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INTRODUCTION

Although Edgar Allan Poe’s name is most often identified with stories of horror and fear, Poe and the Visual Arts stakes a claim for the less familiar Poe—the one who often goes unrecognized or forgotten—the Poe whose early love of beauty was a strong and enduring draw, who “from childhood’s hour . . . [had] not seen / As others saw—.”¹ The evidence in this book demonstrates that Poe’s “deep worship of all beauty,” expressed in an 1829 letter to John Neal when Poe was just twenty, never entirely faded, despite the demands of his commercial writing and editorial career. In that letter, Poe appealed to Neal “as a man that loves the same beauty which I adore—the beauty of the natural blue sky and the sunshiny earth.”² Poe and the Visual Arts looks at Poe’s connection to such visual beauty, his commitment to “graphicality” (a word he coined), and his knowledge of the visual arts, noting what he saw, how he used what he saw, and how he criticized those who would not see.

Poe valued the artist’s vision as well as the ability of a writer to create in words what can be seen by “an artistical eye.”³ His regard for the artist’s ability to see how various, seemingly arbitrary combinations can create a composition of beauty is clearly articulated in “The Landscape Garden”: “No such combinations of scenery exist in Nature as the painter of genius has in his power to produce. No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed upon the canvass of Claude.⁴ In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess. . . . [The artist] positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter, or form, constitute, and alone constitute, the true Beauty” (Tales, 1:707–8). The explicit references to paintings and painters, such as Claude, in many of Poe’s stories and sketches enhance thematic concerns or help produce a preconceived effect. In other works, such as “Landor’s Cottage” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” Poe obliquely refers to the Hudson River school painters by evoking their paintings in his own descriptive prose rather than directly naming the paintings he has in mind. In this way, the tales signal a turn in Poe’s visual aesthetics from the sublime to the beautiful. In addition, Poe’s concern with literary process—as evidenced in “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” for example, as well as in many of his (often harsh) reviews of poetry and fiction—reflects his astute awareness of the similarity between the writing and painting processes. He was keenly aware of how a painter uses his medium to produce a “startling effect,” a concept essential to Poe’s storytelling.

This affinity is evidenced in his February 1838 Southern Literary Messenger review of Alexander Slidell’s The American in England. Poe applauds Slidell’s book as being wise by virtue of being superficial and justifies this seeming contradiction by arguing that the “depth of an argument is not, necessarily, its wisdom—this depth lying where Truth is sought more often than where she is found.” Poe then compares Slidell’s literary effort with the painterly process by observing, “The touches of a painting which, to minute inspection, are ‘confusion worse confounded’ will not fail to start boldly out to the cursory glance of a connoisseur.”⁵ In noting that the overall effect of a painting (as seen by a “connoisseur”) overrides the minute, seemingly “confused” strokes that produce that effect, Poe once again affirms his belief that truth often lies on the surface. He states this quite clearly in his “Letter to B–––”: “As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top.”⁶ In his review of Slidell’s work, Poe also foregrounds his understanding of how a painter creates illusion and how that process applies to literary technique. For example, he compares Slidell’s literary finesse with painterly technique as follows: “[Mr. Slidell] has felt that the apparent, not the real, is the province of a painter—and that to give (speaking technically) the idea of any desired object, the toning down, or the utter neglect of certain portions of that object is absolutely necessary to the proper bringing out of other portions—portions by whose sole instrumentality the idea of the object is afforded.”⁷

Three years later, Poe reiterated this understanding in a May 1841 Graham’s Magazine review of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and Other Tales. Here Poe points out that a painter, rather than attempting to create a direct duplicate of the subject to be depicted, uses his medium to communicate its truth to the viewer through the manipulation of brush stroke, light, composition, line, and shadow—exaggerating elements when necessary and diminishing others to create the desired effect. As he explains, “No critical principle is more firmly based in reason than that a certain amount of exaggeration is essential in the proper depicting of truth itself. We do not paint an object to be true, but to appear true to the beholder. Were we to copy nature with accuracy the object copied would seem unnatural.”⁸

In 1845, in Marginalia 243, Poe once again returned to his long-standing idea that the “mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’” As noted in “The Landscape Garden” and “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe strongly believed that transformation, combination, and composition create beauty beyond what nature can produce, and this belief is evident in the marginalia entry: “We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.” In this short piece, Poe also provides a definition of “Art”: “Were I called upon to define, very briefly, the term ‘Art,’ I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’”⁹

Often, too, Poe used visual metaphors as high praise. For example, in his September 1839 Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine review of Friedrich Fouqué’s Undine, Poe overwhelmingly praises his writing: “‘Undine’ is a model of models, in regard to the high artistical talent which it evinces. We could write volumes in a detailed commentary upon its various beauties in this respect. Its unity is absolute—its keeping unbroken. Yet every minute point of the picture fills and satisfies the eye” (Works, 10:37). Furthermore, in his February 1836 “Autography,” Poe applauds John P. Kennedy’s handwriting: “This is our beau ideal of penmanship. Its prevailing character is picturesque. . . . We should suppose Mr. Kennedy to have the eye of a painter, more especially in regard to the picturesque” (Tales, 1:273). Poe’s praise for the painterly process and for visual art was consistent throughout his literary career.

Chapter 1 of this book, “Poe’s Exposure to Art Exhibited in Philadelphia and Manhattan, 1838–1845,” suggests that Poe’s keen sense of visual aesthetics was nurtured by his exposure to the paintings and sculptures in art venues in Philadelphia and New York, where he lived from 1838 to his death in 1849. The “graphicality” of Poe’s own work is enhanced by allusions to painters and paintings, as demonstrated in chapter 2, “Artists and Artwork in Poe’s Short Stories and Sketches.” This chapter provides a chronological overview of the references to visual artists, paintings, and sculptures in the stories written or revised during Poe’s most productive period, from 1838 to 1849. I show how these allusions build on Poe’s valuing the artist’s vision as well as the ability of the writer to create in words what can be seen by “an artistical eye.” The chapter also provides evidence that supports Kent Ljungquist’s claim in The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques that “[Poe’s] later fiction and criticism mark a general turn away from the sublime.” Ljungquist explains, “Beauty becomes Poe’s guiding principle, and imagination is the predominant faculty, all other faculties subordinated to it with the sublime added almost as a rather unimportant sub-category.”¹⁰

Chapter 3, “Poe’s Homely Interiors,” examines the ways Poe’s well-known strategy of manipulating the merest detail can reveal undercurrent meanings, thematic resonances, nuanced complications of plot, and/or satirical responses to cultural norms. Specifically, this chapter examines the homely items of interior decoration that function in this way in “The Devil in the Belfry,” “William Wilson,” “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.” Poe also used visual cues in an entirely different way in his tales to confront the propensity to see what is desired and not what is actually there. This phenomenon, studied in 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 building, which exists now as Hamilton Hall of the University of the Arts on Broad Street, must have made quite an impression on Poe in all its neoclassical majesty. It brings to mind two lines from Poe’s “To Helen,” a poem he revised for publication in the February 23, 1843, issue of the Saturday Museum, a year before he left Philadelphia for Manhattan: “To the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (Poems, 166). As T. O. Mabbott points out, “[These] two most famous lines, first published in 1843, are among those Poe changed with consummate art” (164).

Within walking distance of Poe’s residence lived one of his colleagues: painter, editor, and engraver John Sartain.²⁵ Sartain’s daughter Anne Clarke remembered Poe’s visits to her father’s home “at Twelfth and Walnut Streets on [Poe’s] way home to Sixteenth Street.”²⁶ Felix O. C. Darley, whose sister married a Sully, was also among Poe’s friends in Philadelphia. According to E. Anna Lewis, “Among the literati who took special interest in [Darley] . . . were N. P. Willis [and] Major Noah,” both of whom were friends with Poe.²⁷ Poe clearly admired and trusted Darley because Poe asked Darley to be the illustrator for the Stylus, the literary journal Poe tried to establish for so long.

When Poe moved to Philadelphia, the city was still feeling the desperate effects of the economic panic of 1837, and violence was not unusual. In 1838, rioters destroyed Philadelphia Hall only four days after it was dedicated as an office space for “free discussion,” which included but was not limited to abolitionist speech; it was open “for any purpose not of immoral character.”²⁸ John Sartain was at the scene of the Philadelphia Hall fire and documented it in an engraving (fig. 2). As Kathryn Wilson and Jennifer Coval have observed, “Violence in fact permeated the antebellum city and was often not indiscriminate but highly discriminating, revealing the fears, anxieties, and challenges of an evolving city and nation. . . . Violence in nineteenth-century Philadelphia had many origins, several of them in the growing pains of a rapidly expanding and industrializing city. Urbanization fed an increasing influx of ‘strangers’ into the city from points abroad as well as the surrounding countryside.”²⁹

Despite this turmoil, the six years that Poe lived in Philadelphia also saw a vibrant arts community emerge at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Early in the 1830s, the Academy almost closed for financial reasons; however, a year before the Great Panic of 1837, it had recovered and had enough economic leeway to buy Benjamin West’s Death on the Pale Horse. This purchase caused a lively debate among local artists who felt that not enough of their own work was being shown at the Academy. The Academy listened, and the result was a move toward the exhibition of American art and away from European artists’ works. The Academy’s website provides the following overview of this period: “While the local artists sought participation in the institution’s management and exhibition planning, the affluent gentlemen board members—many descendants of the City’s founding elite—were more concerned with the diffusion of cultivated taste to the public. Ultimately both sides gained small victories: the academy focused increasingly on American art and the board remained in the control of laymen city leaders.”³⁰

After Poe’s six-year stay in Philadelphia, he returned to Manhattan with his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, in April 1844. For a short time, Poe had been relatively free of debt because of his successful petition in December 1842 under the 1841 Bankruptcy Act. His bankruptcy petition released him from more than two thousand dollars in financial obligations to numerous people.³¹ The New York that Poe found was likewise a much more prosperous place than it had been when he lived there briefly in 1837. By 1844, New York had recovered from the great fire of 1835 and the economic panic of 1837. The city’s population had grown by 75 percent; nonetheless, most commerce and residences were still concentrated below Fourteenth Street. What is now Central Park then housed what Eric Homberger describes in Scenes from the Life of a City as “squatter encampments.”³² Evidencing Poe’s influence in so many disciplines, Homberger enhanced his description of this area of New York with an excerpt from Poe’s first installment of “Doings of Gotham,” a series of letters he contributed to the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, newspaper Columbia Spy right after his move to New York: “I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta. Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary—to me it conveys the sublime. Trees are few; but some of the shrubbery is exceedingly picturesque.”³³

During this stay in New York, Poe saw its first railroad being built; completed in 1846, it extended from City Hall twenty-seven miles to White Plains. By that same year, the first telegraph line connected New York with Philadelphia.³⁴ These new communication resources indicate a thriving and prosperous city. Wealthy merchants such as Jonathan Sturges and Charles Leupp had both the time and the money to patronize the arts, and they did. Not surprisingly, as a result, a growing number of artists began to settle in New York, and its visual arts scene rapidly expanded. The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, the city’s first permanent-exhibit art gallery, was founded in 1844, and both the National Academy of Design (dedicated to the display of American artworks) and the American Art-Union (dedicated to the sale of American artists’ works) enjoyed marked profits from the substantial increase in attendance at their exhibits during these important years.³⁵ In fact, more people than ever before were exposed to the arts because the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts and the American Art-Union provided access to their galleries for little or no charge. The former charged a minimum entrance fee, while the latter was committed to being a “free Picture Gallery, always open and well attended.”³⁶

This was an exciting time for the arts in New York, and Poe enjoyed a similar excitement in his career. During these two years, he gained great celebrity, became the owner of his own literary magazine, and lived in the most fashionable part of town near Washington Square Park at 85 Amity Street. His time in Manhattan was punctuated by two dramatic literary events: one when he first arrived—the self-proclaimed enthusiastic response to his article “The Balloon Hoax”—and the other early the next year with the publication of “The Raven.”

One week after he arrived in New York, Poe’s “Balloon Hoax” was issued as a one-page broadside by the Sun, followed two days later by publication in Mordecai Noah’s Sunday Times. “The Balloon-Hoax” created quite a stir, if we can believe Poe’s account in his column in the Columbia Spy of May 21, 1844: “On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement, the whole square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building was literally besieged, blocked up—ingress and egress being alike impossible, from a period soon after sunrise until about two o-clock P.M. . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper.”³⁷ Whether this level of excitement actually occurred could be questioned; nonetheless, Poe unabashedly promoted this “premier” publication in his new hometown of “Mannahatta.”

The other pivotal event that pushed Poe into the limelight was the publication of “The Raven.” The poem was met with lavish praise, and as a result Poe enjoyed months of celebrity. He was invited to soirees at 116 Waverly Place, the home of poet and socialite Anne Lynch (fig. 3), where he had many opportunities to talk with writers and artists such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Osgood, N. P. Willis, and Horace Greeley. I was struck by the curious Poe-like coincidence that I discovered by coordinating the notes in the Poe Log describing both Poe’s dramatic reading of “The Raven” at Miss Lynch’s home on the evening of July 19, 1845, and the great fire of that year, which broke out on the same day. The New-York Mirror’s description of the night of the fire—“The moon light falls upon the ruins which are still burning to some extent, and gives a wild and unnatural aspect to the whole scene”—suggests a particularly eerie setting for Poe’s recitation. While lower Manhattan smoldered and the moon was full, Poe read “The Raven” to the eager listeners at the Lynch soiree. The setting surely enhanced his performance, described by Miss Lynch as “electrifying” (Poe Log, 553). Not only did this reading increase Poe’s popularity and reinforce the reputation he had for his mesmerizing reading style, but the drama that surrounded the event must have intensified the recitation’s lasting effect on its audience. Before sunrise the next day, the worst fire since the great fire of 1835 had raged throughout many streets in lower Manhattan.

Although fires had been a constant concern for New Yorkers since the city was founded, the completion of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842 promised to lessen the chance that a major fire like the one in 1835 could reoccur. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Even with the abundant water supply provided by the aqueduct and the work of a more efficient fire department, the 1845 fire destroyed more than three hundred buildings and killed thirty people. In his diary, George Templeton Strong describes the fire, which began, according to his account of Saturday, July 19, at “half-past three this morning by a couple of explosions in quick succession that shook the house like an earthquake and must have blown me out of bed. . . . The moon was shining full and bright; the dawn just beginning to show itself, and to the southeast there rose into the air a broad column of intense red flame that made the moon look pale.”³⁸

The weekly edition of the New-York Mirror for Saturday, July 26, 1845, began its account of the fire with this claim:

We are called upon to record a dire calamity, equaled only by that which visited the city in 1835. . . . At about 4 o-clock it communicated to the store of Crocker & Warner, in New Street, in which was stored a huge quantity of salt petre, which blew up with an explosion that shook the city like an earthquake. . . . SATURDAY—MIDNIGHT—The scene at this hour is awfully sublime. The moon light falls upon the ruins which are still burning to some extent, and gives a wild and unnatural aspect to the whole scene. The sentinels perform their duties in silence. They seem to be guarding the remains of some vanquished, sacked and ruined city, and the idea of a place besieged and suffering all the horrors of war is before us.³⁹

This description and the picture (fig. 4) that appeared on the first page of the New-York Mirror a week after the fire remind the reader of Poe’s graphic descriptions of besieged cities and desolate environments. Could Poe have written it himself? Poe worked at the newspaper from October 1844 to February 1845, and either the write-up of the fire was his or the writer who wrote it (possibly N. P. Willis) was influenced by Poe’s earlier descriptions of urban disasters. Compare the Mirror’s description to this one from Poe’s short story “King Pest” (1835): “The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells everywhere prevailed;—and by the aid of that ghastly light which, even at midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and pestilential atmosphere, might be discerned lying in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless habitations, the carcass of many a nocturnal plunderer arrested by the hand of the plague” (Tales, 1:243–44). Or compare this similarly bleak description from “Silence: A Fable” (1838): “And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling and loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon” (1:195–96).

While lower Manhattan recovered from the fire’s destruction, the New York arts community, on the other hand, was reveling in its newfound prosperity. The visual arts attracted much attention during the two-year period Poe lived in Manhattan. Just after he arrived, the nineteenth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 25, 1844; the number of visitors who saw the show before it closed in July was in the thousands.⁴⁰ The 1844 show included about three hundred works of art by American artists, including Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, Francis Edmonds, Charles Loring Elliott, Henry Peters Gray, and Henry Inman.⁴¹ Since its founding in 1825, the National Academy of Design had gained more and more prominence with each passing year, and by the mid-1840s it was considered “the most influential of all serial exhibitions in this country.”⁴² In 1841, the Academy moved from its small quarters to “the Society Library building, at the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. These galleries were larger and more commodious than any yet occupied by the society.”⁴³ Patterned after the Royal Academy in London, the National Academy of Design exhibits were “limited to contemporary American art. . . . Exhibitions were planned and executed by contemporary artists for contemporary artists.”⁴⁴ Works could only be shown once. The shows attracted viewers who wanted to see the newest work by their favorite artist and those who looked forward to the possibility of discovering a new artist whose work they could follow and support. Unlike the American Academy of Art founded in 1802, which was “primarily concerned with the promotion of civic virtue”⁴⁵ and mostly exhibited work by European “masters,” the National Academy of Design was established by artists to promote American art and train American artists. By the mid-1840s, New York was considered the center of the arts, primarily because of the quality of the shows at the National Academy of Design.

In addition, in 1844, businessman and art patron Jonathan Sturges organized a group of patrons to establish the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, the city’s first gallery with a permanent collection. The inaugural exhibit consisted of paintings and drawings from Luman Reed’s collection, which included works by prominent contemporary artists such as George Whiting Flagg, Thomas Cole, and William Sidney Mount.⁴⁶ Reed began collecting European art in the 1820s but turned to collecting works by American artists in the 1830s. He was one of New York’s most generous art patrons, and before his death in 1836 he opened his home at 13 Greenwich Street on a regular basis to those wishing to view his artwork. According to Abigail Gerdts, “Reed’s collection remained in his home [after his death] until 1844, when to the alarm of his friends and fellow patrons of the arts, it became known that the family intended to dispose of it.”⁴⁷ This provided the impetus for the efforts by Sturges and his fellow patrons to establish the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts and keep Reed’s collection intact.

The inaugural exhibit of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts was located in rented rooms at the New York Society Library, but soon thereafter, in March 1845, New York City’s Common Council voted to allow the gallery to use the Rotunda in the Park “to establish in the city of New-York a permanent gallery of paintings, statuary, and other works of art.”⁴⁸ It prospered there until 1848, when the city reclaimed the building for another use and the collection was transferred to the New-York Historical Society: “The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts . . . did propose to the said New-York Historical Society that if the said Society in the construction of their new fire proof Edifice then in progress of erection, would provide a suitable Gallery for the reception, safe keeping, and proper exhibition of the aforesaid collection of art, the said New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts would deposit the same in perpetuity. . . . The New-York Historical Society did cause, at great extra expense, change in the building to provide the Gallery.”⁴⁹

An article describing the origin of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, attributed by Burton Pollin to Henry Cood Watson,⁵⁰ appears in the September 13, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal. Watson generously commends the individuals who saw in the pending disposal of Reed’s collection “a favorable opportunity for founding a Public Gallery”: “Too much praise cannot be awarded to these true followers of the beautiful art; while many, and particularly the fashionable many, expend their so-called enthusiasm in wordy expletives and mawkish lamentation upon the fallen state of the Arts in this country, a few gentlemen honorably distinguished as New York merchants, step forward, and give the only substantial proof of their interest in Painters and the Painter’s Art.”⁵¹ This article is quite unlike the two columns written by Charles Briggs about the founding of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts in earlier issues of the Broadway Journal. In the March 1, 1845, issue, Briggs chastises the founders of the gallery for showing “bad pictures” (BJ, 1:134). He later expressed his disappointment in the founders for hanging copies alongside original works by American artists: “What we had hoped to see, when the New York gallery was first projected, was the foundation of a gallery of American Art; one that we could point to with pride. . . . Our country is so belittled by imitation and copyism, that we cannot but think that a collection of Original American works would have a beneficial effect in other departments, and lead to self-dependence in other things of seemingly greater importance than paintings and statues” (1:187). Neither of these sentiments is included in Watson’s overview of the founding of the gallery published months later when Briggs was no longer associated with the Broadway Journal.

During this same period, the American Art-Union’s lottery shows were thriving. Founded in 1839, the Art-Union was designed to popularize and promote the sale of contemporary American artwork:

Unlike the AUL [Art Union of London], which was created for both philosophical and practical reasons, the AAU [American Art-Union] was founded in 1839 primarily to create a gallery for new art in New York. . . . The AAU borrowed heavily from the AUL’s idealized rhetoric about the moral and social benefits of promoting taste among the broader population and of encouraging artistic production, but openly acknowledged that the form of its particular operations were driven largely by a dual commitment to its “Perpetual Free Gallery” (open free to members and at a nominal charge to non-members) and to the purchase of prizes by committee.⁵²

By 1845, the gallery had 3,233 members, a significant increase from its original 814 members.⁵³ In addition to this venue, many artists exhibited their work in “rooms at Broadway.”

Poe, like others in artistic circles, would have been caught up in the city’s enthusiasm for these new and prospering institutions of art. While working at the New-York Mirror and later at the Broadway Journal, Poe would have had plenty of opportunities to meet artists and attend art exhibits. He also lived in a neighborhood with painters and other members of the artistic community; in fact, Asher Durand (91 Amity) and James Hamilton Shegogue (7 Amity), both influential members of the National Academy of Design, were Poe’s neighbors when he lived at 85 Amity. Whether Poe came into personal contact with Durand or Shegogue can only be guessed, but since walking to work was a normal means of transportation for those in lower Manhattan, it is highly likely that, as neighbors with similar interests, they came into contact with one another.

The underlying contention of this book, then, is that not only did Poe attend art exhibits, write about painting and sculpture, and become acquainted with artists in his neighborhood in both Philadelphia and New York, but his immersion in the visual arts also had a significant impact on his writing, especially immediately following his stay in Manhattan. Poe’s exposure to paintings, especially those by the painters of the Hudson River school, similarly influenced his developing visual aesthetics. Of course, as mentioned earlier, Poe had always shown a pointed interest in the visual arts and visual tricks, as his writing prior to 1844 demonstrates; nonetheless, the excitement generated in the arts community at this pivotal time in New York, the nascence of American art criticism, and the impact of Poe’s close working relationship with Charles Briggs made this period particularly important and influential, especially as Poe’s writing turned from the drama of the sublime to the harmony of the beautiful.