Painting the dark side: art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century America 0520249879, 9780520249875

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AHMANSON FINE

THE

ARTS

AHMANSON

MURPHY IMPRINT

FOUNDATION

has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of

FRANKLIN

n

MURPHY

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

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Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association of America.

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

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PAINTING THE DARK SIDE

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PAINTING THE DARK SIDE

~

ART AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

SARAH BURNS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY

·

LOS ANGELES

·

LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England First paperback printing 2006 © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burns, Sarah. Painting the dark side : art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century America I Sarah Burns. p. cm-(The Ahmanson-Murphy fine art imprint) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-I3: 978-0-520·24987·5 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-IO: o-520-24987-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Painting, American-19th century. 2. Race awareness in art. 3· Stereotype (Psychology) in art. 4· Masculinity in art. s. Art and mythology. I. Title. II. Series. .B87 2004 759.13 'o9'034-de2r

ND2 I 0

Manufactured in Canada I3 I2 II IO 09 08 7

6

4

07

06

2

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI!NISO z39-48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).§

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments Introduction

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vu

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xm

xv

I.

Gloom and Doom

2.

The Underground Man

3·

The Shrouded Past

75

4·

The Deepest Dark

IOI

5·

The Shadow's Curse

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6.

Mental Monsters

I

7·

Corrosive Sight

8.

Dirty Pictures

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24 7

Notes

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249

Index

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293

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Epilogue

I

128

58

r88 221

44

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ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES (FOLLOWING PAGE 100)

r.

Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, r828

2.

Thomas Cole, Ruined Tower (Mediterranean Coast Scene with Tower), ca. r832-36

3·

David Gilmour Blythe, Art versus Law, r859-6o

4·

David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout, ca. r86o-63

5·

Washington Allston, Belshazzar's Feast, I8I7/I843

6.

Washington Allston, Tragic Figure in Chains, I 8oo

7·

John Quidor, The Money Diggers, I832

8.

David Gilmour Blythe, Ole Cezer, ca. I 8 58-6o

9·

John Quidor, Tom Walker's Flight, ca. I856

ro.

William Rimmer, Flight and Pursuit, r872

II.

Elihu Vedder, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, r864

I2.

Elihu Vedder, Fisherman and the Genie, ca. r863

13.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, r 8 7 5

Vll

14·

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Temple of the Mind, before I88 5

I 5.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight, early I 89os

FIGURES

r.

Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), I825

2

2.

Thomas Cole, Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick, I828

6

3.

Thomas Cole, Shipwreck Scene,

6

4·

Thomas Cole, The Storm, ca. I827

5.

Thomas Cole, Romantic Landscape, ca. r 8 26

II

6.

Thomas Cole, Landscape with Tree Trunks, I828

II

7·

Thomas Cole, Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans," Cora Kneeling at the Feet ofTamenund, I827

8.

Thomas Cole, The Death of Cora, ca. I827

9·

George W. Hatch after Thomas Cole, "Chocorua's Curse," I83o

I

828

8

I5

IO.

Thomas Cole, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, 1832

20

I I.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, I 8 3 6

20

I2.

David Claypoole Johnston, "Anti-Catholic Doings," I836

22

I}.

David Claypoole Johnston, "The Two Monuments," I836

22

14·

John H. Bufford, Ruins of the Merchants' Exchange, I 8 3 5

I5.

Thomas Cole, Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower I838

I6.

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, I829

I 7·

Thomas Cole, Untitled [Volterra], I 8 3 I

I8.

Thomas Cole, Rock in Connecticut, ca. I827

I9.

Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Mountains), ca. I831/32

20.

Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Building Fragment), ca. I83I/32

21.

Thomas Cole, Past, I838

35

22.

Thomas Cole, Present, I 8 3 8

35

23.

Thomas Cole, Simeon Stylites, ca. I828

37

24.

Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, I842 (detail)

37

25.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, I84o

39

26.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, I 840

27·

Thomas Cole, study for The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey, from The Cross and the World, ca. I 84 7

VIII

ILLUSTRATIONS

28.

David Gilmour Blythe, Temperance Pledge, ca. r8 56-6o

51

29.

William Sidney Mount, Loss and Gain, r 84 7

52

30.

David Gilmour Blythe, Good Times, ca. r8 54-58

53

31.

David Gilmour Blythe, Hard Times, ca. r856-6o

53

32.

David Gilmour Blythe, The Urchin, ca. r856

s6

33·

David Gilmour Blythe, Boy at the Pump, ca. r858-59

57

34·

David Gilmour Blythe, Conscience Stricken, ca. r86o

57

3 5.

"The Total S'iety, A Comic Song," sheet music cover, r 840

58

36.

"A Brandy Smash," published in Yankee Notions, May r853

59

37·

David Claypoole Johnston, "Every Man for Himself!" published in Joseph C. Neal's Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis, r844

59

3 8.

David Gilmour Blythe, Man Putting on Boots, r86o

6r

39·

"Evening Amusements in New York," published in the Lantern, October 9, r 8 52

64

40.

David Gilmour Blythe, Post Office, 1859-63

65

41.

"An Obstruction of the Tear (tier) Duct," published in Yankee Notions, September 9, r86o

67

42.

David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, ca. r 8 56-58

69

43·

David Gilmour Blythe, A Match Seller, ca. r 8 59

7I

44·

David Gilmour Blythe, Prospecting, ca. r86r-63

73

45·

Anonymous, Slave Revolt, mid-nineteenth century

ss

46.

Richard Newton, A Real Sans Culotte, 1792

88

47·

Washington Allston, Rocky Coast with Banditti, r 8oo

90

48.

Washington Allston, Saul and the Witch of Endor, r82o-2r

93

49·

After Washington Allston, "Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand," 1831

so.

93

Washington Allston, Spalatro's Head, for "Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand," r83o

94

John Quidor, Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, r 8 39

107

52·

William Sidney Mount, Dancing on the Barn Floor, r 8 3 r

107

53·

Gorgon, relief sculpture from the pediment of the Temple of Artemis, Corfu, Greece, 6oo-58o B.C.E.

IIO

Nicolina Cal yo, Negro Dancer and Banjo Player, r 8 3 5

IIO

51·

54·

ILLUSTRATIONS

IX

55.

56.

57·

58.

"James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington," published in Crockett's Yaller Flower Almanac for '3 6, I 8 3 6

II2

Frank Bellew, "The Modern Frankenstein," published in the Lantern, January JI, I852

II 5

Henry Louis Stephens, "The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster 'Rebellion,"' published in Vanity Fair, May Io, I862

II6

"The Grave-digger," published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine 24, no. I7I (I864)

II7

59·

"Samba the Whitewasher," published in Yankee Notions, October I863

II9

6o.

"Pat Samba the Whitewasher," published in Yankee Notions, October r863

II9

6r.

John Quidor, The Devil and Tom Walker, I 8 56

122

62.

"My Long Tail Blue," sheet music cover, r83os

124

63.

John Quidor, Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, I 8 58

I26

64.

William Rimmer, Midnight Ride, I 8 30/ca. I 8 53

I3I

65.

William Rimmer, Secessia and Columbia (Combat of Giants), r862

1 34

66.

William Rimmer, Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers (Warriors against Slavery}, I863

I34

67.

William Rimmer, Oh for the Horns of the Altar, r867

q6

68.

Perilous Escape of Eliza and Child, lithograph, I 8 50s

I38

69.

"Running Away," published in Suppressed Book about Slavery, I 8 57

I39

70.

Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, r 862

I39

7I.

William Rimmer, Faces: Greek, Goth, Moor, ca. I867

I40

72.

"The Shadow Dance," published in Samuel van Hoogstraten's r675 treatise on painting

143

Henry Louis Stephens, "Substance and Shadow," published in Vanity Fair, January 2I, I86o

143

Henry Louis Stephens, "The Highly Intelligent Contraband," published in Vanity Fair, April 26, I 862

145

Frank Bellew, "The Slave Owner's Spectre," published in Harper's Weekly, May 30, r863

I47

George Cruikshank, "The Pursuit of the Shadow," illustration, published in Peter Schlemihl, I823

I 52

William Rimmer, Evening (The Fall of Day), r 8 69-70

I 56

73· 74·

75· 76.

n

X

ILLUSTRATIONS

7S.

Elihu Vedder, sketch for Fisherman and the Genie, ca. IS63

I65

79·

Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx, r S6 3

I7I

So.

Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx of the Seashore, r S79

174

Sr.

Elihu Vedder, Medusa, IS67

176

S2.

Elihu Vedder, The Young Medusa, r S72

176

s3.

Elihu Vedder, Perseus and Medusa, ca. r 87 5

I77

S4.

Elihu Vedder, The Dead Medusa, rS75

I7S

85.

"The Modern Sphinx," published in Harper's Bazar, May r, rS69

183

S6.

Thomas Nast, "Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan," published in Harper's Weekly, February 17, rS72

1S4

S7.

Elihu Vedder, The Phorcydes, rS6S

rS6

8S.

"The Body Snatchers, A Recent Actual Occurrence in the Vicinity of New York City," published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, April r8, r86S

193

S9.

"To the Surgeon," Civil War valentine, ca. r 8 6 r -6 5

1 95

90.

Henry Louis Stephens, "A Hint for State Surgeon-Generals," published in Vanity Fair, July 5, rS62

197

Fernando Miranda, "Hospital Circumlocution-Even Charity Must Be Barred Out," detail, published in New York Daily Graphic, January 15, ISS5

I9S

92.

William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty, I 7 5 I

200

93·

"Chien fixe sur Ia table a vivisection," published in Claude Bernard's Ler;ons de Physiologic Operative, I879

203

Henri Regnault, Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Granada, I87o

206

After Thomas Anshutz, "Dissecting Room," published in Scribner's, September rS79

2IO

Thomas Eakins, Differential-Action Study: Man on Ladder, Leaning on Horse's Stripped Hind Leg, While Second Man at Left Looks On, platinum print, r S8 5

2I2

Eadweard Muybridge, Local Chorea, Standing, published in Animal Locomotion, pl. 557, r8S7

2I4

Thomas Eakins, Naked Series: "Brooklyn No. r," Female with Dark Mask, Poser, ca. ISS3

215

Emanuel Leutze, The Poet's Dream, by rS4o

225

"The Emigrant's Dream," published in Yankee Doodle, March 20, I S4 7

225

9T.

94·

95· 96.

97· 9S.

99· roo.

ILLUSTRATIONS

XI

ror.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Toilers of the Sea, ca. r883-84

230

ro2.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Lord Ullin's Daughter, r89os

232

ro3.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Lorelei, early to mid-r89os and later

232

ro4.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Curfew Hour, r88os

24I

XII

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M

y voyage into the dark side of American nineteenth-century art would have run aground long ago had it not been for the support of many colleagues and friends. The book had its

origins in the mid-r990s, when the dark side of Thomas Eakins's Gross Clinic ignited my curiosity. Work on this project proceeded haltingly, however, until it was my privilege to spend two years at Stanford University, where I enjoyed munificent institutional, material, and intellectual support, along with the time to research and write several chapters. I am grateful beyond measure to Wanda M. Corn and Alexander Nemerov for inviting me to teach in the Department of Art and Art History during my first year there, and I am much indebted to the Stanford Humanities Center, where I was a fellow during the second. At Stanford, it was my good fortune to enjoy a sustained and inspiring dialogue with fascinating colleagues and talented students, whose ideas, knowledge, and suggestions helped me to clarify, focus, and refine my thinking. I owe a special thanks to Wanda, too, for her role as "matchmaker" between me and the University of California Press and for her perpetual generosity. It is ironic that a book on the dark side should have come out of a time so bright. Many others have made indispensable contributions to this book. Above all, I owe an enormous measure of thanks to Dr. Terri Sabatos, Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf, Patricia Smith Scanlon, and Kelly Ingleright-Telgenhoff, my supersleuth Indiana graduate assistants, whose resourcefulness, per-

X Ill

sistence, energy, ingenuity, and good cheer helped to solve countless problems, seek out innumerable facts, and track many an elusive picture. Colleagues here at Indiana and elsewhere facilitated the work in different ways. I owe special appreciation to Bruce Cole for his unfailing support during the years he chaired the Department of History of Art at Indiana University. Susan Rather, Melissa Dabakis, Scott Dimond, and Darrel Sewell all provided opportunities to deliver versions of the Eakins material while the work was in progress. Jeffrey Weidman was most helpful with questions on William Rimmer, as was Charles Colbert, and Bruce Chambers graciously answered queries on David Gilmour Blythe. Bruce Robertson, Paul Staiti, and Bryan Jay Wolf read the manuscript with scrupulously critical attention. Their plenteous and thoughtful comments helped me to produce what I hope is a much better book. Stephanie Fay has been a model of patient and meticulous editorial acumen from start to finish. Finally, as ever, I want to acknowledge the intellectual inspiration and sustaining friendship of Michele Bogart, Vivien Fryd, Barbara Groseclose, Barbara Miller, Robbie Reid, Eric Rosenberg, Janice Simon, and Ellen Handler Spitz. Without them, the last few years would have been a lot less fun and interesting.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

~

INTRODUCTION

~

THE ART OF HAUNTING

M

y training as a historian of American art was based on a canonical narrative that still commands authority. In this narrative, the most representative, most "American," painting was

the celebration of landscape as type and emblem of national identity. Significantly, the most American of all landscape genres was so-called luminism, in which all-pervading light took on the status of transcendental signifier, standing in for the divine, and for the divinity in nature. Light flooded the grandiose paintings of the Hudson River school; light blazed in the sunset skies of Frederic E. Church and sparkled in the canvases of the American Impressionists. The genre painters we studied likewise produced radiant, mythic images of daily life: farmers harvesting, children romping in sunny fields. When race entered the picture, it seldom had a threatening edge. Black men and women appeared on the margins as harmless, often laughable figures. If violence occurred, it was far off on the western frontier, where Indians slaughtered buffalo and threatened pioneers. We now know all too well how selectively (and for what political and cultural ends) such images represented the American scene. Notwithstanding, they still constitute the mainstream of our historical inquiry, although the emphasis has shifted from celebration to interrogation. 1 Scholars tended to explain the many exceptions to the rule of sunny-side up as just that, ranking those artists with oddballs and misfits who, for whatever contrary reason, broke out of the mold. Indeed, the title of Abraham Davidson's 1978 study, The Eccentrics and Other American

XV

Visionary Painters, says it ali.2 The "eccentrics," whose art bears little resemblance to that of "mainstream" painters, lingered at the margins of American art history, unincorporated into the larger canonical picture. By and large, I accepted that model, though I always nursed a secret preference for the oddballs. It was not until I began to think about Thomas Eakins's Gross Clinic (see Plate r 3) that I stumbled into the boneyard of American art history. Admired and praised in the twentieth century as a powerful and uncompromising masterpiece of American realism, this portrait of a distinguished surgeon in action excited controversy in its earliest years; ambivalence toward the painting persisted long after the hullabaloo had subsided. A full quarter century after its first appearance in public the art critic Sadakichi Hartmann found it both morbid and macabre. As late as 1931 the critic Frank Jewett Mather was describing The

Gross Clinic as a "witches' kitchen," where a "beneficent magus" presided over "eager young men" clutching at the patient's "gashed thigh" in a mysterious ambience of "general black fustiness. " 3 Looking back at the virulent critical reaction in r879, when the painting was on display at the Society of American Artists in New York, I discovered the same pattern. What could account for such disgust before a work many now consider a monumental and unparalleled representation of modern surgical achievement? Was there another side, a darker side, to The Gross Clinic and the artist who made it? My research strongly suggested that there was. If Eakins-a canonical artist if ever there was one-had a dark side did this hold out possibilities for reconsidering those oddballs and eccentrics so far from the center? 4 That is, if Eakins's dark side was as much a part of him as the systematic, scientific, fact-finding sensibility that structured his work and constituted his image as an authentically American genius, then why not revisit the eccentrics and reconsider them in relation to the mainstream? Why not regard their visual production as equally "American," with equally compelling things to say about America in the nineteenth century? Was there a way to connect artists otherwise widely separated, socially, geographically, and chronologically? And were there other canonical painters besides Eakins who ventured into the dark side? I knew that there was a substantial and rapidly expanding body of history and criticism on the gothic tradition in American literature, stretching from the novelist Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville in the nineteenth, to William Faulkner and beyond in the twentieth. Why was there no similar corpus of work on a gothic tradition in American art? How could the gothic in American culture be limited to one medium? Was it possible to trace a gothic strain in the history of American art, tying together misfits and mainstream painters? And how might the answers to those questions alter the contours of the American art-historical canon? I determined to find out. In this book, I explore and interpret the dark side: the gothic imagination in nineteenth-century American painting.

XVI

INTRODUCTION

My "gothic" is at some remove from the "Gothic" architectural and decorative style that enjoyed a romantic and ecclesiastical revival in the nineteenth century. 5 It is also at some remove from the English literary gothic tradition initiated by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliff, and "Monk" Lewis. The gothic novel in England was the product of an age in upheaval. Centering on themes of terror, mystery, and the supernatural, gothic tales mapped the struggles and desires of the self, haunted by the dark forces of the ancestral past or oppressive feudal institutions. Fictions of a turbulent era, these narratives featured wicked monks and corrupt aristocrats as villains bent on persecuting innocent maidens and brave youths. Their landscapes were brooding and their settings ruinous or sublime: rotting castles, labyrinthine dungeons, medieval fortresses on crags. In the pictorial arts, the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli achieved perhaps the epitome of gothic expression in works such as the memorable Nightmare (178 r; Detroit Institute of Arts), with its swooning woman, scowling incubus, and ghostly nag's head peering through theatrical curtains. Early in the nineteenth century, English and Continental artists explored other gothic themes: ruined churches, apocalyptic disasters. 6 What had all this to do with America? Born out of revolution, the young country had no ruins and (in comparison with the Old World) only a shallow past-and what seemed an infinitely bright future. As a product of the Enlightenment, it meant to be a republic of reason, dominated by neither church nor king. Tradition and culture still bound independent America to England, but there was little to foster the transplantation of the English gothic to American soil. Yet it did take root here, shifting shape in response to different and varying sets of historical and social circumstances. In this project I follow directions traveled by the literary and cultural historians who in recent decades have historicized the American gothic. Leslie Fiedler's landmark study Love and Death in

the American Novel remains important, even though scholars have, with good reason, criticized his figuration of American gothic as an exclusively masculine genre centering on a "flight from society to nature, from the world of women to the haunts of womanless men." For Fiedler, American gothic was "a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation." But as Teresa Goddu notes, Fiedler translated the "dark spectacles" of the gothic into the "more meaningful symbolism of psychological and moral blackness." That is, he sought mythic, universalizing transcendence for the gothic in America and, although he discussed racial conflict and oppression, gave comparatively little weight to the racial, political, and economic meanings that have more recently engaged scholarly energy. Nonetheless, his vision of the haunted American literary landscape moved criticism into new territory, both troubling and shadowy.l These shadows have lengthened over the panoramic expanse of our history as scholars continue to dismantle the myths of America as an enlightened and progressive republic. In Nightmare on

Main Street, Mark Edmundson examines the resurgence of the gothic in the millennia! 1990s, track-

lNTRODUCTION

XVII

ing it everywhere, from the insatiable public appetite for violence and horror to repressed-memory syndrome and Goth subcultures. Focusing on the antebellum decades, David S. Reynolds, in Be-

neath the American Renaissance, explores the cultural "basement" of the period and argues that canonical writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, tapped into a teeming, murky world of popular fascination with sex, crime, vice, and perversion. Although Reynolds is concerned with literary form more than social critique, his research shows how vast a chamber of horrors underlay the polished surfaces of American literary culture. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen focuses more specifically on a pervasive, enduring public fascination with horrific, savage criminality, from the earliest years of settlement. 8 I also draw heavily on the important work of Toni Morrison and Teresa Goddu on the subject of race. Although I focus on the social, the sexual, and the psychological, the racial is an overwhelming and compelling presence in the territory I explore. The institution of slavery and, more generally, racial oppression and violence have haunted and disfigured history and society alike. In "Romancing the Shadow," Morrison insists urgently that we must recognize the connotations of the "darkness" that pervaded American romantic expression. "Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities," Morrison writes. "For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination." Even the Enlightenment can be understood only in relation to the institution of slavery: "the rights of man and his enslavement." Whiteness, the fundamental term of American identity, means nothing without its foil of blackness. The "Africanist" presence in our literature, therefore, is a "dark and abiding" one that shaped the "imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed." Yet more often than not this presence, unmentionable for many reasons, appeared in a vocabulary "designed to disguise the subject. " 9 In Gothic America, Goddu examines "a number of sites of historical horror-revolution, Indian massacre, the transformation of the marketplace-[but] is especially concerned with how slavery haunts the American gothic." Gothic stories, she argues, intimately connected to the culture producing them, "articulate the horrors of history." The nation's narratives "are created through a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion. By resurrecting what these narratives repress, the gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history." Oozing into other genres and appearing in unlikely places, the gothic brings "the popular, the disturbing, and the hauntings of history into American literature." 10 In the course of my research, I came to realize that similar gothic patterns infused American visual culture. Above all, the Africanist presence identified by Morrison could be glimpsed in a variety of disguises, some obvious, others oblique. Where graphic caricature spoke bluntly of racial

XV!ll

INTRODUCTION

tension and unease, the language of painting was characteristically indirect and required careful unraveling to reach the racial dimension. Slavery was not the only divisive and explosive American social ill. Pernicious inequities of gender, class, and ethnicity also found utterance in gothic visual speech. But slavery and its legacy, looming large in our history, stand for all. In these pages, therefore, slavery is the keystone of my gothic arch. The scholarly works that have informed my own thinking point clearly to a radically alternative vision of America, haunted by specters of otherness: psychological, familial, social, and especially racial. Yet they focus almost exclusively on the printed word. Even when they include illustrations from the period-pictures from trial pamphlets, grotesque political cartoons, and the like-those pictures amplify or reinforce the argument of the text rather than define a gothic visuality. Painting the Dark Side, by contrast, imports the gothic into the realm of the visual. I seek to broaden and complicate our ideas of the gothic and its meaning in nineteenth-century American visual culture-especially in painting. I define this "gothic" as the art of haunting, using the term as container for a constellation of themes and moods: horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity. The art of haunting was an art of darkness, often literally: several of the artists I study shared a dark style, characterized by gloomy tonalities, deep shadows and glaring highlights, grotesque figures, and claustrophobic or chaotic spaces. The gothic is hardly limited to such visual traits, however; we see it in Elihu Vedder's sunstruck beaches and the highly descriptive and strictly controlled drafting of William Rimmer or Thomas Eakins. If there is no consistent set of gothic conventions, what connects these disparate works across the nineteenth century? Beyond the question of style, the gothic is a mode of pictorial expression that critiques the Enlightenment vision of the rational American Republic as a place of liberty, balance, harmony, and progress. Gothic pictures are meditations on haunting and being haunted: by personal demons, social displacement (or misplacement), or the omnipresent specter of slavery and race. They explore the irrational realms of vision, dream, and nightmare, and they grapple with the terror of annihilation by uncontrollable forces of social conflict and change. Gothic pictures trade on terror, ambiguity, and excess while inverting or subverting the status quo. They conjure up disturbing spectacles of grotesque bodies in which the monstrous, the animal, and the anomalous threaten the social construction of the normal. They push and occasionally dissolve boundaries designed to segregate social and cultural space, crisscrossing between high and low, elite and popular, painting and caricature. The dark side remains for the most part unknown, although several studies in addition to Davidson's Eccentrics have done significant work in mapping the territory. Bryan Jay Wolf uses deconstruction and psychoanalysis to probe gothic dimensions in the art of Washington Allston, Thomas

INTRODUCTION

XIX

Cole, and John Quidor, who also figure large in Painting the Dark Side. David Miller explores the image and connotations of the swamp, which he construes as the dark side of the nineteenth-century American landscape both in painting and in literature. Michael Fried dips into certain dark and haunted regions of Thomas Eakins's psyche, and, more recently, Gail E. Husch has revealed the cultural meanings embedded in the disaster genre, which enjoyed a great resurgence in the years from r848 to r854· 11 Rich in ideas, these studies are also highly selective, focusing on a specific period, artist, genre, or method. I want to account for the gothic pictorial imagination in a broader and more unified historical, social, and cultural framework. But my narrative does not weave itself into a seamless whole, nor does the book function as a systematic, all-inclusive survey of the gothic in nineteenth-century art. 12 My aim is to suggest how the gothic, in its many forms, gave certain artists-in and out of the mainstream-a potent, fluid language for dealing with darker facets of history and the psyche that seldom intruded into the optimistic domains of more conventional landscape and genre painting. Gothic pictures stand as visual metaphors for an ever-shifting tangle of secrets, obsessions, fears, and dread. In them disquieting forces, impossible to address directly, find expression in disguise, and things kept in the dark return in the form of veiled, coded, or elliptical messages. Elihu Vedder, for example, could never have expressed outright in a painting his hidden fears of female power. But his images of colossal sea serpents, dead Medusas, and devouring Sphinxes allowed him to displace and distance those terrors, to push them to the dark side, where veils of fantasy shroud a raw anxiety. Nor could the Boston painter Washington Allston acknowledge his identity as a slaveholding southerner in any acceptable, pictorial form. His gigantic unfinished opus

Belshazzar's Feast (see Plate 5) gave him a covert channel for managing a past that never ceased to haunt him. There was more to it than personal expression, however. Were the pictures by these artists and others I investigate merely visual diaries, written in code and dedicated to the exorcism of personal demons, they might be very interesting indeed, but would remain unconnected-a diverting array of tormented psyches and guilty consciences. Instead, however, on the gothic picture plane the personal and the political interlace in complex ways. Vedder's serpents, Medusas, and Sphinxes reference not only his own anxieties but also those of middle-class masculinity, socially adrift and threatened by the destabilizing forces of emergent feminism. Allston's fear and guilt were also the fear and guilt of a white society-North and South-stained, haunted, and torn by the curse of slavery. Gothic picture were slates on which the cultural unconscious inscribed itself in cryptic symbols and expressed itself in terms at once subjective and social, private and public. This is the gothic strain, the gothic pattern, that I trace in Painting the Dark Side. The gothic in my account (as in Fiedler's) is an almost exclusively masculine province, one in

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INTRODUCTION

which images map the terrain of white male anxiety, fear, and repression. Social, economic, and political tensions splintered nineteenth-century American life into myriad shards as opposing groups sought to gain or aggrandize power. For men, art became one of the sites where these conflicts and others simmered or raged. Women artists and artists of color were in the extreme minority through most of the century, and few, if any, ventured into the gothic visual territory I survey here. For such groups literature served as the vehicle of gothic expression while men colonized the pictorial domain. White masculine status and identity, far from stable and unified, constantly faced social, political, and economic challenges. Those may partly explain why male artists manufactured gothic visual languages to express (and repress) their fears or deployed the gothic vocabulary in acts of pictorial and social transgression. All were haunted by visions of social cataclysm and fantasies of regression and personal dissolution. The dread of losing control-or the delights of surrenderpermeated the space of the gothic picture. Another connecting thread besides whiteness ties together the eight painters I study. All were, in one way or another, outsiders. Cole was an immigrant who never rooted himself deeply in the soil of his adopted country. Allston was a displaced southern aristocrat trying to conceal his profoundly southern roots in a quintessentially northern town. Blythe and Quidor were at the extremes of marginality, socially, economically, and even geographically. Vedder was a cultural migrant, adrift in wartime New York and subsequently a permanent expatriate, Rimmer a man of precarious balance, always on the brink of poverty and madness. Ryder, a working-class outsider, sedulously cultivated the weirdness that fascinated his largely middle-class clientele. Eakins, a Philadelphian of respectable family and impeccable professional credentials, though he might seem the odd man out here, willfully made himself an outsider. His provocations to the status quo ranged from the gory Gross Clinic to the flagrant pursuit of nudity in the service of art. Pushed to the margins, these painters stood on the brink and gazed down into frightening depths. From the beginning, I wondered if there was a way to bring the emerging gothic pattern in nineteenth-century painting into line with the gothic strain in American literature. As the work progressed, the figure that came back again and again in different guises was that of Edgar Allan Poe, although Hawthorne and Melville both make appearances here, along with the earlier gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown. In The Scarlet Letter (I 8 5o) and The House of the Seven Gables (I 8 5 T ), Hawthorne probed the personal, familial, and social dimensions of the past as a haunting

weight on the present. Brown's haunted landscapes suggest an approach to Cole's, and Melville in

Benito Cereno ( r 8 56) produced an elaborate metaphor for the haunting presence and evil of race in America. Yet it was Poe who, like the repressed, kept returning. Poe, as Goddu has noted, fits awkwardly with a national literary canon, functioning most often as "the demonized 'other' who must be exorcised from the 'mainstream' of our 'classic' American

INTRODUCTION

XXI

literature." 13 To integrate him, Goddu argues, literary historians and critics resorted to tactics designed to transcend Poe's region (the South) and its politics. Thus despite his reputation Poe's standing in the canon remains problematic. As outsider and southerner haunted by personal demons and racial fears, Poe offered a striking pattern for understanding the gothic facets of the nineteenthcentury American painters I chose to study. Indeed, for the pictorial gothic Poe turned out to be a hall of mirrors, offering up the possibility of complex, multiple reflections. Like Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer, he spoke of the horrors of slavery and the nightmare of racial fears in elliptical, metaphoric language fraught with images both terrifying and bizarre. Displaced, dispossessed, a would-be southern aristocrat, Poe seemed an intriguing reference point for Thomas Cole, a displaced Briton stranded somewhere between gentleman and lowly artisan. As a downwardly mobile inebriate hopelessly defeated by the culture of the marketplace, Poe furnished a striking parallel to David Gilmour Blythe, spiraling downward, increasingly out of control. Indeed, like all the painters in this book, Poe struggled in the unrestrained capitalist economy of urbanizing, industrializing America and, like most of them, fell victim to it. Like Blythe, he explored the dark side of modernity and the modern urban wilderness; like Ryder at the century's end, he probed the gothic layers of modern subjectivity: the guilty conscience, the tortured mind. Poe, more than any other writer, haunts both the gothic pictorial imagination and this book. The narrative that follows falls into three sections. The first, embracing Cole and Blythe, ventures into the gothic spaces of nature and the metropolis. The centerpiece or keystone section examines the racial fears and fantasies embedded in works by Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer. The last section is a voyage into gothic pathologies of mind and body in the art of Vedder, Eakins, and Ryder. My approach varies, depending on focus, but each chapter revolves around one or two "puzzle pictures," and each attempts to discover the key, or keys, to their gothic secrets. Because I view these pictures as haunted ground, inhabited by demons both personal and social, biography plays a crucial role here. Where possible I identify personal crises or conflicts that might return to the canvases in pictorial disguise. In a complementary move, I examine the historical landscape-social, political, cultural-for signs of trauma, danger, rupture, and dread; that is, repressed, disturbing, or taboo material that might reappear, in masquerade, within the space of the gothic picture. Though the biographical and the social occur in varying proportions from chapter to chapter, they work together to open up hidden layers and suggest gothic meanings. My turn to biography involves risk. It is something like walking a postmodern art-historical plank. That is, sooner or later (following in the footsteps of the artists I examine here) I am bound to

tumble into the depths. Beyond certain concrete markers-birth date, father's occupation, ed-

ucation, date and duration of marriage, date of death-biography furnishes a rich body of unreliable evidence, and a life story may be subject to variation in successive retellings. Even a subject's

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INTRODUCTION

diaries or letters or the recollections of relatives, friends, and enemies give us no more than selective, distorted, deceptive, and contingent slices of a life irretrievable in its totality. And in the case of David Gilmour Blythe and John Quidor, only scraps of evidence can be found. All this means that I often journey into the foggy reaches of speculation. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine writing this book without biography. In recent years, art historians have tended to privilege the external social matrix, market forces, and the discourses of race, class, and gender as devices to excavate art's meaning. The artist, operating at the intersection of social and historical forces, is also their product and their tool, a creature of limited agency enjoying only the most illusory of freedoms. I do not dispute the importance and utility of that model, and it is fully operational here. Taken to an extreme, though, it can reduce art to the function of a machine for meaning, predictably decodable (or predictably ambiguous). As I ventured further and deeper into the research for Painting the Dark Side, I was drawn again and again into the artists' private lives, so richly and strangely textured (or riddled) with obsessions, illusions, quirks, weaknesses, disappointments, and secrets. Surely those leaked out, somehow, onto the surfaces of the gothic picture or seeped up from its depths. Not to factor in that dynamic-however fluid, elusive, and ultimately indeterminate-would only flatten the lattice of public meaning and private feeling that constitute the gothic. I am not in sympathy or complicity with the eight painters I study here; I do not seek to excuse them or explain away their mistakes, delusions, bigotry, and flaws. I will say, though, that they continue to fascinate me, and that, in the end, may be one of the principal reasons for this book. In Painting the Dark Side, finally, I did not set out to overturn the established canon or to erect another in its place. The book is not a counternarrative or carnivalesque inversion of the status quo. Rather, it expands and complicates the canon and suggests productive ways of rethinking it. Inclusive rather than exclusive, it makes new sense of artists hitherto considered misfits while revealing darker dimensions in the work of canonical masters and patrolling the spongy borderlands where popular visual culture and the elite medium of oil so often mixed, mingled, and traded places. More than anything else, Painting the Dark Side seeks to add strangeness and shadow to the familiar well-lit terrain of nineteenth-century American art. Only if we consider the dark side, indeed, can we better comprehend the light.

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BLANK PAGE

GLOOM AND DOOM

O

ne cloudy August day in 1836, the painter Thomas Cole (1801-48) noted in his journal that such weather made him so melancholy that "all life, the past and the future," seemed to lie

beneath a shroud of gloom. "I often think," he went on, "that the dark view of life is the true one." Cole frequently had such thoughts. In his diary, letters, prose writings, and poems, the words "gloom," "melancholy," and their various analogues appear again and again, from his first days as a landscape painter to the end of his life. Rays of sunshine did penetrate the shadows. His marriage to Maria Bartow, three months after that gloomy August day, proved a great source of contentment. The growth of strong religious feeling in middle age gave him a bulwark against despair. Yet dread, sadness, and hopelessness plagued him. As a young man, he wrote of the "darkness, doubt, and fear" that lay beyond the future's "dim horizon." In I 84 I that future was still blank and mysterious, "lost in gloom." His forty-sixth birthday, on February 1, 1847, conjured up once again his old, persistent vision of eternity as an unfathomable, dark gulf yawning before him. 1 Gloom and ruin were recurrent themes in Cole's art as well. Although he alternated between brooding pessimism and sunny moods, the darker vision always returned. Death cast a pall over his earliest ventures into landscape. The trees in his Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), one of the paintings that launched Cole's career in New York after a summer sketching trip into the mountain wilderness (Fig. 1), stand leafless around dark, still waters, their trunks naked and branches

I

FiGURE J:.

on

the eye frorn the

"vith the

the

gray is no way out

deer

around

he took

l)00Yv1

In the early years, Cole allowed his imagination to fly unchecked. Later, as a gentlemanly, upright, religious, and moral landscape painter, he was more careful to partition the dark side from the light, and to package his forays into murkier territory with uplifting messages. He could never curb his attraction to such themes, however, not least because he was able to channel into them the deep anxieties, conflicts, and frustrations that shadowed his interior world. His scenes of savage wilderness and cataclysmic destruction guide the viewer into a mental landscape, projected onto and fused with distinctive features of the world outside. Cole's paintings also registered the broader political and social anxieties that preoccupied gothic writers in America. His early landscapes, ravaged and dark, figured the young Republic as a land haunted by the same violent and bloody history that shadowed the American wilderness of the novelist Charles Brockden Brown. Cole's scenes of ruined castles and towers find a literary analogue in the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, obsessed like Cole with contempt for and dread of the multitude that the new democratic order had spawned, and bedeviled like Cole by the conflicting demands of art and an increasingly commercial market. At once personal and political, Cole's landscapes opened up a gothic space where that inner world of doubt and dread tangled with the outer world of haunting history and foreboding change. 3 Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire. 4 His father, James, was a muslin manufacturer who aspired to middle-class gentility. Cole was the second-to-last child in a large family of girls. He was particularly close to his younger sister, Sarah, who seems to have been his chief confidante. In his ninth year he was sent to school at Chester. According to his first biographer, the Reverend Louis Noble, the small, sensitive child suffered so severely from harsh discipline, poor food, and sickness that traumatic memories of that period remained vivid in his mind all his life. At the age of fifteen, Cole became an apprentice engraver of designs in a Chorley calico factory, where he had to endure the uncongenial society of fellow workers he thought rude and coarse. He consoled himself with long walks in the country, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by sister Sarah. He read voraciously as well, especially the works of his favorite poets, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Never successful, Cole's father decided to emigrate in the hope that brighter prospects awaited him in the United States. The family sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia, landing on July 3, r 8r8. For the next few years James Cole tried to make his fortune, first running a dry-goods shop in Philadelphia, then manufacturing wallpaper in Steubenville, Ohio, and, when that failed, floor cloths in Pittsburgh. Thomas, meanwhile, found work as an engraver in Philadelphia. In January r8r9 he voyaged to the island of Saint Eustatius in the West Indies, remaining there until May. After his return he walked the entire distance from Philadelphia to his father's rented house in Steubenville. There he gave drawing and painting lessons in the young ladies' seminary established by his sis-

GLOOM AND DOOM

3

ters. Having learned the rudiments of oil technique from an itinerant portrait painter, Cole traveled on foot from one small town to another, attempting with little luck to interest citizens in having their likenesses recorded. In I 823 Thomas helped his father in the floor-cloth manufactory in Pittsburgh but late that year decided to become an artist, despite James Cole's disapproval. He spent the winter of I824 in Philadelphia, painting comical pictures for sale to oyster houses and saloons while studying from casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In April I 825 he rejoined his family, which had given up on the floor-cloth enterprise and moved to New York City late the preceding year. Cole now became a serious full-time painter. With the sketches from his trip up the Hudson in the summer of I825 he was able to lever himself into the best cultural circles, attracting patrons such as the Baltimore financier Robert Gilmor and the Connecticut gentleman Daniel Wadsworth. In r 826 he became a founding member of the National Academy of Design, run by artists and supported by businessmen. From then on he exhibited landscapes regularly at the academy's annual shows, as well as a variety of other venues in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Eager to refine his art and further his artistic education, he sailed back across the Atlantic in I829, spending a total of three years abroad, in England and on the Continent. This is certainly an extraordinary tale. Young Thomas Cole had successfully made the transition from artisan (albeit a bookish one), producing cheap textile designs, to full-fledged fine-art painter. He had gone from reluctant association with crude apprentices to privileged acquaintance with some of the most prosperous cultural power brokers of the eastern United States. Yet his situation was highly unstable and his identity unfixed. For years he lived a rootless existence, traveling with his family or by himself from one town to the next, from one venture to another. He was an immigrant, who desired nothing more ardently than to call America his true home. Yet he could not shed his Englishness as if it were some worn-out skin. He painted American landscapes but beheld them with English eyes; he identified himself with his wealthy, aristocratic patrons and "genteel culture" but for years barely managed to retain his foothold in the nascent middle class. He was in-between, neither one nor the other, a transplant, a graft. Nor was the art world where he sought renown stable and fixed. Its institutions were young, its future uncertain. 5 Cole suffered substantial and worrying insecurities. From the I82os well into the mid-I83os he shouldered nearly all responsibility for supporting his father, mother, and sisters. As the Cole family's movements suggest, father James failed in successive attempts to build a business, repeating the pattern of Lancashire, where financial ruin constantly threatened to reverse the family's modest social progress and plunge it into poverty and disgrace. 6 By the time the Coles moved to New York, James had given up any pretense of being the breadwinner, handing over that role to his son. On one occasion he wrote to Thomas that he was quite idle, had nothing to do, and did not yet

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GLOOM AND DOOM

know which business to follow. Like Dickens's Mr. Macawber, he hoped that something would "turn out" and urged Thomas to take any offer for the paintings he was currently trying to sell in Boston. 7 In his letters Cole lamented this heavy burden, which contributed greatly to friction within and beyond the family. Once he apologized for a misunderstanding with his patron, Robert Gilmor: "I hope you will find me excusable when I inform you that on the morning I saw you my mind was harassed and perplexed by several disagreeable occurrences in the family that had just transpired before I saw you." Struggling to rise in the art world and to scrape together the money he needed to embark on his European travels, Cole felt that he was running hard but getting nowhere. As he explained to Daniel Wadsworth, "The chief cause of my low spirits ... is that owing [to] the unavoidable expenses of my family-after the labor of several years with every advantage of ready sale and good prices for my pictures[-]! am as far as ever from attaining that for which I have laboured incessantly for a great length of time." The problem was compounded by Cole's obligation to pay off the money his father owed after his business ventures collapsed. Cole's prospects had begun to brighten, he wrote, but "our large family ... came on to me from the West, and with it debt, contracted by my father, for which I was bound .... Nearly four years I spent in Europe, not in the pursuit of pleasure, but in the earnest endeavour to acquire the means of supporting an affectionate family, and of paying those debts that crushed my very soul to think of. " 8 Cole's landscapes from the four-year period preceding his "escape" to Europe take on new dimensions when read against this narrative of frustration and despair. If anything haunted Cole at this time of his life, it was that soul-crushing encumbrance he was forced to take on at a critical stage of his career and his self-fashioning. Two drawings from that time graphically symbolize the painter's state of mind: Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick and Shipwreck Scene (Figs. 2, 3 ). In both, a tiny figure marooned on a craggy rock waves at an impossibly distant ship as the sun sets and storm clouds mass. Shipwreck Scene includes a fragment of wreckage bearing the word "fortune." It is difficult to imagine a more transparent landscape meta ph or. The elements here are conventional, well-worn even, and ubiquitous in the vocabulary of romanticism. However hackneyed, though, these little sketches offer a key to the subjective component in landscapes such as the Lake with Dead Trees, described earlier. Storms, ruin, entrapment, danger, death, and isolation made up a dominant strain in Cole's landscape iconography, in his poetry and prose writings as well as pictures. During the 18 2os he wrote several accounts of perilous, solitary journeys into the wilderness. In an early prose sketch, "The Bewilderment," Cole describes himself as "alone & a stranger in the wilderness," threading the "deepening shadows of the gloomy forest" at sunset. As he descends into a valley, the shadows deepen, and his twisted path becomes more and more obscure. He passes the scene of a recent

GLOOM AND DOOM

H. of Arts.

Thomas Collection of The New-

tornado, which has left desolation in its wake. Looking for a passage through the entangled roots and branches of the toppled trees, he becomes "perplexed and bewildered," entirely losing his way. At length he struggles out, but before him lies a "pitchy blackness." The earth suddenly crumbles, and Cole finds himself "plunging headlong" far down into deep, black waters, where he clings to a rock in "utter darkness." Groping about, he discovers that perpendicular "walls of unscaleable stone" surround him. The only escape is to follow the course of the water through a cave that yawns "like a sepulchre." "Where might it lead?" he muses. "Perhaps to unfathomable gulfs, into black labyrinths, into the day less caverns of the earth." Clambering onto a piece of driftwood, the lone man in the wilderness makes a "strange voyage" into the ever-deepening darkness, toward a furious whirlpool that he manages to evade by a hairsbreadth. Finally, he makes his way to safety, by moonlight, through a long, cavernous passage. 9 Another narrative, "The Storm," even more extravagantly incorporates elements of blackness, precipitous heights, abysmal depths, disorientation, and entrapment. Somehow, Cole finds himself "far from the earth careering through a permeable waste into some outer void, beyond the grasp of gravitation." He flies through "illimitable plains" and over the "sullen waves of shoreless oceans," ultimately entering a region of primeval chaos, where all things mingle "in mysterious confusion." When he comes back to earth and his senses, he finds himself on the brink of a promontory, with a "headlong torrent" on either side plunging into the "deep obscurity of the valley. " 10 Both tales end in deliverance. The lost wanderer stumbles to a friendly hunter's cabin; the storm passes over, giving way to brilliant, glittering light. Cole, however, relishes the ordeal as much as the fortunate outcome. In "The Bewilderment" he finds "a kind of pleasure in the fearful sublimity" of his plight, and in "The Storm" his entrapment on the rock between roaring columns of water gives rise to "peculiarly romantic" sensations. Cole's drawing conveys the same exhilaration and fear in the face of extreme peril. Everything is stupendously huge, except for the minute black silhouette of the stranded traveler sheltering beneath a ton of overhanging rock (Fig. 4). Mammoth trees writhe in the gale, and on either side the cataract, monstrously swollen, plunges down. The situation is dire; there is no way out. Yet the tiny man exults in his peril, standing near the edge of the precipice and stretching out his arms as if to implore-or embrace-the fury all around him. Danger is at once terrifying and irresistible. 11 Although these narratives may have originated in actual events, given that Cole was an avid mountain hiker, he obviously embellished both writing and drawing for dramatic effect. Cole's imagery is conventional, deriving from the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque as well as the gothic effects of Salvator Rosa, the seventeenth-century Italian whose landscapes were visual textbooks of terror for romantic painters. Cole's stories are also naturalized versions of a Bunyanesque pilgrimage through darkness and danger into light and life. That theme, emerging early in Cole's

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FIGURE 4· Thomas Cole, The Storm, ca. Pencil on paper, 8 x 4 Y:;". Founders Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph© 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.

oeuvre, would continue to serve as the structuring device for later landscape allegories. excess

quirky

Cole's vision, however, suggests more than reliance on generic formula. The American

wilderness served Cole as a platform from which to launch a thrilling and perilous journey of the He nationalized and localized the topography of the gothic, hitherto associated with castles on crags,

abbeys, eerie crypts, and tortuous dungeon passageways. 12

No fixed boundaries on either page or canvas separated the landscapes of Cole's imagination from those he based on observation. Minus the the landscape in Cole's Expulsion American wilderness Coie celebrated in composition on John Martin's further emphasizes

8

GLOOM AND DOOM

I

and wind-whipped palms, the "fallen"

the Garden of early works

is a seamless stand-in for the Plate 1 )< That Cole based his

illustration of the same subject from Milton's

much of the painter's topography came out of his head (or books)

Lost

than from nature. On the right side, the Garden of Eden glows in the radiant atmosphere of golden sunlight. There are palm trees (reminiscent, perhaps, of Cole's voyage in the West Indies), swans, lush vegetation, and masses of flowers. The real, fallen world on the left, by contrast, is in every sense the dark side. Spears of light flame from the portals of Eden, but once those doors are sealed, only the flash of lightning and the red glow of the volcano will illuminate this perilous land, separated from the garden by a crumbling stone catwalk over an unfathomable abyss that draws our eyes downward into a headlong plunge. Around the banished pair soar craggy pinnacles; beneath them is the fall into nothingness. Storm-battered trees, broken and gnarled, bear witness to the violence of this gloomy realm. On the brink of a ledge in the left foreground, a snarling wolf begins to devour a deer, a vulture hovering nearby. As a mighty torrent crashes into the depths, inky clouds swirl above.u Cole overlaid his American landscapes with a cloak of naturalism, basing them on sketches executed in the course of his tireless excursions into the remote reaches of the woods and mountains. Yet these "real" scenes bear the same marks of violent cataclysm. In Romantic Landscape broken trunks and snaking branches lie in the foreground, framing a still, dead lake (Fig. 5 ). Massive chunks of rock, long ago smashed and tumbled into ruin, repose in the waters. The sky is dark and stormy, though one long beam of light shines in from an opening in the clouds on the left. In Landscape

with Tree Trunks a shattered, twisted tree stands on the shore of a dark lake; opposite rise brooding cliffs (Fig. 6). Black clouds tower threateningly on the right; far back on the left the sky clears and brightens. These distant portals of radiance are ambiguous. We might read them as the sign of a golden future, promising the proverbial calm after the storm. Or, reversing direction, we might imagine ourselves, like Adam and Eve, traveling from that splendid light, into the darkness of the fallen world. 14 What are the implications of Cole's ambiguity? Cole carried into painting what the American gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown ( I77r-r8ro) had attempted to create in fiction: a dark vision ofthe American landscape as a place

of mystery and terror. 15 If Brown, raised a Quaker in Philadelphia, seems on the surface to have little in common with Cole, one solid link connects them. William Dunlap, Brown's friend and first biographer, was also the author of an important early biography and critical assessment of Cole, based in part on information obtained directly from the artist. It is conceivable that Cole, a voracious reader, knew Brown's work. I do not want to suggest that Cole sought somehow in his paintings to give visual expression to the writer's gothic vision. But I am interested in the way Brown's gothic American landscape offers a tool for opening up Cole's. 16 Brown wrote all six of his novels in the short span of years from 1796 to I8orY After that he turned to magazine editing and continued to contribute prolifically to periodicals in Philadelphia and New York. In his fiction he sought to discredit superstition and belief in the supernatural by

GLOOM AND DOOM

9

recourse to rational explanation. Thus in his best-known work, Wieland (1796), a ventriloquist turns out to be the source of the mysterious, ghostly voices that drive Theodore Wieland to madness and the murder of his wife and children. Despite their ostensible argument for Enlightenment reason, Brown's stories of insanity, delusion, disease, and fear produced "an almost obsessive sense of terror in the landscape and history of this country," where mystery and danger lurked and threatened to unmake the promise of the new Republic. 18 In Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep- Walker (1799 ), Brown rejected the shopworn literary conventions of the Old World

to

base his fiction in the conditions of the New. "One merit the

writer may at least claim," he wrote in his preface, "is that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader, by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable, and, for a native of America to overlook these, would admit of no apology. These, therefore, are, in part, the ingredients of this tale." 19 In Brown's hands, the English or German tale of terror metamorphosed into a tale of national terror, haunted woods supplanting haunted ruins, caves standing in for dungeons, and savage natives replacing evil monks, wicked aristocrats, and bandits. The setting of the novel is the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Edgar Huntly, the narrator, is a character who, like Cole, seeks solitude in the wilderness: "Thou knowest my devotion to the spirit that breathes its inspiration in the gloom of forests and on the verge of streams. I love to immerse myself in shades and dells, and hold converse with the solemnities and secrecies of nature." In the course of the story, his journeys into the wilderness become voyages into a world of ever-darkening fear, danger, and violence. The plot turns on a mysterious sleepwalker, Clithero Edny, whom Huntly mistakenly believes the murderer of his best friend, Waldegrave. Haunted by Waldegrave's death, Huntly sets out to determine the truth and, in the process, discovers both the horrors of the wilderness and the horrors in his deepest, most secret self. The wilderness through which Huntly tracks his quarry is gloomy, rugged, perilous, and desolate, exhibiting "a perpetual and intricate variety of craggy eminences and deep dells" walled by soaring, vertical cliffs. The landscape is a ruinous "chaos of rocks and precipices," and even in the flatland "it is made rugged and scarcely passable by enormous and fallen trunks, accumulated by the storm of ages, and forming, by their slow decay, a moss-covered soil, the haunt of rabbets and lizards. These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of pines, whose eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the reverberations of the torrents and the whistling of the blasts." Every path is a maze, every opening terminates "sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice, or the bottom of a steep."

GLOOM AND DOOM

IO

When Huntly discovers the mouth of the cave where he believes Clithero has hidden, he plunges into its blackness, an "intense dark" that is, he observes, "always the parent of fears." Groping blindly along treacherous passageways, he struggles to the point of exhaustion. He comes at last to a soaring chamber where a cataract dashes down into dizzying depths. There, across an impassable gulf, he sees Clithero, lying in a trance among the rocks. Roused by Huntly's cries, the sleepwalker jumps up and vanishes. Only by felling a tree can Huntly cross the abyss and continue his pursuit. Needing an ax, he is forced to double back through the cave and make his way home. The following day, he returns to the edge of the abyss, chops down the tree, and fashions a rude log bridge, but before he can creep out on it, a violent storm crashes down: "Torrents of rain poured from above, and stronger blasts thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound chasms." The trees twist and bend violently in the howling blast of the wind. Beset by danger, Huntly (like Cole) nonetheless finds intense pleasure in the sublimity and grandeur of the scene. Unable to cross, he manages once more to find his way out of the cave, his quarry still at large. The next time Huntly penetrates the wilderness, he too becomes a somnambulist, waking to find himself deep in the same pitch-black cave. Hopelessly lost, desperate and starving, he encounters a panther and kills it with a cast-off tomahawk he has chanced upon in his blind gropings. Then, ravenous, he feasts upon the "yet warm blood and reeking fibers" of the brute, only to vomit up his awful meal in revulsion. Glimpsing light ahead, Huntly creeps toward it to find four "savages" around a campfire, and suddenly he is reliving the awful day when his parents and an infant sibling were murdered in their beds: "Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years. You will not be surprized that the fate of my parents, and the sight of the body of one of this savage band, who, in the pursuit that was made after them, was overtaken and killed, should produce lasting and terrific images in my fancy. I never looked upon, or called up the image of a savage without shuddering." Yet the horror is only beginning. Huntly steals off after rescuing a young girl held captive by the Indians, but he encounters them soon after at the site of a recent massacre. In the skirmish that follows, Huntly shoots and kills three of his enemies, who collapse in a heap of tangled limbs and gore. Appalled and sickened, Huntly contemplates the vastness of the destruction he has caused: "This scene of carnage and blood was laid by me," he thinks. "To this havock and horror was I led by such rapid footsteps." By the time Huntly, moving like a wolf or panther "upon all fours," encounters the last of his foes, he himself has become "savage," "led by such rapid footsteps" to the most brutal extremes of survival in the wilderness. From that point, he gradually returns to humanity and civilization, and in the end, all the complex mysteries are unraveled. Huntly, however, is a changed man, forever scarred by his ordeals. 20

T2

GLOOM AND DOOI\l

As literary scholar Sydney J. Krause has noted, Charles Brockden Brown's mind was prone to "gothicize the inner world by projecting it into nature." In his dreamlike odyssey, Huntly walks "in the wild of the unknown Self." Its topography at once psychological and concrete, the wild becomes the locale for a journey that impels "the emergence of the dark self." With its labyrinthine passages, steep cliffs, and dank hollows, this is a landscape of desolation, a "fallen garden" where beasts roam and savage killers lurk. Brown's gloomy, gothic American terrain was a metaphorical minefield, threatening republican virtue at every turn. The integrity of republican selfhoodself-governing, rational-depended entirely on the repression of the dark self or, better yet, its extermination. Edgar Huntly's regression demonstrated how insidiously reason could fall prey to lower nature. The landscape in Edgar Huntly is historically dark as well, shadowed by memories of the bloody violence that attended Euro-American settlement. 21 Like Brown's landscapes, the desolate wastelands Cole conjured up on paper and canvas were fallen gardens in their own right, represented by an array of highly specific signifiers. In the year he completed the Expulsion, Cole wrote to Wadsworth, returned from a tour of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Cole told his patron that he had often imagined standing by his side in "that region of sublimity ... amidst the ruins of mountains in the Notch, gazing awestruck, and amazed on its death-like desolation." Wadsworth thought along the same lines. When he received Cole's Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans'' (Fig. 7), he praised its magnificence, reserving his most fervent admiration for "the deep Gulfs, into which you look from real precipices,-The heavenly serenity of the firmament, contrasted with the savage grandeur, & wild Dark masses of the Lower World,-whose high pinnacles only, catch a portion of the soft lights where all seems peace. " 22 Cole worked out his repertoire of "Lower World" scenery in four variations on episodes from James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published in r826. In that same year, Cole produced the first painting (Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago), commissioned by the Stevens family of Hoboken, New Jersey, to decorate their new Hudson River steamboat, the Albany. This painting depicted the murder of the self-sacrificing heroine Cora at the hands of the villainous Huron Magua and his warriors. Cole reworked the same scene in The Death of Cora (Fig. 8). In two other versions, he focused on an earlier stage in the sequence of events, when Cora kneels at the feet of the old sage Tamenund while he decides her fate. One went to Daniel Wadsworth (see Fig. 7). The other ( r 82 7; New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown) was for Robert Gilmor, who had directed Cole's attention to the Cooper novel as a rich mine of subject matter to enliven and localize his sublime topography. 23 Even though the subject was Cooper's, the landscape was in essence Brown's: Cooper freely appropriated his predecessor's vision of the wilderness and, like Brown, used natural setting to ground and amplify moral drama. 24 In Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans," members of the Delaware tribe form a circle on the

GLOOM AND DOOM

13

flGUHE

l( Mu~cum

of Art, .Hartford,

the

sister

Alice 5woons. ·n,e heroine choose

secure vantage

14

G!OO\!

"~the v~.,~igvuoJ1J or

m

FIGURE

8.

ca. I827. Oil on canvas, 3

Thomas

X

. Annenberg Rare Book and

University of

to reach.

the "Dark masses"

the chasm that divides the

It is as if the bridge back

from the calmer reaches of the mountain range beyond cannot into Eden

seems

air. Even the

over

the foreground, but the eye is left poised,

collapsed after Adam

Eve made

way into the fallen world. the dizzying brink,

the

The Death of Cora takes place in a

the dark towers of rock. Cora, in white, kneels at the edge of the precipice over

of rock shadowing the terrifying

Across the chasm looms a

block

the ledge writhing trees off in the

Magua stands

only serves to accentuate the rough violence of

be-

way. The placid foreground. The tiny

Uncas, poised on a boulder, seems to express the hopelessness of survival against such mighty and pitiless odds. Even more poignant is the

ter axis of the composition, How can

positioned exactly at the cen-

a minute slip of

GLOOM AND DOOM

I5

excessively dark, deep, powerful, and vast? Indeed, another minute and nearly everyone will be dead: Cora; Uncas and the scout Heyward, stabbed by Magua; and Magua, shot by Hawk-Eye, lying at the bottom of the abyss, all of them swallowed up by inexorable darkness. For Cole, past brutality, suffering, and death reverberated in the present-day landscape, even in its most peaceful moods. His r826 poem "Lines on Lake George" celebrates the lake's purity and timeless tranquillity. Yet in r757, during the French and Indian War, that unsullied paradise had been the site of the gruesome Fort Henry massacre. Again, Last of the Mohicans may have furnished inspiration. Subtitled A Narrative of I757, the novel recounted this event, a factual anchor for Cooper's romantic fiction. In the poem Cole remembers when the streams feeding the lake ran red with men's "hot blood," and "warm heart's blood" trickled over the mossy boulder where a wounded soldier fainted and died. Savage Indians massacred defenseless victims, "Dying female shrieks, I And the weak plaint of feeble innocence; I Mingled with yells of Indians banqueting in blood." To look upon that smiling, dimpled lake, one would never imagine it had seen such sickening horrors. Cole prayed that the calm and lovely days of peace might never be broken.26 Yet again and again he returned to the theme of violence-real and implied-in the American wilderness. The lost painting Chocorua's Curse (r829) dealt unambiguously with the haunting presence of the bloody past. The idea arose from Cole's r828 tour in the White Mountains, where Mount Chocorua rose "like an immense pyramid" from its forested base. Curious about the mountain's name, Cole learned that soon after the French and Indian War, the native Chocorua became the target of a white man bent on revenge. The legend told how this hunter and his party chased Chocorua to the very summit of the "high and almost inaccessible mountain" and gave him a choice: jump from the dreadful precipice, or perish by their rifles. Chocorua chose the latter rather than brave that "terrific leap." He uttered a curse with his dying lips, and ever after, cattle grazing on his old hunting ground took sick and died. 27 An engraving after the painting appeared in The Token in r83o (Fig. 9). The hunted Indian lies stranded on a dark crag high over a dizzying abyss. Jagged, broken trees fill the opposite corner. The hunting party has just attained the summit, and their leader stands poised to shoot. Chocorua's desperation is almost palpable, even in the crude reproduction. Rather than show the landscape at peace, Cole chose to represent the murderous act that had tainted this not-so-virgin wilderness. The darkest side of the landscape was the space of violence and deadly conflict that lay, or lurked, in even the most serene and domesticated prospect and echoed, however distantly, in the present. Cole staged his epics of strife between Euro-American invaders and native tribes at the time of relentless pressure to remove and exterminate Indians. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, white settlers flowed west in great numbers to cultivate lands inhabited by native peoples. Conflict in-

r6

GLOOM AND DOOM

FIGURE 9.

in The

After Thomas 1830.

Indiana.

resistance to the invasion and appropriation of

as Indians

evitably Their attacks

in their own

the

enemies to

massacres allowed

wielded

I813-14,

Creeks at Fort

of two hundred Mims in

Jackson's

men,

murderers of

acts of violent conquest. won1en,

land.

as

in r828

beginning of the massive

campaign that displaced some seventy thousand west of the Mississippi and kiiled

Indian

the Indians from the

in the end, were the

The

slaughtered

displaced their own savagery upon the 28

Cole's paintings of the American connected from such events. Set in a

as "Lower World" seem on past,

dis-

surface

romanticize raw cruelty,

and

the figure

an "Indian

Gilmor on one occasion recommended that Cole

GLOOM AND DOOM

17

Hunter ... with his rifle leveled and one or two deer crossing an open space" to "assist the idea of solitude" in picturing the "desolate wilderness of American nature." Later, Gilmor expressed delight with Cole's rendering of the "savages" in Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans. " 29 For Gilmor, and probably for Cole, Indians lived only in the mythic time glamorized by Cooper and elegized by Cole himself in "Lines on Lake George." Thus they could take their place as accessories inhabiting the landscape in its primordial state. But the darkness, violence, and deathliness of Cole's landscapes form a gothic pattern that allows us to trace the histories his paintings contrive to mask in the language of the sublime. In Cole's gothic wilderness, the New World was a paradise lost almost from the start. As such, it was the fitting repository for all the painter's melancholy fears. Like Brown's landscapes, Cole's are doubly haunted, by history and by the shadows of his own doubt and despair. Cole worshiped the beauty of nature and sought within it the presence of the divine. Nonetheless, often plummeting into his own bottomless abyss, he viewed the world as desolation, as the end rather than the beginning of time. Longing for stability and peace, he was irresistibly drawn to confusion, chaos, collapse, and disintegration. In the "Lower World" inner darkness and the darkness of history converged. Yet the longer Cole lived and struggled in modern America, the more it, too, seemed fatally tainted. Early on, Cole was acutely conscious of the vast divide between his old and new homes. Before making his first trip back to England and the Continent, he traveled to Niagara Falls and saw the city of Rochester, New York, which impressed him as a wonder of the world, a large, handsome town, risen in the midst of the wilderness. "But for the appearance of newness," he wrote, "the traveller would imagine that it would have been the work of ages. Bridges, Aqueducts, Warehouses and huge mills which are the Castles of the United States are standing over the rushing waters and in future ages they shall tell the story of the enterprise and industry of the present generation-These edifices will not be hallowed by the deeds of noble knights .... No! But they will stand as monuments of the triumphs of peace and liberty-and the romantic interest of chivalrous days shall be dimmed by the brighter and happier exploits of peace." These shining new castles of industry, material symbols of American progress and prosperity, would never molder under darkening skies. 30 By contrast, the castles of Europe stood as emblems of a dark past. When Cole toured the dungeons under the fortress of Volterra in r 8 3I, he found them "dreadful" and "fearful." In their depths, the Medici had incarcerated their political foes, burying them alive. "The walls, I whispered to myself, have resounded to the moans of suffering and hunger, and the curses of despair," Cole wrote in his travel journal. "As I retreated through the gloomy passages, the sense of human

18

GLOOM AND DOOM

cruelty bore with a crushing weight upon my heart, and I was glad when we ... stood again beneath the pure blue sky." Ten years later, in Sicily, Cole pondered the lesson embodied in the ruins there. "Our only means of judging the future is the past," he said. "We see that nations have sprung from obscurity, risen to glory, and decayed. Their rise has in general been marked by virtue; their decadence by vice, vanity, and licentiousness. Let us beware!" Haunted throughout his adult life by thoughts of impending cataclysm, Cole came to see in the ruins of Europe the specter of what America might become, its "Castles" reduced to heaps of rubble. 31 Cole shared these forebodings with Edgar Allan Poe (I809-49). In I83I Poe drafted the first version of a poem about a ruined city, slowly sinking into the sea. It was published as "The Doomed City." In I 8 3 6 he revised it and renamed it "The City of Sin." The third and final title, from I 84 5, was "The City in the Sea." From one title to the next, Poe's imagery remained consistent, conjuring up an eerie metropolis: Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest. There shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours.

"Melancholy waters" slowly engulf the solitary town. Poe describes its lurid light, streaming up from below and illuminating the domes and spires, the shrines, the kingly halls and the "Babylonlike walls." All the while "from a proud tower in the town I Death looks gigantically down." The sea is motionless. Not even a ripple curls along this "wilderness of glass," so "hideously serene," until the end, when the faintest breath of movement and a red glow upon the waves foreshadow the city's disappearance into the depths of the ocean. 32 A year after Poe drafted the first version of this poem, Cole produced his first painting of ruins, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, showing a crumbling medieval tower on a hill above encircling waters (Fig. I o). In I 8 3 6, the year Poe revised the poem, Cole finished Desolation, the last painting in the five-part series The Course of Empire (Fig. rr). In it a lone Corinthian column, ivy surrounding its base, stands amid the colossal wreckage of fractured arches and tottering colonnades, half submerged in the waters of a dead-calm, moonlit harbor. In the mid-I84os, just when Poe published his final version of "The City in the Sea," Cole wrote an apocalyptic prose sketch,

GLOOM AND DOOM

I9

Thomas Snanon

x

". Collection

"Verdura." And one of his very last paintings, The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His journey, showed the wayfarer at the gulf of eternity, where the ruined temple of Mammon lies, a jumble of rubble, on the shore (see Fig. 27). What to make of this striking convergence of vision in the art of the poet and the painter? Cole and Poe, though near contemporaries, never met. There is no evidence that Cole read Poe's work, which until the I 84os was not widely known, or that Poe saw Cole's. The nearly simultaneous emergence of ruin imagery in their work may be coincidental. Both had access to certain widely circulated and influential sources, such as Constantin Fran~:.;ois Volney's Ruins (I 79 3) and the work of Lord Byron, notably Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (I 8 I 8 ), a romantic textbook of sorts on the meanings of ruin. The fact that they sustained an interest in the subject through the I 83os, though, suggests some shared response to the mounting turmoil and anxiety about the future that marked the Jacksonian era. 33 In the I83os and I84os social and political establishments were under attack. The burgeoning market economy and industrialization, slavery and abolition, immigration, urban growth, the emergent working class, financial crises, and sectional strife generated tremendous unease and misgiving about the nation's future. Abolitionism and nativist agitation were rampant, and rioting was out of control in the big cities. Particularly virulent was anti-Catholic feeling, which boiled over most horribly on August n,

I

8 34, when a mob sacked and burned the Ursuline convent in

Charlestown, Massachusetts. Etchings published in r 8 3 6 by the Boston cartoonist David Claypoole Johnston show looters brandishing torches, trampling a crucifix, and dragging a dead nun from a coffin while flames engulf the building behind them (Figs. 12, I3 ). The aftermath displays "two monuments" together, the obelisk on Bunker's Hill-commemorating the battle of I775and the convent ruins, "in commemoration of the glorious deeds of the heroes of r 8 34· " 34 Civil disorder and natural disasters alike contributed to the visual iconography of ruin in the I

8 3 os and I 84os. In I 8 3 5 a huge fire burned out the business and financial heart of New York, re-

ducing hundreds of buildings to cinders and setting off "a very saturnalia of lawlessness." When it was over, thousands gathered "in silent crowds about the great heaps of ruins that still sent up clouds of black and dismal smoke." All around were horrible scenes of desolation. 35 After the fire, Nathaniel Currier published John Bufford's lithograph Ruins of the Merchant's Exchange representing just such a sight: a gutted facade, still smoldering (Fig. 14). In r 84 5 another fire in the same area set off a terrific explosion and demolished two hundred buildings. Again, Currier published views of the cataclysm. In addition, his firm regularly issued prints depicting steamboat explosions and other disasters. These concrete catastrophes served to heighten already widespread anxieties about the nation's ultimate disintegration. For Cole and Poe alike, the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline. Both subscribed to the cyclical theory of history, especially as it pertained to contemporary conditions in GLOOM AND DOOM

21

FlGUIU ! 2..

David CL1ypoolc Johnston, "Anti Catholic Doings,''

published in IS) 6. \Xii!son Library Annex, University of !vlinnesou I ,ibraries. FlCURE 1 'l.

David Claypoole Johnston.

"The Two Monuments.'' published in Scraps, I x3 0. \Vibon Library Annex, Um versi tv o{ \!i nnesota Libraries.

the United Stares. In that belief rbey were hardly unusu;d. Disorderly, expanding democracy pro-

voked intense con sen ative fear rhar society vYas headed for a breakdown. Everywhere, signs were nmmous; everywhere, ruin loomed. In 1838 the diari~t Philip Hone, vvho owned Cole's Lake with

Dead Trees, feared th< 6 I t•.

Art

Amherst

FIGURE 22"

8, Oil on canvas, 40

fbomas

AC: 1950.I9o.

61 ".Mead

:\ n1herst

production. On the dark side were shattered stumps, tumbledown arches, cracked turrets shrouded in ivy, shadowed and sinister castles. On the bright side were sunny meadows, tranquil lakes, grand mountain ranges, and the hope of a dazzling Hereafter. Unlike Poe, who pitched headlong into his own personal depths, Cole managed to stay aloft and keep the two forces in play. But there was always a gap between them, difficult if not impossible to bridge. The recurrent themes of the cracked wall and the split-open tower were the permanent markers of the painter's embattled stance against the world. 57 That embattled stance, finally, illuminates the theme of solitude that recurs time and again in Cole's art. Even in the midst of family life, Cole thought of himself as an isolated man. He explored the subject from the earliest years of his life as an artist. Simeon Stylites, an idea for a neverrealized painting, conflates man with architecture, showing the desert anchorite standing on top of a lofty column, far above the heads of followers clustering at its base (Fig. 23). In Desolation, the last painting of The Course of Empire, a single tall, mighty column dominates the twilight scene (see Fig. n). Wrapped in ivy, it serves as nesting place for a pair of herons. Cole wanted this last painting to be the "funeral knell of departed greatness," expressing "silence and solitude." Hereturned to the theme again in Taormina, Sicily, where in I 842 he sketched a solitary broken column, standing sentinel among ruined walls and cavelike arches (Fig. 24). 58 Cole's writings provide a running commentary on his preoccupation with solitude, which as concept and experience was multifaceted, varying with his age and situation. The quest for solitude and self-discovery in the wilderness made up the backbone of his art in the I 8 2os. In the I 8 3os his thoughts turned to marriage, which he professed to have little hope of attaining. To a recently betrothed friend, he wrote, "I am still single & alas likely to remain so. I am not so fortunate as you-I find no congenial spirit to mingle soul with my soul." He thought of returning to Italy, since nothing tied him

to

his home: "Thus it is to be a bachelor-rootless!" Marriage and fatherhood

failed, despite their joys, to dispel his sense of isolation or end his nomadic habits. Many a winter he was forced to stay in New York for weeks or months waiting for the Hudson River to thaw so that he could return to his wife and children in Catskill. Even in their company, he felt himself a lone traveler. In I838, just after the birth of his first child, he wrote to Durand that he was "toiling up mountains ... solitary and companionless." The mountains in this case were on his easel, but the solitary ascent was characteristic. Melancholy, he wrote in one of his many poems, was always near the "lonely wanderer," her pale face like the moon "when falls her gentle light I On some lone tower or antique arch." His career suffering setbacks in the I 84os, he bemoaned his fate: "I am in a remote place. I am forgotten by the great world, if I ever was known. What a dismal situation!" 59

36

GLOOM AND D00.\1

'[hmm1s

,\imeon

Pcncil on paper, () 1i:1 > 5 New York State Dino

Petrocelli. FIG U llJi 2-'t·

i\!fount

Etntt

The Detroit Institute of i'·,rr:;,

Cole's domestic circumstances contributed to his chronic feeling of marginality. He met Maria Bartow at Cedar Grove, the Catskills estate of John Alexander Thomson. Maria and her three sisters were Thomson's nieces and wards. When Cole and Bartow married, they moved together into a second-floor bedroom at Cedar Grove, and all three of Maria's unmarried sisters occupied the other bedroom (the "Girls' Room") on that floor. In this menage, Cole in a sense assumed the dependent position once occupied by his father, though of course the artist by that time was hardly empty-handed. Destitute of a place to call his own, he lacked patriarchal power and authority in the household, even to the extent of being required to pay boarding expenses. As the lone younger male, he was decidedly outnumbered if not overwhelmed. In I839 he found some relief when Thomson let him have a temporary painting room in a newly built storehouse, enabling the painter to flee the "noise and bustle" of the family's home. When Thomson finally died in

I

846, Cole did

not come into the property. Maria and her sisters jointly inherited the house and surrounding lands, with the exception of two acres Cole had purchased from Thomson some years before. At that late date he finally set about building his own studio on the one bit of land he actually owned. 60 Nor did the happiness of marriage shelter Cole from the continued demands and sufferings of his own family. His parents both died in I837, James of a stroke in February and Mary in October. Mary Cole suffered horribly in the months before she died. Visiting her in August, Cole wrote to his wife that his mother was in the grip of relentless pain. The family was in dire financial straits as well, exacerbated no doubt by the general climate of economic depression. The deaths of his impecunious father and mother did little to relieve Cole of his obligations, however. Dr. William George Ackerley, husband of Cole's sister Mary, was as ineffectual as Cole's father had been when it came to business. Sarah Cole, unmarried, lived with them and reported the woes of the household in letters to her brother. The doctor was always hard up and could not collect his fees from his patients. The landlord was coming after the rent, which they were unprepared to pay. They had not gotten their winter wood, potatoes, or flour. "We are in a pretty thin way in the money line," she ended. "I am sorry it is so just at this time when your purse is so low for I am sure you must be harassed." In 1842 the doctor became gravely ill and died with much suffering. The family continued to be short of money. 61 Given that history, it is tempting to imagine a hint of self-portraiture in Cole's Prometheus Bound (I 84 7; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), with its titanic figure chained to a flinty mountain peak, waiting for the vulture that every day for all time will tear out and devour his self-regenerating liver. 62 Cole aspired with all his being to rise

to

the heights of inspiration, exaltation, and spirituality

in art. He conceived of his calling as a sacred, holy mission. Yet time and again the world, and the past (like Prometheus's vulture), caught and pulled him down. Once, he lamented in his journal,

38

GLOOM AND DOOM

FIGURE 25.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, r84o. Oil on canvas, Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.1:07.

52

x 78 ".Munson-Williams-

he had been absorbed in love of the beautiful in nature. Now the world, with its multitudinous affairs, was breaking in on his "former little kingdom of the mind. It is a hard battle that I have to fight. The fire which burns within me receives no fuel from without. Society is uncongenial, it is material, unspiritual." Cataloguing recent reversals, he concluded: "I have been sadly thrown back in my pecuniary matters and I am yet struggling with poverty and obtain just sufficient money to supply the immediate wants of myself and family. " 63 Significantly, the traveler in The Voyage of Life ( r 84o; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute) is a solitary man. In this monumental four-part allegory commissioned by Samuel Ward, Cole imagined life as a river journey, beginning at dawn in some tropical paradise and flowing on through bosky groves and green meadows. In Manhood, however, the weather turns bad (Fig.

2

5). Here

the beleaguered voyager, in a now rudderless and battered boat, rushes helplessly on dark waters toward boiling rapids. Around him loom craggy pinnacles of rock and tormented, naked trees. Among the churning douds hover shrieking demonic forms. Through a small clearing in the

GLOOM AND DOOM

39

far above, the man's guardian angel observes his plight but refuses to intervene. The rapids thunder around a bend in the river and crash down a steep, twisting, narrow channel. In the distance, the darkness lifts, and we can see the vast ocean of eternity. In this painting the landscape enacts a pantomime of the man's torment. About to be hurled down the rapids, he stands poised on the brink. Twisted trunks and branches mirror his agony. The storm clouds become ghastly, portentous spirits, identified by Cole as the demons of "Suicide, Intemperance, and Murder which are the temptations that beset men in their direst trouble." For all that the allegory delivers its message through a religious and supernatural language, the landscape elements are consistent with the "Lower World" vocabulary of natural forms Cole formulated, visually and mentally, at the very beginning of his career. The artist certainly intended The Voyage of Life to be an intensely public work of art, yet it follows the established course of his inner voyages as well. 64 Cole's Manhood represents the climactic stage of life's journey, perilous and agonizing. Its topography is likewise the grand climax of his naturalized vocabulary of mental strife. Other paintings in the series exhibit different but equally telling landscape symbols: the cave of birth and its complement, the shadowy gulf or ocean of eternity, powerful metaphors for the beginning and the end. The end, more than anything else, harbored Cole's fear of regression into the ultimate and irreversible state of nonbeing. When dark thoughts of failure and ruin beset him, he conjured up visions of nothingness. After he was dead, he ruminated, "my works and the worthiest reputation I may gain shall be as though they never were, swept by the wing of time into oblivion's gulf. And shall it be? Shall not the spirit ... sink also into the gloomy depths of nonentity?" Life's journey was from darkness to darkness, from cave to grave. 65 In Old Age, the last painting in The Voyage of Life, the now decrepit man, his boat broken, drifts down to the "vast and midnight" ocean of eternity (Fig. 26). 66 Above his head appears a heavenly vision: beams of light transporting legions of angels, ready to welcome him home. This was Cole's pious hope over the last decade of his life when he turned to conventional religion to cast light into the dark mysteries of eternity. In his allegories, however, light is almost always evenly balanced, or pitted, against darkness, reflecting the artist's persistent fascination with the realm of obscurity and nothingness. The Cross and the World (1846-47), Cole's last moralizing, allegorical series, dramatized the ambiguities that shadowed his vision to the end. This five-part visual narrative remained unfinished at the time of his death. The story follows two "pilgrims" through life, from youth to the journey's end. As the title implies, the young men setting forth on their pilgrimage choose different paths, one through a perilous wilderness and the other through a voluptuous realm of wealth, luxury, and pleasure. As in The Voyage of Life, Cole's own adventures in the wilds of his imagination

40

GLOOM AND DOOM

FIGURE 26.

of Life: Old Age, r84o. Oil on canvas, 52 x Thorr1as Cole, The Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.108.

".Munson-Williams-

served as template for the landscapes of his pilgrims' progress. Although the

are

lost and the studies scattered, Cole's descriptions chart familiar territory.

When the young n1en part, the first directs his steps through a

«n'""'r"

the

meadow

"rugged gorge" rising beyond. A "dark mist" in the distance conceals the difficulties

sorrows bot-

that lie ahead. The worldly youth, by contrast, sets out for the radiant tom of a "graceful and winding way." In the distance are the pinnacles and domes of a great The first pilgrim, grown to manhood, finds himself in a howling

of black

chasms, and angry cataracts. He "pursues his way on the edge of a frightful precipice" in a moment fraught with peril. Light from the cross, however, keeps him on his narrow way. Finally, an man, he attains the summit and catches his first view of the

and eternal." The cross

now spills blinding radiance over the scene as angels advance to lead the pilgrim into the infinite. Meanwhile, the other pilgrim, having used up his allotment of worldly delights, has arrived at the "horrid brink" overhanging the "outer darkness" (Fig.

Surrounded by rubble from the Tern-

pie of Mammon and rotting trees from the gardens of pleasure, he looks out onto an

GLOOM AND DOOM

4T

FIGURE 27.

Thomas Cole, study for The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His journey, from The Cross and the World, ca. r 84 7· Oil on canvas, r 2 x r 8". Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.

ocean. In the sky hovers the fearful vision of death, a skull with vast, spreading wings. In this vision of the end, nature and culture alike stand in ruins. 67 Such places and spaces-the precipice, the abyss, the ruin, the dark expanse, oblivion's gulf, the ocean of eternity-had been in Cole's head from his earliest years as a landscape painter and dreamer. His thoughts at the close of r 8 39 were entirely characteristic. As usual, he translated his anxieties about ruin and death into landscape metaphor: "The latest footsteps of the year are now being impressed on the sandy and unstable shores of time, that shore which skirts the ocean [of] eternity. It is a narrow shore which man treads; before him spread thick mists and darkness[,] and ever and anon we hear the plunge of one who has fallen into the gulf into which we all must descend." It is fitting that one of his last paintings should take that awful gulf as its theme. Never ready for that plunge, he nonetheless lost his own footing on the brink in February rR48. Taken with an inflammation of the lungs on the fifth of the month, he died five days later at the age of forty-seven. Was he destined for eternity in the light of the cross, or would he stand in the ruins, looking out at nothing? 68

42

GLOOM AND DOOM

Sober, religious, and fiercely earnest, Cole was no tortured, unraveling poet. Yet his many domestic difficulties, his hard-won yet always unsure foothold in a highly fluid art-world economy, and the many abrasive clashes between high ideals and market demands were more than enough to populate his own depths with a family of demons. His stormy scenes and visions of destruction are powerful, often extravagant, visual statements. Next to them, his Arcadian fantasies and pastoral landscapes, however sincere, seem bland. To the end of his days, Cole both nurtured andresisted a strong attraction toward darkness: the plunge into the abyss, the headlong rush down black rapids underground, the desolate contemplation of nothingness. His fascination with the bad ending was dead level with his yearning after the rapture of the good. Salvation and damnation were equally possible, and (perversely) equally interesting. Cole's wilderness was the haunted ground of this tormenting and profound ambivalence. In turn, his dark vocabulary of wilderness, ruin, and doom would offer his successors an alternative to the sunny vision of the American pastoral. The alien terrain of ruin always lay just beneath and beyond the margins of the sunlit meadows and peaceful glades that proliferated in nineteenth-century art. The bloody frontier, the gaslit slum, the dismal swamp, and the blasted battlefield were landscapes of the "Lower World" that only a gothic language could represent. However fantastic and theatrical, Cole's imagery was a point of access into that unquiet netherworld of history.

GLOOM AND DOOM

43

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

S

ometime in r859 or r86o, the Pittsburgh painter David Gilmour Blythe (r8rs-6s) produced

the satirical self-portrait Art versus Law (see Plate 3 ). With palette in hand and canvases under

his arm, the artist stands at the top of a dingy stairway and stares at a "To Let" sign posted on the door of his studio. The sign advises that the landlord will waive the deposit and pay the water tax, "Provided the Tenant uses any water." A smaller placard tacked up on the left announces, "No admittance till all conditions are complied with," and another on the right says, "For further information apply way down stairs." Prominent on the shabby door is a large padlock. The landing is cluttered with junk: broken crockery, a liquor bottle atop a battered keg, a jug by the door, and at bottom left a wooden crate, signed by Blythe and containing a broom, yet another bottle, and an upended pair of boots. The painter, as seedy as his surroundings, wears a ragged coat splitting at the seams and a bashedin top hat. His pants are patched, his shoes scuffed, his hair and beard shaggy. Glaring, sulfurous light floods the landing, but just over the painter's head a black wedge of shadow slants down. The signs on the door reinforce the visual evidence of the painter's condition. By implication, the cast-out tenant must be unclean. The instruction to apply "way down stairs" has a double edge, suggesting not only the location of the rental office but also the downward mobility and abject social destiny of this beggarly artist. Hemmed in by dark shadows and locked out of the higher realms

44

of art, he has no choice but to descend. Art versus Law is a compelling visual paradigm of the artist as outsider, against the law in every sense. The jugs and bottles that litter the gloomy attic vestibule signal the probable cause of the artist's undoing. The broken-slatted crate harbors further clues, easy to decipher once we know that Blythe's nickname was "Boots." A habitual punster, he sometimes signed his paintings with a pair of boots, or inscribed the word itself somewhere on the canvas. Surely it is no accident that in Art versus

Law the upended boots lie jumbled with the liquor bottle in the bottom of the box, with its disquieting resemblance to a cheap coffin. These objects take on emblematic status as a disguised portrait of the artist and the drunkard's doom that awaits him. The painting's first owner, C. H. Wolff, took the image at face value. He had purchased Art versus

Law directly from the artist in r86o. "This work," he wrote, "portrays a true incident in the life of the artist when occupying a studio in Denny's Building, corner of Market and Fourth St. Pittsburghhis own form and suggestive features are admirably given-poor Blythe; all knew his faults-few his virtues." 1 It is more than a simple self-portrait, however. Transforming the stuff of everyday life into the language of visual metaphor, it maps the obsessions that haunted this painter, who operated on a dark urban frontier populated by drunkards, loafers, and dangerous guttersnipes. Unlike Thomas Cole, seeking his dark side in untamed nature or romantic ruins, Blythe explored his own lower depths in the modern urban wilderness. Pittsburgh was the nominal setting for his vision of the urban underground, but Blythe was no realist artist-reporter, nor was he driven primarily by social concern. In his canvases inner darkness fused with the subterranean, disorderly shadow world of the modern metropolis, a realm of deadly but irresistible temptation. At the same time, Blythe's urban phantasmagoria both reflected and embodied emergent middle-class perceptions of the city as the locus of hidden but ever present menace from below. Mining the metropolitan underground for subjects, Blythe formulated his aesthetics of degradation, compounded of grotesque bodies, lurid effects, and spectacular decay. Following in the fated pathway of Edgar Allan Poe-an alter ego-Blythe was the flaneur of the dark alley and the seedy dive. In this chapter I explore these sites, moving from the realm of Blythe's inner demons to the metropolitan underground and finally back into the painter's own troubled interior. 2 Blythe's career as painter of the urban gothic was brief. Nearly all his topical paintings date from the last nine years of his life. Born in East Liverpool, Ohio, Blythe was the son of a Scottish immigrant cooper and an Irish mother. According to the Blythe expert Bruce Chambers, the painter's rigorously Presbyterian parents gave him a strict moral education, a vivid sense of sin, and a strong commitment to individual rights and liberty. Blythe served an apprenticeship to a wood carver in Pittsburgh and became a ship's carpenter in the U.S. Navy. Upon his discharge in

I

840, he took

up the life of an itinerant (and generally mediocre) portrait painter, eventually settling in Union-

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

45

town, Pennsylvania, where he married Julia Keffer in I 848. The death of his young wife after less than two years of marriage may have been the prime catalyst of a long downward-spiraling journey. The commercial failure of his Great Moving Panorama of the Allegheny Mountains ( r 8 50-5 I; lost) probably helped accelerate this decline. 3 After an interval of restless relocations, Blythe chose Pittsburgh as his base of operations in I 8 56 and began to paint the dark side of modern urban life, producing works both funny and corrosive. As disunion and conflict loomed in the late

I

8 sos,

Blythe took up more and more politically barbed subjects, which dominated his output during the war years. In r865 the artist died at age fifty, probably from chronic alcoholism. Coming out of an artisan tradition, Blythe worked on the margins of the art world. He schooled himself in popular comic art and political caricature, appropriating images from past and present prints, illustrations, and cartoons. According to Chambers, "a large part of Blythe's preparation for his works may have consisted of the haunting of Pittsburgh's newsstands and bookstores in search of pictorial fodder." He showed his works mainly in the display window of a print dealer, his friend

J. J.

Gillespie, his audience an ever changing stream of passersby. Blythe's window ex-

hibits were said to be "the talk of the town, and attracted such crowds that one could scarcely get along the street." Such tactics underline the sensational and popular character of his urban scenes. 4 An elusive subject, Blythe is doubly difficult to pin down because nearly all his papers are lost, bits and pieces surviving only in transcription. A handful of poems, the paintings themselves, scraps of critical response, and a few recollections, many based on tradition or hearsay, constitute the record. However scant, the evidence indicates that Blythe was a compound of striking oddities. Tall and rangy, he was known by his disheveled red hair and beard. According to the Uniontown historian James Hadden, after Julia's death Blythe-unkempt inside and out-became careless of his dress and "utterly regardless of the opinion of his fellowmen." Hadden detailed Blythe's sartorial eccentricities: Having secured a piece of buffalo robe he decided to make himself a cap of it. He cut out pieces and sewed them together and put it on. Such an outlandish looking affair could scarcely be imagined. It covered his head from his eyes to his neck and his most intimate friends could not recognize him. He needed a coat so he purchased a piece of goods, took it to Ab. Guiler's tailor shop where he spread it across the cutting board and without a single measurement cut out pieces which he thought, when sewn together, could be called a coat. He did all the tailor work himself and then put it on .... It fit him "like a shirt on a bean pole," but nevertheless he wore this suit for years. 5

By most accounts, Blythe rejected the gentlemanly codes of conduct that governed the behavior of more socially ambitious peers. He was remembered for his failure to "exemplify the virtues of industry and material success which dominated the business community." He was rude to stu46

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

dio visitors, took no interest in marketing his paintings, and "never seemed to care whether they pleased or no." Shortly after his death, the Daily Post described him as the "peculiar local artist ... singular, but gifted." Thirty years later, the Pittsburgh Gazette claimed him as "our eccentric artist." As Blythe's biographer Dorothy Miller noted, despite inaccuracies arising from foggy memories, the published statements emphasized Blythe's "eccentricities, his independence of character, his complete honesty, his passionate patriotism, his carelessness of dress, and his convivial nature. " 6 The notion of the painter as tippler endured. One writer rated Blythe an outright genius who "but for whiskey, might have made himself a name among the highest in the country." When the Whitney Museum mounted a Blythe exhibition in I 9 3 6, Time published a colorful profile of the painter, portraying him as "unkempt, red-whiskered, hard-drinking, and contemptuous of his popularity." Bruce Chambers has made an effort to normalize him, arguing that there is no direct, compelling evidence that Blythe had a drinking problem or that Julia's death caused his downfall. Yet his own writings and his many paintings on the subject of drunkenness suggest otherwise. And certainly the bottles on the studio landing in Art versus Law hint strongly that the problem lurked close to home? Blythe may have modeled himself on Poe in fashioning a down-and-out artistic identity. From several allusions in his own verse, it is clear that Blythe knew something of the poet, if only through reading "The Raven," much admired and much parodied from the moment of its publication in I

84 5. 8 An omnivorous consumer of newspapers and magazines, Blythe probably picked up many

bits of information and misinformation. Beyond this, in the absence of evidence, it is impossible to establish how well Blythe knew Poe's work and reputation, but the parallels are suggestive. A many-sided, brilliant, unstable figure given to self-defeating antagonisms and periodic bouts with the bottle, Poe inspired both love and hate, admiration and disgust. Adrift on the tides of the market revolution, he was chronically unable to hold down a job or

to

make even a subsistence

living from his writing. His erratic, extravagant behavior gave rise to a myth of the artist as degenerate that began to form in his lifetime and colored his public image after his death. Chief among his detractors was the magazine writer and editor Rufus Griswold, with whom Poe had a rocky relationship over the course of several years. After Poe's death, Griswold wrote an obituary for the New York Tribune in which he highlighted Poe's dissipation, restlessness, and perpetual want of money and painted a word picture of the deranged poet as an intoxicated wanderer: He was at times a dreamer-dwelling in ideal realms-in heaven or hell, peopled with creations and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes turned up in passionate prayers ... or with his glance introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the wind and rain, he would speak as if to spirits. THE UNDERGROUND MAN

47

In later accounts Griswold improved on this portrait with even more lurid details of the poet's disorderly conduct and drunken escapades. He recounted the circumstances of Poe's death in Baltimore, where, having entered a tavern, he succumbed to drink: "His resolutions and duties were forgotten; in a few hours he was in such a state as is commonly induced only by long-continued intoxication; after a night of insanity and exposure, he was carried to a hospital; and there ... he died, at the age of thirty-eight years." Many took Griswold's accounts as truth, riddled with exaggerations and inaccuracies though they were, and even Poe's supporters saw his life, if not his art, as a disastrous downward slide. As George R. Graham wrote, "Let the moralist who stands upon tufted carpet ... pause before he lets the anathema ... fall upon a man like Poe! who, wandering from publisher to publisher ... finds no market for his brain-with despair at heart, misery ahead ... and gaunt famine dogging at his heels, thus sinks by the wayside, before the demon that watches his steps and whispers,

OBLIVION." 9

Blythe dwelled on his own downward spiral in both verse and art. Like Thomas Cole, he was a poet-painter, producing almost seventy recorded poems. His poetic output ranged from pensive and sentimental to satirical and extravagantly bizarre. The sentimental verses are bland and conventional, although the artist on occasion liked to poke holes in his poetic gossamer. He began one poem, for example, in romantic cadences describing the fall of "mantling shadows" and "sable darkness" upon the sleeping world. He ended it, however, with a cheeky thud: "On that memorable night that Tom came I s'near breaking his neck on the back porch." More malignant are his verses on the corruption of the world and of the body. These poems exhibit a striking fascination with the imagery of abjection: decay, vomit, swill, ooze, putridity, bodily disorder, and dissolution . 10 Blythe's verse portraits of drunkards are in that vein, steeped in a disgust that seems to fuse selfloathing with a caustic contempt for human frailty: Out from the cold black emptiness Of a Drunkard's home, Slowly and hush'd as A Gnome-shade, vomited from the green pestilent Stomach of a sepulchre, comes forth a thing The suppliant tongue of charity might Hesitate to call a man.

The verses follow his "wayward feet" to a barroom, where "hot-breathed temptation stands" with a "blood-shot window I Winking him a welcome." Quaffing the "demonizing draught," the drunkard idles away the "God-bought hours." His eye is like an "angry, ill-closed, half-heal'd I Wound," his cheek "like blood-dip't I Violets." The poem ends on a note of what seems like sheer absurdity:

48

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

He wakes: and like the Raven on "the palled Bust of Pallas," falls the light in yellow Flakes upon his liquid cheek, simmering Similar to corn-dodgers frying on The red-hottedness of-the Lord-knows what.

The reference, of course, is to "The Raven," Poe's most famous poem, irreverently paired with those sizzling corn cakes. The conclusion mocks the highly colored language dramatizing the drunkard's subhuman degradation, yet its nonsense seems to mimic the collapse of reason, decorum, and self-control in the last stages of chronic alcoholism. 11 "The Drunkard's Doom: By 'Boots"' retraces some of the same steps, once more using images of decay: Did'st ever seriously think How awful is the drunkard's doom? Trace, step by step and drink by drink, Until he sees his body sink Into its loathsome tomb.

This dour poem diagrams the drunkard's sad history. He takes an occasional glass at first, but soon he is a full-time habitue of the grog shop, where with every drink a coin goes "clink" into the landlord's till. His home is wretched, his wife and child heartbroken. At last "crime's putrid wave" sweeps him from the earth, his body in some forgotten grave, his soul in hell. In another poem an exasperated wife throws a "washtub full of thickened swill" on her husband as he tries to enter his barred and bolted house. Afterward, the "moons pale ray" picks out a "great big drownded loafer" sprawled out before the unyielding door. References to drink abound in Blythe's verse, sometimes riotous, sometimes rueful. One of them seems frankly confessional, though in an antic spirit. Referring to a night when he had scribbled some scabrous verses on the town of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Blythe wrote: 'Tis very likely "Boots" was drunk And occupied a garret bunk, But what of that?

Finally, one of his rare aphorisms is a rumination on renouncing drink: "There is a philosophy in the remark, 'I've quit drinking': Yes, some people do quit some things: and some people quit quitting some things-and some people quit quitting to quit some things. There are a thousand things ought to be condem'd-a thousand things that to condem-we must condem ourselves." This sug-

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

49

gests many a vacillating attempt to renounce the habit. 12 But in death, Blythe followed in Poe's footsteps. On May I 5, I 8 6 5, a friend came to visit and found the painter on the floor, mortally ill. Taken to the Passavant Hospital, he died the next day, the cause diagnosed as mania potu, or delirium from drink. !3 Blythe's verse narratives follow the formulaic tracks of the temperance novels and plays that abounded in the I 8 3 os and r84os, when legions of middle-class reformers attacked drinking as deadly to domestic happiness and social order. These didactic tales typically feature a clean-living innocent who by trickery gets hooked on liquor and descends inexorably into degradation. Spending every cent on booze, such characters lose their jobs, pawn their clothes, beggar their families, turn to crime, beat and sometimes murder their wives, and ultimately end up in jail-if not dead. The action is melodramatic, the language florid. One drunkard, for example, denounces the evil tavern keeper who has destroyed his manhood: "Eternal curses on you! Had it not been for your infernal poison shop in our village, I had still been a man-the foul den where you plunder the pockets of your fellows, where you deal forth death in tumblers, and from whence goes forth the blast of ruin over the land." The only salvation lay in signing the pledge of total abstinence. Like a magic shield, the pledge was all-powerful against temptation-at least in fantasy. 14 Blythe's fascination with the most sordid details of inebriation and his vision of the drunkard as festering excrescence suggest something more than the rote rehearsal of well-worn tropes. His paintings on the subject are grimly comic essays, simultaneously attractive and repulsive. With few exceptions, these works fall roughly into the period from the mid-I85os to about r86o, suggesting that something during that time compelled Blythe to return repeatedly to the subject. 1s Whether it was some zealous reformist campaign or the result of his own struggle with temptation is difficult to say. Temperance Pledge, however, hints that the choice represented on canvas was close to the artist's heart (Fig. 28). This dark painting presents the case with the strictest economy of means. The man, seen closeup, is nearly bald. Amber light models the dome of his skull but leaves half his face in deep shadow, a metaphor for his uncertainty over which path to take-the bright one of sobriety or the dark one of dangerous yet pleasurable indulgence. Chin in hand, he knits his brow and grimaces in concentration, his lips compressed, the corners of his mouth drooping. Before him is the pledge, wrinkled and dog-eared, as if folded and unfolded many times between long spells in a pocket or a drawer. With its boldly legible inscription, it lies directly in the thinker's line of sight. His gaze, however, focuses with single-minded intensity on the uncorked liquor bottle aligned with the shadow side of the composition. What will the outcome be? The painting gives no clues. The temptation of the bottle may prove too strong, or perhaps that crumpled sheet of paper will prevail. 16 The ambiguity of Blythe's image comes into focus if we compare the work with one by the popular genre

50

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

Oil on

r2

'f.

FIGURE 29.

William Sidney Mount, Loss and Gain, 1847· Oil on canvas, 24 x 20". Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages. Bequest of Ward Melville, I977·

painter William Sidney Mount, entitled Loss and Gain (Fig. 29). In it a rustic drunkard, in climbing a rail fence, has overturned his liquor jug. Unable to scramble to the ground to right

he

watches in dismay as its contents bubble out and drain into the ground. The message is unequivocal: he has lost his liquor, but gained sobriety. Ambivalence also suffuses Blythe's paired paintings Good Times and Hard Times (Figs. 3 o, 3 I). Ostensibly the didacticism is more pointed in these grim little pendants. In the first painting a paunchy tippler in a red chair sucks mightily from an upturned jug, his lips, as the art historian Diana Strazdes has put it, forming a "perfect seal" with mouth of the vesse!.l 7 The drinker's face, cheeks puffed and eyes glazed, expresses blissful infantile oblivion. The very space he inhabits reinforces this notion. Gray toper, his face a mask

blank, it is the domain of nothingness. In the second picture, the

m1sery

his paunch collapsed, has been collared by a baton-wielding

constable or watchman. The drunkard's hat sits askew, covering one eye; his hands are hidden in the pockets of his drab and baggy coat. The burly constable glowers at his captive, his hard features contrasting with the other's squashy flesh. As in Good Times, the space is empty, merely a dingy brown wall with a windowsill high up to the left, suggesting some back alley where glimmers

gaslight give way to deep shadows. The message seems clear enough in its cause-and-effect

sequence. Yet the question lingers whether those blissful moments of primal, ecstatic suckling might after all be worth the

52

THE UNDERGROUND iv!AN

FIGURE 30.

David Gilmour Blythe, Good Times, ca. r854-58. Oil on board, n'Ys x 8%". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of the Richard King Mellon Foundation. FIGURE 3 I . David Gilmour Blythe, Hard Times, ca. r8 s6-6o. Oil on board, I I 'Ys x 8%". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

That lingering question gets us to the heart of Blythe's ambivalence. Walking an either-or tightrope, he fits the profile of what the literary historian David S. Reynolds has described as dark or immoral reform, in which the reformer is "drawn to the very vices he denounced." In the I 8 3os and r 84os popular temperance literature became darker and more sensational. The Washington Temperance Society, established in I 840, was influential in this shift. Originally a working-class organization of reformed alcoholics, the "Washingtonians" sponsored flamboyant temperance lecturers such as the notorious John Bartholomew Gough, whose theatrical performances played up the "grisly details of alcoholism" rather than a cure. Correspondingly, temperance fiction dwelled more and more on the sordid details of crime and perversity, until what had started out as a campaign against vice seemed increasingly to take a voyeuristic pleasure in its exposure. 18 Perhaps the most flamboyant exhibition of this doubleness was the tongue-in-cheek performance of the theater owner and actor Tom Flynn at the Chatham in New York in the I 84os. Goaded by Washingtonian activism in the city, Flynn, an inveterate drinker, proclaimed that on an appointed day he would renounce rum and explain his reasons to his audience. Onstage near the footlights was a table bearing a half-filled glass pitcher and a tumbler. Emerging from the wings to thunderous applause, Flynn filled his glass and, as Frank Kernan recalled: drank the contents in one draught, and then proceeded with his lecture. He was a brilliant and voluble talker, and his fund of anecdotes never seemed to be exhausted. The pathos and eloquence with which he pictured step by step the drunkard's path down the abyss of moral ruin I will never forget, neither will I forget the laughter I enjoyed while listening to his side-splitting anecdotes .... One moment the sobs of men and women were distinctly audible throughout the whole building while Flynn drew one of his inimitable pictures of the curse of rum. At the next moment everybody was holding his or her sides in a strong effort to save themselves from bursting with laughter.

Eventually, some inquisitive temperance people discovered that "the pitcher which was supposed to contain water actually contained gin-old swan gin, which was Tom's favorite beverage." Flynn, they realized, had been "drawing inspiration for his lecture from the camp of the enemy, and ... his exhaustion and final collapse were not due so much to the mental strain of the lecture as from the seductive and exhausting contents of the pitcher." The whole ruse, Flynn later explained, was to discourage the temperance people from asking for the use of the theater, which "they never did." 19 Like Flynn, Blythe may have been powerless to resist the "seductive and exhausting contents of the pitcher." The flavor of "dark temperance" reform infuses his images of temptation, drunken felicity, and sordid mishap. There is also at least a hint of Tom Flynn's subversive mockery, as in

54

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

Blythe's Urchin, also called Boy Sipping Wine (Fig. 32). In this painting a very young curly-headed boy slouches voluptuously against a hogshead of wine. His clothes are in tatters, one pink shoulder exposed and a grubby knee protruding from a large hole in his trousers. With a dreamy expression, he sucks up wine through a straw poked into a crack between the staves. The ruby liquid has spattered and smeared his face, hands, arms, and chest. Two more kegs lie behind him, and there are sketchy indications of dockside pilings. The atmosphere is smoggy and brown. On one level, of course, the painting reads as a cautionary tale. About the same time, Blythe depicted a ragged boy stealing from a sugar bowl (ca. r8 56-58; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute) and paired it with a painting (now lost) entitled Man Peering from jail. The Urchin might well be the child who is father to the man in Good Times and Hard Times. Yet this tender degenerate radiates an air of pure, sensuous pleasure that subtly undercuts the implicit moral of the story. Insouciant and self-contained, he flaunts his besotted idleness. If diligence, respectability, restraint, and cleanliness were the rules of order for middle-class success, this urchin has gleefully broken them all. Furtive he may look, but he is neither ugly nor malformed. He is a juvenile, streetwise Victorian Bacchus, embodying the outlaw spirit of license and revelry. 20 Blythe took a stance as double-edged as the spirit of "dark reform" itself, brooding on the perversely alluring degradation of drunkenness and simultaneously poking fun at the rhetoric and imagery of the temperance campaign. In this capacity the artist straddled another line, tapping the topsy-turvy world of pictorial satire to furnish inspiration for his spectacles of drunken abandon and remorse.

Boy at the Pump and Conscience Stricken offer signs of Blythe's roots in the boisterous and irreverent realm of popular visual culture (Figs. 3 3, 34 ). In the first, the setting is some desolate corner of the city, an alley threading past a dilapidated building. Refuse litters the paving stones. To the left stands a pump bearing a sign that announces invitingly, "Ho! all ye who art THIRSTY come and

DRINK."

Before it stands an impudent youth in baggy rags, wearing a hat pulled down to his

eyebrows. He thumbs his nose at the pump and its message. Behind his back he holds a wickerwrapped jug, and from his pocket protrudes the neck of a corked liquor bottle. In the second half of the sequence, the same person, presumably, now grown to adulthood, stands knock-kneed before the vision of his own mortality in the form of a tall stone cross occupying the same position as the pump in the first picture. The setting is again an alley, this time with bricks exposed under scuffed and crumbling stucco. The cross looms in the dusky corner, and darkness envelops the upper portion of the composition. The sinner, hand over heart and hat in hand, casts his eyes aloft. Behind him a pick and shovel-tools for grave digging-lean against the wall next to that fatal jug. The drunkard's shadow takes on a life of its own, creeping toward the cross like a murky cloud of smoke. Yet the scene is as comic as it is tragic. Caught between symbols of sal-

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

55

FIGURE 32.

David Gilmour Blythe, The Urchin, ca. r8 56. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30". Duquesne

Pittsburgh.

vation and the tomb, the drunkard may still reach for the jug, his penitence lution irreversible. The link between Blythe's painting and cartoons is the used to identify the drunkard or the dark targets the hypocrisy ting is a hall

temperance reform and the

alcoholics have assembled to

speaker. They have outsized

scape of Niagara Falls

" a song published in r of its resolves (Fig. 3 5). The setreceive inspiration from the

exaggerated features,

references to the temperance movement's obsession

On the wall are ironic the right kind of drink: a framed land-

another of a waterspout. The lecturer leans over his pulpit and hands

pledge to a man rising from his seat to poses his dark secret, his hidden weakness: like pocket.

56

"The

in the pocket, one of a set of

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

forward, however, the speaker exnose-thumbing

he has a

in his

F'IGURE 33· David Gilmour Blythe, at the ca. I 85 Oil on canvas, I4 x nVs". Philadelphia Museum of Art: The W. P. Wilstach bequest of Anna H. Wilstach.

FIGURE

34·

David Gilmour Blythe, Conscience ca. I86o. Oil on canvas, 14 x 12". Philadelphia Museum of Art: The W. P. \Vilstach Collection, bequest of Anna H. Wilstach.

FIGURE

35·

"The Total S'iety, A Comic Song," sheet music cover, r 840. Courtesy of The Lester S. Levy Collection, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.

Humor magazines abounded in this kind of imagery. "A Brandy Smash," published in Yankee Notions, depicts a ragged alcoholic with a bashed-in hat, shuffling by a storefront advertising "Rum & Cigars" (Fig. 36). Behind him, a smirking boy is about to bring down a hammer on the bottle

protruding from the drunkard's coat pocket. Shabbiness, rags, ill-fitting clothes, and patches, all suggestive of some deeper bodily and mental disorder, were also standard accoutrements. 21 The drunkard was a stock figure as well in the new genre of the city sketch. David Claypoole Johnston's "Every Man for Himself!" was one of eight illustrations commissioned for Joseph C. Neal's Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis (Fig. 37). "Ripton Rumsey; A Tale of the Waters" recounts the mishaps of a lowlife one rainy night. A chronic boozer, Rumsey is discovered sprawling in a waterlogged gutter, "saved from being floated away solely by the saturated condition of both his internal and external man." In Johnston's etching, Rumsey, his clothing in shreds, lies like a spouting fish in the street, just below the stairs leading to the door of a saloon. A gaslight brilliantly illuminates the lettering on this door but little else. A foxy dog peers out from under the

58

THE UNDERGROUND 1\!AN

stairs; a rain barrel overflows with water, gushing from a downspout. A night watchman with a baton stands over Rumsey's sodden figure, about to nudge him with his foot. The narrative takes up the next incident. The watchman gives Rumsey "a prodigious kick as an evidence of his amicable feeling" and warns: "If you don't get up, you'll ketch ... the collar-and-fix you. Up with you, Jacky Dadle." The subtitle of the story, like the pictures on the wall in "The Total S'iety," makes ironic reference to the reformers' efforts to displace liquor with pure, cold water. 22 The drunk, disheveled, disorderly, and dissolute belonged to the shadow side of modern metropolitan life. The Philadelphia editor and humorist Neal (I 807-4 7) made that shadow side his specialty, in the aptly named Charcoal Sketches (I838) and other publications. Little known today, Neal's highly popular work went through multiple editions. His sketches were picturesque tours of the urban lower depths. Although contemporaries found his humor precious and quaint (which it certainly is), they recognized him as a connoisseur of lowlife. "The forte of Mr. Neal was a certain genial humor, devoted to the exhibition of a peculiar class of citizens falling under the social history description of the genus 'loafer,'" stated one biographer. "Every metropolis breeds a race of such people, the laggards in the rear of civilization ... who fall quietly into decay, complaining of their hard fate in the world, and eking out their deficient courage by a resort to the bar-room. " 23 That Blythe made paintings not only of drunkards but also of street characters (for example,

The Bum and A Loafer, both unlocated) suggests his familiarity with the city sketch genre. Indeed, he may have taken his nickname from Neal's story, '"Boots': or, The Misfortunes of Peter Faber." The main character is a "poor little man-poor grim little man-poor queer little man," whose "monomania had boots for its object." The farcical tale concerns Peter Faber's strenuous, protracted, but ultimately "bootless" attempts to pull on his beloved footgear, only to break the straps and go somersaulting backward across the street. The night watchman witnessing this catastrophe mockingly dubs the unfortunate tumbler Boots. 24 Blythe's Man Putting on Boots portrays an analogous and equally absurd fix (Fig. 38). A stout man in a dressing gown and nightcap sits on his bed and hauls mightily on the straps of his right boot, while the left waits its turn. A look at the man's still unshod left foot reveals why the struggle has twisted up his face into a rubbery and barely human mask of pain: the foot is several sizes too large for the dainty little boots in question. Although Blythe had a great deal in common with Neal as a painter of lowlife and tragicomic tipplers, Blythe's style entirely lacked the fastidious gentility that characterized Neal's. Blythe reveled in the city as the domain of chaos, crime, and grotesque bodies. His works, in evidencing that pleasure, aligned themselves with the newer and more disturbing genre of sensational city expose, which from the I 84os through the 18 50s proliferated in pulp fiction and garishly hued "true-life"

6o

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

FIGURE

38.

David Gilmour Blythe, Man Putting on Boots, r86o. Oil on canvas, I4 x of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of Mrs. James H. Beal.

II".

Carnegie Museum

excursions to the dark side of the modern metropolis. Often these cheap popular books and pamphlet novels were wildly successful. One of the most lurid, George Lippard's Quaker City; or, the

Monks of Monk Hall (I 84 5) went through twenty-seven editions, achieving a sales record surpassed only when Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin, appeared in I 8 5 2. 25 In all, more than fifty such "city mystery" exposes appeared before the outbreak of Civil War hostilities turned anxiety in a different direction. They were segments of a vastly extended discourse on the problems of urbanization, which had accelerated almost beyond control and comprehension since the I 8 3os. During this period, commerce, industry, and banking created new wealth and facilitated movement into upper- and middle-class status. An enormous influx of immigrants from European shores, supplemented by large numbers of fortune-seeking rural and small-town Americans, helped create an increasingly complex and class-stratified urban geography. The new city was a place of crowds, strangers, anonymity, enigma, and fear. The haunts of the poor gave rise to nightmarish visions of social breakdown and upheaval from the depths. There was some reason for such apprehension. As the historian Paul Boyer has written, among the urban poor, the period from the I 8 3 os to the I 8 5os "was a time of almost continuous disorder and turbulence" in the form of gang wars, race riots, and other mayhem. It is impossible to read extensively in writings about the city during this time, notes Boyer, "without being struck again and again by the pervasiveness of fears aroused by street violence, riots, rowdiness, crime, and moral degeneracy in the slums." 26 The purpose of the city mystery narrative was to offer armchair tourists a view of the lower depths. Writers sometimes claimed moral justification for their inclusion of shocking, sordid, disgusting scenes. In New York by Gas-Light (I85o), George Foster assured readers that he offered his descriptions, not in a spirit of levity, but to do good. Society needed "facts which show the actual consistence, color, and dimensions of the cancer that lies eating at its very vitals." Dramatically, Foster flung back the curtain on the hidden city his narrative would reveal: "New York by gas-light! What a task have we undertaken! To penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis ... all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum-the underground story-of life in New York!" Foster wrote of oyster bars, prostitutes, newsboys, drunkards, thieves, dance halls, theaters, and saloons. Although some scenes glittered with gaiety, many others were dreary and threatening. A prostitute's childhood home in a "little back cellar down an alley in Orange Street" was a place where the sun never shone and "black mud and slime" oozed up through cracks in the floor. The notorious Five Points was even more horrific, a maze of danger. "Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell-here is the very type and physical resemblance, in fact, of hell itself." A den called "The Brewery" was home to vile people who had found their way down "to

62

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

this hell-like den-little less dark, gloomy, and terrible than the grave itself, to which it is the prelude." Like the rhetoric of temperance reform, Foster's language is ripe and salacious, allowing readers to savor the forbidden pleasures and perversions of the very places such an expose was supposed to render hideously repulsive. 27 "Evening Amusements in New York," published in the Lantern in r 8 52, is the pictorial equivalent to Foster's prose, giving us voyeuristic access to the same realm of nighttime violence (Fig. 3 9 ). In it a band of ruffians has set upon a man in evening dress. Roughly pushed against a wall by two assailants, the man screams in terror as the third holds a dagger ready to plunge into his heart. Hemmed in by the scuffle, another victim falls to the pavement, wounded or dead. Around the corner, a woman flees from some other aggressor, while flames and smoke billow from the windows of a burning building. Meanwhile, at left, a policeman lounging on a squat post turns nonchalantly away from the uproar. The barbed message comments on the constabulary's inability to control the spread of crime in the streets. At the same time, however, the image hints at deeper fears. Modern Pittsburgh, Blythe's adopted home, provided the same raw materials to fashion into a vision of the metropolis on the edge. A heavily industrialized western frontier city with a large immigrant population of Irish and Germans, Pittsburgh suffered urban ills as intensely as did New York. At midcentury the swelling numbers of the poor combined with an unstable and depressed economy to produce an urban underclass that inspired fear and dread among the more prosperous. Riots erupted periodically. In I 8 5 I, for example, "a condition approximating anarchy ensued for a season." Thieves and "midnight marauders" burned houses and robbed citizens unhindered until the mayor appointed a new police force to restore law and order. The lower class, according to one Pittsburgh historian, had more than its share of the mischievous and the indigent: "the poorer and more shiftless Irish immigrants, the drinking, fighting draymen, the canal and steamboat roustabouts, the railroad 'Paddies,' the quarrelsome washerwomen and charwomen, and the lads who worked in the glasshouses and iron mills instead of going to school or who ran in gangs instead of working in their fathers' countingrooms or stores." Such was the Pittsburgh of Samuel Young's Smoky City: A Tale of Crime (I 84 5). Pittsburgh, the "smoke begrimed city of the West," is a place of sleazy criminals, repellent drunkards, and sepulchral dives with oozing walls and miasmic atmosphere. The plot involves fraud, robbery, suicide, and murder. In the end, fire levels the city, every mansion and hovel reduced to smoldering ruins. 28 As Young's title suggests, smoke-hellish, murky, suffocating-was the badge, or blot, of the city's identity. Coal provided the energy for Pittsburgh's manufactories and home fires, and its smoke cast a perpetual pall over the streets. James Parton reported in I 866 that from high up on the river bluffs the city appeared wrapped in darkness. "The entire space lying between the hills was filled

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

63

!lCdiRE 39· "fvening Anmsen\\:'nts

in New York," puhlisbed

in the Lmtcm, Ocrober 9. r H5 .l.. Courtesy, American Amigu;1ri:m Soc:ictv.

sent forth tongues of

with the blackest smoke, from out ot vvhich the hidden frorn rhc depths of the a

L"