href="#uf2f055e9-4fda-5fad-aff3-a606f31077f9">chapter 4, “Poe’s Visual Tricks,” reveals how the act of seeing plays a pivotal role in short stories such as “Ligeia,” “The Sphinx,” and “The Spectacles.” Finally, chapter 5, “Poe’s Art Criticism,” details the critical responses to visual art that Poe published throughout his career but focuses especially on his responses to the art on display in New York during the time he lived in Manhattan and wrote for the Columbia Spy and the Broadway Journal.
Poe’s attentive response to the visual arts manifests itself in his writing style as well. The “graphicality” of his prose and poetry has influenced visual artists throughout the centuries, including Robert Motherwell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and René Magritte.11 For example, Kevin Hayes notes that Magritte painted images entitled The Domain of Arnheim in 1938, 1949, 1950, and 1962, but “rather than images of Poe’s tales, Magritte’s works represent images inspired by Poe.”12 Burton Pollin’s Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations details the remarkable extent of this influence, making it undeniable that Poe’s stories and poems are visually provocative. As Pollin notes at the beginning of his introduction, “Edgar Allan Poe has become one of the most widely and most diversely illustrated of authors by virtue of the sketches by Manet, Redon, Doré, Ensor, Gauguin, Beardsley, Whistler, Kubin, and more than seven hundred other artists.”13 In an interview published in the Edgar Allan Poe Review in 2001, I asked Dr. Pollin why he believed the residual effect of Poe’s work often provokes creative responses from people of all disciplines in the arts—dance, music, and especially the visual arts. He pointedly responded,
We have to remember, one of Poe’s creations . . . : the word was “graphicality”—and Poe coined it. Poe felt that the English language needed to be expanded—and, of course, he felt no hesitation in doing so . . . to express ideas, not necessarily images, but ideas which he felt were needed in the development of talking about the arts, particularly. . . . “Graphicality” is one of the things that Poe aimed at in his tales, at least, and to a certain extent in his poems, it is something an artist can latch onto quite easily—images that are striking and startling, in their nuances and the particular adumbrations that Poe gives to those objects, images, call them what you will, in language, because they convey something to him that he feels has never been done before. That’s why the Impressionists were so enormously influenced by Poe, or the Symbolists, people like Redon, for example, or Manet.14
Pollin’s observation echoes what Washington Irving wrote to Poe in an 1839 letter. After reading “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Irving had this to say: “I am much pleased with a tale called ‘The House of Usher,’ and should think that a collection of tales, equally well written, could not fail of being favorably received. . . . Its graphic effect is powerful.”15 Poe’s profound influence on visual artists demonstrates the “graphicality” of his tales.
Poe’s keen sense of visual aesthetics was additionally enhanced by exposure to the work of American artists whose paintings appeared as engravings in the magazines and gift books that he reviewed or where his own work was published. For example, Henry Inman’s The Newsboy appeared in The Gift Book for 1843 alongside “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and William Sidney Mount’s The Trap Sprung was included in The Gift Book for 1844 along with “The Purloined Letter.” In sketches and short stories such as “The Assignation,” “Landor’s Cottage,” and “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe included references to painters and artworks, and many of his tales focus on the art of seeing or the ways visual tricks can be used to dupe, deter, or detract.16 In addition, Poe’s working relationship with Charles Briggs, who wrote most of the reviews of the exhibits at the National Academy of Design and the American Art-Union, brought Poe into close contact with a style of art criticism that went beyond a mere listing of paintings on display—the usual fare found in the daily and weekly newspapers of the time. Poe’s own forays into art criticism highlight his visual aesthetics found in sketches and tales such as “The Landscape Garden” and “The Philosophy of Furniture.”
The stories, sketches, and art criticism Poe wrote in his later years were enhanced by the art he saw on display in Philadelphia and New York and by his acquaintance with visual artists. In Philadelphia the prominence of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts provided a rich resource, as did Poe’s friendships with artists Felix O. C. Darley, John Sartain, John Gadsby Chapman, Thomas Sully, and the latter’s nephew Robert Sully. Thomas Sully’s father, an actor, appeared onstage alongside Poe’s mother, and Poe was childhood friends with Robert Sully in Richmond, where the boys attended school together. They renewed their friendship as adults, and “according to tradition, [Robert] Sully entertained Poe and his bride Virginia in 1835.”17 Of special importance is Poe’s relationship with Felix O. C. Darley, who signed a contract with Poe and publisher Thomas C. Clarke in 1843 to provide illustrations for Poe’s literary journal Stylus. Darley also illustrated Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.”18 Writing for the Home Journal in 1854, E. Anna Lewis observed that Darley’s “pictures not only seem to breathe, they seem to think, which is the highest commendation. They exhibit in the midst of broad humour and satire, a moral pathos which awakens the mind and expands the heart.”19
Later, when Poe lived in New York, he became acquainted with Hudson River school painter Frederic Church as well as Gabriel Harrison, a painter and daguerreotypist. The latter, “who was also the owner of a tea store on the corner of Broadway and Prince Streets,” met Poe when the writer visited his shop. In 1875, Harrison wrote in a reminiscence in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “From this moment Poe and I became well acquainted with each other, and from 1844 to 1847, whenever he was in the city we frequently met” (Poe Log, 472). In the 1850s, Harrison created allegorical daguerreotypes that “found support only in academic, elitist circles.”20 In addition, through his acquaintance with the poet Frances Osgood, Poe would have had conversations about art with her husband, Samuel Stillman Osgood, who also painted a portrait of Poe. Samuel Osgood had two paintings in the 1845 National Academy of Design show—Girlhood and Portrait of a Lady—that Poe certainly would have seen and discussed with the Osgoods.21
Toward the end of Poe’s career, his focus on visual aesthetics and the importance of beauty intensified. The two years he spent in New York from 1844 to 1846 were filled with the excitement of a burgeoning arts scene and that of his own newfound fame established by the public’s praise for “The Raven,” published in January 1845.22 New York was fast becoming the nation’s arts center, and Poe found himself in the midst of this excitement in his varying roles at the Broadway Journal. This was a very important time in his career.
Since Poe was drawn to the visual throughout his writing career, this study not only examines his maturing visual appreciation evidenced by his time in Philadelphia and Manhattan but also provides background on his visual allusions, cues, and tricks found in stories, criticism, and sketches written prior to this time. Poe’s aesthetic sensibility never faded as he continued to meet the public’s desire for “sensational” literature; he never forgot his youthful attachment to beauty. In effect, then, the intent of Poe and the Visual Arts is to show how Poe’s initial commitment to beauty and his ability to see not “as others saw” affected his work, especially in the last and most productive years of his life.
Setting the Context
Poe spent six years in Philadelphia, from early 1838 to April 1844. He lived in the same “small house” in Philadelphia near Locust Street and North Eighth Street (now Sixteenth Street)23 for four years after a brief stay at a boarding house at 202 Arch Street in 1839.24 According to an 1843 map, Poe’s North Eighth Street residence was one block west of the Philadelphia Railroad and one block north of the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (fig. 1). This daunting
