Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age 9780520352568, 9780520272453

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A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

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

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation, and of Judith and Kim Maxwell as members of the Literati Circle of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Playing It Straight

Playing It Straight Art and Humor in the Gilded Age

Jennifer A. Greenhill

University of California Press  |  Berkeley  Los Angeles  London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenhill, Jennifer A., 1974–  ​ ​Playing it straight : art and humor in the Gilded Age / Jennifer A. Greenhill. — 1st [edition].  ​ ​ ​ ​p. ​ ​cm.  ​ ​Includes bibliographical references and index.  ​ ​i sbn 978-0-520-27245-3 (cloth : alk. paper)  ​ ​1. Wit and humor in art. ​ ​2. National characteristics, American, in art. ​ ​ 3. Art, American—19th century—Themes, motives. ​ ​4. Art and society—United States—History—19th century. ​ ​I. Title.  ​ ​n 8212.g74 ​ ​2012  ​ ​700.973'09034—dc23 2011053103 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 ​ ​20 ​ ​19 ​ ​18 ​ ​17 ​ ​16 ​ ​15 ​ ​14 ​ ​13 ​ ​12 10 ​ ​9 ​ ​8 ​ ​7 ​ ​6 ​ ​5 ​ ​4 ​ ​3 ​ ​2 ​ ​1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii



Introduction  1

1

Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan  10

2

Laughing with J. G. Brown, E. W. Perry, and Thomas Nast  43

3

William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  77

4

Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus SaintGaudens and Henry James  108

5

Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle  139



Epilogue  164

Notes  169 List of Illustrations  223 Index  227 Plates follow page 132

Acknowledgments

Agnes Repplier, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia critic whose essays on humor still crackle with life, inspired me to make humor the subject of my own writing. Countless others made the actual writing of this book possible. Alex Nemerov, my advisor at Yale, gave me new ways to think about both art and words; he offered a model of rigorous, inventive, and brave visual analysis; and he taught me what dedication to one’s vision and plain old hard work look like. Jennifer Roberts made invaluable suggestions for revising the manuscript at its various stages. P. J. Brownlee and Bruce Robertson also offered astute criticisms of the book and encouraged its publication. Participants in the American Art and Visual Culture Seminar organized by Sarah Burns and Diane Dillon at the Newberry Library, in Chicago, read an early draft of my third chapter and helped me to see how to improve it. A version of my first chap­ter appeared in the journal Art History in 2009 and benefited from the advice of David Peters Corbett. Jennifer Burns made thoughtful suggestions to a draft of chapter 4 and, by bringing up Duchamp, helped me to see Saint-Gaudens and White in a whole new light. Lilya Kaganovsky, Jason LaFountain, Elizabeth Lee, David Lubin, Justine Murison, Marc Simpson, Irene Small, and Terri Weissman read individual chapters and pushed me to refine my arguments throughout. Although I did not take all of their suggestions, I hope they will see the impact of their criticisms in these pages. At the University of Illinois, Jonathan Fineberg, Cara Finnegan, Nan Goggin, Anne D. Hedeman, Suzanne Hudson, Masumi Iriye, Bruce Michelson, David O’Brien, and Lisa Rosenthal (and especially Irene Small and Terri Weissman) supported my work on this book in myriad ways. To Jonathan I owe a special thank-you, for he offered me the chance in 2009 to test out my ideas at the Phillips Collection’s Center for the Study of Modern Art in Washington, D.C., giving   |  vii

me ready access to works of art on the East Coast and to essential archival resources. The University of Illinois Research Board also provided critical support for the book with funding for research assistance and for illustrations. I thank Howard Guenther, Nancy Abelmann, and the Research Board reviewers for so generously backing the project, and my research assistants, Adam Thomas and Amy Weber, for surprising me with some fabulous research finds. The Wyeth Foundation for American Art also helped to make the book possible by providing funds for color illustrations—crucial for any art-historical study. With sincere gratitude, I acknowledge the foundation’s important encouragement of scholarship on American art. At the early stages of composing a dissertation I was fortunate to hold a Wyeth fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, an American Council of Learned Societies/Luce Fellowship, and short-term fellowships at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Terra Foundation in Giverny, France. A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at Winterthur, a Beckman Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, a Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and a short stint at the Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts, gave me the time and the resources to transform the dissertation into this book. I had the very good fortune during each of these periods of focused research and writing to exchange ideas with some truly brilliant scholars. Those who had the most impact on my thinking and went out of their way to offer advice include Maya Brym, Marcelline Delbecq, Jeannine DeLombard, John Fagg, Andrew Hemingway, Dan Horowitz, Helen Horowitz, Pat Hills, Matthew Hunter, Guy Jordan, Kittiya Lee, Michael Leja, Dorothy Moss, Susan Power, Katie Rieder, Marni Sandweiss, Sascha Scott, Susanah Shaw Romney, Veerle Thielemans, Bill Truettner, and Margaret Werth. I am especially indebted to John, Dorothy, Susan, and Sascha, on whom I have come to rely over the years, along with Jason LaFountain, my favorite collaborator. I have also turned repeatedly to colleagues and mentors I first met in graduate school: Tim Barringer, Graham Boettcher, Ned Cooke, Olivia Horsfall Turner, Alex Mann, Morna O’Neill, Jenny Raab, and Irene Small. I lean most heavily on Graham, to be sure—for his encyclopedic knowledge of American art, his truly boundless generosity, and his unerring ability to find what I am looking for when I am stumped. Graham and many other colleagues invited me to present material from this book at their institutions, and I thank them all for giving me the chance to test my arguments before different audiences. I could not have refined those arguments without the help of the many people who facilitated my research at the viii  |  Acknowledgments

institutions where I held fellowships—Gigi Barnhill, Cecilia Chin, Cindy Mills, Colonel Moore (whose files at SAAM are indispensable), Amelia Goerlitz, Wendy Wick Reaves, Miranda Fontaine, Kay Collins, Helena Richardson, Rosemary Krill, Juan Gomez, Susie Krasnoo, David Mihaly, Susan Colletta, and Roy Ritchie. These dedicated museum and research institute professionals often made amazing things happen. At Winterthur, for example, the art conservators Mary McGinn and Margaret Little agreed to analyze a painting that Robert McCracken Peck, of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, brought in for me to study from his personal collection. While I spoke with him about his painting, Jim Schneck photographed it, and in just a few hours I had everything I needed to move forward with one of my favorite arguments in this book, about the animal painter William Holbrook Beard. Many others at the archival and museum collections I consulted helped to push the project forward, far too many to name. Especially helpful were Carrie Rebora Barratt and the curatorial assistants in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Linda Seckelson of the Met’s Watson Library; Helena Wright of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History; the curators in the New York Public Library’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints, and Photographs; and Martha Hoppin, the foremost expert on the artist John George Brown. Linda Clous, a good friend and former colleague from the Phillips Collection, welcomed me into her home every time I traveled to New York City and talked through many an idea with me. And Bill Gerdts generously gave me access to his personal library in New York. Despite disagreeing with some of my arguments, he has been unfailingly generous and forthcoming with information. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to work with the editors at the University of California Press—Kari Dahlgren, Eric Schmidt, and Jacqueline Volin—who handled everything associated with the production of this book with great care. Stephanie Fay read individual chapters in their very early stages and saw the book through to the end. I hope she finds it a good read; I know it is better because she had a hand in it. Fronia W. Simpson also helped to put my mind at ease by proofreading the book as only she can. Through all the years of research, writing, and revising, my family has been my mainstay. My husband, Matt Tanner, with whom I’ve laughed for the past fifteen years, has supported every step taken toward making this study happen. Far more admirable is the patience with which he’s suffered through my need to analyze his jokes since I began thinking critically about humor. His parents, our siblings—especially my brother Andy, who helped in so many ways while I was finishing the book at the Huntington in California—our aunts and uncles, and nieces and nephews have also shown great patience and goodwill in their encourAcknowledgments  |  ix

agement of this project. I thank them, and I send out chin scratches and belly rubs to my feline muses for getting me through tough writing days. (As Agnes Repplier wrote of her own cat, “Agrippina will never make herself serviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestimable service.”) Finally, with all the gratitude I possess, I acknowledge the influence and support of my mother, Patricia Ann Greenhill, a single, working parent who gave me everything. I dedicate this book to her memory.

x  |  Acknowledgments

Introduction

In the January 1867 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the writer and social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson made an impassioned “plea for culture.”1 With the gunshots fired in the Civil War still ringing in his ears (the Massachusetts native had led the African American First South Carolina Volunteers), Higginson struggled to imagine a future in which intellectual and artistic pursuits would not seem irrelevant to the country, now more immediately preoccupied with politics and industry.2 He hoped that such concerns, though crucial to the nation’s future health, might one day give way to broader humanistic interests that were infinitely more meaningful—timeless, in Higginson’s estimation. “A certain point of culture once reached,” he assured his readers, “we become citizens of the world.” By “culture,” Higginson meant the pursuit of knowledge beyond utility, the investment in “science and art as objects of intrinsic worth.” Culture for him meant cultivation, in the sense of the term codified during this period as a fundamental goal of the patriarchal elite (to which Higginson belonged), who believed in sharing their refined values as a social responsibility.3 Although many Americans viewed the arts as expendable adornments to the day-to-day business of living—art was “alien,” Higginson wrote, merely “tolerated” in the United States—he expected that with the shift toward “knowledge for its own sake” in col­lege curricula and the establishment of civic institutions like the Boston Pub­ lic Library, they might one day become fully integrated into American society. The “America of toil” would become “the America of art.”4 Thirty years later, with an infrastructure in place for an “America of art,” the Norwegian American Columbia College professor Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen complained that his students suffered from “a total want of reverence.” Higginson would surely have been dismayed that the young men in Boyesen’s Germanic languages courses did not take the pursuit of knowledge seriously, that they could   |  1

not help making a joke of it. Over half the examination essays Boyesen’s students submitted were “in a more or less jocular vein.” The professor attributed that inclination to take things lightly to the “all-levelling democracy” of the American context. “The most pervasive trait in the American national character is jocularity,” he argued, echoing countless others who had made similar claims. “It is by that trait, above all, that Americans are differentiated from all other nations.” Indeed, the “only trait that the entire population has in common,” Boyesen wrote, was a “reckless determination to be funny,” a “spirit of heedless levity which spares nothing sacred or profane.”5 We in the twenty-first century know well this desire to strike the funny bone, particularly in situations that would seem to require seriousness. It is a commonplace to see the artist or intellectual playing the entertainer before public audiences, cracking jokes to make the medicine of “culture” go down more easily.6 This is perhaps not surprising, for the arts continue to be treated as extraneous to more pressing American business. The defenders of high culture, wisecracking as they communicate their most deeply held beliefs about the importance of art, appear to accept the idea that culture is only an amusement—not, in itself, serious business. Their discomfort as they make light of the culture to which they contribute and in which they are (at least in private) fervently invested signals their uneasiness about disavowing seriousness in favor of the levity American audiences demand. This book explores works of art that were made when this uneasiness first became a defining condition of American art—when artists felt, more than ever before, both the pressure to make serious art and the “spirit of heedless levity” that Boyesen lamented. Between the Civil War and the World’s Columbian Exposition, which in 1893 reintroduced the United States to the world as a force of sophistication, calls for a new cultural seriousness ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor. The market for humor expanded rapidly in these years, just as the “sense of humor” assumed new significance as an element of character and an essential feature of middle-class experience.7 This increased investment in humor and its insistent visibility inspired sustained debate. Leading philosophers, college professors, writers, art critics, and even congressmen theorized, with greater regularity than ever before, about the guises and effects of “American humor.” Many writers agreed with Boyesen that irreverence and exaggeration defined it, a legacy, perhaps, of the tall tales that dominated narratives of the American West earlier in the century.8 By 1895, when Boyesen’s article was published, this reckless and irreverent humor had grown into a national nuisance, what the professor called a “plague of jocularity.”9 How would high culture—a category very much under construction—with2  |  Introduction

stand jocularity’s wink and nudge? How would it keep a straight face amid a populace that saw cause for laughter in serious matters? The arts, as I have already suggested, were heavily contested in this period of national reinvention, dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their satirical novel of 1873.10 In these years, philanthropic elites expended substantial sums of money on collecting art and building monuments, libraries, and public museums that would edify the American public. These civic institutions would attest both to the country’s wealth and to its sophistication and seriousness. “In a mere decade,” the historian Alan Trachtenberg writes of the 1870s, “an entire apparatus appeared, an infrastructure which monumentalized the presence of culture, of high art and learning.”11 Although those who developed this apparatus stressed accessibility and inclusion, the rhetoric behind their efforts reinforced social and aesthetic hierarchies. Middle-class Americans were caught between the jocularity that suffused their everyday experience and the seriousness of the culture they could experience in a few rarefied precincts. Artists too felt the pull of both the levity of American life and the gravity of their own aspirations as ambitious practitioners. Some critics derided John George Brown’s paintings of laughing street urchins, one writer explained, because their “comic situations” were so close to “those which make the fortune of the humorous weekly press. Such pictures, when elaborated in oils, are among the bugaboos of the art critic.”12 The New York critic Clarence Cook refused to grant that Brown’s works and those of William Holbrook Beard could be classed as humorous genre painting. Their work was something else, something cruder and coarser that exceeded that category. Their painting, the rankled critic contended, was “a grave sin against society.”13 Even the painting of Eastman Johnson, one of the period’s most celebrated artists, would be deemed unfit for the gallery when it depicted laughing children. One critic found his “jocular” Old Stagecoach (1871) “too noisy, after all, for an art exhibition.”14 The caricature ex­ hibitions held at American art schools in the 1890s mocked such restrictions by travestying serious works by well-known artists, often the teachers at those schools, whose status and expectations the students temporarily undermined with their carnivalesque decrowning.15 Humor in fine art was a high-stakes affair in these years, particularly in New York City, the center of the elite’s civilizing efforts and the place where the serious artist tested his mettle. Because New York was also a center for humor—in the many comic journals published there, the countless public lectures given on the topic, and the many analyses of American humor that appeared in the New York press—I focus, in five roughly chronological chapters, on how art and humor came together there. The chapters canvass the developments rather than provide a Introduction  |  3

teleological map of them, each chapter, in its own way, asking how the pressure to make serious art became entangled in and informed by jocularity. Several artists in the climate either gave up humor completely or spurned the elite critics, making works to elicit an easy laugh. Other artists sought a course between ponderous dignity and brazen jocularity, opposites equally unappealing to many of them. Rethinking the place of humor in their work, these artists at times tested the boundaries of one or another humorous idiom to produce metacritical arguments about the cultural work it might perform. In other cases, they adopted the techniques of popular humor—as it appeared in the newspaper, for example, or on the stage—and worked through the meanings of those techniques in their own art.16 I am intrigued by all of these procedures, especially when they informed works that simultaneously heed and ignore developing senses of serious culture. Many of the artists of this study did just that by walking the line between levity and gravity. Aware of the emerging requirements of serious culture but invested in humor, they played it straight. By focusing on works that look critically at the methods and consequences of humorous expression in fine art, I depend, somewhat obliquely, on a thesis developed by Walter Blair, the scholar who did more for the study of American literary humor than perhaps anyone else in the twentieth century. Blair argued that the ability to see oneself critically, with “detachment,” was fundamental to American humor. He sees this self-critical faculty developing in the 1830s, when Americans began moving west, departing in earnest from inherited European models of expression and beginning to exploit the absurdity of a scenario to draw laughs— to look on themselves with detachment.17 William Sidney Mount’s regionally specific visual jokes about Yankee horse traders and the like belong to this moment in the history of American humor. My book argues, however, that only in the later nineteenth century did this self-critical view widen to take in humor as such and address its place within the emerging frameworks of serious culture. I would argue not that metacritical investigations into humor were uncommon in American art made before this period, but rather that the climate of the New York art world during the Gilded Age made such investigations necessary. By engaging the techniques of popular humor, artists found a way to participate, however slyly, in the public conversation about issues of general social concern while making art that would appeal to a more rarefied community of patrons and critics. Most of the work discussed in this book departs radically from the stock jokes and off-color satire that have come to stand for the nineteenth-century sense of humor. Readers looking for chapters on how racist stereotypes inform American genre painting, for example, may be disappointed, but they will find discussions 4  |  Introduction

of this and related issues embedded in arguments about imagery that has posed— at least to me—greater interpretive challenges. Indeed, the paintings and sculpture I analyze may appear at first to have nothing to do with humor—they play it straight so convincingly that humor seems irrelevant. In other cases, the works appear to be light, frivolous fare, incapable of making serious arguments about the high stakes of humor and art in this period. In these instances, I have tried to show how their apparent triviality is itself imbued with a critical point of view. In all cases, artists produce ambitious art by engaging in a sophisticated dialogue with popular humorous tropes and techniques. Those tropes and techniques range from sentimental, genial humor—the cheerfulness that Catharine Beecher in the 1840s thought lightened one’s load and encouraged familial warmth18—to the raucous and often vulgar jocularity associated with the alternative communities that formed with the movement westward, which played out in the Davy Crockett almanacs from about the same time.19 They include dialect humor that toyed with correct spelling to approximate regional, class-, or ostensibly race-based speech patterns—in these almanacs, in minstrel shows, and in the tales published by the Civil War humorists, for example—and the clipped, two-line dialogue jokes that, by the 1890s, had largely supplanted the dialect-laden, long-winded, and character-driven humorous stories that were so popular with the previous generation.20 The tropes comprise caustic and politicized satire that skewers its target, often with caricature and parody, as well as a more benign, more evenhanded, and amiable satire. Henry James’s comedies of manners from the 1870s exemplify the gentler approach.21 And then there is nonsense, the humor that has no target and in its purest forms seeks simply to convey “absurd or ridiculous ideas.” This strategy, linked to the work of the British writers Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll from the 1840s through the 1870s, was appreciated by American audiences and found new admirers in the generation that came of age in the 1890s.22 Deadpan, another important technique, operates differently from nonsense, which typically draws attention to its excrescences; deadpan, by contrast, works hard to conceal its mechanics. The platform comedians of the 1860s made deadpan into a high art by appearing to be unconscious of their own hilarity.23 Burlesque, which flowered between the 1830s and the 1890s, has a related doubleness: when most successful, it adopts the forms and conventions of the genre it ridicules with such fidelity that the critique of those conventions can be difficult to detect.24 Mark Twain, in his burlesques, for example, mocks the purple prose of a poet or the formulas of sensational journalism by very subtly twisting them from within. The homage he paid to these precedents was thus ironic, an unsmiling, potentially private joke. The subtlety of this literary burlesque contrasts with the burlesque performed onstage in the late 1860s, Introduction  |  5

a sexualized, gender-bending, and over-the-top entertainment.25 The techniques of these stage performers came back to, and drew on, the risqué comic energies that antebellum Americans found in the western almanacs. And many more interconnections might be drawn between these and the other styles of humor that make up the tangled landscape of nineteenth-century American humor. Although scholars of American humor have often categorized humorous tropes according to their regional affiliations—Blair, for example, separates “Down East humor” from “humor of the Old Southwest”—I have opted above for a more comprehensive, if unwieldy, list of the humorous tropes germane to the visual material of this study.26 Because techniques overlapped in the later nineteenth century, particularly in visual media, I have taken a more flexible approach, inspired by period critics like Bret Harte, who downplayed regional specifics in order to explore a humor that had broader ramifications in these years. Perhaps the humor that critics worked so hard to assign to one or another “geographical section” of the United States, he argued, “was only the form or method of to-day.”27 To make sense of the forms and methods of Harte’s day, and of the complex and often experimental visual statements embedded in the network of nineteenthcentury humor styles listed above, I attempt to think across media—to situate works of visual art in relation to literature and the techniques of stage performers, for example. We need to look not just to subject matter or iconography but also to the structural dynamics of how humor plays in the realm of the visual—often in ways that exceed what we understand as “caricature” or “satire,” for example. I use those terms and others like them in my analyses but try to be as specific as possible about how they function in each case. “Our conventional descriptions,” Bruce Michelson writes in his work on literary wit, “have grown archaic and diffuse, and they fail to help us engage well with rich, adventurous texts.”28 Although Michelson focuses on literature, his comment also applies to visual humor, which constantly requires interpreters to question and refigure their categories and assumptions about how it can work. Many scholars have been sensitive to the complications of visual humor, and I owe much to the art historians Sarah Burns, Marc Simpson, David R. Smith, Mariët Westermann, and Bryan Wolf, among others. If, as Westermann has pointed out, studies of visual humor often take the works’ humorous aspects for granted, “as visualizing a universal humor accessible to the modern viewer without mediation,” these scholars have usefully grounded works of art in historically and culturally specific senses of humor.29 Smith’s and Wolf’s scholarship has been particularly important to my own thinking. Their innovative treatment of works

6  |  Introduction

that play it straight in various ways gave me a roadmap to the humor of the late nineteenth century, when playing it straight assumed great social and aesthetic significance.30 My first chapter recuperates the central importance of the “gag” to Winslow Homer’s early paintings, made during the Civil War. Homer created as his entrée into the New York art world a form of visual deadpan that spoke to the “comical and coffinly”31 circumstances of the war; resonated with the methods of the period’s controversial platform comedians; and answered the critical call for a “higher sort of humor” that moved beyond the overdrawn antics of the comic mode of the 1850s.32 If Homer would seem to give up levity by the war’s end, in Prisoners from the Front (1866)—the work that signaled to critics that he was finally serious—his early experimentation with it would resurface in his later work. Chapter 2 considers the burgeoning market for humor after the war and its role in promoting national consensus during Reconstruction. The True American, a chromolithograph designed by the genre painter Enoch Wood Perry and published by the New York firm of Bencke and Scott in 1875, points up the manipulative logic of those seeking to capitalize on humor’s renewed value as social lubricant. It critiques genre painting that glorifies mindless amusement—a favorite strategy of John George Brown, who made his name painting mildly contented street children—and shows how violent and disfiguring assimilation could be. In this way, the print not only challenges the view that popular imagery like chromolithography was inherently hollow but also out-radicalizes the period’s ostensibly radical caricature to show how it too relies on a manipulative logic of circular reasoning. In the third chapter, I focus on the work of William Holbrook Beard, the controversial artist specializing in bawdy animal paintings who channeled a reputation for lowness into powerful critique. In 1869 Beard created designs for a series of galleries that he hoped would be built beneath New York’s Central Park. Beard’s dark passageways populated by colossal beasts were to lead directly to the museum New Yorkers planned to build above ground on the west side of the park, between Seventy-Seventh and Eighty-First Streets. It was thought that the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History—still largely undefined visions—might share that space. When Beard’s key financial backer died, the artist tried, unsuccessfully, to drum up support for his scheme by appealing directly to the organizers of the Met.33 This chapter suggests why—beyond the obvious funding issues—Beard’s project languished unrealized. If wealthy, civic-minded individuals hoped to enlighten and educate

Introduction  |  7

the masses by constructing institutions like the Met, filled with old-world masterpieces, Beard’s underground galleries burlesque those grandiose aims. Beard, in his critique of the fine-arts establishment and its privileging of European precedent, also acknowledges that his own art—which had suffered damning critique—would always occupy a place below the enlightened institutions that were changing the New York landscape above ground. As the “low” beneath “high” culture, Beard’s scheme structures visually what the writer Brander Matthews would later call “the penalty of humor”—its fate to be not only maligned but also consigned to oblivion.34 Chapter 4 explores the satirical sensibilities of the sculptor Augustus SaintGaudens. It argues that Saint-Gaudens used the monument he made for an important civic leader of Springfield, Massachusetts—The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (1883–86)—as an opportunity to investigate the social and aesthetic mean­ ings of provincialism in an art world that was becoming more cosmopolitan. The sculptor and his collaborator, the architect Stanford White, gave a sober graveyard feel to this public monument and, in so doing, met their patron’s demand for an “intensely serious” work of art, as Henry James would put it in his literary treatment of sculpture. But in this tone of intense and weighty seriousness, the sculptor and architect produced an in-joke that stands at an ironic remove from the demands of civic statuary. In The Puritan and its surrounding environment, I argue, Saint-Gaudens and White set up a Jamesian contest between American provincialism and cosmopolitan worldliness and make a case for tolerance as an artistic point of view. Chapter 5 returns to a theme treated in Chapters 2 and 3: the ability of a maligned, ostensibly “low” idiom to make its lowness signify a critical position. The chapter focuses on the work of John Haberle, the American trompe l’oeil painter most attuned to the comic potential of his imagery and most invested in popular humor, particularly as it appeared in newspaper journalism. Haberle’s painting The Slate (ca. 1895), I argue, internalizes a key shift in the American joke market, as critics attempted to separate old-fashioned joking techniques from more mod­ ern ones. In The Slate, Haberle situates his art somewhere between those techniques. He tests out the formulas of the modern—the so-called machine-made joke of the daily papers—but simultaneously acknowledges what his art shares with the long-winded character-based forms of humorous storytelling that had been cutting edge in the 1860s, where my study begins. In the process, Haberle presents trompe l’oeil still-life painting as a difficult art. Because we still live in the cultural framework established by the Gilded Age, and because American society still seems to be suffused with a “spirit of heedless levity,” it is worth looking back to the period when seriousness and jocularity 8  |  Introduction

competed intensely. That confrontation produced an unexpected détente: subtle works of art that brought together levity and gravity, jocularity and something more serious. By investigating works of art that negotiate the overlap of—and often the space between—these terms, I hope to reinvest late nineteenth-century artistic discourse with some of its former contentiousness and vitality and to expand, productively, limited conceptions of how the period’s visual humor works, what it looks like, and how it can mean.

Introduction  |  9

1 Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan

His words were often open to an ironical interpretation, and one could not always make sure whether he was speaking seriously or, as the pithy slang phrase has it, “through his hat.” William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 1911

Winslow Homer’s “sense of the dramatic,” his feeling for grave and often tragic situations, has made him a titanic figure in the history of American painting. His work, which, especially from the 1890s on, revolves around the themes of man versus nature and life versus death, has inspired some of the most nuanced argumen­tation on nineteenth-century American painting. In Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996), for example, Sarah Burns investigates how Homer’s paintings of men at sea spoke to American businessmen riding the perilous wave of an unpredictable stock market and purchasing Homer’s paintings as heroic testaments to their own manly struggles.1 Elizabeth Johns, in her biography Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (2002), accounts for the grave scenarios of Homer’s imagery by turning the focus from the patrons to the artist himself. She sees Homer’s artistic production as a form of spiritual selfreflection. He was an “observer” in a period when “observation meant using God’s gifts of mind in the most reverent way,” that is, “to study and draw conclusions about a world in ongoing creation.”2 This chapter moves in another direction. Taking a cue from two of Homer’s earlier biographers, William Howe Downes and Philip C. Beam, I reconsider the central importance of the “gag” to Homer’s dramatic sensibility.3 If Homer was 10  | 

engaged in a spiritual quest, if his art spoke to embattled Gilded Age manhood, how did he arrive at a painterly idiom that encapsulated such heady concerns? He cultivated a reputation for seriousness only after attempting to bring the gags of his illustrated work to oil painting, a medium he first explored in the early 1860s, during the American Civil War. To stress this should not diminish his stature but rather add nuance to our understanding of his complex art. For Homer during these years created an entrée to the New York art world by way of visual deadpan, which resonated with the methods of the period’s controversial platform comedians and answered the critics’ call for a “higher sort of humor,” different from the antebellum comic mode that one critic derisively dubbed the “funny school of the fifties.”4 If much of that pre–Civil War work can be described as “semantic prattle,” an art that signposts and almost compulsively restates to convey its meaning, Homer’s paintings offer no easy punch lines.5 In Homer the joke is “told gravely,” to borrow a phrase Mark Twain uses in explaining the mechanics of verbal deadpan.6 Indeed, Homer’s paintings withhold the conspiratorial wink and nudge, framing jokes in understated, even ambiguous terms. The ironic and subversive qualities of Homer’s works are most perceptible in the 1860s, during the war, which many commentators considered a “ludicrous” and “grotesque” spectacle.7 Nathaniel Hawthorne asked in 1863 whether the war, as a play “too long drawn out,” could be classed as “tragedy or comedy.”8 People at the time paired the “comical and the coffinly” or spoke of levity and gravity, op­ positions that apply to the structural dynamics of Homer’s camp scenes (Plate 1).9 Often these works incorporate an almost imperceptible light note at odds with the dominant heavy tone of the images. Scholars generally argue that these works picture mundane and unremarkable moments in a soldier’s experience—the dark truth behind the idealist vision of battlefield valor.10 But how does levity fit into the construction of this mundane view? Homer explores the uneasy relationship between levity and gravity to meditate on the experience of war and the principles both of humor and of painting itself. If the hilarity of jokes is fleeting and humor difficult, if not impossible, to translate once its context vanishes—William Dean Howells, for example, criticized the humor of the ante­ bellum period as terrible stuff—Homer admits that painting is powerless to record the fleeting, building that very condition into his imagery.11 Acknowledging that painting is powerless to record the fleeting, Homer makes that a virtue of painting’s achievement as an investigative, rather than a reportorial or taxonomic, medium. If, by the war’s end, Homer seems to expunge levity from his art, the early works are driven by an exploration of its potential to serve and inform ambitious painting. Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  11

Inappropriate Levity Abraham Lincoln explained that “if [he] did not laugh [he] should die” from the strain of the war, but members of his cabinet were reportedly disgusted by his “inappropriate levity.” On one occasion, before presenting a draft of his Emancipation Proclamation, he read to them from the writings of the humorist Artemus Ward (the pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne). The president’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, later commented on the incident: “Not a member of the Cabinet smiled; as for myself, I was angry, and looked to see what the President meant. It seemed to me like buffoonery.” The appalled Stanton considered “rising to leave the meeting abruptly.” This phrase, “rising to leave,” evokes the low position of levity, which serious leaders were expected to rise above.12 Although the comic peri­odical Yankee Notions rather affectionately tagged Lincoln the “Prince of Jokers, and Fun Maker General to the Universal Yankee Nation,” the popular press criti­cized him relentlessly for relying on humor during the war. An anecdote from Yankee Notions entitled “Honest Abe’s Hilarity” presents Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, as similarly annoyed by the president’s levity, thinking it “subtracted from the Presidential dignity.”13 One popular cartoon put Lincoln on a battlefield calling for a funny story among the dead. Another pictured him exclaiming, “This don’t remind me of any joke!!” as he scrambles to outrun the severed and stereotyped head of a slave that Columbia prepares to launch in his direction.14 If the president’s levity seemed self-indulgent in the context of war, these cartoons may have seemed appropriate because they interweave the “comical and coffinly”: they engage in satirical critique, not levity for its own sake. That distinction informed “The Humorous in Art,” a piece by the critic Clarence Cook that appeared in the New Path in February 1864. Although Cook was just then coming to notice as one of the most outspoken and unforgiving critics in New York, he had already made an impact.15 George William Curtis, who preceded Cook at the New-York Daily Tribune, reviewing exhibitions for the paper in the early 1850s, praised Cook’s “conviction,” which confirmed for him the vitality of art criticism in the United States.16 “If art is worth talking about at all,” Cook wrote in 1855, “it is worth talking about in a vigorous manner, and in plain terms.”17 Many artists and art world figures would suffer the sting of Cook’s sharp tongue over the course of his long career; in “The Humorous in Art,” his targets were John George Brown and William Holbrook Beard. Cook was troubled by the popularity of paintings like Brown’s First Cigar and Beard’s Jealous Rabbits, recently exhibited in New York, which he found indulgent, morally corrupt and “coarse.” Instead of arousing “pity for the friendless and 12  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 1 John Gast after John George Brown, The First Cigar (early 1860s), ca. 1870, chromo­ lithograph, 161 ⁄4 × 12 in. Peter J. Eckel Newsboy Collection, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

oppressed” or ridiculing “the foibles and follies of the world,” like William Hogarth, these artists appealed to humanity’s baser instincts. Both works seem to have been lost, but Brown’s First Cigar exists in a print made after the original painting about 1870 (Fig. 1). In it, a boy, having tasted his first cigar, seems on the verge of vomiting. He stares imploringly in the viewer’s direction through the smoke one boy blows in his face, while another boy laughs. Cook argued that this Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  13

imagery encouraged the viewer to be amused at suffering. Beard’s work was even worse, reveling in the antics of debauched animals. (Jealous Rabbits apparently showed a rabbit adulterer caught in the act.)18 The Harvard-educated Cook conceded that the two paintings represented different strains of humor, but he saw them as equally “dangerous” to public taste, especially since so many people seemed to find them “funny.” Indeed, a review of Brown’s painting when it was shown at the Maryland State Fair in Baltimore, in April 1864, called the work a “gem,” a picture “full of life, fun, wickedness, and, in a word—boy.” Lincoln reportedly loved it as well when he visited this fair, mounted to raise funds for the Union effort. “When President Lincoln saw it the other night, his humorous spirit caught the infection in a moment, and enjoyed it greatly.”19 Whether apocryphal or not, this account situates Lincoln’s sense of humor at a distance from Cook, whose elitist propriety led him to call the humorous paintings of Brown and Beard “an insult to refined and cultivated people”— those who presumably expected more from their art than jocular entertainment. Writing as one of the “defenders of the pure and exalted in art,” Cook conceded that humor was “legitimate in what is called genre painting,” but he maintained that these paintings were not worthy of that name: “We deny that either of these pictures is ‘humorous.’ ”20 Earlier in the nineteenth century the New York painter William Sidney Mount produced humorous genre painting that made him, according to an essay published in the American Whig Review in 1851, “the comic painter of the country.”21 Although Mount’s works are largely rustic scenes heavily invested in visual interpretations of period slang, his humor is more refined than that of either Brown or Beard. Instead of soliciting a belly laugh, Mount required viewers to engage in a more intellectual form of play, reading in his naturalistic details a double meaning. Mount’s Cider Making, for example, presents an elaborate allegory of William Henry Harrison’s presidential campaign of 1840 (Fig. 2). A work dense with political references, it seems to translate into paint the verbosity of the early nineteenthcentury political cartoon. Mount, or one of his friends, went so far as to publish a long narrative key to Cider Making to guide viewers interpreting the work and ensure that they understood how it put naturalism to the service of satire, that those hogs lounging at far right were Democrats sleeping, as Elizabeth Johns has written, “through the Whigs’ successes.”22 That some viewers missed Mount’s sa­ tirical edge—that his naturalism could conceal or distract from political content— may have been one reason for his work’s broad appeal. It was seen as “sweet” and “fine-tempered,” with “no bitterness, no moral obliquity or personal deformity.”23 A decade later Cook worried that those qualities in humorous painting had been lost as an art of bold impropriety replaced an art of nuance. 14  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 2 William Sidney Mount, Cider Making, 1840–41, oil on canvas, 27 × 341 ⁄ 8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, by exchange, 1966 (66.126). Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cook’s censure of Brown’s and Beard’s ostensibly depraved imagery echoes writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who distinguished between “true and false” wit and humor. One writer argued in 1787 that “wit . . . is intimately connected with morality,” going on to list which strokes of wit—what the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries would call practical joking—were not amusing. “Stealing a blind man’s dog, has been mentioned as vastly funny and monstrous clever—but for funny I read wicked, and for clever I read cruel.” He felt the same when a young man “who had diverted the company with many very witty feats and sayings, at last, by way of a capital stroke, threw a quart bottle, just emptied of wine, at my head.”24 Good humor provides harmless amusement and has a salutary effect, but false or bad wit is linked to delinquency, damage to property, and physical violence. This view supports theories positing that laughter offers release from social and psychological constraints.25 It also supports theories that link humor at someone else’s expense to a need to assert social superiority.26 The difference between harmless and harmful buffoonery is one of degree. The later nineteenth century would face the problem of enforcing the distinction as Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  15

moral reformers codified behavior among the emerging middle classes, whose sense of self depended on ideals of moderation and self-restraint.27 Cook, who saw himself as a reformer, would use his position to tame and punish those who crossed the line. He wanted to inspire a new era of vigorous, original, and uplifting artistic production, along with public interest in art that he hoped would cut across divisions of class. That was why he had argued so vehemently in the 1850s that art criticism should be the province not only of specialized art journals but also of the newspapers, where general-interest readers might learn from it how to enjoy art’s “blessings.” “If the Fine Arts were once fairly treated in this country, if every newspaper and every public journal would do its whole duty liberally and cheerfully toward them, considering their culture in our midst as important as the chronicle of accidents and murders with which their columns are daily filled,” Cook argued, “we should soon see a happy change in the manners and domestic life of our people.”28 But some, like Beard, felt that Cook’s criticism was more damaging than inspiring. When Cook wrote in the Tribune that Beard’s March of Silenus was “unclean” and that his work “defiled the walls of . . . public exhibitions,” the artist responded quickly in a public letter, which the Tribune published in May 1864 (Fig. 3).29 Although Cook hoped Beard might be “afraid and ashamed to paint such loathly things any more,” the artist defended the painting as “a satire” employing animals to “exhibit . . . the . . . beastly vices of man.” In Beard’s view, Cook had missed the point and threatened to ruin the artist’s reputation by attacking his moral character.30 Homer would have encountered this debate if he read the journal that published his own illustrations, Harper’s Weekly. There, George William Curtis attempted to mediate between the two parties. Curtis supported Beard by conceding that the work was “not without a startling strain of Rabelaisque satire and warning.” But he also defended Cook’s right to state his views and belittled the artist’s reaction as immature. This extended exchange, spilling over from the Tribune to Harper’s Weekly, reads like a cautionary tale about the risks of humorous expression in a period when art critics were renegotiating what American painting should be.31 Concerns about humor’s place in painting would escalate after the war, as cultural leaders in the reunited country worked to assert its maturity, especially in the realm of the “high” arts.32 If by the 1890s jocularity was seen as a “plague” spreading through American culture, critics much earlier pleaded for seriousness.33 “The stupidest book in the world is a book of jokes, and the stupidest man in the world is one who surrenders himself to the single purpose of making men laugh,” Josiah Holland, the writer, lyceum speaker and co-founder of Scribner’s, argued in 1872 in “Triflers on the Platform,” a critique of the new breed of professional humorous lecturers.34 “It is 16  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 3 William Holbrook Beard, The March of Silenus, ca. 1862, oil on canvas, 45 × 35 in. AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Photograph: Albright-Knox Art Gallery/Art Resource, New York.

a purpose that wholly demoralizes and degrades him.” Holland was particularly inflamed because in the 1870s the platform “Drollerists” no longer attracted merely a “low crowd of men and boys as coarse and frivolous as themselves” but came into contact with “the better part of society.” This was one indication of the broader market for humor during the second half of the nineteenth century and its permeation of varied spheres of American experience. Holland had no patience for this thundering jocularity that failed to respect the boundary lines of polite society. The “professional jesters,” the writer concluded, as if to enlist his readers in enforcing that boundary, “ought not to be tolerated by any man . . . interested in the elevation and purification of the public taste.”35 This movement to contain levity and its coarser variant jocularity—to keep them from undermining efforts to elevate public taste—begins in earnest with Cook’s censure of Brown and Beard. It is impossible to know what Homer might have made of these emerging restrictions on “the humorous in art,” what shape it should and should not take. We do know, however, that he was well versed in a range of comic strategies and that his graphic work from this period relied heavily on caricature, racial stereotype, punning, and slapstick. In Our Jolly Cook a grotesquely stereotyped black figure dances in convulsive merriment; in other works soldiers fall off horses or are tossed up in the air by amused comrades, as if the war were merely a game.36 The artist’s new medium, oil painting, which had significantly higher stakes, inspired a more complex investigation, inflected by ambition and an awareness of painting’s limits and possibilities. “Throughout his life Homer understood the difference between the mediums of art,” the art historian Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. has argued, “in the sense of what was expressively appropriate to them, what meanings each could best convey.”37

Painterly Control in Playing Old Soldier Homer investigates the possibilities of weaving levity into ambitious painting in his early depictions of life in the Union army camps. In so doing, however, he shuts down levity to the point of nearly extinguishing it, thus exploring a kind of humor that is subtler than that in Beard’s or Brown’s work and closer to that of the platform comedians. The structural dynamics of Playing Old Soldier (1863) reveal how this works (see Plate 1).38 The painting depicts a young soldier pretending to be sick—“playing old soldier,” in the slang of the 1860s—to get out of duty.39 Because the “appearance of the tongue” was a “standard criterion of condition,” men pretending to be sick commonly coated their tongues with licorice and coffee (producing the “brown 18  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

tongue of typhoid fever”) or other substances that produced a sickly whitish film.40 Essays in medical journals addressed the phenomenon of “malingerers” with stern seriousness, sympathizing with the surgeon who had to sort the truly ill from those who lied in presenting their symptoms. To expose the lie, surgeons might force the shirker into absurd and dangerous situations, putting a man faking blindness on a precipice, for example, or monitoring his heart rate as he receives some terrible news to judge whether he is actually not deaf as he has pretended.41 It became a challenge to see who would outsmart whom, and both surgeons and shirkers became ever more creative in their efforts. “These malingerers are often very ingenious,” according to “Rough Notes of an Army Surgeon’s Experience, during the Great Rebellion,” published in 1863. “They understand very well what diseases can be ‘played,’ (as they term it,) and what cannot.” One man, against all the odds, “played” insanity—instead of something a bit easier, like rheumatism, for example; he sat for hours in camp “with a pole, and [imagined] himself fishing.” The ruse worked: “He was at length discharged, and when leaving his camp, one of his old company said to him: ‘Bill, what did you make such a d——d fool of yourself as to sit out in the sun all day pretending to be fishing.’ Pulling out his discharge papers he replied, with a quiet smile, ‘I was fishing for these papers.’ ”42 Although attempts to evade duty were a serious problem, they also had comic potential. The malingerer was accordingly a popular subject of the humorous anecdote, poem, and satirical sketch.43 Homer’s painting, dedicated to such a malingerer, seems meant to be funny— this was Homer looking at the “laughing side” of the conflict.44 The title alone would suggest this. But the painting is also visually connected to a tradition of humorous medical imagery, such as seventeenth-century Dutch tooth-pulling scenes, where the open mouth, twisted in pain, is pictured as an inherently interesting and amusing subject, with figures smiling and leaning in for a better view. Playing Old Soldier, with its open-mouthed figure, is part of this tradition, but not quite. The painting is not exactly funny. The man’s doleful expression—that of a figure whose “whole appearance,” one critic wrote, “denotes an entire willingness to be considered ill”—is calculated to elicit pity. His slumping shoulders convey a striking heaviness that reinforces the gravity of his expression.45 Homer’s painting alludes to this tradition of visual humor, then, but it does not cue the viewer’s response with figures like those the Dutch genre painter often employs, who laugh and sometimes point to the locus of humor in the work. Homer’s painting omits these “laughing prompts” and guides viewers more subtly to the man’s open mouth.46 Note the surgeon’s line of sight and outstretched arm; the thin branch above and to the left of the soldier’s head that leads diagonally to the area around his mouth; and the ledger held by the standing recorder, the cover Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  19

Fig. 4 Winslow Homer, Surgeon’s Call, from Life in Camp. Part 1, 1864, lithographic card, 41 ⁄ 8 × 21 ⁄ 2 in. American Antiquar­ ian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Fig. 5 Winslow Homer, Hard Tack, from Life in Camp. Part 1, 1864, lithographic card, 41 ⁄8 × 21 ⁄ 2 in. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

of which falls loosely to the level of the seated soldier’s upper lip. The focus on the tongue, not customarily revealed in public, might have seemed transgressive in different circumstances—in oil painting, as the Cook-Beard-Curtis exchange suggests, and also in life. At a time when etiquette books advised middle-class readers not to spit, smoke, yawn, cough, sneeze, laugh too loud, or register any strong emotion on their faces, sticking out one’s tongue signaled at best a lack of decorum and at worst a more troubling loss of control.47 Neither offense, however, seems at issue here, where the narrative of medical examination normalizes the gesture and diffuses its potential vulgarity. Homer’s painting, then, tempers the excess of this kind of physical humor. Although one period critic said that the tongue was “thrust” out of the figure’s mouth, its precise position, quite controlled, answers both the surgeon’s command to show it and the logic of the man’s disconsolate look.48 This was not the case in 1864, when Homer translated the composition to a lithographic card for the Prang series Life in Camp (Fig. 4). If the title of the card, “Surgeon’s Call,” 20  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

seems to distance it from the comic connotations of the painting’s title, the figures are marked by distortion and caricature. The seated man has sunken cheeks and bulging eyes, while the man behind him, awaiting his turn with the surgeon, has a cheek swelled up like a balloon. A similar exaggeration characterizes “Hard Tack,” another Life in Camp card with a seated open-mouthed figure. Here an outsize head sits atop a diminutive body almost overwhelmed by a monstrously big cracker (Fig. 5). In Playing Old Soldier this rhetoric is muted, managed.49 The soldier there is, after all, an obedient figure, pinned down and hemmed in by his examiners. Homer concentrates or qualifies in the painting the exaggerated energies of the period’s popular humor that he uses in the Prang cards, reducing them to the controlled, protruding tongue.

Passive Aggression But “reducing” seems not quite right here because, if anything, Homer’s concentration on the tongue makes for greater intensity. The tongue is doubled in form and color by the red flag that dangles from a branch just above the soldier’s head to mark the surgeon’s lean-to. This formal rhyme acts like an exclamation point, insisting that we recognize the disruptive gesture of the tongue. Even as the soldier obeys the surgeon’s command to stick out his tongue, he can’t help sticking out his tongue. That is, the gesture must be read as both compliant and defiant, bringing the figure in line with the tallest boy in an almanac illustration who responds to his instructor’s quiz by sticking out his tongue (Fig. 6). In this image, from TwentyFive Cents Worth of Nonsense; or, The Treasure Box of Unconsidered Trifles, published in the 1850s, the expressions of the misbehaving students vary, with some distorted into funny faces. The tallest boy sums up the attitude of the group; with his tongue sticking out, he cannot respond to his teacher’s questions and stands for the group’s unwillingness to play by the old man’s rules. (They respond to his questions with absurd answers, each rhyming with the one before.) One set of eyes is averted in each of these images: the eyes of the wizened instructor, which look down at his lesson, giving the boy a chance to express his true feelings without fear of recrimination, and the eyes of the soldier in Homer’s work, which, instead of connecting directly with the diagnostic gaze, stare impassively into the distance. Passive aggression is the operative concept here: it was in the 1860s, as it is now, a key feature of much humor with a critical edge. If, as Charles Schutz has argued, “all humor [is] a form of social communication [that] is confused and duplicitous,” it is “the concealed meanings in humor [that] permit it to express criticism and hostility.”50 If the pathos of the soldier elicits sympathy as he slumps Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  21

Fig. 6 “Geography,” from Twenty-Five Cents Worth of Nonsense; or, The Treasure Box of Unconsidered Trifles (Philadelphia: Fisher and Brothers, 1850s). Library of Congress.

over—literally looked down on, even weighed down by that high horizon line— his tongue is a pithy summary of the rebellious spirit of his ruse, his attempt to get out from under the watchful eye of the authority figure while seeming to play by the rules. The ambiguity of his gesture gives it a critical edge. Homer’s figure represents humor that is serious and subtle, passive but also aggressive. This figure is closely related to the man from In Front of the Guard-House (also known as Punishment for Intoxication), who is made to balance on an upended box while shouldering a plank of wood, like a circus animal (Fig. 7). “Nothing new,” said one period critic of this work when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1864, reinforcing the link between it and earlier works structured on the same premise.51 Kept in line by an armed guard and made a spectacle, the man, like Homer’s seated soldier, is a pitiable figure. But he too enacts his own quiet retort. Carrying his wooden plank in place of a gun, the insubordinate soldier mocks the armed guard assigned to him. Period writers recognized this. The picture, said a critic writing in the New-York Times, “represents a soldier doing ignominious penance on the top of a wine box with a rail across his shoulder for a musket.” The writer for the New-York Illustrated News suggested how the man mocks the guard: “Standing upon a box, the better 22  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 7 Winslow Homer, Punishment for Intoxication (In Front of the Guard-House), 1863, oil on canvas, 17 × 13 in. Gift of Bartlett Arkell, Courtesy of The Arkell Museum at Canajo­harie, New York.

Fig. 8 C. F. Morse and G. A. Morse, Yankee Volunteers Marching into Dixie, 1862, chromo­ lithograph, 10 × 121 ⁄ 2 in. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

to observe the movements of his well-instructed comrade, he imitates them with a log of wood placed in his hands instead of a musket.”52 Elevated on a makeshift pedestal and isolated against the sky, he strikes an ironically heroic sculptural pose as he looks down on the faceless guard—that “well-instructed comrade”— pacing before him. With this work in view, elements of Playing Old Soldier take on greater significance. The figure on the right in each composition embodies order, in measured steps or in the recording of words on a page. If the orderly’s note taking in Playing Old Soldier bespeaks order—a willingness to fall in line, to fit the expression of the individual into a broader regimental scheme—the soldier playing sick represents a subtle disorder. Challenging the authority figure to incorporate him into the organization of war, he signifies disruption. In a class of otherwise dedicated students who, in a contemporaneous print depicting Yankee volunteers, find enjoyment in the duty they are expected to perform—all smiles as they march behind their gallant officer to the rhythm of a drum—he is the camp crank, the misbehaving clown (Fig. 8). 24  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Homer’s Yankee—the regiment is the Sixty-First New York—is not a joiner. He is a rebellious figure who must be reckoned with, but he is also immature, just a boy. He has the air of a child still waiting to grow into his body. His trousers billow out above thin ankles, exaggerating the size of his feet. This affect of childlike impotence is amplified by the limp hat in the boy’s hands, a displaced manifestation, perhaps, of the genitals those hands so decorously cover. This is a figure who has deheroized himself to make himself appear unfit for duty. He views himself as expendable (they can go on without him) but also as irreplaceable (he’s trying to protect his life). The work thus imagines the iconoclast as both impotent and anarchic, a character who at once admits to his own position as an outsider— his ultimate powerlessness or irrelevance—and exhibits a desire to subvert received models of thinking and behavioral codes.

War and Disillusionment Pictures like Playing Old Soldier and In Front of the Guard-House stand at a critical distance from the popular fiction that “all soldiers were brave, that battle was glorious, that battlefield death was heroic—that war, in short, was intrinsically noble.”53 They also speak to the overturning of conventional hierarchies as a result of war and chart a prehistory of alienated, equivocating soldiers depicted later in popular culture, from Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895) to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) to the film and television series MASH. If in the twentieth century the gap between the costs of war and its meager rewards was viewed ironically, as the historian Paul Fussell has suggested, soldiers in the Civil War also felt the disparity. After the losses the Union sustained at Fredericks­ burg in 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes “pretty much made up [his] mind that the South [had] achieved their independence.” When the Union lost the bat­tle at Chancellor­sville, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts despaired in the spring of 1863, “Lost, lost, all is lost.” Hopelessness drifted on the winds of battle. The Confederate General Frank Paxton wrote in a black moment, “Our victories . . . seem to settle nothing.”54 A dark humor emerged from this atmosphere of defeat, as in Alfred R. Waud’s sketch depicting a drinking party with Death, scythe in hand, biding his time.55 Hopelessness and the gap between idealism and the reality of serving in the war became evident in the reaction against conscription that began in 1862, and also in the frequent discussions in comic journals like Vanity Fair of “skedaddling,” or evading duty. An essay entitled “Weak Knees” from August 23, 1862, describes the desire to escape conscription as a mania that “fortunately . . . only a few [thouHomer’s Visual Deadpan  |  25

sand]” citizens suffer from. The poem “Soldier on Leave” in the August 9, 1862, issue, satirizes feigning illness to escape duty once a soldier is drafted: “Though I’m sick, I look well,” the “coward” affirms. “The Surgeon’s my brother, he’ll do aught for me—He says I am troubled with Debili-ty.”56 Such satires were meant to incite ridicule and shame. They also reveal the change in mood as the war dragged on and the North’s able-bodied men turned away from the ideals that had initially made so many want to fight. The New York draft riots of July 1863 were perhaps the bloodiest manifestation of this sentiment. Soldiers began to see the ceremony, regimentation, and costume of the war ironically. One soldier noted how his uniform made him good-looking but also marked him as a target for the enemy. Soldiers also pointed out the absurdity of following orders. When on the march, they were expected to stay in line on all terrain, so that “while one part would be marching on the smooth surface of the ground, another part might be climbing a fence or wading a brook.”57 Men were beginning to recognize that conventions of soldierly behavior and dress had been designed, not necessarily for their needs, but according to martial codes that seemed outdated. Some began to question the mechanics of war, as the central character of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage would three decades later, torn between duty and a nagging inner logic that tells him his officers are buffoons and the war a sham. Disenchantment had set in. If the physical body was required to serve, the mind—as the often unfocused eyes of Homer’s soldiers so powerfully suggest—could remove itself to a critical distance as a means of survival. This decision to exist outside one’s social requirements attends the mod­ern experience, whether in war or in cultural or commercial exchange. Like the pro­ tagonist of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), who responds to his boss’s demands with a passive-aggressive “I would prefer not to,” Homer’s noncompliant tricksters are figures of modernity. The humorist traditionally plays the role of noncompliant in modern society, an idea Homer’s paintings seem to acknowledge. Like the protagonist in both Playing Old Soldier and In Front of the Guard-House, the humorist typically presents himself as a marginal figure whose foibles members of the audience are invited to look down on, reinforcing their own social superiority. This technique was crucial to the routines of Artemus Ward, who, beginning with his first lecture tour of 1861–62—with stops in New York City; Madison, Wisconsin; and various points between—perfected the art of “well-feigned confusion” and apparent “embarrassment.”58 The disobedient figures of Homer’s paintings appear ridiculous in much the same way—humiliated, though each maintains a measure of subversive authority. The marginality of the humorist gives him license to deviate from norms and speak openly, as others cannot, about his culture’s most deeply 26  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

felt ideological assumptions. He is the “counter-cultural spokesman,” the observer speaking a “universally recognized but politically taboo” truth.59 Just as Shakespeare made use of such figures—his fools offering critique and commentary on the central action of the play—so did the precursors of our stand-up comedians, the Civil War humorists, who moved from newsprint to the stage in these years.60 These humorists—including not only Ward, but also Petroleum V. Nasby (the searingly racist character created by David Ross Locke), Orpheus C. Kerr (Robert Henry Newell), and Bill Arp (Charles H. Smith) in the South—provided “a means of registering dissatisfaction with the war,” exposing “failures in the war effort,” and making “the profoundly subversive point that war was ridiculous.” 61 As a “special artist” during the war, Homer occupied a similar position of privileged but marginal outsider. Harper’s Weekly, like the other illustrated journals published during the war, made much of the heroic efforts of its artists to tell the war’s story, with their pencils in the field, upon their knees, upon a knapsack, upon a bulwark, upon a drum-head, upon a block, upon a canteen, upon a wet deck, in the gray dawn, in the dusk twilight, with freezing or fevered fingers; upon horseback, in ambulances, under a shed, in a tent; under the sky, in snow and rain and sunshine; from the bough of a tree through which the bullets sang; from a corner of the deck over which the shells whistled and crashed; in the glow of victory, in the rage of defeat.62

But other writers questioned the artist’s utility while so many other young men were fighting. Artists who had been sent out into the field to report back to the Crayon, for example, were giving up the “indulgence” of painting for fighting.63 In the pages of Vanity Fair, the “special artist” was portrayed as a figure cozy in a private drawing room, sketching toy soldiers, far removed from the sites of battle. The manhood of the figure, nattily attired and playing with war toys as he sketches, is called into question.64 In an illustration celebrating the reach and impact of “News from the War,” Homer suggests the artist’s diminished status by depicting his artist precariously on a barrel, sketching on his knee—seated and dwarfed by two giant soldiers standing at attention.65 The artist’s thin pen or pencil contrasts pathetically with the long bayonets of the soldiers he sketches. In the course of his life, Homer would be drawn to those relegated to the margins of a community—such as African Americans, children, and laborers—and this concern with the outsider position began early in his career. Homer spent most of his time in this period establishing himself in New York and taking practical steps to become a painter. He had begun his illustrative work in Boston in the mid-1850s with the lithographer John H. Bufford, but he soon Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  27

became dissatisfied with the “treadmill existence” of commercial work. When he left Boston for New York in 1859, he began freelance work for Harper’s Weekly instead of accepting the full-time position he was offered. His apprenticeship in Boston, he later recalled, was “too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again.”66 He received instruction in painting from Frederic Rondel beginning in 1861, and probably by early summer of the following year, he had set up a studio in the New York University building, where he would paint alongside artists such as Eastman Johnson.67 By 1863 he had begun to spend less time illus­ trating. In 1860 he had published some twenty-three illustrations in the popular press; in 1863, just eight; in 1864, three; in 1865, seven; and in 1866, two. At this point, “Homer may have thought he had left illustration work behind him.” 68 Some critics were indeed beginning to write of him explicitly as a painter: “Few if any of our young painters have displayed in their first works so much that belongs to the painter as Mr. Homer,” a critic wrote on viewing In Front of the Guard-House and The Brierwood Pipe, which Homer exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1864. “His pictures indicate a hand formed to use the brush.”69 His superiors at the National Academy of Design seemed to agree: in 1865, after the exhibition of The Bright Side, Pitching Quoits, and The Initials, this mostly self-taught artist was elected an academician. In 1867 he would be chosen to represent the United States at the Universal Exposition in Paris, where he was acclaimed by the critics. But in the early 1860s, as the period reviews make clear, he was still learning, still “very young in the profession,” some said “almost a beginner,” producing what were understood as “immature” efforts.70

The Visual Joke Revised Homer’s immature soldier might be seen as an apt representative of the young artist who depended on more established members of the New York art world to judge (like the surgeon in his painting) his expressions. That soldier is, after all, a painter himself, having coated his tongue to pull one over on his superiors.71 We may even be tempted to read Homer’s soldier as a comedian, a figure who in the classic stand-up comedy formula voices a common complaint or critique that without his utterance would go unspoken. But if the tongue at the painting’s center—the gag, framed by straight men—is its punch line, we have to ask precisely what it means. Punch lines generally derive their power from their brevity and clarity, and on those grounds this one fails. The close-up perspective of the surgeon and the more distanced position of the orderly, who focuses not on the soldier’s tongue but on the transcript of the consultation he is noting down, both 28  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

seem to miss something. We achieve no greater understanding from our place outside the canvas. The viewer is invited to lean in to scrutinize the soldier’s tongue, to question, like the surgeon, whether it signals sickness. But no hardand-fast conclusion can be drawn. Homer’s painting The Bright Side (1865) contains a related instance of the inscrutable or incomprehensible punch line (Plate 2). The humor of the painting depends both on the wordplay of the title and on some well-inscribed visual tropes: in the formal rhyme between the lounging muleteers in the foreground and the mules in the background, the work makes the familiar antebellum equation between the African American and laziness, best represented perhaps by Mount’s Farmers Nooning (1836) or James Goodwyn Clonney’s Waking Up (1851). The critic for Watson’s Weekly Art Journal seems to have recognized the joke: “The lazy sun­ light, the lazy, nodding donkeys, the lazy, lolling negroes,” he writes, spelling out the discursive chain that structures the work, “make a humorously conceived and truthfully executed picture.”72 But some critics located the work’s humor elsewhere, in the “comic old darkey with the pipe, poking his head through the tentopening.”73 This figure, whose assertive, appraising look at the viewer one critic misread as “grinning,”74 seemed to period writers the punch line for the painting’s joke about blackness and laziness—a cue to the laughter that, to nineteenthcentury Americans steeped in the imagery of minstrelsy, seemed a natural response to African American characters.75 But this punch line, if we can call it that, counters the stereotype that informs the rest of the composition and might therefore be seen to turn the joke on its head. “Homer’s muleteer is the defiantly aware center of the canvas,” Marc Simpson writes. “He challenges the viewer to respond, but provides no clues as to what the nature of that response should be.” This figure, with his inscrutable expression, complicates the easy joke, calling into question the familiar elision between black man and animal.76 The man’s forthright stare may be unsettling—as it surely was to those viewers who recast it as a familiar smile—but that is how the “emblem of incomprehensibility” works, according to the philosopher Ted Cohen. The inscrutable or incomprehensible detail, woven into the fabric of the joke, invites deeper consideration and may promote a change of view.77 Even as Homer engaged in visual stereotyping, he often asked viewers to rethink stereotypes when considering the social position and subjectivity of African Americans, as the historian Peter H. Wood has shown of paintings like Near Andersonville (1865–66), which depicts an African American woman standing on the threshold of her Georgia home as Union soldiers are marched to captivity by Confederates in the distance (Fig. 9).78 The painting explores the trauma of both the war and slavery and asks the viewer to ponder the uncertain future of the Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  29

Fig. 9 Winslow Homer, Near Andersonville, 1865–66, oil on canvas, 23 × 18 in. Newark Museum. Gift of Mrs. Hannah Corbin Carter; Horace K. Corbin Jr.; Robert S. Corbin; William D. Corbin; and Mrs. Clementine Corbin Day in memory of their parents, Hannah Stockton Corbin and Horace Kellogg Corbin, 1966 (66.354). Photograph: Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York.

war’s many victims. By treating this woman sympathetically, Homer unsettles the rhetoric of popular cartoons featuring incredulous and stupefied Southern mammy types.79 In The Bright Side, he performs a related maneuver, but he calls into question the racist ideology informing such imagery with an ambitious form of visual deadpan that keeps humor in play instead of pushing it aside. Like The Bright Side, Playing Old Soldier is a metacritical work that focuses on the mechanics of joke telling and draws attention to the complexities of visualizing humor, a fleeting mode of expression. “You had to be there,” we say when telling a funny story that fails to translate the humor of the original moment. Platform comedians like Ward exploited the awkwardness of this situation and used it to elicit a laugh. Telling his long-winded tales in a flat, deadpan manner, Ward amused audiences precisely because he seemed unaware of his own comedic effect. At times he played the nervous naïf so well and spoke with such quiet gravity that members of the audience believed him. One critic describes members of the audience at one of Ward’s lectures who “would not, or perhaps could not see the point of his jokes, and who looked as if they thought they had been swindled out of their entrance money.” Another critic tells how a crowd gathered around Ward, after his “Babes in the Wood” talk, to “express sympathy for the nervousness through which, as they supposed, he had failed to say anything at all about the Babes in the Wood.”80 Mark Twain modeled his own delivery on Ward’s. If audiences during Twain’s late 1860s lecture tour were “at first fooled . . . into believing they were in for a boring evening” because of “the slow, drawling speech, the dry humor, and the dead-pan face,” their “awakening from this error,” the Indianapolis Journal reported in 1869, “[came] so suddenly, so thoroughly and pleasantly too, that from this point on to the close of the lecture, the doubter at first, is a willing and delighted captive, drinking in every word.”81 Deadpan was risky but, when it succeeded, Twain felt it was high art.82 He formulated this argument as a methodology in 1895. The humorous story was “told gravely,” with the teller doing his best “to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” The listener had to be alert, because the teller often drops the “nub”— the punch line—“in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.” Ward, for example, “would begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the remark intended to explode the mine—and it did.”83 He “could get laughs out of nothing,” Marshall P. Wilder wrote in the foreword to his 1911 collection of American humor, “by mixing the absurd and the unexpected, and then backing the combination with a solemn Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  31

face and earnest manner.”84 Ward’s deadpan method was a critical development in American humor and it seems, in some way, the antidote to the taint of exaggeration and self-indulgence that plagued definitions of American humor from the 1860s to the end of the century.85 If the content of his jokes could be crude or coarse, his manner in telling them was careful and refined. Humor resided in this bristling contrast between content and form. The humorous story that exploited incongruities or subverted expectations to a high point of refinement was, Twain said, “strictly a work of art,—high and delicate art,—and only an artist can tell it.”86 Twain’s essay on his method dates from the mid-1890s, when some writers were beginning to see it as outdated. Twain’s meandering jokes had come to seem longwinded relics of a slow-paced era as anonymous joke writers developed a new style that prized brevity.87 Ward suffered the same critique by the end of the century. One writer in the 1890s claimed that even in his own day Ward was “belated.”88 The grotesque exaggeration of Ward’s tortured spelling and feigned naïveté made it difficult for the critic to see the sophistication of the comedian’s deadpan approach. He misses the oscillation in Ward’s humor between levity and gravity and the seriousness of its cultural critiques—he misses, in short, the subtlety of Ward’s grave comic style.89 That is the humor of Playing Old Soldier, a nuanced deadpan easily missed or even misinterpreted.90 The orderly’s note taking in the painting reads like a parody of someone’s recording such a joke (especially the joke told orally), as if its spark could be maintained in the translation. “No quality is more evanescent and volatile than the essence of a joke,” the author of “A Plea for Seriousness” argued in 1892 in the Atlantic Monthly. “It often evaporates while taking the form of words, and can be told only by a glance or gesture.” Humor, always “ephemeral,” could quickly become obsolete.91 If, as Howells suggested, “all fashions change, and nothing more wholly and quickly than the fashion of fun,” if “what amused people in the last generation,” which came of age before the war, struck Howells as “terrible,” recording it would be pointless. The joke would be dead even before it was caught by pen or brush.92 Homer’s painting may question the staying power—perhaps even the very idea—of visual humor, critiquing the achievement of antebellum humorists like Mount and David Claypoole Johnston, who defined the look of what had been a golden age of American comic expression. Although Mount’s work was subject to multiple readings, depending on viewers’ familiarity with the colloquialisms to which he alluded, the artist nonetheless tried to ensure that his jokes were legible to the majority. The signposting of Cider Making, where every object alludes to a political issue, bears this out. Johnston’s work is heavier handed. Humor in his 32  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 10 David Claypoole Johnston, Sound Asleep or Wide Awake, 1845–55, oil on panel, 12 × 161 ⁄ 2 in. Washington, D.C., Collection of Teresa Heinz.

painting Sound Asleep or Wide Awake (1845–55), for example, is presented as visually translatable, even as the work produces a charged commentary on complex class and art world dynamics (Fig. 10).93 There is the stereotypically simian profile of the sleeping figure to tell us he’s Irish, the brick in the hat (a period slang phrase) to tell us he’s drunk, and the broadside at far right (faintly reading “used up,” “bamboozled,” and “sleeping beauty”) that serves as a caption for the central action, the practical joke. The laughing figure behind the box—a laughing prompt— works with all the other prompts to ensure that the viewer responds by laughing with the man who laughs at the victimized vagrant. This is the “semantic prattle” that Roland Barthes suggests is “typical of the archaic—or infantile—era of mod­ ern discourse, marked by the excessive fear of failing to communicate meaning.”94 Iconographic and textual pointers direct interpretation excessively so that the joke is impossible to miss. The humor of mid-nineteenth-century genre painting can be lost to us if we lack a key to its iconographic and colloquial nuances. In the 1860s, however, genre painting was “rapidly rising into favor” and praised for its clarity and the “intelligibility of its motives,” as the art critic and collector James Jackson Jarves put it. “He that looks may understand,” Jarves maintained.95 Humorous genre painting continued unabated through the war; Brown, for example, did extremely well Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  33

into the late nineteenth century with his merry street urchin pictures. Homer’s imagery calls attention to the structural principles of this work, aligning him with the platform comedians who played the content of their jokes against their manner of telling them. Indeed, Playing Old Soldier has a staged quality, with its spotlighted central figure, its proscenium-like foreground, and its lean-to as backdrop, with the blanket at far left arranged like a curtain pulled back to reveal the show. The theatrics of popular comic imagery—overdone gestures, direct address of the viewer, textual cues, and laughing prompts—have been diluted into a few key compositional markers, transmuted into structure. In his early experimental works like Playing Old Soldier, Homer thus disrupts the familiar idioms to reveal their basic armature. Homer’s contemporary Édouard Manet engaged in parallel experiments in deadpan ambiguity in Paris during these years with Déjeuner sur l’herbe, exhibited at the Salon de Refusés in 1863 (Fig. 11). Homer’s work is not nearly as scandalous as this painting, which broke with bourgeois codes of decency both in its technique—the passages of imprecise brushwork and areas of flat, unmodulated color—and its subject matter: a nude woman enjoying the company of two fully clothed men. The art historian Michael Fried has described that central nude’s glance out at the viewer in this parodic homage to Titian’s Concert champêtre as a “deadpan though also slightly amused gaze.” This, he argues, “definitively forestalls all possibility of compositional closure.” Indeed, critics joked that this painting, with its perplexing figures and spatial discontinuities, was a “rebus” or a “riddle.”96 This is very much to the point, for deadpan, as a rule, operates like a riddle. Its strategy is to split the utterance in two and separate signifier from signified: the comedian’s manner of expression from his intent, for example. This divergence sometimes materializes in painting as form or structure that draws attention to itself and thereby undermines the illusion of mimetic sincerity. This is certainly the case for Manet who, in his painting Olympia (1863), drew attention to the flatness of the painting support by rendering the figure (whose gaze is truly deadpan) starkly flat herself, without the modeling that marked the figure in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, on which he riffs. An interest in “flatness” thus informed modernist artistic practice in various ways during the 1860s, and deadpan should be understood as constitutive of this subversive, antiauthoritarian, and formally challenging modernist turn.97 Like Manet’s imagery, Homer’s looked self-critically at painterly protocols and pushed against semantic prattle in favor of more elliptical communication. But Homer’s deadpan is not quite Manet’s; it is less brazen about its intervention and far more subtle (a strategy that has not perhaps been fully accounted for in the dominant narratives of the period’s modernist visual adventures). There are local 34  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 11 Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the grass), 1863, oil on canvas, 82 × 104 in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. RF1668. Photograph by Hervé Lewandowski. Photograph credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

explanations for this comparative restraint. Homer’s work was part of a broader shift in speech that occurred during the war, not only in comedy but also in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863. In contrast to the two-hour speech made that day by the orator Edward Everett, which glides from the specifics of the battle at Gettysburg to the society of ancient Greece, from statistics and critical data to anecdotes that seem off topic, Lincoln famously spoke for just three minutes.98 That economy of language marked a shift occurring precisely in 1863, during a war that, it now seemed, would only be vulgarized by more words, more description. The literary scholar Peter Coviello, in his introduction to Walt Whitman’s Memoranda during the War, argues that the text is suffused with “understatement,” in part because the task of describing the war was so “daunting.”99 This quiet economy of Whitman’s and Lincoln’s language in their treatment of the war made each word count more. Where Everett depended on flights into metaphor and grandiose language, Lincoln depended more on rhetorical structure to communicate his message: the repetition of words or phrases that pushes clipped clauses forward to make a case that seems both urgent and “natuHomer’s Visual Deadpan  |  35

ral.”100 Lincoln’s speech, according to the historian Garry Wills, “[anticipated] the shift to vernacular rhythms that Mark Twain would complete twenty years later” and made Everett’s oration obsolete in a manner of minutes.101 The ornate and grandiose became passé and artificial as Lincoln redefined oratorical eloquence.

Painting as Investigation Playing Old Soldier exemplifies how the same shift occurred at this time in painting. The work was promoted, when it was exhibited, as a species of the new naturalism that brought the ugly into play, breaking through the stodgy and idealizing gloss that defined the American model of academic painting, as guided and promoted by Daniel Huntington, then president of the National Academy of Design. Full of admiration for the old European masters and a sense of Christian charity that inspired didactic religious imagery and forgiving portraits of U.S. presidents and other luminaries, Huntington profoundly influenced the New York art world, even as new trends began to erupt in the mid-1860s.102 Cook—the critic who lambasted Brown and Beard and co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art and its publication, the New Path—led the charge to oust the old guard Huntington represented. “In the world of art in our day . . . we are in the midst of a great revolution,” he declared: “The old order changeth.”103 Conservative in his way, Cook nevertheless started “a successful offensive against” what he perceived as “the conservative forces in American art.”104 In Emanuel Leutze’s mammoth history painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, exhibited at the Metropolitan Fair in New York in the spring of 1864, Cook saw “a striking representative of the school that is dying out.”105 He similarly placed the work of Huntington in “a past age, and a dead system; an age whose spirit will never return; a system that can never again be revivified.” The work of these artists was “vapid . . . utterly without life, or energy, or spirit of any kind.”106 And it was up to the new artists on the scene, “nearly all young men” who, “not hampered by too many traditions,” would “turn their backs deliberately . . . upon the rubbish of the past” and “inaugurate the new day.”107 Following only nature as a guide, these new men would produce, Cook hoped, something fresh, “more real and smacking of the time.”108 When Homer’s Playing Old Soldier and The Sutler’s Tent were shown at the Artists’ Fund Society in New York in November 1863, the New Path made Homer stand for its most deeply felt convictions about the new painting. “Mr. Homer is the first of our artists who has endeavored to tell us any truth about the war.” 36  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Although “he has looked only on the laughing or the sentimental side . . . what he has tried to tell us has been said simply, honestly, and with such homely truth as would have given his pictures a historical value quite apart from their artistic merit.”109 But as a naturalistic, descriptive painting, Playing Old Soldier is vague and imprecise. The paint is almost uniformly muddy, with the burnt oranges and browns of the dirt in the foreground spread throughout the composition, in the sky and the flesh of the figures as well as the wood supports of the lean-to. Their faces are overworked and labored, with heavy layers of paint occluding any sense of volume or specificity in the surgeon’s face, for example. His arm, resting on the seated man’s shoulder, disappears behind that figure’s back, awkwardly hand-less. These ungainly passages are surely due in part to Homer’s inexperience, but they support the interpretation of painting that the work otherwise proposes in its exploration of and near disavowal of levity. Clumsy and imprecise, the work records the fleeting—the experience of life in camp—but leaves the edges blurred, the details, in, say, the surgeon’s generic features or absent hand, unexamined. The whole has an unfinished, sketchy quality about it. “Mr. Homer must aim for completeness and refinement,” said one critic when writing of another set of works, In Front of the Guard-House and The Brierwood Pipe. “At present, his work is deficient in both these particulars.”110 I wonder, however, if particulars were what Homer was after, if he wanted to duplicate in this painting the crispness and detail of his black-and-white imagery. The work takes all that is not graphic, not linear about the medium of paint and makes it signify a position. If the affect of humor is most commonly to be dashed off—particularly in its most popular forms in the 1860s, the rough and quick caricature, the dialect storyteller’s seemingly off-the-cuff remarks—making the humorous event lasting, durable, by committing layers of paint to it goes against the grain. Much later, in 1892, the author of “A Plea for Seriousness” made this point, quoting a British politician and poet who said, “A wise man might talk folly like this by his fireside, but that any human being, having made such a joke, should write it down, copy it out, transmit it to the printer, correct the proof, and send it forth to the world is enough to make us ashamed of our species.”111 The author of this piece would like to see his fellow man commit such labor to more serious forms of literature. But the statement also suggests the perverseness of treating the joke in this considered way, making it endure. “No quality is more evanescent and volatile than the essence of a joke; it often evaporates while taking the form of words, and can be told only by a glance or gesture.”112 In Playing Old Soldier Homer invests the enduring medium of oil paint with the quality of fleetingness. For just as the picture offers no clear punch line, it suggests, in its lack of particularity, that the world itself may be untranslatable, Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  37

undiagnosable. Homer thus puts the nonpictorial to the service of the pictorial, makes a foundational tenet of humor resonate for the art of painting, and posits humor’s untranslatable quality, paradoxically, as precisely what a work of art is about. We are not supposed to laugh aloud; Homer’s painting is an investigation of the mechanisms of visual joking, an exploration of its limits and possibilities. If the “dramatic power, the tragic possibilities, in Huckleberry Finn attested the author’s intention to do something more than to amuse,” if the intermingling of levity and gravity gave Twain’s work its best chance to “outlive its generation,” the same could be said for paintings like Playing Old Soldier.113 Ironically, because scholars have not studied these works in the context of period debates about humor, Homer’s investment in what we might call dramatic levity has been overlooked.

Repudiating Levity When in 1866 Homer painted Prisoners from the Front—which signaled to critics that he was finally “serious,” that he had not, as Cook wrote, “[degenerated] into a mere carricaturist [sic]”—the artist repudiated his earlier interest in levity and its value to ambitious painting (Fig. 12).114 The work shows rebel soldiers under the firm command of a Union general, who appraises the band as the surgeon had the shirking boy in Playing Old Soldier. If the series of genre paintings that includes Playing Old Soldier was guided by the interplay of levity and gravity, here all is on the level, almost relentlessly in line. Note how the Confederate at far left almost stoops to assume the height of the figures next to him. The Union soldier standing in line with the trio holds his rifle by his side—a contrast to those laid down in the foreground—so that it reaches above the heads of the rebels, dividing him and the appraising brigadier general—Francis Channing Barlow (1834–1896)—from the ragtag band.115 The work, transmuting the iconoclast who challenged the Union effort during the war into the defeated rebels at the war’s end, cancels out the comic counter-utterance. Something besides levity is at issue here, something like the depiction of heroism, of mutual respect between competing sides, of Americans brought again into a unified community. There is also an effort here to make painting into taxonomy, with the three Confederates generalized as the three ages of man yet overburdened with specificity. From right to left we have, as the art critic Eugene Benson described them, the “impudent young Virginian, capable of heroism, because capable of impulse, but incapable of endurance because too ardent to be patient; next to him the poor, bewildered old man, perhaps a spy, with his furtive look, and scarcely able to realize the new order of things about to sweep away the associations of his life; back of him ‘the 38  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 12 Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866, oil on canvas, 24 × 38 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922 (22.207). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

poor white,’ stupid, stolid, helpless, yielding to the magnetism of superior natures and incapable of resisting authority.”116 This is what the Confederate cause looks like, the painting seems to say; these are its faces. That this painting is so often reproduced to illustrate just that point demonstrates the power of the work’s scheme of classification.117 But even if the work can justifiably be seen as an artistic triumph, something might also be lost, a different sense of painting that vanished when Homer lost his outsider status, became part of the system himself. But, then, Homer would never really be part of the system. In the late 1860s and 1870s critics struggling to understand the direction his art was taking cited Prisoners from the Front repeatedly as a moment of greatness now past, a specter of what his work might have become. Homer’s manner of rendering the world had become too vague, too sketchy, too “theoretical.” “It is a sketch too slight to offer the public, a mere memorandum,” Cook argued of Homer’s Manchester Coast (1869), now titled Rocky Coast and Gulls (Fig. 13). “If Mr. Homer has adopted the notion that he can put down in any scene in nature, or in any passage of human life, all that is worth recording, in a half-dozen strokes of his brush, he makes a blunder that in some men would deserve to be called conceit.” In that eruption of spray at the upper right corner, which breaks on the rocks into a hundred little Homer’s Visual Deadpan  |  39

Fig. 13 Winslow Homer, Rocky Coast and Gulls, 1869, oil on canvas, 161 ⁄4 × 281 ⁄ 8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 37.486. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

patches of white paint, we see hints of the late, great seascapes. Cohering to form the bodies of four seagulls at center, these flits of white dot the foreground like little pebbles or shells on the sand. With this work, Homer moved away from the documentation of facts for which Cook had admired him at the start of his career. “We cannot reconcile ourselves to having an artist of real ability,” he wrote, “snuff himself out with a theory in this way. We will hope that he is only suffering from an attack of whim.”118 The artist and critic Theodore Grannis was even harsher. “The dashing of the ocean’s spray above the rocks,” he wrote, “resembles the work of a boy who has dashed a ‘spitball’ upon a newly papered wall.”119 An air of disappointment likewise colors reviews of the croquet scenes with which Homer followed up his triumph at the war’s end. They were all “very sketchy, rapidly painted in the ‘broadest’ manner,” said a critic in the Nation in 1866, “and we are sorry to see Mr. Homer’s work always so slap-dash.”120 This technique would become a dominant trend in painting of the 1870s when the painter had become, like other artists, “an investigator.”121 Prisoners from the Front should be seen as interrupting the theory, which Homer first formulated during his investigation of the principles of visual deadpan, that painting coincided with fleetingness. Homer’s early interest in deadpan reverberates in still other ways in his later paintings. By revising the semantic prattle of the antebellum comic mode, by 40  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Fig. 14 Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868, oil on panel, 91 ⁄ 2 × 157⁄ 8 in. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson, 1988.55.4.

making it more economical and understated—by, in effect, theorizing the mechanics of visual deadpan as part of the broader shift in communication that occurred during the war—Homer began, in the early 1860s, a procedure he would return to again and again. Consider Artists Sketching in the White Mountains of 1868, which takes as its subject the recording and translation of nature into paint (Fig. 14). The artist depicts himself last in a line of three painters, each busily putting the scene on canvas (the artist’s name marks the knapsack in the foreground at left). By the polite spacing and repetition of sunshaded swells, Homer satirizes the effort to offer a unique perspective on this sacred and canonical New Hampshire site, memorialized so many times before by the preceding generation of landscape painters, such as Thomas Cole. Placing a wine bottle on the tree stump to his left, Homer stifles the potential pathos of this Colean detail, makes it an accessory to the leisurely pursuit of art. By mocking his own participation in this deadening artistic practice—Appletons’ Journal and Harper’s Weekly had sent him to capture the view of the White Mountains—Homer wryly signals that his art will go elsewhere, pursue a less traveled and less predictable path.122 This will be the case particularly very late in his career, when he produced some of his most original works. That so many of Homer’s late works, such as Fox Hunt (1893) and The Gulf Stream (1899), exhibit a darkening sense of irony reinHomer’s Visual Deadpan  |  41

forces my argument that this sensibility informed Homer’s work from the start. What had been nurtured by the tragic circumstances of the Civil War developed during the 1890s into a bitter ironic stance, where man is helpless against the motions of the universe and the Darwinian hierarchies of the species are reversed. If levity and gravity mingle in Homer’s early works, gravity wins out at the end of the century. Yet the early and late works can clearly be linked as part of a sustained investigation. That one critic saw The Gulf Stream as infused with “grim humor” suggests the potential rewards of a renewed look at Homer’s “sense of the dramatic.”123 The “gags” that best suited Homer’s dramatic sensibility were deadpan.

42  |  Homer’s Visual Deadpan

2 Laughing with J. G. Brown, E. W. Perry, and Thomas Nast

In Prisoners from the Front (1866), Homer reconnects Union and Confederate men by placing them in an unbroken band across the picture plane, an arrangement that became a template for exploring democratic cohesion during Reconstruction. Much of this imagery had a humorous slant: the structure of solemn unity Homer proposed in 1866 to solidify his reputation as a serious artist was recast ironically in the 1870s as the stuff of would-be hilarity—in pictures, for example, of street urchins laughing together, all in a row, acknowledging their own role in entertaining viewers (Plate 3). These images made the powerful point that communal amusement could produce consensus, and artists, writers, and even congressmen picked up on it in efforts to smooth over differences in the body politic. This chapter explores humor’s palliative effects in works like John George Brown’s Passing Show (1877; see Plate 3) before turning to a chromolithograph titled The True American that critiques the rhetoric of Brown’s picture and others like it (Plate 4). Designed by the genre painter Enoch Wood Perry and published in 1875 by the New York art firm Bencke and Scott, the chromo points to the manipulative logic of works capitalizing on humor’s value as social lubricant and demonstrates how violent and disfiguring assimilation could be. The chapter ends by examining the disfiguring effects of graphic satire in the 1870s, imagery that relied on the unifying power of laughter in targeting subjects of popular derision—most notably the period’s corrupt politicians, men like “Boss” William Tweed, who were pilloried in the caricatures produced by Thomas Nast in the pages of Harper’s Weekly. With a work like The True American in view, even Nast’s merciless caricature begins to look tame; indeed, I argue that the comparison demonstrates how much Nast’s graphic satire shares with Brown’s genre painting. Perry’s print reveals the conservatism both of painting like Brown’s and of radical, reformist caricature, which, in its own way, relies on circular reasoning and pre  |  43

dictable reiteration (characteristics parodied, in turn, in the humorous popular press). The chromolithograph, then, something of an anomaly in Perry’s oeuvre, productively complicates period assumptions of the hierarchy of media: while helping us to see the kinship between the crowd-pleasing visual formulas of Brown’s oil painting and Nast’s graphic imagery, it challenges the notion that chromolithography was inherently hollow.

The Class Dynamics of Laughter In his magazine pieces of 1875 on American humor and his book-length study of the following year, entitled Why We Laugh, the Democratic New York congressman Samuel S. Cox contributed to a growing literature analyzing humor during the 1870s, as it became, increasingly, a topic of serious discussion and debate.1 Before the war, the emergent middle classes had “subordinated humor and laughter to the demands of a sentimental culture,” as Daniel Wickberg has explained, but during the “Civil War and the years immediately following . . . the humorous began to occupy a distinctive niche in national life.”2 In his writings, Congressman Cox sought to redefine humor from mere amusement, as critics like Cook described it, to a socially useful tool for building consensus.3 Class disparities and ethnic variety had made the United States, he said, the “most incongruous, grotesque, odd, angular, outré, and peculiar [country] ever yet known in history.”4 The gulf between the classes, moreover, had widened with the depression of 1873 and continued to grow with the labor strikes that erupted in 1877.5 A shared sense of humor could smooth these “odd” angles of the body politic. For Cox, American humor, like nature’s “rivers in their spring floods,” was characterized by its “rush . . . whirl, and . . . overflow of all bounds.”6 It would overtake, overwhelm, and drown out difference. He demonstrated how this worked in recounting a speech made by a mem­ber of the Missouri legislature on the anniversary of the American victory over the British, on January 8, 1815, in the Battle of New Orleans, the final battle of the War of 1812. When another member objected to the cost of posting “a hundred bills announcing that the glorious day had arrived,” the first legislator undermined that position, winning over listeners by infusing his speech with incongruous colloquialisms. “Whigs, Know-Nothings, Democrats, hard, soft-boiled, scrambled, and fried,” should come together across party lines, he declared, “to print the bills and inform the country that we are as full of patriotism as Illinois swamps are of tadpoles.” Every eruption of such grotesque imagery was rewarded by “great laughter” in Cox’s account of the speech, laughter that knits the threads of the 44  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

argument together, pushing it forward like a surging wave of support.7 Cox presents incongruous levity, which converts listeners by distracting them from the argument, as a critical tool in the game of winning political allegiance.8 Humor could neutralize opposition and make political and social distinctions appear inconsequential. “If velvet paw can only shake horny hand over a joke,” Cox reasoned, “velvet paw and horny hand are a community at once of equal franchises.”9 The biases of Cox’s argument reinforce the social stratification he himself was ostensibly concerned to overcome; he writes in another passage that the rich, by laughing with the poor, would make them “forget their repugnancy.”10 Commentaries on the Centennial of 1876 were plagued by similar inconsistencies. Although they celebrated variety as the foundation of democracy, they betrayed, like Cox, uneasiness about the shape the body politic was taking and ambivalence, especially about the effects of immigration. According to the Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, “America represents every nation on the globe better than the nation represents itself.” Beecher catalogued the nations of the American melting pot, extolling the virtues of the mixed-race “true American.” In him, Beecher insisted, “all the inconveniences of foreign mixtures, of difference of language, the difference of customs, the difference of religion, the difference in domestic arrangement [are] a trifle” compared with what he gave the country: “the augmentation of power, of breadth of manhood, the promise of the future,” compensations Beecher deemed “past all computation.” Mixing, figured as an inconvenience in this account, is worth enduring. Although for Beecher the virtue of “foreign mixtures” is national physical prowess, he still consigns “foreign hands” to the laboring classes. “The true American,” in contrast, occupies a position of elevated whiteness: “we [who are] suspected of having English blood in our veins” are enriched by having “our fields tilled by foreign hands, our roads built by them.”11 Imagery that celebrates diversity and promotes equality also, at times, shows the seams of these constructs. Amid congressional debates about the status of former slaves and the ratification of amendments specifying that naturalized citizens could not be denied rights on the basis of race, artists like Thomas Waterman Wood lined up the English American, Irish American, German American, and African American in schematic testaments to the success of the melting pot (Fig. 15). Wood had made a name for himself in the mid-sixties memorializing the contributions of African Americans to the Union war effort. Although he aims to portray the bravery of blacks, the sacrifices they made, and the complexity of the shift from slave to freedman in works like War Episodes: The Contraband, the Volunteer, and the Veteran (1866), Wood relied on props to tell his stories, so that Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  45

Fig. 15 Thomas Waterman Wood, American Citizens (To the Polls), 1867, watercolor, 17 × 351 ⁄4 in. T. W. Wood Gallery and Arts Center, Montpelier, Vermont.

his visual arrangements look somewhat stiff and artificial.12 In American Citizens (To the Polls), he presents as progressive the gathering of all eligible men to help determine the country’s future. But compare that work with Horace Bonham’s vision of community in Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit (1879), and the tensions of Wood’s formula become apparent (Fig. 16). Bonham, who painted in York, Penn­ sylvania, turned to art only after testing out a range of vocations in the 1860s, from newspaper editor to assessor of internal revenue. As the son of a Pennsylvania judge and the twin brother of a lawyer who, according to one source, went to Mississippi to fight for the Confederacy during the war, Bonham must have thought hard about the complications of national unity and the challenge of producing it.13 In Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1879, Bonham pictures a rough-and-ready equality, with a mountain of men pushing past one another to glimpse the cockfight in the viewer’s space. Men grip the shoulders in front of them and lean on other men’s backs, enacting an overdone metaphor of social connection in the face of the spectacular conflict that draws them together. The long-standing association of the cockpit with the theater of politics makes the spectacle into a national entertainment.14 The painting recalls the rough-and-tumble “outcroppage” of men in Walt Whitman’s “Democracy” (1867): “I, as Democrat, see clearly enough (none more clearly), the crude, defective streaks in all the strata of the common people; the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable and the very low and poor.” Instead of repressing this “disorder,” the American government would do better to “develop, to open up to 46  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 16 Horace Bonham, Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, 1879, oil on canvas, 201 ⁄ 8 × 27 in. Cor­coran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund 99.6.

cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters.” Bonham’s folding into this informal community a man in evening dress likewise speaks to Whitman, who satirized the attempt of “good class folk” to distance themselves from the “rolling, mountainous surges of ‘swarmery.’ ” Democracy, Whitman believed, would endure only if American citizens “merged” into it, whatever their social position. “The curse and canker of Nations politically has been—or at any rate, will be, as things have come to exist in our day—the having of certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn— they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account,” he argued. Whitman seems to refer as much to the regional hierarchies that resulted from the war as to more specific and localized class inequities. For him, renewed commitment to and faith in democracy would “bind” the nation together again— indeed, it had the power to bind “all nations, all men . . . into a brotherhood, a family.”15 The hands that connect disparate bodies in Bonham’s image of democratic “brotherhood” seem important in Wood’s painting, too, where the men’s hands hold a pipe or lift a cane as Wood attempts to infuse the lineup with life and Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  47

individual character. Unlike Bonham’s image, however, Wood’s insists structurally on the separation of the figures in this cultural stew, each distinct from all the others, none of them overlapping or touching. Bonham thus pictures more convincingly the interclass, interethnic connection that writers like Whitman expected would foster assimilation. (A reviewer of the National Academy exhibition considered the painting “remarkably real.”)16 Yet because Bonham frames his democratic cohesion as an ironic joke—the unruly crew comes together beneath a framed explanation of the “Rules”—he seems to question whether the mixed mob could ever serve, or be folded into, organized democracy. Irony, then, simultaneously supports and critiques the formula for democratic cohesion that developed after the war.

John George Brown’s Communities of Amusement John George Brown’s work exhibits none of this irony or ambivalence. Indeed, his suppression of difference exemplifies pictorially Congressman Cox’s assimilative rhetoric, in which the shared joke promised unity. If Brown excited controversy with his image of street urchins smoking in the 1860s, during the 1870s he earned a reputation for the “softness and refinement of [his] fair child-faces,” scrubbed clean, with mouths fixed in sweet, merry smiles.17 His affectionate portrayal of “poor boys” can be explained in part by the kinship he felt with them and his idealized view of his working-class origins. He had moved from Newcastle, En­ gland, just after his father’s death, to Edinburgh, where he worked in a glass factory. After spending a year in Edinburgh, where he also studied art, he moved in 1853 to London and, later that year, to Brooklyn, where he found a job at the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works, pursuing painting on the side. After some difficult years of trying to make ends meet, he moved into the Tenth Street Studio Building in 1860 and shortly thereafter began to achieve success with his painting. He never forgot where he came from. “I do not paint poor boys solely because the public likes such pictures and pays me for them,” he said late in his life, “but because I love the boys myself, for I, too, was once a poor lad like them.”18 Brown’s rose-colored vision of the trials and the joys of childhood is often suffused with humor. As the art historian Martha Hoppin has pointed out, Brown drew both on English precedents in painting for his compositions and on the cartoons that appeared in the English comic journal Punch.19 He often depicted children of various ages and races focused on one comedic point of interest. In these works his investment in humor relates to the theories of Cox and others who wanted to see laughing bodies drawn together in a cohesive and contented national 48  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 17 John George Brown, A Jolly Lot, 1885, oil on canvas, 321 ⁄4 × 441 ⁄4 in. Private collection.

whole. Brown’s Jolly Lot (1885) seemed to answer such theories with a group of smiling boys gathered to watch a black child performing a song and dance (Fig. 17). Although it reinforces stereotypes by presenting the black child as a comedic performer, thus reinscribing hierarchically imbalanced social relationships, the work does its best to picture an integrated, mutually supportive community. The performer, like the smallest boy with stereotypical Irish features at the center of the composition—Paddy Ryan, one of Brown’s favorite boy models— relates easily to his companions.20 The art historian Claire Perry has argued that works like these assuaged concerns about immigrant groups’ resisting assimilation into American life. “A Jolly Lot contradicted such notions, suggesting instead that entirely new communities were coalescing out of the froth of immigration.”21 Brown’s painting stresses this coalescence by linking the boys of different ethnic backgrounds with the color red: in the scarves tied around the necks of the boys at the far left; the suspenders of the Irish boy and of the seated boy at the far right, who holds out his suspender (accented by patriotic blue), as if to draw attention to it; and in the handkerchief peeking out of the black child’s pocket. The flushed faces and pink lips of all the figures extend this tonal unity to naturalize it. The black child’s skin has warm undertones that are missing in two of Bonham’s black figures, whose unnaturally gray cast and almost glossy sheen give them an Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  49

Fig. 18 Joseph Decker, Our Gang (Accused), 1886, oil on canvas, 24 × 305 ⁄ 8 in. Washington, D.C., Collection of Teresa Heinz.

otherworldly quality (see Fig. 16). Bonham thus stresses their foreignness, even as he weaves them into an integrated whole. Joseph Decker’s Our Gang (Accused), of 1886, also makes the black figure stand out (Fig. 18). The white boys crowding around him appear relaxed, some wearing easy grins, but the “accused” stands at attention, his wide eyes and rigid lips expressing his exclusion from the circle, even as he stands at its center. As the art historian Helen Cooper has argued, Decker, with his “instinctive understanding” of “the youth’s foreboding and isolation,” his sense of “alienation,” asks the viewer to share them.22 Decker came to the United States from Germany in 1867 and began his career as a sign painter in Brooklyn, returning frequently to Germany; he trained in Munich and traveled back to his homeland later in his career, sometimes for years at a time. Decker had a “hard” way of painting, critics wrote, and his still lifes, the genre for which he is best known, sometimes assault the viewer with sharp, almost harsh, details exhibited in “unnaturally shallow space.”23 Although the genre scene Our Gang appears a world apart from his scabbed apples and pears, pushed up against the picture plane, there is something “hard” about the social irresolution pictured in this shallow slice of the urban environment, backed by a chaotic arrangement of torn and overlapping advertisements that seem to shout partially formed ex50  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 19 David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, 1856–58, oil on canvas, 263 ⁄4 × 22 in. Collection of the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

clamations. It is almost as if all of the signage anticipated the aggression that might result from this encounter between the boys, which is filled with hostility rather than conviviality. In this painting Decker foregrounds the barriers to American unity and suggests that the community needs a scapegoat to cohere. Unlike Brown, an artist far more concerned with pleasing his public, Decker does not cover these barriers with a unifying glaze of palatable and good-natured fun. Brown’s Passing Show makes clearer the artist’s reliance on a humor that obliterates difference (see Plate 3).24 Five boys stand watching a circus parade; the broadside on the wall at the far right reads, “I Am Coming. P. T. Barnum’s Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth.”25 The boys, in contrast to the dour Barnum of the broadside, seem elated at the unseen spectacle, the circus parade, for which the viewer stands in—the boy at far right laughs as he points out at whoever surveys him. The boys have the upper hand here because the group stands a step above the viewer and because the rightmost boy pointing his finger turns the viewer into an object of amusement. The viewer is a target, as in David Gilmour Blythe’s formulation of street boy transgression, Street Urchins (1856–58), which pictures boys huddled in a group, smoking cigars, as one of them prepares to light a toy cannon pointed in the viewer’s direction (Fig. 19). Sarah Burns has demonstrated the explosive potential of these bodies packed together like gunpowder behind the projectile, ready to burst.26 Like Brown, Blythe closes the gap between the Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  51

viewer and his urchins, but his portrayal of mischievous boys, far removed from the organizational clarity offered by Brown, has a darker edge. In The Passing Show, Brown disarms both his boys and their viewers with a shared joke that brings them together. Although one boy points to the viewer as a source of amusement outside the painting, his gesture includes the viewer in the idealized community Brown pictures. If we respond as expected, our facial expressions mirror those of Brown’s boys. Laughing together, we create a coherent com­ mu­nity. “Thus they join you,” the philosopher Ted Cohen writes of those who share in the knowledge required to understand a joke. “And then they join you again, if the joke works, in their response, and the two of you find yourselves in a commu­ nity, a community of amusement.”27 Brown’s picture, with its boys who uncannily resemble one another, evokes such a joining. The artist differentiates the figures by subtly varying their attire and by setting the smallest boy just off center between two much taller boys. But Brown achieves the effect of variety by an insistent logic of sameness. The posture of the boys at far left and right matches, each with one foot turned forty-five degrees and the other poised on the curb, so that they frame the group in a frieze-like arrangement. Indeed, each grin is almost uniformly wide and toothy, each pair of eyes pinched at the corners, matching the upward-turned mouths. Brown used this formula for insisting on sameness in other paintings, like his Cider Mill of 1880 (Fig. 20). This stranger image of four girls (and a fifth child behind them) stuffing orbs of fruit into their little mouths helps us see both the artificiality of Brown’s Passing Show and the disturbing element of his formula for childish contentment. Each boy wears the “mask of laughter” that conceals the grim realities of an urchin’s existence in the 1870s—a form of social disguise and denial in line with Cox’s prescriptions.28 By visualizing communal fun as obliterating difference, Brown anticipates what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would say of the culture industry of the 1940s: “To be entertained means to be in agreement,” specifically, in naive agreement.29 The Frankfurt School theorists, displaced to California by the war in Europe, critiqued Hollywood’s version of “fun,” inhibited and packaged for easy consumption. Brown’s circus parade exemplifies such organized entertainment. In the circus, the wild animal and the buffoon each has a moment in the spotlight to act according to his “nature.” But the lion’s roar, like the clown’s fall, is controlled chaos, inspiring only a brief sensation of terror or pleasurable superiority before order is restored. Late nineteenth-century children’s journalism presented circus entertainment as a potentially corrupting influence to be avoided, but Brown makes it the inspiration for disciplined spectatorship, a “passing” opportunity for order on the streets.30 If for Adorno and Horkheimer Hollywood films offered fundamentally inhibited fun, training spectators to limit their ex­ 52  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 20 John George Brown, The Cider Mill, 1880, oil on canvas, 30 × 24 in. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.19. Photograph: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/ Art Resource, New York.

pectations and regularize their emotional responses, Brown’s painting strikes a similar note with its rigid arrangement of mildly amused children. Critics of the 1870s called for some authoritative influence like art or music to “tone down [democratic society’s] self-asserting and aggressive manners, round off the sharp, offensive angularity of character, subdue and harmonize the free and ceaseless conflict of opinions.”31 Brown’s art imagines this rounding off, this harmoniousness, in the contented amusement of the child.

Quarantining Jocularity During the late nineteenth century, jocularity was quarantined in the world of the child. The joking, laughing, and levity unacceptable in adult spheres were expected among children. Although humorless and moralistic representations of childhood predominated in art and literature of the early nineteenth century, as Sarah Burns has argued, the tone changed after the war, when childhood became a “precious, magical condition,” symbolizing the innocence the nation had lost with the wearying experience of the war.32 Representations of childhood gaiety may have spiked because children seemed capable of escaping reality in fanciful worlds of their own making. Eastman Johnson’s Old Stagecoach (1871), which Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  53

Fig. 21 Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871, oil on canvas, 361 ⁄4 × 601 ⁄ 8 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection, Gift of Frederick Layton L1888.22. Photograph by John R. Glembin.

the artist painted at his summer retreat in Nantucket, visualizes this imaginative getaway (Fig. 21).33 In it, a group of rural children collaborates to make a dilapidated stagecoach burst into action. Some serve as passengers, others as horses, still others as guides to the imaginary landscapes of their minds.34 “Ah, the children! the children! what merry witches they are!” a critic for Scribner’s Monthly exclaimed when he saw Johnson’s painting at the National Academy of Design in 1871. Although he thought the “childish anachronisms” of the picture “delicious” and praised the “spirit of fun” that made the work busy with clatter and “laughter,” this writer nonetheless found the painting “too noisy, after all, for an art ­exhibition.”35 The critic encountered Johnson’s painting at the National Academy’s building, designed by Peter B. Wight, which had opened in 1865 as a new home for the in­ stitution, founded in 1825 (Fig. 22). A slice of Renaissance Venice in modern New York, the building advertised the lofty ambitions of tastemakers who hoped that Art might finally “[begin] to dignify [American cities] with her elevating and purifying presence.”36 Artistic culture in the United States was still in its infancy, James Jackson Jarves argued. “We are yet too young in art to have inspired it with those profound emotions and convictions which distinguish its highest flights in the Old World,” he wrote in 1870, “or to have acquired other than a superficial 54  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 22 Peter B. Wight, National Academy of Design, Twenty-Third Street and Fourth Avenue, 1863–65, photograph. National Academy of Design, Archives, New York.

knowledge of its history, methods, and purposes.”37 The art institutions founded in the 1870s were created, in large part, to remedy those limitations. The men who had amassed collections earlier in the century had looked in vain, William Cullen Bryant suggested, “for any institution to which [to] send them.”38 The American Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1802 and presided over in its final years by the Federalist painter John Trumbull, was defunct by 1841; the American Art Union, by the early 1850s. The National Academy of Design underwent major reform in 1869, and the New-York Historical Society, established in 1804, was having a difficult time raising enough funds to move its art collection to a permanent public exhibition space.39 The art historian Alan Wallach, calling on the work of the sociologist Paul DiMaggio, suggests that the country lacked the organizational base to sustain such institutions.40 Jarves said as much in 1870: “In America . . . it is absolutely certain that no steps to advance any branch of learning ever will be undertaken until there are to be found a sufficient number of persons of wealth and aesthetic culture willing to assume for the public the duty which it really owes to itself to do at once and thoroughly.”41 Buildings like the new Academy of Design heralded the grandeur that would mark artistic culture during the 1870s, when elite art patrons and civic leaders mobilized to create the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  55

of Fine Arts in Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.42 Citing these new public museums, Alan Trachtenberg argues that in “a mere decade, an entire apparatus appeared, an infrastructure which monumentalized the presence of culture.” 43 Like libraries and universities, these museums answered the elite “plea for culture.” “What we need is the opportunity of high culture somewhere,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson had argued in 1867.44 Art museums would provide it, using culture to improve public taste and thus create a basis for common understanding. But the very idea of “high culture” reinforced artistic and social hierarchies. As Trachtenberg points out, culture implied leisure, wealth, and intellectual maturity, ideals the new museums reinforced: “Organized by the urban elite, dominated by ladies of high society, staffed by professionally trained personnel, housing classic works of European art donated by wealthy private collectors, the museums subliminally associated art with wealth, and the power to donate and administer with social station and training. Their architecture reinforced the message: magnificent palaces. . . . conveyed an idea of art as public magnificence, available in hushed corridors through a corresponding act of munificence by private wealth.” 45 Codifying behavior—maintaining the “hushed corridor”—was critical to separating the “high” from the “low,” a hierarchy of expression that emerged in these years in the visual arts, in music, and, as Lawrence Levine has argued, in theater. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the plays of William Shakespeare were moved to the rarefied zone of culture. Theaters no longer presented farcical interludes between acts, and audience participation was discouraged. “Nothing seems to have troubled the new arbiters of culture more than the nineteenth-century practice of spontaneous expressions of pleasure and disapproval in the form of cheers, yells, gesticulations, hisses, boos, stamping of feet, whistling, crying for encores, and applause,” Levine writes. When culture was sacralized, such behavior became inappropriate.46 The commentary of the Scribner’s critic who encountered Johnson’s picture after making “the dazzling climb up” the Academy of Design’s steps reinforced the association between culture and quiet contemplation. “A boy outside on the top of the coach is shouting for dear life, about nothing in particular,” he observed in describing the painting before concluding that it was simply “too noisy . . . for an art exhibition.” He imagines Johnson’s kids as a swarm of bees colonizing the old coach, “puffed with its bygone stateliness” and now filled up “with the honey of such enjoyment as only children can know.”47 This statement encapsulates the challenge of Johnson’s vision of childish jocularity: the children surmount the ancient relic to bend it to their will. And under their influence, the dignity of the ruin can’t help giving way, that collapse reflecting the chief worry of conservative 56  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

critics: that the country’s taste for all things juvenile would pull down the dignified institutions just then being conceived. Congressman Cox, even though he argued for the social benefit of humor, acknowledged that in some situations it was inappropriate. (Some charged him with engaging in precisely the unsuitable humor he seemed to abjure when he conceded that the gravity of Congress “precludes levity” yet persisted in telling jokes when he spoke there before his fellow representatives.)48 “It would seem as if all veneration for the solemnities of life had departed from us,” Cox wrote, dismayed. Children exemplified that unhappy tendency, that “utter disregard of sacred things.” “Our youths,” he wrote, “outdo the children of all other nations in their lack of reverence for the aged and for their parents.” They had a “rollicking independency.”49 American humor, in its most popular forms in the 1870s, did have something juvenile about it: it was loud and raucous and could not contain itself; therefore it needed to be disciplined, its “independency” checked or at least subdued, if serious society were to tolerate it. The writer Bret Harte attempted to lift American humor out of its juvenile state when he lectured in New York in 1874, by suggesting that there was nothing specifically “American” about it. It was, Harte reportedly said, “doubtful that . . . American humor [w]as a nationally distinctive intellectual quality.” What may have seemed American in the extravagant humor so widespread in comic literature, for example, was “only the form or method of to-day.”50 Harte’s cosmopolitan approach to style—his effort to move the conversation about humor out of the framework of national identity—parallels artists’ efforts in the 1870s to elevate American art by embracing international approaches. This stylistic shift in the art world of the 1870s may have been one reason that Johnson’s genre painting seemed noisy, and therefore extravagant, in the context of the National Academy’s annual show. The response of the Scribner’s critic to Johnson’s painting—which the Nation called “jocular”—suggests the complications of fine art informed by childish jocularity.51 Following the war, childhood gaiety was considered an enviable state but also a condition to overcome and outgrow, as in discussions of culture, where critics sometimes referred to the nation’s youth to explain its lack of achievement in the fine arts, architecture, and other sophisticated realms.52 Johnson’s painting visualizes the collapse of “high” culture into “low” childish jocularity—youthful exuberance overriding the archaic dignity of the quiet old ruin—and pictures the kind of disruption it presented in the stately exhibition hall. This vision of cavorting children unaware of the viewer’s presence couldn’t differ more from Brown’s picture of boys posed artificially for our amusement. Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  57

Their restrained contentment mirrors the viewer’s posture before the work of art and, more generally, models the behavior of the spectator. Instead of representing the gleeful disruptive shriek, Brown mutes childish jocularity and renders it compliant, re-forming the child to suit the space where he would be seen: the gallery. The Passing Show, in which Brown softened the edginess of his earlier work as he reconsidered how “amusement” would figure in his art, won him international acclaim. In 1878 the painting was sent to Paris to represent the country at the Universal Exposition, where it was well received. A critic for the International Review offered this endorsement: “Every human being, of whatever nation, who came before these laughing boys of Mr. Brown, laughed heartily himself, and forgot for a moment both the cares and vanities of life.”53 The work was a crowd-pleaser that united viewers at the fine art exhibition in shared amusement. In an interview published in the New York Times in 1912, Brown said that The Passing Show had been his “first genuine success in art.”54

“Chromo-civilization” As a chromolithograph, The True American is a different species of visual production, situated at the margins of official culture, to which Brown had gained entry (see Plate 4).55 It takes the formula of the lineup, satirizing its use to effect visions of harmonious oneness. The print was the result of successively pressing separate stones—each bearing a different color of ink—against the paper surface, to produce depth and volume in the layering of tones. The completed image, a composite of these fragmentary parts, preserves the seams of the effort to “connect” or “unify” at the level of its iconography. Instead of smoothing over differences, making the partial whole, The True American privileges the gaps that complicate the procedure Cox theorized so successfully and Brown carried out in paint.56 The print marshals humor to mock the impossible ideal of national unity and the visual formulas that reinforced it. It presents the idea of seamless connection as a national joke. The image was designed more for the masses than for the art critic; it was part of an effort by enterprising businessmen like Herman Bencke and Harshaw Scott to bind the country by means of inexpensive images. Indeed, Louis Prang, chromolithography’s fiercest champion, explained his goal as fundamentally democratic. He hoped “to cultivate the aesthetic taste of the people, to popularize art by scattering broadcast over the land highly finished copies of popular works of art.”57 At the Centennial Fair of 1876 in Philadelphia, chromolithographs were exhibited as fine art, along with painting and sculpture, a proximity detractors 58  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

worried about well before the mid-seventies.58 Critics such as Clarence Cook initially embraced chromolithography for its educational potential, but its closeness to the original—heightened by Prang’s simulation of canvas weave—and the spread, through chromolithographic reproduction, of paintings he considered weak, turned him against it. The industry had debased fine art by mass-producing deceptive imitations for a gullible market of buyers who didn’t know the difference between the quality of the original and that of the chromolithographed copy. And as a stand-in for art, chromolithography failed to lift the taste of the masses, instead restricting its development and fostering contentment with the specious and unsophisticated.59 But there were classes of chromos, and something like Bencke and Scott’s twodollar-and-fifty-cent True American sits at a distance from, say, Prang’s ten-dollar rendition of Albert Bierstadt’s Sunset: California Scenery (1868). The chromatic variation in The True American was achieved with just twelve or thirteen stones, whereas some landscapes, for example, could require five times that number.60 The True American has none of “the dense forms and spectacular atmospheric effects” of Prang’s Bierstadt, whose “mountains, lakes, and clouds glow with golden hues.” Like the original painting, this chromo could “adorn the walls of the most elegant mansion.”61 The True American, in contrast, could stand as evidence of the “fatal success with which a poor painting” could be duplicated and then spread around, arresting cultural development from inside the middle-class home.62 The genre painter Enoch Wood Perry filed for copyright of the design in 1874 and probably made the small oil painting on which the print is based specifically for reproduction.63 Perry was at the height of his popularity in the mid-seventies.64 A resident of the Tenth Street Studio Building between 1867 and 1880 (and then again in the 1890s), he was a close friend of his fellow academician and Studio Building resident Winslow Homer, who was a frequent traveling companion and sketching partner in this period.65 Like Homer and Johnson, Perry painted cavorting children in idyllic rural settings, but he excelled in old-fashioned interior scenes and exhibited those most often. Many other artists of the period who were moved by or hoped to capitalize on the renewed patriotism generated by the centennial festivities did the same. Bencke and Scott surely hoped to tap into this market with The True American, which Bencke, a German immigrant, may have admired for its Düsseldorf School aesthetic, a technically rigid painting style—“hard and dry” in Henry Tuckerman’s words—popular in the 1850s.66 Perry had studied in Düsseldorf with Emanuel Leutze in the early 1850s, before going on to work with Thomas Couture in Paris. Through his father’s political connections—the senior Perry had served Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  59

as chairman of the Louisiana Central Democratic Committee after the family moved south from Boston—Perry was able to extend his stay in Europe by serving as U.S. consul to Venice, a post he took up in August 1856. Resigning in October of the next year—presumably because his duties interfered with his painting practice—Perry sailed for the United States early in 1858. After a period in Philadelphia, Perry returned to New Orleans, where he had lived with his family before studying abroad. In the first year of the Civil War, he painted Secession-oriented themes and a portrait of Jefferson Davis shortly after Davis became president of the Confederacy. His commissions grew scarce by the next year, however, and Perry left for San Francisco, where he established a portrait studio and explored landscape painting. Following a trip to the Sandwich Islands and an arduous trip back East, which included a stay in Utah, where he painted the portraits of prominent members of the Mormon Church, Perry settled in New York City in 1867. It is hard to say how much these varied experiences painting in different communities affected Perry’s art practice. The genre he would make his “specialty” in the 1870s was profoundly uncosmopolitan, even homely.67 The True American in many ways adheres to the generic quaintness of Perry’s other works. From the crisply delineated details of shirt folds and wood grain to the earth tones that give the scene its warmth, the work contrives to meet the viewer with a comforting glimpse of the familiar. That it calls on an outdated aesthetic reinforces this sense of the already assimilated. The cropped signage above the door frame—which asks the viewer to fill in the blanks to produce the words National Hotel—calls on tropes of midcentury genre painting, as does the conceit of men organized around a newspaper on a hotel porch. The work, closely related to that of midcentury genre painters such as Richard Caton Woodville and James Goodwyn Clonney, is thus old-fashioned, belated (Fig. 23). That some scholars have misdated the painting on which the print is based to the mid-1850s suggests how convincingly it speaks the language of an earlier era.68 This genre of painting endured, but the rigidity of its brushwork and the quaint colloquialism of its subject matter would appear passé against the more impressionistic strategies of painting coming out of Paris in the mid-seventies. Earl Shinn noted the fustiness of the idiom in The Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876: “The Düsseldorf school of painting, formerly a great favorite for its clever scenes of familiar life, is represented by a small constituency in the Fair; is this indicative of a waning popularity?” he asked rhetorically, sealing its obsolescence.69 The True American, passed from Perry’s hands to those of Bencke and Scott, must have been precisely what elite critics had in mind in denouncing chromolithography. E. L. Godkin, in a scathing piece published in the Nation in 1874, 60  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 23 Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848, oil on canvas, 27 × 25 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Benton­ ville, Arkansas. Photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

developed an argument that linked the medium to broader social woes, claiming that “chromo-civilization” had supplanted civilized society and installed in its place a “sham” culture of easy agreement. Culture should be understood, he said, as “the result of a process of discipline, both mental and moral. It is not a thing that can be picked up, or that can be got by doing what one pleases.” But “pseudoculture” could be got cheap by attending lectures and reading newspapers and magazines, which diffused a “smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for reading and for ‘art.’ ” This diffusion of pseudo-culture had given rise to a “society of ignoramuses,” idiots who thought themselves savants, who might frame a chromo “as if it were a painting.”70 For Godkin and others, democratized culture was symptomatic of the decline of the American citizenry.71 Clement Greenberg would take up these ideas in the mid-twentieth century, about the time when Adorno and Horkheimer formulated their critique of the culture industry. Godkin’s theory of pseudo-culture looks like a nineteenthcentury precursor of Greenberg’s formulation of kitsch.72 T. J. Clark, building on Greenberg’s landmark essay of 1939, defined kitsch in 1982 as “an art and a culture of instant assimilation.” This is “massified pseudoart” that serves the “management of democracy” but signals the demise of that society’s cultural forms: it is “the sign of a bourgeoisie contriving to lose its identity.” Hence the urgency behind modernism’s alternative, based on notions of difficulty, estrangement, and, in Clark’s view, negation.73 The True American weaves that ostensible opposition into relation: it is Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  61

“massified pseudoart,” structured on negation and difficulty. Indeed, the joke the work tells denaturalizes its outdated normalizing idiom by disfiguring it. By one spatial device or another, each figure’s head—and even the head of the horse in the stud advertisement tacked up on the hotel’s exterior wall—is masked or cut out of view. The joke exists in the ironic gap between the work’s original title, The True American—seen upside down in a newspaper masthead in the scene— and the image’s refusal to fully show such a character. Evacuated of individuality, the figures become “bummers,” social (and aesthetic) voids. Indeed, in the versions of the print at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the words “The True American” have been scratched out and replaced by “The Bummers,” the title under which Perry and then Bencke and Scott filed for copyright.74 By renaming the work, scratching out the original title, the makers of the chromolithograph amplify the coarseness of a subject popular in cartoons and comic valentines that deride the “corner-loafing” bummer and his gambling, drinking, and loitering.75 That the work panders to the popular taste for that subject seals its lowbrow status. Indeed, it is not so far removed from the chromolithographed centerfolds that would appear in the largescale comic periodical Puck, founded in 1877 to feed an expanding market for humorous journalism. (Judge and Life would follow in the 1880s—all three publications had broad circulation and a long life, a departure from the mostly shortlived humorous journals of the antebellum years.)76 But this chromo is pseudoculture mobilized in self-critique, using all the hokeyness available to it to signify something out of kilter with the formulaic norms of popular comic expression. The image seems to bait viewers so that they expect the formulaic, but its surprising departure from, and critique of, the formulaic—the framework to which, as pseudo-culture, it was supposed to adhere—puts pressure on that concept.

The Game of Interpreting “True Americans” The work, in its refusal to grant the true American an individual identity, might be seen to produce the unity Congressman Cox calls for, a willful amnesia about disparities of class and ethnicity that encourages untroubled, easy laughter. Considered in this light, the work reads as more conciliatory than critical. Although the dress of the figure at far right distances him from the group, his posture, as he leans back in his chair, connects him to the newspaper reader to his left. This figure, whose feet rest on the porch railing, overlaps physically with the men on either side, who lean toward him and his newspaper, the “beacon” that drew “wandering minds” to “meet and unite,” as Alexis de Tocqueville put it in De62  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

mocracy in America (1835–40). “Nothing but a newspaper,” he said, “can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.”77 The True American exemplifies the downside of this proliferation of knowledge—and supports Godkin’s argument about cultural decline—for the newspaper in it placates instead of stirring to thought or action. These are silly, stupid characters to whom Perry invites viewers to feel superior.78 Loafing in democratic luxury, the mindless male citizens of The True American present an interpretive challenge, however, resisting easy consumption. Like scientific specimens awaiting analysis, they are pinned in place by a dense network of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines—the wooden slats of the building’s exterior, the railing and porch floor, the chair legs that tip backward, and the banister of the staircase inside. But the work goes through the motions of classifying without delivering the illumination the procedure promises. The newspaper, instrument for transmitting information, here shields it from viewers, like the angled shutter that blocks the face of the figure at far right. If the paper in Woodville’s War News from Mexico (see Fig. 23) is an epiphanic “window of light” that facilitates a revelatory experience, as Bryan Wolf has argued, the paper here is an instrument of obfuscation.79 It completes what the porch railing takes up as a half-hearted mission, to set a barrier between the included and the excluded. The True American thus makes a joke of the attention paid to the head and face as indexes of character during this period of phrenological cataloguing and interpretation itself, because it thwarts empirical procedure. That the work shows the viewer primarily the figures’ backsides suggests that there may be another ass on display outside the picture. By folding the viewer into the joke, the work relates closely to Brown’s Passing Show. Perry is less explicit about targeting the viewer than Brown with his pointing, laughing boys, but their two works seem equally focused on incorporation. Yet there are important differences. Perry’s arrangement of already headless bodies segmented into parts has an element of the macabre far removed from the innocuous geniality of Brown’s humorous arrangement. The figure leaning in at the open window in The True American evokes, strangely, an execution by guillotine. And then there is the way that window’s shutter, at far right, doesn’t so much mask the well-dressed figure’s head as reveal its absence. The shutter’s angled position should make visible some facial contour—the tip of a nose, say— but it doesn’t. This spatial disjunction disrupts the image’s realist idiom to draw attention to its construction. The work, by disarticulating “identity” in these ways, raises questions about how it comes into being. The atmosphere that produced The True American also produced the children’s game Sliced Nations, put on the market in 1875 by the New York–based Selchow Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  63

Fig. 24 Selchow and Righter Company, New York, Sliced Nations, inside of game box top, 1875. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

and Righter Company. This game put ethnic and racial mixing into the hands of children as a puzzle for them to work out (Plate 5). With twelve ethnic and racial options, ranging from American to Zulu, the game taught American children to spell and to compose a national type by correctly piecing together the horizontal slats (Fig. 24). If Henry Ward Beecher and others saw the American circa 1876 as a mingling of the German, French, Scotch, and so on, this game separates those groups, so that mixing with the American or with each other produces nonsense, an incoherent picture and text. But the game also admits the challenge of picturing a representative contemporary American. If the Russian, the Turk, and the others are vaguely generalized, the American “type” is the most celebrated figure in the nation’s history: George Washington. Taking his likeness from paintings of the hero on the battlefield from the preceding century, the makers of the game tellingly relied on a figure from the past to represent the American nation of the present.80 Even if Beecher insisted that Americans of 1876 “wear better heads” than their predecessors, he still had to ask, on the occasion of the centennial, if Americans 64  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

were as “virtuous as they were a hundred years ago.” If that greatest generation of the previous century was remarkable, Beecher asked, “Have we shrunk? Are we unworthy of their names, and places, and functions, which have been transmitted from their hands to ours?”81 That Beecher was himself embroiled in scan­ dal at this time (accused of having an affair with the wife of his protégé, Theodore Tilton); that New York had only recently seen the corrupt Tweed Ring disbanded (with the help of Francis Channing Barlow, who had moved on from his Civil War post, memorialized by Homer in Prisoners from the Front, to serve as attorney general of New York); and that the nation was coming to terms with the Grant administration’s “errors of judgment” might have suggested to some that the pres­ ent generation had indeed shrunk into some species of unworthiness.82 This was, as the art historian Vincent Scully has noted, a “self-conscious generation, tormented, as the men of the mid-century had seldom been, by a sense of history, of memory, and of cultural loss.”83 A sense of cultural loss informs Enoch Wood Perry’s Talking It Over (1872), which, like the game, looks back in time for its American characters, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, whom it pictures as two farmers, pausing in a moment of rest and reflection (Fig. 25).84 Painted for the Century Association’s exhibition in February 1872, the month of the presidents’ birthdays, the work memorializes these cultural icons and testifies to their enduring relevance to the American imaginary. Perry uses key details such as the cut of Lincoln’s beard, for ex­ample, and Washington’s sideburns and jowls to evoke these famous Americans and demonstrates a caricatural sensibility—an ability to highlight facial features to summarize character. Although different in tone from The True American, this painting may help to explain the shape Perry’s idiom takes in that work. Talking It Over, formally related to The True American by the network of horizontal and vertical lines that encases the two figures, draws attention to the head as a site of interest, just as the chromolithograph does, and not only because it asks the viewer to see in these farmers the familiar faces of Washington and Lincoln. Note the shadow of a horse’s head cast on the barrel from outside the picture space. This playful passage in the composition raises questions about painterly illusion—the horse’s shadow wraps a little too neatly around the barrel, making it appear disembodied—and hints at the logic of dislocation and absence that will inform Perry’s design for The True American. The bummers in the chromolithograph are linked by vacuity above all else; they are united by their communal lack, connected by their bodily dis-connection. If Brown’s aesthetic smoothes over difference with lighthearted levity, The True American leaves cracks in the surface; it masks only to probe masking’s disfiguring effects. The art historian Carol Armstrong has written about the contemporaneLaughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  65

Fig. 25 Enoch Wood Perry, Talking It Over, 1872, oil on canvas, 221 ⁄4 × 291 ⁄4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, 1980 (1980.361). Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ous work of Edgar Degas as a “deliberately anticohesive” art that “[dismantles] the terms of pictorial legibility and critical judgment” by “uprooting” perspective, cropping bodies, and refashioning caricatural conventions. “Disassembling” the human body and the space it inhabits, Degas undercuts the “viewer’s claim that to see was to be able to know, to measure . . . [to] judge.”85 The True American makes this withholding of information, this questioning of interpretive proce­ dure, a comic gag. (It is worth noting here that some critics saw Degas’s pictures as satirical.)86 The chromo parodies the will to incorporate and demonstrates the inevitable violence of laughing forgetfulness. As pseudo-culture that makes a virtue of vacuity by investing it with critical significance (that space where the head should be), the work challenges the notion that chromolithography was an insidiously placating and hollow medium of imitative surface illusions. In Perry’s hands—and, by extension, those of Bencke and Scott—it is a medium of difficulty. That Perry chooses chromolithography for his satire signals that medium’s significance as a site for edgy critical commentary.87 Indeed, it is hard to imagine a medium better suited to portraying a community of parts imperfectly united: chromolithography is an art of parts that produces a coherent picture only after 66  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 26 Thomas Nast, “Who Stole the People’s Money?” (detail of “Two Great Questions”), Harper’s Weekly 15 (August 19, 1871). Photograph courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

those parts are aligned, pressed one on top of another. When those colored stones are imperfectly arranged, the mismatched registration draws attention to the difficulties of the procedure. One has only to look at a progressive proof book that a firm would use to gauge alignment, the effect of the individual transparent tones, and the success of the final image to understand the complexities of producing an integrated picture.88

Thomas Nast’s Caricatural Circuitry The True American mocks the pretense of imagery that purports to unite distinct American characters into a seamlessly integrated whole and announces, in the process, how pseudo-culture might take a critical stance. But The True American may also help us to see the stale and hackneyed aspects of another genre of pop­ ular comic imagery of the 1870s, graphic satire, especially the work of Thomas Nast (Fig. 26). The anxious impulse to memorialize the virtuous at the time of the centennial also inspired the caricaturist’s defamation of the corrupt men takLaughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  67

Fig. 27 “The Rogues’ Gallery,” Puck 3 (July 3, 1878). The Newberry Library, Chicago.

ing their place, men like “Boss” Tweed and his ring, which ran New York City from 1865 to 1871 with clenched fist and swelling pocket. A coalition of the Society of Saint Tammany (founded in 1789 as a patriotic fraternal organization), the Democratic Party, and big business, the Tweed Ring was associated with Irish Catholicism, “negrophobia,” brutal coercion, ballot stuffing, and fraud.89 The behavior of local figures like Tweed as well as national representatives like Cox— whose integrity was questioned during the congressional race of 1872—explained the “distrust and contempt, which are so freely and so often expressed for the national legislature.”90 Graphic satire, which flourished as part of the expanding market for illustrated journalism during the tensions of the 1870s, countered the public official’s duplicitous rhetoric with pointed visual assault. Nast first made a name for himself during the Civil War with sober and often sentimental illustrations supporting the Union cause in Harper’s Weekly. His reputation for searing critique, developed in the mid to late 1860s with such images as his rendition of Andrew Johnson as hypocritical despot, continued in the early 1870s, when he launched his attacks on Tweed.91 Caricaturists like Nast, writing character on a distorted face, reinforced the link between spirit and body, which seemed to grant citizens some measure of control as decoders of deceit. If premodern societies avoided equating the health of the body politic with the health of the individual body, the nineteenth century put great faith in this metonymic link and the generalizing it allowed.92 The overarching presumption was that the body—and, by extension, society—could be mapped and known. In this era of the high-powered gentleman criminal, whose face could be difficult to read, caricature promised revelation. A cartoon from an 1879 issue of Puck suggests that “old style” rogues were easily recognized because of their 68  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 28 Thomas Nast, “The ‘Brains,’ ” Harper’s Weekly 15 (October 21, 1871). Photograph courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

low, narrow brows and sinister grins (Fig. 27). The “new style,” however—the Defaulting Cashier, Trustee, and Swindling Bank President—had the faces of elite gentlemen, bespectacled, with high foreheads; well-groomed and wearing polite expressions inviting trust and goodwill. If the face was no longer a reliable sign of character, Nast does away with it altogether, replacing Tweed’s head with a bag of money, writing the man’s motive where his face should be (Fig. 28).93 That is as close as Nast would ever get, conceptually, to the negation that structures The True American. If every caricature annihilates individuality—Ernst Gombrich and Ernst Kris write that in “imitating a man’s expression . . . we have destroyed [his] individuality”—in Perry’s image that annihilation is literalized.94 In de-facing the figure, The True American lays bare the procedure of caricature, demonstrating where it begins and ends. Nast’s imagery relies on such defacement, reinforcing it by repetition. His caricatures supplant the annihilated individual with a deformation that is validated by reiteration and reinforced from one partisan image to the next. As a staunchly devoted Radical Republican—committed to civil service reform and to civil rights for the nation’s immigrant groups—Nast was hostile to any faction that might disrupt that agenda and blinded when his own party failed to live up to his ideals. The Republican Grant administration came under fire repeatedly for mismanaging and misusing public funds in the mid-seventies, but Nast produced only one tepidly critical cartoon of the president, in 1874.95 For Nast, Grant remained a warrior heroically bearing the burden of leadership.96 Although Nast maintained that he was “not a slave or tool of any party,”97 many critics challenged that claim.98 Some argued that his devotion to Grant compromised the integrity of his work: “If Nast were Grant’s bootblack he could not be a more cringing, fawning creature than he is.”99 Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  69

Frank Bellew, another powerful graphic satirist of the period, gives visual ex­ pression to this attitude in a portrait of Nast at his drawing table. In this image— rare and too fragile to reproduce—from the Fifth Avenue Journal’s series Men of the Day, Nast is figured as devoted to the haloed “Holy Grant” in the foreground, and also as unusually cruel, with a dead cat at his feet and a fly skewered and placed on his table as inspiration. With some of his many targets displayed on the background wall—the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, for example, who is labeled “A Fool,” and another figure with simian, and thus stereotypically Irish, features—Nast wields a drawing implement with one hand and a serrated knife with the other. The text appended to this full-page chromolithograph echoes the imagery by calling Nast’s work “blunt” and insisting that it is “prompted more by the spirit of prejudice than by a desire to vindicate principle or cripple vice.”100 In Bellew’s image, Nast cripples the helpless, who are pictured as the casualties of his single-minded focus. Many critics took a view of Nast’s caricatures of Greeley similar to that of Bellew when the editor ran against Grant on the ticket of the breakaway Liberal Republican Party in 1872. Nast’s series of cartoons in Harper’s Weekly in the summer and fall of that year undercut the community-building rhetoric Greeley had used in accepting the nomination, suggesting that the editor was forming more sinister bonds, reaching out to, or shaking hands with, common criminals, Tweed, and even the ghost of John Wilkes Booth. Nast makes a gesture of friendship look underhanded. The handshake that unifies the series was generated by Greeley’s exhortation—“Let us clasp hands over the bloody chasm”—which serves as the caption for many of these cartoons.101 Through this iconographic and textual repetition, which ironized Greeley’s consensus-building efforts, Nast constructed a new public image for the candidate. When Greeley died, in November 1872, some argued that Nast was responsible and that his vilification of “a thoroughly honorable citizen” had gone too far.102 To his detractors Nast seemed blinded by his own politics. Like the Tweed Ring he pictured as endlessly transferring blame (see Fig. 26), Nast in his caricatures consistently pointed the finger away from his own affiliations to enact a similarly closed circuit. His caustic formulas had become predictable, just as Brown’s genial situations would by the 1880s, when Puck parodied the artist’s work with an empty frame and the caption, “J. G. B——n. Same as last year—fill the blank up with bootblacks to suit yourself.”103 Puck had parodied Nast’s idiom in 1879, rewiring the circuitry of his art to demonstrate how clichéd it had become (Fig. 29). The composition parodies a cartoon Nast had produced eight years earlier to comment on the treatment of Chinese laborers (Fig. 30). Banking on the viewer’s familiarity

70  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 29 “Puck Sends His Compliments to Mr. Nast Once More!” Puck 5 (June 4, 1879). The Newberry Library, Chicago.

Fig. 30 Thomas Nast, “The Chinese Question,” Harper’s Weekly 15 (February 18, 1871). Photograph courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

with that image or others like it, the Puck editorial proclaims, “Mr. Nast’s recipe for a cartoon is simple. You take a young woman . . . [and] you stand her up in the middle of a sheet of paper, with a Roman sword in her hand, a Grecian cornice on her head and an expression of mingled agony, enthusiasm and nausea in her face.” You then “surround her with a howling wilderness of posters, newspapers, extracts and literature in general, and you have your picture.”104 The image calls on the commonly stated view that Nast’s work was repetitive, with the same figures appearing in every cartoon. “It has doubtless been noticed that the figures in all his cartoons bear a striking resemblance to one another,” said a critic in the Arcadian.105 “Mr. Nast is the worst instance of playedoutness on record,” echoed the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “He has sunk into the condition of artistic senility.”106 Those derisive remarks were often motivated by politics: because of Nast’s power to guide the public to support his and his party’s agenda, the Democratic papers, especially, made him a target. But we should not dismiss their criticism outright, for their perceptive comments may help us to see the shortcomings of Nast’s pic­ torial strategies. Puck suggests that Nast’s played-out formula could be made to mean anything: “If your taste is for a cartoon on the Chinese question, you may so consider it. If you want a yellow fever picture, there it is. If you want a caricature showing up the awful prevalence of acute cerebro-spinal meningitis among the Papuans of South Utopia, why, bless you, it fits the case to a dot.” The signage around Columbia in this spoof is indeed a riot of competing voices. Classic Nastisms from the Civil War (“The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved”) compete with advertisers’ claims—like the one on the sheet at upper right that reads, “Some People Need Soft Soap More Than Others.” Nonsensical (or maybe deeply philosophical) statements like “What Is a Dollar” reverberate with Nast’s signature parentheses, which had created an opportunity for multiple meanings but in this context read as gibberish: “Preserve O Preserve the Sanctity of the Pol(l) (e)s. North & South Poles. Liberty Poles. Bean Poles.”107 Nast’s dense and voluble art is fundamentally removed, this parody seems to say, from the circumstances it purports to describe. It functions like a symbolic language whose logic depends on the recognizability of its symbols and on their repetition. In this way, Nast created his own currency. This spoof disrupts its easy flow, calling attention to its constructedness and—in linking Nast’s signature maxims to advertising—to the way it markets itself. This reading surely goes against the grain. Caricature like Nast’s is generally presented as a critical tool that dispels the fog of the dominant ideology.108 By targeting the seemingly untouchable ruling classes or institutions, it speaks for the masses and brings about reform. Certainly that is what reformist caricature aims for and, in the best cases, achieves. Nast’s work of the 1870s is a prime exLaughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  73

ample, alerting the masses to Tweed’s underhandedness and making Tweed familiar enough so that he could be captured after he escaped from jail. Authorities in Spain, recognizing Tweed from a Nast cartoon, extradited him to the United States, where he died in jail shortly thereafter.109 If caricature was framed rhetorically as a “bastard brother of art” by one period commentator, it nonetheless had special power because of its “illegitimacy.”110 Its timeliness, portability, and affordability meant it could have great reach and impact. Nast’s “drawings are stuck upon the walls of the poorest dwellings, and stored away in the portfolios of the wealthiest connoisseurs,” the New-York Times maintained in a piece from 1872, stressing how the work cut across class lines. “A man who can appeal powerfully to millions of people, with a few strokes of the pencil, must be admitted to be a great power in the land.”111 Indeed, after attending a party thrown in the early seventies so that the “Great Men of Washington” could meet him, Nast confirmed that “the power” he had was “terrible.”112 Built into Nast’s practice, however, was a debt to the community he so successfully dismantled, a debt to the principles that structured its very existence. Like Tweed or Greeley or Grant, Nast was a consensus builder and self-promoter who brought the public around to his cause by pointing a finger and making them laugh at someone else. I have written about the antebellum caricaturist’s art as inherently parasitic, dependent on a subject the caricaturist can exploit to make his own name.113 Surely this is the case with Nast, whose fame depended on the scandals of the early 1870s, to the extent that the artist imagined himself without purpose once Tweed had been exposed and kicked out of power (Fig. 31). The ideological compromises embedded in Nast’s work should not diminish its power for the twenty-first-century viewer but make it all the more intriguing as a cultural artifact. Indeed, his work reveals the complexities of producing, simultaneously, dissent and consensus. The True American is balanced on the same opposition, although its revisionist aesthetic exhibits a self-awareness that Nast generally lacks, in his belief that his art has the power to bring about reform. Although Perry was at the height of his career in the mid-seventies, critics tended to see him as a good but predictable painter, able to capture the details of a space better than anyone but nevertheless “without much imagination.”114 The True American complicates this view of the artist and shows him to be far more playful, critical, and inventive than period accounts suggest. The work speaks, in a Düsseldorf-style language of the everyday—a humble, colloquial realism of earth tones and understated surface appeal—but denaturalizes the idiom by disfiguring it. By taking the blank and exploiting it, instead of filling it in, the work presents national identity as a concept under construction. In refusing to caricature conventionally, it demonstrates, moreover, that Brown’s 74  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

Fig. 31 Thomas Nast, “Our Artist’s Occupation Gone,” Harper’s Weekly 16 (November 23, 1872). Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

and Nast’s humorous idioms—however disparate—cannot even approximate what the construction of a national identity really means. Only a language that deconstructs the mechanics of assimilation could do justice to its slippery nature during this uncertain moment of Reconstruction. Like the game of Sliced Nations, where alternative configurations of identity are always available in nonsensical permutations (even as the game promotes and expects coherence), The True American created options by imagining American identity as an open question. Where graphic satirists like Nast and genre painters like Brown, Bonham, and Wood rely on characters who have already been processed and codified—in no small part because of their imagery—Perry’s chromolithograph presents “the true American” as an unresolved entity. Several social critics made this point about the same time: “People say that the American character is unformed,” Titus Munson Coan wrote in his essay “A New Country,” of 1875. “We are too young as a nation to have fully developed and matured a national type of face,” said another writer some years earlier, “but we have it in process of formation.”115 The True American appears to call on that rhetoric to resist fetishizing types already delineated. Perhaps “types” are foundational to both caricature and genre painting in part because with them the artist designates figures as knowable and thus able to be contained or controlled. This very idea, however, is based on a central evasion. The act of typing is always distressed and weakened by all that will not be known or cannot be pressed into a mold. The True American somehow acknowledges that Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast  |  75

by making negation central to its organizational scheme. If with its mindless loafers and hokey, outdated naturalism the work emblematizes the cultural selfannihilation that elitist critics believed would result from the spread of such pseudo-culture, it may also counter that rhetoric by deferring closure. Those absent faces, those blanks, signify an unknown that opens into a space not encapsulated by the here and now. In this way, the chromolithograph leaves the future of Amer­ ican identity open and draws the viewer into the reconstructive project as an ironically active participant.

76  |  Laughing with Brown, Perry, and Nast

3 William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

If you would climb the mount of fame, And stand upon the crown, Spend all your strength in climbing, not In pulling others down. William Holbrook Beard, The Spade. Being an Address in verse delivered at the annual dinner of the National Academy of Design, May 9, 1894

We left William Holbrook Beard in Chapter 1 defending his raucous animal paintings from the attacks of the New York art critic Clarence Cook, who thought that Beard, with those images, “defiled the walls” of art exhibitions. “Nothing so low as these pictures has ever, to our knowledge, been deliberately and habitually painted by any other man since pagan days,” Cook declared in April 1864 about The March of Silenus and works like it (see Fig. 3).1 In another review, Cook insisted that Beard’s paintings of animals behaving badly “lower the standard, and feed the wits of only those who are quite incapable of enjoying anything really worth enjoying by cultivated men and women.”2 The critic wanted to make Beard “afraid and ashamed to paint such loathly things any more,” thereby preserving the art gallery—where Beard’s work drew laughs—as edifying and uplifting. But Cook, although he caused the artist some anxiety, would not be able to “nip such atrocities in the bud.”3 Indeed, Beard had a long and successful career. This artist from Painesville, Ohio, who moved to New York City in 1860 to paint alongside his older brother, James, was named an academician by the National Academy of Design in 1862 and exhibited widely and regularly.4 He was a favorite of well-known critics like James Jackson Jarves,   |  77

Henry Tuckerman, and George William Sheldon.5 And prominent New Yorkers purchased his work.6 For all his success, however, Beard was dissatisfied with his place in the New York art world, where he had been cast as a clown, forced to entertain and fight “annoying battles” with critics who wanted American art to aim higher.7 In some sense, Beard supported that goal: he was a serious artist who wanted to do “other kinds of work than the special one which public favor recognizes.”8 Throughout his career, Beard painted those other works—landscapes, for example, and allegorical compositions like The Spirit of the Storm (1872).9 But none earned the attention or popularity of his comic images. An unsympathetic reporter in 1866 summarized the artist’s quandary: “Here was a comedian, sure of applause, and fed with white bread, a man who had at last found his market” but was irritated that his audience would “not listen to him in tragedy for which he is sure he has a vocation.” In the late 1860s Beard was “preparing a grand stroke” to demonstrate his seriousness.10 It took the form of a giant earthwork he proposed, a tunnel complex to be built under New York’s Central Park, which had opened to the public in 1858 but was still a work in progress a decade later (Plate 6).11 Dark passageways in Beard’s conception would have led directly to the art museum New Yorkers planned to build above ground in Manhattan Square, on the west side of the park, between Seventy-Seventh and Eighty-First Streets. In 1869 it was thought that the still largely undefined Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History might share this space, possibly even the same building.12 Henry Keep, the railroad magnate and financier who reportedly backed Beard’s designs, proposed for this site a “National Academy for the Advancement of Art.” When Keep died, in July 1869, without making provision in his will for the project, Beard tried to elicit support for his scheme from the organizers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a promotional article by the respected journalist John R. G. Hassard in the August 1871 issue of Scribner’s.13 The artist worked at the Tenth Street Studio Building, alongside some of the key planners of the Met, bringing in friends and potential supporters to see his plans during the spring of 1871.14 Although the art and natural history museums would not officially split until the following year, Beard’s goal, as Hassard’s article suggests, was to combine his efforts with those of the Met committee. Beard had completed the rough draughts of the Keep Museum, and laid them before the enthusiastic coterie which, without State help, or even recognition, is laboring so earnestly for the aesthetic culture of the people. Let us say at once, however, that between the Metropolitan Museum Committee and the leaders of what, for want of a better name,

78  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

we may call the Beard movement, there is no hostile rivalry. They originated independently and thus far they have worked independently, but there is no reason why they should not come together after a while and unite their efforts for a common cause. Neither has yet developed its plans in full, and it may be found that both are tending towards precisely the same objects by nearly the same road.15

But the roads never merged. The death of Beard’s financial backer could have been enough to kill his project, but it may have languished unrealized for other reasons.16 This chapter considers Beard’s project in relation to the art world’s development of the first monumental public museums in the 1870s. How would the planners of such museums have responded to the proposal of a painter of comic animals? And how would Beard’s project have reflected on those institutions, had it been built? We have no way of knowing how Beard arrived at his plans for a subterranean entrance to an art museum or how many versions he drafted before settling on the designs published in Scribner’s. My analysis focuses on those illustrations, the one oil study that has surfaced (see Plate 6), and period accounts of Beard’s proposal. Beard’s was just one of many proposals connected to the establishment of a “Great Public Museum” during the late 1860s and early 1870s.17 Keep’s interest in funding an art museum inspired, besides Beard’s plans, those of the architect George B. Post, whose “Design for an Art-Institute” was published in the November 27, 1869, issue of Appletons’ Journal.18 This was just four days after those interested in organizing a “Metropolitan Art-Museum” gathered at the Union League Club to form a provisional committee.19 In April 1870, the month the Met was incorporated, yet another museum option emerged when the Industrial Exhibition Company began to develop plans for a “perpetual world’s fair,” to comprise fine art, shops, lecture halls, gardens, “and whatever else that may add to its intellectual attractions.” (It was dissolved in the spring of 1876 after years of mismanagement.)20 Conceptions of what would constitute a “Great Public Museum” were thus profoundly unsettled in these years. Museums were still “matters of experiment.”21 Beard’s plan was one of the most unconventional in this period of experimentation, a vision built on the hopes and expectations of others—a subterranean passageway whose practical details were never worked out, a pathway into a building that had not yet been constructed for collections that had not yet been gathered. Although Beard’s focus on animal life was uniquely suited to a building housing both natural history and art, Hassard’s article makes clear that Beard’s tunnel complex was designed as a route up from the ground into hallowed spaces housing art. “The whole way” of Beard’s tunnel complex “is lined with figures, typical of the difficulties to be overcome before the student enters into the real enjoyment Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  79

Fig. 32 William Holbrook Beard, “Main Entrance,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871). Courtesy of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

and comprehension of the beautiful,” Hassard writes, using an evolutionary language that privileges the beautiful as the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement.22 The visitor was first to encounter figures evoking “the rude origin of art,” at least some of which would be carved in marble, perhaps by Beard, who aspired to enter the field of monumental statuary.23 The visitor, proceeding, would encounter more “poetic conceptions” and “ideal forms.”24 Progress through this space would produce moments of “pleasing uncertainty,” like those orchestrated in the park by its architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who wanted to distance New York’s park from its European precedents, which offered little topographical variety.25 But Beard’s plan was far stranger than anything they could have conceived. The figures evoking the rude origin of art were “grim giants . . . barring the avenue to aesthetic culture”: Hassard describes them as Ignorance and Superstition (Fig. 32). These figures, rep80  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Fig. 33 William Holbrook Beard, “The Approach to the Art Museum,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871). Courtesy of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

resenting primitive men, rudimentary tools in hand, stand at the entrance to the tunnel, where beasts seem to dare the visitor to proceed. This tunnel opened onto a chamber with a colossal male figure—“the guardian genius of the place”—a recumbent nude youth, and more “strange animals” (Fig. 33).26 The visitor could climb the steps behind this male figure to a sculpture gallery celebrating “the famous characters of recent times” and donors to the museum project, whose names would be inscribed on a stone tablet next to a representation of Time sleeping. In this elevated nook visitors might pay their respects to those contemporary heroes. When they descended the stairs, they could choose a path to either the open air of the park, by way of the path to the right in Figure 33, which opened out to the animal-lined tunnel of Plate 6 (a composition also reproduced in Hassard’s article; Fig. 34). Or they could choose the path to the left that led to “broken flights of steps to galleries of sculpture, and so into the Museum proper.”27 Scholars have seen Beard’s project as a sincere and serious proposition far removed from his painting.28 But his convoluted design complicates that reading and recalls his comic painting in surprising ways. That the project’s bid to be taken seriously is indistinguishable from its self-marginalization puts its sincerity into question and may help us to see its potential to incorporate critique (perhaps especially self-critique). Beard, by positioning his art literally beneath the prospecBeard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  81

Fig. 34 William Holbrook Beard, “Second Entrance,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871). Courtesy of The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign Library.

tive museum above ground, internalizes the rhetorical strategy critics had used against him and other humorists of the period.29 Critics like Cook consigned humorists to the realm of the low and dirty, and the new museums would institutionalize that marginalization as they formulated a canon of “high” art.30 Beard literalizes the “low” and thus reinforces simplistic conceptions of artistic hierarchies. But by drawing focus downward as he extends the territory of the art institution with his subterranean portals, Beard undermines the superior position from which it declares his art inferior.31 An understanding of burlesque, which adopts the forms and strategies of the thing it ridicules, helps to untangle the complexity of this effort. By burlesquing the rhetoric of the museum movement, by redoubling it in chaotic, monstrous form, Beard draws attention to its excrescences. But ambivalence is embedded in this effort, because the artist would like nothing more than to take his place in the grand edifice being planned above ground. By means of burlesque, Beard renders the monster museum coincident with the monster humor it would banish from its precincts and bridges the space between them. Defying both his critics and his supporters in this gesture that figuratively collapses the high into the low, Beard charts an alternative path for his art somewhere between those poles.

The Museum Movement in New York Bold ambition drove New York’s philanthropic elite to construct a major public museum of art. Although the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were uninterested “in ostentation, prestige or elevating themselves above the brutish mass by a devotion to high art,” according to the historian Neil Harris, the situ82  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

ation in New York was different.32 Grandeur was almost an end in itself for the boards of the Met and the American Museum of Natural History and the committee that developed Central Park in the late 1850s. “We have become . . . accustomed to doing things, and seeing them done, on a great scale,” the Reverend Dr. Joseph Thompson argued at the November 1869 meeting of those interested in organizing the art museum. And he considered the “very grandeur” of the effort to create it akin to the spirit behind such major accomplishments in industry as the transcontinental rail line, completed in May 1869. A metropolitan museum would be just as grand but nobler. It would inspire the “highest development of the personal soul, and the perfecting of the community.” It would also establish New York as a city on a par with the cultural centers of Europe, drawing visitors from all over the world.33 The “present greatness of the city,” many thought, made a serious museum of art a cultural requirement; even Spain, “a third-rate power of Europe and poor besides,” had an opulent art museum.34 The organizers of the Met were careful to point out that the museum’s aims were primarily educational rather than aggrandizing, however: “The want of such a museum of art is not the want of a place of amusement, nor even of another adornment of our city and attraction to strangers; it is the want of an essential means of high cultivation.”35 They may have underlined that distinction to distance their project from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which had been the city’s primary public museum until it burned to the ground for the second time in March 1868.36 The separation of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art into two distinct buildings in 1872 marked a break with the cabinet of curiosities tradition (on which Barnum had put his own sensationalist spin) and in the process distinguished art from other kinds of objects. The planners of the new museums were less catholic in their interests than Barnum, but they were equally concerned to build vast collections. New Yorkers expected their city to grow. Thinking of the future, they had given over a huge tract of land to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Central Park, though some were initially “appalled at the thought of so vast an outlay.”37 Indeed, the organizers of the Met pointed to the park in soliciting support for their own endeavor.38 The park drew vast crowds, as did European museums like the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London. While the Met in its infancy could not hope to rival those institutions, its supporters nonetheless busied themselves collecting art for it in Europe.39 The Met acquired three important private collections of old masterworks in France during the summer of 1870, at the start of the Franco-Prussian War.40 “Great bargains in works of art” were there for the taking, and the Metropolitan’s founding trustees worked feverishly to take adBeard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  83

vantage of the situation.41 A column in the New York Tribune under the heading “Monster Museum of New York” insisted that the glut of masterpieces on the market made “now” the time to act.42 The goal was to build up a collection that would ensure the country’s eventual cultural sophistication. Those funding the art institutions and establishing a canon—prominent New York bankers, lawyers, and industrialists—had an uncertain grasp of artistic quality but still purchased art in bulk.43 This was the beginning of the boom in old-master paintings, when a taste for the Old World to some degree superseded interest in contemporary American art.44 Although critics called for the development of “a thorough art-culture” that would move the United States out of Europe’s shadow—releasing the country from its “provincial dependency”—the taste for old masterworks in this period, somewhat ironically, reinforced that relationship.45 Much of the art snatched up in 1870 was dark, overvarnished, and heavily retouched, with suspect attribu­ tions. By the late 1880s, when the museum’s collecting policies had become more discriminating, much of the “trash” gathered up in these formative years was “weeded out.”46 The inability to discern quality reinforced the reputation of the United States among Europeans as a nation of “practical men” who could only “pretend to be civilized,” as one Belgian commentator sneered in 1871.47 By celebrating the educational mission of a metropolitan museum, writers in the United States echoed this characterization of Americans as a “raw and noisy and obtrusive” population that might rise out of its “barbarian” state if given opportunities to encounter great art in a public museum.48 Beard imagined moving the visitor from darkness to light, from a tunnel deep in the earth up into an art museum, thus effecting literally the metaphorical transformation of visitors the Met’s founders hoped for. The project’s ambition matched that of the museum’s organizers: Beard proposed an undertaking bigger than anything he had ever attempted. It would have launched him into a truly mammoth enterprise, a late-1860s version of Charles Willson Peale’s museum project of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which had made en­ lightenment similarly dependent on the mastering of sites belowground. These were spaces filled with the bones of gigantic creatures of the past, which would shock and surprise the public when arranged for public viewing in Peale’s gallery as reconstituted skeletons.49 Beard, in contrast to Peale, keeps the beasts in their underground domain. He had begun work on his tunnel project after returning from a trip through the Rocky Mountains. Beard’s descent into the gold and silver mines of Colorado may have inspired him to consider the underground back East in designing his museum project.50 The underground feature of his scheme was not entirely original, for in 1866 the park’s architects had proposed an underground 84  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

passage from the park into a slightly different configuration of Manhattan Square that would have combined a natural history museum and a zoological garden.51 Beard preserves that idea but refigures “the wild” and relates it to a site for advanced art. The animals of his proposal are not the hooting and hollering beasts of The March of Silenus, however; none gives in to a sensuous desire to lounge, play, and gorge on stolen fruit as they do in Bears in a Watermelon Patch, painted in 1871 (Plate 7). Instead, they are on their best behavior, like the ancient animal guardians placed before tombs, institutions of learning, and so on.52 The gray tones of Beard’s oil study suggest that he made it specifically for reproduction in the Scribner’s article, but his restricted palette also suits the logic of inversion that informs this project. If his palette consisted generally of high-keyed chromatic contrasts like those in Bears in a Watermelon Patch, in the museum project Beard takes the coldness of the earth to heart, freezing his animals into respectable postures. In contrast to the beasts on all fours lining the dark interior of the tunnel, the two gatekeepers stand upright in remarkably sophisticated poses. Beard’s giant cat— perhaps a tiger?53—with ears pinned back and fangs bared, looks ready to attack, much like the animal that crouches above visitors at the other end of the tunnel. It is a wild animal, yet its paw bends in a delicate arc, seemingly relaxed. The bear opposite the cat mirrors its classical contrapposto; it bends one leg and rests it on its own step. Beard has reformed his rowdy beasts as heroic statuary. Smiling open-mouthed at each other across the tunnel’s opening, the gatekeepers invite us to read their ponderousness as a colossal joke, a performance of dignity at which they can only chuckle.54 Indeed, the cackling mouth of Beard’s trademark bear is one of the most densely labored passages of the oil study, an aspect of the composition the artist clearly wanted to get right. Like the eerily grinning cat of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of 1865 (initially titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground), Beard’s bear has about it a sphinx-like mystery in this topsy-turvy space where logic is undermined and strangely evolved animals tower over an insect-size humanity below.

Beard, Twain, and the Old World Period writers acknowledged the strangeness of Beard’s program and sensed something slightly skewed in it. When Hassard, for example, insists that Beard’s subterranean scheme is “not a mere freak,” he implies just the opposite. Although he claims that Beard’s plan “[observes] the historical order of the arts,” he manages only a confusing explanation of how that order works. The journalist labors Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  85

to make the case that Beard’s passageway would be “quite as good in its way as any department of the building to which it [would lead],” and would “suit any style of architecture, any arrangement of the collections, and any kind of ground,” but his argument feels somewhat overstated.55 The outlandishness of Beard’s scheme—which complicates the versatility Hassard proposes—readily strikes twenty-first-century viewers, but it apparently had at least a small circle of unperturbed supporters. One writer, who reported on the “cultivated and critical audience” that assembled in Beard’s studio to view the proposal in March 1871, claimed that all saw “merit and feasibility” in his plans.56 An account in the Art Review, however, notes viewers’ hesitancy: “The plan strikes a few of our citizens unpleasantly, because there is nothing at all like it in the old world.”57 The critic’s statement signals how Americans judged value in relation to European precedent and acknowledges Beard’s scheme as unusual and modern. Beard’s project, however, does resemble something Old World in its use of antique models of high artistic expression. Beard’s departure from and critique of them, however, belong to his own place and time. Henry Tuckerman, one of Beard’s most sensitive critics, argued in 1867 that the artist was especially skilled at introducing “a comic vein, where we should least expect to find it . . . without producing a discordant effect.”58 In doing so, Beard followed a primary rule of burlesque: to ridicule a convention subtly by almost lovingly adopting its forms. Because of that strategy, burlesque differs from satire, which, in its most recognizable forms, derides unambiguously. Unlike satire, burlesque “wants to destroy nothing”—it simply wants to distort.59 It draws attention to the artificiality of the convention by pushing it just over the edge, so that the “gilded mannerisms and heightened materials” of the historian, for example, will seem overcooked, or the sentimental language of the romance novel will sound especially cloying.60 No matter the genre, the goal of the burlesque is always to deflate the inflated thing that takes itself too seriously. The author who co-opts the high-flown form raises himself above it, laying claim to superiority by revealing its assumptions and artifice. Burlesque flowered in the United States from the 1830s to the 1890s.61 Two ex­ amples from works by Mark Twain help to demonstrate how it operates in Beard. The first, from “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902), burlesques rhapsodic accounts of landscape scenery: It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple

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and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.62

The only word that struck contemporaries as an error was “oesophagus,” although the passage positively brims with related offenses. Twain successfully approximates the tone and cadence, and borrows the vocabulary, of purple prose; his reference to the color in the phrase “purple and yellow flames” provides a clue to his burlesquing purpose. He declared the passage a success as burlesque because readers noticed only the strangeness of the word “oesophagus” in this context, proving that the “paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader.”63 A much earlier burlesque by Twain, of a news account, performs a related maneuver. “Petrified Man,” published anonymously in the Virginia City Enterprise in 1862, critiques the willingness of the public to believe what they read in the newspaper, especially the news of a petrified man unearthed during this great age of subterranean exploration.64 Twain’s article describes the man as “pensive,” but in his meticulous account, the figure’s pose hardens into a wink and a snook: “The right thumb resting against the side of the nose . . . the right eye . . . closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.” The petrified man thus thumbs his nose at the reader taken in by the just-the-facts journalistic tone. As in “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” the reader is asked to find in an elaborate, long-winded narrative the element that stands out, that prompts skepticism. Beard’s underground project similarly adopts the highfalutin rhetoric of the museum movement but distorts it in a space that features his trademark cackling bear. Like Twain’s “oesophagus” in his newspaper piece, the bear—the key fig­ ure of Beard’s comic paintings—stands out amid the seeming gravitas of the project as a whole, which is long-winded in its own way. The subterranean entrance was “a series of very elaborate and picturesque allegorical representations,” wrote George William Sheldon.65 The central gallery, especially, appropriates old-world dignity, although its dense and confusing allegorical program undermines that effect, with its “strange animals,” recumbent nude, and “guardian genius” (see Fig. 33). This partially concealed space with its menagerie of animals might be linked to ancient and Renaissance grottoes.66 Typically grottoes belonged to larger architectural arrangements, where they established a contrast to the rational order of the edifices above ground. “Within a world dominated by Renaissance ratio . . . grottoes may be equated with a longing for the bizarre, the contrived, the unusual,” one scholar has argued. “For ambiguity is present in [the Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  87

grotto’s] very topos—on the one hand, a pastoral, idyllic setting; on the other, the opening into the abyss; the negation of time and the source of eternity; the absence of daylight and the presence of the light divine.”67 Beard’s scheme—bizarre, contrived, and unusual—is imbued with the liminal ambiguity of the old-world grotto. The titanic male nude, the “guardian genius of the place,” might have read as an ancient river god in that context, yet he serves here as a base for a roughly rectangular sculptural arrangement recalling Transfiguration and Assumption scenes that represent a spiritual hierarchy, with the earthbound in the lowest register (the titan), the heavens in the highest (the contemporary heroes), and a zone of passage between them from one world to the next (the nude youth). Does the “light divine” somehow shine in this dark space, then? Probably not, for Beard’s design looks like a perverse scrambling of the spiritual hierarchy, with that bearded God-the-Father type brought down to earth and accoutred like a warrior. The voluptuous nude youth who looks down on him from above introduces a carnal element, like the animals below, further complicating straightforward iconographic meaning and the narrative relationship between the gallery’s sculptural parts.68 Plenty of American precedents for such convolution might be cited, including Thomas Crawford’s Senate pediment, which Jarves lambasted in 1864 in his ArtIdea, the volume in which he praised Beard. Jarves considered Crawford’s group “a jumble of modern commonplace, savage life, and allegory.” After working his way through Crawford’s iconography—the “bales of merchandise,” the “Indian warrior meditating upon a rock,” the “mechanic reclining on a cog-wheel,” the “colossal symbolic figure in the centre”—Jarves declared that a “composition of this character confuses and conflicts with noble art.”69 Richard Morris Hunt’s proposal, in 1865, for elaborate gates at the southern entrances to Central Park suffered similar criticism.70 Hunt imagined for one of the four entrances—the Gate of Peace—a four-hundred-square-foot plaza with a semicircular terrace framed by staircases that descended into the park. An enormous column at the center of the terrace would have featured the city’s arms, held up by a sailor and a Native American figure, and at the column’s base, a pool of water with Neptune in his chariot, figures representing New York’s Hudson and East Rivers, and Henry Hudson standing on the prow of a ship. Olmsted and Vaux rejected this elaborate expression of municipal pride—with expansive vistas and iconography that drew on models of civic planning Hunt had encountered during his training in Paris— because they disliked its “imperial” character.71 The idiom was “worn-out,” out of step with the supposedly democratic tenor of the park and with American society in general.72 Beard’s sculptural program rivals Hunt’s allegorical convolution. The artist 88  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

invokes the high-flown grandeur of the Met’s organizers and flatters their taste for the Old World, but he pushes this rhetoric (and its implicit elitism) to a confused extreme. That strategy comes to the fore in Beard’s central gallery, which equates wealth and virtue. Inscribing the names of elite art patrons on a stone tablet beside “Time sleeping” was supposed to “delicately intimate the immortality of fame which [would] reward the gift of a thousand dollars or so to the museum.” Situating this arrangement at the gallery’s highest point, Beard suggests that money buys an elevated place in the world as well as everlasting life. Although old-master imagery often implies the virtue of donors, in Beard’s post–Civil War era, with its financial boom and political mismanagement, money in New York was tainted by its association with corruption. “Good citizens may fear,” William J. Hoppin wrote in a letter read at the Union League meeting of 1869, that a museum like the one proposed would “only afford another additional source of corruption—a means of enriching a few individuals at the expense of the many, without procuring any substantial good in the direction proposed.”73 But the Met’s organizers had to concern themselves primarily with the interests of those few whose wealth could make the museum a reality. They appealed to that elite group by publicizing the amount of their donations and stressing the “pride and pleasure” they would take “in being among the earliest promoters and founders of a great Institution.”74 Beard’s central gallery celebrates those virtuous souls but also subtly upsets the Met organizers’ rhetoric by linking money, inherited tastes and conventions, and the power of the critical establishment to dictate how the one serves the other. Twain, in The Innocents Abroad (1869), mocked the assumed equivalence of money and virtue when he quipped that the people of Florence built a grand mausoleum “to bury our Lord and Savior and the Medici family in.” If the Medicis had not been included, they “would have smuggled themselves in sure.”75 Twain’s narrator pretends not to know about the Renaissance to which his guides keep referring: “Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”76 He complains especially about the frequent praise of Michelangelo: I do not want Michel Angelo for breakfast—for luncheon—for dinner—for tea—for supper—for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michel Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. . . . Dan said the other day to the guide, “Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michel Angelo!”77

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This passage, mocking the nationalistic pride of the Italian guides who repeatedly referred to Michelangelo, also undermines the sanctity of the old masters as the source of culture. The narrator questions their cultural authority by refusing to revere their works.

The Authority of Art Critics Beard had studied abroad during the 1850s, in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.78 When asked in the 1890s, “What painting, of all you have seen, comes nearest to the ideal and why?” Beard named Titian’s altarpiece The Death of Saint Peter Martyr.79 And he modeled some of his early works on the animal paintings of the English artist Sir Edwin Landseer, with whose imagery he consciously engaged throughout his career.80 Nevertheless, in “The Oldest Institution in the World,” an Aesopian fable Beard published in 1880, he, like Twain, expressed skepticism about inherited practices and precedents. He began as follows: Long, long ages ago, when Jove had the ruling of mundane affairs, before animal nature had been so classified and divided—indeed, when there was no classification at all, but all creatures as well as plants spoke one language, and the arts were in a rudimental state—there was a society formed having for its object the advancement of arts and sciences. When we say a society had any particular thing for its object, we should by no means be understood as saying it attained that object. There were many members of this society, and much business dispatched; many rules laid down for eternal guidance, and memberships established in perpetuity; all principles and rules of action which governed these first members to go unchanged and unchangeable with the membership, which was to descend by inheritance in direct line from parent to offspring, from the earliest periods, away back in the “blue distance of time,” to the present day.

Phrases like “eternal guidance,” “unchanged and unchangeable” and the “blue distance of time” call attention to the restrictiveness and rigidity of laws dictated by the past. The “taste of the time”—for banal, pretty art—has been “transmitted through countless ages down this long line” and is validated by the “aesthetic Mole,” whom Beard describes as a “critic of art”—the authority the society trusts to judge all creations. Because he is “dull in both sight and hearing,” however, the mole’s appraisals are questionable. When a crow demonstrates its ability to caw, the mole makes an odd gesture that the animal crowd interprets as approval. Such arbitrary verdicts, Beard writes, are “to this day strictly adhered to in this old, old society.”81 Age alone gave them authority. 90  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Beard, as we know, commonly used animals to critique culture. Beard’s “brutes are four-legged humanity,” Jarves declared in 1864, and later writers have reinforced that view.82 Beard embedded his objections to the art-critical establishment in his story of the aesthetic Mole who, though reputed to be “very penetrating,” causes irreparable damage with his interventions. Beard’s description of the mole echoes his remarks of the 1860s about Clarence Cook and art critics generally as “the vainest, most conceited race on the face of the earth.”83 In a public letter published in the New-York Daily Tribune, Beard defended his work and implied that Cook was not only vain and “pretentious” but also an “ignoramus.”84 If Cook compared Beard’s “unclean” work with the art of “pagan days,” Beard argued that the critic, in doing so, only advertised a mind that was itself unclean.85 Ignorance and Superstition, the gigantic gatekeepers of Beard’s tunnel complex, who bar “the avenue to aesthetic culture,” suggest, with their inflated proportions, the egos and arrogance Beard associated with the ignorant critics and their exaggerated significance as guardians of culture. These figures, like the aesthetic Mole and, in Beard’s view, contemporary critics like Cook, impede the enjoyment of art. If Beard “had not precisely the weapons to meet” critics who had “misunderstood his aims and slandered him,” as a reporter suggested in 1866—if he only “half-understood” his “conflicts” with them—the artist here offers a somewhat scrambled rebuttal. As an artist, he felt constrained when he met critics on their own turf, in the newspaper. “It is perhaps unusual for an artist to take up the pen in his own defense,” Beard wrote, “but it seems to me that justice demands” a response, even if he must formulate it with an artist’s “circumscribed powers of expression.”86 Beard’s underground project is another attempt at a response—to prove the critics wrong and to undermine their judgments of his work. If you are such a penetrating judge, Beard seems to say, tell the people what it means; make this monumental project into one of the “loathly things” you want the public to avoid.87 Beard’s chief worry about Cook was that he had made an unprejudiced engagement with his work impossible. The newly robust and professionalized art criticism of the second half of the nineteenth century, for which Cook was in great measure responsible, moved away from innocuous flattery—even (or perhaps especially) in commenting on the work of well-known artists with solid and unquestioned reputations—in favor of sharper, ostensibly truer judgments.88 But it bothered artists like Beard that the potentially idiosyncratic perspective of a critic could have such influence.89 In his fable, his tunnel project, and his comments on Cook, Beard’s fundamental concern was the unequal power of artists, the critics, and their public in this era of authoritative and sharp-tongued art criticism. His fable playfully points out the injustice of critics’ arbitrarily (it seemed to him) privilegBeard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  91

ing some artists and damning others. Passing down the critics’ judgments from one age to another only magnifies and extends the errors. Good reviews increased the prices an artist could demand during his lifetime and established the value of his work for future generations. But bad reviews could shorten the life of an artist’s work and limit its reach to his own period (until a later generation perhaps “rediscovered” it on different terms). Critics could thus have inordinate power, and artists could be at a disadvantage.90 Indeed, Cook’s judgments reached a vast public: “This writer,” Beard complained in his Tribune letter, “presents me to hundreds of thousands of readers of the Tribune as the boldest, most persistent corruptor of . . . public morals.” George William Curtis’s support of Cook only deepened the wound. Curtis maintained that Cook had “so positive a conviction, and so clear an understanding of what he means and what he likes and dislikes, that we congratulate our art and our artists and ourselves, the spectators, upon the vitality of interest which such criticisms evince.” Cook’s cocksure reviews repre­ sented not blind and idiotic criticism—and certainly not “a personal attack”— Curtis insisted, but a thriving art world.91 The establishment of institutions like the Met reinforced the vitality of this art world, which Cook endeavored to spur to greater achievement with his harsh criticism. Those institutions often disappointed Cook (he repeatedly criticized the Met, for example),92 and he frequently championed the cause of working artists in the face of institutional policies that he thought hampered the development of their work or put it at a disadvantage (for example, in crowded and poorly lit exhibitions that privileged the work of European artists).93 His involvement in the late 1870s with the Society of American Artists, a body formed to challenge the restrictions of the National Academy of Design, and his publication in 1888 of the magisterial Art and Artists of Our Time demonstrate his dedication to improving the circumstances and celebrating the achievements of living American artists. But Cook’s relationship to the artists of his time was as complex as that of the institutions. The Met, for its part, was only marginally interested in the work of contemporary American artists, at least at first. Artists such as Daniel Huntington, John F. Kensett, and Frederic Edwin Church were involved in organizing the Met, and many New York artists attended the 1869 meeting.94 But the museum equivocated, to some degree, in its support of the city’s contemporary art scene because it did not want to be defined by any single body of artists—such as the National Academy of Design—and because it emphasized the value of foreign objects from the distant past.95 Although some argued that it should also collect contemporary American art—one supporter encouraged the museum to “order immediately from each middle-aged contemporary artist a masterpiece”—it focused its collecting energies 92  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

on antiquities and the works of the old masters, in the belief that such works would serve the country’s current and future artists.96 When the museum opened in early 1872 at the Dodworth Building, at Fifth Avenue between Fifty-Third and FiftyFourth Streets, the Metropolitan’s president, John Taylor Johnston, felt “apprehensive of the effect of inviting the disaffected artist element” who wanted the institution to purchase American rather than European works.97 Beard and other contemporary American artists found a place at the Met when collectors sent their paintings to loan exhibitions that were mounted to stir public support and generate funding during the 1870s and 1880s.98 These exhibitions were the proper place for contemporary works of art, argued one commentator who felt that “modern pictures have not really a place in any gallery except for purposes of sale or temporary exhibition, as in the present loan collection.”99 That was an extreme view, tempered by the Met’s eventual inclusion of gallery space dedicated to the work of living American artists. But although the Met acquired work by many of Beard’s peers, it never acquired any of his work for its permanent collection, perhaps because his imagery was racier than that of his colleagues.100

Indecency and Inversion A case in point is the painting that established Beard’s name, The March of Silenus, which intensifies the carnality of the ancient myth it borrows by making the woodland deity who raised Dionysus into a corpulent, hairy beast. Another form of burlesque—performed on the New York stage—can help to explain how the earthy quality of a work like The March of Silenus reverberates in Beard’s larger project. In late 1868 Lydia Thompson and her English troupe of female performers, the British Blondes, arrived in New York City.101 Because of their shows “bur­ lesque” came to describe comic theatrical entertainment performed by scantily clad and charmingly impertinent women.102 Thompsonian burlesque—travestying one trope or another in plays that lampooned respectable drama—was never subtle but always brash and indelicate. One critic declared that “its design is to be uproariously funny and glaringly indecent.”103 By exhibiting flesh and inverting gender roles (with women performing wisecracking male characters), burlesque was “monstrously incongruous and unnatural.”104 Like Beard’s project, the performances of the 1868–69 season emphasized incongruity over coherence. They seemed “without design,” and for some critics, like the Shakespearean scholar Richard Grant White, impossible to describe.105 A critic for the New-York Times concluded that the literary faults of these plays served burlesque’s goal to upset the status quo—“to upset decorum, to upset gravity, to disarm judgment, and to Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  93

Fig. 35 William Holbrook Beard, Making Game of the Hunter, 1880, oil on canvas, 26 × 40 in. © Christie’s Images New York.

intoxicate the senses.”106 Older literary forms of burlesque similarly undermined decorum, but the British Blondes added sensory overload to burlesque, linking it to transgressive gender-bending bodies.107 Beard codes transgression as animal, but often he also sexualizes his inver­ sions, for example, in Making Game of the Hunter (1880; Fig. 35). In this painting, a hunter’s weapon is turned against him as two bears looking on exchange a smile at the turn of events. This reversal-of-fortune imagery involving bears informs Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s oil painting A Tight Fix (1856) but was more common on trade cards, in the accounts of hunters and trappers, and in the period’s comic and children’s literature.108 Beard gives the theme a darker, more perversely humorous flavor. The feminized hunter, falling back into the arms of an upright bear, looks in horror at the rifle pointing his way, while his dog, at right, looks toward him and seems to scream. Clarence Cook recounted almost breathlessly the “anxious look of the hunter, who grasps the logic of the situation more easily than he does the humor of it; the agonies of the dog, disgusted by the liberties taken with him by one of the cubs, and his frantic appeals to his master for help.”109 The suggestion of arousal in the tail visible between the dog’s legs draws attention to the perversion that structures the piece. Violation is central to this game’s mechanics, in the figures of the composition and also at the level of genre. Organized on a diagonal, the picture echoes a scene of historical confrontation, John 94  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Fig. 36 John Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775, 1786, oil on canvas, 25 × 34 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Trumbull Collection.

Trumbull’s epic painting The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill (Fig. 36). Indeed, the pose of the white-bellied dog, with left paw crossed over the body and right hind leg cutting visually across the left, resembles that of Trumbull’s dying general. Parodying Trumbull’s representation of heroic anguish, Beard at once grants grandeur to the animal’s suffering and deflates the histrionics of history painting. For him, the epic was tinged with the absurd. In this and other paintings, Beard subverts the dignified and the elevated with an antiauthoritarian conceit that, like Thompsonian burlesque, depends on irreverent and sexualized inversion. The British Blondes’ performances were “threatening,” as Robert C. Allen explains, and were seen as ultimately lowerclass entertainment because they presented “a world turned upside down and inside out in which nothing was above being brought down to earth.”110 This game of inversions depended on shock and surprise. A woman speaking in the low tones of a man—performing, as it were, against her nature—was simultaneously horrifying and uncomfortably funny. The low voice that is the sign of inversion—like the false eyelashes of a modern performer in drag—was recruited for its semiotic clarity, as a shortcut to signify “man,” the “opposite” sex. Such signs are typically hyperbolic, the most explicit means possible for producing inversion. Beard’s most scandalous works operate according to this same literalizing logic. Asked to design Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  95

a label for a manufacturer of “bear’s oil,” Beard “produced a design of a huge black bear angrily hugging a hog and squeezing from it a stream of lard oil which ran into a trough labeled ‘bear’s oil.’ ” The manufacturer of this product “failed to see the humor of it and refused to accept the design.”111 That bestial intimacy owed much to popular imagery of the frontier—for ex­a mple, in the Davy Crockett almanacs, published from the 1830s to the 1850s (Fig. 37). Jarves had presented Beard as an artist “fresh from the Western wilder­ ness” in 1864, and Beard often drew on the lawlessness and exaggeration char­ acteristic of this vision of the West as an earthy, coarse, dirty place of “undif­ ferentiated, unorganized [and] uncontrollable relations.”112 Eastern critics used similar terms to describe the theatrical performances of the British Blondes, a different, but clearly related, frontier zone. Their straightforward and unabashed vulgarity was “a huge, a monster humor,” a phrase a later critic used to describe the humor of Twain and his ilk, “gotten of exaggeration, the belching of great giants filled with strong meat.”113 That critic employed a Rabelaisian language that links beastly carnality and overdone—literally oversize—humor. The gargantuan bear of Beard’s project embodies that monster humor—it is the clearest link to his comic paintings and emblematizes, in monumental form, the energies that permeate them. As in Thompsonian burlesque, the liminal figure represents both humor and horror—characteristics, according to the film theorist Noël Carroll, intimately related as “adjacent and partially overlapping regions” on the “map of mental states.” Although humor, commonly associated with release, may seem antithetical to horror, with its “feelings of pressure, heaviness and claustrophobia,” both humor and horror often depend on incongruities for their effects: “the violation of our standing categories . . . and common expectations,” as Carroll puts it. The gatekeepers of Beard’s oil study (see Plate 6) extend the transgressive liminality of the animals in his paintings. Grotesque combinations of the human and the animal, Beard’s beasts are abominations that Cook would expel from the gallery. This expulsion is self-inflicted in Beard’s underground complex, which would have pulled the visitor into a dark zone that has all the pressure and heaviness Carroll associates with horror: note how the arch of the tunnel presses down and closes in on the figures packed inside the semicircular space Beard draws within the rectangular frame of the canvas.114 The woman of his oil study alone registers the disorientation of his space (see Plate 6). If in his other designs Beard imagines a more emotionally integrated community of men and women, he sets off this figure, who pauses, perhaps indecisively, at the edge of the tunnel, her body turned one way, her head, another. Dressed in a costume reminiscent of the eighteenth-century fashion in vogue 96  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Fig. 37 Cover, Crockett Almanac, vol. 2, no. 3, 1841. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

during the late 1860s and early 1870s, she may be Beard’s emblem of Culture, which Alan Trachtenberg argues was feminized in these years as “the repository of elevating thought and cleansing emotions.”115 It is fitting, then, that this woman should appear uneasy in the space of Beard’s complex, which frustrates the uplift the Met’s organizers hoped would result from visitors’ experience of the museum. Beard incorporates class (if not racial) variety in the two men to the woman’s right, one smartly dressed, with top hat and cane, and the other older, more bedraggled, in ill-fitting clothing. The suggestion of variety is surely meant to signal the range of people welcome in this place. But the implicit resistance to separating the upper and lower classes, the decorous and the indecent, undermines the museum movement’s delineation of social levels in its rhetoric about raising up the masses. Indeed, Beard’s project draws attention to the period’s relegation of undesirable things to low spaces. The park’s architects, for example, channeled traffic across the park to roads sunk eight feet below the surface. “Teams are driven across the Park, funerals, with their long line of carriages, thousands of cattle for the market, and teams that no man can count,” Matthew Hale Smith wrote in Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1869). “Yet all this is hidden from the eye of the visitors.”116 Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  97

Fig. 38 Frontispiece, Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr and Com­pany, 1869). Courtesy of The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign Library.

Before they could construct their park, Olmsted and Vaux similarly displaced sixteen hundred New Yorkers, mostly German and Irish immigrants and African Americans, living in makeshift housing in this part of Manhattan. Although the historians Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar have productively complicated our view of these communities, mid-nineteenth-century writers repeatedly framed them as the “shadow” to the “sunlight” that would emerge once the park was completed, drawing “luxury and elegance” to the area.117 Smith, in his study of the city, makes clear the class implications of hiding noise and poverty, writing that tourists had to descend to explore “life among the lowly” in cellars occupied by men, women, and children “huddled together in one disgusting mass,” where “the decencies of life are abandoned.”118 The frontispiece of his book (like its title) establishes the dichotomy of the shadow world—a ramshackle brewery at Five Points in lower Manhattan, with its dreary surroundings and ragged ­population—and the pristine, sunny world above it, where mansions and well-dressed pedestrians suggest order and care (Fig. 38). Here, to be beneath 98  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

the clean, spruce world is to be morally disreputable, indecent, and pitiable, to exist as the dark side of the institutional organization above, to distort its order. Ralph Waldo Emerson, even as he defended comic amusement in the 1840s, situated it in this spatially subservient position: “We must . . . explore the whole of nature, the farce and buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and philosophers upstairs in the hall.”119 Beard taps into this period rhetoric but complicates it by rejecting the schematic separation of low from high. Instead of placing his central gallery underground, Beard in fact concocts a space that, had it been built, would have been visible as a giant mound in the park. (See Figure 33, where the arch at left appears to lead up steps to the museum but the arch at right takes visitors directly out into the park at ground level.)120 Beard’s conception weirdly collapses underground and ground levels, for he locates his project in an awkward intermediary zone between high and low. Again, this conceit surely owes something to Alice’s Adventures; the world down the rabbit hole is a topsy-turvy place where the rules of Alice’s aboveground experience of time and space, grammar, and the behavior of plants and animals have no relevance. Spatial nonsense dismantles the rigid organizational frameworks that art critics like Cook and social theorists like Smith devised to reinforce a conceptual and physical distance from undesirable social elements. Although Beard uses their rhetoric of the literally low and seems, like them, to consider the low a place for the maligned and marginalized, he invests it with critical significance.

Foundational Inferiority In his designs, Beard attacks the monster museum and the financial and critical apparatus sustaining it, though he himself wanted nothing more than to rise in the New York art world, to be taken seriously by the artists, critics, and patrons whose definition of “high” art excluded his low idiom. He imagines his work as part of elevated culture, even as he drags that culture down. Burlesque is Beard’s version of gravitas, allowing him, like Twain in The Innocents Abroad, to move between “comic irreverence and conventional piety.” Although the book asserts the superiority of American democratic society, it often appears to accept the cultural superiority of the Old World.121 A similar anxiety about inferiority also informs Beard’s project, which defers to old-world models while undermining them. Burlesque can’t help existing in this ambivalent zone. Like caricature, it depends on what it distorts. And because it could not exist without the precedent it undercuts, burlesque may always be tainted by some degree of resentment. Beard, bidding for immortality, appeals to the taste for the grandiose and Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  99

historical in his work, attempting to move it out of the low, dark space to which Cook had consigned it. The contemporary earthwork he devised, had it been built, would have outdone the so-called masterpieces of the past, pulling artistic work into another register. The transitional spaces that open to right and left from his central gallery would have let visitors bypass the museum entirely (see Fig. 33). They could have used the main entrance, guarded by Ignorance and Superstition, and then have ended their visit with Beard’s colossal animals rather than ascend either the steps behind the male genius, to pay homage to the museum’s benefactors, or the stairs beyond the exit at left, to enter the museum proper. The artist thus proposes his own art to visitors as an alternative to climbing; his art, we could say, allows them to resist elevation and enlightenment in the monster museum. Beard monumentalizes his subversive humor as a rival form of monstrosity, in a gesture that has something carnivalesque about it. Although he magnifies his own lowness, as if to assert his art’s significance—following carnival’s model of hyperbolically enacted social reversals—he departs from that model by simultaneously suppressing it,122 thereby acknowledging not only his art’s gargantuan rebelliousness but also its obsolescence. By the 1870s Beard would lose touch with prevailing trends. As art practice em­phasized the manner of painting rather than subject matter or narrative, his work began to look “old school,” as one critic put it.123 Beard pitted himself against the new school at the annual dinner of the National Academy of Design in May 1894, critiquing the taste for “Frenchy” pictures and his colleagues’ willingness to profit from it. Ambition got the better of too many, he said, whose “vanity / Is so inflatable / A little gross attention / Will fill them overfull.”124 They were mere imitators of another culture’s way of painting, “Induced by flattery to take / The taffy-coated pill / That renders them subservient / Unto their captor’s will”—the “captor” in this case being artistic precedent and the critical machine encouraging a taste for it. “Stand for what you really are,” he declares, “As firm as granite rock / Descending to no clap-trap / Nor watering your stock.” Here, Beard seems to equate claptrap—trash or nonsense—with foreign precedents one emulated but did not fully understand. “No Frenchman would be likely / To paint it in that way,” he argues, pointing out the distance between a French picture and its imitation by an American artist.125 Beard’s word “clap-trap,” as something one descends into, seems appropriate to his underground project, where he imitates foreign precedent badly, absurdly, in the service of burlesque. This burlesque complicates the popular period view that the meaning of his art was always clear. “Cruikshank himself . . . is not more easily understood,” George William Sheldon said of Beard, linking him to the early nineteenthcentury English graphic satirist.126 This comparison, meant as congratulatory, 100  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Fig. 39 L. Y. Hopkins, “Etchings—Scenes from Shakespeare,” back page, Scribner’s Monthly 2 (September 1871). Courtesy of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

says, in effect, what another critic in 1881 would assert, that “Beard’s paintings were better suited to the last page of Harper’s Weekly than to the walls of the [National] Academy [of Design]”: he was “more of a humorist than an artist.”127 His underground project actually entered the orbit of the comic back pages in the issue of Scribner’s that followed the one in which his designs were published. That last page depicts a scenario related to Beard’s oil study, though here the bear, rising up on hind legs, triumphs over man by eating him (Fig. 39). Turning the journal sideways to read this narrative evokes the changed frame of mind generated by the funny page.128 Beard’s tunnel project would have required a related shift in position. By subverting the pretense to high culture, keeping the unruly energies of his art beneath the surface, Beard demonstrates how cultural uplift depended on suppressing critique. And by burying his “unclean” and “deliberately low” comic aesthetic, Beard sets his own limit. If his art was associated with moral depravity, if Cook argued for its expulsion from the art gallery, Beard proposed that the work go underground, where in a sense it belonged.129 David Gilmour Blythe provides a slightly different model of self-marginalization. If William Sidney Mount had been the antebellum comic painter of “finetempered sweetness,” Blythe was the period’s “underground man.” Sarah Burns Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  101

describes him as an artist working at the margins of the art world in Pittsburgh and painting subjects more usually found in satirical cartoons. In Blythe, alcoholics thumb their noses at temperance literature, and misshapen figures huddle against the ground or hide out in dark underground chambers. These are subversive zones, which ironize the quaint characters and anecdotal interest of genre painting like Mount’s. In The Hideout, from 1860–63, for example, a man losing his footing on a ladder in the background distracts the standing figure pouring milk into a pitcher, who, missing his mark, pours the milk onto the table and the floor, where a thirsty cat laps it up (Fig. 40). This is just one messy detail in a chaotic composition, in which space seems skewed; the barred and oddly angled door at left gives the place a funhouse feel. Then there is the figure shaving, whose flesh obeys the tug of his finger a little too readily. Blythe’s world, a dark and distorted space filled with misshapen figures, is, as Burns writes, a nonconformist alternative to the brighter visions the New York art world embraced at midcentury.130 Beard’s subversive idiom was also most at home underground, a space that, somewhat paradoxically, liberated his deepest-held fantasies of grandeur and endurance. The philanthropic elite had the same fantasies, and Beard’s art menaced them, Burns writes, “partly because of its humor and no doubt because it mocked the wealthy and the powerful.”131 In his project, Beard mocks them by collapsing their goals into his, making the high, uncomfortably, one with the low. Thus, if Beard figuratively falls in acknowledging his own inferiority, the art establishment falls harder. The obscenely overblown monument to high art collapses from the pull of subversive critique. In the terminology of the literary critic Harold Bloom, kenosis—taking down the master in an apparent “act of self-abnegation”—undermines the power and influence of the paternal voice, here, that of the institution setting trends and establishing canons of taste. The minor figure “[empties] the precursor of his divinity, while appearing to empty himself of his own.”132 Beard’s low art, though set deep in the earth, is also foundational, the premise on which the aboveground institution is built. The artist thus revises the critical position of his work by presenting the institution’s excesses as one with his own. The vulgarity of Beard’s work is indistinguishable from the vulgarity of the museum movement. They are reciprocally dependent, and if Beard resigns him­ self to the loser’s share in that arrangement, he also jostles the high who sit in selfregarding superiority. Beard showed the viewers who studied his plans in that Scribner’s essay of 1871 an elephantine vision of future disruption. Just when elites were attempting to secure public support and struggling to raise the enormous sums needed to realize their goals—some $250,000133—Beard presented to a mass audience a grandilo102  |  Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Fig. 40 David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout, 1860–63, oil on canvas, 22 × 26 in. © Christie’s Images New York.

quent and grotesque vision of progress gone awry, boring into the dirt and moving backward into the dark ages, exceeding the space of the museum proper and spil­ ling over into the park. His proposal questions aesthetic and institutional progress and thus disrupts—if only briefly, if only in a mock and pointless protest—the relentless expansion of the monster museum, whose backers largely expected public support. Although the Metropolitan modeled itself after the South Kensington Museum in London, which brought applied arts into relation with painting and sculpture in an effort to reach out to the nation’s laborers and promote the arts of industry, many commentators noted how the Metropolitan aligned with the interests of elites who wanted a hushed environment for contemplating high art.134 In the 1880s the museum discontinued the classes for artisans that had been so important to its educational mission. That it also outlawed sketching from its collection seemed to Clarence Cook an acknowledgment that educating Amer­ica’s artists was never really a goal of the institution. “What a ridiculous comment it is on our Museum as an educational influence,” he wrote, “to say that all sketching and copying are absolutely forbidden!”135 Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  103

Fig. 41 Samuel D. Ehrhart, “The Metropolitan Museum,” cover of Puck (January 2, 1889). The Newberry Library, Chicago.

The museum also placed limits on the kinds of visitors who could pass through its doors. Catering to the views of the conservative Presbyterians on the board, the Met remained, until 1891, closed on Sundays—which was seen as a way of excluding the laboring classes.136 In 1889 Samuel D. Ehrhart’s cover of the comic journal Puck depicted the museum as a fortress protected from the crowd gathered at its doors—including a sobbing little boy—by a line of policemen (Fig. 41). “And this is how the workingman enjoys the Museum on his only day of liberty,” reads the caption beneath the image, a counterpoint to a statement the museum’s president made welcoming “the humblest artisan” along with “the most refined lover of the fine arts.” The museum did not truly welcome the workingman, the image suggests; despite its claims to the contrary, it endeavored to restrict the movement of certain citizens—like Central Park, which warned people to “keep off the grass,” a warning repeated at lower right on the Puck cover, solidifying the connection.137 The museum’s refusal to allow a plumber in overalls to enter was en­ capsulated in a newspaper headline: Sober Workman Has to Leave Art Galleries Art for the Well Dressed Sensitive and Refined Plumber Affronted.138

The museum’s controversial director in these years, Luigi P. di Cesnola, explained, “We do not want, nor will we permit a person who has been digging in a filthy sewer or working among grease and oil to come in here, and, by offensive odors emitted from the dirt on their apparel, make the surroundings uncomfortable for others.” When Mark Twain was asked to leave his cane in the cloakroom, he mocked the restriction—like the writer of the newspaper headline quoted above— by exaggerating the posture of uncouth ruffian: “Leave my cane! Leave my cane! Then how do you expect me to poke holes through the oil paintings?”139 In 1880, some months before the museum opened in the magnificent new building at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Second Street, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, the New York Tribune declared that “from the very beginning [the Met] has been an exclusive social toy, not a great instrument of education.”140 Its supporters reinforced that view by describing the museum as a shrine for education and uplift, far removed from the “spirit of a Bowery dime muse­u m.”141 Each architectural addition to the building echoed that rhetoric of separation, as Vaux and Mould’s redbrick building, designed to blend into the surrounding landscape, was masked by Beaux-Arts classicism. In 1895 Richard Morris Hunt won the commission for the museum’s Fifth Avenue wing, which reoriented the entrance away from the park. McKim, Mead and White would add to the imperial Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum  |  105

Fig. 42 (above) Aerial view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the southeast, ca. 1920, after construction of five wings and the library annex by McKim, Mead and White. Fig. 43 (left) William Holbrook Beard, The Fal­ len Landmark, 1872, oil on canvas, 471 ⁄4 × 361 ⁄ 8 in. © Christie’s Images New York.

grandeur of Hunt’s construction (Fig. 42).142 These expansions, and the many to follow, pulled the museum further from its humble origins and into the orbit of imperial nobility. Beard lampoons the rhetoric of separation in his prescient design, which brings the temple to earth, in a symbolic victory that presages its consignment of his work to the shadows.

Coda In 1872 Beard painted what might be seen as a postscript to his tunnel project, The Fallen Landmark, an unusual and understudied work that seems to reflect on his own implausible proposal (Fig. 43). In the painting an old traveler gazes on an enormous tree whose trunk has split. Parts of its interior continue to shoot up from the split, while most of the tree bends downward, obeying the same law of gravity that has felled the branches that twist around the figure’s feet. The tree, split and shattered, makes a more forceful impression splayed out on the ground than it would stretching up into the sky. If this work somehow speaks to Beard’s unrealized project, perhaps it mourns a lost opportunity for immortality while insisting that art is more interesting at ground level, when it gives up its pretensions to height and sinks down to earth.

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4 Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James

Like Mark Twain, who made a joke of the Old World in The Innocents Abroad (1869), the novelist Henry James saw comic potential in the American encounter with Europe. In The American (1877), James’s protagonist, Christopher Newman, is traveling through Europe when he meets another American, the young minister Benjamin Babcock. For a time, they take in the sights together, until Mr. Babcock decides, in Venice, that his traveling companion is a bad influence. “You are too passionate, too extravagant,” he exclaims before they part ways. The letter Newman receives from Babcock a few days later explains: “Art and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in our travels in Europe we should especially remember the immense seriousness of Art.” Babcock closes the letter with an admonition, repeating himself to get through to his impetuous friend (and demonstrating the dull monotony of his own thinking): “I hope you will continue to enjoy your travels; only do remember that Life and Art are extremely serious.” Newman responds to this letter not with a written reply but with “a grotesque little statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century,” depicting “a gaunt, asceticlooking monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and pulling a portentously long face.” The little figurine, however, is less austere than it first appears. “It was a wonderfully delicate piece of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you espied a fat capon hung round the monk’s waist.” The narrator facetiously considers this detail and Newman’s desire to give the figure to Babcock: “In Newman’s intention what did the figure symbolize? Did it mean that he was going to try to be as ‘high-toned’ as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he should succeed no better than the friar, on a closer inspection, proved to have done? It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon Babcock’s own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical stroke. He made his late companion, at any rate, a very valuable little present.”1 108  | 

This episode puts sculpture at the center of a contest between two ways of seeing the world: that of the cosmopolitan bon vivant and that of the morally upright ascetic. Sculpture is the vehicle for a humorous critique of both positions, more obviously that of the sermonizer but also that of the fun-loving protagonist, incapable of a “cynical stroke.” As a final wordless but nonetheless concrete response to Babcock’s letter, the statuette perfectly expresses the ambivalence that marked the men’s uneasy friendship—and probably constituted its appeal to James as an emblem of his own attraction to, and simultaneous disavowal of, the competing points of view he explored in his comedy of manners. This chapter proposes Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (1883–86) as a parallel—but monumental and public—expression of the ambivalence produced when cosmopolitan élan meets ascetic sobriety (Plate 8). Saint-Gaudens knew James’s writing well, and although he seems to have found James’s style opaque—he once told his son Homer that at times when reading James, “You have to hold your hands and your feet, stand upside down, take a bath, and everything, to understand it”—he was, in his way, a kindred spirit, examining from multiple angles the characters he memorialized in bronze as he formulated his take on them.2 That approach to character, mingling complex and sometimes competing attitudes toward the sculptural subject, is nowhere more evident than in The Puritan, where Saint-Gaudens’s wry sense of humor makes itself felt in ways that feel very close to those of James in The American and also in the novel he published the next year, The Europeans. The chapter draws Saint-Gaudens and James together not by any intentional relationship but, rather, by a subtler and more meaningful correlation, adding in this way to the already substantial and nuanced interpretation The Puritan has attracted, especially in the twenty-first century. The art historian Julia Rosenbaum, for example, has located The Puritan and its variants—the Philadelphia version unveiled in 1905 (known as The Pilgrim) and the reductions owned by such notable Americans as Theodore Roosevelt—in the context of the rise of New England societies established to assert Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority during the late nineteenth century.3 In her article on the sculpture, Erika Doss builds on Rosenbaum’s argument that the Philadelphia version, in particular, may subtly mock the social claims of those societies.4 She explores the colonial encounter of Native Americans and Puritans, the complex inheritance of their violent entanglement in the late nineteenth century, and the politics of The Puritan’s original placement in a public park in Springfield, Massachusetts, in a largely workingclass immigrant neighborhood. The Chapin family, which commissioned the monument to honor their Puritan ancestor, Deacon Samuel Chapin, hoped to make that neighborhood a thriving center of city activity.5 The family’s continued Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  109

commitment to honoring that legacy is clear from the family foundation’s sponsorship of In Homage to Worthy Ancestors: The Puritan, The Pilgrim, published in collaboration with the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.6 The argument of this chapter builds on all of this work, but suggests that SaintGaudens used The Puritan as an opportunity to investigate the social and aesthetic meanings of provincialism in an art world becoming more and more cosmopolitan, an interest he shared with James and with many others in his own circle.7 The sculptor and his collaborator, the architect Stanford White, gave a sober graveyard feel to this monumental public sculpture and, in so doing, met their patrons’ demands for, to borrow James’s phrase, an “intensely serious” work of art.8 But the tone of intense seriousness takes an unexpected turn in The Puritan as the sculptor and architect produce an in-joke that stands at an ironic remove from the demands of civic statuary. This assertion may seem counterintuitive to readers who know that public sculpture commemorating great individuals is serious business, requiring the endorsement of committees and vast sums of money. Beyond those substantial pressures is the expectation that the monument maintain its meaning and value for future generations. Saint-Gaudens understood all of this, and he mastered the language of gravitas required of his very public medium.9 But he also had a recalcitrant side that bucked convention, inspired his revolutionary innovations in sculpture, and led him to live a life devoted to pleasure in its many forms. Humor was an important part of that life, as is evident from the letters he exchanged with colleagues and the anecdotes told by friends like the art critic Royal Cortissoz, who praised the sculptor’s comic timing and deftness with caricature— his ability to “make the gravest visage comic” with just a “few strokes of the pen.”10 For his close friends Saint-Gaudens made caricatural portraits in bronze. Although many writers from his time to our own have kept the artist’s private and public lives separate, it is worth considering how his playful sensibility may have registered in his public works. Satire is one way it registered—not a caustic or one-sided satire like Thomas Nast’s in his Harper’s Weekly cartoons of the 1870s, but one that acknowledges the complexity of the character represented and evidences a bemused understanding of, and even affection for, that character. Such a portrayal would preserve the dignity of the figure represented while maintaining its own dignity. We are far removed from the outlandishness of William Holbrook Beard’s burlesque, which I discussed in Chapter 3. Saint-Gaudens lacked Beard’s motives for burlesque: he did not occupy a low position, and he had no scores to settle. Moreover, he had nothing, truly, against the historical figure he memorialized, though his aesthetic beliefs and social attitudes did put him at odds with the ideals Deacon Chapin 110  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

represented. That is how The Puritan, as a quietly dignified satirical statement in bronze, came to be—by a weighing of oppositions, a consideration of alternative perspectives. In this monument and its surrounding environment, Saint-Gaudens and White set up a contest between American provincialism and cosmopolitan worldliness, intolerance and tolerance, asceticism and the unregulated flights of creative experience. In so doing, they not only demonstrate how satire could operate in a civic environment but also make a case—a rather Jamesian one—for tolerance as an artistic point of view.

The Puritan Imaginary in the Gilded Age Chester W. Chapin, who commissioned the monument, was a wealthy transportation magnate and civic booster of Springfield who could trace his ancestry to the city’s first Puritan settlers.11 During the Civil War, Chapin helped to organize a family reunion affirming the significance of Deacon Samuel Chapin (1598–1675), who had settled in Springfield in 1642, and the achievements of his many descendants.12 Saint-Gaudens and his wife, Augusta, had gotten to know Emelia Ward Chapin, the wife of Chester W. Chapin’s son—Chester W. Chapin Jr.—in Paris during the late 1870s. The sculptor made a bas-relief portrait of Emelia Chapin and was commissioned in 1881—after the two couples had returned to the United States to live in New York City—to make a portrait bust of her father-in-law.13 In 1883, the senior Chapin asked Saint-Gaudens to create a monumental sculpture of the family’s Puritan ancestor for a site in Stearns Square, in downtown Springfield. This monument to one of the city’s founders would help to transform this area while guaranteeing both the Chapin family’s standing and its con­tinued investment in Springfield. The connection between Chapins past and present registered in Saint-Gaudens’s use of the facial features of the senior Chapin for his Puritan.14 Saint-Gaudens asked White to design the pedestal, a Red Beach granite circular base with naturalistic decorative bands recalling the patterns the architect used in the frames he began making during this period.15 White would also orchestrate the landscaped sculptural environment consisting of The Puritan, a fountain opposite it, a bench between those two elements, a hedge behind the figure, and rows of birch trees along either side of the park.16 The monument was supposed to glorify a specific individual—Deacon Chapin— but it exceeded that specification, Saint-Gaudens explained, to embody the Puritan spirit. What did that spirit represent for him and his circle? In 1882 the historian John Fiske described the Puritans as “intensely conservative,” “profoundly ethical,” and animated by the desire “to drive out sin from the community”—qualities that Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  111

explain their reputation for “exclusiveness” and “intolerance.”17 Saint-Gaudens’s closed-off, forthright figure signals those characteristics, which, Erika Doss argues, owe much to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction, in his Scarlet Letter (1850), of his own ancestor—a “sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace.”18 Saint-Gaudens’s Puritan, his walking stick planted confidently as he takes a step, dominates the circular base that supports him and cuts a figure as imposing as the one Hawthorne described. The cloak looks heavy—like “a coat of mail,” Cor­ tissoz said —and the broad-brimmed hat, pressed down tight on the figure’s head, echoes the downward pull of the cloak.19 Its folds wrap around the deacon’s walking stick and shelter the Bible he carries in his left hand, conveying a sense of self-containment. It closes off the figure with his book, separating him from everything behind him as he pushes past a pine branch, as one writer suggested, on his way to worship.20 The monument, by seeming to wall off the Puritan, glorifies his heroic individualism but also overemphasizes his exclusionary self-righteousness. The portrayal taps into late nineteenth-century American ambivalence about the Puritans and their legacy. The members of the many New England societies founded in the 1880s and 1890s glorified their Puritan ancestors in the face of mounting challenges to Anglo-Saxon Protestant predominance in the United States. Each new Puritan monument erected and each new society founded provided a new opportunity to dispute Anglo-Saxon claims to cultural authority.21 Speakers at the unveiling of John Quincy Adams Ward’s Pilgrim in New York’s Central Park in 1885, for example, tried hard to hear “those bronze lips speak” of “heroic endurance, of obedience to the voice of duty, of loyalty to justice, truth, and right.” But they couldn’t help also hearing “acrid defiance and sanctimonious sectarianism,” the voice of “a band of ignorant and half-crazy zealots.”22 The speakers at the unveiling of Saint-Gaudens’s monument in Springfield insisted that the “noblest and best features of [the American] nation were derived from its Puritan forefathers,” and suggested that the sculpture aptly portrayed this nobility in the figure’s “firm” step, which would “not easily be turned out of the way of truth and righteousness.” But where the Chapin family saw a righteous man with a “glowing face [that] tells us how he loves the Lord’s day,” others, such as the artist and critic Kenyon Cox, a friend of Saint-Gaudens’s who praised his portrayal as “the finest embodiment of Puritanism in our art,” described the figure as militant and unforgiving, “clasping his Bible as Moses clasped the tables of the law, and holding his peaceful walking-stick with as firm a grip as the handle of a sword.”23

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A newspaper cartoon of 1892 spoofed this sour and inflexible morality in commenting on the debate about closing the World’s Columbian Exposition on Sundays. Wrapping his heavy cloak around the fair, the gargantuan Puritan looks down at the immoral amusements to which the Sunday closure has ironically given rise, his exclusionary posture doing more harm than good.24 Mark Twain gave the Puritans a similar cast when he was asked to speak at the first annual dinner of the New England Society of Philadelphia, in 1881. Calling them repeatedly “a hard lot,” Twain catalogues the Puritans’ long list of offenses: their exclusivity, savagery, and penchant for persecuting “everybody else’s ancestors,” including his own, “an early Indian,” whom the Puritans “skinned . . . alive.” Twain lets his charges hang in the air for only a moment before he overstates his views and thus undercuts his criticism. So ridiculous are his accusations that he reaffirms the Puritans’ moral superiority by mocking the restrictive moral code of the New England societies, which are, he declares facetiously, becoming “hotbeds of vice, of moral decay.” As proof, Twain lists the refreshments offered at the dinner: “I see water, I see milk, I see the wild and deadly lemonade,” he exclaims, burlesquing fire-and-brimstone outrage and exaggerating puritanical conceptions of vice. To avoid the downward spiral to dissipation and ruin, the members of these New England societies should “disband,” Twain advises, stop their bragging, and “learn to behave!”25 Twain, in this ironic diatribe, exploits the hilarity of humorless self-righteousness, which deserved ridicule, according to many period critics. If the “pedant tries to maintain his superiority . . . by an attitude of excessive solemnity,” the “obvious retort is to laugh at him.”26 Twain laughs at the heirs of the Puritans and their sense of entitlement even as some were beginning to see Twain himself as a pedant for his vehement defense of his social principles and artistic rights (over copyright, for example).27 Saint-Gaudens and Twain were friends throughout their lives, and the sculptor, too, could be forthright about his political and social views, though generally only in private conversation.28 In a letter he once warned his son Homer about the shortsightedness of patriotism, which he thought fostered a narrow-minded and false sense of superiority. “Patriotism, to my thinking, is habit; it’s the habit of one’s country,” he wrote. “Of course it’s all right as it’s our country, the country we have the habit of; and that’s vanity. Patriotism is vanity.” He went on to suggest that if Homer wanted to write a play (which he had proposed to do) dealing with such “fundamental emotions of mankind,” he might do so “with satire.”29 These remarks suggest why Saint-Gaudens might have been unsympathetic to the exclusivity of the New England societies and their claims of cultural supremacy and why he might have been moved to satirize them. A critic writing

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about The Pilgrim (the version of the Chapin sculpture commissioned in 1903 by the New England Society of Pennsylvania) posited that Saint-Gaudens “accentuate[d]” puritanical “rigidity” because of his own mixed European her­ itage.30 He was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a French father who brought him to the United States during the Irish potato famine before he was a year old. The family lived on New York’s Lower East Side, where his father worked as a shoemaker. Saint-Gaudens’s American narrative thus differed radically from that of members of the New England societies.31 Where they saw the romance and nobility of their hardy Puritan forefathers, Saint-Gaudens saw something far bleaker. He chafed at the Puritanism he sensed in the eighteenth-century house in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he began to summer in 1885, while working on The Puritan. The house looked “as if it had been abandoned for the murders and other crimes therein committed,” he wrote in his Reminiscences. It “stood out bleak, gaunt, austere, and forbidding, without a trace of charm. And the longer I stayed in it, the more its Puritanical austerity irritated me, until at last I begged my friend Mr. George Fletcher Babb, the architect: ‘For mercy’s sake, make this house smile, or I shall clear out and go elsewhere!’ ”32 Saint-Gaudens could not have expressed such irritation outright in his work, of course. And Homer Saint-Gaudens insisted that his father had rejected the recommendation of the architect Joseph Wells that he “almost caricature the typical Puritan” for the Chapin commission: “It was only my father’s tolerant discernment and standard of art that prevented him from accentuating, even more markedly than at present, Puritan sternness and single-mindedness.”33 This anecdote suggests the incompatibility of Saint-Gaudens’s aesthetic values with caricature and helps us to see why he may have been moved to explore a subtler satire that encompassed not just scorn but also affection, not just critique but also, inevitably, endorsement.34 As a maker of public monuments, Saint-Gaudens was, after all, in the business of promoting the very things about which he had misgivings— “vanity” and “patriotism,” for example. Ideals like those underlay the commission­ ing of the work by Chapin, who, as the wealthiest man in Springfield, was moved in part by a desire to rival the claims of other elite families in the city—the Morgans, for example, who erected a statue to their ancestor, Captain Miles Morgan, in 1882.35 At the unveiling of The Puritan, “several Chapin children removed the large United States flag that had concealed the statue,” a gesture that both cemented the deacon’s association with nation building and presented the commission as an act of patriotic—if also hubristic—philanthropy.36 One wonders what SaintGaudens must have thought of such fanfare; he had traveled to Springfield from New York to observe the unveiling from the edge of the crowd.37 114  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

The Hilarity of Puritanical Humorlessness A sculpture that would both incorporate satire and serve an ennobling purpose— at the unveiling exercises and for generations to come—had to present a critique that was dignified, almost courteous. It would have to employ a valorizing language even as it challenged the appropriateness of that language for the character represented. Saint-Gaudens apparently had a gift for making the grave and dignified appear ridiculous—he “had a kind of passion for caricature and mimicry,” Cortissoz declared—and was tickled when somber and serious occasions went awry, apparently recounting such instances like a skilled comedian. He thought hilarious, for example, the failure of the Eli Bates Fountain, which he had designed in the mid-1880s for Chicago’s Lincoln Park. When a group of dignitaries gathered to observe what they expected to be a glorious gushing display, the fountain produced the merest trickle of water. In telling the story to a group of friends, “Saint-Gaudens made the whole scene live before his auditors; they waited breathless and excited for the swelling climax, and they were dissolved in mirth, as he was, over the absurd collapse of the whole thing.”38 In these instances, gravity collapses because of a seemingly minor alteration or omission— the stroke of a pen or a lack of water pressure. In The Puritan, too, seemingly insignificant details subtly undermine the figure’s claim to respectability, as Saint-Gaudens weaves a critique into his valorizing portrait. The size of the deacon’s Bible is one clue that something is slightly off kilter. As Doss points out, the Bible is probably modeled on the King James Pulpit Folio, printed in England in 1611. Weighing nearly thirty pounds, the sixteen-by-eleveninch folio clutched in the deacon’s arm signals the man’s strength and authority.39 But this Bible is inappropriately sized for a figure marching through the wilderness; designed for the pulpit, it was not meant to be portable. Saint-Gaudens’s Bible seems to acknowledge how figures, objects, historical events, ideas, and ideals are magnified in public statuary. Even without telling the viewer explicitly that the book is a Bible—which he would do in the Philadelphia version, by turning the book around to reveal the words “Holy Bible” on its spine—he exaggerates its significance for this specific character. He does so by creating a formal rhyme in the heavy clasps that fasten the book and the Puritan’s tightshut mouth, thereby suggesting some kinship between them. He is of that Bible, as the sculptor suggests by picking up the ridges of its pages in the vertical lines of the deacon’s socks and the patterning of the underside of his cloak at the shoulders. Saint-Gaudens, with those rhyming details, evokes metaphorically the in­flexi­ bility of the Puritan’s principles. He also evokes the Puritan’s fixed sense of right Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  115

Fig. 44  Thomas R. Gould, John Bridge, 1882, bronze, over life-size, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reproduced in William F. Bridge, An Account of the Descendants of John Bridge, Cambridge, 1632 (Boston: J. S. Cushing and Company, 1884). Amer­ican Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

and wrong, good and evil, with a schematic language of opposing open and closed forms. Compare The Puritan to Thomas R. Gould’s monument to another deacon, John Bridge (1578–1665), unveiled in Cambridge in November 1882 (Fig. 44). A coat encases Bridge’s slim figure so tightly that its buttonhole closures pull in ridges across the figure’s torso.40 By contrast Saint-Gaudens’s figure is expansive, with his doublet opening in an inverted V at the bottom. This opening and the but­ton missed above it—sartorial details that bespeak haste, comfort, or fashion—lend the figure a common humanity. That wide opening around the belly, moreover, loosens some of the figure’s pinched resolve. The unfastened buttons leading up to the deacon’s closed countenance subvert its overstated restraint and invite viewers to see that restraint as somehow forced and unnatural. The cloak, which foregrounds Saint-Gaudens’s modeling, also challenges the figure’s rigidity, with its formal experimentation and decorative interest (Fig. 45).41 Its folds and twists make the back of the figure a vast experimental passage of alternating hollows and rounded forms that support the sculpture’s narrative of forward movement but are also interesting on their own account. The composition of this sculpture is bifurcated; narrative description defines the view from the front and something more elusive determines viewers’ experience of the back view. Indeed, the planes demarcating the Puritan’s clothing seem to have a mind of their own as they billow out and fold bulkily, working 116  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 45 Detail of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin). Photograph by the author.

against the figure’s forward stride. The patterning on the pedestal White designed functions similarly, with its decorative meandering of interlocking semicircular forms and curlicues that call attention, by contrast, to the figure’s ramrod straightness and undeviating forward movement. The environment Saint-Gaudens and White created for The Puritan further accented the figure’s unnatural demeanor by making his self-restraint and paternalistic authority seem overplayed. The dour deacon originally looked across the park in Springfield to a fountain they designed (Fig. 46). Two fish, surmounting a garlanded bronze globe propped up by smaller fish, sprayed water from their mouths into a shallow circular basin composed of pebbles bordered by larger stones.42 Four turtles—two at the sides of the globe and two farther out, at the pool’s edge—expelled reciprocal jets of water. The fountain’s exuberant release of water contrasted with the tight-lipped solemnity of The Puritan. While he clamped down, open-mouthed animals clattered exuberantly, meeting the deacon’s decorum with churning expressivity. Fountains have historically been sites of refreshment, associated with rejuvenation and magical transformation. In an urban space a fountain is an oasis, a meeting place that calls people to it with the sound and activity of whimsically fluctuating water.43 White’s fountain surely was such a place, framed by a park Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  117

Fig. 46 Stanford White, fountain, Stearns Square, Springfield, Massachusetts, ca. 1899. Spring­ field Photograph Collection, Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History— SPC-04–0045–03.

that was itself meant for respite and leisure activity in downtown Springfield. The art historian Joyce Schiller argues that the fountain helped to “[foster] contemplation because it masked the local noise of an expanding city.” It thus reinforced the message of the sculpture and the invitation to honor the worthy ancestor.44 But in this environment The Puritan is cast as the disapproving parent, embodying the popular view that the Puritans “positively cultivated everything harsh and unpleasant, frowning down all things pleasant and attractive.” 45 The incongruity of the face-off inspired commentary that sucked the air out of the Pur­ itan figure’s self-righteousness: he was “an old gander come forth from the fountain to chase away an urchin,” as one Springfield resident put it, or he was a delicate specimen of masculinity, distanced from the fountain so that he would not be “endangered by damp.”46 These accounts suggest that period viewers perceived the contrast between The Puritan and the fountain that made the figure even more sanctimonious and forbidding. It is perhaps no surprise that The Puritan’s site was vandalized repeatedly before the Chapin family had the sculpture moved, at the turn of the century, to its current location on a hill known as Merrick Park, a more “dignified” setting adjacent to a complex of civic institutions: the Springfield City Library, the new art museum, and Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral.47 (The bench and parts of the fountain are still in Stearns Square, now rather dilapidated.) The working-class immigrant families in the community around Stearns Square may have resisted 118  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 47 Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his Cornish, New Hampshire, studio with the completed clay model of The Standing Lincoln, 1887. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire.

the looming presence of the sculpture and its environment, which hampered their use of open space and their movement in it. “Henceforth Stearns park exists solely as a stage and setting for the exhibition of this effigy,” wrote the Civil War veteran and Stearns Square resident Orrin Wilkins Cook. “It is difficult to do full justice to the vulgarity which has destroyed the delightful open lawn.” 48 The community whose park was co-opted by this “effigy” may have resisted, as Doss argues, the Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  119

attempt of elites to organize public behavior through such urban renewal projects.49 Perhaps this community saw The Puritan, and many another American monument, as an assertion of paternalistic entitlement. The aggression encoded in the figure’s authoritarian posture is clear when we compare it with the figure of the Standing Lincoln, on which Saint-Gaudens was working during the same period (Fig. 47). Whereas Lincoln stands with head bowed, his hand lightly holding the lapel of his coat, The Puritan bursts forth, laying claim to an authority that Lincoln, with his contemplative demeanor, does not take for granted. The greater humanity of the Lincoln makes the man more relevant to the human viewers who stand before him.50 The larger-thanlife Puritan, in contrast, appears to be of another world; Saint-Gaudens and White signal his irrelevance by distancing him from the kinetic activity of the fountain. With that fountain and the water that flowed through it, the artists draw the visitor away from the stolid authority figure to the opposite side of the park— what Saint-Gaudens called “the extreme other end,”51 where play and pleasure define an alternative environment. The arrangement in Stearns Square thus ennobled the deacon while also arguing for an alternative to his way of ex­peri­ encing the world.

“Pleasurable Sensations” and American Sculpture This sculptural environment might seem unremarkable if it did not contrast so sharply with those Saint-Gaudens and White typically developed, drawing visitors into the world of the figure memorialized by creating dynamic, unified fields of engagement. The Standing Lincoln monument is a case in point. A semicircular bench defines the area behind the president, who appears to have just risen from his chair to address a crowd. Viewers who walk behind him to take a seat change from listeners before the president to supporters who sit behind him.52 The artists first experimented with this technique in their design for the monument to the Civil War admiral David Farragut, which was unveiled in New York’s Madison Square Park in 1881 (Fig. 48).53 “Here . . . the visitor may sit, and, as the rushing river of life goes by, may turn and give a thought to the good man and brave soldier whose image stands above him,” Clarence Cook wrote in his review, entitled “Something New in Statues.” The base suggested both the waves of the ocean and the prow of a ship, with Farragut, modeled on Donatello’s Saint George (1415–17), poised upon it. The conceptual oscillation between the two engages viewers imaginatively in the scene and in the life of the figure aptly symbolized by the watery ripples that make the hard stone seem to liquefy before them. “The idea 120  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 48 Augustus Saint-Gaudens (designers of base: Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White), Farra­gut Monument, 1877–80, bronze, 8 ft. 3 in. high, Madison Square Park, New York City. Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

of flowing water—‘a wet sheet and a flowing sea’—is the foundation of the decoration,” Cook explained, “and all the forms of the stones of which the pedestal is composed are suggestive either of the lines of waves or of the rounding and smoothing action of the water.”54 “The whole monument,” Saint-Gaudens’s friend the poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder announced, “has, so to speak, a sea-swing!”55 The phenomenological vibration of the dynamic Farragut Monument marked a departure from the usual fare in American public sculpture. “This is a statue that will make the rest of the feeble brood forgotten,” Cook declared.56 The monument was as much a commentary on the shortcomings of American sculptural practice as a testament to Saint-Gaudens’s exposure to the civic statuary of Europe and his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which emphasized the cross-pollination of sculpture, painting, design, and architecture.57 Saint-Gaudens Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  121

joked to White about those who “write on Art in ‘Ameriky’ ”—the dialect spelling connoting backwoods provincialism and perhaps hinting at anxious selfmockery—telling him, as he worked on the Farragut in Rome during the late 1870s, that he was determined to “strike away from the stuff we have in America.”58 That “stuff”—what Cook called the “feeble brood”—included works that missed the mark in various ways. The art critic S. G. W. Benjamin, in his article of 1879 surveying the progress of sculpture in America, gives a sense of how sculptural practice and what critics thought it might achieve were changing in these years.59 Benjamin acknowledged the “commanding place, fairly won” of the neoclassical sculptor William Wetmore Story, who produced his best-known work—such as the imposing marble Cleopatra—during the late 1850s and 1860s (Fig. 49). But the critic qualified his praise by questioning whether there was “any exceptional originality and daring in any thing Story has done.” The work, which privil­eged smooth surfaces and idealized forms, “commands our respect,” he argued, “rather than our enthusiasm.” For Hawthorne, the Cleopatra was “likely to spring upon you like a tigress,” but Benjamin thought that one could gaze on most of Story’s works “unmoved.” 60 Benjamin was equally unmoved by the work of Hiram ­Powers—whose Greek Slave (1843) created a popular sensation in its day, in part because it both evoked and disavowed the erotic—associating it with a “dryness of style and a reticence of emotion.”61 Even though the Vermont-born sculptor spent much of his career in Italy, those qualities, for Benjamin, were regionally specific. They were “inherited from the undemonstrative people of New England, as if when the artist was executing them the stern genius of Puritanism, jealous of the voluptuous or the passionate in art, had stood Mentor-like at his side and said, ‘There, that will do; beware lest your love of beauty lead you to forget that you are an American citizen, to whom duty, principle, example, are the watch-words of life.’ ”62 Benjamin’s analysis is fascinating because it associates American identity with self-restraint. James had assessed Hawthorne in related terms, viewing Puritanism as a cold, narrow, and naive tradition and locating it everywhere in Hawthorne’s writing—in the “tone of the picture” Hawthorne sketched and “in a certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment” of his characters and his themes. When Hawthorne turned his gaze to art, James felt, he saw it unsympathetically. His “curious aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture” made him seem provincial, as did his discomfort when he traveled abroad. (Hawthorne “bitterly detest[ed] Rome.”) Those were the great weaknesses of Hawthorne, “the last of the old-fashioned Americans,” whom James saw as more rigidly bound to region and nation than the cosmopolitans of the late nineteenth century.63 According to these accounts, Powers, like Hawthorne, having ostensibly internalized the puritanical ancestor 122  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 49  William Wetmore Story, ­Cleopatra, 1858 (this carving, 1869), marble, 551 ⁄ 2 × 331 ⁄4 × 511 ⁄ 2 in. The Metro­ politan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Taylor Johnston, 1888 (88.5a-d). Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

figure, kept his national identity at the forefront of his imagination, so that a “love of beauty” could not undermine his American principles. For foreign critics especially, those principles had fundamentally handicapped America’s art. In Culture and Anarchy (1869), the English poet and social critic Matthew Arnold argued that Puritanism was the root of late nineteenth-century America’s cultural parochialism. The Puritan mindset would never achieve “the full perfection of our humanity” because it had a “narrow and inadequate” under­ standing of perfection.64 For Arnold puritanical “self-satisfaction” and the searching experiments of art were fundamentally divided. Art had not flourished—and would not flourish—in the United States. The American writer Van Wyck Brooks, in his first book, The Wine of the Puritans (1908), similarly characterized the lasting effects of America’s Puritan heritage, as did the art critic Sadakichi Hartmann soon after, in an article entitled “Puritanism, Its Grandeur and Shame.” Using Saint-Gaudens’s Puritan as an emblem of the type, Hartmann describes him “with staring eyes that are indifferent to visible things.” That lack of sympathy with beauty and “sensual life” curtailed the creative energies of “poetic souls,” particularly in New England.65 Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  123

James had felt the same way several decades earlier. In one of the more sympathetic passages of his biography of Hawthorne, he blames the region for the writer’s shortcomings. Was it any wonder that his writing was cold? For he was an artist besieged by and at war with his ancestors, who frowned on his creative endeavors: “The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell . . . these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightaway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them—to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony.”66 Like Arnold and Hartmann, James pits the fancies of the creative mind against the restrictions legislated by the Puritan tradition. He adds to these accounts the notion that an artist might critique those restrictions by making a character hostile to art and amusement fodder for both. In his comic novel The Europeans (1878), James demonstrates how this strategy might work by bringing the “aesthetic point of view” into the orbit of the puritanical Wentworth family of Boston in the 1840s. In James’s scheme, the Wentworths’ cosmopolitan relatives are the agents of this aesthetic fancy: the siblings Eugenia, a baroness, and Felix, an aspiring artist, who have come from Europe for a surprise visit. They are indeed true cosmopolitans—Felix claims to have lived in “every city in Europe”; he has “lived anywhere—everywhere.” 67 Felix’s rootlessness and flexibility unnerve his uncle, the “straight-backed” Mr. Wentworth, a cold man who has never traveled beyond his region, lacking the curiosity that might have inspired him to do so. Felix calls him a “tremendously high-toned old fellow,” who “looks as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing.”68 The joys of life have no place in Wentworth’s existence, and Felix’s irrepres­ sible gaiety provokes the suspicion of his uncle, who thinks to himself that there is “something almost impudent, almost vicious—or as if there ought to be—in a young man being at once so joyous and so positive.”69 But he is never able to locate any vice in Felix, who ends up showing Wentworth the virtues of joyousness, its pleasures, and even its social uses. For Felix proves an astute judge of character and thus a man with more “weight and volume and resonance,” the narrator confirms, than many “distinctly serious” young men.70 James undermines Wentworth’s authority by allowing Felix to beat him at his own game. He has a “confident, gaily trenchant way of judging human actions” that his uncle comes to envy.71 This is a great irony, for judging is supposed to be the forte of the puritanical Wentworth. And that is the writer’s point: Wentworth’s straight and sober path has not made him morally superior; it has simply made him provincial. By putting Wentworth into conversation with the multifaceted and worldly (if also seemingly frivolous) Felix, James accentuates his dimensional 124  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

limitations and makes an argument for the cosmopolitan point of view. The somewhat schematic opposition between these characters fits the comedy of manners genre and James’s “favorite comic techniques” of “balance, repetition, and symmetry.”72 The contrast James establishes in The Europeans to demonstrate the edifying potential of the cosmopolitan’s sense of pleasure resembles the structural contrast Saint-Gaudens and White construct between The Puritan and its environment. The fountain alters the monument in the same way that the Europeans alter their Bostonian cousins; they loosen them up by showing them the pleasures of a life free of inherited and artificial constraints. Saint-Gaudens, like James, associated creative freedom with the cosmopolitan outlook he developed while training and traveling abroad. In a letter to White from Rome in the late 1870s he wrote, “What a gorgeous place Italy is and how I hate to leave it. . . . It gives me a curious mixture of a wish to do something good and of the hopelessness of it, to see all these glories of the ‘Renaissance.’ ”73 (That “wish” would come true when he served as sculptural advisor at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which Saint-Gaudens thought was “the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century.”)74 White, for his part, was equally enraptured when he made his first trip to Europe about the same time. He wrote of bursting into tears before a Veronese, marveling at the Elgin Marbles, which made his “hair stand up and then lie down again,” and of being “set . . . wild” by the architecture of Bruges. Exclaiming “Paris, Paris, Paris, that is the attraction” in a letter to his mother, White declared, “Not in this world is it possible to find another place where your wants, intellectual and physical, are so catered to.”75 Saint-Gaudens was so taken with the atmosphere abroad that he took pains to re-create it when he returned home. “Because of my dislike of America and its conditions, the dislike common to young men of my age and frame of mind on their return to America,” he wrote many years later, “I cast about for something to bring back to my memory the paradise of my place in Rome. . . . I would turn on the water . . . let it run continuously with a gentle tinkle, and thus recall the sound of the fountain in the garden at Rome.”76 Although Saint-Gaudens’s account may be apocryphal, it confirms his association of sensuous delight with Europe and suggests how he tried to activate it when he returned to New York (even if he did so on a hilariously understated scale that only reinforced the disparity between the Italian and the American context). He derived an atmospheric pleasure from letting the water run in his studio, and he infused his work with similar effects, by drawing viewers into a phenomenological experience. Critics used this kind of language to situate Saint-Gaudens in the orbit of old-world Renaissance masters. He was the “legitimate successor” of the sculptors he admired, not because he imitated them, but because he worked “in Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  125

the spirit of the Renaissance,” extending its ethos of inventiveness and originality, as Kenyon Cox argued in 1887. For Cox, the Farragut Monument epitomized that ethos. It was “as living—as vital”—as that great work produced four hundred years earlier; there was no “cold conventionalism” to it.77 Cox’s characterization of Saint-Gaudens’s vital art dovetails with the English critic Walter Pater’s analysis of the art of the Renaissance, published in 1873 and, in subsequent editions, into the twentieth century.78 Pater’s text, which works against the moral criticism of the age (and thus contributes more to late nineteenth-century aestheticist discourse than to scholarship on Renaissance artists, as many scholars have noted), argues that works of art operate “as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations.”79 He appreciates a work of art for the same reason he appreciates “a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure.” The more one was open to those impressions, which Pater associated with the rich and fulfilling potential of human experience, the more one learned.80 Whereas Kant had devalued sensuous response in advocating an ostensibly higher form of reflective judgment, for Pater sensuous response was entwined with cognitive judgment and critical to the processing of artistic knowledge.81 The “duty, principle, [and] example” that, according to Benjamin, informed the dry reticence of Powers’s sculptural work is fundamentally out of sync with this art-for-art’s-sake sensibility.82 Although monumental civic statuary, in particular, owes its purpose to those puritanical terms—to the need a society feels to honor nobility and erect a monument that will set an example of duty and principle83—Saint-Gaudens strove to infuse his work with an enlarged Paterian conception of aesthetic vivacity, which American critics called for increasingly during the 1870s and 1880s. Indeed, Benjamin sees Saint-Gaudens as part of a “transition stage” from the line of American sculpture represented by Story and Powers to work that is more “imaginative and powerful.”84 Because of SaintGaudens’s contributions, the art of sculpture, Cox claimed in 1887, was “now alive again, full of fresh vigor and moving on to the conquest of new realms of beauty.”85 Perhaps the most vigorous, vital element of The Puritan is the cloak, which, viewed from the back, is alive with sinuous undulation (see Fig. 45). The sculptor and historian Lorado Taft admired “the flow and hang of surfaces, the variety of textures,” and “the looseness and freedom” of not only the cloak but every inch of Saint-Gaudens’s dour Puritan. We see that flow and hang in the figure’s billowing breeches, which arc at the hip and undulate at the knees and beneath the figure’s doublet. The breeches give the figure unexpected buoyancy. Perhaps these were the details Taft considered a “joy to the eye” (details that ironically contradicted the joylessness of the character who wore them.)86 In James, “stylistic 126  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

fanciness”—for example, in the embroidered and ornamental language of the opening paragraphs of his Europeans—“exists to amuse us, to give us an aesthetic pleasure,” as the literary scholar Richard Poirier has argued.87 Taft’s remarks suggest that we might read the formal interest of Saint-Gaudens’s work in related terms. For some period viewers the cloak seems to have been the primary challenge to the Puritan’s gravity, not for the formal interest I have pointed to but, stranger still, for its evocation of possible flight. One Springfield resident—Orrin Wilkins Cook, the man who called The Puritan an “old gander” in a newspaper piece about the sculpture (which he had to look at every day from his Stearns Avenue address)—riffled through bird imagery in his critique. The figure was a “puritan rooster which has mounted the big town-pump and flapping its wings is about to crow.” Another Springfield resident, one of the city’s druggists, saw the deacon as “a bat with wings outspread.”88 With these accounts in mind, it is easy to see how the Puritan can appear poised, almost, to fly from his perch, with the heel of his back foot upraised and his walking stick giving him purchase to launch himself. The cloak, as it falls around the man’s shoulders, almost mimics the low point of a bird’s wingspan in the midst of aerial locomotion. The man’s breeches balloon out as if to supply the hot air to lift him up. All these suggestive details complicate The Puritan’s gravity, particularly the cloak that inspired period viewers to see the figure as a monstrous bird. That cloak invests the sculpture with some measure of lightness even as it bears down on him, then. For this reason I wonder if we should not see the formal interest of the cloak as itself entwined with levity, so that both aesthetic flexibility and levity—in its multiple senses—collude to undermine this character’s weight and rigidity. Saint-Gaudens looked laughingly on that rigidity and, perhaps in these subtle details, found a way to liberate the figure from his unforgiving mold.

Private Passions and Indecent In-Jokes That is how levity operates in James’s Europeans. It is interwoven with creative freedom and flexibility, with the freshness and worldly vigor Felix represents for the Wentworths. He is like a jester, “addicted to taking the humorous view of things.” The narrator, while gently chiding Felix for his frivolity, nonetheless wants the reader to see “something substantial in his laughter.” For Felix’s laughter suggests not impudence or childishness but the ability to engage fully in, and express, sensations of pleasure. Thus Felix knows what his Bostonian relatives will never fully understand—perhaps not even Gertrude, who is so taken by him Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  127

that she decides to leave her family and the minister she was supposed to marry to wed Felix. She wants not only to see the world with him but also to live like him—to learn how to express her emotions freely, to “be natural.” She could have no better guide in these pursuits than Felix. He is, after all, an artist, who looks with bemused curiosity on everything he encounters. “This comical country, this delightful country!” he exclaims when he and his sister first arrive, before breaking “into the most animated laughter.” Although Felix demonstrates later that he understands how satire might be used as a form of critique, his laughter is kindhearted and appreciative, not mocking or scornful.89 Unlike the villainous cosmopolitan characters James would later develop, in novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Felix is genuine, a figure who stands for uncomplicated enjoyment.90 In his characterization of Felix, James endorses popular conceptions of what the literary scholar Gregg Camfield calls amiable humor, whose perception and expression many nineteenth-century Americans considered fundamental to a well-rounded individual.91 Emerson had argued, in an essay of the 1840s republished in 1886, that “the perception of the Comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves.”92 According to that logic—engrained in the American psyche even as critics worried about overindulgence in humor (and Emerson too mentions this)—Felix’s cheerful and easy laugh is a mark of his humanity, his naturalness. Homer Saint-Gaudens had evaluated his father along similar lines, saying of his autobiography that “his unfailing sense of humor and his dislike of morbid introspection left in his writing that air of health, wide sympathy, and belief in the world that was so characteristic of his life.”93 Social theorists like Catharine Beecher argued in favor of cheerfulness and against Calvinist self-abnegation because she had seen how hearty laughter and amusement could bond families and encourage a joyous piety.94 In The Europeans, Felix makes this point by convincing his uncle that he is both jovial and virtuous.95 His encompassing and “substantial” levity contests the Wentworths’ asceticism, which James suggests is both unnatural and unhealthy. Saint-Gaudens’s own eighteenth-century home in Cornish was the site of a similar contest as he made the puritanical house “smile” by adding elements inspired by old-world precedents: a “Pan pool” to the garden, a pergola to the barn, and a terrace, which he called his piazza, to the main house. The terrace was the setting for the masque performed in 1905 by the Cornish colony of artists, including Saint-Gaudens, who all played the parts of gods and goddesses, using the New England landscape as a portal into a classical world. Part of the fun was no doubt transforming the regional landscape, giving it, as Elizabeth Lee has observed, a “Mediterranean ‘feel.’ ”96 Saint-Gaudens’s friends thought the house 128  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 50 Frederick MacMonnies, Bacchante and Infant Faun, 1893–94 (this cast, 1894), bronze, 84 × 293 ⁄4 × 311 ⁄ 2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Charles F. McKim, 1897 (97.10), Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

with its new terrace looked like “some austere and recalcitrant New England old maid struggling in the arms of a Greek faun,” as the artist later quipped.97 A pagan, sensuous element overtakes old-fashioned rigidity in this anecdote, as it does in The Europeans, with Felix’s conversion of Gertrude. A similar contest seems to have been created unwittingly by the architect Charles McKim in his choice of sculpture for the courtyard of the Boston Public Library, completed in the mid-1890s by his firm, McKim, Mead and White: Frederick MacMonnies’s Bacchante and Infant Faun (Fig. 50). As Julia Rosenbaum has explained, conservative viewers (religious organizations and Boston’s Brahmin elite) objected not only to the figure’s nudity, but also to the grapes in her hand, which, together with her broad smile, seemed to promote drunkenness.98 MacMon­ nies’s glorification of pleasurable sensations seemed to grate on critics who believed in the sober purpose of sculpture and the serious civic function of the library. “The merits of the work might have been better appreciated,” one critic wryly Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  129

declared, if MacMonnies had “planted both feet firmly on the pedastal [sic], stroked off some of the rotundity of form so as to give a suggestion of consumption or piety, substituted a rattle for the grapes, taken the laugh out of the eyes and given them an upward or a pensive cast, and compressed the joyous mouth into sedate seriousness.”99 Saint-Gaudens wrote letters to the Boston Art Commission endorsing and even explaining the sculpture. (As Rosenbaum points out, he linked it to a “French tradition of light-hearted sculptural figures.”) For him, it was “the dernier mot of grace and life.”100 Sensuous frivolity would never register in the same way in Saint-Gaudens’s own work (except, perhaps, in the figures on which he collaborated with MacMonnies for the Eli Bates Fountain in Chicago).101 Frivolity emerges in Saint-Gaudens’s work not iconographically but atmospherically and stylistically, as it draws viewers into the experience of visual and physical pleasure. Saint-Gaudens would never diminish the dignity of his figures with a toothy grin like that of the Bacchante. Even in his personal correspondence and in works not made for public view, he preferred coded references to private intimacies and raunchy fun. The abbreviation “KMA”—for “Kiss My Ass”—and other ribaldry in the letters Saint-Gaudens and White exchanged leavened the seriousness of their business collaborations as they remind one another, perhaps, that the bond between them was a shared sensibility that exceeded the specifications of this or that commission, this or that patron. (Patrons could be, White said, “perfect blockhead[s] about art.”)102 Sometimes “Kiss My Ass” was translated into Italian, sometimes into French, giving this affectionately risqué directive a cosmopolitan flair.103 The abbreviation “KMA” appears on a medallion Saint-Gaudens created to com­ memorate an eleven-day trek he made through the South of France with White and McKim in the late 1870s (Fig. 51). The bronze disk depicts the trio, in caricature, with the symbols of their trade—an architect’s T square and a sculptor’s mallet. Between the caricatures (White, with his bushy hair and mustache, surmounts Saint-Gaudens’s sharp profile, at lower left, and McKim’s, at lower right) Saint-Gaudens represents the sculptural and architectural works they saw on their journey, and Latin inscriptions referring to memorable events, such as SaintGaudens’s “tickling episode” (“TICKLEVM/FVRIO”).104 Infusing the ancient medallion format and Latinate lettering with such colloquial humor, SaintGaudens draws together levity of sentiment and aesthetic gravitas, a commingling that is a hallmark of his sense of humor. The “KMA” just under the T square adds a roguish indecency, an in-joke, to the composition. And that in-joke opens for the sculptor and his friends “sources of pleasure,” as Freud might say, at least in part because it directs the elegant and enduring medium of bronze to the expression of inelegant and jocular colloquialisms.105 130  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Fig. 51 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1878, bronze, 6 in. diam. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1992 (1992.306), Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The little monk statuette in James’s American, the novel with which this chapter opened, emblematizes how aesthetic beauty and indecent jocularity could be joined in a work of sculpture. The exquisite figurine has that “fat capon” hanging from its waist, putting delicate carving in dialogue with gluttony and even lust to produce a subversive and vulgar joke. For the neutered rooster spied “through one of the rents of [the monk’s] gown” makes him symbolically a neutered male and pokes fun at church authorities, who ostensibly manage sexual desire by enforcing privation. No matter how severe the monk’s “portentously long face,” the coded suggestion of gluttony, peeking out from his clothes, makes it clear that desire is imperfectly managed. Ascetic restraint is but a posture, James suggests. And if it is, it gives new meaning to the theatricality of Saint-Gaudens’s Puritan, Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  131

who performs the role of self-righteous dignity in a costume consisting of layers of voluminous fabric. (That Saint-Gaudens modeled the figure’s hat on one used by the painter William Merritt Chase when he dressed up as a Puritan for a masked ball only reinforces that theatricality.)106 By concealing the body in this way, Saint-Gaudens suggests that this is a man more of the book—that cold, heavy historical authority—than of the flesh. Yet the line of unfastened buttons on the doublet complicates that reading by drawing the viewer’s attention to the body bursting forth, fighting against restrictive garments—the body that is located somewhere between states of dress and undress. The viewer’s attention is thus “recalled from the soul to the body,” to borrow a phrase used by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who, like Mikhail Bakhtin, located humor in bodily spectacle—those physical expulsions, such as sneezes and the activities of the “bodily lower stratum,” that Bakhtin analyzes in his treatment of Rabelais.107 Saint-Gaudens’s Puritan is not Rabelaisian, but the figure’s swelling physicality, almost bursting the seams of his garments, conjures the very self-indulgence he is supposed to renounce. He is a glutton outfitted in Puritan’s clothing, a man with a capon tied to his waist. The body provided the basis of both the aesthetic ideals of Saint-Gaudens’s circle and the ribald, subversive humor that united the group. White’s collection of nudes, commissioned from his artist friends, confirms how this worked, and, more specifically, how the delicately indecent in-joke operated in their circle. White wanted works “alluring enough to scare all the straight-laced people in New York,” he told one of the artists whose work he wanted for his collection, which he planned to give to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he explained, “to shock everybody for all time.”108 One of those works, Thomas Dewing’s pastel Reclining Nude, glimmers like a precious gem in the frame White designed for it (Plate 9), whose gold leaf picks up the shimmering gold flecks in the body, its sinuous lines redoubled in the frame’s lacy undulations, which have their own allure.109 Visual and tactile pleasure come together in a work that both advertises White’s devotion to orchestrating aesthetically rich sensations and his desire to undermine the tastes and moral biases of the average American who he hoped would encounter his collection at the Met (he died before he could make this gift). White’s biographer, Paul R. Baker, notes that the architect believed “in freedom, ‘in every person doing as they darn please.’ ”110 For White and his circle that meant, as Elizabeth Lee explains, “fraternal exchange beyond the limits of marriage and family”—late-night outings, or sprees, as they called them; lavish parties; and extramarital affairs.111 Facilitating those affairs was the apartment Saint-Gaudens and White rented in the Benedict Building at Washington Square, where they would entertain and hold concerts in the 1880s. In 1887 White started 132  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

the Sewer Club, which grew out of the evening meetings with friends and fellow artists, though its emphasis seems to have been unmistakably sexual. Members included Saint-Gaudens; his brother, Louis Saint-Gaudens; White; the architect Joseph Wells; and the artists Frank Lathrop and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who described the Morgue, the club that succeeded the Sewer Club, with mostly the same members, as a place for “scenes of mirth, and physiological interests and investigations.”112 With the Sewer Club in mind, the fountain imagery the artists evoked when expressing their appreciation of European art and culture—White’s bursting into tears before a Veronese and Saint-Gaudens’s re-creation of Roman waterworks in his New York studio, for example—takes on new meaning. Aesthetic pleasure is associated with watery release, with free-flowing emotions, with the plumbing that keeps the human body and the spaces it inhabits working as it pumps essential fluids, up through fountains’ spouts and down into the tunnels of the sewer. Before Marcel Duchamp collapsed fountain and sewer in his urinal turned on its back (Fountain of 1917), these artists performed that rhetorical condensation in their own playful and subversive ways. If the bodily pleasures induced by fountains like the one White designed for Stearns Square seem to invert those offered by the Sewer Club, perhaps the frivolity of the public fountain is not so far from that of the private men’s club, which offered its members a break from adult responsibilities, social expectations, and moral codes. It is worth thinking through this line of argument because these artists at times incorporated into their work private references to the double lives they led. Saint-Gaudens, for example, who had a longtime affair with Davida Clark—she had been his model since the early 1880s and became the mother of one of his sons, Louis, in 1889—used her facial features for his Diana, goddess of the chase (Fig. 52).113 This colossal gilded copper nude glittered in the sun and shone at night with incandescent lighting atop the tower of White’s Madison Square Garden, designed to house a range of amusements and entertainments, from the annual Horse Show to orchestral performances. One of White’s friends reportedly quipped, “Well, you’ve designed quite a pedestal for Saint-Gaudens this time.”114 There was some truth to this, for all eyes were drawn up, past the tower—inspired by the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain, with its mingling of twelfth-century Moorish design and Renaissance elements—to this elegant finial.115 It was a bolder intervention than the Farragut Monument that Saint-Gaudens and White had unveiled ten years earlier in the park below, and it more fully advertised their dedication to “producing pleasurable sensations,” to borrow Pater’s phrase again—sensations they sought to produce, in this case, not only with form but also with light and atmospheric effects. Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  133

Fig. 52 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, 1892–94, copper sheets, 14 ft. 6 in. high. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1932.30.1, Gift of the New York Life Insurance Company, 1932.

The sculpture was designed to yield to the influence of nature—to move with the wind—and as it did, it would have seemed infused with vivacity as it sparkled in the sun or shone in electric lighting against the night sky, as if filled with in­ ternal light.116 It achieved what Pater considered to be sculpture’s fundamental struggle with the obdurate heft of its own materiality.117 All lightness and air, a vision of balance and flexibility poised on the ball of one foot, the Diana, which Saint-Gaudens began working on the year he finished The Puritan, is the flip side of that heavy, dour figure. Where he frowns on prurient pleasure, she encourages it; the neighborhood around Madison Square Park was reportedly filled with “clubmen armed with field glasses,” the better to see her.118 Saint-Gaudens and White knew that the sculpture would attract such attention, and they also knew that some would balk at the nudity of the figure, considering it indecent for a civic site, even though as nudes go, the figure is extremely reserved, far removed, in its dignified ideality, from the naturalism of MacMonnies’s Bacchante, for example.119 As Elizabeth Lee points out, artists often stressed the chastity of this 134  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

Roman goddess of the hunt.120 Yet illuminated as she was, Saint-Gaudens’s figure gave up modesty for sensual allure, like a “side-show come on: the naked electrified hook to draw crowds into the Garden.”121 Saint-Gaudens and White must have relished situating their city under the sign of beauty, disputing the popular belief that a public monument should glorify nobler qualities. Madison Square Garden was, after all, a site for amusement above all, for pleasure on a monumental scale, sanctioned, it would seem, by the ages—by a nude figure that evoked the classical world. That the Diana did not represent loftier ideals bothered some commentators. One seemed troubled by the prominence of a sculpture that, unlike the Statue of Liberty (unveiled in 1886), “is the emblem of no patriotic or social sentiment. It commemorates nothing . . . it has nothing in particular to say of any event in history, or of any ‘cause,’ past, present, or to come.”122 That was precisely the point: to shift the terms of sculptural commemoration, to glorify aesthetic over moral ideals, just this once, as a monument to the cosmopolitan artists who had the audacity to think her up, to hoist her atop the tower, to make her the highest point of the New York skyline so that all would feel her influence. The Diana stood for Saint-Gaudens’s aesthetic and social commitments, and he was so dedicated to the project that he donated it, asking only that he be paid the expenses he incurred in producing it. Clearly it had personal significance to him. The Diana was a monument to the sensual pleasure the sculptor and his circle sought in their extramarital lives, no matter how austerely that pleasure registers in the virginal goddess’s lithe form and dispassionate expression. Indeed, that austerity is fundamental to Saint-Gaudens’s sculptural language; it is the way he made an idea monumental, worthy of public preservation. But his circle must have relished the subtext of the work. The sculpture must have seemed to its members, for all its elegant ideality, like a colossal in-joke. How else could friends like Dewing, who also memorialized his love affairs in exquisitely beautiful works of art, have viewed this great finial to White’s pleasure palace?123 That White in 1901 seduced the young showgirl Evelyn Nesbit in the apartment he kept in the tower, at the foot of Diana; that Nesbit later recalled climbing the narrow stairway up to the sculpture with White, to survey the city from Diana’s perspective, demonstrates how narrow a gap separated ideal and real, public and private.124

Cosmopolitan Points of View Although the controversies over the Diana and MacMonnies’s Bacchante postdate The Puritan by almost a decade, they help us to see what was at stake in SaintSatire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  135

Gaudens’s memorial to the Puritan point of view. That view, according to Puritanism’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics, was hostile to art and to beauty—deemed frivolous beside such noble pursuits as religious piety, industry, and self-improvement. To indulge in pleasure or be passionate about beauty was dangerous, immoral; such indulgence would hasten that downward spiral Twain had such fun exploring in his dinner speech.125 But Saint-Gaudens argues that art and life are fundamentally entwined, or should be, if they are to retain any vitality. Like James, he understood the role of frivolity in creative freedom, in the production and enjoyment of pleasurable sensations, and in cosmopolitan points of view. That Saint-Gaudens’s sense of humor angled toward delicate indecency and an investment in the hilarity of humorlessness helps to explain why his frivolity, at least when it enters his sculptural practice, remains dignified. His laughter is substantial, we might say, borrowing James’s description of Felix in The Europeans. James likes Felix so much because he represents an open-minded perspective, that of a man who has traveled, seen the world, and found much to appreciate—a man much like James himself. Richard Poirier has argued that Felix’s sister, Eugenia, is a figure for the author because of her urbane affectations, which echo the “stylistic fanciness” of James’s writing.126 But Felix’s outlook on life—curious, jovial, multifaceted—is itself artistic and cannot be reduced to style or contrivance. He is a model of tolerance and, thus a better figure for James, whose tolerant eye invites the reader to sympathize, in the end, with high-toned old Wentworth, to see the value of his straightforwardness and the endearing aspect of his brusque naïveté.127 In The American, that tolerance is manifest in the sculpture the bon vivant Newman gives to the minister Babcock. Because the capon undoes the dour asceticism of the monk, the sculpture critiques not only Babcock’s extreme seriousness but also, potentially, Newman’s self-indulgence. It mocks both and/or it mocks neither—it can be read in multiple ways. It is hard-hitting at the same time that it is noncommittal, or, we might say, it condemns affectionately. This tolerant irresolution makes James’s writing apropos to a consideration of Saint-Gaudens’s work. Despite personal predilections and aesthetic commitments, James and Saint-Gaudens are tolerant of the characters they carve out and commemorate. James made this tolerance into a literary approach in The Point of View (1882), a comic narrative made up of letters written about various American and European cities from the perspective and prejudices of people visiting from other parts of the world. This prismatic approach acknowledges the relativity of viewpoints and relies on gentle satire to poke fun at characters without damning them. Saint-Gaudens’s son Homer suggested that his father took a similar approach 136  |  Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James

to The Puritan, as I noted above. “It was only my father’s tolerant discernment and standard of art,” he wrote, “that prevented him from accentuating, even more markedly than at present, Puritan sternness and singlemindedness.” Because of that tolerance, Saint-Gaudens does not fully condemn his Puritan but situates him instead as one option in a contest between rigid self-restraint and exuberant flexibility. But even if the figure were considered apart from its context in Stearns Square, Saint-Gaudens’s affection would be perceptible in his satirical portrayal of a Puritan who maintains his dignity even as it is undermined. Sadakichi Hartmann, despite his distaste for the Puritans, could not help appreciating their “manly vigor, their austerity of purpose and preciseness of action,” when he wrote about Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture.128 His response is telling, for it suggests that the monument somehow endorsed those qualities before Hartmann himself did. They were, after all, the qualities required, many period critics thought, of great art, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson argued in a piece from 1870 that challenges Matthew Arnold’s claims that art could not thrive in a puritanical culture. “Take these Puritan traits,” he wrote, “employ them in a more genial sphere, adding intellectual training and a sunny faith, and you have a soil suited to art above all others.” The principles of the Puritan character could be marshaled, Higginson suggests, to produce serious art of the highest standing. “To deny it,” he adds, “is to see in art only something frivolous and insincere.”129 Thus Higginson formulated Puritanism as a foundational element of the American artistic contribution. And Saint-Gaudens, like so many other artists, probably shared more with that mindset than his complaints about puritanical asceticism suggest. Critics and friends often remarked on his “moderation and conservatism” despite the “progressive” character of his work.130 Royal Cortissoz said he learned “a lesson in devotion to an ideal of thoroughness” when watching Saint-Gaudens and White collaborate on the base for the Standing Lincoln.131 Saint-Gaudens was thus precisely the kind of American artist that Higginson championed, and many other writers stressed the Americanness of his individualism, his integrity, and his dignity. Cortissoz, in particular, worked to maintain that respectable, almost pious, portrait of the sculptor by excising from his Reminiscences the “profane,” the “excessive,” and the “offensive.” He did so, in many places, by downplaying the social activities Saint-Gaudens engaged in with White. “Why drag in the Sewer Club?” Cortissoz’s notes ask Homer Saint-Gaudens, who was editing the manuscript and had asked for the critic’s advice. “It is not funny, that whole affair was but an episode in Saint-Gaudens’s life, and to many it would be repulsive.”132 Saint-Gaudens may have approved of Cortissoz’s edits; he was typically more dis­creet than White about those activities, and judged the architect harshly for Satire in Saint-Gaudens and James  |  137

his en­tanglement with Nesbit. (As is well known, the man she later married, Harry K. Thaw, shot White dead in 1906 in the rooftop garden of the building he had designed.)133 Before White became the subject of pulpit sermonizing, however—which only reinforced the distance between his and his culture’s conceptions of how far one should go in the pursuit of pleasure (for White, it seemed, there were no limits)— he and Saint-Gaudens created a sculptural environment that encompassed the contest between the puritanical and the pagan, the ascetic and the joyously selfindulgent, which so many writers saw as shaping the American character.134 Saint-Gaudens was especially attuned to such overlaps and intersections because his own position was multidimensional. The Puritan investigates these competing claims on late nineteenth-century American art and culture and their associ­ ations with provincialism and cosmopolitanism. That an affectionate satire colors the investigation suggests how central both humor and tolerance were to SaintGaudens’s cosmopolitan sensibility.

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5 Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle

Trompe l’oeil still-life painting—painting that works to fool the eye of the beholder into mistaking two-dimensional representation for an unmediated presentation of three-dimensional objects—has long been a staple of narratives about the humorous potential of art.1 During the late nineteenth century, trompe l’oeil still life achieved new relevance and notoriety in works by such American artists as William Michael Harnett, John Frederick Peto, John Haberle, and a host of other painters who adopted the idiom.2 Their paintings were not necessarily funny— indeed, they are sometimes marked by nostalgia for the stuff of simpler times3— but they often sparked laughter from engaged viewers. According to newspaper reports, some viewers tested their visual perceptions by picking at the painted representation of what they presumed to be actual objects that might be dislodged from the surface of the canvas. When they took the bait of a picture’s illusionism, they became the butt of an artist’s practical joke. As that comic spectacle unfolded, the crowd would, as critics reported, “burst into a roar of laughter.” 4 John Haberle, of New Haven, Connecticut, was surely the late nineteenthcentury American trompe l’oeil painter most attuned to the comic potential of his imagery. Indeed, he was especially interested in the formulation and exchange of humorous material—that is, in joke making and taking. The visual jokes of his paintings provide evidence of this, but Haberle may have also explored other means of humorous expression, by jotting down jokes and submitting them for publication in the period’s journals and newspapers. His personal papers include a stack of small cards noting the content accepted by one paper or another. These same cards attest to Haberle’s knowledge of the comic tropes of his day, for many of them emphasize techniques for producing a well-crafted joke. Humor was Haberle’s primary material, then, perhaps in a range of media.5 We do not know for sure whether Haberle submitted any jokes to the popular   |  139

press, but his oil painting The Slate (ca. 1895) dialogues with the mechanics of the modern journalistic joke and its medium of transmission, the newspaper page (Plate 10). Indeed, the work internalizes a key shift in the American joke market about 1895. Critics at the time attempted to distinguish old from new jokes and to separate old-fashioned techniques from more modern ones. The Slate situates Haberle’s art somewhere between those poles and in the process makes a case for trompe l’oeil still-life painting as a difficult art. The self-referential dimensions of Haberle’s work have inspired art historians such as Johanna Drucker to situate him on the cusp of twentieth-century modernism, as a “proto-modern” artist.6 But while Haberle’s art anticipates the interventions of modernist wits, it also points back in time. For even as he tests out the formulas of the modern so-called machine-made joke of the newspapers, Haberle simultaneously acknowledges what his art shares with the character-based forms of humorous storytelling that had been cutting edge in the 1860s, where this study began.

Joking circa 1895 During the late nineteenth century, jokes were dislocated to float on their own, divorced from the authorial voice that created them, as the historian Daniel Wickberg has shown. Although the “joke”—a term introduced into AngloAmerican culture in the late seventeenth century—had always been subject to exchange, it became a different commodity during the second half of the nineteenth century because of the new status of the sense of humor as an important social value.7 As Americans of this period redefined the place of humor in their culture, they “developed markets for the exchange of the new units of humor designated as jokes.” In these new markets, the joke became more like an “objective thing” than ever before, “free from the extraneous contexts of social relationships and manners of telling.”8 It was thus delocalized and depersonalized and rendered saleable, like so many other commodities consumers enjoyed, knowing little about their origin or production. The creators of this humorous material— most often unnamed—were valued not for their ability to concoct one memorable zinger that evoked the personality of its creator, but for inventing as many jokes as they could, as quickly as possible. A public accustomed to the rhythms of mass consumption would readily digest this quickly produced comic material. As an isolable unit, the joke of 1900 was much more easily exchanged than the long-winded and character-dependent stories Artemus Ward and Mark Twain told in the 1860s. If Twain could, as he boasted, hold listeners rapt with a well-timed

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pause or a searching look around the room, “to-day a longwinded story-teller can disperse a crowd about as quickly as a man with a bad case of smallpox,” the vaudevillian Marshall P. Wilder claimed.9 After-dinner speeches changed shape in this context to become “a series of jokes strung loosely together” after the pattern established by the monologues of vaudeville, which became a respectable middle-class urban entertainment with the first “clean” New York show of 1881.10 Some vaudeville performers purchased jokes from gag wholesalers, a practice responsive to the pressures of the new market, which separated the writing of jokes from their delivery onstage. Madison’s Budget, a serial published beginning in 1898, was a storehouse of such material.11 Comic expression became a collaborative effort that minimized authorial agency and magnified the joke’s status as a transferable entity. This new humor, as it was called—“more universal in character” because it did not depend on an individual’s idiosyncrasies—was thus, as Wickberg explains, more “accessible as a product to an anonymous audience of consumers.”12 In “How to Tell a Story” (1895), Twain defended a midcentury model of comic expression against this late nineteenth-century model by stressing that the ­author/​ creator and his humorous product were inextricable. The essay argues that the “humorous story,” long-winded and “told gravely,” with the teller assuming a deadpan demeanor and seeming not to comprehend its hilarity, was “strictly a work of art,—high and delicate art,—and only an artist can tell it.” Twain contrasted this American work of art with the French “witty story” and the English “comic story,” which he asserted “anybody” could tell. Those stories were “brief and [ended] with a point,” an obvious point at which the storyteller would laugh heartily, jabbing elbows into ribs until listeners responded in kind.13 Facile and straightforward, they were what Twain’s deadpan meandering narratives worked against. In his lectures about American humorists, delivered in London in the early 1880s, the English minister Hugh Reginald Haweis explained Twain’s “long-drawn-out, elaborately spun” humor, focusing on his literary production: “He distils his fun drop by drop through a whole page, instead of condensing it into a sentence.” And anticipating Twain’s argument that the humorous story was a work of art, Haweis describes his technique in pictorial terms. “With every touch the atmosphere is intensified,” he declared, “and the picture slowly comes together until the page, or even the chapter, stands out a perfect pyramid of fun.”14 This well-balanced humor depended on a pace that “[bubbled] gently along.” The humorous story was measured, whereas the comic or witty story simply “burst,” Twain argued, as if anticipating (or willing) its inevitable demise.15 But the popularity of those other forms worried Twain and inspired him to legitimate the subtle character-based story-telling entertainment that had been his bread and

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butter for over thirty years. Wickberg explains that Twain’s ostensible targets— French and English comic techniques—were in fact displacements of the true object of his scorn: the modern American joke, which was making his approach seem old-fashioned.16 Indeed, as Twain’s piece proceeds, he drops references to the French witty story entirely, seeming to collapse it into a more generalized conception of the comic story (no longer explicitly English). In “How to Tell a Story”—a facetious title, because its author has no interest in democratizing his art form— Twain does not contrast national schools of humor, but instead pits his humorous story against modern jokes circa 1895, which “a machine could tell.”17 Haberle’s methods of humorous expression are situated somewhere between the poles of the character-driven humorous story and the modern joke that he was negotiating in the paintings he made about the same time Twain wrote his treatise. A key effect of trompe l’oeil is to make the question of representation appear irrelevant—the painted objects seem to be straightforwardly presented instead of represented. The simulation is so exact at times that the artist can seem to disappear behind his illusionistic brushstrokes.18 Trompe l’oeil still-life painting bears a complex relation to the structure of the commodity in part because of this “disappearance” of the artist’s hand. The works typically picture well-worn objects, distanced “from the world of mass production and consumption,” that can nonetheless index the “commodity realm” when the painter gives them a glossy newness, the appearance, as the art historian David Lubin argues, of never having been touched. “They look instead as though they were made by an intricate, inordinately sophisticated, superphotographic machine,” he writes of the objects crafted by Harnett. And “by denying the presence of the artist’s hand or brush, trompe l’oeil paintings thus advertently or inadvertently partook of the machine aesthetic characterizing modern mass-produced commodities.”19 Lubin’s argument in some ways echoes the historical association between the genre of trompe l’oeil still life and the “mechanical” but updates it by situating it, in his argument, in a late nineteenth-century industrialized marketplace.20 Trompe l’oeil still-life painting, in seeming to have been generated automatically, resembles the modern joke, making it an optimal site for investigating the modern joke’s mechanics. Yet Haberle stresses his role as creator at every turn, knitting his works into a narrative about the importance both of the authorial voice and of trademarking that voice in the modern marketplace. The artist was a skilled self-promoter who drew viewers into his professional story by “appearing” in his paintings: in the guise of a signature, a self-portrait, or a reference to his body of work. In The Slate, for example, which simulates a grocer’s blackboard, the artist’s name appears twice, carved into the upper left corner of the blackboard’s wooden frame and 142  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

Fig. 53 John Haberle, A Bachelor’s Drawer, 1890–94, oil on canvas, 20 × 36 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Henry R. Luce Gift, 1970 (1970.193), Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

written on the blackboard itself, as part of an advertisement for another painting. “Painting, A Bachelor’s Drawer, is FOR RENT” appears through chalky smudges and partial erasure. “Inquire of John Haberle, New Haven, Connecticut,” we read below, and, to the left of this, the word “Studio” (Plate 10). Haberle is picking up the trail of self-advertisement from his most famous painting, A Bachelor’s Drawer (1890–94; Fig. 53), in which one of the newspaper clippings at the center of the composition reads, “It Fooled the Cat.” The story under the headline, based on a piece published in the Detroit Evening News in 1891, refers to yet another of Haberle’s paintings, Grandma’s Hearthstone, made in 1890 for the Massachusetts paper manufacturer James T. Abbe. After Abbe sold this large painting to the manager of a Detroit saloon, it reportedly fooled a cat into snuggling up to what it believed was a warm fire in the fireplace.21 The Slate extends this reference to Haberle’s achievement with a simplistic sketch of a smiling cat, below which appears the phrase “but the cat can” (Fig. 54). In these three paintings, then, Haberle creates a sophisticated network of self-referencing that draws attention to the artist and the critical reception of his work.22 As the organizing principle and main character of an interpictorial narrative, Haberle operates like a Twainian humorous storyteller, inseparable from his comic product. Other artists in these years used playful self-aggrandizement to stand out from the competition in an expanding marketplace. The art and novelty potter George Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  143

Fig. 54 Detail of John Haberle, The Slate (Plate 10).

Ohr, for example, drew attention at the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895 with signage touting his “greatness” and inviting visitors to make sense of his “wonderfull [sic] puzzling” work (Fig. 55). Puns like “be ware” and the rep­ etition of the word “puzzling” invite viewers to see the encounter with Ohr’s work as a game.23 Oil painting might seem to exist on a different plane from novelty pottery hawked at an outdoor fair, but trompe l’oeil circulated in saloons, drugstores, and liquor stores in addition to the art gallery. (Haberle’s first and only re­t­ rospective during his lifetime, in 1896, for example, was held at Conway’s liquor store in Boston.)24 The Slate, which asks viewers to discern words and piece together references, functions like Ohr’s advertisements, as a puzzle that encourages conceptual play. This play always directs one to the artist himself and his body of work, like the “ware” of Ohr’s “be ware,” which refers to his own ceramic wares displayed on the ground, linking Ohr’s earthenware to the earth. Ohr’s display of his art on the ground commingles self-deprecation and selfaggrandizement, a technique Haberle also uses. It is no surprise that self-deprecation plays a role in Haberle’s work, for illusionism, as the art historian Nicolai Ci­ kovsky Jr. has argued, was a “marginal enterprise” in the New York art world— relegated to peripheral spaces when it was shown in major exhibitions and derided 144  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

Fig. 55 Photograph of George Ohr on the Midway of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia, 1895. Courtesy of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, Mississippi.

by critics who thought it pandered to the tastes of “children and half-trained people.”25 De Scott Evans, who had come to New York in 1887 from Ohio, seems to have been concerned that this marginalization would damage his career. He painted primarily figural scenes, which he exhibited at the National Academy of Design, but he also painted trompe l’oeil still lifes—small compositions depicting nuts wedged precariously behind broken glass, which Evans tempts the viewer to brave with little cards marked “try one.” Evans worked to distance his more serious figure painting from these neat little visual jokes (which cleverly ironize trompe l’oeil’s invitation to touch) by using pseudonyms that continue to complicate efforts to piece together an accurate portrait of his oeuvre.26 Unlike Evans, Haberle never disowned his trompe l’oeil work, even though he too wore other hats, as a drawing instructor and as an illustrator for the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut, where he spent most of his life. Haberle took classes at the National Academy of Design in 1884 and exhibited there several times, but he spent most of his career on the outskirts of the art world Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  145

Fig. 56 John Haberle, Imitation, 1887, oil on canvas, 10 × 14 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Century Fund, Gift of the Amon G. Carter Foundation. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

in New York, where his work was sometimes met with the very criticism that may have compelled Evans to dissociate himself from trompe l’oeil. Haberle’s Imita­tion, exhibited in 1887, the critic for the New York Evening Post argued, was “a re­markable piece of imitation” but not “in any sense of work of art” (Fig. 56).27 The cur­rency, Haberle’s subject here—a one-dollar note, a newer fifty-cent note angled on top of it, a copper penny at the upper right, and, near the lower left corner, a colonial shilling, stamps, and a tintype of Haberle himself—was associated with the work of William Michael Harnett, who began painting paper currency in the late 1870s and had been warned in 1886 by the United States Secret Service to stop such “coun­ terfeiting.” Haberle turned to this subject when Harnett gave it up, sometimes using the same paper currency that his predecessor had featured as a defer­en­tial nod to Harnett and perhaps also an assertion of his own secondary status.28 In The Slate, Haberle self-deprecates in a different way, facetiously undermining his own status while stressing the significance of his role in generating the work. He does so with the doodles that share blackboard space with his self-advertisement. Between the board’s directive, “Leave Your Order Here,” and the artist’s mention of A Bachelor’s Drawer, a gesticulating stick figure, a grinning cat, and a tic-tac-toe game draw the viewer’s attention. In relation to these 146  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

Fig. 57 John Haberle, The Slate: Memoranda, ca. 1895, oil on canvas, 121 ⁄ 8 × 91 ⁄ 8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase by exchange, gift of Miss F. M. Knowles, Mrs. William K. Gutskow, Miss Keith Wakeman, and the M. H. de Young Endowment Fund, 72.29.

little playful scrawls, Haberle’s self-promotional reference starts to look like a juvenile—and, since this is a blackboard, ephemeral—expression. The art historian Wendy Bellion argues that these “childlike sketches” form an “ironic contrast to [Haberle’s] display of mimetic aptitude” in the simulation of chalk.29 This tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation reinforces the elite critics’ association of trompe l’oeil with the juvenile and untrained, which Haberle plays up in the slate series overall. “One subject that appeals to the sense of the ridiculous,” a Boston critic wrote about 1895, “is a slate, which looks as if it had upon its surface the attempts of an urchin to draw.”30 Slates were standard classroom equipment in the period, and popular imagery commonly paired them with children. A McLoughlin Brothers publication from the 1870s used the image of a blackboard to tell a story from a child’s point of view, and an illustration that appeared with a story in Harper’s Young People, in 1880, depicts a boy drawing caricatures on one.31 In The Slate: Memoranda (ca. 1895), which one critic described as “a very funny slate, which appears to be covered with a small boy’s handiwork,” Haberle explicitly links the blackboard and juvenilia by painting, in the awkward script of a schoolboy, the words “My last slate at Watertown. FRED” (Fig. 57).32 Haberle investigates juvenile irreverence in The Slate by making the surface he simulates—this time a grocer’s instead of a student’s blackboard—a ground for game playing and childish transgression. The board’s straightforward directive— “Leave Your Order Here”—is disregarded and the surface repurposed for unauthorized self-advertisement, for doodles.

The Circulation of the Humorous Self The theme of the blackboard around which these works are organized provides another link to Twain’s humorous storyteller. In the mid-1890s the blackboard served cultural critics as a metaphor for the humor Twain defended, which depended on feigned ignorance and often a juvenile or uneducated persona. Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and other dialect comedians, one critic wrote in 1894, “placed their jokes on the blackboard, as it were,” in contrast to more polished literary humorists, whose strategies were less easily isolated or imitated.33 The tricks of the dialect humorist’s trade were orthographic distortion, word twisting, and a “tone of impudent familiarity.”34 To master the idiom, one simply had to court “outlandish dialect and broken-backed spelling,” as Billings pointed out in 1886, by changing “Essay on the Mule” to “Essa on the Muel.”35 One writer condemned Billings’s misspelling—which he thought had no re-

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gional specificity (the “dialect” of his writing was “neither genuinely Yankee nor really witty”)—by suggesting that Billings, Ward, and the other dialect comedians drew their techniques from the world of African American humor: “The faculty which the negro has for making fun by the distortion of language is well known.” That predilection for making “letters do the grinning,” that “grotesquerie which is natural to the negro,” were somehow unnatural, the writer suggested, for these white humorists.36 The critique points to the racialized dimensions of dialect humor; Ward and Twain were both avid fans of blackface minstrelsy, which, as Randall Knoper points out, “incorporated much of what we now know to be African-American dialect and vernacular” and attracted humorists like Twain for its critique of “modes and registers of representation associated with genteel culture,” its “mockeries of white pretensions.”37 The humorist Melville D. Landon (known as “Eli Perkins”) writes of being unable to drag Ward away from the slaves on his plantation when Ward visited him; a “quiet fascination drew him to the negroes.” Ward had a good laugh at the expense of “an UncleTom-like patriarch” after expounding on the virtues of idleness. (“Resolve to be idle,” he tells the man forced into enslaved labor; “no one should labor; he should hire others to do it for him.”) Even though he subjected the slave to his cruel irony and exhibited the racist attitudes of his day by making the black man the butt of his joke, Ward also appreciated the “verbal masquerade and language play” he studied among disenfranchised blacks.38 Critics who did not see the art of Ward’s word twisting, who could not understand how his “careful shaping of words into distorted forms [yielded] comic images in miniature,” tried to discredit dialect humor by connecting it to African American forms of expression.39 Ward and the other dialect humorists, the critic quoted in the preceding paragraph suggests, lowered themselves by their derivative “cacography” in utterances that exemplified the American tendency to treat all things with colloquial irreverence.40 According to one detractor, Ward’s writing pandered to the “taste for levity . . . that pastes bills on monuments, and makes natural scenery an advertising agent for quack medicines.”41 In this view, linguistic play is but one step away from defacing public space: disrespect (and a flair for self-promotion) characterized both offenses. Although Twain’s writing did not rely on “preposterous spelling” to the degree that Ward’s or Billings’s did, he was folded into this school of “juvenile delinquents” by critics who considered his jocularity equally “forced.”42 Although dialect humor had an air of childishness, its linguistic playfulness was often sophisticated. Some American trompe l’oeil painters likewise explored the limits and possibilities of language in works that seem to thematize juvenile

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Fig. 58 John Frederick Peto, The Cup We All Race 4, ca. 1900, oil on canvas and wood panel, 251 ⁄ 2 × 211 ⁄ 2 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1979.7.80.

delinquency. In The Cup We All Race 4, John Frederick Peto substitutes the number “4” for the word “for,” thereby condensing two meanings and a misspelling— f-o-u-r instead of f-o-r (Fig. 58). The misspelling conjures an illiterate authorcarver with a juvenile mind. But “4” is also a conceptually rich pun that exerts pressure on the conventions of correct spelling and singular meaning. In “A Visit to Brigham Young,” Ward performed a similar maneuver by splitting one idea into multiple linguistic permutations: “It is now goin on 2 (too) yeres, as I very well remember, since I crossed the Planes for Kaliforny, the Brite land of Jold.” 43 150  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

The “too,” which Ward puts in parentheses after the number “2,” is meant to be read as the writer’s attempt to reinforce understanding. That he offers all options but the correct one—“two”—produces the line’s humor. Peto similarly puts semiotic options in tension, setting both “cups” in his painting in a rectangle whose tone is slightly lighter than that of the frame around it. Haberle was also interested in signification as a flexible process. Formal play and transfiguration inform his repetition of the loop in The Slate and the con­ sequent changes in its signification—in the D in “Drawer,” the tail of the cat, and the string curling around the chalk. Despite their affect of juvenilia, then, these paintings draw the viewer into a complex consideration of the principles of signification.44 Haberle’s investigation of semiotic mutability registers more broadly in how his works present the authorial self as a fugitive sign. Haberle appears in his works in different ways—as a signature that changes shape from one work to the next, as a photographic portrait, or in references to his works and their display. The Changes of Time takes the fluctuation of identity as its central theme (Fig. 59). A wooden frame carved with the portraits of American presidents surrounds a grayblue cupboard covered with newspaper clippings, American currency of different denominations and from different periods, stamps, a portrait of and letter addressed to Haberle himself, and a magnifying glass for examining the details. The recent-issue five-silver-dollar note emblazoned with the portrait of Ulysses S. Grant attracts the viewer’s attention most forcefully. Grant is part of the presidential lineup carved into the frame, but Haberle renders him a transient character by drawing his visage into the domain of currency, by making him—like Washington and Lincoln—subject to marketplace fluctuations.45 Haberle understands that he too is subject to such dispersal, and his art presents the public, authorial self in malleable and fugitive terms. William James understood modern subjectivity similarly in The Principles of Psychology (1890), in arguing that the self was “a fluctuating material,” an abstraction one could sense and gain access to only partially along the “stream of consciousness.” Each person, James said, was necessarily multiple—he had “as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”46 Haberle may have been especially attuned to such fluctuations: the transpositions of his name during his lifetime provide a linguistic index of his shifting public self. The family spelled its name Häberle before arriving in the United States from Germany in 1852. (Haberle was born in New Haven, Connecticut, four years later.) The artist’s name appears in the city directories of New Haven, where he spent most of his life, as Haberle, Haberly, Haberlee, and Haeberle. In a ledger found at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, where Haberle worked for a time, his name is spelled Haebele.47 The Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  151

Fig. 59 John Haberle, The Changes of Time, 1888, oil on canvas, 233 ⁄4 × 153 ⁄4 in. Private collection.

artist incorporated some of the alternative spellings into his work, using “Haberlee” in Chinese Firecrackers (ca. 1890) and “Häberle” in Small Change (1887). Although the humorous story Haberle tells across his body of work reinforces his singular professional identity, the artist is dispersed and reconstituted, each time with a slight difference, so that he remains more a fugitive presence than a fixed one. “Mark Twain” was himself an evasive figure, performing the alter ego of Samuel Clemens. But Haberle seems even more interested in exploring the contingencies of a dispersed self, the comic effects it generates, and the institutional frameworks facilitating the circulation of this material. 152  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

Jokes on the Journalistic Wave Those contingencies were, in many ways, shaped by popular journalism. The popular press helped both to construct Haberle’s dispersed comic identity and to establish the forms of the new humor, in which the artist was well versed. According to Walter Blair, newspapers first became truly invested in humor with the advent of the penny press in the 1830s.48 The platform comedians of the 1860s had their roots there, and elements of their “elaborately-spun” storytelling lived on in the late nineteenth century: a case in point is “Bill” Nye, whose weekly letters, reprinted across the country during the 1880s and 1890s, sometimes took up a whole page of the paper.49 Yet right at this moment the “new humor” began to supersede the long-winded and character-dependent forms, as the joke became “the simplest organized thing printable.”50 Newspaper editors, especially, appreciated this easy filler, which helped to sell papers and ensure their survival in a culture that demanded levity.51 They published humor under the rubric A Group of Pleasantries and in columns of jokes titled Crisp and Casual, or Queer Wrinkles.52 Stacked one above the other, each separated from the next by a centered horizontal bar, these mostly brief comic bits required a shorter attention span than the longer humorous story: they took up much less space, typically just a few lines. This was humor that, in the words of one critic, was “structural rather than dependent upon expression.”53 These were jokes made for and fitted to the conditions of the popular press. Newspapers often drew their humorous content from other papers and from the comic journals like Puck and Tid-Bits, founded during the humor boom of the late nineteenth century, and the exchange went both ways, with Tid-Bits and other journals reprinting jokes found in the papers.54 Although newspapers usually acknowledged the journalistic sources of this material, they did not name the individual authors, the new professional class of joke writers.55 “His was the journalist’s fate, to remain unknown to almost all who enjoyed his humor and to have his work printed anonymously,” lamented the New York Sun in a tribute to the paper’s humorist, Phillip H. Welch, after his death in 1889.56 The newspaper humorists often found their “sketches” reprinted without permission in other papers.57 This widespread clipping and reprinting gave international recognition to newspaper humorists like Artemus Ward and later “Bill” Nye. But in the age of the anonymous joke, this system of exchange often dispersed humor without making its creator a household name.58 The American Press Humorists, an organization of comic writers for popular journals and newspapers, held its first convention in Baltimore in May 1903, partly with the goal of retaining greater control of their output. The American Press Humorists’ Book reprinted the best “gems Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  153

from the funnymakers’ pens,” along with their portraits and biographies, to cement the connection, for the consumer, of the comic product and its creator.59 The members of the organization, from newspapers and journals across the country, were surely tired of the situation recounted by the Sun, of Welch’s finding his jokes, unattributed, in other papers. He “would run his eye over that borrowed column, and find week after week that every joke, or all except one, perhaps, was from his pen, though nearly every one was credited to a different paper.”60 In a memorable turn of phrase, Brander Matthews described these “numberless little bits of parody [floating] hither and thither with the journalistic wave.”61 Floating with journalism, these short, authorless units of humor were also of it, structurally affiliated—ephemeral and regenerated, seemingly endlessly. Many joke writers described their work as industrial labor, and their jokes as “machine-made.”62 Although Nye once told a budding humorist not to allow “the general air of current humor to mould [him] into a machine funny man,” in the age of Taylorism, many joke writers churned out their products like workers on an assembly line sorting and reorganizing parts (of some story overheard, for example) to make humor, producing a certain number of jokes in a specified time. One writer insisted he composed one hundred jokes a day.63 A New York Times reporter mocked this intense production schedule, and the time- and energysaving procedures it required, when he complained that his interview with “the commercial humorist” was a by-the-minute and by-the-word affair.64 When asked to explain their working habits in the 1890s, joke writers described how they sent this joke in to that paper, filed the unused ones, and generated new material to start the process over again.65 They submitted their jokes on separate slips of paper so that an editor could select one joke and leave the rest, or come back to one in the pile at a later date.66 The many “how to” articles published at the turn of the century suggest that joke writing had become a genre anyone could work in, one “requiring no special ability or talent.”67 Such democratization of production may have inspired Haberle to submit his own humorous sketches to the papers. Among his personal papers, as I noted above, are small cards with the addresses of various newspapers and a description of content they accept. “Associated Newspapers,” for example, considers “humorous articles & comic drawings,” Haberle noted. The journal Smart Set, he writes on another card, “considers satirical writings from 400 to 600 words.” Other cards focus on how to sell the humorous sketch or short story—when to send it in and so on.68 Some of these cards address literary techniques, and several consider the most effective ways to construct a dialogue between characters. The first rule of dialogue is “compression,” Haberle notes, surely drawing that advice from some writing manual of the period; it suited an age of “short cuts,” which 154  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

he described on another card. Compression, essential to the modern joke, was a characteristic of the new humor Twain especially disliked.

The Slate and the Newspaper Page If Haberle tried his hand at humorous writing, he probably did so because it provided both financial and creative opportunities. We know that Haberle and his fellow trompe l’oeil painters had the newspaper in mind because it had established their notoriety, a debt they acknowledged by consistently including newspapers in their works in one form or another, folded up under a pipe, for example, or seemingly clipped and pasted to the painting’s surface.69 Haberle did not imitate the newspaper faithfully or use it as the raw material for his art. Instead, he used parts of disparate reviews in the clippings he painted, adding lines as he saw fit.70 In Imitation, he placed a newspaper clipping featuring his own name, J. Haberle, on the painted frame, where viewers might expect to find a label for the painting (see Fig. 56). Haberle’s substitution of ephemeral newsprint suggests that he identified his artistic practice with the newspaper medium—Haberle the artist is a product of the press and the press makes the painting a work of art. In The Changes of Time, Haberle turns newspaper clippings into raw material for a more intricate procedure. The clipping partly covered by the magnifying glass combines at least two different mentions of Haberle’s work in the press (see Fig. 59). The last line, “and a most deceptive tromp l’oil”—with the misspelling that creates a pun Haberle must have relished—appeared in the New York Evening Post in a review of Imitation.71 Other parts of the clipping come from some other source, however, or are Haberle’s own invention. In Reproduction (1888), the artist included an illustrated clipping that “imitates the typographical style which the New York World followed between 1883 and 1888,” as the art critic and historian Alfred Frankenstein noted long ago. But no story with the headline “John Haberle the Counterfeiter” ever appeared in that paper.72 Tinkering with the text in these ways, Haberle, like a journalist, entered the newspaper page conceptually, even as he made it serve his own medium. In The Slate, Haberle abandons the clipping to investigate the mechanics of the newspaper page more generally and the formulas of the journalistic jokers. Art historians have grappled with the use of newspapers by artists like Pablo Picasso: Was he invested in the content of the clippings arranged in his collages? Or was he more interested in the clipping as a semiotic cipher marking a pictorial property, such as depth or distance?73 Although Haberle is certainly interested in the content of the newspaper—as the clippings referring to his own work demExchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  155

onstrate—he is even more interested in the structure of that content. The Slate, in which Haberle works through his art’s relationship to the popular joking strategies of newspaper journalism, signals this interest. In the layout of the newspaper page, a piece on a sinking ship may butt up against a joke, and the medium normalizes that juxtaposition—much like Haberle’s Slate, which also brings disparate utterances into spatial proximity. Haberle’s grocer’s blackboard is as thoroughly dialogized as the newspaper page, which similarly features discontinuous, ephemeral sketches, and a range of contributions and voices. Anyone might, after all, “leave an order.”74 In The Slate Haberle puts divergent marks and competing languages into con­ versation with one another. The artist’s self-advertisement, mingling cursive and capital letters, and veiling his words with chalk dust and smudges, contrasts with the clarity of the board’s directive, with its precise, regularized typeface that evokes modern industrial forms of communication. The chalk responds to this painted lettering: the two registers are in dialogue. The interchange is rather schematic: Haberle, as if playing the role of journalistic joker in his own medium, presents a deadpan setup (the directive), followed by a punch line that subverts expectation by misinterpreting or undermining it (the artist’s smudged self-­advertisement and the doodles). He thus depicts in the work the structure of trompe l’oeil’s engagement with viewers, the arrangement of setup and punch line on which these painted gags depend. But this metacommentary on the genre invites a more specific meditation on popular joking strategies circa 1895, about their usefulness to painting and to trompe l’oeil, in particular. The Slate explores the visual effects of the medium that transmitted the modern joke and also the formal strategies of the jokes themselves, which in 1895 generally consisted of a dialogue between two parties. The dialogue joke—which emphasized the punch line, with one line serving as setup and the other as what Twain called the “nub”—was the most basic form of journalistic joking in the 1890s.75 Precedents for the modern joke dialogues exist in eighteenth-century jest books like Joe Miller’s Jests (1739).76 But the popularity of the formula during the late nineteenth century may owe more, as Wickberg argues, to the two-piece conversation acts of vaudeville, which produced jokes like this: The Farmerette:  Do you think I can learn how to milk this cow in a week? The Farmer: I hope so, miss—for the sake of the cow.77

In 1920, Thomas L. Masson, the longtime editor of the satirical journal Life, published that exchange in an article explaining how he wrote “50,000 Jokes in 156  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

20 Years.” Published at the start of a movement to create a “science of humor,” which culminated in the 1950s with Evan Esar’s attempt to develop a rational typology for jokes, Masson’s essay looks back to journalistic humor during the late nineteenth century.78 The “group of pleasantries” published in the New York Times in 1891 contained the following exchange, for example: Little Johnny:  Say, father, what makes the baby cry every time it wakes up? Brown: Well from what I know of babies, it cries from vexation to find that it has kept still for a reasonable length of time.79

The father’s response subverts expectation by providing a surprising explanation for the baby’s cry. The twist is crisp and clear. The stock characters—father, son, and baby—make the joke land quickly. Sometimes the exchange occurs without even naming the speakers, when, for example, the situation explored is so general that such information is unnecessary. Stripped of extraneous matter, the joke is even more condensed, as in this three-liner published in the Tribune in 1895: Here’s a piece of light literature that makes a man think very seriously. What is it? A gas bill!80

These stock characters and concerns could be repurposed endlessly. Change or exchange the subjects or situations—or fold topical material into “typical” scenarios— and one had new jokes.81 Such “new” jokes were simply the latest iteration of a formula that had already been exploited countless times before, as many commentators noted.82 There had always been mother-in-law jokes; one could not help depending on these stock characters and scenarios.83 The modern joke was thus somewhat predictable. Indeed, that is why these joke dialogues were so popular: both their form and their content were well worn. Like trompe l’oeil painting, they dealt with subjects and traded in techniques “with which the public is thoroughly familiar.”84

Haberle’s Humor: A Difficult Art Haberle’s little note cards demonstrate his awareness of popular joking formulas and methods of exchange, an awareness that informs The Slate, which acknowledges that the “order” of the day is ephemeral humor, typically focused on wellworn subjects and articulated as a clipped dialogue between two parties. But the Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  157

work also suggests the limits of the formula, perhaps because Haberle, although he may have wanted to become a journalistic joker himself, saw his humorous painting on some other level, as a product only he could create, a product of his singular imagination. The dialogue I have tried to identify in The Slate—if we can refer to it as such—serves, after all, merely as a framework for more ambiguous and unpredictable expression. The tic-tac-toe game, the stick figure, and the cat, although spatially proximate, may not relate at all, except to mark the slate as a surface for unpredictable play. They are placed side by side without any narrative glue. And these doodles, which fill the space between the painting’s textual call and response, are precisely the loose ends that the journalistic joking formula could not contain. They mark the slate as a frame for mutable expression that literally cannot be pinned down. This trope had been used by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to express the elusiveness of rational understanding, offered tantalizingly by the Cheshire Cat, who materializes to give counsel at moments of crisis but either suggests illogical solutions or simply evaporates before aiding the girl.85 Haberle’s chalk-drawn cat calls to mind the dematerializing cat of Carroll’s novel, which though published in 1865, still set the standard for literary nonsense in the 1890s (as it does today), inviting considerable attention in the press, particularly after the author’s death, in 1898.86 With this little figure and the other narratively disconnected doodles, Haberle weaves something like nonsense into trompe l’oeil, a mimetic style of painting that derives much of its power from seeming self-evident and thus seeming to require no explanation. But he goes beyond an iconographic reference to Carroll’s story by evoking the writer’s comic strategies. His unexpected combination of words and images literalizes, in the simulation of ephemeral chalk, Carroll’s technique for producing nonsense, with a “hazy, ill-defined image floating about” until it butts up against “a fancied similarity or false analogy.”87 Freud would theorize in 1905 that such unexpected associations produced a pleasurable release from the restrictions of sense. Like dreams, Freud argued, jokes—especially those generated by absurd or illogical premises—link ideas that are “rejected and studiously avoided by serious thought.”88 Nonsense jokes, which subvert or scramble the usual order of things, restored playful modes of thought associated with the mind of the child and provided relief from the mechanical patterns of adult existence. They offered nonformulaic and unpredictable fun, and it is easy to see why nonsense appealed to a culture beginning to see the self—in William James’s theory—as multiple points on a stream.89 Nonsense offered an alternative to the modern joke’s systematic brevity, stock characters, and punch lines. Indeed, the key virtue of Carroll’s—and of Edward Lear’s—writing was the extent to which it departed from the “latest ‘gag’ of the music halls,” as one critic described it in 158  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

1887.90 The gags of journalistic humor were similarly formulaic in their setup and reply. Nonsense, in contrast, was a “difficult art.”91 Haberle angles after a difficult humorous art in his own way as he works to dislodge the link between trompe l’oeil and mechanical expression. If The Slate explores the basic structure of the modern joke—setup and punch line—it does not, after all, merely replicate or imitate that structure. The painting’s call-andresponse arrangement evokes the strategies of modern joke makers, but it offers no clear punch line. Instead, it exceeds this formula to produce nonsense and thus an ambiguity foreign to the modern joke, which strove for clarity to connect quickly with its consumers.92 Haberle’s experiments with the modern joke took place during a temporary shift in his own painting technique that helps account for the irresolution of The Slate. About 1895, Haberle replaced the hard-edged precision of his earlier works with a formal dissolution that would be easier on his eyes.93 He did so in the blackboard series and in another series devoted to packages torn in transit, which feature loosely painted landscapes at their center, framed by paper and string, articulated in Haberle’s trompe l’oeil idiom (Plate 11). In these works Haberle was working through his own stylistic affiliations to consider what a shift in technique might mean for his joking strategies and for trompe l’oeil still life as a form of visual humor. Although the conceit of a painting framed by partially torn packaging paper dates to the Renaissance, Haberle seems to have associated the trompe l’oeil paper and string of Torn in Transit with modernity: those bright shipping labels that repeat the word “express” trumpet the fast pace of modern life.94 This, he pits against the landscape composition whose blue-gray undertones and easy recession follow premodern conventions. Haberle’s packaging string not only segments this landscape—making imaginative envelopment in it impossible—but also invades it by casting the string’s shadows on the painting’s surface. This segmentation, which mimics mullioned windows, as Wendy Bellion has argued, “puns upon the Renaissance notion of painting as a window onto nature.”95 With the triangular tears at the bottom right corner and at the upper left of the simulated packaging paper, Haberle parodically doubles—and, in the case of the tear at the upper left, inverts—the shape of the mountain peak to which the eye is supposed to be drawn in the distance. Instead, viewers’ eyes are attracted to the shipping labels with their text and bright, blaring color. In these ways, Haberle mocks the Albertian mandate that painting provide a view through itself to some elsewhere, figuring the landscape as generic and bland, unlike the trompe l’oeil framework in which it is wrapped—the materials of a joke on the move.96 In The Slate, Haberle abandons this connection between trompe l’oeil and Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  159

fast-paced modernity to fill up the idiom with time as he works to stretch out and thus complicate the viewing process. As with Torn in Transit, the composition features loose, atmospheric brushwork, but Haberle makes it communicate opacity instead of old-fashioned and easily digestible painterly tropes. Because of the partially erased and blurred text in The Slate, the viewer has to work to discern meaning. In this way, Haberle weaves illegibility into a style of painting associated with “neat” and thoughtless imitation providing easy amusement. According to this critical view, the trompe l’oeil painter is a panderer, seeking praise with his amusing pictures that require only an ability to imitate—a skill that the late nineteenth-century American landscape painter George Inness considered “worthless.”97 In The Slate, Haberle plays up the trompe l’oeil association with pandering in the knot of white string that is bound into the top of the wooden frame. It appears that the long string wrapping around the chalk had once been attached to this tuft, which angles toward the word “your” in the command below. “Leave your order here,” Haberle seems to say, with this subtle form of painterly italics, in a perhaps self-mocking nod to trompe l’oeil’s reputation for entertaining and gratifying viewers, for emphasizing the importance of their engagement. Indeed, without a viewer to laugh and inspect the details, trompe l’oeil paintings can seem somewhat forlorn, as if awaiting a human interlocutor to complete the gag. These paintings aim to provide, in their insistent illusionism and everyday themes, an amusing and familiar interaction. But even as Haberle reinforces the link between trompe l’oeil and easy amusement in The Slate, he might also be seen to recuperate for trompe l’oeil a different identity by featuring atmospheric brushwork, which defined advanced American painting of the 1890s.98 Many trompe l’oeil paintings incorporate illegible elements—the newspaper clippings Harnett included in his works are perhaps the most notorious example. Such passages, which seem to disrupt the imitative clarity of trompe l’oeil, have a concentrated representational power and can be seen as emblems of the genre, which cannot help dissolving into painted marks on a flat surface as the viewer inspects the details.99 Like Harnett’s newsprint, the blur featured in Haberle’s Slate playfully undermines trompe l’oeil’s reputation for mimetic clarity even as it reinforces the genre’s simulation strategies—those white smudges are the most convincing element of the painting’s illusionism. If Haberle makes one stylistic trope of painting serve another here, he is also reiterating the complexity built into trompe l’oeil as a painterly event that requires stages of viewing. Haberle suggests that contrary to the view of elite art critics, illusionistic painting could not be comprehended instantaneously. Although often exhibited in corridors and other marginal spaces, it rewarded sustained examination and indeed demanded 160  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

it. What viewers perceived from a distance differed from what they saw up close as the illusionistic conceit gave itself up, showing its cards, as it were, in the painter’s brushwork.100 But the joke was not always this easy either, as Haberle’s art labors to show. While his works operate like any trompe l’oeil practical joke—with the punch line emerging as viewers walk closer to the painting to perceive presentation shift into representation—his humor does not stop there. He puns, makes plays on words, caricatures, parodies, and explores the humorous potential of incongruity. If he aped Harnett, imitating his paintings of currency to establish his own notoriety as a “counterfeiter,” as I suggested above, Haberle makes his most original contributions through humor. In The Slate, his imitation of a grocer’s blackboard explores the mechanics of the journalistic joke dialogue and the newspaper page, its medium of transmission, to argue for trompe l’oeil as more creative, more idiosyncratic than the modern joke. This is an especially important moment in Haberle’s art, which demonstrates his self-identification as a humorist and his profound interest and investment in joking strategies.

Proto-modernist Humorous Storytelling In 1898, perhaps with a wry, self-critical smile, Haberle would go for the easy joke in one of his largest and most elaborate interior scenes, Japanese Corner (Fig. 60). With a painted envelope pressed flat up against the picture plane, reading, “Do Not Touch,” he reinstates trompe l’oeil’s status as a predictable practical joke while mocking the genre’s association with such a simplistic form of humor.101 Just a few years earlier, with The Slate, he had complicated trompe l’oeil’s association with mechanical procedures by angling toward opacity, toward a less formulaic form of joking and painterly communication—toward an argument that associates trompe l’oeil with layered complexity, with art that could not be understood instantaneously. Indeed, because Haberle’s work often points outside the paintings themselves to some other work or some other newspaper account, he requires unusually attentive viewers to pick up the threads of his extended narrative, frustrating interpretive closure in still other ways. This playful deferral is one of the many reasons so many scholars have described Haberle’s work, and The Slate in particular, as proto-modernist.102 Early twentieth-century modernists would perform juvenile nonchalance, create absurdist incongruities and use other techniques of mass-mediated popular humor to test the conditions and expectations of artistic practice. As the critic Benjamin De Casseres wrote in “The Ironical in Art,” a piece published in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work in 1912, the work Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  161

Fig. 60 John Haberle, Japanese Corner, 1898, oil on canvas, 81 × 52 in. Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Chauncey Steiger. Photograph by David Stansbury.

of Picasso, Baudelaire, and other heralds of the modern represented “Art doubling on itself, thought and feeling achieving a sublime mockery of itself,” the dream of an impossible perfection revenged through ridicule.103 Haberle’s art had its own way of turning in on itself. Yet while his art anticipates the interventions of modernist wits, it also points back in time to explore the edginess of the supposedly old-fashioned forms of comic expression. Many of the techniques of Haberle’s art that have inspired scholars to view it as anticipating twentieth-century trends are the same as those employed by the teller of Twain’s so-called humorous story. Although the modern joke “was organized around [some] central incongruity,” culminating in a punch line, the humorous story did not resolve itself in that way, Wickberg writes. Its humor was “built on the negation, deferral or understating of any goal.”104 It was designed to defy expectation and avoid resolution—to avoid functioning as mere setup for an obvious payoff. For Twain and his generation of joke makers, the comedian’s meandering, the pointlessness of his story, and his pretended ineptitude were the joke. And the result was sometimes “nonsense sheer and undiluted,” to borrow a 162  |  Exchanging Jokes with Haberle

phrase used to describe Josh Billings’s writing in 1895.105 The sheer nonsense fundamental to certain strains of modernist expression in the visual arts of the twentieth century is already present in works like The Slate, which meanders in its own way and privileges nonsense over a clear, concise punch line. Haberle’s painting helps us to draw together the worlds of the nineteenthcentury verbal humorist and the twentieth-century visual modernist to show how the old-school techniques of one form of comic expression translated into the avant-garde practices of another. Haberle’s painting invests the old forms with new life. In the midst of a shift in his painting technique, as he investigated how humor might work in an art that forgoes clarity, Haberle reactivates the old joking methods and suggests that they might not be outdated. And by putting modern joke techniques in tension with the old—making the economical brevity and anonymity of the journalistic joke dialogue overlap and intersect with more idiosyncratic and convoluted expression—Haberle suggests that the shift from the old humorous story to the new abbreviated joke was not as clean as the professional joke writers would have it. Indeed, the painting supports the view of some of those writers that the old indelibly marked the new. More than just a residue, it provided the structure for the ostensibly new formulations. In The Slate, the old and new forms of humor messily overlap and intertwine. Haberle’s painting, made when shifts in popular joke making and exchange were well under way, internalizes the transition. He thus maps this complex moment in the history of American humor and locates trompe l’oeil’s place within it.

Exchanging Jokes with Haberle  |  163

Epilogue

In a piece published in 1894, Agnes Repplier, a Philadelphia essayist and frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, made a case for difficult humor. Jokes that do not require “deciphering,” she argued, “are often so threadbare and feeble from hard usage that it is scarcely decent to exact further service from them.” American wags never wearied of telling jokes about “the slowness of Philadelphia, the ostentation of New York,” or “official mismanagement and corruption,” for example, but these themes were tired, and the strategies employed to mock them, predictable. Yet Repplier, while calling for fresher, less feeble jokes—the kind that required deciphering—still wanted to enjoy a hearty laugh at simple jocularity. The “new standards” of her day frowned on “such mirth,” however, which her colleagues considered “unbecoming in a refined and critical age.” She should learn to appreciate instead, she was told, “species of pleasantry too delicate or too difficult for laughter.”1 Repplier, who wrote several essays about humor during her long and distinguished career, represents a critical middle position: she wants both the “somewhat elusive satire of the modern analyst” and the “exaggerated types” of popular humor, which she sees as distanced from “threadbare” and predictable waggery.2 She is particularly troubled by the tendency of her colleagues in literary criticism to wave away the jocularity of earlier writers, transforming figures known in their day as humorists into glowering moralists incapable of engaging in unbridled fun.3 Something was lost in this distortion of the historical record, Repplier thought, a deeper enjoyment and appreciation of the human experience. “Our grandfathers cried a little and laughed a good deal over their books, without the smallest sense of anxiety or responsibility in the matter,” she argues, “but we are called on repeatedly to . . . exercise in all cases a discreet and conscientious severity, when what we really want and need is half an hour’s amusement.” Seeing a 164  | 

Fig. 61 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Exposition Grounds, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Photograph, Library of Congress.

place in American society for both jocularity and a more difficult humor, she bristles when she thinks of giving up the pleasures of one for the other in the name of national refinement, to suit the “dismal seriousness of the present day.”4 Just when Repplier published two of her most important pleas for humor, seriousness found monumental expression at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which the art critic Charles de Kay described as a “turning point in the fine arts for the nation” (Fig. 61).5 A magnificent, if temporary, spectacle of art and architecture, constructed on six hundred acres of Chicago’s lakefront, announced to the world that the American people had achieved serious culture. Dignified neoclassical structures (composed of white staff undergirded by iron and steel skeletons that would be dismantled at the fair’s end) housed exhibits devoted to the machinery of civilized society: Administration, Manufactures, Agriculture, Art, and so on. But art was more than just one piece of this system; it was the mechanism that established the value of all the rest. As Alan Trach­ tenberg has pointed out, “art provided the mode of presentation, the vehicle, the medium through which material progress manifests itself, and manifests itself precisely as serving the same goals as art: the progress of the human spirit.” 6 If the American nation had once been too practical to expend significant energy Epilogue  |  165

on artistic pursuits, the fair dispelled that reputation as its organizers and contributors (many of them notable New York painters, sculptors, and architects) made the “America of toil”—to borrow again Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s formulation—serve the new “America of art.”7 One of the many things the fair confirmed for Clarence Clough Buel, a Civil War scholar and contributor to Century magazine, was that the “era of the light jest has passed.”8 What Repplier said about the literary criticism of her day appears to have applied to a wider sphere of American experience. Yet Buel is unconvincing, particularly when he strains to separate the fair’s grandeur from the exaggeration that had for decades been associated with American humor. In con­ trast to some of the proposed exhibits that seemed to him self-evidently absurd— such as a “tower three thousand feet high,” a “building four hundred stories high,” and “a suite of rooms to be excavated under Lake Michigan”—Chicago’s “architectural challenge to the universe” was, somehow, a perfectly serious and dignified proposition.9 Distancing the fair from the taint of association with absurdity, levity, or amusement for its own sake was the concern of other critics as well. One writer, who approved of the architectural ornament on the Fisheries Building depicting crabs and other sea life at play, was careful to distinguish it from the whimsy that “descends into buffoonery.”10 Others stressed the importance of going to the fair with “serious purpose,” of taking “at least part of your pleasure in the Fair very sternly.”11 If pleasure was structurally ghettoized on the Midway Plaisance—the location of a hodgepodge of sensational entertainments—it nonetheless had to be kept in check to preserve the fair’s message of American cultural supremacy. Perhaps this was so in part because the exhibits of the Midway, such as the colossal Ferris wheel, recast the rhetoric of the fair in terms of popular amusement. The dialogue between the Midway and the Court of Honor, which gave pride of place to the monumental sculptures of Frederick MacMonnies and Daniel Chester French, must have accented for visitors the grandiloquence of those allegorical pronouncements. The fair’s sober civic purpose would be recast at Coney Island’s Luna Park a decade later, in sculptural and architectural arrangements that privileged novelty over order. Indeed, the stridently playful buildings and sculptural ornament of Luna Park, which owed so much to the model of the fair as a spectacular civic space, activated the absurdity of its exclamatory civility in a winking retrospective critique.12 That period critics failed in their attempts to render this exclamatory civility dignified in their commentary on the fair signals the residual presence of a jocularity that would not go away, that continued to live in the fabric of American “culture.” How could it be otherwise? For as Benjamin De Casseres would write in 1912, “There is something in seriousness that runs 166  |  Epilogue

counter to the spirit of things. . . . In a universe that wavers and totters and flows and blends, that melts and reappears eternally, Seriousness attempts the static pose. It tries to stanch motion by predicating a cohesive finality.”13 The fair was, at its core, both a cohesive finality and a fleeting fancy; it attempted the static pose but also acknowledged, in its way, the moving spirit of things in the panoply of human experience. Like Repplier, the artists I have examined in this book understood, well before the fair, the hazards and limits of the static pose, and the inextricability of the serious and the jocular, the lighthearted and the grave. They understood that American culture was constituted in the flow and bend of those states of mind, and they produced works of art that tapped into their subtleties.

Epilogue  |  167

Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Plea for Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (January 1867): 29–37. 2. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), on his experiences in the war. 3. See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 9. 4. For the quotations in this and the preceding paragraph, see Higginson, “A Plea for Culture,” pp. 34, 37, 30. For the quotation about university curricula, see Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 49. In 1869, two years after Higginson published his article in the Atlantic Monthly, Charles William Eliot, who became president of Harvard that year, published in the same journal an essay calling for the reform of university education. Among the many important changes he advocated was the separation of the college curriculum from that of the professional schools. College should be devoted, he thought, not to preparing the student for a specific vocation, but to “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects.” See Menand, Marketplace of Ideas, p. 49; and C. W. Eliot, “The New Education” parts 1 and 2, Atlantic Monthly 23 (February and March 1869): 203–21, 358–67. 5. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, “The Plague of Jocularity,” North American Review 161 (November 1895): 528–30. See also Oscar Fay Adams, “Is ‘American Humor’ Humorous?” Outlook, June 2, 1894, 961–62; Adams argued that the United States had “brought forth a style of humor that substitutes flippancy and smartness for wit; that esteems nothing too high for its theme, as it considers nothing too low; that jests at scars, and runs riot among all the obligations of life.” 6. See “Academics Making Forays into Stand-Up Comedy,” New York Times, December 19, 2010, for some British academics who have brought their material into comedy clubs in an effort to engage the public.

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7. See Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 127. 8. On “subversive frontier humor,” see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 441–66. 9. Boyesen, “Plague of Jocularity,” pp. 528–36. Constance Rourke, a key historian of American humor, echoed Boyesen’s stress on irreverence in her book American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1931). 10. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). 11. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, p. 144. 12. “The Academy Exhibition,” New-York Times, October 29, 1882. 13. See Clarence Cook, “The Humorous in Art,” New Path 1 (February 1864): 133–35. 14. See “Culture and Progress at Home. The National Academy Exhibition,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (July 1871): 330. 15. See Heather Campbell Coyle, “Laughing Matters: Art Caricature in America, 1878–1918,” Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2011. 16. Platform comedians like Artemus Ward seem likewise to have learned much from visual humorists when they used imagery in their lectures. The badly painted panorama Ward used in his lecture tour of the mid-1860s, for example, provided the setup to his punch lines and an apparatus for his crowd-pleasing physical humor, as when he tried to adjust the moon of a night scene from backstage, making it jiggle and flicker “in the most inartistic and undecided manner.” See T. W. Robertson and E. P. Hingston, eds., Artemus Ward’s Panorama. (As exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, London.) (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1869), p. 159. 17. See Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1800–1900) (New York: American Book Company, 1937), pp. 3–16; and Nancy A. Walker’s summary of Blair’s contributions in her introduction to her edited anthology What’s So Funny? Humor in American Culture (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998), pp. 12–13. 18. On Catharine Beecher, see Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 180–81. 19. On these almanacs, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 90–108. 20. On this shift, see Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 120–69. 21. See, for example, Henry James, The American (1877) and The Europeans: A Sketch (1878). See also Ronald Wallace, Henry James and the Comic Form (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975). 22. Carolyn Wells, A Nonsense Anthology (New York: Scribner, 1902), p. xxi. See, for example, Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846; enlarged, 1861); Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871); More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (1872); and

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Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, etc. (1877). See also Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869); Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871); and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). 23. On deadpan, see Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story” (1895), in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays, 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 201–6; and Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966), pp. 211–36. 24. Walter Blair, “Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor,” American Literature 2 (November 1930): 236–47. 25. See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 26. For these and other categories, see Blair, Native American Humor; and Rourke, American Humor. 27. See “American Humor: Lecture by Bret Harte, at Association Hall, Yesterday Evening,” New-York Times, January 27, 1874. 28. Bruce Michelson, Literary Wit (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 1. 29. Mariët Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997), p. 10. Insightful treatments of visual humor include Westermann’s “How Was Jan Steen Funny? Strategies and Functions of Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Hermann Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 134–78; Sarah Burns, “Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard, and the Bears of Wall Street,” American Art Journal 30 (1999): 8–35; Burns, “Apocalyptic Carnival: Painting, Satire, and the Very Uncivil War,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 66–83; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Every­ day Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 24–59; Tanya Sheehan, “Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,” Photography and Culture 4 (July 2011): 133–56; Marc Simpson, “The Bright Side: ‘Humorously Conceived and Truthfully Executed,’ ” in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, with contributions by Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., Lucretia Hoover Giese, Kristin Hoermann, Sally Mills, and Christopher Kent Wilson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988), pp. 46–63; David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Bulletin 69 (September 1987): 407–30; Smith, “Inversion, Revolution, and the Carnivalesque in Rembrandt’s Civilis,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring 1995): 89–110; Smith, “Portrait and CounterPortrait in Holbein’s The Family of Sir Thomas More,” Art Bulletin 87 (September 2005):

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484–506; Shearer West, “Laughter and the Whistler/Ruskin Trial,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12 (Spring 2007): 42–63; and Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 3–23, 107–73. The most useful works on caricature published after 2000 include Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Lauren Kroiz, “Breeding Modern Art: Criticism, Caricature, and Condoms in New York’s Avant-Garde Melting Pot,” Oxford Art Journal 33 (2010): 337–63; and Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). 30. Smith, “Portrait and Counter-Portrait in Holbein’s The Family of Sir Thomas More”; Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, pp. 3–23. 31. On the “comical and coffinly,” see “Punishment of a Negro at Richmond, VA,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 29, 1865, 349. 32. See L. A. Sherman, “American Humorists,” Chautauquan 22 (November 1895): 163; and “How They Jested in the Good Old Time,” Continental Monthly 3 (February 1863): 243. 33. See J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871): 409–15. 34. See Brander Matthews, “The Penalty of Humor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 92 (May 1896): 897–901.

1. Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan 1. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 187–217. 2. Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 4–5. 3. “He loved gags . . . that fitted in with his sense of the dramatic,” Philip C. Beam writes in Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 197. For the passage quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, see William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 240. 4. L. A. Sherman, “American Humorists,” Chautauquan 22 (November 1895): 163. See also “How They Jested in the Good Old Time,” Continental Monthly 3 (February 1863): 243. 5. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 79. 6. Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story” (1895), in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays, 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1992), p. 201. 7. Lucia Z. Knoles first suggested to me that this was a common period pairing. See,

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for example, Alf Burnett, Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive (Cincinnati: Rickey and Carroll, 1863), p. iii. Roger B. Stein, “Picture and Text: The Literary World of Winslow Homer,” in Winslow Homer: A Symposium, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with the University Press of New England, 1990), p. 52, points to the ironic and subversive undercurrent present in Homer; my reading of the artist owes much to Stein’s example. 8. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry Bright, March 8, 1863, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 18, The Letters, 1857–1864, ed. Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 543. 9. For the quoted phrase, see “Punishment of a Negro at Richmond, VA,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 29, 1865, p. 349. 10. This is the standard view of these works. For an example of how the “monotony of camp life” gave rise to humorous diversions, see “Pets for the Camp,” Vanity Fair 3 (May 25, 1861): 245. On the difficulties of producing paintings that adequately addressed the conflict, see Lucretia Hoover Giese, “ ‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia M. Burnham and Giese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 64–81; and Steven Conn, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?” History and Theory 41 (December 2002): 17–42. 11. “All fashions change, and nothing more wholly or quickly than the fashion of fun; as any one may see by turning back to what amused people in the last generation; that stuff is terrible.” See W. D. Howells, “Mark Twain,” Century 24 (September 1882): 783. 12. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 195–96, summarizes this episode and quotes Stanton. See also Don C. Seitz, Artemus Ward: A Biography and Bibliography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1919), pp. 113–15. Lincoln was also a fan of Orpheus C. Kerr (Robert Henry Newell) and Petroleum V. Nasby, the comic alter ego created by the Republican David Ross Locke to skewer the shortsighted racism of the Democratic Copperheads. See Fahs, pp. 212–14. 13. “Honest Abe’s Hilarity,” Yankee Notions 12 (March 1863): 67. On Lincoln as “Prince of Jokers,” see Yankee Notions 13 (December 1864): 383. 14. See Currier and Ives, Abraham’s Dream! “Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before,” a lithograph of 1864 in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. For mention of the print “The Commander-in-Chief Conciliating the Soldiers’ Vote on the Battle Field” (1864), see Frank Weitenkampf, Political Caricature in the United States in Separately Published Cartoons (New York: New York Public Library, 1953), p. 141. 15. Cook may have written some of the anonymous Art Items columns for the New-York Daily Tribune in the early 1860s, but he began signing essays and reviews for the paper only in early 1863, about the time that he co-founded the Association for the Advance­ ment of Truth in Art. On his impact on the New York art world, see J. M. Mancini, Pre-­

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Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 102–31; Barbara Jean Ste­ phanic, “Clarence Cook’s Role as Art Critic, Advocate for Professionalism, Educator, and Arbiter of Taste in America,” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1997, pp. 70–77; and John P. Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth Century America,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1952, pp. 245–65. 16. See George William Curtis, “Art-Criticism,” Harper’s Weekly 8 (April 30, 1864): 274–75. David B. Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, ed. Dearinger (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, in association with the National Academy of Design, 2000), pp. 72–76, provides a useful summary of Curtis’s and Cook’s careers and contributions to the Tribune. 17. [Cook], The Fine Arts, Independent 7 (November 1, 1855). 18. For a description of Jealous Rabbits, see Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: Putnam, 1867), p. 498. 19. B.M. “An Hour with the Painters,” Baltimore American, April 26, 1864. I thank Adam Thomas for drawing this review to my attention. See also the mention of Brown’s painting in “The Art Exhibition,” Baltimore American, April 22, 1864. 20. Clarence Cook, “The Humorous in Art,” New Path 1 (February 1864): 133–35. S. G. W. Benjamin, “An American Humorist in Paint,” Magazine of Art 5 (1882): 17–18, recounts Cook’s critique and its ramifications. See also William H. Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard: Animals in Fantasy (New York: Alexander Gallery, 1981), pp. 17–19. 21. W. Alfred Jones, “A Sketch of the Life and Character of William S. Mount,” American Whig Review 14 (August 1851): 124. 22. For a detailed description of the painting, see Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 50–54. 23. Jones, “A Sketch of the Life and Character of William S. Mount,” pp. 125–26. 24. “Remarks on True and False Wit,” American Museum 1 (February 1787): 147–48. See also “Ill Nature Is Often Mistaken for Wit as Buffoonery Is for Humor,” Juvenile Port-Folio 4 (March 9, 1816): 39. 25. On the pleasurable “psychical relief” jokes offer, see, for example, Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 143–70. 26. For a summary of disparagement- or superiority-based theories, see Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 2–3. See also Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 106–39, on “tendentious” jokes. Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xiv, questions the usefulness of these theoretical models as outdated and unable to account for “neurology’s newly unfolding model of mind.” Although I sympathize with Camfield’s project, I rely here on those ideas, which

174  |  Notes to Pages 12–15

have helped me to understand reservations about certain strains of humor in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 27. On nineteenth-century manners and middle-class behavioral codes, see John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990). 28. [Cook], “Newspaper Criticism of the Fine Arts,” Independent 7 (May 24, 1855). 29. Beard’s letter may have represented the views of many National Academy of Design academicians, who apparently complained to the New-York Daily Tribune’s editor, Horace Greeley, about Cook’s harsh reviews. Greeley told them to write a letter to the paper, agreeing to publish it if it was “sufficiently interesting”; see Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth Century America,” pp. 262–63. 30. See [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair,” New-York Daily Tribune, April 9, 1864; Beard, “Art Criticism,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 21, 1864, which responds to Cook’s review and to George William Curtis’s endorsement of it in “Art Criticism,” Harper’s Weekly 8 (May 7, 1864): 290–91. Many critics disagreed with Cook’s assessment, and even years after it was painted, the work would be praised as Beard’s best. See, for example, Benjamin, “An American Humorist in Paint,” p. 18. 31. See Curtis, “Art-Criticism,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 28, 1864, reprinted in Harper’s Weekly 8 (June 4, 1864): 354–55. For a summary of this exchange, see Gerdts, Beard: Animals in Fantasy, pp. 17–19. Beard was scarred by the attacks on his art. See “Art in New York,” Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, January 24, 1866. 32. For this rhetoric, see, for example, James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 50–61. 33. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, “The Plague of Jocularity,” North American Review 161 (November 1895): 528–30. 34. [Josiah Holland], “Triflers on the Platform,” Scribner’s Monthly 3 (February 1872): 489. On the new professional humorists, what they took from the “Yankee” and “Southwestern” humorists who came of age in the 1830s, and how they departed from these precedents, see Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1800–1900) (New York: American Book Company, 1937), pp. 102–24. For an analysis of the techniques of these humorists, in their writings and on the stage, see Melville D. Landon, Kings of the Platform and Pulpit (Chicago: Werner, 1896). 35. [Holland], “Triflers on the Platform,” p. 489. 36. Winslow Homer, Our Jolly Cook, in Campaign Sketches (Boston: Prang, 1863). 37. See Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “The School of War,” in Cikovsky and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 22. 38. The most extensive treatment of Playing Old Soldier is Sally Mills’s entry on it in Marc Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, with contributions by Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., Lucretia Hoover Giese, Kristin Hoermann, Sally Mills, and Christopher Kent Wilson (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988), pp. 148–52. For provenance and exhibition history, see Lloyd Goodrich, Record of Works by Winslow

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Homer, vol. 1, rev. and expanded by Abigail Booth Gerdts (New York: Spanierman, 2005), p. 237. 39. The earliest occurrence of the period phrase “playing old soldier” that I have located is in Walter March [Orlando Bolivar Wilcox], Shoepac Recollections: A Way-Side Glimpse of American Life (New York: Bunce and Brother, 1856), pp. 199–200. See also Bruce Catton’s Civil War: Three Volumes in One (New York: Fairfax Press, 1984), p. 476. 40. See Frazar Kirkland [Richard Miller Devens], The Pictorial Book of Anecdotes and Incidents of the War of the Rebellion, Civil, Military, Naval and Domestic . . . (Hartford, CT: Hartford Publishing, 1866), p. 428; Tom O. Edwards, “Malingering,” Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal 15 (January 1, 1863): 36; March, Shoepac Recollections, p. 199; and “Soldier’s Tricks,” U.S. Army and Navy Journal 1 (January 9, 1864): 314. 41. “To assume to be deaf and dumb requires extraordinary skill,” writes Edwards in “Malingering,” p. 35. For the anecdote about the man placed on a precipice and ordered forward, see p. 34. 42. J. Theodore Calhoun, “Rough Notes of an Army Surgeon’s Experience, during the Great Rebellion,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 10 (August 15, 1863): 217, 218–19. 43. See, for example, “Weak Knees,” Vanity Fair 6 (August 23, 1862): 89; “The Soldier on Leave,” Vanity Fair 6 (August 9, 1862): 70; and “The Song of the Eleventh-Hour Patriot,” Vanity Fair 6 (October 18, 1862): 191. These and other anecdotes, poems, and cartoons like them began to appear in greater number after Lincoln signed “the first draft act in American history” on July 17, 1862. See Eugene C. Murdock, Patriotism Limited, 1862–1865: The Civil War Draft and the Bounty System (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1967); and James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991). The quotation is from Murdock, p. 6. 44. The work “[evinced] appreciation of certain humorous phases of camp life,” said the critic for the Evening Post, December 14, 1863, quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 152. For the quotation on the “laughing side,” see Lionel [Clarence Cook?], “The Artists’ Fund Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition,” New Path 1 (December 1863): 95. 45. Hence the way the painting is generally treated, either as a springboard for discussions of the sad state of medicine during the war, when amputation and infection ruled the day, or as a gateway into the story of the boy martyr who, if not killed on the battlefield, would surely die in the field hospitals. See, for example, Sally Mills’s entry on the work in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 148–52. Julian Grossman, however, in his book Echo of a Distant Drum: Winslow Homer and the Civil War (New York: Abrams, 1974), p. 95, stresses the comic. 46. On “laughing prompts,” see Mariët Westermann, “How Was Jan Steen Funny? Strategies and Functions of Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Hermann Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), especially pp. 156–59. 47. See Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, especially pp. 124–26, 162–63.

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48. See “The Artists’ Fund Exhibition. Second Notice,” New York Evening Post, December 14, 1863, quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 152. 49. It is worth considering how the lithographic cards may have informed viewers’ understanding of Homer’s oil paintings, particularly the few cognate pairs like “Surgeon’s Call,” published in early 1864, and Playing Old Soldier. It seems reasonable that viewers who saw Homer’s painting at the Maryland State Fair in Baltimore in April of that year and in June at the Great Central Fair of Philadelphia might have compared it to this caricatural version of the subject and understood it as in some ways an extension of the little comic card. I thank Dorothy Moss for raising this issue. For exhibition history, see Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:237. 50. Charles E. Schutz, “Cryptic Humor: The Subversive Message of Political Jokes,” Humor 8 (1995): 51. 51. See “National Academy of Design. The Thirty-Ninth Exhibition. (Seventh Article),” New-York Daily Tribune, June 11, 1864, quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 164. 52. “National Academy of Design. Notices of Works on Exhibition,” New-York Times, May 5, 1864; “The National Academy Exhibition. (Continued),” New-York Illustrated News 10 (May 7, 1864). 53. Fahs, Imagined Civil War, p. 201. The period literature is rife with sentimental stories of the brave youth ready to die for his country. See, for example, Kirkland, Anecdotes and Incidents of the War of the Rebellion, pp. 540–41, 562–63. 54. Holmes and Sumner, quoted in James McPherson’s introduction to 1863: Turning Point of the Civil War (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1998), pp. 4, 6. For more on the evolution of the soldier between 1861 and 1865, when the “gap between the expectation and the actuality of war” widened, see Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), and for the Paxton quotation, p. 250. 55. See Alfred R. Waud, “Here’s a Health to the Next One That Dies,” a pencil sketch (early 1860s) in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. See also the writings of Orpheus C. Kerr, lambasting “the sentimental approach to wartime death found in popular literature,” with a captain advising his troops: “Should any of you happen to be killed in the coming battle, let me implore you to Die without a groan. It sounds better in history.” See the Orpheus C. Kerr Papers (1862), quoted in Fahs, Imagined Civil War, pp. 206–7. 56. “Weak Knees,” Vanity Fair, p. 89; “The Soldier on Leave,” Vanity Fair, p. 70. 57. Theodore Winthrop and Charles E. Davis, quoted in Henry Steele Commager, ed., The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents, rev. ed., Erik Bruun (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2000), pp. 206, 211. 58. See J. H. Northcroft, “Artemus Ward, the Baldinsville Showman,” Littell’s Living Age 177 (May 5, 1888): 302. On the sites Ward visited and the press coverage of his tour, see John. Q. Reed, “Artemus Ward’s First Lecture Tour,” American Literature 34 (January

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1963): 571–73; and John J. Pullen, Comic Relief: The Life and Laughter of Artemus Ward, 1834–1867 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), pp. 170–74. 59. Lawrence E. Mintz, “Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” American Quarterly 37 (Spring 1985): 71–80. 60. Mintz, “Standup Comedy,” locates the roots of twentieth-century stand-up comedy in the routines of the new professional humorists of the 1860s. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 457, for mention of the “frontier circuit riders and urban revivalists that proliferated during and after the Second Great Awakening” as possible precursors of the humorists. 61. See Fahs, Imagined Civil War, especially pp. 202, 204, 224. By criticizing the war, Artemus Ward and others “followed in the stylistic footsteps of popular antebellum humorists” such as James Russell Lowell, whose Hosea Biglow had critiqued the Mexican War in the late 1840s. For more on the impact of the new comedians, see Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially pp. 29, 126–28. 62. “Our Artists during the War,” Harper’s Weekly 9 (June 3, 1865): 339. 63. “Military Correspondence, Washington, May 17, 1861,” Crayon 8 (June 1861): 134. 64. See Benjamin Henry Day Jr., “Our Own Artist Sketching ‘A View of Gen. Banks’ Army on the Spot, from a Drawing by Our Special Artist,’ ” Vanity Fair 4 (September 14, 1861): 130. See also Homer’s lithograph “Our Special,” from Life in Camp (part 2), reproduced in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 12. On the precariousness and impracticability of making an image in the midst of battle, see “Explosion of the ‘Merrimac,’ or Any Other Ship,” Vanity Fair 5 (May 31, 1862): 262. 65. See Winslow Homer, News from the War, in Harper’s Weekly 6 (June 14, 1862): 376–77. David Tatham, “Winslow Homer at the Front in 1862,” American Art Journal 11 (July 1979): 87, identifies the artist as Homer’s colleague Alfred R. Waud. 66. For the quotations, see Cikovsky, “The School of War,” and Charles Brock, “Chronology,” in Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer, pp. 17, 391. 67. For a chronology of Homer’s activities, see Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:117–29. 68. See “Journal Illustrations from Designs by Winslow Homer, 1859–1866,” in Good­rich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:370–73, and 1:127 for the quotation. Homer’s illustrations appeared for the last time in Harper’s Weekly in 1875. 69. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design. III,” Round Table 1 (May 7, 1864): 326. 70. For reviews of Playing Old Soldier stressing that Homer’s work was still “immature,” see, for example, Lionel [Clarence Cook?], “The Artists’ Fund Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition,” New Path 1 (December 1863): 95; “The Artists’ Fund Exhibition. Second Notice,” New York Evening Post, December 14, 1863; Fine Arts, “Exhibition of the Artists’ Fund Society,” Albion 41 (November 21, 1863): 561. For reviews of In Front of the Guard-

178  |  Notes to Pages 27–28

House in this vein, see Art, “The Artists’ Reception,” Round Table 1 (January 23, 1864): 92; “The Academy Exhibition. Second Article,” New York Leader 10 (April 30, 1864): 1. All are quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 152, 163–64. 71. I thank Jennifer Roberts for suggesting to me how the soldier’s act of coating his tongue parallels Homer’s work as a painter. 72. “National Academy of Design. Seventh Article,” Watson’s Weekly Art Journal 3 (July 1, 1865): 148–49, quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 206. 73. George Arnold, “Art Matters,” New York Leader 11 (June 3, 1865): 1, quoted in Simp­ son, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 206. 74. Fine Arts, “The National Academy of Design. Third Notice,” Albion 43 (May 27, 1865): 249, quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 206. 75. Black characters served as a comic baseline in these years, as many scholars have pointed out. See Joseph Boskin, “Sambo: The National Jester in the Popular Culture,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 165–85. The author of “The Army of the Potomac. What It Has Done and What It Is Doing,” New-York Times, October 30, 1864, concluded that “even when most seriously inclined, the negro is amusing.” 76. Simpson, “The Bright Side: ‘Humorously Conceived and Truthfully Executed,’ ” in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 46–63, suggests that this defiant stare challenges the stereotype promoted by the version reproduced in Our Young Folks, in July 1866, because it cuts this figure out. The quotation is from p. 56. For the five versions of this composition, see Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:319–25, 357–58. 77. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 50. 78. See Peter H. Wood, Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). For a broader treatment of this subject, see Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). I thank Marc Simpson for pointing me to Wood’s work. 79. For one such image, see Is All Dem Yankees Dat’s Passing? in Harper’s Weekly 9 (January 7, 1865): 16. 80. See J. H. Northcroft, “Artemus Ward, the Baldinsville Showman,” Littell’s Living Age 177 (May 5, 1888): 302; and M. A. De Wolfe Howe, “American Bookmen. VII.—Some Humorists,” Bookman 6 (September 1897): 31. 81. See Fred W. Lorch, “Mark Twain’s Lecture Tour of 1868–1869: ‘The American Vandal Abroad,’ ” American Literature 26 (January 1955): 523. 82. On “deadpan narration” as a “hazardous gamble,” see Paul C. Rodgers Jr., “Artemus Ward and Mark Twain’s ‘Jumping Frog,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (December 1973): 277. 83. Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” pp. 201–4. 84. Marshall P. Wilder, “Foreword: Embodying a Few Remarks on the Gentle Art of

Notes to Pages 28–32  |  179

Laugh-Making,” in The Wit and Humor of America, ed. Wilder (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1911), 1:ii. 85. For a thoughtful discussion of possible antecedents of deadpan in antebellum theatrical performances, see Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Cul­ ture of Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 55–73. As Blair suggests in Native American Humor (116n.4), Shakespeare also used the technique of jesting with a “serious brow.” Quoting a passage from Henry IV, Part 2 (5.2.90–93), Blair notes that Falstaff “admirably described his method and that of the American humorist when he said: ‘O, it is much that a lie with a slight oath and a jest with a sad [i.e., serious] brow will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders.’ ” 86. Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” p. 201. For more on Twain’s methods, see Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966), especially pp. 211–36. 87. See, for example, Albert T. Davis, “A Latter-Day Type of American Humour,” Nassau Literary Magazine 49 (November 1893): 266. On this shift in styles of humor in the 1890s, see Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 120–69. See also Chapter 5 of this book. Many humorists, like “Bill” Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, continued to practice “the humorous story” in the midst of this shift, as Twain points out in “How to Tell a Story,” p. 202. 88. Sherman, “American Humorists,” p. 163. 89. One writer who did justice to Ward and humorists like him in the 1890s was Melville D. Landon (known as Eli Perkins). Landon’s magisterial Kings of the Platform and Pulpit, which draws together religious lecturers and platform humorists, explains, on p. 34, the power of Ward’s demeanor, “solemn as the grave.” 90. William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), p. 185, noted how easy it was for readers to misconstrue literary work that mingles levity and gravity. 91. “A Plea for Seriousness,” Atlantic Monthly 69 (May 1892): 625, 626. 92. Howells, “Mark Twain,” p. 783. See also Samuel S. Cox, Why We Laugh (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), pp. 24, 26–27, on humor’s cultural and historical specificity. Mary Douglas theorizes this specificity in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 90–114. 93. For a more extensive discussion of this painting, see Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of Caricature,” American Art 17 (Fall 2003): 32–51. 94. Barthes, S/Z, p. 79. Giorgio Vasari made a related claim when he criticized painters who used text in paintings as (in Meyer Schapiro’s words) “a crutch” for an art that “has not yet learned to walk alone.” Schapiro discusses Vasari’s argument in Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language (New York: Braziller, 1996), pp. 117–21. I thank Jason LaFountain for pointing me to Schapiro’s text.

180  |  Notes to Pages 32–33

95. James Jackson Jarves, “Art and Artists of America. Catalogue of the Thirty-Eighth Exhibition of the National Academy of Design. New York. 1863,” Christian Examiner 75 (July 1863): 120. 96. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 297. 97. The literature on Manet, and on this work in particular, is extensive. See especially T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985). Flatness would be crucial to Clement Greenberg’s claim that Manet was the first modernist artist. See Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957– 1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 85–93; and Fried, Manet’s Modernism, pp. 13–14. I thank Jennifer Roberts for encouraging me to consider Homer in relation to Manet. 98. See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 99. Peter Coviello, introduction to Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. xxviii–xxix. 100. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 158, notes that Lincoln’s sentences moved “naturally,” for all their density and scope. 101. Ibid., p. 148. 102. Huntington had been elected an academician in 1840. He served as president from 1862 to 1869 and again from 1877 to 1891. 103. [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair.” 104. Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth Century America,” p. 265. 105. [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair.” 106. [Cook], “Exhibition of Pictures at the Sanitary Fair,” New-York Daily Tribune, April 16, 1864. Even in the 1850s Cook was unimpressed by the big names of American art and their reputations, which always seemed to earn them a prime place in National Academy exhibitions. See [Cook], The Fine Arts, Independent 7 (May 17, 1855). 107. [Cook?], “Introductory,” New Path 1 (May 1863): 1, 3. Although unsigned, this essay has the forthright tone of Cook. Stephanic, “Clarence Cook’s Role as Art Critic,” p. 70, confirms that Cook was the “principal writer and editor” for the New Path. 108. [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair.” 109. Lionel [Clarence Cook?], “The Artists’ Fund Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition,” p. 95. 110. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design. III” (as in n. 69). 111. “A Plea for Seriousness” (as in n. 91), p. 628. The author attributes the quotation to Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859). 112. Ibid., p. 625. 113. Ibid., pp. 627, 626. 114. See [Cook], “The National Academy of Design. Forty-First Annual Exhibition,”

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New York Tribune, July 4, 1866. Giese, “Prisoners from the Front: An American History Painting?” in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, p. 66, writes that the painting “impressed everyone with its appropriateness and seriousness.” 115. For a summary of Barlow’s character and career, see Marc Simpson’s entry on the work in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 246–59. 116. Sordello [Eugene Benson], “National Academy of Design. Forty-First Annual Exhibition. First Article,” New York Evening Post, April 28, 1866. This and similar accounts are quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 247–59; and in Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:348–56. 117. “Thirty years from now, when the generation of Southerners who fought at Antietam has vanished, the group of rebel prisoners will be studied for its faithful types of a character which the South will never repeat,” a critic wrote in 1876. See Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:352. See Giese, “Winslow Homer: ‘Best Chronicler of the War,’ ” in Winslow Homer: A Symposium, ed. Cikovsky (as in n. 7), p. 26, on the work’s legibility; and Charles Colbert, “Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front,” American Art 12 (Summer 1998): 66–69, who notes this interpretive trend. 118. Cook, quoted in Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:351–52. 119. Theodore Grannis, “National Academy of Design. Third Article,” New York Commercial Advertiser, May 12, 1869. 120. For the quotation, see Goodrich and Gerdts, Record of Works, 1:361. For more on the reception of Homer’s work in this period, see Margaret C. Conrads, Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, in association with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2001). 121. See, for example, “The Two New York Exhibitions,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (June 1879): 777–78, where “Mr. Currier’s [watercolor] sketches . . . bearing the impress of extreme haste” make him “an investigator.” The review bashes Currier but praises the work of John La Farge, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent, revealing inconsistencies in criticism that declares investigative “sketchiness” alternatively a mark of laziness and of self-assured, subjective expression. 122. My reading of this painting is heavily indebted to Thomas Andrew Denenberg’s analysis of it in Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place (Portland, ME: Portland Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 15–18 and 32. 123. See note 3, above, on Homer’s “sense of the dramatic.” The Gulf Stream was described as a “caricature,” painted with “a sense of grim humor,” in “ ‘Smiling Sharks’: Unique Burlesque by Winslow Homer. Was Seen in This City. It Possesses All the Artist’s Eccentricities,” Philadelphia Item, January 6, 1907, p. 16, in the Winslow Homer Papers, Bowdoin College Archives. For a rebuttal of the Philadelphia critic’s judgment, see the clipping from New York’s American Art News, January 12, 1907, p. 4. Questioning the critic’s sarcasm, the New York writer maintained that “if Philadelphia chooses to laugh at the marine as a burlesque, New York can well afford to laugh, for ‘he who laughs last, laughs best.’ ” The Metropolitan Museum of Art had just acquired the painting.

182  |  Notes to Pages 38–42

2. Laughing with J. G. Brown, E. W. Perry, and Thomas Nast 1. S. S. Cox, “American Humor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 50 (April 1875): 690–702; Cox, “American Humor: II,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 50 (May 1875): 847–60; Cox, “Legislative Humors,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 51 (October 1875): 713–23; Cox, Why We Laugh (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876). Cox, who was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1824, had a law practice and edited the Ohio Statesman before he entered politics in his home state in 1856. He was elected to Congress, but when he failed to be reelected in 1864, Cox moved to New York City. There he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1868 and held that office, intermittently, until his death in 1889. 2. Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 127–29. 3. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Clarence Cook’s essay “The Humorous in Art,” New Path 1 (February 1864): 133–35. 4. Cox, “American Humor,” p. 697, and Why We Laugh, p. 36. 5. See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hall and Wang, 1982), especially pp. 70–100. 6. Cox, “American Humor: II,” p. 854. 7. Ibid., p. 857. 8. Cox, “Legislative Humors,” p. 716, and Why We Laugh, p. 123. 9. Cox “American Humor: II,” p. 859. 10. Ibid. 11. Henry Ward Beecher, “The Advance of a Century,” New York Tribune, July 5, 1876. Essays purporting to explain the character of “the true American” appeared regularly in these years. See, for example, D. H. Jacques, “Signs of Character: American Faces,” American Phrenological Journal 49 (January 1869): 12–13; “The Elements of Our Nationality,” Catholic World 14 (October 1871): 91–100; Titus Munson Coan, “A Nation without Neighbors,” Galaxy 19 (February 1875): 170–81. 12. Wood’s work is discussed briefly in Hermann Warner Williams Jr., Mirror to the American Past: A Survey of American Genre Painting, 1750–1900 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 159–60; and Karen M. Adams, “The Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 7 (November 1975): 58. Patricia Hills, “Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), p. 113, argues that this was a rare subject for painters of the period, who, with the exception of Wood, “ignored the subject” of “suffrage for former male slaves.” 13. See the Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., 3rd ed., 1881–83 (Hartford, CT: Press of the Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1883), p. 421; William A. Coffin, introduction to Catalogue of the Private Art Collection of Thomas B. Clarke,

Notes to Pages 44–46  |  183

New York, to be sold at absolute public sale . . . (New York: American Art Association, 1899), p. 11; and Susan R. Hull, Boy Soldiers of the Confederacy (New York: Neale Publishing, 1905), p. 54. 14. On these associations, see John Ireland and John Nichols’s discussion of William Hogarth’s Cockpit (1795) in Hogarth’s Work: With Life and Anecdotal Descriptions of His Pictures (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1883), 2:146–59. I thank Graham Boettcher for pointing me to this source. 15. Walt Whitman, “Democracy,” Galaxy 4 (December 1867): 919–33, especially 922–26. 16. See Fine Arts, “Fifty-Fourth Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of ­Design—Second Notice,” New York Herald, March 31, 1879. 17. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], The Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1876), p. 47. See also S. G. W. Benjamin, “Fifty Years of American Art,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 59 (October 1879): 683. 18. “A Painter of Street Urchins,” New York Times, August 27, 1899, p. 4, quoted in Martha Hoppin, The World of J. G. Brown (Chesterfield, MA: Chameleon Books, 2010), p. 9. This biographical information is drawn from her introduction, pp. 9–21. 19. See Hoppin, ibid., pp. 27–31, 33–36. 20. For more on this painting, see ibid., pp. 191–92. On Brown’s models, see pp. 156–60. 21. Claire Perry, Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 139. 22. Helen A. Cooper, “The Rediscovery of Joseph Decker,” American Art Journal 10 (May 1978): 63. 23. Ibid., pp. 61, 59. 24. Period critics recognized that Brown repeatedly employed this organizational trope. See “The Two New York Exhibitions,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (June 1879): 785; and Martha Hoppin, Country Paths and City Sidewalks: The Art of J. G. Brown (Springfield, MA: George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 1989), p. 22. 25. This advertisement is based on period broadsides, of which the Huntington Library’s Graphic Arts Collection contains several examples. I thank David Mihaly for making them available to me. 26. See Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), especially pp. 68–70. 27. See Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 40. 28. On laughter as mask and social disguise, see Mikita Brottman, “Risus Sardonicus: Neurotic and Pathological Laughter,” Humor 15, no. 4 (2002): 413. To be salable, depictions of boy bootblacks and newspaper vendors typically masked social realities. See Perry, Young America, pp. 112–45.

184  |  Notes to Pages 46–52

29. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 115. 30. See, for example, M.E.B., “What the Circus Did,” Wide Awake 15 (October 1882): 229. 31. John S. Dwight, “Music as a Means of Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (September 1870): 326. 32. Sarah Burns, “Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children: Sentiment and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” American Art Journal 20 (1988): 26. 33. See Patricia Hills, “Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in Picturing Nantucket: An Art History of the Island with Paintings from the Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association, ed. Michael A. Jehle (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association, 2000), pp. 35–47. 34. See H.H. “By Stage to Boston,” Our Young Folks 7 (June 1871): 338, for a literary echo of Johnson’s painting. The author of this poem, about children who similarly activate a derelict coach, ends with the author’s lamenting his inability, as an adult, to enter the child’s world. 35. “Culture and Progress at Home. The National Academy Exhibition,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (July 1871): 330. 36. See the review of P. B. Wight, National Academy of Design. Photographs of the New Building, with an Introductory Essay and Description (New York: S. P. Avery, 1866), North American Review 103 (October 1866): 586. 37. James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 51. 38. See “Mr. Bryant’s Address” in A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York. Proceedings of a meeting held at the theatre of the Union League Club, Tuesday evening, November 23, 1869 (New York: Union League Club, 1869), p. 9. 39. See Alan Wallach, “Long-Term Visions, Short-Term Failures: Art Institutions in the United States, 1800–1860,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 297– 313; Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), pp. 3–93; “Art in New York: What Has Been Accomplished within Seventy Years,” New York Evening Post, October 6, 1871; “The ‘Old Masters’ of America. Early Struggles of Art in New York. Societies, Exhibitions, and Galleries,” New York Evening Post, March 9, 1872. On the need for reform at the National Academy of Design, see “Reforms in the National Academy of Design,” New York Evening Post, September 28, 1869. 40. Wallach, “Long-Term Visions, Short-Term Failures.” See also Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins et al. (London: SAGE Publications, 1986), pp. 194–211. Wallach notes the

Notes to Pages 52–55  |  185

important exceptions of the Boston Athenaeum, Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and New York’s National Academy of Design. 41. Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” p. 55. 42. On the museum movement, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 48–71. 43. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, p. 144. 44. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Plea for Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (January 1867): 31. 45. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, p. 144. See also Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 206. 46. See Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, p. 192, for the quotation, and pp. 85–168, on the sacralization of culture. See also John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in NineteenthCentury Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), pp. 215–56. 47. “Culture and Progress at Home. The National Academy Exhibition,” pp. 329–30. 48. Cox made waves in Congress with his “flippant and unsightly levity.” See “Three Legislative Clowns,” Puck 3 (May 1, 1878): 2. For the quotation, see Cox, “Legislative Humors,” p. 714. 49. Cox, “American Humor: II,” p. 850. 50. See “American Humor: Lecture by Bret Harte, at Association Hall, Yesterday Evening,” New-York Times, January 27, 1874. 51. The International Exhibition—XI. American Art.—II,” Nation 23 (August 3, 1876): 72. 52. Titus Munson Coan, “A New Country,” Galaxy 19 (April 1875): 462–72. See also Jarves, “Museum of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America” pp. 50–51. 53. Philip Hamerton, “English and American Painting at Paris in 1878. II,” International Review (May 1879): 557, quoted in Hoppin, The World of J. G. Brown, p. 148. 54. “Well-Known Artists Tell of the Paintings That Did Most to Win Fame for Them and How They Came to Take Up Art,” New York Times, January 28, 1912. 55. “The Academy Exhibition,” New-York Times, October 29, 1882, links Brown’s art to the comic journals, however, as a way of explaining its popularity. 56. I thank Jennifer Roberts for suggesting that I consider the process of chromolithography in relation to the fragmentary logic of The True American. 57. Louis Prang, “On Theories of Chromo-Lithography,” Nation 5 (November 28, 1867): 438. 58. See Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, p. 160. 59. Cook addressed chromolithography regularly in the late 1860s, when he entered into a public debate with Prang. See [Clarence Cook], “Chromo-Lithography,” New York Tribune, May 25, 1866; [Cook], Fine Arts, New York Tribune, November 20, 1866; L. Prang and Co., “To the Editor,” New York Tribune, December 1, 1866; [Cook], Fine Arts, “Mr. Prang’s Defense,” New York Tribune, December 7, 1866; [Cook], Fine Arts. “Mr. Prang’s

186  |  Notes to Pages 55–59

Recent Chromos,” New York Tribune, July 21, 1868; and [Cook], Fine Arts. “Chromo-Lithography,” New York Tribune, August 8, 1868. Michael Clapper, “ ‘I Was Once a Barefoot Boy!’: Cutural Tensions in a Popular Chromo,” American Art 16 (Summer 2002): 16–39, provides a useful overview of the debate and its stakes. 60. James Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit (New York: Virtue and Yorston, 1871), p. 395, made this point. 61. See Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America, Chromolithography, 1840–1900 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1985), p. 111; and excerpts from the press relating to Sunset in Prang’s Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art 1 (September 1868): 3, and (April 1869): 6. 62. See E. L. Godkin, “Autotypes and Oleographs,” Nation 11 (November 10, 1870): 317–18. 63. See “Perry (E. W.), New York” and “Bummers,” Copyright Records General Index, 1870–1897, at the Library of Congress. The painting lacks the finish of his other paintings, perhaps because it was designed for reproduction. Indeed, this is the only painting for which Perry filed for copyright that is categorized in the Copyright Index as “Design” instead of “Painting.” The monogram signature at the bottom left of the painting, unusual for the artist, may have been his way of designating this work for a wider market. The monogram helps to explain why the attribution of the work, discovered, in 1944, along with other paintings and letters of Perry’s, has seemed uncertain. The copyright record, which seems not to have been consulted until now, should put this speculation to rest. Natalie Spassky, with Linda Bantel, Doreen Bolger Burke, Meg Perlman, and Amy L. Walsh, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Kathleen Luhrs (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 2:346–48, explores the attribution problems the painting has presented. See also Linda Mary Jones Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.: A Biography and Analysis of His Thematic and Stylistic Development,” M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1981, pp. 95–96, who was less hesitant to attribute the painting to Perry. 64. Perry “occupies a position very nearly at the head of our genre painters,” notes the article “American Painters—E. Wood Perry,” Art Journal 1 (1875): 216. For biographical information on the artist, see Bartlett Cowdrey, “The Discovery of Enoch Wood Perry,” Old Print Shop Portfolio 4 (April 1945): 171–81. 65. For the artists’ tenancy, see Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 1997), pp. 133–34. For reports of Homer and Perry’s trips together, see Art Notes, New York Evening Post, July 8, 1872; Art Notes, New York Evening Post, July 25, 1874; Art Notes, New York Evening Post, July 28, 1875; Art and Artists, Boston Daily Evening Transcript, October 5, 1875; Fine Arts, New York Evening Post, August 28, 1876. 66. For the quotation from Tuckerman and a discussion of the Düsseldorf aesthetic, see Marzio, Democratic Art, pp. 46–48. The firm did not last long. Herman Bencke, after partnering with Charles Armstrong in the late 1860s and running his own firm for a few

Notes to Page 59  |  187

years, worked with Harshaw Scott but retired from the chromolithography business in the late 1880s, focusing his energies on the trade of sugar and cotton until his death, in 1898. See Marzio, pp. 45–46; and Jay T. Last, The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, CA: Hillcrest Press, 2005), p. 165. 67. See Gibbs, “Enoch Wood Perry, Jr.: A Biography and Analysis of His Thematic and Stylistic Development,” pp. 14–48, on the artist’s European training and travels before he established himself in New York. For the quotation, see Fine Arts, “Domestic Notes,” New York World, November 26, 1875. 68. Although Williams, Mirror to the American Past, p. 201, dates the painting circa 1875, as does Marzio, Democratic Art, p. 296, Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 590–92, dates it circa 1860, and the Met, which has owned the painting since 1955, to the 1850s. Lynne Z. Bassett, a costume specialist at the Connecticut Historical Society, suggested to me that the figures’ clothing—high-waisted pants, square-toed shoes, and tieback vests—dates from midcentury. The Met’s dating also takes account of the title of the newspaper the work features, which the museum, in its curatorial files and in Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, 2:346–48, links to one published in Lexington, Kentucky, in the mid-1840s, which, as Boime writes, 657n.115, “represented a secret anti-Catholic order.” The painting may therefore “be an attack on the kind of American who read this paper,” he concludes. Several other newspapers with this title, however, appeared in various cities during the nineteenth century. I argue that reading the work for explicit signs of political affiliation conflicts with its spirit of irresolution. This composition makes a game of interpretation to satirize the source hunting that mid-nineteenth-century genre painting typically rewards. 69. Strahan [Shinn], Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition, p. 110. As discussed in Chapter 1, more elusive approaches were beginning to define painting in New York in these years. See Saul E. Zalesch, “Competition and Conflict in the New York Art World, 1874–1879,” Winterthur Portfolio 29 (Summer–Autumn 1994): 106. This approach was institutionalized in 1877 by the American Art Association (from 1878 the Society of American Artists). See G. W. Sheldon, “A New Departure in American Art,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (April 1878): 764–68. 70. E. L. Godkin, “Chromo-Civilization,” Nation 19 (September 24, 1874): 201–2. See also Marzio, Democratic Art, pp. 1–2. For the last quote, see Fine Arts, “Chromo-lithographs, American, English, and French,” Nation 5 (October 31, 1867): 359. 71. For a more positive account, see Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit, pp. 383–403; and Frederick Douglass on the change chromolithography effected in the African American home, quoted in Marzio, Democratic Art, p. 104. See also J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 116–25, who complicates the notion that the crusade against chromos represents “a straightforward conservatism.”

188  |  Notes to Pages 60–61

72. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49. 73. T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9 (September 1982): 147, 145. 74. Marzio, Democratic Art, pp. 45 and 236n.30, writes that the original title was “scratched out and replaced.” “ ‘The Bummers,’ ” he writes, “is lettered by hand directly over the original title.” Close inspection and conservation work, generously performed on my behalf by the staff of the National Museum of American History, support this claim. 75. See McLoughlin Brothers, New York, Bummer, comic valentine, nineteenth century, American Antiquarian Society; “Tramps,” Old and New 11 (April 1875): 503–4; and “The Beauty of Laziness,” Puck 3 (May 1, 1878): 3. 76. See Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 127–29; and Frank Weitenkampf, “The Comic Paper and the Daily Press,” in American Graphic Art, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 228–50. For more on Puck and Judge, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (1865–1885) (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 520–32, 552–56. For Life, see vol. 4 (1885–1905), pp. 556–68. 77. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: J. and H. G. Langley, 1840), pp. 119–20. 78. Boime, Couture and the Eclectic Vision, p. 591, suggests that the painting depicts “a mindless creature,” to be “snickered at from a middle-class perspective.” 79. Bryan J. Wolf, “All the World’s a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44 (Winter 1984): 328–37. 80. Even the game’s other “American” representative—the “Indian” chief—belonged to the past, according to period conceptions of the Native American as vanishing American. 81. Beecher, “The Advance of a Century” (as in n. 11). 82. See Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 134–35. “Characteristics of the International Fair,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (July 1876): 85–91, demonstrated the national change of heart about Grant. On the Beecher scandal, see Richard Wightman Fox, “Intimacy on Trial: Cultural Meanings of the Beecher-Tilton Affair,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 103–32. 83. Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 4. 84. See Dorothy Hesselman, “Talking It Over: A Patriotic Genre Painting by Enoch Wood Perry,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 33 (1998): 297–303. 85. See Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 101–56, and, for the quotations, pp. 128, 130–31.

Notes to Pages 61–66  |  189

86. Ibid., pp. 134–35. 87. Boime, Couture and the Eclectic Vision, p. 590, suggests that Perry’s work “reflects his French master’s [Couture’s] taste for social satire.” 88. See Parton, Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity, and Public Spirit, pp. 390–95, for an explanation of the “long, delicate, and expensive” process of producing a chromolithograph. 89. See Elliot H. Goodwin’s entries on “Tammany” and “William Marcy Tweed” in Cyclopedia of American Government, ed. Andrew C. McLaughlin and Albert Bushnell Hart (New York: D. Appleton, 1914), 3: 467–69 and 582–83. See also Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 177–82. 90. For the quotation, see “Congress and Public Opinion,” Harper’s Weekly 21 (December 15, 1877): 978; and on Cox, see “Forgiving, Not Forgetting,” Harper’s Weekly 16 (September 28, 1872): 747. Harper’s Weekly repeatedly called attention to Cox’s failure to support Lincoln during the Civil War and to his reputed ties to Tammany as a Democratic congressman in New York. As a Copperhead, or Peace Democrat, when he served as a representative for his home state of Ohio in the sixties, Cox had opposed the war and reportedly argued that “Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln ought to be brought to the same block together.” For a literary account of the new breed of corruptible leader, see J. W. DeForest’s “Honest John Vane,” Atlantic Monthly 32 (July–November 1873): 66–76, 150–64, 285–96, 438–47, and 574–90. 91. Johnson was the villain in Nast’s Grand Caricaturama, a group of thirty-three large-scale paintings, shown in New York in December 1867 and then in Boston. When Johnson took office after Lincoln’s assassination, he infuriated Radical Republicans like Nast for treating the Southern states leniently, readmitting them to the Union during Reconstruction without enforcing civil rights. Nast never forgave Johnson for vetoing the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. (Congress overrode the veto.) 92. See Wai Chee Dimock, “Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially pp. 60, 65. 93. In this transposition, Nast is clearly aware of Charles Philipon’s famous renditions of Louis-Philippe (king of France from 1830 to 1848) as a pear, or “fat-head,” in a loose idiomatic translation. See Albert Boime, “Thomas Nast and French Art,” American Art Journal 4 (Spring 1972): 43–65. 94. E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris, Caricature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1940), p. 14. 95. The image critiques Grant’s loyalty to Alexander R. Shepherd, governor of Washington, DC, even after Shepherd, like Tweed, was revealed to have ruled by corrupt contracts and bribery. See the cover for Harper’s Weekly 18 (July 18, 1874). For an insightful treatment of Nast’s Grant imagery, see Wendy Wick Reaves, “Thomas Nast and the President,” American Art Journal 19 (1987): 60–71. 96. See “A Burden He Has to Shoulder,” cover, Harper’s Weekly 18 (October 24, 1874). 97. Nast, quoted in an interview, “Th. Nast’s Pen,” Omaha Daily World, November 26,

190  |  Notes to Pages 66–69

1887, collected as a clipping in Nast’s scrapbooks, housed in the Print Collection of the New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL). The library has four scrapbooks that cover most of Nast’s career. The Downs Collection at Winterthur also holds two scrapbooks of clippings and ephemera dating from 1889 to 1897. 98. See “Out of Time,” Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman, January 21, 1875(?), and an unattributed clipping dated October 25, 1874, in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. 99. See the Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 1, 1875, a piece reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer, in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. 100. “Men of the Day—No. 1,” Fifth Avenue Journal (1872), in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. 101. In Harper’s Weekly 16, from 1872, see “Old Honesty,” July 20, p. 573; “The DeathBed Marriage,” July 27, p. 584; “Baltimore 1861–1872,” August 3, p. 596; “Diogenes Has Found the Honest Man,” August 3, p. 605; “Romish Politics—Any Thing to Beat Grant,” August 17, p. 637; “ ‘Satan, Don’t Get Thee behind Me!’—Any Thing to Get Possession,” August 17, pp. 640–41; “It Is Only a Truce to Regain Power (‘Playing Possum’),” August 24, p. 652; “The Next in Order—Any Thing! Oh, Any Thing!” September 14, cover; “Circumstances Alter Cases,” September 28, cover; “Let Us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm,” September 21, p. 732; “More Secession Conspiracy,” October 12, cover; “Let Us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm,” October 19, p. 804; “Clasping Hands over the Bloodless (Sar)c(h)asm,” November 23, p. 912. For a discussion of the 1872 election, see William Gillette, “Election of 1872,” in History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2: 1848–1896, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), pp. 1303–330. 102. See Thomas Nast St. Hill, Thomas Nast: Cartoons and Illustrations (New York: Dover, 1975), pp. 30–33; and “Nast. Pen and Pencil. Flying Sketches by the Way,” Saint Louis Republican, March 21, 1874, in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. See also Baird Jarman, “The Graphic Art of Thomas Nast: Politics and Propriety in Postbellum Publishing,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 20 (2010): 156–89, on Nast’s “no-holds-barred” treatment of figures like Greeley in the context of a journalistic shift toward civility. 103. “Gems of the N.A.D. [Illustrated with Sketches by Our Special Artist, after the Original Masters],” Puck 17 (April 15, 1885): 106. 104. “Puck Sends His Compliments to Mr. Nast Once More!” Puck 5 (June 4, 1879): 194. 105. “Men of the Hour. IV. Th. Nast, or, the American Doré,” Arcadian (probably 1870s), in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. 106. See the clipping from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 28, 1876, in Nast’s scrapbooks, NYPL. For a different view of Nast, one stressing his “versatility of invention,” see S. S. Conant, “Progress of the Fine Arts,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 52 (April 1876): 704. William Murrell, A History of American Graphic Humor, vol. 2, 1865–1938 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 59, notes that Nast’s “device of repeating or returning to the charge with the same cartoon symbol was one of [his] most successful methods of pressing his attacks home.”

Notes to Pages 69–73  |  191

107. “Puck Sends His Compliments to Mr. Nast Once More!” 108. See Weitenkampf, American Graphic Art, p. 230; Murrell, History of American Graphic Humor, 2:18–21, 43–63; Mary Flynn, “Thomas Nast: Crusading Cartoonist,” Connoisseur 208 (November 1981): 235–37; and Hills, “Cultural Racism” in Johnston, Seeing High and Low. Hills’s investigation is especially interesting because it grapples with the complications of Nast’s work and the challenges it poses to the twenty-firstcentury viewer. Other nuanced examinations of Nast’s work include Sarah Burns, “Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard, and the Bears of Wall Street,” American Art Journal 30 (1999): 8–35; Ross Barrett, “On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle Class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots,” Prospects 29 (2005): 25–55; and Jarman, “Graphic Art of Thomas Nast.” 109. See Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, pp. 181–82; and, for the cartoon, which Harper’s Weekly reprinted after Tweed’s capture, see the supplement of October 7, 1876, p. 821. 110. See the review of James Parton, Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), in New Publications, New-York Times, October 28, 1877. 111. “Mr. Thomas Nast,” New-York Times, March 20, 1872. 112. Nast, quoted in Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, p. 76. 113. See Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of Caricature,” American Art 17 (Fall 2003): 32–51. 114. See Fine Arts, Putnam’s Magazine 1 (March 1868): 388; “The Academy of De­sign. Genre Paintings in the Fifty-Second Annual Exhibition,” New York Evening Post, May 12, 1877; and “E. Wood Perry,” in American Art and American Art Collections, ed. Walter Montgomery (Boston: E. W. Walker, 1889), 2:585–86. 115. Coan, “A New Country,” p. 463; Jacques, “Signs of Character,” p. 12.

3. William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum 1. [Clarence Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair,” New-York Daily Tribune, April 9, 1864. 2. [Clarence Cook], “National Academy of Design. The Thirty-Ninth Exhibition,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 4, 1864. 3. [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair.” This anxiety is palpable in W. H. Beard, “Art Criticism,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 21, 1864. 4. The most authoritative source on Beard’s career is William H. Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard: Animals in Fantasy (New York: Alexander Gallery, 1981). 5. See James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea: Part Second of Confessions of an Inquirer (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1864), pp. 221–22; Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1867), pp. 498–501; G. W. Sheldon, American Painters

192  |  Notes to Pages 73–78

(New York: D. Appleton, 1879), pp. 56–60; S. G. W. Benjamin, “Fifty Years of American Art, 1828–1878,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 59 (September 1879): 491–92; S. G. W. Ben­ jamin, Art in America: A Critical and Historical Sketch (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1880), pp. 86–87; S. G. W. Benjamin, “An American Humorist in Paint. William H. Beard, N.A.” Magazine of Art 5 (1882): 14–19; S. G. W. Benjamin, “William H. Beard, N.A.” in Wil­ frid Meynell, Some Modern Artists and Their Work (London: Cassell, 1883), pp. 191–95. 6. See Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 9, on Beard’s clientele. See also Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (1894 [7th ed.]; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1:43–44. 7. “Art in New York,” Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, January 24, 1866. 8. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 499. See also Sheldon, American Painters, p. 58. On Beard’s ambitions, see also Art Notes, New York Daily Graphic, April 27, 1873. 9. This painting is reproduced in Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 41, fig. 24. 10. “Art in New York” (as in n. 7). 11. See Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 12. See Jay E. Cantor, “The Museum in the Park,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (April 1968): 333–40. 13. See “Death of Henry Keep,” New-York Times, July 31, 1869. According to J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871): 412, “Several years ago the late Mr. Henry Keep purposed devoting some of his wealth to the foundation of an Art Gallery, and it was for him that Mr. Beard first sketched the remarkable plans which we have chosen to illustrate this article.” 14. See “Designs for an Art Museum,” New York Tribune, March 30, 1871 (the newspaper had been the New-York Daily Tribune until April 1866); and Fine Arts, “Mr. Church’s ‘Jerusalem’—Mr. Boughton’s ‘Return of the Mayflower’—Mr. Beard’s Designs for the Portals of an Art Museum,” New-York Times, April 2, 1871. 15. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” p. 413. See also Cantor, “The Museum in the Park,” p. 340, who suggests that by the time Beard published his designs, the trustees of both museums had “already decided that the needs of their institutions were so distinct as to require separate structures.” 16. Robert McCracken Peck, “The Museum That Never Was,” Natural History 103 (July 1994): 65–66, argues that Keep’s death, along with William Tweed’s rise to power, made Beard’s plan unachievable. When the Tweed Ring took control of Central Park in 1869 and changed the name of the Board of the Commissioners of the Central Park to the Department of Public Parks, it halted or changed the building projects of the former administration and promoted projects in its own interest. Because Beard’s designs are never mentioned in the meeting minutes or annual reports of the Central Park commission, we can only speculate whether the commissioners ever considered them seriously—

Notes to Pages 78–79  |  193

before, during, or after the Tweed era. The annual reports and minutes of meetings held by the boards of the Central Park commissioners and the Department of Public Parks commissioners are housed in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Library. I am grateful to Kaitilin Griffin, Parks’ Librarian, for making these documents available. 17. For the phrase “Great Public Museum,” see [Clarence Cook], Table Talk, Putnam’s Magazine 3 (March 1869): 383. For a broad overview of the initiatives and attempts of various constituencies to shape the art world in this period, see J. M. Mancini, PreModernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 45–97. 18. “Design for an Art-Institute,” Appletons’ Journal 2 (November 27, 1869): 460. See also “A Lost Chance for Art,” Appletons’ Journal (October 23, 1869): 306; Fine Arts, NewYork Times, October 24, 1869. 19. See A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York. Proceedings of a meeting held at the theatre of the Union League Club, Tuesday evening, November 23, 1869 (New York: Union League Club, 1869). 20. See The Industrial Exhibition Company, of New York, Chartered by a Special Act of the Legislature of New York (New York: Industrial Exhibition Company, 1872); “Letter from J. J. Jarves—How an Art Museum Should Be Established . . . ,” New York Tribune, February 11, 1871; “A World’s Fair. Proposed Permanent Exhibition,” New-York Times, September 28, 1872; and “Local Miscellany. The Industrial Exhibition. A Long-Lived Swindle in Five Different Shapes . . . ,” New-York Times, April 10, 1876. 21. “Jarves—How an Art Museum Should Be Established.” 22. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” p. 413. See also Fine Arts, “Mr. Beard’s Designs for the Portals of an Art Museum” (as in n. 14). 23. See Sheldon, American Painters, p. 58; and W. H. Beard, “Grant’s Memorial: What Shall It Be?” North American Review 141 (September 1885): 278–81. 24. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” pp. 413, 415. He writes, on p. 415, that Beard’s complex would provide “specimens of the successive schools [of sculpture], from the representation of natural objects up to the realization of ideal forms, and the embodiment in marble of the purest poetic conceptions.” 25. See the pamphlets Two Letters to the President on Recent Changes and Projected Changes in the Central Park, by the Landscape Architects (New York, 1872), p. 14; and the Plan for Central Park (March 31, 1858), p. 18. See also Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, p. 139. 26. “Beard’s Plan for an Entrance to a National Art Gallery,” Art Review 1 (May 1871): 8, describes this figure as a “former combatant of progress [who] sits peacefully, in stone, with a benevolent expression grown into his face.” 27. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” p. 413. Beard imagined the museum as a domed structure. See p. 412 of Hassard; and Fine Arts, “Mr. Beard’s Designs for the Portals of an Art Museum” (as in n. 14).

194  |  Notes to Pages 79–81

28. See, for example, Alison Sky and Michelle Stone, Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age (New York: McGrawHill, 1976), pp. 36–37; Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 19; Robert McCracken Peck, “William Holbrook Beard (1824–1900),” Antiques 146 (November 1994): 49–701. See also Peck’s “Museum That Never Was,” pp. 62–67. Cantor, “Museum in the Park,” p. 340, sees Beard’s design as a “rather fanciful project,” however. 29. See Brander Matthews, “The Penalty of Humor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 92 (May 1896): 897–901. 30. See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 140–81, and my discussion of this movement of cultural uplift in Chapter 2. 31. See Branden W. Joseph, “What Is a Minor History?” in Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008), especially pp. 48–53, on how the minor figure pressures, even as it extends, the territory of the major. I thank Terri Weissman for pointing me to Joseph’s text. 32. Neil Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14 (Winter 1962): 562. 33. See “Remarks of Rev. Dr. Thompson,” in A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (as in n. 19), pp. 20–21; and “A National Art Institution. Deliberations of the Union League Club,” New York Evening Post, October 21, 1869. 34. See “Prof. Comfort’s Address” and “Mr. Bryant’s Address,” both in A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York, pp. 13, 9. 35. Address of the Officers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the People of New York (New York: Francis and Loutrel, 1871), pp. 3–4. 36. Rosenzweig and Blackmar make this point in The Park and the People, pp. 352–53, when writing about the American Museum of Natural History, which, unlike the Met, was described in the language also used to characterize Barnum’s “American Museum.” “Most Americans . . . associate museums with chaotic gatherings of curiosities and monstrosities . . . united in dramatic entertainments, such as Barnum’s,” according to “Jarves—How an Art Museum Should Be Established.” 37. See Horace William Shafer Cleveland and Robert Morris Copeland, A Few Words on the Central Park (Boston, 1856), p. 5. 38. “If the ideas of the Committee appear at a first view to be on too large a scale, and to involve the expenditure for which the public mind is unprepared,” reads the Report of the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the General Committee (New York: Union Printing House, 1870), p. 2, “they would refer to the analogous case of the Central Park.” This report and other ephemera related to the organization and early years of the museum are housed in chronologically organized albums of pamphlets at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library (hereafter TJWL). I thank Linda Seckelson for her assistance with this material. 39. See Report of the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 12.

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40. See Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Dutton, 1970), pp. 36–37; “A Review of Fifty Years’ Development, 1870–1920,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 15 (May 1920): 101–6; and “Metropolitan Museum of Art” in Europe (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 1872), p. 2, TJWL, which mentions this “conquest.” 41. Joseph Choate, quoted in Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, pp. 36–37. 42. “Art Collections. The Monster Museum of New-York. Now Is the Time to Establish It—the Advantages to Accrue,” New York Tribune, February 11, 1871. 43. See Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 37, and, for a related situation about 1900, when J. P. Morgan held sway, pp. 95–99. 44. Ibid., p. 37. 45. See “The Need of Art,” reprinted from the Home Journal in A Metropolitan ArtMuseum in the City of New York, pp. 36–38. 46. “Pictures in New York,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, July 30, 1888. See also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, pp. 99–101; and Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contra­ diction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 50–51. 47. The quoted phrases are drawn from a piece published in the Indepéndance Belge (Brussels) and reprinted as “The New York Museum of Art,” New York Evening Post, November 13, 1871. See also James Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art, Artists, and Amateurs in America,” Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 51. 48. See “Museums as a Means of Instruction,” Appletons’ Journal 3 (January 15, 1870): 80. 49. See Charles Willson Peale’s Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806–8, Maryland Historical Society, and The Artist in His Museum, 1822, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On Peale’s museum and the place of the mastodon skeleton in it, see Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” Prospects 6 (1981): 139–85. 50. See Bayard Taylor, Colorado: A Summer Trip, ed. William W. Savage Jr. and James H. Lazalier (1867; reprint, Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1989), p. 63. 51. See Peck, “The Museum That Never Was,” p. 63, and Peck, “William Holbrook Beard,” 701n.12. 52. Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 19, suggests a relationship between Beard’s gatekeepers and the animals guarding the tombs of the Ming emperors. There are many related examples. 53. “Beard’s Plan for an Entrance to a National Art Gallery,” p. 8 (as in n. 26), describes this figure as “the eldest of the cat family, an immense tiger.” 54. The ponderous animal had been an agent of humor before. See Mark Twain, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1852–1890 (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 171–77. 55. See Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” p. 413. 56. “Designs for an Art Museum” (as in n. 14). Although Cook was the primary art

196  |  Notes to Pages 83–86

critic for the New York Tribune, he is not the author of this piece. See Jo Ann W. Weiss’s bibliography of Cook’s journal and newspaper contributions in “Clarence Cook: His Critical Writings,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977, pp. 289–367. See also Fine Arts, “Mr. Beard’s Designs for the Portals of an Art Museum” (as in n. 14). 57. “Beard’s Plan for an Entrance to a National Art Gallery” (as in n. 26). 58. “Even when the subject is of a serious cast, and the feeling it naturally awakens is of a thoughtful character, he still manages to introduce into it a touch of grave, quaint humor, which, far from violating good taste or jarring the sensibilities by its seeming incongruousness, harmonizes, grotesquely it may be, and gives, by contrast, additional strength to the motive of the picture,” Tuckerman argued in Book of the Artists, p. 500. “The art of introducing a comic vein, where we should least expect to find it, either in a picture or a poem, and that, too, without producing a discordant effect, is one which few possess, and can only be successful when no natural law is violated, and its appropriateness is patent to all.” 59. V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 2. 60. See Walter Blair, “Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor,” American Literature 2 (November 1930): 236–47; p. 243 for the quotation. 61. Ibid. 62. Mark Twain, The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 468–69. 63. Twain, quoted in Pascal Covici Jr., Mark Twain’s Humor: The Image of a World (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), p. 145. The exchange is also reproduced, in full, in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, pp. 468–71. 64. Mark Twain, “The Petrified Man” (October 4, 1862), in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1852–1890, p. 19. I thank Bruce Michelson for reminding me of this piece; see his analysis of it in Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 14–18. For one of the period’s legendary subterranean hoaxes, see “The Cardiff Giant,” Harper’s Weekly 13 (December 4, 1869): 776. On subterranean exploration in these years, see W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 124–35. 65. Sheldon, American Painters, p. 58. 66. See Bertha Harris Wiles, “The Grotto,” in The Fountains of Florentine Sculptors and Their Followers from Donatello to Bernini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 74–79. I thank Tim Barringer for suggesting that I consider ancient grottoes in relation to Beard’s project. 67. Naomi Miller, “Domain of Illusion: The Grotto in France” in FONS SAPIENTIAE: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, no. 5 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978), p. 183.

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68. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 23, has argued that because art collectors often displayed the sacred and secular side by side in their homes, nineteenthcentury Americans “saw no disturbing irony in the juxtaposition of sacred and secular scenes.” It is worth attending to the artist’s scrambling of sacred and secular iconography here, however, given that critics like Cook pinned Beard’s effrontery to his humorous exploration of pagan themes. 69. Jarves, Art-Idea, p. 267. 70. See [Clarence Cook], “Mr. Hunt’s Designs for the Gates of the Central Park,” NewYork Daily Tribune, August 2, 1865; and Francis R. Kowsky, “The Central Park Gateways: Harbingers of French Urbanism Confront the American Landscape Tradition,” in The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt, ed. Susan R. Stein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 79–89. 71. See Kowksy, “Central Park Gateways,” p. 84. 72. See [Cook], “Mr. Hunt’s Designs for the Gates of the Central Park.” Cook again took up the issue of Hunt’s gates in A Description of the New York Central Park (1869; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), pp. 155–59. Although the park was open to all, its planners’ ideas of what constituted “proper” behavior within it led to restrictions that many critics and cartoonists found elitist. See Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, pp. 211–59. 73. See A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (as in n. 19), p. 28. 74. See Subscriptions to the Fund of 250,000 Dollars, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 17, 1871), and the letter of April 20, 1872, signed by John Taylor Johnston, both in TJWL. 75. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2003), p. 183. 76. Ibid., p. 170. 77. Ibid., pp. 206–7. Bruce Michelson discusses this passage in Mark Twain on the Loose, pp. 52–53. 78. For Beard’s experiences abroad, see Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, pp. 7–8. 79. See “W. H. Beard’s Favorite. One of Titian’s Masterpieces the Nearest Approach to the Ideal,” New York Mail and Express, April 28, 1894. Beard may have seen the painting in Venice’s church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo before the painting was destroyed by fire, in 1867. 80. See Beard’s Domestic Squabble (1857), a revision of The Cat’s Paw (1824), by Land­ seer. For period comparisons of his works to those of Landseer, see “The Bear Dance,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 4, 1866; “The Academy of Design,” New York Evening Post, May 19, 1877; and Sheldon, American Painters, pp. 59–60. 81. W. H. Beard, “The Oldest Institution in the World,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 62 (December 1880): 46, 48. 82. Jarves, Art-Idea, p. 221. See also Beard, “Art Criticism” (as in n. 3), where the artist

198  |  Notes to Pages 88–91

writes of using animals to exhibit the “vices of man”; and [Cook], “National Academy of Design. The Thirty-Ninth Exhibition” (as in n. 2), which acknowledges that Beard specialized in “the caricaturing of men under the forms of animals.” See also Sarah Burns, “Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard, and the Bears of Wall Street,” American Art Journal 30 (1999): 8–35. 83. “Art in New York” (as in n. 7). This is the reporter’s paraphrase of Beard’s view. 84. Beard, “Art Criticism” (as in n. 3). 85. See [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair” (as in n. 1); and Beard, “Art Criticism.” 86. See “Art in New York”; and Beard, “Art Criticism.” 87. [Cook], “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair.” 88. On the professionalization of art criticism in these years, see Mancini, Pre-Modernism, pp. 99–131. 89. Twain, similarly irritated by his critics, got his revenge by burlesquing a dour English review of The Innocents Abroad and then exposing as idiots the critics who quoted it, revealing that he himself had written it. See “An Entertaining Article,” burlesquing a review supposedly printed in the London Saturday Review, October 8, 1870, that appeared in the Buffalo Express, December 3, 1870, and in the Galaxy (December 1870); and “A Sad, Sad Business,” in which Twain exposes the hoax, in the Buffalo Express, December 24, 1870. Both are reprinted in Mark Twain at the “Buffalo Express”: Articles and Sketches by America’s Favorite Humorist, ed. Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 262–66, 277–79. 90. Cook, in his satire of obsequious and insincere art criticism, acknowledged the critic’s power and his ability to shape the market for an artist’s work. See Fine Arts, New York Tribune, July 11, 1867. 91. See Beard, “Art Criticism”; George William Curtis, “Art-Criticism,” Harper’s Weekly 8 (April 30, 1864): 274–75; and Curtis, “Art-Criticism,” Harper’s Weekly 8 (June 4, 1864): 354–55. For more on this exchange, see Chapter 1. Cook would be kinder to Beard in later reviews. 92. Cook was a strong voice in the controversy over the Met’s acquisition of Cypriote antiquities in the 1880s, for example, and the alterations to those works effected by the museum’s director Luigi P. di Cesnola, the man who had undertaken the excavations. See Mancini, Pre-Modernism, pp. 125–31. On Cook’s criticism of the Met’s policies, see also Jo Ann W. Weiss, “Clarence Cook: His Critical Writings,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977, pp. 171–90. 93. See Weiss, “Clarence Cook,” pp. 29–32; and Barbara Jean Stephanic, “Clarence Cook’s Role as Art Critic, Advocate for Professionalism, Educator, and Arbiter of Taste in America,” Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1997, pp. 129–93. 94. For an incomplete list of artists in attendance at the Union League meeting, see “The Metropolitan Art Museum. Enthusiastic Meeting at the Union League Club House,” New York Evening Post, November 24, 1869.

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95. According to G. P. Putnam’s “Report of the Art Committee of the Union League Club,” “To place the sole control of such efforts [to organize a museum] in the hands of any body of artists alone, or even in the National Academy, might not be wise.” See A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (as in n. 19), p. 5. See also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, pp. 295–97, for the tensions between New York artists and the museum’s organizers. The Hearn Fund, given to the museum in 1906 by the department store owner George A. Hearn to purchase the works of “living” American artists, would shift the focus for a time to contemporary art. 96. See Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 35. William J. Hoppin, in a letter read at the Union League meeting—see A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York, p. 29—likewise suggests that “we should try to procure a complete series of specimens of the works of our American artists—of all those who have been noticed by our friend Tuckerman.” He was referring to H. T. Tuckerman’s 1867 Book of the Artists, which, incidentally, includes Beard. On the belief that a collection of old masterworks would create a foundation for art in the United States, see National Museum of Art. Report to the Executive Committee, February 14, 1870 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870), p. 4, TJWL. 97. Quoted in Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 42. 98. These exhibitions largely favored European works, however. See Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 46. The owner of Beard’s Pets on a Spree, B. F. Carver, submitted the painting to the loan exhibitions of September 1874, December 1874, and May 1875. See the Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 1874); Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Statuary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 1874); and Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Statuary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 1875). See also the Catalogue of the New York Centennial Loan Exhibition of Paintings Selected from the Private Art Galleries (1876; held at the National Academy of Design and at the Met), nos. 271 (Beard’s “Oh, My!” from the collection of Mr. D. H. McAlpine) and 282 (Beard’s Stag from the collection of Dr. F. N. Otis); Loan Collection of Paintings, in the West and East Galleries (April to October 1880), no. 57 (Beard’s Wreckers, lent by Mrs. Hopkins); Loan Collection of Paintings and Sculpture, in the West Galleries and the Grand Hall (November 1882 to April 1883), no. 75 (Beard’s Bears in a Watermelon Patch, lent by Dr. F. N. Otis). 99. Wm. H. Goodyear, “The Metropolitan Museum,” Independent 25 (June 26, 1873). 100. I thank Elizabeth Athens, who generously provided this information. The Met owns one 39⁄16 by 41 ⁄ 8 –inch Beard drawing, however, Clam Chowder Picnic, in the McGuire Scrapbook, given to the museum by James C. McGuire in 1926. 101. See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 3. I thank Sarah Burns for directing me to Allen’s text. 102. See, for example, Richard Grant White, “Age of Burlesque,” Galaxy 8 (August 1869): 256–67; and William Dean Howells, “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly 23 (May 1869): 635–44.

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103. See Table Talk, Appletons’ Journal 1 (July 3, 1869): 440, quoted in Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 136. 104. See White, “Age of Burlesque,” p. 256. 105. See ibid.; and Howells, “New Taste in Theatricals,” p. 637. 106. Theatrical. “The Burlesque Madness,” New-York Times, February 5, 1869. 107. See Allen, Horrible Prettiness, pp. 133–35. 108. Examples include the Currier and Ives chromolithographic card “A Bare Chance” (1879), in the Graphic Arts Collection at Winterthur; “Encounter with a Bear,” in Hunters and Trappers, Their Perils and Adventures (New York: Lewis Colby, 1853), pp. 42–43; and George D. Brewerton, “How the Bear Hunted Me,” Our Young Folks 6 (September 1870): 544–50. 109. Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York: Selmar Hess, 1888), 3:265–66. 110. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, p. 29. 111. “William H. Beard Dead. He Was a Well-Known Painter of Humorous Pictures of Animals,” New York Times, February 21, 1900. On drag, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 223–42. I thank Irene Small for nudging me to develop this argument. 112. Jarves, Art-Idea, p. 221; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 90–108. See also David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 441–66. 113. “The Debasement of Humor,” Current Literature 9 (January 1892): 4, 3. 114. Noël Carroll, “Horror and Humor,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (Spring 1999): 145–60. The quotations are from pp. 156, 145, 154. 115. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, p. 145. I thank Sarah Burns for suggesting how this costume resembles the Dolly Varden getup featured in Dickens and popular in the late 1860s and early 1870s. 116. Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr, 1869), p. 359. See also Description of a Plan for the Improvement of the Central Park (New York: John F. Trow, 1858), pp. 10–11. 117. This opposition appeared in “The Central Park—How It Looks Now,” New-York Times, March 5, 1856, and is noted in Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, p. 63. See pp. 63–91 for more on the communities displaced by the park. 118. Smith, Sunshine and Shadow, p. 366. 119. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Comic” (1843), in Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8 of The Complete Works, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886), pp. 151–66. 120. I thank the architectural historian Sarah Dreller, a participant in the Newberry Library’s Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture, for drawing my attention to the nonsensical arrangement of the space. 121. Peter Messent, Mark Twain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 24. The long

Notes to Pages 93–99  |  201

interlude extolling the wonders of American democratic society in chapter 26 of The Innocents Abroad most clearly demonstrates the anxiety about cultural inferiority that undergirds the book. 122. On carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and, for a visual analysis, see David R. Smith, “Inversion, Revolution, and the Carnivalesque in Rembrandt’s Civilis,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring 1995): 89–110. 123. Quoted in Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 5. Burns, “Party Animals,” p. 33, makes the same point. 124. W. H. Beard, The Spade. Being an Address in verse delivered at the annual dinner of the National Academy of Design, May 9, 1894 (New York: Gregory Bros., 1894), stanza 39. 125. Beard, The Spade, stanzas 40, 36, and 35. 126. Sheldon, American Painters, p. 57. 127. Art Notes, Critic 1 (November 19, 1881): 325. 128. According to S. S. Cox, Why We Laugh (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), p. 19, comic back pages were fundamentally changing Americans’ reading habits. I thank Emily Burns for suggesting how the turning of the page suggests a necessary shift in the viewer’s frame of mind. Although page turning is often required for full-page illustrations, when it comes to comic back pages, which produce an unmistakable change of tone, the action seems to signify differently and beg for analysis. 129. For a related banishment, consider what happened to the English artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who was employed at this moment to construct dinosaur sculptures for a proposed Paleozoic museum in Central Park. Tweed’s henchmen vandalized his studio and buried his models. See Edwin H. Colbert and Katharine Beneker, “The Paleozoic Museum in Central Park, or the Museum That Never Was,” Curator 2 (1959): 137–50; Adrian J. Desmond, “Central Park’s Fragile Dinosaurs,” Natural History 83 (October 1974): 64–71; and, for a more extensive account of Hawkins’s career, Valerie Bram­ well and Robert M. Peck, All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences, 2008). See also the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public Parks for the Year Ending April 30, 1871 (New York: Evening Post Steam Presses, 1871), pp. 292–93 and 322–33, for the board’s decision about the Paleozoic museum; and Minutes of the Proceedings of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public Parks for the Year Ending April 30, 1873 (New York: Evening Post Steam Presses. 1873), p. 453, for Hawkins’s appeal. Beard’s name appears on the letter from the artists of the National Academy of Design asking the commissioners of the Department of Public Parks to reinstate Haw­kins. See this and other ephemera contained in the Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins Album, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. 130. Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), especially pp. 70–72.

202  |  Notes to Pages 100–102

131. Burns, “Party Animals,” p. 32. 132. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 91. See also Alex Nemerov’s discussion of minorness in Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 164–65. 133. See Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, pp. 43–48. The letter by William J. Hoppin, read at the Union League meeting of 1869, acknowledged the challenge of winning the support of the general public. See A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (as in n. 19), pp. 25–29. 134. On the interest in industrial arts and the model of South Kensington, see, for example, the comments of George Fiske Comfort in A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (as in n. 19), pp. 13–15; “Museum of Art,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, November 23, 1872; and Fine Arts, New York Evening Post, January 26, 1880. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 197, notes that “South Kensington provided an imperfect model for the New Yorkers” and argues that there was never any question that “ ‘great’ art primarily would grace the galleries of the Metropolitan.” 135. Clarence Cook, “Our Mismanaged Museum,” Art Amateur 5 (August 1881): 46–47. 136. See Alexis McCrossen, “Opening Up Sunday,” in Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 65–78. 137. See the cartoon “The Central Park: A Delightful Resort for Toil-worn New Yorkers,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 19, 1869, which features this restriction and others; it is reproduced in Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, p. 247. 138. See Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 84. 139. The Twain incident is recounted in Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, p. 359, and in Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 86. 140. For the quotation, see Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, p. 59. See also Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 57; and Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, p. 144. 141. “The Metropolitan Museum Again to the Front,” New York Evening Post, January 6, 1880. Mancini, Pre-Modernism, pp. 130–31, suggests that the Met’s trustees created a “circuslike atmosphere” in the museum in the spring of 1882, when they invited the public to judge the genuineness of the Cesnola collection of antiquities that Cook and others had labeled a fraud. They were invited to bring all sorts of tools to scrape and rub the statues themselves. “Barnum’s model,” Mancini writes, “continued to exert some influence . . . even in an institution as ‘highbrow’ as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” It was perhaps not so far from the Bowery dime museum after all. 142. See Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, pp. 363–66. On the mu-

Notes to Pages 102–107  |  203

seum’s architectural evolution, see Morrison H. Hecksher, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Architectural History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004).

4. Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James 1. Henry James, The American (New York: Rinehart, 1954), pp. 66–69. 2. See The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. and amplified by Homer Saint-Gaudens (New York: Century, 1913), 1:389–90. Saint-Gaudens dined with James at the Century Club late in his life, as William Dean Howells noted in a letter to the sculptor’s son. See Reminiscences, 2:65. 3. Julia B. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of Amer­ ican Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially pp. 60–77. 4. Ibid., pp. 70–72; Erika Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan: Founder’s Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts,” Winterthur Portfolio 46 (Winter 2012). I thank Erika for sharing this essay with me before its publication. 5. Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan.” See also Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, pp. 62–63, on Stearns Square and the downtown community; and for an examination of the contesting interest groups in Springfield, see Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840–1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 6. See In Homage to Worthy Ancestors: The Puritan, The Pilgrim (Ossining, NY: SaintGaudens Memorial, 2011). I thank Joyce Schiller for sharing this with me. 7. Thayer Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009) provides a summary of Saint-Gaudens’s life, attitudes, and career. For her examination of the critical reception and the use of the sculptor’s work by those “refuting charges of [American] provincialism,” see also Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics, and the New School of American Sculpture, 1875–1893,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2003 (p. 3 for the quotation). 8. Joyce K. Schiller, “The Artistic Collaboration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White,” Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1997, provides an overview of the artists’ collaborative efforts and the vicissitudes of their friendship from their meeting in the 1870s to White’s untimely death, in 1906. For the Chapin family’s favorable response to the sculpture, see Rev. A. L. Chapin, Unveiling of the Chapin Monument, at Springfield, Mass., Thursday, November 24, 1887 (Springfield, MA: L. H. Orr, 1887), p. 10. 9. On the exigencies of public statuary, see Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 2:78–79. 10. Royal Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), p. 82. Robert G. Berkelman, “America in Bronze: Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” Sewanee Review 48 (October–December 1940): 494–509, also foregrounds the sculptor’s sense of humor. 11. Chapin’s career and hard-nosed business tactics as head of one of the most important

204  |  Notes to Pages 108–111

railroads in New England—the Boston and Albany—is recounted in Edward Chase Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 366–81. For more on his contributions to Springfield, see Moses King, ed., King’s Handbook of Springfield, Massachusetts: A Series of Monographs, Historical and Descriptive (Springfield, MA: James D. Gill, 1884), pp. 161, 222, 282, 302. 12. See The Chapin Gathering: Proceedings at the Meeting of the Chapin Family in Springfield, Mass., September 17, 1862 (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles, 1862). 13. See Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” pp. 169–75; and John H. Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 101, 116, and, for The Puritan, pp. 162–66. 14. See Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1:354. 15. See Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” pp. 180–83; and Schiller, “The Puritan, Striding through Springfield,” from In Homage to Worthy Ancestors, pp. 7–8. 16. See Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:353. 17. John Fiske, “America.—New England in the Colonial Period,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 66 (December 1882): 114, 116, 117. 18. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, a Romance (1850; reprint, Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), p. 8; Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan.” 19. Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, p. 39. 20. See Art and Artists, Boston Daily Evening Transcript, July 28, 1886. 21. On the New England societies, see Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, pp. 65–77; and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 206–15. The monuments erected in these years include J. S. Hartley’s Miles Morgan in Springfield, MA (1882); Thomas R. Gould’s Deacon John Bridge in Cambridge (1882); Daniel Chester French’s John Harvard in Cambridge (1884); and John Quincy Adams Ward’s Pilgrim in New York’s Central Park (1885). 22. Stewart L. Woodford and George William Curtis, quoted in Unveiling of the Pilgrim Statue by the New-England Society in the City of New York, at Central Park, June 6, 1885 (New York: New-England Society, 1885), pp. 14, 21. Although Curtis argued at the unveiling that “we must not think of Puritanism as mere acrid defiance and sanctimonious sectarianism, nor of the Puritans as a band of ignorant and half-crazy zealots,” he admitted that this was the “popular conception of the Puritan.” 23. Chapin, Unveiling of the Chapin Monument, pp. 6, 17; Kenyon Cox, “Augustus SaintGaudens,” Century 35 (November 1887): 30. 24. See “The Spectre of the Fair: Practical Idea of the Evil That the Sunday Closing of the Great Chicago Show Will Bring About,” New York Herald, July 24, 1892. 25. Mark Twain, “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,” First Annual Dinner, New En­ gland Society of Philadelphia, December 22, 1881, in Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), pp. 162–66. See also Bruce Michelson, Mark

Notes to Pages 111–113  |  205

Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 20–23. 26. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 1:187. 27. Twain’s reputation for “stoical or even puritanical” attitudes grew, especially late in his career. See G. K. Chesterton, “Mark Twain,” T. P.’s Weekly 15 (April 29, 1910), reprinted in Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 463–65. 28. For mention of their various interactions, see Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:248; Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 2:288; Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 2:764; and Allen Walker Read, “The Membership in Proposed American Academies,” American Literature 7 (May 1935): 161. When Saint-Gaudens wrote to Twain, on February 28, 1881, after breaking an engagement with the writer, he included in his letter a caricature drawing of himself on his knees before a sword-wielding Twain. I thank Neda Salem, of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley, for making these and other letters available to me. 29. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:390. 30. “Saint-Gaudens and His Work,” Art World 1 (February 1917): 302, quoted in Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, p. 72. For Saint-Gaudens’s account of the differences between the two versions, see Reminiscences, 1:354. Henry J. Duffy, in his introduction to In Homage to Worthy Ancestors, p. xi, suggests that “this commission must have given SaintGaudens some pause,” because “he tended to dislike subjects done posthumously.” 31. Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” p. 22, argues that Saint-Gaudens “was well aware of his essential disadvantages in terms of education, refinement and manners.” 32. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:316. 33. Homer Saint-Gaudens, in the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College Library Special Collections (hereafter DCLSC), Box 68, Folder 14, notes for chapter 13 of the Reminiscences, page 15. 34. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 166, would explain the situation this way: “Let us assume that there is an urge to insult a certain person; but this is so strongly opposed by feelings of propriety or of aesthetic culture that the insult cannot take place.” 35. See Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan,” on Chapin’s desire for a monument that would rival the claims of the Morgan family, which had, in 1882, donated a sculpture of the seventeenth-century Captain Miles Morgan by J. S. Hartley. Chapin did not live to see his sculpture unveiled; he died in 1883. See also Chapin, Unveiling of the Chapin Monument, p. 11. 36. “The Chapin Statue: Unveiled, Dedicated and Presented to the City,” Springfield Daily Union, November 25, 1887, quoted in Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan.”

206  |  Notes to Pages 113–114

37. See “The Proceedings Attending the Unveiling of the Chapin Statue . . . ,” Springfield Republican, November 25, 1887. 38. Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, pp. 82, 85. See also Berkelman, “America in Bronze” (as in n. 10), pp. 494–509. 39. Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan.” 40. For more on the Bridge monument, see An Account of the Descendants of John Bridge, Cambridge, 1632 (Boston: J. S. Cushing, 1884). 41. Duffy, introduction to In Homage to Worthy Ancestors, p. xii, notes that the French American sculptor Philip Martiny, known for “[bringing] lightness, volume, and texture” to wood, assisted Saint-Gaudens on The Puritan. He may have played a role in articulating the cloak. 42. On specifics of the commission and changes made as the conception developed, see Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:354; Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” pp. 168–202, and Schiller, “Puritan, Striding,” pp. 14–16; and correspondence in vol. 1 of the Stanford White Collection, Drawings and Archives, Avery Library, Columbia University. 43. On the historical and metaphorical meanings of fountains, see Marilyn Symmes with Maria Ann Conelli, “Fountains as Refreshment,” and Naomi Miller, “Fountains as Metaphor,” both in Fountains: Splash and Spectacle. Water and Design from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Symmes (New York: Rizzoli, in association with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 1998), pp. 31–53, 57–73; and Terry Comito, “Beauty Bare: Speak­ ing Waters and Fountains in Renaissance Literature,” in FONS SAPIENTIAE: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elisabeth B. Macdougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, no. 5 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978), pp. 23–24. 44. Schiller, “Puritan, Striding,” p. 16. 45. “The Progress of Painting in America,” North American Review 124 (May 1877): 452. 46. Heman Wilkins [Orrin Wilkins Cook], “Doesn’t Admire Deacon Chapin,” unattributed newspaper clipping from ca. 1887, in the vertical files of the Connecticut Valley Historical Society, Springfield, Massachusetts (hereafter CVHS). Cook (1841–1929), a veteran of the Civil War, served in the Twenty-Second Infantry, Second Sharpshooters, Third Light Battalion Massachusetts Volunteers, and made a comfortable postwar living as an accountant. The Springfield City Directory for 1890–91 lists his address as 12 Stearns Avenue, right at Stearns Square, where The Puritan was installed. I thank Michelle Barker for providing me with this clipping and information about its author. I also heartily thank Graham Boettcher for providing me with additional information about Cook, including his Stearns Avenue address. 47. See Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:353–54; and Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, p. 63. See also “Stearns Square in the Days When Deacon Chapin Took His Stand There,” CVHS; and Heman Wilkins [Orrin Wilkins Cook], “Doesn’t Admire Deacon Chapin.” 48. See Heman Wilkins [Orrin Wilkins Cook], “Doesn’t Admire Deacon Chapin.”

Notes to Pages 114–119  |  207

49. Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan.” 50. Mariana Van Rensselaer, “Saint-Gaudens’s Lincoln,” Century 35 (November 1887): 37–39, details Saint-Gaudens’s complex portrayal and the impression the figure makes on the viewer. Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics,” p. 270, notes that in contrast to the Standing Lincoln, the Chapin monument “occasioned very little notice in the national or art-related press.” 51. The words “extreme other end” were changed to “opposite end” in the published Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:353. For Saint-Gaudens’s original formulation, see Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Reminiscences of an Idiot” (1906), Saint-Gaudens Papers, DCLSC, Box 44, Folder 16, p. 75. 52. For more on this work, see Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, pp. 158– 61; and Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 23. 53. See Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, pp. 110–15. For the history of the Farragut commission, see Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics,” pp. 83–85, 192–203. 54. “Something New in Statues. Clarence Cook’s Criticism on Saint Gaudens’s ‘Farragut,’ ” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 26, 1881. 55. Richard Watson Gilder, “The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (June 1881): 166. 56. Cook, “Something New in Statues.” 57. Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 7, makes this point and provides a summary of his training. On the École, see also Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. 21–22. 58. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:256–57. In the first passage, Saint-Gaudens praises Clarence Cook as “far superior to all the others we have had to write on Art in ‘Ameriky.’ ” 59. S. G. W. Benjamin, “Sculpture in America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 58 (April 1879): 657–73. See also Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics,” pp. 20–27, on the “American school of sculpture” before Saint-Gaudens. 60. Benjamin, “Sculpture in America,” p. 668. William H. Gerdts, “William Wetmore Story,” American Art Journal 4 (November 1972): 20, quotes Hawthorne and suggests that if today “we fail to see the tiger-like energy, this may be our failure, not the artist’s.” 61. Benjamin, “Sculpture in America,” p. 661. See Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 46–72, on Powers’s Greek Slave. 62. Benjamin, “Sculpture in America,” pp. 661–62. 63. Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879), pp. 110, 155–56. William Dean Howells criticized James for overusing the word “provincial” in his biography of Hawthorne. See James’s letter to Howells, January 31, 1880, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 1:71–74.

208  |  Notes to Pages 120–122

64. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 10, 39, 100. Arnold responded to critics unsympathetic to this view and fleshed out his portrait of American culture in Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888). 65. Sadakichi Hartmann, “Puritanism, Its Grandeur and Shame,” Camera Work 32 (October 1910): 17. I thank Emily Burns for pointing me to this article. 66. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 60. 67. Henry James, The Europeans: A Sketch, with an introduction by Tony Tanner and notes by P. Crick (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 55. 68. Ibid., pp. 60, 61. 69. Ibid., p. 87. 70. Ibid. When James’s brother William declared that The Europeans was “thin,” James agreed but defended his book by charging William, in a letter of November 14, 1878, with precisely the narrowness he had faulted in the novel: “I think you take these things too rigidly and unimaginatively—too much as if an artistic experiment were a piece of conduct.” See Letters of Henry James, 1:65. 71. James, Europeans, p. 111. 72. See Ronald Wallace, Henry James and the Comic Form (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), p. 89. 73. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:255–56. 74. Saint-Gaudens, quoted in Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 119. 75. See Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 87–88; see also the letter from White dated September 6, 1879, quoted in Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., “Intimate Letters of Stan­ ford White: Correspondence with His Friend and Co-Worker Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Part II” Architectural Record 30 (September 1911): 286. For White’s exclamation about Paris, see the letter fragment in “Stanford White’s Letters from Europe,” 1878, Stanford White Collection (as in n. 42). 76. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:154, 157. 77. Cox, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” pp. 28–30. 78. The historical and aesthetic elisions in Cox’s criticism are very Paterian; Pater makes a similar link between artists like Botticelli and the Greeks. Art, for both Pater and Cox, is a “series of inlets,” to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Wallen, “Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance,” ELH 66 (Winter 1999): 1035. 79. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, rev. ed. (1873; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1888), p. xi. Wallen, “Alive in the Grave,” pp. 1033–51, suggests how Pater’s account of the Renaissance served his “aesthetic project.” 80. “Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety,” Pater wrote in The Renaissance, p. xi. 81. Ibid., p. 2. See also Noel B. Jackson, “Rethinking the Cultural Divide: Walter Pater,

Notes to Pages 123–126  |  209

Wilkie Collins, and the Legacies of Wordsworthian Aesthetics,” Modern Philology 102 (November 2004): 207–34, which parses the “status of sensation” in the writings of Pater and others. 82. For the political significance of Pater’s position, see Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 75–100. 83. Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 16, makes this point about the Farragut. 84. Benjamin, “Sculpture in America,” p. 670. 85. Cox, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” p. 28. 86. Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p. 294. 87. Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (Lon­ don: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 108. 88. Heman Wilkins [Orrin Wilkins Cook], “Doesn’t Admire Deacon Chapin.” Cook quotes the druggist in his newspaper piece. 89. James, Europeans, pp. 99, 52, 128, 37. 90. On the evolution of James’s cosmopolitanism, see Adeline R. Tintner, The Cosmopolitan Worlds of Henry James: An Intertextual Study (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). 91. Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in NineteenthCentury American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 185. 92. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Comic” (1843), in Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8 of The Complete Works, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), p. 155. 93. See Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:xiv. 94. Beecher, quoted and analyzed by Camfield, Necessary Madness, pp. 180–81. 95. “I assure you I don’t like improper things,” Felix tells him, “though I daresay you think I do” (James, Europeans, p. 113). 96. See Elizabeth Lee, “White Fantasies: Dirt, Desire and Art in Late NineteenthCentury America,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2002, pp. 112–13, 122–25 (p. 124 for the quotations). 97. Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens, 1:316. 98. These critics of the sculpture feared that it would set a bad example and inspire the carousing that Anglo-Saxon civic leaders associated with the immigrant populations that were challenging their influence in the city. See Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, pp. 37–60. 99. H. H. Greer, “Frederick MacMonnies, Sculptor,” Brush and Pencil 10 (April 1902): 10. 100. See Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging, pp. 43, 42. McKim ultimately decided to give the sculpture to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was happy to take it off Boston’s hands. White clearly shared Saint-Gaudens’s high opinion of the sculpture, for he kept a version of it in his studio. See Lessard, Architect of Desire, p. 13.

210  |  Notes to Pages 126–130

101. MacMonnies assisted Saint-Gaudens in modeling the figures, two birds shooting water from their mouths and four fish gripped by smiling fauns. See Dryfhout, Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, pp. 156–57. 102. Doss, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan,” mentions Saint-Gaudens’s and White’s macho ribbing, as does Lessard, Architect of Desire, pp. 220–21. For complaints about patrons, see, for example, White’s letter to Saint-Gaudens, May 8, 1880, published in Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., “Intimate Letters of Stanford White,” p. 285. 103. See Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 184–85. 104. See Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, p. 94. 105. See Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, especially pp. 123–28. 106. See Schiller, “Puritan, Striding” (as in n. 15), p. 5. 107. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900; first English edition, 1911) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 93; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 108. White, in a letter of January 4, 1893, quoted in Nina Gray and Suzanne Smeaton, “Within Gilded Borders: The Frames of Stanford White,” American Art 7 (Spring 1993): 38, caption for fig. 8. 109. For a description of this frame, see ibid., p. 41. 110. See Baker, Stanny, p. 132. 111. See Lee, “White Fantasies,” pp. 133–34; and her article, “The Electrified Goddess: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White and Diana at Madison Square Garden,” Nineteenth Century 31 (Spring 2011): 12–22. 112. See the letter dated February 14, 1895, Folder 39:9(D), Box 5 (old box 39), of White’s incoming correspondence, Stanford White Collection (as in n. 42); and Baker, Stanny, p. 132. For mention of these and other clubs, see Homer Saint-Gaudens’s notes for the Reminiscences, in the Saint-Gaudens Papers, DCLSC, Box 71, Folder 11, p. 13. 113. Augusta Saint-Gaudens knew of the second family the sculptor maintained and stood by him despite her displeasure with the situation. One of Saint-Gaudens’s studio assistants, Frances Grimes, attempted much later to explain Saint-Gaudens’s actions and his wife’s reaction to them: “She said he was a Frenchman,” Grimes said, adding, “SaintGaudens was very amorous, He had a great many love affairs. . . . He had affairs all the time.” See Interviews of Frances Grimes, ca. 1960, Archives of American Art, Duplicate tape 3, side B, and tape 4, side A. See also Baker, Stanny, p. 189, and Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” pp. 55–56n.65. 114. See David Garrard Lowe, Stanford White’s New York (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1999), p. 142. The original gilding has been lost. 115. On the attention the sculpture attracted, see Baker, Stanny, pp. 157–60; and “Completion of the Tall Tower: Description of the Great Shaft at the Madison Square Garden,” New-York Times, October 14, 1891.

Notes to Pages 130–133  |  211

116. Or, at least, this was how the eighteen-foot-high, 1,800-pound Diana was supposed to function when she was put into position in October 1891. Saint-Gaudens and White, realizing that she was too large and too heavy to shift in the wind, and that her proportions were out of kilter with those of the building over which she presided, took the sculpture down in September 1892. Saint-Gaudens shaved off almost five feet in the version that replaced the original a year later. As Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus SaintGaudens, p. 205, notes, soon after, “the figure had to be bolted down, which kept it from turning, or, in fact, functioning as a weathervane.” The original was sent to Chicago and placed atop the dome of McKim, Mead and White’s Agricultural Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, where Saint-Gaudens served as sculptural advisor to the fair’s director of works, Daniel Burnham. 117. See Pater, Renaissance, p. 67. See also Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), on the kinesthetic and phenomenological potential of obdurate sculptural matter. 118. New York Mercury, November 22, 1891, quoted in Baker, Stanny, p. 158. 119. “Art and Common Sense,” New York World, October 14, 1896 (Frederick Mac­ Monnies Scrapbook, Archives of American Art, reel D245, frame 114) connected the two sculptures as each “unfit for the place selected for it,” however. On the aims of the sculptor and architect with this “conspicuous” sculpture, see Baker, Stanny, pp. 157–58. 120. Lee, “Electrified Goddess,” p. 14. 121. Jennifer Hardin, “The Nude in the Era of the New Movement in American Art: Thomas Eakins, Kenyon Cox, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000, p. 309. 122. Edward Cary, “The Diana of the Tower,” Century 47 (January 1894): 477. 123. See Lee, “White Fantasies,” pp. 134–36, on how the artists of Saint-Gaudens’s circle, by “presenting their mistresses through the lens of high culture . . . used their art to conceal their ‘dirty’ lives.” The sculpture, Lee writes in “Electrified Goddess,” p. 20, is “a monument of playful eroticism.” The term “pleasure palace” appears in Rob­ert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Montague Massengale, New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890–1915 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 15. 124. See Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days: The Untold Story (New York: Julian Messner, 1934), p. 34. Lee, “Electrified Goddess,” p. 20, quotes Nesbit’s account and suggests that “for White, Saint-Gaudens and their intimate friends, the connections between the Broadway dancer and the Roman goddess would have been hard to miss.” This connection was based in part on the lithe form of Saint-Gaudens’s nude, which, Lee points out, echoed the figure of “slender young women like Nesbit.” 125. A sermon inspired by Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture remarked on the “Puritan defect of lack of sympathy with art.” See Allen E. Cross, “St. Gaudens’ Statue of ‘The Puritan’: A Sermon,” n.d., CVHS. 126. Poirier, Comic Sense of Henry James, p. 108. Poirier insists on the connection to Eugenia because she—unlike Felix—ends up estranged from an American context, as

212  |  Notes to Pages 134–136

James arguably was. But The Europeans reads to me like a negotiation of a more nuanced position. 127. Wentworth’s “rigidity . . . had no illiberal meaning,” the narrator confirms in The Europeans, p. 63. His “manner was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility.” 128. Hartmann, “Puritanism, Its Grandeur and Shame,” p. 18 (as in n. 65). 129. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Americanism in Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 25 (January 1870): 60. 130. “Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the Sculptor Who Has Typified American Character and Has Left Us Noble Memorials of Great Events in American History,” Craftsman 8 (October 1907): 65. 131. Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, p. 79. 132. See Cortissoz’s comments on chapters 6, 8, 9, and 10 of the Reminiscences in their draft form in the Saint-Gaudens Papers, DCLSC, Box 70, Folder 4. As Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics,” p. 7, notes, the Reminiscences were “sanitized” not just by Cortissoz, but also by “Homer, his mother Augusta, and other friends and family members.” The Dartmouth collection is invaluable for its inclusion of various drafts and notes by those involved in the project. 133. Saint-Gaudens considered his involvement with Davida Clark “a mere pecadillo [sic]” in contrast to White’s sins. He is quoted in Schiller, “Artistic Collaboration,” pp. 55– 57. For more on Nesbit, White’s murder, and Thaw’s trial, see Lessard, Architect of Desire, pp. 259–74, 301–30. 134. See Randolph Bourne, “The Puritan’s Will to Power,” in History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays (1920; reprint, New York: Biblio and Tanner, 1969), pp. 176–87. On the use of White’s story by preachers, see Lessard, Architect of Desire, p. 17. See also “Why White’s Friends Are Silent,” Life 48 (July 26, 1906): 107; and Henry Frank, “The ThawWhite Tragedy,” Arena 36 (September 1906): 262–65.

5. Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle 1. On the “opposition between the terms ‘representation’ and ‘presentation,’ ” a framework for understanding trompe l’oeil, see Johanna Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto: Visuality and Artifice among the Proto-Modern Americans,” Art Bulletin 74 (March 1992): 38. 2. Scholarship often draws these artists together. In addition to Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” pp. 37–50, see Alfred Frankenstein, The Reminiscent Object: Paintings by William Michael Harnett, John Frederick Peto and John Haberle (La Jolla, CA: La Jolla Museum of Art, 1965); Frankenstein, After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870–1900, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969); John Wilmerding, Important Information Inside: The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and

Notes to Pages 136–139  |  213

Row, in association with the National Galley of Art, 1983); Bruce Chambers, Old Money: American Trompe l’oeil Images of Currency (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1988); Doreen Bolger, Marc Simpson, and John Wilmerding, eds., William M. Harnett (New York: Abrams, in association with the Amon Carter Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992); Olaf Hansen, “The Senses of Illusion,” in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), pp. 267–88; David M. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 272–319; Cécile Whiting, “Trompe l’oeil Painting and the Counterfeit Civil War,” Art Bulletin 79 (June 1997): 251–68; James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 214–55; Meredith Paige Davis, “Fool’s Gold: American Trompe l’oeil Painting in the Gilded Age,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005. 3. See, for example, Lubin’s chapter on William Harnett, ibid.; and Whiting, ibid. 4. Clarence Cook, “Art’s Counterfeiting: Some Notable Examples of Deceiving the Eyes by Pictures,” New York Daily Star, December 30, 1885. See Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 125–52, for the potential lessons of these experiences, which, he argues, taught viewers to be more skeptical in their everyday lives. As Leja suggests, the popular press undoubtedly exaggerated such accounts of viewers’ naïveté. 5. See the folders labeled “Notes,” Box 1, in the unmicrofilmed John Haberle Papers, 1882–1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 6. Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto.” M. P. Davis, “Fool’s Gold,” pp. 50–51, disagrees with Drucker’s designation and challenges the notion that self-referentiality is an “exclusively modernist project.” 7. See Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 120–23. See also Chapter 2 of this book. 8. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 123, 135. See also Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cul­ tural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63, for a summary of commodity/exchange theory. I thank Jennifer Roberts for pointing me to this text. 9. Marshall P. Wilder, The Sunny Side of the Street (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), p. 58. 10. See Wickberg, Senses of Humor, p. 132. 11. Madison’s Budget: A Cyclopedia of Comedy Material for Vaudeville Artists, Radio Starts, Masters of Ceremony, Etc., containing original monologues, sketches, minstrel firstparts, sidewalk patter, wise cracks, revue and burlesque bits, etc., etc. (New York: J. Madison, 1898). See Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 155–56. 12. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, p. 122. See also Albert T. Davis, “A Latter-Day Type of

214  |  Notes to Pages 139–141

American Humour,” Nassau Literary Magazine 49 (November 1893): 267; and H. D. Traill, “The Future of Humour,” New Review 10 (January 1894): 33. On the “new humor” in vaudeville, see Albert F. McLean Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 106–37. Burges Johnson debated the existence of the “new humor” in “The New Humor: First Paper” and “The New Humor: Second Paper,” Critic 40 (April 1902): 331–38, and (June 1902): 526–32. 13. Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story” (1895), in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 201, 203. 14. H. R. Haweis, American Humorists (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883), pp. 145–46. 15. Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” pp. 201, 203. 16. On Twain’s ostensible outdatedness, see A. T. Davis, “Latter-Day Type of American Humour,” pp. 265–73. 17. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 135–38; Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” p. 203. For more on the “carefully elaborated jokes” Twain promised audience members, see Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). 18. Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” p. 48, argues that the artist “seems to ‘disappear’ ” behind his technique. 19. Lubin, Picturing a Nation, pp. 291, 293. 20. For such attitudes, see Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 42, 57; quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “ ‘Sordid Mechanics’ and ‘Monkey-Talents’: The Illusionistic Tradition,” in William M. Harnett, ed. Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, pp. 23–24. Cikovsky points out the endurance of this view into the late nineteenth century. 21. Grandma’s Hearthstone was shown in the dark end of a room accented by electric lighting, which heightened its illusionism. Nevertheless, as Wendy Bellion points out, this account is most likely apocryphal because it so blatantly retools the ancient conceit of the animal tricked by trompe l’oeil. See “The Picture Fooled the Cat: Remarkable Example of the Realistic in Painting,” Detroit Evening News, June 4, 1891, reprinted in Gertrude Grace Sill, John Haberle: American Master of Illusion (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, in association with the New Britain Museum of American Art, 2009), pp. 54–55; and Bellion’s entry on Haberle’s Slate in Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Wolf Singer, Paul Staiti, Alberto Veca, and Arthur K. Wheelock, Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 232. 22. Wendy Bellion traces this “self-congratulatory chain of pictorial quotations,” in Ebert-Schifferer et al., Deceptions and Illusions, p. 232. 23. For more on Ohr, see Richard D. Mohr, Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 24. This liquor store was owned by one of Haberle’s key patrons. See Sill, John Haberle, p. 83.

Notes to Pages 141–144  |  215

25. See Cikovsky, “‘Sordid Mechanics’ and ‘Monkey-Talents,’ ” p. 23. 26. See William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801–1939 (Columbia: Philbrook Art Center, with the University of Missouri Press, 1981), pp. 200–204; and Nanette V. Maciejunes, A New Variety, Try One: The Art of De Scott Evans or S. S . David (Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1985), pp. 11–12. 27. Review of Haberle’s work in the New York Evening Post, November 19, 1887, quoted in Sill, John Haberle, pp. 15–16. 28. Cikovsky, “ ‘Sordid Mechanics’ and ‘Monkey-Talents,’ ” p. 25, explores the meanings of this subject for Haberle and offers a more flattering interpretation of the artist’s imitation of Harnett. See also Sill, John Haberle, pp. 25–28. 29. Bellion, in Ebert-Schifferer et al., Deceptions and Illusions, p. 232. 30. “Haberle’s Realistic Paintings,” Boston Herald, ca. 1895–96, frame 347, reel 3753, Haberle Papers (as in n. 5). 31. See Robinson Crusoe (Master J. Spraggles, His Version of Robinson Crusoe as Narrated and Depicted to His School Fellows at Dr. Tickletoby’s Academy) (New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1880); and the illustration in David Ker, “The Boy Emigrant in Russia,” Harper’s Young People 1 (August 10, 1880): 588. 32. Clipping from an unidentified Boston newspaper, quoted in Sill, John Haberle, p. 64. For more on this painting, see also Sill, John Haberle: Master of Illusion (Springfield, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), p. 50. 33. M. P. Pendleton, “American Humor,” Outlook 50 (July 28, 1894): 135: “But, whether broad or subtle, whether from Major Jack Downing, Artemus Ward, Nasby, and Josh Billings, for the first, which are now mostly read in England (see Routledge’s cheap editions); or the larger latter class, composed of those who don’t place their jokes on the blackboard, as it were, of whom Howells and Warner are brilliant examples, the Americanism of our humorists is always in evidence, so that their qualities cannot be mistaken for those of any other nation.” 34. For criticism of these techniques, see the review of Artemus Ward; His Travels (1865), in “Art. X.—Critical Notices,” North American Review 102 (April 1866): 587–88. See also [Josiah Holland], “Triflers on the Platform,” Scribner’s Monthly 3 (February 1872): 489; and Brander Matthews, “The Penalty of Humor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 92 (May 1896): 898–99. For endorsements, see, for example, “Artemus Ward,” Scribner’s Monthly 21 (November 1880): 144–50; and J. H. Northcroft, “Artemus Ward, the Baldinsville Showman,” Littell’s Living Age 177 (May 5, 1888): 301–4. 35. Quoted in Coleman E. Bishop, “ ‘Josh Billings,’ Or, the Good of Bad Spelling,” Chautauquan 6 (January 1886): 224. 36. “Yankee Humor,” Every Saturday 3 (March 16, 1867): 335. 37. Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 44–45. On Ward’s appreciation of minstrelsy, see Edward P. Hingston, The Genial Showman: Being the

216  |  Notes to Pages 145–149

Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward (1870; reprint, Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1971), p. 93. 38. See Melville D. Landon, “Biography of Charles F. Browne,” in The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1875), pp. 15–16. For the final quotation in the sentence, see Knoper, Acting Naturally, p. 46. On page 45, Knoper (as part of his argument about Twain) works through Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “characterization of ‘Signifyin(g)’ as a manipulation of language among African Americans that emphasizes and ‘turns on the sheer play of the signifier.’ ” 39. See John J. Pullen, Comic Relief: The Life and Laughter of Artemus Ward, 1834–1867 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), p. 12. 40. On the historical permutations of “cacography” and its appearance in the work of various writers, see Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1800–1900) (New York: American Book Company, 1937), pp. 118–19n.2. 41. Review of Artemus Ward; His Travels, p. 588. 42. On dialect and juvenile delinquency, see Frederic M. Bird, “Paralyzers of Style,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 47 (February 1896): 282. L. A. Sherman, “American Humorists,” Chautauquan 22 (November 1895): 163, situates Twain at a distance from the “tribe of clowns and punsters” to which Ward belonged. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, “The Plague of Jocularity,” North American Review 161 (November 1895): 533, however, quotes a colleague who complained about the “forced jocularity” of Twain’s writing; and A. T. Davis, “Latter-Day Type of American Humour,” p. 266, describes Twain’s humor as, like Ward’s, “overdrawn,” in part because of the “undue length to which he stretches out his books.” 43. Ward, “A Visit to Brigham Young,” in The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1875), p. 59. 44. As Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” p. 50, has argued, late nineteenthcentury trompe l’oeil paintings reinforce “the semiotic proposition that the real exists because it is articulated in terms of signs.” 45. This is one of Haberle’s most discussed and reproduced paintings. M. P. Davis, “Fool’s Gold,” p. 195, stresses that the presidents circulate “in an allegorical, rather than historical form.” See also Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” p. 42, on the painting’s concern with circulation. Hansen, “Senses of Illusion,” pp. 272–73, argues that the painting represents history “as a transitory phenomenon” and evokes “the Emersonian fear that once we leave all the layers of appearance behind us, we might discover that there is nothing behind them.” 46. See William James, “The Consciousness of Self,” in The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1890), especially pp. 291, 294, 299 (italics in original). M. P. Davis, “Fool’s Gold,” pp. 68, 254, argues that the letter rack paintings of the trompe l’oeil painters present the self as James does, by showing “subjectivity as composite, malleable, and mobile.” Hansen, “Senses of Illusion,” pp. 267–68, also draws the work of these artists into relation with the ideas of William James.

Notes to Pages 149–151  |  217

47. See Zelda Edelson and Barbara L. Narendra, “John Haberle, a Great American Artist and His Links to the Peabody Museum,” Discovery 20 (1987): 29. 48. Walter Blair, “The Popularity of Nineteenth-Century American Humorists,” American Literature 3 (May 1931): 178. 49. On Nye’s career and the reach of his work, see ibid., pp. 190–94. Nye, unlike many of his predecessors, did not assume an alter ego or character, nor did he make use of dialect in his writings. He did, however, use some of his predecessors’ stage techniques. See David B. Kesterson, Bill Nye (Boston: Twayne, 1981), pp. 76–78. 50. John Albert Macy, “The Career of the Joke,” Atlantic Monthly 96 (October 1905): 499. 51. “Nothing will build up a paper quicker than good jokes,” said the author of “On Machine-Made Jokes. An Expert Operator Tells How He Grinds Out Humor,” New York Sun, May 18, 1890. “No matter how celebrated these papers may have been, the moment they stop their jokes they sink into obscurity.” See also Oscar Fay Adams, “Is ‘American Humor’ Humorous?” Outlook 49 (June 2, 1894): 962; and Blair, “Popularity of NineteenthCentury American Humorists,” pp. 181–82. 52. The column headings A Group of Pleasantries and Crisp and Casual appeared in the New-York Times in the 1880s. Queer Wrinkles appeared in the New York Sun during this period. Newspaper Waifs appeared in the New York Evening Post. I thank Adam Thomas for his research into these columns. For a list of other columns like these, see Frederick Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690–1872 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), pp. 695–96. On the differences between these and other late nineteenthcentury newspapers—in layout, audience, and sales figures, for example—see Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1947). 53. See A. T. Davis, “Latter-Day Type of American Humour,” p. 273. Davis is interested primarily in American humorous literature, but when he assesses the work of the reporter and novelist Richard Harding Davis, which he contrasts with Twain’s writing, his comments dovetail with the shift in the journalistic treatment of joking. 54. See David E. E. Sloane, ed., American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. xxiii, 219–26, 287–89. 55. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, p. 122. See also Blair, “Popularity of Nineteenth-Century American Humorists,” pp. 180–81. 56. “Fun and Sadness Blended. The Story of the Last Years of a Great Humorist’s Life. Phillip H. Welch, the Sun’s Humorist, Who Wrote His Jokes While under Sentence of Death and under the Knives of Surgeons,” New York Sun, February 25, 1889. “The joke writer is seldom allowed to sign his work,” Arthur Sullivant Hoffman confirmed in “Who Writes the Jokes?” Bookman 26 (October 1907): 173. 57. See Hoffman, “Who Writes the Jokes?” p. 172. Wit and Wisdom, a journal distrib­ uted by the American News Company, which reprinted material from the newspapers, criticized the practice of non- and misattribution and inspired at least one paper, the San

218  |  Notes to Pages 151–153

Francisco Wasp, to change its practices. See Sloane, American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals, pp. 492–93. 58. On the “exchange system that allowed publishers to swap material free of postage (and free of royalties to authors),” see Pullen, Comic Relief, pp. 26–27. 59. See Frank Thompson Searight, ed., The American Press Humorists’ Book (“Bill” Nye Monument Edition) (Los Angeles: Searight, 1907), n.p.; and Arthur K. Taylor, “The First Convention of the American Press Humorists,” Inland Printer 31 (July 1903): 589. 60. “Fun and Sadness Blended. The Story of the Last Years of a Great Humorist’s Life.” On plagiarism, see also Macy, “Career of the Joke,” p. 507. 61. Brander Matthews, “The Parody of the Period,” Galaxy 17 (May 1874): 696. 62. “On Machine-Made Jokes” (as in n. 51). See also Thomas L. Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes in 20 Years,” American Magazine 89 (June 1920): 234; and Traill, “The Future of Humour,” p. 27, on the joke as “a manufactured product.” 63. “Bill” Nye, quoted in Searight, American Press Humorists’ Book, n.p.; “On MachineMade Jokes”; see also Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes,” pp. 26–28, 233–34. 64. “The Commercial Humorist at Work in His Sanctum,” New York Times, January 26, 1908. 65. “On Machine-Made Jokes”; see also Hoffman, “Who Writes the Jokes?” p. 171. 66. See Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes,” p. 234. 67. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 137–38. 68. See the folders labeled “Notes,” Box 1, in Haberle Papers (as in n. 5). 69. See M. P. Davis, “Fool’s Gold,” pp. 123, 146; and Laura A. Coyle, “ ‘The Best Index of American Life’: Newspapers in the Artist’s Work,” in William M. Harnett, ed. Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, pp. 223–31. 70. M. P. Davis points this out in “Fool’s Gold,” p. 155. 71. See Sill, John Haberle, pp. 15–16. 72. See Frankenstein, After the Hunt, pp. 116–18; and Sill, John Haberle, p. 22. 73. On this debate, see Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 11, 121–42; Rosa­ lind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque, A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Abrams, in association with the Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 261–86; and Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 25–85. 74. As Mikhail Bakhtin argued, the newspaper page is a “living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day, where the most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side and one side against the other” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], pp. 29–30, quoted in Krauss, The Picasso Papers, p. 47). For Bakhtin’s conception of dialogism, see “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 259–422.

Notes to Pages 153–156  |  219

75. The author of “On Machine-Made Jokes” maintained that “the popular form of humor in this country is, and has been for some years, the dialogue, consisting of a question which is put for the purpose of bringing out the joke in the answer.” 76. See, for example, the dialogue joke about a man’s “stinking breath,” in Joe Miller’s Jests (London, 1739), p. 7. See also Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 147–48. 77. See Wickberg, Senses of Humor, p. 142. 78. Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes”; Evan Esar, The Humor of Humor (New York: Horizon Press, 1952); Wickberg, Senses of Humor, pp. 134–35. 79. A Group of Pleasantries, New-York Times, January 29, 1891. 80. Talk of the Day, New York Tribune, April 7, 1895. 81. Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes,” p. 234; and “The Need of a New Joke,” Atlantic Monthly 85 (May 1900): 717. 82. See Frank J. Wilstach, “Nothing New under the Sun—except Jokes,” New York Times, June 4, 1922; Macy, “Career of the Joke,” pp. 504, 509–10; “New Jokes? There Are No New Jokes. There Is Only One Joke,” New York Times, May 2, 1909; and Wilder, Sunny Side of the Street, p. 317. 83. Or so Masson claimed in “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes,” p. 23. John Wardroper, ed., Jest upon Jest: A Selection from the Jestbooks and Collections of Merry Tales Published from the Reign of Richard III to George III (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 28, argues that the mother-in-law joke was a nineteenth-century invention, however. For a list of standard joke subjects and characters, see also “The Need of a New Joke,” pp. 717–18; and Johnson, “The New Humor: Second Paper” (as in n. 12), p. 529. 84. Masson, “How I Wrote 50,000 Jokes,” p. 233. 85. Bellion, in Ebert-Schifferer et al., Deceptions and Illusions (as in n. 21), p. 232, likewise suggests that the cat’s “knowing smile” recalls Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. 86. See “Economical Nonsense-Verse,” Academy 57 (December 2, 1899): 629; and C. M. Aikman, “Lewis Carroll,” Littell’s Living Age 220 (February 18, 1899): 424–35. 87. “Crooked Answers,” Littell’s Living Age 162 (September 6, 1884): 639. 88. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 147. 89. On the “lush development of ‘nonsense-writing’ ” in these years, see Johnson, “The New Humor: First Paper” (as in n. 12), p. 331. 90. See “Word-Twisting versus Nonsense,” Littell’s Living Age 173 (May 7, 1887): 381. 91. On nonsense as a difficult art, see Anna Robeson Brown, “A Plea for Nonsense,” Chap-Book 9 (July 1, 1898): 115–16. 92. Even in the nonsense jokes the newspapers published, the punch line is emphasized, diminishing whatever ambiguity informs the setup. See the joke that puts William Merritt Chase’s Portrait of a Lady in conversation with an oversize bust by the Philadelphia sculptor Charles Grafly, in “Fun as a Serious Matter. A Country Editor Gets His Paper Out under Difficulties,” New York Sun, February 17, 1895.

220  |  Notes to Pages 156–159

93. Haberle said, about this time, that he would “devote himself entirely to broader work.” See Sill, John Haberle, p. 39. 94. Bellion points to the fifteenth-century precedent for this trope in her entry on Haberle’s Torn in Transit, in Ebert-Schifferer et al., Deceptions and Illusions (as in n. 21), p. 322. 95. Ibid. 96. See Alfred Frankenstein, “A Mystery Partly Solved,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, August 23, 1970, pp. 37–39, which reproduces a painting by Henry Dickson, possibly the source for Haberle’s landscape. See also Saul Zalesch, “What the Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 1880s,” American Quarterly 48 (March 1996): 78–80, on the ubiquity of cheap oil paintings like this landscape, ordered through trade catalogues, which he suggests Haberle may be depicting here. 97. Inness, quoted in George Inness Jr., Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness (New York: Century, 1917), p. 124. 98. “Why, a wooden man would enthuse over such a painting,” a critic had written of Harnett’s Old Violin (1886), expressing the gratification such works provided a widespread public. See “Unidentified Cincinnati clipping, in an advertising brochure for F. Tuchfarber Co., c. 1887,” in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California press, 2009), p. 909. 99. Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” p. 43, suggests that the illegible newsprint is Harnett’s way of “[stopping] short of pushing his deceit to the point of self-effacement. He allows the newsprint clipping to remain illegible, a mere imitation of the shapes and graphic frequencies of typographic format, a signal that the entire canvas is not to be read as real, but as painted image.” 100. Leja, Looking Askance, pp. 125–52, offers the most compelling analysis of how Harnett’s brushstrokes and the materiality of the paint itself disturb trompe l’oeil’s illusionistic effects. 101. For more on this painting, see Sill, John Haberle, pp. 93–99. 102. Scholars who link Haberle and the other trompe l’oeil still-life painters to twentiethcentury modern artists include M. L. d’Otrange Mastai, Illusion in Art: Trompe l’Oeil. A History of Pictorial Illusionism (New York: Abaris Books, 1975), p. 306, who connects Haberle’s Slate to Dubuffet; Frankenstein, After the Hunt, p. 115, who suggests a relation between Haberle’s work and surrealism; and Wilmerding, Art of John F. Peto, who compares Peto’s work to that of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Pablo Picasso, and others. Drucker, “Harnett, Haberle, and Peto,” p. 38, in suggesting that Haberle, more than Peto or Harnett, “[anticipates] the conspicuous and characteristic practices of modern art,” does the best job of nuancing the relationship of these artists to modernism. On comedic techniques and the strategies of Marcel Duchamp, see Andrea Olson and Lance Olson, “Whaling the Daylights Out of Authority: Postmodern Humor and Duchamp,” Studies in Iconography, vol. 2, ed. Anthony Lacy Gully (Phoenix: Arizona State University, 1987), pp. 253–62.

Notes to Pages 159–161  |  221

103. Benjamin De Casseres, “The Ironical in Art,” Camera Work, no. 38 (April 1912): 17. 104. Wickberg, Senses of Humor, p. 137. 105. Sherman, “American Humorists,” p. 163.

Epilogue 1. Agnes Repplier, “Humor: English and American,” Cosmopolitan 16 (January 1894): 364, 362, 365. 2. Ibid., p. 365. 3. Repplier wrote, in “A Plea for Humor,” Atlantic Monthly 63 (February 1889): 176: “The great masterpieces of humor, which have kept men young by laughter, are being tried in the courts of an orthodox morality, and found lamentably wanting; or else, by way of giving them another chance, they are being subjected to the peine forte et dure of modern analysis, and are revealing hideous and melancholy meanings in the process.” “A Plea for Humor” was subsequently published in Repplier’s book Points of View (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894). 4. Ibid., pp. 179, 175. 5. Repplier, “Humor: English and American” and “A Plea for Humor.” Charles de Kay, “A Turning Point in the Arts,” Cosmopolitan 15 (July 1893): 265. 6. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 214. 7. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Plea for Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (January 1867): 37. 8. C. C. Buel, “Preliminary Glimpses of the Fair,” Century 45 (February 1893): 615. 9. Ibid., 623, 616. 10. Julian Hawthorne, Humors of the Fair (Chicago: E. A. Weeks, 1893), p. 61. Whimsy also entered the fair in the pavilions Stanford White designed for the White Star Steamship Co. and for Puck magazine, which invited visitors to observe the printing of its special World’s Fair edition. Located between the Horticultural Hall and the Woman’s Building, the small Puck building was a “pink and white confection . . . with twisted baroque columns at the entrance and ornamental cartouches with the magazine’s logo above each window.” See Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White, McKim, Mead and White: The Masterworks (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), p. 126; and “Puck at Chicago,” Puck 31 (March 2, 1892): 23. 11. Mariana Van Rensselaer, “At the Fair,” Century 46 (May 1893): 7, 6. 12. See Michele H. Bogart, “Barking Architecture: The Sculpture of Coney Island,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2 (Winter 1988): 3–17. She describes Coney Island as “a parodic commentary on the classic plans of world’s fairs.” 13. Benjamin De Casseres, “The Ironical in Art,” Camera Work, no. 38 (April 1912): 18.

222  |  Notes to Pages 162–167

Illustrations

Plates following page 132 1. Winslow Homer, Playing Old Soldier, 1863 2. Winslow Homer, The Bright Side, 1865 3. John George Brown, The Passing Show, 1877 4. Bencke and Scott, New York, after a design by Enoch Wood Perry, The True American (The Bummers), 1875 5. Selchow and Righter Company, New York, Sliced Nations, game box top and puzzle pieces, 1875 6. William Holbrook Beard, study for an unrealized museum in Central Park, 1869–70 7. William Holbrook Beard, Bears in a Watermelon Patch, 1871 8. Augustus Saint-Gaudens; base designed by Stanford White, The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin), 1883–86 9. Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Reclining Nude Figure of a Girl, n.d. 10. John Haberle, The Slate, ca. 1895 11. John Haberle, Torn in Transit, 1890–95

Figures 1. John Gast after John George Brown, The First Cigar (early 1860s), ca. 1870  13 2. William Sidney Mount, Cider Making, 1840–41  15 3. William Holbrook Beard, The March of Silenus, ca. 1862  17 4. Winslow Homer, Surgeon’s Call, from Life in Camp. Part 1, 1864  20 5. Winslow Homer, Hard Tack, from Life in Camp. Part 1, 1864  20 6. “Geography,” from Twenty-Five Cents Worth of Nonsense; or, The Treasure Box of Unconsidered Trifles, 1850s  22 7. Winslow Homer, Punishment for Intoxication (In Front of the Guard-House), 1863  23

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8. C. F. Morse and G. A. Morse, Yankee Volunteers Marching into Dixie, 1862  24 9. Winslow Homer, Near Andersonville, 1865–66  30 10. David Claypoole Johnston, Sound Asleep or Wide Awake, 1845–55  33 11. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the grass), 1863  35 12. Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866  39 13. Winslow Homer, Rocky Coast and Gulls, 1869  40 14. Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868  41 15. Thomas Waterman Wood, American Citizens (To the Polls), 1867  46 16. Horace Bonham, Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, 1879  47 17. John George Brown, A Jolly Lot, 1885  49 18. Joseph Decker, Our Gang (Accused), 1886  50 19. David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, 1856–58  51 20. John George Brown, The Cider Mill, 1880  53 21. Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871  54 22. Peter B. Wight, National Academy of Design, Twenty-Third Street and Fourth Avenue, 1863–65  55 23. Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848  61 24. Selchow and Righter Company, New York, Sliced Nations, inside of game box top, 1875  64 25. Enoch Wood Perry, Talking It Over, 1872  66 26. Thomas Nast, “Who Stole the People’s Money?” (detail of “Two Great Questions”), Harper’s Weekly 15 (August 19, 1871)  67 27. “The Rogues’ Gallery,” Puck 3 (July 3, 1878)  68 28. Thomas Nast, “The ‘Brains,’ ” Harper’s Weekly 15 (October 21, 1871)  69 29. “Puck Sends His Compliments to Mr. Nast Once More!” Puck 5 (June 4, 1879)  71 30. Thomas Nast, “The Chinese Question,” Harper’s Weekly 15 (February 18, 1871)  72 31. Thomas Nast, “Our Artist’s Occupation Gone,” Harper’s Weekly 16 (November 23, 1872)  75 32. William Holbrook Beard, “Main Entrance,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” 1871  80 33. William Holbrook Beard, “The Approach to the Art Museum,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” 1871  81 34. William Holbrook Beard, “Second Entrance,” from J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” 1871  82 35. William Holbrook Beard, Making Game of the Hunter, 1880  94 36. John Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775, 1786  95 37. Cover, Crockett Almanac, vol. 2, no. 3, 1841  97 38. Frontispiece, Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, 1869  98 39. L. Y. Hopkins, “Etchings—Scenes from Shakespeare,” back page, Scribner’s Monthly 2 (September 1871)  101

224  |  Illustrations

4 0. David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout, 1860–63  103 41. Samuel D. Ehrhart, “The Metropolitan Museum,” cover of Puck (January 2, 1889)  104 42. Aerial view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the southeast, ca. 1920, after construction of five wings and the library annex by McKim, Mead and White  106 43. William Holbrook Beard, The Fallen Landmark, 1872  106 44. Thomas R. Gould, John Bridge, 1882  116 45. Detail of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin)  117 46. Stanford White, fountain, Stearns Square, Springfield, Massachusetts, ca. 1899  118 47. Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his Cornish, New Hampshire, studio with the completed clay model of The Standing Lincoln, 1887  119 48. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (designers of base: Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White), Farragut Monument, 1877–80  121 49. William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858  123 50. Frederick MacMonnies, Bacchante and Infant Faun, 1893–94  129 51. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1878  131 52. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, 1892–94  134 53. John Haberle, A Bachelor’s Drawer, 1890–94  143 54. Detail of John Haberle, The Slate  144 55. Photograph of George Ohr on the Midway of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia, 1895  145 56. John Haberle, Imitation, 1887  146 57. John Haberle, The Slate: Memoranda, ca. 1895  147 58. John Frederick Peto, The Cup We All Race 4, ca. 1900  150 59. John Haberle, The Changes of Time, 1888  152 60. John Haberle, Japanese Corner, 1898  162 61. Frances Benjamin Johnston, Exposition Grounds, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893  165

Illustrations  |  225

Index

Italicized page numbers indicate figures. Color plates are indicated by number (e.g., pl. 3). Adorno, Theodor, 52–53, 61 African Americans: and Artemus Ward, 149; by Brown, 49; and chromolithography, 188n71; in Civil War, 1, 29, 30, 31, 45, pl. 2; by Decker, 50–51, 50; depicted by Bonham, 46–48, 47, 49–50; depictions of, 30, 46, 47, 49, 50, 61, pl. 2; and dialect humor, 149; displaced by Central Park, 98; by Homer, 18, 27, 29, 30, 31, 41–42, pl. 2; and minstrelsy, 29, 149; and racial stereotype, 12, 18, 29, 49, 149, pl. 2; and slavery, 29, 149; as subject of humor, 29, 31, 179n75; and “verbal masquerade,” 149; by Wood, 45–48, 46. See also race Alberti, Leon Battista, 159 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 85, 99, 158 Allen, Robert C., 95 almanacs. See Crockett almanacs The American (James), 108–9, 131–32, 136 American Academy of Fine Arts, 55 The American Art Association (after 1877 the Society of American Artists), 92, 188n69 American Art Union, 55 American Citizens (To the Polls) (Wood), 46, 47–48 “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard” (article by Hassard), 78–82, 85–86, 80, 81, 82, 102, pl. 6. See also Beard, William Holbrook

The American Museum of Natural History, 7, 83; relationship to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 78 American Press Humorists, 153–54 American Press Humorists’ Book, 153–54 American Whig Review (periodical), 14 Appletons’ Journal (periodical), 41, 79 The Arcadian (periodical), 73 Armstrong, Carol, 65–66 Arnold, Matthew: on American culture as parochial, 123, 124; Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America, 209n64; Culture and Anarchy, 123; Higginson’s critique of, 137 Arp, Bill (pseud. Charles H. Smith), 27. See also Civil War, humorists during art: and chromolithography, 44, 58–62; and criticism of Homer’s work, 36, 38– 42; hierarchies of: and Beard’s work, 7– 8, 77, 81–82, 94–97, 99–107; and social uplift, 12–18, 54–57, 82–84, 96–97, 165– 66; and trompe l’oeil still-life painting, 144–48, 160 Art and Artists of Our Time (Cook), 92 art criticism: as newly professionalized, 91– 92; critiqued by Beard, 90–92. See also Cook, Clarence The Art-Idea (Jarves), 88 The Art Institute of Chicago, 56. See also museum movement

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The Artist in His Museum (Peale), 196n49 Artists’ Fund Society, 36 Artists Sketching in the White Mountains (Homer), 41 Art Review (periodical), 86 Associated Newspapers, 154 Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 36, 173n15. See also The New Path Atlantic Monthly (periodical), 32, 164 Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, 110. See also Saint-Gaudens, Augustus Babb, George Fletcher, 114 Babcock, Benjamin (character in The American), 108–9, 136 Bacchante and Infant Faun (MacMonnies), 129–30, 129, 134–36, 210n100 A Bachelor’s Drawer (Haberle), 143, 146 Baker, Paul R., 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail: on physical humor, 132; on newspapers, 219n74 Barlow, Francis Channing, 38, 65 Barnum, P. T.: featured in The Passing Show (Brown), 51, pl. 3; his American Museum, 83, 195n36, 203n141 Barthes, Roland, 33 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 26 Battle of New Orleans, 44 Baudelaire, Charles, 162 Beam, Philip C., 10 Beard, William Holbrook: ambition to produce sculpture, 80; on art criticism, 16, 90–91; Bears in a Watermelon Patch, 85, pl. 7; as “clear,” 100–101; Cook’s criticism of, 3, 7–8, 12–18, 20, 36, 77, 82, 91–92, 94– 96, 99–101; criticism of Cook, 16, 90–91; The Fallen Landmark, 106, 107; Jarves’s comments on, 91, 96; Jealous Rabbits, 12, 14; Making Game of the Hunter, 94–95, 94; The March of Silenus, 16, 17, 77, 85, 93, 175n30; as modern, 86; as “more of a humorist than an artist,” 101; museum project, ix, 7–8, 77–107, 80, 81, 82, pl. 6; museum project, attempt to appeal to organizers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 78–79; museum project and oldworld precedent, 86–93, 99–100; museum project and Peale, 84; museum project

228  |  Index

promoted in Scribner’s, 78–82, 85–86, 80, 81, 82, 102; “Oldest Institution in the World,” 90–92; as “old school,” 100; patrons of, 77, 93; Sheldon’s criticism of, 78, 87, 100–101; The Spade (address, National Academy of Design), 77, 100; The Spirit of the Storm, 78; study abroad, 90; trip through Rocky Mountains, 84; Tuckerman’s comments on, 78, 86 Bears in a Watermelon Patch (Beard), 85, pl. 7 Beecher, Catharine, 5, 128 Beecher, Henry Ward: conception of the “true American,” 45, 64–65; on immigration, 45, 64; remarks on class, 45; scandal involving, 65 Bellew, Frank, 70 Bellion, Wendy, 148, 159 Bencke, Herman. See Bencke and Scott Bencke and Scott, 58, 187–88n66; The True American (The Bummers), 7, 43– 44, 7, 58–69, 74–76, pl. 4. See also chromolithography Benedict Building, 132 Benjamin, S. G. W., 122, 126 Benson, Eugene, 38–39 Bergson, Henri, 132 Bierstadt, Albert, 59 The Biglow Papers (Lowell), 178n61 Billings, Josh (pseud. Henry Wheeler Shaw), 148–49, 163 Blackmar, Elizabeth, 98. See also Central Park Blair, Walter: on burlesque, 86; concept of “detachment,” 4; on deadpan, 180n85; on humor in the popular press, 153; on regional humor, 6 Blythe, David Gilmour: Hideout, 102, 103; Street Urchins, 51, 52; as “underground man,” 101–2 Bonham, Horace: Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, 46–48, 47; reliance on types, 75; vocations before painting, 46 Book of the Artists (Tuckerman), 200n96 Boston Art Commission, 130 Boston Public Library, 1, 129 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth: on American national character, 2; complaints about

students’ lack of seriousness, 1–2; on “the plague of jocularity,” 2 “The ‘Brains’ ” (Nast), 69. See also Tweed, “Boss” William The Brierwood Pipe (Homer), 28, 37 The Bright Side (Homer), 29, 31, pl. 2 The British Blondes, 93–96 The British Museum (London), 83 Brooks, Van Wyck, 123 Brown, John George: The Cider Mill, 52– 53; and “communities of amusement,” 48–53; Cook’s criticism of, 12–18; early life, 48; The First Cigar, 12–15, 13; A Jolly Lot, 49; paintings of street urchins, 3, 7, 33–34, 43–53, 49, 57–58, 63, 70, 74–75, pl. 3; parodied in Puck, 70; The Passing Show, 43–44, 51–53, 57–58, 63, 74–75, pl. 3; as repetitive, 70 Browne, Charles Farrar. See Ward, Artemus Bryant, William Cullen, 55 Buffalo Express, 199n89 Bufford, John H., 27 Buel, Clarence Clough, 166 bummer (slang term) 62, 65. See also The True American (The Bummers) The Bummers. See The True American (The Bummers) burlesque: and Beard, 82, 86–89, 99–103, 107, 110; literary, 5, 86–87; theatrical, 5, 93–96 Burnham, Daniel, 212n116 Burns, Sarah, 6: on Beard, 102; on Blythe, 51–52, 101–2; on childhood after the Civil War, 53; Inventing the Modern Artist (book), 10 cabinet of curiosities, 83 Calvinism, 128 Camera Work (periodical), 161–62 Camfield, Gregg, 128, 176n26 Cardiff Giant, 197n64 caricature, 5, 32–33, 99; reliance on types, 75–76; theory of, 68–69; in the work of Homer, 18, 20–21, 20, 182n123; in the work of Nast, 7, 43–44, 67–76, 67, 69, 72, 75; in the work of Perry, 65; in the work of Saint-Gaudens, 110, 114–15, 130, 131. See also graphic satire

caricature exhibitions, 3 Carroll, Lewis, 5: Alice’s Adventures, 85, 99, 158; and nonsense, 5, 158–59 Carroll, Noël, 96 cartoon. See graphic satire Catch-22 (Heller), 25 Centennial (1876), 45, 59, 64–65, 67 Centennial Fair, 58–59, 60 Central Park (New York), 7, 78, 80, 83, 84–85, 105; Hunt’s gates for, 88; immigrants displaced by, 98; and Paleozoic Museum (Hawkins), 202n129; The Pilgrim (Ward) in, 112; and Tweed Ring, 193–4n16, 202n129. See also Beard, William Holbrook, museum project The Century (periodical), 166 The Century Association, 65 The Changes of Time (Haberle), 151, 152, 155 Chapin, Chester W., 111, 114 Chapin, Chester W., Jr., 111 Chapin, Deacon Samuel, 110–11. See also The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens) Chapin, Emelia Ward, 111 Chapin family, 109–11, 112, 114, 118 Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Saint-Gaudens), 130, 131 Chase, Salmon P., 12 Chase, William Merritt, 132, 220n92 Cheshire Cat (character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), 158 children: in Blythe, 51–52, 51; in Brown, 7, 33–34, 43–53, 49, 53, 57–58, 63, 74–75, pl. 3; conceptions of after Civil War, 53, 57; evoked in Haberle, 146, 147, 148; irreverence of, 57; in Johnson, 3, 53–54, 56–58: journalism for, 52 Chinese Firecrackers (Haberle), 152 “The Chinese Question” (Nast), 70–73, 72 “chromo-civilization” (term coined by Godkin), 60–61. See also chromolithography chromolithography: criticism of, 59, 60– 61, 76; exhibition of, 58–59; method of production, 58, 66–67; status of, 44, 58– 62. See also The True American (The Bummers) Church, Frederic Edwin, 92

Index  |  229

Cider Making (Mount), 14, 15 The Cider Mill (Brown), 52–53 Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., 18, 144 Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America (Arnold), 209n64 Civil War: art criticism during, 12–25, 36– 42; conceptions of childhood after, 53, 57; and Copperheads, 173n12, 190n90; Cox during, 190n90; and the draft, 176n43; and draft riots, 26; and Emancipation Pro­clamation, 12; and the Gettysburg Address, 35; and Higginson, 1; and Homer, 10–42; humorists during, 5, 7, 26–27; and Lincoln, 12, 35–36; medicine during, 19, 176n45; Nast’s work during, 68, 73; Perry’s work during, 60; role of artists during, 27; shift in speech during, 35– 36; shirkers during, 18–19, 25–26; soldiers, 11, 18–39, 43; Whitman’s writing on, 35 Clark, Davida, 133–35. See also Diana Clark, T. J., 61 class: and art, 32–33, 45–53, 58–63, 97, 105; disparities and disputes, 16, 44–53, 62, 97–99, 118–20; elite art patrons and civic leaders, 1–4, 55–57, 82–85, 92–93, 99– 100; lower class entertainments, 95, 141; middle class conceptions of self, 2–3, 16, 20, 44, 58–59 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark Cleopatra (Story), 122, 123 Cleveland Plain Dealer (newspaper), 73 Clonney, James Goodwyn, 29, 60 Coan, Titus Munson, 75 Cohen, Ted, 29, 52 Cole, Thomas, 41 comedy of manners, 5, 125. See also The American (James); The Europeans (James) comic journals. See popular press, humorous Coney Island, 166 Confederacy, 29, 46; featured in painting, 38–39, 60. See also Civil War Cook, Clarence: Art and Artists of Our Time (book), 92; on art and social uplift, 16; on art criticism, 16; and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 36, 173n15; on chromolithography, 59, 60–61, 76; on

230  |  Index

“the conservative forces in American art,” 36; criticism of American sculpture, 120–22; education of, 14; on Homer, 36– 40; on humorous genre painting, 3, 12– 18; on John George Brown, 3, 12–18; on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 92, 103; reputation of, 12; on Saint-Gaudens, 120– 22; on William Holbrook Beard, 3, 7–8, 12–18, 20, 36, 77, 82, 91–92, 94–96, 99–101 Cook, Orrin Wilkins, 119, 127, 207n46 Cooper, Helen, 50 Copperheads. See Democratic party Cornish colony of artists, 128 Cortissoz, Royal, 110, 112, 115, 137 cosmopolitanism: in an American context, 8, 122, 138; approaches to style, 57, 100; evoked in Bret Harte’s conception of American humor, 57; in Henry James, 8, 109, 122, 124–25, 127–29, 136; Perry’s style as rejection of, 60; and SaintGaudens, 108–11, 125, 130, 135, 138 Cotton States and International Exposition (Atlanta), 144 Couture, Thomas, 59 Coviello, Peter, 35 Cox, Kenyon: criticism of The Farragut Monument (Saint-Gaudens), 126; criticism of The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens), 112; on Saint-Gaudens as heir to Renaissance sculptors, 125–26 Cox, Samuel S.: on American humor, 44– 45, 48, 52, 62; comments on American children, 57; and Democratic party, 44, 68, 183n1, 190n90; on humor and government, 44–45, 57; role of and attitudes during Civil War, 190n90; Why We Laugh (book), 44 Crane, Stephen, 25, 26 Crawford, Thomas, 88 Crockett almanacs, 5, 6, 96, 97 Cruikshank, George, 100 culture: movement to establish, 1, 3, 53– 56, 82–84, 97, 165–67; as pursuit of knowledge beyond utility, 1. See also art, hierarchies of; museum movement Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 123 culture industry, 52–53, 61 The Cup We All Race 4 (Peto), 150

Currier, Nathaniel, 182n121 Currier and Ives, 201n108 Curtis, George William: comments on art criticism, 12, 92; mediating between Cook and Beard, 16, 20, 92 Davis, Jefferson, 60, 190n90 Davy Crockett almanacs. See Crockett almanacs deadpan, 5, 11, 31–32, 40–42, 141–42, 180n85. See also “the humorous story”; platform humorists The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill (Trumbull), 95 De Casseres, Benjamin, 161–62, 166–67 Decker, Joseph: Our Gang (Accused), 50–51, 50; still-life paintings, 50; training, 50 Degas, Edgar, 65–66 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet), 34–35, 35 De Kay, Charles, 165 “Democracy” (Whitman), 46–48 Democratic party: affiliated journalism’s criticism of Nast, 73; Copperheads, 173n12, 190n90; featured in Mount’s painting, 14, 15; Perry’s association with, 60; Samuel S. Cox’s affiliation with, 44, 68, 183n1, 190n90; and Tweed Ring, 68 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 62–63 Detroit Evening News, 143 Dewing, Thomas, 132–33, 135, pl. 9 dialect: and African American humor, 151; as humorous, 5, 37, 122, 148–51; as juvenile, 148–51; in Ward’s writing, 148– 51. See also platform humorists dialogism, 156, 219n74 Diana (Saint-Gaudens), 133–36, 134, 212n116 di Cesnola, Luigi P., 105, 199n92 Dickson, Henry, 221n96 DiMaggio, Paul, 55 Dodworth Building, 93 Donatello, 120 Doss, Erika, 109, 112, 119–20 “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (Twain), 86–87. See also burlesque, literary Downes, William Howe, 10 draft riots (New York), 26 drag performance, 95–96

Drucker, Johanna, 140 Duchamp, Marcel, 133 Düsseldorf School, 59–60, 74 Dutch genre painting, 19 École des Beaux-Arts (Paris), 121 Ehrhart, Samuel D., 104, 105 Elgin Marbles, 125 Eli Bates Fountain (Saint-Gaudens and MacMonnies), 115, 130 Eliot, Charles William, 169n4 Emancipation Proclamation, 12. See also Civil War; Lincoln, Abraham Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 99, 128, 217n45 Esar, Evan, 157 “Etchings—Scenes from Shakespeare” (Hopkins), 101 etiquette books, 20 Eugenia (character in The Europeans), 124, 136 The Europeans (James), 109, 124–25, 127– 29, 136, 209n70 Evans, De Scott, 145–46 Everett, Edward, 35 The Exhumation of the Mastadon (Peale), 196n49 The Fallen Landmark (Beard), 106, 107 Farmers Nooning (Mount), 29 Farragut, David, 120. See also The Farragut Monument (Saint-Gaudens) The Farragut Monument (Saint-Gaudens), 120–21, 126, 133; Cook’s comments on, 120–21; Cox on, 126; Gilder on, 121 Felix (character in The Europeans), 124–25, 127–29, 136 The Fifth Avenue Journal (periodical), 70 The First Cigar (Gast after Brown), 12–15, 13 Fisheries Building (World’s Columbian Exposition), 166 Fiske, John, 111 Five Points (New York), 98 Fountain (Duchamp), 133 fountain designed for The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens), 11, 117, 118, 120, 125, 133 fountains, history and associations of, 117–18 Franco-Prussian War, 83

Index  |  231

Frankenstein, Alfred, 155 Frankfurt School, 52 French, Daniel Chester, 166, 205n21 Freud, Sigmund, 130, 158, 206n34 Fried, Michael, 34 Fussell, Paul, 25 Gast, John, 13 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 217n38 genre painting: African Americans depicted in, 30, 45–51, 46, 47, 49, 50, 61, pl. 2; children featured in, 48–58, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 61; Civil war subjects in (Homer), 18–25, 28–34, 30, 36–39; class disparities depicted in, 45–48, 47, 61, pl. 4; Cook’s criticism of, 3, 12–16; as humorous, 3, 12–16, 32–34, 47–48; and immigrant commu­ nities, 49–51, 49; legibility of, 33–34; as nostalgic, 65–66; and “semantic prattle,” 11, 33–34, 40; use of types in, 45–52, 75–76 Gertrude (character in The Europeans), 127– 29 Gettysburg Address, 35–36. See also Civil War; Lincoln, Abraham Gilder, Richard Watson, 121 Giralda Tower (Seville), 133 Godkin, E. L., 60–61 Gombrich, Ernst, 69 Gould, Thomas R., 116, 205n21 Grafly, Charles, 220n92 Grandma’s Hearthstone (Haberle), 143 Grannis, Theodore, 40 Grant, Ulysses S., 65, 69–70, 74; administration of, 65, 69–70; featured in The Changes of Time (Haberle), 151–52; Thomas Nast’s support of, 69–70 graphic satire, 68, 71, 104; and the work of Thomas Nast, 7, 43–44, 67–76, 67, 69, 72, 75. See also caricature The Greek Slave (Powers), 122 Greeley, Horace, 70, 74 Greenberg, Clement, 61 Grimes, Frances, 211n113 grottos, 87–89. See also Beard, William Holbrook, museum project The Gulf Stream (Homer), 41–42

232  |  Index

Haberle, John: A Bachelor’s Drawer, 143; changes in spelling of surname, 151–52; The Changes of Time, 151, 152, 155; Chinese Firecrackers, 152; Grandma’s Hearthstone, 143; Imitation, 146, 155; Japanese Corner, 161, 162; newspaper clippings featured in paintings, 143, 151, 155; personal papers, notes on jokes, 139, 154–55, 157; position at Peabody Museum, 145, 151; potential submissions to newspapers, 139, 154–55; as “proto-modern,” 140, 161– 62; Reproduction, 155; self-references in paintings, 140, 142–43, 155–56; shift in technique, 159–60; The Slate, 8, 140, 142– 43, 144, 146–48, 151, 155–63, pl. 10; The Slate: Memoranda, 147, 148; Small Change, 152; Torn in Transit, 159–60, pl. 11; training, 145 Hard Tack (Homer), 20–21 Harnett, William Michael, 139, 142, 146, 160–61, 221n98 Harper’s Weekly (periodical), 16, 41; Homer’s work featured in, 16, 27–28; Nast’s work featured in, 43, 67–75, 67, 69, 72, 75, 110 Harper’s Young People (periodical), 148 Harris, Neil, 82 Harrison, William Henry, 14 Harte, Bret, 6, 57 Hartley, J. S., 205n21. See also Miles Morgan Hartmann, Sadakichi, 123–24, 137 Harvard University, 14, 169n4 Hassard, John R. G.,”An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” 78–82, 85–86, 80, 81, 82, 102. See also Beard, William Holbrook, museum project Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 141 Hawkins, Benjamin Waterhouse, 202n129 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: comments on Cleo­ patra (Story), 122; Henry James’s criticism of, 122–24; and his Puritan ancestors, 122– 24; remarks on the Civil War, 11; The Scarlet Letter, 112 Hearn Fund, 200n95. See also The Metropolitan Museum of Art Heller, Joseph, 25

The Hideout (Blythe), 102, 103 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth: conception of art as “alien” to the United States, 1; criticism of Arnold, 137; “plea for culture,” 1, 56, 166; role during Civil War, 1; on the value of “Puritan traits,” 137 Hogarth, William, 13 Holland, Josiah, 16, 18 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 25 Homer, Winslow: African Americans featured in works by, 18, 29–31, 30, 41–42, pl. 2; Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 41; as a “beginner,” 28; The Brierwood Pipe, 28, 37; The Bright Side, 29, 31, pl. 2; children featured in paintings by, 59; Civil War camp scenes of, 11, 18–42; croquet scenes of, 40; graphic imagery of, 27–28, 37; The Gulf Stream, 41–42; Hard Tack, 20–21, 20; The Initials, 28; and irony, 11, 41–42; late paintings of, 10, 40, 41–42; Life in Camp, 20–21, 20, 177n49; Near Andersonville, 29–31, 30; News from the War, 27; and oil painting, 28, 37–38; Our Jolly Cook, 18; and outsiders, 18–31, 39; Pitching Quoits, 28; Playing Old Soldier, 18–42, pl. 1; Prisoners from the Front, 7, 38–39, 43, 65; Punishment for Intoxication (In Front of the Guard-House), 22, 23, 24–25, 37; Rocky Coast and Gulls (Manchester Coast), 39–40, 40; his sense of humor, 10–11, 41–42; his “sense of the dramatic,” 10, 42; sketching trips with Perry, 59; Surgeon’s Call, 20–21; The Sutler’s Tent, 36 Hopkins, L. Y., 101 Hoppin, Martha, 48 Hoppin, William J., 89 Horkheimer, Max, 52–53, 61 Howells, William Dean: critique of ante­ bellum humor, 11, 32; criticism of James’s biography of Hawthorne, 204n2, 208n63 “How to Tell a Story” (Twain), 31–32, 141– 42. See also “the humorous story” Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 38 humor: and African Americans, 29, 31, 149, 179n75; American (as extravagant), 7, 11, 12–18, 57, 96, 148–49, 164–65, 169n5;

American (theorizations of), 2, 44–45, 169n4; of the 1850s, 7, 11, 14, 32–33; in­ congruity theories of, 158, 161; market for, 2, 7, 8, 16–17, 62, 140–41, 153–57; releasebased theories of, 15, 158; role in creating consensus, 43–45, 48–49, 52; the sense of, as social value, 2, 44, 140; superiority theories of, 158, 161 humor, styles of (summary), 5–6; amiable, 5, 15, 44, 128; buffoonery, 12, 15, 99; burlesque (in the work of Beard), 82, 86–89, 99–103, 107, 110; burlesque (literary), 5, 86–87; burlesque (theatrical), 5, 93–96; carnivalesque, 100; deadpan, 5, 7, 11, 31– 32, 40–42, 141–42, 180n85; dialect, 5, 37, 122, 148–51; farce, 99; gag, 10, 28, 42, 66, 141, 158–60; the grotesque, 32, 44–45, 96, 108, 148–49; in-joke, 8, 110–11, 130, 135; irony, 48, 70, 102, 113, 145, 149; jocularity, 2–5, 12–18, 53, 56–8, 130–31, 164–67; levity, 1–4, 11–18, 53, 57, 127, 149; nonsense, 5, 64, 73, 99–100, 158–59, 162–63, 220n92; parody, 5, 32, 70–73, 71, 95, 154, 159; physical, 15, 19–20, 95–96, 132; practical joke, 15, 139, 160–61; pun, 18, 144, 150, 155, 159, 160; satire, 4, 5, 14, 16, 26, 66, 86, 108–117, 164; stand-up comedy, 26–27, 28, 178n60; two-part dialogue joke, 156–57; wit (and modern art), 162–63; wit (literary), 6. See also caricature; graphic satire; jokes; laughter “the humorous story,” 5, 8, 180n87; theorized by Twain, 11, 31–32, 140–43, 148, 162–63. See also deadpan Hunt, Richard Morris: designs for Central Park gates, 88; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 105 Huntington, Daniel, 36, 92 Imitation (Haberle), 146, 155 immigration, 45–51, 69, 98, 109, 118–20 Indianapolis Journal (periodical), 31 Industrial Exhibition Company, 79 In Front of the Guard-House. See Punishment for Intoxication (In Front of the Guard-House) (Homer) In Homage to Worthy Ancestors, 110

Index  |  233

The Initials (Homer), 28 Inness, George, 160, 182n121 The Innocents Abroad (Twain), 89–90, 99, 108, 199n89 International Review (periodical), 58 irony, 48, 70, 102, 113, 145, 149 James, Henry: The American, 108–9, 131– 32; comedies of manners, 5, 125; and cosmopolitanism, 8, 109, 122, 124–25, 127– 29, 136; criticism of Hawthorne, 122–24, 208n63; The Europeans, 109, 124–25, 127– 29, 136; literary treatments of sculpture, 8, 108–9; The Point of View, 136; Portrait of a Lady, 128; Saint-Gaudens’s criticism of, 109; satire in, 5, 108–111, 124–29, 131– 32, 136; William James’s criticism of, 209n70 James, William, 151, 158, 209n70 Japanese Corner (Haberle), 161, 162 Jarves, James Jackson: The Art-Idea (book), 88; on Beard, 77, 91, 96; criticism of Crawford, 88; on genre painting, 33; on museums, 195n36; remarks on culture, 54–55, 57 Jealous Rabbits (Beard), 12, 14 “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (Twain), 196n54 jocularity, 2–5, 12–18, 53, 56–58, 130–31, 164–67. See also humor, American (as extravagant); laughter; “The Plague of Jocularity” Joe Miller’s Jests, 156 John Bridge (Gould), 116, 205n21 John Harvard (French), 205n21 Johns, Elizabeth, 10, 14 Johnson, Andrew, 68, 190n91 Johnson, Eastman, 28; The Old Stagecoach, 3, 53, 54, 56–59 Johnston, David Claypoole, 32–33 Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 165 Johnston, John Taylor, 93 jokes: as commodity, 140–41, 159; in contrast to “the humorous story,” 8, 140–43, 162– 63; as ephemeral, 32, 37–38, 157; in-joke, 8, 110–11, 130, 135; as “machine-made,” 8, 140, 153–57; market for, 8, 140, 153–55; in newspapers, 8, 140, 153–57; practical joke,

234  |  Index

15, 139, 160–61; role in creating consensus, 43–45, 48–53; as “simplest organized thing printable,” 153–57; stock subjects of, 157; in trompe l’oeil still-life painting, 139–40, 145, 155–63; Twain’s critique of modern techniques of, 140–42, 154–55; as two-part dialogue, 156–57; and vaudeville, 141, 156; writers of, 140–41, 153–57, 163 A Jolly Lot (Brown), 49 Judge (periodical), 62. See also popular press, humorous Kant, Immanuel, 126 Keep, Henry, 78–79. See also Beard, William Holbrook, museum project Kensett, John F., 92 Kerr, Orpheus C. (pseud. Robert Henry Newell), 27, 173n12, 177n55 kitsch, 60–61 Knoper, Randall, 149 Kris, Ernst, 69 La Farge, John, 182n121 Landon, Melville D. (“Eli Perkins”), 149, 180n89 Landseer, Edwin, 90 laughter: featured in art, 13, 17, 33, 53–54, 56–58, 94, 129–30, 129, pl. 3, pl. 6, pl. 7; role in creating consensus, 43–45, 52; “laughing prompt,” 19, 33–34 Lear, Edward, 5, 158 Lee, Elizabeth, 128, 132, 134 Leutze, Emanuel, 36, 59 Levine, Lawrence, 56 Liberal Republican Party, 70 Life (periodical), 62, 156–57. See also popular press, humorous Life in Camp (Homer, Prang), 20, 21, 177n49 Lincoln, Abraham: assassination of, 190n91; cartoons featuring, 12; Cox’s criticism of, 190; Emancipation Proclamation of, 12; featured in The Changes of Time (Haberle), 151–52, 152; featured in The Standing Lincoln (Saint-Gaudens), 119, 120, 137; featured in Talking It Over (Perry), 65–66, 66; Gettysburg Address, 35–36; remarks on The First Cigar (Brown),

14; sense of humor, 12, 173n12; sense of humor as inappropriate, 12 Lincoln Park (Chicago), 115 Locke, David Ross (“Petroleum V. Nasby”), 27, 173n12. See also Civil War, humorists during Louisiana Central Democratic Committee, 60 Louvre Museum, 83 Lowell, James Russell, 178n61 lower classes. See class Lubin, David, 142 Luna Park (Coney Island), 166 MacMonnies, Frederick: Bacchante and Infant Faun, 129–30, 129, 134–36; Eli Bates Fountain, 115, 130; sculpture at World’s Columbian Exposition, 166 Madison’s Budget (periodical), 141 Madison Square Garden, 133, 135 Madison Square Park (New York), 120, 134 Making Game of the Hunter (Beard), 94– 95, 94 Manchester Coast (Homer). See Rocky Coast and Gulls Manet, Edouard: and deadpan, 34; Le Dé­ jeuner sur l’herbe, 34–35; Olympia, 34 Manhattan Square, 78; as proposed site for the American Museum of Natural History, 78; as proposed site for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 78; proposed zoological garden in, 85 The March of Silenus (Beard), 16, 17, 77, 85, 93, 175n30 Martiny, Philip, 207n41 Maryland State Fair, 14 MASH, 25 Masson, Thomas L., 156–57. See also jokes, as “machine-made” Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition (Shinn), 60 Matthews, Brander: conception of the “penalty of humor,” 8; on jokes in newspapers, 154 McKim, Charles, 129–30, 131 McKim, Mead and White, 105–6, 129, 212n116 Medici family, 89 Melville, Herman, 26

Merrick Park, 118 The Metropolitan Fair, 36 “The Metropolitan Museum” (Ehrhart), 104, 105 Metropolitan Museum Committee, 78– 79; investment in old masters, 8, 83–84; meeting at Union League Club, 78–79, 89; mention in Scribner’s article promoting Beard’s museum project, 78–79. See also The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 7–8, 55, 106, 132, 182n123, 210n100; additions to, 105–107; architectural Cesnola collection, 203n141; Cook’s criticism of, 92, 103; courses for artisans, 103; Dodworth Building, 93; as exclusionary, 103–7; founding of, 78–79, 82–84, 89; loan exhibitions at, 93, 200n98; place of contemporary art within, 93, 200n95; relationship with American Museum of Natural History, 78; relationship with contemporary artists, 92–93. See also culture, movement to establish; Metropolitan Museum Committee; museum movement Mexican War, 178n61. See also War News from Mexico (Woodville) Michelangelo, 89–90 Michelson, Bruce, 6 middle classes. See class Midway Plaisance (World’s Columbian Exposition), 166 Miles Morgan (Hartley), 114, 205n21 minstrelsy, 29, 149. See also African Americans; race modernism: and Degas, 65–66; and “difficulty,” 61, 162; and Haberle, 140, 162–63, 221n102; and Manet, 34 “Monster Museum of New York” (news­ paper piece), 84. See also The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Morgue, 133. See also Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, and his circle Mormon Church, 60 Morse, C. F., 24 Morse, G. A., 24 Mould, Jacob Wrey, 105 Mount, William Sidney: Cider Making, 14, 15, 32; as “the comic painter,” 14, 32, 101;

Index  |  235

Mount, William Sidney (continued) Farmers Nooning, 29; legibility of paintings by, 32; and regionally specific humor, 4 museum movement, 3, 53–57, 79, 82–84 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 55–56, 82. See also museum movement music, 53, 56. See also art, and social uplift Nantucket, 54. See also The Old Stagecoach (Johnson) Nasby, Petroleum V. (pseud. David Ross Locke), 27, 173n12. See also Civil War, humorists during Nast, Thomas: “The ‘Brains,’” 69; “The Chinese Question,” 70–73, 72; debt to Philipon, 190n93; graphic satire in Harper’s Weekly, 43–44, 67–76, 67, 69, 72, 75, 110; imagery of Grant, 69–70, 190n95; imagery of Greeley, 70; “Our Artist’s Occupation Gone,” 75; parodied by Puck, 70–73, 71; as powerful, 74; as Radical Republican, 69–70; as repetitive, 70–73; scrapbooks kept by, 190–191n97; and Tweed Ring, 68, 70, 73–74; “Who Stole the People’s Money?” (detail of “Two Great Questions”) 67, 70; work during Civil War, 68, 73 The Nation (periodical), 40, 57, 60 National Academy for the Advancement of Art, 78. See also Beard, William Holbrook, museum project The National Academy of Design: Beard elected academician by, 77; Beard’s address at annual dinner of, 77, 100; Bonham shown at, 46; building, 54–56, 55; classes taken by Haberle at, 145; Cook’s criticism of, 36, 92; Homer made aca­ demician by, 28; Homer shown at, 22, 28; involvement with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 200n95; Johnson shown at, 54, 57 National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 62 Near Andersonville (Homer), 29–31, 30 Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit (Bonham), 46–48, 47 Nesbit, Evelyn, 135, 138

236  |  Index

Newell, Robert Henry (“Orpheus C. Kerr”), 27, 173n12, 177n55. See also Civil War, humorists during New England societies, 109, 112–14 New Haven, Connecticut, 139, 143, 145, 151 Newman, Christopher (character in The American), 108–9, 136 The New Path (periodical), 12, 36. See also Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art newspapers: Bakhtin on, 219n74; Cook on, 16; de Tocqueville on, 62–63; featured in trompe l’oeil still-life painting, 8, 143, 151, 155; jokes in, 8, 153–57, 220n92; New-York Daily Tribune (New York Tribune from April 10, 1866), 12, 16, 70, 84, 91–92, 105, 157; New York Evening Post, 146, 155; NewYork Illustrated News, 22; New York Sun, 153, 154; New-York Times (New York Times from December 1, 1896), 22, 58, 74, 93, 154, 157; New York World, 155; trompe l’oeil painting mentioned in, 155. See also popular press New-York Daily Tribune (New York Tribune from April 10, 1866), 12, 16, 70, 84, 91–92, 105, 157 New York Evening Post, 146, 155 New-York Historical Society, 55 New-York Illustrated News, 22 New York Sun, 153, 154 New-York Times (New York Times from December 1, 1896), 22, 58, 74, 93, 154, 157 New York University building, 28 New York World, 155 nonsense, 5, 64, 73, 99–100, 158–59, 162– 63, 220n92 Nye, Bill, 153, 154, 180n87 Ohr, George, 143–44, 145 old masters: featured in The Innocents Abroad (Twain), 89–90, 99, 108; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 83–84; and Saint-Gaudens, 125–26, 133; taste for, 83–84; White’s appreciation of, 125, 133 The Old Stagecoach (Johnson), 3, 53–54, 56– 59 The Old Violin (Harnett), 221n98

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 80, 83, 84–85, 88. See also Central Park Olympia (Manet), 34 “Our Artist’s Occupation Gone” (Nast), 75 Our Gang (Accused) (Decker), 50–51, 50 Our Jolly Cook (Homer), 18 parody, 5, 32, 70–73, 71, 95, 154, 159 The Passing Show (Brown), 43–44, 51–53, 57–58, 63, 74–75, pl. 3 passive aggression, 21–25. See also Playing Old Soldier (Homer) Pater, Walter, 126, 133–34 patriotism, 44–45, 59, 113–14 Paxton, Frank, 25 Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven), 145, 151 Peale, Charles Willson, 84 “The Penalty of Humor” (article by Matthews), 8, 81–82 The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 56. See also museum movement Perkins, Eli (pseud. Melville D. Landon), 149, 180n89 Perry, Claire, 49 Perry, Enoch Wood: copyright filed by, 59, 62, 187n63; popularity of, 59; range of subjects, 59, 60; sketching trips with Homer, 59; Talking It Over, 65–66; training, 59–60; travels, 59–60; The True American (The Bummers), 7, 43–44, 58– 69, 74–76, 187n63, pl. 4 Peto, John Frederick, 139, 217n46; The Cup We All Race 4, 150 “Petrified Man” (Twain), 86. See also burlesque, literary The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 56. See also museum movement Philipon, Charles, 190n93 phrenology, 63. See also caricature Picasso, Pablo, 155, 162 The Pilgrim (Saint-Gaudens), 109, 115 The Pilgrim (Ward), 112, 205n21 Pitching Quoits (Homer), 28 “The Plague of Jocularity” (article by Boyesen), 2, 16. See also humor, American (as extravagant) platform humorists, 5, 7, 26–27, 31–32, 170n16;

and African American humor, 149; Holland’s criticism of, 16–18; use of dialect, 148–49. See also Civil War, humorists during; deadpan; “the humorous story” Playing Old Soldier (Homer), 18–42, pl. 1; and deadpan, 28–34, 40–42; and disillusionment during the Civil War, 25–27; as example of Homer’s early work, 27–28; and painting trends of the 1860s, 36–42; and passive aggression, 21–25; and physical humor, 19–21; and shirkers during the war, 18–19, 22–25; and speech, 34–36 “playing old soldier” (slang phrase), 18 “A Plea for Culture” (article by Higginson), 1, 56 The Point of View (James), 136 Poirier, Richard, 127, 136 popular press, 3, 139–40, 153–57; Beard featured in, 78–82, 80, 81, 82, 90–92; Homer’s work featured in, 16, 27–28; humorous, 44, 48, 62, 68, 71, 104, 105, 153; humorous back pages of, 101; Thomas Nast featured in, 43–44, 67–75, 67, 69, 72, 75. See also newspapers Post, George B., 79 Powers, Hiram, 122–23, 126 Prang, Louis: remarks on chromolithography, 58–59; Life in Camp (Homer), 20– 21, 177n49; rendition of Bierstadt’s Sunset: California Scenery, 59 The Principles of Psychology (James), 151 Prisoners from the Front (Homer), 7, 38–39, 43, 65 provincialism: and Hawthorne, 122–24; in Henry James, 8, 122–25, 127–28, 136; and Puritanism, 111–14, 122–24, 137–38; Saint-Gaudens criticism of, 8, 110–11, 113– 14, 135–38. See also cosmopolitanism “pseudo-culture,” 61–62, 66, 67. See also chromolithography, criticism of Puck (periodical), 62, 153; cartoons in, 68– 69, 68, 70–73, 71, 104, 105; pavilion at World’s Columbian Exposition, 222n10. See also popular press, humorous Punch (periodical), 48 punch line: and Homer’s works, 10, 28–29, 37; and trompe l’oeil still-life painting, 156. See also “the humorous story”; jokes

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Punishment for Intoxication (In Front of the Guard-House) (Homer), 22, 23, 24–25, 28 puns, 18, 144, 150, 155, 159, 160 The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (SaintGaudens), 8, 109–20, 117, 118, 126–27, 131– 33, 135–38, pl. 8; Cox on, 112; fountain opposite, 117, 118, 120, 125; Hartmann’s criticism of, 123, 137; move to Merrick Park, 118; newspaper cartoon spoof of, 113; original site of, 111, 117–18; original site of vandalized, 118; pedestal for, 111; reductions of, 109; Springfield resident’s criticism of, 119; Taft’s comments on, 126– 27; unveiling of, 114; White’s involvement in, 8, 110–11, 117–20, 125, 133, 138 Puritans (and Puritanism): Arnold’s criticism of, 123; Benjamin’s criticism of, 122; Hartmann’s criticism of, 123, 137; and Hawthorne, 122–24; Higginson on, 137; James on, 122–24, 127–29, 136; reputation of, 111–13, 118, 122–24, 136; Twain on, 113. See also The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens) Rabelais, 16, 96, 132 race, 29–33, 44–51, 63–65, 70–73, 97, 113, 149. See also African Americans; immigration; Puritans Radical Republicans, 69–70, 190n91. See also Nast, Thomas Reclining Nude Figure of a Girl (Dewing), 132, pl. 9 Reconstruction, 7, 43, 75–76 The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 25, 26 “Reminiscences of an Idiot” (Saint-Gaudens), 208n51 The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 114; Cortissoz’s edits of, 137; as “sanitized,” 213n132 Renaissance (Italian): grottoes, 87–88; and Haberle’s work, 159; Pater’s writing on, 126; referred to in The Innocents Abroad (Twain), 89–90; and Saint-Gaudens, 125– 26, 133. See also old masters Repplier, Agnes, vii, x, 164–65, 167 Reproduction (Haberle), 155 Republican party, 69. See also Grant, Ulysses S.

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Riley, James Whitcomb, 180n87 Rocky Coast and Gulls (Homer), 39–40 “The Rogues’ Gallery” (cartoon in Puck), 68–69, 68 Rondel, Frederic, 28 Roosevelt, Theodore, 109 Rosenbaum, Julia, 109, 129, 130 Rosenzweig, Roy, 98. See also Central Park “Rough Notes of an Army Surgeon’s Experience” (article), 19 Saint-Gaudens, Augusta, 111, 211n113, 213n132 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus: attitudes toward the United States, 113, 122; caricatural portraits, 110, 130–31; and Chapin family, 109–11, 114; Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 130, 131; collaborations and friendship with White, 110–11, 117–22, 125, 130, 135–38; comments on Bacchante and Infant Faun (MacMonnies), 130; comments on James’s writing, 109; Cook’s criticism of, 120–21; Cortissoz on, 110, 112, 115, 137; Cox’s criticism of, 112, 125–26; Diana, 133–36, 134, 212n116; Eli Bates Fountain, 115, 130; on Europe, 125, 133; European heritage, 114; extramarital affairs, 132–35, 211n113; The Farragut Monument, 120–21, 126, 133; and his circle, 130–35; house in Cornish, 114, 128–29; link to old masters, 125–26; The Pilgrim, 109, 114, 115; The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin), 8, 109–20, 117, 118, 126–27, 131–33, 135–38, pl. 8; Reminiscences of, 114, 137, 213n132; sense of humor, 109–10, 115, 128, 130, 136; son Homer, 109, 114, 128, 136–37; son Louis, 133; The Stand­ ing Lincoln, 119, 120, 137; training, 121–22; and Twain, 113; work at World’s Columbian Exposition, 125, 212n116 Saint-Gaudens, Homer, 109, 114, 128, 136, 137 Saint-Gaudens, Louis, 133 Saint George (Donatello), 120 Salon des Refusés, 34 Sargent, John Singer, 182n121 satire, 4, 5, 14, 16, 26, 66, 86, 164. See also The American (James); The Europeans

(James); graphic satire; The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens) Schapiro, Meyer, 180n94 Schiller, Joyce, 118 Schutz, Charles, 21 Scott, Harshaw. See Bencke and Scott Scribner’s Monthly (periodical), 16, 54, 56, 57, 78, 79, 85, 101. See also “An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard” Scully, Vincent, 65 sculpture: criticism of American sculpture, 122, 126; featured in James, 108–9, 131– 32, 136; by MacMonnies, 129–30, 129; by Powers, 122–23, 126; requirements of civic monuments, 110, 114–15; by Story, 122–23; by Ward, 112; at World’s Columbian Exposition, 165–66. See also Saint-Gaudens, Augustus Selchow and Righter Company, 63–64, 75, pl. 5 “semantic prattle” (Barthes), 11, 33–34, 40 The Sewer Club, 133. See also Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, and his circle Shakespeare, William, 27, 56, 93, 101, 180n85 Shaw, Henry Wheeler (“Josh Billings”), 148– 49, 163 Sheldon, George William, 78, 87, 100–101 Simpson, Marc, 6, 29 slang, 18, 33, 62, 65. See also dialect The Slate (Haberle), 144, pl. 10; and “the humorous story,” 8, 139–48, 152, 161–63; and joking strategies of popular journalism, 8, 155–58; and nonsense, 157–63; references to A Bachelor’s Drawer and Grandma’s Hearthstone, 142–43; as selfdeprecatory, 144–48; and semiotic play, 149–51 The Slate: Memoranda (Haberle), 147, 148 Sliced Nations (game, Selchow and Righter), 63–64, 75, pl. 5 Small Change (Haberle), 152 The Smart Set (periodical), 154 Smith, Charles H. (“Bill Arp”), 27 Smith, David R., 6 Smith, Matthew Hale, 97–99, 98 The Society of American Artists (American Art Association until 1878), 92, 188n69

Society of Saint Tammany, 68. See also Tweed, “Boss” William “The Soldier on Leave” (poem in Vanity Fair), 26 Sound Asleep or Wide Awake (Johnston), 32–33 The South Kensington Museum, 103 The Spade (address delivered by Beard), 77, 100 The Spirit of the Storm (Beard), 78 Springfield, Massachusetts, 8, 109–11, 114, 117–18; Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral, 118; City Library, 118; immigrant population in, 118–19; Merrick Park, 118; Stearns Square, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 127, 133, 137. See also The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens) The Standing Lincoln (Saint-Gaudens), 119, 120, 137 stand-up comedy, 27–28. See also platform humorists Stanton, Edwin, 12 The Statue of Liberty, 135 Stearns Square, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 127, 133, 137. See also The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin) (Saint-Gaudens) Stieglitz, Alfred, 161 still-life painting. See trompe l’oeil still-life painting Story, William Wetmore, 122, 123 Street Urchins (Blythe), 51–52, 51 Sumner, Charles, 25 Sunset: California Scenery (Bierstadt, Prang), 59 Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Smith), 97–99, 98 Surgeon’s Call (Homer), 20–21, 21, 177n49 The Sutler’s Tent (Homer), 36 Taft, Lorado, 126–27 Tait, Arthur Fitzwilliam, 94 Talking It Over (Perry), 65–66 Tammany. See Tweed, “Boss” William Taylorism, 154 Tenth Street Studio Building, 48, 59, 78 Thaw, Harry K., 138 theatre, 46, 56, 93–96, 180n85 Thompson, Joseph, 83

Index  |  239

Thompson, Lydia. See The British Blondes Tid-Bits, 153. See also popular press, humorous A Tight Fix (Tait), 94 Tilton, Theodore, 65 Titian: Beard’s appreciation of, 90; Con­cert champêtre, 34; Death of Saint Peter Martyr, 90; Venus of Urbino, 34 Torn in Transit (Haberle), 159–60, pl. 11 Trachtenberg, Alan: on culture as feminized, 97; on institutions of high art and learning, 3, 56; on labor strikes, 44; on World’s Columbian Exposition, 165 Transcontinental Railroad, 83 “Triflers on the Platform” (article by Holland), 16, 18. See also platform humorists trompe l’oeil still-life painting: as a “difficult art,” 9, 140, 157–63; by Evans, 145–46; exhibition of, 144–45, 160–61; by Harnett, 139, 142, 146, 160–61; as juvenile, 148–50; as mechanical, 142, 159, 160; mentioned in newspapers, 155; newspapers featured in, 143, 151, 155–56, 160; by Peto, 139, 150; as practical joke, 139, 160–61; and semiotic play, 149–50; and viewers of, 139, 156, 160– 61. See also Haberle, John “true American,” 45, 64–65, 75. See also Reconstruction The True American (The Bummers) (Perry, Bencke and Scott), 7, 43–44, 58–69, 74– 76, pl. 4; and bummers, 62, 65; and caricature, 65; change of title, 189n74; clothing featured in, 188n68; copyright records for, 59, 62, 187n63; dating of, 60; and Düsseldorf School aesthetic, 60; and game of Sliced Nations, 63–64; method of production, 58–59, 66–67; newspaper featured in, 62–63, 188n68; original painting for, 60; and popular taste for chromolithography, 60; price of, 59; and types, 75–76 Trumbull, John, 55, 95 Tuckerman, Henry: Book of the Artists, 200n96; comments on Beard’s work, 78, 86; on Düsseldorf School, 59 Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel Clemens): and the Buffalo Express, 199n89; critique of the Puritans, 113; “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 86–87; friendship with

240  |  Index

Saint-Gaudens, 113; “How to Tell a Story,” 31–32, 141–42; Huckleberry Finn, 38; The Innocents Abroad, 89–90, 99, 108, 199n89; “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” 196n54; lecture tour, 31; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 105; and minstrelsy, 149; “Petrified Man,” 87; theorization of deadpan, 11, 31–32, 141–42; and “vernacular rhythms,” 36; on Ward’s techniques, 31–32. See also burlesque, literary; “the humorous story”; jokes Tweed, “Boss” William, 43, 65, 68, 70, 73– 74; caricatured by Nast, 43, 67, 69; and Central Park, 193–94n16 Tweed Ring. See Tweed, “Boss” William Twenty-Five Cents Worth of Nonsense; or, The Treasure Box of Unconsidered Trifles, 21, 22 Union League Club, 79, 89, 92. See also Metropolitan Museum Committee Union war effort, 18, 25, 29, 38–39, 43, 45, 68. See also Civil War; Playing Old Soldier (Homer) United States Secret Service, 146 Universal Exposition (Paris), 28, 58 Upper classes. See art, and social uplift; class Vanity Fair (periodical), 25–26, 27 Vasari, Giorgio, 180n94 vaudeville, 141, 156 Vaux, Calvert, 80, 83, 84–85, 88, 105 Virginia City Enterprise, 87 “A Visit to Brigham Young” (Ward), 150–51. See also dialect Waking Up (Clonney), 29 Wallach, Alan, 55 Ward, Artemus (pseud. Charles Farrar Browne): and African Americans, 149; “Babes in the Wood” (lecture), 31; as “belated,” 32; deadpan techniques of, 26–27, 31–32, 140–42; and “the humorous story,” 31–32, 140–42; lecture tour, 26; Lincoln’s appreciation of, 12; in newspapers, 153; his panorama lecture, 170n16; Twain on, 31–32; use of dialect, 32, 148– 51; “A Visit to Brigham Young,” 150–51

Ward, John Quincy Adams, 112, 205n21 War Episodes: The Contraband, the Volunteer, and the Veteran (Wood), 45 Warner, Charles Dudley, 3 War News from Mexico (Woodville), 60, 61, 63 War of 1812, 44 Washington, George, 64–65, 66, 151, pl. 5 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze), 36 Washington Square (New York), 132 Watson’s Weekly Art Journal (periodical), 29 Waud, Alfred R., 25, 177n55 “Weak Knees” (Vanity Fair piece), 25–26 Welch, Phillip H., 153, 154 Wells, Joseph, 114, 133 Wentworth (character in The Europeans), 124–25, 127, 136 Westermann, Mariët, 6 Whig party, 14 White, Richard Grant, 93 White, Stanford: on art patrons, 130; death of, 138; featured in Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus SaintGaudens (Saint-Gaudens), 130, 131; frames designed by, 111, pl. 9; friendship and collaborations with Saint-Gaudens, 110–11, 117–22, 125, 130, 135–38; his circle, 130– 35; his collection of nudes, 132; involvement in the Sewer Club, 133; and Nesbit, 135, 138; as subject of pulpit sermonizing, 137–38; time spent in Europe, 125, 133; work on The Farragut Monument, 120– 21, 126, 133; work on The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin), 8, 109–120, 117, 118, 126–

27, 131–33, 135–38, pl. 8; work on The Standing Lincoln, 119, 120, 137; work at World’s Columbian Exposition, 222n10 White Mountains (New Hampshire), 41 White Star Steamship Company, 222n10 Whitman, Walt, 35, 46–48 “Who Stole the People’s Money?” (detail of “Two Great Questions”) (Nast), 67, 70 Why We Laugh (Cox), 44 Wickberg, Daniel, 44, 140–42, 156, 162. See also “the humorous story”; jokes Wight, Peter B., 54, 55 Wilder, Marshall P., 31, 141 Wilkins, Heman. See Cook, Orrin Wilkins Wills, Garry, 36 The Wine of the Puritans (Brooks), 123 wit: eighteenth-century conceptions of, 15; literary, 6; and modern art, 162–63 Wolf, Bryan J., 6, 63 Wood, Peter H., 29 Wood, Thomas Waterman: American Citizens (To the Polls), 46, 47–48; use of types, 75; War Episodes: The Contraband, the Volunteer, and the Veteran, 45 Woodville, Richard Caton, 60, 61, 63 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 2, 113, 165, 166–67, 212n116, 222n10 yankee: in Civil War imagery, 24, 25; and dialect humor, 149; featured in the paintings of Mount, 4 Yankee Notions (periodical), 12 Yankee Volunteers Marching into Dixie (Morse and Morse), 24

Index  |  241

Designer: Sandy Drooker Text: 11/15 Walbaum Regular MT Display: Walbaum Medium MT Compositor: Integrated Composition Systems Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.