In the three decades following Peale’s death, his children struggled valiantly to maintain his museum, but many Americans seemed more interested in the freakish entertainments hawked by showmen masquerading as curators and professors—the kind of men who attached a human skull to the skeleton of a large fish and then sold the public tickets to see a mermaid. Around 1850, two of these men, P. T. Barnum and his partner Moses Kimball, acquired the Peale collections—in part to display pieces from it, but mostly to kill the competition to their new Philadelphia museum of wonders.
A FEW MONTHS after Peale’s death, Hosack wrote to DeWitt Clinton saying he had heard a rumor of Clinton’s death. Hosack knew the governor was alive, but he also knew he was in terrible health. The once-handsome Great Apollo, the man whose Erie Canal triumph had unleashed speculation that he would be the next president of the United States, had become, according to a cruel description left by John Francis, “a mass of obesity, unwieldy, and . . . loaded with adipose deposits.” Hosack fretted about Clinton during the fall and winter of 1827, sending him medical advice that included exercise and a high-protein diet but also the retrograde measure of bloodletting to ease excess pressure in his blood vessels. Early in February 1828, Hosack warned him in person of the danger of his situation, but Clinton assured him he was “not afraid to die.” His words reminded Hosack of George Washington’s reported equanimity in the face of death in 1799. This turned out to be the last time Hosack ever spoke with his oldest, dearest friend. A few days later, Clinton died at his desk, in the presence of two of his sons.
Hosack immediately began writing to Clinton’s family, friends, and associates, compiling memories and documents for a biography. At the memorial service for Clinton, Hosack read from these biographical materials at such length that many people in the audience gave up and filed out before he was even half finished, according to one of his medical students. When Hosack published his biography of Clinton the following year, it ran to more than five hundred pages. He sent copies to everyone he could think of, including James Madison, who in his thank-you note paid a lovely compliment to Hosack himself. “Permit me Sir, on this occasion to express the particular esteem, I have long been led to entertain for the Endowments, intellectual & ornamental, which distinguish your character; and to join in the public tribute which the use you have made of them, must always command.”
After Clinton died, Hosack lost yet another old comrade. This time, the news came from across the Atlantic. On March 17, 1828, Sir James Edward Smith succumbed to a seizure at the age of sixty-eight. For thirty-five years, Hosack’s friendship with the king of British botany had been a source of inspiration and pride. It had been Smith who had masterminded the greatest honor of Hosack’s life—election to the Royal Society. Bolstered by Smith’s moral support and his steady example, Hosack had never ceased fighting for the cause of botany in the United States.
In fact, Hosack had recently launched into a new botanical campaign with all his customary vigor, after receiving an intriguing letter from Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush. Rush, as one of Benjamin Rush’s sons, knew Hosack well, but on this occasion he was writing on behalf of President John Quincy Adams. “The President has it at heart to cause to be introduced into our country all such trees and plants, (not heretofore known among us,) from other countries, as may give promise, under proper cultivation, of flourishing and of becoming useful in any part of the U. States.” President Adams was seeking advice from American men of science about which plants his diplomats around the world should be sending home. Hosack was so excited about this sign of presidential interest in botany that at the next meeting of the New-York Horticultural Society, he created a committee to draft a report for the president. When it was ready, Hosack sent it to Rush, who promised to show it to President Adams.
Two decades earlier, in 1806, Hosack had tried to persuade President Jefferson to create a national network of botanical gardens so that American naturalists could conduct research on foreign and native plant species in different climates, with the results shared systematically across the country. He had failed on that occasion—and then he had been forced to watch helplessly as Elgin fell apart, as well. Now Hosack wrote Secretary Rush pointedly that the United States had “no public botanic gardens of any consequence, nor experimental gardens, which are deemed of so much importance, that every part of Europe, even places of minor notice, can display one.” Hosack and his committee were recommending the creation of a federally funded network of at least three gardens: one in New York City, with its excellent access to national and international shipping routes and its northern climate; one in the South (Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina), where warmer-weather plants could be tested; and one in the nation’s capital, where, as Hosack knew, a botanical garden was already taking shape on the Mall. But even twenty years after he first floated the idea to Jefferson, Hosack was still ahead of his time. Not until 1887 would Congress enact legislation creating a national network of plant research facilities—today’s agricultural experiment stations.
In proposing his idea to Secretary Rush, Hosack couldn’t resist pointing out that Elgin could have been “the pride and ornament of our state and country.” Still, the new signs of interest in botany and horticulture coming from Washington seem to have increased his appetite for tussling with Columbia over the Elgin land. In April 1828, Hosack told the New-York Horticultural Society that he had reopened negotiations with the college. He allowed himself to feel optimistic about the outcome.
With all these encouraging developments, that summer should have been a relaxed and happy one for Hosack, when he could retreat from teaching to putter among his grapevines and flowers at the Kip’s Bay estate and work on his plans for Elgin. Instead, it was a season of miseries. In July, his nephew Caspar Wistar Eddy died of an inflammation of the brain at the age of thirty-eight. Caspar’s place of death was officially recorded as Bloomingdale. Perhaps when he had fallen ill of a brain malady he had been placed in the Bloomingdale insane asylum, with some of the familiar old Elgin trees ornamenting the grounds around him. Or maybe he had simply been staying with friends in the pretty countryside of northern Manhattan, where he had as a boy roamed through the meadows with his cousin John and collected rabbit’s-foot clover to carry back to their uncle for his garden. Caspar had been a constant fixture in Hosack’s life for more than twenty years. His death severed one of the few remaining links to the happy early days at Elgin.
One week after Caspar’s death, Hosack’s oldest son, twenty-five-year-old James Edward Smith Hosack, died in London, where he had gone to study medicine in his father’s old haunts. James was buried in the graveyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the cause of death unrecorded. Hosack knew the church from his own days in London, having attended the funeral of the famous anatomist John Hunter there more than thirty years earlier. Ten days after James’s death—but before Hosack had received this devastating news—he was forced to report to the horticultural society that his negotiations with Columbia to lease the land back so he could rebuild the garden had failed. The trustees had bigger plans for the property: leasing it to builders of apartments. Hosack gave up on Elgin forever.
For three decades he had tended his garden—first in his imagination, then in the earth, and finally in his aching heart. “I fear New York is destined to be what Napoleon called England, a nation of shopkeepers,” he wrote to a friend. “As I once said the Tontine Coffee House is her university and the Insurance companies her colleges.” Thanks to a chance encounter the following spring, Hosack found a poignant way to mark the loss of the garden. On a Saturday afternoon in late May 1829, he ran into a friend named Thomas Cole in the street. Cole, a young painter, was running errands around town as he prepared to set sail on his first artist’s trip to Europe, where he planned to tour the beautiful old cities and landscapes with his sketchbook in hand. It was a dream itinerary, but for the past year Cole had been wrestling with depression and anxiety over his faltering fortunes. By th
e time Hosack encountered him in the street, he was panicking.
One year earlier, at an exhibition held in May 1828, New Yorkers had been dazzled by two biblical paintings by Cole. They were large works, each more than three feet by four feet. One was entitled The Garden of Eden. Cole had poured his love of nature into every inch of its canvas, imagining Eden as a lush and colorful valley where the tiny figures of Adam and Eve were almost lost to the viewer’s eye in a glorious profusion of plants. Here species from disparate climates flourished in a single garden—hollyhocks, strawberries, irises, tulips, roses, aloe, poplars, palms, pines, and more. The closest thing to this botanical fantasy that New York had ever seen before was the Elgin Botanic Garden. A reviewer raved that The Garden of Eden was “a picture on which the eye could banquet for hours.”
Cole’s other biblical painting was jarringly different. On the right half of the canvas, a swath of the Garden of Eden glowed in the sunlight, while on the left half, Adam and Eve traversed a frightening terrain of jagged rocks and twisted tree trunks. The title of this painting was The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Cole was justifiably proud of both works, and over the next months, he received a great deal of attention for them. Nonetheless, a year after the exhibition had opened, they still hadn’t sold. Cole even went so far as to try to organize a raffle in New York. He grew resentful about the paintings, fretting that he had wasted his time on them while blaming their failure to sell on the “apathy” of “this wholly commercial city.” Cole desperately needed the proceeds from their sale in order to travel to Europe, where he knew he could improve his technique and fire his artistic imagination. It was the best way to draw more American buyers for future works, but he couldn’t afford the trip without selling his current works. He felt trapped.
One year after Cole had first exhibited the two paintings, he put them on display in New York once again—this time at a bookstore on Broadway. As an ad ran in the newspaper touting these “fine productions of American talent,” he started planning his European trip in earnest. In early May 1829, he dashed off to see Niagara Falls for the first time, writing to his patron Robert Gilmor in Baltimore, “I wish to take a ‘last lingering look’ at our wild scenery. I shall endeavor to impress its features so strongly on my mind that in the midst of the fine scenery of other countries their grand and beautiful peculiarities shall not be erased.” He found the falls grander by far than he had anticipated. When he returned to New York City, he learned that a local banker had agreed to pay $400 for The Garden of Eden. Cole still didn’t have enough money for his voyage, however, and he was scheduled to sail for Europe on June 1, now just days away.
Then, on the afternoon of May 30, Cole ran into Hosack in the street. Hosack made Cole an offer then and there for The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There was no more suitable owner in the United States than the man now permanently exiled from his American Eden. But if this painting captured Hosack’s stormy past, a second painting he bought from Cole that day heralded a more serene future. This was a smaller work, The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, which depicted the first moments of ethereal calm after the Great Flood. Cole had painted a single white dove flying toward Noah’s Ark across waters that shimmered like mother-of-pearl in the sun. Hosack swore Cole to secrecy about the amount of his offer for the two paintings; the latter complained the next day to Gilmor that it was far lower than he had wanted. Still, the sale enabled Cole to leave for Europe, where he saw the ancient ruins that would inspire The Course of Empire, the series of five monumental paintings he created after his return to New York in 1832.
Hosack, meanwhile, collected The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and hung it in his townhouse on Chambers Street. Around this time, he went to survey the remains of his own lost garden. A specimen from a persimmon tree (Diospyros virginiana), held today by the herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden, is labeled in his hand: “Elgin Garden 1829.”
BY NOW, THOUGH, Hosack had an exciting new distraction. In the autumn of 1828 he and Magdalena had purchased Samuel Bard’s Hyde Park estate from Bard’s son William, a lawyer in New York. For Hosack, the Bard mansion was filled with happy memories of a mentor who had cherished the time he spent there, surrounded by his family. All around the mansion lay hundreds of acres of breathtaking Hudson River scenery. Thanks to Samuel Bard’s boyhood studies with Jane Colden in upstate New York, he had loved botany and horticulture his whole life and had made many improvements to the Hyde Park farms and gardens after inheriting them from his father, Dr. John Bard. Now Hosack, drawing on his two decades of experience at Elgin, began to form his own new vision for the estate. All through the winter of 1828 to 1829, he daydreamed down in New York City about what kinds of gardens he would lay out, which fences he would remove, and which hayfields he would mow to feed the livestock he planned to import from Britain. In March 1829, he told William Bard that he was longing for the frozen Hudson to thaw so he could take a steamboat up to Hyde Park and get to work.
By summertime, Hosack, Magdalena, and some of their younger children had settled into an old farmhouse on the property. Magdalena fell in love with the estate, too—a good thing, because it was largely her fortune that Hosack now began spending on building materials, plants, labor, and animals. John Pintard sniped in a letter to his daughter that Hosack had become so obsessed with the estate that he was no longer donating to charitable causes. This was a bit unfair, given all the time and money Hosack had poured into Elgin and the many other institutions he had been involved with over the previous thirty years. But it was true that people were taking note of Hosack’s new spending habits. Jacob Harvey, who had recently married Hosack’s daughter Mary, wrote to his father in Ireland, “My father-in-law has laid out a great deal of money at Hyde Park which will probably never be got again, but he enjoys the change very much.”
Thanks to Magdalena, Hosack could now dream on as grand a scale as almost any man in New York City who suddenly had a country estate for his plaything. He summoned one of New York’s foremost architects, Martin Thompson, to Hyde Park. Thompson designed two new wings for the Bard mansion. They contained a billiard room, a music room, a library, and a gallery for Hosack’s large collection of European and American paintings—among which were two fourteen-foot panoramas of Niagara Falls by John Trumbull and a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. A Philadelphia physician who visited Hosack’s Hyde Park gallery concluded that “as a connoisseur of fine art, none of his contemporaries excelled him.”
The façade of the mansion now stretched for almost one hundred forty feet, much of it two stories high. Hosack had a coal furnace installed in the basement to help keep the family and guests cozy in the sprawling house on cool nights. Piazzas graced both the front and the back of the mansion, and the view from the back piazza had one guest after another swooning. A friend of Hosack named James Thacher was awed by what he saw when he stood there: “The noble Hudson, which is nearly a mile in width, speckled at all times with the white spreading canvas, or the more formidable Fulton steamers. A richer prospect is not to be found, a more varied and fascinating view of picturesque scenery is scarcely to be imagined.” The British writer Harriet Martineau, who visited in the fall of 1834, loved the way the land behind the house made its way down toward the Hudson—“not square and formal, but undulating, sloping, and sweeping, between the ridge and the river.” Although Martineau was in her early thirties, this grassy hillside tempted her to “run up and down the slopes, and play hide-and-seek in the hollows.”
She found these enticing effects repeated throughout the estate. They were the signature technique of André Parmentier, the gifted young horticulturist Hosack had hired to redesign the estate grounds. Parmentier was a nurseryman and fellow member of the New-York Horticultural Society who had grown up in Belgium in a family of celebrated horticulturists. In 1824 he had emigrated to Brooklyn, where he opened a nursery and began writing about and designing American gardens. He brought with him a philosophy of landscape
design that was honed in reaction to the stiffness of French formal gardens. He urged wealthy New Yorkers to embrace the British predilection for soft lines and ever-changing vistas. He thought straight lines “ruinous” to a lovely view and argued “how ridiculous it was, except in the public gardens of the city, to apply the rules of architecture” to a landscape.
Hosack’s mansion at Hyde Park
Parmentier’s ideas were new to most New Yorkers, and indeed to most Americans. Just before he began his work for Hosack at Hyde Park, Parmentier laid out his revolutionary philosophy of what he called the “modern style” of landscape design. Through the painterly use of plants and trees to give color and structure to a landscape, a skillful designer “presents to you a constant change of scene,” thereby engaging the eye and the imagination. At the edges of an estate, the trees should have “thin and light foliage,” while those grouped closer to the mansion should be deep green. The viewer’s gaze is thus subtly directed toward the central subject of the designer’s “landscape-picture”—the mansion. Hosack gave Parmentier all seven hundred fifty acres of Hyde Park to use as his canvas. The results were so spectacular that the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing pronounced the estate “one of the very finest in America.” The writer Frances Trollope raved after a visit, “It is hardly possible to imagine anything more beautiful than this place.”
Hosack and Magdalena felt the same way. They began spending most of each year on the estate, moving back to their New York townhouse only for the winter season. At Hyde Park, their neighbors were friends from the city, including the Roosevelts, the Livingstons, the Van Nesses, and the Pendletons. Members of these families often came over to socialize with the Hosacks, sometimes squiring guests onward for visits to their own estates. Hosack wrote to his friends in New York and elsewhere inviting them to visit him at Hyde Park and urging them to invite their friends.
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