and the artifacts in his collection, see H. C. Nash, The Leland Stanford Jr. Museum: Origin and Description (Palo Alto, Calif.: the Museum, 1886). 74. The quote by Jane Stanford is in Osborne, “Stanford Family,” 90. 75. On Thomas Welton Stanford, see Osborne, “Stanford Family,” 70–73. See also E. Daniel Potts and Anette Potts, “Thomas Welton Stanford (1832–1918) and American Australian Business and Cultural Relations,” 193–209, article preserved in the Biographical Files, Green Library, Bing Wing, Special Collections, Stanford University. The quote on the collection of apports is on 203. I was unable to locate the article in the source mentioned by Osborne as the document on Jane Stanford and apports: she cites San Francisco Examiner, September 6, 1905. I want to thank Dr. Sarah Burns for calling my attention to these apports. 76. Potts and Potts, “Thomas Welton Stanford,” 203. On Jane Stanford and the “soul life” of students, see Orrin Leslie Elliott, Stanford University: The First TwentyFive Years (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1937), 584. 77. Mrs. E. Vale Smith, “How Prince Charles Saved My Life; or, A Psychological Enigma Resolved by Art,” The Crayon 6 (July 1859): 205–6. Chapter 2. Reenchanting America 1. On the continued belief in witchcraft in the antebellum era, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 228–33. 2. Orestes A. Brownson, The Spirit-Rappers and Criticisms of Some Recent Theories in the Sciences, in Works of Orestes A. Brownson, vol. 9, collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson (1854; New York: AMS Press, 1966), 161. 3. Good reviews of Story’s career can be found in William H. Gerdts, “William

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Wetmore Story,” American Art Journal 4 (November 1972): 16–33; Jan Seidler Ramirez, “William Wetmore Story (1819–1895),” in Kathryn Greenthal, Paula M. Kozol, and Jan Seidler Ramirez, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, intro. Jonathan L. Fairbanks (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 107–30; H. Nicholas B. Clark, A Marble Quarry: The James H. Ricau Collection of Sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art, with an essay by William H. Gerdts (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997), 174–78. 4. Katherine H. Porter, Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), 91–99. For Story’s quote on magicians, see William Wetmore Story, Conversations in a Studio, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 1: 289–90. On Story’s religious affiliations, see Charles Crowe, “Christian Socialism and the First Church of Humanity,” Church History 35, 1 (March 1966): 93–106; Elizabeth Gerrity Ellis, “New Discoveries in American Art,” American Art Journal 17, 2 (Spring 1985): 89. 5. Story, Conversations, 1: 296–98 6. Story, Conversations, 1: 286; William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), 79–80. 7. See Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, intro. Colin Wilson (1848; Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986), 425; Emma Hardinge (Britten), Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: Published by the Author, 1870), 51; No author, Planchette, or The Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 289. 8. For the symbolism of The Libyan Sibyl, see Jan Seidler, “A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1985), 508–9; William Wetmore Story, The Proportions of the Human Figure According to a New Canon (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866). On Story’s awakening to the revelation of his system of proportions, see Story, Conversations, 2:480. 9. Story, Conversations, 1: 299–300. 10. William Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot Norton, August 15, 1861, quoted in Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, in Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 vols. (1908; New York: Grove Press, 1957), 2: 70–71. 11. Mary E. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story (New York: Rand, McNally, 1897), 130; Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl” (1863), in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter et al., 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 1: 2382. For Sojourner Truth as a Spiritualist, see David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 262; Seidler, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 516. 12. Story, Conversations, 2: 327–44, quote 336. 13. For Story’s reflections on the appearance and demeanor of spirits in heaven, see Story, Conversations, 1: 294–96. 14. Story, Conversations, 1: 341.

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Notes to Pages 66–69

15. A. [Thomas Gold Appleton], A Sheaf of Papers (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), 197–98. 16. On creating one’s future world, see Story, Conversations, 1: 295. 17. Hiram Powers to Rev. Henry W. Bellows, May 18, 1869, Archives of American Art (henceforth AAA) 1136/175. See also Henry W. Bellows, “Seven Sittings with Powers, the Sculptor,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature and Art 2 (September 1869): 107; Charles Colbert, “Spiritual Currents and Manifest Destiny in the Art of Hiram Powers,” Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 529–43. Much of the following is drawn from this source. 18. Hiram Powers to Thomas Powers, December 31, 1849, AAA 1134/1728–29. See also Donald Martin Reynolds, “The ‘Unveiled Soul’: Hiram Powers’s Embodiment of the Ideal,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 412; and Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, 2 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 1: 208. Wunder relates this account also to Powers’s statue of Eve; see Wunder, Powers, 1: 181. 19. The Greek Slave was exhibited in Woodstock, Vermont, on August 15, 1850, during a tour conducted by Powers’s brother-in-law Henry J. Adams; see Wunder, Powers, 1: 243. See also Hiram Powers to “Cousin Thomas” [Powers], January 8, 1851, AAA 1135/1756. 20. Hiram Powers to “Dear Cousin” [John P. Richardson], December 14, 1853, AAA 1136/1095–96. Also relevant is the discussion of Spiritualism included in this letter. 21. Henry W. Bellows, “Seven Sittings with Powers, the Sculptor,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art 1 (August 7, 1869): 596. 22. Hiram Powers to “Cousin Susan,” January 3, 1853, AAA 1136/392; Hiram Powers to Susan S. Eastman, December 4, 1863, AAA 1142/253. 23. L. L. Barnes, “26 June 1865, Mr. Hiram Powers’ Studio, Florence,” AAA 1146 (in the roll I consulted, the individual entries were not numbered). Powers himself was judged to have the phrenological faculty of “Locality” large; it gave him a “knowledge of places and facility to find ...[his] way.” His “Inhabitiveness” was also large, making him “very anxious to be settled permanently in one homestead”: L. N. Fowler, “Phrenological Description of Hiram Powers,” AAA 1146. On the phrenological implications of the affinity animals had for places, see George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1835), 3. Again, Powers’s narrative apparently derives from a personal experience; as a child he was rescued from danger and guided home by a dog; see Charles Edwards Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times, 2 vols. (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1845), 1: 28–29. 24. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, trans. George F. Dole (1758; New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1984), 50, 68; William Gregory, Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and Its Phenomena (1909; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 95; and No author, “Effect of Consecrated Places,” Spirit Telegraph 3 (1854): 117. 25. James T. Kloppenberg, “Thomas Jefferson,” in A Companion to American

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Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 349. 26. Hiram Powers to “My Dear Friend,” April 5, 1855, AAA 1137/836. 27. Hiram Powers to “Dear Cousin” [John P. Richardson], April 4, 1858, AAA 1139/731. For the loss of Powers’s Calhoun, see Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1: 200–203. 28. Hiram Powers, quoted in Lester, The Artist, 1: 88. 29. Hiram Powers to Rev. Philip Slaughter, April 21, 1852, in Wunder, Hiram Powers: 2:146. 30. Hiram Powers, quoted in Lester, The Artist, 1: 89. 31. Crowe, Night-Side of Nature, 218; Gregory, Animal Magnetism, 232. 32. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1867), 286. 33. Gene Edward Veith, Painters of Faith: The Spiritual Landscape in NineteenthCentury America (Washington, D.C.: Regency, 2001), 49. 34. Crowe, Night-Side of Nature, 205, quote 27. 35. Hiram Powers to Jeb Cook, August 12, 1850, AAA 1134/1395. 36. For a discussion of cogitation as a means of focusing psychic energy to compel the materials of the mundane realm to fulfill its directives, see Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 53. Aspects of this practical idealism anticipate the “New Thought” movement that was organized in the 1890s. For a discussion of New Thought and its relation to Spiritualism, see J. Stillson Judah, The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 169–93. 37. Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, October 27, 1858, AAA 1139/1204. 38. The iconography and social context for America are discussed in Vivian Green Fryd, Art and Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 205–6; Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1: 158, 167, 279, 304, 2: 18–21; Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 205–9. For Powers’s claim, see Hiram Powers to York Atlee, February 10, 1856, AAA 1138/174. 39. Hiram Powers to Sidney Brooks, March 8, 1865, AAA 1142/980; see also Hiram Powers to Ben Reilly, June 19, 1865, AAA 1142/1264–66. 40. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 362. 41. The first mention of this idea appears in Hiram Powers to William A. Buffum, October 18, 1855, AAA 1139/1187. For this letter, see also Wunder, Hiram Powers, 2: 126. Other instances include Hiram Powers to George T. Marye, January 24, 1861, AAA 1141/191; Hiram Powers to George Gordon, March 5, 1867, AAA 1143/1793; and Hiram Powers to William S. Latham, June 3, 1867, AAA 1143/968. In these letters, Powers discusses the possibility of casting the figure in bronze; elsewhere, he also expresses a willingness to send California to San Francisco or Sacramento, both near, if not

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Notes to Pages 75–78

precisely on, the goldfields and both still in rudimentary stages of development; see Hiram Powers to Samson [Powers], August 18, 1850, AAA 1134/1416; and George Gordon to Hiram Powers, July 25, 1867, AAA 1143/1063. 42. The explicit message of California, Powers remarked, was that appearances are deceiving, and the suitor intent on “wooing” her must patiently endure her capricious bestowal of favors. See Hiram Powers to Philip Slaughter, April 16, 1852, AAA 1135/2709; and Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1: 162–63; 2: 124–25. Begun in the winter of 1849–50, California originally held an inverted cornucopia, which was changed to a quartz crystal, apparently in 1851, when the artist learned the gold was located in veins of quartz. See Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, May 23, 1850, AAA, 1134/1168–69. For a contemporary discussion of these matters and the gold in quartz, see Bayard Taylor, El Dorado (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1873), 110–11, quote 235. The explicit indication that the figure is indeed a Native American is the style of the hair, which is straight and long. 43. Hiram Powers to George Gordon, March 5, 1867, AAA, 1143/793. 44. On female crania, see Charles Caldwell, Elements of Phrenology (Lexington, Ky.: Meriwether, 1827), 269–70. 45. See Caldwell, Elements, 239–40. See also Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana: or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1839); and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 57–68. 46. O. S. Fowler, The Practical Phrenologist (Boston: O.S. Fowler, 1869), 13. 47. Newspaper clipping, no title, no date, Cincinnati Historical Society, mss qP888, 6RM, box 6; George Combe, The Constitution of Man (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1829), 167. 48. Crowe, Night-Side of Nature, 436. 49. W. S. Courtney, “Clairvoyance and Psychometry,” Spiritual Telegraph 3 (1854): 277. 50. Untitled entry, Spiritual Telegraph 6 (1855): 372. 51. No author, “A History of the Divining Rod; with the Adventures of an Old Rodsman (Concluded),” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 26 (April 1850): 372. 52. “A Transparent Humbug,” Boston Daily Advertiser 88 (Aug. 16, 1856). For the materials and practices associated with the divining rod, see Sir William Barrett and Theodore Besterman, The Divining Rod (1926; New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1968), 233–40. 53. Crowe, Night-Side of Nature, 436. 54. Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy, Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast, 1780–1830,” American Quarterly 38 (Spring 1986): 6–34. Much of what follows is from this article. No author, “A History of the Divining Rod; with the Adventures of an Old Rodsman,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 26 (March 1850): 223.

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55. Taylor, “Supernatural Economy,” 15–22, quote 22. For more on the growth of treasure hunting after the Revolution, see Butler, Awash, 230. 56. No author, “A History (Concluded),” 319. See also Taylor, “Supernatural Economy,” 11–14; Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveler, ed. Judith Giblin Haig (1820; Boston: Twayne, 1987), 258–60. 57. Hence, Powers discusses her “wiley [sic] expression” and the fact that most who went to California were disappointed. Hiram Powers to Mr. Buffman, [1858], AAA, 1139/1186. 58. No author, “A History,” 220. The quote is from No author, “Wands, and the Divining Rod,” American Phrenological Journal 18 (1853): 127. 59. Gregory, Animal Magnetism, 99–100. 60. J. M. Peebles, The Practical of Spiritualism (Chicago: Norton and Leonard, 1868), 10, 58, 61. 61. Hiram Powers to Hamilton Fish, February 1, 1859, AAA 1139/1400. This statement is part of a text in which Powers discusses the possibility of establishing an “equilibrium” in California. 62. Hiram Powers to Sidney Brooks, February 7, 1860, AAA, 1140/555. 63. Hiram Powers to Samson Powers, February 5, 1851, AAA, 1135/1803. 64. Henry I. Simpson, Three Weeks in the Gold Mines (Henry I. Simpson, 1848), reprinted in Magazine of History (Tarrytown, N.Y.) 171 (1932): 191, 194. 65. Malcolm T. Rohrburgh, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 221. Rohrburgh discusses the arrival in the goldfields of ideas about Manifest Destiny. 66. Paradoxically, the sense that a statue was destined for a particular site contributed to Powers’s willingness to change the title of California to Australia. In addition to his patriotism, he believed that the Anglo-Saxon race should “defy the world in regard to power and lead all the nations in the grand march of Christianity, civilization and science.” Just as the discovery of gold in California had advanced this process, so the goldfields of Australia would make an important contribution. The above quote is from Hiram Powers to Collie [Collin?], June 8, 1865, AAA, 1142/1229. 67. For more on Powers’s reaction to political events in Europe in 1848–49, see Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1: 159–63. See also Hardinge, American Spiritualism, 28. 68. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 36–39, “implacable materialism” 38. 69. David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2005), 175. 70. On Powers’s disposition toward mechanical innovation, see, for example, Sylvia E. Crane, White Silence (Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1972), 174. 71. “K.,” “Sketchings,” The Crayon 1 (January 17, 1855): 43. 72. For Thoreau’s thoughts on this matter see journal entry for December 2, 1853, in The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Dover, 1961), 125.

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Notes to Pages 85–91

73. From “Most Famous of American Women Sculptors: Miss Harriet Hosmer of Watertown,” Boston Sunday Globe, March 1, 1908, 11. Quoted in Clark, Marble Quarry, 214. 74. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 148. See also Harriet Hosmer to Miss C[arr], July 1851, in Cornelia Carr, Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), 13. On Tennyson, see Russell M. Goldfarb and Clare R. Goldfarb, Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), 112, 161. Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam,” in The Poems of Alfred Tennyson 1830–1863 (London: Dent, 1909), 339. 75. Tennyson, “Oenone,” Poems, 88–94; Kasson, Marble Queens, 148–50; “Sketchings,” The Crayon 4 (February 1857), 56. 76. Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American, 1830–1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 249. The dream took place in 1866. 77. Lydia Maria Child, “Miss Harriet Hosmer,” Boston Daily Advertiser, October 19, 1857. 78. Hosmer, quoted in Sherwood, Hosmer, 309; on Gibson, see 310. Harriet Hosmer, “Apulia: A True Story of Art and Rome,” ms. 8; Harriet Hosmer Papers, Schleisinger Library, Radcliffe College, M 60 (henceforth Hosmer Papers), box 2. 79. Harriet Hosmer to an unidentified friend, March 1861, quoted in Carr, Hosmer, 172; Harriet Hosmer, “1975 A Prophetic Drama,” serialized in The Cosmopolite, newspaper clipping, 1875, Hosmer Papers, box 2. 80. “Woman’s World: Marvelous Experience of Miss Hosmer with an Apparition” (in pencil), Terre Haute Gazette, October 23, 1877, 24, Hosmer Papers, box 3. 81. On the growing taste for realism and Hosmer’s interest in perpetual motion, see Sherwood, Hosmer, 311, 323. On Hosmer’s invention, see “Miss Hosmer’s Discoveries,” newspaper clipping, Hosmer Papers, box 2. On Edison, see Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 261. 82. On Hosmer’s Chicago World’s Fair proposal, see “A Planetary World’s Fair,” Chicago Tribune, newspaper clipping, Hosmer Papers, box 3. 83. On leisure after the Civil War, see H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994), 92–95. 84. John W. Edmonds and George T. Dexter, Spiritualism (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853), 123. 85. The quote on natural law by Hosmer is in “A Presentiment,” newspaper clipping, Hosmer Papers, box 3. 86. Emerson’s quote on rat-revelations is from his journal entry for June–July 1852 in Emerson in His Journals, sel. and ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 434–35. His remark on symbols and nature is in Emerson, Representative Men (New York: Hurst, various dates), 88. 87. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 258–59.

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Chapter 3. Revelations by Daylight 1. Edward P. Buffet, “William Sidney Mount: A Biography,” Port Jefferson Times, 1923–24, in Archives of American Art (henceforth AAA), SM 1/614. 2. “Three funerals today in this place—a few evenings since I heard three raps giving warnings of the above deaths.” Diary of William Sidney Mount, entry for August 21, 1861; Alfred Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount (New York: Harry Abrams, 1975), 353. On the “electro-nervous flued,” see Diary of William Sidney Mount, entry for March 11, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 288. For the use of natural laws by the spirits to communicate, see Diary of William Sidney Mount, 1855; Frankenstein, Mount, 295–96. 3. For Mount’s discontent with the Presbyterianism of his youth, for instance, see Diary of William Sidney Mount, entry for April 15, 1855; Frankenstein, Mount, 296. For Mount’s reading of Spiritualist literature, see Deborah J. Johnson, “William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life,” in Deborah J. Johnson, Elizabeth Johns, et al., William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1998), 105. For Mount’s possession of E. W. Capron’s Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions (1855; New York: Arno Press, 1976), see “Books Owned by William Sidney Mount,” in AAA SM 4/847. Mount proposed a painting of “three or four figures talking about spiritualism,” but the work was never executed. The undated proposal appears after a diary entry dated April 18, 1847; obviously, it would have to be at least a year later than this date; Frankenstein, Mount, 174. 4. See, for example, Diary of William Sidney Mount, November 22, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 287. 5. For a discussion of this drawing see Johnson, “Mount,” 81. 6. Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in Martha V. Pike, Janice Gray Armstrong, et al., A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 71–73. 7. Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 135–36. The quote on Reynolds can be found in diary of William Sidney Mount, 1849; Frankenstein, Mount, 31. For Rembrandt’s devotion to nature, see diary of William Sidney Mount, undated entry; Frankenstein, Mount, 175. 8. On the rambling character of trance dictation, see William James, “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance” (1890), in William James, Essays in Psychical Research, foreword by Frederick H. Burckhardt, intro. Robert A. McDermott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 81–84. 9. Two letters from the spirit of Rembrandt, January 29, 1855, March 25, 1855; Frankenstein, Mount, 292–95. All the following citations are from this source. 10. “If he [Mount] would study Ostade and Jan Steen, especially the latter, and master their colour and chiaroscuro, there is nothing, as I see, to prevent him becoming a great artist in the line he has chosen.” Washington Allston quoted in William Dunlap,

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A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 2 vols., ed. Rita Weiss, intro. James Thomas Flexner (1834; New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 2, part 2, 452. See also Benjamin F. Thompson, The History of Long Island from Its Discovery to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New York: Gould, Banks, 1843), 2: 528; and Charles Lanman, Haphazard Personalities: Chiefly of Noted Americans (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1886), 169. 11. “Vanderline [sic] says that I must mass more as regards shadow, a group of dark figures upon a light ground (Like his Landing of Columbus or light group on a dark ground).” Diary of William Sidney Mount, 1848–57, entry undated, AAA SM 2/716. See also entry for April 18, 1850; Frankenstein, Mount, 240. 12. Colbert, Measure, 70–71. See also Diary of William Sidney Mount, 1858–68, entry undated, AAA SM 2/498. 13. Diary of William Sidney Mount, June 6, 1858; Frankenstein, Mount, 311. 14. Letter from the spirit of Rembrandt delivered to William Sidney Mount, January 29, 1855. Frankenstein, Mount, 293. 15. D. Huntington, “Sketches of the Great Masters, Rembrandt,” The Crayon 1 (January 17, 1855): 41. 16. Letter from the spirit of Rembrandt delivered to William Sidney Mount, January 29, 1855; Frankenstein, Mount, 292–93. 17. No author, “National Academy of Design,” The Crayon 6 (June 1859): 192. 18. See Frankenstein, Mount, 474; see also, “Stony Brook—1859,” AAA SM 2/701. The latter includes the information that The Tease involved “a flirtation.” 19. Diary of William Sidney Mount, entry for February 1, 1847. Frankenstein, Mount, 172. 20. David Cassedy and Gail Shrott, William Sidney Mount: Works in the Collection of The Museums at Stony Brook, ed. Janice Gray Armstrong (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1983), 21–22, 51. 21. Diary of William Sidney Mount, March 19, 1854. Frankenstein, Mount, 271. 22. For a discussion of Coming to the Point (1854, New-York Historical Society) and its shortcomings see Frankenstein, Mount, 269. 23. On Mount’s rheumatism preventing him from painting, see No author, “Sketchings,” The Crayon 4 (February 1857): 56. He was also suffering from eye trouble; see Roxana Scripture Swearingen, “In Sickness or in Health: How William Sidney Mount’s Well-Being Shaped His Work and Life,” in Robert W. Kenny, Elizabeth Kahn Kaplan, and Robert Wunderlich, William Sidney Mount: Family, Friends, and Ideas (Setauket, N.Y.: Three Village Historical Society, 1999), 56. 24. On Mount’s mobile studio, see Frankenstein, Mount 262–65; and Frank C. Erk, “Effingham Tuthill: Builder of Mount’s Portable Studio,” in Kenny et al., Mount, 72–78. 25. Diary of William Sidney Mount, entry for April 3, 1854, Frankenstein, Mount, 273; entry for March 11, 1854, Frankenstein, Mount, 288; entry for 1859, (no day specified), Frankenstein, Mount, 347. William Sidney Mount, Autobiographical Sketch, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 19–20.

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26. Frankenstein, Mount, 18–19. 27. Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 2 vols. (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1839), 2: 631, 643; O. S. Fowler, Life: Its Science, Laws, Faculties, Organs, Conditions, Philosophy and Improvement (Boston: O.S. Fowler, 1871), 114; Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 78–79. 28. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, 1854 (no day specified). Frankenstein, Mount, 287. 29. Conference—Tuesday, March 16, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 289. 30. Conference—Tuesday, March 23, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 289. 31. For a discussion of Long Island Farmhouses, see Johnson, “Mount,” 87. 32. Buffet, “Mount,” AAA SM 1/615. 33. William Sidney Mount, Notebook 1853–58, AAA SM 4/195. 34. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, 1854. Frankenstein, Mount, 291. 35. William Wetmore Story, Conversations in a Studio (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 8–9; Camille Flammarion, The Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 128. For a text on psychometry, see William Denton, The Soul of Things: Psychometric Experiments for Re-Living History (1863; Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1988). 36. Shepard Alonzo Mount, “The Old Double Door,” in Deborah J. Johnson, Shepard Alonzo Mount: His Life and Art (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1988), 10. 37. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, 1854, “Sittings”; Frankenstein, Mount, 291. 38. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, November 22, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 287. 39. William Sidney Mount to Alden J. Spooner, September 26, 1868; Frankenstein, Mount, 454. 40. William Sidney Mount to Mr. Marie Louise Hood, April 10, 1864; Buffet, “Mount,” AAA SM 1/625. 41. On Robert Nelson Mount’s house, see Frank C. Erk, “Family of William Sidney Mount,” in Kenney et al., Mount, 11. Erk errs, however, in claiming William died in the Brewster house. William’s dislike of a sister who was also living in the Mount family home with him seems to have alienated him from the ancestral abode and likely prompted his peregrinations. He “never was happier” than when she was absent. See journal entry for February 16, 1847; Frankenstein, Mount, 172; William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, March 25, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 290. 42. Johnson, “Mount,” 87. In choosing the site, Mount had to accommodate the portable studio. Weighing nearly a ton and measuring some eight by twelve feet, it had to be towed along a road by a team of horses, and this limited his options. He may have wished to present his brother’s house more prominently, but that prospect may have been precluded by the terrain. In other words, to have done so would have obliged him to work outside the studio, relinquishing the very advantages and comforts it

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Notes to Pages 107–110

was designed to provide. He seems to have selected a place where he could depict both Robert’s home and Long Island Sound, features freighted with great personal meaning. Mount’s attention to birthdays, including the time of nativity, and to days of death is apparent in a list he compiled of these dates as they pertained to himself and his relatives. See diary entry for June 14, 1853, in Frankenstein, Mount, 267. 43. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, March 25, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 290. 44. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 145–47. See also Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 277. Mount does copy an epigram by Emerson about Napoleon in a journal entry for February 4, 1850, and another about talking to a man with a rigorous mind on February 10, 1850; see Frankenstein, Mount, 238–40. For the superiority of the written word see Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854; New York: New American Library, 1960), 73. For the Concord philosophers and art, see Charles Colbert, “Thoreau’s Panoramic Vision and the Art of Guido Reni,” Concord Saunterer 7 (1999): 219–31. 45. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Selected Poems (New York: Gramercy Books, 2001), 44. 46. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, March 11, 1854; Frankenstein, Mount, 288. 47. William Sidney Mount, Spiritualist Diary, April 15, 1855; Frankenstein, Mount, 296. 48. The most recent survey of Lane documents by Dunlap and Buck mentions possible affiliations with the Unitarian and Universalist churches and touches on Spiritualism and Transcendentalism but remains curiously mute about the Trask statement. Sarah Dunlap and Stephanie Buck, Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends (Gloucester, Mass.: Cape Ann Historical Society, 2007), 75–76, 101–2, 112–13, 149–50. See also Gene E. McCormick, “Fitz Hugh Lane, Gloucester Artist,” Art Quarterly 15 (Winter 1952): 295; James A. Craig, Fitz H. Lane: An Artist’s Voyage Through Nineteenth-Century America (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2006), 120–22. 49. For discussions of the possible influence of Emerson, see John I. H. Baur, “American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in NineteenthCentury American Painting” (1954), in American Art: Readings from the Colonial Era to the Present, ed. Harold Spencer (New York: Scribner’s, 1980), 129; John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York: Praeger, 1971), 48; Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, “Cape Ann Views,” in John Wilmerding et al., Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988), 19–20; and Franklin Kelly, “Lane and Church in Maine,” in Wilmerding et al., Lane, 144. 50. Craig, Lane, 117–21; Kelly, “Lane and Church,” 25; Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, “Fitz Hugh Lane and the American Union of Associationists,” American Art Journal 17 (Spring 1985): 89. On Emerson’s thoughts about phrenology and associated reforms,

Notes to Pages 110–117

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see Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), 87. 51. On Emerson’s resistance to the spiritual sciences, see Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 28; Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 340–41. 52. Craig, Lane, 140–44, 136, 158–60. 53. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 1: 42–43. 54. The connection between Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and Lane’s paintings of Norman’s Woe is mentioned in Wilmerding, Lane, 37, and Craig, Lane, 190. On Longfellow’s popularity and “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” see Higginson, Longfellow, 1: 106; Longfellow, Selected Poems, 16–19. Longfellow researched and wrote “The Wreck of the Hesperus” in 1839; Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 1: 348. 55. S. G. W. Benjamin, “Gloucester and Cape Ann,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 51 (September 1875): 465–74. 56. John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 60–61. For the perils of Brace’s Rock, see Wilmerding, Lane, 87. 57. Ellis, “Cape Ann Views,” 42. 58. Longfellow’s remarks on Michael Faraday are in his letter to Thomas Gold Appleton, August 30, 1853, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 3: 393. For the discussion with John Rollin Tilton, see Longfellow’s journal entry for June 17, 1855, in S. Longfellow, Life, 2: 289. On Cora Hatch, see journal entry November 20, 1857, Life, 2:347; for Catherine Fox, see journal entry for October 9, 1865, Life, 3: 62. The remarks on Newburyport appear in a letter to George Washington Green, March 1, 1873, in Letters, 5: 653. For a discussion of Longfellow’s adoption of Spiritualism, see Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), 146. 59. Journal entry for July 11, 1851, in S. Longfellow, Life, 2: 210. 60. L. H. S., “Norwich, Conn.,” The Crayon 2 (July 25, 1855): 57. The author does not specifically mention psychometry, but the use of the daguerreotype as a means of explaining the capacity of objects to register psychic energies was a favored device of devotees of the discipline; see, for example, Denton, Soul of Things, 26. Longfellow’s summons is found in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The New England Tragedies: John Endicott,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 465. 61. For the activities of Spiritualists in Gloucester, see McCormick, “Lane,” 295. 62. The quote about leaving shadows behind is from Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860), 58. 63. On Mary Mellen, see Craig, Lane, 129–30. On Church’s Puritanism see Tim

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Notes to Pages 117–121

Barringer, “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820–1880,” in Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape and Painting in the United States 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 54–55. The quote is in reference to Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness in Novak, Nature, 98. 64. The quote is from Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, cited in Georgess McHargue, Facts, Frauds, and Phantasms: A Survey of the Spiritualist Movement (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 70. 65. Novak, American Painting, 122. The relationship of Lane’s Dream Painting to his Spiritualism is problematic. This painting and the associated drawing were executed in the winter of 1862/63. The artist recorded that “while lying in bed asleep, a richly furnished room was presented to my imagination. Upon the wall my attention was attracted to a picture which I have here endeavored to reproduce. The dream was very vivid and on awakening I retained it in my memory for a long time. The effect was so beautiful in the dream that I determined to attempt its reproduction, and this picture is the result. The drawing is very correct, but the effect falls far short of what I saw, and it would be impossible to convey to canvas such gorgeous and brilliant coloring as was presented to me. This picture, however, will give the beholder some faint idea of the ideal.” The Spiritualists gave great credence to the content of dreams as the outcome of spontaneous clairvoyance, and this may be the context for Lane’s experience. It is not possible, however, to confirm this interpretation positively. Lane’s reference to the “brilliant coloring” he could not convey on canvas suggests he intended to capture the preternatural sensations and heightened consciousness that accompany spiritual communion. The Dream Painting, then, may intend to make explicit what is only implied by the natural light of Norman’s Woe; both images intimate a salvation consistent with Lane’s Spiritualism, a faith unencumbered by the particulars of Christian dogma. The quote is in a copy of a letter in the hand of Lane’s acquaintance, Joseph Stevens, in the Cape Ann Historical Association. See Wilmerding, Lane, 79–80, 194. 66. Emerson, Essays, 78–79. 67. For those who criticized the abstract qualities of Emerson’s theology, see Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 174–76. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1968), 204–5; Barbara Novak, Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30–31. 68. Longfellow, Selected Poems, 44. 69. Donald Keyes, “William Sidney Mount Reconsidered,” American Art Review 4 (August 1977): 127.

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Chapter 4. Ghostly Gloamings 1. G. K. Chesterton’s quote is in Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel: (Not What We Ought to Say) (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 95. His response serves as a reminder that the fault many individuals found with Impressionism at the time was not due to an ignorance of its aims, but rather derived from a highly perceptive understanding of them. For more on Tonalism as an alternative to the irreligion perceived in Impressionism, see Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In this respect, Willard Metcalf, Julian Alden Weir, and Mary Cassatt, Spiritualists and Impressionists all, tended to modify the style significantly in their occasional essays in religious imagery. For their Spiritualism, see Elizabeth de Veer and Richard J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L Metcalf (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 18, 25–26, 44, 60, 75, 77, 115; Hildegard Cummings, “Home Is the Standing Place: J. Alden Weir and the Spirit of Place,” in Hildegard Cummings, Helen K. Fusscas, and Susan G. Larkin, Julian Alden Weir: A Place of His Own (Storrs: Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, 1991), 28–29. Judith A. Barter, “Mary Cassatt: Themes, Sources, and the Modern Woman,” in Judith A. Barter, Erica E. Hirschler et al., Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (New York: Harry Abrams, 1998), 86. 2. The quote is from Martin Goldman, The Demon in the Aether (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983), 158. See also Dorothy Michelson Livingston, The Master of Light (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), and P. M. Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. See Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man: A Study in Unrecognized Human Faculty (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909), 342. W. P. Jolly, Sir Oliver Lodge (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 230. 4. Elizabeth Robbins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Whistler Journal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921), 157. 5. For Whistler and chemistry, see Gordon Fleming, The Young Whistler 1834–66 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), 99–103; Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 1:62, 260. 6. On Daniel Dunglas Home, see Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 67. The quote, by Mary Howitt, is in Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 20. 7. Frank Podmer, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (1902; New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), 2:47–60. On Whistler’s cultivation of his Americanism, see Fleming, Young Whistler, 216. 8. For the Davenport brothers, see Pennell and Pennell, Whistler Journal, 177; Doyle, Spiritualism, 1: 211–29. 9. Pennell and Pennell, Whistler Journal, 157; Mortimer Menpes, Whistler as I Knew Him (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1904), 64.

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10. See Pennell and Pennell, Whistler Journal, 273. For his cousin, see Elizabeth Robbins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908), 1: 115. On the planchette, see Elizabeth Robins Pennell with Joseph Pennell, The Art of Whistler (New York: Modern Library, 1928), 135. On the table-turning, see Menpes, Whistler, 64. 11. Alan Summerly Cole, Diary, March 12, 1876, PWC 281/557–587, University of Glasgow Web site: “The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855–1903,” ed. Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Monfort, and Nigel Thorp, including “The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855–1880,” ed. Georgia Toutziari, University of Glasgow, 2007 (henceforth GUW) 13132; Cole, Diary, September 16, 1876, GUW 12986; Cole, Diary, August 26, 1881, GUW 13432; Cole, Diary, May 13, 1877, GUW 13132. 12. Pennell and Pennell, Whistler Journal, 157. On the antiquity of beliefs as a sign of their truth, see Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature Or, Ghosts and GhostSeers, intro. Colin Wilson (1848; Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986), 218. 13. On the critical response to The White Girl, see Richard Dorment, “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl,” in Dorment et al., James McNeill Whistler: A Retrospective, ed. Robin Spencer (New York: Wings Books, 1991), 27; Robin Spencer, “Whistler’s The White Girl, Painting, Poetry, and Meaning,” Burlington Magazine 140 (May 1998): 300–311. For Courbet, see Fleming, Young Whistler, 189. Some of this response may be attributable to the excitement surrounding the achievement of full-body materializations in 1860. 14. For the identification of the lacquer box, see Paintings in Oil and Pastel by James A. McNeill Whistler (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1910), 9. The shape, size, and color of the object on the mantel in The Little White Girl resembles the so-called “Meigetsu-wan” lacquer bowls of the early Edo period whose prototype was attributed to tea master Oda Urakusai. See, for example, Meigetsu-wan, early seventeenth century, ht. 7cm., diam. 11.2 cm., Kamakura, Meigetsu-in, pl. 143, in Beatrix von Rague, A History of Japanese Lacquer Work, trans. Annie R. Wasserman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 176. These bowls have tops, and Whistler could easily have regarded one as a “box.” A similar artifact appears on the far right of Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art). See also David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2004), 194. Here the object is described as “a carved red lacquer box.” Whistler’s collection of oriental objects was sold in 1879 and cannot be traced; consequently, the researcher must draw inferences based on the similarity of the object in the painting to known artifacts. See Dorment et al., Whistler, 86, 168. 15. On the psychic qualities of his Japanese box, see Pennell and Pennell, Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2: 157. 16. Charles Caffin, The Story of American Painting (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 287; Sadakichi Hartmann, The Whistler Book (Boston: L.C. Page, 1910), 65; Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 130–34.

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17. Algernon Charles Swinburne to “Cher pere [Whistler] 2 April 1865,” in Whistler, ed. Spencer, 76. For disembodied heads as an expression of Spiritualist practices, see Trudie Grace, “The Disembodied Head: A Major Theme in European Art from 1885–1905” (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1984). For more on the Spiritualist consequences of Jo’s reflection in a mirror and on Freer’s response to art, see Kathleen Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector as an Agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and Connoisseurship,” Art Bulletin 78, 1 (March 1996): 80, 87–88. On Whistler and Hokusai, see Mortimer Menpes, “The Actualists: Some Impressions of Shilto Jessop, Artist,” National Review 23 (June 1894): 552, quoted in Anna Greutzner Robbins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 22; Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 73. 18. The poem, “Before the Mirror,” is quoted in Whistler, ed. Spencer, 76. For more on the Spiritualist implications of The Little White Girl, see Pyne, Higher Life, 97–99; Deanna Marohn Bendix, Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors, and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 228– 30. The poem, which would have made the Spiritualist implications of The Little White Girl apparent when it was attached to the frame in 1865, can be found in a photograph of the painting in its original frame in Whistler, ed. Spencer, 76. Arthur Symonds, Studies in Seven Arts, “Whistler,” 1906, quoted in Whistler, ed. Spencer, 350. One did not have wait for the creator’s demise in order to commune with him or her; much of the phenomena recorded by Spiritualists involved the contacts made between the souls of the living; see Lodge, Survival of Man, 107. “A Last Breakfast in Cheyne-Walk,” The World, June 19, 1878, 14, included in Catherine Carter Goebel, “Arrangement in Black and White: The Making of a Whistler Legend” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1988), 896–97. 19. John Siewert, “Rhetoric and Reputation in Whistler’s Nocturnes,” in Linda Merrrill et al., After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 73. 20. For a discussion of the arrangements in black, see Sylvia Yount, “Whistler and Philadelphia: A Question of Character,” in Merrill et al., After Whistler, 57. 21. The quote from “Echo” is in James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, intro. Alfred Werner (1892; New York: Dover, 1967), 323. For a related discussion about the ambiguity of the environment, see Robbins, A Fragile Modernism, 67–69. Here are also discussed alternate interpretations of the image. 22. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Wisthler [sic]” Certains, 1889, quoted in Whistler, ed. Spencer, 258, 267. On Sir William Crooks, see Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1983), 102–26. 23. On Lady Campbell as a Spiritualist, see Roy McMullen, Victorian Outsider: A Biography of J. A. M. Whistler (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), 212; Oscar Wilde to James McNeill Whistler, June 1882, GUW 09547; Janey Sevilla Campbell to Beatrix

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Whistler, April 4, 1890, GUW 0515; Janey Sevilla Campbell to James McNeill Whistler, September 21, 1895, GUW 00522. 24. John Siewert, “Whistler’s Decorative Darkness,” in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denny (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 95–97. 25. “Current Art-IV,” Magazine of Art (1885): 467–68, quoted in Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York: Frick Collection, 1995), 66. 26. Camille Mauclair [Camille L. C. Fausti], “James Whistler et le mystère dans la peinture,” in Mauclair, Trois morceaux sur James M. N. Whistler (1905), 306 (English translation, 9). A copy of this pamphlet—undated and without a publisher—is located in the Library of the Freer Gallery of Art, accompanied by an English translation in typescript. The article originally appeared as Camille Mauclair, “James Whistler et le mystère dans la peinture,” Revue Politique et Littéraire: Revue Bleue 20 (October 3, 1903): 440–44. My citations are from the pamphlet and the translation (which I have employed below for the phrasing in English) in that order. I am grateful to the staff of the library for providing this material. On astral or etheric bodies, see Crowe, Night-Side, 247. 27. Alfred de Lostalot, Le Journal, May 1, 1894, quoted in Munhall, Whistler, 156; Royal Cortissoz, Art and Common Sense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 198–99. 28. The passage about “emptying” the sitter is quoted from the diary of Edmond de Goncourt, entry for July 7, 1891, quoted in Munhall, Whistler, 66. See also Sadakichi Hartmann, The Whistler Book (Boston: L.C. Page, 1910), 231, 209; Pennell and Pennell, Life of James McNeill Whistler, 1: 194. 29. Le XIXe siècle, April 25, 1894, quoted in Munhall, Whistler, 159. On Whistler and the critics, see Robbins, A Fragile Modernism, 30. 30. Mauclair, “Whistler,” 303–4 (1), 310 (8). 31. Hartmann, Whistler Book, 81–99, 124, 246, 249. 32. The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. John L. Sweeney, foreword Susan M. Griffin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 25. 33. Lee Glazer, “Whistler, America and the Memorial Exhibition of 1904,” in Merrill et al., After Whistler, 92. 34. Mauclair, “Whistler,” 308, (6). 35. [Tom Taylor], “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Times, May 1, 1877, 10. Quoted in Siewert, “Whistler’s Decorative Darkness,” 95. 36. Siewert, “Rhetoric,” 69. 37. Whistler, Gentle Art, 144. 38. On “stygian gloom” see James McNeill Whistler to Robert de MontesquiouFezensac, January 2, 1890, GUW 04119. 39. Menpes, Whistler, 64–65. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. Robert Ricatte (Monaco: Fasquele and Flammarion,

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1956), 22: 31–32. In their entry for May 31, 1896, the Goncourts repeat Duret’s report, stating, “he sees phantoms, which he fears to encounter alone, and several times he has asked [Duret] not to leave” (my translation). Pennell and Pennell, Whistler Journal, 273. On ghosts as negative beings, see Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 2: 280. For a discussion of the fear incited among mediums by ghosts, see Earl Wesley Fornell, The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 67. Whistler may have dealt with his fear of ghosts by traveling at night accompanied by companions who could provide assurances in the manner of Menpes and Duret. For his companions, see Richard Dorment, “Nocturnes,” in Dorment et al., Whistler, 120–21. 40. Hartmann, Whistler Book, 70. Pall Mall Gazette, March 4, 1890, quoted in Whistler on Art: Selected Letters and Writing of James McNeill Whistler, ed, and intro. Nigel Thorp (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 120; Haldane MacFall, Whistler: Butterfly, Wasp, Wit, Master of the Arts, Enigma (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1905), 70; Pennell, Life of James McNeill Whistler, 1: 163; Mauclair, “Whistler,” 310–12 (8–11); “Art: The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Spectator, May 4, 1878, 568, included in Goebel, “Arrangement,” 914. The quote from Christian Brinton is cited in Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 72. See Caffin, American Painting, 296. 41. Hartmann’s discussion is mainly about portraiture, but it does include a consideration of landscapes. Hartmann, Whistler Book, 81–99, quotes 89, 90, 96, 142. 42. The quote about an “ethereal ocean” comes from Robert Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 89. See Camille Flammarion, The Unknown (New York: Harper Books, 1900), 303, 307. 43. William C. Brownell, “Whistler in Painting and Etching,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (August 1879): 487; Caffin, American Painting, 382; Royal Cortissoz, “Egotism in Contemporary Art,” Atlantic Monthly 73 (May 1894): 647–48; Planchette; or The Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 305–9. 44. “The Winter Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures in Oil, Dudley Gallery,” The Athenaeum, November 2, 1872, 568, included in Goebel, “Arrangement,” 770. 45. On Whistler’s preference for coarse canvas, see Pennell and Pennell, Life of Whistler, 2: 3. For the remark on Whistler’s paint being applied sparingly, see Otto Bacher, With Whistler in Venice (New York: Century, 1908), 31. On the vibrations of colors and Whistler’s “spiritual eye,” see Hartmann, Whistler Book, 70, 180. For the “vibratory movement” of imponderable fluids, see Joel Tiffany, Lectures on Spiritualism (Cleveland: J. Tiffany, 1851), 112. For a recent discussion of this topic, see Marc Simpson, ed., Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 46. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 57, 146–47; Caffin, American Painting, 292.

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47. Inez Bate to James McNeill Whistler, May 1899/1901, GUW 00226. On Whistler’s evaluation of Tintoretto’s Birth of the Milky Way, see Cortissoz, Common Sense, 213. Pennell and Pennell, Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2: 172; Nigel Thorp, “Studies in Black and White: Whistler’s Photographs in Glasgow University Library,” in Studies in the History of Art: James McNeill Whistler, A Reexamination, ed. Ruth E. Fine (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), 90. 48. For the Asian magpie, see With Kindest Regards: The Correspondences of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeill Whistler 1890–1903, ed. Linda Merrill (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 105–6. See also Bendix, Diabolical Designs, 135. 49. Nigel Thorp mentions that Whistler planned to write a guide to the National Gallery in the 1880s with Malcolm Salaman. To be called In the National Gallery with Whistler, it never came to fruition, but we can surmise that Tintoretto would have been in it and Whistler would have known the iconography. Thorp, “Studies,” 90. For the iconography of Tintoretto’s painting, see Francesco Valcanover and Terisio Pignatti, Tintoretto, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Harry Abrams, 1985), 140. 50. Whistler, Gentle Art, 144–46. 51. A discussion of the quote by Frederic Myers is in Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 149. For the location of heaven in proximity to the Milky Way, see The Harmonial Philosophy: A Compendium and Digest of the Works of Andrew Jackson Davis, ed. “A Doctor of Hermetic Science” (Milwaukee: National Spiritualist Association of Churches, n.d.), 180, 186. 52. James McNeill Whistler to Rosalind Birnie Philip (n.d), GUW 04690. The discussion is about arrangements for Beatrix’s grave; Whistler remarks that she knows about them. 53. James McNeill Whistler to Charles Freer, March 24, 1897, in Kindest Regards, ed. Merrill, 114. 54. On spirits operating through birds, see Emma Hardinge (Britten), Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: Published by the Author, 1870), 195. 55. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1999), 337. On Mrs. Guppy’s practices, see Planchette, 231. 56. On Impressionism and the city, see Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 87 (December 2005): 664–87. 57. Robert Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 83–84. For related developments, see Pyne, Higher Life, 26–28, 97–105. On Whistler as a “Master” and his contemplative intervals, see Robbins, A Fragile Modernism, 23, 36. 58. “The Dudley Gallery Winter Exhibition,” Art Journal (February 1876): 45, is included in Goebel, “Arrangement,” 820. 59. For a discussion of Gautier and his ideals, see Ronald W. Johnson, “Whis-

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tler’s Musical Modes: Symbolist Symphonies Numinous Nocturnes,” Arts Magazine 55 (April 1981): 166. 60. McMullen, Victorian Outsider, 216. 61. James McNeill Whistler to Beatrix Whistler, June 11, 1891 [?], GUW 06591. On Pointillism, see Pennell and Pennell, Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2:219. 62. For Fernand Khnopff, see Brendan Cole, “Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff’s Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses,” Art Bulletin 91 (September 2009): 325–42. 63. For the relation between James’s philosophy and interest in art, see Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), xx. On James and Rembrandt, see William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; New York: Dover, 1956), 229. Mention of ether is found in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, intro. Eugene Kennedy (1902; New York: Triumph Books, 1991), 60. For James and the paranormal, see William James on Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), and William James, Essays in Psychical Research, foreword Frederick H. Burkhardt, intro. Robert A. McDermott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 64. James, Psychical Research, 201, 212–13. For more on realities behind surfaces, see Lodge, Survival of Man, 247. 65. James, Psychical Research, 134–35. 66. George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880– 1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 153. 67. David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2005), 298. 68. On the decline of the popularity of Whistler’s style, see Pyne, Higher Life, 201–6; Marc Simpson, “Painting Softly—An Introduction,” in Simpson, ed., Breath on Glass, 17. Chapter 5. Land of Promise 1. Elliott Daingerfield, “A Reminiscence of George Inness” (1895), quoted in George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy, ed. Adrienne Baxter Bell (New York: Braziller, 2006), 199. 2. Montgomery Schuyler, “George Inness: The Man and His Work,” Forum 18 (November 1894): 311. 3. George Inness, Jr., Life, Art and Letters of George Inness, intro. Elliott Daingerfield (New York: Century, 1917), 61. See also Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (New York: George Braziller, 2003), 35. 4. For the religious background of Inness, see Schuyler, “Inness,” 302–3. On Inness’s interest in numbers, see G. W. Sheldon, “George Inness” (1882), quoted in George Inness, ed. Bell, 181. On the interest in the psychic driving Inness to Swedenborg, see Charles Caffin, “Some American Landscape Painters,” (1904), cited in Adrienne Baxter Bell, “George Inness: Artist, Writer, Philosopher,” in George Inness, ed. Bell, 42.

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5. For Inness at Eagleswood, see Doreen Bolger Burke, “Louis Comfort Tiffany and His Early Training at Eagleswood, 1862–1865,” American Art Journal 19 (Fall 1987): 29–39. See also Bell, Visionary Landscape, 25–26, and Michael Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 1: 76–77. 6. Joshua C. Taylor, William Page: The American Titian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 32–33. For further evidence of the interest in Spiritualism in Page’s circle, see, for example, Robert D. Benedict to William Page, June 1853, Archives of American Art (henceforth, AAA), Roll 20/501–502. 7. Bell, Visionary Landscape, 76–78. 8. “Inness’s Allegorical Pictures,” (1867), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 109–12. See also Sally M. Promey, “The Ribband of Faith: George Inness, Color Theory, and the Swedenborg Church,” American Art Journal 26, 1–2 (1994): 52–55. Bell, Visionary Landscape, 82–85; Rachael Ziady DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 145–70; Quick, George Inness, 1: 270–74. Much of what follows comes from these sources. On society being in human form, see Theophilus Parsons, Essays, 3 vols. (Boston: William Carter and Brother, 1868), 1: 107. On a city descending into the clouds, see “Fine Arts: The Roys Gallery—New Pictures,” New York Evening Post, July 2, 1867, 1, cited in DeLue, Inness, 159. Some sense of the extent to which Inness consulted Swedenborgian ideas when envisioning social improvement can be gained by considering his proposal that organizations such as the National Academy be replaced by “small societies in each of which all the members have one general aim tending to the development of some distinct artistic sympathy.” Large, national exhibitions would be arranged in a manner that would acknowledge these societies by hanging the works of members together. This proposal resembles the system governing Swedenborg’s heaven, which consisted of diverse societies of kindred spirits that collectively compose the Grand Man. For Inness’s statements, see George Inness, “Strong Talk on Art,” New York Evening Post, June 3, 1879, included in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 736–38, quote 737. 9. “Inness’s Allegorical Pictures,” George Inness, ed. Bell, 111–12. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, trans. George Dole (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1984), 322–27, quote 67; Hiram Powers to Alfred Ibbotson, July 25, 1870, AAA 1144/1308. 10. Quick, George Inness, 2: 421–22. On the railroad and its correspondences to the human body, see James John Garth Wilkinson, The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851; London: New Church Press, 1918), 29–31. Inness’s ideas about correspondences relating to geometry, number, and color have been much discussed, but no definitive relationship with the paintings has been identified. On Inness’s interest in geometry and numbers, see Michael Quick, “George Inness: The Spiritual Dimension,” in Gail Stavitsky and William H. Gerdts, George Inness: Presence of the Unseen (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1994), 30–32. For an authoritative discussion of Inness’s interest in color, see Promey, “George Inness.” George Inness, Jr., remarks

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that his father regularly changed his opinions about color; this makes any specific assessment of the symbolic nature of his colors highly unlikely. Inness, Jr., George Inness, 91. It may be that he was equally varying in his determinations about geometry and numbers. 11. O. S. Fowler, A Home for All (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1851). On Page’s octagonal house, see Taylor, Page, 184; Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 350–58, quote 352. 12. Henry James, “Roman Neighborhoods,” in Henry James, Transatlantic Sketches (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1875), 165, quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “Inness and Italy,” in Irma B. Jaffe, ed., The Italian Presence in American Art: 1860–1920 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 56. 13. Quick, George Inness, 1:330. 14. For Kate Field’s communications with the dead, see Kate Field, ed., Planchette’s Diary (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1868). Field claims only to have edited messages received from the other world. For Elihu Vedder and Swedenborg, see Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V.: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 345. See also Jane Dillenberger, “Between Faith and Doubt: Subjects for Meditation,” in Joshua Taylor, Jane Dillenberger, Richard Murrary, et al., Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, intro. Regina Soria (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 115–27, quote by Davies 115; Joshua C. Taylor, “Perceptions and Digressions,” in Taylor et al., Perceptions and Evocations, 61. See also Colbert, Measure, 68–71. 15. Quick, George Inness, 1: 322–37. On Inness and Titian, see Bell, “George Inness,” 20–22. On Inness scraping the surface of his paintings, see DeLue, Inness, 141, 220–21. 16. On technique, see Taylor, Page, 77–82, 132; Marjorie Dakin Arkelian and George W. Neubert, George Inness Landscapes: His Signature Years (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1978), 16. On Titian’s painterly procedures and Inness, see Bell, “George Inness,” 18–19. On introducing the personal element by means of brushwork, see Bell, Visionary Landscape, 52–55. 17. For Inness’s remarks on Titian’s work, see E., “Mr. Inness on Art-Matters” (1879), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 69, 71–72. On Inness and mediums, see Elliott Daingerfield, “Introduction,” in Inness, Jr., George Inness, xx. On Vedder’s circle and Inness’s trip to Pieve di Cadore, see Quick, George Inness, 1: 322, 359. 18. On Inness’s visits to the homes of famous men, see Inness, Jr., George Inness, 75. Story’s comments can be found in William Wetmore Story, Conversations in a Studio, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 1: 285–86. The remarks on Shakespeare’s home and related matters come from, No author, “Old Masters,” The Crayon 2 (July 11, 1855): 15–16. On Page and the mask of Shakespeare, see Taylor, Page, 195–201, quote 200. 19. For an account of the patronage and circumstances relating to Ampezzo Pass, Titian’s home, see Quick, George Inness, 1: 503–5. 20. For a review of the social conventions surrounding views of artistic genius

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toward the end of the nineteenth century, see Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). On Inness as a clairvoyant, see J. R. W. Hitchcock, Catalogue: Special Exhibition of Oil Painting Works of George Inness, NA (New York: American Art Association, 1884), 10, 38. 21. Mention of Titian’s influence on Inness’s techniques can be found in Inness, Jr, George Inness, 234. For more on Titian’s techniques and Inness, see Bell, “George Inness,” 18–21, and Bell, Visionary Landscape, 46–47, 139. The passage on Titian’s use of his fingers is quoted in Francesco Valconover, “An Introduction to Titian,” in Titian: Prince of Painters (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1990), 24. Bell mentions Leonardo and Turner as artists who also used their fingers; the former did so in his underpainting, while the latter was not particularly admired by Inness. It seems highly unlikely that either of these men could have influenced Inness in this matter. For Inness’s thoughts on Turner as a genius corrupted by a love of money, see No author, “A Painter on Painting” (1878), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 63. For more on this subject, see Cikovsky, “Inness and Italy,” 57–59. 22. A review of Inness’s work in Medfield from 1860 to 1863 can be found in Quick, George Inness, 1: 171–72. Inness’s remarks on spontaneity and want of finish are in “A Painter,” in George Inness, ed. Bell, 66–67. 23. For related issues see Bell, Visionary Landscape, 37–38. 24. On Inness’s use of his thumb to paint, see Frederick Stymetz Lamb, “Reminiscences of George Inness” (1917), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 219; Daingerfield, “George Inness,” 200; and S. C. G. Watkins, “Reminiscences of George Inness, the Great Painter, as I Knew Him” (1928), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 231. On the use of a palette knife and the wooden end of the brush, see DeLue, Inness, 136, 173. On the techniques used in Early Autumn, Montclair (1891, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware), see Bell, Visionary Landscape, 139. This also lists the use of similar passages in other paintings. 25. On Inness as a man possessed, see Daingerfield, “George Inness,” 200. For Inness’s working like mad, see Stanwood Cobb, “Reminiscences of George Inness by Darius Cobb” (1894), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 191–92. On Inness’s working in a rapt condition, see Henry Eckford, “George Inness,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 24 (May 1882): 60. Inness’s being viewed as a “genius” by his contemporaries is discussed in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Life and Work of George Inness (New York: Garland, 1977), 109. On the spiritual unfolding of Inness, see Inness, Jr., George Inness, 184–85. 26. On Inness’s claiming he had forms at his fingertips, see Daingerfield, “George Inness,” 200. Schuyler’s comment on Inness’s life currents is quoted in Burns, Modern Artist, 151. Watkins on Inness’s soul being transferred to the canvas is in Watkins, “Reminiscences,” 231. For extramission, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9–10. For a related discussion of Inness’s brushwork embodying influx see Bell, George Inness, 37.

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27. On creating without paint, see George Inness, Jr., “George Inness,” in George Inness, ed. Bell, 163, 168. For the quote on Raphael, see W., “Dialogue Between a Spiritualist and a Skeptic,” Sacred Circle 2, 3 (1855): 115. 28. The Bangs Sisters, Lizzie and May, had been mediums since childhood but only began in 1894 to use the process described here. James Coats, Photographing the Invisible (1911; New York: Arno Press, 1973), 292–326, quote by Louis B. Leach, husband of the deceased, 309; Hamlin Garland, Forty Years of Psychic Research (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 14. On several occasions, the Bangs sisters were exposed as frauds; see Hereward Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 91. 29. On art as a means of cultivating the artist’s own spiritual nature, see No author, “A Painter,” in George Inness, ed. Bell, 66–67. For related ideas, see DeLue, George Inness, 87. 30. On the “civilized landscape” see No author, “A Painter,” 66–67. 31. For Henry George and the single tax movement, I have consulted Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1880; New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1940); Arthur Nichols Young, The Single Tax Movement in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1916); Louis F. Post, What Is the Single Tax? (New York: Vanguard, 1926); Jacob Oser, Henry George (New York: Twayne, 1974). The quote on the theological orientation of George is in Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 207. For a discussion of George and Inness, see Leo G. Mazow, “George Inness: Problems in Antimodernism” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1996); Leo G. Mazow, “George Inness, Henry George, the Single Tax, and the Future Poet,” American Art 18 (Spring 2004): 59–77. For a review of Henry George’s impact on American art, see Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 32. For George’s interest in phrenology, see Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 185. George’s quote on population is in George, Progress, 133. See also Mazow, “Antimodernism,” 141. 33. For George’s interest in lots of forty to eighty acres, see Young, Single Tax, 48. George’s dedication to Jeffersonian democracy is discussed in George, Progress, 455. See also Meixner, Realist Painting, 121–23. Mazow mentions this in passing: Mazow, “Antimodernism,” 143. For the quote on the retrospective nature of George’s theory, see Oser, George, 64. On the four-acre farms of Rome, see George, Progress, 547–49, quote 547. For his remarks on California and Dakota, see 253. 34. For George’s popularity among Swedenborgians, see Mazow, “Antimodernism,” 149. On Inness reading George’s work in the early 1880s, see Mazow, “George Inness,” 59. Inness seemingly addressed issues related to George’s theories at least once in a figurative work rendered in the 1880s, a period when his interest in this genre was spurred by the return home of artists trained in Paris and Munich to depict the figure

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en plein air. In 1884, a critic described his Wanderer (location unknown), a portrayal of an abandoned woman carrying her child, as illustrating “the bitterness of a homeless life brought sharply out in contrast with the peaceful comfort of the farmer.” This subject likely found its inspiration in George’s indictment of modern society. His claim, for example, that “the ‘tramp’ comes with the locomotive” epitomized his alarm about the price paid for material progress. Vagrancy was not, he contended, the inevitable condition of a certain portion of humanity; it was the product of misplaced social priorities. In 1894, responding to a depression that had swept the country a year earlier, Inness took up this issue in an article written to endorse the eight-hour day. Reducing the time each laborer spent at work, he proposed, would provide employment for more and reduce the numbers of “idle men in every community.” Painted almost a decade earlier, The Wanderer likewise was intended to call attention to the plight of those forgotten by society. Despite this one (lost) painting, the preponderance of evidence regarding Inness’s allegiance to George appears in his landscapes. On Inness’s turn to monumental figures in the early 1880s, see Quick, George Inness, 2: 1–2, 6. See also Mazow, “Antimodernism,” and Mazow, “George Inness.” Mazow reviews not only the figurative work but also Inness’s tendency to appropriate paintings he had already sold. Mazow proposes that the joint ownership presumed by this act drew on notions of collective ownership of the land advocated by George. But the economist is quite specific about this principle applying to land, not moveable property. Inness acknowledged this and stated, “the individual has certain rights to that which he pays for.” His tendency to repossess paintings is probably attributable to an arrogance that contemporaries often viewed as eccentricity or the prerogative of genius. For Inness’s quote, see George Inness, “Speech on Henry George” (1890), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 137; Hitchcock, Catalogue, 10. For George’s remark on the tramp and the locomotive, see George, Progress, 7. For Inness on unemployment, see Inness, “Unite and Succeed” (1894), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 139. 35. For Inness on the ideal, see Inness, “Speech,” 136–37. All the quotes are from this source. George discusses the progressive nature of humanity in George, Progress, 476. 36. On working our way to paradise, see George Inness, Letter to Ripley Hitchcock (March 23, 1884), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 130. Once his system came to fruition, George declared, populations would be more evenly distributed, relieving the overcrowding of cities while transforming the neglected portions of the countryside into productive, agricultural districts. Urban dwellers would reap the benefits of pure air and sunshine; rustics would partake of some of the economic and cultural advantages of the city, and all would intuit from their improved conditions the possibilities of a higher existence. This condition prevails in The Mill Stream, Montclair, N.J. (1885–89, Minneapolis Institute of Arts), which depicts the Crump factory near Inness’s home in a park-like setting, creating, according to Michael Quick, “an image of an industrial concern in harmony with the landscape.” For George on diffuse populations and gardens around houses, see George, Progress, 451. On The Mill Stream, Montclair, N.J. and Crump’s factory, see Quick, George Inness, 2: 192.

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37. On the orchard’s providing inspiration, see Arekelian and Neubert, George Inness, 18. 38. On the popularity of the single tax in New Jersey, see Young, Single Tax, 132. This single tax club in Montclair is discussed in Mazow, “George Inness,” 61. 39. On Inness’s “signature style” of 1884–94, see Arekelian and Neubert, George Inness, 7. 40. Bell applies the term sgraffito to The Home at Montclair in George Inness, 98. 41. For the idea that art was founded on laws analogous to those of life, see E., “Mr. Inness” in George Inness, ed. Bell, 75. Inness’s belief that one must see things in relation to one another is quoted in No author, “Strong Talk on Art” (1879), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 86. 42. For Swedenborg on light from the divine sun and on effluvia, see Emanuel Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, trans. John C. Ager (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1982), 168, 165. George’s statement is in George, Progress, 564–65; Cikovsky, Life and Work, 303. For more on spiritual sight, see DeLue, Inness. 43. For Swedenborg on sight in heaven, see Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 134–35. Some of those who have discussed Inness’s paintings as depicting a direct vision of the celestial world and its qualities of space include Cikovsky, Life and Work, 327–37; Arkelian and Neubert, George Inness, 7–8; John Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984), 107; Quick, “George Inness,” 11; Bell, Visionary Landscape, 31; DeLue, Inness, 3; Quick, George Inness, 2: 35–39. DeLue also considers ideas relating to psychometry in DeLue, Inness, 124. Bell examines the wraith-like figures in Inness’s landscapes in Bell, George Inness, 120. 44. Cikovsky, Life and Work, 329. 45. For an account of The Sign of Promise, see Natalie Spassky, “George Inness, 1824–1899,” in American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Kathleen Luhrs, assisted by Jacolyn A. Mott, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 2: 250–53. The reviewer’s response to this work is quoted in No author, “The Sign of Promise” (1863), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 107. 46. The response to Nantucket Moor is in No author, “The National Academy Exhibition,” Critic 7 (November 28, 1885): 256, quoted in DeLue, Inness, 215. For “ethereal and tender light,” see William Howe Downes and Frank Torrey Robinson, “Some Living American Painters: Critical Conversations by Howe and Torrey,” Art Interchange 32 (April 1894), in Burns and Davis, American Art, 866. On art as a subtle essence, see E., “Mr. Inness,” 81, 76. On correspondences being actual, not metaphorical, see, Cikovsky, Life and Work, 321. For Inness’s ideas about a spiritual science, a term favored by Spiritualists, see Inness, Jr., George Inness, 64. 47. For Inness on the invisible side of visible objects, see George Inness, “Letter on Impressionism” (late 1880s–early 1890s), in George Inness, ed. Bell, 131. 48. No author, “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 18 (1871): 830–36, quote 831. For Burnham, Swedenborg, and the City Beautiful,

290

Notes to Pages 180–188

see Thomas Hines, Burnham of Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 246–48; David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2005), 246–48. Chapter 6. Romantic Conjurations 1. Sarah Betzer, “Ingres’s Studio Between History and Allegory: Rachel, Antiquity, and Tragedie,” Art Bulletin 87 (September 2006): 539. 2. “Composition Written by Mr. Fuller When Quite Young,” George Fuller Papers, Archives of American Art (henceforth AAA), AAA 610/649; Sidney Dickinson, “George Fuller,” Bay State Monthly 1 (June 1884): 371, AAA 610/1465. 3. W. D. Howells, “Sketch of George Fuller’s Life” and Thomas W. Ball, “Incidents of Early Days,” in George Fuller: His Life and Work, ed. Josiah B. Millet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 19, 9. 4 Sarah Burns, “Images of Slavery: George Fuller’s Depictions of the Antebellum South,” American Art Journal 15 (1983): 37. George Fuller to “Dear Elijah,” Apr. 26, 1855, AAA 606/1110. George Fuller to “My dear friend Rebecca,” AAA 606/1181. 5. George Fuller to “Dear Hatty,” July 3, 1856, AAA 606/1186. 6. Howells, “Fuller’s Life,” 24. 7. The document is simply signed “K.” This is likely Katherine Yale, Linus’s wife, who spells her name with a C or a K. K, “Psychometrical Reading,” AAA 609/188–89. 8. “Phrenological Character of George Fuller: Given by Mr. George Gouda [?] through Miss. E. H.,” Brooklyn, New York, June 21, 1856, AAA 606/1035. 9. “Phrenological Character: Mr. George Fuller given at Fowler and Wells’ Phrenological Cabinet No. 308 Broadway NY by Nelson Sizer,” May 4, 1859, AAA 610/1446– 1460. 10. Sarah Burns, “A Study of the Life and Poetic Vision of George Fuller (1822– 1884),” American Art Journal 13 (Autumn 1981): 22; Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 159– 61. 11. George Fuller to “My dear Agnes,” April 15, 1878, AAA 607/322; George Fuller to “Dear Wife,” April 18, 1878, AAA 607/327; George Fuller to “Dear Agnes,” April 29, 1878, AAA 607/336; George Fuller to “Dear Agnes,” May 2, 1878, AAA 607/345–346; George Fuller to “My dear Agnes,” May 26, 1878, AAA 607/359. 12. Howells, “Fuller’s Life,” 50; George Fuller to “Dear Agnes,” May 13, 1878, AAA 607/352; 13. Linus Yale to “My dear Mrs. Fuller,” December 1, 1867, AAA 609/28; newspaper clipping, no date, no author, AAA 610/1521; newspaper clipping, no date, Cyrus Cobb, AAA 610/1478; “George Fuller’s Pictures,” newspaper clipping, no date, AAA 610/1503; “The George Fuller Memorial Volume,” newspaper clipping, no author, no date, AAA 610/1502. 14. Agnes Fuller to George Fuller, April 29, 1878, AAA 608/322. The writing is not especially clear: it reads “You will byjuged [be judged?] by Spiritualism.”

Notes to Pages 188–196

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15. From “Your mother Yale,” to “My dear delightful daughter Agnes [Fuller], November 23, 1883, AAA 609/136. On Psyche being translated, review included in No author, “George Fuller’s Life,” AAA 609/834. 16. Dickinson, “Fuller,” 369, 371, 375; Sarah Burns, “George Fuller: The Hawthorne of Our Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 18 (Summer–Autumn 1983), 134; Burns, “Poetic Vision,” 29. 17. Burns, “Poetic Vision,” 29. 18. Burns, “Poetic Vision,” 26. See also Dickinson, “Fuller,” 376. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895). 19. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 118. See also “The Lesson of a Life,” newspaper clipping, no date, no author, AAA 610/1506; Burns, “Hawthorne of Our Art,” 129. 20. “Art Gossip at Home and Abroad” [in pencil, March 20–27, 1882], newspaper clipping, no author, AAA 610/130. Catherine Yale to “My dear Agnes,” November 2, 1881, AAA 609/130; “The Lesson of a Life,” newspaper clipping, no date, no author, AAA 610/1504. See also Burns, “Hawthorne of Our Art,” 133. 21. George Eliot, “The Spanish Gypsy,” in The Complete Works of George Eliot: Poems, Essays, Leaves from a Note Book (New York: George D. Sproul, 1901), 5: 70, 66; Sarah Burns, “Black, Quadroon, Gypsy: Women in the Art of George Fuller,” Massachusetts Review 25 (Summer–Autumn 1985): 420–22. 22. M. G. Van Rensselaer, “George Fuller,” The Century 27 (December 1883); 229; “Lesson of a Life,” AAA 610/1504. 23. “Fuller’s Pictures” [in pencil, Advertiser, April 25, 1884], newspaper clipping, no author, AAA 610/1501; “Memorial Exhibition,” Boston Daily Globe [in pencil, April 24, 1884], AAA 610/1501. 24. For a perceptive account of Ryder’s lifestyle, see Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 221–25. On Ryder’s religion, see David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 2005), 285. See also William Inness Homer and Lloyd Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), 16. 25. For William Marshall and the Fitzpatricks, see Elizabeth Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 19–20, 153–54. 26. On the subject’s choosing the artist and on dreams possessing one’s work, see Homer and Goodrich, Ryder, 53, 186. On eyes seeing the vision beyond and the need for patience, see A. P. Ryder, “Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse, 1905,” Broadway Magazine 14 (September 1905): 10–11, in American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, ed. John W. McCoubrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 187. Ryder’s remark on the inchworm is in Frederic Fairchild Sherman, Albert Pinkham Ryder (New York: Privately Printed, 1920), 28. 27. For Ryder’s The Resurrection, see Sherman, Ryder, 49. For Spiritualist ideas about the Resurrection, see Isaac K. Funk, The Widow’s Mite and Other Psychic

292

Notes to Pages 196–201

Phenomena (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904), viii, 31; J. Hewat McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse: Its Theory and Practice (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), 45, 63. The quote about spirits walking is in Mrs. A. T. Hall, “Christ, A Spiritualist,” Sacred Circle 1 (February 1855): 454. 28. On Ryder’s having seen Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art), see Broun, Ryder, 234–35. On “psychopathic greetings,” see Ryder to Mrs. Lloyd (Peggy) Williams, August 29, 1913. For Joan of Arc, see “Joan of Arc,” quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Ryder, 79, 211–12. 29. On Joan of Arc’s voices, see Funk, Psychic Phenomena, 311. On Voltaire, see Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, intro. Colin Wilson (1848; Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986), 216. For the Civil War, see Emma Hardinge (Britten), Modern American Spiritualism (New York: Published by the Author, 1870), 507. For Victoria Woodhull, see Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998), xii. 30. Elliott Daingerfield, “Sketch of His Life Written by Elliott Daingerfield— in Response to a Request,” AAA 3615/36–37. For Daingerfield and Ryder, see Elliott Daingerfield, “Albert Pinkham Ryder: Artist and Dreamer,” Scribner’s Magazine 63 (March 1918): 380–84. 31. Ryder, “Paragraphs,” 187–88; No author, “The Younger Painters of America: First Paper,” Scribner’s Monthly 20 (May 1880): 101. On radiance, see Henry Eckford, “A Modern Colorist: Albert Pinkham Ryder,” The Century 18 (June 1890): 101; Camille Flammarion, The Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 303–4; Hereward Carrington, The Coming Science, intro. James Hyslop (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1908), 164. 32. On Ryder’s Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, see Broun, Ryder, 288–90; Homer and Goodrich, Ryder, 162; Diane Chalmers Johnson, “Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens: Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Response to Richard Wagner’s Gotterdammerung,” American Art 8 (Winter 1994): 22–31. For the Mesmeric themes in Wagner’s operas, see Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 153, 90; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 314–15. 33. On the therapeutic qualities of Wagner’s work, see Katherine Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Though in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 155–56; Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 281. On the similarity of psychic vibrations to those of music, see Flammarion, The Unknown, 236. For the quote on being shook like a tree, see William James, Essays in Psychical Research, intro. Robert A. McDermott, foreword Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 146. 34. On Mesmer and planets, see A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans. Georg Bloch, intro. E. R. Hilgard (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufman, 1980), 13–14. On the influence of the moon, see William Gregory,

Notes to Pages 201–210

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Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and its Phenomena (1909; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 101–2; Frank Podmer, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (1902; New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), 1: 118. On using the force of the universe, see The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, coll. and arr. Henry F. Brownson, vol. 9, Containing the Spirit-Rappers and Criticisms of Some Recent Theories in the Sciences (1854; New York: AMS Press, 1966), 33; McKenzie, Spirit Intercourse, 51. 35. For good accounts of Ryder’s walks at night, see Burns, Dark Side, 237–38, and Broun, Ryder, 138–41. On Ryder soaking in the moonlight, see Sherman, Ryder, 26; “Albert Pinkham Ryder: Biographical Essay by Charles Fitzpatrick” (1917) AAA D181/ 561. For vital fluids escaping from the feet, see Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 169. 36. On the Sanden belt, see Homer and Goodrich, Ryder, 92; Broun, Ryder, 140–41, 10. On electro-therapy see Green, Fit for America, 168–74. 37 Flammarion, The Unknown, 303. 38. Henry Eckford [Charles de Kay], “A Modern Colorist: Albert Pinkham, Ryder,” Century Magazine 40 (June 1890): 258–59, quoted in Burns, The Dark Side, 243. 39. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1866), 23–42, 44–46, 132 (no date, translator, or place of publication given). For Hugo as a Spiritualist, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1981), 457. The present title, Toilers of the Sea, was added during an exhibition in 1884, but art historians assume Ryder gave his consent to the addition and that he and his viewers thought the connection with Hugo’s work enhanced the appreciation of the imagery. See Burns, The Dark Side, 227–28; Broun, Ryder, 303. On the ocean of electricity around us, see Planchette, 216. 40. Flammarion, The Unknown, 308–9. 41. Louise Fitzpatrick to Flora Evergood [no day included] March 1927, in Philip Evergood, “The Master’s Faithful Disciple,” in Philip Evergood Papers, AAA D181/582. 42. Jackson Pollock, “Two Statements on His Paintings, 1944, 1947,” in American Art 1700–1960, ed. McCoubrey, 212. 43. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds., Art in Modern Culture: an Anthology of Critical Texts (London: Phaidon, 1995): 308–14. 44. Flammarion, The Unknown, 307. 45. These movements are reviewed in J. Stillson Judah, The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967). Chapter 7. The Critic as Psychic 1. Much of the content of this chapter appears in Charles Colbert, “A Critical Medium: James Jackson Jarves’s Vision of Art History,” American Art 16 (Spring 2002): 19–35. Jarves acknowledges his sources, listing Alexis Francois Rio, Lord Lindsay, John Ruskin, and Mrs. Jameson as authors whose ideas inspired his own; see James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), vii. In modern literature,

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Notes to Pages 210–215

emphasis is usually placed on the importance of John Ruskin. Wilmerding, for example, remarks that Jarves “promulgated Ruskin’s theories”; see John Wilmerding, American Art (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1976), 93. 2. On Jarves’s childhood collections and his interest in phrenology, see James Jackson Jarves, Why and What Am I? (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1857), 71, 119–21, 197–98. For Boston and its interest in phrenology, see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 14–20. 3. The quote on the faculty of Ideality is in James Jackson Jarves, Art Hints (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 91. On the annihilation of Ideality by Puritanism, the need to exercise the faculties and to keep beauty in religion, see Jarves, Art Hints, 9–10, 75. For a discussion of the obligation to exercise all the faculties, see O. S. Fowler, Self-Culture and Perfection of Character (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1855), 132–33. The quote on the ideal faculty and our identity in heaven is in Jarves, Art Hints, 19. 4. On Jarves and his faith, see William L. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 1: 183, 195. See also Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), 118–21. On Jarves’s rejection of realism, see James Jackson Jarves, Italian Rambles (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 355. For the “ideal faculties” of Americans, see Jarves, Art Hints, 27. For further reflections on French realism and intellectualism, see James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (1864; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 207. On Whitman and phrenology, see Arthur Wrobel, “Walt Whitman and the Fowler Brothers: Phrenology Finds a Bard” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1968). 5. For the account and the quote about a dream of hell, see Jarves, Why and What, 40–45. The remarks by Jarves on ghosts in his childhood and the quote are on 95–96. 6. For the quote on the conditions for encounters with ghosts, see Jarves, Why and What, 94. For a discussion of the time and patience needed for manifestations, see Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 2: 211, 301. See also Isaac K. Funk, The Widow’s Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904), 62. 7. On Jarves’s parents and Daniel Dunglas Home, see Steegmuller, Two Lives, 118. For more on Jarves’s Spiritualism, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 129–30. 8. Jarves, Art Hints, 204. James Jackson Jarves, Art Studies (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861), 133. James Jackson Jarves, A Glimpse of the Art of Japan (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1876), 43. 9. For Art-Hints introducing Americans to art appreciation, see Steegmuller, Two Lives, 142. His plans for a museum are on 171–83, 253. 10. On the cultural custodians, see George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 103–5, quote 103. G.

Notes to Pages 215–222

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Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 13–18. For Jarves on galleries as a means of securing political tranquility, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 272. 11. For Thomas Gold Appleton, see Susan Hale, Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 322, 183, 255, 338–39, 327. 12. W. D. Howells, The Undiscovered Country (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1880), quote by Ford, 86. Phillips’s clairvoyant abilities are suggested on 259. On gender stereotypes in the late nineteenth century, see Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). 13. On Jarves and debates about attributions, see Steegmuller, Two Lives, 148, 223. The quote about an “electrical current,” is in Jarves, Art Studies, 34–35. 14. Jarves, Art Studies, 34–35. 15. On interpreting a work’s spirit, see Jarves, Japan, 144. For spirits lingering in our midst, see Jarves, Art Studies, 148. For the quote on spiritual tonic, Jarves, Japan, 85. On the author’s personal acquaintance with artists of the past, see James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869), 360. 16. On the impossibility of measuring the truth, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 295. For a painting speaking as through disembodied spirits, see Jarves, Art Studies, 148. 17. The parentheses and brackets refer to the fact that these are phrenological faculties- the brackets because the word is not in the quote, the parentheses because that is the way I have marked phrenological faculties. It seemed excessively wordy to include “[the phrenological faculty of Ideality]” though that could be done if you believe it would clarify the idea. 18. The quote on materialism is in Jarves, Art-Idea, 203; Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 353. On the Spiritualists as pioneers in the study of the subconscious, see R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 155. On the account of human nature by the Spiritualists, see Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 25. An example of the praise for Jarves’s evaluation of works of art, see Theodore Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves: A Forgotten New Englander,” New England Quarterly 6 (March–December 1933): 335–36. On the sensibility necessary to discern an artist in his work, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 7. 19. See Jarves, Art-Hints, 63, 2–4. For more on the importance of attentive looking see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 20. Jarves, Art Studies, 92. 21. For the Romans and their phrenology, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 290. A summary of Jarves’s ideas about the Greeks is in Vance, America’s Rome, 1: 196–98. For his views on the Etruscans, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 40–48.

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Notes to Pages 222–227

22. For ‘spiritual clairvoyance” as a property of blood and race, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 48. On the qualities of the Tuscan countryside, see Jarves, Italian Rambles, 31–32. DeLue notes that Jarves drew on Herbert Spencer’s ideas about race and geography for his history of art. Jarves modifies this with his notions about Spiritualism; Rachael Ziady DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 26. On the rise of the independent city-states, see Jarves, ArtHints, 22; Jarves, Art Studies, viii. For the quotes on the “mental wave” and “moral vibrations,” see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 49, 110; Jarves, Art Studies, 103, 246. 23. On the spiritual faculty see Jarves, Art Studies, 231. The quote on the apprehension of the spirit life is in Jarves, Japan, 17. For Fra Angelico and his visions, see Jarves, Art-Hints, 344–45, 366, and Jarves, Art Thoughts, 47. 24. On artists being accounted as Etruscans, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 81. On the Medici and their impact on the arts see Jarves, Art-Hints, 23, and Jarves, Art Thoughts, 7. On the arts and Louis XIV, see Jarves, Art-Hints, 298. 25. On Japanese religious practices, see Jarves, Japan, 32–33, 81, 68. 26 For the Japanese clairvoyant sense of ornament, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 323. On the Etruscans, see Jarves, Japan, 21, remarks on Hokusai, 112. 27. For the soul’s hovering over the body, see Jarves, Japan, 82; his remarks on Japanese renderings of midnight are on 156. On the suggestion of things unseen in the universe, see 94; his response to Ruskin is on 156. On the quote on the “wearisome literalness” of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 141–42. On the value of suggestion over imitation, see Jarves, Japan, 157; on Japanese art taking possession of our spirit, 148. 28. On European art being degraded for centuries since the Renaissance, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 7. On European art, atheism, and superstition, see Jarves, ArtHints, 17. For Jarves on William Blake, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 318, 209. For Jarves on the French, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 144, 207; on the absence of spirituality in modern art, see 120. On the ethical awakening of the West, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 369. 29. For Jarves on suggestion, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 142, and Jarves, Art-Hints, 166. On Corot as a clairvoyant, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 273. On the ending of sectarianism, see Jarves, Art Studies, 58. For more on the religious implications of Corot as a clairvoyant, see Laura L. Meixner, French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161–70. 30. On America as a place to develop the ideal faculties, see Jarves, Art-Hints, 27. On Bierstadt and Church, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 299, and on George Inness, see 372. For Jarves’s ideas about an aesthetic and worshiping race, Jarves, Art Studies, 493. 31. On Yankees needing to study the arts, see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 153. For Jarves on museums, see Jarves, Art-Idea, 266, and Jarves, Italian Rambles, 379. For the quote on “haunts of vice,” see Jarves, Art Thoughts, 315. On enlarging the faculties by art, see Jarves, Art Studies, 8, and on the obligation to exercise all the faculties, see 13. On God’s wanting all the faculties to expand, see Jarves, Art-Hints, 63. For more on attempts to use museums as a means of refining American culture see J. M. Mancini,

Notes to Pages 227–235

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Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 45–131. 32. On the relevance of Italian art to America, see Jarves, Art Studies, 246. The quote on material objects is in Jarves, Art Thoughts, 52–53. 33. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York, Dover, 1994). Veblen’s arguments about art are not especially convincing, try as he might to accommodate it to his system; see 72. On Jarves’s rejection of asceticism and its implications, see Jarves, Art-Hints, 10. 34. For the social implications of consumption, see Roy Porter, “Baudrillard: History, Histeria [sic] and Consumption,” in Forget Baudrillard? ed. Chris Rojeck and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 9. The two meanings of the word “consumption” come together in the sense that the disease was seen to take possession of, and use up, or consume, the body; see Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 9; Sharon Hirsh, “Codes of Consumption: Tuberculosis and Body Image at the Fin-de-Siecle,” in In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon and Gabriel P. Weisbert (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 144–65. 35. On the school of American art, see James Jackson Jarves, Pepero the Boy-Artist: A Brief Memoir of James Jackson Jarves by His Father (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 55. On Pepero’s appreciation of Michelangelo, see 26, 28. 36. Rothman, Shadow of Death, 57–74. The semiotics of disease in nineteenth-century America is also discussed in Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15. For Frances Trollope to James Jackson Jarves, December 31, 1854, see Steegmuller, Two Lives, 138. 37. Jarves, Pepero, 30–32; Jarves, Art Studies, 316. 38. On Pepero’s refusal to invite his friends, see Jarves, Pepero, 30. 39. For the quotes on Michelangelo’s spirit and his art, see Jarves, Art Studies, 439–440. On Jarves’s activities anticipating the collecting policies of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, see Joshua C. Taylor, “The Art Museum in the United States,” in On Understanding Art Museums, ed. Sherman E. Lee (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 37. See also Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 56. For the discussion of art as a religion, see, for example, Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 474. Chapter 8. Lessons in Clairvoyance 1. William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988), 220; David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 259–78. 2. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960). 3. On Henri and Rimmer, see Bernard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (New York: Dover, 1991), 10. On Rimmer’s reliance on Spiritualism and related

298

Notes to Pages 235–238

theories, see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 87–97. On Henri and Swedenborg, see Homer, Henri, 36. For Henri and his dictum on joining no creed, see Henri, Art Spirit, 106. For ghosts in England, see Robert Henri to “Dear Sloans,” September 2, 1907, and Robert Henri to “Dear Sloans,” September 6, 1907, published in Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri, ed. Bernard B. Perlman, intro. Mrs. John Sloan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 165, 171. 4. On Robert Henri as seen by Hal Burrows as a hypnotist, see Kimberly Orcutt, William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri (Greenwich, Conn.: Bruce Museum, 2007), 31. Henri’s magnetic powers are mentioned by Edward Hopper and George Bellows, quoted in Perlman, Henri, 55, 64. Guy Pene du Bois is quoted in Betsy Fahlman, “The Art Spirit in the Classroom: Educating the Modern Woman Artist,” in American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945, ed. Marian Wardle (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 2005), 110. Jo Nivison is quoted in Erika Doss, “Complicating Modernism: Issues of Liberation and Constraint Among the Women Art Students of Robert Henri,” in American Women, ed. Wardle, 118. The quote on the spiritual view of life is in Homer, Henri, 209. For Henri on painting spirit, see Henri, Art Spirit, 240. 5. On Chase and Henri, see Orcutt, Chase. See also Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 74–76. On Henri and Emerson, see Joseph J. Kwiat, “Robert Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition,” PMLA 71 (September 1956): 617–36. For Henri’s ideas, see Henri, Art Spirit, 44, 88, 94, 135, 177. 6. Henri, Art Spirit, 50, 134, 19; Homer, Henri, 193–94. 7. Henri, Art Spirit, 19–20, 171, 26. 8. For the history of ideas about the fourth dimension, see W. Whately Smith, A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival: The Fourth Dimension and Its Applications (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1920). See especially Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), quote by Mable Dodge, 203. 9. For Henri on the fourth dimension, see Henri, Art Spirit, 54, 113. On the circulation of similar ideas, see Max Weber, “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View,” Camera Work 31 (July 1910): 25, reprinted in Patricia Hills, Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 2001), 23–24. 10. Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Robert Henri (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1922), viii; Henri, Art Spirit, 125, 176, 45. 11. Henri, Art Spirit, 159, 170, 32. “The Teaching of Robert Henri,” “The Alice Klauber Manuscript,” quoted in Perlman, Henri, 145. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The OverSoul,” in Essays and Journals, intro. Lewis Mumford (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1968), 196.

Notes to Pages 239–246

299

12. Henri, Art Spirit, 32, 259, 148; Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857), 214–15. 13. Henri, Art Spirit, 16–17, 67, 159–61. On Spiritualists claiming their phenomena were not miracles but governed by natural laws, see Planchett; or the Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 280. 14. On going into a trance, see “Klauber Manuscript,” Perlman, Henri, 144; Henri, Art Spirit, 68–78, quote 77. 15. On issues surrounding Mesmerism and clairvoyance, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Henri’s quote is in Robert Henri to Bill Roberts, n.d., cited in Homer, Henri, 203. For Henri on a penetrating vision, see Henri, Art Spirit, 184. 16. On Henri’s nudes, see Homer, Henri, 260. For Henri on children, see, for example, Art Spirit, 246–47. 17. On the women of Spain, see Robert Henri to John and Dolly (Sloan), January 31, 1924, in Revolutionaries of Realism, ed. Perlman, 300. For Henri on the Irish, see Henri, Art Spirit, 143. On Mesmerism and class, see Winter, Mesmerized, 61–62, 129, quote 129. 18. On “spiritual sight,” see Henri, Art Spirit, 242. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 60. Henri’s quote on faces as realities not yet attained is from Henri, unsent letter October 19, 1917, quoted in Valerie Ann Leeds, Robert Henri: The Painted Spirit (New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2003), 13. For Henri on the progress of the human spirit, see Henri, Art Spirit, 66; on the future revolution, see 199. 19. For Cortissoz on Henri, see Royal Cortissoz, American Artists (1923; New York: AMS Press, 1970), 179–80; for his remarks on “Ellis Island art,” see 3–22. 20. Royal Cortissoz, John LaFarge: A Memoir and a Study (1911; New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 20, 15, 59, 58, 206. Cortissoz, American Artists, 266, 306–7. On Cezanne, see Royal Cortissoz, Art and Common Sense (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 130. 21. On clairvoyance, see Cortissoz, American Artists, 69, 121, 241, 359; Royal Cortissoz, The Painter’s Craft (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 417, 471; Cortissoz, Common Sense, 268. 22. Royal Cortissoz, Personalities in Art (1925; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 9–13, 26–27. 23. George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880– 1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 32–38, quote 32. 24. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, intro. Ellen Kappy Sockiel (1912; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), quote 37; Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 332. 25. Bruce Wilshire, “The Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World: William James’s Last Thoughts,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 107, 120, 122–23.

300

Notes to Pages 247–255

26. James, Radical Empiricism, 9–10. 27. On antinomianism and Spiritualism, see Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 34. Postscript 1. Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2009. 2. White, Unsettled Minds, 192. 3. Edward Lind Morse, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 1: 325, 367. 4. Morse, Morse, 2: 195, 225, 46–47, quote 46. 5. Morse, Morse, 2: 221–22. Morse’s use of the term “tricks” in reference to animal magnetism is on 225. 6. William Kloss, Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988), 127–29; David Tatham, “Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre: The Figures in the Foreground,” American Art Journal 13 (Autumn 1981): 38–48. Tatham lists the paintings depicted on 34. His discussion of the American tourists is in on 46. 7. Samuel F. B. Morse, Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, ed. and intro. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 56; Paul J. Staiti, “Samuel F. B. Morse’s Search for a Personal Style: The Anxiety of Influence,” Winterthur Portfolio 16 (Winter 1981): 267–69; Tatham, “Morse’s Gallery,” 46. 8. On Rimmer’s beliefs, see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 85. The source of the quote is Daniel Howard, cited in Truman H. Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician (1890; New York: DaCapo, 1970), 21. 9. J. Stillson Judah, The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 170. This reviews the directives of New Thought. The italics in the reference to things are in the original. 10. William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988), 232. For more on Henri’s continuing influence on younger generations and his use of the brushstroke to express his interest in Henri Bergson and vitalism, see Sarah Vure, “After the Armory: Robert Henri, Individualism and American Modernisms,” in The Eight and American Modernisms, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57–64; Daniel A. Siedell, “Robert Henri and His Influence,” American Art Review 14 (June 2002): 148–53. 11. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities (Winter 1947–48): 79, reprinted in John W. McCoubrey, American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 213; Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51 (December 1952): 23, reprinted in McCoubrey, American Art, 216. 12. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), 11–12.

Notes to Page 256

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13. Jackson Pollock, Arts and Architecture 61 (February, 1944): 14, reprinted in McCoubrey, American Art, 212. 14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 999. 15. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 50.

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Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources Archival Sources Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (AAA) Biographical Files, Green Library, Bing Wing, Special Collections, Stanford University Harriet Hosmer Papers, Schleisinger Library, Radcliffe College (Hosmer Papers) Pennell-Whistler Collection, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, (PWC) University of Glasgow, “The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855–1903.” Ed. Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Monfort, and Nigel Thorp (GUW)

Journals and Newspapers Appleton’s Journal of Literature and Art American Phrenological Journal Boston Daily Advertiser The Crayon Gallery of Spirit Art, and Illustrated Quarterly Magazine Spiritual Telegraph The Sacred Circle United States Magazine and Democratic Review

Published Works A. [Thomas Gold Appleton], A Sheaf of Papers. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895. Albee, John. Henry Dexter: A Memorial. Cambridge, Mass.: Privately Printed, 1898. Bacher, Otto. With Whistler in Venice. New York: Century, 1908. [Ballou, Adin]. Autobiography of Adin Ballou. Ed. William S. Heywood. Lowell, Mass.: Vox Populi Press, 1896. Ballou, Adin, History of the Hopedale Community. Ed. William S. Heywood. Lowell, Mass.: Vox Populi Press, 1897. Bartlett, Truman H. The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician. 1890. New York: DaCapo, 1970. Caffin, Charles. The Story of American Painting. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937. Capron, Eliab Wilkinson. Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions. 1855. New York: Arno Press, 1976.

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Carr, Cornelia. Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912. Carrington, Hereward. The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920. Coats, James, Photographing the Invisible. 1911. New York: Arno Press, 1973. Combe, George. The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects. Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1829. Cortissoz, Royal. American Artists. 1923. New York: AMS Press, 1970. —. Art and Common Sense. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. —. John LaFarge: A Memoir and a Study. 1911. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. —. The Painter’s Craft. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930. —. Personalities in Art. 1925. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. Crowe, Catherine. The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers. Intro. Colin Wilson. 1848. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986. Daingerfield, Elliott. “Albert Pinkham Ryder: Artist and Dreamer.” Scribner’s Magazine 63 (March 1918): 380–84. —. George Inness: The Man and His Art. New York: Privately Printed, 1911. Davis, Andrew Jackson. The Great Harmonia: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual and Celestial Universe. 2 vols. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1851. —. The Magic Staff: An Autobiography. Boston: Colby and Rich, 1857. —. The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse, Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1855. Denton, William. The Soul of Things: Psychometric Experiments for Re-Living History. 1863. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1988. Dickinson, Sidney. “George Fuller.” Bay State Monthly 1 (June 1884): 367–77. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The History of Spiritualism. 2 vols. New York: George H. Doran, 1926. Dunlap, William. A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. Ed. Rita Weiss, intro. James Thomas Flexner. 2 vols. 1834. New York: Dover, 1969. Eckford, Henry. “George Inness.” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 24 (May 1882): 57–64. —. “A Modern Colorist: Albert Pinkham Ryder.” Century 18 (June 1890): 101–2. Edmonds, John W., and George T. Dexter. Spiritualism. New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853. Field, Kate, ed. Planchette’s Diary. New York: J.S. Redfield, 1868. Flammarion, Camille. The Unknown. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. Flournoy, Theodore, Spiritism and Psychology. Trans. and ed. Hereward Carrington. New York: Harper Brothers, 1911. Fowler, O. S. The Practical Phrenologist. Boston: O.S. Fowler, 1869. —. Self-Culture and Perfection of Character. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1855. Funk, Isaac K. The Widow’s Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904. Garland, Hamlin. Forty Years of Psychic Research. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

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George, Henry. Progress and Poverty. 1880. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1940. Graham, Sylvester. Lectures on the Science of Human Life. 2 vols. Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1839. Gregory, William. Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and Its Phenomena. Intro. M. A. Oxon (William Stainton Moses). 1909. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Hale, Susan. Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton. New York: D. Appleton, 1885. Hardinge (Britten), Emma. Modern American Spiritualism. New York: Published by the Author, 1870. Hartmann, Sadakichi. The Whistler Book. Boston: L.C. Page, 1910. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. Henri, Robert, The Art Spirit. 1923. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902. Hitchcock, J. R. W. Special Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Works of George Inness, N.A. New York: American Art Association, 1884. Howells, William Dean. The Undiscovered Country. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1880. Inness, George, Jr. Life, Art and Letters of George Inness. Intro. Elliott Daingerfield. New York: Century, 1917. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. 2 vols. 1908. New York: Grove Press, 1957. James, William. Essays in Psychical Research. Foreword Frederick H. Burckhardt, intro. Robert A. McDermott. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. —. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Intro. Ellen Kappy Sockiel. 1912. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. —. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Intro. Eugene Kennedy. 1902. New York: Triumph Books, 1991. —. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. 1897. New York: Dover, 1956. Jarves, James Jackson. Art Hints. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855. —. The Art-Idea. Ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. 1864. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. —. Art Studies. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861. —. Art Thoughts. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869. —. A Glimpse of the Art of Japan. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1876. —. Italian Rambles. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1883. —. Pepero the Boy-Artist, a Brief Memoir of James Jackson Jarves by His Father. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. —. Why and What Am I? Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1857. Lanman, Charles. Haphazard Personalities: Chiefly of Noted Americans. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1886.

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Lester, Charles Edwards. The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times. 2 vols. New York: Paine and Burgess, 1845. Lodge, Sir Oliver. The Survival of Man: A Study in Unrecognized Human Faculty. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ed. Andrew Hilen. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972. —. Selected Poems. New York: Gramercy Books, 2001. Longfellow, Samuel, ed. Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891. MacFall, Haldane. Whistler: Butterfly, Wasp, Wit, Master of the Arts, Enigma. Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1905. Mauclair, Camille [Camille L. C. Fausti]. “James Whistler et le mystère dans la peinture.” In Trois morceaux sur James M. N. Whistler. Library of the Freer Gallery of Art. Originally appeared in Revue Politique et Littéraire: Revue Bleue 20 (October 3, 1903): 440–44. McKenzie, J. Hewat. Spirit Intercourse: Its Theory and Practice. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917. Menpes, Mortimer. Whistler as I Knew Him. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1904. Millet, Josiah B., ed. George Fuller: His Life and Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Morse, Edward Lind. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Morse, Samuel F. B. Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts. Ed. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Owen, Robert Dale. Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1860. Parsons, Theophilus. Essays. 3 vols. Boston: William Carter and Brother, 1868. Phillips, Mary E. Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story. New York: Rand, McNally, 1897. Planchette: or the Despair of Science. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869. Peebles, J. M. The Practical of Spiritualism: Biographical Sketch of Abraham James. Chicago: Norton and Leonard, 1868. Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins, and Joseph Pennell. The Art of Whistler. New York: Modern Library, 1928. —. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1908. —. The Whistler Journal. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921. Podmer, Frank. Mediums of the Nineteenth Century [originally published as Modern Spiritualism]. 2 vols. 1902. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963. Pousette-Dart, Nathaniel. Robert Henri. New York: Frederick Stokes, 1922. Ryder, A. P. “Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse, 1905.” Broadway Magazine 14 (Sep. 1905): 10–11. Reprint in American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, Ed. John W. McCoubrey. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. 186–88.

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Schuyler, Montgomery. “George Inness: The Man and His Work.” Forum 18 (November 1894): 301–13. Sherman, Frederic Fairchild. Albert Pinkham Ryder. New York: Privately Printed, 1920. Story, William Wetmore. Conversations in a Studio. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890. —. The Proportions of the Human Figure According to a New Canon. London: Chapman and Hall, 1866. —. Roba di Roma. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl.” 1863. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 2 vols. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 1:2381–83. Swedenborg, Emanuel. Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. Trans. John C. Ager. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1982. —. Heaven and Hell. Trans. George F. Dole. 1758. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1984. Tiffany, Joel. Lectures on Spiritualism. Cleveland: J. Tiffany, 1851. Tuckerman, Henry T. Book of the Artists. New York: Putnam and Son, 1867. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New York: Dover, 1994. Vedder, Elihu. The Digressions of V.: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1910. Watson, Samuel. The Religion of Spiritualism: Its Phenomena and Philosophy. 1850. New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1884. Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Intro. Alfred Werner. 1892. New York: Dover, 1967.

Secondary Sources Banta, Martha. Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Basham, Diana. The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Bell, Adrienne Baxter. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape. New York: George Braziller, 2003. —, ed. George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy. New York: George Braziller, 2006. Bendix, Deanna Marohn. Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors, and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Bjelajac, David. American Art: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2005.

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Block, Marguerite Beck. The New Church in the New World: A Study of Swedenborgianism in America. New York: Octagon Books, 1968. Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Knopf, 1983. Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Broun, Elizabeth. Albert Pinkham Ryder. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Burke, Doreen Bolger. “Louis Comfort Tiffany and His Early Training at Eagleswood, 1862–1865.” American Art Journal 19 (Fall 1987): 29–39. Burns, Sarah. “Black, Quadroon, Gypsy: Women in the Art of George Fuller.” Massachusetts Review 26 (Summer–Autumn 1985): 405–24. —. “George Fuller: The Hawthorne of Our Art.” Winterthur Portfolio 18 (Summer– Autumn 1983): 123–45. —. “Images of Slavery: George Fuller’s Depictions of the Antebellum South.” American Art Journal 15 (1983): 35–60. —. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. —. “Old Maverick to Old Master: Whistler in the Public Eye in Turn-of-the-Century America.” American Art Journal 22, 1 (1990): 29–49. —. Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. —. “A Study of the Life and Poetic Vision of George Fuller (1822–1884).” American Art Journal 13 (Autumn 1981): 11–37. Burns, Sarah, and John Davis. American Art to 1900: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Cassedy, David, and Gail Shrott. William Sidney Mount: Works in the Collection of the Museums at Stony Brook. Ed. Janice Gray Armstrong. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museum at Stony Brook, 1983. Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr. The Life and Work of George Inness. New York, Garland, 1977. Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., and Michael Quick. George Inness. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Clark, Nichols B. A Marble Quarry: The James H. Ricau Collection of Sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art, with an essay by William Gerdts. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997. Coats, James. Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography, Spirit Portraiture, and Other Rare but Allied Phenomena. New York: Arno Press, 1973. Colbert, Charles. “A Critical Medium: James Jackson Jarves’s Vision of Art History.” American Art 16 (Spring 2002): 19–35.

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—. “Harriet Hosmer and Spiritualism.” American Art 10 (Fall 1996): 29–49. —. A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. —. “Spiritual Currents and Manifest Destiny in the Art of Hiram Powers.” Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 529–43. Cotkin, George. Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900. New York: Twayne 1992. Cox, Robert. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Craig, James A. Fitz H. Lane: An Artist’s Voyage Through Nineteenth-Century America. Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2006. Crane, Sylvia E., White Silence. Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1972. Crowe, Charles, “Christian Socialism and the First Church of Humanity.” Church History 35, 1 (March 1966): 93–106. Curry, David Park. James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2004. DeLue, Rachael Ziady. George Inness and the Science of Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Dillenberger, John. The Visual Arts and Christianity in America. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984. Dorment, Richard, and Margaret F. MacDonald. James McNeill Whistler. New York: Harry Abrams, 1994. Dunlap, Sarah, and Stephanie Buck. Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends. Gloucester, Mass.: Cape Anne Historical Society, 2007. Ellis, Elizabeth Gerrity. “New Discoveries in American Art.” American Art Journal 17 (Spring 1985): 89. Fine, Ruth E., ed. Studies in the History of Art: James McNeill Whistler, a Reexamination. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987. Fleming, Gordon. The Young Whistler, 1834–66. London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. Fornell, Earl Wesley. The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Frankenstein, Alfred. William Sidney Mount. New York: Harry Abrams, 1975. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fryd, Vivian Green. Art and Empire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Fuller, Robert C. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Gauld, Alan. The Founders of Psychical Research. London: Routledge, 1968. Gerdts, William H. “William Wetmore Story.” American Art Journal 4 (November 1972): 16–33. Goebel, Catherine Carter. “Arrangement in Black and White: The Making of a Whistler Legend.” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1988.

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Goldfarb, Russell M., and Clare Goldfarb. Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. Goldman, Martin. The Demon in the Aether: The Story of James Clerk Maxwell. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983. Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Knopf, 1998. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Hirsh, Sharon. “Codes of Consumption: Tuberculosis and Body Image at the Fin-desiecle.” In In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom, Ed. Laurinda S. Dixon and Gabriel P. Weisbert. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 144–65. Homer, William Inness. Robert Henri and His Circle. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988. Homer, William Inness, and Lloyd Goodrich. Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams. New York: Harry Abrams, 1989. Husch, Gail E. Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectations and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Johnson, Deborah J. Shepard Alonzo Mount: His Life and Art. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1988. —. William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1998. Johnson, Diane Chalmers. “Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens: Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Response to Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.” American Art 8 (Winter 1994): 22–31. Johnson, Ronald W. “Whistler’s Musical Modes: Symbolists Symphonies Numinous Nocturnes.” Arts Magazine 55 (April 1981): 164–76. Judah, J. Stillson. The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967. Kasson, Joy S. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Kaplan, Elizabeth Kahn, Robert W. Kenny, and Roger Wunderlich. William Sidney Mount: Family, Friends, and Ideas. Setauket, N.Y.: Three Village Historical Society, 1999. Katz, Wendy Jean. Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Kennedy, Elizabeth, ed. The Eight and American Modernisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Kerr, Howard. Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Kirk, John T. The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief. New York: Harry Abrams, 1997.

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Index

Ballou, Adin, 24 Bangs, Lizzie and May: create spirit portraits, 167–68; psychic abilities since childhood, 287n28 Barber, Mary, 21 Barber, Miranda, 29 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 196 Baudelaire, Charles, 149 Bell, Adrienne Baxter, 154, 160–61, 164, 286n21, 289n40 Bendix, Deanna, 129 Betzer, Sarah, on Romantic symbolism, 182 Bjelajac, David, 84 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 15 Bowman, John, mausoleum in Cuttingsville, 53–57 Braude, Ann, 4 Browning, Elizabeth, 47 Brownson, Orestes, 61, 151 “burned-over district,” 4, 34 Burnham, Daniel, 180 Burns, Sarah, 188–89

Channing, William Henry, founds Religious Union of Associationists, 62, 110, 116 Chapman, Hannah, 26 Chesterton, G. K., 122 Child, Lydia Maria, 86 Church, Frederic, 117 Civil War, 11, 14 Cole, Alan Summerly, 126 Cole, Thomas, The Voyage of Life, 72 “conspicuous consumption,” 210; and collecting art, 231–22; as factor in social progress, 227; on implications of word “consumption,” 297n34; and Jarves, Jr., 229; as model for appreciation of art, 229; relation to tuberculosis (consumption), 228; and shrine to Michelangelo, 230; and theories of Thorstein Veblen, 228 Cortissoz, Royal, 18, 135, 143–44, 150; “Ellis Island art,” 244; John LaFarge and clairvoyance, 244; opposition to Modernism, 243; rejects Giovanni Morelli’s methodology, 244; seeks to validate critic’s profession, 233; thoughts on Bernard Berenson, 245 Cotkin, George: and “cultural custodians,” 214–15, 233, 256; on “reluctant modernism,” 2, 151 Courbet, Gustave, 127, 151, 237 Craig, James, 110, 111 Crookes, William, encounter with spirit of Katie King, 279 Crowe, Catherine, 37

Caffin, Charles, 127, 142–43, 145, 154 Carroll, Bret, 32 Carter, Mrs. L., spirit photographer, 13

Daingerfield, Elliott: conversation with Ryder, 198; on Inness and Titian, 153n61 Danto, Arthur, and “tempular” museum, 255

Allston, Washington, 97; advice to Mount, 271n10; and Fuller, 184 Anderson, Wella, 29, 31–32 Appleseed, Johnny (John Chapman), 180–81 Appleton, Thomas Gold, 15; as “cultural custodian,” 215–16 apports, 26, 29; and Mount, 93, 236; in Stanford collection, 58–59

316

Index

Davenport, Ira and William, 125 Davis, Andrew Jackson: ideas about light, 111; on light and water, 117, 121, 163, 210, 239; teachings, 6–10; witnesses birth of the spirit, 23 Day, F. Holland, 129 DeLue, Rachael Ziady, 160 Dexter, Henry, 16, 32; reflects “burned-over district,” 34; reliance on clairvoyance and phrenology, 35–36, 93 divining rod, 78–84 Duret, Theodore, on Whistler’s fear of ghosts, 141

92; phrenological readings, 185; Priscilla Faunteleroy and Hawthorne’s writings, 189–90; and Romantic symbolism,182 Fuller, Robert, 5, 148–49

Eagleswood, and Inness, 154, 161, 284n5 Edison, Thomas, 88 Eliot, George, and Fuller’s imagery, 190 Elliott, Charles Loring, and Mount, 94 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17; disagrees with Spiritualism, 119–21, 127, 235; and Henri, 248; responds to Spiritualism, 90–92, 108, 110–12 ether: and aesthetic of anticipation, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 142–44, 150, 151, 153; and art of Fuller, 187–90, 194; and fourth dimension, 237; and Mesmer, 5, 8; and interplanetary space, 204, 206; and Jarves’s views of Tuscany, 222; and materializations, 11–12; 17; relevance to Whistler, 122–24; and “spiritual science,” 179; and style of Inness, 178; and Swedenborg, 177 Everett, Edward, 73

Hatch, Cora, 10, 115 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 127; on Whistler’s light, 136–39, 142–43, 150 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 189 Henri, Robert, 18; and clairvoyance, 233, 236; disagreements with William Merritt Chase, 235; on fourth dimension, 236–37; influence on younger generation, 300n10; interest in Spiritualism, 234; Laughing Child, 238; and relevance of Mesmerism, 240–42; theories recall Abstract Expressionism, 255; on “trace,” 239 Hiffernan, Jo, 125, 129 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 49–50 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 36, 47, 124, 125; and Jarves, 213 Hopedale, 24, 26 Hosmer, Harriet, 16; Hesper, 85; interest in invention, 85; interest in perpetual motion, 88; Oenone, 86; project for World’s Columbian Exposition, 89; Puck expresses psychic ideals, 47–50; studies with John Gibson, 87; training with Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, 46; Will-o’-the-Wisp and psychic ideals, 50–52 Howells, William Dean, 21, 32; and “cultural custodians,” 216; and Fuller, 187 Hugo, Victor, influence on Ryder’s imagery, 204 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 132

Fitzpatrick, Charles and Louise; care given to Ryder, 195, 202; on psychometry and Ryder’s art, 206 feminism, 10 Flammarion, Camille, 143, 150; on ether, 204, 206–8 Fox sisters (Kate, Margaret, and Leah), 3; admit to fraud, 15, 37, 115; appear on stage in 1849, 4; and materializations, 11 Freer, Charles Lang, 129, 146, 147 Fuller, George, 17; art and psychometry, 194; attends séances in Boston, 186, 187; critical response to Psyche, 188; critical response to Winifred Dysart, 192–93; early career, 183; experiments with psychic phenomena, 184–85; Fedalma and Eliot’s writings, 190–

Gauld, Alan, 14, 218 Gautier, Théophile, 149 George, Henry, 17, 153; agrarianism and art of Inness, 180; and “civilized landscape” of Inness, 170–77, 179; and Inness’s Wanderer, 287n34; on population distribution in ideal state, 288n36 Greenberg, Clement, 1, 207

Inness, George, 17; Ampezzo Pass, Titian’s Home, 162; belief in occult, 153–54; and “civilized landscape,” 169; favored by Jarves, 226; on George’s theories about population distribution and

Index Inness’s imagery, 288n36; and Georgian agrarianism, 180; Home at Montclair, 175; influence of Swedenborg, 284n8; on Inness’s turn to figurative painting and theories of George, 287n34; Lake Nemi and hauntings, 159–64; Montclair as center for economic reforms of George, 174; The New Jerusalem (Valley of the Olives), 155; population and Celestial Man, 156; and theories of George, 170; and theory of correspondences, 284n10; Titian’s influence, 164–69; on use of fingers to apply paint, 286n21 Inness, George, Jr.: on his father’s fascination with birthplaces of famous men, 161; on his father’s “spiritual unfolding,” 165–6 Irving, Washington, 81 James, Henry, 10, 53, 139, 159 James, William, 18, 148; on importance of continuity, 150–51, 233; interest in art, 246; and “New Psychology,” 245; and “radical empiricism,” 245–48; and Henri’s theories, 247 Jarves, James Jackson, 18, 22, 210; Blake’s clairvoyant powers, 225; collects Italian art, 214; and connoisseurship, 216–19; Corot as clairvoyant, 225; and “cultural custodians,” 214–15; early encounters with spirits, 212– 13; and Etruscans, 220; favors Inness, 226; Japanese art and religion, 223–24; Medici and decline of art, 222–23; museums as means of social improvement, 227–28; and phrenology, 211–12; on psychometry and museums, 231–32, 254, 256; son as model for American artists, 229–31; visions of Fra Angelico, 222 Jarves James Jackson, Jr., on consumption, 229–31 Jay, Martin, 145 Land Ordinance, 69 Lane, Fitz Henry, 17, 92; relevance of Davis’s ideas, 111; Spiritualist beliefs, 109; The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe, 110–21 Lanman, Charles, 97 Lindsay, Coutts, 126 Lee, Mother Ann, 29, 32 Lily Dale, 14 Lodge, Oliver, 123–24, 150

317

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 50; on Dream Painting, 276n65; interest in art, 108; interest in Norman’s Woe, 113; relevance of his art to that of Lane, 113; responds to Spiritualism, 115, 120, 121 Luminism, 108, 116, 119 Lyell, Charles, 6 Lyman, Theodore, 32–34, 35 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 171 Manifest Destiny, 83, 91; and ideals of Jarves, 212, 228 Mauclair, Camille (Camille L. C. Fausti): on astral forms, 133–35; on Whistler’s death, 136, 139, 142 materializations, 11 Mellen, Mary, 116–17 Menpes, Mortimer, 125; on Whistler’s fear of ghosts, 140–41 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 5, 123; influence of celestial bodies, 200, 251 Mesmerism: and issues of class and gender, 240–43, 251; popularity in United States, 4–6, 62, 85, 91, 94, 110, 111, 135; and vital currents, 166, 202 Methodism, 5–6 Miller, William, 4 Modernism, 1, 19, 151–52; and “conspicuous consumption,” 232; and Cortissoz, 243; and fourth dimension, 237; and Romanticism, 256; and Ryder, 197, 207 Morgan, David, 36 Morse, Samuel F. B.: and Calvinism, 251; Gallery of the Louvre, 251; lectures on art, 252 Mount, Shepard Alonso, The Old Double Door, 108 Mount, William Sidney, 17; advice from Allston, 271n10; birthday, 107; Coming to the Point and Bargaining for a Horse, 100–107; and Concord Transcendentalists, 274n44; decisions behind choice of sites for landscapes, 273n42; importance of light, 98–99; letters from Rembrandt, 96; Long Island Farmer Husking Corn, 99; Long Island Farmhouses, 103–9; mobile studio, 100–107; plans to do a painting about Spiritualism, 271n3; portrait of Rembrandt, 94; The Tease influenced by Rembrandt, 98–99; and Transcendentalism, 108; turns

318

Index

Mount, William Sidney, (cont’d) to Spiritualism, 92–93; Vanderlyn’s advice, 272n11; views on family home, 273n41 Mumler, William, 12–13 Myers, Frederic, 147, 151, 194 Nochlin, Linda, 243 Novak, Barbara, 108, 117, 119 Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, 72 Owen, Alex, on evaluating Modernism, 1–2, 209 Owen, Robert Dale: debates Christian views of death, 23; on followers of Spiritualism, 4 Palladino, Eusapia, 14 Paul, Jeremiah, 5 phrenology, 7–8; and assessment of spirits, 32; influence on Jarves’s ideas about art, 210, 218; and Jarves’s evaluation of Roman culture, 220; and Jarves’s ideas about moral influence of art, 227, 234; and Mount, 97, 110, 111; possible influence on George, 171; and Powers busts, 37–42, 46, 62; Powers discusses, 68; and Powers’s California, 77, 83; practiced by Dexter, 34–35; readings of Fuller, 185; and Rimmer, 254; and the soul, 247, 250 Page, William, 154; alerts Inness to Titian’s techniques, 164, 284n6; builds octagon house, 157–8; 161, and death mask of Shakespeare, 162 Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins and Joseph, 124–27, 141, 142 Pollock, Griselda, 12 Pollock, Jackson: praises art of Ryder, 207; similarity of statements to those of Henri, 255, 256 Pop art, 255 Powers, Hiram, 16; on adapting California to developments in Australia, 269n66; belief in Swedenborg and Spiritualism, 36; on content of California, 268n42; and divining rods, 78–82; and domestic altar, 37–45; and household shrines, 224; ideas on a site for California, 267n41; and Page, 156; phrenological readings of, 266n23; responds to dreams and folkways, 67–68; retrospective precognition, 68 Prothero, Stephen, 256

psychometry, 105, 127, 129, 152, 162, 167; and antinomianism, 234; and Fuller, 185; and Fuller’s Fedalma, 190–92; and Henri, 233; and Henri’s theory of “trace,” 240, 248, 251; and Japanese art, 224, 231–32; and Jarves on connoisseurship, 217; and Romantic symbolism, 182; and Ryder, 199, 206, 214; and style of Inness, 175 Pyne, Kathleen, 127, 152 Quick, Michael, 157, 160 Quidor, John, Money Diggers, 81 Rembrandt: influences Mount’s Tease, 98, 121, 136, 150, 236, 245; letters to Mount, 96–102; portrait by Mount, 93–96 Reynolds, David, 91 Reynolds, Joshua, 96 Rimmer, William, 253; interest in psychic phenomena, 254; and “New Thought,” 254; and prolonged viewing of art, 254 Rochester rappings: connections made with gold rush, 83, 93; and Fox sisters, 4, 11, 29, 36 Rosenberg, Harold, 255 Rosna, Charles B., 3, 4, 11 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 125, 143, 148 Rothko, Mark, 144 Rowlandson, Thomas, 93 Ruskin, John, 210, 224 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 17; acquires electric belt, 202–4; faith and therapeutic powers of a friendly universe, 194; imagery of Christ as a spirit, 195; and Modernism, 207–9; and moonlight, 200–202; psychic qualities of Wagner and Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 200; on title of Toilers of the Sea, 293n39; Toilers of the Sea and Hugo, 204; and Romantic ideals, 209; and Romantic symbolism, 182 Sanden, Albert T. 202 Schwain, Kristin, 129 séance: “cabinet séance,” 11, 22; compared to appreciation of art, 248; compared to Wagner’s music, 213, 216; and Fuller, 186; how conducted, 10; materialized hands and faces, 26, 62, 91, 122, 124; and Whistler’s circle, 125–27, 140–42, 147–49, 152, 154, 182 Second Great Awakening, 2, 4

Index Seybert Commission, 14 Shakers, 26, 29–30 Sloan, John, 233; Henri’s letters to, 234 Society for Psychical Research, 14, 123 Stanford, Leyland and Jane: build university and museum, 58–59; vision of deceased son, 57 Stanford, Thomas Welton, 58–59 Story, William Wetmore, 16; commitment to Spiritualism, 62–64; on haunting houses, 162; rejects both Classicism and Realism, 65–66, 104, 110 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 65 Summerland, Spiritualist heaven, 7, 88, 106, 111 “supernatural economy,” 79–81, 83 Sutter’s mill, 75, 82 Stuart, Nancy Rubin, 4 Swedenborg, Emanuel: beliefs adopted by Powers, 36–38, 68, 75, 82, 84, 85, 91; conjures specific spirits, 163; and ether, 177; “Grand Man,” 179; influence on Davis, 6, 17; influence on Inness, 155; influx as artistic inspiration, 166; and Inness’s “civilized landscape,” 170; and Inness’s “sentiment of humanity,” 175; interest of believers in theories of George, 172–73; and Page, 154; and taming wilderness, 180; theory of correspondences and Inness, 153; Vedder’s interest in, 159; and Henri, 234 Symbolism, 66, 143–44, 150; and Henri, 233, 243 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 127, 129, 149 Symonds, Arthur, 130 Taylor, Alan, 78, 79 Taylor, Eugene, 15 Taylor, Joshua, 159 Tennyson, Alfred, 85, 86

319

Thoreau, Henry David, 84, 90, 216 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 145–49 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 17, 153, 160–61; channeled by Inness, 174; Inness visits home town, 162–63; techniques influence Inness, 164–9 Transcendentalism, and phrenology, 8, 19, 90–92, 108, 110, 120, 121, 152 Truth, Soujourner, 65 Tuckerman, Henry, 35, 72 Turini, Giovanni, 53 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 43–45 Vanderlyn, John, 97 Van Rensselaer, Mariana, 192, 291n22 Vedder, Elihu: influence on Inness, 160; interest in Swedenborg and Spiritualism, 159; and Pieve di Cadore, 161; style compared to Inness, 164 Wagner, Richard, 200–204 Weber, Max: on disenchantment, 1, 61, 66, 209, 256 Whistler, Beatrice (Godwin), 133, 145–48 Whistler, James McNeill, 17; and “art for art’s sake,” 149; assessed by Sadikichi Hartmann, 136–39; on confronting fear of ghosts, 280n39; dislikes Pointillism, 150; ethereal aspect of Nocturnes, 143; favors art of Tintoretto, 145–48; importance of ether, 122–24; on Japanese art, 278n14; and philosophy of William James, 150–51, 219, 277n1; technique, 144 White, Christopher, 250, 254 Whitman, Walt: and phrenology, 212; and Henri, 233 Wilde, Oscar, 132–35 witchcraft, 4, 10, 61 Woodhull, Victoria, 10, 45, 196

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Acknowledgments

Research for this book began during the fall of 1999 at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware, an opportunity made possible by a fellowship jointly granted by the Winterthur and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A special debt of gratitude is owed those institutions and Gretchen Buggeln, Gary Kulik, and Pat Eliot for their assistance during my residence at the Winterthur. Thanks are also due to Dr. Katherine Manthorne of City University of New York and Dr. Sarah Burns of Indiana University for reading portions of this manuscript and making useful suggestions.