to my thinking on this and ever so many other topics. I am particularly grateful to Eric Rosenberg for his encouragement, mentoring, and friendship, not to mention his ongoing engagement with this book. And, finally, to four Georgis and one Puglisi, my deepest gratitude for their love and support.
INTRODUCTION
Everything in a picture, it must be added, depends on the composition; if it be the subject that makes the interest, it is the composition that makes, or that at any rate expresses, the subject. By that law, accordingly, our boxful of ghosts [the correspondence of W. W. Story] “compose,” hang together, consent to a mutual relation, confess, in fact, to a mutual dependence. If it is a question of living again, they can live but by each other’s help, so that they close in, join hands, press together for warmth and contact. The picture, before it can be denied, is therefore so made; the sitters are all in their places, and the group fills the frame. We see thereby what has operated, we both recognise, so to speak, the principle of composition and are enabled to name the subject. The subject is the period—it is the period that holds the elements together, rounds them off, makes them right. They partake of it, they preserve it, in return; they justify it, and it justifies the fond chronicler. Periods really need no excuses.
—Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)
This book is an interpretation of the art writing of James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Clarence Chatham Cook (1828–1900), and William James Stillman (1828–1901). As significant critics from the mid-nineteenth-century art world, they have much to say about art’s definition and aesthetic requirements in a moment of supposed transition—the era of the Civil War, whose upheavals left no aspect of American society untouched. These three writers are the central figures of this study not because they are the only important critics from the era; they are not. Rather, they figure here because they are, each in his own way, closely associated with key nineteenth-century critical tenets, aesthetic schemata, and classificatory ideas that the book will argue to be central to modern histories of nineteenth-century American art. In comparing these critics’ positions with how we have historicized their words, the book hypothesizes that there exist deep structures in the field: ways of organizing time, style, and meaning in histories of nineteenth-century American art, which are not necessarily reducible to one methodological approach or another.
The goal might also be explained by recourse to Henry James’s fanciful “composition” from the epigraph. This composition is nothing less than the form that calls into being the picture of history—that which gives the outline, substance, and collectivity to disparate objects that might well remain invisible without this ordering principle. The “confession of mutual dependence” allows fragments from the past to exist again, not simply to be meaningful. Transparent and insubstantial, they are otherwise ghosts, James says, but they take on solidity and firm contours when they are juxtaposed in the “right” way. The reembodied ghosts then constitute a subject, the historical period. But James admits that the subject and the composition are actually one and the same.
The subject of this book is also a group of figures and the composition that has helped form their present outlines. The period that draws them into relief is the Civil War era, or roughly the 1860s and 1870s. It is a sociopolitical moment that, perhaps not surprisingly, has often been conflated with an art historical period. The war has been perceived as the bold line, the profound rupture, the trauma that drove America forward—to putative freedom, to international stature, to economic expansion, to aesthetic modernism, and so forth. It is the supposedly defining event that runs between and even creates distinct art historical periods. This book looks closely at the rhetorical structures and the critical language employed by the three critics to consider the ways in which their words have helped modern scholars constitute an era by means of classificatory, rhetorical, and linguistic mechanisms. It seeks to analyze how such mechanisms give structure and coherence to the individual components existing in the chronological moment, which we then take to form a meaningful picture that allows us to define as history the art of the nineteenth century.
With this condensed and stratified statement of the overall goals, we need to back up several paces and situate the study within the larger discussions to which it aims to contribute: How has nineteenth-century art criticism figured in the history of American art? The broadest of such discussions consists of studies devoted to nineteenth-century American art criticism and art histories. Until recently, nineteenth-century art critics and their writing did not get much attention from modern scholars. John Peter Simoni’s Ph.D. dissertation “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America” is among the first of such studies. Roger Stein’s pioneering book John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 analyzes the ways in which the ideas of Ruskin, an English critic, were incorporated and transformed in the American context. It is an indispensible study of nineteenth-century art criticism in the United States, particularly since versions of Ruskin’s thought were indeed pervasive in antebellum America. Additional work on American criticism includes a few articles from the 1980s written by influential Americanists William Gerdts and Elizabeth Johns, respectively, outlining early critical commentary and art histories. Two lesser-known scholars, Earl and Ellen Harbert, have contributed a dated but worthwhile essay constructing a nineteenth-century critical lineage for a “dissenting” tradition prior to the Armory Show of 1913, and covering the early part of the century is an article by Anne Farmer Meservey.1 Recently, however, David Dearinger’s Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 has done a great deal to fill the gap. It provides a very thorough guide to the major critics, their writing, the journals for which they wrote, and the exhibitions they reviewed.2 And Maura Lyons’s monograph dedicated to William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States offers the first full-length study of this first history of American art, examining how the style and narrative of the text express nationalist and other agendas of its author.3
Nineteenth-century American art criticism has also played a relatively minor role as an interpretive tool in the study of any given artist or school, though that is beginning to change. It is safe to say that the odd quote here or there has always turned up. In such cases, language is taken as a transparent vehicle, stable and securely linked to its ostensible referent. But where criticism has been more integral to the interpretation, conceptions of language have also been more analytical. Examples of the latter include Elizabeth Johns’s seminal work on American genre painting, Angela Miller’s work on landscape painting, and Margaret Conrads’s study of Winslow Homer.4 Displaying theoretical interests uncommon in American art history, there are additional exemplary interpretations that read critical language within complex and overlapping linguistic, pictorial, and psychological practices, where history is questioned even as it is grasped and whose possible meanings emerge at times from silences as much as words. Bryan Wolf is a key pioneer in this regard, though with literature more than critical reception.5 Other examples include David Bjelajac’s work on Washington Allston; Eric Rosenberg’s work on Thomas Eakins, Albert Ryder, and the so-called colorists; and Rachel Ziady DeLue’s book on George Inness.6 The present study works with an understanding of critical language that is closest to this last group. By approaching critical writing in such a manner, my analysis of the three nineteenth-century critics makes extensive use of rhetorical patterns and metaphorical structures in the period art discourse. As the following chapters will show, the critics’ words taken alone are too easily subject to unrecognized narrative desires on the part of modern writers.
A further note on methodology might be useful here. My approach responds to a range of theoretical studies whose common point of departure is to question positivist models of history and language. I share with them a fundamental skepticism with regard to perceiving the past as having an objective meaning that can be recuperated and retold as such, and to the idea that language can represent a referent in a fixed manner. Narrative theories in particular strongly influence my understanding of historiography; linguistic analyses that might generically be labeled
