Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  AN AFTERNOON STROLL. Far from the river, beyond the upper wall on the slope of the hill, lies the executioner’s meadow, where criminals are put to death and buried. Beyond the field, higher up the hillside, the vineyards begin. At the top of the vineyards runs a long path of beaten earth, which divides the vineyards from the forest above. Here one can walk undisturbed in the sun-broken shade of overhanging branches, passing an occasional vintner in a cart, or another wanderer from the town below. We recognize each other at once, we solitary ones who seek the heights above the town, and pass each other with a sense of fraternal sympathy not unmixed with irritation, for it is not society we seek on the upper path where the wood begins. From the path we can see a pleasing view of the town below, with its red tiled roofs, its church steeples, the twin towers of the guild hall, the merchants’ fountain in the market square, the garden of the Carthusian monastery, the courtyards of the patrician houses with their wooden galleries, the draw wells in the stone-paved streets. From the town rises a rich interweaving of sounds: the ringing of hammers in the blacksmiths’ street, the honking of geese hanging by their feet from the poulterers’ stalls, the clatter of cart wheels, the shouts of children, the bang of bells. They are the sounds of an industrious, prosperous, and peaceful town, prepared to defend itself against disturbance from within or without, honoring work and order above all, proud of its wealth, stern in its punishments, suspicious of extremes. The divisions of its day are well accounted for, with no room for idling or dreaming. But now and then, unbidden, a shadow passes across the mind of an artisan in his shop or a merchant in his counting house, and turning his head he looks up to see, across the river, the high castle shining in the sun. Then an image returns, perhaps from a tale heard in childhood, of a dark stairway, a princess with golden hair, a dungeon buried deep in the earth. Long ago these tales unfolded, long ago the prisoner escaped, the dwarf faded into darkness, the Princess closed her eyes. And yet even now we can sometimes see, in the high tower, a flash of yellow hair, we can sometimes hear, in the clear air, the sound of the prisoner cutting through rock. Ships pass on the river, bearing away copper bowls, armor plate, and toothed wheels for sawmills, bringing us spices, velvet, and silk, but under the river live trolls and mermaids. For these are the images that linger, of the river, of the castle, these are the town in dream. Then we smile to ourselves, we solitary ones, we who are of the town but bear toward it a certain reserve, for we see that the town reaches toward higher and lower places than those it honors. But the sun is halfway along the arc of the western sky, it’s time to go down to the town, which after all is our home, even ours. Grapes swell on our slopes, deer graze in the grassy trench between our walls, and in the winding streets, bordered by houses of whitewashed wood and clean stone, sunlight and shadow fall equally.

  Catalogue of the Exhibition:

  The Art of

  Edmund Moorash

  (1810–1846)

  [1]

  THE BELLE AFTER THE BALL

  Circa 1828

  Ink and brown wash on paper, 9 1/2 × 11 5/8 in.

  As an undergraduate (Harvard College, 1826–1830), Moorash composed a series of six satirical drawings in the lively vein of Hogarth, only one of which has survived. Despite a certain crudity of execution, it possesses the boldness of his more mature work, as well as a savage and almost disturbing air of mockery. The Belle is shown among her partially cast-off clothes, with her wig at her feet and her teeth on the table, but Moorash carries the well-worn theme much further: one glass eye lies beside her mask, one naked breast lies under the table, her left arm, still gloved, lies on the floor beside a bouquet of withered roses, and in her lap she holds her bald, toothless, and half-blind head, which stares at the viewer with an expression of malignant hatred. The details of the grotesque scene are scrupulously observed; each minuscule link in the graceful gold chain that hangs from the headless neck is drawn with a miniaturist’s precision.

  [2]

  WILLIAM PINNEY

  1829

  Black chalk, heightened with white, on buff paper, 10 × 8 1/4 in.

  William Osgood Pinney (1808–1846) was born in Philadelphia, the son of Thomas Pinney (a lawyer and publisher of legal papers) and Ann Osgood. Although two years older than Moorash when they met at Harvard College in the fall of 1828, he befriended the younger man and introduced him to others of his set. Moorash’s moody nature and fierce independence of spirit made him a difficult friend, but he warmed to Pinney as to no other man. Chester Calcott, an undergraduate friend of Pinney’s who later became a fashionable portrait painter and a harsh critic of Moorash’s work, noted in his diary a difference between the two men: “In any gathering, Pinney will cross the room to greet you with his hand held out and a smile of welcome on his lips, but Moorash will always hang back, looking at you as if you intended harm.” Moorash once said of Chester Calcott that he had the looks of a god, the mind of a devil, and the esthetic sense of a brewer’s assistant.

  Pinney intended to study law but appears to have been deflected from that purpose by his association with Moorash. Upon graduation he sold his share of the family property to finance his study of art in London, where he was joined by Moorash in the following year. Pinney returned to Cambridge in 1832 and spent two unhappy years as an apprentice in the studio of Henry Van Ness, a leading portraitist who was noted for his brilliant rendition of transparent silk sleeves, ermined capes, velvet armchairs, and ostrich plumes, and who permitted William to paint backgrounds and draperies under close supervision. After a year of indecision Pinney became an architect’s apprentice in Boston, where Moorash, who refused to paint portraits, was working in cramped quarters and eking out what he called an “unliving” by a series of obscure jobs, including the painting of panels for the backs of fire engines.

  Pinney is shown in the fashionable dress of the day: the black coat with its glimpse of lining, the white linen shirt and high collar, the rippling neckcloth. The coat is unbuttoned below to reveal the vest, to which is attached a delicate chain and a small key; a dark jewel set in pearls is visible on the shirt front. Pinney wears his hair curling, long, and a little wild. Moorash has captured a peculiar expression: Pinney seems to have been caught unawares, and he is shown half-rising, looking at the viewer with a kind of irritated surprise.

  [3]

  RAT KRESPEL

  1835

  Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 1/8 in.

  E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Rat Krespel” appeared in 1819 in Volume One of Die Serapionsbrüder. Although it is not known whether Moorash was able to read German, his sister Elizabeth was well read in both German and French; she may have translated the story for him directly from the German, or from the French translation by Loève-Veimars of the Oeuvres complètes (1829–33). Moorash has depicted the scene of Councillor Krespel’s wild grief after learning of the death of his daughter:

  Deeply shaken, I sank into a chair. But the Councillor, in a harsh voice, began singing a merry song, and it was truly horrible to see how he hopped about on one foot, the crepe (he still had his hat on) fluttering about the room and brushing against the violins hanging on the walls. In fact, I couldn’t help giving a loud shriek when the crepe struck me during one of his sudden turns; it seemed to me that he wanted to enfold me and drag me down into the horrible black pit of madness.

  The details of the scene are faithfully recorded in the painting: the violins on the wall are draped in black, in place of one violin there hangs a wreath of cypress, and Krespel wears a black sword-belt beneath which is tucked a violin bow instead of a sword. What is striking, however, is not the careful rendering of detail but precisely the opposite: the furious distortion of details as they are swept up into lines of force, the deliberate and expressive blurring of form. Thus the streaming of Krespel’s hair and coat is seen in the violins, which in the dark radiance of the candlelight seem to writhe like snakes, and the ripple of the fluttering band of crepe is echoed in the curve of the piano’s music rack, while the pia
no itself appears to be dissolving into reddish darkness. The effect is of a center of violent energy diffusing itself throughout the entire painting. Krespel himself, partially plunged in blackness and partially illumined by the red candleflames, has the distorted features of a grimacing dwarf. Despite such distortions, the painting retains a number of illusionist features, such as definite though at times ambiguous perspectival lines and a stable, centralized vantage point.

  If the scene attracted Moorash for its painterly possibilities, the story itself has significant implications in light of what is known of Moorash’s theory of the demonic properties of art. It will be recalled that Krespel’s daughter is blessed with a supernaturally beautiful singing voice, which derives in part from a defect of the lung; if she continues to sing, she will die. The dubious origin and fatal effect of art—twin themes that haunted the romantic imagination (see Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” for a later variation)—is here given one of the earliest and most memorable expressions by the German fabulist.

  The painting, believed lost until 1951, when it was discovered in the attic of a descendant of William Pinney’s maternal uncle, shows some damage: the paint surface is abraded in the top right corner and in a small area to the right of the cypress wreath. There is also some loss of paint along the upper and lower edges of the picture, where the canvas has deteriorated.

  Note. Because Rat Krespel is frequently connected with the Phantasmacist movement of the early 1830s, it may be worthwhile to distinguish Moorash’s work from the paintings of that minor and short-lived school. In works such as The Headless Horseman (1832) by John Pine and Lenore (1833) by Erastus Washington we see the typical Phantasmacist interest in macabre scenes drawn from literature, the use of violent contrasts of light and dark, and the attraction to shrill discords of color, but in essence the technique of this school is diametrically opposed to that of Moorash. The Phantasmacists attempt to capture the macabre, the eerie, the fantastic by the method of scrupulous precision; even their fondness for unusual effects of light (flickering lantern-light, cloudy moonlight, stormy daylight, the flames of hell) is expressed in an almost scientific method of distortion. Their concern for detail, for exact representation, for high finish and smooth facture, connects them with the academic art against which they appear to be rebelling. But Moorash, even in this early painting, has begun to dissolve the outlines of objects, to blur linear identity, to infect all parts of a painting with an energy that appears to erupt from within the canvas.

  It would nevertheless be interesting to know whether Moorash ever visited the Boston studio of Erastus Washington, whom he once ambiguously praised in a letter to William Pinney (5 December 1843): “All the same, I’d rather have painted one devil by old Erastus Washington than all the landscapes by Hudson.” (Moorash liked to speak of an imaginary artist called Hudson who was supposed to have painted all the pictures of the land-scapists working in the Hudson River valley and not yet known as the Hudson River School.) Erastus Washington (1783–1857), one of the more eccentric artists of the 1830s, spent ten years completing a cycle of over five hundred paintings in red, burnt sienna, and black called The Underworld, which he intended as Part I of a three-part cycle and which he burned along with his entire library after a mystical revelation at the age of sixty. He spent the last fourteen years of his life writing religious tracts in which he inveighed against the idolatry of art and asserted that Nature itself is a great painting composed of images that obliquely reveal an unseen Master. If Moorash ever admired him, it was for his wildness and sincerity rather than for his art.

  [4]

  LANDSCAPE WITH FOG. STONE HILL,

  EARLY MORNING

  1836

  Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in.

  In the early spring of 1836, at the urging of fellow painter Edward Ingham Vail, Moorash left Boston, where he had been struggling for two years, for the village of Strawson in northern New York. Here he rented a cottage “dirt cheap” on the outskirts of town. The country appeared to agree with him, and in June he moved to the nearby village of Saccanaw Falls, where he rented a rural cottage about half a mile from the village center on sixteen acres of fields, woods, and streams. He was soon joined by his sister Elizabeth, who had been living restlessly with her parents in Hartford, Connecticut. She had recently been left a small annuity upon the death of a favorite aunt, and saw in the move a chance both to free herself from unhappy domestic circumstances and to watch over her beloved and careless brother. The property contained a decaying barn that Moorash used as a studio.

  His new life delighted him, in part because he was happy to put distance between himself and Vail, whose dreamy landscapes and sentimental portraits grated on his nerves. The cottage was situated on a small rise known as Stone Hill, a name that in Elizabeth’s Journal refers sometimes to the hill itself, sometimes to the entire property, and sometimes to the cottage. Moorash’s life at Stone Hill was by no means as isolated as has been claimed (see Havemeyer, 56–58, for the classic statement of Moorash’s “romantic solitude”); Elizabeth records frequent visitors, such as William Pinney and his sister Sophia, Edward Ingham Vail, the miniaturist Thomas Swanwick, the itinerant folk artist Obadiah Shaw, who specialized in perspective views painted on cigar-box lids and Biblical scenes painted on glass, and the poet and portraitist Lyman Phelps (later a successful attorney-at-law). In addition, the Journal mentions numerous excursions to Strawson and the surrounding countryside, as well as twice-weekly walks into Saccanaw Falls, a small but bustling village of two churches, four taverns, a dry goods store, two bakeries, three butcher shops, a cooper’s shop, three smithies, a tannery, a mason’s shop, a furrier’s, a brewery, a hatter’s, two druggist shops, and even a musical instrument establishment.

  The painting, completed in late summer, should be seen as an attack on the popular topographical views of the day, on the early contemplative landscapes of the Hudson River painters, and perhaps on the entire genre of landscape painting, which by mid-century would supplant portraiture in popular esteem. Indeed there is a distinct element of satire here, despite the absolute seriousness of the work. As one early critic put it: where is the landscape? Moorash has chosen to depict a thick, obliterating fog, in shades of gray, white, and black, with brown and green tints seeping through and, in the right-hand portion, a luminous yellow-ocherish burst where an invisible sun is glowing. Nothing whatever is visible in the picture, aside from the brilliantly rendered fog itself and a single, sharply emergent leafless branch in the lower left-hand corner; here and there dark, wavering forms appear indistinctly. Moorash has completely abolished perspective. There is no vantage point, no center; there is no image, except for the disturbing branch in the lower left hand corner, which serves the ambiguous function of anchoring the viewer in place, of providing stability, and also of radically confusing or destabilizing the point of view, for it is impossible to determine the relation of the branch to anything else. We tend to read it as a sign of height, but its position in the lower left-hand corner either contradicts that reading or forces us to imagine that we are looking down on the sceneless scene from an elevated point. The painting makes no attempt to induce in the viewer a state of revery, or to suggest deep religious meanings infused in a natural setting; rather, its effect is to disturb, to confound, to render uncertain.

  [5]

  ELIZABETH IN DREAM

  1836

  Oil on canvas, 26 1/2 × 36 in.

  Moorash’s early masterpiece was refused by the National Academy of Design in New York and the Boston Athenaeum but accepted for exhibition by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where it attracted the attention of several critics who subjected it to ridicule mixed with moral indignation. The picture was begun in the spring, set aside for Landscape with Fog, and taken up again by the end of August, after which Moorash worked at it steadily until its completion in mid-November. As the weather grew colder he was forced to move from the barn to the house, where with Elizabeth�
�s help he converted the upstairs parlor to a studio and moved most of the parlor furniture down to the kitchen. The ground floor of the cottage was divided into two rooms—the large kitchen and Elizabeth’s bedroom—as well as a small room in back that served as a wash-house; the upper floor consisted of a large front room (Moorash’s studio, formerly the parlor) and two back rooms, one of which was Moorash’s bedroom and one of which served as a storage or guest room. William Pinney, a frequent visitor in 1836, has left a vivid description (in a letter to his sister of 8 September 1836) of the transformed cottage, where guests were entertained in a kitchen containing an armchair, a writing desk, and a sagging sofa, as well as a pile of canvases leaning against an old churn in one corner.

  Elizabeth Moorash (1814–1846) was twenty-two at the time of the painting. We are fortunate to have a likeness of her dating from 1836: a miniature watercolor on ivory painted by Edward Ingham Vail. The glossy brown-black hair parted in the middle and bursting into side curls, and the dramatic blackness of the dress, which blends into the dark background, serve to throw into relief her striking face, which Vail rendered meticulously in delicate clear color: the large, heavy-lidded eyes look out with an expression of frankness and passionate intelligence, softened by a kind of dreamy, inward stare, as if her deepest attention lay elsewhere.

  Elizabeth in Dream carries to fulfillment the technique first seen in Rat Krespel, in which a central image or character infects the entire world of the painting. Here the barely perceptible face, transparent and dissolving, of the dreaming Elizabeth is dispersed throughout the picture: her transparent hair streams into the night sky, her eyes are streaks of purple-black, her bare arms melt into the brilliance of the moon; and the night itself, under the influence of the dream-dispersed young woman, seems to melt into streams of bright darkness or dark brightness. The world and the dreamer intermingle and dissolve. And yet there is nothing soft, gentle, or revery-like about this dream world, which on the contrary is charged with an extraordinary energy, as if the night were composed of black fire.