Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting: Painting at the Threshold 9780367409593, 9780367810122

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Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting

This book examines the portrayal of themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement in US genre paintings during the second half of the long nineteenth century (c. 1860–1910). Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography. Lacey Baradel is a historian of the art of the United States. She has taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at Vassar College.

Cover image: Eastman Johnson, The Tramp, 1876–77. Oil on canvas, 42 × 64 in. Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library, Watertown, NY. Photo by Cindy Bell.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France John Finlay Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck Self Representation by Early Modern Elites John Peacock The Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Multiplied and Modified Edited by Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and Magdalena Herman Iconology, Neoplatonism, and the Arts in the Renaissance Edited by Berthold Hub and Sergius Kodera History and Art History Looking Past Disciplines Edited by Nicholas Chare and Mitchell B. Frank Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting Painting at the Threshold Lacey Baradel The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China Roslyn Lee Hammers For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Researchin-Art-History/book-series/RRAH

Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting Painting at the Threshold Lacey Baradel

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Lacey Baradel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40959-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81012-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Randy

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1

viii xi 1

Mobility and Containment in Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings

17

2

Mapping Enoch Wood Perry’s Genre Scenes

58

3

Crossing Thresholds in Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties

89

4

Dislocation and Connection in John Sloan’s Scenes of Urban Transport

123

Conclusion Index

154 157

Figures

0.1 0.2 0.3 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

Jacob Ochtervelt, Street Musicians at the Door, 1665 William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847 Francis William Edmonds, The Bashful Cousin, c. 1841–42 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859 Eastman Johnson, The Tramp, 1876–77 Currier & Ives, The Home of Washington, Mount Vernon, VA, c. 1856–72 Eastman Johnson, The Old Mount Vernon, 1857 Adriaen van Ostade, The Cottage Dooryard, 1673 Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves (recto), c. 1862 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 Eastman Johnson, Fiddling His Way, 1866 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Strolling Musicians, c. 1635 John Lewis Krimmel, Blind Fiddler, 1812 Eastman Johnson, Fiddling His Way, c. 1866 Eastman Johnson’s Studio, Nantucket Alfred Kappes, The Tramp Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, c. 1870 A Glimpse of Mr. Johnson’s Studio Eastman Johnson, The Tramp (detail) Eastman Johnson, The Tramp (detail) Josiah Freeman, The Hermit of Quidnet, c. 1875 Enoch Wood Perry, The True American, c. 1874 Enoch Wood Perry, Portrait of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, 1861 Enoch Wood Perry, Rose Ranch, ‘Ulupalakua, On the Slopes of Haleakalā, Maui, 1865 Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848 Alfred Jones, after a painting by Richard Caton Woodville, Mexican News, c. 1853 Bencke and Scott, New York, after Enoch Wood Perry, Bummers, 1875 Enoch Wood Perry, Studying the Map, date unknown Emily Sartain, after Enoch Wood Perry, Welcome News, 1888

7 8 9 18 18 22 23 25 28 29 31 32 32 34 37 42 45 45 46 47 48 59 61 62 64 64 66 68 69

Figures 2.9

2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13

2.14 2.15 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

G. Woolworth Colton (cartographer and engraver) and Rufus Blanchard (publisher), G. Woolworth Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States & Canada: with Railroads, Counties, etc., 1863 Enoch Wood Perry, How the Battle Was Won, 1862 [Dividing the] National [Map], 1860 Reproduction of a painting of Kīlauea by Enoch Wood Perry E. W. Perry, Map of the Washoe, Humboldt and Reese River Silver Mines in the State of Nevada By E.W. Perry . . . 1865 [with specimen for pamphlet for the Commonwealth Mining Company. . .] , 1865 E. W. Perry, Map of Mining Claims of Pine Wood District, State of Nevada/By E. W. Perry, New York 1865, 1865 Enoch Wood Perry, The Patchwork Quilt Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890 Reproduction of Breaking Home Ties after a photogravure by C. Klackner Main Design of the MacMonnies Fountain The Golden Door, Transportation Building Thomas Hovenden, The Founders of a State, 1895 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1862 Thomas Hovenden, The Sailor’s Return (When Hope Was Darkest), 1892 Thomas Hovenden, Bringing Home the Bride, 1893 Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown, 1882–84 John Brown Ascending the Scaffold Preparatory to Being Hanged John Longstaff, Breaking the News, 1887 Albert E. Sterner, Wistfully Gazing at Hovenden’s Country Lad Leaving Home Toby Edward Rosenthal, Departure from Home, 1884 Newspaper clipping from Thomas Hovenden scrapbook, 1866–95 Helen Corson Hovenden, Thomas Hovenden in his studio with his son Thomas Hovenden, Jr., from Thomas Hovenden scrapbook, 1866–95 William Gilbert Gaul, Leaving Home, 1907 Eight-cent John Sloan postage stamp from the “American Painting” series, 1971 John Sloan, Gray and Brass, 1907 John Sloan, Fifth Avenue Critics, 1905 John Sloan, Six O’Clock, Winter, 1912 John Sloan, Wake of the Ferry, No. 1, 1907 John Sloan, Wake of the Ferry II, 1907 Illustrated letter from John Sloan to Dolly Sloan, February 21, 1906 John Sloan, Ferry Slip, Winter, 1905–06 Byron Company (New York, NY), Ferries, Crowded Ferry Boat, Ferry Boat in Winter, c. 1906

ix

70 71 72 74

75 76 82 90 90 92 93 96 97 99 99 102 103 104 107 108 110 113 114 124 125 126 132 136 136 138 139 140

x Figures 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14

Charles Dana Gibson, On the Ferry John Sloan, Sunset, West Twenty-third Street (23rd Street, Roofs, Sunset), 1906 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c. 1817 John Sloan, Movies, Five Cents, 1907 John Sloan, The Theater, 1909

141 141 142 145 146

Acknowledgments

Many more individuals and institutions than I can thank individually here have shaped his book in significant ways since it began more than a decade ago as a dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. I am fortunate to have learned from Michael Leja, my advisor at Penn, whose ambitious and rigorous scholarship inspires me and whose kindness and support have always been greatly appreciated. As dissertation committee members, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Karen Redrobe, and Kathy Foster asked insightful questions and shared focused comments that helped me to refine my arguments when this project was at its most nascent stage. I am grateful for the time and attention they gave generously in this capacity and as mentors. Many friends from Penn, including Ellery Foutch, Ruth Erickson, Nathaniel Prottas, Juliet Sperling, Alison Chang, and Rafael Walker, provided indispensable encouragement, advice, and citations. This project would not have been possible without the support of several institutions. A year spent in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow proved enormously productive when I was in the early stages of research. Eleanor Jones Harvey was a generous advisor, and I benefited enormously from her willingness to share with me her thoughts on Eastman Johnson’s American Civil War–related paintings. My “fellow fellows” from the 2010– 11 cohort provided an excellent community of friends and scholars as I embarked on this work. A Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art provided essential financial and research support. Because of the Baird Society Resident Scholar Program, I was able to spend two months at the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology studying historical world’s fairs materials, research that formed the basis of my chapter on Thomas Hovenden. The Tyson Scholars Program at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art enabled me to begin the process of working on the book manuscript. I am deeply grateful to all who made this time spent in Bentonville fruitful, but especially to Margi Conrads, Mindy Besaw, Leo Mazow, Breanne Robertson, and Annie Ronan. Many thanks are also due to the faculty and staff of the Art Department at Vassar College, where I spent a year teaching. Brian Lukacher, in particular, was a generous mentor, and I am also thankful for guidance provided by Nick Adams, Thomas Hill, and Yvonne Elet. My time in Poughkeepsie was a wonderfully collegial experience. I was also fortunate to spend a year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and I received crucial research support during this time. I extend heartfelt thanks to Associate Dean Therese O’Malley for guiding my research and for bringing me

xii Acknowledgments on board to work under her direction on the History of Early American Landscape Design digital research project. I also thank Dean Elizabeth Cropper and Associate Dean Peter Lukehart, Helen Tangires and the center’s staff, my fellow Postdoctoral Research Associates, especially Lara Langer and Silvia Tita, and the 2016–17 cohort of CASVA fellows. At the University of Washington in Seattle, I received significant research support as the Allan and Mary Kollar Endowed Fellow in American Art. I would like to thank Allan and Mary Kollar for their warm welcome to that city and for their patronage of American art history at the University of Washington; Stuart Lingo and Jamie Walker for their leadership; and my colleagues in the School of Art + Art History + Design, especially Adair Rounthwaite, Katie Bunn-Marcuse, Estelle Lingo, and Sonal Khullar, for offering advice and encouragement along the way. Numerous museums, libraries, and historical associations generously opened their archives and facilitated much of the research that went into this book. I wish to thank Elizabeth Oldham from the Nantucket Historical Association’s Research Library, Akemi May from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Stephanie Heydt and Erin Day at the High Museum of Art, Heather Campbell Coyle and Rachael DiEleuterio at the Delaware Art Museum, Yvonne Reff at the Flower Memorial Library, and the staff at the Archives of American Art and Library of Congress for providing essential access to research resources and works of art in their collections. My research has benefited a great deal from questions, comments, and suggestions offered when portions of this book were presented in earlier stages of development. I am grateful to attendees of the lunchbag seminars I gave on the work of Thomas Hovenden and Enoch Wood Perry at the Archives of American Art for offering their insights and to Amelia Goerlitz for organizing these events. My work on Johnson and Perry was also enhanced by audience feedback at the annual conferences of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association in 2016 and 2019, respectively. I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute “The Visual Culture of the Civil War and Its Aftermath” in 2018 and would like to thank Sarah Burns, Joshua Brown, and Gregory Downs for leading many thought-provoking discussions and my fellow summer scholars for sharing their research and for their interest in mine. My analysis of John Sloan’s ferry paintings was enriched by audience questions and comments when I presented the work as part of the panel “Intimate Geographies” at the 2018 College Art Association annual conference. Portions of Chapters 1 and 3 have appeared in articles published in American Art and the Archives of American Art Journal, respectively. I am deeply grateful to Emily Shapiro and Tanya Sheehan for their editorial suggestions, to the anonymous readers of both article manuscripts for their generous responses, and to the University of Chicago Press for permission to republish from these essays. The editorial team at Routledge, especially Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong, has consistently shown interest in this project and patiently guided this first-time author through the publication process. Three anonymous readers offered helpful comments and suggestions on the book proposal and sample chapters that shaped the final result in meaningful ways, and I am thankful for their encouraging responses to my work. The Wyeth Foundation provided a publication subvention grant that helped make this book possible and much more richly illustrated than it would have been otherwise. Finally, this book would never have been realized without the encouragement and goodwill of my parents, stepparents, and in-laws, Louise Baradel and Marc Knapp,

Acknowledgments

xiii

Ron and Mary Alice Baradel, and Stephen and Lucy Bell. My brothers Chris Baradel and Brice Baradel and their families expressed just the right amount of curiosity (“Are you done with your book yet?!”) to help me keep the end goal in sight, especially when it seemed unachievable. My husband and best friend, Randy Bell, has patiently made many sacrifices of both time and distance over the course of our relationship that enabled me to see this project through from beginning to end. This book is dedicated to him. And last but not least, Porter Bell joined our family as I was completing the manuscript, and he instantly proved to be the most delightful “distraction,” filling my days and nights with lots of love and laughter (if not sleep).

Introduction

US Mobility and the Genre Painter’s Predicament In 1860 the Cosmopolitan Art Journal reported a peculiar contradiction for genre painting in the United States: Genre painters, in this country, are an impossibility, if we consider exposition of stereotyped local life and manners as necessary material for this class of artists. As a people the Americans have not lived long enough in one spot to gain strongly local as well as national peculiarities. We are made up of everybody from everywhere. We stay nowhere, and live just as the caprice dictates. We change everything, from our hats to our houses, as often as twice a year; and the artist in pursuit of American “cottage life”—American “low life” or “high life”—American “boatmen” or “fishermen”—American dogs, cats, mothers, and babes—would have to break his rest-stick in despair.1 According to this author, unsettledness was a defining characteristic of life in the United States and one that impeded the development of “strongly local as well as national” traits. This situation posed a significant predicament for genre artists who sought to portray contemporary “life and manners” by depicting recognizable social types. The population’s alleged capriciousness frustrated artistic attempts to visualize typically “American” subjects and, the critic imagined, drove the artist to destroy his tools “in despair.” This assertion in the Cosmopolitan Art Journal marks a significant departure from established modes of understanding the cultural work that genre painting performed in the United States during the nineteenth century. Genre painting, as it developed in European and earlier American traditions, is usually assumed to be about stasis, the settled, and the quotidian. These are not topics that lend themselves readily to a thematics of instability and unrootedness, as the Cosmopolitan Art Journal critic’s claim attests. In her influential study of genre painting in the United States from the 1830s to the start of the American Civil War, the art historian Elizabeth Johns argues that artists utilized legible social types grounded in regional, racial and ethnic, gender, and economic class distinctions to express the dominant ideologies espoused by their patrons.2 The quotation from the Cosmopolitan Art Journal indicates that by 1860 some had begun to ponder if genre painting based on typology was really possible in a country where, as contemporary commentators often claimed, people were so frequently on the move.

2

Introduction

This book excavates the ways in which historical discussions about the social meanings and effects of spatial mobility (rather than actual movement per se) informed the production and reception of genre painting during the second half of the long nineteenth century in the United States. The artworks examined in this study privilege portrayals of social flux and geographic instability, and they probe the contours of a complex—and often conflicted—discourse about the impacts of mobility on individuals and communities. Analyzing period discourses about mobility in relation to domestic genre painting sheds light on the historically and culturally specific meanings of the narrative and formal elements that structure many genre scenes produced during this period, particularly the arrangement of figures in liminal architectural spaces. The paintings and related prints and drawings at the center of this study engage themes of geographic mobility on multiple registers, through both subject and form; the works are at once depictions of the effects of modern flux and abstracted treatments of forces shaping social life that demanded different modes of picturing. Artists grappled with new subjects and representational strategies in an attempt to engage an audience that saw itself as particularly unmoored and considered mobility a characteristic of modernity. With its emphasis on mobility as a lens through which to examine works of art, this study emerges from the so-called spatial turn that shapes much recent humanistic scholarship. Inherently interdisciplinary, this body of scholarship has drawn on and adapted spatial frameworks developed by geographers and social scientists to ask new questions about works of cultural production, especially literature.3 Historians of US art have begun to examine the significance of mobility to issues of identity in figurative painting. The recent exhibition Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, for example, takes up these subjects as they relate to Edward Hopper’s paintings of hotels, motels, and related tourist spaces made between the Great Depression and the Cold War. This book is also in dialogue with—but not exactly a part of—an emerging body of art historical scholarship that considers the impact of spatial mobility on artistic practice by focusing, in particular, on the circulation of artworks and movements of artists.4 As period discourses acknowledge, locomotion was not a frictionless or neutral process. This book explores how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity impacted the work of four leading US genre painters: Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). These artists did not attempt to resolve the genre painter’s predicament described by the Cosmopolitan Art Journal critic in 1860. Rather, they utilized the flux of modern life to shape the narratives and forms they painted on canvases that portray themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement. Such themes presented artists with new representational opportunities and viewers with novel possibilities for engaging with pictorial space and narrative. The paintings explored in the chapters that follow—through their artists’ manipulations of form and style—grapple with the physical, social, and psychological aspects of their subjects’ movements through space, and with the uncertainty modern dislocations provoked.

Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Mobility in the United States Although commentary on the supposed penchant for spatial mobility in the United States was commonplace, nineteenth-century critics rarely agreed on its origins or meaning. A comparison of the assertions made by two period commentators—Joseph

Introduction

3

C. G. Kennedy and Dr. Robert Tomes—suggests how politicized this discourse could be. Both men reflected on the causes and significance of geographic mobility during the middle of the nineteenth century. Their insights reveal how the discourse shifted to suit specific political concerns at different historical moments. Kennedy, appointed by President Zachary Taylor’s administration to run the 1850 US census, noted in his 1852 report on the data that nearly one-quarter of native-born citizens did not reside in the state of their birth. Connecting this demographic trend to popular assumptions about “national character,” he concluded that “[t]he roving tendency of our people is incident to the peculiar conditions of their country” and predicted that “each succeeding Census will prove that it is diminishing.” Americans’ mobility, Kennedy argued, was largely the consequence of US-born migrants relocating to the American West in search of better economic opportunities, and he anticipated that such opportunities would eventually dry up as settlement in the West continued: “When the fertile plains of the West shall have been filled up, and men of scanty means cannot by a mere change of location acquire a homestead, the inhabitants of each State will become comparatively stationary.”5 It was commonplace for commentators to tie various forms of spatial mobility, whether in the context of longdistance migrations (such as the ones Kennedy references) or more localized movements, to the potential for social mobility. But as a Whig politician, Kennedy would likely have opposed rapid territorial expansion. According to one historian, many in the party viewed the Democrats’ expansionist agenda during the Mexican-American War as promoting “land hunger, greed, and a widely dispersed population,” which “promised to destroy the social and economic conditions necessary to a virtuous citizenry.”6 Perhaps because of this, Kennedy expressed hope that, following the settlement of the western United States, “our countrymen will exhibit that attachment to the homes of their childhood, the want of which is sometimes cited as an unfavorable trait in our national character.”7 Even commentators, like Kennedy, who championed geographic mobility as a means of achieving social mobility and “progress” expressed concern that moving from place to place would erode local communities, weaken familial attachments, and stunt the development of a robust culture that could hold its own against more storied traditions in Europe. Like the superintendent, the physician and author Robert Tomes connected Americans’ mobility to the United States’ geographical expanse. Tomes became US Consul to Rheims, France, in 1865 and promoted in his travel writing large-scale military and corporate projects that expanded transportation systems in the United States and abroad. In the 1850s Tomes had also served as surgeon to the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. and made several trips between Panama and San Francisco in this capacity.8 Writing for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1865, Tomes focused on the habitual travels that everyday life in the United States supposedly necessitated. He argued that, because of the United States’ “spaciousness,” Americans “can not [sic] perform many of the ordinary duties of life without a great deal of locomotion.” For Tomes, this locomotion was so routine as to barely faze the traveler; an American, he claimed, “starts on a journey of hundreds of miles, as readily as he puts on his coat and comes down to his breakfast.” It was the nation’s size that necessitated its inhabitants’ frequent mobility, but it was the United States’ “facilities for travel”—railroads and navigable riverways, in particular—that facilitated their journeys. “[A] citizen of our vast republic,” Tomes boasted, “passes with ease and rapidity from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, or from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”9

4

Introduction

Although Tomes certainly exaggerates the “ease and rapidity” of transcontinental travel in 1865, his claims point to the large-scale infrastructural improvements that were then underway. The Republican Party’s rise to power—winning control of the House of Representatives in 1858 and nominating Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and wining a majority in the Senate in 1860—led to a number of legislative measures that promoted the United States’ rapid industrialization and directly spurred the population’s spatial mobility. In 1860, none of the more than 30,000 miles of railroad that crisscrossed the United States reached farther west than the Missouri River, but the Pacific Railway Act, signed into law by President Lincoln during the summer of 1862, enabled the first transcontinental railroad to become a reality. Workers connected the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, in May 1869, linking California and the East Coast by rail for the first time, and the reach of railroads across the nation continued to expand over the next 50 years.10 As a nationally distributed periodical, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the publication in which Tomes published his essay, relied on such expansive transportation networks to reach a wide audience. Tomes’s article, which appears in the June 1865 issue, just two months after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee effectively ended the American Civil War, optimistically claims mobility as a unifying national trait: The American is a migratory animal. He changes place with such facility that he never seems so much at home as when leaving it. Go where you may—north, south, east, or west—you will be sure to meet him. . . . Populous cities and untracked deserts are alike trodden by his ubiquitous feet. On the heels of a deadly conflict that pitted Northerners and Southerners against one another, Tomes’s words are striking for the way that they collapse and minimize geographical distinctions. Rather than distinguishing Northerners or Southerners or Westerners, for example, Tomes’s text emphasizes unity by painting a portrait of “the American” as, above all else, “a migratory animal” who seemingly flows with ease throughout the nation and, indeed, the world (Tomes’s article also discusses Americans’ supposed penchant for travel abroad).11 Other articles appearing in nationally distributed publications claimed that Americans’ appetite for mobility was rooted in an innately restless temperament, which was supposedly evidenced by the history of European-Americans’ westward migration across the continent. An article that appeared in Putnam’s Magazine by the physician and critic Titus Munson Coan provides just one of many examples from the period: I have said that Americans are, not merely that they or their ancestors have been, a migrating nation. . . . The American-born citizen is still essentially an emigrant. He is hardly less a wanderer, by instinct and by habit, even in our oldest cities, than his ancestors were when the Western wildernesses were first penetrated by the pioneers, who made their little clearings, gathered around them a few of the comforts of civilized life, and then moved onward into the depths of the forest, to repeat the processes as long as their restless lives should last.12 By linking restlessness with national character and grounding the connection in historical circumstances, Coan, somewhat paradoxically, claims mobility as a source of continuity and stability. As the literature scholar Mark Simpson has argued,

Introduction

5

nineteenth-century Americans’ repeated emphasis on geographic mobility as a national trait originated partially in the demographic characteristics of the US population but also in contemporaries’ anxieties about the relatively short history of the nation. Simpson writes: For a newly nationalizing people notoriously anxious about its professed lack of sedimented cultural history, one of the chief means to cultural distinction under modernity, travel’s practice, could in a perfect tautology serve as the very sign or mode of cultural distinction. . . . Ideologically speaking, restlessness—ceaseless mobility—supplied one key to the American subject’s vaunted exceptionalism.13 Coan drew this linkage between mobility and exceptionalism explicitly in his essay: “No other people in the world are so harried as ourselves by the spirit of unrest.”14 Mobility became a source of “vaunted exceptionalism” to be sure, but its supposed excesses were also used as a rationale to control and restrict segments of the population. It was not unusual for commentators to blame the mobility of people from socially disempowered groups or of political enemies for spreading ideas that they believed to be problematic or even potentially deadly. Following the armed slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, for example, the state’s governor, John Floyd, wrote to James Hamilton, Jr., governor of South Carolina: I am fully persuaded the spirit of insubordination which has, and still manifests itself in Virginia, had its origin among, and emanated from, the Yankee population, upon their first arrival among us, but most especially the Yankee pedlars and traders. Faulting traveling “pedlars and traders” from the North for spreading ideas about racial equality—that “all men were born free and equal”—and planting the seeds that erupted in the slave revolt, Floyd decided that he would “recommend that laws be passed to confine the slaves to the estates of their masters.”15 Floyd’s claims remind us that mobility must never be assumed to be fully liberating, universal, or equal.16 The formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass expressed this inequality of access to mobility and freedom—an inequality left unmentioned by many of the authors cited above—in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom: The people of the north, and free people generally, I think, have less attachment to the places where they are born and brought up, than have the slaves. Their freedom to go and come, to be here and there, as they list, prevents any extravagant attachment to any one particular place, in their case. On the other hand, the slave is a fixture; he has no choice, no goal, no destination; but is pegged down to a single spot, and must take root here, or nowhere. The idea of removal elsewhere, comes, generally, in the shape of a threat, and in punishment of crime. It is, therefore, attended with fear and dread. A slave seldom thinks of bettering his condition by being sold, and hence he looks upon separation from his native place, with none of the enthusiasm which animates the bosoms of young freemen, when they contemplate a life in the far west, or in some distant country where they intend to rise to wealth and distinction.17

6

Introduction

Douglass contrasts the ways that free people—particularly the “people of the north” or the “young freemen” who have the ability to move at will to “the far west”—might conceive of mobility and opportunity against the brutality and heartbreak of mobility forced upon an enslaved person who, under typical circumstances, is “a fixture . . . pegged down to a single spot.” In so doing, he poignantly voices an alternative conception of mobility and opportunity, one far more nuanced than the optimistic narratives typically expressed in mainstream channels like the popular press.18 Claims that Americans could just pick up and move in search of better opportunities or even in response to personal whim ignored the realities of many women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged whose movements were often either forced or severely restricted by outside parties and circumstances.19 The genre paintings examined in this book engage this politics of mobility and identity in the United States during the second half of the long nineteenth century. In various ways, they expose the complexity of this discourse, whether through the ambiguity of their open-ended narratives regarding identity or by highlighting the emotional and social costs of physical movement.

Thresholds This book’s subtitle, Painting at the Threshold, frames two of the primary questions I seek to address in this study. First, it highlights a core theme that connects the four case studies examined in the following chapters: the artistic portrayal of thresholds and other liminal spaces as sites in which figures’ identities are destabilized, negotiated, or transformed. Thresholds not only demarcate but also connect otherwise distinct spaces. As the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in his 1909 essay “The Bridge and the Door,” “The door . . . demonstrates that acts of separating and relating are but two sides of the same act.”20 In the tradition of genre painting, the placement of figures in relation to these threshold spaces often communicates relationships between figures in the composition and reflects insider and outsider status. But thresholds also contain the possibility of the figures’ movements across these spaces, allowing them to serve as important compositional tools for artists who want to probe concepts of social and spatial mobility and the psychological and emotional aspects of such flux. All four artists discussed here imaginatively reworked the comparatively rigid spatial conventions of earlier European and American genre traditions in order to engage modern viewers and to make visible seemingly tenuous linkages between place and belonging. Threshold or liminal spaces (I use the terms interchangeably) are an essential pictorial and narrative component of the works examined here. Thresholds signify in multitudinous ways across a wide range of cultural traditions, and thus this project also contributes to a growing body of literature on the topic. It is important to consider the artworks’ connections to earlier genre traditions—particularly Dutch and British— that used threshold spaces in significant ways.21 The art historian Georgina Cole has argued of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting that [w]ithin the matrix of the domestic interior, doorways are appropriated as an architectural framework for narrative action, configuring different kinds of spaces and spatial subject positions. Mundane parts of everyday experience, doorways are elevated in Dutch art to signs of transition, transgression, and territorialisation.

Introduction

7

The open portals in Dutch genre scenes such as Jacob Ochtervelt’s Street Musicians at the Door (1665; Figure 0.1) and Nicolaes Maes’s The Milk Seller (c. 1657), for example, function as zones in which different social types interact. However, the figures’ exchanges pictured in the paintings are “strictly governed by the rules of economic transaction,” according to Cole, and thus the works maintain established social and economic hierarchies. The figures never traverse the thresholds and, significantly, experience “no subjective ‘transformation.’ ”22 Most art historians who have explored the impact of seventeenth-century Dutch art on US genre painting have focused their analyses on its effect on early nineteenth-century artistic production.23 Engraved reproductions of Dutch genre paintings circulated in the United States, and American artists who traveled to Europe would also have had opportunities to study original works. According to the art historian Peter John Brownlee, John Burnet’s A Treatise on Painting: In Four Parts (1827) was another important source through which nineteenth-century US artists became familiar with

Figure 0.1 Jacob Ochtervelt, Street Musicians at the Door, 1665. Oil on canvas; 27 × 22 1/2 in. (68.6 × 57.2 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Eugene A. Perry in memory of her mother, Mrs. Claude Kilpatrick, 162:1928. Source: Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

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Dutch and British genre paintings, because many examples illustrated the popular instructional manual. Although Brownlee argues that the influence of Dutch genre painting on US artists waned by the 1870s, the works examined in this book demonstrate its continued impact into the first decade of the twentieth century as well.24 Art historians have also considered the role of threshold spaces in US genre paintings, although previous studies have focused principally on work produced before the American Civil War, especially canvases that portray the relationships between European American and African American figures. Often these liminal spaces separate figures by racial category in order to reinforce social hierarchies. Elizabeth Johns argues that early nineteenth-century genre scenes created by white artists for white audiences that feature African American figures—works such as William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music of 1847 (Figure 0.2) or Richard Caton Woodville’s War News From Mexico of 1848 (Figure 2.4)—portray unequal social positions spatially by relegating African American figures to the margins of their compositions or otherwise excluding them from the social spaces inhabited by white figures. The scholar Jo-Ann Morgan has demonstrated how the “marginal placement” of mammy figures in genre scenes made before the American Civil War, as in the position of the African American cook seen through the shadowy doorway in the background of Francis William Edmonds’s

Figure 0.2 William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847. Oil on canvas, 17 1/16 × 21 1/16 in. (43.4 × 53.5 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund, 1991.110. Source: Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

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The Bashful Cousin (c. 1841–42; Figure 0.3), presents the mammy as “incidental” to the scene and conveys “her status as a servant in antebellum society” who is presumed to be available to attend to others.25 This book likewise examines the dynamics of space and belonging in US genre paintings, but it focuses on artworks produced during the second half of the long nineteenth century, rather than the antebellum period, and is particularly interested in how these spatial dynamics intersect with period discourses of mobility. “Thresholds,” as the literature scholar Sally Bayley argues, “signify boundaries as well as entrances; to ‘thresh’ is also to tread or to trample across a boundary.”26 The thresholds in the paintings I examine are spaces of visible or implied movement. They function as zones of possibility and vulnerability; they are the pictorial spaces of encounter, exchange, and reflection utilized by artists to give form to the negotiation of cultural and social boundaries. Second, the book’s subtitle evokes the shifting cultural and artistic status of genre painting during this period, when its relevance to contemporary experience seemed uncertain as earlier modes of picturing social interaction grew obsolete. The cultural project of genre painting in the United States during the second half of the long nineteenth century is ripe for reexamination. Within the field of American art, there have

Figure 0.3 Francis William Edmonds, The Bashful Cousin, c. 1841–42. Oil on canvas, 24 7/8 × 29 15/16 in. (63.2 × 76 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Frederick Sturges, Jr., 1978.6.4. Source: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

10 Introduction been no recent book-length studies of genre painting as a mode of picturing, and Johns’s 1991 American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life remains the touchstone on the topic despite its focus on the first half of the nineteenth century. Although various museum exhibition catalogs and scholarly books have integrated analysis of genre paintings from the time period covered in this book into their arguments in significant ways, they either largely conform to the model of genre painting discussed in Johns’s book or do not take up the topic of genre painting as their organizing principle.27 Art historians often claim that a distinct shift in genre painting’s modes and status in the United States occurred by the middle of the nineteenth century. Johns argues that the specific model of genre painting traced in her study was “virtually abandoned” after the American Civil War. Peter John Brownlee writes that, although genre painting “remained popular with American audiences,” by the late 1860s “its critical importance waned as its pictorial codes evinced a more cosmopolitan aesthetic.”28 Analyzing mid-nineteenth-century articles describing private art collections in the United States, Jochen Wierich discerns a generational shift in taste; whereas the previous generation of collectors preferred to acquire works by genre painters like Edmonds and Mount, the newer generation purchased Eastman Johnson’s work.29 Such shifts in collecting patterns may signal changes in the artistic strategies employed by the generation of genre painters that began working during the Civil War era. Genre painting did not die out or decline with this perceived shift. Exhibition records and critical commentary attest to its continued—perhaps even increasing—popularity in the decades that followed.30 In 1863 the art critic James Jackson Jarves announced, “Genre painting is rapidly rising into favor, because of the cleverness of many young artists and the intelligibility of its motives. He that looks may understand.” Jarves championed genre painting as a clear mode of visual communication, a claim that will be challenged by the unintelligibility and ambiguity of many of the artworks analyzed in this book. Nevertheless, the critic predicted that genre painting “will attract the popular taste more and more from its too exclusive partiality for landscape.”31 By the end of the decade, commentators observed the waning of landscape and rise of genre at the National Academy of Design’s annual spring exhibition. A critic for The Nation claimed in 1869 that landscape “disappears year by year from our exhibitions” and that the exhibition-going public preferred “painted stories,” especially domestic scenes.32 As late as 1878, a writer from The Aldine proclaimed “that genre painting is yet in its infancy” in the United States and confidently predicted increased supply and demand by US artists and collectors.33 In addition to their prevalence at art exhibitions, genre paintings circulated among a wide audience through printed and photographic reproductions. Nonetheless, comparatively few art historical studies focus on genre paintings produced during the second half of the nineteenth century.34 The historiography on late nineteenth-century genre painting is dominated by accounts that privilege genre scenes that adopt a nostalgic view of the past, often situated in the countryside, or, on the other hand, by more urban and self-consciously cosmopolitan subjects.35 And yet, neither of these two trajectories for late nineteenth-century genre painting accounts fully for the appearance of the works discussed in the chapters that follow. If the model of genre painting that dominated in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century lost currency around 1860, through what means did artists working in a narrative mode attempt to incorporate the spatial and social

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transformations of modernity into their work? This book proposes one answer to that question. The model of typology outlined in Johns’s study—itself a reaction to social fluidity during the first half of the nineteenth century and an attempt by period artists and patrons to “[order] their social universe”—became both more unstable and more specific during the period examined in this book, no longer driven by regional types or the political allusions and visual puns that structured many antebellum genre paintings’ narratives.36 But genre painters continued to portray recognizable social types well into the nineteenth century (and beyond). In his 1867 painting American Citizens (To the Polls), for example, the artist Thomas Waterman Wood depicted four social types—Yankee, Irishman, German immigrant, and African American—that, the art historian Vanessa Meikle Schulman posits, viewers of that period understood to have particular political leanings. Wood’s use of typology did not lend itself to a “singular interpretation” but enabled viewers to construct numerous narratives about political participation and interaction at the polling place. The artist mobilized the types to “mirror the very forms of visual identification and social control that existed at the polling place.”37 Typology remained a key element of genre painting during the second half of the long nineteenth century, but the artists whose work is examined in the following chapters utilized it in different ways, either focusing on “new” social types that were understood by viewers to have emerged from or to resonate particularly well with modern forms of mobility (e.g., Eastman Johnson’s tramps, Thomas Hovenden’s boy leaving home for the city, and John Sloan’s commuters) or playing with the very notion of typology itself (as in the headless figures in Enoch Wood Perry’s satirical painting The True American).

Chapter Descriptions Four case studies illuminate the ways that genre scenes delineated, through visual representation, the contours of change that constituted modern experience during the second half of the long nineteenth century. Chapter 1 examines the artist Eastman Johnson’s representations of the (im)mobilities of enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as well as the incursion of signs of urban industrialism into rural and domestic spaces through depictions of geographically mobile figures. Produced during an era in which borders—and the crossing of them—were particularly fraught topics in public discourse, the paintings subtly engage, through both subject and form, debates about locomotion, agency, and belonging. Close examination of several of Johnson’s paintings produced between 1859 and 1877, especially Negro Life at the South, Fiddling His Way, and The Tramp, reveals the artist’s significant interest in backyard spaces and domestic thresholds as sites for picturing social transformation. This chapter explores how Johnson adapted and transformed a traditional Dutch and British genre subject—the “outsider” at the domestic threshold—to appeal to US audiences in the decade following his return from study in Europe, as he established his reputation as the premiere genre painter working in the United States. Chapter 2 explores connections between genre scenes by Enoch Wood Perry and his artistic peregrinations, which took him to Europe, across the United States (from New England, to New Orleans, Utah, and California), and as far west as Hawai‘i. Although nineteenth-century critics noted a disconnect between the artist’s global travels and the decidedly “uncosmopolitan” character of many of his paintings, this chapter explores

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Perry’s genre scenes produced during the 1860s and 1870s that take up themes of travel and mapping, putting them into dialogue with period cartoons about mapping and with the social and pictorial aspects of cartography. The chapter centers on the artist’s painting The True American (c. 1874) and the 1875 chromolithograph published after it, both witty explorations of the intersection of mobility and identity, as well as the futility of depicting stable national types. The “True American” in Perry’s work ceases to possess any identifying characteristics, save for his status as a traveler. As if to reinforce his rootlessness, Perry positions each figure in a liminal space (the doorway, the window, the porch) of the hotel—a setting that itself evokes constant comings and goings. As seen in this work and others by Perry, the artist’s compositions build tension between the figures’ implied mobility—their status as travelers—and stasis. Chapter 3 focuses on Thomas Hovenden’s blockbuster 1890 painting Breaking Home Ties to argue for the importance of the artist’s portrayal of space and the domestic threshold to the work’s popular reception when it was widely proclaimed the “most popular painting” exhibited at the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago. To better understand the production and reception of Breaking Home Ties, this chapter situates the work in relation to other works by Hovenden as well as to paintings by the genre artists Toby Rosenthal (1848–1917) and John Longstaff (1861–1941), who took up the theme of leaving home or who used the domestic threshold as a significant narrative device during this period. This chapter explores how pictorial space and narrative in Hovenden’s canvas prompted viewers to process the social and psychological transformations accompanying the nation’s modernization. Through analysis of works ranging from oil paintings and prints to a quickly drawn sketch in the artist’s private correspondence, Chapter 4 examines John Sloan’s images of both public and private modes of urban transport. The artist’s Wake of the Ferry paintings, made during a period in which Sloan described experiencing pronounced feelings of placelessness, explore the social and psychological effects of increased spatial mobility in urban spaces. Although many of Sloan’s works set in New York City portray interactions among strangers, his depictions of commuting emphasize the social and physical dislocation of individuals who turn inward as they occupy a space between work and home. This chapter argues for a different experience of intimacy in Sloan’s ferry scenes, one that emerges out of circumstances shaped by distance and absence. The liminal space of the ferry’s deck—neither interior nor exterior, neither departure point nor destination—becomes a potent emblem of the condition of the modern self in Sloan’s work. Sloan’s inclusion alongside Johnson, Perry, and Hovenden may strike some readers as unexpected because of the boundaries traditionally drawn in the field between nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and between academic and modern art. Sloan’s contemporaries often described his work and that of his fellow Ashcan artists as “revolutionary,” and, even today, the Ashcan School often serves as a convenient dividing point around which to organize surveys of the field.38 Without a doubt, Sloan’s loose brushwork differs greatly from the tighter, academic styles practiced by the other artists examined in this book, and his subjects are decidedly more urban than theirs. But I include his work here because it nonetheless shares important thematic and compositional similarities with their work.39 It is my hope that analyzing Sloan’s paintings in the same vein as those of the nineteenth-century genre painters will build bridges across divides that typically structure the field of American art. There are also direct

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links between the earlier genre painters and Sloan’s circle. Robert Henri, Sloan’s close friend and mentor and the guiding force for the Ashcan School aesthetic, studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art with Hovenden; Henri even referred to himself in his diary from that time as “Hovey’s darling.”40 And, as discussed in Chapter 4, Sloan expressed his admiration for the work of nineteenth-century US genre painters, including Johnson (the subject of Chapter 1), although he noted the differences in their approaches to handling paint, and for the work of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. Sloan’s paintings of urban commuters probe similar tensions around mobility, individualism, and community as his predecessors’ works. The chapters that follow suggest one new framework for considering the cultural significance of genre painting during the second half of the long nineteenth century. I do not intend for these case studies to constitute a comprehensive view of late nineteenth-century genre painting, and readers will notice that some major figures from the period, such as Winslow Homer and John George Brown, are largely absent from my discussion. It is my hope that scholars will continue to investigate artistic engagement with mobility during this period, and future research may uncover connections to the work of these artists and others. The artworks examined in this book, addressing these themes through both subject and form, raise important questions about the roles of experimentation and innovation within a genre that is so often perceived as staid and tradition-bound. This book not only illuminates how genre painters rose to meet new representational challenges and opportunities posed by the technological, economic, and demographic changes around them but also sheds light on viewers’ responses to the novel experiments with pictorial space and narrative that shaped these works.

Notes 1. “Charles F. Blauvelt,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 4, no. 4 (December 1860): 166 (emphasis original). Although the critic claims that “a good piece of local characterization is rare,” the author suggests a number of subjects that might prove fruitful for genre painters in the United States, including many migratory urban types (“news-boys, street-sweepers, woodsawyers, immigrants, dock-loafers, strolling organ-men, Yankee pedlers, butcher-boys, negroes, Irish laborers, German lager-beer guzzlers, etc., etc.”), and proclaims the New York genre painter Charles F. Blauvelt (1824–1900) to be “[a]mong those most successful in this department” (166–67). Immigrants and travelers were among Blauvelt’s most frequent subjects, as seen in paintings like German Immigrant Inquiring His Way (1855; North Carolina Museum of Art) and Homeward Bound From New York (undated; Santa Barbara Museum of Art). For a discussion of the politics of the Cosmopolitan Art Journal’s art criticism, see Wendy Jean Katz, Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press (New York: Empire State Editions, 2020), 182–83. 2. Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). The types with which US genre painters during this period principally concerned themselves, according to Johns, include Yankees, Westerners, African Americans, women, and urban street children. 3. See, for example, Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Sally Bayley, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space, From Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan (Oxfordshire: Peter Lang, 2010); and Ivy G. Wilson, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum US (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4. Erika Doss, “Accommodating Mobility: Marjorie Hillis, Edward Hopper, and the Meaning of ‘Home’ in Modern America,” in Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, ed. Leo G.

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Mazow with Sarah G. Powers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 47–61; and Jason Weems, “Driven Inside: Hopper’s Hotels and the Automobile,” in Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, 111–23. See also Randall R. Griffey, “Drawing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: Trespassing and Identity in American Art,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 414–32. Recent scholarship that examines that significance of mobility to the history of art through the movement of objects includes Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and J. M. Mancini, Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking, and Taking From Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). One recent study focused on the mobility of artists is David Young Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 5. US Census Office, Seventh Census (1850), The Seventh Census: Report of the Superintendent of the Census for December 1, 1852 (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, Printer, 1853), 15. 6. Michael A. Morrison, “ ‘New Territory Versus No Territory’: The Whig Party and the Politics of Western Expansion, 1846–1848,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 1992): 28. 7. U.S. Census Office, The Seventh Census, 15. 8. Howard A. Kelly and Walter L. Burrage, “Tomes, Robert (1817–1882),” in American Medical Biographies (Baltimore, MD: The Norman, Remington Company, 1920), 1152. Tomes published a book about the Panama Canal Railway titled Panama in 1855: An Account of the Panama Rail-Road, of the Cities of Panama and Aspinwall, With Sketches of the Life and Character of the Isthmus (New York: Harper & Bros., 1855). He also published an abridged account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s expedition to Japan: The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition to Japan, Under Commodore Perry (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1857). 9. Robert Tomes, “The Americans on Their Travels,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31, no. 181 (June 1865): 57. 10. Another Republican-backed legislative measure, the Homestead Act, allowed people to settle (and eventually own) public land at a very low cost and promoted settlement of the West. Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12, 14, 40. 11. Tomes, “The Americans on Their Travels,” 57. 12. T. M. Coan, “Americans—And Some of Their Characteristics,” Putnam’s Magazine 5 (March 1870): 352–53. Coan (1836–1921) was born in Hawai‘i to prominent Christian missionaries and attended Williams College and joined the United States Navy before settling permanently in New York in 1865. For a biographical sketch and discussion of Coan’s relationships with US writers Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau, see Robert J. Scholnick, “Titus Munson Coan: An Early Defender of Thoreau,” The New England Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 1981): 119–21. 13. Simpson, Trafficking Subjects, XXVI. 14. Coan, “Americans—And Some of Their Characteristics,” 353. 15. John Buchanan Floyd, “The Sons of Governor John Floyd, Manuscript,” The John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph-Macon College 4, no. 1 (June 1913): 85; qtd. in Simpson, Trafficking Subjects, 4. 16. Scholarship on various forms of mobility (or the more inclusive term “mobilities,” preferred by many scholars today) “need not embrace them as a supposed form of freedom or liberation from space and place.” Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 210. 17. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mullgan, 1855), 176–77. 18. Immediately after the American Civil War, Southern African Americans experienced “a surge of mobility” during the years 1865–67, according to analysis by the scholars William G. Thomas III, Richard G. Healey, and Ian Cottingham, especially as people migrated for Freedmen’s Bureau contracts and relocated from the Upper South to Ohio. See William G. Thomas III, Richard G. Healey, and Ian Cottingham, “Reconstructing African American

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Mobility After Emancipation, 1865–67,” Social Science History 41, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 673–704; quote on p. 700. 19. Leslie Dale Feldman argues that the conceptual linkage between mobility and freedom in the United States is rooted in the Hobbesian view of liberty. Leslie Dale Feldman, Freedom as Motion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001). In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) wrote, “Liberty, of Freedome, signifieth (properly) that absence of . . . externall Impediments of motion.” Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 161. For more on the historical restrictions placed on the mobilities of specific segments of the US population, see Euan Hague, “ ‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’: The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States,” Mobilities 5, no. 3 (September 2010): 331–47; and Tim Cresswell, “The Right to Mobility: The Production of Mobility in the Courtroom,” Antipode 38, no. 4 (September 2006): 735–54. 20. Georg Simmel, “The Bridge and the Door,” in The Domestic Space Reader, ed. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 250. 21. For thresholds in the Dutch tradition, see Lynn F. Jacobs, Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385–1530) (London and New York: Routledge, 2018); Georgina Cole, “ ‘Wavering Between Two Worlds’: The Doorway in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting,” in “Liminal,” special issue, Philament 9 (December 2006): 18–37; and Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For the significance of doorways in the British genre tradition, particularly in the pastoral cottage door scenes popularized by Thomas Gainsborough and his followers, see Ann Bermingham, ed., Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and David H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. 84–90. For thresholds in Parisian modernist painting, see Hollis Clayson, “Threshold Space: Parisian Modernism Betwixt and Between (1869 to 1891),” in Impressionist Interiors, ed. Janet McLean (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008), 14–29. 22. Cole, “ ‘Wavering Between Two Worlds,’ ” 19, 21, 23. 23. See, for example, Henry Nichols Blake Clark, “The Impact of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Genre Painting on American Genre Painting, 1800–1865” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1982); and Henry Nichols Blake Clark, Francis W. Edmonds: American Master in the Dutch Tradition (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988). A recent exception is John Fagg’s analysis of the impact of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting on the twentieth-century US artists John Sloan and Edmund C. Tarbell. John Fagg, “Near Vermeer: Edmund C. Tarbell’s and John Sloan’s Dutch Pictures,” Modernist Cultures 11, no. 1 (2016): 86–117. 24. Peter John Brownlee, American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2013), 15–16, 39–40. 25. Johns, American Genre Painting, esp. chapter 4, “Standing Outside the Door”; and Jo-Ann Morgan, “Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century,” American Art 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 90. 26. Bayley, Home on the Horizon, 3. 27. Two relevant exhibitions focused on American genre painting are American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life (Terra Collection Initiative, various venues, 2013–14) and American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009–10). Jennifer A. Greenhill’s Playing it Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) examines genre paintings by late nineteenthcentury painters, including Winslow Homer, John George Brown, and Enoch Wood Perry, but considers these works primarily in the context of visual humor during this period. 28. Johns, American Genre Painting, XI. See also Brownlee, American Encounters, 39. 29. Jochen Wierich, Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 129. 30. Looking to the National Academy of Design for data on the continued popularity of genre painting during the second half of the nineteenth century, Wright notes that approximately one-quarter of the artworks displayed at the National Academy’s 1874 spring exhibition

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were genre paintings, exceeded only by “landscapes and foreign scenes,” and that “[t]hese proportions were typical throughout the 1860s, 70s and 1880s.” Furthermore, critical reviews of the exhibition “spent significant time on the genre paintings.” Lesley Carol Wright, “Men Making Meaning in Nineteenth-Century American Genre Painting, 1860–1900” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1993), 10. 31. James Jackson Jarves, “Art and Artists of America,” Christian Examiner 75, no. 1 (July 1863): 120. Jarves hoped that genre painters would turn away from the Düsseldorf school and follow more closely the examples set by French and Belgian painters. The next year Jarves wrote, “Thanks to French incitement, the dawn of a respectable school of genre and home painting is night at hand.” James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea: Part Second of Confessions of an Inquirer (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1864), 220. 32. “Fine Arts: The Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” The Nation, April 29, 1869, 340. These reported trends are a departure from the relative numbers of genre paintings reported in reviews from the 1850s. A writer for the New York Daily Tribune in 1855, for example, remarked, “[W]e are surprised to find so few genre pictures in the Exhibition. They are, in fact, very scarce, and to discover them one must search among the portraits and landscapes, of which the Exhibition is almost entirely composed.” “The National Academy of Design: Second Article,” The New York Daily Tribune, April 27, 1855, 5. Likewise, in 1859, The Crayon reported that only 103 of the 815 works on view were “figure subjects,” whereas 190 were portraits and 306 were landscapes. “Sketchings: National Academy of Design,” The Crayon (May 1859): 152. 33. A. Saule, “Genre Pictures,” The Aldine 9, no. 1 (1878): 22. 34. Notable exceptions include Wright, “Men Making Meaning”; and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Redefining Genre: French and American Painting, 1850–1900 (Washington, DC: Trust for Museum Exhibitions distributed by University of Washington Press, 1995). Weisberg ascribes the lack of attention to a skewed emphasis by art historians on “the innovations of the avant-garde, those painters who moved away from the tradition of narrative art as practiced and espoused by a wide range of genre painters” and argues that between 1850 and 1900 “genre painting was anything but out of fashion or insignificant” (19). 35. Patricia Hills, The Painters’ America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910 (New York: Praeger, 1974), 34, 137; Brownlee, American Encounters, 11–12; and H. Barbara Weinberg, et al., American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2009). 36. Johns, American Genre Painting, 16. 37. Vanessa Meikle Schulman, “Visualizing Race at the Polling Place: Thomas Waterman Wood’s American Citizens,” American Art 33, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 48. 38. As an example of scholarship that positions the artwork of the Ashcan circle as a decisive break from the tradition of nineteenth-century US genre painting, see Lee M. Edwards, Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840–1910 (Yonkers, NY: The Hudson River Museum, 1986), 30. 39. John Fagg also argues in favor of considering the continuities between the Ashcan artists’ work and the nineteenth-century genre tradition. See John Fagg, On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 40. 40. Rebecca Zurier, “Picturing the City: New York in the Press and the Art of the Ashcan School, 1890–1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1988), 28.

1

Mobility and Containment in Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings

Painted just two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War, in the midst of rising national tensions over slavery, Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South (Figure 1.1) appears, at first glance, to be inward-looking and detached from the politics of the impending crisis. Johnson likely hoped the work would attract attention for its unusual subject matter: a group of enslaved African Americans engaged in various forms of leisure in a yard behind a crumbling house in Washington, DC. As scholars have shown, the flexible iconography of Negro Life at the South maximized its appeal by making Johnson’s painting more palatable to a deeply divided national audience in the years just before the Civil War.1 The artist undoubtedly hoped the canvas would boost his budding career, and, indeed, the painting’s debut at the 1859 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York City launched the 34-year-old artist’s reputation as the leader of a new generation of US genre painters. The work sold almost immediately after the exhibition’s opening for $1,200, and critics praised it lavishly in published reviews. Shortly after the New York exhibition closed, the painting traveled to the Boston Athenaeum, where photographic reproductions of Johnson’s breakout canvas were made available for sale, further ensuring the work’s enduring popularity.2 The overwhelmingly positive response to Negro Life at the South precipitated Johnson’s election as associate to the National Academy of Design the year that he unveiled the work and to full academician the next. Eighteen years after he first exhibited Negro Life at the South, Johnson debuted The Tramp (Figure 1.2), a painting that shows the eponymous figure’s arrival at a rural, vine-covered farmhouse. Much as the subject of Negro Life at the South proved to be both unusual and topical in 1859, so was Johnson’s decision to depict tramps in 1877. He was one of the few US artists to paint the subject when coverage of a so-called tramp crisis emerged suddenly in the popular press in the 1870s.3 During this period the term “tramp” was widely used to describe vagrants—usually men—who traveled the country looking for money and food but not for work. Transformations in the United States’ economy and infrastructure facilitated the tramp’s emergence during these years. A financial panic in 1873 caused a sharp rise in unemployment and homelessness, and the country was still in the throes of a crippling depression when Johnson painted The Tramp. Furthermore, the rapidly expanding transportation infrastructure—especially the realization of a transcontinental system of railroads in 1869—enabled the growing homeless population to travel vast distances quickly.4 Johnson’s painting monumentalizes this new social type, inserting him into what would otherwise be a traditional domestic genre scene portraying rural cottage life. Though it addresses quite different social and political circumstances than Negro Life

18

Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings

Figure 1.1 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859. Oil on linen, 37 × 46 in. (94 × 116.8 cm). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, The Robert L. Stuart Collection, S-225. Source: Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

Figure 1.2 Eastman Johnson, The Tramp, 1876–77. Oil on canvas, 42 × 64 in. Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library, Watertown, NY. Source: Photo by Cindy Bell (author’s collection).

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at the South, The Tramp shares a number of thematic and compositional concerns with the earlier work. As I will argue in this chapter, even though Johnson’s choice of subjects shifted significantly during this period, there are pictorial and thematic threads that suggest that the artist conceived of mobility and containment as an important framework for picturing the flux of modern life. Architectural boundaries in Johnson’s work are often spaces of metaphorical significance where assumed identities become blurred. The artist first developed this thematic and formal logic in several paintings, including Negro Life at the South, that depict enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans and engage the highly contested politics of race and mobility in the years surrounding the American Civil War. But as the United States transformed from a largely agricultural economy to an increasingly urban industrialized one, Johnson expanded upon the possibilities of mobility and containment as key themes for picturing the encroachment of modern capitalism into the domestic sphere. Produced during an era in which borders—and the crossing of them—were particularly fraught topics in public discourse, the paintings by Johnson discussed in this chapter probe the shifting social and economic order.

Geographies of Slavery and Freedom in Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings Negro Life at the South might seem a surprising work by Johnson with which to begin an analysis of the artist’s engagement with notions of mobility. With its complex and carefully observed setting and precisely arranged clusters of well-defined figures, the painting exhibits little spontaneity or speed, and its composition, cropped tightly around the walled urban slave yard, creates a heightened sense of enclosure. And yet, despite Negro Life at the South’s focus on the physical containment of enslaved people, the spatial arrangement of the figures within the architectural setting holds the potential for an alternative reading of the painting. Numerous doors and windows through which certain figures pass punctuate the confined space. Johnson uses these architectural elements—the thresholds between spatial zones—to examine the relationship between mobility and containment and the instability of racial identities during a time in which such topics consumed public discourse. Matters of space and especially movement were central to the construction of racial categories during this period. Johnson began seeking subjects to launch his career as a figure painter in the United States soon after moving in the fall of 1855 from Europe to the nation’s capital, and he focused many of his early canvases on two population groups whose liberties were greatly restricted. The first was members of the Ojibwe who, following the 1854 La Pointe treaty, had recently moved to the Grand Portage reservation north of Superior, Wisconsin, a boomtown where two of Johnson’s siblings lived and where he speculated in real estate.5 The second group comprised enslaved African Americans living at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s former plantation located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. Both populations were deeply impacted by political debates in the United States about the nation’s seemingly ever-changing borders. As the geographer D. W. Meinig argues: That the United States was “a temporally and spatially changing and changeable set of relationships” was in fact very widely understood in the 1850s. . . . Expansion was always a contentious matter. It could hardly have been otherwise in such a complex, precariously balanced, dynamic political structure.6

20 Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings Political thought was fully consumed by the maintenance of geographic and political boundaries during the decade. In this era of expansion, the addition of each new state or territory threatened the balance of power in the federal government between slave and free states, provoking a great deal of uncertainty. Laws passed to regulate the mobility of African Americans, in particular, helped to precipitate the impending political crisis, deeply dividing an already fractured US public. Johnson must have been attuned to the heated debates about mobility and identity during these years as the conflict over slavery reached a boiling point. The Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850, made everyone— Northerners and Southerners alike—responsible for monitoring illicit mobility and reporting all discovered self-emancipated people. The law proved to be a flash point in contests over African Americans’ rights to move throughout the country. Opponents presented legal challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act and other statutes restricting African American mobility, with outraged abolitionists in the North arguing that freedom of movement should be a constitutional right for all Americans regardless of race.7 Before exploring further the themes of mobility and containment in Negro Life at the South, it is useful to look back to the artist’s earliest known attempts at representing slavery. For his first foray into the topic, Johnson chose to depict a scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 blockbuster novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a story inspired, in part, by the author’s opposition to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Johnson exhibited the work, titled Father Tom and Evangeline, at the 1853 Exhibition of Painting and Artwork by Living Masters at the Teeken-Academie in The Hague, where Johnson lived for more than three years between 1851 and 1855.8 Little is known about the painting, which is presently unlocated, but one period review indicates that Johnson portrayed Uncle Tom and Eva—two main characters from Stowe’s novel—with “a book (probably the Bible).” Because of this description, it seems likely that Johnson pictured Tom and Eva reading the Bible in an outdoor arbor, a scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin represented by many mid-nineteenth-century artists. The vignette was initially given visual form by Hammatt Billings, the illustrator of the first edition of Stowe’s novel, and, according to the scholar Jo-Ann Morgan, it was “the one [illustration by Billings] that most captivated viewers.” Images of Uncle Tom and Eva reading the Bible in a garden proliferated across a wide range of visual media within a year of the novel’s debut.9 One can only speculate about Johnson’s interest in picturing a scene from Stowe’s abolitionist story; likely the artist sympathized with the subject and hoped to take advantage of the novel’s popularity in the Netherlands. In a review of Johnson’s painting, one Dutch critic remarked that Stowe’s novel was “the subject of all conversations” and deemed it an appropriate topic for “genre historique.” The painting was marked for sale in the 1853 exhibition catalogue, suggesting that the artist did not receive a commission to paint it. The Haarlem publisher A. C. Kruseman released a best-selling Dutch translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853 under the title De negerhut. Een verhall uit het slavenleven in Noord-Amerika, and Stowe’s story quickly became a commercial success in the Netherlands, as it was in the United States, England, and France. Just a couple of weeks before Johnson unveiled his painting in The Hague, performers in the city staged an eight-scene theatrical melodrama of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.10 De negerhut also played an important role in galvanizing public support for emancipation in the Dutch colonies, although the Netherlands would not officially abolish slavery in Surinam and the Dutch Antilles until 1863, making it one of the last European colonial powers to do so.11

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It is perhaps surprising that Johnson chose to exhibit Negro Life at the South when establishing himself as a genre painter in New York City when we consider the reception of Father Tom and Evangeline. Despite its popular subject, the painting seems not to have been a critical success. One commentator faulted Johnson’s depiction for departing too much from the qualities of Uncle Tom and Eva described in Stowe’s original text. Rather than seeing the youth and purity of Stowe’s Eva, the critic found in Johnson’s canvas “an ugly, flat-nosed little creature, grinning over a book,” and, instead of an “inspired and idolizing Tom, with his childlike faith,” the commentator accused the artist of reducing the novel’s title character to an offensive racialized type, “a monkey, of the most monkey-like kind.” The writer lamented in a rhetorical address to Stowe, “Your protagonist has been transformed into an orangutan, and the Heavenly Eva, turned into a mess!”12 Without any surviving images of Johnson’s painting, it is impossible to judge the artist’s work in relation to the critic’s claims, but this review indicates that Johnson’s first known representation of an enslaved African American did not bring the success that the artist likely hoped it would.13 Nonetheless, soon after returning to the United States following six years abroad, Johnson continued to pursue the subject, turning his attention to the racial geographies of slavery when he painted a series of figural and architectural studies at Mount Vernon in the summer of 1857. The topic of geography and slavery had recently risen to the forefront of national concern when the US Supreme Court took up the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Johnson lived in Washington, DC, when oral arguments concluded in December 1856, and the Court announced its decision in March 1857, asserting that US citizenship—and attendant rights to spatial mobility—was determined by racial identity rather than geography. Dred Scott, an enslaved man from Missouri, argued that he had been effectively manumitted upon reaching free soil while traveling with his white enslaver, Dr. John Emerson, and living in territories where slavery was illegal. Scott’s claims aligned with previous legal decisions that ruled slavery to be, as cultural geographer Euan Hague notes, “fundamentally spatial in its operation and that upon reaching free soil, the slave became free.”14 However, the Court’s majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, reversed legal precedent. The controversial Dred Scott decision “sparked violent protests” and fueled opposition to slavery in the North.15 Johnson began his Mount Vernon series just a few months after the Dred Scott decision was delivered. Throughout the 1850s, Mount Vernon became a “politically charged icon” as proslavery and antislavery factions battled over the first president’s legacy. Artists of many different political persuasions depicted Mount Vernon during the decade, but Johnson’s representations stand out as unusual in their focus on the contemporary plantation and its enslaved inhabitants.16 On estates such as Mount Vernon, the relative siting of the “big house,” the enslaved workers’ living quarters, and other racialized structures helped to construct and give visual expression to established racial and social hierarchies. This “spatiality of slavery” on a plantation was, above all, according to the scholar David Delaney, a “geography of discipline and confinement and, for most slaves, extremely limited mobility.”17 This was certainly the case at Mount Vernon, which George Washington redesigned in the 1790s to minimize the visibility of enslaved laborers from his house. In 1791 Washington tore down the quarters for enslaved people located in a brick building near to the house and rebuilt them farther away so that they would be kept out of view of the mansion. The art historian Joseph Manca argues that Washington took

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additional steps to hide the enslaved residents of Mount Vernon from view, forbidding enslaved children from playing on the grass near the main house or in the walled gardens because “by the 1790s the presence of slaves on the estate was a point of shame in Washington’s national and international reputation, and he took steps to shield visitors from seeing them.”18 Whether Johnson was aware of this history of Washington’s renovations at Mount Vernon is unknown, but it seems likely that the enslaved figures he portrayed would have been well aware of the spatial politics of power and control in the plantation’s design, as that knowledge certainly passed between generations. This history is important context for understanding the extremely unusual depictions of Washington’s home that Johnson made in 1857, when he visited the estate then owned by Washington’s great-grandnephew Col. John Augustine Washington III. The artist originally intended to paint a historical scene of Washington receiving the Revolutionary War military leader, the Marquis de Lafayette, at Mount Vernon—a work the artist never executed.19 Although most nineteenth-century representations of the mansion focus on its famously grand two-story portico (Figure 1.3), Johnson foregrounded the enslaved inhabitants and portrayed the famous southern plantation in its current state of disrepair.20 The Old Mount Vernon (Figure 1.4) emphasizes the servants’ hall and the north colonnade that connects it to the former president’s home. Johnson depicted an African American man sitting on the stoop of the servants’ hall, a multipurpose building originally erected by Washington to house his guests’ white

Figure 1.3 Currier & Ives, The Home of Washington, Mount Vernon, VA, c. 1856–72. Handcolored lithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-pga-04878.

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Figure 1.4 Eastman Johnson, The Old Mount Vernon, 1857. Oil on board, 23 1/4 × 34 1/2 in. Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Purchased with funds courtesy of an anonymous donor and the Mount Vernon Licensing Fund, 2009. Source: Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

servants during their visits to Mount Vernon.21 The man’s wide stance with elbows resting on his knees projects confidence, as he visually claims a space historically denied to people in his condition. To this man’s right, enslaved children are gathered in the arcaded wing, and one toddles across the lush green lawn at the center of the composition. Johnson pushed the portrayal of Washington’s mansion to the background. The form of a woman who appears to be white and wearing a black dress stands at the northeast corner of the building’s portico. She is less noticeable than the enslaved figures at the center of the canvas. Turned away from the viewer, the woman seems to look toward the river, which is barely visible through the trees at the far left of the composition. Her view is not ours, and, because of her placement within the architecture, she cannot see what we see. Johnson’s composition optimistically encourages the viewer to relate to the multiple enslaved characters who take center stage in the canvas, despite the distance from which the artist paints them. Although still confined to the plantation, they are shown to exercise agency over their social world during this quiet moment.22 Johnson appears not to have exhibited The Old Mount Vernon, even though it was the largest of his canvases depicting the first president’s estate, but the work clearly informed the artist’s interest in the connection between space and slavery, providing an important antecedent for Negro Life at the South, which Johnson most likely commenced the following year.23

Liminal Space and Identity in Johnson’s Civil War–Era Paintings Negro Life at the South brings the spatial politics of slavery in the United States into dialogue with the pictorial conventions of earlier American and European genre

24 Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings traditions. It blurs the architectural and social separations commonly found in early nineteenth-century US paintings that segregate African American figures from European American ones, as well as those in seventeenth-century Dutch genre traditions that distinguish “insiders” from “outsiders.” Through the course of his extensive travels, as well as through the circulation of works of art in this period, Johnson became well acquainted with the conventions of earlier genre traditions, and he developed a flexible artistic toolkit from which to draw as he experimented with pictorial strategies for representing space and identity on the eve of the American Civil War.24 Specifically, when crafting his composition, the artist reinvented earlier genre modes to suit his contemporary subjects, reimagining the more rigidly defined spatial and experiential zones that typically divide social types in previous genre traditions to portray the flux and instability of modern life. By centering the African American figures in The Old Mount Vernon and Negro Life at the South, Johnson’s canvases reverse the pictorial logic of earlier representations of African Americans in US genre painting, epitomized by a work such as William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (Figure 0.2) of 1847. Mount, who was a conservative Democrat from a family that held people in slavery, provided what was, in many ways, the typical antebellum genre formula for depicting African American and white figures together in moments of leisure. The Power of Music keeps the African American man “in his place” at the margins of the scene, both formally and narratively.25 Although individualized more sensitively than most contemporaneous imagery of African American subjects produced by white artists, Mount’s figure remains relegated to the outside of the barn, where he pauses unobserved to listen to the white fiddler playing inside. Painted before debates about African American mobility reached their zenith with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, Mount’s The Power of Music offers a scene in which, the art historian Elizabeth Johns argues, “there is no movement . . . only quiet listening.”26 Johnson also looked to Dutch genre scenes when conceiving of his compositions. While working in The Hague, the artist earned the appellation “the American Rembrandt” from his peers for his ability to incorporate the lessons of Dutch painting into his work.27 But Johnson was not only an “heir to the Old Masters,” he was an innovator as well, reforming the conventions of Old Master genre paintings to address modern concerns and tastes.28 The artist would have encountered seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes through various channels; as a teenager, Johnson worked as an apprentice at a lithography shop in Boston and might have studied Old Master works through the circulation of prints, and he also lived and worked in Europe for six years, spending much of that time in the Netherlands. Negro Life at the South is indebted to the Dutch tradition. George William Curtis’s review of Negro Life at the South at the National Academy of Design exhibition praised Johnson’s canvas for being “painted with Dutch fidelity.”29 In its attention to naturalistic details and the depiction of family life in a courtyard setting, the painting evokes the example of Adriaen van Ostade’s The Cottage Dooryard (Figure 1.5) of 1673. Ostade’s paintings and etchings, particularly his family scenes, were extremely popular during the nineteenth century.30 Like Ostade’s canvas, Johnson’s painting displays a strong interest in naturally rendered details that dot the scene, such as the earthenware pots, the clinging vines, and the carefully painted textures of wood, brick, and glass. The two works also share thematic and compositional similarities. In Ostade’s painting, a woman prepares food in the courtyard of a rustic cottage,

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Figure 1.5 Adriaen van Ostade, The Cottage Dooryard, 1673. Oil on canvas, 17 5/16 × 15 9/16 in. (44 × 39.5 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Widener Collection, 1942.48. Source: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

surrounded by children at play. A male figure leans against the frame of an open doorway at the back of the scene. His presence does not disturb any of the other figures—including the dog—indicating that he is a member of the family rather than an intruder. As one art historian has observed of the painting, “No comings or goings, no exceptional confrontations or other unusual circumstances provided motivation for this scene; rather, Ostade celebrated here the peaceful existence of this peasant family tending to daily life.”31 Johnson, like American and European genre painters before him, absorbed the spatial lessons of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, particularly its “focus[ed] attention on the constitutive possibilities of the door within a domestic milieu.” The art historian Georgina Cole argues that doorways in Dutch paintings “contribute to the ‘spatialisation’ of figures as insiders or outsiders.” In works by the artists Jacob Ochtervelt and Nicolaes Maes, for example, “[t]here is no subjective ‘transformation’ of the figures, as they are never permitted to actually cross the threshold.”32 By contrast, Negro Life at the South injects a sense of encounter and instability into what is, in the Dutch painting, a harmonious scene of a family in a courtyard. At the far right of the composition of Negro Life at the South, a woman in a fancy dress

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followed by a second woman steps through a ramshackle wooden portal and into the dilapidated yard. Their presence complicates what could otherwise be read as an insular, even static, setting. But is this rickety doorway a space of passage, or is it a boundary? Should we understand it to contain or connect the figures portrayed in Johnson’s painting? Scholars have long read Negro Life at the South as a metaphor for the relationship between Black and white people under the system of slavery, but they have reached quite different—and often contradictory—interpretations of the nature of the relationship represented. At the root of this discussion lies different interpretations of the association between the inhabitants of the two domestic spaces shown in the work: the crumbling wooden structure and the much more substantial brick house next door. Johns, for example, argues: These black people are under the aegis of the white group next door: their social world devolves on, and needs the care and supervision of, the white group. Johnson’s picture presents a metaphor of the relation of the two communities: the black community can function only through the arrangements of the white. Rejecting this paternalistic reading, Eleanor Jones Harvey has argued that the painting resists a binary interpretation, especially with regard to the racial identities of the figures portrayed. Negro Life at the South’s numerous vignettes, Harvey writes, “form a narrative that challenges the very idea of race as a means of determining a person’s status.” The variety of the enslaved figures’ complexions depicted in Johnson’s canvas implies a history of interracial sex that, in Harvey’s view, is further suggested by various elements in the scene that bridge the otherwise seemingly disparate zones, such as the leaning ladder that visually connects the slave yard with the brick house. This permeability of the boundaries between the properties has prompted Harvey to ask the provocative question: could the woman stepping through the doorway who appears to be white simply be “passing for white” and “liv[ing] as a free woman” next door?33 Early reviews of Negro Life at the South offer little insight into Johnson’s inclusion of the women at the far right of the composition. Few commentators mentioned their presence, and those who did typically described two white sisters who were drawn into the yard by the sound of the banjo music.34 Such critics apparently did not study these figures closely; none of the reviews note the second woman’s red headscarf, which is similar to the one worn by the older African American woman in the second-story window and creates a strong visual link between the two figures, suggesting that they might share African ancestry. Although contemporary commentators did not question the racial identities of the figures in Johnson’s painting, Harvey’s careful analysis presents a convincing case for considering the issue of “passing”—both physically and metaphorically—in Negro Life at the South. To my mind, it is not as important to determine the intended racial identities of the women coming through the portal as it is useful to dwell on their liminality, on the indeterminacy of their status. The first woman entering the scene through the doorway can be productively read in relation to the enslaved girl in the blue dress located immediately to the left of her. The poses of these two figures closely mirror one another; both figures stand with their bodies mostly frontal and heads turned in profile, and both hold one hand against a wooden board as they lean toward the doorway. It is difficult to discern the precise direction of the woman’s gaze. Does she meet the girl’s, or is her attention

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focused on something else across the yard, perhaps the banjo player at the center or the courting couple at the far left? The art historian John Davis has argued that the woman functions as “a stand-in for Johnson’s presumably all-white audience” and serves as “a self-conscious reminder of their alterity in this slave space.”35 This reading would seem to be a reversal of the empathetic orientation of Johnson’s The Old Mount Vernon, in which the gaze of the white woman on the margin is decidedly not a “stand-in” for the viewer’s. And while I agree with Davis that the woman who peers into the pictorial space of the painting echoes our own viewer position, it is also useful to note the significant role that the girl in the blue dress plays in counteracting some of that sense of “alterity.” Couldn’t she too be a “stand-in” for the viewer’s gaze—her turn toward the woman at the door marking that woman as the object of the girl’s (and our) vision as much as any other figure in the scene? Such issues surrounding the power of the gaze are central to the spatial dynamics of the slave-yard setting in Johnson’s painting. Davis argues that cramped urban yards such as the one portrayed in Negro Life at the South allowed the enslaved “to claim a modicum of personal space and escape the master’s scrutiny, if only for a few precious moments.” The woman’s arrival “give[s] visual shape” to this notion—the idea of the yard as a place of “escape” for the enslaved—by dramatizing the “easy visual ‘policing’ of the yard.”36 The bounded and contained yard enables the enslaved to surveil—and thus resist—the enslaver/outsider at the same time that its restricted space enables the enslaver/outsider to exercise visual and physical control over the enslaved. The women and the girl at the doorway confound any definitive reading of the painting’s narrative; they, like so many other elements in the painting, are open to multiple interpretations. The ambiguity of their role in the narrative is echoed in the indeterminate spatial relationships of the setting against which the genre scene unfolds. The flattened perspective evident at the left and right edges of the canvas destabilizes attempts to make sense of the pictorial space. On the left-hand side, the peculiar position of the outer wall of the quarters for the enslaved and the roof above it, flattened out and pushed toward the surface of the picture plane, heightens the sense of enclosure, blocking any view of the sky or of the doorway to the interior that might otherwise be visible if Johnson had followed the rules of linear perspective more rigorously. At the far right, the open doorway presents its own spatial puzzle. Close inspection reveals how unusual the relationships are between the walls and the doorframe (just imagine how difficult it would be to re-create this passage in three dimensions). Again, the space is seemingly compressed for narrative effect, this time to enable a better view of the second woman following behind the woman entering the slave yard and underscoring the sense of the figures’ movement and traversing of space. In form as well as subject, then, Negro Life at the South manifests tension between mobility and containment. Negro Life at the South is a transitional work in Johnson’s oeuvre. At the same time its figures and composition gesture toward the social hierarchies and stereotypes that structured many US genre paintings produced before the Civil War, it destabilizes a secure reading of space or identity through its engagement with liminality. The woman crossing the threshold in Johnson’s painting poses a challenge to the reasoning of the Dred Scott decision, prompting renewed consideration of the degree to which this woman’s presumed status as a free person is decided by her ancestry and to what extent it is a spatially determined condition. Johnson sets up a startling contrast between mobility and containment, in which the woman coming through the doorway (whom we understand to have access to the privileges of whiteness) seemingly

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transgresses both the spatial and social boundaries set up in the work. But she is not the only figure in the painting with the potential to do so. The mirroring presence of the child in the blue dress creates a strong visual connection between her and the women coming through the doorway, raising the possibility that spatial and social mobility might one day be available to the younger generation, even if it is not yet. Although Johnson was an ardent supporter of the Union and, for much of his life, of the Republican Party, the artist avoided military service during the American Civil War by procuring a substitute to take his place in the military draft, a possibility afforded by Johnson’s personal wealth.37 Nonetheless, he trailed Union soldiers to gather material for his artistic practice, following members of the Union’s Army of the Potomac through Virginia in March 1862. An event he claimed to witness during this time inspired a scene that poses a more radical challenge than Negro Life at the South to the prewar paradigm of genre painting that portrayed African American figures as static and marginalized. A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves (Figure 1.6) is the most experimental painting by Johnson—and perhaps by any US artist working up to this time—to depict African American agency and the relationship between mobility and emancipation. There is no record of him ever exhibiting the subject. However, he

Figure 1.6 Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves (recto), c. 1862. Oil on paperboard, 21 15/16 × 26 1/8 in. (55.8 × 66.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Gwendolyn O. L. Conkling, 40.59a-b. Source: Brooklyn Museum, 40.59a_PS9.jpg.

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created three nearly identical versions of the painting, suggesting that there was an audience for the subject—albeit, perhaps, not a public one.38 The paintings each show a family of four—a father, a mother holding a swaddled infant, and a young child— racing across a landscape on a galloping horse. The blur of the horse’s tail against the hazy, formless background evokes the frantic pace with which they flee. A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves takes up a topic of great historical significance but tells the story through the representation of a single family making a daring escape from slavery. Thousands of enslaved people fled to Union lines in 1861 and 1862, when the Union army occupied territory at the boundaries of the Confederacy. According to the historian Eric Foner, the demographics of fugitives from slavery changed as a result of the Union army’s advance. In contrast to the majority of people who fled slavery before the American Civil War, “these runaways [during the war] included large numbers of women, children, and elderly men, as entire families abandoned their plantations, willing . . . to ‘incur any danger’ in their quest for freedom.”39 The art historian Jochen Wierich connects Johnson’s approach to painting history to his past experience creating a small-scale copy of Emanuel Leutze’s monumental 1851 history painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware (Figure 1.7), when Johnson worked in Leutze’s Düsseldorf studio. Wierich writes that in A Ride for Liberty: Johnson literally reduces Washington’s epic grandstanding in a boat to a more modest and human scale, yet maintains the movement of the central group from right to left. The outcome of Washington’s historic crossing was established when Leutze painted the scene; Johnson became witness to a black family’s struggle in the historical present.40

Figure 1.7 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. Oil on canvas, 149 × 255 in. (378.5 × 647.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897, 97.34. Source: Photography © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

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This comparison highlights the ways mobility served as a key framework for picturing significant moments of social and historical transformation within Johnson’s artistic circle. For fugitives from slavery, such as the figures at the center of A Ride for Liberty, escaping geographic boundaries was often a matter of life or death. Johnson’s tightly cropped composition precludes the viewer from knowing if the escaped family is being pursued, a possibility raised by the mother’s backward glance over her shoulder. In the Brooklyn Museum’s version of the painting, the artist portrayed the glinting reflections of Union soldiers’ bayonets at the left of the canvas, visible just under the horse’s snout, a detail that makes clear the family’s destination and implies that the army’s presence makes the daring escape possible. However, whether the fugitives will succeed in reaching Union lines—and what their fate will be if they do—remains unresolved in the image. Johnson inscribed the back of a different version of the painting, now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, with the words, “A veritable incident in the civil war seen by myself at Centreville on the morning of McClellan’s advance towards Manassas,” an event the artist claimed to have witnessed in March 1862. This dating situates the scene at a moment just before the provisions of the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act were overturned, although the power of the law was already eroding quickly. While the outcome of the family’s flight is presumed to be freedom—a notion reinforced by the work’s title—the fate of escapees who reached Union lines had not been officially decided by the spring of 1862. As early as 1861, some Union army commanders, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, had begun welcoming escaped slaves as contraband of war. General George B. McClellan, to whom Johnson refers in the inscription, however, was one of many who routinely returned fugitives from slavery before President Abraham Lincoln issued an order effectively barring the practice.41 Although this history creates an air of uncertainty about the outcome of the family’s flight, the shifting line between slavery and freedom was understood by most Southern African Americans to align with the movements of Union troops, and by 1865 nearly one million African Americans had found refuge by fleeing to army lines.42 Although emancipation after the war enabled greater numbers of African Americans to travel legally and seek new economic opportunities, there still remained considerable social and economic obstacles to uninhibited movement. Beginning in 1865 and 1866, nearly every former slave state passed highly restrictive “Black Codes” that regulated the movements of African Americans as well as their participation in the free labor market. Most notably, a series of vagrancy laws targeted newly emancipated African Americans in the South, depriving them of their rights to mobility and conscripting many into new modes of forced labor.43 Painted at the same time that these Black Codes were passing Southern state legislatures, Johnson’s 1866 painting Fiddling His Way (Figure 1.8) offers a significant critique of contemporaneous racial policies enacted across the South. The painting shows an itinerant African American entrepreneur who earns a living, at least in part, by fiddling for members of a large, white family in their rural home. The red bundle on the floor next to the fiddler’s chair marks him as a traveler, and nineteenth-century critics interpreted the painting as portraying a freedman who had migrated from the South to New England.44 Much as he had done with Negro Life at the South, Johnson reworked the spatial dynamics of the encounter at the heart of a traditional genre subject to comment on changing political, social, and economic relationships in contemporary society.

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Figure 1.8 Eastman Johnson, Fiddling His Way, 1866. Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 × 36 1/2 in. (61.6 × 92.7 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 89.60. Source: Courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.

Fiddling His Way is a creative reimagining of the interaction between a family at home and the wandering musicians who arrive at the door. Johnson undoubtedly would have been familiar with seventeenth-century Dutch examples of the subject such as Jacob Ochtervelt’s painting Street Musicians at the Door (1665; Figure 0.1) or Rembrandt’s etching The Strolling Musicians (c. 1635; Figure 1.9). But Johnson’s setting creates a very different narrative than we find in the Dutch pictures. In both of those cases, the threshold joins the domestic sphere and the outside world in tension but ultimately maintains a physical boundary—and thus social harmony—between the two. It is clear that the rootless visitors will not transgress the bounds of propriety.45 The original source for Fiddling His Way is almost certainly the Scottish painter David Wilkie’s The Blind Fiddler of 1806, a work that was copied by the US genre painter John Lewis Krimmel in 1812 (Figure 1.10) and very widely reproduced.46 The blind itinerant fiddler in Wilkie’s scene, now brought inside the domestic sphere (in contrast to the Dutch examples), becomes the target of ridicule. Almost no one, with the exception of two small children at the center of the composition, actually watches the fiddler perform. The father snaps his fingers, presumably to the beat of the music, to entertain the baby on the mother’s lap. The child at the far right parodies the fiddler by attempting to play a fireplace bellows using a poker for a bow. Krimmel not only copied Wilkie’s version but also created his own variation on the theme, The Quilting Frolic (1813), which substitutes a highly caricatured African American figure

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Figure 1.9 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Strolling Musicians, c. 1635. Etching, image: 5 1/2 × 4 5/8 in. (14 × 11.7 cm), sheet: 5 5/8 × 4 13/16 in. (14.3 × 12.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.7242. Source: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Figure 1.10 John Lewis Krimmel, Blind Fiddler, 1812. Oil on canvas, 16 5/8 × 22 1/6 in. (42.2 × 56 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.81. Source: Photography © Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

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for the white musician in previous iterations of the subject and relegates him to the edge of the composition. Like Wilkie and Krimmel, Johnson situates his itinerant fiddler firmly within the domestic realm, but, unlike his predecessors, he strips the scene of any of its comedic aspects. In contrast to Wilkie’s and Krimmel’s scenes, the fiddler in Johnson’s painting captures the attention of nearly every other figure in the composition. A mother holds a smiling baby at the center, while a girl claps her hands to the fiddler’s music to amuse the infant. The rest of the children appear transfixed by the fiddler as well; the two boys closest to him stare intently at the musician, a young girl abandons her half-eaten apple to watch from the floor, and a young woman holding a broom stops sweeping to take in the performance from the doorway at the right. Even the farmer, seated on a bench next to this young woman and positioned with his body facing the viewer and arms crossed, turns his head to watch the fiddler across the room. The only figure not engrossed in the performance is the elderly woman at the back and to the right who busies herself with work by the hearth. Perhaps she ignores the fiddler because her hearing has weakened with age. Or perhaps these generational distinctions are significant, with the children’s engagement suggesting a more hopeful future for the economically independent African American man, while the grandmother’s indifference calls to mind the past. The rustic cabin door, which remains open to the outdoors in Wilkie’s and Krimmel’s paintings, is securely closed in Johnson’s composition, a detail that minimizes the wandering fiddler’s outsider status. We can see how radically the politics of race and mobility have shifted in Johnson’s work over the course of the American Civil War by comparing the musician in Fiddling His Way with the banjo player in Negro Life at the South. In Fiddling His Way Johnson has retained many of the same formal relationships that structured Negro Life at the South: a musician flanked by an admiring boy, a girl watching from the floor and mother and children dancing at the center, and a woman occupying the doorway at the right. The comparatively static banjo player of Negro Life at the South—treading the line between minstrel stereotype and individualized figure—has given way to the itinerant fiddler, now granted more agency and an expanded social sphere. Johnson also created a version of Fiddling His Way that features a white musician (Figure 1.11). The compositions of the two works are similar, although the version with the white fiddler contains fewer figures. It is also less finished, suggesting, perhaps, that the artist might have painted the canvas with the white fiddler before deciding to substitute an African American figure in the later version. The itinerant fiddler appears to have been, for Johnson, a fluid social type not defined by a particular racial identity and apparently detached from rooted ideals of rural domesticity and yeoman labor. By experimenting with two versions of the same scene, the artist probed the effects of representing whiteness and Blackness. Johnson ultimately seems to have been more interested in his depiction of African American itinerancy, as he chose to exhibit the scene with the African American fiddler in New York City and Paris soon after completing the work.47 But by the late 1860s, Johnson had largely abandoned African American subjects, and Fiddling His Way was among the last works made and exhibited by the artist to explore themes related to African American mobility. Nonetheless, he continued to pursue many of the pictorial strategies that he developed in these Civil War–era paintings in later years, as he turned his attention more overtly to the effects on the domestic sphere of industrialization and a market-based economy.

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Figure 1.11 Eastman Johnson, Fiddling His Way, c. 1866. Oil on artist’s board, 20 7/8 × 24 7/8 in. (53 × 63.2 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund, 1999.8. Source: Photography © Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

Blurring the City/Country Contrast The wake of the Civil War in the United States hastened the growth of urban industrialization, and by the 1870s genre artists turned to depictions of transient figures visiting rural homes to explore the social impact of these economic transformations. The Tramp is Johnson’s most monumental work to address the subject: measuring three and a half feet tall and more than five feet wide, it is much larger than most of the artist’s other genre paintings, including all of the Civil War–era works discussed earlier in this chapter. At the center of the composition, a farmer converses with the tramp through a partially opened red door as a small child, standing next to the farmer, peers out from behind the doorframe to look at the stranger.48 At the left of Johnson’s canvas, one woman leans out of an open first-floor window to study the unexpected visitor, while another, dressed in more fashionable attire, shepherds another child from the yard into the main part of the house. The figure being ushered inside—the only one whose attention has not been captured by the tramp—enters the home clutching a toy sailboat. This detail, as well as the miniature sailboats floating on the top of an open barrel to the right of the red door, suggests that the tramp’s arrival abruptly interrupted the children’s play. The tramp’s fellow traveler, a youth clad in a dark shirt and brimmed hat, casually leans against a fencepost located to the right of and behind the

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house where the tidy picket fence demarcating the domestic property meets the split rail fence running along the grassy path. Waiting there, the boy remains out of sight from all of the other figures in the painting; only the geese waddling past him seem to know of his presence. The peacocks have gone to roost at the top of a tall tree at the far right, and, visible through the tree branches, glowing shades of yellow illuminate the sky. It is dusk, and the tramp and his young protégé are almost certainly in search of a meal or a place to pass the night. When Johnson showed The Tramp at the National Academy of Design’s annual spring exhibition in 1877, a critic from the New-York Tribune, likely Clarence Cook, noted the painting’s appeal to the exhibition’s visitors, observing that the canvas “always has its little circle of spectators” gathered around it and describing the work as “so admirable in execution that we are reconciled to the acceptance of an unsavory ‘dead beat’ as the central figure.”49 By characterizing the central figure as a “dead beat,” this critic echoed the prevailing attitude toward tramps expressed in the popular press during the period. Some writers claimed that the experience of military life during the American Civil War had spurred a rise in tramping during the 1870s, alleging that veterans who had become accustomed to living off the generosity of strangers while traveling long distances during the war continued these practices after the conflict ended.50 Scientists in the 1870s attempted to characterize tramps’ mobility as the result of a pathological desire to wander, a pseudo-medical condition called “wanderlust” or “dromomania.”51 For many, the tramp symbolized unchecked mobility as a threat to domesticity and also became a flash point for contemporary debates about labor and immigration. One article published in the National Republican (a Washington, DC-based newspaper that likely sought to distance the effects of the recent 1873 financial panic from Republican economic policies) traced the origin of the modern “professional tramp” to the “Wandering Jew,” while nativists connected the rise of tramping to the inflow of millions of immigrants from northern and western Europe during the middle of the century.52 The oft-repeated assertion by anti-immigrant factions that immigrants composed the majority of the tramp population helped fuel fears that tramps would spread incendiary ideas and tactics. This notion took root especially after the widespread, violent labor strikes in 1877, when nativists, looking to assign blame for the unrest, cast the tramp as “a subversive, a carrier of alien ideas.”53 When Johnson painted his canvas, tramps were potent cultural symbols in the United States of modern mobility’s most disquieting associations. Images of tramps and other rootless wanderers were unlikely to attract interested buyers or garner praise from critics who believed art should uplift viewers’ moral sensibilities. The Tramp received mixed reviews from critics, particularly when Johnson presented it at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in the spring of 1877. The most negative analyses tended to focus on the painting’s subject matter. An author from the Art Journal, for example, declared that “the subject is not one amenable to art” and reproached Johnson for not selecting a “story to tell or character to portray that is calculated to take strong hold of human sympathies.”54 Despite the attention— both positive and negative—that the painting received from critics, it failed to attract a purchaser. After the spring exhibition season in New York, the artist sent the canvas on its own “tramp” across the country in search of a buyer, exhibiting the work at Martin O’Brien’s gallery in Chicago that summer and at the Morris, Schwab & Co. gallery in San Francisco that fall. The Tramp remained unsold when it appeared at the Art Museum of the St. Louis Exposition in the fall of 1878.55 The painting eventually made its way into

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the collection of Roswell Pettibone Flower sometime before Flower’s death in 1899. While Flower’s involvement in business and politics is well documented, his activities as an art collector—including when and how he acquired The Tramp—remain largely unknown. Flower, who made his fortune by managing investments during turbulent economic cycles, might have viewed The Tramp as a reminder of the precariousness of his success in a modern market economy or, conversely, of his superiority in weathering— even profiting from—economic disturbances. More specifically, as an individual heavily involved in the development of the railroad industry, Flower might have been intrigued by Johnson’s painting because tramps were so closely associated with railways in contemporary discourse.56 Perhaps Johnson’s interest in depicting the subject was piqued by his own observations of the development of the island of Nantucket, where the artist maintained a home and the studio where he painted The Tramp.57 A devastating fire in 1846 as well as the decline of the whaling industry in the 1850s prompted Nantucket residents to remake their local economy around tourism, and, as early as 1855, the community gathered to discuss the possibility of marketing the island as a summer retreat. Islanders partnered with the Old Colony Railroad and the Island Home ferry to advertise Nantucket as a destination for urban tourists. By the 1870s, their efforts had blossomed into a robust industry on the island with the establishment of tourist lodging, transportation hubs, and leisure activities like fishing and sailing.58 Johnson clearly hoped to benefit personally from tourism to Nantucket. Between 1871 and 1903, the artist and his wife made at least 63 real-estate transactions on the island, often purchasing large tracts of land “intended for subdivision and development.” Most of the Johnsons’ investments on Nantucket proved unsuccessful.59 The press also touted the artist’s presence on the island as a potential draw for tourists, although it is not known to what extent Johnson encouraged this publicity. An 1875 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article includes an illustration of the artist working in his Nantucket studio (Figure 1.12). Johnson is shown standing at his easel, palette in hand, with his back to the viewer. The artist was not known for painting seascapes, but the Harper’s illustration pictures Johnson looking out his window as if studying the sailboats floating on the sea and gulls flying overhead, establishing a strong visual link between the artist and Nantucket’s geography. The public connection between the island and the artist persisted for many years, and, as late as 1885, The Century also published a description and illustration of Johnson’s Nantucket studio.60 Despite his role in Nantucket’s development, however, Johnson began to complain about the island’s increasing popularity with urbanites just a few years after he moved there. In 1876, the year he began work on The Tramp, Johnson wrote to his longtime friend and fellow artist Jervis McEntee: We are seeing rather more friends here this season than usual. In fact, it is getting a little too lively for work I am afraid. When Society gets to Nantucket I shall leave, altho. I confess it is very pleasant to see them.61 A few years later, it seems as if Johnson’s fears had been realized. In 1881, Johnson grumbled about the steady stream of tourists and speculative investment on the island: This is no longer such a good place to work in as formerly. This summer there has been a throng of people—a good many New Yorkers and there are various excitements, land speculations & c. They have a railroad across the island.62

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Figure 1.12 Eastman Johnson’s Studio, Nantucket. Wood engraving. From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1875, 65.

He repeated similar complaints the following year.63 Johnson clearly felt conflicted about Nantucket, simultaneously wishing it to be an isolated and tranquil community, while also investing heavily in its increased accessibility and growth. There is a wider pattern discernible in Johnson’s personal correspondence of the artist expressing competing desires to reside in the city and the countryside. As early as 1862, upon returning to New York from rural Maine, Johnson wrote to McEntee about his relief to be back in the city: I got terribly tired of the place I was in & the people. . . . You may be sure that Pork as a steady diet for three months is not favorable to art. I am lucky to be able to do more than grunt. The city appears delightful. Plug hats are soothing to the eyes. Napkins, butter knives, & salt spoons, bring a tear to the same organ. There is a rapture in beefsteaks and chops. The rumbling of omnibuses on the stone pavement is an anthem to mine ear. Bill posters and lamp lighters I greet with a becoming smile & upon the small rag-muffins as they swear at Hopscotch & other metropolitan games goes forth my benediction. The good rank gutters are fragrant and familiar, the daily papers sociable and authentic. Beggars are pleasant people. . . . It would seem that the trials I have endured, owing to the peculiarities of diet & the somewhat limited social privileges for which that locality is truly remarkable & which are probably inevitably incidental to the pristine character & condition of the place & people of my native precincts have done me

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Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings good service in qualifying the natural asperities of my disposition, & in having sent me home a wiser & a better man, & I take the liberty to believe that I am now about as amiable & benignant a member of Society as there is agoing. . . . I recommend that every citizen, be compelled to go to the country three months on pork, 30 miles from a railroad & no daily papers. The nett [sic] result in contentment & suppression of lawyers can’t be estimated. My only apprehension is that, in my own case, the influence may be but temporary & that by the time you get back I shall be as sour as ever.64

Although Johnson describes the Maine countryside and people as “pristine,” he was nevertheless thankful to return to the convenience and variety available in New York City. While he valued the remoteness of the country and credited his time there with rejuvenating him enough to cope with everyday urban annoyances, he expressed great pleasure in returning to the city’s transportation infrastructure, better access to newspapers, and a variety of diet. A native of these very Maine woods, the artist nonetheless grew restless with rural surroundings quickly. Nearly two decades later, Johnson wrote to McEntee about wanting to spend the winter on the island of Nantucket rather than travel back to the city. Johnson acknowledged that by spending the winter and spring in New York City, he would be able to “keep in the whirl” rather than “be left behind” professionally; he felt it was important to remain active in artist societies, to show work at the annual exhibitions, and to court lucrative patrons. At the same time, however, Johnson yearned to remain on Nantucket because he found life there “peaceful and satisfactory,” although he noted, “it might take a different color if we were never to go to New York again.”65 Johnson only seemed able to appreciate the relative advantages of one place by spending time in another. The artist’s desire to maintain multiple residences speaks to a number of demographic and economic transformations during the period. First, the rapid growth of urban populations made cities crowded—and sometimes unpleasant and even dangerous—places to live. Johnson’s frequent shuttling between city and country helped the artist tolerate the irritating aspects of living in the city by knowing that he would soon be leaving for the country (and vice versa). Second, as a financially successful artist, Johnson had the means and flexibility to divide his life between multiple residences, and he utilized the benefits of relocation and travel to advance his career. His experiences were not wholly unusual for an artist of his stature during the second half of the nineteenth century; it became common for artists to spend several months each year sketching in the countryside, and the press regularly reported artists’ travels. One writer for the Charleston Mercury observed at the close of the 1860 exhibition season in New York that artists who could afford to leave the city would “soon be scattered . . . among the charming nooks of our romantic northern scenery, or the broad prairies, or the magnificent sea coast scenery and the luxuriant vegetation of the South—in quest of subjects.”66 Johnson enjoyed accompanying fellow artists on sketching trips to the mountains. Remaining in New York City during the summer of 1867 (in part to have a skylight in his studio replaced), Johnson lamented to McEntee, who was painting in the mountains at the time, “I wish I could only rove around as other painters do.”67 And finally, periodic changes to his surroundings and routine undoubtedly helped keep the artist’s perceptions fresh. Johnson relocated so frequently, in part, to alleviate boredom and seek new wells of

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artistic inspiration. In an 1870 letter to McEntee, Johnson wrote from New York of his desire to visit the sea: I have got the sea-air notion into my head partly because. . . , feeling my own liberty somewhat restricted this season for the first time, the heat tells on me, & I think it would be favorable for the work.68 Summering by the ocean, he hoped, might restore his lost sense of “liberty” and “be favorable for the work,” inspiring a greater variety of subject matter. Travel was a privilege available primarily to the upper classes, but it also became associated with notions of the free-spirited modern artist as much as, if not more than, any other segment of the population. Understanding Johnson’s conflicted feelings about city and country, and the changes he witnessed on Nantucket during the 1870s, sheds light on the themes the artist explored in The Tramp and another painting that he executed around the same time in his Nantucket studio, a presently unlocated canvas titled City People in Country Quarters. Period descriptions report that the latter painting depicted a city family gathered in the interior of a rural farmhouse, with a fashionably dressed woman (the mother/wife of the family) bending over the kitchen stove. However, these various descriptions disagree about the narrative portrayed in the work, specifically whether it is the urbanites who help the country family use the cookstove or vice versa. An early account provided by a writer for the Hartford Daily Courant, who visited Johnson’s Nantucket studio during the summer of 1876 while Johnson was still working on this canvas and The Tramp, describes City People in Country Quarters as follows: The story . . . is the trials of a city family in a farm-house. . . . The family is having a “row” with the kitchen stove and seem to be baffled entirely. The husband and father, with coat off, stands in an attitude and wears an expression of despair at having exhausted unsuccessfully all his brains in the effort to press the villainous stove into service for the preparation of his dinner, while the wife and mother, dressed in the perfection of the present mode, is bent over the stove; a half-grown son, stylishly dressed, leaning against the wall, looks on in cold blood and smokes his pipe, and members of the farmer’s family are wondering what the end will be.69 The critic describes the “despair” and frustration felt by urban dwellers while struggling with an outmoded country stove, as the farmer’s family looks on with anticipation at the city family’s clash with the “villainous” device. Johnson debuted the work in December 1876 at an exhibition at the Century Association in New York City. He also exhibited the canvas at the Century Association in February 1877 and alongside The Tramp at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition that spring. It seems that he displayed the painting under a new title, Trials of City People With a Country Cooking Stove, at the 1877 Louisville Industrial Exposition and again at the 7th Exhibition of the Utica Art Association in 1879.70 This change in title reinforces the description of the narrative given by the Hartford Daily Courant commentator, who presumably had discussed the narrative with the artist during his visit to the Nantucket studio. A catalogue published in conjunction with the 1877 National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition commented on the presumed familiarity of the

40 Eastman Johnson’s Genre Paintings painting’s subject matter: “And on the right of the door a picture which must appeal to the experience of many people who go from their convenient town quarters to the country.”71 Curiously, however, the 1907 sale catalogue of work that remained in Johnson’s studio at the time of his death describes the dynamics of the encounter in reverse: A city family, who evidently have [sic] taken up their quarters for the season in a farmhouse, are making the best of their surroundings. The kitchen stove, which has been temporarily installed near the old fireplace, has apparently failed to draw, and the lady from the city, dressed in a loose blue wrapper, has been summoned by the farmer to give him the benefit of her experience. She leans over the stove and simply opens the damper, thus proving her superior knowledge. Her husband and children are seen in the doorway of an adjoining room, and the mother is in earnest conversation with the farmer’s wife.72 According to this text, it is the country family in Johnson’s painting that struggles to adjust to modern conveniences (a stove, rather than a fireplace) and must rely on the city family’s “superior knowledge” in order to adapt to their increasingly modern way of life. The woman’s “loose blue wrapper” was an inexpensive cotton morning dress popular in the 1870s that was fashionable (although casual) and mass-produced.73 In this account, the urbanites’ and kitchen stove’s presence in the rural home mark modernity’s undeniable arrival in the countryside; it suggests the homogenization of household commodities (and the implied homogenization of lifestyle) across urban and rural spheres in the age of industrial production. As the scholar Priscilla J. Brewer has argued, the shift from fireplace to mass-produced cookstove constituted a key technological change in nineteenth-century domestic space, one that elicited ambivalence and divided public opinion between those who celebrated the shift as an industrial advancement and modern convenience and those who mourned the widespread adoption of the appliance as a symbol of the breakdown of the domestic sphere.74 The conflicting descriptions of Johnson’s painting imply that the narrative was sufficiently ambiguous to cause confusion over which figures in the work have the “superior knowledge” required to operate the stove, leaving open the question of which direction Johnson intended to level his critique— at the backwardness of the farmer’s family or at the urbanites’ loss of traditional domestic knowledge. Some critics thought Johnson failed to strike a balance between subject matter, composition, and tone that would please contemporary viewers, writing, “[Johnson’s] ‘City People in Country Quarters,’ does not possess humor enough to atone for a rather hackneyed subject, and a rather mediocre composition.”75 Poking fun at unsophisticated country cousins was a common strategy in early nineteenth-century genre painting, and artists like Mount and Edmonds were often overtly didactic in their subject matter and derived comedic value by deriding the lower classes. The critic evidently expected Johnson to follow in this vein, unless the first descriptions of the painting more accurately characterize the work’s intended narrative, in which case the humorous mocking of the city family’s frustration would be a less common genre strategy. Because the painting’s whereabouts are unknown, one cannot assess the artfulness of Johnson’s composition or its humor (though he was not known for creating humorous works). Objections to the subject matter of City People in Country Quarters may also

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have stemmed from larger concerns expressed by contemporary commentators about the effects of locomotion in the United States, especially the uneasy meeting of traditional and contemporary ways of life in communities previously thought to be outside the bounds of modernization.

Industrial Capitalism’s Intrusions Johnson took up related themes in The Tramp but centered that painting’s narrative on a subject that had recently grabbed national attention. One reviewer described the work as “a glimpse of serene country life momentarily disturbed by the tramp, who is more likely to be a ruffian than an angel in disguise.”76 In the midst of the so-called tramp menace, some middle-class Americans displaced their anxiety about larger social and economic transformations and the rapidity with which they spread on to the social type of the wandering tramp. The tramp’s rejection of labor and his geographic mobility were defining characteristics, at least according to commentators who sought to obscure the relationship between the rise in tramping and recent economic policy. In 1876, the year before Johnson debuted his painting, one newspaper described tramps as “working hard to shirk work, making weary pilgrimages all over the land, hobbling on through life with nothing to worry them.”77 As the historian Kenneth L. Kusmer argues, the vagrant came to symbolize “the beginning of the breakdown of community-centered life and the growing intrusion into its domain of the forces of a large-scale industrial capitalism, especially as represented by the railroad.”78 The pictorial press often pictured this “growing intrusion” through scenes of confrontation between tramps and rural families. Newspaper accounts characterized vagabonds as harbingers of violence and destruction. A New York Times article in 1876 proclaimed, for example, “A small army of tramps is marching through Saratoga County, and wherever a squad appears some serious crime is certain to follow.” The author describes a rash of offenses blamed on the tramps’ sudden appearance in the community, including robberies, arson, and physical assaults on women. However, such claims were often exaggerated, and tramps rarely attacked private civilians or their residences.79 Nonetheless, depictions of tramps barging into private homes and threatening women and children were pervasive in mainstream reporting during the period, even if such fears were largely unfounded. A full-page wood engraving by Alfred Kappes published in Harper’s Weekly in 1876 (Figure 1.13) exemplifies the vilification of tramps in the mainstream illustrated press.80 The image appears in conjunction with a short article that reports an increase in the nation’s tramp population. Echoing the tenor of much of the newspaper coverage of the topic, the author argues that the tramps “are no longer simply traveling beggars, but thieves and robbers, without respect for persons or property.” Because “the law appears to be almost helpless against them,” according to the author, “farmers and others who are the victims of outrage on the part of these peregrinating scoundrels are frequently obliged to arm themselves in their own defense.”81 The accompanying illustration, like Johnson’s painting, focuses on the encounter between the uninvited visitor and a rural family at home. Unlike Johnson’s work, however, the Harper’s Weekly image situates the conflict within the family’s abode. The tramp occupies an open doorway at the left of the composition. His torn coat, scruffy whiskers, and right hand, extended in the gesture of begging, clearly signal his marginalized

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Figure 1.13 Alfred Kappes, The Tramp. Wood engraving. From Harper’s Weekly, September 2, 1876, 720. Source: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

status. Despite the seeming humility of this gesture, the Harper’s engraving presents a far more ominous scene than we find in Johnson’s painting. Johnson’s tramp shows restraint, conversing with the farmer from outside, through the open doorway. In Kappes’s illustration, by contrast, the tramp transgresses the threshold to the home without invitation and comes face to face with a startled mother and frightened child. Only a small, snarling dog stands between its mistress and the tramp, issuing the stranger a warning to keep a safe distance. By setting the scene within the home and suggesting that the woman and child are alone, Kappes deliberately creates a sense of anxiety in the work. Yet Kappes’s engraving mitigates the tramp’s potential threat. A male farmer and child are visible through the open doorway, and their proximity implies the imminent rescue of the family members inside the home. Kappes also carefully contains the tramp’s presence within the outline of the open door; even the intruder’s outstretched hand does not cross the vertical plane of the door’s edge. However, the article instructs the viewer to interpret the tramp’s self-control as an indication of cowardice rather than submissiveness: Our engraving . . . shows us the alarm and danger to which women and children are frequently subjected by these vagabonds. Fortunately in this case rescue is at hand; for the tramps, who are only valorous when they have to contend with

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weakness, never fail to assume the humility of a suffering mendicant when confronted by the muscles of a sturdy yeoman.82 The illustration and article in Harper’s present an unambiguous message to readers: while the wandering beggar may pose a temporary threat to rooted and self-sufficient Americans (as typified by the farmer and his family), the tramp is ultimately no match for their vigilance and fortitude. Johnson’s painting includes many iconographic and narrative elements readily recognizable from coverage of the tramp scare in the illustrated press. However, the artist reworked the familiar theme in a new way, creating a painting more multifaceted than many of its late nineteenth-century critics acknowledged. The tramp’s appearance in the countryside served as a reminder that even the most remote communities remained within reach of the urban industrial world in an increasingly mobile society. Much as he did in City People in Country Quarters, Johnson featured in The Tramp the differing responses of urban and rural families in a farmhouse to a specific—albeit quite different—disturbance. Many period commentators noted the diverse reactions of the various figures in the scene to the tramp’s arrival, differentiating some of those figures as having city origins and others as being members of the farmer’s family. For example, F. A. Eastman, writing for the Chicago Daily Tribune, praised the artist’s portrayal of a “farmer, his wife, a city lady and little girl.” Another critic distinguished between “the searching inquiry of the inmates of the house who come to the door” and “the retreating of the city mother with her children.”83 The tramp in Johnson’s painting seems to inspire not only alarm but also some measure of curiosity. While most of the figures withdraw into the safety of the home, some (especially the woman in the window and the child in the red doorway) also peer out from the confines of their domestic space inquisitively. By indicating both aspects of the group’s response—alarm and curiosity—Johnson further muddies any clear narrative interpretation of the work.84 Perhaps Johnson expected the viewer to interpret the fear of the city figures, who hurry inside at the left of the canvas, as evidence of their greater familiarity with the perceived tramp threat from their experiences of urban life, whereas the curiosity of the country family suggests its members’ comparative naiveté at a relatively recent arrival of tramps in the rural milieu. Kusmer argues that while homelessness had long been considered a primarily urban problem, “[t]he increased mobility of the homeless, who after 1870 were as likely to travel by train as on foot, potentially brought the specter of homelessness to the doorstep of every family in the country.”85 Will the inhabitants hide inside and turn the tramp away, or will the farmer take pity on the wanderer and invite him in? Is the tramp genuinely in need, or is his supplication only a ruse masking criminal intentions? Rather than resolving the narrative conflict, The Tramp dwells instead in the uncomfortable tension created by the vagrant’s presence at the rural home. The Tramp continues the artist’s Civil War–era experiments with using pictorial space as a formal and narrative device in genre paintings concerned with the instability of social identities and hierarchies during the period. The tramp’s arrival at the rural family’s home functions as an allegory of the convergence of seemingly distinct spheres in a modern and increasingly mobile world; his presence in the scene invites the era’s tumultuous social and economic realities into a home space no longer conceived of as a refuge from modernity. Johnson artfully arranged the painting’s composition to

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heighten this sense of permeability. The painting signals the artist’s continued interest in using matters of space and locomotion to investigate popular anxieties about changing social boundaries. In The Tramp, as in Negro Life at the South, figures cluster around open spaces—doorways, windows, and gateways—where they stand poised between realms. Some contemporary critics noticed this aspect of the painting too. Eastman complained that Johnson obscured too many figures behind partially open windows and doors: [T]he farmer stands half concealed by a half-closed door,—which he is ready to close,—the housewife is partly seen just inside a partly-shut window, who looks as if momently expecting a savage knife to flash in the light of the declining sun.86 The critic focuses on the narrative explanation for the figures’ positions—they linger near windows and doors because they fear the tramp and want to flee inside. In addition to their narrative significance, however, the open windows and doors in The Tramp suggest Johnson’s return to issues of mobility and containment. They mark sites of tension between the unrestricted spaces of the tramps’ wandering and the family’s more confined domain, but they also point to the likelihood that the threats of industrial capitalism (as embodied by the tramp) will forever change the character of the yeoman’s paradise against which the encounter unfolds. With The Tramp, Johnson revisits the backyard motif that stages Negro Life at the South to explore a new set of demographic and economic changes. In both paintings, figures peer out of vine-covered dwellings through open windows and doors to look toward the central figures in the yard. In particular, the farmer leaning out of the red door to converse with the tramp visually echoes the woman emerging through the open doorway at the far right in Negro Life at the South and the young girl in the blue dress who observes the woman’s entry. Johnson very likely had Negro Life at the South in mind when he began work on The Tramp. The artist had recently returned to the earlier canvas, when, sometime in the early 1870s, he made a small copy of it (Figure 1.14), most likely to serve as the basis for a chromolithographic reproduction. Indeed, a chromolithograph was created by the firm Bencke and Scott and published under the title My Old Kentucky Home to coincide with the exhibition of the original painting at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.87 Johnson also seems to have kept a detailed study of the setting of Negro Life at the South—depicted without any of the painting’s figures—in his New York City studio, suggesting the artist’s enduring interest in its spatial configuration. As shown in a photograph of his studio published at the time of the artist’s death in 1906 (Figure 1.15), the architectural study was centrally placed (just to the left of a version of A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves) and one of the few framed works on a wall covered with oil sketches for various genre paintings and portraits by the artist. The fact that Johnson created a copy of Negro Life at the South in the 1870s and kept studies of the yard in his studio perhaps makes the striking visual parallels between The Tramp and his 1859 canvas less surprising. The Tramp, like Negro Life at the South, focuses on an enclosed yard, yet it offers a more sweeping view of the surrounding landscape that draws attention to the tramps’ implied traversing of the country lane that recedes into the distance at the right. If, as I have been arguing, the work is fundamentally about the arrival of a symbol of modern rootlessness (the tramp) into a scene of domestic rootedness (the rural family

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Figure 1.14 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, c. 1870. Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 × 24 1/8 in. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Fine Art Collectors with leadership gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Henry Schwob, Mr. and Mrs. Terry Stent, Mr. and Mrs. Austin P. Kelley, Mr. and Mrs. John L. Huber, Dr. and Mrs. Gerald M. Stapleton, Mr. and Mrs. Noel Wadsworth, and the Collections Council Acquisition Fund, and funds from the Winter Family Foundation, and through prior acquisitions, 1997.187. Source: Photo courtesy of the High Museum of Art.

Figure 1.15 A Glimpse of Mr. Johnson’s Studio. From Edgar French, “An American Portrait Painter of Three Epochs,” World’s Work 13 (1906), 8317.

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at home), positioning the figures in liminal spaces invites the viewer to consider to what extent the traditionally insular domestic realm will yield to or resist the tramp’s intrusion. The complexity with which The Tramp engages themes of geographic mobility is elegantly distilled in the water-filled wooden barrel positioned on the side of the open doorway opposite the tramp and equidistant from this figure and his youthful companion (Figure 1.16). On the one hand, the miniature vessels floating on the surface of the water evoke themes of transportation. On the other, like the tramp who continuously wanders the open road, the sailboats float in perpetual movement although the top rim of the barrel effectively stifles their progress. These symbols of travel appear at first glance to be restricted or at least securely contained. Another detail in the painting, however, suggests otherwise. One toy boat finds its way into the family’s home, clasped under the arm of the small child at the left of the painting (Figure 1.17). The boat’s imminent entry into the house is further evidence of Johnson’s innovative approach to the subject of the tramp and brings to the fore his critics’ concerns: the painting marks an ambitious attempt to represent the disappearing line between the self-contained, traditional family home and the transformational forces of modern mobility. As with Johnson’s observations of Nantucket, the rural home is no longer a haven from the social changes wrought by modernization. Indeed, in The Tramp, the two become inseparable. For an artist who felt deeply conflicted about the transformations he witnessed from his studio in Nantucket, though, the ubiquitous tramp offered a compelling—and exceedingly topical—subject through which to explore the growing encroachment of urban industrialism into all spheres of modern life. The curiosity performed by some of the figures in Johnson’s painting raises the possibility of another intriguing connection to Johnson’s experiences of mobility and

Figure 1.16 Eastman Johnson, The Tramp (detail).

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Figure 1.17 Eastman Johnson, The Tramp (detail).

modernity on Nantucket. It is tempting to speculate that Fred Parker, an eccentric, longtime Nantucket resident, might have inspired Johnson’s representation of the tramp at the cottage doorway. Dubbed the “Hermit of Quidnet” by the contemporary press, Parker lived an isolated life in a one-room dwelling on the far east end of Nantucket and became a tourist attraction in his own right. Traveling journalists frequently published their perceptions of this “old tramp,” as one commentator from the Boston Daily Advertiser described him, in narrative accounts of visiting the island. Henry M. Baird, writing for Scribner’s Monthly, revealed how Parker used the tourists’ visits to his advantage: His sole diversion is reading; his means of subsistence the scanty product of his fishing, eked out by the few copper coins which he obtains from visitors on the plea of using the pieces of metal to nail to the floor of his cabin and form the initials of their names.88 Parker was also the subject of several stereographs that were part of a series of Nantucket views published by Josiah Freeman in the mid-1870s. One, titled The Hermit of Quidnet (Figure 1.18), shows Parker in profile, reading while seated in a rocking chair in front of his cabin. The man’s long, overgrown beard and floppy hat are strikingly similar to those worn by Johnson’s tramp. Even the rustic empty barrels strewn about Parker’s yard in the stereograph echo the barrel at the right of Johnson’s canvas. Although Parker was a hermit rather than a tramp (despite one journalist’s description of him as such), it is tempting to speculate that he might have inspired the artist’s painting or even posed for Johnson. Perhaps, in an indirect way, Johnson even

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Figure 1.18 Josiah Freeman, The Hermit of Quidnet, c. 1875. Stereograph, albumen silver print card mount. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef, 84.XC.979.3431. Source: Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

identified with Parker, because both of their residences were tourist destinations on the island and often described in the same articles.89 If Johnson did in fact model his tramp after Parker, the painting could also be read as a playful reversal of the incursion pictured in The Tramp. With the growth of the tourism industry on Nantucket, and in light of Johnson’s complaints about the island’s development, it is the urban tourist—not Parker (nor the tramp)—who becomes the trespasser. Looking to Johnson’s imagery helps us to understand the complex politics of mobility and containment during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The topic captivated the imaginations of genre artists seeking new ways to connect with audiences in the years surrounding the American Civil War, and Johnson was at the forefront of this emerging paradigm by examining the shifting spatial and racial geographies of the era. Many of his paintings from the 1850s and 1860s utilize threshold spaces to make visible the tension between mobility and containment that structured contemporary discourses about the social and political status of African Americans at mid-century. Johnson’s compositions also break down divisions between “insiders” and “outsiders” in the scene, further underscoring the spatial dimensions of identity and belonging during the period. Space no longer clearly divides and categorizes figures, as it did in earlier American and European traditions. Rather, blurring the boundaries between mobility and containment enabled Johnson to explore the negotiation of identities during a period of tremendous flux. The similarities between Negro Life at the South and The Tramp—canvases painted nearly two decades apart—make clear Johnson’s long-standing interest in these themes (even as the subjects used to frame them shifted substantially) and in the use of liminal spaces as a way to investigate them through form. Attention to this aspect of Johnson’s oeuvre alters our understanding of Johnson’s artistic practice. Although he certainly

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painted nostalgic and sentimental rural home scenes—works that sold well and contributed to his financial success—he also responded to contemporary forces.90 He did so not by looking back to escape them but by updating traditional genre motifs to shed light on them. Such canvases present the viewer with unresolved or ambiguous narratives that, with their probing liminality, question the boundedness of domestic space and the fixity of identity.

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter were published previously in the article by Lacey Baradel, “Geographic Mobility and Domesticity in Eastman Johnson’s The Tramp,” American Art 28, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 26–49. © 2014 by Smithsonian Institution. I am grateful for permission to republish this material and would like to extend my gratitude to the journal’s editors and anonymous readers who made many helpful suggestions during the preparation of the article manuscript. John Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, DC,” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 1 (March 1988): 79–80; and Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012), 186. 2. The Home Journal advertised that Negro Life at the South was “admirably photographed by Rintoul and Rockwood.” “The Old Kentucky Home,” Home Journal (August 27, 1859); qtd. in Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South,” 70. Davis reports that no examples of these early photographic reproductions have been found (89n17). 3. At least three other US genre painters debuted paintings of tramps before Johnson. In 1876, James Wells Champney exhibited an oil painting entitled The Tramp (unlocated) at the Boston Art Club (January 12–February 5). See Janice H. Chadbourne, Karl Gabosh, and Charles O. Vogel, eds., The Boston Art Club: Exhibition Record, 1873–1909 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1991), 109. Champney showed a work with the same title at the 1877 National Academy of Design annual exhibition. Curiously, while Johnson’s painting attracted a great deal of commentary at this exhibition, I have not been able to find any published description of Champney’s work. The illustrated exhibition catalogue for the 1877 National Academy of Design exhibition lists Champney’s painting as for sale with an asking price of $150. See National Academy of Design, Illustrated Catalogue of the FiftySecond Annual Exhibition, 1877 (New York: E. Wells Sackett & Bro., 1877), 34. Thomas Satterwhite Noble displayed a painting titled The Tramp (unlocated) in the Art Annex of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. John Sartain, the Centennial’s Art Bureau Chief, bypassed the selection jury and admitted the painting into the exhibition directly. Little else is known about Noble’s painting, but I have found one review that mentions it: “ ‘The Tramp’ is one of the strongest paintings in the annex. It is rude and hard, of course, as is the tramp-life, but the work is boldly and powerfully done, and the Exhibition would have lacked one of its peculiar and striking features if this picture had not been admitted.” “Centennial Exposition Memoranda,” Potter’s American Monthly 7, no. 59 (November 1876): 399. Johnson might have seen Noble’s canvas when he visited the Centennial Exhibition. William Holbrook Beard’s painting Kicked Out; No Money; No Friends, which reportedly depicted a tramp cast out from an inn during a storm, was put up for sale by the artist at Miner’s Art Galleries in New York City in May 1876. “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, May 29, 1876, 4. For a description of Beard’s painting, see A., “The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association’s Exhibition. II. (Continued),” The American Architect and Building News 4, no. 149 (November 2, 1878): 149. 4. While the noun “tramp” became common in the 1870s, the term was used much earlier as a verb to define “various forms of movement,” including “the act of marching long distances during the Civil War.” See Tim Cresswell, “Making Up the Tramp: Toward a Critical Geosophy,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 183n7. A homeless unemployed person who wandered became a new legal category when, beginning in 1876, state lawmakers condemned the tramp’s unchecked, directionless

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mobility by passing a series of “Tramp Laws” to supplement existing anti-vagrancy statutes. Cresswell, “Making Up the Tramp,” 170–73, 175. The term “homeless,” as I use it here, appears very infrequently in written accounts of homelessness from the period in which Johnson painted and exhibited The Tramp. More often, contemporaries used terms like “tramp,” “vagrant,” and “wandering poor” to describe the homeless unemployed. 5. Johnson traveled to Superior, Wisconsin, for two lengthy trips to visit his sister Sarah and brother Reuben in 1856 and 1857. John B. Grant, Jr., “An Analysis of the Paintings and Drawings by Eastman Johnson at the St. Louis County Historical Society” (master’s thesis, University of Minnesota, 1960), 6; and “Arrivals,” Superior Chronicle, May 6, 1856, 2. The land upon which Superior was built was ceded by the Ojibwe as part of the La Pointe treaty signed on September 30, 1854, which also led to the removal of local Ojibwe to segregated land reservations. For more background on the founding of Superior, see Louise Phelps Kellogg, “The Rise and Fall of Old Superior,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 24, no. 1 (September 1940): 4, 6–7. Johnson purchased real estate in Superior during this period and did not fully divest himself of the property until the 1880s. According to the papers of John A. Bardon, Johnson returned to Wisconsin in the early 1880s to “[close] up some land transactions.” Quoted in Bertha Heilbron, “A Pioneer Artist on Lake Superior,” Minnesota History 21 (June 1940): 154. 6. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume 2: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 217. 7. Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 59; and Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 240. 8. Johnson’s Vader Tom en Evangeline, naar aanleiding van “Uncle Tom’s Cabine,” van Ms. Beecher Stowe appears as number 260 in the exhibition catalogue. Tentoonstelling van Schilder en Kunstwerken van Levende Meesters: ’S Gravenhage: 1853 (The Hague: H. S. J. de Groot, 1853), 29. 9. Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 27. 10. “De’s Gravenhaagsche Tentoonstelling: Tweede Bezoek,” Nieuwe Amsterdamsiche Courant: Algemeen Handelsblad, no. 6702 (June 3, 1853): 2; author’s translation. Marijke Huisman writes that the first edition of the Kruseman Dutch translation sold out of the initial print run of 11,000 copies “almost immediately” (at a time when usual print runs for novels in the Netherlands comprised 3,000 copies) and was soon followed by two reprints and the publication of new, cheaper editions of the novel. The publisher claimed that he sold at least 18,000 copies of the novel within the first four years of publication. According to Huisman, the first review of the novel in the Dutch press appeared in the January 19, 1853, issue of De Morgenster. Weekblad ter bevordering van het levend christendom. Marijke Huisman, Verhalen van Vrijheid: Autobiografieën van Slaven in Transnationaal Perspectief, 1789–2013 (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 2015), 60–61. J. G. Riewald and J. Bakker note that the first translation of Stowe’s text to be published in the Netherlands actually appeared the previous year under the title De Hut van Onkel Tom: Eene Slavengeschiedenis (Ghent: Hoste, 1852). J. G. Riewald and J. Bakker, The Critical Reception of American Literature in the Netherlands, 1824–1900: A Documentary Conspectus from Contemporary Periodicals (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), 229. For more on the reception of Stowe’s writing in the Netherlands, see Riewald and Bakker, The Critical Reception of American Literature in the Netherlands, 1824–1900, 10–11 and 229–69. An advertisement for the theatrical performance appears in Dagblad van Zuidholland en’s Gravenhage, no. 54, May 6, 1853, 3. 11. After the publication of the Dutch translation of Stowe’s novel, the Dutch Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery was revived in April 1853, and the Minister of the Colonies, C. F. Pahud, established a state commission to investigate how emancipation in the Dutch colonies could be achieved. Huisman, Verhalen van Vrijheid, 64. Also in 1853, Julien Wolbers, a Dutch abolitionist, published De slavernij in Suriname, of Dezelfde gruwelen der slavernij, die in de “negerhut” geschetst zijn, bestaan ook in onze West-Indische koloniën! (Amsterdam: H. de

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Hoogh, 1853), directly connecting the atrocities described in Stowe’s novel to the conditions of enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Surinam. For a history of Dutch slavery, see Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen, The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 12. “De’s Gravenhaagsche Tentoonstelling,” 2; author’s translation. 13. In 1853 the artist Robert S. Duncanson also painted a scene from Stowe’s novel titled Uncle Tom and Little Eva (Detroit Institute of Arts), a work commissioned by the abolitionist and Detroit Tribune editor, James Francis Conover. A writer from the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette described the painting as “An Uncle Tomitude” and criticized the artist for picturing Uncle Tom as “a very stupid looking creature.” Detroit Free Press, April 21, 1853, 2, quoting the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette; qtd. in James A. Porter, “Robert S. Duncanson: Midwestern Romantic-Realist,” Art in America: An Illustrated Art Magazine 39, no. 3 (October 1951): 129. It is interesting to note that two art critics, writing in two different countries, both found early attempts by American painters to portray Stowe’s characters deficient. 14. Euan Hague, “ ‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’: The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States,” Mobilities 5, no. 3 (September 2010): 337. Hague’s article offers an in-depth reading of Dred Scott v. Sandford with respect to issues of African American mobility. 15. Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 174. 16. Maurie D. McInnis, “The Most Famous Plantation of All: The Politics of Painting Mount Vernon,” in Landscapes of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, ed. Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 101. In August 1857, a few months after Johnson visited Mount Vernon, the artist’s widowed father married Mary Washington James, a distant relation of George Washington, who brought three enslaved people into the Johnson household. Patricia Hills, “Painting Race: Eastman Johnson’s Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedman,” in Eastman Johnson: Painting America, ed. Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills (New York: Brooklyn Museum in association with Rizzoli International Publications, 1999), 122. Harvey interprets the artist’s decision to paint enslaved people at Mount Vernon as “a subtle indictment both of Washington’s acceptance of slavery and his own father’s acceptance of enslaved people in his household.” Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 184. 17. David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 35. 18. Joseph Manca, George Washington’s Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 95. See also Adam T. Erby, “Designing the Beautiful: General Washington’s Landscape Improvements, 1784–1787,” in The General in the Garden: George Washington’s Landscape at Mount Vernon, ed. Susan P. Schoelwer (Mount Vernon, VA: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2015), 18. 19. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South,” 69. 20. Although Johnson’s focus on the contemporary enslaved residents of Mount Vernon is unusual, it is not unique. In 1858, the year after Johnson painted The Old Mount Vernon, the Danish artist Ferdinand Richardt completed View of Mount Vernon (de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), a depiction of the mansion’s two-story portico with various African American figures walking the grounds around the house. Winslow Homer also made a sketch of Mount Vernon in 1861 (Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association) from a similar perspective of that taken by Johnson four years earlier. Peter Wood speculates that Homer might have known of Johnson’s painting before making his own sketch. Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 36–37. 21. Erby, “Designing the Beautiful,” 8. 22. In this way, Johnson’s painting recalls Rebecca Bedell’s discussion of nineteenth-century sentimental art, in which “the act of sympathetic understanding sometimes takes place across and reinforces a status divide. Viewers are invited to make sympathetic connection across boundaries of class, gender, age, and race while, paradoxically, remaining at a distance.” She writes that Winslow “Homer’s images of black life, however well intentioned they have been, were painted from the perspective of an outsider . . . and this, to be sure, must be part of any full assessment of Homer’s work and career.” But she reads his

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paintings as “encourag[ing] in viewers an egalitarian identification with his subjects rather than a condescending compassion or pity.” Rebecca Bedell, Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 110. This painting by Johnson, I think, attempts a similar experience of connectedness. For a discussion of sentimental art that encouraged sympathy with marginalized social types to further radical social reforms, including abolitionism, see Bedell, “Sentiment and Social Change: Slavery, Race, and the Art of Henry Ossawa Tanner,” chapter 2 in Moved to Tears. 23. Johnson did exhibit another canvas he painted based on his visits to Mount Vernon, Washington’s Kitchen at Mount Vernon, at the 1860 National Academy of Design exhibition, following on his success the previous year displaying Negro Life at the South. See McInnis, “The Most Famous Plantation of All,” 107. Nancy Heller and Julia Williams argue that Johnson began work on Negro Life at the South in 1858. Nancy Heller and Julia Williams, “Portrait of America: The American Land and Its People Celebrated by Eight American Painters,” American Artist 40 (January 1976): 65. 24. By the time he painted Negro Life at the South, Johnson had already lived or spent significant periods of time in Maine; Massachusetts; Washington, DC; Wisconsin; Ohio, New York; Düsseldorf; The Hague; and Paris, and had traveled extensively across Western Europe. For Johnson’s biography, including when he lived in various cities, see Patricia Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson: The Sources and Development of His Style and Themes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977). 25. Bruce Robertson, “Stories for the Public, 1830–1860,” in American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915, ed. H. Barbara Weinberg and Carrie Rebora Barratt (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 68. 26. Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 119. For examples of scholarship on the racialized spaces of early nineteenth-century genre paintings depicting African American subjects, see Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Johns, “Standing Outside the Door,” chapter 4 in American Genre Painting; and Ivy G. Wilson, “Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and American Genre Paintings,” chapter 5 in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum US (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 27. John I. H. Baur, An American Genre Painter: Eastman Johnson, 1824–1906 (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1940), 14. 28. Jochen Wierich, Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 139. 29. [George William Curtis], “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 19, no. 109 (June 1859): 126. Peter John Brownlee argues that Johnson admired the “narrative thrust of [Jan] Steen’s pictures, especially the communicability of household objects and architectonic spaces (though he chose not to adopt the Dutch master’s characteristic humor and frivolity).” Brownlee, “American Genre Painting: An Art of Encounter,” in American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2013), 37. 30. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, “From Bruegel to Bonvin: Three Hundred Years of European Genre Painting,” in Redefining Genre: French and American Painting, 1850–1900, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (Washington, DC: Trust for Museum Exhibitions distributed by University of Washington Press, 1995), 17. According to Chu, “Because he was active as an etcher, Ostade’s influence was widespread and long lasting” (18). 31. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 188. 32. Georgina Cole, “‘Wavering between Two Worlds’: The Doorway in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting,” in “Liminal,” ed. Elaine Minor, special issue, Philament 9 (December 2006): 18, 19, and 23. Cole nonetheless reads doorways in Dutch genre scenes as liminal because they echo the frame around the canvas and thus “produc[e] a liminal zone that intervenes between the ‘real’ world [of the viewer] and the represented world [of the painting]” (23).

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33. Johns, American Genre Painting, 130; and Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 188, 190. As Harvey points out (266n45), Nona R. Martin also raises this idea in “Negro Life at the South: Eastman Johnson’s Rendition of Slavery and Miscegenation” (master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1994). See also Randall R. Griffey, “Drawing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: Trespassing and Identity in American Art,” in Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 423. 34. Reviews of the painting that identify the two women at right as being white include “Sketchings: Domestic Art Gossip,” The Crayon 6, no. 4 (April 1859): 125; “The Academy of Design,” New York Times, April 20, 1859, 10; and “Sketchings: National Academy of Design,” The Crayon 6, no. 6 (June 1859): 191. Furthermore, according to Baur, Johnson’s niece Mrs. Walter D. Edmonds later identified the model for the woman coming through the door at the right as Johnson’s sister, Mary. Baur, An American Genre Painter, 17. 35. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South,” 81. 36. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South,” 81. 37. Jervis McEntee noted in his diary in 1890, “A request for a check from Rock and a bitter partisan letter to Pres. Harrison published in the Post sent by Eastman Johnson who I am sorry to say now enjoys any abuse of the Republican party of which he was once a loyal and enthusiastic member.” The Jervis McEntee Diaries, April 15, 1890, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA). Johnson’s military substitute, a 22-year-old man named George Hack from Maine, enlisted in New York on July 6, 1864. Such transactions were privately arranged and often involved financial compensation. Alan Hirsch, “Eastman Johnson’s Guilt,” Notes in the History of Art 34, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 36–43. According to documentation in the New York Civil War Muster Rolls, Hack deserted the army just three months later, on September 5, 1864, while on furlough. New York State Archives, Cultural Education Center, Albany, New York; New York Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, 1861–1900; Archive Collection #: 13775–83, Box #: 1088–1089; accessed through Ancestry.com, January 20, 2017. 38. For more information on the differences between the various versions, see Elizabeth L. O’Leary, et al., American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in association with the University of Virginia Press, 2010), 169n1. 39. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 43. 40. Wierich, Grand Themes, 144. 41. In May 1861, just one month into the Civil War, General Benjamin Butler declared three self-emancipated individuals who reached Union army lines “contraband of war” and therefore not subject to the Fugitive Slave Act. In August of that year Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which freed all enslaved African Americans who were used to support the Confederate war effort directly. But, as Harvey notes, despite this weakening of the law, some Union officers, “either opposed to abolition or unwilling to challenge the Fugitive Slave Act,” regularly returned people who escaped captivity and reached Union lines to their enslavers. Until President Lincoln issued an order on March 13, 1862, that prevented Union officers from handing over any fugitives from slavery, General George B. McClellan was one of many Union leaders who regularly sent them back to enslavers. This fact gives “an added dimension of uncertainty” to the work, calling into question the family’s future should its members safely reach Union lines. Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 199, 200. 42. O’Leary, et al., American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 169; and Delaney, Race, Place and the Law, 44. 43. Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free, 260, 262. 44. Evening Post, New York, February 16, 1865, 1; qtd. in Hills, “Painting Race,” 150. 45. Mariët Westermann, “ ‘Costly and Curious, Full off Pleasure and Contentment’: Making Home in the Dutch Republic,” in Art & Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2001), 74. See also Susan Donahue Kuretsky, Paintings of Jacob Ochtervelt, 1634–1682 (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld & Schram, 1979); Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 199; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of

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Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 570–71; and Lynn F. Jacobs, Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385–1530) (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 193–95. 46. Krimmel likely knew of Wilkie’s painting through the circulation of an 1811 engraved copy by John Burnet. Catherine Hoover, “The Influence of David Wilkie’s Prints on the Genre Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 6–7. For more on Wilkie and Krimmel, see Anneliese Harding, “British and Scottish Models for the American Genre Paintings of John Lewis Krimmel,” Winterthur Portfolio 38, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 221–44. 47. Johnson exhibited this version of Fiddling His Way at the 1866 National Academy annual exhibition and the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Robert L. Stuart purchased the painting in 1867. Stuart would also purchase Negro Life at the South the following year. By contrast, the version of the painting with the white fiddler remained in the artist’s studio until his death when it was included in the 1907 sale of Johnson’s work. 48. A pencil sketch on paper by Johnson of a figure that appears to be a study for the tramp at the center of the artist’s painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. The sketch is known by the title Fisherman and dated to the 1860s, perhaps because its connection to The Tramp has not been previously established (Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase), National Gallery of Art, 2015.19.565). 49. “Academy of Design: III: Genre-Pictures,” New-York Tribune, April 16, 1877, 5. 50. One 1878 novel asserted, “The reckless, free life of the army had given them a taste for wandering and a distaste for every species of labor, and following their natural instincts, directed by their acquired habits, they became professional tramps.” Lee O. Harris, The Man Who Tramps: A Story of To-Day (Indianapolis, IN: Douglass and Carlon, 1878), 18. Reverend Edward E. Hale also offered this explanation as well as being one of the few who pointed to downturns in labor markets. See Paul T. Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 15–24. Johnson treated the theme of Civil War tramping in the painting Union Soldiers Accepting a Drink (ca. 1865, Carnegie Museum of Art). 51. Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 115. 52. “Tramps Tramp: An Army of Idlers—A War of Extermination—Aid for the Deserving Poor,” The National Republican, February 19, 1876, 4. Although the mainstream press often pointed the finger at immigrants and minorities when searching for the cause of the nation’s tramp population, the majority of tramps toward the end of the century were, in fact, white men born in the United States. For demographic analysis of the tramp population during the late nineteenth century, see Cresswell, The Tramp in America, 39; and Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Underclass in Historical Perspective,” in On Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives, ed. Rick Beard (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1987), 22. 53. Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47–48. 54. “The Academy Exhibition,” Art Journal (1877): 160. 55. In the illustrated catalogue for the 1877 National Academy of Design exhibition, The Tramp is listed as being in the collection of the artist and does not have a price, suggesting it may not yet have been made available for sale. Academy Sketches, Exhibition of 1877. With Descriptive Notes by “NEMO” (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877), 46. For reviews of the painting at these various venues, see “Art Gossip,” Inter Ocean, Chicago, June 19, 1877, 4; “Autumn Art Exhibitions,” San Francisco Bulletin, September 22, 1877, 2; “Art Notes. Private Galleries. New Pictures,” San Francisco Bulletin, October 26, 1877, 2; “Our Exposition, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 15, 1878, 3; and “Art Notes, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 13, 1878, 3. 56. For the association of tramps with railways, see Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 39–41. At the time of Flower’s death, his wife, Sarah Morse Flower, and daughter, Emma Flower Taylor, inherited most of his vast fortune. In 1903 Taylor erected the Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library to honor her late father in his hometown of Watertown, New York. She donated The Tramp and a variety of decorative objects and furnishings from the Flowers’ New York City

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mansion, located at 597 Fifth Avenue, to the library in 1912. The Tramp has been housed there ever since. For Flower’s biography, see “Roswell P. Flower Dies Suddenly,” New York Times, May 13, 1899, 1. For the donation of the painting to the library, see “Gifts for the Flower Library,” Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times, March 22, 1912, 10. 57. E., “Summer Correspondence: Nantucket and The Vineyard,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 24, 1876, 1. The author describes viewing the unfinished canvases for City People in Country Quarters and The Tramp in Johnson’s Nantucket studio the summer before the paintings’ debuts in New York City. 58. Marc Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit: Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, essays by Marc Simpson, et al. (San Diego, CA: Timken Art Gallery, 1990), 35. As a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine noted in 1875, “Even in Nantucket they are laying out sea-side resorts, and that island may yet, with the help of summer visitors, regain somewhat of its former wealth.” Charles Nordhoff, “Cape Cod, Nantucket, and the Vineyard,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 51, no. 301 (June 1875): 62. 59. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 37. For a full list of all of the Johnsons’ land deals on the island, see the appendix in Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket. 60. Lizzie W. Champney, “The Summer Haunts of American Artists,” The Century 30, no. 6 (October 1885): 845–60. See also Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 37. 61. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, August 6, 1876, Jervis McEntee papers, Letters, Box 1, Folder 24, fr. 109, AAA. 62. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, September 22, 1881, Jervis McEntee papers, reel D30, fr. 476, AAA. 63. Johnson wrote, “The place is losing all the old quiet and solitude. There is a railroad in operation.” Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, August 9, 1882, Jervis McEntee papers, Letters, Box 1, Folder 24, fr. 152, AAA. By 1898, Johnson had grown tired of Nantucket and wrote about urgently wanting to sell his home there. Simpson, “Taken with a Cranberry Fit,” 37. 64. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, June 28, 1862, Jervis McEntee papers, Letters, Box 1, Folder 24, fr. 9–14, AAA. 65. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, December 13, 1879, Jervis McEntee papers, AAA. 66. “Correspondence of the Mercury,” Charleston Mercury, March 5, 1860, 1. 67. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, July 27, 1867, Jervis McEntee papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, AAA. 68. Letter from Eastman Johnson to Jervis McEntee, June 21, 1870, Jervis McEntee papers, Letters, Box 1, Folder 24, fr. 77–79, 76, AAA. 69. E., “Summer Correspondence,” 1. 70. At both exhibitions the painting was listed in the exhibition catalogues with a sale price of $2,000. 71. Academy Sketches, Exhibition of 1877, 52. 72. Item no. 143, Catalogue of Finished Pictures, Studies and Drawings by the Late Eastman Johnson, N.A. To be sold at unrestricted public sale by order of Mrs. Eastman Johnson at the American Art Galleries Madison Square South on the Evenings Herein Stated (New York, 1907). 73. For information on wrappers in the 1870s, see Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 297, 304, 310. 74. Priscilla J. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America (Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). Brewer also notes resistance to the proliferation of cookstoves by the middle of the nineteenth century, when “a chorus of antistove rhetoric arose among northern, middle-class Anglo-Americans” decried “the extent to which manufactured goods and commercial relations had compromised the integrity and independence of the household” and “were reluctant to advise women to embrace modern appliances.” By contrast, they celebrated fireplaces “as symbols of gentility and

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ease” (95). For a discussion of the cultural meanings of mass-produced cooking stoves during the period, see also Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 53–62. 75. “Fine Arts: The Academy Exhibition II,” New York Evening Mail, April 23, 1877. 76. “Autumn Art Exhibitions,” San Francisco Bulletin, September 22, 1877, 2. 77. “Tramps Tramp,” 4. Another commentator expressed concern that the press’s coverage of the perceived tramping crisis would discourage “honest, healthy pedestrianism”—the recent “fashion” for men to walk hundreds of miles to see and experience the country as a form of tourism. This article is revealing in its concerns about slippage between “sinister and suspicious” mobility (i.e., tramping) and “[g]ood, healthy, honest” mobility (e.g., pedestrianism). The author also singles out Johnson’s painting for amplifying the negative tramp stereotype. “Is the Pedestrian a Tramp,” San Francisco Bulletin, September 28, 1877, 2. 78. Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Underclass: Tramps and Vagrants in American Society, 1865– 1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1980), 4. 79. “Thieving Tramps in the Interior,” New York Times, August 2, 1876, 5; and Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 41–42. 80. Alfred Kappes began his career as an illustrator, but later, in the 1880s and 1890s, he became known as a painter of the poor, including many paintings of African American figures, and other “lowly” subjects, such as his 1886 painting Tattered and Torn (Smith College Museum of Art), which depicts an African American woman dressed in rags. See “Alfred Kappes, Painter and Illustrator,” The Art Union 2, no. 4 (October 1885): 75; The American Art Association, Thomas E. Kirby, William A. Coffin, and Robert B. Woodward, “Kappes (Alfred), A.N.A., Deceased,” Catalogue of the Private Art Collection of Thomas B. Clarke, New York, to be Sold at Absolute Public Sale . . . Part 1: Paintings (New York: The American Art Association, 1899), 75; and Leo G. Mazow, “Taxing Visions and the ‘Decent Distance,’ ” in Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Leo G. Mazow and Kevin M. Murphy (University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 28–30. 81. “The Tramp,” Harper’s Weekly 20, no. 1027 (September 2, 1876): 718. 82. “The Tramp,” 718. 83. F. A. Eastman, “Art in New York,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 25, 1877, 7; and “Autumn Art Exhibitions,” 2. 84. Kusmer notes that by at least 1879, “some people exhibited more curiosity than apprehension about the new vagabonds.” Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 59. Johnson’s painting would be an even earlier suggestion of the public’s growing curiosity. 85. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 7. 86. Eastman, “Art in New York,” 7. 87. Brownlee, “American Genre Painting,” 38; and Stephanie Mayer Heydt, entry for “Negro Life at the South,” in American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, ed. Peter John Brownlee (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2013), 60. As Davis has argued, although the earliest reviewers of Negro Life at the South mention the work’s urban setting—the backyard plot of a building that was adjacent to Johnson’s father’s Washington, DC, home on F Street NW—commentators soon drained away its site specificity, and the work quickly came to be known by the title Old Kentucky Home (after Stephen Foster’s 1853 minstrel song, “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!”), obscuring the work’s urban context. According to Davis, this act of “geographic amnesia” was “closely tied to Johnson’s unusual engagement with the volatile issue of slavery in the nation’s capital.” Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South,” 70, 67. 88. William, “Nantucket: Characters and Characteristics in the Summer of ’77,” Boston Daily Advertiser, August 22, 1877; and Henry M. Baird, “Nantucket,” Scribner’s Monthly 6, no. 4 (August 1873): 393. Parker reportedly left town in the early 1860s, after his wife left him, and settled in Quidnet. Michael A. Jehle, ed., Picturing Nantucket: An Art History of the Island with Paintings from the Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association. Works by Artists Born Before 1900 (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association, 2000), 198. 89. See William, “Nantucket.” In addition to dedicating a paragraph to Fred Parker, the article published in the Boston Daily Advertiser describes a visit to Johnson’s studio. Baird’s article also gives an account of Johnson’s studio and includes an illustration of Johnson’s home and

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studio as seen from the water. An illustration of the interior of Parker’s home reproduced from a painting by George B. Wood also appears in the article. Baird, “Nantucket,” 390, 395. 90. Johnson’s work was often understood in these terms during his lifetime. George William Sheldon described Johnson’s genre paintings as possessing “simple, tender characterization” and exhibiting “sweet, serene inspiration.” G. W. Sheldon, American Painters: With EightyThree Examples of Their Work Engraved on Wood (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1879), 167.

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Mapping Enoch Wood Perry’s Genre Scenes

A small, curious canvas painted by the artist Enoch Wood Perry, Jr., shows a group of figures gathered at a hotel (Figure 2.1). What immediately strikes the viewer about the painting is the way the artist has cleverly designed the composition so that none of the figures’ heads is visible. The corner of the exterior sign at the upper left of the composition, which partially reveals the site, the “National Hotel,” obscures the head of a figure, barely visible through the open doorway at the left of the canvas, as he ascends an interior stairway toward the second floor. The six other figures are on the hotel porch. Three of the men’s heads are hidden by the open pages of a newspaper, which one man reads while casually tipping back his chair. Another figure leans into an open window, causing his head to disappear into the hotel’s shadowy interior. The man to his right tips his chair back in a manner similar to that of the person holding the newspaper, such that the partially opened, green shutter conceals his visage. The heads of a boy seated on the porch floor at the far right of the composition and of the small dog beside him are also excluded from the composition and cropped by the picture’s frame. Even the head of a horse depicted on a flier tacked on the wall disappears behind the floppy upper right-hand corner of the paper. The title of the open newspaper at the center suggests that the scene will present the viewer with a representation of “The True American” (also the title by which the painting is known). However, through its humorous composition that purposefully withholds the figures’ idiosyncratic features from the viewer, the work refuses to deliver on its promise.1 It points instead to the impossibility of depicting legible national types. Scholars have usually treated The True American as an anomalous work in Perry’s oeuvre. Although it shares some stylistic similarities with more typical paintings by Perry, it appears more lowbrow and quirkier than the artist’s usual narrative scenes featuring rural and domestic subjects.2 Perry is less well remembered today than the other artists featured in this study, but he was once a member of prominent art circles in the United States. He regularly exhibited oil paintings and watercolors at major art exhibitions and international world’s fairs during the second half of the nineteenth century; he rented a studio in New York City’s famed Tenth Street Studio Building for nearly two decades (1868–80 and 1891–98) and worked alongside artists such as Winslow Homer, Sanford R. Gifford, and Albert Bierstadt; he became an academician at the National Academy of Design in 1869 following the successful debut of his painting The Weavers; and some of the United States’ wealthiest collectors, including George Hearst, Leland Stanford, and Collis P. Huntington, purchased Perry’s paintings.3 Although he depicted a wide variety of subjects, including portraits and landscapes, by the 1870s he was known primarily as a genre painter. In 1875, the year

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Figure 2.1 Enoch Wood Perry, The True American, c. 1874. Oil on canvas, 11 7/8 × 16 1/8 in. (30.2 × 41 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1955, 55.177. Source: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

after Perry likely completed The True American, a critic from the Art Journal extolled the artist’s professional status, declaring, “Mr. Perry at the present time occupies a position very nearly at the head of our genre painters.”4 Details in The True American provide clues about the identities of the various headless figures in the painting. Hands, when pictured, suggest that the figures are white, and their clothing marks them as male. The bare feet and rolled-up trouser legs of the figure seated on the porch in the lower right corner of the painting evokes the character of the carefree “barefoot boy,” a popular social type in visual and literary culture in the decade following the American Civil War, and indicates to the viewer the figure’s relatively youthful age.5 The man all the way to the right of the scene, whose head is obscured by the green shutter (and seen only in the shadow it casts on the hotel’s façade), appears to wear more formal clothing than the other figures. They seem to be uniform in their race and sex, but Perry hints at variations in age and social class. There may not be one uniform “True American,” according to Perry’s picture, but a unifying thread among them is the setting: they are all gathered at a hotel. The space of the hotel evokes constant comings and goings, and the primary identifying feature of the “True American” in Perry’s work is his status as traveler. Traveling is a subject that Perry must have thought about a lot, because he relocated frequently for both personal and professional reasons throughout his life. It was an aspect of the artist’s biography that often drew attention from period commentators. The Art Journal critic, for example, described Perry’s “desire to rove.” In 1889, long

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after Perry had established his professional reputation, another writer specified the artist’s “natural and acquired love of travel.” Twenty years earlier, as Perry began to gain attention for his genre paintings of homely domestic subjects, a critic from The Independent who visited the artist’s New York City studio pointed out an apparent disconnect between Perry’s global travels and the decidedly “uncosmopolitan” character of many of his recent paintings: Mr. E. W. Perry . . . offers some remarkable evidences of his wide wanderings on the walls of his apartment. There are views in Venice, in California, in Honolulu, in China; copies of Titian, and studies of the Old Colony. . . . [B]ut it is plain enough, from the pictures he is now executing, and from those which do him the most credit, that the burden of his brush is, ‘O, dulce, dulce domum.’ His heart, untraveled, fondly turns to the old homesteads which were familiar to his boyhood, or at least might have been.6 This writer draws a contrast between the artist’s peregrinations and the supposedly “untraveled” character of his heart, crediting Perry’s voyages for the variety of his artistic production while also claiming for the artist an intimate familiarity with the rural, domestic contexts he so often depicted in his popular genre scenes. Perhaps such commentary evidences an anxiety on the part of the author about the constructedness of Perry’s rural home scenes by asserting a plausible—if not authentic—childhood connection between the artist and his chosen subjects, despite the evidence of his “wide wanderings.” But in The True American we find another avenue for considering Perry’s relationship to genre painting, one that does not put his travels at odds with his genre subjects. This chapter seeks to understand how Perry’s engagement with the related themes of mobility and cartography informed The True American and other works by the artist. Together, the artworks examined here present a critique of genre painting’s capacity to communicate a clear message to its audience.

Perry’s Peregrinations Through his travels, Perry established various personal and professional connections that facilitated the artist’s embrace of diverse subject matter and styles throughout much of his career, a variety observed by The Independent critic in the 1869 description of Perry’s studio and by an author from the Art Journal who noted in 1875 Perry’s “wide range of domestic subjects” and “broad” style.7 Perry painted landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits. He seems not to have embraced a politically or ideologically pure agenda in his work, making portraits of public figures as diverse as Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant. He executed oil paintings, watercolors, and works intended for mass reproduction as prints. In short, Perry was an opportunist who adapted his work to suit the needs of his patrons. Like Eastman Johnson and many other American painters of this generation, Perry pursued artistic training in Düsseldorf, heading to the city by way of London in 1852 to study in Emanuel Leutze’s studio. The American Art-Union apparently played a significant role in Perry’s decision to study there. Letters sent between Perry and the American Art-Union’s corresponding secretary reveal that Perry requested information about studying in Düsseldorf and contact information for other American artists

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residing there. He remained in Germany for about two and a half years before heading to Paris in 1854, where he trained with Thomas Couture for about a year (the same atelier in which Johnson also studied briefly during this period). Perry traveled to Rome with his close friend Albert Bierstadt and then back to Germany to sketch the Nahe River with Worthington Whittredge and others. Desiring to remain in Europe but running out of money, Perry used his father’s political connections in the Democratic Party to secure a position as US Consul to Venice in 1856, a scheme that allowed him to live and work in the city for about 14 months. He returned to the United States in 1858 and established a portrait studio in Philadelphia before heading home to New Orleans in 1860.9 As sectional tensions exploded and the nation edged closer to civil war, Perry moved to Washington, DC. There he painted portraits of prominent politicians from the South, including Senator John Slidell and Vice President (and presidential candidate) John Breckenridge. By the time of Secession, the artist appears to have returned to Louisiana, where he created a monumental oil sketch for a never-completed history painting of the Louisiana legislature’s signing of the secession ordinance, as well as portraits, including one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Figure 2.2), painted sometime in the spring of 1861. Perry apparently supported the Confederacy, at least at the outbreak of the Civil War; his younger brother Alfred served as a doctor in the Confederate Army, and Perry raffled his portrait of Davis to raise funds for the Confederate war effort.10 But Perry spent most of the war traveling. He headed west in 1862, landing first in San Francisco, where he opened a portrait studio, offered art lessons, and painted 8

Figure 2.2 Enoch Wood Perry, Portrait of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, 1861. Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 31 3/4 in. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.

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works including studies of the city’s Chinese population and landscapes of the Yosemite Valley. From San Francisco, Perry journeyed abroad to Honolulu, Oahu, in September 1864, and he remained on the Hawaiian Islands for ten months.11 Soon after Perry’s arrival, a writer from the Pacific Commercial Advertiser called for the artist to paint portraits of the Hawaiian royal family because “it is so seldom genuine artists visit the islands that the opportunity should not be lost.”12 Perry did indeed receive numerous portrait commissions during his time on the islands, including posthumous portrayals of King Kamehameha IV and his son Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Leiopapa a Kamehameha. In addition to portraiture, Perry painted landscapes and the estates of wealthy property owners, including pastoral views of buildings and livestock tucked into the impressive terrain of sugar plantations belonging to Americans such as Dr. Gerrit P. Judd and S. G. Wilder’s Kualoa Ranch on the shore of Kaneohe Bay on Oahu and Captain James Makee’s Rose Ranch in ‘Ulupalakua on Maui (Figure 2.3), both painted in 1865. Perry’s painting of Rose Ranch presents a picturesque view of the sugar plantation located about two thousand feet above sea level on the southwestern slopes of East Maui. The composition is divided into three zones. The foreground features detailed renderings of a rocky landscape with wild flora; the middle ground shows the ordered landscape of the sugar plantation with various white buildings that support the agricultural activities at the site, a steam-powered mill, and a large Hawaiian flag towering over the compound; and Haleakalā volcano dominates the background.13 Perry spent the summer “traveling with his sketch book and

Figure 2.3 Enoch Wood Perry, Rose Ranch, ‘Ulupalakua, On the Slopes of Haleakalā, Maui, 1865. Oil on canvas, 26 × 38 in. (66 × 96.5 cm). Honolulu Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frank A. Hecht in memory of Selden, 1993 (7383.1).

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canvas” around the islands, but he left to return to the United States just three months after the American Civil War ended, setting sail for San Francisco aboard the D. C. Murray on July 19, 1865.14 Two months after arriving in San Francisco, Perry departed the city by private stagecoach “bound for the East, by the Overland route,” according to a report in one California newspaper.15 The artist went to Salt Lake City, but his impetus for heading there is unknown. He might have gotten the idea from Bierstadt and the journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, with whom Perry had traveled to Yosemite in 1863. Just prior to the Yosemite trip, Ludlow and Bierstadt had traveled overland from the East Coast to California and stopped in Salt Lake City along the way, a trip that Ludlow chronicled in his 1870 book, The Heart of the Continent.16 Perry remained in Salt Lake City for about a year, buoyed by commissions from the Church of Latter-Day Saints to paint portraits of the church’s leadership. In 1866 the artist moved to New York City, returning first to San Francisco before traveling by steamer down the Pacific Coast to the isthmus of Panama and then voyaging up the Atlantic Coast to New York.17 There, Perry secured space in the Tenth Street Studio Building and cemented his professional reputation, choosing, by the 1870s, to exhibit mostly quotidian scenes of domestic life.18 The artist embarked on summer sketching trips in search of source material for these paintings. In 1870, for example, a Nantucket newspaper reported Perry’s second visit to the island “in search of subject, inspiration, and life for new contributions to American art.”19 Two summers later, Perry accompanied Winslow Homer to Ulster County, New York, to sketch “quaint old Dutch interiors.”20 The Independent critic, mentioned earlier, made a distinction in 1869 between Perry’s travels and the homely subjects that the artist showed in recent exhibitions, crediting Perry’s nostalgic portrayals of “old homesteads” to boyhood memories and going so far as to describe the artist’s “heart” as “untraveled.” And yet it was precisely Perry’s travels to places like Nantucket and Ulster County that brought such homely scenes into being. Locomotion was not only an important element of Perry’s working process—a way to seek novel source material for paintings—but it also provided an overarching theme for several of the artist’s canvases.21

Hotel Porches and the Traveling Public There is little doubt that Perry had Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 genre painting War News From Mexico (Figure 2.4) in mind when he conceived of The True American. The man at the center of Woodville’s painting reads the latest war news aloud from the paper he holds aloft and reacts to what he reads with an expression of shock or astonishment. The title War News From Mexico makes clear that the information read aloud from the printed page is about the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The other figures in the painting have mixed reactions to the news. The man visible over his shoulder at the right lifts his cap with excitement. Others appear much more reticent, as if concerned or puzzled by what they hear. The outcome of the MexicanAmerican War promised serious and controversial consequences for US policies regarding territorial expansion and the spread of slavery, and it divided Democrats who favored these policies and Whigs who largely opposed the war. Having spent more than two years studying in Düsseldorf, Perry would certainly have known Woodville’s painting, which was executed in that city just four years before Perry’s arrival and widely distributed in engraved form (Figure 2.5). The American

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Figure 2.4 Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848. Oil on canvas, 27 × 25 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2010.74. Source: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

Figure 2.5 Alfred Jones, after a painting by Richard Caton Woodville, Mexican News, c. 1853. Engraving. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-pga-03889.

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Art-Union purchased War News From Mexico in 1849 and hired Alfred Jones to make two engraved reproductions, the larger of which the organization distributed to its members. Many details in The True American mimic elements of Woodville’s canvas: the stage-like, cramped hotel porch settings (with signs naming the site the “National Hotel” and the “American Hotel,” respectively); the uniformly white and male figures within the porch spaces; the reading of a newspaper at the center of the compositions; green louvered shutters with a figure leaning through the open window on the right side of each canvas; and the poster featuring a horse tacked up to the wall to the right of the open doorway in both paintings. In addition to these apparent similarities, the two paintings also exhibit anxieties about the communities assembled in the supposedly “democratic” space of the hotel. Hotels, according to the historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, are an American invention dating to the early decades of the republic that are bound up with particular “beliefs about democracy, commerce, and equality, but also a crucial underlying fact of the nation’s human geography: its people were among the most mobile in the world.” Travelers and local populations mingled at hotels, integrating the local “into expanding networks of commodities, capital, and information.”22 That the hotel setting of War News From Mexico was important to Woodville is evidenced by the fact that the artist painted the word “hotel” on the “American Hotel” sign over the word “tavern” (the original text now barely visible in the underpainting). The art historian Grant Wesley Hamming argues that anxieties around modern mobility, specifically “the disjunction of travel, the terrifying, vertiginous dislocation of the rhythms of local life by the urban world of the stranger and the steamboat” run through many of Woodville’s works. The repetition of bric-a-brac and other seemingly incidental details across Woodville’s canvases are an attempt to work through the traumas “of modernity, of successfully incorporating strangers, movement, and displacement into the national mind.”23 Perhaps as a way to contain such anxieties, Woodville used architectural space in War News From Mexico to define a social hierarchy based on inclusion and exclusion, in which white men—those with political power and the right to vote—are more central than women and African Americans. The painting features seven figures (all white men) sitting or standing on the hotel porch to hear the latest updates from the war. An eighth white man leans over the porch railing at the right, so that his head and upper torso fall within the architectural space of the covered porch. An older white woman peers out of an open window at the far right of the canvas, and an African American man sits on the porch steps beside a girl who observes the scene from the ground in front of the hotel. They are noticeably excluded from the porch, even though the news read from the paper affects them too. Playing in The True American with the notion of mobility as a national trait, Perry participated in a much larger cultural discourse that weighed the pros and cons of movement on individuals and on society as a whole. It was not unusual during this period for commentators to frame Americans’ presumed restlessness positively, as a spur for social mobility, national “progress,” and an important source of shared identity. But it was also, paradoxically, viewed by some as a basis for diminishing community ties and threat to individualism. In an 1865 essay in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the writer Dr. Robert Tomes claimed: Whether at rest in the hotel, or in motion on steamboat and rail, you are forced to herd with the crowd. You are obliged to sink the individual in the mass, and form an indistinct part of that flowing whole called the traveling public.24

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Through subject and form, Perry’s The True American pokes fun at anxieties about individualism and community in period discourses about mobility in the United States. With the individuals’ lack of heads, Perry’s composition subverts the seeming security of the social structure exhibited in Woodville’s composition. The art historian Jennifer A. Greenhill argues that it also embraces a “logic of dislocation and absence.” The figures in the work are “united by their communal lack, connected by their bodily dis-connection.” In Greenhill’s analysis, the assemblage of headless individuals on the porch—the “community of parts imperfectly united”—is analogous to the medium of chromolithography. Perry’s painting, made to be transformed into a chromolithograph, deliberately exposes the seams, both of social unity that the work’s title promises and of the making of the image itself, visible in the layering of tones from different lithographic stones.25 But, the figures’ “bodily dis-connection” is also, I would add, wholly appropriate for the themes of mobility explored in Perry’s work. Perry’s composition for The True American builds tension between the figures’ implied mobility (as travelers) and stasis. Not only are the figures, save for the one climbing the stairs, pictured at rest, but, as Greenhill observes, they appear “pinned in place” by a seemingly impenetrable grid of horizontal and vertical lines comprising the porch banister and railing, the exterior siding, and the shutter slats.26 This tension comes into greater focus in the chromolithograph published by Bencke and Scott after Perry’s painting in 1875 (Figure 2.6). When the artist and publishers filed for copyright of the image, they titled the work Bummers, and, indeed, in some surviving copies of the chromolithograph the words “The True American” have been scratched off and replaced with the new title, written by hand directly onto the print.27 A derelict

Figure 2.6 Bencke and Scott, New York, after Enoch Wood Perry, Bummers, 1875. Chromolithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-pga-04382.

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counterpart to the travelers depicted, the “bummer” was understood to be both a vagrant and a loiterer, and the slang term—a mid-nineteenth-century Americanism— was sometimes used interchangeably with “tramp.” The word “bummer” came into common usage around the time of the American Civil War, “when it was specially applied to a straggler, hanger-on, or free-lance.”28 According to the journalist Samuel Bowles, the term was also part of the “mining vernacular” used in Western camps— such as the one Perry likely illustrated in an 1865 map, discussed later—to describe people who were not engaged in “tangible and real and money-making” efforts.29 A second, related usage of the word referred to “[a] heavy loss, severe pecuniary reverse,” adding additional elements of humor to Perry’s print, in which the figures have all suffered “a heavy loss” in their lack of heads.30 Finally, it is possible that the chromolithograph’s title is also a play on the word “bum” as slang for buttocks, the most conspicuous body part on a majority of the figures in the work. The revised title evokes the relationship between mobility and stasis found in Tomes’s description of the “flowing whole called the traveling public” composed of individuals “at rest in the hotel, or in motion on steamboat and rail.” The True American both pictures figures “at rest” at a hotel—loafing on the front porch—but it also renders them “indistinct” by stripping them of their heads and faces, their most distinctive features, and treating them as a “flowing whole.” Tomes’s text conjures the image of a mass of people always in transition. Although Tomes refers in this essay to the population’s physical mobility, the idea of transition and fluidity also applied to concepts of one’s social and economic positions. The historian Karen Halttunen argues that a “cult of the self-made man thrived in antebellum American culture” and that “its fundamental assumption was that all Americans were liminal men, in passage from a lower to a higher social status.” The assumption during the period was that members of the middle class, which included all but the poorest and wealthiest people, were in a “permanent condition of liminality” with “no fixed status.” This social liminality, according to Halttunen, found expression in the regional character types popular in US literature and visual culture before the American Civil War, from the Western backwoodsman to the New England Yankee, who were “independent of any fixed social nexus” and distinguished both by their geographical and social mobility.31 The figures’ expressions in Woodville’s War News From Mexico suggest the liminality of their social positions as they respond to the latest war news. Not only are the fates of the African American figures at stake, but, as Elizabeth Johns writes, the white male citizenry gathered on the porch “[a]ll seem to be devoted to getting ahead” and “[e]ach face wears a look of speculation, even calculation, about the opportunities that this news might bring.”32 The True American is blatant in its undoing of legible social types such as the ones that structured so many narratives of early nineteenth-century genre paintings, including War News From Mexico. It strips them of their particularities and makes their liminality explicit by placing them on a porch (a transitional space between interior and exterior) in unstable or transitional poses (bending through an open window, leaning over to the side, tipping back in their chairs, and climbing the stairs).

Cartography and the American Civil War Comparing The True American with other paintings by Perry that share compositional and thematic similarities, albeit without the satirical point of view, illuminates the social and cultural critique of Perry’s canvas. An undated, and presently unlocated,

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painting by Perry—known by the title Studying the Map (Figure 2.7)—takes up the subjects of travel and mapping as its central themes.33 The work depicts a young woman and older couple gathered around a table on a porch. With her right thumb and pointer finger, the young woman draws the couple’s gaze to a specific place on a map. In her left hand she holds a small sheet of paper, perhaps a letter. Perry shows the figures examining the cartographic object in the liminal space of the covered porch, with the majority of the canvas dedicated to distant landscape views of fields and rolling hills. The landscape gestures toward the expansive terrestrial territories that are rendered schematically and at a much-reduced scale within the spatial confines of the two-dimensional map. The liminality of the setting in Perry’s painting is clear when we compare the canvas to an etching titled Welcome News (Figure 2.8) that the Philadelphia-based artist Emily Sartain made after Perry’s work in 1888.34 Although Sartain retained much of Perry’s original composition, including the arrangement of the three figures, the table and chairs located on the porch, and the map draped over the table, she made several significant alterations in her reproduction, such as the addition of a small dog in the foreground and adjustments to the figures’ clothing to make the trio appear more elegant than the comparatively rustic group portrayed by Perry. Sartain also altered the landscape in the background of Perry’s painting, transforming it into a riverscape with sailboats visible in the distance, and she adjusted the perspective of the porch to reveal more of the building’s walls and less of the natural setting. A plant-covered lattice forms a screen in Sartain’s etching, creating a greater sense of enclosure for the porch than the space depicted in Perry’s painting. Whereas Perry portrayed the blunt

Figure 2.7 Enoch Wood Perry, Studying the Map, date unknown. Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 in. Location unknown. Source: Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library.

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Figure 2.8 Emily Sartain, after Enoch Wood Perry, Welcome News, 1888. Etching on chine collé on cream wove paper, 20 × 29 1/4 in. (50.8 × 74.295 cm). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1985.×.437. Source: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

ends of the porch floorboards and the wooden roof covering the porch in his composition, Sartain cropped these architectural details out of her work. The elimination of these transitional architectural elements, which emphasize the liminality of the porch in Perry’s original painting, as well as the addition of the lattice, contribute to a heightened sense of enclosure around the three figures in the print. It is not known when or if Perry exhibited Studying the Map publicly, but Sartain’s etching reached a large audience and received praise when she exhibited it at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The historian Hubert Howe Bancroft described Welcome News as “among the best” of the 70 etchings on view in the Pennsylvania state building’s ladies’ parlor, and he included a full-page reproduction of the print in his 1893 publication, The Book of the Fair.35 In both Perry’s painting and Sartain’s etching, the map’s top edge drapes over the side of the table so that the words “Guide Map” and “United States & Canada” are visible to the viewer. Because of this title and its design, it seems likely that Perry modeled the map after G. Woolworth Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada, with railroads, counties, etc. (Figure 2.9), a popular map of the eastern half of the United States and southern Canada published in at least six editions between 1861 and 1871. It is not known when Perry completed Studying the Map, but it seems likely that the painting dates to the years during or just after the American Civil War because of the popularity of Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada during this period as well as Perry’s demonstrated interest in mapping around this time.

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Figure 2.9 G. Woolworth Colton (cartographer and engraver) and Rufus Blanchard (publisher), G. Woolworth Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States & Canada: With Railroads, Counties, etc., 1863. Hand-colored map, 76 × 92 cm. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Maps were vital tools during the American Civil War. Military and political leaders used maps to devise strategic plans for military campaigns, and they documented battles after the fact through the production of post-battle maps.36 There is evidence that public officials used Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada, specifically, for strategic purposes. A copy of the 1862 version of the map in the collection of the Library of Congress, for example, was hand-colored with red lines to demarcate various geographical departments of the US military that are labeled in blue script.37 Maps also played an essential role on the home front, enabling people to follow published accounts of battles or troops’ movements and to learn about geographic areas previously unfamiliar to them. Whereas maps “rarely appeared in American newspapers” before the war, they became a much more common component of the news during the conflict. Northern daily newspapers featured more than two thousand maps between April 1861 and April 1865, “ranging from large-scale plans of fortifications and battles to smallscale campaign and theater of war maps.”38 In 1865 Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the “Benefits of War” in his journal and claimed that Americans’ daily engagement with maps had expanded the public’s awareness of their homeland. He wrote: [The war] added to every house & heart a vast enlargement. In every house & shop, an American map has been unrolled, & daily studied,—& now that peace has come, every citizen finds himself a skilled student of the condition, means, & future, of this continent.39

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While living in New Orleans in 1862, Perry took up the subject of wartime mapping explicitly in his painting How the Battle Was Won (Figure 2.10), which pictures a soldier drawing a diagram of a battle with chalk on a tabletop for a group of seven interested onlookers at a tavern.40 The members of the group range in age from the white-haired elderly man in the center, who holds his hand up to his ear as if struggling to hear, to the child standing behind him. In addition to the variety of ages present in the group, the figures wear different types of clothing and hairstyles, suggesting that they occupy various social positions. Behind them, a bartender and another child witness the scene. The painting’s title indicates that this motley group is brought together by the soldier’s tale, which is enhanced by his tabletop drawing. The orderliness of the diagrammatic image he creates to picture the events he describes contrasts with the text legible on the poster behind them that announces the “first performance” of a “great national circus,” including the participation of “clowns.” The poster’s placement on the wall beside a broadside declaring “volunteers wanted” relates the national conflict to a circus and suggests, perhaps, that the artist was not fully in support of the war effort.41 An open doorway in the background at the right of the composition frames a view of the landscape surrounding the tavern and of two horses hitched to a wagon that is out of frame. This background scene helps to relate the abstracted representation of terrain in the soldier’s map with (the illusion of) real, physical outdoor space, a juxtaposition that structures Studying the Map as well. Nothing pictured in Studying the Map overtly links the work to the American Civil War, but it is likely that contemporaries interpreted it in this way. The title of Sartain’s print, Welcome News, may also be the original name of Perry’s painting (which was

Figure 2.10 Enoch Wood Perry, How the Battle Was Won, 1862. Oil on canvas, 22 1/4 × 30 1/4 in. Collection of the Newark Museum of Art, Purchase 1961 Thomas L. Raymond Bequest Fund, 61.25.

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given the title Studying the Map in the mid-1940s). The woman in Sartain’s print, as in Perry’s original painting, appears to hold a sheet of personal correspondence, perhaps a letter with “welcome news” of the location of a loved one who has gone off to war (the young woman’s wedding ring suggests that it might be from her spouse). An alternative title for the print, News From the Front, explicitly connects the work to a wartime context.42 Artists portrayed national maps in contemporary visual culture to comment on the unity—or lack thereof—of the nation during the Civil War period. One unidentified cartoonist used the tearing apart of the national map to satirize the deep divisions that marked the 1860 presidential election in a lithographic broadside from that same year (Figure 2.11).43 Dividing the National Map features the three main presidential candidates of the highly divisive 1860 election—Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and John Breckenridge—ripping the nation apart by destroying a large map labeled “National” that hangs against a wall. At the far left, Lincoln and Douglas tug vigorously at the western portions of the country. Lincoln grabs a section that would deliver him California and Kansas Territory, while Douglas clings to Illinois with his left hand and Ohio with his right. Breckenridge, facing less competition than Lincoln and Douglas for his desired territory, has nearly succeeded in separating the southeastern quadrant from the map. A fourth candidate, John Bell, the Constitutional Union Party’s candidate who supported slavery but was also an ardent defender of the Union, futilely attempts to glue the Northeast back together at the far right of the print. He stands on a chair to the right of the map, about to plunge a brush into a jar

Figure 2.11 [Dividing the] National [Map], 1860. Lithograph on wove paper, image: 34 × 48.8 cm, sheet: 35.8 × 52.4 cm. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-ppmsca-33122.

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of Spalding’s Celebrated Prepared Glue, a popular glue brand from the period, in an attempt to repair the fracturing. Several crates of the glue stacked behind his chair suggest the immense effort required to surmount the tearing of the nation at the hands of the other three politicians. By contrast, Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada pictures the vast network of railroads—marked on the map by thick black lines with short perpendicular marks mimicking the appearance of track—that sutured a nation torn apart by civil war. Perry’s choice to feature a “Guide Map of the United States and Canada”—and to make its title legible to viewers—is significant. The railroad tracks that visually unite the states also weave across the border between the United States and Canada, indicating inter-national as well as intra-national flows.

Perry and Cartography Perry seems to have experimented widely with cartographic modes of picturing in a variety of contexts, in genre paintings including Studying the Map and How the Battle Was Won, in portraits (as in the example of his portrait of Jefferson Davis, which features a map of the Confederate states on the wall behind the sitter), as well as in landscapes. Soon after Perry’s arrival to the Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser announced the artist’s plan “to sketch the crater” at Kīlauea and also noted that Perry would be joined by the artist Virgil Williams, with whom Perry had traveled in California the previous year.44 Perry was certainly not the first US artist to paint the volcanic crater. Titian Ramsay Peale painted pendant scenes of Kīlauea at daytime and nighttime in 1842, following his November 1840 visit to the site as part of the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition.45 Like Peale’s paintings, Perry’s view of Kīlauea is part of a topographical landscape tradition that seeks to document geographic features accurately. The art historian Robin Kelsey argues that “[t]he history of the topographic view is entwined with that of the map” because topographic sketching required both “pictorial and cartographic habits.”46 That Perry’s painting was seen to have documentary value in the nineteenth century is evidenced by the fact that scientists reproduced it at least twice in their publications. The geologist William T. Brigham published Perry’s view of Kīlauea in his 1868 Notes on the Volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands to illustrate his description of visiting the crater in 1864, although Brigham’s text does not make specific reference to Perry’s portrayal of the site.47 Perry’s painting appears again in the American Journal of Science in 1888 to illustrate an article by the geologist James D. Dana (who, like Peale, was a member of the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition) that details a history of physical changes to the crater. Dana writes that Perry’s painting, reproduced from a photograph of the work (Figure 2.12) that he acquired from Brigham, appears in the article because it “contains the remains of the Lyman ridge as mapped by Mr. [William T.] Brigham, and is further testimony as to its position with reference to the walls.” Dana characterizes Perry’s painting as reliable confirmation of the position of Lyman ridge as it appeared in 1864, praising Perry’s “sketch of the crater” for its “evidence throughout of great accuracy of detail.”48 Perry apparently experimented with more traditional forms of cartography as well. Two maps of silver mining regions in Nevada, made in 1865, are signed by E. W. Perry of New York, offering evidence that Perry tried his hand at mapmaking. No definitive proof has come to light to link the author of the Nevada maps with the artist at

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Figure 2.12 Reproduction of a painting of Kīlauea by Enoch Wood Perry. From J. D. Dana, “History of the Changes in the Mt. Loa Craters; Part I. Kilauea,” American Journal of Science, ed. James D. and Edward S. Dana, 3rd ser., 35, no. 205 (January 1888): 25.

the center of this chapter, but it is almost certain that the same Perry created them.49 The artist was involved with various mining companies during his time in San Francisco. In August 1863 Perry became a trustee for the Tucker Gold and Silver Mining Company. And in August 1864 Perry advertised in a San Francisco paper the annual meeting of stockholders for the New Hope Silver Mining Company, which operated in the Washington Mining District in Lander County, Nevada Territory. Perry signed the advertisement “E. Wood Perry, Jr., Secretary,” indicating that he held a leadership position in the company.50 The artist likely traveled to the mining districts in Nevada while living in San Francisco, and he almost certainly would have stopped in the area again in the autumn of 1865 while en route from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. One of Perry’s maps, a fold-out map entitled Map of the Washoe, Humboldt, and Reese River Silver Mines in the State of Nevada (Figure 2.13) and engraved by the firm Waters-Son of New York, is included in the back of an 1865 booster publication The Silver Mines of Nevada, which promotes the mineral-rich region as ripe for investment and promises investors significant returns.51 Published just one year after Nevada became a state, the map shows the locations of various silver mines in the region, as well as the transportation connections between the mining areas and the neighboring state of California and Utah Territory. The existing Central Pacific Railroad lines between Sacramento and Fort Bridger are marked with track-like cross hatching, and the more southerly route of a proposed railroad following the route of the United States postal service is indicated by a line of contiguous black and white rectangles. Perry charts these transportation routes against the various waterways, lakes, and mountains that crisscross this part of the country, and the mileage between

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Figure 2.13 E. W. Perry, Map of the Washoe, Humboldt and Reese River Silver Mines in the State of Nevada By E.W. Perry . . . 1865 [with specimen for pamphlet for the Commonwealth Mining Company. . .], 1865. Map, 7 × 17 in. Source: Courtesy of the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, https://purl.stanford.edu/rp475gg2342.

major cities and the mining areas appears in text at the left side of the map. The map suggests that Enoch Wood Perry practiced traditional forms of cartography early in his career, an experience that undoubtedly informed his later narrative paintings that feature figures making or examining maps. Perry also created a map that combines the two-dimensional conventions of traditional cartography with pictorial and narrative content in the Map of Mining Claims of Pine Wood District, State of Nevada (Figure 2.14) published by Alphonse Brett’s lithographic company in New York in 1865. This map departs from the usual cartographic conventions of the period by plotting in two dimensions the various mining companies’ claims along the branches of Ranch Creek and Pine Creek layered against a more illusionistic, three-dimensional rendering of Pine Wood City nestled in a valley and surrounded by steeply sloping mountains. A well-supplied wagon train approaches from the direction of Virginia City at the lower left. The cropped form of a horse at the far-left corner of the composition suggests that the group is large, stretching beyond the map’s frame. The wagons pass a post office that indicates the connectivity of an otherwise seemingly isolated site and approach the bridge crossing the Ranch Creek. This is an incredibly optimistic view of the opportunities in the area, considering that, following a boom in the early 1860s, the mining industry in Nevada experienced a major panic and depression around the

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Figure 2.14 E. W. Perry, Map of Mining Claims of Pine Wood District, State of Nevada/By E. W. Perry, New York 1865, 1865. Pictorial map, 46 × 29 cm. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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time Perry created this map. The curving path of the road leading to the river and the sinuous lines of the fence running through Pine Wood City create the impression of recession into space, and the map holds in tension the illusionistic approach to rendering the landscape and the narrative content of the figures heading into town with the diagrammatic two-dimensionality of the mining claims mapped on paper. This spatial tension is evident as well in the map’s title and Perry’s signature, which appear in an irregularly shaped form at the lower right of the image. Perry arranged the text diagonally so that the words slope down when reading from left to right, a device that evokes the foreshortening of the wagon train, road, and fence in the illustration but also the flatness of the schematic rendering parallel to the picture plane of the mining claims. Although Perry’s Map of the Washoe, Humboldt, and Reese River Silver Mines in the State of Nevada uses more conventional cartographic techniques to indicate the locations of different mining sites and their accessibility via transportation routes from California and Utah Territory—almost certainly in order to attract speculative investment in the region—it remains unknown who the intended viewers of a hybrid work like Map of Mining Claims of Pine Wood District, State of Nevada, with its inclusion of scenes of town life and topographical landscape, would have been. Maps in the nineteenth-century United States found a wide audience. The literary and material culture historian Martin Brückner’s analysis of estate inventories reveals that “citizens of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds” owned maps and displayed them in their homes. New technological developments in printing processes and the production of machine paper facilitated the industrialization of American mapworks during the first half of the century, making maps more accessible to a wider swath of the public. The medium of lithography was particularly well-suited for industrialized mapmaking because it allowed for relatively quick and inexpensive updates to be made as geographic borders and transportation routes changed. By the end of the 1850s, it had replaced steel and wax engraving as the dominant medium for producing maps in the United States. Industrialized map manufactures emerged across the nation, and networks of retail channels that included specialized map stores, bookkeeper and stationer shops, and traveling salesmen, distributed maps to even the most rural areas.53 Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada was intended to be portable and used frequently. Unfolded the map measures approximately two and a half by three feet, but versions were made available that folded the map into a small case that resembles a book cover and measures approximately four by six inches. This presentation made the map pocket-sized and easy for travelers to carry. The text on the inside cover of the 1862 edition of the pocket version of Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada makes this advantage explicit, stating that it was “[e]specially designed for the use of merchants, business men, forwarder, travelers, etc.” and claiming that, “while of convenient size for use, [it] contains more minute and accurate information than any similar map ever published.”54 According to Brückner, all maps, but especially smaller maps that were mobile and used on a regular basis (like the pocket version of Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada), “facilitated the widespread adoption of cartographic thinking as part of American everyday life.” The proliferation of small maps in the marketplace also enabled younger generations to become “cartoliterate” in childhood, as maps became an integral part of education and were incorporated into textbooks and 52

78 Mapping Enoch Wood Perry’s Genre Scenes classrooms with greater frequency. This generational shift in familiarity with maps is suggested by Studying the Map. It is the younger woman, not the elderly couple, who reads the text and locates specific points on the map, pointing with her right thumb and forefinger so that her elder companions can locate the relevant coordinates. As the US population became “cartoliterate” during the period, maps (as artifacts) and mapping (as a concept) were deeply “involved in social relationships” and offered “a major mode of social communication.”55 Thus, it should come as no surprise that Perry turned to maps as key motif in several of his genre paintings.

Mapping and the Narrative Image Maps, as a “major mode of social communication,” provide the conduit for narrative and social interaction in Perry’s How the Battle Was Won and Studying the Map. Perry’s depiction of a soldier sketching a map for a civilian audience in How the Battle Was Won references the central role maps played in communicating events to the public during the American Civil War. The soldier’s tabletop map complements his verbal narration (the gesture of the elder man who holds his hand up to his ear to hear the soldier’s words makes visible this auditory component), and his use of visual narrative apparently enthralls his viewers. Studying the Map portrays a printed map that has been unfurled on the tabletop so that the three figures in the painting can trace a route presumably described in the letter held in the young woman’s hands. If the letter is indeed from someone serving in the American Civil War, as I suggested earlier, the painting mobilizes the map to create a more intimate audience for wartime narrative. The maps in these two genre paintings personalize public events (in the soldier’s firstperson account of a battle in How the Battle Was Won and in the letter the woman holds in Studying the Map), whether the news is received in the public or private sphere (in the tavern or on the family’s porch). We might explore Perry’s use of maps as a tool for communication in these paintings by considering the function of the newspaper featured prominently at the center of Woodville’s War News From Mexico, which shares with Perry’s genre paintings an interest in wartime narrative and liminal space. Scholars have examined War News From Mexico in terms of the transmission of information in response to changing market forces, a process made visible by the reading of the penny newspaper at the work’s center and by the various ways that news is communicated and filtered to the painting’s figures. The art historian Bryan Wolf’s analysis of the painting explores how the penny press not only constitutes the central motif of War News From Mexico but also how its “cognitive code” structures the painting’s forms, which mimic and repeat the rectangular shape of the newspaper and connect the ideas of medium and communication. Woodville, Wolf argues, “convert[s] the news into an analogue for his own art” and “renders himself, like the newspaper he depicts, a broker of knowledge.”56 Pointing to the ways that characters in War News From Mexico have to strain or otherwise exert themselves physically to consume the news, however, Justin Wolff argues that “[t]he information here does not flow freely,” a dynamic that he interprets as more akin to the ways the telegraph caused news reporting to become increasingly selective, controlled, and repetitive as information was transmitted to distant destinations.57 Perry’s The True American exaggerates the communication breakdown that Woodville’s painting only suggests. Most of the figures on the porch seemingly pay the open newspaper no mind. Similarly, the painting playfully refuses to reveal itself fully

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to the viewer by obscuring the faces of all of the figures in the work, and the newspaper is a key “instrument of obfuscation” in the composition and “set[s] a barrier between the included and the excluded.”58 The maps in Perry’s paintings, on the other hand, facilitate communication and storytelling. By the middle of the nineteenth century, cartographers began to experiment with new visual forms to communicate information as the “purpose of a map . . . shifted” from traditional, descriptive topography to more thematic and statistical content that “focused on the distribution of phenomena rather than the landscape itself.” The nineteenth century saw “the realization that maps were visual tools, uniquely capable of conveying complex ideas.”59 But even topographic maps, like Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada, could, when annotated, be used for strategic and complex thinking. In 1864 General Ulysses S. Grant used the 1863 edition of Colton’s map altered with red and blue lines to mark past and proposed lines of defense for the Union army, which he shared with General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman wrote of Grant’s map, “That map, to me, contains more information and ideas than a volume of printed matter.”60 Much as a genre painter attempts to communicate a story through paint, the soldier in How the Battle Was Won constructs his narrative, at least in part, through graphic means, presenting a hand-made image to his captivated audience. Perry signed and dated How the Battle Was Won in brown paint, which he applied—not in one of the lower corners of the canvas—but near the composition’s center, on the panel of the table that faces the viewer. In so doing, Perry further links the figure of the soldier to that of the genre artist by equating his own graphic marks on the table with those made by the soldier. The painting connects the visual with storytelling. That the soldier is speaking—presumably telling the story of a battle, as the title suggests—is indicated by the elderly man at the center who raises his left hand to his ear. But all of the figures gathered around the table direct their gaze down to the hand-drawn map, an aspect of the work’s composition that privileges the visual information over the auditory component. Maps often served a dual function during the nineteenth century, as both a utilitarian object and a decorative image. Brückner notes myriad ways in which “the distinction between cartography and art” were blurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when “the navigational and pictorial functions of cartography were deemed both mutually constitutive and integral to the production and reception of other forms of American visual culture.” American shopkeepers often sold maps along with prints and treated them “as both commercially and conceptually compatible goods.” Advertisements for maps targeted an “audience invested in the visual arts” by emphasizing the similarity of maps with other decorative printed images (rather than with printed texts). People frequently hung maps like pictures on interior walls in their homes.61 A small metal loop at the top edge of the map and the thick, dark band visible between the loop and the top of the paper suggests that the map in Studying the Map was normally used in this way, mounted to a fabric backing and hung on a wall. Removed from the wall and brought to the table on the porch, the map in Studying the Map offers not just a visual but a sensorial experience. As the young woman leans over the table, her fingers reach across a span between two points that presumably correspond to locations described in letter. The gesture invokes a narrative of travel—of relocating from point A to point B—that is implied but not depicted in the

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picture. According to Brückner, it was not unusual for users to interact with maps in this bodily manner: Once removed from elevated wall placements, maps made of paper, cotton, silk, ceramics, or cardboard would be subject not only to eyes but also to fingers tracing topographic lines, roads, and borders. Seeing maps was no longer exclusively predicated on a map’s being a picture; rather, the tactile interaction with the map’s materiality would have complemented the visual experience and invariably would have incorporated the map’s material staging grounds—that is, map-bearing furniture such as tabletops and bookshelves and sartorial articles. Nineteenth-century schoolchildren were taught to interact with maps in a tactile fashion. Pointing to particular features on a map while reciting the corresponding place names became the preferred method of demonstrating geographical knowledge during this period.62 Typically, when nineteenth-century genre painters and portraitists pictured figures physically engaging with maps, they portrayed them indoors in their homes or studies, and the maps are props that communicate something about the figures’ social identities. Brückner writes: [B]y deploying maps as props, artists offered two specific choices for picturing real or imagined sitters’ identities in situ: the painter’s use of graphic conventions that situated subjects through the imitation of natural space using linear perspective, colors, and the realistic portrayal of objects; and the mapmaker’s cartographic conventions used for plotting objects inside a uniform, abstract, and geometric space. Although the paintings privilege the former mode of representation, by showing the figures touching the maps in various postures, the paintings also enmesh imaginary and real subjects inside a sensory world in which the painted picture of unfurled planar maps operates as both the visual and tactile link . . . to an external, cartographically defined environment.63 It is in the painted unfurled map that the affairs of the external world enter the private domain. Maps could help personalize public events. The soldier’s map in How the Battle Was Won not only helps to communicate the man’s story but also appears to move his audience emotionally. The bearded man standing in the center of the group raises his hand up to his forehead in a gesture that suggests his emotional investment in the soldier’s tale. Similarly, the man in the vest, standing behind the soldier, leans forward and places a hand on the soldier’s shoulder, as if offering sympathy or comfort. Both men appear to be deeply engaged with and impacted by the soldier’s tale, and it is the hand-drawn map that serves as an important means by which the soldier affects his audience. Tactile engagement with maps fostered bonds of intimacy. It helped map viewers make emotional connections with loved ones from a distance, especially by “locating or tracking absent members of the family.” Following the peregrinations of a nowdistant loved one’s travels on a map not only oriented nineteenth-century map readers to the traveler’s route but also “gave members of the household the illusion of virtual participation.”64

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This was particularly the case for women. Since the eighteenth century, geography and map literacy were deemed appropriate scholarly pursuits for educated girls and young women.65 Educated women were part of an “emotional cartographic culture,” according to the scholar Penny L. Richards, in which maps afforded a way to bridge “separat[ion] from kin and other loved ones” when “gender norms and physical realities limited their travel and restricted them to their homes.” Nineteenth-century written accounts provide evidence that women used maps to trace the routes of their loved ones’ travels as described in the “geographic narratives” that their loved ones communicated to them in personal correspondence. Maps helped women “connect emotionally with loved ones far away.”66 The woman leaning over and touching the map on the table visually recalls Perry’s many depictions during the 1870s of women performing domestic labor indoors, especially scenes of weaving, knitting, and quilting. The women in the 1872 wood engraving The Patchwork Quilt published in Harper’s Weekly (Figure 2.15) or in paintings such as The Quilting Party (1876) and Girl Quilting (1885) lean over patchwork compositions arranged on quilting frames as they hand stitch the pieces together.67 Map reading and women’s handiwork were closely related activities performed by women in the nineteenth-century United States. Using maps was a skill that women might have honed, in part, through their daily engagement with “graphic information” in everyday activities like dress patterning, quilt planning, and needlework.68 Quilting was, according to the quilting historian Robert Shaw, a popular pastime for women “all over the county and in every stratum of society” in the decades following the American Civil War. It played important social and emotional roles, helping communities to begin “the slow, painstaking work of healing” after the conflict.69 Patchwork quilts, composed of multicolored swaths of cloth stitched together to make a design, could communicate narratives (through their imagery or through the histories of the fabrics used) and strengthen familial and community bonds through the often communal ways in which they were made (for example, quilting bees) or when gifted to friends and family.70

Genre Painting and Communication Breakdown Despite their obvious differences and visual conventions, we might consider the conceptual and formal similarities between mapping and genre painting. Both use the arrangement of color and line across a flat pictorial surface at a much-reduced scale to present spatial and demographic data and to produce meaning for viewers.71 The dimensions of Perry’s Studying the Map are nearly identical to those of Colton’s New Guide Map of the United States and Canada—differing in size by less than two inches—a correspondence that the artist almost certainly recognized (assuming that he had access to a copy of Colton’s map in his studio while working on the painting) and perhaps even intended. It raises the possibility that Perry considered the connections between his painterly project and the cartographer’s. If Perry contemplated the relationship between mapping and genre painting, he would have followed in a long tradition that drew the two modes of picturing into dialogue. The literary historian Richard Helgerson traces the contrasting symbolic associations of the map in seventeenth-century Dutch culture, representing either modern, worldly “accomplishments in government, exploration, commerce, and technology”

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Figure 2.15 Enoch Wood Perry, The Patchwork Quilt. Wood engraving. From Harper’s Weekly, December 21, 1872, 1005.

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or, paradoxically, anti-modern, moralizing messages on “the vanity of all such pursuits.” He notes that in shops in Dutch cities during this period: one could easily buy for about the same price a wall map or a genre painting—a representation of the world or of the home—and the two must often have ended hanging side by side in their purchasers’ homes. For Helgerson, this juxtaposition signals the emerging importance of “home” in Dutch society as an antidote to the worldliness symbolized by the map.72 Perry apparently studied the lessons of Dutch genre painting. Although he likely viewed Dutch works during his time in Europe in the 1850s, Appletons’ Journal reported that Perry spent the summer of 1873 in the Netherlands and Belgium to study “the masters and the methods by which he may better develop the particularities of his subjects, and push yet further the artistic feeling and completeness of his works.”73 Perry adapted the conventions of old master Dutch genre paintings to suit his own needs and interests. The maps in Perry’s genre paintings do not pit home against worldliness but rather function to take up themes of mobility as arenas for social engagement and unfolding narrative. The three paintings by Perry explored in this chapter—How the Battle Was Won, Studying the Map, and The True American— all, to a certain degree, disrupt the transmission of communication to the viewer. In How the Battle Was Won and Studying the Map the pictorial information from the map that is presumably legible to the figures in the painting is withheld from the viewer. Positioned on the tabletop, the geographical specificity of the maps dissolve in their foreshortening into a condensed blur of paint. How the Battle Was Won and Studying the Map use the cartographic image as a mode of communication between the figures, but they seemingly refuse the same level of spatial and narrative legibility to its viewers. With its playful withholding from the viewer, The True American mocks the fluid transmission of information along networks of circulation. It is this communication breakdown that Perry satirizes so effectively in The True American. At a time when critics publicly wondered about the continued relevance of a tradition of genre painting based on stable types in a society as seemingly liminal as that of the United States, Perry appears to have engaged these questions directly. Although The True American is often described as an anomalous work in Perry’s oeuvre, this chapter has sought to demonstrate its relationship to more traditional genre paintings by the artist. There are a number of thematic and visual similarities between this work and Studying the Map: they both portray a group of figures gathered in a liminal space and feature at the center of the composition a supposedly democratic means of communicating information, a map in one and a newspaper in the other. The top of the newspaper in The True American folds toward the viewer, revealing its title in much the same way that the map curves over the table to make its name legible. These similarities suggest a shared set of questions at the heart of both works. But in The True American the tension between geographic mobility and community, and the pressure that tension places on genre painting’s capacity to communicate, is made most explicit and to comedic effect. As one of the country’s leading genre painters and an exceptionally mobile individual himself, Perry was particularly well situated to perform this critique.

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Notes 1. The original title for the work is not known. Although it is titled The True American today, it has also been published under the title The Vanishing American, which was given by the Old Print Shop when it acquired the painting in the mid-1940s. Bartlett Cowdrey, “The Discovery of Enoch Wood Perry,” The Old Print Shop Portfolio, ed. Helen Comstock, 4, no. 8 (April 1945): 173. The 1874 National Academy of Design exhibition catalogue lists a painting by Perry and lent by owner F. D. Moulton titled The Weekly Paper (No. 346). However, no known exhibition reviews describe the work’s subject, so it is uncertain whether The Weekly Paper is the painting known today as The True American or a different work by the artist. Natalie Spassky with Linda Bantel, Doreen Bolger Burke, Meg Perlman, and Amy L. Walsh, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Between 1816 and 1845, ed. Kathleen Luhrs, assisted by Jacolyn A. Mott (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 1985), 2: 347. For the role visual humor plays in the work, see Jennifer A. Greenhill, Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 43–44, 58–67. 2. Hermann Warner Williams, Jr., Mirror to the American Past: A Survey of American Genre Painting, 1750–1900 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 201. Greenhill reads the seemingly anomalous aspects of the work as being due to it being made specifically for reproduction as a chromolithograph for a mass audience (Playing It Straight, 44, 58–60). 3. George William Sheldon, American Painters: With Eighty-Three Examples of Their Work Engraved on Wood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879), 72; Annette Blaugrund, “The Tenth Street: Studio Building: A Roster, 1857–1895,” The American Art Journal 14, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 71; Williams, Mirror to the American Past, 199; and Linda Jones Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.: A Biography and Analysis of His Thematic and Stylistic Development” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1981), 3. 4. “American Painters.—E. Wood Perry,” The Art Journal 1 (1875): 216. 5. Eastman Johnson painted this motif. See Michael Clapper, “ ‘I Was Once a Barefoot Boy!’: Cultural Tensions in a Popular Chromo,” American Art 16, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 16–39. 6. “American Painters.—E. Wood Perry,” 215; Walter Montgomery, ed., American Art and American Art Collections (Boston, MA: E. W. Walker, 1889), 2: 386; and “Art and Artists,” The Independent, January 21, 1869, 2. 7. “American Painters.—E. Wood Perry,” 216. 8. Perry wrote to Andrew Warner, the American Art-Union’s corresponding secretary, on May 13, 1851, requesting advice about studying at the academy in Düsseldorf. On February 20, 1852, he again corresponded with Warner, this time asking for contact information of an American living in Düsseldorf who would be able to provide more specific information about the admission processes for the academy. Warner wrote to Perry recommending that Perry consult with Leutze and Worthington Whittredge. See Natalie Spassky, et al., American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 342–43. 9. Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.,” 14–28; and Sheldon, American Painters, 70–72. Although born in Boston in 1831 to a family with New England roots, Perry grew into adulthood in New Orleans, where his family relocated when he was a child. According to Gibbs, by the mid-1850s Perry’s father, Enoch Wood Perry, Sr., had become a prominent member of the business and political communities in Louisiana. By 1855 he served as chairman of the Louisiana State Central Democratic Committee. Perry Sr. wrote to both Jefferson Davis, who then served as Secretary of War, and to President Franklin Pierce in 1856 to recommend his son for the job (20–21). Like his son, the elder Perry also earned a reputation for traveling great distances in his youth. His obituary proclaimed, “He was of a roving disposition when he was young, and took to the sea when but 16. He made several long trips, visiting all the principal ports of South America.” “Enoch Wood Perry, Nigh a Centarian, Dies Last Night After a Three Weeks’ Illness,” Times-Picayune, New Orleans, LA, November 26, 1901, 10. 10. Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.,” 28–34. According to one contemporary account, Perry received a commission of $1,000 from “friends and admirers” of Slidell to paint Slidell’s portrait “standing at his desk in the Senate Chamber.” “Louisiana Democracy and the Baltimore Nominees,” San Francisco Bulletin, June 29, 1860, 2. The artist John Quincy Adams

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Ward made in 1860 a sketch of Perry painting Slidell in Washington, titled, Sketch Class Series–E. W. Perry, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (John Davis Hatch Collection, 1979.20.119). Kevin Sharp speculates that Perry painted Davis’s portrait from a daguerreotype, rather than from life, because of “the painting’s only vague resemblance to the Confederate president.” He also notes that Perry’s “views on the causes of the war, states rights, and slavery are unrecorded,” but speculates that “his emotions and loyalties could scarcely have been anything but divided. His family was now firmly and prominently established in New Orleans. Their success had allowed him to travel and study art. And, of course, there was his brother, risking his life for the Confederate cause. On the other hand, nearly all of the American artists Perry had met and befriended in Europe were from Northern cities, and he himself had chosen to live in Philadelphia upon returning from abroad.” Kevin Sharp, Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era (Memphis, TN: The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2009), 45–46. 11. Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.,” 32, 36, 38, 41, 43; and David W. Forbes, Paintings, Prints, and Drawings of Hawaii from the Sam and Mary Cooke Collection (Honolulu, HI: Mānoa Heritage Center, 2016), 180. Perry advertised drawing and painting lessons in the Daily Evening Bulletin, March 6, 1863. 12. “An Artist,” 2. 13. Sugar was a booming business in Hawai‘i when Perry visited the islands. Rising sugar prices in the United States during the American Civil War drove demand for Hawaiian sugar and spurred additional investment, especially by European and American entrepreneurs. The first commercial sugar plantations in Hawai‘i began in the 1830s, and the industry continued to grow in the following decades as capital investments in whaling declined and the California gold rush created an expanded market. By 1860 production reached 722 tons of sugar and 2,600 barrels of molasses. A sugar refinery opened in Honolulu in 1861 and remained in operation for seven years. Captain James Makee purchased the sugar plantation at ‘Ulupalakua in 1858 from L. L. Torbert, who had taken over management of the site in 1852. Makee’s plantation at ‘Ulupalakua was in operation until 1883. C. Allan Jones and Robert V. Osgood, From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawai‘i’s Premier Crop (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), 20, 27, 30–31. See also Carol A. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai‘i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 30–31. 14. “A New Orleans Artist,” New Orleans Times, July 13, 1865, 4. For more on Perry’s Hawaiian works, see Don R. Severson, Michael D. Horikawa, and Jennifer Saville, Finding Paradise: Island Art in Private Collections (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press in Association with the Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2002), especially 78–80. 15. Perry apparently traveled with the merchant William T. Coleman. Marysville Daily Appeal, Marysville, CA, vol. 12, no. 91, October 20, 1865, 2. 16. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, With an Examination of the Mormon Principle (New York: Hurd and Houghton 1870). 17. “Home Affairs: Departed,” The Semi-Weekly Telegraph, Salt Lake City, UT, May 24, 1866, 3. 18. According to Gibbs, Perry took over Biertstadt’s old studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building. Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.,” 55. But one contemporary commentator noted in 1869 that Perry occupied Jervis McEntee’s studio while McEntee was in Europe. “Art and Artists,” 2. 19. The same article reported that Eastman Johnson was also on the island at the time and that Perry was traveling with the artists Virgil Williams and William S. Tiffany. “Visitors at Nantucket,” Inquirer and Mirror, August 13, 1870; qtd. in Patricia Hills, “Appendix 1: Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in Picturing Nantucket: An Art History of the Island With Paintings From the Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association, ed. Michael A. Jehle (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association, 2000), 35. 20. “Art Notes,” The Evening Post, July 8, 1872, 1; qtd. in Dorothy Hasselman, “Talking It Over: A Patriotic Genre Painting by Enoch Wood Perry,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 303n24. 21. At least one critic did credit Perry’s travels for his work, claiming that Perry was his own best teacher: Leutze and Couture were “good enough masters; but his best master has been E. Wood Perry, with whom he has closely studied life in many parts of the world.” “Fine Arts: Art and Artists in New York,” The Independent 33, no. 1701 (July 7, 1881): 8.

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22. A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 2–3, 235. 23. Grant Wesley Hamming, “Amerikanischer Malkasten: American Art and Düsseldorf” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2016), 132, 139–40. 24. Robert Tomes, “The Americans on Their Travels,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31, no. 181 (June 1865): 58. 25. Greenhill produces convincing evidence that Perry made the painting specifically for the production of the chromolithograph. The artist filed for copyright of the design in 1874 under the category of “Design” rather than “Painting.” She also surmises that the painting’s relatively unfinished surface and unusual monogram signature were a consequence of the painting’s purpose as a basis for the much more widely circulated print. Greenhill, Playing It Straight, 58–59, 187n63. Greenhill describes the “logic of dislocation and absence” in Perry’s Taking It Over (1872) as anticipating the design for The True American (65). 26. Greenhill, Playing It Straight, 63. 27. Greenhill, Playing It Straight, 189n74. Greenhill sees the significance of the new title as labeling the figures as “social (and aesthetic) voids” and signaling the print’s lowbrow humor (62). 28. John S. Farmer and W. E. Hanley, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1905), 78. The word perhaps derives from the German verb bummeln, meaning to stroll or dawdle. John D. Seelye, “The American Tramp: A Version of the Picaresque,” American Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1963): 543. 29. Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, With Speaker Colfax (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles & Co.; New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1865), IV. This is Bowles’s account of the trip he made between Massachusetts and California in 1865 in the company of, among others, Congressman Schuyler Colfax (a Republican from Indiana), Speaker of the House; William J. Bross, Lieutenant Governor of Illinois; and Albert D. Richardson, journalist for the New York Tribune. 30. Farmer and Hanley, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, 78. 31. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 29–31. 32. Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1. 33. The painting was likely titled Studying the Map for its exhibition at the Harry Shaw Newman Gallery at the Old Print Shop in New York City in April 1945. There is no evidence that the painting was known by this title during Perry’s lifetime, but it is the title for the painting given in Cowdrey, “The Discovery of Enoch Wood Perry,” 171–81. This article announces that the Harry Shaw Newman Gallery had come into possession of a collection of more than 30 paintings by Perry as well as drawings, letters, photographs, plates from Perry’s copy of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1881), and other archival items. The whereabouts of Studying the Map after its possession by the Old Print Shop in 1945 remains unknown. 34. Sartain was part of a prominent family of printmakers and painters in Philadelphia. For more on Sartain’s training and career as an artist, see Phyllis Peet, “The Art Education of Emily Sartain,” Woman’s Art Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1990): 9–15. 35. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 776 (the print is reproduced on p. 775). Sartain also exhibited the etching at other venues, including the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1889 and the 1889 Minneapolis Industrial Exposition. The etching is listed in the exhibition catalogue for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a sale price of $65 and for the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition with a sale price of $60. Catalogue of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1889), 40; and Catalogue of Works of Art (Fourth Annual Exhibit.) in the Art Galleries, of the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition (Minneapolis, MN: The Swinburne Printing Co., 1889), 29. Part of the appeal of Welcome News in the context of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition might have been its resonance with the multilayered meanings and roles that cartography played at the exhibition. See Diane Dillon, “Mapping Enterprise: Cartography and Commodification at the 1893

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World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century, ed. Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 94. 36. Ronald E. Grim, Debra Block, and Janet H. Spitz, “Introduction,” in Torn in Two: 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, ed. Janet H. Spitz and Dale Rosen (Boston, MA: The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, 2011), 8. In the spring of 1862 the US Coast Survey marked a map to chart the “relationships, resources, and the shifting fortunes of the Union military” by “us[ing] color to identify the reach of Union forces at different moments in the first year of the conflict.” Susan Schulten writes that the “historical sketches” of the war, beginning with the Coast Survey map, “tell a story of movement.” Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 47. 37. This version of the map is held in the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC (call number G3701.S5 1862. C6). A digitized version is available at http:// hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3701s.cw0025300. 38. David Bosse, “The Parlor War: Civil War Maps in the Popular Media,” in Torn in Two, 32–33. 39. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Vol. 15, 1860–1866, ed. Linda Allardt and David W. Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 64. 40. Williams, Mirror to the American Past, 199. According to Williams, Perry painted the work in New Orleans, and it is distinguished for “being one of the few surviving canvases to show an incident in the Civil War behind Confederate lines.” 41. Sharp, Bold, Cautious, True, 46. 42. The second title for the print, News From the Front, appears in Phyllis Peet, “Emily Sartain: America’s First Woman Mezzotint Engraver,” Imprint (Autumn 1984): 25. Peet does not give a source for this alternative title, and I have not been able to uncover any nineteenthcentury texts that use this name for Sartain’s print or for any painting by Perry. 43. Another example of a popular print featuring politicians tearing apart the national map is The True Issue or “Thats Whats the Matter” published by Currier & Ives in 1864. The print shows Lincoln and Davis tearing apart the national map, while General George B. McClellan tries to put a stop to the tug-of-war. 44. According to the article, Perry and Williams were originally supposed to be joined by Albert Bierstadt, but Bierstadt had to go to New York City instead to attend to business. “An Artist,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, October 1, 1864, 2. 45. For an in-depth analysis of Peale’s paintings of Kīlauea, see Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, “The Missing Pacific: The Expeditionary Blank in Titian Ramsey Peale’s Kilauea Landscapes,” chapter 3 in Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking, Routledge Research in Art History (London: Routledge, 2018). 46. Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37. 47. Perry’s painting is reproduced in William T. Brigham, Notes on the Volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands: With a History of Their Various Eruptions (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1868), 419. 48. J. D. Dana, “History of the Changes in the Mt. Loa Craters; Part I: Kilauea,” American Journal of Science, ed. James D. and Edward S. Dana, 3rd series, 35, no. 205 (January 1888): 25–26. 49. Although several libraries that hold the map credit the maker as Enoch Wood Perry on Worldcat.org, I have not been able to uncover any direct evidence that the mapmaker is the same E. W. Perry as the artist who is the subject of this chapter, nor have I been able to uncover any evidence of a different individual named E. W. Perry who is likely to have made the map. Perry did not establish his New York City studio until 1866, although perhaps he signed his name with “N.Y.” following it knowing that the city was his intended destination after the conclusion of his travels in Utah. The Nevada maps seem to have been one-offs, and I have not located any other maps from the period that are credited to Enoch Wood Perry or E. W. Perry. 50. “To-Day’s Advertisements: Tucker Gold and Silver Mining Company,” Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco, CA, August 26, 1863; and “To-Day’s Advertisements: New Hope Silver Mining Company,” Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco, CA, August 20, 1864.

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51. The Silver Mines of Nevada (New York: Wm. C. Bryant & Co., 1865). 52. For a history of the birth of the mining industry in Nevada and its various booms and busts, see Ronald M. James, The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1998). I am grateful to Christine Garnier for pointing me to this source. 53. Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 91–92, 97–98, 105, 178 (quote). 54. A digital version of the 1862 pocket map cover in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (list number 4813.001) of the David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, is available digitally at www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?q=list_no=%224813.001%22. For more on the social history of pocket maps and other transient cartographic types during this period, see Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 260–73. 55. Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 278, 244–45, 3. For more on the generational shifts in the use of maps in childhood education, see chapter 8. 56. Bryan Wolf, “All the World’s a Code: Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44, no. 4, American Art (Winter 1984): 330, 331, 333. 57. Justin Wolff, Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 107. 58. Greenhill, Playing It Straight, 63. 59. Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 2–3, 8. 60. Quoted in Benjamin Franklin Cooling, To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864–1865 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 116. 61. Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 121, 167, 179. 62. Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 196 (quote), 288–92. 63. Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 191. 64. Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 197. 65. Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 18. 66. Penny L. Richards, “ ‘Could I but Mark Out My Own Map of Life’: Educated Women Embracing Cartography in the Nineteenth-Century American South,” Cartographica 39, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 2, 6. 67. Images of these paintings may be found at www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2019/trium phant-grace-important-americana-from-the-collection-of-barbara-and-arun-singh/enochwood-perry-the-quilting-party and www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2517B/lots/399. 68. Richards, “ ‘Could I but Mark Out My Own Map of Life,’ ” 2, 12n4. Connections between quilting and cartography from the nineteenth century to the present were explored in the exhibition Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts (American Folk Art Museum, New York City, July 16-October 3, 2018), https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/ handstitched-worlds-cartography-quilts/. 69. Robert Shaw, American Quilts: The Democratic Art (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2009), 119. 70. Perry’s illustration The Patchwork Quilt accompanies a brief article entitled “The Patchwork Quilt,” Harper’s Weekly 16, no. 834 (December 21, 1872): 1005. 71. For a discussion of the “mapping-picture relationship” in the seventeenth-century Dutch context, in which maps and pictures (particularly landscapes and history painting) overlapped conceptually and “on the basis of their resemblance,” see Svetlana Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” chapter 4 in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 72. Richard Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps in Modernity,” in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 257, 259. 73. “Art, Music, and Drama,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art (August 16, 1873): 219.

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Crossing Thresholds in Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties

Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties (Figure 3.1) was, according to many contemporary accounts, among the most successful artworks exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. One newspaper described it as “The most popular work of all the 9,000 or more gathered at Chicago . . . attract[ing] more attention from the millions of visitors to the World’s Fair than any other one exhibit in Jackson Park.” Another reviewer remarked upon the throngs gathered to see the painting at the fair’s Fine Arts Palace: “The space in front [of it] is always jammed and always will be . . . up to the very last minute visitors are allowed in the building.”1 The painting had received praise in 1891 at exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, but its appearance two years later in Chicago ensured its reputation. Breaking Home Ties stood out among the diverse paintings assembled for the fair’s exhibition of contemporary American art (work produced after 1876), a display that, according to the art historian Carolyn Kinder Carr, showcased “a wide range of styles, schools, and subject matter.”2 As its title suggests, the painting depicts a farewell scene; an adolescent bids his mother goodbye before leaving home to make his own way in the world. Several family members gather around the mother and son, observing their emotionally wrought parting. Measuring just over four feet high and six feet long, the work monumentalizes a private, domestic moment on a scale that had been traditionally reserved for history painting. Organizers of the 1893 fair evidently anticipated the painting’s popularity when they approached the artist about lending the picture. On November 14, 1892, Charles E. Dana, a Philadelphia artist and member of one of the fair’s juries of acceptance, wrote to Hovenden about the upcoming event: “There are very few American pictures in Philadelphia that we care for but at the head stands your ‘Breaking Home Ties’ of course. Do you care to send that to Chicago?”3 Hovenden agreed, and arrangements were made with the painting’s owner, Charles C. Harrison, to send the work before the exposition’s opening in May.4 The painting apparently achieved blockbuster status quickly. By July, Charles M. Kurtz, the supervisor of the contemporary art exhibition at the Fine Arts Palace, wrote to Hovenden about the painting’s enormous popularity: “I think I am not exaggerating when I tell you that ‘Breaking the Home Ties’ is the most popular picture in the Exposition. I wish I could repeat to you the many pleasant things said of it.”5 Apart from its success at the fair, Breaking Home Times reached an even larger audience through the publication of C. Klackner’s large-scale photogravure (Figure 3.2) and other commercial reproductions. As one commentator reported, “ ‘Breaking Home Ties,’ has been engraved probably oftener than any other American work, and is to be found literally in thousands of homes.”6

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Figure 3.1 Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890. Oil on canvas, 52 1/8 inches × 72 1/4 in. (132.4 × 183.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Ellen Harrison McMichael in memory of C. Emory McMichael, 1942, 1942-60-1. Source: Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Figure 3.2 Reproduction of Breaking Home Ties after a photogravure by C. Klackner. Published in Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 680.

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Previous scholarship on Hovenden’s painting has probed the significance of its subject matter for late nineteenth-century viewers anxious about the modernization and industrialization of the United States and has explored both the modern and antimodern aspects of its highly legible aesthetic and mass appeal.7 Building on these studies, this chapter considers the critical and popular reception of Breaking Home Ties—especially the connections contemporaries made between the painting and period discourses of geographic mobility—to understand the painting’s great success, particularly at the 1893 world’s fair. Comparison with other paintings by Hovenden and by the artists Toby Rosenthal and John Longstaff highlights how popular notions of space and progress informed viewers’ reactions to the subject and composition of Breaking Home Ties, especially its use of liminal space. For many commentators, these aspects of the painting prompted quite personal—often emotional—connections with Hovenden’s canvas.8

Mobility and Progress at the 1893 World’s Fair While the theme of mobility registered for critics writing about Breaking Home Ties in 1891, fairgoers in 1893 would have been especially primed to consider the painting in such terms. Officially, the World’s Columbian Exposition marked the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America, but it also celebrated the supposed westward sweep of civilization—from Europe to the Americas, and then across the North American continent—that the explorer’s journey purportedly initiated. The fair’s organizers (primarily elite, white men from Chicago) drew connections between this grand march-of-progress narrative and the nation’s recent economic and cultural ascendancy, thus claiming geographic mobility as a central factor in the formation of a modern United States. The literature scholar Mark Simpson has argued that the exposition “epitomized” a “habitual, even hegemonic” cultural discourse that “treat[ed] mobility as the key to national temperament.” This discourse bound “two traits supposedly intrinsic to ‘the American’: the need to move (freedom as geographical expansiveness) and the need to rise (freedom as social uplift).”9 It might have been rooted, in part, in demographic trends. According to census data, in the second half of the nineteenth century US men who relocated at least one county away experienced higher rates of occupational mobility, suggesting that “geographic mobility [was] an avenue to economic advancement.” By the end of the century, most migration was from rural to urban areas. Perhaps for this reason, commentators frequently imagined that the country boy in Hovenden’s painting was departing for the city (despite a dearth of visual evidence to support such a specific claim).10 Regardless of the adolescent’s supposed destination, the currency of the population’s mobility at the time led one critic writing on Breaking Home Ties to observe that “the parting is the critical incident peculiar to our country and to our age of the world.”11 Geographic mobility was not only an essential theme guiding the fair’s conception, it was also a reality for the millions of visitors who came from near and far to experience the exposition. Visitors might have reflected on their own travels while celebrating Columbus’s journey at the fair. Simpson argues that the fair’s Columbian framework might have resonated with fairgoers’ more modern experiences as tourists: A touristic destination of global significance, the fair worked to commemorate one narrative of mobility’s power in the past (the myth of discovery framing Columbian exploration), not least by epitomizing a distinct but related manifestation of

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The fair celebrated transportation as crucial to national prosperity, and fairgoers delighted in viewing the latest transportation technologies on display. Within the context of the 1893 exposition, official works of art, exhibits, and public events connected various modes of mobility—ranging from histories of westward migration to the celebration of modern transit—to ideas of national progress. The historian Reid Badger argues, “If the great world’s fairs celebrated change by showcasing the innovations of applied science, they sought in art a means of controlling and understanding that change.” Artworks commissioned to adorn the fairgrounds and exposition buildings of the White City, an area of the fair known for its white Beaux-Arts architecture, employed traditional allegory to depict the values espoused by exposition officials.13 Frederick William MacMonnies’s Columbian Fountain (Figure 3.3), which stood in the central Court of Honor, for example, presented Columbia on her ship of state, propelled forward by figures representing the arts and sciences, as Father Time steered the vessel from the stern. Although the sculpture was static, the barge’s illusion of momentum, suggested by Victory’s forward stride on the ship’s bow, conveyed an abstract concept of the United States’ advancement. The exposition’s emphasis on progress through geographic mobility was perhaps most clearly visible to visitors in the art and displays of the Transportation Building

Figure 3.3 Main Design of the MacMonnies Fountain. From Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 602.

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(Figure 3.4), the first building dedicated solely to the topic at any international world’s fair. The idea for a standalone Transportation Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition was the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan’s, who, serving as secretary of the fair’s Exhibition Board of Architects, lobbied the exposition’s organizers to designate “Transportation” as a separate display category rather than subsuming it under “Machines and Liberal Arts,” as it had been in the past. The building’s displays, according to the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, were intended to illustrate “the progress of transportation in all its branches,” ranging from ancient carts to the most modern locomotives. Bancroft boasted in his description of the Transportation Building: In no branch of human endeavor, except in the application of electric power, has such progress been made as here is shown, and nowhere than in this country of magnificent distances has the annihilation of distance been more nearly approached. Yet achievement thus far is but a foretaste of what is to come.14 The building’s exterior decorative program made this linkage between transportation and progress explicit. The “Golden Doorway”—the building’s east entrance so-named because of the gold-leaf appliqué adorning its arches—featured inscriptions by the British authors and statesmen Lord Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59). The texts connected developments in transportation to nation

Figure 3.4 The Golden Door, Transportation Building. From Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 566.

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building and prosperity and primed visitors to consider the exhibits inside the Transportation Building in relation to the era’s rapid commercial and industrial development. On either side of the Golden Doorway, bas-relief panels by the Philadelphia sculptor John J. Boyle complemented the quotations by Bacon and Macaulay. The reliefs, positioned just above eye level, juxtaposed ancient and contemporary technologies of locomotion to illustrate the progress of the modern era, creating a striking contrast of transportation in the past and present.15 Through this juxtaposition, the sculptural panels presented a version of the “expansive and evolutionary view of history” that the art historian Wanda Corn has argued worked to create a binary between the “primitive” past and the “civilized” present. This “Progress/Triumph/Civilization paradigm,” as Corn describes it, appeared frequently across the fairgrounds in 1893, especially in the murals and sculptural programs that adorned the various official buildings.16 Boyle’s panels for the Transportation Building—comprising two reliefs installed on the south side of the door representing Ancient Transportation and a pair on the north side depicting Modern Transportation—participated in this larger project, placing transportation at the center of the fair’s celebratory march of progress.17 And yet, although the fair officially portrayed mobility as a driver of national, social, and economic success, artists, audiences, and the fair’s organizers all contributed to a dynamic and often conflicted discourse that championed mobility and transportation as vital to a modern United States, while also recognizing its various physical, emotional, and social costs. Commentators interpreted artworks at the fair in the context of their lived experiences. The Transportation Building’s architects, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, for example, intended for the large winged angel forms bearing banners with the names of famous innovators in the history of transportation that occupied the spandrels of the building’s arched façade to represent “the idea of transportation” with their outstretched wings acting as symbols of the figures’ movement.18 However, throughout the nineteenth century, transportation was also closely linked with anxieties about the physical danger of high-speed travel and the material excesses that were seemingly systemic in the Gilded Age. One critic viewed the angels on the front of the Transportation Building as something much more ominous: angels of death carrying newly deceased travelers to heaven. Connecting these winged forms to the dangers of riding railroads and streetcars during the period, the writer describes the painted angels as “so suggestive of the kind of transportation we are all anxious to avoid, yet (there was a touch of the grim in this) are perhaps most exposed to when we use modern means of transportation.”19 This was a problem that contemporaries associated with the city of Chicago, in particular, due to the concentration of railroads downtown. In an article entitled “Chicago and Her Railroad Web,” the journalist Julian Ralph wrote: The people of Chicago may be said to know that each rising sun ushers in a day in which human life will be slain by some train of cars, so nearly do the murders in each year approach the sum of one a day. And that is saying nothing of the mangling that goes on!20 Indeed, this proved to be Hovenden’s fate when a train struck and killed the artist near Philadelphia just two years after the fair. The World’s Congress Auxiliary, a series of about 20 assemblies convened in conjunction with the fair, provided, according to the cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg,

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“the intellectual equivalent of the [exposition’s] visible art,” mobilizing lofty cultural ideals to frame the event’s celebration of material progress.21 On July 12, 1893, at the American Historical Association’s congress, Frederick Jackson Turner formulated a unified narrative of national growth and defined a collective national character grounded in historical patterns of US settlement. In his now-famous address, the historian posited that the experience of westward expansion was the single largest factor shaping “the forces dominating American character,” especially “individualism, democracy, and nationalism.”22 Writing at the end of a century profoundly marred by sectionalism, Turner’s address cast the “mobility of population” as a corrective to the divisive localism that had culminated in civil war. According to Turner, a “composite nationalism” had emerged from the frontier’s cultural heterogeneity, born out of “interstate migration” and spurred by “a process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions.”23 For contemporaries concerned about recent signs of national discord— especially the 1893 economic depression and widespread labor unrest—the historian’s unifying thesis must have been reassuring.24 Turner’s thesis resonated with the grand narratives promoted throughout the World’s Columbian Exposition. The fair—with its celebration of Columbus, exploration and migration, and the triumph of American ingenuity and innovation, particularly with regard to transportation—provided an especially sympathetic milieu for Turner’s address. The historian explicitly connected his project to the exposition’s Columbian framework, writing: Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. Indeed, the fair hailed Columbus as “the pioneer of the pioneers,” tracing the roots of a supposed national character and justification for westward expansion to this fifteenth-century explorer.25 The fair and Turner’s thesis worked in tandem to position a newly modernized and industrialized United States against this historical backdrop. Although the 1890 census had declared the US frontier closed, Turner predicted that the cultural characteristics and institutions fostered by westward migration would persevere. If relocating to a western wilderness were no longer possible, Americans’ “restless, nervous energy” would carry them to another frontier. “He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased,” Turner predicted. “Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American intellect will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”26 Imperialist conquest became one means to achieve “a wider field of exercise” to accommodate Americans’ supposedly “expansive character,” and the United States was only five years away from entering into a war with Spain over its territories. But Turner’s thesis goes beyond notions of Manifest Destiny to root US imperialist efforts in a national character defined by the will to move in pursuit of opportunity. American cities provided another “wider field” to absorb the millions of individuals looking to better their circumstances. An anxious desire for movement and progress would remain the foundation of the nation’s character, Turner implied, as long as immigrants and rural Americans felt compelled to leave home and begin their lives anew. Turner’s 1893 address was the most famous

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articulation of these ideas, but it drew on a wealth of recent thinking that Theodore Roosevelt described in a letter to the historian as “floating around rather loosely.”27 Perhaps inspired by Turner’s thesis and the opening of a large swath of land in present-day Oklahoma—the so-called Cherokee Outlet—to homesteaders in 1893, Hovenden began his last, and largest, canvas after the fair. The monumental genre painting, titled The Founders of a State, depicts a group of white pioneers setting up camp (Figure 3.5).28 In the foreground, a pair of figures stands in front of a Conestoga wagon, as others, visible in the background, graze horses. The mustachioed man in the foreground rests his left hand on the woman’s right shoulder and points his right arm straight ahead toward a place presumably behind and to the left of the viewer. The couple looks in the direction of the man’s pointed finger toward an unseen (to the viewer) location in the distance. Although Founders of a State shows a moment of rest during the settlers’ travels, Hovenden’s use of the hand pointing toward a distant horizon implies that their journey is ongoing. It recalls similar gestures in nineteenthcentury depictions of westward expansion in the United States, such as the pointed hand of the settler in the lower left corner of Emanuel Leutze’s expansive 1862 mural in the United States Capitol Building, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Figure 3.6). Hovenden might have seen Leutze’s mural firsthand when he lived in nearby Baltimore in the late 1860s and early 1870s or when he relocated with his family to Washington, DC, during the winter of 1893–94. A commentator writing for the Evening Star in the fall of 1894 reported that Hovenden was presently “busy with a . . . marvelously realistic study of western emigration” and that, although Hovenden had returned to his home and studio in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, he intended to send the work to Washington, DC, for exhibition upon its completion.29 However, the canvas remained unfinished at the time of the Hovenden’s sudden death in 1895

Figure 3.5 Thomas Hovenden, The Founders of a State, 1895. Oil on canvas, 53 × 72 in. From the Collections of The Historical Society of Montgomery County, PA.

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Figure 3.6 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1862. Stereochrome, 240 × 360 in. US Capitol Building, House Wing, Washington, DC. Source: Image courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.

and was exhibited posthumously at the National Academy of Design and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.30 It was the artist’s final effort in a string of genre works that addressed themes of mobility through familial narratives.

Comings and Goings Breaking Home Ties invited viewers to consider mobility’s effects at the level of family drama. Even before the fair, the view that the ordinary American (assumed to be white and male) who left home to seek opportunity represented the heart of the nation informed commentators’ interpretations of the painting. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph adopted this perspective in 1891, offering an emphatically nationalistic reading of Hovenden’s canvas: We know he is going to do well. The American boy always does well. Thousands like this one are going out from home every day to make homes for themselves, to create new conditions, to acquire property, to marry well and establish another family, to become good citizens and valued members of new communities, to develop that estate of American manhood which is the strength of the strongest nation in the world to-day. Discerning a message about stability and continuity in Hovenden’s scene, the critic assured readers that, despite the population’s mobility (or perhaps because of it), home

98 Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties would remain the bedrock of US society. Lest one feel anxious about the breaking up of so many American families, the writer positioned the boy’s departure as the first step in a virtuous cycle of “creat[ing] new conditions . . . acquir[ing] property . . . establish[ing] another family,” and becoming a pillar of his adopted community. The reviewer thus asked that Hovenden’s canvas be read not as a story about “breaking home ties” but rather as one about the enduring significance of home and community.31 Hovenden’s personal experiences might have inspired, even if indirectly, his interest in painting such subjects. The artist had left home numerous times throughout his life, most notably for his 1863 immigration to the United States from Ireland. However, for Hovenden, who was orphaned as a young boy, that farewell must have born little resemblance to the imagined scene of leaving behind a large family unit that he pictured in Breaking Home Ties. After departing Ireland, Hovenden settled in New York City, where he reunited with his elder brother who had previously moved there, enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design, learned lithography, and earned a living as a frame dealer. The artist moved to Baltimore in 1868 in an attempt to establish his career in the city’s less competitive art market. Six years later, with patronage from the Baltimore collectors William T. Walters and John W. McCoy, Hovenden left the United States for Paris to continue his training abroad and enrolled in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel. The following summer, he joined the art colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The artist finally returned to New York City in 1880, but, after marrying the artist Helen Corson in June 1881, he soon relocated to her family home in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Hovenden spent the majority of the rest of his career there and taught painting, drawing, and composition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.32 Themes of arrival and departure pervade Hovenden’s oeuvre, and, by the 1880s, Hovenden was well-known for creating large-scale domestic genre paintings that evoked the era’s demographic flux. Art critics drew comparisons between Hovenden’s work and that of Eastman Johnson, naming Hovenden the inheritor of the elder artist’s genre tradition after Johnson turned increasingly to portraiture at the end of his career. One critic in 1893 proclaimed that Johnson and Hovenden were “first of the first in this country, no other painters undertaking such important works of this character.” The artists, the critic argued, excelled in their ability to capture the essence of contemporary life “and record for future ages how we live and move and have our being in the nineteenth century.”33 As one period commentator noted of Hovenden’s work, “Somebody is [always] either coming or going in this artist’s pictures.”34 In addition to Breaking Home Ties, Hovenden exhibited two other paintings with homecoming subjects at the world’s fair in Chicago. The title of one of these, The Sailor’s Return (When Hope Was Darkest) (Figure 3.7), refers to the anxiety of two women and a man, shown in the rustic interior of a cottage, as they await news of a relative who has gone to sea. The young woman by the window rests her arm on the edge of a sleeping baby’s bassinet. Unbeknownst to the group, the young sailor, visible to the viewer through an open doorway at the right of the composition, is nearly home. In this painting, the viewer is provided with privileged information not yet known to the central figures in the composition. The transformative impact of the sailor crossing the threshold is not yet realized and adds an element of anticipation to the scene.35 The third canvas that Hovenden exhibited at the 1893 fair, Bringing Home the Bride (Figure 3.8), likewise portrays a homecoming. Several reviewers interpreted

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Figure 3.7 Thomas Hovenden, The Sailor’s Return (When Hope Was Darkest), 1892. Oil on canvas, 91 1/2 × 145 cm. Private Collection. Source: Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Figure 3.8 Thomas Hovenden, Bringing Home the Bride, 1893. Oil on canvas, 56 × 78 in. O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. Source: Reproduced from Anne Gregory Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 171.

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Bringing Home the Bride as a sequel to Breaking Home Ties. One described the work as Hovenden’s “picture of making home ties.” Another even surmised that the figures in Hovenden’s new painting “may be the same family after the lapse of a dozen years or so.”36 Reversing the direction of Breaking Home Ties’s narrative by presenting a son reuniting with his family and the creation of bonds between the family and his new wife, Bringing Home the Bride was thus said to “illustrat[e] that making of new home ties which is the paramount event in the history of the youth who, as shown in the former picture, goes forth to establish a place for himself in the world.”37 In such commentary, Bringing Home the Bride confirmed that the boy’s departure from home had paid off by setting him on the path of upward social mobility. While many commentators celebrated the boy leaving home in Breaking Home Ties as the first step in a narrative of personal and national progress, not everyone in the late nineteenth-century United States viewed geographic mobility in such a positive light. For some, it was a negative force that eroded local communities, weakened familial attachments, and stunted the growth of a robust national culture. The physician and critic Titus Munson Coan, for example, worried that the conditions of a “bustling country, where every man is in anxious haste to change his house” stifled the development of “a nearness, an intimacy, [and] a habit of friendship,” which, he claimed, characterized the “home-life” of more rooted nations.38 Commentators reveled in teasing out the painting’s narrative, often projecting specific traits and desires onto the figures and even speculating about the characters’ prospects, which apparently depended on whether the figure was leaving or remaining home. Some reviewers drew a distinction between the departing youth’s future possibilities and the lack of opportunities available to the family he was leaving behind. An author writing for the Evening Telegraph in 1892 remarked that the boy’s “youthful energy” was the kind that had led pioneers to leave their homes in the East and settle in the West. This is a quality that his grandmother, seated at the head of the family table, apparently lacks; she observes the parting scene “with the wooden immobility of age,” as she was described in an Evening Telegraph review the previous year.39 A critic for the New York Recorder likewise projected onto the younger generation a desire to leave home, describing the girl seated at left as looking “as if she rather envied her brother his opportunity to escape the humdrum life of the farm.”40 These observations signal the boredom of domestic rural life and the potential thrill of moving to the city, as perceived by readers of the urban middle-class press; they also point to the gender gap in travel opportunities in the 1890s. The historian William Leach has argued that Americans reconciled a fundamental tension in period discourses of mobility by embracing competing impulses: From the late colonial period on, Americans have been advocates and captives of the need to move, to get out of town, to end up far from the spot where they began. At the same time, a contending pattern was taking shape, one that encouraged Americans to settle down, domesticate themselves, and forge a coherent identity. The first pattern we might call centrifugal, because it thrust outward and cared little for boundaries and centers; the second we might call centripetal, because it favored centers and boundaries and cultivated a sense of place.41 Hovenden’s painting illustrates the simultaneous attraction of such centrifugal and centripetal forces. On the one hand, the young man’s decision to leave home points

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to a “need to move,” as does what some period viewers saw as bored expressions on his sisters’ faces. On the other hand, the painting’s domestic interior, an environment in which strong community bonds were formed, evokes the desire “to settle down.” By representing the tug of both forces, Breaking Home Ties offered a fuller and more complex range of Americans’ feelings about mobility and domesticity than was realized by the fair’s official discourse. Some period commentators worried about the disruptive effects that mobility could have on an individual’s sense of self. If continuity of place was associated with the formation of a stable, coherent identity, leaving a long-familiar environment could provoke feelings of uncertainty, estrangement, and loss. According to a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, “the constantly overlapping continuity” experienced by rural denizens “helps to keep the man’s own thread of personality unbroken.” But for modern individuals who “cut loose from geography, make friends and break with friends,” the writer wonders, “how far backward over our days can the uninterrupted ‘I’ be fairly said to extend?”42

Thresholds and Identity The setting of Breaking Home Ties points to a type of personal rupture and discontinuity similar to that described in the Atlantic Monthly. The open doorway in the right background of the composition, a light-filled point of entry and exit, punctuates the otherwise cozy interior space. Both a spatial and a metaphorical device, the doorway draws the viewer’s gaze out of the room to the world beyond the confines of home. “The drift of movement is naturally and necessarily towards the threshold, across which the old life is severed from the new,” one critic observed.43 By inviting the viewer’s eye to travel across the canvas from left to right and toward the open door, Hovenden encouraged identification with the departing figure and contemplation of the consequences of crossing the limen. Hovenden had previously used threshold space in his work to symbolize transformation. His monumental historical painting The Last Moments of John Brown (Figure 3.9), painted from 1882 to 1884, pictures the eponymous figure exiting the Charlestown jailhouse to be executed for treason in 1859 after leading a raid against a federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). In Hovenden’s painting, the abolitionist pauses on the stairs to kiss the forehead of a young African American baby whose mother holds the child up toward Brown. The apocryphal event pictured by Hovenden is based on a story first published by the special correspondent Edward H. House for the abolitionist-aligned newspaper the New York Tribune. Robbins Battell, a New York businessman and philanthropist, commissioned the painting from Hovenden and selected its subject, despite the artist’s apparent misgivings about the scene’s historical inaccuracy.44 Hovenden was not the first to paint Brown’s apocryphal kiss, but his large canvas became one of the best-known nineteenthcentury representations of Brown as a peaceful hero.45 A critic for the Washington Post proclaimed in 1894 that it was the Last Moments of John Brown that “made [Hovenden’s] fame as a painter of American subjects.”46 In Hovenden’s portrayal, a Christ-like Brown, already wearing a noose around his neck and binds around his elbows, descends the exterior stairs of the jail escorted by armed guards. The jail’s porch and stairwell mark the site of literal and metaphorical transition for the central figure. Brown’s descent hints at his impending execution

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Figure 3.9 Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown, 1882–84. Oil on canvas, 77 3/8 × 1/4 in. (196.5 × 168.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Stoeckel, 1897, 97.5. Source: Photography © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

and his changing status from revolutionary to martyr (in the view of sympathizers like Hovenden).47 Viewers might have connected Brown’s descending the staircase in Hovenden’s painting to representations of him ascending to the gallows for his execution, such as the wood engraving published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in

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December 1859 (Figure 3.10). For those who made this connection, the abolitionist’s descent of the staircase in the painting anticipates his final ascent before his execution as pictured in the popular illustrated press. Although the Last Moments of John Brown is based on a historical event (albeit a fictionalized account of it), Hovenden repeatedly used the open doorway as a site of implied transition or transformation in his domestic genre scenes as well. The lightfilled threshold in the background at the right in Breaking Home Ties, as we have seen, prompted some commentators to predict that the boy’s “old life [will be] severed from the new” once he crosses it. Hovenden used a comparable architectural space in the background of The Sailor’s Return (When Hope Was Darkest) to similar effect. The sailor on the path that leads to the open doorway of the home will be reunited with his family once he passes through it. Because the other figures presume the sailor to be dead or missing, the sailor’s crossing of the threshold will transform all of their fates. The use of thresholds as a significant compositional and narrative device is certainly not unique to Hovenden’s work. Seventeenth-century Dutch artists employed similar arrangements to create parallel narratives within their genre paintings.48 Other late nineteenth-century genre painters also adapted the use of architectural space to different narrative ends. The 1887 painting Breaking the News (Figure 3.11) by the academically trained Australian artist John Longstaff shares a number of striking visual parallels with Breaking Home Ties.49 Breaking the News won a gold medal in 1887 at the Exhibition of Paintings by the Students of the National Gallery in Melbourne and effectively launched Longstaff’s career. Because of the prize, the artist was able to travel to Paris, where he remained from 1887 to 1893, before relocating to London for an additional two years. A lithograph of Breaking the News was widely reproduced throughout Australia in the 1880s and 1890s, but it remains unknown if it also circulated in Europe or the United States and if Hovenden was familiar with Longstaff’s

Figure 3.10 John Brown Ascending the Scaffold Preparatory to Being Hanged. Wood engraving. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 17, 1859, 33. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-USZ62–132551.

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Figure 3.11 John Longstaff, Breaking the News, 1887. Oil on canvas, 109.7 × 152.8 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Purchased with funds from the Hackett Bequest Fund, 1933.

painting.50 Even if Hovenden did not know Breaking the News, Longstaff’s canvas offers yet another point of comparison to consider the how Hovenden’s threshold would have signified to period viewers. Both Breaking Home Ties and Breaking the News are structured around the opposition between the homey fireplace and mantel at the left and the light-filled doorway at the right. Longstaff’s teacher at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Irish-born Australian artist George Folingsby, often composed his paintings to portray a darkened interior room opening up to a brightly lit open exterior doorway.51 An empty chair sits beside tables set for a family meal in both works, and, in front of the tables, a pair of figures stands facing one another with one person’s hands resting on the shoulders of the other. The women look up with concern at the stoic expressions of their male counterparts, while another male figure at the right of both works faces the open doorway with his back to the viewer. Breaking the News, however, is not a scene of a bittersweet farewell like Breaking Home Ties but rather a depiction of tragic homecoming, one that, according to a critic from the Melbourne daily newspaper The Age, implied that “the home will be broken up.”52 Period viewers understood Breaking the News to show the moment when a young wife, holding a baby, learns of her husband’s death in a mining accident. The mining equipment visible in the distance through the open doorway locates the scene. An elder miner, shown at the center of the composition, delivers the heartbreaking news to the freshly widowed mother.53 Several men bearing a stretcher with her husband’s lifeless body proceed into the domestic space to

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complete the tragic reunion. One commentator proclaimed that Breaking the News, with its representation of “an often-recurring incident of everyday life in a mining district,” “appeal[s] to the tenderest sympathies of our nature.”55 54

Moving Viewers As with Breaking the News, the critical reception of Breaking Home Ties reveals that viewers responded emotionally to the story portrayed on the canvas. For the latter work, many commentators focused on the heavy—and often long-lasting—emotional toll that such events could take on a young man. An 1893 poem about the painting published in a Chicago newspaper imagines the feelings of dislocation that the country boy will endure as he settles into urban life: The boy will find in his future Many hard, homesick days, Ere he’s fitted to new surroundings To city men and ways. Drawing on his own affective experiences, Hovenden evidently hoped that Breaking Home Ties would provide a therapeutic outlet for homesick young men who had not yet adjusted to their new environments. In response to a letter from a woman named Loraine Inmen, alerting the artist to the above poem, Hovenden wrote, “I did think that to many a young man the picture could do nothing but good. This I had with me while I was at work on it.”56 Numerous articles, letters to the artist, and even novels recount the experiences of fairgoers who connected with Breaking Home Ties emotionally and biographically.57 Most of these accounts describe the responses of men who, while studying Hovenden’s canvas, experienced feelings of nostalgia and loss as they were transported imaginatively to moments when they, too, left home. In its depiction of the variety of responses that such separations could produce, the artist’s scene “moved” viewers by summoning into the present vivid recollections of the past.58 Fairgoers’ encounters with the painting reportedly inspired deep reflection or outbursts of emotion. Critics claimed to observe tears shed before the canvas by viewers who had recently left home, as in the following account: One young man stood some time before the picture, then took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes. It had not been long since he had broken the home ties, and the going away was still fresh in his mind.59 Hovenden’s picture was also said to capture the attention of men who had departed home decades earlier. Walter Hall Jewett’s fictional character Uncle Henry, for example, in Jewett’s 1893 short story for The Graphic, stumbles upon Breaking Home Ties while trying to find his way out of the fair’s Fine Arts Palace: [Henry] regarded the picture for some time in silence. It evidently appealed to him strongly, for as he looked his face took on a retrospective expression. . . . He forgot everything but a little New Hampshire homestead and a weeping mother’s last farewell.60

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Jewett describes his protagonist as a “simple, well-to-do country [person]” who spent his entire life “in sequestered places,” but Hovenden’s painting also apparently enthralled longtime city dwellers.61 An illustration by Albert E. Sterner published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894 (Figure 3.12), which depicts a fictional fairgoer examining the canvas, demonstrates Hovenden’s ability to provoke feelings of longing and nostalgia in sophisticated urban viewers. The narrator of the accompanying article describes witnessing the man pictured in Sterner’s illustration “wistfully gazing” at Breaking Home Ties and wonders about this stranger’s biography, imagining him to be a self-made plutocrat from New York City who got his start as “a boy in a country town.”62 Whereas Uncle Henry is “not at all” an art-lover, the man in the Scribner’s article strikes the narrator as “a patron of art.”63 That these two men—one a country rube who mistakes original oil paintings at the fair for cheap, mass-produced chromolithographs, and the other a member of the New York elite with an interest in fine art—were both imagined to have been moved by Hovenden’s painting speaks to the work’s broad-based appeal.64 One Chicago critic claimed: Everybody understands it. Men with the marks of prosperity upon them, and men who have missed their aim and show the blight of failure in their countenances, linger before that picture, not thinking of the school of art it represents, but recalling the ‘heart-break’ chapter of their own lives.65 Another commentator recommended that mothers (especially mothers of sons) seek out the painting at the fair, exhorting them to “steal in silently [to the Fine Arts Palace], alone, for the picture will surely fade from your sight in a mist of blinding tears.”66 Thus, the painting was thought to affect not only the men who left home but also the women they left behind. Accounts of viewers’ strong connections to Breaking Home Ties were not limited to anonymous and likely fictionalized or embellished reports in the popular press. In September 1894, Frank Graham Moorhead of Keokuk, Iowa, wrote a letter to Hovenden in which he recounted the painting’s enduring effect on him long after the fair: I have often wished to write you and express my regards and tell you how pleased and charmed my aged mother and I were by your ‘Breaking Home Ties’ which we saw last year at Chicago. My mother, especially, was so effected [sic] by your picture that it has often been the theme of our conversation since then and each time she is more enthusiastic than before. . . . Her mother heart was deeply touched by your pathetic scene and she wishes to know more about it.67 Perhaps Moorhead, who had recently turned 18, and his mother imagined they might soon face a situation similar to the one depicted in Hovenden’s canvas and, for this reason, were moved enough to write the artist nearly a year after viewing the work. US census records reveal that by 1900 Moorhead had broken “home ties,” relocating nearly 150 miles away from Keokuk to Iowa’s largest city, Des Moines, where he lived in a boarding house and worked as a journalist.68 The Iowan’s letter, which Hovenden saved in a scrapbook, underscores the relevance of the painting’s subject at a time when large numbers of people in the United States uprooted themselves to pursue new opportunities. In studying the reception of Breaking Home Ties, two aspects of the work—the characters’ facial expressions and the artist’s representation of setting and space—stand

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Figure 3.12 Albert E. Sterner, Wistfully Gazing at Hovenden’s Country Lad Leaving Home. From Scribner’s Magazine, September 1894, 336.

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out for sparking viewers’ personal and emotional connections with the painting. To appreciate how Hovenden used these formal features to enhance the affective pull of his narrative, it is useful to compare the work to Toby Edward Rosenthal’s 1884 genre painting Departure From Home (Figure 3.13). Such a comparison brings into clearer view the sensitivity with which Hovenden treated the departure theme and helps us understand his painting’s popularity with fairgoers. Rosenthal exhibited Departure From Home at the 1885 Paris Salon, and the painting likely circulated in the United States through published reviews and reproductions. Although it was not exhibited in Chicago, a writer for the Pittsburgh Press briefly mentioned the similarities between Rosenthal’s canvas and Breaking Home Ties in 1893, noting that both depict the final interaction between a boy and his family before he leaves his childhood home.69 Rosenthal’s painting never achieved the same level of popularity as Hovenden’s, but the Pittsburgh critic likely knew the work because it was in the collection of local iron magnate W. Dewees Wood. As was the case for Hovenden, the theme of leaving home must have held personal significance for Rosenthal. His family emigrated from Germany to the United States when Rosenthal was a young child and eventually settled in San Francisco, where they joined the city’s large population of German-speaking Jewish residents.70 The artist showed an early talent for drawing, but his father was reportedly unsupportive initially of his son’s ambitions to become an artist. Nonetheless, when Rosenthal was nearly 17 years old, his father saved enough money to send him to Europe.71

Figure 3.13 Toby Edward Rosenthal, Departure From Home, 1884. Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 48 1/2 in. (87.6 × 123.2 cm). Private collection. Source: Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 1992.

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Rosenthal later claimed that Departure From Home was autobiographical, inspired by his 1865 journey from San Francisco to pursue artistic training in Munich (where he remained for the majority of his life). His memoir, written decades after this move, records the artist’s recollection of the event: On the day of departure my father took me into his room. He appeared very excited and worried and unable to keep silent any longer. With his first words he warned me of all the dangers to which I would be exposed out in the world. It seemed to calm him when he could show me the possibilities of avoiding these dangers because gradually he became more composed, and when my mother entered he said a brave farewell to me. This conversation made such a lasting impression on me that I have remembered it clearly all my life. In later years I painted the scene. The painting is called “Departure from Home.”72 According to Rosenthal’s account, leaving home as a teenager was a momentous episode in his life, one that “made such a lasting impression,” that nearly 20 years later he chose to commemorate the occasion in a large-scale oil painting. At least two details in the painting suggest that Rosenthal had been thinking of his own family when composing Departure From Home: the rulers hanging on the wall and the tailor’s apron the man wears connect the figure in the painting to Rosenthal’s father, who worked as a tailor. Rosenthal’s decision to depict a boy far younger than he was when he left home heightens the pathos of the farewell. Departure From Home shares with Breaking Home Ties a similar cast of characters and many of the same props, such as packed bags and a black umbrella for the soon-to-be traveler as well as the remains of a final shared meal on the dining table. In both paintings, moreover, gestures make visible the implied emotional bonds between family members. But Breaking Home Ties relies on subtle cues to build tension between the figures rather than the histrionics that structure Rosenthal’s work. The pose and expression of Hovenden’s adolescent, who stares straight ahead, past his mother, register both nervousness and a sense of budding independence, while the child in Rosenthal’s painting anxiously clings to his mother’s apron and his father’s hand. And none of the figures in Hovenden’s canvas exhibit the outpouring of sadness evident in the weeping young woman (perhaps the boy’s sister) at right in Rosenthal’s composition. The poignant interaction between the pair at the center of Breaking Home Ties captivated period commentators, who read into the mother’s and son’s expressions a complex emotional narrative. Newspapers often reproduced sketches of these two figures, separated from Hovenden’s larger composition, to accompany reviews (Figure 3.14). Such illustrations signal the importance of the central vignette for late nineteenthcentury interpretations of the painting. Reviewers described the mother as an embodiment of selfless maternal love—a woman who, although deeply saddened by her son’s impending departure, kept her emotions at bay for the benefit of her child. One 1893 critic lauded Hovenden for emphasizing the mother’s expression as a means of giving visual form to her plight, a “tragedy of . . . life . . . so common that it almost ceases to attract attention.” The writer characterizes the “veins [that] stand out on the [mother’s] forehead” as evidence of her “brave effort to keep the tears back.” She quiets her emotions to avoid “further saddening [the boy’s] departure from home.”73 This display of self-control apparently tugged at viewers’ heartstrings. The poet Francis

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Figure 3.14 Newspaper clipping from Thomas Hovenden scrapbook, 1866–95. Private collection; microfilmed at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Source: Image courtesy Edward Wilson.

Forrester described being moved to tears by the artist’s depiction of the “work-worn mother,” on whose features are “written . . . the words she cannot say” to her “boy [who] stands in awkward silence, ashamed that he wants to cry.”74 For Forrester, it was the words not spoken and the tears not shed in Breaking Home Ties that heightened the work’s affective power. Not all commentators agreed that Hovenden depicted emotional restraint successfully. One critic praised the expressions of the mother and son but found the other figures’ visages too “woodeny.” Despite its “bad points,” however, this reviewer found it difficult to criticize a painting “so dominated by sentiment,” proclaiming that very sentiment the chief reason to admire the work.75 Another critic chastised the artist for making his figures (the mother, in particular) “too sad and anxious.” Hovenden rebuffed this charge by arguing that between the look he painted “and one in which the mother would seek to conceal the anxiety of her eyes by a smile on her lips . . . the former [is] less distressing.”76 Judging from this comment, Hovenden presupposed that viewers would expect an anxious maternal response to the situation depicted; painting “a smile on her lips” would be even more “distressing” because of its emotional dishonesty. Hovenden was evidently frustrated when a reviewer wrote in 1891 that in the “mastery of character, of expression . . . Mr. Hovenden falls short. The heads are the weakest part of his picture, and the weakest of all are the most important, those of the old mother and the son.”77 Hovenden drafted a lengthy response to this critique, admitting that while he “fully agree[d] . . . that [he] did not quite succeed in [his] task,” he fiercely defended the “character [and] expression in the principal group.” The artist

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added that he was “perfectly astounded” at the critic’s charge because “it was always my first position in defense of the quality of my work—that whatever qualities my pictures may lack I must at all hazards ‘tell my story.’ ” Hovenden’s use of the word “my” raises the possibility that he felt a personal, even autobiographical connection to the subject of Breaking Home Ties. However, as the artist referred to his “pictures” in general, it seems likely that the phrase “my story” simply meant whatever story he desired to tell. For Hovenden, the critic’s charge was objectionable precisely because the painter considered expression—rather than aesthetics or technique—the most effective means for communicating with a mass audience. “Even a person very ignorant of art technique can see whether a story is told,” he explained.78 As the comparison between Breaking Home Ties and Rosenthal’s Departure From Home suggests, effectively communicating feeling and character did not require overstatement. The relatively restrained emotional display in Hovenden’s painting provided an opportunity for viewer engagement, prompting commentators to fill in narrative details in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. The mother’s pleading look or her son’s glassy-eyed stare—expressions that elicited a range of narrative interpretations— encouraged diverse audiences to identify with the scene. With the push and pull of a longing for home, on the one hand, and the attraction of the outside world, on the other, Hovenden’s canvas captures the mix of emotions that characterized late nineteenth-century commentary regarding mobility. Setting and composition also play important roles in the two paintings’ divergent effects. As noted earlier, the open doorway in Breaking Home Ties attracted the attention of critics in 1891, who described this threshold as a site of both physical and metaphorical transition between the boy’s old and new lives. Commentators in 1893 likewise remarked on the significance of this space. The art critic Walter Cranston Larned, for instance, identified the boy’s movement through the doorway as a crucial element in the painting’s coming-of-age story: “Soon the boy will have passed through the open door into the world he knows so little of.”79 In Departure From Home, by contrast, the cottage door remains resolutely closed, with only slivers of daylight emerging through the gaps between the door and the surrounding walls. With its spare, dark, and uninviting setting, Rosenthal’s scene seems far more desperate, as if the boy had no choice but to leave home and make his own way in the world. Hovenden’s depiction of a warm, light-filled domestic interior, on the other hand, suggests that his young male protagonist leaves voluntarily, intensifying the work’s emotional tension.

Locating Breaking Home Ties In an 1894 letter, Hovenden reflected on the origin of his famous canvas, writing: I cannot recall the time when the idea of ‘Breaking Home Ties’ first came to me—I only know that it was with me for several years before I commenced to paint it and that I had it very much in my mind and that it took a great hold of me. I had in my mind the mother; that was almost the picture to me. I think I have succeeded pretty well in giving my idea of her—the American mother—as I have seen her in the country.80 While Hovenden connects the subject to a vague notion of “Americanness,” he makes no attempt to further locate the setting of the work.

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Despite the painting’s overarching theme of mobility and leaving home, some critics repeatedly attempted to root the scene with geographic and temporal specificity. Hubert Howe Bancroft applied a regional label to Breaking Home Ties in his coverage of the artwork at the fair, describing the painting as “a simple and touching story of New England life in days not long gone by.”81 Benjamin Truman, author of the 1893 History of the World’s Fair, also described the scene in regional terms, picturing: a simple study of the living room of an old New England farm house, showing the table set with quaint old china, the mantle adorned with pieces of glaze ware, the high-backed yellow chairs, and the ingrain carpet that every New Englander in the United States can remember if he looks back far enough.82 Both Bancroft and Truman point to furnishings in the room as evidence for their locating of the scene. However, the art historian Julia B. Rosenbaum argues that many of the objects in Hovenden’s painting—including the rag carpet and the Windsorstyle chairs—were produced and purchased across the country and bore no particular regional distinction.83 Despite some critics’ impulse to create greater specificity around the narrative and setting portrayed in Breaking Home Ties, viewers in 1891 and 1893 reportedly imagined themselves as part of the scene, suggesting that it was generalized enough to appeal to geographically diverse audiences. One early description of the painting stated, “It is realistic. [Hovenden] has painted a scene into which all of us can thoroughly enter.”84 Packed with old-fashioned furnishings and household goods that his audiences could have grown up with in their childhood homes—a fireplace with lamps on either end of the mantel, a colorful image (perhaps a chromolithograph) framed on the wall above, a teapot on the dining table—it is not surprising that the scene seemed inviting to many viewers. According to an 1891 interview, Hovenden scouted local auctions for old furniture and decorative pieces to use as props for his compositions.85 A photograph of Hovenden working on Breaking Home Ties (Figure 3.15), which shows him sitting in a bow-back Windsor chair nearly identical to the one at the table in his painting, provides further evidence that the artist modeled the domestic furnishings on objects in his own collection. The art historian Sarah Burns has argued that such ordinary household items “played . . . a [vital] part in Hovenden’s storytelling strategies” by “becom[ing] virtual actors in the sentimental drama of ideal American family life.”86 Whereas the setting and composition of Departure From Home distanced the viewer from the action, much as a theatrical performance divides actors and audience members, the range of emotions expressed in Breaking Home Ties—in addition to its “homey” air— encouraged Hovenden’s audience to “thoroughly enter” the painting and to relate to the family at center. An 1893 review went further in establishing period viewers’ perceived proximity to the scene. Studying the dramatic lighting effects that highlight the painting’s two central figures, the critic concluded that the source of this light “must come from an open window behind the spectators.”87 Such observations suggested that viewers saw themselves as fully present—both spatially and emotionally—in Hovenden’s picture.

The Long-Lasting Appeal of Breaking Home Ties The reception of Breaking Home Ties in the early 1890s calls for a broader understanding of the ways that discourses of mobility during the second half of the long

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Figure 3.15 Helen Corson Hovenden, Thomas Hovenden in his studio with his son Thomas Hovenden, Jr., from Thomas Hovenden scrapbook, 1866–95. Private collection; microfilmed at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Source: Image courtesy Edward Wilson.

nineteenth century shaped viewers’ emotional engagement with genre paintings that took up themes of leaving home. It also highlights the particular resonances that threshold spaces had for period viewers. In Hovenden’s painting, leaving home and the familial separation entailed in such a move carry a heavy burden—a sense of loss coupled with anxiety about one’s future well-being. Nevertheless, the potential social and economic advantages outweighed the costs in the minds of many contemporary reviewers, and the boy leaving home was a theme worthy of admiration. The painting resonated well with notions of mobility, identity, and progress promoted by scholars like Turner and supported by the official rhetoric of the 1893 world’s fair. Yet, Breaking Home Ties also provided a reassuring view of change that suggests a promising future—a scene of parting grounded less in the heroic Columbian narrative than in family and domestic life. One reviewer declared, “A community cannot be entirely gone to the dogs when it is enthralled by a simple, homely scene like this. We may feel that there is still hope for us.”88 During a period of economic recession and widespread labor unrest, among other social and financial strains, this critic found reason for hope in Hovenden’s portrayal of strong domestic bonds that, according to most commentators, set the boy up for future success. Despite its theme of departure and disruption, Breaking Home Ties also implies continuity and stability through the evident emotional ties between mother and son and the painting’s “homey” setting, both features of the work that might have felt comforting to those worried about modernity disrupting the domestic sphere. In Breaking Home Ties, the threshold does not mark the boundary of a space threatened by the intrusions

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of modern life (as in Eastman Johnson’s The Tramp; see Chapter 1) but rather a site of transition, the crossing of which, according to many commentators, implies a brighter future for the painting’s protagonist. The popularity of Breaking Home Ties persisted well into the first decades of the twentieth century, a condition evidenced by the fact that several other artists created works that directly reference Hovenden’s canvas during this period. Breaking Home Ties endured in popular memory in part because it remained “a staple at world’s fairs” and was included at exhibitions at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco—both major international expositions that modeled themselves on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.89 The 1907 painting Leaving Home by the artist Gilbert Gaul (Figure 3.16) closely emulates many of the key features of Hovenden’s composition, including the central pair of figures facing each other at a moment of parting; the open doorway in the background giving a glimpse of the outside world; and the cozy domestic space featuring the hearth, a rug-covered floor, and pictures hung on the wall. Although Gaul’s painting references various well-known nineteenth-century paintings (the maternal figure seated in the center of Gaul’s painting recalls the woman in Thomas Eakins’s 1875 canvas The Gross Clinic, for example), it most directly evokes Breaking Home Ties. Gaul, an academician at the National Academy of Design who had studied in New

Figure 3.16 William Gilbert Gaul, Leaving Home, 1907. Oil on canvas, 33 3/4 × 44 in. (85.7 × 111.8 cm). Birmingham Museum of Art, Gift of John Meyer, 1972.463. Source: Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum of Art.

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York City with the genre painter John George Brown, was undoubtedly familiar with Hovenden’s painting. Gaul specialized in rural genre scenes and Civil War subjects. Leaving Home pictures a young Confederate soldier bidding his father goodbye as other family members, the dog, and even three enslaved individuals look on the scene wearing expressions that suggest their admiration for the boy and feelings of heartbreak over his imminent departure. Gaul originally hailed from New Jersey, but he split his time between his studio in New York City and his mother’s hometown of Van Buren, Tennessee. The painting was the first in a series of seven canvases with Civil War subjects that the artist created for reproduction in With the Confederate Colors, a portfolio of chromolithographs published by the Southern Art Publishing Company in 1907.90 Gaul’s politics, judging from his sympathetic and nostalgic portrayals of Confederate themes, were likely quite different from Hovenden’s, and yet Leaving Home draws on the narrative and formal strategies of Breaking Home Ties. Because of the popular success of Hovenden’s painting, Gaul almost certainly expected viewers of his work to think of the earlier canvas. Perhaps he hoped that the emotional connection that many viewers reported feeling for the figures at the center of Breaking Home Ties would carry over to feelings of sympathy—or even empathy, in light of the fact that the print series was heavily marketed to Confederate veterans—for the young soldier and father in Leaving Home. Gaul’s painting employs narrative and compositional strategies used in Hovenden’s painting in order to reinforce the Lost Cause mythology, which pervades With the Confederate Colors.91 Even though Gaul’s composition was derivative and contrived, the scene was advertised as “done as if a photograph had magically turned into colors.”92 As with Breaking Home Ties, commentators claimed Leaving Home to be a realistic and true-to-life portrayal of commonplace events. But unlike Hovenden’s painting, Leaving Home and the other works included in the With the Confederate Colors print portfolio was a financial failure and never experienced the popular success of its predecessor. Perhaps Hovenden’s model failed to connect with viewers who likely could not imagine an optimistic future for the young Confederate soldier about to cross the threshold to head off to war. Many decades later, Norman Rockwell also drew on the success of Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties for his 1954 Saturday Evening Post cover by the same name, one of the most popular of his many creations for the magazine. Rockwell’s version riffs on the central theme of Hovenden’s canvas but updates it for a mid-twentiethcentury audience. It depicts a young man and his father seated on the running board of the family’s truck, waiting for the train to arrive to transport the boy to college. The father’s attire suggests that they come from a rural area, and the forlorn-looking dog at the boy’s side references the similarly despondent canine in Hovenden’s canvas, but there is little else in the composition of Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties that directly recalls the 1890 canvas. The boy’s suitcase, adorned with a red and white pennant sticker that reads “State U.,” reveals the traveler’s destination.93 Whereas many late nineteenth-century commentators presumed an urban future for Hovenden’s boy, Rockwell’s protagonist leaves home to attend college, a story that points to the expanding opportunities to pursue higher education in the United States during the twentieth century.94 Rockwell does not picture the open doorway that featured so prominently in Hovenden’s canvas and that Gaul retained in his painting. Instead, a narrow band of railroad track extends across much of the bottom edge of the composition, promising to whisk the fresh-faced college student off to the rest of his life.

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Gaul’s and Rockwell’s interpretations of the “breaking home ties” theme both draw on Hovenden’s successful 1890 canvas to engage particular audiences at different moments of the twentieth century. Gaul’s nostalgic evocation of the past—a boy leaving to fight for the Confederacy—retains the spatial components of Hovenden’s composition that commentators read in Breaking Home Ties as symbolic of the boy’s future prospects. Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover, on the other hand, does away with Hovenden’s homey interior setting and the large cast of characters and pares the scene down to the sense of sadness and optimistic expectation that contributes to Breaking Home Ties’s pathos. These examples—with their very different compositions and storytelling strategies—point to two possible legacies of Hovenden’s academic genre painting. Gaul and Rockwell reinterpreted the leaving home subject that Hovenden had made popular for less elite artistic media—the chromolithograph and the magazine cover, respectively—although Hovenden’s version of Breaking Home Ties had also achieved widespread popularity in the 1890s, in part, because of its circulation in print on a mass scale.95 Whereas Gaul’s Leaving Home looks to the mid-nineteenth-century past, Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties updates Hovenden’s theme to appeal to the experiences of many mid-twentieth-century viewers, taking Hovenden’s scenario out of the domestic realm and into the liminal space of the edge of the railroad track. The track simultaneously signals the physical distance that the boy will travel and represents the connective transportation networks that will, almost certainly, bring him home again.

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter have appeared in the article Lacey Baradel, “Mobility for the Masses: The Reception of Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties,” Archives of American Art Journal 51, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 4–23. © 2017 by Smithsonian Institution. I am grateful for permission to republish this text and thank the journal’s editors and anonymous readers for their insightful responses to earlier drafts of this material. “The Pennsylvania Academy,” unidentified newspaper clipping, December 16, 1893, Thomas Hovenden scrapbook, 1866–1895, microfilm reel P13:246, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Hovenden scrapbook); and unidentified newspaper clipping, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102. 2. Carolyn Kinder Carr, “Prejudice and Pride: Presenting American Art at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair, ed. Carolyn Kinder Carr, George Gurney et al. (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, 1993), 98. 3. Charles E. Dana to Thomas Hovenden, November 14, 1892, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:278–79. 4. Charles Custis Harrison purchased Breaking Home Ties for the sizable sum of $6,000 for his private collection after its debut at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an amount that the art historian Sarah Burns reports “surpassed Winslow Homer’s lifetime record for the price of a single painting, even though Homer in the 1890s had risen near the summit of contemporary fame and prestige.” Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 320. Harrison had been the head of Harrison, Frazier and Company, his family’s Philadelphia sugar refinery. However, Harrison and his brothers, struggling to maintain the family business in the face of low profits and fierce competition, were bought out by Theodore Havemeyer of New York, a former partner of the Harrisons, who, by 1892, had purchased all of the sugar refineries in Philadelphia. Harrison went on to become Provost of the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. See Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age, 1876–1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300 Year History, Barra Foundation (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1982), 482.

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5. Letter from Charles M. Kurtz to Thomas Hovenden, July 6, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13: 198. 6. “Hovenden, Thomas,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 6 (New York: James T. White & Co., 1896), 470. The Hovenden scrapbook contains numerous requests for permission to reproduce Breaking Home Ties. See, for example, Charles M. Kurtz to Hovenden, July 6, 1893 (reel P13:198); Winters Art Litho. Co. to Hovenden, October 18, 1893 (reel P13:142); and W. H. Yankee to Hovenden, October 27, 1893 (reel P13:182). As late as 1895, the Times-Herald (Chicago) reported that Klackner’s photoengraving of Breaking Home Ties had sold extremely well—that “there has never been such a demand for a copy of an American painting”—and that reproductions had been sent as far away as Alaska. “Artists of the Home,” Times-Herald, Chicago, August 16, 1895, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:312. 7. Sarah Burns, “The Country Boy Goes to the City: Thomas Hovenden’s ‘Breaking Home Ties’ in American Popular Culture,” American Art Journal 20, no. 4 (1988): 59–73; Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist; Michael Leja, “Modernism’s Subjects in the United States,” Art Journal 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 65–72; Julia B. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Anne Gregory Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Barra Foundation, 2006). While Burns’s 1988 article also analyzes how the painting’s narrative and affective appeal figured in its popular reception, the present analysis focuses on how such reception was informed by contemporaneous discourses on geographic mobility. 8. Cultural geographer Peirce Lewis briefly mentions Breaking Home Ties in his discussion of US geographic mobility as a cultural phenomenon. See “The Landscapes of Mobility,” in The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5. 9. Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), XXV. 10. See Joseph P. Ferrie, “History Lessons: The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States since 1850,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 211–13. According to the economic historian Michael Haines, “[B]y late in the [nineteenth] century, the rural-to-urban flow assumed the dominant” direction of migration for the white population in the United States. Michael R. Haines, “The White Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 348. 11. “The City: Hovenden’s New Picture,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, October 14, 1892, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:125. 12. Simpson, Trafficking Subjects, XV. 13. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979), 8. On the use of allegory at the fair, see Wanda M. Corn, “The Fair,” chapter 1 in Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 14. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 59, 543. 15. Boyle studied under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then moved to Paris in 1877 to train for three years at the École des Beaux-Arts before returning to Philadelphia. For a brief overview of Boyle’s career, see Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America, revised ed. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 481–83. 16. Corn, Women Building History, 21–22, 28. 17. If Boyle’s subject matter was conventional, his choice of artistic vocabulary was certainly not. Boyle’s realist style differed noticeably from the classicism most sculptors and painters favored “as their primary artistic language” to convey grand themes at the fair. Corn notes that, by contrast, Boyle’s relief panels depicted a range of figures in garb meant to indicate their “historic moment, race, and class,” rather than the more generalized allegorical figural types that populated most public artwork at the fair. Sometimes the “ethnographic types” in Boyle’s panels verged toward stereotypes. Corn, Women Building History, 55. 18. A Week at the Fair (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1893), 48. 19. Gustav Kobbé, “Sights at the Fair,” The Century 46, no. 5 (September 1893): 649, 652. According to Halligan’s Illustrated World, the angels were “cut in linen, and glued to the

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exterior” of the Transportation Building. See Jewell N. Halligan, “The Transportation Building,” Halligan’s Illustrated World: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition 1, no. 1 (January 15, 1894), n.p. 20. Julian Ralph, Harper’s Chicago and the World’s Fair (New York: Harper and Bros., 1893), 92. 21. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 214. 22. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Everett E. Edwards (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938), 187, 225. 23. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 211, 219. 24. Trachtenberg notes that Turner’s claim was more “an invention of cultural belief” than “a genuine historical fact.” See Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 17. 25. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 228; and Justus D. Doenecke, “Myths, Machines, and Markets: The Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1973): 538. 26. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 228. 27. Theodore Roosevelt to Turner, February 10, 1894; qtd. in Martin Ridge, “Turner the Historian: A Long Shadow,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 137. 28. Terhune considers Founders of a State to be a history painting that captures “national themes in human terms.” Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 126. 29. “In Local Studios,” Evening Star, Washington, DC, November 10, 1894, 13. According to an article published in the Washington Post, Hovenden set up a studio in Washington, DC, during the winter of 1893–94 and considered making the city his permanent home. “Thomas Hovenden Here,” Washington Post, November 19, 1893, 13. A critic from the Evening Star claimed that Hovenden abandoned the plan because of “his inability to find suitable accommodations anywhere in the city.” “Art Notes,” Evening Star, Washington, DC, January 5, 1895, 9. 30. Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 146–47. 31. “Thomas Hovenden,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, January 31, 1891, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:100. 32. For more on Hovenden’s biography, see Lee M. Edwards, “Noble Domesticity: The Paintings of Thomas Hovenden,” American Art Journal 19, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 5, 11, 13–14, 36; Terhune, Thomas Hovenden; and Anne Gregory Terhune, “Thomas Hovenden: Images of Heritage and Hope,” in Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895): American Painter of Hearth and Homeland (Philadelphia, PA: Woodmere Art Museum, 1995), 8–34. 33. “The Fine Arts,” unidentified clipping, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:118. Twentiethcentury scholars have also occasionally drawn connections between the two artists. See, for example, Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 152. Hovenden surely knew of his predecessor’s work, not only because of Johnson’s fame and considerable influence in New York City art circles but also because the elder artist served as one of the assigned academicians at the National Academy’s school while Hovenden was enrolled as a student. Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 5–6, 197n22. 34. “Fine Arts,” unidentified newspaper clipping in a scrapbook relating to fine arts exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago History Museum. 35. Hovenden’s choice of subject matter was not unprecedented. Lemuel Everett Wilmarth’s 1884 painting Jack’s Return (also known by the titles The Sailor’s Return and Homecoming) also portrays a sailor returning home, but Wilmarth’s painting shows the young man happily reuniting with his elderly mother as well as two younger women in the household. The open door at the back left of the composition, implies his recent arrival to the home. Hovenden’s painting, by showing the moment just before reunion, invests the subject with greater emotional tension. Wilmarth (1835–1918) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Munich, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He taught at the National Academy of Design and was elected academician in 1873. For more on Wilmarth, see George William Sheldon, American Painters: With Eighty-Three Examples of Their Work Engraved on Wood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879), 110–11; and Lee M. Edwards, Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840–1910 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 1986), 74. 36. Untitled clipping, December 17, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:246; and “Gems of Art,” Pittsburgh Press, November 6, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102. Despite the

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tendency among critics to read these paintings as companions, Hovenden’s widow claimed this was not the artist’s intent. Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 34n37. The painting sold for $6,000 (the same price Hovenden received for Breaking Home Ties in 1890) to the Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. Victor G. Fischer, “Artists and Art Works: Thomas Hovenden,” Washington Post, April 15, 1894, 16. 37. “The Fine Arts,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:118. 38. Titus Munson Coan, “Imaginative Friendships,” Aldine 7, no. 2 (February 1874): 37. The historian Susan J. Matt argues that during the second half of the nineteenth century, “Many Americans began to worry that families were decaying and believed that mobility was the root cause of such decay.” Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 130. 39. “The City: Hovenden’s New Picture,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, October 14, 1892; and “Thomas Hovenden,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, January 13, 1891. 40. “The National Academy,” New York Recorder, April 5, 1891, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:114. 41. William Leach, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 8. 42. Andrew Holbrooke, “Individual Continuity,” Atlantic Monthly 58, no. 346 (August 1886): 264. 43. “Thomas Hovenden,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:100. 44. House was not even there to witness Brown’s execution, having fled to Baltimore after receiving death threats because of his previous coverage of Brown’s trial. The story, published in a December 5, 1859, article in the New York Tribune, was, according to the historian R. Blakeslee Gilpin, invented by the newspaper’s Southern agricultural correspondent, Henry S. Olcott, and was soon “immortalized” by the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier in his “Brown of Osawatomie.” R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning With Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 61–62, 65. See also Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 136–37. Terhune states that Hovenden and Battell likely relied on Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s Memoirs of John Brown (Concord, MA: J. Munsell, 1878); and James Redpath’s The Public Life of Captain John Brown (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1860) as source material for the painting (133). She also argues that either Worthington Whittredge or Eastman Johnson (or both) recommended Hovenden to Battell for the commission (129). 45. Gilpin, John Brown, 64. An earlier, well-known (and currently unlocated) painting of the scene was made by Louis Ransom and titled John Brown on His Way to Execution (1860). Reproductions of this painting were widely distributed as lithographs by Currier & Ives. See also Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 73–79. 46. Fischer, “Artists and Art Works.” 47. The artist’s in-laws, the Corsons, were ardent abolitionists, and the family farm, to which Thomas and Helen moved after their marriage, had long been a stop along a route of Quaker safe houses on the Underground Railroad. The building that Hovenden transformed into a studio on the property was known as Abolition Hall because it was used as a venue for abolitionist meetings in the decade before the American Civil War, a history that Hovenden promoted in published interviews. Terhune, Thomas Hovenden, 100–2. For Hovenden’s account of his studio’s history as an abolitionist meeting space and stop on the Underground Railroad, see “Hovenden at Home,” Philadelphia Times, February 23, 1891, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:64. In the interview, the artist is reported to have said that, because of the building’s history, “I have often thought of painting a scene of the refugees in their flight North.” 48. See Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 49. I am grateful to Emily C. Burns for bringing Longstaff’s Breaking the News to my attention. 50. As part of the prize, the young artist, then only about 25 years old, won the Victorian Travelling Scholarship that paid for three years of art training abroad. Longstaff spent the award studying in London and Paris from 1887 to 1895. Prue Joske, Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff 1861–1941 (Melbourne, Australia: Claremont, 1994), XI. 51. Joske, Debonair Jack, 40. Many of Folingsby’s students employed similar compositions in narrative paintings that take up themes of mobility. See, for example, Frederick McCubbin’s

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Home Again (1884), which depicts a “swagman” (a term used in nineteenth-century Australia to describe an itinerant laborer who wandered the bush in search of work). The swagman crosses the threshold as he returns home, much to the apparent surprise of the woman performing domestic work inside the home. 52. Untitled newspaper article, The Age, Melbourne, Victoria, April 25, 1887; qtd. in Joske, Debonair Jack, 39. 53. See, for example, “Melbourne,” Gippsland Times, Sale, Victoria, April 29, 1887, 3; “Melbourne Tea-Table Talk,” The Western Australian, Perth, Western Australia, May 16, 1887, 3; and “Sketches with Pencil: Our Coloured Supplement: Breaking the News,” The Australasian Sketcher With Pen and Pencil, Melbourne, Victoria, July 12, 1887, 99, 102. 54. The subject might have been inspired by the death of Longstaff’s uncle Thomas Campbell, who died at age 29 in a mining accident at the South Clunes mine in 1875. Joske, Debonair Jack, 7. 55. “Sketches with Pencil.” 56. Franc[i]s Forrester, “The Story of a Picture,” Inter Ocean, Chicago, October 29, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102; and Thomas Hovenden to Mrs. Loraine Inmen, August 21, 1894, in Thomas Hovenden: In Memoriam (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 14. See also Matt, “Breaking Home Ties,” chapter 4 in Homesickness. 57. For an example of a period novel that imagined viewers’ responses to Breaking Home Ties, see Marietta Holley, Samantha at the World’s Fair (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893), 431–32. 58. Burns attributes the painting’s nostalgic appeal to viewers’ longing for a “better, simpler America.” Burns, “The Country Boy Goes to the City,” 63. 59. Unidentified newspaper clipping, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:108. See also Mary Temple Bayard, “Hovenden, the Artist,” Philadelphia Times, October 22, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:109; and “Appropriate Presents,” Pittsburgh Press, December 24, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:105. 60. Walter Hall Jewett, “Uncle Henry at the Art Gallery,” The Graphic, Chicago, October 28, 1893, 351. 61. Jewett, “Uncle Henry at the Art Gallery,” 351. 62. Octave Thanet [Alice French], “The People of the Cities: Sketches of American Types,” Scribner’s Magazine 16, no. 3 (September 1894): 331. A clipping from this article is preserved in the Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:101. 63. Jewett, “Uncle Henry,” 351; and Thanet, “The People of the Cities,” 331. 64. Although popular with a diverse group of fairgoers, the painting did not resonate with the subset of the cultural elite that preferred formal innovations and cosmopolitan aesthetics; see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 313–14. To emphasize this point, Scribner’s contrasted the enthrallment of the New York plutocrat (who “likes stories in his pictures”) with the disinterest of his more fashionable daughters (“who admire Monet”); Thanet, “The People of the Cities,” 331. 65. “About the Studios,” Inter Ocean, Chicago, May 14, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:115. 66. “In the Art Gallery,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:103. 67. Frank Graham Moorhead to Thomas Hovenden, September 13, 1894, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:219–21. 68. According to the 1895 Iowa State Census, a “Frank G. Morehead [sic],” age 18 and race listed as white, lived in Keokuk, Iowa. All census records accessed through Ancestry.com, http://ancestry.com. 69. “Gems of Art,” Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102. 70. The Rosenthals were part of a much larger migration of about two hundred thousand Jews to the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century, and “[t]he overwhelming majority hailed from German-speaking lands of Central Europe.” Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 2. By 1860 there were approximately ten thousand Jews living in the American West, and half of them resided in San Francisco, where they made up nine percent of the city’s population (25). 71 Rosenthal began taking drawing classes in San Francisco at the age of 14, first with the French sculptor Louis Bacon before studying with the portrait painter Fortunato Arriola. Arriola convinced Rosenthal’s parents to send their son to Munich to further his artistic

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training, and in 1865, Rosenthal left home for Germany, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy in Munich. Rosenthal only returned to the United States to visit his family twice (in 1871 and 1879). Although Rosenthal lived and worked abroad for most of his career, he nonetheless identified as an American artist and staged a major exhibit of his work in his hometown of San Francisco in 1884, where the local newspapers had continued to report regularly on Rosenthal’s career abroad. Rosenthal also exhibited his work in the United States sections of the 1876 and 1893 world’s fairs, contributing a painting entitled Elaine to the Centennial Exhibition (where it won a gold medal) and another called A Dancing Lesson of Our Grandmothers to the World’s Columbian Exposition. For a more detailed biography of the artist, see Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 92–93; Harriet Rochlin and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2000), 186–88; and Ava F. Kahn, ed., Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849–1880 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 429–30. 72. Toby E. Rosenthal, “Memoir of a Painter,” trans. Marlene Rainman, in San Francisco’s Artist, Toby E. Rosenthal, 151–52. Rosenthal’s memoir was originally published as Erinnerungen Eines Malers (Munich: Richard Pflaum Drucherei und Verlags, A.G., 1927). 73. “In the Art Gallery,” Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:103. 74. Forrester, “The Story of a Picture,” Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102. 75. Untitled newspaper clipping, Inter Ocean, Chicago, August 13, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:113. 76. “Hovenden at Home,” Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:64. 77. “Some Questions of Art,” New York Sun, April 5, 1891, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:101. 78. Thomas Hovenden to the critic at the New York Sun, n.d., Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:239. 79. Walter Cranston Larned, “Exposition Pictures,” in Chicago Record’s History of the World’s Fair (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1893), 170. 80. Letter from Hovenden to Mrs. Loraine Inmen, August 21, 1894, in Thomas Hovenden. 81. Bancroft, Book of the Fair, 681. 82. Major Ben C. Truman, History of the World’s fair: Being a Complete Description of the World’s Columbian Exposition From Its Inception (Chicago: Mammoth Publishing Company, 1893), 382. The association of New England with rural life became especially potent in the late nineteenth century, despite the fact that the region was the most rapidly modernizing in the nation. See Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, “Changing New England: 1865–1945,” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–13. 83. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, 33–34. 84. “The Quintet Club,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 14, 1891, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:106. 85. In the interview Hovenden specifically mentions that the mantle and rug depicted in Breaking Home Ties were based on objects in his studio. See “Hovenden at Home,” Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:64. 86. Burns, “The Country Boy,” 64. 87. “Breaking Home Ties,” Dubuque Daily Telegraph, August 3, 1893, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:104. 88. Unidentified clipping, Hovenden scrapbook, reel P13:102. 89. David B. Dearinger, ed., Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000), 246. 90. Stephanie J. Fox, “Gilbert Gaul,” in Tales From the Easel: American Narrative Paintings in Southeastern Museums circa 1800–1950, ed. Charles C. Eldredge (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 114. 91. For more on Lost Cause ideology, see David Blight, “The Lost Cause and Causes Not Lost,” chapter 8 in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 92. “Confederate War Pictures,” Confederate Veteran 16, no. 5 (May 1908), XLIV. 93. Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 296, 298; and Carol Vogel, “$15.4 Million at Sotheby’s for a Rockwell Found Hidden Behind a Wall,” New York Times, November 30, 2006. The

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painting was reproduced on the cover of the September 25, 1954, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. 94. “The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred exhibited substantial increases during the 20th century.” Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (National Center for Education Statistics, 1993), 67; available online at https:// nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. An indication of the scale of this increase between the years when Hovenden and Rockwell painted their respective canvases, 13,902 bachelor’s degrees were conferred to male students during the 1890–91 academic year, whereas 182,839 were awarded to male students during the 1954–55 academic year (82–83). 95. Sarah Burns argues that Hovenden’s legacy during the twentieth century was in popular art. Burns, “The Country Boy Goes to the City,” 72.

4

Dislocation and Connection in John Sloan’s Scenes of Urban Transport

In 1971 the United States Postal Service issued an eight-cent stamp to mark the centennial of the artist John Sloan’s birth (Figure 4.1). Designed by Bradbury Thompson and Robert J. Jones, the stamp features a reproduction of Sloan’s 1907 painting Wake of the Ferry II (Figure 4.6). Although it is one of Sloan’s best-known paintings—its popularity evidenced by its selection for Sloan’s commemorative stamp—it has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. This is likely because, with its melancholic view of a solitary figure, the painting falls outside of established art historical narratives regarding Sloan’s approach to picturing turn-of-the-century New York City. Dominant accounts of the artist’s career during this period trace a shift in Sloan’s focus around late 1906 and early 1907 from more traditional architectural cityscapes such as Spring, Madison Square (1905–06) to ground-level narratives that portray the experiences and social relationships of city dwellers, as in The Picnic Grounds (1906–07) and Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street (1907).1 Wake of the Ferry II does not fit comfortably within either of these categories; it is neither a distant, architectural cityscape nor a street-level view of sociality. But with its themes of connection across distance, the painting was an apt choice for the stamp. The ferry passenger’s mobility—pictured in the midst of a journey—recalls the transport of items sent through the mail. The stamped letter, when in a state of transit between points of departure and destination, is unconnected to place. And yet, as a form of communication, the letter functions as an agent of connection and even intimacy formed despite distance. The confluence of themes of mobility, dislocation, and connection evoked in Wake of the Ferry II signals one significant way that Sloan’s genre scenes respond to modern experience in turn-of-the-century New York City. Like others in his artistic circle, a group of urban realist painters later dubbed the Ashcan School, Sloan drew artistic inspiration from the time and place in which he lived. He walked New York City’s streets in search of artistic material and recorded the routes he traveled in his diary. His early New York City paintings typically represent the experience of modern urban life at the level of the individual and often draw on situations the artist experienced or moments he observed while traveling through the city.2 This approach to picture making is in keeping with the artistic philosophy of Robert Henri, Sloan’s mentor and friend. Henri advocated for a model of the modern artist as a “sketch hunter” who “has delightful days of drifting about among people, in and out of the city, going anywhere, everywhere, stopping as long as he likes—no need to reach any point, moving in any direction following the call of interest.” This notion relates to Charles Baudelaire’s idea of the modern artist as a flâneur but with an important difference. The art historian Rebecca Zurier argues that “for Henri, the

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Figure 4.1 Eight-cent John Sloan postage stamp from the “American Painting” series, 1971. United States Postal Service. Source: Photo by author.

artist’s task went beyond the recording of fashion and appearances from a distance to plunging into urban ‘life’ itself.”3 Sloan worked as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia before moving to New York City in 1904, and his approach to painting retained some of the visual elements and narrative strategies that he developed in this line of work. The surfaces of the Ashcan artists’ paintings were dynamic, with brushstrokes made increasingly visible as records of the supposedly sketch-like manner in which they were created.4 Henri championed spontaneity and speed of execution as important qualities in modern art, but, whereas Henri would discard a canvas that was not working out and start fresh, Sloan “stubbornly fought his canvas through,” according to the artist’s biographer Van Wyck Brooks, leading Henri to joke that “ ‘Sloan’ was ‘the past participle of ‘Slow.’’ ”5 The suggestion of quick execution in the style of Sloan’s brushwork was often to create a desired visual effect rather than serving as a reliable marker of the time it took the artist to complete the work. Despite the ostensibly spontaneous visual effects of Sloan’s canvases, his paintings were, in fact, carefully composed studio creations. Claims by early twentieth-century commentators that Sloan’s work was “100% American” minimized the impact of the artist’s careful study of work from other narrative traditions, including prints by William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier and genre paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, and Jan Steen, among others.6 Sloan also reportedly saw a relationship between his work and that of nineteenthcentury American genre painters. He observed that, like Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, and William Sidney Mount, he and his fellow Ashcan artists “painted the life

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around them,” although he considered the nineteenth-century genre painters’ work to be “too tight and finished.”7 Much as Johnson, Enoch Wood Perry, and Thomas Hovenden did before him, Sloan responded to social, demographic, and technological changes by engaging themes of mobility. Although his work is quite different in style than his predecessors’, Sloan also invested liminal spaces with narrative and social significance. Sloan’s images of personal and public transportation during his first years in New York City invest threshold spaces with great significance. Other scholars have noted the importance of liminal passages in Sloan’s work from this period. The art historian Susan Fillin-Yeh argues that “[t]hresholds are the locus of his art” and that spaces such as the shop windows and city sidewalks that appear so frequently in Sloan’s early New York City paintings and prints “are mapped metaphors for . . . exchanges of consumerism.”8 By contrast, the artworks discussed in this chapter examine the roles of thresholds and liminal spaces in Sloan’s work in two ways. His depictions of private transportation, like the etching Fifth Avenue Critics (1905; Figure 4.3) and painting Gray and Brass (1907; Figure 4.2), feature open, liminal zones that blur boundaries between public and private space. At the same time, the private modes of transportation also construct seemingly impenetrable barriers between socioeconomic classes even as rich and poor move through the city in close proximity to one another. In Sloan’s representations of commuters on public transport, on the other hand, liminal spaces become sites of dislocation. Wake of the Ferry, in particular, cultivates a sense

Figure 4.2 John Sloan, Gray and Brass, 1907. Oil on canvas, 22 × 27 in. (55.9 × 68.6 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund, 2018, 2018.649. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 4.3 John Sloan, Fifth Avenue Critics, 1905. Etching, image: 4.9 × 6.11 in., sheet: 9.14 × 11.7 in. Museum of the City of New York, 83.154.1. Source: Photo credit: The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, NY © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of intimacy and empathy that emerges, paradoxically, out of circumstances shaped by distance and absence.

Mobility as Subject and Stimulus When Sloan and the other Ashcan artists began showing work in New York City, the press cast them as rebels against the academic tradition.9 James Huneker, art critic for the New York Sun, championed the Ashcan painters in an article covering a debate about the hanging of paintings at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in 1907. He compared the display of their work to the unstoppable force of an oncoming train: When George Stephenson, the father of English steam railways, was laying the tracks for his first locomotive, early in the nineteenth century, a Parliamentary committee summoned the husky engineer to investigate his scheme. “If,” asked one member of the commission, with a fine prevision of the latter day hypothetical question—“if a cow gets on the track, Mr. Stephenson, what will happen to your train of cars?” “All the worse for the coo,” was the blunt retort in Stephenson’s country dialect. If the wall of the Fine Arts building is in danger because of pictures sent in by

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the younger men, then, say we, all the worse for the wall. Perhaps it may be that these modern chaps . . . who interpret nature, but not according to musty academic formulas, are feared because their paint will kill everything in their vicinity. Then, indeed, would it be a tragic wall!10 Transportation proved to be a useful metaphor for supporters who promoted the Ashcan artists’ transformative impact. Much as a cow on the tracks is powerless against an oncoming locomotive, the more conventional work on view at the National Academy of Design was no match for that of the Ashcan painters, according to the critic. The quote anticipates sentiments expressed a couple of years later by Henri, who compared modern American artists to transportation inventors. After describing his delight at reading about the recent successes in aviation of the Wright brothers and realizing they were Americans (Henri was traveling in Europe at the time and read the news abroad), the artist wrote: To create and to express is in its way also a great work of art. . . . We want inventors all through life; the only people that ever succeed in writing, painting, sculpture, manufacturing, in finance are inventors. And it is the inventor in art who expresses the valuable idea.11 Like Stephenson’s train or the Wright brothers’ airplane, some contemporaries viewed the work of the Ashcan artists as the next revolutionary invention in art—as transformative as developments in transportation had been over the course of the previous century. The art critic Samuel Swift, writing in Harper’s Weekly in 1907, praised Sloan and his fellow Ashcan artists for their approach to making pictures: “The prophet’s mantle has fallen indubitably upon a group of artists chiefly concerned, not with the figure as such, but with actual human beings, their emotional life, and the material environment that helps to determine their character.”12 In Swift’s view, what made the Ashcan artists “revolutionary figures” was their attention to the ways in which environment shapes people’s emotions. One aspect of the city’s “material environment” in particular—its transportation systems—provided a stimulus for Sloan’s exploration of intimacy and dislocation in works he made during a period in which he experienced pronounced feelings of placelessness. Unlike the other genre painters examined in this study, Sloan undertook relatively few long-distance journeys over the course of his career. He did not immigrate to the United States as Hovenden and Rosenthal had, he never traveled to Europe for study or pleasure like Johnson and Perry (in fact, Sloan declined to go abroad even when he was presented with the opportunity), and it was not until he was in his forties that Sloan began to travel during the summers (to Gloucester, Massachusetts, beginning in 1914 and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico, every year beginning in 1919). During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sloan typically did not journey much farther away from the lower Manhattan neighborhoods in which he lived and worked than his hometown of Philadelphia and, briefly in the fall of 1907, to Pittsburgh, where he taught classes at the Pittsburgh Art Students League. Despite the comparatively bounded geographic area in which Sloan lived and worked, mobility was an important aspect of his career. Indeed, much of the existing literature on Sloan’s artistic practice addresses how movement impacted his work.

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Scholars who have considered Sloan’s involvement with themes of locomotion have largely focused on the artist’s predilection for roaming the city, his representations of pedestrians—especially crowds—navigating urban spaces, and his interest in early cinema.13 Even Sloan’s contemporaries argued for the importance of motion to the artist’s work. In 1907 the critic Charles Caffin connected Sloan’s approach to impressionistic subjects, writing: For it is what the Japanese call the “Ukiyoye” that attracts him—the ‘passing show’ of shops and streets, overhead and surface traffic, and the moving throngs of people. . . —a phantasmagoria of changing colour [sic], form, and action.14 But Sloan’s interest in themes of mobility runs deeper than previous scholarship on the Ashcan School or early twentieth-century critics have acknowledged. Further examination of the role urban transportation plays in the artist’s oeuvre expands our understanding of Sloan’s long engagement with locomotion as both subject matter and stimulus for his work.15

Picturing Personal Transport and the Rigidity of Class Boundaries Sloan’s 1907 painting Gray and Brass (Figure 4.2) uses personal transportation— specifically, the automobile—to portray rigid social boundaries between wealthy and poor urbanites. The painting features a group of upper-class motorists driving by Madison Square Park in a new gray touring car with bright brass fixtures. The wealthy passengers contrast markedly with the park-bench loafers shrouded in shadow in the background.16 The artist wrote in his diary that he conceived of the painting after witnessing a similar scene in Madison Square on September 15, 1907, and began work on the canvas the following day.17 The vehicle’s colors are the most obvious source for the painting’s title, but Sloan also meant for “gray” and “brass” to refer to the contrast between social classes depicted in the work. He reflected on the painting’s origins, writing: I well remember how earnest was my intention to bring out the pomp and circumstance that marked the wealthy group in the motor car. The car, gray trimmed with much brass, gave me my title for the picture. This automobile and the veils and dusters are gone today, but the gray lives of the sidewalk are little changed.18 The automobile’s emergence during the first decade of the twentieth century completely transformed the ways people interacted in urban space. During its first years on the market, the automobile was, according to the historian Maury Klein, predominantly “a plaything of the wealthy” and became firmly entrenched in class politics. It was less a means of practical conveyance around the city than an object of entertainment and leisure for the upper classes.19 In 1906, the year before Sloan painted Gray and Brass, Woodrow Wilson (then president of Princeton University) accused “automobilists” of furthering antagonism between social classes and “encouraging the spread of Socialism.” The New York Times quoted Wilson as saying, “Nothing . . . has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.”20 Although Wilson was primarily concerned with the growing

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antagonism toward wealthy automobile drivers who recklessly motored through the countryside at high speeds, endangering rural residents and their livestock for no reason other than the thrill of a joyride, Sloan’s painting reveals that the automobile’s fraught class politics was prevalent in the urban context as well. The majority of automobiles were, in fact, owned by wealthy urbanites who lived in areas with access to paved roads and wide parkways and who could afford to employ a full-time chauffeur, not only to drive the car but, more importantly, to perform regular maintenance and costly repairs. By 1900, New York City was a key market for automobile sales, and the city continued to have one of the highest per capita ownership rates in the world a decade later.21 Automobility was primarily an urban mode of spatial mobility during this period and one reserved for the wealthiest consumers. As a mode of privileged mobility, the automobile provided Sloan with a promising subject through which to explore the power dynamics of motion and stasis in the city. Sloan creates a sense of movement in Gray and Brass by positioning the car on the right side of the composition so that the back of the vehicle is cropped out of the picture plane, as if the car has just entered the viewer’s field of vision and is driving perpendicular to the viewer from right to left. The back tire appears blurry, kicking up debris as it speeds along the road, and the bottom hem of the male passenger’s duster, which has fallen out of the vehicle’s interior, blows back beside the car, adding a further suggestion of movement in the scene. The wealthy motorists—full of appearance and show—move through the city with ease, while the urban poor in the background are comparatively immobile and seemingly stuck in place. Sloan, who had had only limited experience with automobiles, sought advice from his friend and fellow newspaper artist W. Sherman Potts (an automobile enthusiast) on “the construction” of the car.22 But the organization of space within the vehicle—and especially the positions of the passengers in the back seat—is confusing. The woman in red rests her left arm on the top edge of the door so that her bent elbow casts a shadow on the side of the automobile closest to the viewer. The woman with the large yellow hat seems to be seated behind the woman in red. Her yellow corsage partially occludes the woman’s red dress, eliminating the possibility that the two women are seated side by side. The incredible volume of the second woman’s yellow hat also calls into question whether Sloan’s brushy strokes of yellow and white paint are actually meant to suggest the presence of a third woman who is seated beside the woman in yellow. Visible between the male passenger in the front seat and the woman in red, a man wearing a khaki-colored cap faces the viewer. His presence is startling and seemingly unexplained. Dressed in a cap and duster similar to those worn by the male passenger and chauffeur, this figure seems, on the one hand, to be another passenger seated beside the woman in red. On the other hand, however, the figure’s strange position (nearly perpendicular to the other passengers) suggests that he is a pedestrian who approaches the far side of the vehicle from the street. He leans toward the car as if to examine the passengers or perhaps ask them a question, but the passengers ignore him. The woman in red, the figure with whom he attempts to engage, closes her eyes and faces straight ahead. Sloan’s peculiar arrangement of space frustrates the viewer’s attempt to establish firm connections between the figures. Although the automobile is fully open—there is no protective windshield and the cloth top has been folded down behind the women in the back seat—the passengers remain effectively isolated from their surroundings and from one another. The painting forestalls any possibility of social engagement or

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the blurring of boundaries between social classes. In fact, all of the figures in the car seemingly turn inward and isolate themselves from their surroundings. By caricaturing the automobile passengers and portraying them as aloof and detached, Sloan makes clear his contempt for the wealthy New Yorkers who look down upon everyone else from their vehicular thrones. Gray and Brass was not the first time Sloan explored the class divisions of urban transportation in his work. The artist had previously taken up the subject in his 1905 etching Fifth Avenue Critics (Figure 4.3), a print from the artist’s New York City Life series of ten views of life on West 23rd Street. The art historian Katherine Manthorne argues that the series is a thoughtful exploration of “the complexities of visual attention” that attracted the artist’s notice after he moved to New York.23 Fifth Avenue Critics, as the title indicates, is a scene about making judgments. In this case, the “critics”—Sloan’s title is intentionally facetious—are the two older women riding in a chauffeur-driven horse carriage in the foreground of the composition. Much like the female automobile passengers in Gray and Brass, the woman in the lighter colored hat, clearly designated a “critic” by the pince-nez she clutches in her left hand, stares down her nose with an air of superiority. However, in this instance, she does not ignore or disengage from her immediate surroundings. Rather, her gaze is directed toward another traveler—a younger woman in a hansom cab approaching from the opposite direction in the middle ground of the etching. Sloan’s composition leaves little doubt that the younger woman is the object of the elder women’s scorn. The horse’s reins on the hansom cab draw the viewer’s eye from the “critic’s” left hand holding the spectacles across the picture plane from left to right toward the young woman in the cab, who in turn looks straight ahead and downward as if either oblivious to or deliberately avoiding the stares of her self-appointed evaluators. Sloan’s print makes clear that the older women are in no position to judge. Their exposed ankles and feet appear from under voluminous skirts, suggesting their impropriety even as they remain critical of the younger woman. He also points to their outmoded ways of thinking by including a sign that reads “Antiques” behind their heads. In 1945 Sloan supplied critical commentary on the etching’s figures: “These were typical of the fashionable ladies who used to drive up and down the Avenue about four o’clock of an afternoon, showing themselves and criticizing others.”24 But what exactly about this scene prompts the women’s critique? Scholars have been quick to note the women’s critical judgment, but the precise source of their apparent disdain is ambiguous. Sloan originally titled the work Connoisseurs of Virtue, a title that implies that the young woman’s morals are somehow open to question from her “critics,” while simultaneously poking fun at the self-important older women for considering themselves exemplars of virtue. Perhaps it is the type of vehicle in which the young woman rides that attracts the women’s notice and leads them to question her character. The hansom cab’s partial enclosure is, according to Manthorne, “indicative of [the young woman’s] more clandestine—and, [the critics] judge, disreputable— purposes.”25 Hansom cabs quickly became popular vehicles after their introduction to New York City’s streets in the 1890s because their low center of gravity and lightweight frame allowed them to travel at faster speeds than other types of horse-drawn carriages. Because hansom cabs only required one horse to pull them, they were also comparatively inexpensive to operate and thus became a common form of transportation on New York City’s streets by the turn of the century. Some contemporaries

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worried that the vehicles’ relatively private cabins would tempt young, unchaperoned couples to act “inappropriately.”26 The fact that the young woman travels alone in a semi-enclosed vehicle may partially explain why the young woman attracts the older women’s notice, but differences in the class associations of their various modes of transport also likely inform the critics’ judgments. While hansom cabs were sometimes used as personal vehicles, they were more commonly for hire. Sloan later suggested that it is this feature—the contrast between the women’s modes of transport—that inspires the “critics” to look down their noses at the younger woman. In 1940 Sloan made a painting after the print that shares its title. Writing about the painting’s subject matter in 1946, Sloan said, “Limousines and taxis have taken the place of the vehicles of that day but the humans are the same.”27 By equating the “critics’ ” horse-drawn carriage with a limousine and the hansom cab with a taxi, Sloan’s comments suggest that he intended, and that contemporary viewers likely understood, that the young woman has hired the hansom cab that drives her through the city. In this way, the print anticipates the use of transportation to explore class differences in Gray and Brass, which Sloan created two years later. Although he claimed to leave politics out of his paintings, Sloan’s subjects and compositions often express the artist’s sympathy for the lower classes and a desire to expose injustice and inequality.28 One of the themes he utilized to highlight economic disparities in the city was transportation. The open vehicle in Gray and Brass is neither an insular interior nor a communal space that connects the passengers with those around them. Rather, it is the site where the two groups meet but do not mix. The spatial dynamics at work in Gray and Brass recall those employed in seventeenthcentury voorhuis scenes by the Dutch artist Jacob Ochtervelt (Figure 0.1). The open automobile is a transitional space between interior and exterior, at the threshold of which wealthy and poor citizens encounter one another but do not cross the spatial or social divide. Sloan undoubtedly considered public transportation a more democratic means of moving through the city. In his scenes of mass transit—especially those featuring commuters—the liminal spaces of transport take on much different meanings, functioning as spaces of empathy and intimacy.

Picturing Public Transit and the Dislocation of Commuting When Sloan and his wife Dolly moved from Philadelphia to Manhattan in April 1904, transit was a major topic of concern throughout the country as cities rushed to develop systems to accommodate swelling urban populations. George Hooker, a city planner from Chicago, wrote that year that every city was “out of breath trying to catch up with its local transportation problem, and seem[ed] nevertheless to be scarcely gaining upon or even keeping up with it.”29 New York City was a leader in such efforts. Although attempts to develop a comprehensive rapid transit scheme began in the 1860s, the urgency around the effort ramped up dramatically in 1898, when the five boroughs—Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island—banded together to form Greater New York and greatly expanded the city’s geographic footprint. On October 27, 1904—just six months after Sloan’s move to New York—the city’s subway system opened, connecting lower Manhattan, Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, the Upper West Side, and the Bronx.30 Construction on Pennsylvania Station, a major train terminal in midtown Manhattan that connected the borough to

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New Jersey and Long Island via tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, also began in 1904. By 1909 one million workers commuted into New York City every day.31 Although Sloan was not a commuter, he seems to have welcomed the development of rapid transit and frequently marveled in his diary at how quickly he was able to travel across the city. He was especially impressed by the opening in 1908 of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad tunnel, which ferried passengers between Manhattan and Hoboken, New Jersey. The tunnel was a great success, transporting approximately 100,000 passengers on its opening day.32 Sloan recorded his exuberant reaction to the tunnel’s opening in his diary: “The first of the Tunnels under the North River was open at 12 midnight last night and a new era has dawned. From Hoboken to 19th & Sixth Avenue, N.Y., in 10 minutes.” One year later the artist’s enthusiasm remained strong, and he noted that he was able to travel between Newark and 23rd Street in Manhattan “in less than half an hour by train and tunnel under river.”33 Despite his apparent interest in riding the rapid transit tunnels connecting New York City to New Jersey, Sloan never chose to represent the experience. Instead of showcasing recently developed or particularly fast forms of travel, he chose to portray the most ordinary ones, specifically the elevated trains and ferries that New Yorkers had been riding for decades. The technologies that enabled transit across New York City, whether novel or familiar, had a profound social impact, and it is this aspect of transportation that Sloan explores in his depictions of commuters. Sloan’s 1912 painting Six O’Clock, Winter (Figure 4.4) pictures the evening rush of commuters on one of New York City’s elevated train platforms and pedestrians

Figure 4.4 John Sloan, Six O’Clock, Winter, 1912. Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 × 32 in. (66.3575 × 81.28 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1922. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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streaming by below the tracks. The scholar Sabine Haenni has noted the ways in which the elevated functioned as “a liminal space,” not only in its blurring of the “distinctions between private and public spheres” (the train car serving as an enclosed, semi-private space that moves through public urban space) but also in its “potential to alter social relations” by bringing together in close proximity people of diverse social positions. Sloan does not picture the “compressed space of the car itself” in this painting, but his representation of a crowded city sidewalk and, especially, the congested elevated platform achieve a similar effect.34 The elevated was liminal for another important reason: it was a significant mode of transportation that shuttled commuters between the domestic and public spheres. Although New York introduced mechanically powered elevated trains in the 1860s, the switch to electric power in 1902 boosted the system’s ridership, and Sloan’s painting conveys the energy of the bustling crowd.35 Commuting became a regular activity in many cities during the period as effective means of rapid transit became increasingly commonplace. Period commentators emphasized the physical and psychological effects of rapid transit in urban centers, particularly during the relatively new phenomenon of rush hour. Much of this commentary echoed the rhetoric regarding Americans’ presumed inclination toward spatial mobility that carries through, in different ways, each chapter of this book. In 1900, a writer from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, for example, claimed that rush hour was a particularly American problem. He lamented that Americans would never adopt the Parisian system of assigned seating on trains because it would slow them down too much, and he quoted the British author Ian MacLaren’s observations about Americans: No man goes slow if he has the chance of going fast; no man stops to talk if he can talk walking; no man walks if he can ride in a trolley car; no man goes in a trolley car if he can get a convenient steam car; and, by-and-by, no one will go in a steam car if he can be shot through a pneumatic tube. . . . There is nothing which an American cannot do, except rest.36 Contemporaries debated the effects of commuting on interpersonal connections and family life. Advocates hailed improved transit as the answer to problems posed by dark, crowded, and disease-ridden tenements. Supporters claimed that the development of fast, inexpensive public transportation would spur the growth of suburbs that would enable the urban poor to escape from tenement homes in lower Manhattan to larger, light-filled homes on the outskirts of the city and still remain within reach of their jobs downtown.37 Critics of commuting, however, pointed to the routine disruptions to family life that commuting necessitated and the physical exertion required to travel back and forth each day. A writer for Harper’s Bazaar claimed that commuting from the suburbs increased the “wear and tear of life.” Rapid transit made the trips “possible,” but not “easy.” According to the author: “[A] suburban home in the experience of the man doing business in the city is a mad rush to catch a car, a fierce, longer or shorter whizzing ride at night and morning, and separation from his family.” Echoing oft-repeated claims about American restlessness, the author proclaimed, “So far as home life is concerned, rapid transit has realized for us little more than an extension of our possibilities of unrest.”38

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Sadakichi Hartmann, a prominent art critic and an acquaintance of Sloan’s, suggested commuter rush hour on the elevated platform as a subject for artists in his well-known essay published in 1900, “A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York”: Almost any wide street with an elevated station is interesting at those times when the populace goes to or returns from work. The nearer day approaches these hours, the more crowded are the sidewalks. Thousands and thousands climb up or down the stairs, reflecting in their varied appearance all the classes of society, all the different professions, the lights and shadows of a large city, and the joys and sorrows of its inhabitants.39 Six O’Clock, Winter seemingly answers Hartmann’s call to portray a diverse crowd during evening rush hour, but the painting focuses less on the New Yorkers’ “joys and sorrows” than on the visual aspects of the elevated. In particular, Sloan’s composition juxtaposes the purposeful forward movement of the train (suggested by its strong diagonal orientation) with the seemingly directionless flow of pedestrians at the bottom of the canvas.40 The darkening blue sky and warm, yellow electric lights from inside the train and the street-level shops below contrast with the cold, dark steel structures of the elevated tracks. It is a quite vibrant image of a feature of the cityscape that contemporaries often described as loud, dirty, and obtrusive. According to the transportation historian Michael W. Brooks, “[T]he streets of Manhattan were dominated by four noisy, reverberating metal structures” that, in the late nineteenth century, contributed to “a noisy, bustling, smelly, jarring chaos.”41 Sloan’s diary reveals that he shared at least two common complaints regarding the elevated: that the structures blocked natural light from reaching the street and that they increased the risk of street-level accidents. On March 9, 1907, after taking a stroll through the muddy streets of New York, Sloan described in his diary the vegetables and meat for sale on the corner “in the mud and the sun that gets by the elevated railway structure.” The following year, Sloan recorded witnessing a runaway horse barreling down Sixth Avenue and added, “The elevated railroad pillars made this quite dangerous.”42 Despite such observations about the elevated, Sloan romanticizes its appearance in Six O’Clock, Winter. The New York Sun’s review of the painting noted that, by enveloping the structure in warm glow, Sloan’s elevated train was “glorified, or at least mitigated as to its inherent ugliness by the dusk and the lights.”43 The train’s infrastructure appears in Sloan’s painting as an unyielding fixture of the city’s fabric that contrasts with the transient commuters. The artist and critic Guy Pène du Bois, who studied under Henri, commented that the commuters in Sloan’s painting appear to be out of place: “They hurry as they pass in the purple air. . . . But they do not belong here, these homegoers. Sixth Avenue assumes another character when they are gone.”44 Pène du Bois’s assessment suggests that, much as Sloan had “mitigated” the “inherent ugliness” of the elevated train tracks by portraying them at dusk and under warm electrified light, he also altered the usual character of Sixth Avenue’s populace by including “homegoers” who only pass through the Tenderloin entertainment district rather than the presumably rougher, less reputable crowd that usually populated the area. For Pène du Bois, Sloan’s commuters evoke a sense of dislocation. Many of Sloan’s representations of life in public space focus on “meaningful connections among strangers,” as Zurier has argued.45 Yet his paintings of commuters

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explore experiences of social disconnection in the modern city. The sociologist Richard Sennett argues that nineteenth-century urban planners, learning from the experience of violent revolutions in European cities like Paris, designed metropolitan space in ways that “aimed to create a crowd of freely moving individuals, and to discourage the movement of organized groups through the city.” “Individual bodies moving through urban space,” he writes, “gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained.” The effect of such efforts by planners to move individuals speedily and efficiently through urban space was a growing sense of detachment from one’s immediate surroundings and from others “[a]s space became devalued through motion.” Urbanites turned inward, coexisting with their fellow travelers but rarely engaging with them. And yet, Sennett argues, the experience of “displacement” could, like a shock, bring the individual back to an awareness of his or her place and relation to others.46 This notion of connection through displacement is a useful lens through which to consider Sloan’s ferry paintings. Hartmann, the critic who suggested rush hour on the elevated as a subject for US artists, also advocated for the “surprising beauty” of “approach[ing] New York by the Jersey City ferry” as a potential theme.47 Sloan repeatedly took up the ferry as a subject in his work, but his two 1907 paintings titled Wake of the Ferry focus not on the beauty of the approaching city but on one of its inhabitants and the view of what is left behind. The subject was evidently of great interest to the artist; he painted two nearly identical versions of Wake of the Ferry, a practice that was not typical for Sloan. According to his diary, Sloan began working on the first version of the painting, Wake of the Ferry, No. 1 (Figure 4.5), after riding the ferry between Jersey City and Manhattan on March 19, 1907. When he returned home that evening, Sloan wrote, “Back from the ferry ride, I made a start on a canvas. ‘The Wake of the Ferry’ it might be called if it is ever finished.” He made at least two additional ferry trips over the next five days.48 However, Sloan badly damaged Wake of the Ferry, No. 1, soon after its completion, when, during a drunken outburst, he hurled a rocking chair toward the canvas, tearing a portion of its painted sky. About a month after this incident, Sloan made the second, identically sized version of Wake of the Ferry.49 Although the subject matter remains the same in both canvases, there are important differences in composition and style that shift away from the realism and specificity of the first version toward greater abstraction and placelessness in the second. In Wake of the Ferry, No. 1, a woman stands alone at the back of the boat and stares out at the gray-green choppy water, smoky gray sky, and the city skyline in the distance. She leans against the safety gate at the vessel’s stern, shifting her weight on her bent leg and resting the opposite arm akimbo, seemingly unbothered by the streaks of rain that reach the ferry deck. The woman stands with her back turned three quarters from the viewer so that only part of her face is visible. The painting’s dark palette and drizzly, smoke-filled atmosphere suggest the figure’s melancholic emotional state. She is shown in a moment of contemplation, her mind seemingly elsewhere. Wake of the Ferry II (Figure 4.6) is similar in palette and composition to the original version, but the artist made several adjustments to the second canvas that alter the mood of the work and the sensation of mobility it evokes. In reconceptualizing Wake of the Ferry, Sloan greatly simplified the background by eliminating the red tugboat at the right as well as much of the city skyline that remains visible in the first version. He also played up the foggy atmospheric effects and used a more limited palette. The

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Figure 4.5 John Sloan, Wake of the Ferry, No. 1, 1907. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in. (66 × 81.3 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Miss Amelia Elizabeth White, 61.165. Source: Bridgeman Images. © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 4.6 John Sloan, Wake of the Ferry II, 1907. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in. (66.04 × 81.28 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1922. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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second version reveals the artist’s close study of Japanese woodblock prints as well as James McNeill Whistler’s paintings of the Thames. With its churning water and spitting rain, Wake of the Ferry, No. 1, more directly evokes the experience of riding a ferry at a specific moment and place, hewing more closely to the seemingly spontaneous and painted-from-life approach that characterizes Sloan’s narrative urban scenes from this period. By contrast, Wake of the Ferry II is ungrounded. Sloan has simultaneously elevated and lowered the viewer’s perspective in the second canvas; we now look down on the stanchions and deck and up at the traveler, whose presence has become more visually imposing. The ferry’s tilt is now more severe even though the environment has been made a less forceful actor.50 Sloan reduced the visual impact of the ferry’s architecture in the second version by slimming the columns and making the gate appear less substantial, blurring the boundary between the boat’s watery deck and the world beyond. This dematerialization of the vessel reinforces the work’s thematic exploration of dislocation. According to Brooks, the artist once wrote of riding the New Jersey ferry, “Optimistic people go to the front of the boat, the depressed stand in the stern.”51 This quote suggests that Sloan conceived of representing figures’ emotional states spatially and in relationship to the built environment. As the ferry moves forward, the woman in Wake of the Ferry looks back to where she has left rather than to where she is going, her gaze following the swirling waters of the ferry’s wake. Sloan wrote of the first version of the painting, “A melancholy day, when she, to whom the coming landing means nothing, seeks the sad outlook of the vessel’s broadening wake. Such was the mood under which the picture was painted.”52 The Sloans took the ferry frequently during these years, but, unlike most ferry passengers, they were not daily commuters. Prior to the completion of the tunnel under the Hudson River in 1908, the ferry running between the docks at West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Jersey City was a vital link in the route between the couple’s newly adopted city and their beloved hometown of Philadelphia. It was also the best way to visit friends who lived on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. Sloan evidently associated the ferry with frequent reunions and departures imposed by visits from friends and family from Philadelphia as well as by periods of prolonged separation from his wife, who frequently traveled to Philadelphia to receive medical treatment for alcoholism and depression.53 Although Sloan had been living in New York City for about two and a half years by the time he painted Wake of the Ferry, he missed living in Philadelphia a great deal. Years after completing the painting, Sloan wrote that the mood was “evoked by some nostalgic yearning for Philadelphia. The ferry of course is the first lap of the road home.”54 The liminal space of the ferry—neither interior nor exterior, neither departure point nor destination—is a potent emblem of this condition. The comings and goings by ferry are both the means of reuniting with now-distant family and friends and the mode of separation. Sloan gave visual form to these experiences in a sketch made in a February 1906 letter to his wife Dolly that illustrates the artist waiting for her return to New York. Dolly had gone to Sloan’s parents’ home in Pennsylvania to visit the artist’s sick mother—a trip that Sloan, due to a fast-approaching exhibition deadline, did not join. In the drawing, which the artist titled “Waiting” (Figure 4.7), Sloan sits at the water’s edge under a sign marked “23rd St. Ferry.” His knees are drawn up to his chin as he stares straight ahead toward Dolly, the intended viewer of the sketch in the context of this

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Figure 4.7 Illustrated letter from John Sloan to Dolly Sloan, February 21, 1906. John Sloan Manuscript Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library and Archives, Delaware Art Museum. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

private letter. The artist is out of scale; he is much too large in relation to the surrounding cityscape and the boat traversing the river at the right. This shift in scale visually emphasizes Sloan’s separateness from his surroundings. Although situated firmly in the city, the artist’s thoughts are elsewhere and his loneliness looms large. When Sloan sent this sketch to Dolly, he was already at work on his first ferry painting, Ferry Slip, Winter (Figure 4.8), which depicts the massive boat cutting through choppy water and piles of snow and ice as it approaches the dock. Snowcapped piers separate the viewer from the ferry and the crowd of daily commuters that packs onto the deck in anticipation of the boat’s imminent arrival. The commuters, dwarfed by the technology that enables their passage, appear helpless as the vessel struggles against the elements on their behalf. The painting is rendered in a palette of grays, blues, blacks, and browns that the artist described as “somber.” Diagonal brushstrokes in the sky suggest the blustering wind and imbue the scene with a sense of nervous energy. Recently relocated to New York City and still feeling out of place, Sloan wrote that Ferry Slip, Winter, was “[p]ainted at the time when New York still awed an unacclimated Pennsylvanian.”55

Performing Intimacy and Empathy at the Limen Wake of the Ferry shifts our view from the vessel’s exterior pictured in Ferry Slip, Winter, to its interior and provides a more intimate study of a solitary traveler than the crowds of passengers gathered in the earlier canvas. The Wake of the Ferry paintings

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Figure 4.8 John Sloan, Ferry Slip, Winter, 1905–06. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 × 31 3/4 in. (55.1 × 80.5 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966, 66.4607. Source: Image credit: Cathy Carver. © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

are at odds with the themes of urban spectatorship and communal pleasures with which the artist is usually associated. The passenger falls outside of the framework of “urban visuality,” a two-way mode of vision in which the urban viewer acknowledges that she or he is not only looking but also being looked at by others, that, as Zurier has argued, structures so much of Sloan’s work.56 Both versions, but especially Wake of the Ferry II, are insular and register a quite different kind of “intimacy” than the interpersonal connections that shape Sloan’s street-level genre scenes. A writer for The Craftsman, likely the managing editor Mary Fanton Roberts, described Wake of the Ferry II after viewing it at the Folsom Galleries in 1913 as follows: At a first glance it is an empty canvas and then slowly it fills with the life of the one figure in the shadow. You cannot escape entering into her thoughts, into the sorrows that have come to her. And the chances are that you recall some day when you too, stood desolate, looking out over the receding waters, wondering, too, of your future.57 The critic’s empathetic response to the woman pictured in Wake of the Ferry II, underscored by the repeated use of the word “too,” is undoubtedly provoked by the perspective Sloan gives the viewer, who looks onto the scene from the ferry’s interior.58

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The point of view constructed by Sloan in both versions of Wake of the Ferry differs markedly from other period representations of New York City ferry passengers. A turn-of-the-century photograph by the commercial photography studio Byron Company (Figure 4.9), for example, emphasizes the vessel’s crowded bow filled with commuters pressed up against the safety gates, waiting as the ferry pulls into its slip— a perspective that shares more with Ferry Slip, Winter, but places even greater focus on the energy of the crowd. The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson selected ferry passengers as the subject of the first full-page image in a series of four vignettes depicting a typical New York City morning that he published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1898 (Figure 4.10). In the illustration, men, women, and children push up against the accordion gate, expectantly waiting to disembark. It is unclear where we as viewers are in relation to the figures in Gibson’s illustration. Are we disembodied and hovering over the water, or do we stand on the dock as the ferry pulls into the slip? There is no context given to help discern our position, other than the gate that makes clear we are separated from the ferry passengers and not one of them. In the Wake of the Ferry paintings, the object of our vision is not so much the passenger as it is the passenger in relation to her environment and to us. The turned figure appears in other works that Sloan made during this period. In 1906 the artist painted a lone woman, seen from behind, as she pauses while hanging laundry on her rooftop to view New York City’s towering skyline at sunset. Like the Rückenfigur of German Romanticism, the woman in Sloan’s Sunset, West Twenty-Third Street (Figure 4.11), serves as a surrogate through which the viewer experiences sublime surroundings.

Figure 4.9 Byron Company (New York, NY), Ferries, Crowded Ferry Boat, Ferry Boat in Winter, c. 1906. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.4157.

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Figure 4.10 Charles Dana Gibson, On the Ferry. Wood engraving. From Scribner’s Magazine, June 1898, 672.

Figure 4.11 John Sloan, Sunset, West Twenty-third Street (23rd Street, Roofs, Sunset), 1906. Oil on canvas, 24 3/8 × 36 1/4 in. (61.91 × 92.1 cm). Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 25th Anniversary Purchase, 1957.15. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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In contrast to the otherwise unoccupied, sublime landscapes in which the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich so often pictured “halted travelers,” exemplified by Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Figure 4.12), the woman in Sloan’s painting takes in the juxtaposition of nature and the built environment.59 Approximately half of the canvas is dedicated to the depiction of the bright orange glow breaking through an otherwise muted gray sky and the other half to the silhouetted forms of buildings and vehicles driving along the street below. The woman at the boat’s stern in Wake of the Ferry II likewise looks out over an industrialized landscape in the course of everyday events (commuting), marking a significant contrast to the turned figure in Friedrich’s painting who is momentarily arrested while wandering through a sublime—but seemingly untouched—natural landscape. And yet, as in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Wake of the Ferry II features an “insubstantial and spatially unstable” landscape. The thickness of the fog and smoke and the misty effects of the rain create the obscurity upon which the aesthetics of the sublime depend and require the “beholding subject” to make sense of its appearance.60 The Rückenfigur also imbues the work with a sense of melancholy. The art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that the “faceless anonymity” of the Rückenfigur elicits the “uncanny” effect of “seeing oneself seeing.” The belatedness of this dynamic—the viewer has always arrived at the scene after the beholder pictured within it—imbues the viewer’s experience of the painting with a sense of sadness and loneliness. The Rückenfigur thus serves not only as the viewer’s surrogate in the scene but also as the means of estrangement from it.61 Sloan’s ferry passenger echoes the melancholic effect of the Rückenfigur but riffs on the traditional motif. Her placement complicates the

Figure 4.12 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c. 1817. Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, On permanent loan from the Foundation for the Promotion of the Hamburg Art Collections. Source: Photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/Hamburger Kunsthalle/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY.

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issues of vision, modern experience, and social engagement that pervade Sloan’s work and thwarts any straightforward reading of both Wake of the Ferry paintings as referring directly to the pictorial conceits of the Romantic sublime. The Rückenfigur appears in nineteenth-century US genre painting as well. It was a “recurring motif” in Winslow Homer’s oeuvre between 1865 and 1909, according to the art historian Rebecca Bedell, who argues that Homer’s figures’ “turned backs exclude us even as they invite us in, simultaneously offering and denying connection.” Modernist critics and twentieth-century scholars have often treated Homer’s approach as distinct from the sentimentality that characterized the work of his fellow nineteenth-century genre painters, including Johnson, Perry, and Hovenden. But Bedell argues that Homer’s paintings—in particular his paintings of figures with turned backs—should be interpreted as very much a part of the same impulse: “They are iconic representations of sentimentalism’s central theme: the yearning for human connection and communion.”62 Sloan’s ferry paintings, I argue, emerge from a similar desire. Sloan also might have thought of Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” when creating Wake of the Ferry. The artist greatly admired Whitman’s celebration of everyday urban experience, and he once described the poet’s impact on his work: “I liked what resulted from his descriptive catalogues of life. They helped to interest me in the details of life around me.”63 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” appears in Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which Sloan gifted to Henri soon after the two artists first met at a party in Philadelphia in 1892.64 The art historian Ruth L. Bohan argues that for modern artists working in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States, Whitman’s poetry offered “a unique combination of change and rootedness” that served as a model “for a modernism grounded in American cultural experience.”65 Both Wake of the Ferry and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” position the vessel as a site of empathy and universal human experience. Whitman expresses his fascination with the ordinary sights of New York City—both natural and manmade (the river and sky, the crowds of commuters, the ferry boats)—and how they fit together into a “well-joined scheme” that transcends the specificity of any single time or place. Drawing on the experience of riding the ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Whitman writes: It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried, Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thickstemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. In the first three sections of his poem, Whitman casts this routine experience of riding the ferry as a vehicle for intimate and empathetic connection across time and space,

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a universal human condition that spans generations and, correspondingly, collapses the gap between reader and writer: “Just as you feel . . . so I felt.” The water’s current (“the ties between me and them”) symbolizes this connection in the poem much as the wake in Sloan’s painting bridges distance.66 Sloan’s ferry paintings picture a tension between movement and stasis that recalls the dynamics at play in Whitman’s poem (“I stood yet was hurried”) and similarly suggest the universality of experience by inviting the viewer to identify with the passenger. At the same time, Sloan’s paintings refuse the optimism of Whitman’s river’s “bright flow” and “refresh’d” passengers. Rather, the artist focuses on themes of social disengagement on public transportation and of implied intimacy across distance. The gaze of the figure in Wake of the Ferry II is trained onto an index of displacement: the boat’s wake is the result of the literal displacement of water. In Sloan’s painting, this physical act of displacement becomes the site of contemplation for the more abstract dislocation that the ferry passenger experiences in her implied separation from community. But the wake, caused by displacement, also signals connection as it streams off into the distance, linking the boat to its point of departure. The painting thus evokes a particular form of intimacy—a relationship to presently distant people and places informed by Sloan’s own separations from Philadelphia and given visual form in the wake’s connective flows. Contained within the borders of the ferry’s architecture (the two support pillars, the ferry’s roof, deck, and gate), the woman appears to face a framed landscape. Sloan portrayed the passenger as a viewer—not just of the ferry’s wake but of an image. The artist used images to connect with distant loved ones, frequently including drawings in his personal correspondence, as in the sketch “Waiting” discussed earlier. The art historian Michael Lobel has demonstrated how, during this period, Sloan used the weekly illustrations he created for the Philadelphia Press to communicate with his family from afar. Sloan drew the weekly illustrated puzzles in New York City and sent them to the newspaper in Philadelphia for publication. The puzzles sometimes incorporated portraits of family members or hidden messages that his family would recognize. According to Lobel, Sloan’s weekly puzzles “were a way for the family to maintain a connection.” One such puzzle, published on May 26, 1907, takes up this theme explicitly. It features a panel that portrays the artist’s mother seated in profile—a reference to Whistler’s 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother)—with a text bubble that reads “I hear the voice of Jack” (Sloan’s nickname). The illustration ostensibly shows a moment when the artist’s mother hears her son’s voice from a distance as he, presumably, approaches the family home. Lobel observes, “It is a picture, then, of a child’s homecoming, complete with a waiting parent and a dutiful canine. At the same time, it registers the son’s physical absence, since he is not visible in the scene.”67 Sloan’s illustration served as a mode of connection and intimacy forged in circumstances of distance and separation. Sloan frequently employed the framed image as a compositional device in these years. An avid movie and theatergoer, Sloan often depicted performance spaces in his paintings and prints. The figure in Wake of the Ferry II visually recalls the performers pictured at the threshold of framed images in two slightly later works by Sloan, Movies, Five Cents and The Theater. Movies, Five Cents (Figure 4.13), a painting begun the month after Wake of the Ferry II, shows an audience—largely composed of figures turned three-quarters away from the picture plane and in shadow—watching a movie at a downtown nickelodeon. Most, but not all, of the audience members train their

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Figure 4.13 John Sloan, Movies, Five Cents, 1907. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 31 1/2 in. Private collection. Source: Photograph, Rowland Elzea Catalogue Raisonne File on John Sloan, Delaware Art Museum. © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

eyes toward the curved frame surrounding the movie screen and the image projected onto it. Seen from an oblique angle, the movie screen, tilted slightly down and to the right (relative to the top edge of the canvas), echoes the monochromatic seascape seen through the opening at the back of the rocking boat in Wake of the Ferry II.68 Manthorne argues that Sloan’s experiences as a moviegoer informed the formal aspects of many of his pictures begun in 1907, especially those aspects that focus the viewer’s attention on a particular figure who “stands out” from the crowd. “This is what movies do,” Manthorne writes, “They isolate us at the threshold of the picture screen.”69 The threshold of the picture screen—where image meets audience—is a liminal space of intimacy and connection in many of Sloan’s images of performers. Recalling the juxtaposition of performer and viewer in this space, where the bottom of the movie screen meets the heads of the audience members in the front row, the ferry passenger in Sloan’s painting is both the viewer of the image (the painterly landscape) and an actor within it. This dynamic structures much of Sloan’s urban imagery. Zurier argues that figures in Sloan’s paintings “participate as both actors and audience” in the “theater” of urban life, one in which “temporary connections make momentary dramas amid strangers.”70 During the period in which he painted Wake of the Ferry, Sloan frequently used framing devices to achieve this effect. Janice M. Coco argues that “the window becomes a trope of shifting subjectivity, a point of vacillation between those

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who examine and those who are examined” in many of Sloan’s works.71 In Sloan’s 1907 painting Hairdresser’s Window, for example, the liminal social position of the painting’s ostensible subject (the hairdresser, who is gawked at by a crowd of onlookers) is registered figuratively by the woman’s placement in a transitional space within the painting’s composition (a second-story window). The window motif and themes of voyeuristic spectatorship in Sloan’s work also mark concerns about the destruction of boundaries between public and private life in the early twentieth-century United States.72 The framed space in Movies, Five Cents is also the locus of performed intimacy. The projected image shows a couple locked in a kiss, a display of affection frequently commodified by the bourgeoning film industry. Sloan’s composition contrasts the couple’s staged embrace with the more spontaneous social interactions of the densely packed crowd of moviegoers below. But, as Zurier observes, the theater is a site of “artificial intimacy,” where strangers gather in close proximity for a shared experience.73 The Theater (Figure 4.14) suggests that the artist was still intrigued by the performance of intimacy at the threshold of the framed image in 1909, when he made the monotype. There are striking compositional similarities between the print and Wake of the Ferry. The Theater depicts an audience watching a stage performance. Two figures stand on a platform framed by elaborate columns and reach toward one another, perhaps grasping hands. Behind this physical demonstration of intimacy, blurry white

Figure 4.14 John Sloan, The Theater, 1909. Monotype, image: 7 1/2 × 9 in. (19.1 × 22.8 cm), sheet: 10 3/4 × 10 5/8 in. (27.3 × 27 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph L. Wilson in memory of Anna Elizabeth Wilson, 1961.162. Source: © 2020 Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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streaks run across a green backdrop. The expressive brushstrokes and amorphous white trails cutting through the painterly surface evoke the ferry’s wakes in Sloan’s paintings. The formal similarities between the compositions of these works suggest that the artist returned to themes of intimacy in a variety of contexts—the ferry deck, the downtown nickelodeon, and the uptown theater, among others.74 If art works like Movies, Five Cents and The Theater investigate the public performance of physical closeness as a spectacle for the viewer’s consumption, Wake of the Ferry, No. I and II, evacuate such displays from the paintings’ visual field. The viewer becomes privy to a new mode of connection implied at the work’s center. The liminal space of the ferry fosters interiority but also a particular intimacy—one that, paradoxically, emerges from conditions of dislocation and the in-between.

John Sloan and Genre Painting It could be argued that Sloan’s Wake of the Ferry paintings relate uneasily to late nineteenth-century genre painting and that they are, perhaps, more concerned with evoking an ambiance than telling a story. In his 1907 survey of American painting, Charles Caffin characterizes Sloan’s artistic approach by claiming that “while the rendering of the spectacle presented to the eye is [Sloan’s] first concern, his mind also is busy with the human comedy and tragedy that beats below the surface.” “[T]he humanity of the scene,” according to Caffin, is communicated by the artist not with “a definite story, but by inference and suggestion.”75 Zurier observes that the ambiguity of Sloan’s “stories without endings” often frustrated or perplexed contemporary critics, and she argues that it is this open-ended quality of Sloan’s “narrative images [that] sets them apart from the genre tradition of Victorian narrative paintings,” in which “[t]he stories . . . have a clear beginning, middle, and end, or at least provide enough information to reconstruct a life history for each character.”76 But, as I hope the preceding chapters have demonstrated, late nineteenth-century genre painters often presented viewers with narratives that were ambiguous and unresolved, especially in works that take up themes of geographic mobility and social flux. The same year that Caffin defended Sloan’s approach to capturing “the humanity of the scene,” the art critic Frank Jewett Mather offered a damning assessment of the “status of genre painting” in the United States at the time: it was “almost completely in abeyance.” According to Mather, “Such American painters as Mount and Eastman Johnson, who had an eye for the characteristic in our life and a hand to present it with charm, have hardly left successors.” Part of the reason for this, according to the author, was that romanticism and its privileging of the “exotic” had resulted in “scorn visited upon all anecdotal compositions,” dealing the already declining genre “its death-blow.” He advocated for genre painting’s resuscitation and pointed to the work of Sloan and others in his orbit (William Glackens, George Luks, and Jerome Myers) as a promising trajectory for the revival of this tradition in the United States.77 The art historian John Fagg argues that, while the work of the Ashcan artists, including Sloan, marked a “thematic and stylistic break from earlier genre precedents” with its comparatively unfinished surfaces and urban subjects, it also “represented a continuation of earlier forms of life and art” by finding in these urban contexts “new sites for anecdote and visual humor.”78 Following Fagg’s notion of anecdote, several details in the Wake of the Ferry paintings—the text on the ring buoy hanging from the ferry railing, the various other boats poised to cut into the ferry’s wake, the ribbon on the passenger’s

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hat—push the works into the realm of genre painting.79 They contribute to the impression that the scene is set in a particular moment of time and at a particular place. Furthermore, this chapter has demonstrated how Wake of the Ferry relates thematically and compositionally to more overtly narrative works by Sloan, including Gray and Brass and Movies, Five Cents, in their explorations of social (dis)connection. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Wake of the Ferry seems, at first look, to fall outside of Sloan’s expected approach to picturing early twentieth-century New York City, structuring scenes around social interaction. But, as we have seen, Wake of the Ferry has a strong social component, even if it portrays a solitary figure. The wake implies the passenger’s connection to others, albeit an abstract connection that cuts across distance and absence. Like the nineteenth-century genre painters Sloan admired, he “painted the life around [him].” But what kind of story of the life around him did Sloan tell? Works that take up themes of urban mobility and transportation constitute one significant strain in his work, a way to picture experiences of dislocation and connection in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century city. Although they differ from the subjects and academic styles favored by Johnson, Perry, and Hovenden in their attention to the urban context and sketch-like handling of paint, in their probing of the social dimensions of mobility and liminality, they share a great deal more than one might expect.

Notes 1. As Rebecca Zurier and Robert W. Snyder have argued, the Ashcan artists’ “insight was to reverse the formula of the previous generation of New York painters [such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase], placing the unstructured dynamic energy of the people at center stage and relegating designed urban spaces to background settings.” Rebecca Zurier and Robert W. Snyder, introduction to Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, ed. Rebecca Zurier (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton, 1995), 8. According to Michael Lobel, Sloan’s emphasis on painting in 1907—a year in which he finished more than 28 canvases, including Wake of the Ferry II—marks a significant shift in Sloan’s conception of himself as an artist, from an illustrator to a painter. Michael Lobel, John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 87. 2. Molly S. Hutton, “Walking in the City at the Turn of the Century: John Sloan’s Pedestrian Aesthetics,” in John Sloan’s New York, ed. Heather Campbell Coyle and Joyce K. Schiller (Wilmington, DE: Delaware Art Museum, 2007), 95–104. For examples of diary entries in which Sloan discusses walking, see John Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene from the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence 1906–1913, ed. Bruce St. John with an introduction by Helen Farr Sloan (1965; repr., New York: Ishi Press, 2009), 142 (July 16, 1907), 208 (March 24, 1908), 458–59 (September 22, 1910). In addition to Sloan, the term “Ashcan School” typically refers to the artists Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows. These artists did not use the appellation to describe themselves, however. A 1916 article in The Sun about a disagreement over Sloan’s editorial policies at The Masses, quotes the cartoonist Art Young on the group, “They want to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio street—regardless of ideas—and without title.” “Clash of Classes Stirs ‘The Masses,’ ” The Sun, New York, April 8, 1916, 6. The art historians Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., later applied the name “Ashcan School” to the group in the 1934 book Art in America in Modern Times. Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 319n1. 3. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, compiled by Margery Ryerson (New York: Harper & Row, 1984; originally 1923), 17; and Zurier, Picturing the City, 26. For Charles Baudelaire’s description of the artist as

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flâneur, see “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 37–42. 4. Zurier, Picturing the City, 26. Sloan admired the loose, virtuosic brushwork that animated the surfaces of canvases by Old Master painters like Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez as well as the nineteenth-century artist James McNeil Whistler. He wrote, “Back in the Nineties our gods were Whistler, Velasquez, and Frans Hals. We were too much concerned with getting the impression of the moment, the beauty of easy brushwork, the surfaces of things.” John Sloan, Gist of Art: Principles and Practice Expounded in the Classroom and Studio, Recorded With the Assistance of Helen Farr, 2nd ed. (New York: American Artists Group, 1944), 15. For an in-depth analysis of Sloan’s work as an illustrator and how it informed his work as a painter, see Lobel, John Sloan. 5. Van Wyck Brooks, John Sloan: A Painter’s Life (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1955), 20. 6. John Fagg argues that Sloan’s work reveals a debt to the example of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, especially in its sense of “place, home and local character.” John Fagg, “Near Vermeer: Edmund C. Tarbell’s and John Sloan’s Dutch Pictures,” Modernist Cultures 11, no. 1 (2016): 113. The claim that Sloan’s art was “100% American” was made by Helen Appleton Read, New York Realists, 1900–1914 (New York: Whitney Museum, 1937), 7; qtd. in Fagg, “Near Vermeer,” 87. 7. Quoted in “John Sloan Discussing Robert Henri,” in John Sloan/Robert Henri: Their Philadelphia Years, 1886–1904 (Philadelphia, PA: Moore College of Art, 1976), 27. 8. Susan Fillin-Yeh, “Images as Imaginary Documents: John Sloan’s Sidewalks and Thresholds,” in John Sloan’s New York, 118, 141. Fillin-Yeh examines the “windows, open doors, rooftops, and sidewalks, and other places that serve as boundaries between inside and outside, public and private,” focusing in particular on two paintings from 1907 as “case studies in liminality”: Hairdresser’s Window and The Haymarket (119). Her essay does not address the liminality of Sloan’s transportation pictures. 9. Virginia M. Mecklenberg, “Manufacturing Rebellion: The Ashcan Artists and the Press,” in Metropolitan Lives, 191–213. When critics did relate their work to other artistic traditions, it was most often to the visual effects of French impressionism. Fagg, “Near Vermeer,” 93–95. 10. “That Tragic Wall,” The Sun, New York, March 16, 1907, 8. For an analysis of James Huneker’s art criticism at The Sun, see John Loughery, “The New York Sun and Modern Art in America: Charles Fitzgerald, Frederick James Gregg, James Gibbons Huneker, Henry McBride,” Arts Magazine 59 (December 1984): 77–82. 11. Robert Henri, “Progress in our National Art Must Spring From the Development of Individuality of Ideas and Freedom of Expression: A Suggestion for a New Art School,” The Craftsman 15, no. 4 (January 1909): 399. 12. Samuel Swift, “Revolutionary Figures in American Art,” Harper’s Weekly 51, no. 2625 (April 13, 1907): 534. 13. See Hutton, “Walking in the City”; Zurier, Picturing the City; James Glisson, “Anxiety and Occlusion: New York City in the Imagination of American Impressionists and Ashcan School Artists” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2012); and Katherine Manthorne, Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting, Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019). 14. Charles H. Caffin, The Story of American Painting: The Evolution of Painting in America From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1907), 373. 15. Zurier argues that “the questions the Ashcan artists addressed helped define the modern city,” questions that include “the impact on daily life of such technological changes as mass transit and photomechanical reproduction.” Zurier, Picturing the City, 39. 16. Schiller and Coyle note that similar figures occupy the benches in many of Sloan’s park scenes during this period. Sloan referred to them as “men of leisure” and “the unemployed.” Quoted in Schiller and Coyle, “John Sloan’s Urban Encounters,” in John Sloan’s New York, 47. 17. Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 154–55 (September 15 and 16, 1907). 18. Sloan, Gist of Art, 15. In his analysis of Sloan’s scenes of tenement life, Fagg argues that Sloan often directed the “comic charge” of the moralizing messages in his works at the “well-dressed leisure-class” individuals present (or whose presence is implied) in the scenes. John Fagg, “Chamber Pots and Gibson Girls: Clutter and Matter in John Sloan’s Graphic

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Art,” American Art 29, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 37. Sloan similarly ridicules the upper-class figures in street scenes such as Gray and Brass and Fifth Avenue Critics. 19. Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 180. New York City’s major newspapers widely reported on the class politics of automobiles during the early twentieth century. See Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 128. 20. “Motorists Don’t Make Socialists, They Say,” New York Times, March 4, 1906, 12. The article also quotes several automobile defenders, who argued that “a few reckless drivers” were giving the car a bad name and did not justify placing “all motor car owners in the class of persons who are exemplifying the arrogance of wealth.” The automobile’s supporters also pointed to the positive impact of the vehicle on the economy. Wilson’s opinion of the automobile, like that of many Americans, changed dramatically in a very short span of time. By 1913, then US President Wilson supported the Lincoln Highway Association’s efforts to privately finance a transcontinental highway from New York City to San Francisco (it was not fully realized until the 1930s), and, in 1915, Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act, which designated federal funds to improving the nation’s roads. See Janet F. Davidson and Michael S. Sweeney, On the Move: Transportation and the American Story (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 2003), 102. 21. McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 104–5. 22. Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 155 (September 17, 1907). Around the time Sloan completed Gray and Brass, the artist likely had his first ride in an automobile. On September 26, 1907, Sloan noted in his diary that he, Dolly, and their friend Miss Lawrence rode in a chauffeured automobile while visiting friends in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. Sloan recorded very little about this experience, only noting that they “Had a nice ride, cold tho’ . . .” John Sloan’s Diaries, transcribed and annotated by Judith O’Toole in consultation with Helen Farr Sloan, John Sloan Manuscript Collection, Delaware Art Museum, 109 (September 26, 1907). He seems to have reserved his biting criticism of motorists and the class politics of early automobile culture for his painting. 23. Katherine Manthorne, “John Sloan’s Moving-Picture Eye,” American Art 18, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 83. See also Manthorne, Film and Modern American Art. 24. Text published in a brochure for a retrospective of Sloan’s etchings held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (“John Sloan: A Retrospective Exhibition of Etchings,” February 16–March 13, 1945); available online at https://renaissancesociety.org/ publishing/558/a-retrospective-exhibition-of-etchings-works-in-exhibition/. 25. Manthorne, “John Sloan’s Moving-Picture Eye,” 81. 26. Hansom cabs became “a symbol of shadowy urban romance” because of the relative privacy afforded by the cab’s enclosed sides. Irving Lewis Allen, The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 96. 27. Sloan in the catalogue to the 1946 retrospective John Sloan: Paintings and Prints at Dartmouth College; qtd. in Rowland Elzea, John Sloan’s Oil Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 386. 28. For Sloan’s politics and its relationship to his artistic practice in various media, see Gail Gelburd, “John Sloan’s Veiled Politics and Art,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 1 (January 2008): 69–88. 29. George E. Hooker, “Report to the City Council of Chicago on Local Transportation Development in Great Cities,” (typescript; Chicago, February 1, 1904), 49; qtd. in Glen E. Holt, “The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology: An Essay on the Development of Mass Transit in the United States,” in Cities in American History, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz (New York: Knopf, 1972), 332. Between 1870 and 1900, cities across America grew at an astonishing rate in response to the nation’s industrialization. New York City’s population, for example, grew more than 150% during this period. Chicago’s grew more than 430% over the same timeframe. These population booms in urban centers necessitated the development of an effective means by which to transport people through urban and suburban space. See McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 21–22; population data appear in Table 2.1. 30. New Yorkers utilized rapid transit much more frequently than inhabitants of other cities. By 1890, New York had 233 per capita rides on public transit compared to 74 in London and 91

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in Berlin. See Michael W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 35. Despite the system’s eventual success, the growth of rapid transit in New York City did not follow a straightforward path. Calls for a comprehensive rapid transit system in New York had been issued repeatedly throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but technology lagged behind demand. New York City’s geography also contributed to this problem: the island of Manhattan in particular, with its elongated, narrow shape, caused many contemporaries to believe that rapid transit would need to achieve faster speeds there than what was required by transit systems in other major metropolises. David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), 237. 31. Kathleen Eagen Johnson, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: New York’s River Festival of 1909 and the Making of a Metropolis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 25. 32. John Sloan’s Diaries, 188n792. 33. Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 201 (February 26, 1908), 292 (February 20, 1909). 34. Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 36. 35. New York introduced mechanically powered elevated trains in 1868 and initiated the operation of a steam-powered version three years later. The steam-powered trains only reached maximum speeds of about ten miles per hour, however, and they proved insufficient for daily commuters traveling between upper Manhattan and downtown. Ridership leveled off and even declined in the 1890s as streetcars became more popular. Electrification allowed for longer trains and faster speeds, thus expanding the system’s capacity to accommodate greater numbers of passengers. Hammack, Power and Society, 237. For a history of the elevated, see James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit (1918; repr., New York: The Law Printing Company, 1970); and Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 338–40. 36. Ian MacLaren [Rev. John Watson], “The Restless Energy of the American People-An Impression,” The North American Review 169, no. 515, ed. George B. M. Harvey (October 1899): 569, 575; qtd. in George H. Johnson, “Rapid Transit in Great Cities,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 50, no. 3 (July 1900): 9. 37. Holt argues that New Yorkers had expected “cheap electric transportation” to help spur the suburbanization of slum dwellers, but by the early twentieth century many realized that their “vision did not come true; the poorest remained the least mobile, locked into their ghetto areas.” Holt, “The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology,” 333. 38. “Rapid Transit and Home Life,” Harper’s Bazaar 33, no. 48 (December 1, 1900): 2003. 39. Sadakichi Hartmann, “A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York,” Camera Notes 4 (October 1900): 93. 40. However, as Fagg argues, the pedestrians in Six O’Clock, Winter are not an illegible mass. Some “figures are separated out from the crowd, and anecdotal elements take on a life distinct from the whole.” John Fagg, On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 50. 41. Brooks, Subway City, 33. 42. Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 111 (March 9, 1907), 219 (May 11, 1908). As Holt notes, “The elevateds closed out the sun on the streets where they ran, and land values in lots immediately adjacent to the lines were lowered by the nuisance factors of noise and dirt. The supporting structures were also seen as a hazard which slowed speeds and increased possibilities for accidents.” Holt, “The Changing Perception of Urban Pathology,” 332. 43. “Artists Who Are Their Own Jury: McDowell Club’s Self-Organized Group System Works Well,” The Sun, New York, May 6, 1913; clipping in John Sloan Collection, Printed Matter, Bibliography, Photocopied newspaper clippings, box 223, folder 1910–19, Delaware Art Museum. 44. Guy Pène du Bois, “Who’s Who in Modern Art—John Sloan,” New York Evening Post, magazine section, September 28, 1918; photocopy in John Sloan Collection, Printed Matter, Bibliography, Photocopied newspaper clippings, box 223, folder 1910–19, Delaware Art Museum. 45. Zurier, Picturing the City, 270.

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46. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: Norton and Company, 1994), 323–24. 47. Hartmann, “A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York,” 94. 48. Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 113 (March 19, 1907). Sloan took the ferry that day to escort Mary Smyth Perkins, a fellow artist from Philadelphia and a friend of the Sloans, to the train. Perkins likely studied with Henri at the Philadelphia School of Design when he taught there from 1892 to 1895. See John Sloan’s Diaries, Delaware Art Museum, 12n58. Sloan also records ferry rides on March 22 and 24, 1907 (Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 114, 115). 49. In his diary, Sloan reports that, after a night of drinking whiskey and beer, he “grew riotous, then sick” and “threw a rocking chair through ‘The Wake of the Ferry.’ ” Although he did not record the impetus for his outburst, a footnote in the published text indicates that the cause was a fight with his wife Dolly over her heavy drinking. See Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 118–19 (April 5, 1907). Sloan kept the torn canvas in his studio, and eventually had it repaired more than two decades later, in 1929. He eventually sold it to his friend Amelia White. Elzea, John Sloan’s Oil Paintings, 74. Sloan recorded in his diary that he was “working on the new ‘Wake of the Ferry’ ” on May 8, 1907 (127). 50. Snyder and Zurier also note this effect, writing that in Wake of the Ferry II, “movement is suspended.” Robert W. Snyder and Rebecca Zurier, “Picturing the City,” in Metropolitan Lives, 100. 51. Quoted in Brooks, John Sloan, 69. 52. Sloan, Gist of Art, 209. Curiously, Sloan also wrote that he found the second version to be “in a slightly less melancholy mood” than the original (211). The artist did not provide his reasoning for this assessment, however, leaving us to guess at what he meant. 53. Schiller and Coyle, “John Sloan’s Urban Encounters,” in John Sloan’s New York, 35. 54. Sloan, Gist of Art, 209. 55. Sloan, Gist of Art, 206. 56. See Zurier, Picturing the City, 7. 57. “American Life by American Painters,” The Craftsman 23, no. 3 (December 1912): 371. 58. David Peters Corbett also considers the role of empathy in the work of the Ashcan painters in “Camden Town and Ashcan: Difference, Similarity and the ‘Anglo-American’ in the Work of Walter Sickert and John Sloan,” in “Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA,” ed. David Peters Corbett and Sarah Monks, special issue, Art History 34, no. 4 (September 2011): 778, 781, 784. 59. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 193–94. Michael Lobel also notes the significance of the turned figure in Sloan’s works from this period. But, in his analysis of Sloan’s Election Night (1907), the figure functions not as a Rückenfigur-like viewer but as an active “painterbeholder” that dramatizes the act of painting. See Michael Lobel, “John Sloan: Figuring the Painter in the Crowd,” The Art Bulletin 93, no. 3 (September 2011): 367n39. 60. Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 211–13. 61. Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 35–36, 192. 62. Rebecca Bedell, Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 121. 63. Quoted in Joseph J. Kwiat, “Robert Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition,” PMLA 71, no. 4 (September 1956): 620. 64. Schiller and Coyle, “John Sloan’s Urban Encounters,” in John Sloan’s New York, 26. 65. Ruth L. Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 5. 66. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, PA: David McKay, 1891–92), 129–30, available online at www.whitmanarchive.org. Sloan mentions this poem in his diary: “I walked a little in Brooklyn which was the town Whitman knew so well, and on the bridge I thought of Whitman’s Brooklyn Ferry. I on one bridge and the two others in sight beyond the bend at Blackwell’s Island.” Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 422 (May 31, 1910). 67. Lobel, John Sloan, 71.

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68. Molly S. Hutton also observes the resemblance of the ferry’s architecture to a movie screen. Hutton, “Walking in the City,” 103. 69. Manthorne points specifically to the paintings Easter Eve, Picture Shop Window, Hairdresser’s Window, and Election Night, all of which, she argues, “plays with the conflation among the picture plane, window, and moving-picture screen.” Katherine E. Manthorne, “John Sloan, Moving Pictures, and Celtic Spirits,” in John Sloan’s New York, 161. 70. Rebecca Zurier, “City, Stage, and Screen: John Sloan’s Urban Theater,” in On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art, ed. Patricia McDonnell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2002), 178. 71. Janice M. Coco, “Inscribing Boundaries in John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window: Privacy and the Politics of Vision,” Prospects 24 (October 2009): 395. 72. Coco, “Inscribing Boundaries,” 398, 403. In an earlier psychoanalytical interpretation of the painting, Coco argues that Sloan distances and contains the hairdresser from the artist/ viewer through the work’s “complex spatial construction” because hairdressers were associated with “danger and sexuality at the turn of the century.” The window thus functions as a way “to contain his [Sloan’s] anxieties symbolically.” Janice M. Coco, “Reviewing John Sloan’s Images of Women,” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 88. Fillin-Yeh interprets the window as a liminal space that “joins together allure, sexuality, and commerce.” Fillin-Yeh, “Images as Imaginary Documents,” 136. By contrast, I view the framing devices in Sloan’s ferry paintings and theatrical compositions as liminal sites that encourage the viewer’s experiences of intimacy and empathy. 73. Zurier, “City, Stage, and Screen,” 182. Zurier argues that Sloan’s movie theater is not a site of “existential isolation” like Hopper’s, but rather a place of “conversation” (181). 74. Other sites of intimacy include the city streets and building rooftops. See Zurier, “City, Stage, and Screen,” 185; and Nick Yablon, “John Sloan and ‘the Roof Life of the Metropolis,’ ” American Art 25, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 14–17. 75. Caffin, The Story of American Painting, 373. 76. Zurier, Picturing the City, 300–1. 77. Frank Jewett Mather, “Status of Genre Painting,” New York Evening Post, February 4, 1907, 8. 78. Fagg, On the Cusp, 39–40. 79. Anecdotal elements in paintings are elements that “contribute” to “the main spectacle” represented in the work but also “background details that become compelling” and “compete for the viewer’s attention.” These “anecdotes carry the potential to disrupt and undermine notions of what is central or significant in the wider narrative.” Fagg, On the Cusp, 36–37.

Conclusion

During a panel discussion at the symposium New Approaches to Presenting American Art convened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012 to celebrate the recent reopening of the museum’s American Wing, the artist Kara Walker lamented the attention paid to artworks in the collection that, in her words, reflected an “old American attitude.” Emanuel Leutze’s iconic and monumental 1851 portrayal of Washington Crossing the Delaware (Figure 1.7) was emblematic of this kind of work, in her view. Rather than grand-manner history paintings, Walker argued in favor of highlighting artworks that might “celebrate [America’s] clunky, quirky, cartoonish, improvisedlooking attempts at establishing modern citizenship.” Throughout her remarks, mobility and fluidity emerged as key themes in Walker’s proposed vision for the ideal rehanging of the American Wing. As a way to “rethink what was influential in American art,” she championed “the idea of the itinerant painter . . . who travels from town to town” as well as greater consideration for “the movements and waves of immigration that created this country.” Later in the discussion Walker asked for an image that she had chosen from the museum’s collection to be projected on the screen located behind her and her fellow panelists: it was Enoch Wood Perry’s The True American (Figure 2.1), a work not hung in the reinstalled galleries. She observed of it, “Somehow this seemed to exemplify my take on the American scene.” Referring to the headless figures in Perry’s composition, she added, “We don’t know who they are and maybe they don’t know who they are either.” She expanded on this idea, musing, “It spoke to me as what I thought about as the American personality, which is kind of like, somewhere here [Walker gestured to cover her face] or else putting on a mask or a suit.” For Walker, the painting spoke to the messiness around issues of identity. Walker did not explicitly link Perry’s satirical painting of headless figures assembled on a hotel porch to her earlier appeal for greater attention to themes of movement and itinerancy in American art, but the connection is apt. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, genre painters during the second half of the long nineteenth century often explored the unstable contours of identity through themes of geographic mobility. Eastman Johnson, Enoch Wood Perry, Thomas Hovenden, and John Sloan each, in different ways, engaged period discourses of mobility and identity in their work. They turned to topical subjects (fugitives from slavery, tramps, adolescents leaving home, and commuters) and sites (the porch and the ferry deck) to probe the politics of locomotion and identity during the period. They also created compositions that emphasize the liminality of these figures and places, reworking a much longer tradition in European and US genre painting of using

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thresholds to demarcate boundaries between social groups. Rather than portraying scenes focused on fixed relationships and rooted social types, the works in this study evidence deep artistic engagement with themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement during the period. Discourses of mobility informed not just the production but also the reception of many of these genre paintings, and commentators brought their own lived experiences with these themes and the emotions they entailed to bear on the works. The case studies in this book focus on the second half of the long nineteenth century, but the legacy of these artistic experiments extend well into the twentieth century, even if the terms of debate shifted. Major dislocations, not least the mass relocation of African Americans from the South to the North during and after World War I as well as the migrations of laborers from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, continued to impact life and art in the United States throughout the twentieth century. With these migrations, as well as the development of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and the growing significance of automobile culture, mobility continued to serve as both subject and stimulus for narrative painting. One need only think of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series with several of its canvases using threshold spaces for narrative effect or Edward Hopper’s paintings of hotel rooms and gas stations to consider some of the diverse ways that artists adapted many of the themes explored in this book over the following decades. In 1927 Hopper wrote about the significance of architectural spaces in the work of his friend John Sloan: “Sloan’s chief interest is humanity, but the architecture or landscape in which his figures live is always a part of the plastic whole and is never the slight and casual thing it so often is to humorists or satirists.”1 This is a quality shared by the work of both artists. The art historian Leo Mazow has recently explored Hopper’s own engagement with architectural spaces and mobility, specifically his numerous works that portray hotels, motels, tourist homes, and other travel-related infrastructure. The dynamics of alienation with which Hopper’s work is frequently associated is rooted not only in the artist’s biography and subjective experiences but, just as importantly, in the social history of hotel and motel tourist spaces and experiences. Mazow writes that in these works, created mostly during the Great Depression and Cold War years, “Hopper offers a pointed critique of the process by which individuals engage in unyielding flux—and inevitable back-and-forth—when they inhabit these structures.” Tropes of modernism including fragmentation and dislocation found expression in Hopper’s depictions of the hotel experience during the “motel craze,” when larger numbers of Americans took to the road in their personal automobiles for extended periods of time.2 In 1948 a writer from Time pointed the reader’s attention to the ways in which these themes found expression in the forms on Hopper’s canvases: “A road cuts across the foreground of most of Hopper’s paintings. Sometimes it becomes a city street, or a railroad embankment, or a porch step, but it is there—a constant reminder of transience.”3 Dislocation and transience are arguably themes more commonly associated with twentieth-century modernist art than with nineteenth-century narrative painting. And yet, this book has attempted to broaden the ways art historians think about genre painting and its engagement with modern life in the United States during the second half of the long nineteenth century. Kara Walker wondered how greater attention to mobility and fluidity might shift dominant narratives about “what was influential in American art.” With its focus on genre painting of the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, this book proposes but one answer to this question. What other narratives might we tell about the history of art in the United States with renewed attention to these themes?

Notes 1. Edward Hopper, “John Sloan and the Philadelphians,” Arts 11 (1927): 174. 2. Leo Mazow, “Introducing Hopper’s Hotels,” in Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, ed. Leo G. Mazow with Sarah G. Powers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 2, 17, 20. Mazow also argues that “Sloan was, to a point, Hopper’s brethren in articulating a hotel consciousness.” During the 1910s and 1920s, Sloan created paintings and prints that depict hotels in New York City, sometimes as their explicit subject, as in his images of the Hotel Lafayette (1927–28), while other times they appear in the background of cityscapes, as in Stein at Window, Sixth Avenue (1918) (see p. 21). 3. “Traveling Man,” Time, January 19, 1948, 59.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Adler, Dankmar 94 African Americans: Civil War and 29, 53n41; enslavement of 5–6, 19, 21–22, 24, 27, 29, 53n41; in genre scenes 8, 9, 11, 24, 51n20, 65, 67; by Hovenden 101; by Johnson 11, 17–31, 18, 23, 28, 31, 33–34, 45, 48; mobility of 14n18, 20, 30, 155 Age, The (newspaper) 104 Aldine, The 10 American Art-Union 60, 65, 84n8 American Citizens (To the Polls) (Wood) 11 American Journal of Science 73, 74 Ancient Transportation (Boyle) 94, 117n17 Army of the Potomac 28 Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) (Whistler) 144 Art Journal 35, 59–60 Ashcan School 12–13, 123, 128, 148n2; artistic strategies of 124, 148n1, 152n58; genre painting and 16n39, 147; reception of 126–27; scholarship on 16n38, 128 Atlantic Monthly 101 automobiles 128–30, 150n20, 155 Bacon, Francis 93–94 Badger, Reid 92 Baird, Henry M. 47 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, The Book of the Fair 69, 93, 112 Bashful Cousin, The (Edmonds) 8, 9 Battell, Robbins 101 Baudelaire, Charles 123 Beard, William Holbrook, Kicked Out; No Money; No Friends 49n3 Bedell, Rebecca 51n22, 143 Bell, John 72 Bencke and Scott: Bummers 66, 66–67; My Old Kentucky Home 44 Bierstadt, Albert 58, 61, 63, 87n44 Billings, Hammatt 20

Black Codes 30 Blauvelt, Charles F. 13n1 Blind Fiddler (Krimmel) 31, 32 Blind Fiddler, The (Wilkie) 31, 33, 54n46 Bohan, Ruth L. 143 Book of the Fair, The (Bancroft) 69, 93, 112 Boston Athenaeum 17 Boston Daily Advertiser 47 Boyle, John J. 117n15; Ancient Transportation 94, 117n17; Modern Transportation 94, 117n17 Breaking Home Ties (Hovenden) 12, 90; expression in 109–11; legacy of 114–16; location of 112; reception of 97–98, 100, 105–6; subject of 91, 100, 112; threshold in 101, 103–4, 111; at the World’s Columbian Exposition 89 Breaking Home Ties (Klackner) 89, 90, 117n6 Breaking Home Ties (Rockwell) 115–16 Breaking the News (Longstaff) 103, 104, 105 Breckenridge, John 61, 72 Brett, Alphonse 75 Brewer, Priscilla J. 40 Brigham, William T., Notes on the Volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands 73 Bringing Home the Bride (Hovenden) 98, 99, 100, 118–19n36 Brooks, Michael W. 134 Brooks, Van Wyck 124, 137 Brown, John 101, 102, 103 Brown, John George 13, 115 Brownlee, Peter John 7, 10 Brückner, Martin 77, 79–80 bummers 67 Bummers (Bencke and Scott; Perry) 12, 66, 67 Burnet, John, A Treatise on Painting 7 Burns, Sarah 112, 116n4, 122n95 Byron Company, Ferries, Crowded Ferry Boat, Ferry Boat in Winter 140

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Cabanel, Alexandre 98 Caffin, Charles 128, 147 Carr, Carolyn Kinder 89 cartography see maps Centennial Exhibition 44, 49n3, 121n71 Central Pacific Railroad 4, 74 Century, The (periodical) 36 Century Association, The 39 Champney, James Wells, The Tramp 49n3 Charleston Mercury 38 Chicago Daily Tribune 43 Church of Latter-Day Saints 63 City People in Country Quarters (Johnson) 39–41, 43 Civil War: African Americans and 29–30, 53n41; Gaul and 115; industrialization and 34; Johnson and 28, 30; localism and 95; maps and 69–70, 72–73, 78; mobility and 4, 14n18; Perry and 61, 63; quilting and 81; slavery and 17, 19; sugar industry and 85n13; tramping and 35 Coan, Titus Munson 4–5, 14n12, 100 Coco, Janice M. 145 Cole, Georgina 6–7, 25 Colton, G. Woolworth, New Guide Map of the United States & Canada 69, 70, 73, 77, 79, 81 Columbian Fountain (MacMonnies) 92 Columbus, Christopher 91, 95 commuting 132–33, 137, 151n35; representations of 134, 140, 143; by Sloan 11–13, 125, 131–34, 138, 142, 154 Compromise of 1850 20 Constitutional Union Party 72 Cook, Clarence 35 cookstoves 40, 55n75; representations of 39–40 Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1–2 Cottage Dooryard, The (Ostade) 24, 25 Couture, Thomas 61 Craftsman, The 139 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (Whitman) 143–44 Currier & Ives, The Home of Washington, Mount Vernon, VA 22 Curtis, George William 24 Dana, Charles E. 89 Dana, James D. 73, 74 Daumier, Honoré 124 Davis, Jefferson 60, 61, 73, 87n43 Davis, John 27, 56n89 Delaney, David 21 Democratic Party 3, 24, 61, 63, 84n9 Departure From Home (Rosenthal) 108, 109, 111

dislocation: connection and 66, 123, 147–48; displacement and 144; mobility and 105, 123; modernism and 155; representations of commuting and 12, 126–27, 134, 137, 147; travel and 65 Dividing the National Map 72 Douglas, Stephen 72 Douglass, Frederick 5–6 Dred Scott v. Sandford 21, 24, 27, 51n14 Duncanson, Robert S., Uncle Tom and Little Eva 51n13 Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways 155 Eakins, Thomas 117n15; The Gross Clinic 114 Eastman, F. A. 43 Edmonds, Francis William 10, 40; The Bashful Cousin 8, 9 elevated trains 132–34, 151n35 Emerson, John 21 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 70 Evening Telegraph 97, 100 Fagg, John 147 Father Tom and Evangeline (Johnson) 20–21 ferries 137 Ferries, Crowded Ferry Boat, Ferry Boat in Winter (Byron Company) 140 Ferry Slip, Winter (Sloan) 138 Fiddling His Way (Johnson, 1866) 11, 30, 31, 33, 34 Fifth Avenue Critics (Sloan) 125, 130–31 Fillin-Yeh, Susan 125 Fisherman (Johnson) 54n48 Flower, Roswell Pettibone 36, 54n56 Floyd, John 5 Folingsby, George 104 Folsom Galleries 139 Foner, Eric 29 Forrester, Francis 109–10 Founders of a State, The (Hovenden) 96 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 102, 103 Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 133 Freeman, Josiah 47; The Hermit of Quidnet 47, 48 Friedrich, Caspar David 142; Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog 142 Fugitive Slave Act 20, 24, 30, 53n41 Gaul, William Gilbert 114–16; Leaving Home 114, 114–16 genre painting: anecdote in 147, 153n79; British art and 6, 8; Düsseldorf and 16n31;

Index Dutch art and 6–8, 24–25, 83, 103, 124, 131; humor and 40, 67, 147; maps and 81; status of 9–10, 13, 15–16n30, 147; typology and 1, 11–12, 24, 58, 67, 83, 155 Gibson, Charles Dana, On the Ferry 140, 141 Gifford, Sanford F. 58 Girl Quilting (Perry) 81 Glackens, William 147, 148n2 Grant, Ulysses S. 60, 79 Graphic, The 105 Gray and Brass (Sloan) 125, 128–31, 148 Great Depression 2, 155 Greenhill, Jennifer A. 66 Gross Clinic, The (Eakins) 114 Haenni, Sabine 133 Hals, Frans 124, 149n4 Halttunen, Karen 67 Hamilton, James, Jr. 5 Hamming, Grant Wesley 65 hansom cabs 130–31 Harper’s Bazaar 133 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 3–4, 36, 37, 65 Harper’s Weekly 41, 42, 81, 82, 127 Harrison, Charles C. 89, 116n4 Hartford Daily Courant 39 Hartmann, Sadakichi 134–35 Harvey, Eleanor Jones 26 Hawai‘i: Perry in 11, 62; sugar industry in 85n13 Hearst, George 58 Helgerson, Richard 81, 83 Henri, Robert 13, 123–24, 127, 134, 143, 148n2 Hermit of Quidnet, The (Freeman) 47, 48 Hogarth, William 124 Home Again (McCubbin) 119–20n51 Home of Washington, Mount Vernon, The, VA (Currier & Ives) 22 Homer, Winslow 13, 116n4; influence of 124; Tenth Street Studio Building and 58; travels of 63; work of 51n20, 51–52n22, 143 Hooker, George 131 Hopper, Edward 2, 155 hotels 65; Hopper and 2, 155; mobility and 65; Perry and 12, 58–59, 67, 154; Woodville and 65 House, Edward H. 101, 119n44 Hovenden, Helen Corson 98, 113, 119n47 Hovenden, Thomas 12–13, 98, 113, 125, 143, 148, 154; Breaking Home Ties 12, 89, 90, 91, 97, 100, 103–6, 108–16; Bringing Home the Bride 98, 99, 100,

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118–19n36; death of 94, 96; The Founders of a State 96; The Last Moments of John Brown 101, 102, 103; The Sailor’s Return (When Hope Was Darkest) 98, 99, 103; travels of 96, 98, 127 How the Battle Was Won (Perry) 71, 73, 78–80, 83 Huneker, James 126 Huntington, Collis P. 58 Independent, The (periodical) 60, 63 Inmen, Loraine 105 Jack’s Return (Wilmarth) 118n35 Jarves, James Jackson 10, 16n31 Jewett, Walter Hall 105–6 Johns, Elizabeth 1, 8, 10–11, 24, 26, 67 Johnson, Eastman 11, 143, 148, 154; British art and 11; career of 10; City People in Country Quarters 39–41, 43; Civil War and 28, 30, 53n37; Dutch art and 11, 24–25, 31; Father Tom and Evangeline 20–21; Fiddling His Way (1866) 11, 30, 31, 33; Fiddling His Way (c. 1866) 33, 34; Fisherman 54n48; history painting and 29; influence of 13, 98, 124–25, 147; land speculation and 19, 50n5, 55n59; Maine and 37–38; Nantucket and 36, 37, 38, 46–48; Negro Life at the South (1859) 11, 17, 18, 19, 23–28, 30, 33, 44, 48; Negro Life at the South (c. 1870) 44, 45; New York City studio of 45; Ojibwe and 19; The Old Mount Vernon 22, 23, 24; Republican Party and 27; A Ride for Liberty—the Fugitive Slaves 28, 29–30, 44; The Tramp 11, 17, 18, 19, 34–36, 39, 41–44, 46–48, 114; travels of 36–39, 52n24, 60–61, 127; Washington’s Kitchen at Mount Vernon 52n23 Jones, Alfred, Mexican News 63–65, 64 Jones, Robert J. 123 Kappes, Alfred, The Tramp 41, 42, 56n80 Kelsey, Robin 73 Kennedy, Joseph C. G. 3 Kicked Out; No Money; No Friends (Beard) 49n3 Kīlauea 73, 74 Klackner, C., Breaking Home Ties 89, 90, 117n6 Klein, Maury 128 Koerner, Joseph Leo 142 Krimmel, John Lewis: Blind Fiddler 31, 32; The Quilting Frolic 31, 33 Kurtz, Charles M. 89 Kusmer, Kenneth L. 41, 43

160

Index

Lafayette, Marquis de 22 Larned, Walter Cranston 111 Last Moments of John Brown, The (Hovenden) 101, 102, 103 Lawrence, Jacob, Migration Series 155 Leach, William 100 Leaving Home (Gaul) 114, 114–16 Lee, Robert E. 4 Leutze, Emanuel 84n8; Düsseldorf studio of 29, 60; Washington Crossing the Delaware 29, 154; Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way 96, 97 limen see thresholds liminality see thresholds Lincoln, Abraham 4, 30, 53n41, 72, 87n43 Lobel, Michael 144 locomotion see mobility Longstaff, John 12, 91; Breaking the News 103, 104, 105 Lost Cause ideology 115 Louisiana Purchase Exposition 114 Louisville Industrial Exposition 39 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh 63 Luks, George 147, 148n2 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 93–94 McClellan, George B. 30, 53n41, 87n43 McCoy, John W. 98 McCubbin, Frederick, Home Again 119– 20n51 McEntee, Jervis 36–39 MacLaren, Ian 133 MacMonnies, Frederick William, Columbian Fountain 92 Maes, Nicolaes 25; The Milk Seller 7 Makee, James 62, 85n13 Manca, Joseph 21 Manthorne, Katherine 130, 145 Map of Mining Claims of Pine Wood District, State of Nevada (E. W. Perry) 75, 76, 77 Map of the Washoe, Humboldt, and Reese River Silver Mines in the State of Nevada (E. W. Perry) 74, 75, 77 maps: in art 80; Civil War and 69–70, 72–73, 78; communication and 78–79; as decorative images 79; in Dutch culture 81, 83; education and 77–78, 80–81; genre painting and 81; industrialization of 77; intimacy and 80–81; mobility of 77; ownership of 77; tactile engagement with 80; topographical landscape and 73; women and 81 Martin O’Brien’s gallery (Chicago, IL) 35 Mather, Frank Jewett 147 Mazow, Leo 155 Meinig, D. W. 19

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The 154 Mexican-American War 3, 63 Mexican News (Jones) 63, 64, 65 Migration Series (Lawrence) 155 Milk Seller, The (Maes) 7 mobility: African Americans and 14n18, 20, 30, 155; artists and 38–39; Civil War and 4, 14n18; discourses of 2–6, 19, 65, 91, 94–96, 100–1; freedom and 15n19; social mobility and 3, 28, 65, 67, 100; territorial expansion and 3–4, 95; transportation and 3–4, 17, 91, 94, 131–33; Turner’s frontier thesis and 95–96, 113; World’s Columbian Exposition and 91–94, 113 Modern Transportation (Boyle) 94, 117n17 Moorhead, Frank Graham 106 Morgan, Jo-Ann 8–9, 20 Morris, Schwab & Co. gallery (San Francisco, CA) 35 Mount, William Sidney 10, 24, 40, 124, 147; The Power of Music 8, 24 Mount Vernon 19, 21–23 Movies, Five Cents (Sloan) 144–48, 145 Myers, Jerome 147 My Old Kentucky Home (Bencke and Scott) 44 Nantucket 36–39, 46–48, 63 Nation, The (periodical) 10 National Academy of Design 58, 97, 114, 127; 1859 annual exhibition 17, 24; 1860 annual exhibition 52n23; 1874 exhibition 84n1; 1877 annual exhibition 35, 39, 49n3; 1891 annual exhibition 89; 1907 annual exhibition 126; genre painting at 10, 15n30; school of 98, 118n33 National Gallery of Victoria 104 Negro Life at the South (Johnson, 1859) 11, 17, 18, 19, 33, 48; Dutch tradition and 24–25; narrative ambiguity and 26–27; racial identity and 25–26, 28; space in 23, 30; study for 44 Negro Life at the South (Johnson, c. 1870) 44, 45 Nevada silver mining 73–75 New Guide Map of the United States & Canada (Colton) 69, 70, 73, 77, 79, 81 New York Recorder 100 New York Times 41, 128 Noble, Thomas Satterwhite, The Tramp 49n3 Notes on the Volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands (Brigham) 73 Ochtervelt, Jacob 25, 131; Street Musicians at the Door 7, 31 Old Mount Vernon, The (Johnson) 22, 23, 24

Index On the Ferry (Gibson) 140, 141 Ostade, Adriaen van 52n30; The Cottage Dooryard 24, 25 Pacific Commercial Advertiser 72–73 Pacific Mail Steamship Co. 3 Panama-Pacific International Exposition 114 Paris Salon 108 Parker, Fred 47, 57n88 Patchwork Quilt, The (Perry) 81, 82 Peale, Titian Ramsay 73 Pène du Bois, Guy 134 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 13, 89, 97–98, 117n15, 118n35 Perry, Enoch Wood, Jr. 11–12, 125, 143, 148, 154; The Bummers 12, 66, 67; career of 58–59; Civil War and 61, 85n10; Dutch art and 83; Girl Quilting 81; How the Battle Was Won 71, 73, 78–80, 83; Kīlauea and 73, 74; mapping and 11, 73–75, 87n49; Nevada mining industry and 74; The Patchwork Quilt 81, 82; Portrait of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy 60, 61, 73, 85n10; The Quilting Party 81; Rose Ranch, ‘Ulupalakua, on the Slopes of the Haleakalā 62; Studying the Map 68–69, 71–73, 78–79, 81, 83, 84n1, 86n33; travels of 11, 59–63, 73, 83, 85n21, 127; The True American 12, 58, 59, 60, 63–66, 78, 83, 154 Perry, Enoch Wood, Sr. 84n9 Philadelphia Evening Telegraph 97 Philadelphia Press 144 Picnic Grounds, The (Sloan) 123 Pittsburgh Art Students League 127 Pittsburgh Press 108 Portrait of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy (Perry) 60, 61, 73, 85n10 Potts, W. Sherman 129 Power of Music, The (Mount) 8, 24 Putnam’s Magazine 4 quilting 81, 88n68 Quilting Frolic, The (Krimmel) 31, 33 Quilting Party, The (Perry) 81 Republican Party 4, 28, 35 Richards, Penny L. 81 Richardt, Ferdinand 51n20 Ride for Liberty, A—the Fugitive Slaves (Johnson) 28, 29–30, 44 Rijn, Rembrandt van 124; The Strolling Musicians 31, 32 Roberts, Mary Fanton 139 Rockwell, Norman, Breaking Home Ties 115–16

161

Rosenbaum, Julia B. 112 Rosenthal, Toby 12, 91, 120–21n71; Departure From Home 108, 109, 111; travels of 108–9, 127 Rose Ranch, ‘Ulupalakua, on the Slopes of the Haleakalā (Perry) 62 Rückenfigur 140, 142–43 Sailor’s Return, The (When Hope Was Darkest) (Hovenden) 98, 99, 103 St. Louis Exposition 35 Sartain, Emily, Welcome News 68, 69, 71–72, 86n35 Sartain, John 49n3 Saturday Evening Post 115–16 Scott, Dred 21 Scribner’s Magazine 106, 140, 141 Scribner’s Monthly 47 Shaw, Robert 81 Sherman, William Tecumseh 79 Simmel, Georg 6 Simpson, Mark 4–5, 91 Six O’Clock, Winter (Sloan) 132, 134 Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street (Sloan) 123 Sketch Class Series—E. W. Perry (Ward) 84–85n10 slavery 24, 26; Civil War and 17, 19–21, 29–30, 72; Dutch colonies and 20, 50–51n11; mobility and 5; Mount Vernon and 19, 21; territorial expansion and 63 Slidell, John 61, 84–85n10 Sloan, Dolly 131, 137–38 Sloan, John 154–55; career of 124; Dutch art and 13, 124, 131, 149n6; Ferry Slip, Winter 138; Fifth Avenue Critics 125, 130–31; Gray and Brass 125, 128–31, 148; illustrations by 144; mobility and 127–28; Movies, Five Cents 144–48, 145; nineteenth-century genre painting and 12–13, 124, 148; The Picnic Grounds 123; postage stamp 123, 124; Six O’Clock, Winter 132, 134; Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street 123; Spring, Madison Square 123; Sunset, West Twenty-third Street 140, 141; The Theater 144, 146, 147; travels of 127; “Waiting” 137, 138, 139, 144; Wake of the Ferry, No. 1 12, 126, 135–38, 136, 143, 145–48, 152n49; Wake of the Ferry II 12, 123, 126, 135–39, 136, 142–48; Walt Whitman and 143–44 Southern Art Publishing Company 115 Spring, Madison Square (Sloan) 123 Stanford, Leland 58 Steen, Jan 52n29, 124 Stephenson, George 126–27

162

Index

Sterner, Albert E., Wistfully Gazing at Hovenden’s Country Lad Leaving Home 106, 107 stoves see cookstoves Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 20–21 Street Musicians at the Door (Ochtervelt) 7, 31 Strolling Musicians, The (Rembrandt) 31, 32 Studying the Map (Perry) 68–69, 71–73, 78–79, 81, 83, 84n1, 86n33 Sullivan, Louis 93–94 Sun, The (newspaper) 126, 134, 148n2 Sunset, West Twenty-third Street (Sloan) 140, 141 Swift, Samuel 127 Taney, Roger B. 21 Taylor, Zachary 3 Teeken-Academie 20 Tenth Street Studio Building 58, 63, 85n18 Theater, The (Sloan) 144, 146, 147 Thompson, Bradbury 123 thresholds: antebellum US art and 8; British art and 6, 11; Dutch art and 6, 11, 25, 31, 103; identity and 6, 101; liminality and 6, 27, 67, 103, 145; meanings of 6, 9, 12, 48, 113; narrative and 98, 111, 131, 155; picture screens and 144–46; transgressing and 42 Time (periodical) 155 Tomes, Robert 3–4, 14n8, 65, 67 Trachtenberg, Alan 94 Tramp, The (Champney) 49n3 Tramp, The (Johnson) 11, 17, 18, 19, 39, 114; mobility and 46; reception of 35; space in 43–44; subject of 34–36, 41–43, 47–48 Tramp, The (Kappes) 41, 42, 56n80 Tramp, The (Noble) 49n3 tramps: attitudes toward 35, 41–43, 46–48; Civil War and 35; demographics of 35, 54n52; mobility and 11, 35–36, 44; as subject 17, 154; terminology and 49–50n4, 67 Treatise on Painting, A (Burnet) 7 True American, The (Perry) 12, 63, 78, 83, 154; subject of 58, 59; travel and 60, 65–66 Truman, Benjamin 112 Turner, Frederick Jackson 95–96, 113 Turner, Nat 5 Uncle Tom and Little Eva (Duncanson) 51n13 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 20–21; Dutch translations of 50n10

Union Pacific Railroad 4 United States Postal Service 123 Utica Art Association 39 “Waiting” (Sloan) 137, 138, 139, 144 Wake of the Ferry, No. 1 (Sloan) 12, 136, 145–46, 152n49; intimacy and 126, 147–48; space in 138; subject of 135, 137; Whitman and 143 Wake of the Ferry II (Sloan) 12, 123, 136, 145–46; framed image and 145; intimacy and 126, 139, 147–48; subject of 135, 137; turned figure in 142–43; wake in 144; Whitman and 143 Walker, Kara 154–55 Walters, William T. 98 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich) 142 Ward, John Quincy Adams, Sketch Class Series—E. W. Perry 84–85n10 War News From Mexico (Woodville) 8, 63–67, 64, 78 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze) 29, 154 Washington, George 19, 21–22, 51n16 Washington, John Augustine III 22 Washington Post 101 Washington’s Kitchen at Mount Vernon (Johnson) 52n23 Waters-Son 74 Welcome News (Sartain) 68, 69, 71–72, 86n35 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Leutze) 96, 97 Whig Party 3, 63 Whistler, James McNeill 137, 149n4; Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) 144 Whitman, Walt 143; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” 143–44 Wierich, Jochen 10, 29 Wilkie, David, The Blind Fiddler 31, 33, 54n46 Williams, Virgil 73, 85n19 Wilmarth, Lemuel Everett, Jack’s Return 118n35 Wilson, Woodrow 128, 150n20 Wistfully Gazing at Hovenden’s Country Lad Leaving Home (Sterner) 106, 107 With the Confederate Colors 115 Wright brothers 127 Wolf, Bryan 78 Wolff, Justin 78 Wood, Thomas Waterman, American Citizens (To the Polls) 11

Index Wood, W. Dewees 108 Woodville, Richard Caton 65; War News From Mexico 8, 63–67, 64, 78 World’s Columbian Exposition 69, 89, 90, 114; in literature 105–6; mobility and 91–94, 113; Transportation Building of

163

92–94; Turner’s thesis and 94–96; White City of 92 World’s Congress Auxiliary 94 World War I 155 Zurier, Rebecca 123, 134, 139, 144–47

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