outline here will point to the range of his commitments and interests. He held two consular posts in the 1860s: in the first half of the decade, he served in Rome during the tumultuous final years of the unification of Italy, just before the pope lost temporal authority and the city became the capital of the new republic; then, from 1865 to 1869, he was stationed in Crete at the moment of uprising against Turkish rule. More activist than was seen to be fitting, Stillman found himself in trouble on a few occasions for his open sympathy with the struggle for liberty. Throughout much of his life—which he summarized as that of a journalist—he wrote not about art but about the revolutions of his day, in which he was a firsthand observer if not a direct participant. These writings include numerous letters from the various fronts and subsequent books such as The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 (1874), Herzegovina and the Late Uprising (1877), and The Union of Italy, 1815–1895 (1909).
Most of his life from 1860 onward was spent overseas, largely in England and Italy. After his work at the Crayon, his next regular journalistic appearance was in the pages of the Nation, though he was apparently an occasional correspondent, sending many articles from Crete from 1866 to 1869. He regularly submitted editorials and other signed reviews for decades afterward. He was an official reporter for the London Times beginning in 1886, though he had already been publishing with the paper and receiving payment for his contributions for many years. His writings on art and archeology (the latter had become a kind of specialty from his years in Crete) were also published in the Century magazine, among other periodicals.38
Stillman’s writing perhaps comes closer to the shift in critical definitions of art than does that of the other two figures. Ironically, however, he remains largely understood as an antebellum follower of Ruskin. The last two chapters are consequently dedicated to Stillman’s writing with the goal of bringing his work into sharper focus. Chapter 4 concentrates on his earliest and best-known criticism—the essays and other contributions he wrote for the Crayon. It centers on certain conspicuous aspects of the language Stillman used at this moment. His style was densely figurative with a riot of metaphors, and the chapter proposes that this language was intimately related to the definition for art that he championed at the time. Stillman’s early art theory demanded a certain type of critical writing that relied heavily on forms of figurative language. His tropes helped establish the substance of the philosophy, not just the tone of evangelizing zeal.
The chapter then contemplates the less discussed but significant rejection of Ruskin that actually characterized Stillman’s art criticism for the majority of his long life. In the late 1860s, Stillman openly rejected his earlier Ruskinian understanding of art. From this time onward, he returned on various occasions to the subject of Ruskin and to his quarrel with the art theory of his former mentor. These instances are analyzed together, with the premise that the articles on Ruskin form a sequence in Stillman’s thinking that helps us plot the primary points of contention in play. These key points of Stillman’s refutation of Ruskin show us that it was not Ruskin’s morality per se that he rejected, but its insertion into art discourse. He refuted the assignment of ostensibly timeless non-art meaning to art; he refuted a metaphorical definition of art.
Chapter 5 then takes up Stillman’s later writing and, in particular, the linguistic changes that accompanied his rejection of Ruskin. His language became much less metaphorical, and new forms replaced the earlier tropes. The chapter argues that the substantive criteria for Stillman’s post-Crayon definition for, and assessment of, art required a new critical language. As his Ruskinian definition had relied on those tropes discussed in the previous chapter, the later art theory was embodied in a less overtly figurative style. The new language helped theorize art on the basis of apparently factual and not metaphysical comparison. New metonymic figures appeared, creating a discourse of art filled with self-referentiality, an art criticism more about art—and specifically by way of its own materials and supposed history. This later, ostensibly more art-centered art theory needed a form of critical language that built into itself a referential mode of explanation.
Apparently fitting our periodization, Stillman’s later texts set up a definition for art in which it is no longer about morality, but rather about communicating by way of art’s particular properties, about expressing an artistic insight into the subject, which is made meaningful precisely by art. The elevated value of the subject is that which is added by art. Beauty, art’s materials, and art’s traditions became Stillman’s new critical cornerstones. The history of art in particular became an important and often repeated factor in his critical discourse. Many references were made to past art, to older styles, to the characteristics associated with various schools of art, to sociohistorical factors associated with the production of art. The chapter argues that these more overtly material and art-related sources for art’s meaning were an intentional contrast to those earlier bases for critical evaluation—the metaphorical imposition of God and religious morality—which had come to seem external to art. Indeed, the invocation of history appears to have been one of Stillman’s primary means for giving art discourse a new, materialist grounding. It was a theme widely shared by his peers in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
Looking closely at the role of past art and history in Stillman’s art discourse, however, the chapter finds that his various uses of history are not really historical. They might better be called a discourse of history inasmuch as history, the past, and ideas of historical change appear as rhetoric in the writing. They became integral to Stillman’s critical judgments as terms of value. Indeed, history offered him a comparative standard against which to judge the art of his own time. The term “history” reveals its rhetorical character even further by its frequent contraposition to the label “science.” So whereas history helped define the ideal in art, those contemporary paintings that did not live up to Stillman’s notion of art were, by contrast, often categorized as science. Science named what art was not. The chapter thus analyzes these new key terms, finding that science stood for the present, for what Stillman perceived as its misguided modes of apprehension, its insistence on change, its deference to “fact” at the expense of beauty. These were features of Stillman’s era that he lamented bitterly.
This was the modern world according to Stillman, the society on the other side of the many revolutions, social upheavals, and movements for self-determination for which he himself had fought. It had ushered in, above all, time and flux, growth and change—all of which seem to have destroyed for Stillman the coherence and beauty, the traditions and training, that had formerly (“historically”) belonged to art and life. What was good in contemporary art was that which did not represent the tendencies of the day, but which in some way demonstrated formal strengths rooted in art’s past. History was a way to refer to what was lost in the modern world; it was a metaphor.
Thus, while Stillman most closely resembles the critical picture drawn by our modern periodization, he nonetheless located his ideal of art in the not-present, in a timeless world of art’s traditions and best past masters and styles. “Good art”—which, it is important to note, possessed many of the same features that we too consider to be the salient and “good” characteristics of the art from the moment—was for Stillman precisely that which eschewed overt engagement with its time. Is it not remarkable, then, that we interpret those same features, even some of the same paintings, as representing modernity’s success, as coming from the change, “revolution,” and expansion of that era? For Stillman, change, expansion, and linear time were among art’s chief obstacles. They produced contemporary art that needed the label “science” or “archeology.” In our modern periodization, these same features of change and expansion constitute not only history but also art’s historical meaning. Is it not then possible that we too have failed to differentiate between history and metaphor—that formation, expansion, and change are themselves metaphors for American art’s particularly American meaning?
