Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp [1 ed.] 0520249968, 9780520249967

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AHMANSON FINE

THE

AHMANSON

ARTS

MURPHY IMPRINT

FOUNDATION

has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of FRANKLIN~

MURPHY

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

upon

Publishedwith the assistanceof the GettyGrantProgram

ASKANCE LOOKING

unNersrTYOFcauForrnaPress Berkeley

LosAngeles

London

illICHaeL

LeJa

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles. California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England First paperback printing 2006 © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leja, Michael, 1951Looking askance , skepticism and American art from Eakins to Duchamp/ Michael Leja. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN978-0-520-24996-7 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Optical illusions in art. 2. Visual perception-Psychological aspects. 3. Art and society-United States. 4. Art, American19th century. 5. Art, American-20th century. I. Title. N7430.5.L44

2004

Manufactured in Canada 15

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111098765432 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANs1/N1s0z39.48-1992 (n 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

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Acknowledgments

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List of Illustrations

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• 1 ASKANG( lOOKING

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ACKllOWLeDGmenTS

Many more colleagues and friends than I can name here offered suggestions and criticisms while this book was being written. Among those who graciously and insightfully commented on work in progress were Wendy Bellion, Martin Berger, Casey Blake, Michele Bogart, Marcia Brennan, Josh Brown, Roger Buergel, Perry Chapman, David Peters Corbett, Wanda Corn, John Davis, Kathleen Foster, Peter Galison, Jack Greenstein, Walter Hopps, Caroline Huber, Amelia Jones, Caroline Jones, Michael Kelly, Jennie King, Elizabeth Legge, David Lubin, Katherine Man thorne, Kobena Mercer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Isabelle Moffat, Erika Naginski, Alex Nemerov, Ruth Noack, Kathleen Pyne, Eric Rosenberg, Joel Snyder, Maren Stange, Christine Stansell, David Summers, Katherine Taylor, Lisa Tickner, Nancy Troy, Martha Ward, Janet Wolff, Sylvia Yount, and Rebecca Zurier. Departmental colleagues and graduate students at Northwestern University, MIT, and the University of Delaware were extraordinarily generous as the ideas developed here evolved. Erin Marietta and Kerry Roeder provided invaluable assistance as the manuscript was being prepared for publication. A wonderful year spent at the Clark Art Institute near the end of my work on this project allowed me to bring several of the chapters to conclusion. Stephen Bann, Matthias Bruhn, Mark Cheetham, Darby English, Elizabeth Harvey, Mark Haxthausen, Michael Ann Holly, Laure de Margerie, Olivier Meslay, Keith Moxey, Todd Porterfield, Gary Shapiro, Fronia Simpson, Marc Simpson, and Mariet Westermann proved stimulating and insightful interlocutors and delightful neighbors. Anne Wagner and Tim Clark must be singled out for special thanks. Their responses to developing ideas have been essential all along the way. Stephanie Fay's deft editing dramatically improved the clarity, economy, and fluidity of my text,

vii

but she has been much more than an editor. Her unflagging commitment to the project from early on greatly eased the work of bringing itto publication. Margaret Werth's influence is present on every page. Her insights and challenges constantly enriched my thinking. Fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Clark Art Insti tute, and National Endowment for the Humanities gave me indispensable time off from teaching and administrative duties. Research support from Northwestern University, MIT, and the University of Delaware funded essential travel and photography expenses. This book is dedicated to my father, Stanley Leja, and to the memory of my mother, Margaret Leja.

ACKNOWlrnGMrnTS

ILLUSTraTIOllS

PlAHS COlOR fallowing page xiv

~-

Maxfield Parrish,Agib in the Enchanted Palace, 1905 Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull),

3. 4.

1871 Thomas Eakins, Starting Out after Rail, 1874 Thomas Eakins,A May Momingin the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-

1.

Hand), 1879

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Thomas Eakins, The Concert Singer, 1890-9~ Thomas Eakins, Professor Henry A. Rowland, 1897 Claude Monet, Wheat Field, 1881 Claude Monet, TheArtist's Garden at Vetheuil, 1881 Claude Monet, Poppy Field in a Hollow near Givemy, 1885 Claude Monet, Field of Poppies at Givemy, 1885 George Inness, Winter Morning, Montclair, 188~

Childe Hassam, In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden), 189~ 13. William Harnett, The Old Violin, 1886 14. William Harnett, Ease, 1887 15. William Harnett, Bard of Avon, 1878 16. William Harnett, Still Life-Violin and Music, 1888 17- Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth, poster for Roltair, 1898 18. Henry Brown Fuller, Illusions, before 1901 1~.

19. ~o.

Thomas Dewing, In the Garden, 189~-94 Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890

ix

X 21. 22.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 Marcel Duchamp, Tum', 1918

23.

Detail of Plate 22

24.

Marcel Duchamp, replica of Wanted-$2,000 Reward, [1923]

flGUR[S 1.

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Untitled, 1901 (three women seated on a bench at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo) 3

2.

Elihu Thomson, Photograph, from Century, May 1896, 126 6 Elihu Thomson, Cathodograph, from Century, May 1896, 127

3. 4.

"Onderdonk, the 'Hayseed,"' Morning Journal (New York), Dec. 15, 1885, 1 8

5. 6.

Robert Toombs, at the Age ofSeventy-fwe Years, photograph

Handbill for Joice Heth, 1835

19

7- William H. Mumler, Mrs. French of Boston with Spirit Son, ca. 1868, carte de visite

22

8.

William H. Mumler, Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869

9.

Rockwood and Boyle, P. V Hickey with Tookeras Spirit, Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869 25

10.

11. 12.

"The Spiritual Photograph Trial, before Justice Dowling, at the City Prison, New York, April 21," Frank Leslie's fllustrated Newspaper, May 8, 1869, 120 28 Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869, wood engravings after spirit photographs 36 William H. Mumler, Man with a Female Spirit Holding an Anchor over His Heart, ca. 1870, carte de visite

13. 14.

23

38

Rockwood, C .B. Boyle-by Rockwood, Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869 39 William H. Mumler, Medium Guided by Spirit Hand and Spirit Child, Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869

39

15.

William H. Mumler, Charles Livermore with Wife's Spirit, Harper's Weekly,

16.

May 8, 1869 40 William H. Mumler, Charles Livermore with Wife's Spirit, Harper's Weekly,

May 8, 1869 41 17. William H. Mumler, Mrs. Conant of Banner of Light, and Her Brother, Charles H. Crowell, ca. 1868, carte de visite lllUSTRATIONS

42

xi 18.

William H. Mumler, MasterHerrodin a Trance,ca. 1872, carte de visite

43

19.

Abraham Bogardus, P. T. Barnum with Spirit of Abraham Lincoln, mock

20.

spirit photograph, 1869, carte de visite 49 FeejeeMermaid, wood engraving, from BostonSights and StrangersGuide (1856); reprinted in Bostonian, November 1894, 120 51

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Detail of Plate 2 63 Eadweard Muybridge, Trotting,Occident,plate 35 from TheAttitudes

of Animals in Motion, 1881 68 Detail of Plate 4 69 Diego Velazquez, Las Hilanderas, 1657 (detail) 72 Thomas Eakins, Mending the Net, 1881 74 Thomas Eakins, Geesewith Treeand Two Men in Backgroundat Gloucester,

New Jersey,1881 75 27- Thomas Eakins, The Crucifixion,1880 80 28. Paul Philippoteaux:, Panorama of Jerusalemwith the Crucifixionof Christ, 1882 (detail) 81 29. 3o. 31. 32.

Thomas Eakins, Dr. William Thomson, 1907 91 St. John Harper, The OpeningoftheAmericanArtAssociationGalleries,Madison

Square,New York,from Harper'sWeekly,November 15, 1884, 750 94 Scienceand Philosophyin Art, 1886, title page 95 Portrait of Helen Abbott Michael, from Studies in Plant and Organic

Chemistryand Literary Papers,1907 97 Scienceand Philosophyin Art, cover 102 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-81 112 35. Woodblock print after Robert Koehler's painting Strike, published 115 in Harper'sWeekly, May 1, 1886, 280-81 36. Marion Hooper Adams, GeorgeCasperAdams with Mary OgdenAdams, Mary Adams, and CharlesFrancisAdams III on Rockat BeverlyFarms, 118 ca. 1883, photograph 37- Marion Hooper Adams, Mrs.JosephBell on Rockat Smith's Point, ca. 1883, 118 photograph 38. Marion Hooper Adams, RebeccaDodgeat Old Sweet Springs, 1885, 33. 34.

photograph 39.

119

Which Is Which?VictorTalking Machine Company advertisement, 1908 126 lllUSTRATIONS

40.

Civil War Cyclorama, Buffalo, 1901, photograph from Richard Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo, 15 127

41. 4~.

Jefferson David Chalfant, Which Is Which? 1890-93 Detail of Plate 13 129

43.

Edison Manufacturing Company, UncleJosh at the MovingPictureShow, 1901-~, film still 132

44.

Anonymous, WorldRenowned Cafeof TheodoreStewart, New York,n.d., colored photograph 135

45.

William Harnett, TheArtist's LetterRack, 1879 138 William Harnett, The Professor'sOld Friends, 1891 141 Detail of Plate 16 143

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 5~. 53. 54. 55. 56. 5758.

129

"Interior Decoration-Meyers," plate from L. Frank Baum, TheArt of DecoratingDry GoodsWindows, ~17 146 Pears' Soap advertisement, "A Specialty for Infants," from Harper's Monthly, 1887 148 Pears' Soap advertisement, "For the Toilet," from CenturyMagazine, 1896 149 "A Scene in Venice-Morton," plate from L. Frank Baum, TheArt of DecoratingDry GoodsWindows, ~07 150 Bird's-eye view of Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 154 Entrance to Johnstown Flood Attraction, Buffalo, 19o 1 157 Cleopatra's Temple, Buffalo, 1901 159 Henry Roltair in Temple of Mystery, photograph 161 Henry Roltair, Folly, from "Mystifying Pictures," Penny Magazine (1903), 495 162 Henry Roltair, Satan's Dream, from "Mystifying Pictures," Penny Magazine (1903), 494 163 The Sphinx nlusion, from Henry Ridgely Evans, The Old and the New Magic,

6~.

319 165 Henry Roltair, House Upside Down, Buffalo, 1901 170 Henry Roltair, Creation,St. Louis World's Fair, 1904 172 Edwin Howland Blashfield, Evolutionof Civilization, 1895-96 (detail) 173 Henry Roltair, Creation,"A glimpse of Italy from the moving platform,"

63.

from the pamphlet Roltair's Creation,1904 174 ArthurB. Davies.A Measureof Dreams, ca. 1903 180

59. 60. 61.

lllUSTRATIONS

xiii 64.

William James, "A Case of Automatic Drawing," PopularScienceMonthly,

65.

January 1904, 198 194 William James, "A Case of Automatic Drawing," PopularScienceMonthly,

66.

January 1904, ~oo 195 William James, "A Case of Automatic Drawing," PopularScienceMonthly,

67.

January 1904, 199 197 William James, "A Case of Automatic Drawing," PopularScienceMonthly,

68. 69.

January 1904, 197 198 Odilon Redon, Why Should ThereNot Exist an Invisible World?1887 Auguste Rodin, Head of Sorrow(Joan of Arc), by 188~ 202

201

71.

203 George Grey Barnard, Struggleof Two Natures in Man, 1889-94 C. D. Arnold, Progressof Man, sculptural group before the U.S. Government Building, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 204

7~.

Charles Grafly, Man the Mysterious, fountain (destroyed), Buffalo,

73.

1901 205 William James, "A Case of Automatic Drawing," PopularScienceMonthly,

74.

January 1904, ~01 207 Lantern slide of angels, from set illustrating the "Rock of Ages," painting

70.

on glass, ca. 1895

208 209

75.

Lantern slide of imps

76.

Baron C. De Grimm, I See Dozensof Folks Weepin'Quite Hard beforeSome on 'Em, from Josiah Allen's Wife [Marietta Holley], Samantha at the World's Fair (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893), 4~3 214

n

Johannes Gelert, The Strugglefor Work,189~ 216 "The Armory Puzzle," American Art News, March 8, 1913, 4 222 John Sloan, Snake CharmerPuzzle, Philadelphia Press,May 5, 1901 224 Detail of Plate ~1 225 "The Nude- Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us," New YorkTribune,

78. 79. 80. 81.

83.

September 1~. 1915 228 Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Rack, 196i, after lost original of 1914 230 "The exhibit refused by the Independents," The Blind Man, May 1917

84.

"The Richard Mutt Case," The Blind Man, May 1917 233

8~.

232

lllUSTRATIONS

e

I•

Maxf:teldParrish, Agib in the Enchanted Palace, 1905, glazed oil on paper, 18 x 16 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence P. Fisher. © Maxf:teldParrish Family Trust, licensed by ASaP, Holderness, New Hampshire, and VAGA,New York (photo© 199~ Detroit Institute of Arts).

"1 .. Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund and Scull), 1871, oil on canvas, 3~ ¼ x 46 ¼in.Metropolitan

gift of George D. Pratt, 1934 (34.9~) (photo© 1994 Metropolitan Museum of Art).

• J • Thomas Eakins, Starting Out after Rail, 1874, oil on canvas mounted on Masonite, ~4 ¼ x 19 % in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Hayden Collection-Charles Henry Hayden Fund (35.193) (photo© ~oo3 MFA Boston).

" 4• Thomas Eakins,A May Morningin the Park (TheFairmanRogersFourin-Hand), 1879, oil on canvas, ~4 x 36 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of William Alexander Dick.

• I• Thomas Eakins, The ConcertSinger, 1890-9~. oil on canvas, 75 x 54 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams.

.. 0 .. Thomas Eakins, ProfessorHenryA. Rowland, 1897, oil on canvas, 80 ¼ x 54 in.© Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Stephen C. Clark, Esq. (1931.5), all rights reserved.

• I• Claude Monet, WheatField, 1881 (Wildenstein 676), oil on canvas, ~5¾ x3~ in.© Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Herny White Cannon (1941.197).

Claude Monet. TheA,tist ·s Garden at Vethwil, 1881 (Wildenstein 684), oil on canvas, 39 x 31 ½in.Private collection (photo© ~004 Christie ·s Images Inc.).

Claude Monet, PoppyFieldin a HollownearGivemy. 1885 (Wildenstein I ooo), oil on canvas, 25 5/a x 32 in. Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection (25.106) (photo© 2003 MFA Boston).

ID

Claude Monet, Field of Poppies at Givemy, 1885 (Wildenstein 997). oil on canvas, ::;35/ux~8 ¾in.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Richmond. collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (photo: Katherine Wetzel© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).

George Inness, Winter Morning. Montclair, 188~. oil on canvas, 3o ¼ x 45 ¼in.Montclair Art Museum, Montclair. New Jersey. gift of Mrs. Arthur D. Whiteside (1961. 1).

11 Childe Hassam. ln the Garden(Celia17iaxterinHerGarden). , 894, oil on canvas. 44x181/s in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of John Gellatly (19z9.6.5z).

IJ William Harnett. The Old Violin. 1886, oil on canvas, 38 x ~3 5/sin. National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C., gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mellon Scaife in honor of Paul Mellon (image© Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art).

14

William Harnett, Ease, 1887, oil on canvas, 48 x 5~ in. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (197~-~).

.. II William Harnett. Bard ofAvon, , 878, oil on canvas, ~9 ½ x 19 ½ in. Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, Inc., NewYork.

Ii William Harnett, Still Life-Violin and Music, 1888, oil on canvas, 40 x 3o in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Fund, 1963 (63.85) (photo© 1991 Metropolitan Museum of Art).

17

Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth, poster for Roltair, 1898. Library of Congress.

rn Henry Brown Fuller, Illusions. before 1901, oil on canvas, 70½ x 45 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of William

T. Evans (1909.9.1).

rn Thomas Dewing, In the Carden, 189~-94. oil on canvas. ~o ½ x 35 in. SmithsonianAmericanArt Museum, Washington, D.C., gift ofJohn Gellatly (19~9.6.37).

10 Thomas Hovenden. Breaking Home Ties, 1890. oil on canvas, 5~ 1/n x 7~ 1/.1 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art. gift of Ellen Harrison McMichael in memory of C. Emory McMichael.

11 Marcel Duchamp, Ni,de Descenclingc,Staircase, No. :1. 19 ,z, oil on canvas, 57 ½ x 35 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection© zoo4 A.RS.New York/ ADACP. Paris/ Succession Marcel Duchamp.

'll. Marcel Duchamp, Turn·, 1918, oil and mixed media on canvas, ~7 ½ x q3 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest© ~004 ARS, New York/ ADAGP, Paris/ Succession Marcel Duchamp.

1J Detail of Plate~~-

WANTED

REWARD s2,ooo leading information Bull. alias Welch. W. Bucket Operated etcetry. For

name

HOOKE. inches.

LYON

Weight

5 feet

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medium. eyes SELAVY

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etcetry. Pickens in New York under

CINQUER about 180

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Marcel Duchamp. replica ofWanted-$2.000 Reward. [19'43]. color lithograph. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection© '4004ARS, New York/ ADAGP, Paris/ Succession Marcel Duchamp.

Height

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IllTfODUCTIOll: LOOKillGASKance

Adjusting to modern life in NewYork circa 1900 meant learning to see skeptically. To function successfully, even to survive, every inhabitant of the modern city, every target of competitive marketing, every participant in the new mass culture, every beneficiary of modern science and technology, every believer in spiritual realms had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile. The visual arts-including the fine arts and the larger visual culture of commercial amusements, photographic illustrations, and pictorial advertising-played a complex and varied part in this process, fostering this way of looking and responding to it. They helped to make "looking askance"-to use the period lingoa generally shared habit, and they learned to engage a viewership that peered out through suspicious eyes. The pressures on ordinary vision as an instrument for gathering reliable knowledge of the world affected both ends of the line of sight. At one, the aspects of things in the world were recognized increasingly as deceptive; at the other, the human eye was revealing itself a dull tool, inadequate to its tasks. If seeing had ever been a basis for believing, it certainly was not now. Looking askance thus involved both maximizing one's visual acuity and sharpening one's mental faculties for critical analysis and interpretation. Some illustrations will clarify these points. At the world's fair in Buffalo in 1901 a young man and woman in the crowd attracted a great deal of attention. They did nothing remarkable-they merely wandered through the displays like countless other visitors-but their costume and bearing made them stand out. According to the Buffalo Daiiy Courier,the pair were "to all appearances a genuine country bumpkin and his sweetheart come up for a day at the Fair." Rural farmworkers insulated from the fashions and manners of urban and mass culture were be-

2 coming rare by this time, so the sight of two amid a modern spectacle like the PanAmerican Exposition might naturally draw a second look. But the couple drew from the crowd not what we might expect in this situationthe smug head-to-toe survey of social superiors taking amusement from inferiorsbut looks of mistrust, suspicious scrutiny (perhaps like that illustrated in Fig. 1).The Courierreported that crowds of people turned and followed the couple to "satisfy themselves whether or not the big, good -natured, over-grown, lubberly- looking fellow and the stringy- looking girl by his side were real Rubes or were advertising one of the numerous concessions." The newspaper went on to relate that one woman, after giving them "a searching ocular examination to see if they had any tags on them" promoting some of the fair's attractions, announced, "That's not an advertisement. If it were, they'd be labeled in some way." Other viewers were certain that the rubes were frauds. One especially skeptical man sitting on the veranda of the Louisiana Purchase Building disdained to give them a second look, certain that they were part of some ballyhoo. His verdict on the farmer was laconic. "Fake. He '11be hollering 'Stop that train,' too, in a minute," he said, referring to the show put on by the fairground's miniature railroad, which employed clownish figures dressed as rubes to chase behind the trains. 1 Some observers believed they could resolve the uncertainty by looking harder; others considered further looking unnecessary and applied past experience. In the end, the skeptics proved right. The couple had been hired to advertise chewing gum-how, the newspaper account does not reveal. Presumably the spectacle had a dramatic moment: a pitch was made once a sufficient crowd had gathered. The Courier'sreport observed that the real farmers who visited the fair were unlikely to be distinguished by odd clothes or uncouth manners. "The farmer who patronizes the Exposition has money, enough of it at least to conceal his identity from the urban resident by buying a suit of· store clothes' before he leaves home." True rubes are invisible; apparent ones, fakes. The newspaper taught its readers a lesson: to guard against being duped by enterprising advertisers or by masquerading dissemblers. The skeptical fairgoers described in the Courier'sstory clearly had learned that lesson already, testing their sight daily amid the deceptive spectacles and aggressive, often fraudulent, advertising that dominated the public spaces of the modern capitalist city and learning to question the reliability of such newspaper reports in light of the promotional functions they served. For their part, advertisers, faced with a "well-defined pub-

lOOKING ASKANC[

3

flGUl[I • Frances Benjamin Johnston, Untitled, 1901 (three women seated on a bench at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo), gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ6~-79383.

lie skepticism, the result of innumerable humbugs," devised increasingly creative ways to disarm wary consumers. 2 Another source of peril to vision is illustrated in a passage written in 1896 by the aspiring novelist Theodore Dreiser, then twenty-five years old and the editor and principal writer for Ev'ry Month, an illustrated women's magazine of popular music, drama, and literature. In one of his regular columns Dreiser reflected on the cumulative effect of recent scientific and technological discoveries that were radically altering his sense of the world. What could seem marvelous, he wondered, after the recording, amplification, and transmission of sound? What could seem strange in a world where streetcars were powered by electricity? Roentgen's recent discovery of the X-ray provoked Dreiser to fantasize about the faculty of vi sion: "This new light, before which flesh, wood, aluminum, paper, and leather

lOOKING ASKANC[

4 become as glass, sounds quite like some aged Arabian fiction, akin to the natural fountains of colored waters and the trees whose fruit was diamonds and precious stones. The magic wand is nothing so strange now as it was, for who knows but that rocks and trees may yet be seemingly made to disappear and dark places be made light without any visible influence operating to effect it? "3 The visible world was becoming an enchanted realm where fantasy and reality were difficult to distinguish. Dreiser's commentary helps us see that the fantastic art and literature of this period, often interpreted as forms of escape from modernity, in fact encapsulated modern experience (Plate 1). Scientific discoveries were challenging the sensory and cognitive faculties-particularly

vision-that humankind relied on to distinguish reality from illusion. Photography was continuing in the new century to extend vision in astonishing ways, from stopping motion on the ground to reveal ing distant nebulae in the heavens. Roentgen's discovery of X-rays was publicized early on as a new "photography of the invisible by means of an invisible light" that revealed "things concealed from the human eye. "4 One author, having seen anXray of his own hand, reported, "It is impossible to describe the feeling of awe that one experiences on actually seeing the image of his own skeleton within the en shrouding flesh. "5 Roentgen's announcement followed close on the heels of other startling discoveries involving invisible phenomena. The microbiological research of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch on rabies and anthrax was developing into germ theory, and turn -of-the-century advocates of progressive practices in sanitation, hygiene, and medicine popularized germs as" invisible enemies. "6 That they were not com pletely invisible but could be exposed to sight with the aid of a microscope was cru cial to their popular acceptance. Vision did not lose its authority in this period; it could still discern truth if scientifically enhanced. But what Walter Benjamin designated the "optical unconscious," the realm of visibility beyond the reach of the naked eye, was drastically extended. 7 Descriptions of the invisible realms revealed through science and technology often led to formulaic conclusions: "Our eye is but a very imperfect optical instrument," or "Having eyes, we see not," or "Blear-eyed mortals, how little you see of what is after all obvious and palpable enough!" 8 Shakespeare was frequently invoked regarding "things hid and barr' d from common sense," especially Hamlet's observation, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The psychologist Joseph Jastrow was not alone in lOOKING ASKANC[

reminding his readers that "the saying that appearances are deceptive is an in heritance from very ancient times. " 9 Century magazine's report onX -rays gave the attentive reader evidence to won -

der about some of these simplifications. It dramatized the contrast with ordinary vision by juxtaposing a photograph of assorted objects with anX -ray of them (Figs. ~

and 3). Of course there is irony here in eliding normal vision with photography,

which often stood for a more exacting and superior alternative. The juxtaposed im ages made it evident, however, that photography, oriented to the surface of things, aligned with sight whereas the X-ray penetrated to previously unseen depths. The comparison also demonstrated that some objects had no depth, since they were rendered invisible in the X-ray-for

example, items made of wood, cork, paper,

cellulose, and, most interesting of all, a piece of bromide print containing white letters spelling out the word "Assembly." The materials of photography (minus the silver), here representing ordinary vision, were obliterated in the X-ray and thereby exposed as depthless themselves. The objects collected to illustrate the behavior of X-rays had been chosen for their diverse materials. Most readers surely were captivated by the more dramatic X-ray images in the article-of

an anesthetized mouse, a mangled bird, and the

author's awesome hand. The limits of surface vision evident in the comparison would have impressed them more than that vision's striking richness. Century's X-ray illustrations joined other forms of contemporary visual culture, like the popular magic lantern exhibitions featuring projected images of microscopic organ isms, that sought to make the invisible accessible to vision. The developing consensus was that science and technology revealed the blindness to many of the world's bedrock truths of ordinary, unaided human vision. Its access to the natural world revealed as arbitrary and limited, its representations partial, distorted, and unreliable, vision became alienated. The most extreme view-that normal vision presented a world of flimsy and deceptive surfaces-led to dangerous confusion about the knowledge available to sight. Phrenology and eugenics grew out of the belief that character, pathology, and intelligence could be observed in certain features of the head, face, and brain. At the same time, an individual's face and bearing were coming to seem unreliable indicators of character and personality; alternative indices, such as handwriting, now seemed more secure.

10

The story of the Buffalo rubes and Dreiser's meditation onX-rays illustrate how both advertising and scientific technologies played a part in destabilizing vision. lOOKING ASKANC[

6

flGURf 1 • Elihu Thomson, Photograph,from Century, May 1896, 1~6.

flGURf l • Elihu Thomson, Cathodograph,from Century, May 1896, 1~7.

I have drawn examples from the period's print journalism, then expanding into a fiercely competitive mass medium that itself was a factor in the developments I am sketching. The popular press that instructed its readers in the perils of seeing in the modern world-sensationalizing the phenomenon as it did so-also produced problems of its own. lOOKING ASKANC[

This point can be illustrated by an incident from 1885-86, when some American newspapers were relying more and more on pictures as they competed for readers. The Daily Graphic ran an article titled "Bogus Newspaper Portraits," warning that some of its enterprising competitors were making use of fraudulent illustrations. It reminded readers of a recent infraction by the New York World, which was caught "palming off the portrait of a New Jersey Assemblyman as that of Mr. Stead, the editor of the London Pall Mall Gazette." Now, the Daily Graphic reported, "it is the New YorkMorningJournal's turn to own up to a dishonest and disgraceful trick." On December 15, 1885, the MorningJournal had featured a front-page story on a bizarre swindle perpetrated by a man named Garret Onderdonk, who, dressed as a farmer and claiming to be from rural New Jersey, had sold hundreds of dozens of eggs to grocers in Paterson. The eggs were later discovered to be artificial, their shells a mixture of lime and plaster of paris, their filling" a glutinous matter having the resemblance of the whites and the yolk." 11 The Journal speculated that the bogus eggs might have come from" an egg foundry" in Newark that manufactured a similar article, failing, however, to clarify the purpose of that enterprise. Moreover, it hedged its speculation by adding, "Some think that the eggs are what are known as limed eggs, which have become quickened and partially boiled." The Paterson health inspector was called in to determine whether the eggs were doctored or fraudulent. At least one grocer "got very mad at the deception, as he prided himself on being an egg expert." The case makes clear that modern industrial technology, which made possible better imitations and could produce them on a mass scale, was directly involved in the proliferating deceptions of modern life. Although the Journal's headline announced "Hundreds of People Victimized with Spurious Hen Fruit," the report revealed that in fact no one had suffered. "There is a lively demand for the fruit at 5 cents each, as people want them for cu riosities, so that the dealers who bought them did not lose anything." A clever im itation was worth more than the real thing. Shoppers' curious amusement balanced the egg experts' injured pride. The Journal's report included a woodcut portrait of the criminal, captioned" Onderdonk, the 'Hayseed,'" although the figure portrayed looked nothing at all like a hayseed (Fig. 4). His costume was too elegant, his manner too dignified and com mantling. Was this the true aspect of the con man who had assumed the disguise of an innocent rustic? The Graphicoffered a plausible explanation for the confulOOKING ASKANC(

8

IICUR[ 4 "Onderdonk, the 'Hayseed,"' Morning Journal (New York), December 15, 1885, L Courtesy Library of Congress.

Onderdonk, the "Hayseed.''

sion: the portrait was in fact a likeness of someone else-the aged and ailing Gen eral Robert Augustus Toombs, former congressman, senator, and Confederate general from the state of Georgia (Fig. 5). Following the Elmira Advertiser, which originated the story, the Graphic surmised that the Journal had commissioned the woodcut for an anticipated obituary of Toombs but saw an opportunity to save time and money by getting an additional use from a languishing portrait of a figure not widely recognized. Unfortunately for the Journal, Toombs died that very day. According to the Graphic, the Journal had compounded Onderdonk's deceptions by stealing for him the face of a respected politician and military leader dying at that very moment at his home in Washington, Georgia. Even if Toombs vaguely resembled Onderdonk, something never claimed, such "trifling with the public credulity" would have an injurious effect on the press in general, accord-

lOOKING ASKANC[

9

5 • RobertToombs, flGUft[ at the Age of Seventy-five Years,photograph. Frontispiece of Pleasant A. Stovall, Robert Augustus Toombs(189~).

ing to the high-principled Graphic.Its editors apparently believed that their assertion of their own newspaper's integrity more than compensated for the risk of publicizing the press's power to mislabel images. At this key moment in the history of the print media, when images were appearing more frequently but not yet so ubiquitously that they could be readily tested against one another, the Graphic fancied itself a guardian of truthful illustration and captioning. Its attacks on com petitors were clearly a device for self-promotion. 12 Three months later, the Graphiccharged the august Centurymagazine with similar infractions involving the multiple use and incorrect captioning of illustrations.

13

The Journalpublished its deceptive report on a preposterous deception at a time when newspaper illustrations were still woodcuts, although the technological in novations that would make practical the mechanical reproduction of photographs

ASKANC[ lOOKING

10 were only a few years away. The Onderdonk incident itself is trivial compared with the mass media deceptions to follow. Yellowjournalism would warrant far more serious charges of manipulation and deception once William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and their competitors moved into high gear. The pictures that helped to deliver the news were often implicated in schemes to serve the political and commercial interests of battling publications.

14

As visual images became

central to mass politics, a competitive economy of consumption, and the organization of society-that

is, as the culture became more visual and spectacular-

representations and appearances were exploited to deceive audiences and manipulate public opinion. Chief among the unforeseen complications of proliferating images was the need to distinguish trustworthy from deceptive ones. A last vignette will fill out the cultural landscape of illusions and deceptions I have been sketching. In December 1897 Century magazine published a short report submitted by Dr. H. C. Wood, who explained in an introductory note that it represented" a true experience of a patient, given in his own language." The anonymous patient described his experience over eighteen years with "voluntary and involuntary false sight." From a young age he had frequently seen specters. Some of these he could summon through an effort of will; others "came uncalled" and would not be banished. In either case, "the image thus placed before my bodily eyes seemed as actual and touchable as the chair that stood beside it." The author described a diverse range of visions, hallucinations, and illusions-of

monkeys,

snakes, fires, mountains, goblins, traditional ghosts, dwarf and giant versions of himself, eagles, storms, and his mother. Literary characters sometimes invaded his room: "Many nights during one winter in my early youth, as soon as I lay down, I saw the insane wife of Rochester in]ane Eyre enter the open door of an adjoining room, and approach my bed to set it afire. And when she bent over me, holding a shovelful of live coals, I could hardly resist the impulse to scream. I shut the door in her face, and she never came again! The sense of double consciousness, the contradiction between me and myself, which accompanied these apparitions was one of their most disagreeable features."

15

The text exhibits an ambiguity common to its type. If the illusions were as realas actual and touchable-as

the author repeatedly affirmed, what enabled him to

say, "And yet [I] knew that it was a false creation of the mind"? By reserving the term" apparitions" for hallucinations, period discussions acknowledged the un specified quality that distinguished them from ordinary appearances. That apparitions were not quite appearances does not undermine the basic point: mind lOOKING ASKANC[

11 and self were a formidable source of visual deceptions as well as their victim. Dr. Wood's patient was certainly an extraordinary case, but to judge from the amount of ink the press devoted to such stories, they answered the demands of a large sym pathetic readership. These demands might have stemmed from widespread personal experience with occult phenomena-owing perhaps to "American nervousness" and the pressures of modern life or to some mysterious new volatility in the spirit world-or they may have responded to the new range of available explanations for such experiences. Spiritualism and occult philosophies overlapped with the scientific work of James Sully, William James, Joseph Jastrow, and other psychologists formulating explanations for illusions, hallucinations, and deceptions in this period. In the work of these researchers and others-including Freud to some extent-could be found theories of the divided self, one or more of whose parts sometimes intersected the spirit world, with illusions erupting from the divisions and junctions. Such theories acquired currency in the decades bracketing 1900. Their urgency was heightened by deep-rooted ideological conflicts-especially those between ruthlessly competitive business practices and Christian virtues of honesty and charity-that individuals often resolved through self-deception. Self-deception and hypocrisy became indispensable for reconciling the values the culture piously endorsed with the behavior it rewarded. In this respect as in so many others, the ostensible and the true seemed increasingly divergent. was rife with fraudulent spectacles, deceptive images were flourishing in advertising and the mass media, modern science was humbling unaided vision, and transformations in the experience and understanding of the self and its relation to the spirit world were giving cultural significance to hallucinatory visions. The Graphicwas right to worry about erosion of "the public credulity," but it was the seen world at large that was under threat. Modern life was com The modern city circa

1900

ing to be distinguished by a gaping separation between appearance and truth. The similarities and cumulative effect of these developments should not obscure their real differences. Suspecting that the evidence of vision is inadequate to the truths of nature is not the same as wondering whether what one sees has been orchestrated to deceive or suspecting that what one sees is a delusion or para normal phenomenon. To be anxious about the visibility of truth is not necessarily to worry about the trustworthiness of visual communications or about disruptions of the cognitive and sensory faculties. ASKANC[ lOOKING

12 Vision is transitive. How one looks depends on what one is looking at. The field of art history has been sensitive to this point, recognizing that works of art elicit frorn their audiences distinctive and concentrated styles of viewing. Even so, the visual practices developed in one area of experience can impinge on those used for others. Art historians have argued persuasively and productively that the vi sual practices of everyday life sornetirnes intersect with those of viewing art. 16 Similarly, the different anxieties I have sketched sornetirnes overlapped. In the chapters of this book I document sorne of the crossovers, observing and clarifying the differences. Considerable evidence suggests that the assimilation of illusions, rnisperceptions,

apparitions,

and hallucinations

to frauds, hoaxes, swindles,

counterfeits, impostures, forgeries, tricks, impositions, cons, and humbugs had a cumulative impact on individuals during the period. The subtly differentiated period lexicon for deception signals the issue's importance. Suspicious viewing in one situation was justified and intensified by the habits characteristic of so rnany others. Looking askance was two things at once: a way of looking and a way of thinking about looking. It represented a theory of seeing as well as a perceptual style, by which I rnean a historically conditioned practice oflooking. One learned to look askance automatically but also to understand the habit through a network of beliefs. Internalizingthis

practice and rationalizing it were part of the process of be-

corning a modern subject able to function in the modern world. A modern self, knowing well the perils presented to modern vision, looked askance. Precisely what this practice of seeing entailed can only be surmised. The observable effects were rnost likely subtle. One can imagine an impulse to gain an alternative vantage, to literally look askance, a slight jumpiness about focus. Si rnultaneously, one might expect resigned diffidence. an inclination to rely on other sensory faculties, a tendency to dismiss the data of vision unless they were verified through other means. Seeing would almost certainly become a rnore self- conscious act, and that self-consciousness would prompt meditations on vision's finiteness and fallibility. Questions ordinarily considered philosophical-how

do I know what

I arn seeing is real?-would begin to impinge on ordinary life. A magazine advertisement for Wanamaker's Department Store frorn 1898 indicates an analogous shift in habits of reading. Printed on eight pages at the back of an issue of Scribner's, it opens as follows: "The wary reader, on guard against in sidious advertisement, who prefaces his absorption of a magazine article by a swift observation of its illustrations and general character, rnay already have discovered lOOKING ASKANC[

in this, the tell-tale traces of mercantile self-interest.

He shall, at least, have no

cause to triumph in his shrewdness, for here, at the beginning, disguise is aban doned. This is an advertisement, and of a dry-goods store. " 17 Wanamaker's advertisement was disguised as a magazine feature article, but its hook was to acknowledge the disguise up front. More important, the passage notes that a style of reading was developing as a means of ferreting out such concealed advertisements. Now one scanned a text and its illustrations to assess the overall character of an essay before becoming absorbed in it, so as not to be tricked. I envision "looking askance" comprising analogous techniques viewers devised to protect themselves from visual deception. The pressures converging on vision circa

19

oo could not have rendered all see-

ing suspect. Blanket doubt would have impeded practical life, and certainly much visual activity continued to be conducted with the usual confidence. Moreover, modern technology's

prosthetic extensions and other advances in scientific

knowledge justified a countertendency: exuberant optimism about enhancingvision's purchase on truth and knowledge. The paintings of Thomas Eakins, as I argue in Chapter~' powerfully demonstrate the appeal of this position, although their idiosyncrasies betray repression of the uncertainties of vision and appearances. As Eakins's case implies, and as the vignettes I have narrated begin to suggest, pictures and visual representations of all kinds-including

the fine arts-were fully

implicated in these developments. Art had long provided a locus for careful viewing, even (or especially) in the United States, where the legitimacy of art for a democratic and frontier society had always been in question, and where artists themselves were suspect.

18

At the end of the nineteenth century, the visual arts'

long-standing commerce in illusion was absorbed into a larger cultural economy of deception. As more oflived experience warranted concentrated and critical vi sual attention, the situation for art changed. Looking askance and the pressures that produced it became part of making, seeing, interpreting, and experiencing art and images of every sort. Realistic representation adjusted to the diminished credibility of the seen world. The attention ordinarily extended to fine art changed as the barrage of pictures engaged in political, commercial, and ideological persuasion engendered suspicion. Artists recognized and welcomed or denied and resisted the challenge of addressing audiences for whom looking askance was a habit of daily life. This book explores what happened under these circumstances in the urban centers of the northeastern United States in the decades around

1900.

How did lOOKING ASKANC[

14 the visual arts interact with the conditions redefming vision and with the modern skeptical vision itself? How did art exacerbate and ameliorate the situation, produce and respond to it, frame and disguise it, exploit and deny it, and engage it unwittingly? The signs of" art"-a frame, an exhibition space, whatever signaled a demand for aesthetic attention-provoked especially suspicious looking in this period. In 1869 a photographer in New York City was brought to criminal court on charges of fraud. His trial was front-page news, although it is now all but forgotten. He was accused of selling photographs that had been doctored, and, though guilty, he was not convicted. In 1917an artist in NewYork perpetrated a hoax. Using a false name, he submitted to an art exhibition a mass-produced commodity he had purchased. His submission was refused, but he was not charged with any crime-in fact, his action was barely noticed. But its subsequent influence in the field of art has been profound. These two events-the

trial of the spirit photographer William Mumler and Marcel Duchamp's submission of a urinal to an unjuried exhibition in New Yorkdiffer in crucial ways, but they demarcate a history. They bracket a period in which producers of visual artifacts, those that qualified as art and those that did not, participated in New York's growing culture of deception. That culture had emerged well before 1869, and it certainly did not end in 1917,but many of art's principal strategies of engagement with it were formulated and tested in this period. 19 Nor were these developments specific to New York, or even the northeastern cities of the United States. 20 They were, nonetheless, marked there. This book focuses on artistic developments in New York City-the center of the art world, the locus of much of the commentary on deception, and the metropolis where anxiety about it was evidently most acute-but also reaches when necessary to other northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo. In this milieu politicians such as Anthony Comstock and Theodore Roosevelt rose to prominence through highly publicized campaigns against fraud and deception of all kinds. Comstock's Frauds Exposed (1880) alerted the public to widely practiced swindles and mail frauds. Handbooks warned visitors to Anierican cities about the ruses of con men and sometimes gave them tips on how to work their own cons. Witness the pamphlet Tricks and traps of America, or, Swindlers, quacks, humbugs, and rasceLs[sic] exposed: an exposition of aU the various cheats, swindles, impositions, humbugs, etc. of the present day: also contains several Legitimate schemes that can be used

lOOKING ASKANC[

15 to good profit by any person. 21 The national print media took the proliferation of

frauds, deceptions, and illusions as a distinctive feature of unregulated capital ism and modern American life. One aim of my study is to understand the particularities of the engagement between visual art and modern life in the United States. In NewYork throughout this period, suspicion of deception in art was constant. It manifested itself in the frequent appearance in art criticism of the terms "hum bug," "fraud," and" swindle." To call a painting humbug was not to charge the artist with outright forgery, although such fraud attracted attention as the art market heated up. Rather, it signified that the form or content of the work was somehow inauthentic, formulaic, or vapid-that it was hackwork masquerading as art. For the artists and critics who believed that truth was behind, beyond, above, or otherwise removed from appearances, realism and naturalism were humbug; artists like George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder found truth in vague, abstract, and disembodied visions. For artists and critics of nearly every persuasion, "honest" and "truthful" became terms of the highest artistic praise; but these terms, like their opposites, could mean many things when applied to art. Distinguishing truth from humbug-however paradoxical it might be to apply either of these terms to art-became a principal responsibility of art viewing and a preoccupation of art criticism. American viewers, whose cultural insecurity had long made them suspicious of art, could now, in encountering it, cultivate skills essential to coping with modernity and its myriad deceptions. An impressive body of scholarship on French modernist art from 1848 to 1917offers a model for an art that effectively engages features of modern life. By the stan dards of Parisian modernism, American turn -of-the- century art has long seemed provincial and imitative, modern only at second hand. How could it be that the most rapidly modernizing country in the world did not generate a modern art but only imported one? This book argues that answering the question involves recalibrating the measure of modernity in art. In NewYork, the visual culture most significantly implicated in the pressures of modern life operated outside or at the periphery of high modernism, which largely carried different meanings in U.S. artistic circles. The cultural work it performed in Paris was accomplished through other visual modes in NewYork. The modernity of NewYork's non-modernist art, however, was no less intense. Although this book does not argue for the superi ority of New York's brand of modern art, or for any essential "Americanness" in it, its particular adaptation to the issues and problems of modern life in the ASKANC[ lOOKING

16 United States is very much to the point. Phineas T. Barnum had famously said that the American people love to be humbugged, suggesting a distinctively American orientation toward deception. Commentators in the mass press in the decades that followed pondered the idea of such a national trait. 22 Even if Americans loved humbugging or considered looking askance a national characteristic, their culture often fostered a contrary or at least ambivalent image. A view of Americans as innocents or primitives-blind to the complex social codes of cultured society (that is to say, Europe), or committed to straightforward honesty in interpersonal relations, or dauntlessly and naively optimistic-flourished through this same period. The United States was understood as the land of both truth and deception. An older image of the country as homeland of forthright, plainspoken truthtellers survived alongside a newer one featuring shrewd capitalist businessmen whose methods often verged on con artistry. Both kinds of in dividuals were sources of national pride; both were also targets of criticism and ridicule. Oscar Wilde, in his 1889 protest against the decay oflying, ridiculed the truthtellers as evidence of modern America's cultural barrenness. "The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. "23 I have drawn this passage (a favorite of American reviewers of Wilde's book) 24 from the polemic of a fictional character, Vivian-who nonetheless presents Wilde's own views, with characteristic, perhaps even exaggerated, flamboyance. Vivian ad vacates artifice, imagination, and art-for-art's-sake over slavish submission to the facts, which is to say, over realism and naturalism in the arts. In this opposition, America stands not only for indifference to culture but also for the idealization of literal truth, personified by its revered first president and the story of his foursquare admission of arboricide. The overvaluation of facts both suppresses artistic imagination, which thrives on lying, and ensures the triumph of practical life and material interests. Wilde's reasoning assumes that beliefs and culture produce corresponding forms of material life rather than the other way around. This image of the United States and its culture accords well with a now deeprooted assessment of American art around 1900. The nation (that is, the official ASKANC[ lOOKING

17 culture) favored realist styles, according to this view: dominated by practical dem ocrats with a strong Puritan heritage, the citizenry-including individuals-preferred

the most affluent

art grounded in familiar, observable reality. American

artists and art audiences continued to cherish landscape paintings and scenes of daily life rendered in naturalist styles right through the turn of the century, long after the ascension of modernism in Europe. Paintings of humble truths were admired for their honesty and immediacy, and modernism's

concentration

on

artifice failed to attract much interest. The national culture was resistant to modernism, according to this interpretation, because artistic abstractions, distortions, or liberties with truthful appearances collided with the national commitment to materialism and to empirical reality. In the United States circa 1900 material advantage and economic progress constituted a semi-official national agenda. What that meant for the national culture, however, was open to dispute. A passage written forty years earlier by Karl Marx suggests a somewhat different line of reasoning: "[In the United States] the feverish and youthful movement of a material production which has to appropriate a new world has left neither time nor opportunity for the abolition of the old spiritual world. "25 Marx was writing about a frontier nation bent on fulfilling the immediate practical needs of its population, but his point can be extended to a later stage, when the nation, though more prosperous, remains preoccupied with material wealth. Under such circumstances an inherited old-world culture might be expected to survive essentially unaltered, and perhaps even be fetishized, so that the nation sustains its cultural provinciality long after achieving political and economic independence. This interpretation,

too, has been invoked frequently and usefully

for the history of late-nineteenth-century

American art. It too explains resistance

to modernism, but it leads us to expect dominant forms of art and literature different from those conjured by Wilde. Academicism, not realism, would thrive, making the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago more representative than the realist writers and artists Wilde targeted. Latent in Wilde's essay is a third interpretation

of America's Gilded Age cul-

ture that inadvertently but insistently undermines the essay's ostensible thesis.

As Vivian, the promoter of lying, acknowledges, "The amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth. " 26 Mason Weems, Washington's hagiographer and the source of the fable, evidently had precisely "the wit to exaggerate and the genius to romance" that Wilde wanted to promote, even lOOKING ASKANC[

18 if Weems lent those talents to a misguided purpose. America's idealization ofliteral truth was founded on artful lies after all. Moreover, Wilde was forced to draw a subtle distinction between the mendacious lying that thrives in a capitalist market and the artistic lying he was promoting. He called the activity of politicians, salesmen, lawyers, and journalists "misrepresentation";

presumably it would be

common currency in the" crudely commercial" United States. But Vivian's position is open to challenge for mistaking the myth for the reality: where else should we expect to fmd a collective mythology of truthtelling but in a society worried about the scope of its deceptions? If lying, deceit, and misperception permeated social and culturallife and economic exchange in the United States, then the logic of Wilde's essay would require their grounding in a cultural mythology of deception. Here we come to a thesis that has no obvious counterpart in established histories of art in the United States. That deception might be a significant and pervasive issue in American art circa 1900 not only contradicts the "realism thesis" but also threatens to undermine the "resistance to modernism" theory. This book develops just such an interpretation of the visual culture of New York a century ago. It does not, however, supply a new, sweeping characterization of the national visual culture-a

misguided enterprise that necessarily would conceal

much more than it revealed. While my focus is the dominant visual culture of the period-by which I mean works that addressed the interests and commanded the attention of socially elite art audiences or mass publics-I do not imagine the theme of deception as the essence of that culture. Nor do I valorize those works most deeply implicated in this theme. My purpose is not to celebrate or perpetuate that culture but to open it to critical historical analysis. A fuller, more nuanced portrait of the culture requires balancing Washington as American idol with the country's other, very different father figure: P. T. Barnum, who inspired a national fascination and considerable admiration. One of Barnum's earliest and most notorious humbugs had centered on Washington: in the 183os Barnum exhibited an aged black woman named Joice Heth, claiming she had been Washington's nursemaid, which would have made her 160 years old (Fig. 6). Heth even claimed to have witnessed the cherry tree incident firsthand: how better to establish the authenticity of an implausible exhibit than by physical con nection to the paragon of national honesty and his primal demonstration virtue?

of that

27

By 1891, when Barnum died, after a long string of successful and spectacular hoaxes, he was as much a symbol of the United States as Washington. The obituary lOOKINC ASKANC[

GREATEST

THE

Natural & National

GVRIOSITT

WOBLB.

ISi

u

...

D

Nurse to Gu. GEORGE WASHINGTON, (the Father of our Country,) WILL BE SEEN AT

Barnum's Hotel, Bridgeport, On FRIDAY,and ~.ATURDAY, tho 11th. & 12th of December, DAY and EVENIN,&,

day■

1~

JOJCF. HETH it unqueetionably lhe mn1t utooiehing and intereetingcurioeity intlle (the fathr of Gen. Wuhiogtoo,) Woridl Shr WH tbe 1la•e of Augu■ tine Wub~oo, aod -.u the first per.10n Mlioput clnthea on the uncon.-iou, iurant, who, in aOerdaya, led our heroic (atluira on tn glory, to victory, aod freedom. To use her own languap wbeo ayeuinic of the i11111triou1J,iathn of hi, Country, 11ahe nited him." JOICI!: HETU wu born io the 1t!IU 1674, aud hu, con1equeotly, now anivcd al the utoni•hina

I

AGE OF 161 YEARS~

Sbe Weigh■ but FORTY-SIX POU>;D~, ■od yet i1 ••ry cheerful and inter.. tlnc. She retain, h~r :acuhiPI in an unpa,aUeled dt'j!;ree.convtnu freely, 11inf. numeN>UIbymm, relate. m11n7intt'resting anecdufe,1of the boy Wuhington, 111doil.en augh• beartil1 at Hr owliremarl.•, or thoR of the •pc•c1,1or1, Her heath II perfl'ctl! good, an,I her appeUI.DCe ~· ,ery nra1. 811ei1 a ba~i,t anOtakt!I a:real pleuure io co11vrr.1ngwith miniltertaod lhe beholder tt1tll ou per111n•. The apptaraoce oflhit m"rvellnu•relir. of 101iqui17111lrike1 amazerne11t,and t'oovinCe. him that h•• nya are re ■tinp: on the olde1t 11pedmenof moraOriginal, authentic, and in11i,putabled"cu111entlaocom• tali•:r thf'lyc::....-rbe(oro ~uld. paoyinE[her prCi•e,howaver utoni•hm,c the fact may 1ppear, that JOJCE HKTH ia ia e,ery ret1pectthe portonjhe i1 repre• ..nled, 1'h~ rno,t eminent p 1ician1 •nd intelligent men In Cincinnatti, Philadelphia, Newlace■, hav11uamin1•d thit li'fflll ,hid, fl MIidthe document■ acYork, B111m,n 1 and othf'r oompauyin1 her, and all, ooriahly,pronounce her to be, u repreaenttd 1 161 yeort o/o«el A fcm11loi, in continua aUftodauce, aud will giH Hery attention to th ladte■ who ..Wt thil r1dicof hy-gooe ege,. Sho hu ~en vi1ited n Phlludolphia, New.York, Botton, Ile.. b7 mori-.bu Lldiea ind Genth,men 1 within the IHt thrfte moatfll' TWEN t'Y THOUS.\N

Bo•r1of Edibition,J, m9A.J\f.la

IP. Jf. ood/...,.3 la6, aodll/ lalOP.M.

AD.1111'1''1'.&WOB I Oeata, OBIJ:.:DllBII Priil,edb! J. auo'ht • ioN, U.7,t.JL..-

11.&J,J'-•azcm.

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I • Handbill flGUR[ for Joice Heth, 1835, woodcut on paper, 1z x 6 ½ in. Collection Somers Historical Society, New York.

20 for Barnum in the LondonTimesdescribed him as "one of the most typical and con spicuous of Yankees .... His name is a proverb already, and a proverb it will con tinue. "28 Shrewd hucksters and honest farmers were brothers in typical Yankeehood; that was the view from England and the American self-image as well. The

New YorkSun wrote that" more than almost any other living man, Barnum may be said to be a representative type of the American mind." 29 For some time scholars of American Studies and American literature have been developing a picture of nineteenth-century U.S. cultural history that accords a prominent place to con men, entertaining frauds, and trickster figures such as Barnum and his literary counterparts Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, and the Wizard of Oz. A picture has emerged of sustained public discussions, in print media and public forums, to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable and remediable from irremediable fraud. 30 This book builds on these studies, sometimes disagreeing with them, sometimes shifting their focus, in the effort to understand the relations of art and visual culture to the cultural and historical developments they address. From a wealth of possible case studies, I have assembled a selection that represents the broadest range of materials and the most diverse forms of involvement with the themes of this book. Between chapters on Mumler's spirit photographs and Duchamp's readymades appear studies of the paintings of Thomas Eakins and William Harnett, Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory, the interpretation of Monet's impressionism by a young American scientist named Helen Abbott, the myriad illusions featured at the Pan -American Exposition in Buffalo in 19 o 1 (especially the sensational spectacles of the illusionist Henry Roltair), and William James's explorations of automatic drawing. Each chapter strives to nuance and complicate what I have so far sketched in simplified and abstract form. Each attempts to make vivid some element of the drive to look askance, to situate it in particular individuals and historical circumstances, and to analyze its significance for art and visual culture. In doing so the book traces the roots of our current skepticism about images, which is sometimes classified as "postmodern." I hope to show that that skepticism has a long history rooted deep in the culture of modernity and in national values of entrepreneurship,

invention, competition, and un-

regulated marketing. For better or worse, we have inherited the visual culture our modern life and modern values have wanted.

lOOKING ASKANC[

•

••

cHaPTerone

•••

PHOTOGRAPHS fRAUDUl[Nl MUMl[R'S

STING TH[ On March 16, 1869, William H. Bowditch entered a photography studio at 630 Broadway in New York City. It bore the name William W. Silver on its door. Inside the gallery Bowditch asked for Mr. Silver, and when the man answering to that name appeared, Bowditch introduced himself as a skeptic in the matter of spirit photographs. He doubted, he said, "that the likeness of deceased persons could be produced by photographic process on cards with living subjects," and he asked Silver whether he claimed the power to make such pictures. Silver responded that although he himself was not capable of it, there was in the upstairs rooms a spiritual medium and photographer named William Mumlerwho had the power to produce likenesses of supernaturals (Fig. 7). Silver quoted a price often dollars per dozen cards for that work, justifying the high price (about five times the usual rate for portrait cartes de visite) as calculated to keep away the "vulgar multitude." Moreover, he said, "persons who had lost their relatives and others dear to them ... sometimes would not part with [their spirit photographs] for thousands of dollars." His skepticism evidently waning, Bowditch told Silver he would like to have a photograph of his deceased brother-in-law and asked whether he could simply specify the identity of the spirit he wished photographed. No, Silver told him, the spirits that appeared as "extras" in portrait photographs of living subjects were

21

22

flGURU • William H. Mumler, Mrs. Frenchof Bostonwith SpiritSon, ca. 1868, albumen carte de visite, 4 x 2 % in. American Museum of Photography (www.photographymuseum.com).

those "nearest in sympathy" with the sitter at the time the exposure was taken. Success could not be guaranteed, but Silver confided that Bowditch looked like someone whose prospects were good. Agreeing finally to try the experiment, Bowditch was asked to provide a five-dollar deposit, but he easily negotiated the figure down to two. As soon as the deposit was paid, a woman who had been occupied in the gallery during the negotiation silently proceeded up the stairs. Silver identified her to Bowditch as Mrs. Mumler, wife of the spirit photographer and herself a medium. Silver subsequently engaged Bowditch in idle conversation for about ten minutes, until a bell rang, prompting him to escort Bowditch upstairs, where Mumler was MUMUR'S fRAUOUUNl PHOTOGRAPHS

23

flGUR[ i • William H. Mumler,Ha,per's Weekly, May 8, 1869, cover, wood engraving after photograph.

waiting for them (Fig. 8). Mumler told Bowditch that "no other person could take such wonderful pictures" as his own, and he "challenged the sceptical world" to try. When Bowditch expressed his doubts, Mumler became eager to convince him that "the pictures were not the result of trick or deception." He took Bowditch into his darkroom and explained the photographic process, volunteering that his own strong feelings indicated this particular sitting would be successful. Bowditch sat in the appointed chair and posed as if for an ordinary portrait. The procedure seemed entirely routine to him, except that while the exposure was being made, Mumler placed his hand on the camera. A short time later Bowditch was shown a negative plate containing a portrait of himself and, behind it, a faint outline of a man's face. Asked ifhe recognized the face, Bowditch said he did not. Mumler told him that in a few days, if he concentrated, he would recognize the shadow as that of a relative or friend. He was instructed to return the next day to collect the twelve cards upon payment of the outstanding balance to Silver.

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUl[Nl PHOlDGRAPHS

The cards were not ready the next day, but on the second day Bowditch found them waiting for him. He noticed that on the receipt given to him by Silver, the latter had signed his name as William Guay. Bowditch carried his photographs up Broadway to Rockwood's photographic gallery, where he showed them to Charles Boyle, a well- known photography specialist. Boyle said he could simulate the effect of Mumler's photograph without the assistance of any supernatural or spiritual agents. Bowditch commissioned him to do so. He also showed the photographs to Oscar Mason, an authority on photography and a microscopist at the Bellvue Hospital. Mason judged them" an imposition on the credulity of the living and an outrage on the sacred respect due to the memory of the dead." He asserted that such photographs could be produced readily by technical means without spiritual agency. With an affidavit from Mason and Boyle's simulated photograph, Bowditch brought charges against Mumler and Silver. Within a month both were summoned to appear before Judge Joseph Dowling in the Manhattan police court and prison known as the Tombs. 1 (A more aptly named site for a trial concerning spiritualism would be hard to invent.) The William Silver who appeared at the arraignment was not the person Bowditch had met at the gallery, so he was promptly released. Mumlerwas charged with two felonies and one misdemeanor, allhavingto do with fraud, larceny, and" obtaining money by trick and device." Having had no prior warning of the charges, Mumlerwas unprepared to post immediately the unusually high bail, set at five hundred dollars. Consequently, he was taken to a cell in the Tombs. The legal action was expedited by Bowditch's identity: he was, in fact, Joseph H. Tooker, agent of the License Bureau at City Hall and chief marshal to New York City Mayor A. Oakey Hall. Tooker was regularly assigned to investigate charges of fraud, and in this case Hall had instructed him to prepare a case against Mumler in response to information supplied by P. V. Hickey, an editor of scientific news at the World, a New York newspaper (Fig. 9). On March~ Hickey had attended a meeting of the Photographic Section of the American Institute of the City of New York (PSAI)-an organization of amateur and professional scientists and photographers to which he belonged-where

Mason, secretary of the PSAI as well as mi-

croscopist at Bellvue, had made a presentation on Mumler's spirit photographs.

2

Mason's ire had been roused by recent newspaper reports publicizing Mumler's photographs, especially an extensive article by a marveling reporter in the New York Sun. 3 He went to Mumler's studio to conduct his own investigation into Mumler's procedures, but his request for a spirit portrait was refused. He did manage to ac-

MUMlfR'S fRAUOUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

25

flCUR[ 9 • Rockwood and Boyle, P. V Hickeywith Tookeras Spirit, Harper's Weekly,May 8, 1869, cover, wood engraving after spirit photograph.

quire three examples of Mumler's work: three carte de visite photographs showing live portrait subjects with ghostly figures visible in the background. He exhibited these at the meeting, pointing out to the audience that the sitter in one of the photographs appeared as a ghost in the other two. Mumler's claims that his photographs were entirely the product of supernatural causes came in for con siderable ridicule at the meeting. Some of those in attendance "expressed the opin ion that the matter called for the intervention of the police," as Hickey recounted in his report on the meeting for the World.4 Hickey took one of the advertisements Mason had brought to the meeting, a card that read "William H. Mumler, Spirit Photographic Medium, No. 630 Broadway, N.Y. N.B.-All are respectfully invited to call and see specimens, and get a pamphlet giving full information." The next day Hickeyvisited the gallery and con versed with some of its patrons. He also conducted some research into Mumler's past, learning that the photographer "had practiced similar deception in Boston

MUMl[R'S fRAUOUl[Nl PHOlOGRAPHS

until he could no longer remain there, and that some of the leading spiritualists having denounced his pretended art as humbug, and others, respectable artists, having demonstrated that similar cards could be produced by scientific and chem ical means, and without any supernatural agency, that said Mumler had thus been induced to come to New York, where his pretensions and himself were alike unknown in order to have a new and wide field for his practices and deceits." Hickey belonged to two powerful institutions with different motivations for prosecuting Mumler. The PSAJ desired to establish photography as a legitimate scientific technology and as a truthful form of representation. It sought to protect the medium from fraudulent practitioners and con artists such as Mumler. To the editors of the World,exposing Mumler's fraud carried multiple benefits. The newspaper would perform a public service and generate sensational news as the charlatan was unmasked in daily installments. Moreover, the paper would outflank its market rivals, the New York City dailies that had seized opportunistically on the gothic sensationalism of Mumler's photographs. The Sun would be particularly embarrassed for having publicized and promoted Mumler's work. A promise, patently hollow, to arm its readership against the city's ubiquitous frauds and deceptions was a standard feature of newspaper advertising at the time, although most of the papers were firmly in the grip of the Tweed ring. The World's editors were delighted to reprint the words of the WorcesterEvening Gazette, which obligingly described the efforts against Mumler as evidence that the Worldwas "the vigilant and vigorous custodian of NewYork morals ."5 Mumler, in other words, became entangled in the competitive posturing of New York's daily newspapers. So on behalf of the Worldand with extensive assistance from the PSAJ, Hickey brought a complaint directly to Mayor Hall, who responded immediately by assigning Tooker to the case.6 Hall, too, had reasons for wanting to see Mumlertried. As one of the most corrupt mayors in the history of New York City, a leading figure in the Tweed Ring and Tammany Hall, he undoubtedly relished prosecuting a cheat whose crimes would not lead back to any of his own. Mumler's side of the courtroom was no less densely populated with interested and sometimes duplicitous supporters. Eminent among them was Mumler's partner, William Guay, the man who identified himself to Bowditch/Tooker as William Silver. That Tooker and Guay presented false identities to each other in the open ing scene of this story suits the drama of deceit they enacted. On March

10

Silver

had sold the contents of his photography studio and the lease on the two floors of 630 Broadway to Guay and Mumler, who were equal partners in the venture. Later

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUHNl PHOlOGRAPHS

Mumler claimed to have been "sole owner and proprietor."

7

Guay had known

Mumler since at least 1862, when a leading figure in the American spiritualist movement, Andrew Jackson Davis, had commissioned him to investigate Mumler's work in Boston, where the first spirit photographs had been made and sold. In subsequent years Guay had played a prominent part in publicizing and defending Mumler's controversial photography. He wrote often to newspapers and magazines, claiming to have thoroughly examined Mumler's process and found it absolutely legitimate.

8

Guay, in answering Bowditch's call for Silver, was proba-

bly trying to conceal the recent transfer of ownership and preserve for the business an illusion of credibility; after all, Silver's name had not yet been replaced on the door. Guay was never formally charged in the case. The affidavits filed by Tooker, Hickey, and Mason provide most of the details for the story I have narrated here. They give an extraordinarily vivid and plausi ble account of acquiring a spirit photograph from the best- known practitioner of the genre in New York in 1869. Similarly, the newspaper accounts and published records of the trial offer unusual insight into the development and diffusion of skeptical viewing of photographs.

9

Earlier in the decade many Americans had

learned to discern truths in the Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner; now photography was being revealed to that same public as yet another field for the practice of humbug.

TH[ TRIAl The preliminary hearing to determine whether Mumler' s case should be sent to a grand jury lasted about three weeks. It had all the weight of a full criminal trial, com mantling extensive press coverage in New York, across the country, and internationally (Fig. 10). It remained a focus of commentary and a point of referenceoften humorous-in

mass-circulation publications for months afterward, and for

much longer in journals of photography and spiritualism. The trial was attended, according to the World,by "persons of all classes, professions, and shades of opinion." The paper went on to boast that "the number of journalists present~a sure index of the popular interest in the case-was remarkable. " 10 Women were unusually numerous in the audience, as they were in the ranks of the spiritualist movement.

11

Of course the Worldmade the most of its role in provoking the trial.

Its front-page coverage transcribed or summarized much of the testimony, and its editorial pages offered a steady stream of critical commentary. Its reporting,

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUlrnT PHOTOGRAPHS

28

10• "The Spiritual Photograph Trial, flCUR[ before Justice Dowling, at the City Prison, New York, April ~1." FrankLeslie'sIllustrated Newspaper,May 8, 1869, 1~0.

however, was heavily weighted toward the prosecution; to learn the full arguments of the defense, one had to turn to the pages of the Tribune, Times, Sun, or Herald. Another indication of the importance of the trial was the postponement of its opening. Mayor Hall seems to have considered prosecuting the case personally, but his schedule prevented his attendance on the date assigned for the opening session. Judge Dowling delayed the proceedings but, for whatever reason, Hall did not join the prosecution. ltwas entrusted to the prominent lawyer Elbridge T. Gerry and an assistant from the district attorney's office, George Blunt. 12 Mumler was represented by an up-and-coming young lawyer named John D. Townsend, assisted by Albert Day and A. E. Baker. At his arraignment Mumler responded to the charges by denying that he had ever claimed spirits were involved in producing his photographs. This weak defense, com bined with the pathetic spectacle of his being led to a prison cell, must have made his prospects look dim at the outset. They brightened dramatically, however, when the trial opened four days later, so much so that after the first day of testimony the World's editorial admitted that Mumler did" seem likely to obtain a legal triumph." 13

PHOlOGRAPHS fRAUOUHNl MUMl[R'S

One factor in this shift of momentum was the large contingent of Mumler's supporters that appeared in the courtroom. Many witnesses and onlookers had traveled from northeastern centers of spiritualism, such as Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Poughkeepsie, and Waterville, to defend the legitimacy of spiritualism and to witness events at the Tombs firsthand. Furthermore, Mumler had procured the services of several energetic young lawyers, who were assisted by the Honorable John W. Edmonds, a retired judge whose distinguished legal career included service on the New York Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals. Edmonds was also an ardent spiritualist and the co-author of a well- known study of spiritualism. 14 His presence in the courtroom was a constant reminder that many individuals of exceptional intelligence and achievement supported Mumler and spiritualism, although Edmonds's astonishing testimony during the trial would compromise his reputation. At the trial the defense lawyers immediately took an aggressive position: rather than deny the involvement of spirits, they asserted the legitimacy of Mumler's supernatural images. Their opening statement threw down the gauntlet: "There is no trick, fraud, or deception in what are called spirit pictures by the accused." Mumler, they argued, did not know how the spirits appeared in his photographs; he knew only that they did not result from any manipulations on his part. His first spirit photographs had appeared nearly a decade earlier, and in the intervening time they had been investigated thoroughly and repeatedly. No one had been able to discover any deceptions on Mumler's part. The case was predicated on the existence of spirits, and Mumler's lawyers presented evidence for this claim. Did not the Bible narrate countless episodes in which supernatural beings had appeared to mortals? A long list of biblical passages was entered as evidence of the reality and visibility of spirits. Would we have a portrait of the spirit of Samuel had Mumler and his camera been present when Saul spoke with that spirit? Would not the spirits involved in the Transfiguration on the mount have been available to photography? Such questions were presented to skeptical prosecution witnesses, primarily photographic specialists, in the effort to get them to admit that they believed in the existence of things they could not see. At the very least they had to admit that invisible things sometimes did become visible in photographs. During his testimony former Judge Edmonds supported this line of argument by acknowledging that he had sometimes seen spirits in the courtroom. On one occasion-a trial concerning an insurance policy and a claim of accidental death-

MUMl[R'S fRAUOUHNl PHOTOGRAPHS

Edmonds saw, standing behind the jury, the spirit of the accident victim, who told Edmonds that his death had not been accidental. He had committed suicide, so the insurance claim should not be paid. The spirit also gave Edmonds some questions to ask the witnesses. Under cross-examination prosecuting attorney Gerry took the opportunity provided by Edmonds 's intimate familiarity with spirits to inquire about the clothing they ordinarily wore, whether they bore signs of the manner of their death, whether they were opaque or translucent, whether they looked like Mumler's photographs. (They did.) Spirits, Edmonds said, are material things similar to gas and air, "but with a refrned degree of materiality far beyond the gross existence which we occupy; ... the camera can bring forth substances invisible to the naked eye." At this point Gerry discreetly asked Edmonds whether he believed in hallucinations. Newspapers everywhere recounted this sensational testimony, sometimes confiding that "for our part we should prefer a judge without the very remarkable and peculiar power possessed by Judge Edmonds. " 15 The defense called before the court a long line of witnesses whose testimony fell into two principal categories. Several were photographers who had worked with Mumler and claimed to have intimate knowledge of his studio procedures. They had studied him closely, observed him working in studios other than his own, and could attest that no tricks or manipulations of any sort were involved in his spirit photographs. Other witnesses were drawn from Mumler's patrons: they had posed for portraits, and however skeptical they might have been at the start, they were persuaded of the legitimacy of the spirit images by an unmistakable resemblance to a dear departed friend or relative. One surprising feature of the defense testimony is that so many of Mumler's supporters claimed to have been highly skeptical initially. They took advantage of Mumler's services while suspecting that he was a fraud. David Hopkins, a manufacturer of railway cars, testified, "I thought Mumler, before I went there, was a cheat; ... I watched Mr. Mumler just as carefully as I could, but could find nothing." Hopkins told the court that as an overseer of many workers he was in the habit of watching people suspiciously, "to see that they did not cheat me or steal from me. [I] have been sometimes deceived, but not often. " 16 The banker Charles Livermore was part of the team of investigators who had prepared a report on Mumler for the New YorkSun. He told the court, "I went therewith my eyes open, as a skeptic." Livermore sought to throw Mumler off balance. He made an appointment for a sitting on a Tuesday, but went on Monday, "to disconcert him." When Mumler MUMHR'S fRAUOUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

31 was ready to make one exposure, Livermore "suddenly changed my position so as to defeat any arrangement he might have made; in another I made him suddenly bring the camera three feet nearer to me and then instantly proceed to take my picture. I was on the look-out all the while. "17 Several witnesses testified that they had used false names in their initial dealings with Mumler, deliberately withholding information about the spirits they hoped to see. Portraying their support of Mumler as a conversion from skepticism was a good rhetorical strategy in the courtroom, and no doubt it was emphasized for that purpose. More than a legal strategy, however, skepticism was a fundamental virtue essential to any individ ual 's dignity and self-respect. To be labeled credulous was an insult that impugned one's intelligence and discounted one's testimony. Implicitly the defense challenged the prosecution both to provide direct evidence of Mumler's involvement in studio machinations and to discredit the patrons' definitive identification of the vague forms hovering around their portraits. Chief prosecutor Gerry recognized the traps set in these challenges. It was difficult and insensitive to question the testimony of a mother who swore that a vague and ghostly form unmistakably resembled her dead son. Gerry pressed: how could she be certain? By the curvature of the spine, the cause of early death, he was told. One witness claimed to recognize her dead brother by the length of his ear. Gerry argued forcefully for the role of imagination in such processes of recognition. He described one witness for the defense as "showing the credulity of a mind prepared to believe .... Polonius-like, he sees in the cloud either a whale, or any other shape that the adroit operator claims that it assumes. " 18 One witness for the prosecution, Abraham Bogardus, a photographer and representative of the National Photographic Association (an organization like the PSAl, committed to protecting photographers from false patents and humbugs), stated that viewers recognize a portrait according to their "quantity of imagination. " 19 He recounted occasions when visitors to his gallery recognized Henry Clay's portrait as that of General Jackson, and others when persons had failed to recognize perfect likenesses of their close friends. One witness for the defense, a portrait painter, claimed that the resemblance of a spirit to his dead mother was unquestionable. He acknowledged that he had once painted a portrait of her, and Gerry offered to have the painting brought the considerable distance from the man's home to the courtroom to confirm the likeness in the spirit photograph. The witness declined, saying the effort would be in conclusive, since the portrait was done with the sitter in a different position and

PHOTOGRAPHS fRAUDUllNT MUMl[R'S

contained much more detail. 20 On other occasions witnesses refused to provide corroborating photographic evidence of the features of individuals identified as spirits, saying the resemblance would not be evident. Their reluctance to match other likenesses to those of the spirits may suggest unacknowledged awareness of the flimsy identification, or it may reveal an intuition that perceiving likeness was a fragile and contingent process, requiring a certain knowledge and disposition not susceptible to public demonstration. In theiruncertaintythey implicitly recognized that no picture could represent a complex being definitively. The witnesses coun tered Gerry's efforts to expose their identifications as imaginative projections-on at least three occasions he asserted that a figure identified as a boy was actually a girl-with assurances that many friends and relatives of the person in question agreed with the identification. The prosecution was unable to undermine such testimony effectively. The delicacy of the problem was revealed in Gerry's attempt to call to the stand a Dr. Parsons, physician at the lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island and an expert in hallucinations and spiritual delusions. He was to testify that seeing spirits was a symptom of a malfunctioning imagination. Gerry was persuaded by the objections of the defense lawyer and by the advice of the presiding judge that the prosecution's case would be ill served by arguing that religion was insanity and distinguished figures like Judge Edmonds were lunatics. Gerry conceded the point and did not call the witness, but in his concluding summary he proposed that Edmonds had been hallucinating, producing "a false creation, proceeding from the heat of an oppressed brain." He quickly noted that Edmonds was not insane, and that many intelligent and accomplished men had been afflicted by mental delusions, including Ben Jonson, Lord Byron, Goethe, Cowper, and Cellini. 21 The other trap set by the defense concerned the mechanisms of Mumler's deceptions. No one ever claimed to have observed Mumler in the act of manipulating his photographs. Gerry pointed out that the demand for such evidence constituted an impractical and unreasonable standard of proof. Bythe logic of the defense's argument, those who emerged from a transaction realizing they had been cheated could seek justice only if they had observed the mechanism of the trick in action. Circumstantial evidence was all Gerry had, and he built his case around it. He called several experts in photography-principally members of the PSAI, specifically Mason, Boyle, and Charles W. Hull-who enumerated nine different techniques for mechanically producing the ghostly effects Mumler claimed resulted MUMlfR'S fRAUOUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

from supernatural forces. These same witnesses composed photographs demonstrating each technique, which constituted the prosecution's visual evidence. The simplest involved a collaborator dressed in white slipping briefly into the background scene, out of the view of the sitter-a technique known in the profession as "Sir David Brewster's ghost." Alternatively, a second glass plate containing a positive image of a figure could be inserted into the camera in front of the sensi tized plate. One witness (Hull) illustrated how this was done, using a real camera during his testimony. This second plate could also be impressed on the sensitive plate outside the camera, in the darkroom, using a dim light. A plate incompletely cleaned after its last use would allow a latent image to appear. A second printing could be made in the darkroom. And so on. Gerry and his witnesses provided the court with basic lessons in photographic technology and processes, which were dutifully reported in the newspapers. Having described an impressive arsenal of technological tricks, the prosecution systematically examined each of the Mumler photographs introduced into evidence and explained which of the nine mechanical processes could have produced each image. One unintended effect of that strategy was to suggest just how clever and elaborate Mumler's techniques were. There was not one trick but many, sometimes used in combination, to produce the different effects presented in his photographs. The complex arsenal also permitted Mumler to escape detection. With so many skeptical patrons, some announcing at the first meeting their skepticism and their determination to watch for trickery, Mumlerwould have had to vary his process to take advantage of the particular opportunities available in each case.

As the prosecution presented him, Mumler was no ordinary charlatan but an exceptionally deft, clever, and industrious one. The prosecution tried to temper that impression by arguing that any competent photographer could execute such manipulations unobserved. Gerry enlisted two apothecaries to pose for spirit photographs taken by Mason. They were in formed beforehand that Mason would be employing some technical trickery to produce the spirits. Both testified that they were unable to discern Mason's departures from ordinary procedure. The photographer Charles Hull backed up their testimony with a boast: "I could humbug anybody unless he held my hands." The prosecution's legal strategy was summed up by the World, "ingenious explanations of how 'spiritual' photographs might be taken by purely mechanical means without a probability of detection by ordinary experts. "22 But Mumler's lawyers undercut much of the prosecution's case by acknowledging from the start MUMHR'S fRAUOUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

34 that spirit photographs certainly could be simulated by mechanical means. However, they also insisted that those simulations did not disprove the existence of true originals on which they were based. A deceptively realistic portrait did not throw into question the existence of the sitter. One of the claims registered by Mumler 's lawyers at the very beginning of the trial was that" in the various attempts to imitate these pictures, and which some photographers claim are the same thing, there are essential points of difference, plainly to be discovered by the practical or the discerning eye and which distin guish the genuine from the false, and which cannot be produced by the imita tor. "23 The lawyers for the defense demanded a strict separation between testimony related to spirit photographs and testimony related to forgeries. They insisted that the prosecution's expert witnesses be designated experts in imitations. 24 One of the challenges facing the defense, then, was to help the court develop the practical and discerning eye that would enable recognition of the subtle details that distinguished authentic examples from forgeries. The defense, in other words, set itself the task of making those following the case connoisseurs of spirit photographs.

ART SPIRIT AND CONNOISS[URSHIP It would have been risky for the defense lawyers to improve very much the powers of observation or the connoisseurship skills of the judge. Their maneuver would only have made glaringly apparent the false distinction between authentic and forged spirit photographs. Perhaps for this reason the defense was largely con tent to let witnesses' affirmations that they recognized the ghosts in their pictures carry the weight of argument. The prosecution, however, insisted on criti cal scrutiny of photographic evidence close enough to justify a claim that the Mumler case made those who followed it more sophisticated, discriminating, and skeptical viewers of photographs, even if they could not see the photographs un der discussion. Pictures were shown and discussed in the courtroom throughout the trial. (Note that the man seated at right in Fig. 10 holds a photo.) The defense lawyers and their witnesses entered twenty-four photographs as evidence; the prosecution supplied roughly the same number of imitations produced by its photographic experts. Parodies of spirit photographs may have been circulating before the Mumlertrial gave them legal purpose. One defense witness testified that prior to Mumler's arrest

PHOTOGRAPHS rRAUDUl[Nl MUMl[R'S

he had gone to Rock:wood'sstudio and inquired about spirit photographs, only to be told by the proprietor that he made "bogus ones." Such testimony suggests that a market existed for spirit photographs based on their being appreciated as technological curiosities, tricks, or creative visualizations of spirit life. 25 Gerry frequently pressured defense witnesses to compare their "real" images with the prosecution's simulations and judge the resemblance. Luthera Reeves showed the court her photographs containing a ghostly image of her son, who died at age four. During cross-examination, Gerry showed her several of the prosecution's photographs and asked if she noticed any resemblance between the shadowy figures on them and those of her son. She did note a resemblance in one, al though she was undisturbed by it. As she left the stand, Judge Dowling handed her a magnifying glass and asked if she positively recognized the shadowy form in her photograph as that of her dead son. She responded that she did. 26 The judge's question shifted the focus away from the prosecution's emphasis on formal and technical similarities and toward the unarguable issue of resemblance. During the trial vision was clearly under pressure, but the direction in which it was exerted was often unclear or disputed. The prosecutor's questioning often elicited detailed discussion of photographic processes. What are the elements contained in collodion? How are plates cleaned? What are the properties of the silver bath ?27 Once an array of possible devices for producing shadowy forms had been introduced in testimony, defense witnesses were asked under cross-examination whether any of the mechanical means could have produced the effects seen in their spirit photographs. Technical discussions often led to distinctions in staging and style. Were the ghosts positioned before or behind the sitter? were they transparent or opaque? did their shadows fall in the same direction as those of the sitter? how blurred were the ghost's features? Technical limitations kept most of the newspapers from reproducing the images in question, so they relied on parenthetical descriptions of the imagery. Photographs drew special interest when the ghost interacted with the sitter in some way, for example, when the spirit's arm passed in front of the sitter while the rest of the spirit stood behind. Newspaper readers learned from the prosecution that the sharpness of the ghost's features was determined by the distance between the two plates used to make the image and that a ghost projecting over the sitter probably resulted from a second printing. Those following the compelling courtroom drama learned to make such discriminations and understood the technical procedures that produced subtle differences, even when the source of infor-

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mation was a newspaper account without illustrations. That very common occurrence must have drawn on capacities for imaginative visualization that were stronger before the turn of the century, when mass-produced images circulated widely. Four days after the trial closed in early May, Harper'sWeekly devoted its cover to the case and reproduced nine woodcut illustrations after photographs (Fig. 11). One was a self-portrait

by Mumler (see Fig. 8); six were spirit photographs by

Mumler, chiefly reproductions of images entered as evidence in the trial; and two were simulated spirit photographs taken by Rockwood with Boyle's assistance (see Fig. 9). 28 Mumler's photograph of his wife with a spirit was not involved in the trial, but the Harper'sWeekly selection of illustrations featured several images that had been central to the case and to prior press reports on Mumler. The photographs themselves are apparently lost; consequently, I am reproducing the wood engravings and supplementing them with similar surviving photographs. Three of the Harper'sillustrations showed a ghost whose hand or arm passed in front of the sitter from behind. (Fig.

1~

is a photograph showing such a ghost.) This effect,

which gave the impression of the ghost enfolding the sitter, was the crux of the defense's claim that true spirit photographs could be distinguished from imitations. It could not be duplicated by mechanical means, the defense insisted. The prosecution disputed that assertion and backed up its challenge with technical explanations and comparable images provided by its photographic experts (Fig. 13). By the end of the trial Gerry felt justified observing that in one photograph "the ghost projects over the sitter, and must, therefore, have been done by a subsequent printing. "29 While they were always criticized by professional photographers as crude and clumsy at best, Mumler's photographs sometimes displayed features perplexing even to experts. One of the Harper'simages showed a medium sitting at a table and writing, his hand guided by the hand and arm of a spirit cut off at the left side of the image (Fig. 14). Another, smaller, spirit stood in the background. One expert witness for the prosecution (Charles Hull) speculated that the rear ghost was produced with a second plate in the camera, and the ghost at left resulted from a second printing. The prosecution entered in evidence an image taken by Rockwood showing Boyle in the position of the medium, accompanied by a single ghost fully present in the frame (see Fig. 13). The prosecution's simulations did not always matchMumler's originals in technical complexity. Mumler's long experience with the processes for achieving his trademark effects gave him an advantage lost in the woodcut reproductions published by Harper's.

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

38

flCUR[ 11• William H. Mumler, Man with a Female Spirit Holding an Anchor over His Hea1t, ca. 1870, albumen

carte de visite, 4 x ~ 3/sin. Courtesy George Eastman House.

Harper'scommissioned engravings of two portraits of Charles Livermore with the spirit of his wife. One, in the description of the World,showed her "standing behind him, bearing a bunch of flowers in her right hand, which was resting upon his right breast" (Fig. 15).30 The other showed her standing behind him, her hand pointing upward (Fig. 16).31 The prosecution had challenged the latter on the grounds that the spirit and sitter could not have been photographed in a single exposure. Mason asserted that "the shadow of the ghost is on one side while the shadow of the sitter is on the opposite side, and the shadow in the picture could not be produced by anything in front of the camera. "32 This was true of many of the spirit photographs, Gerry said, to which the defense responded that different

MUMl[R'S fRAUOUllNl PHOlOCRAPHS

39

flGUR[ IJ • Rockwood, C. B. Boyle-by Rockwood, Harper's

fleui[ll•

Weekly, May 8, 1869, cover, wood engraving after spirit

Hand and Spirit Child, Hmper's Weekly, May 8, 1869, cover, wood engraving after spirit photograph.

photograph.

William H. Mumler, Medium Guided by Spirit

laws govern the behavior oflight in the supernatural realm. But if spirits glowed by their own light, as some defense testimony proposed, how could they be subject to any shadows at all? 33 Spirit photography faced the challenge of representing body and spirit occu pyingutterly distinct realms. They were distinguished from each other by the den sity of figures and the contrasting effects of light that set unmistakable bound aries between them; yet they had to intersect. Spirit photography needed to picture crossovers-to

secure the credibility of its images, to explain the mysterious phe-

nomena spiritualists recounted, and to justify the claims of mediums to bridge the two worlds. Otherwise, the portrayals of distinct but superimposed worlds could be dismissed as mere double exposures. This requirement helps to explain MUMlIR'S fRAUDUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

40

flGUR[ 15• William I-1.Mumler, Charles Live,more with Wife's Spirit, Harper's Weekly, May 8,

1869, cover, wood engraving after spirit photograph.

- •

why Mumler persisted in his efforts to fmd technically inventive and complex ways to portray crossovers and intersections.

Advertisements for his photographs

highlighted the emphasis on contact across realms. Some of his pictures were selected for mass distribution because of their exceptional interest-because

of the

sitter's fame or some unusual visual effect. Mumler's advertising copy drew attention to a spirit child raising the dress of a sitter, "showing the power of spirits to move tangible objects"; or another spirit resting a bouquet of flowers on a sitter's lap or breast; or a spirit baby nestling in the outstretched arms of its parent.

34

Emma Hardinge Britten marveled at the Mumler photograph that showed the spirit of Beethoven giving her a lyre-shaped bouquet, "so placed as to present the shadow between my dress and the watch-chain which falls across it. "35 In devising technically complex photographic representations of crossovers between the MUMl[R'S fRAUOUlrnT PHOTOGRAPHS

41

flGURf Ii • William H. Mumler, CharlesLivermorewith Wife'sSpi1it, Harper'sWeekly,May 8, 1869, cover, wood engraving after spirit photograph.

faded realm of spirits and the vivid world of bodies, Mumler made photography itself a tool for envisioning relations between these spheres. Photographic technology, in other words, helped recast and refme spiritualist ideas about the spatial relationships governing the bodily and spiritual worlds. Even before the trial Mumler's photographs had been singled out from other spirit photographs for certain striking forms and effects. At least two commentators had noted that Mumler's spirits were usually partial figures that faded into invisibility somewhere below the bust or waist (Fig. 17). "The spirit is never a fulllength figure; always a bust or three-quarter

length, and yet it was impossible to

tell where the figure disappears. Jackson Davis wrote in his journal Herald of Progressthat in Mumler's photographs "the upper portion of the form (spir"36 Andrew

itual) is quite distinct, but the lower fades out. " 37 The appearance of only part of

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

42

flGUI[ II • William H. Mumler, Mrs. Conant of Banner of Light, and Her Brother,CharlesH. Crowell, ca. 1868, albumen carte de visite, 4 x ~3/sin. American Museum of Photography (www. photogra phymuseum. com).

the spirit's body in the photographs seems to have made them more plausible as supernatural phenomena. Other commentaries noted that the spirits often seemed especially out of focus in the face. The specific measure of blurriness in Mumler's spirits was another element the prosecution's authorities had difficulty duplicating. Even though the spirits provided the lightest areas in the photographs, "there was none of that clearness of definition usual in under-exposed figures in [other] ghost pictures. "38 Mumler's photographs carefully balanced clarity and ambiguity in the spirit image; as the Sun put it, they were "indistinct and shadowy, but still in many cases clearly enough defined for a likeness to be recognized. " 39 Several commentators noted that the scale of Mumler's spirits sometimes differed from that ofthe sitters.

40

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUHNl PHDlDGRAPHS

43

flGURf Ii William H. Mumler, MasterHerrodin a Trance, ca. 187'~,albumen carte de visite, 4 x ~ 3/sin. American Museum of Photography (www.photographymuseum.com).

Mumler signin.cantly varied his formulas. One of his unlocated portraits, far more elaborate than anything discussed at the trial, was advertised for general sale in 187'.4. The sitter, Master Herrod of North Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was described as a medium. (Fig. 18 shows a different spirit photo of Master Herrod.) "Before sitting for this picture three spirits offered to show themselves, representing Europe, Africa, and America. As will be seen by the picture, the promise was fulfilled. "41 The significance of the figures to the boy was not explained. Mumler's audience would have been familiar with the artistic convention of representing the Earth's continents (usually shown as four) allegorically in the racial type considered native to each. The photograph of the Herrod boy suggests that Mumler sometimes maneuvered his unnatural images into familiar forms and tra-

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUl(NT PHOTOGRAPHS

ditional subjects. A spirit photograph that also represented the Earth's diversity and totality must have disarmed viewers with a mix of the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. Mumler, who had used the formula of a victory figure crowning a hero in some of his earliest works, used it again in one of his portraits of Livermore.

42

Even Mumler's most scathing critics noted improvements in his style overtime. On one occasion Boyle claimed credit for some of them, surmising that Mumler had responded to criticisms Boyle had published six years earlier. I perceive by the reports of the wonders which again fill the air, that the criti cisms of six years ago have not been lost on our friend, Mumler. Four-four size spirit babies, for instance, no longer appear in the arms of affectionate parents who fi_tvery comfortably on a· carte de visite.' Ladies of fifty years ago are not so particular about donning the costume of today, but appear as discrete spirits should always do, in the modes of their time; nor do those ancient inhabitants commit the mistake of bringing with them spirit columns singularly resembling the terrestrial one in Mr. Mumler's gallery; neither do the spirits of Daniel Webster and such men persist in dressing and posing themselves in exact imitation of their card photographs, which are for sale in the book stores; and, above all, the spirits have entirely stopped assuming an exact likeness of well known living people, who have had their photographs taken at Mumler's gallery, all of which, I think you will agree with me, is a very great improvement. 43 Boyle seems utterly aloof here in his disdain. More commonly the PSAI photographers responded anxiously to Mumler's work because it threatened directly their efforts to shape and promote photography as scientific, objective, truthful, and modern. Earlier, when Mumler's photographs were first coming to attention, the PhotographicNews articulated this anxiety: "Our own art is prostituted to purposes of imposture ....

[W]e feel very indignant that our art should be brought

into disrepute by being made subservient to such an impudent trick. "44 We can measure the magnitude of the threat Mumler's work was perceived to pose by the responses it elicited from members of the PSAI and the National Photographic Association. Some of these photographers,

feeling they had not done

enough by putting Hickey onto Mumler, serving as expert witnesses for the prosecution, and writing essays and letters condemning Mumler and his work, also tried to extract damning evidence from Mumler. Near the midpoint of the trial, Mason, Bogardus, Hull, and two other members of the PSAI paid a nighttime visit to Mumler's establishment.

They intended to bring Mumler by force to another

MUMl[R'S fRAUUUHNl PHOTOGRAPHS

46 photography studio and demand that he produce a spirit photograph on the spot, using equipment other than his own under their watchful eye. Mumler was out when they arrived, but Guay responded initially by betting fi.vehundred dollars that Mumler could make a spirit photograph at any studio. When the intruders accepted the bet, Guay retracted it. He became agitated and, according to Hull, knewit.'"In tes"declared he 'was on the make,' and 'he didn't care a--who and Mumler's retraction, its tifying for the prosecution, Hull cited Guay's bet and closing statement made bitter reference to the event. 45 A headline in the World misattributed the retraction to Mumler: "Mumler Not a Betting Man; He Refuses to Photograph Ghosts in Another Man's Gallery." The PSAI photographers generated controversy in the photographic community with their aggressive actions. They had defended the integrity of photography by producing fraudulent images for use as evidence in the trial. They had en ergetically publicized Mumler's deceptive work to keep photography free of such humbug. 46 But press coverage of the trial only increased public awareness that photography could be used to deceive, and Mumler and his ilk became famous. One photographer, in a letter to the editor of a photography journal, disputed the tactics and impugned the motivations of the PSAI photographers: "It must be admitted by all candid minded people that the photographic art has been damaged by this shameful transaction. In my judgement those photographers who took part in this matter, and through their influence rendered Mumler and his silly farce popular, should be held responsible for these soft-shell doings." The writer of the letter went on to address those photographers: "You will probably enter the plea that you were summoned to attend the Mumler trial, and give your testimony. If you had staid away from that scene of disgrace, you would not have been summoned, but your morbid aspirations for notoriety, and your greediness to steal a portion of Mumler's thunder, blinded your eyes to all shame. "47 In the era of a mass-market press, celebrity, and humbugs as entertaining public spectacles, policing photography to keep it a reputable and truthful medium presented conundrums. When a similar case came to the attention of the PSAI exactly six years later, the group acted more cautiously. A photographer named Evans was purporting to take spirit photographs in NewYork, and the PSAIwished to rebut his claims. H.J. Newton, then president of the PSAI, applied the lesson he had learned from the Mumler case: "It was very difficult to prove a fraud." Mason, still secretary of the organization, argued against a proposal to challenge Evans to demonstrate his technique. Mason stated clearly that as far as spirit photographers were concerned,

PHOTOGRAPHS fRAUDUl[Nl MUMHR'S

he "did not propose to spend his time advertising these gentlemen." Mumler had been unable to take advantage of his fame in New York; he had lost everything to the expense of his trial and had left New York immediately afterward. 48 But the public had learned to look askance at photographs, and the medium could never again stand for purely truthful representation. The newspaper descriptions and the woodcut reproductions inHmper's Weekly brought spirit photography into the purview of a large segment of the population. Naive acceptance of photography's truthfulness was now recognized as credulity. Photography in the future would have to develop stylistic means for laying claim to documentary truth.

BARNUM'S HSIIMONY Mumler's opponents may have underestimated both the cultural strength of spiritualism and Mumler's own shrewdness, but they foresaw perfectly that the case would compel public attention. The World conceded, "If this photographic Prospero is no more, he is a very clever performer in his specialty. "49 It noted that Mumler's critics found themselves in the same position as those of another master of humbug, P. T. Barnum. Mumler's attorneys probably had not drawn their strategies of defense from Barnum's example, but they very well could have. The difficulty is in proving the imposture. Six or seven experts testify that they can produce precisely the same phenomena, which are claimed to be supernatural, by ordinary scientific and mechanical means; and Mumler and his believers reply: "No doubt; so can we; but our pictures are not so produced." Which places the non- believers in precisely the position of the man who doubted if Barnum's monkey was a gorilla: "Sir," said he, "that's no gorilla, for the gorilla has no tail." To which the great showman is reported to have blandly replied: "But that does not prove that this is not a gorilla, for the tail, you see, is sewed on." Of course, that ends the argument. 50

Barnum's testing of the limits of plausibility and legality in showmanship made • him an obvious point of reference for commentaries on the trial. Nonetheless, followers of the trial were no doubt surprised and delighted to learn that Barnum had been called to testify. Although both the defense and the prosecution would have had good reason to be interested in his testimony, the prosecution enlisted his cooperation. His appearance at the trial was unquestionably the high point of the event. Barnum's testimony brings some of the crucial complexities of the case into

MUMHR'S fRAUOUlrnT ~HOTOGWHS

focus. The Worldprovided detailed transcripts

of his exchanges with the lawyers;

I draw from them the excerpts that follow. The revealing responses of the courtroom audience, described in parentheses,

are reproduced as published.

Have you, at any period during your life, devoted yourself to the detection of humbugs, so called?

GERRY:

BARNUM:

Yes, sir. (Great laughter.)

Barnum could have been called to testify as an expert witness on the matter of humbugs, but he soon revealed that he was also an authority on spirit photographs. He had been interested

in spiritualism

since its beginnings with the infamous

"Rochester rappings" and the Fox sisters in 1848: "I think it is seven years since I have known Mumler as the original taker, so far as I know, of spiritual photographs; I published a book upon the subject seven years ago." Barnum claimed to have corresponded

with Mumler in connection with his

planned book but said the letters he had received from Mumler were burned in the fire that destroyed his museum in 1865. I wrote to Mumler that I was publishing a book exposing humbugs of the world (great laughter), and that I wished to expose the humbugs of the spiritual photographs; that he had originated the thing, and I wished to purchase from him anything he had got left, inasmuch as he had left that part of the business, and I wished to purchase some of the pictures to exhibit them, and also to give a description of them in my book upon humbugs (laughter); he sent them to me, and I paid $4 or$3 a piece forthem; one represented "Colorado Jewett" and "Napoleon Bonaparte"; they were burned; they were exposed for a longtime upon the museum walls, and they were labelled to express the pretended appearance of Napoleon Bonaparte and the real Colorado Jewett; also of "Henry Clay" and" Colorado Jewett"; the photographs were taken from pictures of Napoleon and Clay; they present precisely the appearance and positions which these photographs showed. 51

Gerry's next questions revealed a third basis for Barnum's testimony, beyond his expertise in humbugs and his enlistment of Mumler in enterprises

that ac-

knowledged spirit photography as humbug. Barnum had agreed to participate in an experiment for the prosecution. GERRY:

Do you believe in "spooks"? (Great laughter.)

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUl[Nl PHOTOGRAPHS

Yes, I do. (Renewed laughter.) I saw many when I was a boy. (Continued laughter.) It is only necessary to believe in them to see them. (Laughter.)

BARNUM:

Barnum went on to recount events of the preceding day, when he had gone to Bogardus's gallery to have a spirit photograph taken, "but I told him I did notwantto have any humbugging in the matter. (Great laughter.)" Bogardus agreed to do it and to allow Barnum to investigate the entire process while the photograph was being made. I investigated the plate glass, went into the dark-rooms and saw the process of pouring over the first liquid; after it was placed in the nitrate of silver bath, then it was put in the camera; there was a little break upon the glass so that I could distinguish it all the time; went through the operation; had my shadow taken, and that of the departed Abraham Lincoln came also upon the glass. (Great laughter.)

BARNUM:

GERRY:

Is that it (showing the picture [Fig. 19])?

BARNUM:

GERRY:

Yes, that's the critter. (Renewed merriment.)

Were you conscious of a spiritual presence?

BARNUM:

I did not feel anything of that sort. (Great laughter.)

If Barnum's shrewd eye could not discover the mechanism of the trick, what chance did any ordinary patron have? Under cross-examination,

Townsend ad-

dressed Barnum not as an authority on humbugs but as a perpetrator TOWNSEND:

of them.

How long have you been in the humbug business?

I was never in it; I never took money from a man without giving him the worth of it four times over. (Laughter.) These pictures that I exhibited I did so as a humbug, and not as a reality, not like this man who takes$ 10 from people.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

BARNUM:

Did you state itto be a humbug? It was so labelled.

All these humbugs that you have taken money for, did you tell the people at the time that they were humbugs?

TOWNSEND:

I never showed anything that did not give the people their money's worth four times over.

BARNUM:

MUMl(R'S fHAUDUlrnT PHOTOGRAPHS

49

f!GUR! 19• Abraham Bogardus, P. T. Barnum with Spirit of Abraham Lincoln, mock spirit photograph, albumen carte de visite, 4 x ~ 3/sin. MeserveKunhardt Collection, Picture History.

TOWNSEND:

Take the woolly horse? (Great laughter.)

That was a remarkable curiosity and a reality, without the slightest preparation or disguise or humbug or deception about it in the world; it was exhibited as a curiosity at fifty cents a head in Pittsburg and Cincinnati, and there I bought it.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

Was it what you represented it to be?

It was a peculiar kind of creature (laughter), but I say that it was what I represented it to be.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

Was it actually a woolly horse?

It was actually a woolly horse. (Bursts of laughter, which were at once checked by the court.)

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

Was it not a horse wooled over?

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUl[Nl PHOTOGRAPHS

50 Not the slightest, and I am very happy to enlighten the public upon that point. (Merriment.) The horse was born just as he was, and there was no deception about him in the world; there was nothing artificial about it, and I was happy to get it to draw the people, but there was no deception about it, I take my oath. (Loud laughter.)

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

No, sir, byno means.

BARNUM: TOWNSEND:

Do you mean to say that the horse was in its natural state? Exactly; just as it was born.

BARNUM: TOWNSEND:

Was it naturally a woolly horse? Itwas. (Laughter.)

BARNUM:

In the condition you represented it?

TOWNSEND: BARNUM:

Was it intended by you to humbug the community?

Yes, sir.

TOWNSEND:

The mermaid, sir? (Great laughter.)

The mermaid, at the time it was exhibited, was represented to be as I represented it, and I have not seen anything to the contrary.

BARNUM:

The Feejee Mermaid was one of the most notorious of Barnum's humbugs: a dried, shrunken, and blackened corpse presented as proof that mermaids exist (Fig. '.40). In fact, this mermaid had been manufactured by attaching the upper torso of a monkey to the body of a fish. 52 Barnum advertised it as a sensation that patrons would have to see not necessarily to believe but to judge for themselves. TOWNSEND: BARNUM: TOWNSEND:

Did you find it subsequently to be otherwise? I never did. Did you represent it as you bought it?

I represented it as I bought it, and I found it as I bought it. I have grown older since, and there was something which made me doubt it, but at the time-

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

You never presented it to the public in any other way than it was?

I had no reason, from an examination of the animal, to doubt what it was represented to me at the time; I never owned it, I hired it.

BARNUM:

MUMl[R'S fRAUOUlrnT PHOTOGRAPHS

51

10• FeejeeMennaid, flGUR[ wood engraving, from Boston

Sights and StrangersGuide (1856); reprinted in

Bostonian, November 1894,

l~O.

I will ask you generally one question. Have you as a public entertainer presented to the mass anything which you knew to be untrue, and took money for it; have you falsified the facts and taken money for it?

TOWNSEND:

Well, I think I have given it a little drapery sometimes founded on fact. (Great laughter-which was not checked for some moments.)

BARNUM:

Now this question of Mumler-oh! the nurse of George Washington. (Peals oflaughter.)

TOWNSEND:

BARNUM:

I shall be delighted. (Renewed laughter.)

TOWNSEND:

Was that the nurse of George Washington? (Great laughter.)

I have seen no reason to doubt it. [See Fig. 6.] I bought it as such. (Renewed merriment.) I never investigated it very closely. (Shouts of laughter, which the court for some minutes vainly endeavored to check.) As far as I knew she was so.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND: BARNUM:

Do you believe that she was?

It is a matter of belief. (Great laughter.)

TOWNSEND:

Do you believe that she was?

PHOTOGRAPHS fRAUOUHNl MUMlrR'S

I bought it upon a bill of sale which represented her as belonging to George Washington's father. The bill of sale never has been disputed, and I never knew who wrote the bill of sale.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND: BARNUM:

Do you believe that the person was Washington's nurse?

I never had a profound belief in regard to things. (Laughter.)

TOWNSEND:

Now I ask the court-

JUDGE DOWLING: BARNUM:

He has given the reasons.

I do not know that she was not.

TOWNSEND:

Did you believe all the time?

I did; my teeth were not cut then as they are now, but I paid a thou sand dollars. It is likely before I got through that I might have had some doubts upon the subject. (Great laughter.)

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

When the doubt came into your mind, did you suggest it to the

public? BARNUM:

I did not think that I should put myself out of the way.

Townsend then turned to disputing Barnum's claim that he had corresponded withMumler. Barnum testified that Mumler's employer had told him Mumler "was played out, and had a great many things on hand; then I wrote to Mumler, and he sold them to me." Under questioning Barnum revealed that he had been notified only the day before that he would be called to testify in this case, but that he had searched thoroughly his surviving files looking for the letters from Mumler, but without success. What you have given here as being contained in the letters is simply from a remembrance of seven years.

TOWNSEND:

Five, six, or seven; they were dated the same year that the exposure was published.

BARNUM:

TOWNSEND:

Does your book speak of Mumler?

I think it was at his request, or at the request of his employers, that I did not do it.

BARNUM:

Would it have any effect upon your mind to state by a positive assertion that he never wrote to you in his life?

TOWNSEND:

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUl[Nl PHOTOGRAPHS

I should know that his assertion was not true, when I wrote to the establishment, and got the answer back, signed Mumler.

BARNUM:

The defense being fmished with the witness, the prosecutor posed one last question. When you were with Bogardus, did you want George Washington's nurse to appear?

GERRY:

He said that she had no vitality left. (Great laughter, during which Mr. Barnum left the stand and left the court-room, the examination having been conducted.) 53

BARNUM:

IRONY AND omPTION This cross-examination

is more than an entertaining game of cat and mouse. Un -

der oath in a court of law Barnum carried on the brilliant performance of gulli bility and ignorance that was his trademark. When he offered his oath that his woolly horse was truly a woolly horse, the response from the audience in the courtroom was loud laughter. Everyone knew he was dissembling, yet he was not accused of perjury. Even the judge seems to have been amused by the performance. But Barnum was on the stand to offer truthful and potentially damaging testimony: that at a moment when his spirit photography business seemed to be failing, Mum ler had agreed to sell Barnum some of his photographs in full knowledge that they were to be presented as examples of humbugs. How did the audience in the court know that these allegations by Barnum were not also tongue-in-cheek? Barnum was able to speak in the confidence that his audience would recognize his falsehoods as such-would know when he was playing the gullible fool and when he was being forthright. They seem to have appreciated his trusting them to know the difference. Defense attorney Townsend seemed perfect in his assigned part as straight man. In one sense Barnum outsmarted him: now it was Townsend who could not prove calculated deceit or illustrate the mechanism of the alleged deception. So long as Barnum stonewalled, Townsend could do nothing to prove guilt. But Townsend's questions were ambiguous: was he attempting to discredit Barnum as a witness by reprising his history as a purveyor of notorious and fraudulent spectacles? Or was he attempting to draw implicit parallels between Barnum's enterprises and Mum -

MUMl[R'S fRAUOUl[Nl PHOTOGRAPHS

ler's? When he asked Barnum, "Have you as a public entertainer presented to the mass anything which you knew to be untrue, and took money for it?" he was only asking why Mumler should be prosecuted for doing the same. Why would a society reward one entertaining charlatan and send another to prison? Barnum seems to have thought the difference was a matter of price. For fi_fty cents his patrons received two dollars' worth of pleasure, by his estimation, while Mumler's patrons received far less than ten dollars in value. At least one of the defense witnesses testifi_ed, however, that he paid Mumler twice his fee as a token of deep appreciation for his services. Who should decide whether a swindle was suffi_ciently clever and entertaining to justify its price? The issue of price only disguised a difference Barnum could not have articu lated. His own patrons were willing participants in his games of deception, as the courtroom merriment made abundantly clear. Mumler's, by contrast, would not acknowledge through nods, winks, and poking elbows any possibility of fraudu lence in his spirit photography. Most explicitly claimed to have had all doubts al layed by fi_rsthand experience with the man and his work. For those who believed spirit photography a pure hoax, its patrons' earnestness was a sign of their naivete. Barnum's position on his activities, as transcribed in the newspaper records, differed little from Mumler's. Both men asserted innocence of any deception. Both professed to have limited knowledge of the sources and causes of their attractions. Both were understood by many in the audience to be performing innocence, with Barnum implicitly aclmowledging his playacting, but not Mumler. To some extent this difference is a matter of style-Barnum's

smug voice or the coy double en-

tendres of some of his answers. But it is also a matter of audience disposition. The fi_rsttwo words out of Barnum's mouth-"Yes,

sir"-elicited

laughter, a clear sign

of an audience inclined to interpret Barnum's answers, on the basis of his past behavior, as deliberately artful and ambiguous. Mumler did not take the stand, but he read a closing statement to the court. It provoked laughter just once, when he explained that the large number of investigators curious about his photographic process demanded all his time and interfered with his ability to support himself. "While greedy themselves for intellectual food, [they] seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that I myself was a material body. (Laughter.)" Moreover, Mumler's words occasionally invited complex interpretation. For example, when he recalled Tooker's visit to his gallery, his strongest memory was that "the form which appeared upon his picture ... [was] the most villainous I had ever taken. I am now satisfied, from the manner in which he came there, under an assumed name, or, MUMl[R'S fRAUDUUNT PHOTOGRAPHS

more vulgarly speaking, with a lie in his mouth, and with the purpose, which subsequent events have shown, that he got what was promised him." This statement might be read as a version of Barnum's claim to have given his patrons a fourfold return on their investment regardless of fraudulence. Unlike the listeners Barnum entertained, who took his professions of truth as invitations to doubt, those who patronized Mumler asserted that he had overcome their skepticism and that they believed absolutely in the authenticity of his spirit photographs. Doubtless many of Barnum's patrons were taken in by his humbugs at least partially-thrilled

by the sight of the Feejee Mermaid or astonished by the

age and experience of Joice Heth. But those individuals were left to fend for themselves in the new market for sensational entertainments.

Were Mumler's patrons

so much more gullible that they needed the protection of legal authorities? In New York's law courts in 1869 earnestness could be a liability and irony, a protection against the law. The Socratic irony of Barnum's masterly maneuvering suited the new culture of deception. Barnum feigned ignorance while communicatingwit and shrewdness, absurdly persistent as he stonewalled in the face of the evidence. He assumed the persona of the dupe, the very target of his own promotions. The World mimicked his irony in describing the paradox of his testimony. "Mr. Barnum has a vast and various power of belief, but he cannot accept these spiritual photographs with an equal mind. He has unbounded confidence in the woolly horse; he stakes his reputation upon the authenticity of the mermaid; he actually overflows with child -like faith inJ oice Heth; but he rejects Mumler. Mumler as a magician revolts his else universal credulity .... Who will pretend a trust in the preposterous pretensions of the spiritual photographer when this childlike spirit, this marvel of credulity, this son of Connecticut in whom there is no guile, repudiates and disavows him ?" 54 The evolution of irony as a cultural style in concert with modern skepticism is a recurrent theme of this book. It will return, along with Barnum, for further reflections in the final chapter. Mumler was arguably as good as Barnum at finding a sensational claim that could not be disproved, but he would not acknowledge his mischief and allow his patrons to share his secret. His allegiance to the old supernatural forms of magic prevented him from following the course charted by Barnum, which might have proved at least as lucrative. Mumler claimed in his autobiography that he had at first doubted his early spirit photographs and had begun by treating them as novelties. 55 Had he preserved that early doubt and simply professed continual amaze-

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUHNT PHOTOGRAPHS

56 ment atthe persistent appearance of spirits in his photographs, inviting the public to judge the results for themselves, he would have approximated the example of Barnum. But even Barnum was unable to preserve neutrality where spirit photography was concerned; he claimed to have defmitively labeled the spirit photographs in his exhibit hoaxes. Barnum's brilliant stonewalling about his own hoaxes was always counterbalanced by his adamant claim that his purpose was to enlighten his contemporaries on the subject of humbugs to improve besieged modern citizens' quality of life. "Ifwe could have a full exposure of 'the tricks of trade' of all sorts, of humbugs and deceivers of past times, religious, political, financial, scientific, quackish and so forth, we might perhaps look for a somewhat wiser gen eration to follow us. I shall be well satisfied if I can do something towards so good a purpose. "56 Like all Barnum's statements, this one must be interpreted skeptically. Could he really have wanted to put himself out of business? Spirit photographs allowed him to enact his identity as a guardian without threat to any of his own enterprises. If deception and illusion are ubiquitous, when should cases be prosecuted? No one doubted that a line had to be drawn somewhere between Barnum's entertaining humbugs and the massive financial and political swindles flourishing throughout the country-developments that contemporaries recognized as related. 57 But had Mumler's ten-dollar spirit photographs crossed that line? The judge seems to have thought so, although he decided in favor of Mumler: "I am morally convinced that there may be fraud and deception practiced by the prisoner, yet I, sitting as a magistrate to determine from the evidence given by the witnesses according to law, am compelled to decide that I would not be justified in sending this complaint to the Grand Jury, as, in my opinion, the prosecution has failed to make out the case. "58 The verdict seems clear, reasonable, and principled, but as in all civil activities in Tweed's and Tammany's NewYork, there is reason to wonder. The public exposure of Judge Dowling's own corruption and malfeasance would begin to unfold in just a few months. As a key figure in the city's "Police Ring"-a conspiracy of the judiciary, law enforcement officers, and the district attorney's office to execute the idiosyncratic "justice" demanded by the Tweed Ring and Tammany Hall-Dowling was known for outrageous impropriety and disregard for the rights of the accused. He was eventually charged with corruption and removed from office. One of the early agents of his demise was none other than John D. Townsend. A few days after the

PHOTOGRAPHS fRAUDUHNT MUMl[R'S

Mumlertrial concluded, Dowling summarily incarcerated two sisters, Anna Pearsall and Joanna Connor, in the Tombs for several days without charges or hearings. They managed to bribe a prison attendant to carry to the New York Tribune a letter they had written describing their plight. Learning of their situation, Townsend volunteered to represent the sisters and initiate legal proceedings before Dowling's agent, Judge Albert Cardozo, despite Cardozo's warnings against prosecuting the case. These events attracted extensive coverage in the newspapers, and, coming so soon after the Mumler trial, they brought Townsend notoriety as a courageous defender of the persecuted against corrupt authorities. •59Asthe Tribune would note a few years later, "This exposure of Dowling and Cardozo by Townsend was in fact the opening of the fi.ghtagainst the corrupt judges," which led to the impeachment, conviction, resignation, and removal of Dowling and several of the most powerful justices in the city. 60 Townsend's success in the Pearsall-Connor case depended substantially on his ability to use the newspapers as a weapon against a repressive court. Although he occasionally found himself having to retract in the courtroom statements cred ited to him in the press, his aptitude for handling the engines of publicity confi.rmed him as a kindred spirit to Barnum. Given the complex operations of New York City's judiciary at the time, one cannot help wondering why Dowling made a principled decision in the Mumler trial and whether ulterior motives conditioned his fi.nding in Mumler's favor. But Dowling's motivations aside, the prosecution had indeed failed to make the necessary case. It had been unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mumler's photographs were frauds. More important, it had no answer to the defense's most powerful argument, which was never explicitly stated: that if truth was the issue, Mumler was no different from Barnum. If Mumler must be sent to jail for profi.tingfrom lying, so must Barnum. Townsend's subtle use of implications and secondary meanings in cross-examination effectively shifted the question. He showed that in the age of Barnum and Mumler, truth was no longer the issue, not even in a court of law. What mattered now was the style of the deception, and the business of the court was to determine which styles would be protected by law and which would not. The failure of the prosecution was not complete, however. It had educated those following the trial in the technical processes of photography and the opportunities they provided for chicanery, and it had promoted skeptical looking. Photography's power to deceive could not afterward be found surprising, and deception

MUMlfR'S fRAUDUlfNT PHOTOGRAPHS

remained a recurrent topic in commentary on the medium.

61

The case helped to

consolidate an experience of photography as a medium simultaneously of truth and illusion. Any given photograph might provoke oscillation between belief and skepticism, or it might generate the astonishment that comes of experiencing both responses at once. 62

If photographs could not be trusted to tell the truth, what visual images could? The next chapter on the paintings of Thomas Eakins takes up this question.

MUMl[R'S fRAUDUlrnT PHOTOGRAPHS

••

CHaPTerTWO

•••

(AKINS'S R(AUTY (ff(CTS

Thomas Eakins first came to public attention in the mid - 1870s as a painter of watersport subjects. In these early oils and watercolors, bird hunters quietly pole their boats through marshes or set out from shore under sail, and oarsmen slice through the reflective waters of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. One of the earliest critical notices of these works, written by Eakins's friend and fellow painter Earl Shinn, appeared in the magazine Nation in 1874. Shinn introduced Eakins to a national readership in this way: "Some remarkably original and studious boating scenes were shown by Thomas Eakins, a new exhibitor, of whom we learn that he is a realist, an anatomist and mathematician; that his perspectives, even of waves and ripples, are protracted according to strict science. " 1 Well over a century later, Eakins's art-historical significance is rooted in his identity as a studious realist, whose painting draws its force from extensive scientific research into anatomy, perspective, reflection, and motion. He is credited with reinventing (or destroying) academic realism by filling its shell with scientific knowledge. 2 Combining close attention to visual appearances with systematic knowledge of structures, functions, and spatial relations, he generated likenesses of extraordinary intensity. In short, Eakins intensified his painted icons by merging seeing with knowing. (I am using "icon" as Charles Sanders Peirce defined it, as a sign that evokes its object through resemblance.)

3 This

interpretation of Eakins's work remains resilient despite ef-

forts by some scholars to advance alternative understandings of his "realism."

59

Eakins himself seems to have formulated his artistic objectives in these very terms. We know, from the evidence of his biography and the vast number of elaborate preparatory diagrams that cluttered his studio, that his devotion to the study of anatomy and perspective bordered on the fanatic. The demanding curriculum Eakins developed for students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts fea tured these same emphases, so much so that a reporter for Scribner's magazine, writing on the school in 1879, was astonished by the exhaustiveness and apparent irrelevance of much of the instruction. Hearing of the grueling routine of dissection and anatomical study at the school, the reporter posed the obvious question: "Must a painter know all this?" Eakins replied: "To draw the human figure it is necessary to know as much as possible about it, about its structure and its movements, its bones and muscles, how they are made, and how they act .... Knowing all that will enable [an artist] to observe more closely, and the closer his observation is, the better his drawing will be. " 4 Knowledge enables close observation, and close observation brings knowledge. Eakins here articulates a belief in the harmonious reciprocity of seeing and knowing that is fundamental to his art. He was no Romantic dreaming of an innocent eye-quite the opposite. His fantasy of vision featured an omniscient eye. Truth fol seeing demanded full and systematic knowledge of the laws of nature and of art. Hearing Eakins make this argument, the reporter for Scribner'sremained skeptical, worrying that too much knowledge was dangerous for art, that it "distorted genuine impulses." He wondered whether Eakins "would insist upon a landscape painter taking an elaborate course of botany," but apparently he did not pose the question in his interview. 5 Several interpreters of Eakins's work-including such insightful and influential scholars as Lloyd Goodrich, Barbara Novak, Elizabeth Johns, and Kathleen Fosterhave analyzed it as an interaction between seeing and knowing. Although they have taken different approaches, they have generally mapped this interaction directly onto another: the interplay between graphic and painterly elements in Eakins's art. Science and measurement most often appear in the underdrawings and diagrammatic preparatoryworks, which provide a skeleton of knowledge that informs but does not limit the close observation, approximation of appearances, and crafting of a work of art accomplished in the skillful overpainting. Analysts gen erally have agreed that the conceptual and the perceptual, or the scientific and the artistic, merge in Eakins's work in the integration of graphic and painterly modes.

mms

[AKINS'S RfAllTY

61 Any tension arising between cognition and perception becomes a problem to be worked out in the relation of drawing to painting. 6 I want to propose a different view: Eakins's commitment to truthful vision through systematic knowledge gave rise to irreconcilable conflicts, which animated his paintings. Those conflicts were too pervasive and unruly to be contained in an opposition of drawing and painting. One conflict stemmed from the multiple systems of knowledge Eakins attempted to mobilize, which often resisted integra tion, and another, from a growing rift between knowing and seeing. That latter conflict in particular is the basis of Eakins's relevance to this book. His paintings try to remake realism for a world of illusions and deceptions. They strive to en hance the truthfulness of depictions by fortifying them with scientific principles, verifiable measurements, and knowledge of deep structures.

8[ TO SHMS WHAT ISAND WHAT The ChampionSingleSculls of 1871 (Plate~). one of the first paintings Eakins exhibited, was an early and ambitious effort to see and render with a knowing eye. Although almost no preparatory studies for the painting have survived, there is every reason to believe that Eakins made many. Indeed, technical analysis has revealed pinholes and incised lines in the underpainting, evidence of a process in volving transfer drawings. 7 Many commentators have remarked the acute observation and careful illusionism of the finished work. Goodrich has offered what is probably the most extreme statement of this view, "This was a scene completely familiar to the artist, observed firsthand, and recorded with fidelity to reality .... An original mind was dealing directly with actualities. The vision was photographically exact, crystal -clear. "8 Goodrich's reference to photography may have some value in drawing our attention to certain features of the painting-the relation of lights and darks, the momentariness of the scene, the fine detailing of forms. But it is inapt overall: Eakins probably had not yet begun workingwith the camera when he did this painting, and, more important, the painting refuses the homogenizing and unifying vi sion of photography. "One senses that boat, man, and water were not all apprehended and painted simultaneously but put together out of different aspects of the painter's experience and sensibility," as Novak has observed. 9 Eakins's thorough knowledge of anatomy plays a small but important part in the central figure, Max

[fHClS R[AlllY [AKINS'S

Schmitt, whose recent victories in amateur races on the Schuylkill River this portrait memorializes. The rendering of his body is only about three inches high, yet his arm and shoulder are modeled with an emphasis that picks them out from the pictorial field more strongly than any contemporary daylight photograph (all questions of color aside). Even more striking than anatomy in this painting is Eakins's systematic study oflinear perspective, which would have helped him situate the objects and reflections precisely in space and keep relationships

of scale internally consistent.

Equally important is his study of the physical principles of reflection. Most of the pictorial interest here is concentrated in the reflective surface of the water. The painting is bisected horizontally by the waterline in the distance and at the right by the separation of the landmass from its reflection that invests the picture with a mirroring dynamic. The reflections are calibrated to give legible information about the distance of the objects; recession brings a proportional diminution of clarity, integrity, and contrast. The river's mirroring is interrupted only by the wakes of the sculls rowed by Schmitt and, beyond him, by Eakins himself. These dark interruptions

in the reflected sky convey a narrative of movement through

the picture space. Eakins's boat has entered at left and is shown following the river into the distance. Schmitt's is moving in the opposite direction, his wake revealing that a moment ago he stopped rowing and began dragging his oars over the water. Eakins has taken obvious liberties to ensure the clarity and legibility of this narrative of movement and action. Most striking is the trail of perfectly intact rings that each rower has left marking the points where the oars were inserted into the water (Fig. '.41). Time has not dissipated them: the earliest remain as integral and discrete as the most recent. Schmitt has left thirteen identical rings neatly stacked like gray lily pads on the canvas; Eakins is in the midst of producing his seventh. While the rowers continue moving through time and space, the river arrests time by stilling and preserving on its surface the marks of the oars' contact. These undissipated rings are anachronisms: they compress past events into the painting's expanded present. The schematic marks representing the indexical traces of the oars on the water juxtapose two temporalities. The wakes of the dragged oars signify continuity and duration, the series of rings, intervals in a structure of repetition. The wake of Eakins's boat at the extreme left edge of the painting also suggests temporal disruption. In this beautifully studied and rendered passage, the wake, moving through light-toned reflections of shore foliage, is far more condensed

[AKINS'S R[AlllY HHCTS

63

21• Detail of Platn. flGURf

and active than it should be at such a distance from Eakins. Even if we grant Eakins the greater speed, such contained turbulence is difficult to justify when the water in the immediate wake of Schmitt's boat is so much less energetic. But the question of speed provokes further confusion. Are not the pools left by Eakins's oarsSchmitt's too for that matter-much too close together to signify even moderate speed? About a boat's length apart, they suggest that the rowers move at an im possibly slow pace or stroke at an improbably furious one. Now we have to imagine the time of the painting as simultaneously slowed and accelerated: picture a Keystone Cop rowing at double time while his boat moves ahead in slow motion. These departures from plausible appearances enhance narration and convey information. The undissipated and overabundant rings are temporal disturbances in the painting's narrative that paradoxically clarify the story pictured. Seeing the rings intact on the water's surface enables the viewer to know more precisely the rowers' spatial orientation and trajectory; like everything else in the painting they have been rendered in careful perspective. The perfectly regular spacing of these rings and their compression also convey information about the elegance and consistency of the rowers' strokes. Confusion about their speed is the cost of a legible trail. The painter's conspicuous presence in midstroke stakes

[fHCTS RWITY HKINS'S

the picture's claim to fusthand information about the art of sculling. Eakins often represented himself as an earnest practitioner of the activity portrayed. 10 This gives him a double presence in his works: as knowing participant and as unseen painter-viewer, who in this case is the implicit object of Schmitt's piercing gaze. In this way Eakins's paintings literalize a dynamic of seeing and knowing. Sometimes the artist's double presence generates explicit tensions-such as the blurring of genres (portraiture and quotidian scene) in this picture. In TheGrossClinic, which shows Eakins at the right edge of the painting, sitting among the medical students and taking notes or drawing, curious fragments of participating bodies draw our attention to the artist's double viewpoint. Either he painted not what he witnessed but rather what he imagined from his position on the other side of the scene, or he included himself by taking a liberty with what he saw, and thus may be one of many fabrications.

11

In The ChampionSingleSculls, Eakins's expertise as a rower is not only pictured but also reinforced by the perfectly spaced rings, the detailed information about boat design, and the precise hand and body positionings. That Eakins wished to highlight this information is suggested by the absence of some reflections that strict mimesis would have required. Where are those of the red-and -white latticework bridges in the distance, and of the extraordinary bright and wispy clouds that trail across the sky, the long central group echoing both the near scull and its frothy wake? 12 Bymy estimation the lower parts of those clouds should be reflected along the very bottom edge of the painting. Had they been included, they would most likely have obscured the painting's narrative of powerful and skillful movement through exquisitely plotted space. But their omission produces other effects, too. It gives the painting an unsettling sense of absence, and it enhances the water's presence as a material substance with absorptive density as well as reflective capacities. Eakins's water has occult powers: it can alter time and swallow reflections. In this painting Eakins's commitments to multiple forms of knowledge come into conflict. Information about the depicted space and about the fme art of sculling jostles with elaborate knowledge about the behavior of water surfaces and reflections. Fidelity to plausible appearances receives a relatively low priority, but the painterliness of some areas of this work signals another system of knowledge high in Eakins's hierarchy: the art of painting. The range of paint handlings shows his engagement in experimental if unsystematic study of the processes by which drawn and painted marks operate simultaneously as equivalents for things in the world and as literal presences capable of evoking affective responses.

[AKINS'S R[AlllY HHCTS

Similar conflicts can be seen in another boating subject done three years later: Starting Out after Rail of 1874 (Plate 3). In this painting, whose verisimilitude has also been praised in extravagant terms, Eakins apparently determined to provide recognizable and forceful portraits of two bird hunters and their boat as they set out from shore in bright sunlight.

13

The watercolor version of this

work was originally titled Harry Young, of Moyamensing, and Sam Helhower, "The Pusher," Going Rail Shooting, and its first owner was a boatbuilder.

14

Some of

Eakins's painstaking perspectival diagrams for this work survive, documenting his interest in achieving an absolute internal consistency of scale in the painting. Eakins once wrote that putting a boat such as this in perspective, getting the tilt and proportions exactly right, could be done more effectively from a mechanical drawing of the boat and a perspective diagram than from life study.

15

He had no doubt that diagrammatic knowledge systematically applied would yield graphic results identical to those achieved, with greater difficulty, by a fully informed study of appearances. Eakins also lavished attention on the heads and figures of the two men in this painting. They are strongly modeled in direct sunlight, and the deep shadows give emphatic information about anatomy and facial features. If viewers sense a disjunction between the figures and their surroundings, it may stem in part from the absence of reflective backlighting from either the bright white sail or the shim mering surface of the water. Although Eakins studiously portrayed the water's reflection and transparency, those effects do not touch the men, nor does the white sail, which, like the smaller white screen of a portrait photographer, should eliminate deep shadows from their faces. Here the sail is far too unreflective. Eakins was no impressionist. The studio lighting on the figures ensures that the dissolving and flattening effects of light and reflection will not undermine anatomical and perspectival knowledge-measurable

information about bodies in space. The

painting stages a competition for prominence and authority between knowledge systems with conflicting demands. Eakins devised an artistic process that was analytic, conceptual, and additive. He broke down his subjects into component parts, plotted and rendered according to systematic principles, and additively recombined.

16 Linear

perspective put

the boat and other objects in space; anatomical research modeled the figures; mathematical calculations generated the reflections; and so on. Just as Eakins did not need life study to set a boat in perspective, so he could calculate reflections systematically. He taught his students to rely on mathematical analysis: the angle

[AKINS'S nmnv HHCTS

66 of reflection equals the angle of incidence. Once they had learned the science, outdoor study of reflections and wave motion would hold no surprises. 17 Even as a young man Eakins had written to his father that "the big artist does not sit down monkey like and copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dung pile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. " 18 The discordant collage of processes and techniques that constitutes the surface of some of Eakins's paintings bears witness to the overall sense of dissonance, as if the artist used a specially designed method of paint application to produce each section. Eakins's attention to the comparative study of painted marks can be seen in these canvases along with evidence, at a deep level, of procedural discontinuity. Apparently, Eakins generally preferred to let stand any disjunctions gen erated in his additive process rather than try to conceal them. He did not turn to appearances to unify his awkward syntheses. "Strain your brain more than your eye," he is reported to have told his students. 19 He seems to have assumed that all knowledge systems would become perfectly integrated and fully congruent with appearances once the learning process was complete. If we share that premise with Eakins, we may be inclined to treat seams and awkwardness in his paintings as signs of failure. The project, after all, was outrageously ambitious; imperfections were inevitable. This reasoning has made possible the conflicting emphases in the art- historical scholarship on Eakins: on the one hand, strong claims for the extraordinary knowledge and truthful observa tion mobilized in his paintings and, on the other, an insistent cataloguing of their disjunctions. Both elements were also present in the early critical responses to his work, which highlighted fust its mimetic force and later its artifice and awkwardness. These conflicting emphases are actually two sides of a coin. The fractures in Eakins's paintings are inevitable, not because Eakins failed in his execution, but because his fundamental assumption was mistaken. Seeing and knowing could not be made congruent in mimetic painting. The further problems that came with Eakins's growth as a painter clarify this point. A decisive rift between knowledge and appearances became explicit in A May Momingin the Park, also known as TheFairman RogersFour-in-Hand, of 1879 (Plate 4). One can extract much factual information from this painting, includingthe exact place in Fairmount Park where the scene is set. One can identify each figure by name, the horses as well as the men and women. One can classify the magnificent custom -built coach that was the pride of its owner and driver, Fair-

HHCTS nmm [AKINS'S

man Rogers, an engineer, a member of the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Academy, and Eakins's friend and supporter. Careful analysis of perspective in the work can establish the distance from which the scene was viewed and the precise placement in depth of each element. One can re-create the painstaking process by which the artist produced the painting from research, photographs, and preparatory works. Scholars have pursued all these avenues and collected all this information.

20

This painting introduces a new knowledge system into Eakins's work: the analysis of motion found in Eadweard Muybridge's stop-action photography (Fig. ~~). In an essay drawing attention to Eakins's study of motion, Fairman Rogers articulated Eakins's thinking: "It is only by thoroughly understanding the mechanism of the motion that the artist will be able to portray it in any satisfactory manner. "21 Eakins's fascination with motion photography has been well documented. He studied Muybridge 's work and technical procedures, corresponded with the photographer, helped bring him from California to a position at the University of Pennsylvania, and undertook his own photographic studies of motion. In May Morning and the preparatory works for it, Eakins labored over equine anatomy and motion, attempting to transfer the truths of movement from Muybridge 's photographs to his own paintings. He produced a number of preparatory studies focusing on movement, including a wax sculpture of the horses. He even tried to persuade Muybridge to alter his procedure to yield results better adapted to the requirements of Eakins's art. 22 Here, as with some of his other scientific researches, Eakins was attempting to embed in a realist painting information beyond the reach of the naked eye. Once again the question was whether painting could remake appearances so as to enlarge their capacity to contain and display nonapparent truth. Although Eakins took much from Muybridge 's photographs, he refused one of their features. The photographs stopped all motion and gave complete information about the forms understood to be moving. One could count the number of spokes in the carriage wheels if one wished. Eakins chose to handle his carriage wheels differently (Fig. ~3). Perhaps because he believed that the unfamiliar configuration of the horses' legs might compromise the painting's power to suggest motion, Eakins attempted to make the wheels of the carriage do that signifying work. 23 In place of the spokes in all four wheels he inserted odd markings that read as blurs. Viewers of this painting see the world through a vision fast enough to stop the legs of a horse but not the spokes of a spinning wheel. Those with ex-

[AKINS'S R[AlllY HHClS

68

flGUR[ 11• Eadweard Muybridge, Trotting, Occident, plate 35 from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1881, albumen print, 6 x 9 in.© Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover. Massachusetts, partial gift of the Beinecke Foundation, Inc .. all rights reserved.

perience in photography recognize the issue as one of shutter speed, a matter of a fraction of a second. The very illusionism of this painting implies a reference to photography. Although photography had opened a rift between seeing and knowing, to Eakins it also promised help healing that rift. And if conflict between seeing and knowing, here as in Champion Single Sculls, produces temporal disjunctions, photography now bears clear responsibility. Barthes observed, "cameras ... were clocks for seeing.

Originally, as Roland

"24

Contemporary critics, perhaps discomforted by the conflict, disparaged the painting. To them, convention seemed truer than the truths revealed through science. Some construed the problem as an opposition between art and science, or between art and photography.

25

The critic for the Philadelphia Press called May

Morning "a mechanical experiment" that failed as a painting.

26

Two reviewers,

however, articulated the problem more clearly. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer wrote that the painting was "scientifically true; but it is apparently, and so,

[AKINS'S R[AlllY HHCTS

69

flGUR[ 23• Detail of Platq.

I think, artistically false. " 27 Sylvester Koehler, writing in theAmericanArt Review, expanded her distinction between science on the one hand and appearances and art on the other: It is said that the artist studied the motion of the horses from the instantaneous photographs lately taken on race-courses. The result is that each limb is motionless, while the spokes of the wheels of the vehicle whirl about so rapidly that they cannot be seen. As a demonstration of the fact that the artist must fail when he attempts to depict what is, instead of what seems to be, this picture is of great value, and perhaps the artist himself has by this time seen his mistake, and only allows the picture to be shown so that others may profit by his experience. 28 Koehler, in pointing to the rift opening between what is and what appears, between the truths of scientific knowledge systems and the ambiguities or deceptions of perceptual experience, reveals the crux of the problem. It would become central to discussions of "instantaneous photography" in the 1880s, which echoed the terms invoked by Koehler and Van Rensselaer. H. P. Robinson spoke for the majority in asserting that what was scientifically correct could be artistically

fUINS'S R[AlllY mms

70 wrong, "for it is the mission of the artistic photographer to represent what he sees and no more. "29 W. de W. Abney, a leading photo chemist and writer on photography, went so far as to argue that instantaneous photographs were both untrue and incorrect artistically. A photograph in which "the carriage wheels will be seen with every spoke sharp" can only be" incorrect and untruthful, as a record of what would strike the eye at the same time. "30 P.H. Emerson agreed that artists and photographers should represent onlywhat could be seen, "for nothing is more inartistic than some positions of a galloping horse, such as are never seen by the eye but yet exist in reality, and have been recorded by Mr. Muybridge. " 31 The questions, however, were trickier than these writers acknowledged. For example, what the eye can see may differ for different moving objects. When horses, like those in Eakins's painting, are moving at moderate speed, human vision can readily take in all the animals' legs at once. But perceptual and cognitive limitations prevent the organizing and processing of fleeting information about the relative positions of four legs moving simultaneously. The position of spinning spokes relative to one another remains completely consistent, so viewers have no trouble organizing the elements mentally. But at high speeds persistence of vision prevents the human eye from following the movement of individual spokes. (This may not have been the case for the limited speed represented in Eakins's painting, but no matter.) Eakins may have been able to use this distinction to justify his decision to copy from Muybridge's photographs but omit the stilled spokes. But would he have wanted to assign a shutter speed to normal human vision? And would he have been willing to accept that limit to the knowledge a painting could contain-a

limit based on the capabilities of unas-

sisted vision? One thing seems clear: the scientif:tc research Eakins conducted was proving more an obstacle to realist painting than an armature for it. The knowledge systems he drew into his analytic and additive process inevitably produced tensions and conflicts. Like a photographer when the camera settings and darkroom procedures best suited to recording information about light, weather, and watery reflections conflict with those ideal for representing anatomy, or space, or movement, or technical information about rowing, Eakins was forced to make diff:tcult choices. And if these did not give him trouble enough, he also bumped up continually against the limits of the seen world to contain and display truthful information. His determination to reach and surpass those limits was an inexhaustible source of pictorial conflicts.

(AKINS'S RfAllTY HHCTS

71 AB truthful knowledge moved further from the domain of ordinary appearances, the practices and convictions of a painter such as Eakins proved harder to sustain. Photography, modern science, and other developments associated with modernity undermined confidence in the harmonious reciprocity of knowledge and appearances. Even as motion studies like Muybridge 's pointed the way toward the powerful illusionism of cinema, illusionistic painting's claims to truthfulness and realism came to ring hollow. 32

m

ICONS AND CONS, DIAGRAMS AND lllUSIONS Although Eakins's statements and writings reveal no consciousness of this crisis of scientific realism, the insight is embedded in his paintings. The blurs he substituted for spokes in May Morning indicate a direction he would take in subsequent works. 33 The blurs interest me because they do not easily fit the principle I cited earlier regarding Eakins's artistic achievement. If Eakins here, as elsewhere, intensified his painted icons by merging seeing with knowing, the blur must be understood as an iconic sign. That is, it must be taken to resemble the phenomenological form in which spinning spokes present themselves to human vision. Kathleen Foster asserts such a view: "In painting the entire wheel blurred, Eakins made a concession to human perception and the visual logic of his art, antici pating that a correctly photographic depiction would look unnatural in his painting. "34 The theorists of instantaneous photography generally believed that blurred spokes were truer to human vision. Abney, who argued that art should strive to show what the eye sees rather than any invisible truths, approved the Punch cartoonist John Leech's solution to the problem of the spinning wheel. In Leech's work, according to Abney, "instead of the sharp spokes of the wheel, is seen a fuzzy mass of wool -like matter radiating from the center, and surmounted by a tire by no means defined. " 35 Abney's expressed preference for one type of blur reminds us that there were blurs and blurs. Had Eakins wished an alternative to Muybridge's example, a developed tradition of painting moving wheels offered other possibilities. The problem of the wheel in motion had absorbed artists at least since Leonardo, and it was a controversial matter during the seventeenth century. In Eakins's time instantaneous photography was reviving interest in an old problem.

36

As a young art student visiting the Prado in Madrid, where his lifelong admi-

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72

flGURW • Diego Velazquez, Las Hilanderas, 1657 (detail), oil on canvas, 5 ft. 6 % in. x 6 ft. z% in. Museo de! Prado, Madrid.

ration for Diego Velazquez began, Eakins contemplated Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) of 1657 and jotted his thoughts about it in his journal (Fig. ~4). 37 An oil sketch for May Morningseems to test Velazquez's approach to the depiction of a turning wheel by giving a clear view through the wheel with little indication of connections between hub and rim. 38 Another alternative would have been an opaque blur, one that partially or fully obscures the view through the wheel. 39 Eakins rejected those conventional approaches, and in contrast with them, his solution appears idiosyncratic. Unlike prior efforts that plausibly claim phenomenological legitimacy, Eakins's blurs suggest an artist uninterested in approximating perceptions.

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73 Granted, what one sees when looking at a spinning wheel varies with the speed of the wheel, the size of the spokes, viewing distance, lighting conditions, and so on. Nonetheless it is hard to imagine any combination of these that would yield the discrete zigzagged arcs and smears Eakins rendered. Perhaps the blurwas so securely associated with photography that Eakins's device would have operated as a photographic reference. Eakins certainly made that connection. On first seeing Muybridge's photographs, he wrote that it was "pretty to see the sharp & blurred motion in these photographs. They mark so nicely the relative speed of the different parts." Eakins paid close attention to the spokes of the wheels and noted that not all of them were entirely sharp. "[The] sulky wheels are blurred above and sharp below, because the upper part travels twice as fast as the hub while the lower part is still." 40 In a subsequent painting, Mending the Net of 1881 (Fig. ~5), Eakins rendered some of the geese in the left foreground in soft focus, perhaps emulating some of the blurred figures that appear in photographs he made as studies for the painting (Fig. ~6). 41 Although a blur appearing in a photograph would not resemble Eakins's spokes, it might function in the same semiotic register. That is, Eakins's painted blurs might inherit something of the hybrid semiotic identity of photographic blurs, which are simultaneously icons and indexes of movement, to revert to the terminology of Peirce. In a photograph a blur is a physical effect of the movement of reflected light imprinted on a photographic plate, which makes it an index. Like many indexes, it may be illegible in itself and require auxiliary iconic and indexi cal signs to establish its signification of movement and its resemblance to the look of moving forms. 42 That Eakins's spokes would be illegible in isolation is certainly true, though such an effect is far from unusual in his paintings. The blurs might even more plausibly be understood as symbols, if we compare them to familiar conventional notations like those of cartoon graphics. However interesting an archaeology or a semiotics or a phenomenology of the blur might be, I do not propose to undertake one here. My point is that the blurred spokes of May Morning are to some significant extent nonmimetic signs for motion. They show that in merging knowledge and vision, Eakins often does more than simply intensify icons (whatever that may mean); he alters their character. One way of describing the effect is to say that Eakins conflates two forms of resemblance: that of the diagram and that of the illusion. 43 This description would apply to the peculiar signs in TheChampion Single Sculls-the overactive, condensed wake and the undissipated rings. Here icons dislocated temporally from the con-

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74

flGUl[25 • Thomas Eakins, Mending the Net, 1881, oil on canvas, 3~ x 45 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 19~9.

text that gives them illusionistic legitimacy shift to a diagrammaticfonction.

The

stacked rings do not mimic what would be observed in nature; instead, they effectively signify elegant rowing to a viewer prepared to read them as schematic markings on a map. 44 The result may be an intensification of iconicity, but these two forms of icon do not blend easily. Combining the abstraction and timelessness of the diagram with the contingency and immediacy of illusionism might be expected to result in exactly the disjunctions and seams we have been noticing in Eakins's paintings-and

the time warps I have described.

A second way of describing the semiotic effect of Eakins's marriage of seeing and knowing is to say that it sometimes moves his signs entirely away from resemblance and toward other semiotic strategies. That some of Eakins's icons migrate into other semiotic classifications may seem surprising in a painting

cherished for its rich illusionism, but Eakins was drawn to that strategy on many

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76

26• Thomas Eakins, Geesewith Treeand TwoMen flGUR[ in Backgroundat Gloucester,NewJersey,1881, dry plate negative, 4 x 5 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust.

occasions. His efforts to make illusionistic painting a vehicle for nonapparent truths often led him away from mimesis toward semiotic adventurousness. Sometimes he appropriated the frame as a space for experiments with signs. The musical notes he carved and colored along the bottom of the frame of The Concert Singer are presumed to specify the song she sings (Plate 5).45 A trained reader of these symbols gains knowledge of the subject through them. They clarify the mood of the event depicted and verify the truth of the painting's title. As Eakins himself put it, "I once painted a concert singer and on the chestnut frame I carved the opening bars of Mendelssohn's 'Rest in the Lord.' It was ornamental unobtrusive and to musicians I think it emphasized the expression of the face and pose of the figure. "46

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76 The bizarre hand with baton projecting from the lower left corner is also semiotically complex. It playfully asks the viewer to integrate it into the painting by projecting an orchestra pit below the bottom edge. But just as playfully, it insists on floating free as a symbol of musical performance, helping to secure an interpretation of the woman's activity as singing rather than speaking or yawning. It also evokes the hand of the artist wielding the paintbrush that generates the image. The fern that intrudes into the painting at upper left seems intended to reinforce the suggestion of a continuous world beyond the frame, but it, too, is difficult to situate in any imaginary space continuous with that of the picture. It breaks free, becoming a witty transformation of the conducting hand, filled with baton fingers that reach out toward the singer. It stands, moreover, as a diagram of vocal projection. The leaves fan out as if mimicking the sound waves from the singer's mouth. This painting and its frame show Eakins to be much less a realist (in the conventional, simplified sense of that term) than an inventive experimenter with visual signs. Perhaps Eakins's most concentrated and dazzling experiment with signs is his portrait of Professor Henry A. Rowland, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University (Plate 6). He is shown seated before his famous invention: a ruling machine for producing concave diffraction gratings, which are slightly curved metal plates scored with minutely spaced lines that diffract light into spectra. Rowland's machine used a diamond-tipped tool to etch 14,400 lines per inch into a five-inch plate, each line about three inches long, with the lines on a single plate totaling almost three miles. Using such gratings, Rowland was able to map the spectrum of solar light. In Eakins's portrait, the physicist holds one of these implements, evidently as sunlight strikes it and splits that light into its component elements. We are shown the bands of colors, but Rowland's more exacting analysis would spread this spectrum over sixty feet, revealing also the Fraunhofer lines, hundreds of dark lines interspersed throughout the spectrum. 47 By measuring precisely the wave~ lengths of these lines and the thousands more that his enlarged spectrum revealed, Rowland was able to determine with new accuracy the chemical composition of the sun's atmosphere. In the process, he founded the field of spectrometry. To convey maximal information about Rowland and his work, the painting em ploys a striking array of sign types. Working outward from the center, the color spectrum, positioned just to the right of center and angled slightly into depth, exceeds its illusionistic function in the painting. It leaps from the otherwise monochromatic field and asserts itself as a diagram of the color relationships on which

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the painter's art is based. Moreover, as pure color applied densely and directly from the palette, these swatches are also literal samples (a kind of index) of the painter's materials. This conflation of spectrum and palette as an immediate physical presence asserts a direct relation between Rowland's work and Eakins's.

48

Above the

spectrum and behind Rowland two disks can be seen; they are elements of the rul ing apparatus that forces the diamond needle across and along the diffraction grating. These disks would be turning slowly when the machine was operating, and Eakins has rendered them with highlights and reflections that suggest rotation. The wheel nearer to Rowland, which drove the engine, has a smooth bronze sheen made with concentric brushstrokes. The silver-gray disk farther to the right, directly before the assistant in the background, contains strangely irregular light gray brush marks that have no obvious mimetic function. Pictorially they separate the disk from the assorted hardware before it, and they vaguely suggest a blur on an opaque and reflective wheel. As part of a ratchet mechanism, this wheel would have turned sporadically. Here again, Eakins enlists the frame in the signifying work of the painting. Those able to decipher its signs-or of science-gain

even to assign them to some particular fields

additional information about the identity and achievements of

the person represented.

Nearly a foot wide and covered in gold leaf, the frame

presents a brilliant field whose surface area, in square feet (~5), almost equals that of the painting (3o). lts face is carved, according to Eakins's own description, "with lines of the spectrum and with coefficients and mathematical formulae relating to light and electricity, all original with Professor Rowland and selected by himself. "49 In a letter to Rowland written in October 1897, Eakins first suggested incorporating some graphic materials into the frame: "It seems to me it would be fine to saw cut shallow some of the Fraunhofer lines which you were the first man to see." Like Muybridge, Rowland had made visible something previously beyond the reach of sight, and Eakins wished to bring that discovery into his painting. He went on to ask Rowland, "Would there be some simple & artistic way I wonder of suggesting the electric unit that I heard of your measuring so accurately? "50 Rowland apparently provided Eakins with that material and more. Along the top and bottom of the frame Eakins reproduced segments of Rowland's spectroscopic analysis of solar light. 51 The top panel shows the spectral signature of pure sodium set above a matching configuration oflines taken from the solar spectrum; this match indicates the presence of sodium in the solar data but also presents a large number of unmatched lines in solar light. At left, two circles

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and some wavy lines form a pictograph suggesting the Earth, its atmosphere, and the Sun. The circle with a dot at the center is repeated at a larger scale on the bottom panel of the frame, which suggests it may be a symbol for the Sun as source of the spectral lines etched alongside it on both panels. While the top panel of the frame represents the part of Rowland's work involved in chemical analysis, the bottom counterbalances this by signifying measurement. It represents a section of one of Rowland's maps of the solar spectrum that align a carefully ruled measuring gauge (enlarged to scale in the painting, each inch on the rule measuring precisely fwe inches) with another sample of spectral lines. The frame itself becomes an instrument of measurement and analysis, a tool of spectrometry. The regularity of these series oflines also evokes the diffraction grating, as if the frame had been in physical contact with the machine portrayed in the painting. A viewer may wonder whether it would diffract raking light like the depicted grating. Eakins, in these elements, ingeniously invokes indexical signification. The handwritten quality of the diagrams and computations on the side panels contrasts with the mechanical ruling at top and bottom. The handwriting is im plicitly autographic, as if evidence of Rowland's own hand inscribing notations on the frame. Eakins of course enlarged these abstract markings and transferred them from Rowland's own designs, making them iconic renderings of autographic originals. Above all, they are signs evoking Rowland's work on the measurement of electrical resistance, the speed of light, the mechanical value of heat, and the sharpness of lines in a spectrum. Various signs are employed toward this end, in eluding mathematical formulas, electrical diagrams, and pictographs. In the upper right corner a pictographic icon of a resistor is placed atop computations of resistance and diagrammatic icons of electrical circuits. Immediately above it, a wheel with hub and seven spokes is set into clockwise motion by an arrow at its perimeter. As an indexical pointer signifying directional movement, the arrow eliminates the need for blurred spokes.

52

Having pushed illusionism to the limits of its capacity to contain informationto the point where knowledge systems jostled and displaced one another-Eakins understood that the information and truth content of his mimetic signs could be supplemented through indexes, diagrams, and symbols. The way to increase the truthfulness

of paintings was not strict mimesis but semiotic hybridity.

53

His

paintings point the way toward the work on signs taken up in cubism, futurism, collage, and dada, and they reveal the logic of one hallmark of modernism: wariness about the relation of picture and world. 54

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DISJUNCTIONS AND TRUTH "By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or commission, does a given picture oflife appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality?" 55 Henry James recognized that the power of a novel or a painting to warrant the description "realistic" was no straightforward matter. Roland Barthes, Nelson Goodman, W. J. T. Mitchell, and many others have illuminated the complexities of this issue. Instead of concen trating solely on the relation of the picture to what it represents, they have shifted attention to the relation between viewer and picture. The perception of iconicitythat is, judging a picture to be realistic, or even merely to resemble what it depicts-is an effect as much of beliefs, conventions, habits, values, interests, and power relations as of skilled artistic imitation. 56 For some time now the idea that Eakins's paintings provide faithful transcriptions of the seen world has been unconvincing. Shifting the emphasis to the scientific knowledge compressed into his likenesses may correspond better with Eakins's own conception of his artistic project, and it may make room for disjunctions in the paintings, but it does not solve fundamental problems. One kind of fidelity to reality merely replaces another. I have argued that a premise of Eakins's art-that seeing and knowing are fundamentally congruent-is untenable, and that his efforts to make them congruent generated pictorial disjunctions as inevitably as they produced fragmentary and partial likenesses. I now want to propose that these disjunctions served a purpose essential to Eakins's realism. They were integral to the rhetoric of his paintings because they signaled to viewers commitment to a particular kind of truth ful rendering of a real subject. That is to say, the seams in Eakins's paintings were not obstacles to his realism but vehicles of his art's reality effects. 57 In this chapter's analyses of Eakins's paintings, I have proceeded from certain peculiarities and discrepancies (missing reflections, undissipated rings, ambiguous temporalities, nonmimetic signification) to inferences about the artist's analytic, additive, research-oriented process and his commitment to representing knowledge. In so doing I have meant to demonstrate the reasonableness of an interpretive maneuver solicited by Eakins's art. The disjunctions characteristic of his paintings invite interpretation as effects of the conflict between highly articulated ordering systems or of the enforced compression of knowledge into ap-

[AKINS'S R[AllTY [fHCTS

80 f'\,·•t ~

"l

...., '.),,

\1 )'

21 • Thomas Eakins, The flCUR[ Crucifixion, 1880, oil on canvas, 96 x 54 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 19~9.

pearances. The paintings thus signal their commitment to a particular realism: one not of shallow mimicry but of likenesses grounded in reliable, systematic bedrock knowledge and natural laws. The fractures in Eakins's illusions distinguish his art from a realism that sim ulates surface appearances in an intricate web of illusion (as in William Harnett's trompe l 'oeil paintings), as well as from a realism that employs pictorial

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81

• Paul Philippoteaux, Panoramaof Jerusalem flGUl£11 with the Crucifixionof Christ,188~ (detail), oil on canvas, 45 ft. high, 360 ft. circumference. Sainte Anne de Beaupre, Quebec.

theatrics to draw viewers into sensational exoticism and eroticism (as in the any realism that employs trickery to deworks of French academicism)-from ceive viewers. "To get these things is not dexterity or a trick.No-it's knowledge," Eakins told his students. 58 The critic Clarence Cook reinforced this distinction when he contrasted Eakins's work with the academic realism of Edouard Detaille, "which has more to do with trick and mechanism than with art. " 59 One need only compare Eakins's Crucifixion (Fig. ~7), especially its simple composition and resolutely embodied Christ, with the spectacular Crucifixion panora mas by Paul Philippoteaux (Fig. ~8), Mihaly Munkacsy, Karl Frosch, Antonius Brouwer, and others. Those works were drawing large audiences in New York and other American cities in the 1880s and 1890s, when the popular press celebrated them as triumphs of exact science, realism, and truth in painting. 60 Eakins exhibited his Crucifixion frequently during this period, and it must have carried an implicit critique of the sensationalism spectacular versions of the subject.

and gimmickry of popular,

61

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Eakins distinguished his illusionism from deceptive and theatrical forms in part by preventing viewers from entering too easily into the imaginative space of the painting. His pictorial discrepancies and fractures, among other devices, positioned viewers outside the work and elicited their critical, analytical scrutiny.

62

The effect resembles Brechtian estrangement, although the critical distance it promotes adheres to an ideology of science rather than a theory of political and ideological demystification. The ruptures in Eakins's paintings also conveyed the artist's process as one characterized by study and labor. Those qualities, heavily emphasized in the critical commentary on his art, differentiated his work from the effortless artifice of Whistlerian aestheticism.

63

The contrast of Eakins's style with other contempo-

rary styles secured an understanding of his realism as one committed to scientific knowledge and opposed to all simplification, ease, shortcuts, trickery, fraud, and deception. "He has acquired this knowledge and skill by arduous study, study not confined to outward phenomena, but dealing with constituents, from the skeleton to the skin. "64 As I have suggested, the disjunctions did not do that work alone; the message was also carried by the information-

and knowledge-packed forms

that filled the paintings as well as by the publicity surrounding Eakins's work. To the painter George Inness, whose aesthetic commitments were antithetical to Eakins's, all those features would have marked Eakins's paintings as an art of scientific knowledge. Inness preferred what he considered a superior art of wisdom, distinguished by unity, beauty, and ease. 65 It may seem paradoxical that the seams and disjunctions, the noniconic el ements, of Eakins's paintings intensified their realist claims, but reality effects always come from some configuration of selections and contrivances that en hances the persuasiveness of the representation

for a particular audience. "The

spectator's approval is not solicited, but extorted" by Eakins's work, according to Shinn.

66

The question we must ask is, Under what cultural and historical cir-

cumstances would Eakins's particular interruptions

and fractures assist, not to

say extort, a viewer's assent to a painting's truthfulness?

I turn to that question

in a moment. Readers no doubt wonder whether I am attributing to all Eakins's viewers, in eluding his contemporaries, the model of response I have described. There is no shortage of evidence that contemporary critics regularly noticed disjunctions in Eakins's work. "Mr. Eakins has done some very strange things, and while compelling admiration for his knowledge and skill in certain important respects, has

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kept his friends perpetually apologizing for him by the wildness of his errors in dealing with other things of quite as much importance. "67 The author of this passage, Leslie Miller, counted himself among those overburdened friends. His comment, prompted by discrepancies noted betweenthe figures and the landscape in Swimming, is representative in conjoining appreciation of the knowledge and skill visible in the painting with recognition of its fractures. In the words of another critic, writing in 1880: "The occasional flashes of brilliancy which start out of his canvases are so sudden as to convey the impression of unreality. Yet, in spite of such mannerisms, Mr. Eakins is one of our best artists. " 68 In one more example, concerningMendingthe Net (see Fig. ~5), a critic notes, "It shows ... the closest study. Each figure is sharply individualized, and the interest of the work is in these separately. Taken as a whole, they do not fuse into the landscape. "69 That last passage links Eakins's pictorial disunity to his rigorous study of particulars, and indeed, critics often traced the causes of disturbance to his scientific ambitions and systematic research. Van Rensselaer's and Koehler's attribution of May Morning's discrepancies to Eakins's borrowings from instantaneous photographs is another case in point. As often as not, Eakins's contemporaries found in his realism" errors," "mannerisms," and "discordances" that estranged them from the paintings while reminding them of his knowledge and skill. That general response-disruptions alienate and point back to scientific process-displays remarkable consistency across the Eakins literature, although the features of the paintings that provoked the response have varied considerably. Van Rensselaer and Koehler concluded that Eakins's painting failed, indicating that for them its disjunctions produced no reality effect. Paradoxically, the pattern of response I am tracing is most evident when a painting is perceived to exceed the acceptable limits of disjunction and therefore to fail as realism. When the reality effect operates at maximum effectiveness-that is, when the impression of realism is most powerful-there is little or no conscious awareness of disjunctions (and, thus, no evidence of their functioning). I envision them registering as an unconscious disturbance or inarticulate intuition, a vague sense that something is not quite right, unaccompanied by the desire or ability to pinpoint the problem. To be but partly aware of anachronisms, or semiotic inconsistencies, or missing reflections in a painting does not mean that one is unaffected by them. Eakins's reality effect would have operated most efficiently when his disjunctions subliminally signified research, science, and additive knowledge without producing confusion or distress. Ideally, a viewer would find truthful an illusion that

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nonetheless contained indescribable elements resistant to ordinary, habitual processing of likenesses. This was a hard balance to achieve; moreover, the point of maximum effectiveness would differ for different audiences. What worked for Eakins's contemporary followers would not necessarily work for twenty-first-century art historians. Yet the claims for his realism have continued alongside fascination with his disjunctions. It is difficult to account for these persistent conflicting emphases in the reception of his work unless they are understood as two sides of a single coin. Nelson Goodman has argued that the realism perceived in a picture arises not from the quantity of information provided but from the ease with which it is read. According to this interpretation, the more stereotypical and familiar the conceptual classifications and modes of representation that generate an image, the more natural and true it seems. 70 In other words, we should understand realism as a phenomenon in which learned codes are matched so closely that communication is transparent. But if that description accurately explains the realism operating in, say, stock photography, it does not account for realisms which belong rather to the tradition that stakes its claim to truth on calculated departures from familiar modes of seeing and knowing. 71 Such departures present themselves as signs that mere conventions have been left behind in the pursuit of a more accurate matching of experience. That happens especially when established codes have lost some credibility. In such cultural situations, opacity may be an effective sign of realism in a picture, insofar as its difficulties and disjunctions register as marks of the hard work of seeing and representing clearly and truly. 72 The many devices responsi ble for the disjunctions in Eakins's paintings-analytic process, scientific research, emphatic application of systematic knowledge, precarious balancing of knowledge systems, selective use of photographic references, intermixing of diagrammatic icons, and other kinds of semiotic hybridity-were deployed in pursuit of truth beyond surface appearances and beyond conventions. The paradox of Eakins's "realism" is neatly encapsulated in one of the playful features of his work. He often signed it in perspective, as if his cursive signature or the block letters of his name adhered to one of the planes in his illusion. Once this uncharacteristically playful aspect of the paintings is discovered, an impulse to locate the signatures in other paintings becomes irresistible. They turn up on boats, piers, furniture, carpets, walls, and rocks. 73 We might interpret this approach to signatures as a sign of the artist's desire to maintain the painted illusion against any disruptive acknowledgment of the flat plane of the canvas. But

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something else happens as well. Eakins attaches his signature to the substance of the world he paints, marking that world, along with the painted representation of it, as his own creation.

RUllSM AND MODfRNISM A simplistic understanding of realism as intensified iconicity was implicit in the modernist critique of realist art as false and deceptive-an art of illusions portraying illusions. Eakins's work forces a rethinking of the opposition of realism to modernism by refusing to be contained by that definition and by incorporating into a realist art semiotic experiments similar to those modernist artists were conducting. A modern realism, Eakins's painting argues, must find creative ways to overcome the limitations of vision, of appearances, and of mimesis as instru ments for knowing and representing the world. In his paintings he relentlessly tested all three limits-of the unaided eye to discern truthful information in the aspect of things, of the surface of the world to contain and display truth, of resemblance as a tool for representing knowledge and truth. Abandoning mimesis could never have been the answer for Eakins; it would have meant giving up too much. The more or less plausible slices of the seen world he deployed as skeletons for his paintings were essential to this researcher in "iconology." They put iconicity on the dissecting table and kept it there as the perpetual object of analysis and critique in his work. As Rowland had perfected the diffraction grating, and Muybridge instantaneous photography, so Eakins experimented with iconic representation to make it a finely machined tool for gathering, recording, and communicating precise information. Modernism's expressive distortion and abstraction represented abandonment of hope for mimesis as a foundation for a modern art, and Eakins was unwilling to follow that path as long as possibilities for enriching and extending iconicity remained untested. Taking mimesis beyond illusionism by means of both scientific research and the judi cious intermixing of diagrammatic and noniconic signs was Eakins's route to a modern art. This must have seemed a course with considerable potential, but Eakins failed to sustain it in his own late work, and no brilliant followers took up the struggle. Eakins's paintings confound our maps oflate-nineteenth-century

American

and European art in two significant ways. First, they disregard the terms of the period opposition between art and science. Caroline Jones and Peter Galisonhave

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86 described the binary economy of art and science at that moment: "The scientific method became linked inextricably with technology, industrial progress, and class mobility, while institutionalized art and literature came to be associated with the preservation of tradition, social order, and the conservation of rustic values. " 74 They go on to point out that the modernist avant-garde defined itself as opposed to this binary structure, claiming affiliation with science and technology. Eakins's involvement with science certainly differed from modernism's, particularly insofar as he sought to extend the reality effects of academic realism. Nonetheless, aligning science with academic realism disrupted one of the fundamental oppositions through which academicism and modernism were defining themselves. The second mapping problem concerns the route that led Eakins to semiotic experimentation. His art did not pass through an impressionist stage, in which the flux of appearances in experienced time and embodied perception undermined academic illusionism's orientation toward the fixed gaze of a transcendental eye. Eakins's commitment to such a gaze remained firm. The temporal peculiarities encountered in his paintings contravene impressionist time. They signify an effort to free vision from its various corporeal limitations.

75

Eakins applied inter-

nal pressure to the mode of vision that has been called Cartesian perspectivalism, turning to semiotic complexity to address the resultingproblems. 76 Byindicating a different path toward modernist representation, and by appropriating science for academic realism, Eakins's art complicates the familiar counterposingof realism and modernism in turn-of-the-century art. His case invites a far-reaching reconstruction of these inherited stylistic classifications.

UKINS, P(IRC[, AND TH( CUl TUR( OfnmPTION Eakins's commitment to a knowledge- based realism and his pursuit of it through semiotic variety occupy an important place in the cultural history this book charts. Their significance can be illuminated by attending to similarities between Eakins and his slightly older contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce, who was rigorously analyzing and codifying the operations of signs. 77 My repeated references in this chapter to some of Peirce's semiotic classifications-particularly

index, icon, and

symbol-are motivated by historical as well as theoretical concerns. Although the two men apparently did not know each other's work their interests and commitments overlapped to a remarkable degree. Peirce was an acquaintance of Henry Rowland's and, like Rowland, conducted research on color spectrography. He

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shared Eakins's interest in motion photography and in 1900 translated anonymously for the Smithsonian Institution Jules- Etienne Marey 's "History of Chronophotography. " 78 Most important, Peirce's and Eakins's intellectual orientations and objectives bear a fundamental resemblance. Eakins tried to do with oil painting what Peirce attempted with logic: to make it a medium able to represent completely the truths of the world. Both pursued this objective by subordinating sense data or common sense to knowledge derived from rational and systematic analysis. During the 1880s, while Eakins worked on his drawing manual, Peirce was writing a textbook on logic. Both wished to elevate public understanding through ed ucation in formal systems. Peirce's semiotic theory was a sustained effort to hone logic and bring truth within reach of reasoning. "Logic has in view only the possible truth and falsity of signs," he wrote. 79 His pursuit of truth was every bit as monomaniacal as Eakins's. For Peirce truth was no abstract philosophical ideal; he envisioned it as the unifi.cation of mind and world, thus lending it urgency and immediacy. He believed that an individual's consciousness of self was essentially a consciousness of separation from the world and truth. The self was born from the experience of error. A child, told that the stove is hot, disbelieves and touches it anyway. When he burns himself, "he becomes aware of ignorance, and it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere .... Ignorance and error are all that distinguish our private selves from the absolute ego of pure apperception. "80 ETTo,ergosum. Peirce's example cites a situation in which vision is inadequate to selfprotection. One cannot tell by looking if the stove is hot. Alienated from truthful knowledge, and unable to trust perceptual data without supplementary informa tion, the individual is sundered from the world. Through his semiotic, philosophical, and scientifi.c labors, Peirce sought ceaselessly to heal that rift and to achieve the unity of mind and world that truth represented. I hope the parallels with Eakins's compulsion to make paintings that rationalized and systematized the data of vision to render them true are becoming clear. And perhaps it is a bit less surprising that Eakins, without knowing Peirce's work, might have used signs unconventionally to force illusionistic painting to contain a maximum of truth. Some of Eakins's written statements imply a semiotic consciousness worthy of Peirce: "The big [i.e. great] painter sees the marks that Nature's big boat made in the mud & he understands them. " 81 Like Peirce, Eakins discovered that truthful propositions were not a matter of icons alone but required various classes of signs. Moreover, both men understood that resem -

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blance integrates the perceptual and the conceptual; true likeness necessarily involved diagrammatic and illusionistic

elements. The clarity and coherence of

Peirce's theory of icons suffer from this elision, but Eakins would have endorsed it wholeheartedly.

Some historical commonality must explain why Peirce's no-

toriously unstable and obscure semiotic classifications

are so useful in under-

standing Eakins's paintings. I sketch this parallel because I see Eakins and Peirce responding similarly to the modern culture of deception and illusion. I suggested earlier that for Eakins and his contemporaries,

a rift was opening between what is and what appears, be-

tween the truths of scientific knowledge systems and the ambiguities or deceptions of perceptual experience. This rift shaped the work of Eakins and Peirce on the problems of illusion and deception central to this book. Peirce sometimes reveals the historical character of his semiotic theory in the illustrations he presents. Several concern the ambiguity of social identity in the modern city. Streetcars are famous ateliers for speculative modeling. Detained there, with no business to occupy him, one sets to scrutinizing the people opposite, and to working up biographies to fit them. I see a woman of forty. Her countenance is so sin ister as scarcely to be matched among a thousand, almost to the border of insanity, yet with a grimace of amiability that few even of her sex are sufficiently trained to command,-alongwith it, those two ugly lines, right and left of the compressed lips, chronicling years of severe discipline. An expression of servility and hypocrisy there is, too abject for a domestic; while a certain low, yet not quite vulgar, kind of education is evinced, together with a taste in dress neither gross nor meretricious, but still by no means elevated, bespeak companionship with something superior, beyond any mere contact as of a maid with her mistress. The whole combination, although not striking at first glance, is seen upon close inspection to be a very unusual one. Here our theory declares an explanation is called for; and I should not be long in guessing that the woman was an ex-nun. 82

This practical application of Peirce's semiotics, beyond its unflattering

assump-

tions about nuns, is striking because it draws on a situation that has become em blematic of modern life. The writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin have made the experience

of riding in a metropolitan

strangers, a trope of modernity: "Interpersonal tinguished by a marked preponderance

streetcar,

face to face with

relationships in big cities are dis-

of the activity of the eye over the activity

of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation.

mms

[AKINS'S R[AlllY

Before

the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another. " 83 The difficulty of typing strangers was a source of considerable anxiety for residents of cities in the United States, as Karen Halttunen's study of urban culture in mid-nineteenth-century

America shows. She argues that when the preindus-

trial system of coding the urban stranger broke down, modern methods were forged. They were defined by an acute awareness that appearances could be deceiving, because individuals now fabricated self-presentations marketplace now rewarded not virtue but apparent virtue.

84

and the urban

John Van Dyke, writ-

ing his enthusiastic portrait of the growing modern metropolis of New York in 1909, confirmed that the mix of types in the city's streets still produced "a masque difficult to penetrate, a riddle hard to answer; and yet a mystery that has its interest. " 85 When Peirce in his writings used visual assessments of strangers as examples of semiotic interpretation,

he favored indexical signs over more easily falsified

icons or symbols. That preference is evident in the passage I have quoted, where facial lines are indexes of discipline, as well as in other passages that read occupation between the lines of self-presentation:

"I see a man with a rolling gait. This

is a probable indication that he is a sailor. I see a bowlegged man in corduroys, garters, and a jacket. These are probable indications that he is a jockey or something of the sort. " 86 Because these indications are at best probable-a

man with a

rolling gait may have a problem with his joints or muscles, or he may have learned to walk in a household of sailors-indexical

signs of habitual activities should agree

with the evidence of costume. Aman in a top hat who walks with a rolling gait may be a sailor trying to pass for a dandy. Peirce's interest in the semiotics of social identity indicates that his experience of modern life shaped his philosophical and scientific program for discern ingtruth, and vice versa. One mark of that connection is the craving for order that made logic in his hands a system of classification. Peirce's "New List of Categories" was published just a year or so after Barnum's Humbugs of the World, and in some ways it was a response. Truth depended on recognizing all visual evidence as representation-as

signs-in

need of astute interpretation.

This is the proper context, I think, for understanding Eakins's unwillingness to give much credence to mere appearances and his compulsion to develop a new foundation for artistic realism in deep nonapparent knowledge, systematic sci-

[AKINS'S nmlfY HHCTS

ence, and diagrammatic representation. Eakins's painting The GrossClinic presents a powerful image of his commitments-not

in the literal self-portrait, which is lost

in shadow at the far right edge of the painting and portrays the artist as unobtrusive recorder of data, but in the often cited conflation of artist and surgeon at the picture's center. Gross 's bloody scalpel is a figure for the artist's crimson- laden paintbrush. That paintbrush becomes a tool that opens surfaces to expose the bones and sinews. That Eakins believed so fully in the reciprocity of seeing and knowing impli cates him in a particular cultural history, one that helps to explain how fractures and inconsistencies could have been decisive assets to painting with realist commitments. They signaled the artist's wholehearted and energetic pursuit of the deeper truths beyond deceptive appearances. The cultural circumstances I have described illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of Eakins's project. With the apparent world disintegrating into deception and illusion, Eakins enlisted art-and

its ineluctable artifice and illusionism-

in the restoration to appearances of reliability and truth.Unlike some of his con temporaries, who preferred an art that played with the deceptions and specta cles of modern life, Eakins turned to the certainty and security of scientific knowledge to fend off such developments. Hindsight makes his resistance to the uncertainties of vision and appearances look quaintly defensive. I hope, however, that the impressive scale of his project and the ingenuity of its inventions are evident by now. Eakins's grand enterprise was inevitably frustrating, as his peculiar paintings and their lukewarm reception attest. The frustrations ultimately wore away his confidence that seeing and knowing could be made fully congruent. His work became less committed to developing imaginative solutions to this hopeless problem. At the end of his life he turned back to it with some irony. His last full-length portrait presents Dr. William Thomson, an early pioneer in ophthalmology (Fig. ~9). Thomson is shown seated in his office receiving the viewer, an ophthalmoscope in his hand, as if he were about to begin an eye test. In the upper left corner of the painting an eye chart barely emerges from the brown shadows. On the table are some books and perhaps another object. Murkiness en velops the realm of visibility. The deck is stacked against the subject who takes an eye test in this space. Moreover, overlighting the painting reveals that the lower lines of the visual acuity test have been painted out. 87 While Dr. Thomson squarely faces the viewer, something Eakins's portrait subjects do only infrequently, his

[AKINS'S RHllTY HHCTS

flGUR[ 29• Thomas Eakins, Dr. William Thomson, 1907, oil on canvas, 73 x 47 in. College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

92 look is more typical of the artist's late work in suggesting the priority of inner vision over outer. Although Eakins's process here was his familiar one, involving many perspectival and preparatory studies, he seems to treat his erstwhile com mitments ironically. To Eakins the young man, the painter of the surgeon Gross, the harmonious interdependence of observation and knowledge was unquestionable. But age, abetted by the forces of cultural history, fmally may have caused him to lose some of that distinctive conn.deuce. Although his innovative work on icons had given normal vision a greater purchase on the world, he must have realized he was n.ghting a losing battle.

HHCTS RfAllTY [AKINS'S

•• •cHaPTer THree• •• IMPR(SSIONISM AND NATURrs D(C(PTIONS

The spring of 1886 may have marked an end for impressionism, but it also brought new beginnings. On May 15 the last of the eight independently

organized im-

pressionist exhibitions opened in Paris. It was a fmal, unsuccessful, effort to sustain group solidarity and independence against the tide of conflict, competition, and absorption by the market. 1 Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley did not contribute, and among the participants,

divisions between the

camps of Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas undermined any illusions of unity. But at that moment of disintegration a new emphasis was emerging in Parisian critical writings that would reinvigorate impressionism for a new generation. Sym bolist readings of this art by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Felix Feneon, Paul Adam, and other French writers were beginning to pry impressionism away from naturalism and assimilate it to a romantic tradition of subjective interpretation. A rebirth of another kind was taking place across the Atlantic. On April

10,

just

five weeks before the independent exhibition opened in Paris, impressionism's American debut generated great fanfare in New York. 2 A collaboration between the French dealer Paul Durand - Ruel and the American Art Association, founded in 1877to promote the work of younger American artists (Fig. 3o), the exhibition contained nearly 300 works, including 46 Monets, 41 Pissarros, and 35 Renoirs. American critics noted that although this introduction to the impressionists was a decade late, it was "a fuller demonstration of [their] aims and daring ... than

93

94

JU• St. John Harper, The Openingof the American flGUR[ Art Association Galleries,Madison Square,New York, from Harper'sWeekly,November 15, 1884, 750.

has ever been made in Europe. "3 For their part, the impressionist painters were eager to stake a claim to the rapidly developing American market for art, despite worries about sending so many paintings out of the country for so long and disdain for the judgment of American viewers. Monet refused to send his favorite new works to the "land of the Yankees," as he put it. The exhibition prompted his famous remark about Paris-"Here above all, and only here, is there still a little taste. "4 Sometime in late May or early June 1886, as the impressionism show in New York extended its run at a second venue-the National Academy of Design-a pamphlet became available to viewers of the exhibition as an unofficial supple-

ummDNS NAlUR['S AND IMrR[SSIONISM

95

SCIENCE ANDPHILOSOPHY INART.

By CELEN §ABBRIN

Wcr gcgcnwiirti& Uber Kunst schrciben will, dcr 1olltc cinigc Ahnung habcn von dcm,

was die Philosophie gclcistct hat, und zu lcistcn fortfiihrt.-C«LA1.

PHILADELPHIA:

WM.

F. FELL 1220-24

SANSOM

I

& CO., ST.

886.

flGUR[ JI • Scienceand Philosophyin Art, title page. General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

ment to the official catalogue. A footnote on the first page affirmed thatthis twentyone-page pamphlet, titled Science and Philosophy in Art, by Celen Sabbrin, was a review of the present exhibition (Fig. 31). The unfamiliarity of the author's name to followers of art would have led them to assume either that the essay was a novice's first foray into art criticism and interpretation

or that Celen Sabbrin was a pen

name.

If it was a first effort, it won an extraordinarily impressive and rapid response. By mid- June Pissarro had read the essay and was writing to the author, complimenting him on his explication of certain scientif1c aspects of impressionist pictures. 5 Pissarro enclosed Feneon's recent review of the Paris impressionist exhi-

IMPR[SSIONISM ANO NAlUR['S O[C[PllONS

bition describing" a new phase in the logical development of impressionism" that he was sure would interest Sabbrin. 6 He also wrote to his son Lucien at this time, noting that he was translating for Paul Signac the essay by Monsieur Sabbrin, whom he described as "le savant americain. " 7 Feneon shared Pissarro's enthusiasm for Sabbrin's review. He added a footnote to his important pamphlet Les Impressionistes en 1886, which reprinted in October three reviews he had published earlier in the year, directing readers to Monsieur Sabbrin's essay. He described it as studying impressionism through a triple concern with philosophy, perspective, and drawing, and he compared it with the zoological and botanical writings of Thomas Huxley and Jean- Louis de Lanessan. The footnote closed with the announcement that Charles-Antoine Vignier was preparing an annotated translation for La Vogue, the avant-garde journal that was defming symbolism. (Gustave Moreas's symbolist manifesto was published in La Vogue in September 1886.) Indeed, the first installment ofVignier's translation appeared in October. 8 The following spring, in an essay on impression ism for L 'Emancipation sociale, Feneon listed Sabbrin among those few courageous authors-Stephane

Mallarme, J .-K. Huysmans, Emile Zola, and Theodore Duret-

who had come to the defense of impressionism.

9

That is not bad company for an unknown Anierican author. Sabbrin is also con spicuous on this list for being the only woman. Gelen Sabbrin was in fact Helen Cecilia de Silver Abbott, twenty-nine years old, multitalented, from a well-to-do Philadelphia family (Fig. 3~). At the age of twenty-four she had abandoned a promising future as a musician to pursue studies in science; by 1886 she was on the brink of an impressive career as a researcher in plant chemistry.

10 When

she wrote her

pamphlet on impressionism, Abbott had her own research facilities in the chem istry laboratories at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, where she was attempting to develop a chemical theory of plant classification. A year earlier she had given a lecture to the Anierican Philosophical Society entitled "A Chemical Study ofYuccaAugustifolia," which was subsequently published. In 1887 she would produce two important papers, "The Chemical Basis of Plant Forms" and" Com parative Chemistry of Higher and Lower Plants," which set the course for her next several years of research into the chemical composition of plants as evidence of their evolutionary and taxonomic relationships. Abbott also promoted the practical and commercial applications of plant chemistry. When she presented two lectures on this subject in January 1887 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the event was described at length in the Philadelphia Public Ledger:

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATURrS O[C[PTIONS

97

/ 7

flGUR[ 31• Portrait of Helen Abbott Michael, from Studies in Plant and Organic Chemistry and Literary Papers, 1907, frontispiece.

The spectacle of a graceful young girl, surrounded by a battery of chemical appliances, ... was interesting from more than one point of view .... When Miss Abbott prophesies that the wax in the sugar-canes, now only an impediment in sugar processes, will one day be made an article of commercial supply, when she points to the paper made from sorghum canes, and to the pretty pink specimens obtained from the familiar yucca plant, as witness of the great magazine in the cellulose of plants, her hearers are charmed by the practical vision .... But a greater charm than was in the subject even, was in the clue all these demonstrations and the elaborate preparations for illustrating the lecture, gave to the energy, the command of resources, and the skilled industry of this young lady. The laboratory, the prolonged and absorbing study into the secrets of plant life, compellingitto yield up its foods, its fuels, its fabrics, its flavors, its essences, its hues, its tonics; ... what more dainty, more beautiful, more useful work to set before the girl student? What a good and brilliant development of woman's work

IMPR[SSIONISM ANO NATUR['S omPTIONS

this is! ... [Miss Abbott] furnishes one more example of what a girl may do who wishes to ftll her life with occupation formerly held to be only possible to the young man. 11 The Ledger's condescending emphasis on the charm of the event and the dain tiness of the labor should not obscure the lasting scientific value of Abbott's research, which brought her international recognition. On a tour of Europe in the late 1880s she met renowned chemists and botanists who knew and admired her work. In the years following her marriage in 1888 to Arthur Michael, a professor of chemistry at Tufts University, Helen Abbott Michael turned to the study of med icine, graduating from Tufts Medical School in 1903. During the first year of her medical practice in Boston, she contracted an infectious illness and died at the age of forty-seven. Science and PhilosophyinArtwas Abbott's only foray into art criticism. In a frag-

ment of an autobiography she recalled the circumstances that led to it. Visiting New York, probably for the Easter holidays, Abbott frequented the exhibition and was overcome by the vision she found there. Monet's paintings revealed to her a natural world rife with deception. She knew already from her own scientific work that appearances often told one story while underlying structures suggested an other. Eakins's art certainly would have resonated with her; one wonders whether their paths might have crossed in Philadelphia's scientific and artistic circles. But Monet's paintings were more disturbing. The nature they portrayed was mocking and cynical; it flaunted pretty lies that masked dark truths. Shocking and hard to contain, this realization struck at the core of her religious faith and forced her to question fundamental assumptions. Perhaps to contain her frightful thoughts, she wrote them down, then distanced herself by using a pseudonym (replacing the beginnings of her first and last names with her middle initials).

12 The

text she pro-

duced is far more than an exhibition review. It is vivid testimony of a personal cri sis brought on by the penetration of illusion and deception to the core of one's experience.

MONH TH[ PHllOSOPHER In Science and Philosophy in Art Abbott focused almost entirely on the work of Monet, whom she saw as much more than an artist. He was a master thinker, a philosopher: "None in art before [Monet] has ever approached so near the do-

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[C[PTIONS

main of the philosopher." In Abbott's view, Monet in his painting merged the aesthetic with the scientif-tc and philosophical. Already the unconventionality of Abbott's account of impressionism is evident. Other American critics followed their French counterparts in asserting that impressionist paintings contained no ideas but were rather about technique. On other fundamental points as well Abbott contradicted the critical consensus. Monet" does not paint what nature is, or as she presents herself to the ordinary mind through the medium of the imperfect senses, but he paints those thoughts which she impresses upon him. " 13 Here she inverts the familiar naturalist sense of the term" impression." Nature impresses thoughts on the mind of the artist-Abbott uses "thoughts" the way symbolist writers of the time used" ideas" -and those are what he paints, rather than mere sense impressions of nature. For Abbott, the truth claims of Monet's paintings resided not in their approximation of vision but in their revelation of profound universal principles. She also contradicted those critics who found Monet's paintings joyous, sensuous, and superf-tcial-qualities

Abbott reserved for Renoir's work-or

who

thought Monet's art represented decadence in the art of painting. What seemed to many commentators the self-evident truth of impressionism's

cheerful visu-

ality struck Abbott as a deceptive facade. She countered the fundamentals of the naturalist reading with a philosophical interpretation of Monet's paintings as allegories of the soul's journey through life. His work brought discerning viewers face to face with the tragic reality revealed in scientif-tc thought. As Abbott put it, cosmic laws "crop out" from Monet's paintings. What were those natural laws, and how did Monet's paintings reveal them? Abbott's vision of nature and the cosmos seems a grim one for a young scientist, but it was grounded in her particular f-teld of expertise. It hinged on a distinction between symmetry and dissymmetry. Abbott credited Louis Pasteur with recognizing the importance of dissymmetry, or asymmetry, in the molecular structure of all chemical products produced in plant cells. By contrast, chemical products artif-tciallysynthesized in the laboratory were symmetrically structured. In this respect, the results of science resembled the natural elements of the mineral world. Abbott took this opposition as evidence of a fundamental conflict in nature, a struggle between organic forces marked by asymmetry and inorganic ones marked by symmetry. Movement toward symmetry was movement toward balance and crystallization, which meant the cessation of life functions. Science was hastening this inevitable unfolding of cosmic history. Humanity's curiosity and its striv-

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S O[C[PTIONS

ing for perfection, both realized in science, were bringing about the conclusion of progress, when, as Abbott says, "human effort would be changed to a stable condition or one of crystallization ... fixation ... [and the termination of] all thought, as the crystal terminates all directive motion ....

That this conclusion seems to

be where scientific thought will eventually drive the world is imminent, and the thought crops out from many of the canvases of Monet. " 14 Abbott's discussions of specific paintings illustrate how such ideas emerge insistently from Monet's work. For example, she interprets Wheat Field (Plate 7) this way: The few red poppies at the sides of the immediate foreground add to the brilliant scene of the present, and it seems as if for the minute nature had relented, and given promise to the weary worker of a haven of eternal joy. The strong red hues of the foreground ... are suggestive of the vigor of life ... ; and soon they shade into the uncertain shades, the feebler tones of the further distance. The eye travels beyond the wheat, past trees and green fields, to the distant blue hills .... The pinkish haziness of the far distance suggests a town and busy industries, they in turn some day to be silenced and dead, even as the wheat field after the harvest will leave only stubble and straw. The wheat will relieve the immediate hunger of man, and the industry that of his soul's longing, but only as a temporary ailment. This picture, a color poem, is a step in advance of art; it is the cry of humanity. 15 Abbott's picture of the cosmos synthesizes a medieval, Manichean character with remarkable prefigurations of the concepts of entropy and the death drive. As the description above illustrates, Abbott looked carefully at Monet's han dling of color and space, but in her formal analysis she went against the tide of consensus once more. Flattening was not the most significant feature of Monet's paintings as she saw them, although she did pay close attention to their surface geometries. Indeed, those geometries fascinated her, and she devoted most of her essay to delineating what she saw as the fundamental compositional principle of Monet's work: triangulation.

Abbott used this term to describe what she saw as

Monet's tendency to organize along parallel diagonals all the forms and objects in his paintings-"

shadows, lights, clouds, fields, the sea, houses, lines of trees."

These diagonals frequently resolved themselves into triangles, particularly right triangles. Triangulation powerfully signified movement, motion, and life through dissymmetrical lines of force-its

"axes of dissymmetry."

It used the principles

of organic life to produce vital compositions, filled with force. This effect was not

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[C[PTIONS

101 just a matter of compositional lines but also of short, straight brushstrokes, which often followed the dominant lines in compositions. The triangles Abbott describes are often difficult to locate precisely, and her focus on diagonal and orthogonal lines leads her to underestimate horizontals and verticals, but her principal claims are not necessarily outlandish. For example, of TheArtist's Garden at Vetheuil (Plate 8), she wrote: The light falls along the hypotenuse line through the flowers to the left, across the stone steps, and vanishes beyond to the right- hand lower corner. The same is true of the shadows. The lattices of the little fence around the terrace are distinctly seen only where the slats are arranged in the direction ofthe hypotenuse. The left- hand corner, which corresponds to the right angle of the triangle, is where the objects are most clearly represented, and the coloring is richer in tone. As the right- hand upper corner of the picture is examined, it will be seen that the objects are less distinctly painted, but the lines which correspond to the direction of the hypotenuse are more distinct, and the color of the picture seems to fade away,and only the geometrical basis remains. The sky is cloudless, but a vapor- like effect can be detected by close observation, draped over the sky's form, in directions corresponding to the hypotenuse. 16 Abbott's geometric analyses often make Monet's paintings sound more like Georges Seurat's: rigidly structured and overtly symbolic. It is no wonder that her text intrigued Feneon and probably Charles Henry, the theorist of "psychophysics," so influential on Feneon, Seurat, and their neoimpressionist colleagues. Henry's eyebrows must have arched when he read: "The truths of geometry ... have been recognized by the Impressionist painters ... as the only correct basis upon which to proceed, in order to produce on the mind of the observer those subjective effects which are the highest expression of Art." Abbott's ideas in that passage are remarkably similar to Henry's theories of diagonal lines. An introductory note to La Vogue's translation of Abbott's essay described the pamphlet's cover design (Fig. 33), and the editor commented that "the reader will see precisely the importance the author attaches to the diagonal. " 17 Triangulation, besides signifying movement, establishes a powerful hypotenuse corresponding

to the observer's line of vision. This hypotenuse draws

viewers into the depth of the paintings and fixes their attention on distant forms evoking the crystalline, static doom that lies ahead of the human race. For example, Abbott describes Monet's Poppy Field in a Hollow near Givemy (Plate 9) as "the best illustration of the theory of triangulation to be found in Monet's pictures."

O[C[PTIONS NATURl'S ANO IMPR[SSIONISM

102

$citnct

\,

nub

\ l,1bilosopbtJ

\

•

tu

~rt. She continues: "Here is the beginningoflife's

flGUU 33• Scienceand Philosophy in Art, cover. General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

course. Unconscious of what is back

of the hill, the soul is absorbed by the immediate; though she may step forward, through the gay-flowered field, onward to her future, the past is locked in mystery. Nature throws no obstacle to her progress; there is no warning hand to hold the soul from running to her own destruction; and the indifference of nature to suffering or happiness is terrible to contemplate." Another painting, Field of Poppies

at Givemy (Plate

10),

continues this allegory of the soul's journey.

"A Landscape at Giverny" is an expression of hopelessness, of the unattainableness of absolute truth, and a confirmation of science's teachings, in the ultimate uselessness of human effort .... On and on the eye travels to the right corner of the background, where the deep blue of the hill range looms up. Above all, lowers a heavy gray sky, blank and cheerless. Speculation can go no further; what is beyond these hills may never be known. The heart weakens and the soul is faint at what she sees. It is the end of the struggle of the human race; all work and

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S O[C[PTIONS

thought have been of no avail;the fight is over and inorganic forces proclaim their victory .... Nature is indifferent, and her aspects are meaningless, for what indications of the unavoidable end come from seeing that gay flowered fie]d? It is a mockery, and that mind which has once felt the depth of the thoughts expressed in this painting, can only seek safety in forgetfulness. 18

Abbott interprets Monet's paintings as spatializing evolutionary time: they render the present as foreground and the future as distance. Moreover, their compositional dynamics entrap viewers in a way that recalls the paradox of science. Just as curiosity and the desire for perfection pull a person against her will into science and collusion with inorganic forces, so the geometry of Monet's art pulls viewers into realization of unbearable cosmic truths. The dynamics of his paintings force viewers to look into the distance and see tragedy, mystery, hopelessness, the indifference of cruel nature, and the eventual triumph of inorganicismor death-all

concealed behind nature's mockingly deceptive gay flowered field.

Surface geometry and flatness convey this content and mark the resistance of the paintings to their own deepest insights. Abbott's responses to Monet's art may seem hopelessly strange and perhaps even beneath consideration as cogent art criticism. They may seem more akin to the dark fantasies projected onto the wallpaper pattern that haunts the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's late-nineteenth-century

story The Yellow Wall- Paper,

"When you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide-plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. " 19Just as the woman in Gilman's story feels herself drawn in and entrapped by the "vicious influence" of the wallpaper's tangle of arabesques, so Abbott succumbs to the irresistible pull of Monet's geometry. Abbott's essay places her in a constellation of accomplished women writers and artists who wrestled with intense feelings of despair and anxiety in the 1880s, a phenomenon analyzed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their book The Madwoman in the Attic. 20 To the literary figures they discuss, I would add Marion Hooper Adams, an

enthusiastic portrait photographer and the wife of Henry Adams. She killed herself in December 1885 by drinking potassium cyanide, a chemical used for developing and retouching photographs. Another woman who suffered periods of in tense depression in the 1880s was Celia Thaxter, a writer and supporter of the American impressionist painters. These women may shed some light on Abbott's essay, and I will return to them presently.

IMPR(SSIONISM AND NATUR('S D(C(PTIDNS

Interpreting the art- historical and cultural -historical significance of Abbott's essay requires addressing its odd and very different receptions in New York and Paris. Her text exemplifies a turn-of-the-century experience that is revealing without being representative. Although it was published quickly and distributed at the exhibition in New York, it had no discernible influence on the critical reception of impressionism in the United States. Perhaps that is unsurprising; Abbott's interpretation may have been too far from the mainstream of contemporary opinion on impressionist art. For whatever reasons, it provoked little or no reaction in New York and Philadelphia. Only recently have substantive references to it begun to appear in writings on impressionism or any other topic. 21 Why was the story so different in Paris? That Abbott's essay was celebrated there by leading figures in the artistic avant-garde so soon after its publication requires explanation. (The usual crossAtlantic cultural time lag was some ten or twelve years, the usual direction of the cultural flow, east to west.) Abbott's essentially symbolist response to impressionism, sharply different from that of other U.S. critics, was key. As I noted earlier, the year 1886 brought new beginnings to impressionism at the moment of its demise as an avant-garde movement. The rebirth in Paris, with its symbolist reading of impressionism, was unlike the new beginning in New York. American critics other than Abbott responded to the 1886 exhibition by explaining impressionism as naturalistic and materialistic, taking their cues in part from Theodore Duret's introduction to the exhibition catalogue. Indeed, such nonsymbolist em phases in American critical writing on impressionism survived essentially un challenged well into the twentieth century. 22 My own examination of the critical literature impressionism generated in the United States indicates no significant symbolist gloss. 23 In that sense the mean ings of impressionism narrowed in the transatlantic voyage. The process brings to mind a passage in which the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates the correlation between a word's meaning and its position in a linguistic system. The French word mouton has the same signification as the English "mutton," Saussure notes, but not the same value. Whereas mouton signifies both the animal and the meat derived from it, English divides this signifying work between two terms: "sheep" and "mutton." "The difference in value," according to Saussure, "between sheep and mouton is due to the fact that sheep has beside it a second term while the French word does not. " 24 I am drawing a loose parallel between the words in a language and the spectrum of styles that constitute artistic practice at a given time IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[C[PTIONS

and place, knowing full well that this parallel will not withstand much pressure. Moreover, I want to avoid any suggestion that such a spectrum may be treated as a stable system for structuralist analysis.Nonetheless, I am persuaded thatthe im portation of impressionism into the field of artistic and critical styles and practices already established in the United States shifted its significance. George Inness, the preeminent landscape painter in the country at the time, was particularly influential in this process. His public statements consigned impressionism to mere materialism and sought to claim individuality, intensity, and spirituality for his own variety oflandscape painting (Plate 11). That critics sometimes presented Inness's own work as a form of impressionism only fueled his anti-impressionist crusade. His public campaign, backed by his stature, deterred impressionism from acquiring symbolist value in America. The consequences for the subsequent history of modernist art in the United States were deep and farreaching. Among these consequences was the split that developed between two elements of the modernist artistic enterprise-transcendent spiritual expression and research into the mechanics of vision and visual representation. This split and a con comitant devaluation of the analysis of visual perception help explain the relative insignificance of impressionism and later cubism in the United States, in contrast to symbolism and expressionism. (In New York, critics aligned impression ism with cubism by emphasizing the rationalist aspects of each, whereas in Paris the differing perceptualist and structuralist elements took priority.) 25 The lack of critical response to Abbott's essay in New York points toward the polarization ofWassily Kandinsky's work and Pablo Picasso's among American modernists. The critic Clement Greenberg blamed Kandinsky's superior influence for delayingthe development of an original high modernist art in NewYork. In Greenberg's account, the early New York modernists lost sight of the rationalist and scientific aspects of European modernism and exaggerated its antirationalist, mystical components. The symbolist features that made Abbott's essay discordant in New York put it in tune with some developments in Paris. Abbott's emphasis on the ideas in impressionism, its connections to philosophy and science, and its symbolic geom etrywould have appealed to Feneon's contingent in the Parisian symbolist avantgarde. At the same time, her picture of the tragic vision in impressionism evokes Mallarme's description of Odilon Redon's paintings as "illuminating the tragic ridiculousness of ordinary existence" and Huysmans's account of Gustave Mo-

IMPR[SSIONISM ANO NATUR['S O[C[PTIONS

reau' s "hieratic and sinister allegories." The merging of these two competing forms of symbolism-the

neoimpressionist

and the romantic-makes

Abbott's essay an

extraordinary cultural document. Having registered both these symbolist components of her text and the absence of similar readings in the American reception of impressionism, I should also acknowledge some incompatibility between Abbott's Science and Philosophy in Art and French symbolist criticism. In new footnotes for his translation for La Vogue, Vignier pointed to unacceptable features in Abbott's essay that compromised its parallels with the work of Feneon, Henry, Mallarme, and Huysmans. For example, Abbott praised Monet much too highly, thus undermining Seurat's achievement and stature, as championed by Feneon. Vignier snidely countered Abbott's statement that" none in art before Monet has ever approached so near the domain of the philosopher," saying, "The translator takes no responsibility for the sometimes juvenile hyperboles contained in this essay." Abbott's ambivalence about science, moreover, was more complicated than Feneon's and Henry's views, and her emotional intensity and mysticism made her brand of symbolism considerably more spiritual than theirs. As La Vogue's translation progressed, the number ofVignier's sneering footnotes increased until one of them fmally disowned the essay altogether: "To tell the truth, the gist of this essay is farcical; likewise, this French translation of it is intended to offer our readers a document illustrating the artistic comprehension

of modern Americans." This footnote goes on to

speculate that the essay may in fact be a joke, a parody of La Vogue's writers per~ petrated by some mischievous colleague: "Some summary directions from Charles Henry, the cuneiform sayings of Felix Feneon, and to tie them together, some sen timental suggestions of various types-these

are things easily cooked up, after all.

It would not take divine insight to discern that Celen Sabbrin (and one doesn't use a name like that unless one has to) is possibly the English pseudonym of one of our transalpine allies, Vittorio Pica, the Pipitone." Closer scrutiny led Vignier to believe that what La Vogue had been serving as mouton was really mutton in mouton's clothing.

26

Unsurprisingly, the promised

third installment of the translation never appeared. The peculiar mix of ingredi ents in Abbott's essay made it as difficult to assimilate in Paris as it had been in New York. Its ambivalence toward science and its combining of rationalism with emotional and religious intensity placed it between the neoimpressionist and spiritualist camps of Parisian symbolism. It remains anomalous in the art criticism of 1886 in both Paris and New York.

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATURrS D[C[PllDNS

TH[ CRYSTAlllNE fUTURE Some of the most striking idiosyncrasies of Abbott's essay fall awaywhen it is seen in relation to other cultural histories. Framed by scientific and philosophical writing on evolutionary cosmology, for example, Abbott's interpretation becomes less surprising and more revealing. Moreover, it wrenches us out of familiar habits of viewing and lets us glimpse Monet's art through the eyes of a viewer who fully registered the shock of new scientific theories. Cosmological thought, as reshaped under the pressure of evolutionary theory, comprised Abbott's dystopic vision of nature on its path toward crystalline stasis. Her essay offers insight into a framework of belief common among educated people in the later nineteenth century. The obvious point of reference for Abbott's vision of the crystalline evolutionary future is Herbert Spencer's classic First Principles. 27 Spencer's effort to comprehend the cosmos, matter, mind, and society in relation to evolutionarytheorywas enormously influential in the United States, as the art historian Kathleen Pyne has demonstrated.

28

Moreover, his ideas were reinforced by widely circu lated popularizations such as Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Based on the Doctrine of Evolution by John Fiske, Spencer's principal American disciple. 29 Abbott seems to have taken literally Spencer's theory of the effects of evolution on matter: "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipa tion of motion; duringwhich the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained

°

motion undergoes a parallel transformation. "3 Fiske's interpretation of this view brings it still closer to Abbott's position: "The fundamental characteristic of evolution is integration of matter with dissipation of internal motion. " 31 Crystallization was Fiske's paradigmatic example of integration. He also differentiated between organic bodies in the colloid form and inorganic substances with their potentially crystalloid form: "It was, in fact, through the study of organic phenomena by physiologists that a formula was first obtained for the most conspicuous features of Evolution .... Instead of a mere law of biology, we have enunci ated the widest generalization that has yet been reached concerning the concrete universe as a whole. "32 In other words, the crystalline, static doom Abbott saw awaiting humanity conformed in its essentials to the account of evolution most widely circulated in the United States in the 1880s. Perhaps I should say" almost conformed." Strictly speaking, Abbott's account was partial: it took as the whole story what Fiske and Spencer presented as only IMPRfSSIONISM ANO NATURE'S O[C[PTIONS

108 half of a cyclical dynamic. For them a process of dissolution necessarily and uni versally counterbalanced the process of evolution. Integration of matter and dissipation of motion were cyclically succeeded by diffusion of matter and absorption of motion. Evolution and dissolution alternated rhythmically, Fiske noted: "Only when all the characteristics ... of Evolution and Dissolution are expressed in a single formula can we be said to have obtained the law of the continuous redistribution

of matter and motion which rhythm necessitates throughout the knowable universe. "33 Observing these two opposing processes atworkin organic as well as inorganic phenomena, Fiske continued: "The career of any composite body is a series of more or less complicated rhythms, of which the differential result is, at first, the integration of its constituent matter and the dissipation of part of its contained motion, and, at last, the diffusion of its constituent matter accom panied by reabsorption of the lost motion, or its equivalent. "34 Abbott's essay, juxtaposed with such passages, seems strange primarily because it interpreted partially and pessimistically a doctrine that American followers of Spencer ordinarily gave an optimistic spin.

35

But even that statement about Abbott's eccentricity is misleading. Abbott was by no means alone in distilling a bleak picture of the planet's evolutionary prospects from Spencer, Fiske, and their colleagues. Fiske himself was uncertain. He envisioned a" cosmic death," a late, static stage of evolutionary integration so intense that the universal dynamic might ultimately end. The moon appears to afford an example of the universal death which in an unimaginably remote future, awaits all the members of the solar system. It then becomes an interesting question whether this cosmic death will be succeeded by Dissolution,-that is, by the re diffusion of the matter of which the system is com posed, and by the reabsorption of the lost motion or its equivalent. We shall fmd it difficult to escape the conclusion that such a Dissolution must ultimately take place .... At the outermost verge to which scientific methods can guide us, we can only catch a vague glimpse of a stupendous rhythmical alternation between eras of Evolution and eras of Dissolution, succeeding each other "without vestiges of a beginning and without prospect of an end. "36

The passage suggests some denial on Fiske's part; what he seems to fmd "difficult to escape" is not what he claims. His theories compelled him to imagine a frightening conclusion to evolution, which he denied by reaffirming his faith in cyclical development.

IMPR(SSIONISM ANO NATURf'S O[C[PllONS

109 Some of the most important thinkers among Abbott's contemporaries held beliefs about the course of evolution that were remarkably close to hers. When scientists and philosophers merged evolutionary theory with cosmology, they usu ally envisioned crystallization and disintegration, and these visions took both utopian and dystopian forms. Charles Sanders Peirce, a friend and associate of Fiske and of Francis Abbot, another influential writer on evolutionary cosmol ogy, opposed the determinism of Spencer and the evolutionists and devised an alternative cosmology emphasizing the role of chance in evolution. But Peirce shared the terminology of Spencerian theory and sometimes sounded like Abbott, all the while articulating his objections to Spencer. In the year that Abbott Peirce delivered a series of lectures involving cosmology in Cambridge, later published in the Monist. In Peirce's account, the uni verse evolved from chaos and nothingness to increasing lawfulness. Although na wrote about impressionism,

ture was increasingly ruled by law, chance always survived, at least until the ultimate crystallization of the world. Some of Peirce's statements resemble Abbott's: "At any time, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infmitely distant future. " 37 For Peirce as for Abbott, symmetry and crystallization were the ends toward which the world was evolving. What Peirce saw as positive movement toward perfectly realized rationality, Abbott construed as compulsion toward stasis and fixity in molecular structure. Peirce's rationalist nirvana was a philosophical counterpart to Abbott's entropic dystopia. Belief in the inevitability of that conclusion brought hope and satisfaction to Peirce but terror and anxiety to Abbott. 38 William James, another significant figure in this array of cosmologists, endorsed much of his friend Peirce's theory. He was attracted by its opening up of explanations for the psychic phenomena that fascinated him.

If one takes the theory of evolution radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the animals and the plants, butto the stars, to the chemical elements, and to the laws of nature. There must have been a far-off antiquity, one is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little by little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular performance began. Every variation in the way of law and order added itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable as history went on; while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not being sim ilarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered off as unrelated vagrants,

PlIONS nrcr NAlURf'S AND IMPR[SSIONISM

or else remained so imperfectly connected with the part of the world that had grown regular as onlyto manifest their existence by occasional lawless intrusions, like those which "psychic" phenomena now make into our scientifically organized world. 39

Evolutionary cosmology proved extraordinarily malleable in the 1880s and 1890s. Abbott's adaptation of it is no stranger than-indeed

is strikingly similar to-those

of highly respected intellectuals among her contemporaries. Perhaps, then, the eccentricity of Abbott's response to Monet's paintings stems not from its cosmology at all but from its assumption, in many respects quite reasonable, of an essential congruence between modern scientific theories and modern art. The scientific truths Abbott assigns to Monet's art, however, violate the ostensible temporality of impressionist painting. In portraying Monet's art as engaged with the vast time spans of evolution, Abbott denies its most distinctive feature-its

focus on present, fleeting moments. Her essay

highlights a conflict between two "modern" conceptions of nature and two "modern" forms of time. Impressionism's

representation

of nature as a stage for evanescent effects of

light and atmosphere has been convincingly associated with the aestheticized countryside as a place for leisure and respite from urban, industrial pressures and the social changes of modern life. 40 Such an account of nature as momentary spectacle stands opposed to the evolutionary view in which nature's time is historical and inexorable. The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has argued that the idea of nature as historical is essential to the modern episteme in the nineteenth century.

41

The new geological sciences, so important to John Ruskin and

his followers, and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Spencer tied natural forms inextricably to progressive time. Modernity's image of nature had two conflicting aspects: one historical and evolutionary, the other momentary and spectacular. One could revel in nature's momentary visual configurations and reflect on past determinants

and future transformations

of its visible forms.

42

Similarly, the time of modernity has been understood as rapid and fragmented, shaped by the rush of life and traffic in the city and by the pace of rationalized la bor in the factory. But it has also seemed the culmination of along, progressive history of gradual technological, artistic, and intellectual advance-that

was how the

exhibits and decorations at international expositions effectively represented it. Abbott's mistake was to mobilize the wrong alternatives in her readings of Monet's

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATURrS D[C[PTIDNS

representations of nature. The temporality her interpretation evoked was arguably more appropriate to moving panoramas, which revealed the history of a particular geography on a long, scrolling canvas, than to Monet's landscapes.

43

THE llMITS OfSIGHT In opting for an evolutionary rather than a spectacular approach to nature and for cosmic time rather than the compressed and fleeting moment, Abbott developed an allegorical perspective on nature that discounted its mere visual aspects: nature" as she presents herself to the ordinary mind through the medium of the im perfect senses," surely including the sense of sight, was a relatively trivial subject for artists. Abbott highlighted Monet's achievement by contrasting it with Renoir's superficiality, which stemmed from his narrow interest in the world of transient appearances (Fig. 34). More sympathetic to symbolism than to naturalism, Abbottvalued ideas over the data of vision. For her, truth was not self-evident to sight. The seeker of truth must probe the evidence of vision to discover cosmic principles or decode philosophical truths behind appearances. Abbott's way of seeing was profoundly conditioned by her beliefs about evolu tion. Scrutiny alone could not reveal the significance of natural forms, in either art or the world: it had to be amplified by knowledge of their relation to past and future. Abbott's responses to Monet's paintings may not strike us as compellingher effort to interpret Monet's art according to Spencerian thought is too vague to dislodge traditional interpretations-but

her response indicates that evolutionary theory had the power to reshape habits of seeing. That a young scientist would discount surface appearances as Abbott does should not seem surprising: her training and professional experience would have disposed her to develop a semiotic approach to them. Her own work emphasized the importance of classifying plants by chemical composition, not by visual data. Chemical analysis, she argued, offered a truer index of taxonomic relations and evolutionary position than observed resemblances. Advanced technologies for exploring nature-not only telescopes and microscopes but photography, with its potential for very long or short exposures, and X-rays-made

unaided vision seem

narrow and limited. Evidence collected through ordinary observation had to be analyzed and interpreted carefully. Darwin had drawn attention to subterfuge in the world of nature-for example, in animal coloration and camouflage. Abbott's essay goes a step further by imputing to nature a malicious deceptiveness that

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[C[PTIONS

112

flGUHrn • Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Luncheonof the BoatingParty, 1880-81, oil on canvas, 51¼x69 1/o in. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Monet's art reveals. "\Vb.at indications of the unavoidable end come from seeing that gay flowered field? It is a mockery," she writes. "The brilliant scene of the present" gives false promise" of a haven of eternal joy." In finding Renoir's truth to joyful outward nature naive, and Monet's revelations of nature's deceptions compelling, Abbott was simply following the principles of her scientific educa tion and practice. Disregard for the visible face of the natural world is one of the most histori cally revealing features of Abbott's essay. Her suspicion of the ostensible makes her kin to Thomas Eakins. Although that wariness gives rise to idiosyncrasies in her interpretation,

Abbott was fundamentally in harmony with most American

interpreters of impressionism. They would have agreed heartily that the issue of truth and deception was at the center of impressionism's

significance.

"True, as they see the truth and feel it, the Impressionists always are," wrote

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S O[C[PTIONS

113 the reviewer for the Critic. They "have ignored lesser truths in order to dwell more strongly upon larger." Another writer, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, portrayed the impressionists as aiming at "truth to natural facts, and not at the rendering of sentiment or feeling of any sort." If Degas shows us awkward dancers, he does so because that is the truth of dancers. Academic skills and techniques have been sacrificed for truth and simplicity, the reviewer for Art Age wrote. 44 This much was consensus, but a little digging into the critics' assumptions about the source and character of impressionism's truth reveals disagreements. Was im pressionism true to an objective world of noumenal substances in motion or, as was more often suggested, true to subjective perception-the world as seen by some more or less unique agent? The critic of Cosmopolitan magazine put the impressionists' mission this way: "To paint things, not as they are, but as they appear. "45 That distinction between things as they are and things as they appear is famil iar from the discussion in Chapter~ of instantaneous photography and the paintings of Thomas Eakins. Eakins's critics informed him that "the artist must fail when he attempts to depict what is, instead of what seems to be." Impressionism, accordingto the perceptualist interpretation, rendered precisely what seems to be, thereby revealing the difficulty and variability of that purpose. Impressionism would have forced critics who had challenged Eakins's position to refine and nu ance their own. For Eakins, faulty perception needed correction and enrichment through concepts; for the impressionists as portrayed in the American press, concepts constrained truth. Truth came from perception liberated from constricting ideas and academic formulas. In the terms of the critical discourse, Eakins and the impressionists

agreed on the objective but pursued it in diametrically

opposed ways.

THE ORlAOfUl fACE OfTHE SKY To read Monet's paintings through suspicion of the visible world is to propose a radically different basis for impressionism's modernity. For most nineteenthcentury critics, impressionism was modern because it was materialist, literalist, true to vision, and free from academic artifice. Impressionism was naturalism and belonged to the age of science by virtue of its empiricism. Abbott too aligned impressionism with modern science, but she did so on the basis of its skepticism and pessimism. Seeing Monet's work as bleak and pessimistic only put Abbott further at odds with the majority of the critics. Most of them found reason for opti-

IMPH[SSIONISM ANO NATUH['S omPTIUNS

mism in impressionism's

assertion of individuality, its dazzling beauty, and its

anticommercialism. Those who found cause for worry concentrated on impressionism's realist subject matter, that is, the tendency of artists such as Manet, Degas, and Renoir to portray low-class and marginalized individuals of the Parisian demimonde.

46

In Paris in the 1870s, critics had sometimes imputed radical and violent politics-a sort of critical pessimism-to

impressionist art by associating it with so-

cialists, anarchists, and intransigents. American critics generally were not inclined to do that. Their disinclination is remarkable because the pages of the very newspapers publishing reviews of the 1886 exhibition were dominated by stories of strikes, demonstrations, street violence, and repressive reactions by government authorities nationwide. On the day the exhibition opened, front pages reported a "Wild Night in St. Louis," as the railroad strike there turned violent. In New York, Third Avenue rail workers had already initiated a strike, as had freight handlers in Chicago. Cincinnati was crippled by multiple work stoppages. The strike against Jay Gould's Southwestern Railroad ended just as a new one at the Edison factory in New Jersey began, amid assurances that no shortage of lightbulbs would result. The country's labor problems climaxed just as the nrst impressionist exhibi tion was closing and the reopening of an expanded version of the show at the Na tional Academy of Design was being announced. On May 1hundreds of thousands of workers nationwide struck, demanding an eight-hour workday. In Chicago, violence erupted at the McCormick Reaper Works, where the murder of two unarmed workers by police initiated the chain of events that included the Haymarket riots of May 4. Robert Koehler's painting Strike had been hanging at the National Acad emy immediately before the arrival of the impressionist show; it was reproduced as a two-page spread in the May 1 issue of Harper's Weekly, timed no doubt to coincide with the national work stoppage (Fig. 35). Given the tense and dangerous political situation, we might expect New York audiences to have been rather jumpy about possible associations between radical art and radical politics. A review in the Mail and Express portrayed the impressionists as strikers-" against academical formulas and vested monopolies" clearly putting a positive spin on their rebelliousness. An often cited review inArt

Age at nrst seems just the hysterically anxious condemnation we should expect to nnd: "Communism incarnate, with the red cap and the Phrygian cap oflawless vi olence boldly displayed, is the art of the French Impressionist." But the meaning of that statement is by no means clear seen in the context of the full review, which

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NAlURrS D[C[PTIONS

116

flGUI[ J5• Woodblock print after Robert Koehler's painting Strike, published in Harper'sWeekly,May 1, 1886, ~80-81.

reveals appreciation of the truth, simplicity, and skill of the realists' and impressionists' work. Even the" moral and artistic depravity" and bitter cynicism the au thor fmds in Degas's art are said to reveal that artist's "great knowledge of art ... and greater knowledge of life." Whether such comments represent the author's own cynicism or, more likely, some combination of sympathies for symbolist deca dence and aestheticist socialism, he seems to have interpreted the rebelliousness of impressionism as more virtue than vice. 47 A surprisingly widespread impatience with academic formula, restraint, prettiness, and facility was apparently a factor in the critical response. One sign of it is criticism of academicism's preferred palette, described in Studio as "shoeblacking, mud, and tobacco juice" and inArt Interchange as "litharge, bitumen, chocolate- brown, tobacco juice. "48 (Both descriptions echo Duret's comments in the exhibition catalogue.) Another sign is praise for impressionism's willingness to veer awayfrom market expectations. The American market for French academic painting was so extensive at this time, and the market for impressionism so un IMPR[SSIONISM ANO NATUR['S O[CHTIONS

developed, that impressionism seemed refreshinglyuncommercial.

Bouguereau,

Gerome, Cabanel, and others were referred to as "popular painters," the too familiar "black band," and the vested monopoly. 49 Why did New York commentators not project their political anxieties onto im pressionism? Perhaps the earlier politicized reception of impressionism in Paris had lent some distance to the issue. Or perhaps for Americans the connection between fme art and the privileged classes was so deep-rooted that any idea of impressionism as a subversive populism seemed beyond serious consideration. The second view would have gained support from impressionism's popularity among Gilded Age industrialists such as H. 0. Havemeyer. The wave of May announcements for the extended and enlarged exhibition at the National Academy noted the addition to it of impressionist paintings from the Havemeyers' and others' collections. Readers of NewYork newspapers knew that in late April Havemeyer had successfully crushed a strike at his Brooklyn sugar refmery. The New York Times reported that employees attempting to burn his factory had been thwarted by police guards. 50 If Havemeyer was not worrying about impressionism's politics, why should anyone? 51 Abbott's pessimistic interpretation

of impressionism does not fit any of the contemporary patterns.No other critic found anything like her tragic vision of future immobility in Monet's deceptively gay paintings. I mentioned earlier that the anguish and despair in Abbott's text bring to mind the artistic work and experiences of other late-nineteenth-century women who were similarly creative, well-educated, accomplished, and affluent, as well as despairing. "Hysterical" behavior associated with women at the time has come to be understood as a response to the intense conflicts many creative women experi enced in patriarchal culture. 52 Features of Abbott's essay link it to that broader phenomenon-pseudonymous

publication, eccentricity within its genre, displacement of the author's personal conflicts onto her protagonist (Abbott's reading of Monet's paintings mirrors her own anxieties about her career choice and the ultimate effects of her scientific work), and especially its powerful thematics of spatial entrapment. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar write that "anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of ... nineteenth-century women .... Obsessive imagery of confinement ... reveals the ways in which female artists feel trapped and sickened both by suffocating alternatives and by the culture that created them. "53 Women's anxiety and despair have also been portrayed as effects of adaptation to new gender and domestic re-

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATURf'S U[C[ PTIONS

lations and to new constructions of female identity. Such anxiety is often mani fest as depression following the death of someone dear, illness or an accident, or childbirth. 54 Marion Hooper Adams, depressed after the death of her father in April 1885, apparently experienced some form of nervous breakdown in July. Five months later she drank poison and died, at the age of forty-two. She had been feeling that she was "not real," as she frequently told her sister. 55 Similar personal circumstances may well have conditioned Abbott's frame of mind, but I am more interested in the role pictures played in Adams's and Abbott's (and Celia Thaxter's) despair. Twoyears before her death Adams had avidly taken up photography, with the technical assistance of a chemist friend. After only a few months, Henry Adams was telling friends that "my wife does nothing except take photographs. " 56 About a hundred of Adams's photographs are contained in three albums in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. They illustrate her steady progress from rank amateur to accomplished composer and printer. Although most of her work is portraiture, there are severallandscapes and open -air figure studies, which feature stiffly posed and oddly detached young rel atives (Fig. 36) or individual women in moody contemplation. In one photograph (Fig. 37) a woman seen from the back stares out at a calm and misty sea, evoking paintings by Winslow Homer as well as Casper David Friedrich. In another (Fig. 38) Adams portrays her friend Rebecca Dodge (Rae), meditative and dark in a sunny landscape. Taken the summer before Adams died, during the period of mourning for her father, and among the last photographs pasted into her album, it vaguely recalls Thomas Dewing's endlessly wandering and searching women. Like Abbott, Adams's subjects have distinct romantic and symbolist aspects; they are undeceived by the natural beauty that surrounds them. How much significance should we give to Adams 's choice of a darkroom chem ical as a suicide weapon? It may simply have been convenient, but symbolically it renders Adams a sacrifice to the medium most closely associated with modernity. Seen alongside Abbott's pamphlet, Adams's suicide reveals that the pictures one made or studied as a way of ordering one's experience of modern life could have lethal aspects. My reflections on Adams's suicide and Abbott's pessimism have been condi ~ tioned by the work of feminist historians such as Gilbert, Gubar, and Carroll Smith- Rosenberg, and also by Walter Benjamin's comments on suicide and modern life in his book on Baudelaire. "Modernity mustbe under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will that makes no concessions to a mentality inimical

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[WTIONS

flGUR[ l6 • Marion Hooper Adams, GeorgeCasperAdams with Mary OgdenAdams, Mary Adams, and Charles FrancisAdams III on Rockat BeverlyFarms, ca. 1883. Marion Hooper Adams Photographs, 50.49, courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

flGUR[ 37• Marion Hooper Adams, Mrs.JosephBell on Rockat Smith's Point, ca. 1883. Marion Hooper Adams Photographs, 50.66, courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

119

flCUR[ 18 • Marion Hooper Adams, RebeccaDodgeat Old Sweet Springs,Virginia,June 1885. Marion I-looper Adams Photographs, 50.110, courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

towards this will. This suicide is not a resignation but a heroic passion. It is THE achievement of modernity in the realm of the passions. "57 To interpret Adams 's and Abbott's manifestations of despair as direct responses to some abstract notion of modernity would be foolish. I do wish to propose, however, that quintessentially modern conflicts felt with immediate personal intensity played crucial roles in the lives and works of these women. In Henry Adams' s novel Esther (1884) the central character is a religious skeptic who, to marry the minister she loves, tries to recover religious faith. But she fmds she cannot do so at will, so the question becomes one of priority: when love and belief conflict, which will win out? The novel's relevance to Marion Hooper Adams's experiences is open to question, but it is plausible that she may have wished to retrieve religion as a source of consolation and been unable to do so. Some of Abbott's words reveal that her response to Monet's art was partly motivated by similar difficulties. The problem of reconciling scientific and religious beliefs was especially acute in the 1880s. Celia Thaxter's despair, according to the art historian Roger Stein, IMPR[SSIONISM ANO NATUR['S O[C[PTIONS

120 involved a vision of the world that "was a tough-minded and precise version of truth to nature-Ruskin tempered by a strong sense of Darwinian struggle. Her religion was an equally tough-minded negotiation between despair and hope." 58 After the death of her mother in 1883, Thaxter wrote to a friend: "I hope all things, I believe nothing! The face of the sky is dreadful to me, I don't know when this terrible weight will wear away and I shall be able to bear the sight of the sun .... The consolation of religion I cannot bear. I can bear my anguish better than their emptiness, though I am crushed breathless under my sorrow. It seems as ifl could never fill my lungs with air again, as if I never wished to look upon the light of day."59 Conflicts between science and religion elicited personal, visceral responses to nature. Thaxter was a devoted admirer and patron of impressionist painting who took profound pleasure in its portrayals of the natural world (Plate 12,). Her despair brought intolerance of those features of nature and art that ordinarily elicited joy and hope-sun, sky, air, light. If not gifts of God and signs of divine benevolence, such delights lost their force. For Abbott, a similar distress seems to have been complicated by suspicion that nature's deceptions were mocking. To understand them as motivated and not the accidental effects of a godless world is to envision God as a cruel joker disguising behind sweet facades an exquisite doom held in store for helpless humankind. Coping with such suspicions would be exceedingly difficult for anyone raised in a culture profoundly shaped by Transcen dentalism and Mani£est Destiny. Although such feelings would not have been lim ited to women, the culture's ideological bonding of women and nature, along with the social -historical difficulties discussed by Gilbert and Gubar, would have exacerbated the problem for them. The cultural historian Jackson Lears has documented the widespread anomie that members of the northeastern elites experienced in the later nineteenth cen tury. He argues that many cases of "neurasthenia" were traceable to ideological conflicts engendered by modernity that the culture failed to address adequately. Depression and suicide were beginning to seem necessary costs of the material, social, and intellectual progress that denned modernity. In an 1887 essay reviewing the previous decade in American art, the critic S. G. W. Benjamin wrote that "pessimism comes of experience, and, in a right sense, means a truer apprehension of the position of the race in this life and a thoughtful consideration of the problems of destiny. "60 William James also wondered whether life was worth living and reflected that fatalism was the source of pessimism: "I take it that no man

D[C[PflONS NATUH['S AND IM~H[SSIONISM

is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. " 61 The thinking of Henry Adams as well was marked by "helplessness before what are perceived as abstract forces governing human society and destiny," as the cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has noted.

62 Fatalism

certainly rings from the" cry of humanity"

that Abbott describes in the face of "the ultimate uselessness of human effort." In this context of pessimism and fatalism, Peirce argued for the adaptive function of optimism. Despite his intense commitment to logic and rational analysis, Peirce tried throughout his life to reconcile religion with science. He was explicit about the religious motivation for his evolutionary cosmology: "The universe of nature seems much grander and more worthy of its creator, when it is conceived of, not as completed at the outset, but as such that from the merest chaos with nothing rational in it, it grows by an inevitable tendency more and more rational. It satisf.tes my religious instinct far better; and I have faith in the religious instinct. "63 Although Peirce certainly experienced desperation and despair, exacerbated by poverty and social alienation, his papers suggest that nature for him always retained a divine presence. His doctrine of "theism" asserted that divinity in nature could be known and experienced; in his philosophy he sought an empirical justif.tcation for religion. As one of his biographers has put it: "An all-pervading divine presence can be experienced in a manner no different in the strength of its authority than the verif.tcation of any hypothesis; he held a mystical doctrine that the suprasensible real mysteriously exists in the sensible as a community of mind and nature. "64 Abbott, looking back after some years on her encounter with Monet's art, felt that its intensity stemmed from the vivid image the paintings gave her of nature divorced from divinity. She recalled that the passionate feelings she expressed in her pamphlet were very real to her. Seeing Monet's art led her to withdraw from impressionism and even from science for a while. Some of the Impressionist paintings especially emphasized the pitilessness of natural forces or of Nature where all human interests were lost to view. It was as if the universe were a huge scientific demonstration, with feeling, mental response, and all that goes to form religion eliminated. It was the inevitable onward march of the physical life of the world, as each aeon brought it nearer and nearer to cold, death, and annihilation. Such thoughts may have been due to an overwrought, sensitive mental organization, but it was all very real, and even the sunlight shining on the green trees and grass brought with it a suggestion of the steel-blue light that astronomers tell us prevails beyond this earth's atmosphere. To break the spell of this

IMPR[SSIONISM AND NATUR['S D[C[PTIONS

122 mood, I gave up the study of the Impressionist paintings at the time, and even the study of the physical sciences became so painful to me that I felt obliged to discontinue it and fmd relief in literature, poetry, and whatever else suggested sentiency. It happened to be HolyWeek, and often in the late afternoon, I would drive to some church and sit there in meditation in the deepening twilight under the spell of the solitary altar lamp, symbolical of everlasting light, and the slowlyfading colors of the stained-glass windows, as one by one they settled into the common tone of the early evening dusk. 65

Abbott sought solace from the revelations of impressionism in religion and its distinctive color and light and time. Although in retrospect she wished to distance herself from the mental organization that had generated the overheated arguments of her essay, she oscillated throughout her life between the poles of science and intense religious mysticism. Her biographer, Nathan Haskell Dole, notes that in the later 1890s "the trend of her mind [became] increasingly religious." By then she felt that her study of science had suppressed her soul, and in response she turned to mystic spirituality and poetry, writing that "the unity of the world lies before me, I am one with all knowledge and experience .... I am afloat upon a lim itless sea of refmed spirituality ....

I ask for nothing more than this complete

absorption with what I understand by God. "66 A few years later she turned back to science and entered medical school. Or should we say that science and religion merged for her once again? In her autobiographical notes, she recalled that while taking classes at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia in the early 1880s, she had been deeply confused and troubled by Frances Emily White's lectures on physiology, which drew heavily on Spencer's principles of evolution: "To one who had been from childhood associated with thoughts of art, the languages, and literature, shrouded in a mantle of Catholic orthodoxy and mysticism, these lectures were puzzling in the extreme." Abbott remained embroiled in the problem of reconciling science and religion throughout her life. Her one work of art criticism seems to have been motivated by impressionism's demanding to be seen in such terms. Monet's paintings tore the fragile fabric of reconciliations that helped Abbott cope with the conflicts of modernity. The paintings struck her violently, and she responded with violence of her own: in her struggle to understand and articulate her reactions, she wrestled Monet's work into an ill-fitting interpretive framework. Abbott's essay may represent the responses of a brilliantyoungwomanbrought

O[C[PTIONS NATUR['S ANO IMPR[SSIONISM

to the verge of a nervous breakdown by her encounter with Monet's paintings, but I hope it is clear that the desperation she expressed in her essay was far from being merely a personal matter. When nature has lost its divinity and appearances their credibility, extreme measures are warranted. Lears has argued that" official culture" in the later nineteenth century generated optimism and enthusiasm for modernization. In glossing over pressing tensions and conflicts, culture became evasive and banal. It was failing to do its work: to help people organize, understand, and cope with experience, and to help them make sense of society and the world. 67 Abbott's essay leads us to see that for culture to be evasive, artists and audiences must collaborate. Cultural artifacts can be pressed into service, even against their will, through powerful, willful, subversive interpretation. Abbott's interpretive effort ultimately may have failed, but her demanding and activist en gagement with culture is surely exemplary. That she felt compelled to align Monet's painting with aspects of modernity distinctly different from those we now habitually associate with it helps us to discriminate between the cultural effects of modernities in New York and Paris in 1886. Abbott yanked Monet's work out of a modernity grounded in bourgeois leisure, momentary time, and spectacular nature, and forced it into the modernity of her own intense personal experience-of deceptive appearances, bleak evolutionary cosmology, and conflict between science and religion. The landscape art of the impressionists, committed to truth to vision, could accommodate the modernity Abbott experienced only if it were fundamentally allegorical and symbolist. Her response, unpredictable and eccentric, was also sensible, intelligent, and historically revealing. It makes clear that for at least some viewers in the 1880s Monet's paintings were anything but occasions for aesthetic delectation. Looked at askance, they provoked acute questions about truth and deception, surfaces and depths, past and future, and they sharpened psychic conflicts induced by the experience of modern life.

IMPRfSSIONISM ANO NATURE'S D[C[ PTIONS

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TOUCHING PICTUR[S BY WllllAM HARN[ll Art includes the delight of awakening belief by means of surfaces. But one is not really deceived! [If one were] then art would cease to be. Artworks through deception-yet one which does not deceiveus? PRIEDRICH

WILHELM

NlETZSCHE,

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," 1873

Pictures whose realism seemed so perfect and complete that they sometimes deceived spectators constituted a popular attraction at the turn of the twentieth century. Such reproductions and simulations were apparently common, or at least that is the impression one gets from the newspapers and magazines of the period (Fig. 39). Press reports and advertisements regularly claimed that some exhibitions presented illusions so persuasive that viewers tried to grasp, touch, or enter them, or to interact with them physically in more dramatic ways. Chapter 5 docu ments several examples, but 1:'.vowarrant separate treatment here. At the 1901 world's fair in Buffalo, a man described as an "old Texan" was overcome by a panoramic painting of the Civil War (the building housing the panorama is seen at left in Fig. 40). After scrutinizing it for some time and listening to the lecturer narrate the events depicted, which took place on November ~5, 1863, at Mission Ridge, Tennessee, the old Texan began shouting "Back you --Yanks!" and fired some shots from a real gun he was carrying into the painted soldiers in blue. 1 After he was subdued, he was quoted as saying, "I reckon it's the head, the heat and my head. I was wounded defending that gun myself and it seemed so real I thought I was there doing it again." Or so the newspapers reported. The daily press routinely exaggerated the success of illusionistic attractions. Publicity and promotion were central to the press's function.

125

126

You think you can tell the difference between hearing grand-opera artists sing and hearing their beautiful voices on the Victor. can vou? In the upcr.a-hoUICcorridor 1ecnc in "The Pit" at Ye Liberty Thntrc, Oakland, Cal., the bmuu, ,1u11rtct frum Rignlcuu w:u Nng h~· l"aru10, Abbut, Homer ::and Scotti nn the Yictor, and the dcltl(hlcd audicm·c thuught the}' \\ ere li,tcning tu the ,ingcr1 thcm1elvcs. En:ry d:aJ·:11 the Walllorf-A,turi:a, ~cw York, the gnnd-opcn atan ling, ac.-comp:inied by Ilic hutd urd1c,1rJ 111,1x1"11 inn~. The dmcn, 1i,1cn with rtipt :mention, craning their neck, w get a ~li1111-.c 111 1hc ,111gC't. Hut it i, :a l'irM. In llu."r11iunJ:1 uf \\':m:unakcr', t'.um>11, l'hiblldphia RIKC, the great pipe organ ac.-cump:rnicd \lclh:1 1111 du: r1,1..r, :anJ the JlC\•plc rwh",I from all dirn.-1iu111tu ICC the aingcr. hl'n 1111h,· r,,r:r bhonwr,, cmpl,wo of1cn 1111:aginc 1h~ :1rc Ii lcning 11111Unger m:aking ,1 r\·l·ur,1 "hilr 1liC'\ rrJII~· hc.1r 1hc 1'1,I•"·

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That same year newspapers in England reported that a British soldier created a similar disturbance in a London theater during a film on the Boer War. Jumping up from his seat and shouting at the Boers on the screen, he brought up the house lights. "I thought it was all real," he said. The newspaper reports of the incident helped publicize the film and boosted its audience. The suspicions provoked in us by the behavior of the two gullible soldiers turn out to be justified. The British soldier was subsequently revealed to be an actor

TOUCHING rlCTUR[S ~yWllllAM HARNHT

127

flGUR[lO • Civil War Cyclorama, Buffalo, 1901, photograph from Richard Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo, 15.

hired by the theater for five pounds and instructed to feign confusion. 2 There is no material evidence of a similar arrangement in Buffalo, but such a double deception in the name of advertising would not have been out of place there. The promotional apparatus for the Civil War panorama may have fabricated the old Texan in a newspaper story or a staged event. The point is that stories and scenes of deception before an illusion were often themselves deceptions. In such situ ations, the real dupe was the condescending witness. A person's credulity was likely to be tested at any moment in the world of turn-of-the-century

spectacu-

lar amusements, which had become part of the regime of competitive marketing and modern advertising.

TOUCHING PICTURES BYWllllAM HARNHT

128 CH[Al TO (NO[AVOR ARTIST'S TH[ R[SISJING If newspaper reports often exaggerated for purposes of promotion and sensation alism, and if spectators' reactions were sometimes contrived performances, then our understanding of another visual illusion popular at the turn of the century needs reappraisal. Trompe l' oeil painting was frequently described in contemporary press reports as eliciting highly animated responses from its audiences (Fig. 41). Viewers are said to have wagered whether the paintings presented illusions or the real things (a matter, in Fig. 41, of which stamp was the real one); or to have poked the pictures with canes and umbrellas; or to have tried to make off with the dead rabbit or pheasant, remove letters from the painted letter rack, or take down the violin to play it. 3 William Harnett was the most prominent and influential painter of these illusions working in Philadelphia and New York in the late nineteenth century. Writers marveled at his paintings and sometimes praised them extravagantly as among "the most remarkable illusions ever produced by the brush of an artist. "4 Such claims stand out even in the hyperbolic commentary on contemporary illu sions. Newspaper articles discussing Barnett's work sometimes mentioned that a police guard had been stationed nearby to ensure that viewers kept their hands off. 5 When his painting The Old Violin was exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886, journalists wrote that spectators attempted with their fmgernails to remove the newspaper clipping brilliantly rendered just below and to the left of the violin (Plate 13and Fig. 4~). One Cincinnati reporter even admitted having run his own hand over that clipping: "While the iron hinges, the ring and sta ple and the rest are marvelous, the newspaper clipping is simply a miracle. The writer being one of those doubting Thomases who are by no means disposed to believe their own eyes, was permitted to allay his conscientious scruples by feeling of it, and is prepared to kiss the book, and s'help me, it is painted. "6 The writer, in professing himself a doubting Thomas where the evidence of vision is concerned, assumes, probably with justification, that his readers will be sympathetic. On the basis of many such reports of disoriented and deceived viewers, Barnett's work has come to be understood as part of" a prevailing cultural discourse of illusion, deception, fraud, and humbug" at the turn of the century. Paul Staiti has developed the fullest and most cogent presentation of this argument. 7 He likens Barnett's paintings to the confidence games proliferating during this time: the viewer becomes a mark, drawn into the illusion, made complicitous in HARNHT WllllAM BY PIClUHS TOUCHING

uine. Mr. the picture and down ag-;:1i11, Ynu'n~ tried to fa