Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  Church himself was an amateur scientist with a wide-ranging knowledge of botany, zoology, meteorology, geology, and geography. He collected rocks and butterflies and devoured accounts of recent scientific expeditions. Humboldt’s influential Kosmos, a description of the physical universe, inspired Church to follow in the geographer’s footsteps through South America to paint mountains, volcanoes, gorges, and waterfalls – heroic landscapes that suggested nature in its rawest and most original manifestations.

  But it was John Ruskin who set him on the great adventure of his life – Ruskin who wrote that to paint water was “like trying to paint a soul.” For the great English critic, whose influence on American painting was profound, the highest form of art was landscape painting, and the greatest landscape painter of all was J.M.W. Turner, whose ability to paint water realistically was, Ruskin felt, unexcelled. In Ruskin’s view, realism in landscape painting was the only “truth” – the link between art, nature, and God. “It will be the duty – the imperative duty – of the landscape painter to descend to the lowest details with undiminished attention,” he wrote. “Every class of rock, every kind of earth, every form of cloud, must be studied with equal industry, and rendered with equal precision.”

  In praising Turner as “the only painter who had ever represented the surface of calm or the force of agitated water” Ruskin plunged into an animated discussion of water in motion that clearly had a profound effect on Church. The critic wrote especially of the gravitational forces that changed the form and character of moving water, changed the very look of it, depending on the speed with which it was moving, the obstacles along its route, and the comparative shallowness or depth of the stream bed. Thus did Ruskin link art with science, a marriage that certainly appealed to Church. He had scarcely finished reading the early volumes of Ruskin’s Modern Painters before he set off for Niagara. He didn’t even wait for the snow to melt.

  In his three expeditions to the Falls in 1856, Church examined everything paintable. He had followed and experimented with the new science of photography; his own camera-like vision astonished his contemporaries. One pupil wrote that “his vision and retention of even the most transitory facts of nature passing before him must have been at the maximum of which the human mind is capable.… His mind seemed a camera obscura in which everything that passed before it was recorded permanently.… The primrose on the river’s brim he saw with a vision as clear as that of a photographic lens.…”

  Unlike many others, Church was not content to depict the Falls from one or two vantage points. He painted it from above and below, from upstream and down, from near and far – as Frankenstein had. But he went farther than Frankenstein, for his interests were also scientific. He studied the anatomy of the river, painted forms of falling water, made drawings of rock formations, investigated the play of light on tumbling rapids, examined the shallows, peered over the brink, drew the curly waves created by the turbulence of the racing stream, the blasts of spray at the foot of Goat Island, and the abstract lines of foam on the lip of the Horseshoe. He studied the hydraulics of the cataract and the sculptural look of the cliffs. His drawings ran the gamut from the parabolic suspension bridge to the forms and colour of various trees and individual flowers. Much of his work was rough – a few pencil scrawls and some scribbled notations – a form of artist’s shorthand, his personal method of committing the Falls to memory. In October he was ready at last to return to his home on the Hudson River to begin work on his masterpiece.

  His most important decision was to settle on a point of view for his work. His solution was revolutionary and breathtaking. Most previous artists had painted the Falls head on and from a considerable distance, so that the entire sweep of the two cataracts with Goat Island dividing them filled the canvas. But Church decided to place the viewer on the very brink of the western edge of the Horseshoe and to concentrate solely on the sweep of its great bend. No barrier, psychological or real, would stand between the viewer and the canvas. Against all tradition he included no foreground, no graceful framework of foliage, no clutch of awed sightseers to give the painting scale. It was as if the viewer were actually standing ankle-deep in the shallows overlooking the brink. Modern photography has rendered Church’s vision almost commonplace, but in its day, this point of view was a revelation.

  The picture is almost entirely taken up with water and sky, the western lip of the Horseshoe sweeping diagonally across the canvas from left to right, then reversing itself to form a horizontal line of white foam slightly above the centreline of the painting. The only evidence of human incursion is the tiny Terrapin Tower in the distance and, on the far American shore, one or two dots that might be people. The sky above glowers and frowns, split by a single ray of white light knifing through the clouds to link up with the broken rainbow that arches over the crescent. In Church’s view, the foaming water was a symbol of God’s implacable wrath, the rainbow of his everlasting love.

  The painting was not an accurate representation of the Falls but a kind of Platonic ideal. There was no point on that crumbling bank from which Church’s view could be exactly duplicated. Yet he had managed not only to catch the power and energy of the cataract but he had also, in Ruskin’s phrase, painted its soul. Everything about the picture was a revelation: he had made the water seem so real, so luminous, so alive that one critic would refer to it as “Niagara with the roar left out.” He had for the first time captured the elusive green of the tumbling water, which Dickens and others had admired. And he had abandoned the conventional squarish frame in favour of a wider canvas, 7½ feet by 3 feet, thus emphasizing the boundless, untrammelled geography of the continent.

  The picture went on display in New York on May 1, 1857, at the Free Fine Art Gallery on Broadway. It had been bought directly from the painter by a respected New York firm of art dealers, Williams, Stevens, Williams, for forty-five hundred dollars – an unheard-of sum for an American canvas at that time. Of this sum, two thousand dollars was for reproduction rights. The firm also agreed to pay Church half of all future profits above the original twenty-five hundred dollars when the painting was sold. Artist’s proofs went on sale for thirty dollars apiece, regular prints for fifteen dollars. To reserve these in advance, some eleven hundred people signed the subscription book.

  From the outset the response was ecstatic. The Home Journal dispatched “one of the most charming and cultivated women” it knew to a preview. She admitted that she had dreaded the visit, but within five minutes she had completely surrendered herself to Church’s composition. “It was there before me, the eighth wonder of the world!” she enthused. “The brown jagged verge above the western section of the Horseshoe was at my feet.…”

  The plaudits poured in. To the Albion, the painting was “uncontestably the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic.” The New York Times called it “the marvel of the western world.” Others were equally enraptured: Church’s painting was a triumph of colour and form; it was epoch making; it heralded a new era in American landscape painting; it rivalled, nay, it surpassed Turner; it wasn’t just a picture of the Falls, it was the Falls. Several onlookers tried to describe it in words and failed, just as in a previous century travellers to Niagara had declared the impossibility of putting the subject into words.

  Throughout May, Church’s The Great Fall, Niagara was the rage. Almost every prominent New Yorker, from Horace Greeley to Charles A. Dana to George Bancroft, had been to see it. In one two-week period, 100,000 people lined up to view the picture. The average time given over to its contemplation was estimated at one hour.

  After only a month, the painting was spirited off across the Atlantic, partly because its owners wanted to have it chromolithed for sale to the public and also because they hoped for the European stamp of approval. That came from the one critic who could make or break an artist – Turner’s champion, John Ruskin.

  The manner of that approval went into legend. Ruskin, on carefully examining the painting, could n
ot believe that Church’s rendering of the elusive rainbow was not enhanced by a trick of light from a nearby window; it couldn’t be mere paint. He raised his hand in front of the picture, expecting to see his fingers in the colour spectrum produced by refracted light coming through the glass. Only when the rainbow remained as Church had painted it did Ruskin realize what the artist had achieved. He told a reporter that he had found effects in the painting that he had waited for years to discover.

  The London press agreed. The grey and forbidding Times applied its own seal of approval to the work by announcing that “the characteristic merit of this picture is its sober truth.” The London Art Journal echoed those words by declaring “it is truth, obviously and certainly … a production of rare merit … an achievement of the highest order.” Church’s realistic rendering of water, the “foam, flash, rush, dark depth, turbidity, clearness, curling, lashing, shattering,” amazed the critics. All agreed that with Church, American painting had come of age.

  That, of course, was what Americans wanted to hear. A writer for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had predicted that the work would “startle those ‘croakers’ across the water into a recognition of American genius.” In the march toward Manifest Destiny, Frederic Church was now one of the standard-bearers.

  The painting toured the English provinces, drawing applause wherever it was shown. It returned to New York in the fall of 1858 to even greater approval. In the words of the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, it was now seen as “the finest painting ever painted by an American artist.” Meanwhile, Church, travelling through South America in Humboldt’s wake, produced another blockbuster, The Heart of the Andes, which was also universally acclaimed. He returned to Niagara to do more paintings and was undoubtedly gratified when, in 1876, a prominent banker, William W. Corcoran, bought Niagara at auction and hung it permanently in the Washington gallery that bears his name. The price was $12,500 – the largest ever paid for an American canvas to that time.

  It hangs there today, among other nineteenth-century landscapes, in its massive gilt frame, and although it is clear that Church was no Turner, it remains a remarkable and respected piece of work. To the modern viewer it evokes, at first, some of the mixed emotions that troubled the mid-Victorians who first viewed the cataract itself and found it wanting. Like the Falls, it requires contemplation to realize the miracle that Church worked with brush and canvas in the days before colour photography.

  Of the hundreds of paintings made of Niagara, before Church and after him, this is by common consent the greatest. Other painters travelled to Niagara, but their numbers diminished. Church had effectively stemmed the flood of artists. To improve upon perfection was, after all, an exercise in futility. Moreover, the emerging science of photography was already changing fashions in art. Six years after Niagara was first exhibited in New York, Edouard Manet’s controversial Le Déjeuner sur Vherbe, shown at the Salon de Refusés in Paris, heralded a new and less representational way of looking at nature.

  Frederic Church had become the best-known American landscape painter of his time, but by the next century he would be all but forgotten. He had helped to banish one word from the lexicon of Niagara. The Falls was no longer “an icon of the American sublime,” in Elizabeth McKinsey’s notable phrase. The terror and mystery were gone and the Falls vanquished. Roebling had bridged the frightening gorge; Church had managed for the first time to capture the awesome power of the cataract. With the funambulists trotting high above the churning rapids on tightropes, could the Falls any longer be called sublime?

  Chapter Five

  1

  The Prince of Manila

  2

  Farini the Great

  3

  Farini the flirt

  4

  The legacy of Niagara

  5

  Into the maelstrom

  1

  The Prince of Manila

  On a summer’s day in 1858, a year after Church’s painting went on display, Jean François Gravelet, a small, well-muscled Frenchman with flaxen hair and a goatee to match, stood on the lip of the Niagara gorge and remarked to a companion, “What a splendid place to bridge with a tightrope.”

  His companion chuckled at the jest, but Gravelet, whose stage name was Blondin, was deadly serious. He later said that had a rope been at hand he would have started at once, and from that moment on, “wherever I went after that, I took Niagara with me. To cross the roaring waters became the ambition of my life.”

  The great cataract obsessed him, haunted his dreams that winter, and drove him back to Niagara the following year, where he startled the world by dancing, tripping, mincing, strutting, leaping, and even somersaulting in a variety of costumes – ranging from gorilla to “Siberian slave” – all on a three-inch manila rope, two thousand feet long, stretched 160 feet above the boiling chasm.

  The Prince of Manila, they called him, the Conqueror of Niagara. The former epithet is apt, the latter less so. Charles Blondin did not conquer the Falls; he trivialized them. The shimmering cascade became a mere backdrop for a circus act. The thousands who crammed every corner of the gorge that summer did not come to view the Falls; they came to see Blondin defy gravity and joust with fate. The cataract, now only a stage setting, could no longer inspire Gothic terror, but those who glued their vision to the tiny figure trotting with such assurance along that slender filament experienced the same tingle in their spines that earlier visitors had reported when confronted with only the majesty of falling water.

  Now the Falls were literally thrust into the background. Although paintings depicted him crossing directly above the thundering Horseshoe, Blondin’s feats were performed more than a mile downstream. Yet in later years he himself appeared to believe the legend, for he talked about “crossing this mighty cataract” as if it had been directly below him. When he returned for a second season in 1860, he gave his performances even farther downstream, beyond the railway suspension bridge. Thus the mass of spectators who chose that vantage point to watch the performance had to turn their backs on the Falls – a symbolic rejection of a natural wonder in favour of a human stunt. It was, as one British observer wrote, rather like shutting your prayer book to go to see a pantomime.

  To many, Blondin’s rope dance eclipsed the Falls. One reporter wrote of that first exhibition: “So intensely engaged was the mind in the event, that we have our doubts whether, among the large crowd present, there was one who even heard the roar of the great Cataract, which was thundering on the ear.”

  The symbolism was extended to the gorge itself. Blondin had literally caught it in his net. Flung across the chasm was a vast spider web of manila – forty-four guy ropes, measuring twenty-seven thousand feet in all – to keep the tightrope steady, fastened to both banks by means of trees and posts. Over this hempen lattice work the tiny figure in pink tights reigned unchallenged.

  Was it the act itself that twenty-five thousand people came to see – or was it their expectation of a darker spectacle? Six days before his first performance, the early birds on the scene had watched in awe as the rope dancer – or “funambulist,” to use the popular term – inched his way two hundred feet along the tightrope in a makeshift cable car to test certain guys. Then, to their astonishment and apparent chagrin, he climbed out of the car, turned a somersault on the rope, and sat down as calmly as if he were in a Morris chair. As the Niagara Falls Gazette reported, somewhat ghoulishly, “Everybody is disappointed to see him display such agility and courage.”

  Disappointed. For the first time it dawned on them that Blondin might actually accomplish what he said he would do and not tumble off the rope to his death below. For many had come expecting to witness Blondin’s doom, and now, as he capered above the chasm, they felt cheated. Death, after all, was what the region was infamous for.

  It explains why every eye remained glued to the spectacle. Nobody wanted to miss a possible stumble, a terrifying loss of balance. A correspondent for the Toronto Daily Spectator told of encoun
tering “a small fellow with a dried-up wizened face who sat in a corner of the enclosure with an opera glass in his hand, which he held fixed to his eyeball from the time Blondin started until he landed.” When someone asked him for a loan of his glass, he retorted, “What! I have come from Detroit every week to see that man fall into the river, and do you think I would lose the chance of seeing it now by lending you my glass, even for an instant?”

  Nicholas Woods, correspondent for The Times who watched Blondin’s final performance in the autumn of 1860, believed that “one half of the crowds that go to see Blondin go in the firm expectation that as he must fall off and be lost some day or other, they may have the good fortune to be there when he does so miss his footing, and witness the whole catastrophe from the best point of view.” Blondin did not stumble. In 1859 he stood at the head of a long line of daredevils to come, all perfectly prepared to risk their lives for fame and fortune, not to mention the profit of the entrepreneurs who encouraged them.

  The greatest natural wonder of all, which had once tantalized the world because of its remoteness in the continental wilderness, was now rendered commonplace by the revolution in transportation. Roebling’s bridge and the arrival of the new railways – Canada’s Great Western and the New York Central – had thrown Niagara open for business on an unprecedented scale. Now there was an instant audience – and a growing one – for performers like Blondin. It was in the interests not only of the railway companies but also of the hoteliers, the souvenir salesmen, the commercial photographers, and the hack drivers to encourage the kind of spectacle that would soon become a regular occurrence at Niagara.

  Blondin did not need to hire a theatre in which to perform. He did not need to sell tickets at the entrance of a marquee. The gorge was his theatre and the railways were delighted to act as his agents. They supplied the customers who, having been inspired by the natural spectacle of the cataract, were happy to linger an extra day or so to view an equally absorbing human drama and, at the same time, help fill Blondin’s collection boxes.