by John Updike
Lear, Garf Hossayn, February 15, 1867. Watercolor with pen in brown ink over graphite. (Photo Credit Ill.15)
And yet there is a poetry, a poetry of pleasurable vacancy, that gives Lear his own place in the distinguished annals of English watercolorists. The precision of the young ornithological painter accompanies the vague quest of the aging traveller, as he hobbles from one commission and loan and act of aristocratic patronage to the next. “Alas! I needs must go and call on swells, / That they may say, ‘Pray draw me the Estrelles,’ ” he wrote in the comically complaining “Eclogue, Composed at Cannes, December 9th, 1867,” a souvenir of his momentary close friendship with Mr. and Mrs. John Addington Symonds. Lear hungered for friendship, and his irrepressibly frisky letters, increasingly Joycean in their whimsy and wordplay, remain as traces of the personal charm that won him valuable loyalties among the upper classes. After his death, Franklin Lushington said that the love of his friends was “the best and sweetest of garlands that can in spirit be laid on his tomb.” Lushington also stated, “He really lived upon the letters of his distant friends more than any man I have ever known.” Lear did not quite live, and he did not quite paint oils, but he certainly wrote; he let go, as we say now, in the realm of language.
Lear, On the Road, Two Hours from Tepelene, April 19, 1857. Watercolor with pen in brown ink over graphite. (Photo Credit Ill.16)
In his letters he eloquently tossed off desolate truths: “I am doing little, but dimly walking on along the dusty twilight lanes of incomprehensible life.… I wish I were an egg and was going to be hatched,” he wrote Charles Fortescue, who saved all of his letters, giving posterity a major trove. (A regrettable mass of his personal papers were lost in the domestic confusion when Lear died in San Remo, having outlived even his beloved cat Foss.) Bliss and melancholy keep close, manic-depressive company in his letters. From Egypt he wrote, “And to me what wonders of broad beautiful green & lilac vegetation & far hills & mosques—see thro’ & beyond gt. palms & acacias! O sugar canes! O camels! O Egypt!” and then, up the Nile among the ruins, “The intense deadness of old Egypt is felt as a weight of knowledge in all that world of utter silence.… One peeps into those dark death-silent giant halls of columns—a terror pervades the heart & head.” In India he deplored the “frightful fuss-ticket-baggage-bother and tumult” and called the British establishment “Hustlefussabad” yet punned happily of himself in Delhi “making Delhineations of the Delhicate architecture as is all impressed on my mind as inDelhibly as the Delhiterious quality of the water of that city.”
His poems exude the same giddy juice. His limericks, not exactly limericks, turn in their repetitive last line on an unexpected adjective; they have the gossamer silliness of days among the children at the Earl of Derby’s lavish and carefree mansion, Knowsley. Lear cast himself early as Uncle Arley, the playful big-nosed uncle with his ready pen and nimble hands on the piano, tossing off a verse or song to earn his place at the dining table. If he had his erotic frustrations and his epileptic fits (which, in stout British fashion, he blamed upon a failure of willpower, like masturbation), a fun uncle keeps his pains to himself, or drowns them, as Lear reportedly did, in alcohol.
O! My agèd Uncle Arley!
Sitting on a heap of Barley
Thro’ the silent hours of night,—
Close beside a leafy thicket:—
On his nose there was a Cricket,—
In his hat a Railway-Ticket;—
(But his shoes were far too tight).
The tightness eased in the presence of children—the least threatening of human beings—and in that of landscapes, the more barren and lunarly picturesque the better. The Cricket on Uncle Arley’s nose might be construed as talent and sensitivity; though not Tennyson or Turner, Lear had his genius, but had to come at it by travelling to the land where the Bong-tree grows.
The Artist as Trailblazer
FREDERIC CHURCH, WINSLOW HOMER, AND THOMAS MORAN: Tourism and the American Landscape, at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, May 19–October 22, 2006.
This engaging, farraginous show at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, on Fifth Avenue, invites the viewer to think of the nineteenth-century American landscape artist, usually envisioned as the independent producer of a luxury artifact, as, instead, a tool of commerce and real-estate development. Frederic Church, who played the starring role in 2002’s travelling megashow American Sublime (London, Philadelphia, Minneapolis) and this year’s exhibition Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church (National Academy Museum, New York), extends his twenty-first-century revival by dominating the two other named artists in an assemblage subtitled Tourism and the American Landscape. Though Winslow Homer is represented by a number of amusing wood engravings and beautiful watercolors, and Thomas Moran adds his otherworldly West to the collective depiction of the relatively unspoiled American wilderness, it is Church whose heirs lodged more than two thousand works in the collection of the Cooper Union Museum (as compared with more than three hundred by Homer and fewer than a hundred by Moran), and it is Church who, in his preternaturally deft and rapid oil sketches, most decisively places before us the thing itself, the New World’s nature.
Cooper-Hewitt and its vast collection need some explaining, which Barbara Bloemink’s catalogue introduction concisely provides. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded by Peter Cooper in 1859 “in order to provide practical courses for the education and self-improvement of the working class, particularly in the trades of engineering, illustration, industrial design, architectural drawing, ornamental drawing, mechanical drawing, and painting.” Cooper, born in New York City in 1791, was himself an inventor and a hands-on industrialist, whose fortune got its start in the glue business, greatly expanded in the iron industry, eventually included more than half the telegraph lines in the United States, and was significantly invested in philanthropy and the cause of public education. Cooper Union provided night classes so that working men could attend; an existing art school for women was incorporated into the institution, “in order to provide female students with the practical skills to become self-supporting designers and art teachers.”
A committee drawn from the distinguished artists on the faculty acquired contemporary drawings “to be used for teaching purposes,” but it wasn’t until 1897, fourteen years after Cooper’s death, that his three granddaughters—Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt, and Amelia Hewitt—founded “the first design and decorative-arts museum in the United States.” Their models were the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Victoria and Albert in London—stately grab bags whose polymorphous utility was expressed by Eleanor Hewitt at the museum’s founding: “For the worker, the source of inspiration is frequently found in the sight of an unexpected object, possibly one of an entirely different trade.” The sisters stocked their museum with buying sprees abroad; Dr. Bloemink states, “Many of the objects the sisters acquired were unusual and eclectic, reflecting an enormous range of works, from match-safes and birdcages to wallpaper and fine lace.”
It was, then, for the training of artists that works of art were acquired, with a craft emphasis on preliminary drawings and sketches. Toward this pedagogic end the sisters and such advisers as the artist Eliot Clark and the collector Charles W. Gould acquired, in 1912, the gift of hundreds of Winslow Homer’s watercolors and drawings from the artist’s brother, and, in 1917, eighty-plus works from Thomas Moran himself. The same year saw the massive donation from Church’s son Louis, including most of the works remaining in his deceased father’s Hudson Valley mansion, Olana. Church’s oil sketches, often dashed off on paperboard pinned to the inside of his paint-box lid, are marvels of an artist’s
habituated eye and hand. Some, such as Sun Rising Over Bar Harbor (c. 1860) and Sunset Across the Hudson Valley (1870), when reproduced in a catalogue, belie with their grandeur their small size; others, like Coast at Mount Desert (Sand Beach) (c. 1850), Autumn Landscape in New England (c. 1865), and the seething, spray-filled Surf Pounding Against the Rocky Maine Coast (c. 1862), amaze us with the fineness of their quickly captured detail. These plein-air notations were meant, of course, to be worked up as studio canvases of marketable dimension and finish, and were added to the Cooper-Hewitt collection as a professional master’s leftovers; their present aspect as delightfully fresh and free works of art had to wait until Impressionism loosened our sense of acceptable brushwork. Still, it is hard to see the two studies by Church of Mount Katahdin’s near slopes, both dated before 1878, one a foot square and the other fourteen by nine inches, as preliminary works, so poised is their composition and impressive their illusionism.
Church, a decade older than Homer and Moran, had the jump on the scenic high points of the American Northeast. As a young man he studied in the Catskills as the only student of Thomas Cole, the founder of American landscape painting. The Mountain House, Kaaterskill Falls, the Hudson Valley, the coast of Maine, Niagara Falls—he painted them all, and produced, in his seven-and-a-half-foot-wide oil Niagara (1857), housed at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, an image that, according to Gail S. Davidson’s catalogue essay “Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Development in the Northeast,” “supplanted Niagara itself as the symbol of America.” Images, reproduced in popular magazines by painstaking wood engravings and lavished upon the middle classes in the photographic form of stereoscopic views, were a key to the solidification and spread of American identity from mid-century onward. Semi-tamed landscape had become a middle-class consumable with the development of vacation resorts, a process in which artists served as groundbreakers. The editor of The Nation, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, analyzed the process as early as 1883, in a tongue-in-cheek essay titled “The Evolution of the Summer Resort”; the cultural historian Hans Huth, in his serious 1957 work Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes, perceived a
three-phase development of resorts, which starts with artists and writers exploring a place and locals creating boarding houses to serve them. In the second phase, the boarding house becomes a rustic hotel filled initially by cultured and refined visitors, then by more economically diverse vacationers. In the final phase, the elite clientele, seeking refuge from the larger community of resorters, builds their own cottages with privately owned beaches.
After Thomas Moran, Katahdin from the South Shore of the Lake—from a Study by F. E. Church, c. 1878. Engraving, by Francis Scott King, for Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, May 1878. (Photo Credit Ill.17)
Godkin puts it this way: “The hotel boarders, who have now become second-class citizens, are driven away to seek newer resorts; and the cycle begins again.”
Niagara Falls, the first and still-classic vacation site, was swiftly overrun by tourists. Church’s magnificent paintings—his second large oil, Niagara Falls from the American Side (1867), came ten years after the epic view from the Canadian side—showed nary a soul of the throngs of visitors and vendors (some in Native American costume, the ancestors of the present day’s Falls-side casino operators) that are visible in a more naïve canvas like Ferdinand Richardt’s Niagara (c. 1855). Entrepreneurs on both sides of the river erected industrial mills and ever-larger hotels, crowding views that remained, in Church’s representation, pristine. Church also, through the magic of thoughtful observation, triumphantly solved a technical problem which the photography of the time could not yet handle—the representation of running, rippling, falling water.
Though he displayed his most ambitious canvases for an admission fee, Church did not exploit the techniques of mass reproduction, as Homer and Moran did. Homer produced black-and-white images, often reused in his paintings, that could be turned into woodcuts for such journals as Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s, The Century, and Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science, and Art. Moran began as a wood engraver; his craggy, rather Gothic views of the arid, mountainous West, based upon his own delicate watercolors, gouaches, and pencil sketches, supplied illustrated magazines and the massive two-volume album Picturesque America, or The Land We Live In (1872–74), edited by no less an eminence than William Cullen Bryant. The artist’s Western travels to the Yosemite Valley, the Sierras, and the Grand Canyon were underwritten by railroads and hotels hoping to attract tourists. Born in England and raised in Philadelphia, Moran was influenced by Ruskin and the paintings of J. M. W. Turner; his own paintings have a Turneresque, romantic, dematerializing tendency flattering to the stony realms portrayed. From prehistorical cave paintings of hunted bison up to medieval icons and Renaissance panoramas illustrating a cultural mythos, art had served social functions; it still served, as advertisements for travel and land development. Further, in the post–Civil War period, glamorized images of the vast American territory distracted North and South from their wounds.
Winslow Homer differed from Moran and Church in populating his vistas with live Americans. The figures in his popular wood engravings from the late 1860s, such as The Summit of Mt. Washington and Summer in the Country, share an icy lack of facial expression and a lively complexity of costume. The conscious comedy of The Artist in the Country (a mustached dauber paints under a tilted umbrella while a comely spectator frowningly eyes his canvas; the original sketch had two painters working in tandem, as on an inspiration built for two) is rivalled by the unconscious comedy of sun hats multiplied like the sharp bills of a flock of birds in The Fishing Party, and the heavily garbed women anxiously peering out from Under the Falls, Catskill Mountains, and the two uncomfortably stiff gentlemen surrounded by roughing-it equipment in Camping Out in the Adirondacks. These representations of the wilderness being breached in clothes designed for the parlor nevertheless spelled out to the middle classes possibilities of activity hitherto restricted to the servant orders. A catalogue essay by Sarah Burns, indeed, accuses Homer of inventing a type of false American pastoral; his sojourns at Houghton Farm, an estate, two hours from New York, run “in accordance with strictly scientific methods” by a well-heeled family, the Valentines, that Homer had known since his boyhood, yielded to the artist’s hand images of toothsome, dreaming shepherdesses: Bo-Peep (Girl with Shepherd’s Crook Seated by a Tree) (1878), Shepherdess Resting Under a Tree (1878), Shepherdess Resting (c. 1877), and the superb watercolor Fresh Air (1878). Such visions of wholesome rural simplicity are, according to Burns, “transparently artificial concoctions that the artist himself had conceived, dressed, and staged” for “urban consumption at a time of vigorous, and problematic, metropolitan expansion.” Even Homer’s beloved image, painted in two versions, of country schoolboys playing snap-the-whip falls into this category of “concoction,” in the form of a study, dated 1872, in black and white chalk.
After Winslow Homer, The Artist in the Country, c. 1869. Engraving, by John Karst, for Appletons’ magazine, June 19, 1869. (Photo Credit Ill.18)
Homer’s drawings, sometimes present as tracings produced in the wood-engraving process, come off as works of art that, however casual, are superior to his rather stiff and surreal magazine illustrations and the colored tiles that, as a member of the Tile Club, a group of New York artists devoted to “ancient methods of hand craftsmanship,” he adorned with shepherdesses. His oil paintings on display at Cooper-Hewitt, executed with a broader, slower brush than Church’s, provoke some verbal acrobatics in Floramae McCarron-Cates’s essay “The Best Possible View: Pictorial Representation in the American West.” Having observed the “detached immediacy” and compressed perspective of Homer’s wood engravings, she states of two good-sized oils on display, each representing a single erect figure, respectively in fall and in blossom-time (Gathering Autumn Leaves, c. 1877; The Yellow Jacket, 1879), that “it is almost as if a sheet of glass were held up between the viewer
and the figures represented, pulling the background forward, and resulting in an abstracted arrangement of forms.” Even those unable quite to grasp this optical stunt can see that Homer of the three artists is the most modern; his early low-keyed Barbizon pastoralism brightened to a homegrown impressionism wherein spatial depth is of small concern. Two watercolors on view, Landscape with Deer in a Morning Haze (c. 1892) and Valley and Hillside (1889–95), are virtually abstract (but for the tiny, poignantly alert deer), and his late, great oils eliminate humanity and confront, like Church’s Niagaras and Moran’s buttes and canyons, raw American nature—crashing waves and battered cliffs. The scenic Maine area of Prouts Neck, incidentally, where Homer built his final home and studio, had become, thanks to the shrewd purchases of the painter and his brother, a Homeric real-estate development.
Development and the need to escape the overstuffed Victorian parlor motivated and recompensed American landscape painting, we are told. Karal Ann Marling’s concluding catalogue essay, “America Inside Out: The View from the Parlor,” wittily speaks of “a dream of some fresh-air utopia visible only from the vantage point of the great indoors.” Fresh air, as Eastern American cities, planted in coastal swamps, grew into massive infestations of humanity, was no small blessing in summertime. A wall card at the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition states, “The pictures made by artists … brought in ministers, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and teachers for their summer vacations.” It wasn’t just nostalgia for an imagined Native American freedom that settled the resorts, but concerns of health and comfort, even though the urban parlor accumulated souvenirs like vases depicting an Indian encampment (Edward Timothy Hurley, 1909) and wallpaper of repeating braves in canoes. Longfellow’s greatly loved poem Hiawatha helped to bring the Midwest’s northern lake country into the orbit of vacationers.
