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POE’S EXPOSURE TO ART EXHIBITED IN PHILADELPHIA AND MANHATTAN, 1838–1845

This chapter presents a comprehensive listing of the paintings by important American and European artists shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts while Poe lived in Philadelphia between 1838 and 1844, as well as lists of paintings by significant American artists hung in the 1844 and 1845 annual exhibitions at the National Academy of Design while Poe lived in Manhattan. A number of these paintings are interpreted in relation to Poe’s visual aesthetics or his tales—specifically paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Francis Edmonds, William Sidney Mount, Asher Durand, and Thomas Cole. Poe mentioned several of these artists, as well as others, in his work even though he did not specify their particular paintings. Although he saw paintings in homes in Richmond and may have been exposed to paintings in London galleries when he was young, this chapter’s discussion of how exposure to art affected his writing and aesthetics begins with his move to Philadelphia in 1838.

Living in Philadelphia for six years (a long time considering Poe’s usually unsettled life) afforded Poe the opportunity to see the shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and discuss art at “informal social gatherings of artists, actors and writers held at the Falstaff Hotel,” where he encountered Thomas Sully, John Sartain, and George R. Bonfield, among others (Poe Log, 284). During this time, Poe came to know John Sartain very well, and their friendship lasted from when they met in 1841 until Poe’s death in 1849.¹ In fact, just weeks after Poe died, Sartain made a mezzotint portrait of him after Samuel Stillman Osgood’s oil painting; this mezzotint was used in Rufus Griswold’s The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. In the 1840s, Sartain provided engravings for many of the same publications where Poe’s work appeared, including Graham’s Magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.² In particular, Sartain’s engraving after a painting by “Martin,” entitled Landscape with Pan and Syrinx (1819), became the basis for Poe’s plate piece “The Island of the Fay,” published in the June 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine. F. DeWolfe Miller believes “Martin” to be English artist John Martin, “whom Sartain knew in England before he moved to Philadelphia. In his Reminiscences, Sartain notes that he owned several of John Martin’s etchings.”³

While in Philadelphia, Poe also established a friendship with Felix O. C. Darley, often called the father of American illustration. Darley’s illustrations accompanied Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” in the June 28, 1843, issue of Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper. Earlier that year, on January 31, 1843, Darley had signed a contract with Poe, agreeing to “furnish original designs, or drawings (on wood or paper as required) of his own composition, in his best manner, and from subjects supplied him by Mess: Clarke and Poe; the said designs to be employed in illustration of the Magazine entitled ‘The Stylus’” (Poe Log, 396). Poe also renewed his friendship with Thomas Sully’s nephew Robert Sully, Poe’s childhood friend from Richmond and a painter.⁴ In addition, Poe may have become acquainted with Joshua Shaw, who lived in Philadelphia during this time and whose painting Poe praised in a fine arts column in the Broadway Journal in 1845. Poe’s relationships with artists during his time in Philadelphia clearly afforded him many opportunities to discuss the art he saw on exhibit or in the homes or studios of his artist friends. That Poe mentions Salvator Rosa in his work more than once suggests that the paintings he saw by Rosa and others at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts made an impression on him. There Poe also saw paintings by his friend Thomas Sully and by his often-quoted favorite Claude Lorrain.

A year after Poe left Philadelphia, a devastating fire in June 1845 completely destroyed the antique cast collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as a number of its important European paintings, including some by Rosa. An article in the New-York Mirror of June 21, 1845, suggests that the fire was set purposefully:

The labor of forty years was thus swept away in as many minutes. It seems to have been the work of an incendiary, and what could have induced the fiendish design is most extraordinary. The fire originated among some lumber in the antique gallery, and no doubt it was placed there intentionally, as two persons were seen to leave the building just before the fire broke out. Many valuable paintings were saved, but the loss is irreparable, as it includes some of the best paintings in the Union—the works of Salvator Rosa, Rubens, Raphael, Kauffman, Titian, David, many of our best native artists. . . . Salvator Rosa’s landscape, Mercury endeavoring to deceive Argus, while watching Io is missing.⁵

As a consequence of the Philadelphia fire and because many influential New York merchants donated significantly to the arts in New York, it fast replaced Philadelphia as the center of the arts. During Poe’s time in Manhattan before his move to Fordham in 1846, he was a part of this newfound enthusiasm for the visual arts. Poe had plenty of opportunities to discuss the arts with Charles Briggs while they were both at the Broadway Journal. In addition, Samuel Stillman Osgood attended numerous soirees with Poe, giving the two men opportunities to discuss paintings on display at the various venues on Broadway as well as Osgood’s own paintings. Osgood’s 1839 portrait of British poet and feminist Caroline Sheridan Norton and his portrait of Poe, painted sometime in 1845 or early 1846, must have been objects of discussion.

Exhibits at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1838–1844

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was founded in 1809 by artists Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, and William Rush as well as by members of the business community. The Academy was established to “provide America’s artists with ‘correct and elegant Copies, from the works of the first Masters’ and to ‘facilitate’ the artists’ ‘access to such Standards.’” In other words, “the Academy founders agreed that their primary mission was to bring classical art education to America, saving artists a difficult and expensive trip to study in London or on the Continent.” However, these idealistic ambitions were overridden by the desire of wealthy donors to make the Academy “a place for gentlemen alone to enjoy the connoisseurship of the fine arts.”⁶ The preservation of the goals set by the founding charter came into conflict with the practical, financial realities of the donors’ desires. This tension continued until the beginning of the 1840s, when the Academy finally recognized that American artists needed an academic curriculum and that the Academy could provide that service.

Despite these negotiations, the Academy’s exhibits were driven by commercial rather than educational or aesthetic values. It held its first show in 1811, but after 1835 it did not sponsor any group exhibits; instead, the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia sponsored group shows at the Academy during this time. Peter Falk’s invaluable catalog The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts provides details of these shows during the time Poe lived in Philadelphia. A list of the most important artists on exhibit from 1838 to 1844 from this catalog follows.⁷

John Gadsby Chapman

1838 Boy Setting a Snare; Baptism of Col. James Smith, or Ceremony of His Adoption into an Indian Tribe, 1755

1840 View in Virginia; The Partridge Trap

1843 Special exhibit: Vignette—Cottage Scene; Vignette—Blacksmith; Vignette—Milk Maid; Vignette—the Wagoner; Vignette—Mowing; Vignette—Haymakers

Thomas Cole

1838 View on the Catskill

1840 Landscape—Schroon Mountain

1842 The Titan’s Goblet

1844 Special exhibit: The Voyage of Life (series of four paintings)

Asher Brown Durand

1841 Landscape

1843 Embarkation of Columbus

Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée)

1844 Special exhibit: Marine View and Sea Port

Nicolas Poussin

1840 Deluge

Salvator Rosa

1843 Landscape and Figures

Clarkson Stanfield

1843 Caligula’s Bridge—Ischia and Procida in the Distance

Thomas Sully

1838 Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Lady Macbeth; The Lost Child

1840 Portrait of a Child; The Mantilla; The Country Girl; The Sleeping Girl (after Reynolds); Full-Length Portrait of Mrs. Darley and Son; Girl and Bird (after Reynolds); The Strawberry Girl (after Reynolds)

Special exhibit: Queen Victoria, St. George’s Society (full length, the original from life)

1841 Portrait of the Late William Kneass; Group of Children; The Farewell (cabinet picture); A Group of Children; Portrait of the Hon. Joel R. Poinsett; Portrait of a Lady

1842 Portrait of a Lady; Sleeping Infant; Portrait of a Young Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Charity

1843 Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady; Equestrian Portrait of Gen. Washington Reviewing His Troops, in the Year 1794, Pending the Whiskey Riots; Portrait of a Lady; Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop (vide Master Humphrey’s Clock); The Sisters; Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady

Special exhibit: Whole Length Child and Dog; Great Pitch of the Falls of Niagara, from the American Side; General View of the Falls of Niagara, from the American Side; View of the Falls, from Below, on the Canadian Side, Including Table Rock; Groupe of Children; Child and Dog; Study for a Whole Length, a Lady; Portrait of a Young Lady

Special exhibit: Mother and Child, from the Murder of the Innocents; “Isabel”—a Sketch; Full Length Portraits of Mother and Child; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of Major Thomas Biddle, 1812

Special exhibit: Madonna (after Battoni)

1844 Zerlina; The Chip Girl; Portrait of the Rev. T. H. Stockton; Young Harry; Portrait of a Lady; Lady Reading; “Cinderella”; Portrait of a Lady

Special exhibit: Portrait of a Lady with a Guitar; Portraits of a Brother and Sister; Whole Length of a Girl and Dog; Portrait of a Lady; Attala (after Girodet)

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)

Poe certainly would have noticed Nicolas Poussin’s 1664 painting The Deluge (fig. 5) at the 1840 exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its powerful depiction of nature and man’s vulnerability. During 1840 Poe was writing short pieces of an unfinished novel, The Journal of Julius Rodman, which included many framed images of rugged landscapes. Only four years earlier, Poe had reviewed Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians in 1835 in the May 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger; in “Letter 5,” Trollope deplores the Louvre’s “covering up” of Poussin’s paintings to give precedence to modern works. She specifically bemoans not seeing The Deluge, noting that its “eclipse” was troubling to her and her children. To support her claim that this painting was too important to have been left out of the exhibit, she quotes her brother Henry Milton’s response to The Deluge in his Letters on the Fine Arts, Written from Paris, in the Year 1815: “Colouring was unquestionably Poussin’s least excellence; yet in this collection there is one of his pictures—the Deluge—in which the effect produced by the mere colouring is most singular and powerful. The air is burdened and heavy with water; the earth, where it is not as yet overwhelmed seems torn to pieces by its violence: the very light of heaven is absorbed and lost.”⁸

In addition to its masterful use of color, this painting, created near the end of Poussin’s career, departs dramatically from his usual classical style, according to Richard Verdi. This striking deviation would have been a draw for any art lover but especially for Poe, who was attracted at this time not only to the beautiful but also to the sublime. As Verdi argues, The Deluge was “an early masterpiece of the horrific sublime . . . its figures being few and entirely subordinated to an awesome vision of the elemental fury of nature.”⁹ That “fury of nature” attracts the viewer, and the eye is first drawn to the lightning that breaks through the menacing, dark sky in the middle to left part of the painting. The drama of this white break in the blackened sky leads the eye to the mysterious, cloud-crossed full moon on the far left. The entire upper half of the painting is singularly devoid of man’s influence; it is only as the eye moves from the moon downward that a man is seen bathed in light and praying to heaven as his boat sinks into the raging water near a rocky precipice. Because of the way the light hits the waterfall behind the praying man, the eye sweeps upward to the upper-right corner of the painting, again to a scene of harsh, rocky terrain with swaying trees uprooted by the storm, and a barren, dark landscape. Only after that initial sweep does the eye move to the bottom of the painting, where humans are seen struggling, unsuccessfully, against the fury of the floodwaters. Quite to the left of the humans struggling to survive the flood, a huge snake, disproportionately large in comparison to the overall landscape, is seen moving up the rocky cliff.

Verdi recounts Horace Walpole’s response to The Deluge more than twenty years after he saw the painting on exhibit in Luxembourg in 1750 as part of Poussin’s four-painting series The Four Seasons: “Walpole observed that, of all the works then on view at the Luxembourg, this one was ‘worth going to see alone.’ ‘The three other seasons are good for nothing,’ he insisted, ‘but the Deluge is the first picture in the world of its kind.’” This striking evaluation of The Deluge did not lose its merit over time, and certainly Poe recognized the painting’s sublime quality when he saw it in 1840. As Verdi suggests, “The Deluge has appealed to an unusually diverse and distinguished series of critics and . . . sustained an almost bewildering variety of interpretations. . . . The critical history of this picture can be seen to have paved the way for the modern view of Poussin as an intensely emotional—and even passionate—painter, rather than a learned and philosophical one.”¹⁰

In the same year that Poussin’s painting was on exhibit, Poe was publishing chapters from his unfinished novel The Journal of Julius Rodman in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. As Burton Pollin so succinctly states in his introduction to his edited edition of Julius Rodman, “There is no full study of the truncated novel in the exact context of Poe’s life and writings in Philadelphia at the time.”¹¹ One such context would be Poe’s exposure to the art on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Even if Poe wrote this serial novel to make money, he nonetheless included passages of landscape description that appear as distinct paintings, suggesting that the landscape paintings he saw were becoming a more important influence on his work than they had been previously. Kent Ljungquist makes note of this textual conceit in his overview of Poe’s picturesque aesthetics: “Poe’s pictorialism aims . . . to produce the effect of a painting, a piquant combination of details that can be seen as within a frame.”¹² Take, for example, the following passage from the third chapter of Julius Rodman:

The banks sloped down very gradually into the water, and were carpeted with a short soft grass of a brilliant green hue, which was visible under the surface of the stream for some distance from the shore; especially on the north side, where the clear creek fell into the river. All round the island, which was probably about twenty acres in extent, was a complete fringe of cotton-wood; the trunks loaded with grape vines in full fruit, and so closely-interlocking with each other, that we could scarcely get a glimpse of the river between the leaves. Within this circle the grass was somewhat higher, and of a coarser texture, with a pale yellow or white streak down the middle of each blade. . . . Interspersed among it in every direction, were myriads of the most brilliant flowers, in full bloom, and most of them of fine odor—blue, pure white, bright yellow, purple, crimson, gaudy scarlet, and some with streaked leaves like tulips. Little knots of cherry trees and plum bushes grew in various directions about, and there were many narrow winding paths which circled the island, and which had been made by elk or antelopes. Nearly in the centre, was a spring of sweet and clear water, which bubbled up from among a cluster of steep rocks, covered from head to foot with moss and flowering vines. The whole bore a wonderful resemblance to an artificial flower garden, but was infinitely more beautiful.¹³

Similar passages are inserted throughout the six installments of Julius Rodman. In the sixth chapter, to cite another instance, Poe describes a “range of high, snow-capped mountains. . . . Two rivers presented the most enchanting appearance as they wound away their long snake-like lengths in the distance, growing thinner and thinner until they looked like faint threads of silver as they vanished in the shadowy mists of the sky.”¹⁴ Such passages demonstrate Poe’s ability to write with “an artistical eye,” a skill that the narrator of “The Landscape Garden” admires in painters. According to this narrator, nature cannot arrange a landscape composition to the best visual advantage: “In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess. . . . The arrangement of the parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained, from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence, in what is technically termed the composition of a natural landscape” (Tales, 1:707).

Salvator Rosa (1615–1673)

Salvator Rosa’s painting Landscape with Figures (fig. 6) was on exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1843. In the painting, the distant light just left of center first attracts the eye, intimating a promised relief to the figures traveling through the rough mountainous terrain. Much in the way that the narrator of “Landor’s Cottage” traverses a “precipitous ledge of granite” to find vegetation “less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character” (Tales, 2:1331–32), so, too, do the travelers in Rosa’s painting approach treacherous terrain at the beginning of their trek through the mountains. Although the figures in the foreground immediately attract the eye, the movement of their party across the river to the mountain pass is quickly superseded by the grandeur of the mountain peaks and the brightly lit sky in the distance. As in most of Rosa’s paintings, the landscape dominates; man is diminished.

Rosa was best known for his rugged, rocky, wild, mountainous landscapes. Writing in 1846, T. C. Pickering observed that “Salvator Rosa’s great excellence lay in landscape. He delighted in representing scenes of desolation, solitude and danger, lonely defiles and deep forests, trees scathed by lightning and clouds lowering with thunder.”¹⁵ When Poe was assistant editor at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, he read (and most likely edited) “A Critical Notice of the Picture Galleries of the North of Europe” by “A Recent Visitor”; the visitor’s review of the work exhibited in a gallery in Copenhagen’s royal palace appears two pages after an installment of Poe’s Julius Rodman. The unnamed critic had been attracted to a very large painting by Rosa entitled Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites, which notably differs from “the gloomy forests and banditti, or the solitary caverns and rocky passes” that characterize much of Rosa’s work.¹⁶

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Lives of the Most Eminent Modern Painters (1754), admires Rosa’s ability to depict “savage and uncultivated nature. . . . What is most to be admired in him, is the perfect correspondence which he observed between the subjects he chose, and his manner of treating them. Everything is of a piece: his Rocks, Trees, Sky, even to his handling, have the same rude and wild character which animated his figures.”¹⁷ Years later, an 1801 reprint of William Mason’s Essay on the Different Natural Situations of Gardens (1774) included another favorable estimation of Rosa: “The author considers Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa the two greatest landscape painters; Salvator for ‘terrible and noble natural situations,’ with blasted trees and scarce sign of life, and Poussin for views of temples, palaces on hillsides, and rich verdure.”¹⁸

The National Academy of Design’s 1844 Exhibit

Although Poe arrived in New York City just before the nineteenth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 25, 1844, he most likely did not attend the opening reception since admission was “on invitation by the Council ONLY.”¹⁹ Nonetheless, he certainly would have had the opportunity to see the works exhibited that year before the show closed on July 6. The exhibit featured 387 works, including paintings by many well-known artists: Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, William Page, and Thomas Sully, each with one painting on exhibit; Peter Frederick Rothermel, with two; Christopher Cranch, Henry Inman, and Joshua Shaw, each with three; Charles Loring Elliott, with four; Jasper Francis Cropsey, Henry Peters Gray, and William Sidney Mount, each with five; George Whiting Flagg, with six; Charles Weir, with seven; and John Gadsby Chapman and Asher Durand, each with nine. James Hamilton Shegogue and Francis Edmonds were on the Committee of Arrangements that year, and as a result they exhibited a large number of their own paintings.

Based on the information in the National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826–1860, the following popular artists’ paintings were exhibited in the 1844 annual show:

John Gadsby Chapman: Peasant Girl of Albano; Hebrew Women Borrowing the Jewels of the Egyptians; Portrait of a Boy in Indian Costume; “On the Fence,” Town or Country?; A Lazy Fisherman; The Brush-Wood Gatherer, a Sketch; Sketch from Nature; two portraits

Thomas Cole: Landscape

Christopher Cranch: Landscape; The Reapers; Landscape

Jasper Francis Cropsey: A Shower Coming Up, at Little Falls on the Passaic River; View in Orange County, with Greenwood Lake in the Distance; Evening, a Composition; View of Greenwood Lake; Falls of the Greenwood

Thomas Doughty: Landscape; View from Greenwood Cemetery, Looking over the Bay of New-York

Asher Brown Durand: The Solitary Oak; Full-Length of a Boy; Landscape, Composition; Study from Nature; Emigrant Family; Landscape, Wood Scene; Italian Cottage; two portraits

Francis William Edmonds: The Beggar’s Petition; The Image Pedler; Sam Weller; Vesuvius, from Sorrento; Aqueducts on the Campagna of Rome; Florence from the Arno

Charles Loring Elliott: five portraits

George Whiting Flagg: Half-Length of a Lady; Bianca Visconti (owned by N. P. Willis); Portrait of J[ames] G. Percival; Thomson’s Lavinia; Girl’s Frolic (owned by N. P. Willis); The Widow

Henry Peters Gray: Portrait of His Wife; Magdalen; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of Himself; Portrait of a Lady

Henry Inman: Portrait of the Late Bishop Moore, of Virginia; The Ladye with a Mask; Landscape

William Sidney Mount: Portrait of Rev. S[amuel] Seabury, D.D.; Girl Asleep; Portrait of Benj[amin] Strong, Esq.; Boys Hustling Coppers; Farmers Nooning (engraved by Alfred Jones for the Apollo Association [sic] from the original picture by Mount)

Peter Frederick Rothermel: De Soto Discovering the Mississippi; The Novice

John Sartain: engraving in mezzotint, from an original picture by Thomas Lawrence

Joshua Shaw: View in Wales, Near Abagavany; Scene on the Coast of Cornwall; Italian Landscape

James Hamilton Shegogue: Senora de Goni; The Gift from Brazil; Eugene, Alfred, and Marion; Fire Island, a Sketch; two portraits

Thomas Sully: The Sisters

Charles Weir: Compositor Setting Type; Boy Feeding Chickens; Fish, a Study from Nature; Fruit; three portraits

Francis William Edmonds (1806–1863)

As one of the organizers of the 1844 exhibit, Francis William Edmonds chose six of his own paintings to be hung. Edmonds was by profession a banker, as well as “an artist of considerable talent . . . [and] a man of great personal charm, who played an important part in the cultural life of New York City.”²⁰ His popularity in the arts community is evidenced by his participation in its most important venues. Samuel Morse, the first president of the National Academy of Design, encouraged Edmonds in his artistic pursuits, and his reputation at the Academy grew, as reflected by his quick move through its ranks from student to associate in 1837 and to academician by 1840.²¹ Additionally, Edmonds became treasurer of the Apollo Society (later renamed the American Art-Union) in 1839 and was appointed vice president of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts when it was founded in 1844. In 1844, as well, Edmonds’s painting The New Scholar was selected as the engraving to be distributed by the American Art-Union to its members.²² As Jane Adams explains in her study of nineteenth-century American art unions, “The benefits from purchasing a five-dollar annual subscription were an engraving, a chance in the yearly lottery distribution for a painting or other original art work, free admission to the gallery and a subscription to the Bulletin, which was a monthly (published from April to December) compendium of art news, reviews, instruction and engravings.”²³ The New Scholar also appeared in the National Academy of Design’s 1845 annual show.

Edmonds was a member of the Sketch Club, founded in 1829 as a gathering place for painters, patrons, and writers. Its members included Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, William Cullen Bryant, John Inman, Jonathan Sturges, and Washington Irving; guests invited to the club included James Fenimore Cooper, James Kirke Paulding, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edmonds remained a member of the organization when, in 1844, the Sketch Club became the Artists’ Sketch Club, with only painters and sculptors as its members. The first meeting of the new club took place at Edmonds’s home at 216 Thompson Street, where he lived from 1844 to 1845. His residence was near the corner of Thompson and Amity Street and was thus quite close to his good friend Asher Durand, who lived at 91 Amity, two buildings away from Poe’s residence at 85 Amity. We have no documentation that Poe ever met Edmonds or Durand in their neighborhood or at a social gathering, but since all three were members of the cultural community, it is probable that they knew each other; if not, they certainly would have known of each other.²⁴ Since Edmonds was friends with William Page, who, in turn, was friends with Charles Briggs, who published a series of essays by Page in the Broadway Journal, Poe might well have made Edmonds’s acquaintance through Briggs. However, since Poe did not share Edmonds’s aesthetic or political propensities, neither would have desired the other’s friendship.

Edmonds often used literary subjects in his art, but his overall concern was to paint homely scenes with an egalitarian bent in the Dutch tradition, such as The New Scholar. He was a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson and, later, Martin Van Buren, and his patrons were merchants, bankers, and railroad executives with primarily Democratic sympathies. Politics assumed a prominent role in genre painting during the antebellum decades and is significant to understanding Edmonds’s art.²⁵ Despite the differences between Poe’s and Edmonds’s political leanings, the cross-references to each other’s subject matter suggest that the two men knew of each other’s work. This is especially true for Edmonds’s painting Facing the Enemy, which Poe certainly would have noticed in the National Academy of Design’s annual show in 1845 (fig. 7).

Charles Briggs reviewed Facing the Enemy in the May 10, 1845, number of the Broadway Journal as part of his article on the National Academy of Design exhibit. Briggs praises Edmonds’s painting and his storytelling, “which is a point that Mr. Edmonds rarely or never fails in.” Briggs describes the “old toper” pictured in Facing the Enemy as “one of those hard drinkers with carbuncled noses and crispy hair, who used to be common enough twenty years ago but are now growing very rare.” Speaking with all the messianic fervor of a Temperance Movement adherent, Briggs voices his belief that there will come a time in the future when “drinking shall have gone entirely out of fashion; the world will scarcely believe that it was indulged in to the excess that books and songs and pictures will tell of” (BJ, 1:306). That Poe read Briggs’s comments on this painting is unquestionable; that he agreed with Briggs’s ardent prediction is highly unlikely.

Poe’s “The Black Cat,” published in the August 1843 number of the United States Saturday Post, can easily be read as a parody of Temperance Movement stories, as T. J. Matheson so convincingly argues. Matheson points to Poe’s acquaintance with Timothy Shay Arthur, whom Poe knew in Baltimore in 1833 when both were members of the literary society Seven Stars. Poe was undoubtedly familiar with Arthur’s temperance tract Six Nights with the Washingtonians, published serially by Godey’s Lady’s Book, since Poe wrote to Joseph Snodgrass in 1841 about Arthur’s stories.²⁶ The unrealistic expectations of the Temperance Movement—the disappearance of all drinking, as Briggs’s review suggests and movement enthusiasts predicted—and the dire stories of drunken debauchery that the movement circulated to scare people away from drinking are subverted in Poe’s own story of drunkenness and death.

That Poe knew Edmonds’s painting is undeniable. Facing the Enemy was not only shown in the 1845 National Academy of Design exhibit but also issued as an engraving by the American Art-Union in 1844. Thus, it would have been widely known. Edmonds’s painting of the “old toper” was picked up by publisher John Ridner as a good illustration for a broadside that appealed to temperance groups. Ridner wrote a tract around the theme of Edmonds’s painting to use in the broadside:

To give a better idea of this picture, it may be well to relate the incident which supplied the subject. Some years ago, when the cause of Temperance was first agitated, a certain mechanic who had long been addicted to habits of drunkenness, became a convert to the Temperance reform, conscientiously adhering to his “PLEDGE.” While sitting with his wife some time afterwards, she observed that he was unusually pensive and his mind apparently disturbed; suddenly he called out to her to “send for a decanter of Rum!” This—it may well be imagined, at once greatly alarmed her, as she had already felt the happy effects of the change from his former habits, and looked forward with still higher hopes to the brighter prospects which his new course of life had led her to anticipate, it is easy to fancy then, that the quickness of woman’s imagination immediately conjured up in her mind the gloomiest forebodings at such an unlooked for request, but, without daring to expostulate, she purchased the liquor and placed it in his hands, he planted it firmly before him, exclaiming “While it was behind me and out of sight I was always thinking of it and fearing it, but now that it is before me and I can face it, I fear it not and defy it.” The point represented by the artist is where “the enemy” has been placed before him and he is complacently facing and reflecting upon it.

It will be remembered that the original is by the Artist who painted the popular picture of “SPARKING,” published by the American Art-Union a few years since.

A copy of this print should be in the house of every Temperance man, and, to bring it within the means of all, the price has been reduced to

ONE DOLLAR.

John P. Ridner, 497 Broadway, Art-Union Building, New-York.²⁷

Interestingly, in both the painting and the sketch on which it was based (fig. 8), the precariously seated carpenter is situated between two emblems also found in Poe’s “The Black Cat”: alcohol and an ax. Moreover, in Poe’s story, the main character’s purported nemesis is the “Fiend Intemperance.” In Edmonds’s painting and sketch, the old man tilts back in his chair as he looks at the “enemy”—the flask purposefully set on a box on the windowsill. Neither Briggs’s interpretation that “the man bends back in his chair as if to get out of harm’s way” (BJ, 1:306) nor Ridner’s story of his determined rejection makes sense if the “old toper’s” countenance and position are considered. The posture of leaning back on two chair legs suggests a nervous or vulnerable person, not someone bent on getting out of harm’s way. In addition, the man’s brow is furrowed rather than determined. The painting’s setting—a place of work threatened by the desire for pleasure that the bottle of alcohol implies—includes a subtext of violence, as indicated by the ax.

Kevin Avery mentions the ax in describing how Edmonds carefully changed the drawing when he made the painting. Avery notes that in moving “from preliminary sketch to finished painting, Edmonds defined the setting and subject in the thorough and thoroughly compelling manner to which his viewers and patrons had become accustomed.”²⁸ In the painting, the ax leans against an upright log surrounded by broken chips (in Avery’s terms, a “chopping block”), indicating that the ax has been used recently. In the sketch, on the other hand, the ax rests against a longer log that lies on its side, uncut. It appears that Edmonds decided that the “history” of the setting in the painting should seem less relaxed than that depicted in the drawing. He purposefully changed the more relaxed environment by illustrating the strenuous—if not violent—act of having lodged an ax into a log numerous times. These conscious decisions made in the move from sketch to painting, in addition to the man’s precarious way of “facing the enemy,” all signal a complex and ironic response to the Temperance Movement—not the determined, purposeful rejection of alcohol that Ridner wanted to see.

Poe incorporates similarly conflicted images of the alcoholic in “The Black Cat” and “King Pest” (first published in 1835 and republished in the October 18, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal). Each story presents a highly dramatized picture of drunken debauchery and its consequences—one excessively violent, the other humorously bawdy. That Edmonds knew “The Black Cat” as the story of an alcoholic who kills his wife by axing her through the head—ostensibly because the “Fiend Intemperance” drove him to do so—cannot be ascertained definitively. However, since “The Black Cat” was published in the Philadelphia magazine United States Saturday Post in August 1843, the same year that Poe won first prize in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper’s contest for “The Gold Bug,” Poe’s story must have drawn some attention in the Sketch Club’s literary discussions. Surely, these two sensationalist stories would not have been overlooked by a society devoted to discussing contemporary literature and art. That Edmonds included an ax in the foreground of his painting is quite purposeful; its prominence could easily be considered a nod to Poe’s alcoholic protagonist in “The Black Cat.”

Two of Poe’s other stories, “The Sphinx” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—both written in 1845 at 85 Amity Street—could easily be read as gesturing toward Edmonds’s Facing the Enemy. It would have been difficult to overlook or forget this painting, since it appeared in two arts venues and was posted throughout the city in Ridner’s broadside in 1845. As in Facing the Enemy, the primary image in “The Sphinx” is a man sitting by a window. It is there that he sees what he mistakenly takes to be a monster or enemy; his deranged response would have led to his mental unraveling, if not for his friend’s rational explanation. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator uses the lure of amontillado to lead his enemy Fortunato, a former friend who had insulted him, to an untimely death. Due to his drunken lightheartedness, Fortunato is unable to see the obvious signs that indicate he is “facing the enemy.” In both stories, the act of seeing plays a prominent role: in the former, distortion causes trauma; in the latter, the unwillingness to see leads to death. Both stories undercut the message of Ridner’s broadside, which urges men to forgo alcohol by simply invoking the will to do so. In neither of Poe’s stories do men succeed in “facing the enemy” with mere willfulness: in “The Sphinx,” the narrator cannot will away his visual hallucination without the help of his friend’s rational explanation, and in “The Cask of Amontillado,” Fortunato cannot see how a trowel could foretell his death. Neither man can simply push himself away from danger; one would have gone mad without his friend’s helpful research, and the other dies.

William Sidney Mount (1807–1868)

Poe’s regard for William Sidney Mount’s work can only be surmised, since Poe does not mention Mount in any of his writings. At first, it might seem that Poe would not have been attracted to realistic images of everyday country life, and many of Mount’s paintings depict such country scenes, often with children. This is indeed the case in the painting The Trap Sprung, which appeared as an engraving in The Gift Book for 1844 alongside Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Yet to say that Poe would have considered Mount’s work too pedestrian or sentimental might not be as apt as this initial surmise suggests. Although Mount’s paintings look like homely renderings of country life, often, if not always, they include underlying, wry social critiques that, like Poe’s responses to the zealous advocates of the Temperance Movement, reveal a cynical approach to social change. For example, as Deborah Johnson points out, Mount’s 1830 painting School Boys Quarrelling “is also a sly commentary on the warring camps of the American art establishment of the 1830s, with the young combatants representing the conservative American Academy of Fine Arts, led by John Trumbull, and the upstart National Academy of Design, presided over by Samuel Morse. As a clue to his underlying subject, Mount placed a grammar book in the lower left corner inscribed with the words ‘Ocular Analysis.’”²⁹ Poe was likewise cynical about social change, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to James Russell Lowell on July 2, 1844: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity” (Letters, 2:449). This sentiment is again expressed in Poe’s 1846 sketch “The Domain of Arnheim” when the narrator reveals his friend Ellison’s perspective on social change: “In the possibility of any improvement, properly so called, being effected by man himself in the general condition of man, [Ellison] had (I am sorry to confess it) little faith” (Tales, 2:1271). Mount, too, must have held this belief, since his paintings promoted both Whig and Democratic causes, depending on the expediency of the commission. Expediency rather than ideological belief was the underpinning of his political and social scenarios.

Mount was known for using wordplay in his images. For example, as Johnson observes, in “Bargaining for a Horse (1835),” two characters cheerfully—and completely calculatingly—negotiate over a horse. The play in this image is around the word ‘horse trading,’ a derogatory term that had been adopted by political opponents to describe the corrupt deal-making of Democrats.”³⁰ Wordplay thus gives Mount’s paintings what Poe called undercurrents of meaning. Bird-Egging (1844), another example, initially seems to be a glancing look at a spring day in the country; three children walk along a sunlit, fence-lined pathway, the oldest holding a bird’s nest. The narrative turns on the word “egging,” which describes what the girl is doing to her older brother—that is, “egging him on”—as well as the actual act of stealing eggs from a bird’s nest. The girl is either pleading with her older brother to allow her to carry the nest of eggs or begging him to give it back to the younger brother, who had “egged” it but lost it to the older, bigger boy. The younger boy hides his face, crying because he lost the nest or perhaps because he is ashamed of his older brother’s “egging” and, unlike his sister, isn’t swayed by the lure of the treasure. This last interpretation would be ironic, of course, since the younger boy is wearing a large plume in his hat, suggesting that he was not altogether innocent of a similar pillage in the past. In either case, the narrative sequence is hardly sentimental.

The children’s disregard for nature’s cycle contrasts sharply with their innocent, gentle physiognomies. The resulting tension pushes the painting beyond a simple pastoral scene; it becomes a comment on man’s relationship to nature and his apparent obliviousness to the destruction that his whims can cause. The viewer is initially drawn into the scene by its homely and pastoral nature, the quiet lighting, and the mannered depiction of the three children walking beneath the trees; these elements signal a safe, domestic space not far from home. However, within this pleasant, comforting space, the viewer can see a forlorn bird sitting on a dead branch in the otherwise verdant, ancient tree whose trunk fills more than a third of the background.

Mount’s The Trap Sprung (fig. 9) also pictures children drawn in the same mannered way, but the narrative is hardly one of youthful innocence. Two boys, trudging uphill through a late autumn snowfall, eagerly approach a rabbit trap, anticipating the kill and the reward. Holding a dead rabbit in his hand, one boy, dressed warmly in an overcoat, scarf, cap, thick pants, and boots, encourages the other, dressed in a torn, lightweight jacket, to get the trapped rabbit. With no means of killing it except their bare hands, the boys’ smiles indicate the anticipated pleasure of wringing the rabbit’s neck. The cloud-filled sky and vast vista of the mountains in the background, along with the snow-covered hillside and the red leaves still lingering on the branches in the foreground, signal both the life that is and the cold death soon to follow.

Mount’s paintings were clearly more than depictions of pleasant pastoral life. As Johnson argues, “Mount [often] employed popular puns that themselves sprang from a nervousness in the culture about the discrepancies between what is seen and what is hidden.”³¹ Other critics discuss the political implications of his farmyard imagery. Differing from the landscape painters of what would become known as the Hudson River school, Mount preferred to paint the “everyday” in all its complex contradictions rather than simply portraying the beauty of nature.

The National Academy of Design’s 1845 Exhibit

The twentieth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 17, 1845, featuring 369 works by 145 artists. These included 152 portraits, 30 miniatures, 97 landscapes, 15 history paintings, 12 watercolors, and 2 sculptures.³² The following works by prominent artists of the time were exhibited in the 1845 show:

Frederick Catherwood: fifteen works, mostly scenes from Mexico and designs for a fountain in Gramercy Park, Gothic buildings, and the pedestal for a statue of Washington in New York City

John Gadsby Chapman: Portrait of a Boy; “Rachel Envied Her Sister”

Frederic Edwin Church: Twilight Among the Mountains; Hudson Scenery

Thomas Cole: Elijah at the Entrance of the Cave; The Mill, Sunset; View Across Frenchman’s Bay, from Mount Desert Island, Maine, After a Squall; A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning

Christopher Cranch: Landscape, Sunset; Landscape, Study from Nature; View on the Hudson, Near Cold Spring; Cloudy Twilight; View from the Palisades Opposite Hastings

Jasper Francis Cropsey: The Forest on Fire; Twilight, View in Sullivan County; View on Esopus Creek; Landscape, a Study from Nature

Thomas Doughty: Land Storm

Asher Brown Durand: Landscape, Composition, “An Old Man’s Reminiscences”; Close of a Sultry Day; Landscape, Composition; The Bride

Francis William Edmonds: “Facing the Enemy”; The New Scholar; Sparking (engraving by Alfred Jones from a picture by Edmonds)

Charles Loring Elliott: Portrait of an Artist; Capt. Ericsson; Frederick R. Spencer, N. A.; Study from Life; Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady; Horace Kneeland, Sculptor; Portrait of a Child

Henry Peters Gray: Cupid Begging for His Arrows; three portraits

Henry Inman: Rydal Water; Jacob Barker, Esq.

William Sidney Mount: Dance of the Haymakers; G[eorge] W[ashington] Strong, Esq.; Bird-Egging; Pencil Sketches of Children

Samuel Stillman Osgood: Girlhood; Portrait of a Lady

Peter Frederick Rothermel: Surrender of Guatemozin

Joshua Shaw: Landscape

James Hamilton Shegogue: Evening—Landscape Composition; Portrait of a Gentleman; Cabinet Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Gentleman; Sadi Edrehi; The Country Pedlar; Portrait of a Lady

Charles Weir: Portrait of a Gentleman; The Young Connoisseur; Blind Old Man Listening to His Nephew Reading; Fruit

Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886)

Unlike William Sidney Mount, Asher Brown Durand was not interested in social critique but was influenced, rather, by Thomas Cole’s spiritual landscapes. Durand was a good friend of Cole, who was held in high regard as a landscape painter by the mid-1840s and was considered the leader of the Hudson River school of painting. Unlike Cole, however, Durand had to depend on portraiture to earn his living in Manhattan. Nonetheless, Cole encouraged Durand “to come to live in the country” because Cole believed that Durand’s work would benefit. “The desire to produce excellence feeds the flame of our enthusiasm,” Cole wrote to Durand, “and I believe the product is worthier than that which is wrought out to the approbation of the many around us. In the country we have necessarily to defer the reward of the approbation of our fellows, and have time to examine critically our own works.”³³ However tempting, Cole’s letter did not persuade Durand to move from the city, since he believed that proximity to his clients was essential; therefore, he remained in Manhattan. Yet, after a trip abroad in 1840, where he was joined by his friend and fellow artist Francis Edmonds, Durand returned home with a renewed sense of his own abilities and a strong desire to give up portraiture and concentrate on landscape painting. One of Durand’s paintings in the 1845 National Academy of Design exhibit, An Old Man’s Reminiscences (fig. 10), was inspired, according to his son, by “the sentiment of Goldsmith’s poetry” and marks the transition from Durand’s dependence on portraiture to his embrace of landscape painting.³⁴

The painting depicts an old man in the left foreground observing the idyllic country scene before him and, as the title suggests, “reminiscing” about a serene life full of love (represented by the intimate couple under the trees next to the old man), peaceful pastimes (men playing baseball across the stream), fruitful employment (the man guiding his cart overfilled with the harvest of hay), domestic tranquility (the cows grazing in the pasture), and natural beauty (the wispy clouds in the blue sky and the general sweep of the composition toward a distant light). Durand depicts the various stages of the old man’s life in a way that suggests it has been full, satisfying, and peaceful. Durand’s painting evokes the peaceful domesticity found in “Landor’s Cottage,” a sketch Poe wrote just before his untimely death. It is as if we are looking at Landor many years after the narrator finds him in his home, which is simply but tastefully decorated and full of repose, two of Poe’s most admired aesthetic principles.

The exhibition of An Old Man’s Reminiscences at the National Academy of Design’s annual show was a turning point for Durand’s acceptance as a landscape painter, and from then on he depended less and less on portraiture. Upon Thomas Cole’s unexpected death in 1848, Durand assumed his role as leader of the Hudson River school of painting.

Thomas Cole (1801–1848)

Sarah Burns argues in Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America that Poe’s and Cole’s work shared a similar concern for politics: “For Cole and Poe alike, the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline.”³⁵ Burns maintains this argument throughout her book, aligning Poe’s tales of gothic horror and fear with Cole’s paintings: “Cole’s scenes of ruined castles and towers find a literary analogue in the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, obsessed like Cole with contempt for and dread of the multitude that the new democratic order had spawned, and bedeviled like Cole by the conflicting demands of art and an increasingly commercial market.” However convenient that comparison may be for some of Poe’s works, Burns totally ignores Poe’s other aesthetic regarding the importance of beauty, which he expressed numerous times throughout his life in essays like “The Philosophy of Composition” and in sketches like “The Domain of Arnheim.” Poe’s work is not simply about gothic horror and fear. Burns’s claim that “Cole’s paintings were influenced by the gothic effects of Salvator Rosa . . . whose landscapes were visual textbooks of terror for romantic painters” does seem to connect some of Poe’s work to Cole, and Poe does refer to Rosa in “Landor’s Cottage.”³⁶ However, Burns ignores how Poe uses Rosa in this sketch.

The scene in question begins with the “Salvatorish” imagery that Burns observes, though she ignores the way that that landscape moves from the sublime toward the beautiful as the narrator approaches Landor’s cottage. Poe uses the reference to Rosa to create a contrast between the aesthetic the narrator approaches and the one he leaves behind. He comes down from the ragged peaks to find solace in the landscape surrounding Landor’s cottage. The narrator shares the following description in remembering his travels through the mountains to the valley that houses the cottage:

To the north—on the craggy precipice—a few paces from the verge—upsprang the magnificent trunks of numerous hickories, black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with occasional oak; and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the walnuts especially, spread far over the edge of the cliff. Proceeding southwardly, the explorer saw, at first, the same class of trees, but less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character; then he saw the gentler elm, succeeded by the sassafras and locust—these again by the softer linden, red-bud, catalpa, and maple—these yet again by still more graceful and more modest varieties. (Tales, 2:1332)

In this passage, the narrator’s vision shifts from the dramatic precipices or “Salvatorish” imagery to a more pastoral, cultivated, and designed landscape that evidences man’s influence. This human influence moves the landscape away from the dreadful, sublime terror that Burns associates with both Cole and Poe and toward a beauty resulting from the artistic transformation of landscape gardening and peaceful domesticity. In an effort to link Poe to the “dark side” of American experience, Burns ignores this more domestic aspect of his sensibility—a sensibility also expressed in “The Domain of Arnheim” (a pendant to “Landor’s Cottage”) and seen in the landscape paintings composed by Asher Durand and Frederic Church during the mid-1840s. This sensibility and its importance to Poe are revealed in a most personal way in his letter to Helen Whitman dated October 18, 1848:

I suffered my imagination to stray with you, and with the few who love us both, to the banks of some quiet river, in some lovely valley of our land. Here, not too far secluded from the world, we exercised a taste controlled by no conventionalities, but the sworn slave of a Natural Art, in the building for ourselves a cottage which no human being could ever pass without an ejaculation of wonder at its strange, weird, and incomprehensible yet most simple beauty. Oh, the sweet and gorgeous, but not often rare flowers in which we half buried it!—the grandeur of the little-distant magnolias and tulip-trees which stood guarding it—the luxurious velvet of its lawn—the lustre of the rivulet that ran by the very door—the tasteful yet quiet comfort of the interior—the music—the books—the unostentatious pictures—and, above all, the love—the love that threw an unfading glory over the whole! (Letters, 2:712)

Such is the sentiment that Poe longed for not only in his life but also in his work. The paintings he saw by Cole, Church, and Durand are portrayals of natural beauty or idealized portraits of human intercourse with nature. The latter description is especially true of Asher Durand’s An Old Man’s Reminiscences. Nothing in the painting is threatening or remiss, bringing to mind Poe’s sketch of Ellison’s life in “The Domain of Arnheim” and Landor’s life in “Landor’s Cottage.”

Poe’s fascination with landscape and landscape gardening is evident in his mature sketch “The Domain of Arnheim,” written in 1846. This sketch not only reflects a desire for peace but also articulates Poe’s visual aesthetics. Here the narrator asserts that “the art of landscape gardening exhibits those qualities of the poet” that Poe held in high esteem:³⁷

The landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flower and the trees, [Ellison] recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort—or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth—he perceived that he should be employing the best means—laboring to the greatest advantage—in the fulfillment, not only of his own destiny as a poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man. . . . Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma:—I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvass of Claude. (Tales, 2:1272)