Cat” was published in the Philadelphia magazine United States Saturday Post in August 1843, the same year that Poe won first prize in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper’s contest for “The Gold Bug,” Poe’s story must have drawn some attention in the Sketch Club’s literary discussions. Surely, these two sensationalist stories would not have been overlooked by a society devoted to discussing contemporary literature and art. That Edmonds included an ax in the foreground of his painting is quite purposeful; its prominence could easily be considered a nod to Poe’s alcoholic protagonist in “The Black Cat.”
Two of Poe’s other stories, “The Sphinx” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—both written in 1845 at 85 Amity Street—could easily be read as gesturing toward Edmonds’s Facing the Enemy. It would have been difficult to overlook or forget this painting, since it appeared in two arts venues and was posted throughout the city in Ridner’s broadside in 1845. As in Facing the Enemy, the primary image in “The Sphinx” is a man sitting by a window. It is there that he sees what he mistakenly takes to be a monster or enemy; his deranged response would have led to his mental unraveling, if not for his friend’s rational explanation. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator uses the lure of amontillado to lead his enemy Fortunato, a former friend who had insulted him, to an untimely death. Due to his drunken lightheartedness, Fortunato is unable to see the obvious signs that indicate he is “facing the enemy.” In both stories, the act of seeing plays a prominent role: in the former, distortion causes trauma; in the latter, the unwillingness to see leads to death. Both stories undercut the message of Ridner’s broadside, which urges men to forgo alcohol by simply invoking the will to do so. In neither of Poe’s stories do men succeed in “facing the enemy” with mere willfulness: in “The Sphinx,” the narrator cannot will away his visual hallucination without the help of his friend’s rational explanation, and in “The Cask of Amontillado,” Fortunato cannot see how a trowel could foretell his death. Neither man can simply push himself away from danger; one would have gone mad without his friend’s helpful research, and the other dies.
William Sidney Mount (1807–1868)
Poe’s regard for William Sidney Mount’s work can only be surmised, since Poe does not mention Mount in any of his writings. At first, it might seem that Poe would not have been attracted to realistic images of everyday country life, and many of Mount’s paintings depict such country scenes, often with children. This is indeed the case in the painting The Trap Sprung, which appeared as an engraving in The Gift Book for 1844 alongside Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Yet to say that Poe would have considered Mount’s work too pedestrian or sentimental might not be as apt as this initial surmise suggests. Although Mount’s paintings look like homely renderings of country life, often, if not always, they include underlying, wry social critiques that, like Poe’s responses to the zealous advocates of the Temperance Movement, reveal a cynical approach to social change. For example, as Deborah Johnson points out, Mount’s 1830 painting School Boys Quarrelling “is also a sly commentary on the warring camps of the American art establishment of the 1830s, with the young combatants representing the conservative American Academy of Fine Arts, led by John Trumbull, and the upstart National Academy of Design, presided over by Samuel Morse. As a clue to his underlying subject, Mount placed a grammar book in the lower left corner inscribed with the words ‘Ocular Analysis.’”29 Poe was likewise cynical about social change, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to James Russell Lowell on July 2, 1844: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity” (Letters, 2:449). This sentiment is again expressed in Poe’s 1846 sketch “The Domain of Arnheim” when the narrator reveals his friend Ellison’s perspective on social change: “In the possibility of any improvement, properly so called, being effected by man himself in the general condition of man, [Ellison] had (I am sorry to confess it) little faith” (Tales, 2:1271). Mount, too, must have held this belief, since his paintings promoted both Whig and Democratic causes, depending on the expediency of the commission. Expediency rather than ideological belief was the underpinning of his political and social scenarios.
Mount was known for using wordplay in his images. For example, as Johnson observes, in “Bargaining for a Horse (1835),” two characters cheerfully—and completely calculatingly—negotiate over a horse. The play in this image is around the word ‘horse trading,’ a derogatory term that had been adopted by political opponents to describe the corrupt deal-making of Democrats.”30 Wordplay thus gives Mount’s paintings what Poe called undercurrents of meaning. Bird-Egging (1844), another example, initially seems to be a glancing look at a spring day in the country; three children walk along a sunlit, fence-lined pathway, the oldest holding a bird’s nest. The narrative turns on the word “egging,” which describes what the girl is doing to her older brother—that is, “egging him on”—as well as the actual act of stealing eggs from a bird’s nest. The girl is either pleading with her older brother to allow her to carry the nest of eggs or begging him to give it back to the younger brother, who had “egged” it but lost it to the older, bigger boy. The younger boy hides his face, crying because he lost the nest or perhaps because he is ashamed of his older brother’s “egging” and, unlike his sister, isn’t swayed by the lure of the treasure. This last interpretation would be ironic, of course, since the younger boy is wearing a large plume in his hat, suggesting that he was not altogether innocent of a similar pillage in the past. In either case, the narrative sequence is hardly sentimental.
The children’s disregard for nature’s cycle contrasts sharply with their innocent, gentle physiognomies. The resulting tension pushes the painting beyond a simple pastoral scene; it becomes a comment on man’s relationship to nature and his apparent obliviousness to the destruction that his whims can cause. The viewer is initially drawn into the scene by its homely and pastoral nature, the quiet lighting, and the mannered depiction of the three children walking beneath the trees; these elements signal a safe, domestic space not far from home. However, within this pleasant, comforting space, the viewer can see a forlorn bird sitting on a dead branch in the otherwise verdant, ancient tree whose trunk fills more than a third of the background.
Mount’s The Trap Sprung (fig. 9) also pictures children drawn in the same mannered way, but the narrative is hardly one of youthful innocence. Two boys, trudging uphill through a late autumn snowfall, eagerly approach a rabbit trap, anticipating the kill and the reward. Holding a dead rabbit in his hand, one boy, dressed warmly in an overcoat, scarf, cap, thick pants, and boots, encourages the other, dressed in a torn, lightweight jacket, to get the trapped rabbit. With no means of killing it except their bare hands, the boys’ smiles indicate the anticipated pleasure of wringing the rabbit’s neck. The cloud-filled sky and vast vista of the mountains in the background, along with the snow-covered hillside and the red leaves still lingering on the branches in the foreground, signal both the life that is and the cold death soon to follow.
Mount’s paintings were clearly more than depictions of pleasant pastoral life. As Johnson argues, “Mount [often] employed popular puns that themselves sprang from a nervousness in the culture about the discrepancies between what is seen and what is hidden.”31 Other critics discuss the political implications of his farmyard imagery. Differing from the landscape painters of what would become known as the Hudson River school, Mount preferred to paint the “everyday” in all its complex contradictions rather than simply portraying the beauty of nature.
The National Academy of Design’s 1845 Exhibit
The twentieth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 17, 1845, featuring 369 works by 145 artists. These included 152 portraits, 30 miniatures, 97 landscapes, 15 history paintings, 12 watercolors, and 2 sculptures.32 The following works by prominent artists of
