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A edited by er. J. Jackson Lears Lively and accessible, this volume draws on cultural geography, museology, gender studies, and art history to explore nineteenth-century attitudes towards the American landscape in the broadest sense. The subjects range from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and Winslow Homer's illustrations of contemporary women, to dioramas of prehistoric life in the American Museum of Natural History. The "invention" of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination and even the films of John Ford are used to illustrate the Victorian era's obsessions with nature. These six essays were originally presented at a symposium organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

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AMERICAN VICTORIANS AND VIRGIN NATURE

I SABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM

:fenwqy (ourt vol. 29

AMERICAN VICTORIANS AND VIRGIN NATURE edited by <f. J. Jackson Lears essays by 'Rj,chard White, Sarah 'Burns, QJllfichele 'Bogart, Elizabeth Johns, Stephen Pyne, and 'Rj,chard Slotkin

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM BOSTON

'Distributed by c:Antique Collectors Club

eAmerican Victorians and Virgin 'J'.!!!:ture J'enway Court, vol. 29 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Copyright

Š 2002

by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

ISBN

0-914-660- 18-7

The essays in this publication were originally presented in r 999 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as

eAmerican Victorians and Virgin 'J'.!!!:ture, the Museum's eighth annual interdisciplinary symposium.

The symposium and publication are made possible by the generous support of The Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

Production coordinated by Museum Publishing Partners, Cambridge, Massachusetts Cynthia Purvis, editor Carl Zahn, designer

Cover: William Henry Holmes, Temples and Towers ofthe Virgin [Grand Canyon].

Frontispiece: Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirirts, r 849. Collection of the New York Public Library.

Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Contents Foreword cAnne Hawley PAGE V II

Notes on the Contributors PAGE V III

Introduction T. J. Jackson Lears PAGE I X

Transcendental Landscapes 'Rj,chard LP'hite PAGE I

Winslow Homer and the Natural Woman Sarah 'Burns PAGE 1 7

Lowbrow/Highbrow: Charles R. Knight, Art Work, and the Spectacle of Prehistoric Life r:!Jllficheie 'Bogart P AGE

39

Cities, Excursions into Nature, and Late-Century Landscapes elizabeth Johns PAGE

64

How the Canyon Became Grand Stephen Tyne PAGE

79

Visual Narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford 'Rj,chard S iotkin PAGE 91

Bibliography PAGE 113

Index PAGE I I j

Photograph credits PAGE I l

8

Foreword I sABELLA STEWART GARD ER went West only once. In 1881, accompanied by her husband and some friends, she set out from Chicago by train for a two-month tour of the western states. She carefully traced her route in orange crayon on a timetable map of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. En route to San Francisco, she stopped at Salt Lake City and Denver, and made excursions to the natural wonders of Yosemite and Monterey. The party returned by way of Santa Fe, crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico.

Isabella and John Gardner made their journey at the very moment when many of the now-standard aspects of Western tourism were being fixed in the American imagination. For example, she witnessed geysers and gazed at Yosemite's El Capitan, but did not visit the Grand Canyon since, as we learn from this volume, the site had not yet become a Destination. Indeed it had not yet acquired its name and is not marked in any way on Mrs. Gardner's timetable map.

By the time Fenway Court opened in 1903, the natural splendors of America had become familiar aspects of art and tourism. While most of her museum was devoted to Italian art, Mrs. Gardner acquired several significant pictorial representations of the American landscape at the end of her collecting career. In l 9 l 6, she bought John Singer Sargent's stunning watercolor Tent in the Rockies and the painting Yoho Falls. These landscapes inspired the exhibition Sargent: The Late Landscapes, shown at the Gardner Museum from May to September l 999. The symposium American Victorians and Virgin Nature, chaired by T. J. Jackson Lears, was held on 2 0 March 1999 to introduce the themes of the exhibition.

The Gardner Museum is very grateful to T. J. Jackson Lears for selecting such a compelling array of participants who have thoughtfully considered America's complex and varied response to the idea of virgin nature. The authors are to be applauded for their contributions. The Andrew W Mellon Foundation has provided generous support for this symposium and publication. For the production of this book, warm thanks are due Patrick McMahon, Alan Chong, Rich Lingner, Cynthia Purvis, and Carl Zahn.

AN E H AWLEY Director

V II

Notes on the Contributors T. ] . ]ACKSO

LEARS, Board of Governors Professor o f History at Rutgers University, is the author of Fables ofAbundance: A Cultural H istory ofAdvertising in America (I 994), No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981), and Something for Nothing: Luck in America ( 200 3).

STEPHE PYNE, professor, D epartment of Biology, at Arizona State University, is the author of H ow the Canyon Became Grand: A Short H istory ( 1998), Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, ofEurope and Europe's Encounter with the World (1998), World Fire: The Culture ofFire on Earth ( 199 5), The Ice: A journey to Antarctica ( 1986), Fire in America: A Cultural History ofWildland and Rural Fire (1982), and Grove Karl Gilbert (1980) .

RI CHARD WHITE, M argaret Bryn e Professor of Am erican History at Stan fo rd University, is rhe author of Organic Machine: The Remaking ofthe Columbia River (1995), Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, r650-1815 (1993), and Frontier in America (1994).

RICHARD SLOTKIN, O lin Professo r of En glish at Wesleyan U niversity, is author of a trilogy on the American m yth of the fro ntier: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology ofthe American Frontier, 1600-r860 (1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth ofthe Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985), Gunfighter Nation: The Myth ofthe Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (1992). He h as also w ritten several n ovels: The Crater ( r 9 So), The Return of Henry Starr ( r 988), and Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (2000).

SARAH BURNS, Ruth N. Halls Professor of History of Art at Indiana U niversity, is the author of Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America ( r 996), Pastoral Inventions; Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1989), The Art of Desire: Erotic Treasures of The Kinsey Institute ( r 997), an d Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (forthcoming).

MICHELE H. BOGART, Professor of Art History, State U niversity of New York, Stony Brook, and V ice President of the Arr Com mission of the City of New York, is the author of Artists, Advertising, and the Borders ofArt ( r 99 5), an d Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (I 989).

ELIZABETH ] OH S, professor emerita of the H istory of Art at th e U niversity of Pennsylvania, and Fellow, Center for Religion , Ethics and C ulture, College of th e Holy Cross, is the auth or of Winslow Homer and the Nature of Observation (2002), American Genre Painting: the Politics of Everyday Life (1991), and Thomas Eakins: The Heroism ofModern Life (1983).

VIII

Introduction T J Jackson Lears

of virgin nature seems ideally suited to provoke intellectual scorn.

There are good reasons for this dismissive attitude, but there are better ones for taking the metaphor seriously. And that is the purpose of the essays in this volume. The notion of virgin nature is not merely a historical curiosity, but an enduring component of the way we think about our encounter with the non-human world down to the present moment - a part of our intellectual life which, for all its difficulties and absurdities, preserves some political and moral worth.

The problems with characterizing nature as virgin begin with the assumption that nature is feminine . The tendency to feminize nature is ancient but surfaced with particular clarity in the discourse of New World discovery. In 1639, for example, Thomas Morton compared New England to "a faire virgin, longing to be sped, and meet her lover in a Nuptial! bed,'' and then launched into a list of the cornucopia of goods to be brought forth from her womb. Yet as Annette Kolodny and others have shown, virginal imagery always coexisted with maternal imagery. Both reflected profound ambivalence - justifying penetration and possession but also reflecting fears of engulfment and suffocation. 1 Over time, the meanings of virgin nature changed. During the early years of colonization, virginity typified a continent to be ravished, exploited, made to bear abundant fruit. By the Victorian era, virginity signified something fragile, delicate, and modest to be preserved, something residing in the mere vestiges of a vanishing "unspoiled" landscape.

Metaphors of virginity promoted a temporal pattern in masculine master-narratives of deflowering nature - mastery, regret, guile, and nostalgia for what was lost or defiled in the act of possession. At the same time, the whole enterprise was accompanied by emasculating fears of nature's awesome resistance to seduction. Sarah Burns's essay clarifies much of this muddle of male anxieties by examining Winslow Homer's images of women. Sexual but respectable, they both embody and contain the force of raw nature.

Homer's work was part of a larger Victorian agenda: the reassurance of panicky males through the naturalization of female subordination. No wonder feminized nature has been a target of feminist critique.

The criticism of gendered metaphors for nature fit in with the broader postmodern project of deconstructing the natural - dismantling apparently biological categories of race and sex by demonstrating their flimsy ontological status as mere cultural construeT HE METAPHOR

IX

tions. Ultimately this unmasking process extended to nature itself. Postmodern theorists had never taken too kindly to nature. Some questioned whether it even existed anymore.

As Frederick Jameson put it with blithe assurance: "Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is over and nature is gone for good." 2 Even environmental historians got into the act, as did William Cronon in his wellknown identification of "The Trouble with Wilderness." The trouble with wilderness, Cronon argued, is this: to imagine an American landscape devoid of human presence a virgin nature - is to imagine a place that never existed, to insult the memory of the Indian people who did live there, and to erase the evidence of human interaction with nature that marks even the remotest places. The popular ideal of wilderness, rooted in emotional need rather than empirical observation, threatens to reinstate the opposition between humans and nature - the very conflict wilderness advocates had set out to overcome. 3 There is much of value in this line of argument. Richard White extends it fruitfully in his essay in this volume. Discussing transcendental landscapes, he shows how John Muir's late Victorian version of virgin nature displaced an earlier set of images that had presented nature as sublime and pastoral but also unfinished, and hence open to human engagement through labor. What was lost through the emergence of Muir's definition of wilderness was a kind of utilitarian pastoral idiom, spoken neither by romantic seers nor by imperial conquerors but rather by unpretentious farmers - the virtuous tillers of the soil, who all but disappear from the twentieth-century discourse of virgin nature.

Without question, the critique of virgin nature has fostered fertile debate within the contemporary literature of environmentalism. And among historians it has fomented a fresh awareness that definitions of nature are always profoundly shaped by the social and cultural circumstances surrounding their formulation. All of the essays in this book demonstrate this fundamental historical insight: We never speak about nature, without at the same time speaking about ourselves.

Still there are problems with the tendency to treat nature as merely - or even mainly - a cultural construction. The intellectual problems are probably by now notorious.

In certain cultural studies circles, the deconstruction of nature has led to a cavalier dismissal of the claims of biology. This can provoke ridicule, as in the physicist Alan Sokal's successful spoof of antifoundationalist thought in the hip journal Social Text. 4 Or it can promote the popularity of sociobiological soothsayers like E. 0. Wilson, whose murky commitment to genetic determinism makes him a convenient straw man for postmodern polemics.

In short, the chief intellectual problem with the deconstruction of nature is its tendency to multiply the demented dualisms that plague contemporary public discourse: nature/nurture, positivism/relativism, heredity/environment, and the like. Why is it not possible to acknowledge that, just as nature is culturally constructed, so culture is naturally constructed?

x

A beautiful illustration of this perspective is Elizabeth Johns's discussion of urban excursions into the countryside during the late nineteenth century. She locates their origins in citydwellers' longings for direct physical experiences - longings that were rooted in the sensuous deprivations of industrial life. Here as elsewhere, a cultural ritual could be traced to the transformation of the immediate conditions of existence, and the ritual in turn promoted practices that transformed existence in new ways. The dualism of culture and nature is replaced by a dialectic.

Apart from their tendency to encourage intellectual oversimplification, postmodern deconstructions of nature are a profoundly provincial pastime. They have proved a tough sell west of the Hudson, east of the Quinnipiac, or outside the Humanities Building. When I visited the University of Colorado at Boulder a few years ago, I was fortunate enough to join the distinguished young cultural historian Philip Deloria for a hike in the foothills of the nearby mountains. Deloria received his doctorate in American Studies at Yale and had spent many seminars deconstructing nature. As we paused for breath and took in one of many astonishing vistas, he said, "You know, postmodernism is a pretty tough sell out here." On another occasion, I remember trying to explain the idea that nature is culturally constructed to my brother-in-law John Parker, who is an architect. He is an intelligent and well-read man who wanted badly to appreciate the implications of what I was saying. But in the end he was simply unable to see that this idea had anything to do with him or his profession - and simply baffled by the idea that anyone might consider it politically radical.

Outside the academy, people do not usually mistake epistemological radicalism for political radicalism. The key political question is not dualism or monism, biology or postmodernity, but rather how we integrate and evaluate humans' encounters with the non-human world. As Stephen Pyne suggests in his perceptive piece on the Grand Canyon, when it comes to apprehending nature, perspective is everything.

Pyne, Michele Bogart, and Richard Slotkin all deftly emphasize in their essays that perceptions of the natural world (virginal or otherwise) imply perspective in time as well as space. (Indeed the association of unspoiled wilderness with a primordial state makes the quest for virgin nature a Proustian search for lost time.) The main temporal perspective on nature in American cultural history is the perspective of progress - visions of glacial evolutionary progress through vast reaches of prehistory, swifter technological progress through recorded history. As Bogart and Slotkin show, the dominant framework is one of steady linear movement forward - westward the course of empire makes us way.

Ironically, it is precisely this triumphalist faith in progress that provokes its opposite. The metaphor of virgin nature acquires its power from the inexorable forward thrust of progress. The cultural pattern falls into place: defilement followed by regret, guilt, and nostalgia for what is lost. Virgin nature is a place in time - lost time - as well as a putative place in space. Hence its associations with irretrievable loss and elegiac sadness. And hence, also, its political significance.

XI

Connecting nostalgia with politics is a tricky business. Hard-nosed political types tend to view nostalgia as mere sentimental evasion. There is something to this, as a story concerning the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti suggests. Rossetti was showing a watercolor of an Annunciation to one of his patrons, a Yorkshire stockbroker. The scene was set in a romantic landscape: the angel appeared in the gray dawn to the Virgin as she wandered by a stream. "Nobutt, Mr. Rossetti," the broker said, "Couldn't you put a soonset floosh over the whole thing?" 5 Romantic landscapes could soothe souls of stockbrokers, surrounding nature in a pleasant haze of nostalgia.

Nostalgic evocations of virgin nature have often sanctified industrialization as "inevitable." Yet the sense that something precious is vanishing can provoke more than a "soonset floosh." The idea of virgin nature reinforces support for sustainable consumption patterns - for freezing through resource conservation the entropy created by heedless economic growth. More broadly, metaphors of virgin nature express persistent, irreducible yearnings. Those yearnings are traceable to the modern detachment from immediate sensuous experience. The dis-ease of creatures cut off from ancestral habitats breeds a powerful countercurrent of nostalgia. Theodor Adorno caught the significance of this sentiment in his Aesthetic Theory.

As long as the earth keeps being ravished by utilitarian pseudo-progress, it will turn out to be impossible to disabuse human intelligence of the notion that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the premodern world was better and more humane, its backwardness notwithstanding. Rationalization has yet to become rational ... has yet to generate a livable life. In this situation, the traces of an old immediacy [exert a powerful and legitimate appeal] .. .. There is no beauty without remembrance. 6 The more strip malls we build, the more farmers' fields we fill with 5000-squarefoot McMansions, the more likely we are to conceive what is left of the natural world as virginal - innocent, threatened, and in danger of defilement. This is the intellectual phenomenon caught by Hegel when he said: "The owl of Minerva flies at dusk." But the great rhythm and blues singer Otis Redding put the matter more directly when he sang: "You don't miss your water, till your well runs dry. "

XII

Thomas Morton, New English Canaan [1637] in Tracts and Other Papers Relating to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, comp. Peter Force (Washington, 1838), vol. 2, p. 10; Annette Kolodny, The Lay ofthe Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975). r.

2. Frederic Jameson, "Introduction" to Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991), p. ix.

3. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness" in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1996) pp.

68-5)0.

4. Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the boundaries toward a

transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," Social Text 46 (1996), pp. 217-52.

5. The anecdote cited in E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (New York,

1977), P路 58

6. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), pp. 95-96, cited in Kate Soper, What is Nature?

(London, 199 5), pp. 201- 2.

XIII

Transcendental Landscapes Richard White In the course of human lives, virginity is something people lose, not gain. But in the course of American history, nature has become increasingly virginal, and it is the late Victorians who first thought to fit her with a cultural and legal chastity belt to maintain her innocence. The Victorians, of course, did not invent the term "virgin nature,'' nor were they the first Americans to picture nature as virginal. The image is an old one, but in the most influential early nineteenth-century American depictions of the human relation to nature, virginity was not the metaphor of choice.

It was neither the concept that the early Victorians inherited from the Enlightenment, nor was it the one that dominated the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (fig. l) and Henry Thoreau (fig. 2).

For Emerson nature was American. It is astonishing, for instance, how little attention he pays to nature in his English Traits (1856). There is a short chapter entitled "Land" with commonplaces on climate, location, and the variety of landscapes, but the only real point of his discussion was that nature designed England to produce Englishmen. Emerson, however, does make a short aside, at once revealing and apologetic: "The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious." 1 In England the product of nature's design had dwarfed the designer, but in America the designer still overshadowed the yet unfinished country.

It was England that brought American nature into focus for Emerson, and there is a passage about American nature in English Traits that is well worth quoting at length: M

ETAPHORS MATTER.

There, I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to make much impression.

There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England. 2 "The merits of America were not presentable,'' he recorded in his journal. "The tristesse of the landscape, the quiet stealing in of nature like a religion, how could that be told?" 3 "That great sloven continent" is not an image that fits easily into the pastoral or the sublime, those two great cultural containers into which we, and the Victorians, fit

FIG.

r. Ralph Waldo Emerson, aged

FIG. 2.

50.

Henry David Thoreau, ca. 1879.

2

representations of nature.4 The England that Emerson rejected was not just industrial England but also the "over-cultivated" pastoral England. Nor was the American nature that he felt inadequate to describe to his English hosts sublime nature. It might be "too much by half for man," but whatever typifies sublime nature, it is not sleeping, murmuring, and hiding. And while disorder is no stranger to the sublime, "sloven" is a little too homely to fit. 5 Mother Nature, God knows, is conventional enough, but this is an oddly sleepy, distracted, virtually senile mother. It is nature as a sort of Victorian bag lady, not as a virgin. 6 The great sloven continent with its sleepy, murmuring mother is an odd image, but it is, I think, a revealing one. It conjures a nature that needs awakening, education, and finishing. "Sloven" is closer to the agricultural census category of unimproved land than to the pastoral and sublime.

The conception of the continent as unimproved or unfinished rather than as virginal is apparent in a classic piece of American Enlightenment writing on nature, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State a/Virginia (1787). The idea of nature being unfinished does not exclude the idea of nature as sublime or pastoral. The three ideas can exist side by side. A few pages before Jefferson has his famous sublime moment on the natural bridge, he talks about another sublime scene where the Potomac "rends" the mountains "asunder" and passes off to the sea. Nearly lost in this sublimity is "the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture." The distant finishing is "placid and delightful." It is "Frederic town and the fine country around that." The natural bridge is sublime. Frederic town and its fine country are pastoral, but Frederic town and the fine country around it are the result of human labor, which is classed as natural.

Previously unfinished, these lands have now been finished. Jefferson's delight, and the subject of much of his writing, is this finishing, the final tidying and polishing of nature into the pastoral by human labor. Labor in the land did not destroy nature; it was nature's way of finishing the landscape. 7 Emerson, that most eminent of the American Victorians, used Romantic language to express these Enlightenment sentiments. 8 He thought labor was a necessity of the spirit, the "means of joining man and matter."9 Finishing was not simply the creation of the economically productive. Unlike their fathers, Emerson said, Americans have come to realize that the world "is not a mere farm out of which we can raise corn to eat; nor a battlefield on which the strongest arm can rob his neighbors of their property; nor a market where men set up each their various talents for sale." ro The earth was a home specially prepared for human occupation. Humans had not been created sooner because the earth was not yet ready for them. The world has been "a progressive preparation for him; an effort (as physiologists say) to produce him; the meaner creatures, the primeval sauri, containing the elements of his structure and pointing at it on every side, whilst the world was, at the same time, preparing to be habitable by him.

He was not made sooner, because his house was not ready." Here was a finishing beyond even Jefferson and an idea of nature as a human home and of the human connection with other creatures. 11

Nature was thus in one sense destined for perfection, with perfection being defined as the best possible home for humans. The world was not a vale of tears, even if humans often made it so, and no object was without beauty.12- "[L]ove and good are inevitable, and in the course of things." 1 3 Emerson, not surprisingly for an ex-minister, created a profoundly Christian nature in which humans were the highest and dominant form. 1 4 All nature was prepared for humans, but part of the preparation was an encouragement of human action. Nature itself welcomed human mastery and has equipped humans for it. The very "symmetry of [human] parts is his equipment for the conquest of nature." 1 5 In Emerson, as in Jefferson, the final improvements were human: By the study of nature he [the human being] improves nature, and keeps the world in repair. For, if the human race should be totally destroyed, it would take no very long time for the sea and the sand and the rivers and the bogs to make most parts of the earth uninhabitable by men. r6 Labor in the agrarian or the pastoral visions of nature was the primary human connection to the natural world, and it was the source of both knowledge and the finished nature Emerson admired. Labor, Emerson said, "is the only road to knowledge."17 It is the only way to learn the substances and powers of nature, and in the learning Americans would better both the land and themselves. 18 With the people of the "nervous, rocky West ... intruding a new and continental element into the national mind ... we shall yet have an American genius." These Westerners were the people whose work would ensure that "the whole land is a garden" and that Americans will have "grown up in the bowers of a paradise." This improved land that they bounded and owned and occupied and transformed would have "a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come." 1 9 This sense oflabor, particularly farming, as forging the most intimate connection between the human and non-human world and providing a means for attaining either property, independence, and virtue (Jefferson), or a higher knowledge (Emerson) became one of the hallmarks of early nineteenth-century thinking about nature. 20 Even the American census came to recognize only two types of land: improved and unimproved.

Although there is a real sense in which Emerson made himself available as a philosopher for an emerging capitalism, Emersonian nature was, like Jeffersonian nature, supposed to produce more than wealth; just as part of the crop for Jefferson was republican virtue, for Emerson the landscape yielded enlightenment. Emersonian Transcendentalism was idealism, with each material fact was "a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact." 21 Mind was "the only reality." 22 For all of Emerson's consuming interest in nature, the ultimate value of the world for him came through correspondence: nature was "emblematic. Every natural fact became an emblem of some spiritual fact." 2 3 "Who," Emerson asks, "looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?" 2 4 4

It was because Emerson thought that the Spirit pervaded the world that the everyday world of nature, finished or unfinished, offered an avenue to the highest knowledge.

Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds.

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters, show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature ... and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order. 2 5 Emerson hoped that farmers immersed in nature would experience such transcendence through their very labor; they would grasp the analogies between natural laws and spiritual laws thus marrying mind and matter. 2 6 Work did become the lens through which most Victorians saw nature, but the result was not transcendence. A more sober Emerson complained privately in his journals that farmers had "renounced their homage and duty, and resolved to get what dirty compensation they could for their right of subscription to wild goodness and beauty, by an unmixed, undistracted attention to squalid economics. 2 7 But it was the cheery published Emerson and his farmers who were such inviting targets for Thoreau's satire of farming and agrarian virtue in Walden (r 854). Yet Thoreau, for all the vicious fun he has with his Concord neighbors, didn't really doubt the sanative influences of work in nature. 2 8 Husbandry was once, he wrote, a "sacred art," but it is now degraded. 2 9 Nor was he ready to dismiss other work in nature. In building his house, he was "more of a friend than a foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it." 3° And there remains a sense in Thoreau, as there is an Emerson, that certain people working in nature become inseparable from nature itself. Thoreau did not go so far as Emerson, who described Alex Therien, the woodcutter of Concord as "really a piece of the old nature, comparable to sun & moon, rainbow & Rood, tiger & lightning, because he is as all natural persons," but he shared Emerson's fascination .31 He could not tell if Therien was "as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child," but Thoreau held (at least as much as Thoreau could) his judgment.32 Thoreau could not go so far as Emerson because in part, he was more ambivalent about the virtues of being a natural person. Thoreau identified nature, both within and outside of himsel£ with a fecundity, a raw sexuality, and a profligacy of life that both fascinated and appalled him. When this nature was outside himself he could be sangurne.

Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be scarified and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely

squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! ... The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. 33 But when nature is not exterior, but interior, and when it is far from virginal, then Thoreau is appalled to the point of silliness. "Higher Laws" is one of the most revealing chapters of "Walden. It begins with Thoreau's famous declaration, now enthroned on innumerable Sierra Club calendars, that he loves the wild not less than the good, but it ends with a disgust with bodies, eating, and sex that it is rarely quoted in Sierra Club literature. "Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it." 34 "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome." 35 This remains a passage that all the scholarly attempts have failed to explain away. Thoreau's higher relation with nature was a transcendence of nature.

To read Thoreau, at least in "Higher Laws," is to come away with the sense that he is the virgin and that nature is wanton and threatening. Ir is a reaction that Thoreau could usually repress, for, as Lawrence Buell has argued, Thoreau remained a pastoralist to a greater degree than Emerson, but it was still rhere. 36 Although their writings provided material for others to do different cultural work, neither Emerson nor Thoreau constructed a virginal nature, nor was their usual use of nature synonymous with wild nature, let alone wilderness. The nature they wrote about most compelling was common and cultivated and decidedly unvirginal. Emerson had his sublime eyeball moment of transcendence, after all, walking across Concord Common.

And if we move from the thinking of these eminent Victorians to the actions of the mass of less eminent Victorians, the indifference to wild nature is, if anything, worse.

Americans were deep into the Victorian Age before they had gone very far in inventing the modern idea of wilderness. They worked in nature, but this work was yielding more wealth than virtue or enlightenment. Despite Emerson's brave claims, his countrymen seemed no better than their fathers, but this was a note that European visitors struck rather more often than Americans.

Both the relentlessness and heedlessness of American work amazed European travelers; their metaphors of an American relation with nature were ones of conquest and waste. De Tocqueville commented: Europeans think a lot about the wild, open spaces of America - but the Americans themselves hardly give them a thought. The American people see themselves marching through wilderness, drying up marshes, diverting rivers, peopling the wilds and subduing nature. 37

6

At the end of the century, James Bryce did not much differ.

All the passionate eagerness, all the strenuous effort of the Westerns is directed towards the material development of the country.... To have an immense production of exchangeable commodities, to force from nature the most she can be made to yield, and send it east and west by the cheapest routes to the dearest markets, making one's city a center of trade, and raising the price of its real estate - this is preached by Western newspapers as a kind of religion. It is not really, or at least it is not wholly, sordid. These people are intoxicated by the majestic scale of the nature in which their lot is cast, enormous mineral deposits, boundless prairies, forests which, even squandered - wickedly squandered - as they now are will supply timber to the United States for centuries; a soil which, with the rudest cultivation, yields the most abundant crops ... they gild their own struggles for fortune with the belief that they are the missionaries of civilization and the instruments of Providence in the greatest work the world has seen. 38

It was Bryce who told Americans: You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent splendid Nature, who first lifted up their axes upon these tall trees and line these waters with busy wharves .. .. Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize Nature, squander her splendid gifts? 3 9 To these hectoring foreigners, although they did not express it this way, Americans had never moved beyond the lowest Emersonian level of the appreciation of nature: the level of commodity.

John Muir (fig. 3) was not nearly as complicated a thinker about nature and society as Emerson or Thoreau, but he, as a late Victorian, did manage to do two remarkable things. First, he found in the writings of the Transcendentalists a replication of his own admiration for wild nature. Muir's reverence for Emerson and Thoreau was rivaled only by his reverence for wilderness, and after him many would read the Transcendentalists as he did. Second, he managed to inscribe upon the western landscape, literally and not merely figuratively, Emerson's ranked levels of knowing and appreciatmg nature.

Muir's nature approached the virginal, but it was a rather complicated virginity, for he coupled virginity with the older Emersonian and Jeffersonian celebration of labor.

Because this was the labor of the workshop and not the labor of birth, nature could become metaphorically virginal. Muir, particularly in his Mountains ofCalifornia (1894) emphasized wild lands as a workshop and nature - gendered as female - as the worker.

Nature no longer needed humans for the completion of her work.

7

FIG.

3路 John M u1r, . ca. r 902.

8

Muir was much more ambivalent about human work in nature than Emerson or Thoreau. In the Pacific Northwest, he saw homesteaders "gnawing like beavers, and scratching for a living among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding the trees as their greatest enemies - a sort oflarger pernicious weed immensely difficult to get rid of." He saw a spectacle of men "hacking, burning, blasting their way deeper into the wilderness." 4째 Muir saw loss where settlers saw only creation. Loss complicated the landscape.

Since Muir so often saw work not as improvement but as degradation, his landscape could not reveal the finishing displayed in the landscape of Jefferson and Emerson. His metaphors were those of destruction and defilement. Sheep were "hoofed locusts;" their shepherds were moneychangers in the temple.41 Lumbermen become purely destructive forces in the Sierras. Because of loggers, "waste and pure destruction are making rapid headway." 42 He wrote of the loggers of western Washington in a way that echoes Thoreau writing about farmers: They are also slow of speech as if partly out of breath, and when one tries to draw them out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh leafy, outreaching branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed with fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dried lumber. 43 Nor did Muir share Emerson's veneration of natural men, a category that Thoreau partially conflated with Indians. In the current iconography of the wild, Indian peoples are identified with the wilderness, but Muir considered them intruders, and to create a proper wilderness Muir needed to expel them. Muir naturalized Indians, but he did so to emphasize an ignoble rather than noble savagery. When he encountered Indians in the Sierras he compared them to bears. They were a "grim company": dirty, ugly, "some of them altogether hideous." "They seemed," he wrote, "to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass." 44 But Muir, the late Victorian, did not disavow work completely, and to our eyes he acknowledged it, justified it, even celebrated it in what we might consider odd places.

Muir was actually sympathetic to miners whom he thought of as a force comparable to nature itself. "The hills," he reported, "have been cut and scalped, and every gorge and gulch and valley torn to pieces and disemboweled expressing a fierce and desperate energy hard to understand. Still any kind of effort-making is better than inaction, and there is something sublime in seeing men working in dead earnest at anything, pursuing an object with glacier-like energy and persistence. " 45 Muir's disgust at loggers, shepherds, and Indians and his celebration of miners seems paradoxical, but his attitudes toward work were less paradoxical than segregated and compartmentalized. His various evaluations of work differed according to their place in the landscapes, and he justified them according to their correspondence to the work of nature, which he anthropomorphized and compared to human work.

9

Muir's valuations were not random; he was carefully classifying, secularizing, and sacralizing the landscape. Muir's valuations corresponded very closely to Emerson's answer to his own famous question: To what end is nature? Emerson gave four answers, with each ranked higher than the last: commodity, beauty, language, and discipline. 46 Muir, in turn, read a simplified version of Emersonian categories onto the actual landscape. The lower elevations were the realms of commodity and of labor. The higher elevations - the Sierras - were the realms of beauty, language and discipline. There "the spirit is but thinly and plainly clothed," unlike the more complicated and complete clothing the spirit wore below. 4 7 Muir began by, regretfully, marking off California's Central Valley for the pastoral.

In The Mountains of California he lovingly recalled his first view of the Central Valley, "little trampled or plowed as yet," as "one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae." 4 8 He lamented the "wanton destruction of the innocents." But Muir also resigned himself to the time "when the entire area of this noble valley will be tilled like a garden, when the fertilizing waters of the mountains, now flowing to the sea, will be distributed to every acre, giving rise to prosperous towns, wealth, art, etc. Then, I suppose, there will be few left, even among botanists, to deplore the vanished primeval flora." 4 9 The foothills Muir reserved for the restless individualism of the miners, an individualism that served industry and commerce. He made the work of the miners into a virtually natural force. He admired them despite the great damage they did. He could admire their work because he had spatialized and segregated it. This was work proper to the foothills.

The high Sierras became pure, restorative nature and here Muir wanted banned any arduous physical labor that altered wild nature. These wild lands became the haunt of, well, people like John Muir (see fig. 4). In his trip to the Pacific Northwest, he contrasted the logger with another figure.

Seen now and then at long intervals but usually invisible is the free roamer of the wilderness .... Lithe and sinewy he walks erect making his way with the skill of wild animals, all his senses active, watchful and alert, looking keenly at everything in sight, his imagination well-nourished in the wealth of the wilderness.

In these Washington wilds, living alone, all sorts of men may perchance be found, poets, philosophers, and even full-blown transcendentalists, though you may go far to find them. 5째 Muir wanted labor banned in the high mountain wilderness not because he treasured a static and timeless nature, but because it was in the high mountains that the labor of nature itself stood fully revealed. The work of the mountains, their ongoing creation, rightfully belonged only to nature. The higher Muir went, the holier the landscape became, not because he was literally near the heavens, but because he was in nature's

IO

FTG .

4. Snow-Bound on Mount Shasta. From: John Muir, The Mountains of California ( 1894).

I I

workshop, the source of creation. Nature's labor was one of the sources of Muir's fascination with glaciers.51 Muir thought glaciers were the primary artisans of nature's creation. They are "snow-flowers ... laboring harmoniously in united strength." 5 2 The high country was their newest creation, the youngest part of the world where the youngest lakes lie in "glacial wombs." It was the place Muir most treasured even though it was by definition impermanent - always in the midst of becoming something else. 53 For Muir the mountains were a world in flux, 54 constantly changing with nature's labor, and yet at any given point always in harmony, the combinations dictated in large part by earlier actions of the glaciers. 55 Muir thus created a temple dedicated to creation itself He would, of course, claim he found a temple, and purified it by driving away the unworthy by banishing human labor and human laborers from the site of nature's creation. He associated human labor in sacred nature with filth and dirt. It befouled both humans and nature. 56 And yet, having worked to expel work and workers, Muir himself recreated an odd and faintly ridiculous echo of the original Jeffersonian finishing in his mountain fastness. To read John Muir is to strike a vein of Victorian nature writing that persists in John Burroughs and finds its culmination in Walt Disney. If Muir's Nature is virginal, then her closest relative is Snow White. Muir's Sierras have everything but the seven dwarfs. The Sierras contained temples and workshops, destruction and creation.

Animals became human analogues, and Muir displaced human labor onto them. The Douglas squirrel, although the "wildest animal" Muir ever saw was also nature's "master forester." 57 He was "a little workman." 5 8 The bighorn sheep were "the bravest of all the Sierra mountaineers." 5 9 They were the opposite of the domesticated sheep Muir hated: bold instead of timid, clean instead of dirty. 6o They were "self-reliant" and noble.61 In the high Sierras animals took on human roles in finishing nature. They completed nature without the final human touch.

In one sense, Muir's spatial organization of the world was utterly conventional. The romantic sublime had long been situated in the mountains. Jefferson and Thoreau had recognized it there. What Muir did, however, was begin to turn these mountain wilds into permanent bounded areas and to view them not in the terms of a primordial, sloven nature but instead in terms of a new, industrious, happy and virginal nature.

Jefferson had assumed the Appalachians would never be settled. Muir knew better. The site of nature's work could, however, be preserved by becoming the site of human leisure, restoration and observation. Muir struggled to preserve the Sierras even as he reluctantly consigned the rest of California to human work. He knew better than to oppose all labor. He only unalterably opposed human labor that altered the mountains, the sacred landscape, but chat landscape was also, he emphasized, a work in progress, undergoing constant destruction and recreation by nature.62 To a considerable degree, Muir mapped the modern western landscape with its high country marked as virginal wilderness and its low country surrendered to human development. Such categories as opposite and distinct made far more sense to a late Victorian like Muir than to Emerson or Thoreau.

12

It is as easy today to be as ambivalent about Muir as Muir was about human labor.

In the name of protecting virginal nature, he was foreshadowing and accepting a detachment of humans from everyday nature. Real nature was available only to visit.

What Emerson and Jefferson hoped to accomplish with work, Muir would replace with contemplation. Muir himself worked in nature - as a sheepherder and then a geologist - but he would have leisure lead others into nature. In class terms, Muir would find his allies among some of the rich - the Harrimans - and more of the urban middle class, not among the farmers or workers of Jefferson's and Emerson's nation.

Muir, however, was not just working on a cultural canvas; he was reacting to very real changes in the natural world. He was appalled by the rapidity of change; the loss of existing landscapes not over generations, or lifetimes, but in the blink of an eye. He reacted to real loss. He unhappily accepted much of the loss, but strove to protect what he defined as essential. In national parks and in the high wilderness he gave us a spatial construct that we maintain yet. Muir drew lines that separated a virgin nature to be "preserved" from a nature already transformed into something else. He drew lines that separated work and leisure. Henceforth, real nature would be across the line or border.

Muir, the Victorian, helped give us that.

l. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Land" in English Traits in Emerson 1983 , p. 785 .

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits in The Complete Works ofRalph Waldo Emerson, with a biographical introduction and notes by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-4), vol. 5, p. 288 .

20. For Jefferson, see C harles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, 1988), pp.

219-20.

2.

3. Robert D . Richardson, Emerson: The M ind on Fire (Berkeley, 1995), p. 460.

21 . Emerson, "The Transcendentalist" in Emerson 1 983, P· 194· 22. Ibid., p. 195 .

23. Emerson, "Nature" in Emerson 1983, pp. 20, 24-2 5. For growth of Emerson's interest, see Robert D.

4 . Leo M arx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in A merica (New York, 1964).

Buell 199 5. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, Jrf25-I87;, revised edition (O xford, 1996).

Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, 1995), PP· 153-54.

5. Margaret Hope N icolson , M ountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The D evelop ment ofthe Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle, 1997), pp. 211-15.

69.

6. Sam Gill, M other Earth (Chicago, 1987), covers the

European and American origins of the earth as mother.

7. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State ofVirginia, edited by William Peden (New York, 1954), p. 19.

24. Emerson, "Nature" in Emerson 1983, p. 21.

2 5.

Emerson, "American Scholar" in Emerson l 98 3, p.

26. E merson, "Nature" in Emerson 1983, p. 26.

2 7. Ra! ph Waldo Emerson,journals ofRalph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward W Emerson and Waldo Emerson Ford (Boston, l 909), vol. 5, p. 50 [from journals V, W, and Y] .

28. Thoreau 1971, pp. 42, 51, 283 .

29. Ibid., p. 165 .

8. Emerson in his Notebooks could sound much like Jefferson when he wrote about farming. See O rrh 1990, p. 290: notebook WA, 1.

30. Ibid. , p. 42.

3 1. O rth l 990, p. 309: notebook WA, 1.

9. Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle ofVision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 19)2.), p. 160.

32. T horeau 1971, pp. 144- 50 .

lo. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Relation of M an to the Globe" in W hicher, Spiller 1959, vol. 1, pp. 28-29 .

34. Ibid., p. 220.

I I.

l

35 . Ibid., p. 221.

Ibid., pp. 29, 32, 34·

2. Em erson 1983, pp. 7, 8, 1 l, 14.

13. Em erson, "The Young American" in Emerson 1983, P· 2 17 · 14. Em erson, " ature" in Emerso n 1983, p. 31. l 5. Emerson, "The Relation of Man to the G lobe" in Whicher, Spiller 1959, vol. r , p. 41.

I

33. Ibid., p. 318.

37. Alexander de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by ]. P M ayer and Max Lerner (New York, 1966), p. 45 3; quoted in G unther Barth, Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American H istory (O xfo rd, 1990), p. 12 3. See also Leo Marx's rem arks on C revecoeur: Leo M arx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (O xford, 1964), p. l 15.

6. Ibid ., P· 44·

17. Emerson, "Trades and Professions" in Which er, Spiller l 9 59, vol. 2, p. 114.

38. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London, l 889), vol. 2, p . 684.

39. Ibid., p. 688.

18 . Ibid ., p. l 13.

19. Emerson, "The Young American" in Emerson 1983, PP· 2.16- 17.

40 . Muir 1888, vol. z., p. z.79. Cohen 1984, p. z.5 0.

Michael Cohen's book fi rst drew my attention ro these M ui r quo tes.

4r. Muir 1997, pp. 185, 387 .

42 . Muir 1985, p. 140.

43. Muir 1888, vol. 2, p. 281.

44. Muir 1997, p. 372.

45 . Muir 1997, p. 227 . See discussion in Cohen 1984, PP路 22 5-3o.

46 . Emerson, "Nature" in Emerson 1983, pp. 7, l 2-3 I. 47 . Quoted in Cohen 1984, p. 52.

48. Muir 1985, p. 2.

49. Muir 1997, p. 24 2.

50. Muir 1888, vol. 2, p. 28I. 5l . The best analysis of Muir and his chinking is in Cohen 1984; on glaciers see pp. 55-64.

52路 Muir 1997, pp. 11-12.

53. Ibid., pp. 14, 25, 75, 85 .

54. Ibid., p. 48.

5 5. Ibid., pp. 98, 10 2- 3, 139, 172, 200, 249 .

56. Cohen 1984, p. 186.

57 . Muir 1997, pp.

58. Ibid. , P路

l

l

59, r6r.

64.

59. Ibid., p. 225 .

60. Ibid. , p. 21 i.

Gr. Ibid., p. 220.

62 . Cohen 1984, pp. 65 - 67.

I

5

FIG. 5. Winslow Homer, Croquet Scene, 1 866. Oil on canvas.

Art Institute of Chicago.

Winslow Homer and the Natural Woman Sarah Burns T HE EARLIEST PAINTINGS of Winslow Homer, outgrowths of his travels as an artist-

reporter of the Civil War, focused almost exclusively on the tough, masculine world of the ordinary soldier. After the war, by contrast, young, contemporary women emerged as the painter's new focus, appearing in many of his illustrations and paintings from 1865 on. In his croquet series, the first of the new, modern-life subjects, Homer turned from the drab or colorful military uniforms of his army scenes to a new kind of uniform: fashionable dress. When he exhibited one of the croquet pictures (fig. 5) at the Avery Gallery, New York, in 1866, the Nation's critic admired the artist's powerful draftsmanship, which recognized the body inside that "preposterous and unnatural dress." "Indeed,'' noted the writer, "as regards costume alone, these pictures ought to be taken care of, that our descendants may see how the incredible female dress of the present day actually did look, when worn by active young women." 1 By the early 188os, however, Homer had turned in another direction, living and painting for some twenty months in the North Coast fishing village of Cullercoats, England. The results of his work there signaled the end of his activity as a painter of modern life. The types he celebrated in paintings such as Hark! The Lark! (fig. 28), with their muscular bodies, big feet, and shawls, existed outside time and fashion. In critics' eyes, such women were powerful, grand, and statuesque. When Homer exhibited some of these paintings in New York in 1883, the Nation praised their "largeness and veracity of feeling" and commented that Homer had retained "an independent feeling for nature from which he mainly draws his inspiration." 2 So elemental were Homer's large females that in time they transcended nationality altogether, continuing to make occasional appearances on the rocky ledges of Prout's Neck, Maine, the artist's home from about 188 3 to the end of his life.

What was the meaning of largeness and naturalness in this construction of femininity? And - to worry over the bone of a recurrent question - what prompted Homer to abandon modern women almost entirely for the elemental females of his later years?

To probe these questions, I will consider the connotations and function of the "natural" in debates that raged around the subject of fashion, feminine hygiene, and female extravagance during the first two decades of Homer's professional life.

Homer did not shift abruptly from fashion plates to earth mothers. From the late 186os on he shuttled regularly between fashionable display and rustic simplicity. Stylish city girls populated his illustrations in magazines such as Harper's Weekly and Harper's

Bazar. After he abandoned commercial work in the mid-187os, they reappeared in his watercolors, as well as in ambitious oils such as Autumn (fig. 6), in which a young lady saunters through the woods in a velvet jacket, plumed hat, gloves, and cascades of pleated ruffles. Interspersed with such modish beauties, however, were chunky farmers' daughters in limp dresses, toting heavy buckets rather than delicate satchels, as in The Temperance Meeting (fig. 26) and Milking Time (fig. 24).

The onset of Homer's interest in modern femininity coincided with the dramatic rise of feminism in the post-war years, when women's demands for access to education, professional opportunities, and political rights moved assertively into public view.

Prominent in this multi-faceted social movement were highly visible organizations such as the National Women's Suffrage Association, which spearheaded the establishment of professional women's clubs in major cities. New York City's Sorosis Club, for example, founded in 1868, attracted some of the most important free-thinkers of the day.

Feminist newspapers also appeared in considerable force, notably the weekly published by free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin. Rejecting limitations imposed by domesticity, postwar feminism cast normative constructions of female nature into disarray. At the same time, it seemed, modern civilization had so severely altered femininity that, as one critic complained, "The woman of Nature" no longer existed. In her place, there was only a "distorted artificiality." During the height of the confusion, the female body itself became site and symbol of fiercely disputed meaning. 3 The greatest burden of meaning settled heavily upon the modern American girl, often derided as the "Girl of the Period." First popularized in England by Eliza Lynn Linton, this label denoted the spoiled, overdecorated, boisterous young misses who seemed to have overthrown the domestic angels of an earlier day. The Girl of the Period epitomized the new freedom in public, and the egregious culture of artifice, extravagance, and dissipation taken up by the young. Fashion magazines and others filled columns with anxious discussion of the new phenomenon, along with recommendations for control and change. The extreme effects of fashion in the late 1860s and seventies also spurred a vigorous campaign for dress reform, sometimes twinned with feminist causes. 4 Health crusader and feminist Dio (short for Diocletian) Lewis is representative.

This reformer, who ran a physical education school in Boston, vigorously attacked contrivances that transformed the female body from "the most beautiful of God's creation" into a monstrosity: "Stand with me at my office window and see a lady pass," he wrote in 1872. "There goes one! Now isn't that a pretty little object? A big hump, three big lumps, a wilderness of crimps and frills, a hauling up of the dress here and there, an enormous hideous mass of false hair or bark piled on top of her head, and on the very top of that, a little nondescript thing, ornamented with bits of lace, birds' tails, etc., while the shop windows tell us all day long, of the paddings, whalebones and springs, which occupy most of the space within that outside rig." Mainstream fashion maga-

I

8

6. Winslow H omer, Autumn, r 877 . Oil on canvas.

National Gallery of Art, Washington.

FIG.

FIG.

7. The Venus de Milo;

01;

Girls ofTwo Different Periods. Wood engraving. Harper's Bazar 3 (22 Jan.1870).

8. The Grecian Bend. Wood engraving.

Harper's Bazar 2 (6 Nov. 1869).

FIG .

FIG. 9. Winslow Horner, At the Spring, Saratoga.

Wood engraving. Hearth and Home 1 (28 Augusr 1869).

20

zines echoed the more radical Lewis's concern and mockery. Harper's Bazar, for example, compared ancient and modern dress, maintaining that "so soon as there is a corset there can be no longer a natural body." The visual message of one Bazar cartoon of l 870 (fig. 7) can hardly be misconstrued, juxtaposing as it does the uncorseted, ideal torso of the Venus de Milo with the deformed and stunted outlines of the modern girls who crowd around the goddess while deriding her big feet and "ridiculous little head." 5 Illustrated journals regularly mocked the Girl of the Period's bizarre silhouette, with the swollen chignon, constricted waist, protuberant backside, and high-heeled court shoes that produced the so-called "Grecian Bend" (fig. 8). The identical profile appears in some of Homer's contemporary drawings, such as At the Spring, Saratoga, published in Hearth and Home in l 869 (fig. 9). Here, two Girls of the Period, trussed and rufB.ed, partake of the pure, natural, health-giving water for which this fashionable resort was famed. Very little in this instance distinguishes Homer's reportage from cartoonist's satire.

More broadly, pictorial satire of the day reflected confusion and controversy about female roles and the destabilization of power relations between men and women. C. S. Reinhart's On a String - The Latest Conquest (fig. 10), for example, shows an ornately dressed young woman in a luxurious interior. This giantess clutches the tiny figure of a terrified man and prepares to affix him to the cord from which her last four victims dangle helplessly. A fifth has just tumbled to the Boor. Other man-hunters went out into the wild like so many modern Dianas intent on bagging some game. Homer's own Butterflies (fig. l l), in fact, reads as a thinly disguised reincarnation of the relentless predators that began to appear as early as l 860 . In a Vanity Fair illustration to accompany the ditty "A New 'Song of a Belle,'" a young woman in a voluminous hoop skirt holds her net aloft and closes in on her quarry, a man-butterfly struggling to elude capture (fig. l 2). It is not difficult to imagine that in a more subtle and metaphorical way, Homer's painting alludes to the same kind of pursuir.6 On the surface, such imagery does not seem necessarily linked with the feminist challenge to domestic ideology. After all, those women want husbands. However, these scenarios do connect with the female power struggle in their references to literal and figurative consumption. The boom years of the war spiraled into a period of feverish postwar speculation, which culminated in the Panic of l 873 and a severe, prolonged depression. Economic uncertainty brought forth a Burry of jeremiads against the American woman's extravagance, which fashion writer Nora Perry targeted as "the root of the personal and national ruin" that threatened to overwhelm the country altogether. Modern dress (as seen in Homer's Autumn) epitomized this cult of excess, with its "endless flutings and puffings and rufB.es and fur-fringes, " tier upon tier upon tier. The tastemal<:er Mrs. M. E. W Sherwood (wife of Homer's patron John Sherwood) also urged a return to simplicity: "Now, when the nation is crippled and in debt, and the men staggering under a load of financial embarrassment, will they, can they, dress so magnificently?" she queried. Thomas Worth's l 871 cartoon In-Come and Out-Go (published in Harper's

21

FIG. Io. C. S. Reinharr, On a String- The Latest Conquest. Wood engraving. Harper's Weekly Magazine I9 (3o Jan. I875).

FIG. I I. Winslow Homer, Butterflies, I 878.

Oil on board. New Britain Museum of American Art.

FIG. I 2. A New "Song ofa Belle. "Wood engraving. vanity Fair (18 August I86o).

22

2

FIG.

r3. Winslow Homer, Opening Day in New York. Wood engraving. r (21 March 1868).

Harper's Bazar

FIG. 14. Gaston Fay, Studies in Natural History. Wood engraving.

Appleton's journal ofLiterature, Science, and Art 2. ( r 6 Oct. r 869) .

Bazar 4 [1July1871]) visualized the theme, showing male commerce, speculation, and insolvency in one frame and in the other, over-decorated women promenading the aisles of a department store, amongst fawning male attendants. Homer weighed in on the subject as well. His 1869 Opening Day in New York (fig. 13) showcases mass consumption of spring fashions: young women trying on coats, testing parasols, and gazing at bonnets. Slyly commenting on the unnaturalizing of the female body by fashion, Homer filled his top register with ''Artificial Flowers" - bouquets of real girls' heads, disembodied and bobbing on slender stalks. 7 Powerful and predatory, the modern woman of fashion became a new kind of alien as femininity metamorphosed into fearsome new shapes. Bazar approvingly quoted the French critic Hippolyte Taine's monstrous vision of "Woman," who by "modern education and dress," had "become a sort of beetle, tightened about the midriff, mounted on a pair of dry and shiny feet, and covered with a glistening envelope .... Like an insect ... nothing is seen of her face but the eyes and the expression. Her whole body has the restless activity of a buzzing fly." Gaston Fay's Studies in Natural History of 1869 (fig. 14) conveys the sense of this critique, juxtaposing a Girl of the Period about to sally forth in a Butterfly's carapace of stiff, elaborate drapery, with the modest, housebound Bee a diligent and dutiful seamstress. Modern science also provided new tools for dehumanizing the woman of fashion, as in Frank Bellew's Darwin's Origin of Species from Harper's Bazar in 1871 (fig. 15). This image tracks the evolution of a monkey into a croquet-playing Girl of the Period, with her trademark bustle and jaunty hat. 8 Overlapping with the emergent "new women" of the day, girls like this one thrust themselves into public, provoking a heavy barrage of satire. In The "Girl of the Period" - Club Life of 1869 (fig. 16), impudently short-skirted girls with gravity-defying piles of hair ice-skate, tease their suitors at the "Syren Flirting Club," play billiards, ride velocipedes, and drive four-in-hand coaches. Significantly, men in all cases are much in the background, weak and subordinate. From Girl of the Period to all-powerful dominatrix was only a short hop. No one more completely embodied this nightmare than the feminist hell-raiser Victoria Woodhull, aggressive preacher and practitioner of free love. An 1870 cartoon, Wall Street Hippodrome (published in the New York Evening Telegraph) graphically dramatizes a vision of total role reversal, in which Woodhull and her sister Tennie crack the whip over the bulls and bears of Wall Street - almighty speculators now harnessed to feminine will - and roll crushingly over every man in their path.9 In one way or another, modern women were like vampires, sucking away the life blood and potency of their men. Dio Lewis got to the heart of the problem in "Why Men Do Not Propose": "You are perplexed and grieved that so many of us hold back and wander about, homeless bachelors all our lives, leaving you to die old maids. Let me whisper in your ear: We are afraid ofyou!' Of course, Lewis allowed himself considerable scope for rhetorical inflation. Yet at the same time, his words effectively convey the sense of anxiety that gripped many a male during a period of intense social and ecnomic instability. 1 0

-~

-

=c_,_ ~足 <....

FIG. r 5. Frank Bellew, Darwin's Origin ofSpecies. Wood engraving, Harper's Bazar 4 (1 July 1871).

FIG. 16. The "Girl ofthe Period" - Club Life. Wood engraving. Harper's Bazar

\ TDT. PA.Lt.AS U!LLIARD CLUB.

THE "GIRL OF THE PERIOD."-CLUB LIFE.

25

2

(30 Jan. 1869).

;= TUE mPPODAlllA Dmnxo CLUB.

Winslow Homer's images of modern young womanhood provide graphic clues to what Lewis's fearful, "homeless bachelors" may have had in mind. At one time Homer (or another hand) painted an archery target - since removed - over the top-hatted man in the Croquet Players of r 865 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). The conflation of man and target is suggestive. In this painting, as in many of Homer's illustrations, women dominate the composition in number and in scale. They are large and vigorous, as capable of hitting their mark as of knocking balls through wickets. In another croquet scene of 1866 (fig. 5), three bulging, brilliantly costumed girls loom over the drab figure of the faceless man stooping between them. In Homer's contemporary illustrations, Girls of the Period are also dominant in number and importance. Self-assertive young females in the r 869 Beach at Long Branch (fig. 17), for example, entirely surround a single top-hatted gentleman. In the foreground, as if staking a claim, one of them has inscribed the artist's initials in the sand with the tip of her parasol. 1 1 The all-engulfing nature of the unconstrained, unnatural woman, however, threatened far more serious consequences. Urged on by feminist propaganda, middle-class women (at least from the masculine point of view) were on the rampage, rejecting their "natural" maternal destiny and duties wholesale. Fashionable mothers left the feeding of their infants to hired breasts. Even worse, abortion was on the rise, reflecting a wholesale rejection of motherhood by growing numbers. Condemned as murder and race suicide, it was seen as an extreme manifestation of the damage done when women - out of control - demanded full political and professional parity with men. Once again, Victoria Woodhull epitomized this new, pernicious evil. In Thomas Nast's "Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan/" (fig. I 8), she appears as a genuine she-devil, with horns, bat wings, and a cloven hoof peeking out daintily under the hem of her skirt. Preaching free love, she travels the downward path to hell. Above her, plodding slowly upward, is the virtuous, long-suffering wife, burdened by her three children and the drunken, carousing husband she bears on her back. Despite her terrible load, she refuses to follow Mrs. Satan, declaring that she would "rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps ." 1 2 Feminism and the abortion movement spurred a backlash that drew heavily on the "ovarian" model of female biology. So widely circulated as to achieve the status of "natural" truth, this model aligned femininity with the animal world by constructing the female body as container, nest, and fountain of sustenance for the young. Modern science added ballast to the argument. As one physician stated, "What woman's natural position is in human society, and what she can and ought to be, may be ascertained by an inquiry into the evolution of the social interests of man, under the guidance of biological law. So low down in the scale of creation as we can go ... we find that maternity is the first and most fundamental duty of the female ... the duty of providing food, warmth, and protection for the ovum, and for the subsequently-developed young, devolves exclusively upon the female." Anything that interfered with this biologically determined female duty - fashion, education, professional work - went against nature. 1 3 26

FIG. 17. John Karst after Winslow Homer, The Beach at Long Branch. Wood engraving. Appleton's journal of Literature, Science, andArt 2 (21 August 1869).

FIG. 1 8.

Thomas Nast, "Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!"Wood engraving. Harper's Weekly Magazine 16 (17 Feb. 1872).

On this issue, graphic satirists closed ranks with the patriarchy. William Holbrook Beard attacked women's liberation in the cartoon Mothers, Ancient and Modern in Harper's Bazar 3 (r 2 March 1870), which juxtaposes the selfless Roman mother Cornelia with a gathering of modern delinquents at the Sorosis Club. Cornelia, epitome of Roman virtue, rejected costly personal adornment. Her children, she famously proclaimed, were her jewels. The caption for the Sorosis Club, by contrast, reads: "I am tired of discussing household matters; there is no worse thing than for women to sir day after day taking care of miserable, sickly, puling children." On the wall hangs a picture entitled Slaughter of the Innocents. Thomas Nast's Bazar cartoon Wife of the Period Suffer No Little Children to Come Unto Me (fig. 19), depicts the interior of an opera box, where a bad wife sits in her finery, attended by a gaggle of fops. At the rear of the box sits her neglected husband, the very picture of Melancholy. In the gloom, an angel takes three ghostly, unborn children up to heaven. Spectral writing on the wall announces portentously: "The American Race is Dying Out." 1 4 It was just at this point, however, that the most unnatural woman came closest to the Darwinian model of nature itself as an all-consuming, deadly force. Consider Elihu Vedder's Sphinx of the Seashore (fig. 20), representing the ultimate nightmare of female nature - or nature as female - out of control. Vedder's Nature is a ravenous beast with a feline body and a beautiful woman's head. Stretched our on a desolate beach dyed red in the light of a fiery sunset, she reigns amidst the rubble of gnawed, polished bones and skulls - the victims she has devoured. This monster recalls Thomas Carlyle's evocation of nature, in Past and Present, as a sphinx, in whose grotesque body a "celestial beauty" coexists with "a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal." Vedder described his painting in similar metaphorical terms, as nature, the all-devouring Destroyer. 1 5 Being natural, or even close to nature, therefore, was treacherous ground when it came to femininity. In his representations of women, accordingly, Homer attempted to negotiate a path to safety through this dangerous territory. Homer, who as a professional illustrator worked in the same milieu as Nast, introduced the wholesome country girl into his illustration and painting just when criticism of the Girl of the Period was rampant and both feminist activism and the anti-abortion campaign were in full swing. The significance of his Dinner Horn (fig. 21), which appeared as a wood-engraving in Harper's Weekly and in three painted variations, lies in the way it situates the young female in a rural, domestic sphere far from the Sorosis Club and the department store. Homer's horn-blower has her hair nearly tucked into a snood. Her arms are firm and strong. Her checked dress, with its rolled sleeves, is innocent of corset, bustle, or crinoline. The wind tugs at her skirt, which outlines rounded hips and a trim waist set off by apron strings. Propped against the cookhouse wall are three wide, shallow pans, of the sort used to skim cream; nearby, a domestic car rubs itself against the frame of the door. Inside, pots swing over a glowing kitchen hearth, and another woman sets the table for the fieldhands' meal. Under the eaves meanders an ivy vine, grown from a pot

28

FIG. r 9. T homas Nast, The Wife of the Period - Suffer No Little Children to Come Unto Me. Wood engraving.

Harper's Bazar 2. (17 April 1869).

FIG. 2.0.

Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx ofthe Seashore, 1879. O il on canvas. Fine Arts M useums of San Francisco.

FIG. 21. Winslow Homer, The Dinner Horn.

Wood engraving. Harper's Weekly Magazine 14 (11 June 1870).

FIG. 2 3. Winslow Homer, Fresh Eggs, 1874. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

FIG. 22 . Thomas Nast, The Girl of the Period Lost in the Wilderness. Wood engraving.

Harper's Bazar 3 (28 May 1870).

on the kitchen windowsill. Connoting dependence, the ivy metaphorically suggests the young woman's place, clinging happily to hearth and home. 1 6 Thomas Nast published The Girl of the Period Lost in the Wilderness in Bazar (fig.

22) only a month before Homer's horn-blower appeared in the Weekly. Nast's drawing pokes fun at a high-fashion damsel in distress, completely helpless in the middle of a filthy, topsy-turvy kitchen. Contemplating the jumbled laundry basket, the overflowing piles of dirty dishes, and a welter of unknown housewares, Nast's Girl can only cradle her aching head, while two teardrops spill from her bewildered eyes. Homer's images are characteristically less polemical than Nast's. Ir may not be possible to determine whether the reticent artist intended to admonish Girls of the Period through representations of domestically skilled (and well-domesticated) farmers' daughters.

However, the appearance of such imagery when modern, urban femininity was under attack can hardly be considered neutral.

Even more suggestive are Homer's egg girls, milkmaids, and shepherdesses, which he produced in thematic clusters from the mid-r 87os to the end of the decade. Fresh Eggs (fig. 23), representing a young woman filling her bucket from nests in a hay-filled barn, teasingly evokes the "ovarian" model of femininity promulgated by the medical establishment. Homer's milkmaids - such as the calico-clad blonde in Milking Time (fig. 24) - serve as not-so-subtle reminders of the mammary function common to human and bovine females alike. The shepherdesses Homer turned out in quantity in the late r 87os, as in Fresh Air (fig. 27) may have more sentimental appeal, yet they too inhabit the same world of domesticated nature as the woolly, bovine creatures in their care. Observers had little trouble working out the connections. Homer's lost painting The Course of True Love (r 875) featured a strapping farm girl and her swain after a tiff.

The young woman, noted Appleton's critic, was nibbling on a bit of straw and at the same time seemed to be "chewing the cud of disagreeable rhoughts." 1 7 Homer's representations of country life passed for the real thing in urban eyes. "He is wholly in sympathy with the rude and uncouth conditions of American life," wrote the Art journal in r 877. "He likes the men, the women, the boys, the girls, of the rustic by-ways of our land - and he likes them as they are, awkward in dress, spare in form, tanned and freckled by the sun, with no sensuous warmth, no dream of beauty, no aspiration disturbing the placid calm of their faces." The word natural appeared over and over in critical response to Homer's farm scenes, which as one reviewer wrote, had an air of "happy naturalness and unpremeditated sincerity. " The shepherdess in Fresh Air, freckled and awkward, was likewise a thorough and quintessentially "natural" rustic. 1 8 We have only to trace the pictorial career of Homer's generic dairymaid, however, to realize how thoroughly the artist conventionalized this seemingly genuine figure.

Making her initial appearance in an r 874 watercolor, In the Garden (private collection) , she surfaced in at least five additional paintings and drawings over the next four years (fig. 25). What purported to be authentic and "natural" in Homer's art was almost entirely synthetic. Despite his status as a realist painter, direct observation only supplied

FIG.

z+ Winslow Homer, M ilking Time, 1875 . Oil on canvas. Delaware Art Museum.

Winslow Homer, M ilkmaid, r 878 .

Watercolor over graphite on paper.

National G allery of Art, Washington.

F I G . 25 .

Winslow Homer, The Temperance M eeting, (Farm at Gloucester), 1 874. Oil o n canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art. FIG. 26.

the raw material for a process of artistic invention. Indeed, in the case of the "Bo-Peep" paintings, he apparently dressed some of his models in a costume, carried from New York to his friend Lawson Valentine's Houghton Farm, where he worked on the shepherdess watercolors. 1 9 Even the pink calico worn by the wholesome dairymaid in Milking Time (fig. 24) was a fabrication. If contemporary farm journals are any indication, country girls of the period were far more inclined to emulate city style than remain content in their plain calico gowns. In addition, women on the farm sustained a "horror of tanned and freckled faces and stout and vigorous forms," much preferring to cultivate pallor and delicacy. Rural and urban women alike came together on the issue of size: both groups associated hefty bodies with the lower classes. Reformer Dio Lewis chided his readers about this wrongheaded view. "Miss Leonora, observing that Bridget O'Flaherty, the scrubgirl, who is ignorant and coarse, has a large waist and a powerful chest, and that Miss Seraphina Flamingo, who is a perfect angel, has a fragile, delicate form, draws the inference that a woman with a strong body is ignorant and coarse while a sylph-like form signifies the spiritual." The problem of perception went beyond the equation of servitude and bulging muscles. As Lewis pointed out, in the eyes of the "fashionable world," the powerful female body was unambiguously and repulsively "masculine." In vain, he sang the praises of the big, strong woman, the "great creature" who could "lift an ox," and whose "fine, noble physique" was "fully competent to bear the labors and trials of motherhood and life." Oddly, for all his feminist sympathies, Lewis's ideal was built primarily for breeding. 2 0 At one and the same time, then, the natural female body bore connotations of wholesome, healthy simplicity and lower-class, primitive, androgynous coarseness.

How, then, might Homer's urban audiences - the bankers, businessmen, lawyers, publishers, writers, and merchants who consumed his work - perceive figures such as the adolescent dairymaid in The Temperance Meeting (fig. 26)? Homer stamped this young woman's body with a complete set of marks signifying "naturalness": ruddy, sun-burnt skin; firm, muscular arms; stocky, uncorseted body; short, limp dress; feet in plain boots, firmly grounded. Further, he plotted the overall design to reinforce this deliberate construction of natural femininity. The gap between the milkmaid and the farmhand lies precisely on the center axis of the picture plane. On the girl's side is the animal and vegetable world: sloping pasture and grazing cows with pendulous udders. On the young farmhand's side, by contrast, the angular geometry of barn and sheds announces the controlling presence of culture - or at least, agriculture.

Like many of Homer's compositions, this one is charged with suspense and ambiguity. The space between the two figures nearly sings with the tension of attraction and repulsion, oscillating first one way and then the other. Straining against the weight of her bucket and squinting in the blinding sunlight, the girl leans back and glances off to the side. In his cocky hipshot stance, the farmhand is self-contained, yet the vectors generated by his out-thrust knee and the handle of his hoe shoot toward the girl like

33

FIG. 27. Winslow Homer, Fresh Air, r878.

Watercolor over charcoal. Brooklyn M useum of An.

FIG. 29.

28. Winslow Homer, Hark.' The Lark.', r882.

Oil on canvas. Milwaukee An Museum.

FIG.

Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, i 876. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles Counry Museum of Arr.

34

invisible arrows. What is the nature of this milkmaid; what lies beneath that impassive, enigmatic surface? Is she reluctant and shy, or is she securely self-possessed in that muscular body? Does the farmhand confidently bide his time or does he hesitate to go downhill into the space of elemental nature and female secretions? 2 1 The carefully calibrated gap between the figures in Temperance Meeting offers a clue to an emerging pictorial strategy. In evading modern womanhood, Homer sought a palatable, pictorial receptacle for all-consuming female energy, one that subdued nature and allowed for safe fantasies of domination and control. With the exception of some watercolors featuring barely pubescent shepherds and shepherdesses, Homer increasingly segregated the sexes later in the 1870s. Ar the same rime, his images of rustic females became more and more substantial, growing into American counterparts of the French peasants made so popular - and collectable - by the art of Jules Breton and the Barbizon painter Jean-Franc;:ois Millet. Homer's large, powerful figures functioned at least in part to dispel the threat of female nature run amok by displacing it onto the subservient bodies of distant, rustic, laboring women. Looking at them, Homer's urban, masculine audience could indulge in wishful thinking about the "natural" woman, strong and plain, nurturing and sexy, and dependably subservient to masculine will. Unlike her civilized urban counterpart, this female needed no trimmings, no department stores, and no opera boxes, nor would she demand abortions, higher education, or a professional career outside the home. 22 Of all the rustic females in Homer's work during the decade, his African-American women are by far the most powerfully built, the furthest from the world of fashionable artifice, and at that rime lowest in the ruling social and racial hierarchy - in all, the most natural and least threatening of women. In The Cotton Pickers (fig. 29) and Upland Cotton, (r 879; Weil Brothers, Montgomery, Ala.), Homer highlighted the physical power and the social powerlessness of these black laborers, stooping to pluck bolls of cotton and bearing the weight of bulging sacks and baskets with impassive composure.

One critic appreciated the "heavy, Oriental figures" of the women in Upland Cotton and the "strong, rich colors" of their dress, indicating that Homer had effectively refashioned southern blacks as exotic others. 2 3 He produced only a small group of such images, however, before moving on, first to the shepherdess theme and then to the fishwives of Cullercoats, who proved finally to be Homer's enduring standard of archetypal femininity. Far across the sea, they provided the middle-class painter with an abundance of otherness unencumbered by the problematic racial questions black fieldworkers might provoke in the posrReconstruction years. The three figures in Hark! The Lark! (fig. 28) are white and have features of generic, classical regularity. Yer they share with their American counterparts the brawny arms, rhe full figures, and the archaic dress, devoid of the marks of fashion, that signified the natural woman. Black or white, they heft bags, nets, and baskets - one for rhe heavy load of cotton, so deceptively Buffy on the stalk, and the other for the harvest of the sea - smelly and cumbersome. A critic for the Boston Evening Transcript

35

wrote, "Mr. Homer seems to have observed the fish-wives unusually closely; his women are women all over in the way they stand, sit, hold their hands, use their back and shoulders in carrying heavy weights, such as baskets of fish and the like." To be a "woman all over,'' evidently, meant nothing more - or less - than total identification with the stout, muscular, laboring body of the domesticated beast of burden, born to work, produce, and serve. 2 4 At the personal level, finally, what are we to make of the movements of a small, dandified, fanatically neat and orderly bachelor, hobnobbing for so many months with these sturdy, muscular peasants of the shore, women whose work entailed close contact with dirt, stench, and slime? Homer's sojourn in that remote place was a middle-class, middle-aged painter's quest for cultural capital to be invested in new pictorial ventures.

However much his work might serve as vehicle for personal expression, he remained an artist mindful of his market. Whatever he chose to paint was necessarily mediated by the need to attract and please potential customers. Undoubtedly he remained mindful of the competition as well, which consisted not only of established giants such as Millet but also newcomers, notably John Singer Sargent, who exhibited his Fishing for Oysters at Cancale (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) at the Society of American Artists in New York, 1878.

While Homer by all accounts maintained an easy camaraderie with his subjects, he remained a voyeur looking into their lives and gathering material from a privileged and mobile position. Converting the low, natural, and dirty into the noble and the monumental, he effectively neutralized woman's nature, bottling up chaotic and potentially dangerous female energies in those stalwart forms so firmly anchored to the shore.

His subsequent fame was grounded upon the persona of an artist whose heroic encounter with the elements gave graphic form to the struggle of man - strong, virile, and determined - against the capricious and often deadly power of a nature that was implicitly and intrinsically female. To what extent Homer had a personal stake in this metaphorical, pictorial battle of the sexes remains an open question - and the subject of a different paper. It is not so difficult to imagine, however, that the echoes of those conflicts continued to resonate in the stark, lonely seascapes that ultimately propelled him to the top of the charts as the toughest and manliest of American painters.

i. "Fine ans," Nation 8 (q Nov. i866), p. 396.

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., "Modern and narional" in Washington 1995, pp. 61-63, discusses rhe significance of Homer's srudy of modern fashion during rhe posrwar years.

of assorted men, metaphorically casrrated by their subservience to feminine control.

10.

Dio Lewis, Our Girls (New York, 1871), p. 188.

l l. See Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of WinslowHomer(NewYork, 1979), p. 305, on the superimposed targer. There was a concrete historical reason for the high ratio of females to males after the war, when a large cohort of young women compered for a small population of eligible males, the few survivors of a conflicr that killed or grievously maimed hundreds of thousands on both sides of the MasonDixon line. For an informative srudy of the croquet series see David Park Curry, Winslow Homer: The Croquet Game (exh. car. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1984).

2.. "Fine ans," Nation 36 (15 Feb. 1883), p. 156.

3. "The woman quesrion," Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science, andArt 1(2.4July1869), p. 537.

On post-war feminist activism see Leach l 980.

4. On questions of dress reform and the cririque of fashion, see: Lois W Banner, American Beauty (New York, 1983), especially pp. 66-105; and Leach 1980, pp. z13-60.

5. Dio Lewis, Our Girls ( ewYork, 1871), pp. 190-91; Harper's Bazar 4 (2.5 Feb. 1871), p. 114. Charles Colbert, A Measure ofPerfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill, 1997), pp. 72.-12.1, discusses rhe antebellum cririque of fashion, which also held up rhe figure of rhe amique Venus as a model of narural perfecrion to artificial modern women, deformed by rheir slavish devorion to rhe mosr currenr rrends.

12.. "A serious social evil," Harper's Bazar 4 (18 Feb. 1871), p. 98. For a useful concise summary of rhe abortion controversy in the l 87os see Carroll SmirhRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, i985), pp. z17-44.

13. Thomas Laycock, "Manhood and Womanhood," Appleton's journal ofLiterature, Science, and Art 1 ( 5 June 1869), p. 312..

6. In 1869, rhe cartoonisr Thomas Nasr published "Husband-Hunting Skerches" in Harper's Bazar 2. (4 Sepr. 1869). In addirion to a burrerfly-chasing girl, Nasr lampooned women, old and young, who were intent on bagging rheir quarry with arrows, traps, rifles, and lassos.

r4. Among other factors, the ruckus surrounding the practice of abortion at that time had irs roots in widespread fears char the masses of incoming aliens would undermine and overpower the established AngloSaxon elite if the latter continued to allow its birth rate to decline.

7. Nora Perry, ''Are women to blame?" Appleton's journal of Literature, Science, and Art 15 ( 1 April 1876), pp. 436- 37. Mrs. M. E. W Sherwood, "New bonnets and fine dressing, " Appleton's journal of Literature, Science, andArt 14(11 Dec. 1875 ), p. 754.

On the figuration of women as all-devouring consumers, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors ofthe Half Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1976), pp. l 89-96.

15. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, edired by Richard D . Altick (New York, 1977), p. r3; Elihu Vedder, "Notes for preface to Omar Khayyam drawings" [ms. in the American Academy and National Insritute of Arts and Letters, New York], cited in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art ofElihu Vedder (exh. car. National Collection of Fine Arrs, Washington, 1979), p. 146.

16. Franklin Kelly, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al., American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I (Washington, 1996), pp. 301-5, and Washington 1995, p. 109, for discussion of the eroticism hinted by these young women's full figures, their glimpsed ankles, and the overrurned milk can in rhe National Gallery of Art's version of the painting, which Cikovsky suggests is the nineteenth-century counterpart to the broken milk pitchers symbolizing loss of virginity in eighteenth-century French arr. In addition to Dinner Horn (1870; Narional Gallery of Art, Washington), there are

8. "Dress, ancient and modern, " Harper's Bazar 4 (2.5 Feb. 1871), p. 114.

9. There was nothing particularly novel about this mode of cartooning. Predictably, ir sprang up whenever emergent feminism posed a threat to established, normative relations berween the sexes. The French artist Thomas Couture vilified female greed and lusr for power in The Courtesan ( 1873; Philadelphia Museum of Art). In this painting, a high-class prostirute in an elaborately festooned chariot drives a team

37

The Dinner Horn (1870-73; Museum ofFineArts, Boston), and The Dinner Horn (1872; Detroit Institute of Arts). In literature the country girl also served as a prescriptive ideal for young, neurotic, spindly urban women; see Louisa May Alcott, An OldFashioned Girl, first published in 1870 bur reprinted many rimes up to rhe end of rhe century and beyond.

"The Arts," Appleton's journal ofLiterature, Science, andArt 13 (8 May 1875), p. 599路 1 7.

18. "The Academy Exhibition," Art journal 3 (1877), p. 159; "The Water Color Exhibition," The Sun (16 Feb. 1879).

19. Helen Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors (New Haven, 1986), p. 60. The other milkmaid clones are: A Milkmaid in black chalk and gouache (1874-75; Addison Gallery of American Arr, Andover); Drawing ofa Milkmaid .fom the Sketchbook ofLars Sellstedt, watercolor and pencil on paper (1875; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Buffalo); and Milkmaid, ink on paper (ca.

1875; see The American Scene [exh. cat. Hirsh! and Adler Galleries, ew York, 1969], p. 40).

20. Annie G. Hale, "Domestic economy; or How to make the home pleasant," New England Farmer (May l 868), pp. 245-46; Dio Lewis, Our Girls (New York, 1871), pp. 66- 69, 85. On rural dress and issues of ladylike delicacy versus masculinizing labor on the farm, see Sally L. Helvenston, "Fashion and function in women's dress in rural New England, 1840-1900," Dress 18 (1991), pp. 39-48.

2r. Kenneth Halrman, "Antipastoralisrn in early

Winslow Horner," Art Bulletin 80 (1998), pp. 102-4, carefully analyzes The Temperance Meeting. Although we converge on certain points, his interpretation differs from mine. Halrman argues rhar both the boy and the girl have been "weaned" from the pastoral landscape behind rhem.

22. Certain middle-class males were powerfully attracted to hefry working-class women, whom they at once desired, ferishized, and feared. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995). On Homer's sojourn in England, see William H . Gerdts, "Winslow Homer in Cullercoars," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 36 (Spring 1977), pp. 18-35.

23. "The Academy exhibition," Art journal 41 (1879), p. 158-5 9. Upland Cotton has undergone extensive alterations and in all likelihood does not now resemble Homer's initial production. However, the critical reaction of rhe rime of its first exhibition gives us a good gauge of how it appeared to viewers of the rime.

24. "The Fine Ans," Boston Evening Transcript (9 Feb. 18 82).

Lowbrow /Highbrow Charles R. Knight, Art Work, and the Spectacle of Prehistoric Life Michele Bogart HEN WE THINK of American representations of nature, we think of landscape painting, and of artists like Thomas B. Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and William Merritt Chase. Landscape tends to be treated as a very straightforward category. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the genre was more expansive. Nature painting included efforts to meld landscape and history painting, to render not just sublime or scenic views of the present but also the deep past. Charles Robert Knight's productions for the American Museum of Natural History, New York, were among the most remarkable forms of this art work (fig. 30). Yet, unlike Moran, Bierstadt, and other canonical artists, Knight ( 1874- I 9 5 3) is ignored in art history textbooks. Reproduced on postcards, experienced in exhibition halls with groups of raucous schoolchildren, Knight's paintings are considered a kind of "lowbrow" nature illustration, not fine art. But in fact, Knight's paintings are an extraordinary and sustained attempt to envision the forms and meanings of nature of the past, and are very much worth taking seriously.

Charles Robert Knight's important new artistic endeavor to depict and vivify prehistoric life was made possible by a unique confluence of institutions, circumstances, and individuals. The works themselves expressed the tensions that emerged from this enterprise. Knight's activities offer a compelling and concrete example of how prehistoric nature was not simply fossils and scientific explanations, but also a conglomerate of socially mediated modern-day representations, bound up with ideologies, identities, and interpersonal relationships. Knight's career reveals the extent to which prehistoric "life" was a product of art.

A number of scholars, focusing on race, class, and ethnicity, have already considered aspects of these circumstances, with regard to the American Museum of Natural History's influential president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and to the eminent sculptortaxidermist Carl Akeley's Hall of Africa displays. Historians and cultural critics Donna Haraway, Greg Mitman, Charlotte Porter, W ] . T. Mitchell, and Ronald Rainger have pointed to the racially biased underpinnings of the "pure" nature ideal represented in dioramas and exhibitions developed under Osborn's supervision (fig. 31). 1 While these issues are indeed central to Osborn's mission and to the history of paleoanthropology and cultural studies more broadly, I focus here on how the delineation of prehistoric nature was informed by a different set of preoccupations - namely, those of artistic identity and professional authority - arising from tensions between worker and employW

39

FIG. 30. Charles R. Knight,

Dryptosaurus Fighting,

1897. Oil on canvas. American Museum of Natural Hisrory,

ew York.

FIG . 31.

The Giant ofKarisimbi, Akeley Hall, 1936. Diorama. American Museum of Natural Hisrory, New York.

er, artist and scientist, creator versus executor, and on the place of the individual artist within the world of scientific institutions. I want to show how these issues were bound up, on the one hand, with the aspirations, the sometimes mundane concerns, and the negotiations among individuals - in this case, Osborn and Knight - and, on the other hand, with the literal and metaphorical depictions of the paradigmatic exemplar of the lowbrow/ highbrow distinction.

How was prehistory painted before Charles R. Knight? At the turn of the twentieth century, the representation of prehistory was neither a new enterprise nor a uniquely American achievement. In fact, Knight's work was part of a venerable tradition of natural history illustration in general, and depictions of what historian Martin Rudwick has termed "scenes from deep rime" in particular - meaning a prehistoric time frame of "unimaginable magnitude." These latter efforts, begun in the seventeenth century, were initially conceived in relation to biblical history, drawing upon illustrations of the Creation narrative and the Deluge as their principal models. Eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges Cuvier developed skeletal reconstructions of extinct creatures, and delineated their full-bodied appearances. Ochers, like geologist Henry Thomas De la Beche (fig. 32), built upon Cuvier's insights, rendering pictorial scenes of extinct plants and reptiles, as engraved book illustrations. 2 These images were very influential, but had artistic and scientific deficiencies. The images of some delineators, like Cuvier, were scientific, but not particularly artistic.

Others, like chose of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins - who in l 85 3 developed fullscale, three-dimensional reconstructions of iguanadons and dinosaurs for the grounds of the rebuilt Crystal Palace at Sydenham (fig. 3 3) - were, despite input from anatomist Richard Owen, artistic and spectacular, but not scientifically accurate.

The formation and expansion of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City provided new opportunities. 3 In particular, the museum's influential curator and subsequent president, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857- 1935, fig. 34), would offer a clear-cut and sustainable vision. Osborn, a wealthy, Princeton-trained paleontologist, joined Columbia University as professor of biology and the museum as curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology in l 891. From l 90 8, when he became the museum's president, until his death, Osborn, for all intents and purposes, was the American Museum of Natural History. He was the principal figure in determining its scientific mission, exhibitions, and policies. Capitalizing on a growing popular enthusiasm for vertebrate paleontology in the late nineteenth century, Osborn garnered tremendous support from his trustees to advance what historian Ronald Rainger characterized as his "agenda for antiquity. " Whereas turn-of-the-century academic science began to concentrate on experimental biology, with its focus on testable hypotheses regarding "inheritance, development, and biochemical processes," Osborn had big plans to transform the American Museum of Natural History into a leading center for popular instruction in paleontology. Like many wealthy and cultivated individuals of the period, he built upon a network of personal connections to the rich and powerful to realize his project. 4 41

FIG. 32路 Henry Thomas De la Beche, Duria antiquior, r 830.

Watercolor. Departmenr of Geology, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

FIG. 3 3. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's Extinct Animals Model-Room, at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. From Illustrated London News 24 (3 r December r 85 3), p.

600.

34. Henry Fairfield O sborn, Presidenr of rhe American Museum of atural Hisrory, r916. American Museum of Natural History, ew York.

FIG.

42

Osborn had a definite conception. That conception included research expeditions and dramatic mountings of fossil specimens (fig. 35) - in some instances explicitly modeled after fine art images - that would stir the public imagination and make them hunger for more information. But Osborn also realized that displays of mere bones and fossils wouldn't go far enough to satisfy an urban public that was being constantly bombarded with alluring visual stimuli, commercial and civic. In his view, art would be a key factor in promoting the science of paleontology. Thus Osborn determined to utilize painting and sculpture as part of a broader scheme of visual pedagogy in the American Museum of Natural History. 5 But who would do this kind of work, and how could it be funded?

The answer was Charles R. Knight (fig. 54). Knight was born in 1874 in Brooklyn, New York, to a mother, Lucy Knight, from Bath, Maine, and an English father, George Wakefield Knight, the private secretary of banker J. Pierpont Morgan. Knight, an only child, grew up in the Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of the city of Brooklyn, attending the private, progressive Froebe! Academy (which emphasized drawing and craftwork as formative skills) and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. His mother died when he was six, and his father remarried Sarah Davis, a watercolorist and china painter who actively encouraged her stepson's youthful artistic interests. 6 Sunday visits with his father to the new American Museum of Natural History - facilitated by trustee J. P. Morgan on a day when the museum was closed to the public - helped to kindle an enthusiasm for drawing animals. 7 Once in high school, Knight's artistic predilections clearly outweighed his academic concerns. Thus, in 188 8, his mother enrolled him in the new Industrial Art School at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an eight-year-old institution dedicated to improving design and ostensibly pitched toward artisans and craft workers. 8 Knight went on to enroll in the Art Students League, and soon embarked on his professional career with an eye open to commercial possibilities. In 1890 he began working at the J. & R. Lamb workshop, a successful Manhattan decorative arts firm, where he made animal designs for church stained-glass windows. 9 After a period of soul-searching following his father's death in 1892, Knight moved into a new artistic arena, illustration, receiving assignments to depict animals and prehistoric scenes from such magazines as McClures, Harper's, and The Century. Expanding his professional options, he thus became increasingly specialized from a typological standpoint. 10 Knight's desire to hone his talents in animal art led him back to the American Museum of Natural History. There, he studied specimens of what at that time passed for taxidermy, an art, as he put it, "still in its infancy." 1 1 Knight showed up at the museum with such regularity that he became acquainted with the staff of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. Before long he was commissioned to undertake a new form of art work, life restoration: an artistic re-creation of an extinct animal. In 1 896, Knight met Osborn. Osborn hired Knight to illustrate an article for The Century.

Thus began a collaboration that would end only with Osborn's death in 1935. 12

43

Funding for these subsequent collaborations was no foregone conclusion. Knight's art work for the American Museum of Natural History was not paid for through the museum's operating budget, but was rather the outgrowth of a fortuitous set of metropolitan connections. Exploiting his personal ties to J. P. Morgan (an uncle by marriage), Osborn convinced the financier to establish a special fund to enable Knight to work freelance on a host of life restorations - sculptures and murals. Osborn returned to Morgan with additional requests on numerous other occasions over the years, and after the death of Morgan Sr., his son J. P. Morgan Jr. renewed the commitment. 1 3 Osborn's persuasive powers were ample, indeed, but were clearly augmented in this instance by Morgan's ties to Knight's late father. 1 4 Morgan no doubt gave willingly not only out of a desire to advance the museum's mission, but also out of a sense of loyalty and obligation to his former personal secretary. Thus Osborn succeeded over the years r 898-1928 in commissioning a series of sculptural and painted restorations of prehistoric animals that functioned as a grand new form of civic art for popular scientific instruction.

Knight's dinosaur canvases were the most memorable and celebrated, but his reconstructions included other extinct creatures like ungulates, mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats. He developed these designs in close consultation with members of the museum's staff. The paintings and statues often served as the models for poses for the skeletal reconstructions, accompanying the fossil specimens as part of the exhibit displays (see figs. 3), 36, 37; note the painting of Apatosaurus [fig. 39] to the right). This use of paintings and sculpture as a form of supplemental visual instruction elaborated upon an approach begun with Hawkins and others several decades earlier, but Knight imparted to his pictures an unprecedented theatricality and extravagance, meant to supplement the lessons provided by the fossils and to arouse visitors' imaginations. 1 5 The artist's broad familiarity with animal behavior and anatomical structure as well as with modeling in the round, and his ability to imitate surface textures convincingly, helped to endow the early sculptural restorations of dinosaurs with a sense of tangible presence (fig. 38). The paintings, rendered according to the conventional design methods of late nineteenth-century academic art, were composed and rendered with deftness and sympathy. In paintings of the Apatosaurus (fig. 39), stegosaurus, mastodons, and Serridentinus and Trilophon, for example, Knight employed the feathery brushwork and subtle color of French academic naturalism, as well as oblique angles, cropped compositions, and counterbalancing curves influenced by Japanese prints - all imparting a sense of immediacy. Osborn, who had a keen sense for publicity, was quick to tout these artistic developments as pathbreaking achievements. Thanks to the artist's talents, significant new fossil evidence, and guidance from the museum's scientific specialists, Osborn insisted, Knight had succeeded in rendering the prehistoric with an unprecedented and convincing degree of physical accuracy. Although present-day paleontologists now question Knight's depictions, especially with respect to behavior, at that time Knight's dinosaurs cam e to establish the representational standard. 1 6 Yet although Knight's museum dinosaurs were among the most memorable and

44

3 5. Allosaurus and Prey Fossil. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

FIG.

36. Charles R. Knight, Allosaurusfragilis restoration, 190 4.

Gouache on paper. American Museum of Na rural History, ew York.

FIG.

37. View of Dinosaur Hall, American Museum of Natural History, Brontosaurus in foreground.

FIG.

45

FIG. 38. Charles R. Knighr, Diplodocus sculprure. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

FIG . 39. Charles R. Knight, Apatosaurus, r 898 . Gouache on artist board.

American Museum of Natural History, ew York.

Case with reco nsrructed buses of Natural History, ew York.

FIG . 4 0 .

eanderthals. American Museum of

familiar of his works, the majority of these images were - at that institution at least relatively small-scale projects.17 From an artistic standpoint, Knight's murals for the fourth floor Hall of the Age of Man - commissioned by Osborn between 1915 and 1924 (through a special mural fund supplied by]. P. Morgan Jr. at Osborn's request) - were a more significant enterprise, and will serve here as my primary focus.

Having completed a Hall of Fossil Mammals in l 89 5, Osborn focused the museum's resources on exploring matters concerning man's relationship to nature, concerns that resonated with those of upper-strata Progressive Era New Yorkers like the trustees of the American Museum of Natural History. 1 8 Inspired by recent new human fossil discoveries - such as the l 89 l unearthing of Pithaecanthropus erectus in Java, the l 90 I uncovering of two Magdalenian period caves (with arresting paintings) in southern France, the l 908 excavation, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, of the most complete Neanderthal specimen to date (fig. 40), and the 191 l "discovery" of the jawbone of "Piltdown Man" - Osborn developed (with major assistance from museum staffers) a new exhibition on human origins and evolution: the Hall of the Age of Man. 1 9 As part of his exhibition agenda, and in conjunction with the publication of his book Men of the Old Stone Age, Osborn commissioned Knight to undertake a series of spectacular murals that would depict man's Stone Age ancestors within the broader ecological environments of the Pleistocene epoch (figs. 41 - 48). 2 0 The largest murals, dating between 1916 and 1919, depicted contemporaneous mammals in different locales and seasons, with subject tides that were reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings: Mammoth and Reindeer, Springtime, on the River Somme in Northern France (fig. 42); Mastodon, Royal Bison, and Horse, Close of the Glacial Epoch (figs. 43, 44); Woolly Rhinoceros, in Winter, in France (figs. 41, 45); and Moose, Tapir,, and Giant Beaver in Northern New jersey (fig. 46). Subsequent murals in the series included Pampean Fauna! Life in Argentina (figs. 47, 48); and Saber-Toothed Tiger, Ground Sloth, Columbian Mammoth in the Rancho La Brea (fig. 49). 2 1 These pictures converged at the three entrance doorways, for which Knight executed additional overhead murals representing human ancestors (figs. 41, 42): Neanderthal Flintworkers (fig. 50), Cro-Magnon Cave Painters (fig. 51), and Neolithic Stag Hunters (fig. 52). Together, the three murals were intended to show diachronic and paleontological developments as straightforward revelations of evolutionary progress, the advancement of human "races" from the Neanderthal to the Neolithic.

In fact, the paintings did not express this ideal quite so neatly; instead they offered cues that betrayed a higher regard for the Cro-Magnon - the "mid-point" group in the tripartite scheme. These disruptions were significant. They underscored the fact that Knight's murals were not mere illustrations of Osborn's scientific theories of the prehistoric past, but in an important sense, responses to them. As artistic processes, the Stone Age Man murals articulated tensions arising from Knight's personal experiences, between his own ideals of romantic individualism and the demands of early twentiethcentury corporate scientific discourses, institutional hierarchies, and work practices -

47

F I G . 41.

View of Hall of Age of Man. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

F I G . 42. Charles R. Knight, Mammoth and Mural Paintings. Skeleton: Columbian Mammoth. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

FIG .

4 3. View in

Hall of Age of Man. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

FIG. 44. Charles R. Knight, Mastodon, Royal Bison, and Horse, Close of the Glacial Epoch, 1916. Oil on canvas.

American Museum of Natural History, ew York.

FIG.

45. Charles R. Knight, Woolly Rhinoceros with Antelope and Mammoth in the distance, r 916. Oil on canvas.

American Museum of

arural History, New York.

FIG. 46. Charles R. Knight, Moose, Tapir, and Giant Beaver in Northern New jersey, r919. Oil on canvas. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

,. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~- '

49

FIG. 47. Charles R. Knight, A Loess Storm on the Pampas ofArgentina, on canvas. American Museum of Natural History, ew York.

19 18.

Oil

48. Charles R. Knight, Pampean Fossil Mammals. Toxodon, Mastodon andium, Hippidion (in Hall of the Age of Man), 1922. Oil on canvas. American Museum of atural History, New York.

FIG.

FIG. 49. Charles R. Knight, Rancho-la-Brea Pleistocene Scene, American Museum of Natural History, ew York.

l 921.

Oil on canvas.

predicaments that he found difficult to overcome in any way other than through painting itself The Hall of the Age of Man murals raised a series of dilemmas concerning the cultural authority of art versus science, which in turn, I want to argue, affected both the renditions and the meanings of the paintings.

Throughout the nine-year production phase of the Hall of the Age of Man murals, debates arose over whether Knight's pictures were principally science or art. At various points these disagreements pitted Knight against a number of the museum's scientists, at other times, against his sponsor and partner Osborn. Did the murals represent the truth, as both Knight and Osborn would have it, or were they fictional as several on the museum's staff characterized murals of the Neanderthal. Should the artist defer to the scientific expert to ensure comprehensive accuracy, or was artistic license necessary to render the accurate details properly and effectively? Should prehistoric man, for example, be rendered "truthfully" - naked in all probability - or should the artist defer to modern-day ideals and standards of propriety and put bearskins on his figures? 22 Were the paintings illustrative or decorative? 2 3 Should each mural be discrete and hence "realistic" or should the paintings be treated as a cohesive aesthetic unit? And what should serve as the models for Knight's view of Pleistocene life - should Neanderthal man, for example, be rendered from contemporary humans, or from some idealized speculative image of the prehistoric type, based upon fossil fragments? 2 4 How to reconcile art ideals with the need for literalism and exactitude? Was it preferable to compromise scientific accuracy to ensure production of compelling, educational, and popular highbrow art?

Or, as the museum's director Frederic A. Lucas posited in the case of the Hall of Man murals, might it be scientifically preferable to omit art from the display? 2 5 From Knight's point of view, the murals were first and foremost, art. Subscribing to a romantic individualism, he insisted throughout the project upon the primacy of the artist's vision. Although willing to accept recommendations from Osborn and other "competent judges" on certain scientific details of anatomy and ecology, Knight bristled at what he perceived as artistic critiques, arguing that these infringed upon his artistic rights. 2 6 Arguing that his paintings were principally mural decorations, Knight insisted that aesthetic principles had to take priority over scientific prerogatives; the visual harmony of the whole room had to prevail over a desire for slavish realism within an individual picture. 2 7 From Osborn's perspective, the murals were intended as tools for scientific instruction; the bottom line was scientific accuracy, not individual self-expression. As the museum's curator emeritus of paleontology, as its president, and as the self-designated representative of the museum's scientific interests, Osborn expected Knight to work under his supervision and follow his recommendations and commands; all projects had to have Osborn's seal of approval. Osborn's authority, moreover, extended beyond the museum's walls. The American Museum of Natural History retained the copyright on Knight's murals (see fig. 44); when the murals were reproduced in magazines, the credits often included Osborn as well as the artist. 2 8

FIG . 50. Charles R. Knighr, Neanderthal Flintworkers, Museum of Narural History, New York.

i920.

FIG. jl. Charles R. Knight, Cro-Magnon Cave Painters, Museum ofNarural Histo ry, New York.

FIG . 52 . Charles R. Knighr, Neolithic Stag Hunters, Museum of Natural History, New York.

52

Oil on canvas. American

1920.

1919.

Oil on canvas. American

Oil on canvas. American

,kl,

I

~:14,

I

/

FIG .

53. Charles R. Knight, Eocene Mural, r9 30. Oil on canvas. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

54. Charles R. Knight in his studio, Bronxville, New York, about History, New York.

F IG .

53

191 r.

American Museum of Natural

Knight accepted these terms, but unhappily. To be sure, compared to most artists, Knight, working freelance for the museum, had a fair amount of flexibility and a rather cushy arrangement, with ongoing commissions for art works to be seen by thousands of people. His situation was nonetheless precarious. His comfortable arrangement with the museum had always hinged upon his connections with Morgan and especially with Osborn. Knight was never fully compelled to broaden his artistic horizons or his circle of patronage. He was thus put in a position of over-dependence. He did not feel that he could afford to alienate Osborn.

Knight's vexation with these circumstances, along with his periodic resentment over feeling exploited, would ultimately motivate him to branch out in 1926, when he received a major commission for twenty-eight murals for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. But prior to that time, while still working on the Hall of the Age of Man, and while still holding out hopes of securing another big commission for the American Museum of Natural History's Dinosaur Hall (which never panned out), Knight had to find ways of productively channeling his frustrations over these disciplinary controversies over science versus art. He did so through his art. Consequently, the Stone Age Man murals acquired an additional layer of significance. In this project, Knight expressed tensions - manifested in debates with Osborn and the scientists over the priority of individual vision in the organizational world of science, over who represented the highbrow and the lowbrow - metaphorically through the paintings themselves.

Cro-Magnon man in particular had special personal relevance. From Knight's standpoint, Cro-Magnon man was the "hero" of the saga of human development.

Building on the recent discovery of the cave paintings in France and Spain, Knight depicted Cro-Magnon man engaged in the act of painting in the cave of Font-deGaume, in the Dordogne.

Knight's mural of Cro-Magnon man (fig. 51) was intended to complement and build on that of the Neanderthal flintworkers, shown standing on a ledge above the Dordogne River (fig. 50). Several of the male Neanderthal glimpse animals off in the distance, but are helpless to act. To the left, a woman with her child stands just inside the cavern of Le Moustier, signifying that the Neanderthals lived as a family unit and thus deserved a modicum of sympathy. Nonetheless, with their horizontally elongated heads, large lips, low, protruding brows, and stooped postures, the Neanderthals conformed to stereotype as an inferior "race" - lumbering, dimwitted, and destined to be eradicated.

The Cro-Magnon image, in contrast, highlighted man's physical and intellectual development and the extraordinary achievement of the "birth of art." 2 9 In distinct contrast to the Neanderthal, hulking and slow to take action, and to the Neolithic stag hunters, pictured as strong and resolute, but at bay, Cro-Magnon was rendered in motion, and as intelligent and (literally) enlightened; Knight bathed the central CroMagnon "artist" figure in light from a primitive lamp, crafted from hollowed out stone.

54

Knight depicted Cro-Magnon bodies partially nude to conform to expert opinion. 30 But he took the representation farther. Although Osborn explicitly instructed Knight not to make the Cro-Magnon figures too "classical or artistic," Knight clearly did not follow instructions when it came to the Cro-Magnon artist in the mural's center.31 That figure is unquestionably modeled after classical statuary in both stance and proportion. (Osborn never challenged Knight on this score; it was Osborn, after all, who referred to the Cro-Magnon as the "Paleolithic Greeks." 32) The associations with classical antiquity, an epoch of momentous artistic advancement and achievements, were clearly intended as deliberate. They evoked a spiritual continuity between the creative minds of the prehistoric and classical past, and Knight in the present.

The pose of the central Cro-Magnon artist was not merely notable because it connected with the grand tradition of classical antiquity. It also tapped into the longstanding visual trope of the artist in his studio, a symbol of inspiration and creative struggle.

As the "original" fine artist, the earliest creator, Cro-Magnon was thus shown to play a crucial cultural role in representing nature truthfully, sincerely. Following Osborn in Men of the Old Stone Age, Knight rendered Cro-Magnon the ideal ancestor, a man of vision who strove to express himself even under conditions of tremendous adversity.

On a certain level, then Cro-Magnon artist would appear to be the artist's alter-ego (see fig. 54), symbolizing the centrality of individual artistic vision and authenticity, of an unmediated vision that modern-day institutional bureaucracies threatened to destroy. Cro-Magnon man was a visible protest against the pitfalls of urban art work, art for hire, and the dynamic of modern corporate patronage. As a visible assertion of the power of art for human progress, and of the American Museum of Natural History's potential as an institution of popular enlightenment and instruction, the Cro-Magnon mural, of course, served the museum's mission. But it served the artist's purposes as well, functioning as a rejoinder to perceived attempts by Osborn and various museum scientists to undermine Knight's art. 33 For Knight, Art was the marker of the highbrow. Knight's Neanderthals, by contrast, were like the "lowbrow" scientists; they contemplate the landscape, bur dull-wittedly, without creativity. Cro-Magnon artist observes no model, but renders images of bison - indexical traces of his spontaneous and authentic visions of nature, on the wall of the cave, to endure for all time. The habits and outlooks of the highbrows and the lowbrows, prehistoric and contemporary, were represented as incompatible. As with the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon, the attempts of artists and scientific popularizers to inhabit the same terrain were doomed to fail. "Doubtless," wrote Knight in a 1922 description of the Cro-Magnon, for example, "they often fought with, and may have annihilated, the much more primitive Neanderthal tribes with whom they came in contact .... Indeed, life in these early times must have been one continuous struggle against the forces of nature, and only the strong and fortunate individuals survived the ordeal. "34 Like the artist, the Cro-Magnon might prevail for a time, but remained continually threatened. The artists in Knight's mural persist in painting, but not for no rea-

55

son did Knight depict a chieftain (whom Osborn characteristically described as gripping "a baton de commandment on his staff as an insignia of his rank") standing off to the side overseeing the action - ready, perhaps, to take matters (violently) into his hands should the artists get out ofline.35 Knight's Cro-Magnon mural evokes a space of enlightened individualism. The figures are sequenced evenly across the horizontal span of the canvas, evoking a decentralized, democratized realm in which each "expert" is in charge of his own domain.

The chieftain is present, but the artists working at center and to the right are the ones who are highlighted; although power in the cave, as in the museum, might be vested in the "chieftain," in Knight's rendering, artists retained their cultural authority.

But if the Cro-Magnon painting represented the artist's vision of the creative life, Knight himself was not fully successful in sustaining that ideal. Indeed, he evoked a very different state of affairs in the third painting of the series, Neolithic Stag Hunters (fig. 52).36 The panel, which hung at the west end of the hall, portrayed the stag hunters resting in "an encampment on the border of one of the northern beech forests." 37 The exuberance and individualism of the Cro-Magnon painting was tempered and subdued.

The Neolithic tribe was shown grouped around a single leader, presenting an image of corporate unity and centralized power. In contrast to the Cro-Magnon realm of spirit and individual inspiration, the Neolithic portrait conjured up a more mundane, material world. The painting was essentially a group portrait with bric-a-brac and technology. It was an image of pragmatism, mediation, and compromise. Using their dogs, powerful expert intermediaries, the Neolithic peoples overcame their prey - analogous to how an artist like Knight might perceive the domineering "leader" Osborn and his intermediaries, the scientists, as "killing off" the artist in him. After reading Knight's correspondence, it is not difficult to imagine Knight unconsciously conjuring up his museum relationships along just such lines. As Knight observed in a description of this painting, "along aesthetic lines ... these pursuers of big game were sadly lacking, as we find no evidences of art among them." 38 The Hall of Man paintings were just paintings, but the conflicts and compromises they evoked were borne out in the subsequent dealings between Osborn and Knight.

In the late 1920s, a stubborn clash over the composition of a commissioned mural representing Titanotheres (fig. 53) virtually dissolved their relationship. The two mended fences, but Knight began to cut loose. 39 Although he continued to work for the American Museum of Natural History, his relationship with the museum did not much outlive Osborn's retirement as president in 1932路 Knight's paintings, which have captivated museum audiences since the turn of the century, offer insights into prehistoric nature, human nature, metropolitan culture, and their intersections. The products of a fortuitous convergence of individuals, urban institutions, and scientific discoveries, Knight's pictures helped to integrate highbrows and lowbrows into the grand tradition of history and landscape, and thus add new vistas to the public image of nature.

Knight's work also had additional significations that derived from very immediate social and personal conflicts. Certainly Knight's images illuminated prehistory and the triumph of highbrows over lowbrows, as conceived at that time from a scientific vantage point. But his murals also highlighted the vicissitudes of art work and the uncertainties of the artist's mission within the devouring organizational world of early twentieth-century science. They are paintings about the troubled identity of the artist, not - pace Charles Willson Peale - in his museum, but rather in Henry Fairfield Osborn's.

57

Acknowledgments:

I would like offer special thanks to Patrick McMahon, Museum ofFine Arts, Boston; Paula Willie, Daryl Gammons, and Barbara Mathey, Special Collections Library, American Museum ofNatural History; Mark Norell, Curato1; and Ruth Sternfeld, Archivist, ofthe Department of Vertebrate Paleontology ofthe American Museum ofNatural History, for their gracious assistance; to Philip J Pauly, Sarah Burns, Charles Colbert, William Gerdts and Sally Webste1; for their helpful suggestions, and to William Ganis, for his generous donation ofslides.

Abbreviations for archives: AM H : American Museum of atural History, New York (Central Archive unless otherwise noted).

DVP: Departmem of Vertebrate Paleontology Archives.

Knight Papers: Charles R. Knight Papers, New York Public Library.

See, for example, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" in Haraway 1989, pp. 26- 58; John Michael Kennedy, "Philamhropy and science in New York City: The American Museum of atural History, 1868-1968" (dissertation, Yale University, 1968), pp. r 54, 193, 205, 207; Mitchell 1998; Porter 1983; Rainger 1991.

1.

2. Marrin S. J. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations ofthe Prehistoric World

(Chicago, 1992), pp. 1-26, 25 5 noter.

3. Founded in 1869 by teacher and naturalist Albert Bickmore and representatives from the city's most powerful financial and industrial elites (including William E. Dodge, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., J. Pierpont Morgan, Isaac N. Phelps, Morris Jessup, and Joseph H. Choate), the American Museum of arnral History would become, by 1920, one of the leading research institutions and cemers of public scientific instruction - renowned especially for its memorable dioramas of African wildlife, and exhibitions on North American West Coast Indians, American woodlands, and especially vertebrate paleomology. On the history of the American Museum of Natural History, see Kennedy 1968.

4. Rainger 1991, pp. 2, 24- 26, 44- 66.

5. Rainger 1991, pp. 97-99,

l

52-8 r.

6. Knight n.d., chap. 1, pp. 1- 30. See also Czerkas,

G lut 1982, pp. 1-3. Sarah Davis was the quintessemial female "arr worker" of this time period: a middle-class woman committed to advancing a range of differem forms of artistic production as worthy and satisfying labor. On women as art workers, see April Masten, "The Work of Arr: American Women Artists and Market Democracy, 1820-1880" (dissertation, Rutgers University, 1998).

7. Knight n.d., chap.

l,

p. 5.

8. Although Knight's father worked for the nation's premier financier, money, Knight observed retrospectively, was an invisible issue; paradoxically, it was considered something "distasteful" and hence not discussed. On Knight's experiences at the Metropoliran, see Knight n.d., chap. 3, pp. 3-13, and Czerkas, Glut i982, P路 5路

9. Knight n.d., chap. 3, pp. 16-20. J. & R. Lamb was located at 59 Carmine Street in Greenwich Village.

On the importance of the League for positioning arr students to move into alternative, commercial careers, see Bogart 199 5, pp. 26- 28 .

IO. Knight n.d., chap. 3, pp. 32- 34; chap. 4, p. r. On expanding opportunities for illustrators, see: Bogan 1995, pp. 18-42; Judy L. Larson, American Illustration: Romance, Adventure, and Success (Calgary, 1986) . Art Students League comacts helped Knight. Edward Penfield, arr editor at Harper's who had known Knight from the League, hired him to do the illustrations for Harper's. Czerkas, Glut 1982, p. 8. Such "old boy networks," which developed as a consequence of the expanding institutional framework and professional circles of turn-of-the-century of New York, were both crucial and commonplace occurrences.

For correspondence between Knight and an directors in these early years, see, for example: August F. Jaccacci to Knight, 3 Nov. 1899; Charles Scribner's Sons to Knight, 25 April 1900 and 12 Oct. 1900 [Knight Papers: box 1, fo lder 1).

11 . "In r 893 almost anyone stuffed animals; that is, they Ii terally inserted in to the prepared skin all the excelsior possible to build up the form, then sowed up the seams in the legs and belly. Large, staring glass eyes were set in place, the hair gives a good brushing, and behold - a pretty poor imitation of a living creature." Knight n.d., chap. 4, pp. 3- 4. l

2. Knight n.d., chap. 4, pp. 5- 6; Czerkas, G lut 1982,

PP路 8-9. l

3. For examples of Osborn's emreaties on Knight's

behalf, see Henry Fairfield Osborn ro]. P. Morgan, 2 March 190;, Osborn to]. P. Morgan Jr., 19 May 1909 [AMNH, DVP: box 65, folder 52 Q. P. Morgan)]; William Diller Marrhew to Knighr, 25 February 1911 [AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58]; Osborn ro]. P. Morgan Jr., 13 May 1915 and 26 December 1916 [AMNH: file 249b, file 249c].

a Hall of Public Healrh ( 1909), which emphasized bacreriological developments and preventive medicine.

The exhibirion offered displays on ruberculosis, a disease thar especially rhrearened urban immigrant popularions whom Osborn soughr ro draw ro rhe museum.

Osborn also became cenrrally involved in campaigns for narure preservarion rhrough rhe museum's displays on birds and Norrh American woodlands; in addirion, he was closely involved wirh the esrablishment of rhe New York Zoological Gardens.

Osborn's morivarions for these various undenakings were mulriple, complex, and, in hindsighr, conflicred. To be sure, they represemed on rhe one hand, a passion for narure and a sincere desire ro uncover the pasr, life's origins and meanings. Ar rhe same rime, as various historians have demonstrared, Osborn's scienrific work was also morivared by concerns about rhe present and future of an increasingly urbanized America. Like his close colleagues Theodore Roosevelr and Madison Grant, Osborn was threarened by rhe influx of immigrams, fearing inbreeding, overspecializarion, and rhe decline of the puriry of rhe "race."

Following Roosevelr, Osborn championed rhe preservarion of nature. Many of rhe museum's displays highlighred rhe power of narure, rhe viral suuggles for survival, and rhe evolurionary superioriry of cerrain rypes of racial rypes or stocks. On Osborn's role in namre preservarion and his relarionships and affiniries wirh Roosevelr and Grant, panicularly in regard ro concerns about immigrarion and race, see: Rainger 1991, pp. 105-81; Haraway 1989, pp. 26-58; Porrer 1983, pp. 26-34. On public healrh, see Osborn 1927, pp.

261-68; on rhe relarionship berween narure srudy and public health concerns ar rhe museum, see Philip J. Pauly, "The developmem of high school biology, New York Ciry, 1900- 1925," in Biologists and the Promise of

14. Knighr n.d. , chap. 1, p. 5.

15. Rainger 1991, pp. 152-63, highlighrs Osborn's fervem commitment to dramaric and lifelike pedagogical displays, bur aparr from Donna Haraway's analysis of rhe African Hall in her much reprinted "Teddy Bear Parriarchy" (Haraway 1989, pp. 26-5 8), rhere has been lirde examinarion of specific curatorial policies and display practices ar rhe American Museum of Narural History.

16. For an example of Osborn's and rhe museum's promorion of Knighr's paintings, see: "Charles R . Knighr, painter and sculptor of animals," The American Museum journal 14 (March 1914), pp. 83-98; Henry Fairfield Osborn, "The Hall of rhe Age of Man in rhe American Museum," Natural History 20 (May-June 1920), pp. 229-46; Osborn 1927, p. 237. Those who refure the accuracy of Knighr's images include Srephen Jay Gould and Roben T. Bal<lcer. See Roberr T. Bal<lcer, The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery ofthe Dinosaurs and Their Extinction (New York, 1986), pp. 15-27. See also Mirchell 1998, pp.

57-64, 104, 265-75; WJ.T. Mitchell,, "Dinos R Us," The University of Chicago Magazine 90 (February 1998), pp. 16-22.

17. The image of Knighr's dinosaurs is more likely rhe resulr of his subsequent work for rhe Field Museum in Chicago, and rhe consequence of the popularizarion of dinosaurs in media like film and animation.

Alrhough Osborn planned a dinosaur hall wirh murals by Knighr for rhe American Museum of Narural History, a lack of funds did nor permir rheir realizarion. Knighr did nor paint dinosaur murals until 1926, when he was hired to design murals for rhe Field Museum. On rhe planned Dinosaur Hall, see O sborn to George H . Sherwood, 23 June 1925; Osborn ro Knighr, 6 July 1925; Knighr ro Osborn, 1 2 January 1927; Sherwood ro Knighr, 18 December 1926 [AMNH: file 1262, file 1262a]; Knighr ro Osborn, 25 June 1925, 9 October 1925, 12 November 1925 [Knighr Papers: box 1, file 4]. On rhe Field Museum murals, see Czerkas, Glur 1982, pp. 30- 31.

American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton, 2000), pp. 171-93.

19. Such a display could nor help bur be rimely, signiicant, popular, and comroversial, necessarily engaging wirh fundamental religious and moral quesrions as well as sciemific quesrions abour rhe meaning of life.

On rhese discoveries, see Bowler 1986, pp. 21-40, l 25 - 28. See also: Osborn 1915, pp. vii-xii; idem.,

Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory ofMan (Princeton, 1927), pp. 23-107.

Since rhe mid- ninereenrh century, rhe very norion of evolurion, which called into quesrion rhe idea that "God was somehow personally responsible for designing rhe succession of human forms," had been exrremely comroversial. Osborn, like many orher

18. For example, O sborn oversaw rhe development of

59

sciemisrs, argued rhar nature was nor emirely some sort of random or "haphazard process" (Bowler 1986, p. 1), and challenged the Darwinian notion rhar "variations were selected on utilitarian grounds by a naturalistic agent" (Rainger 1991, p. 139). For Osborn, "evolution and inheritance were explained by nonmarerial factors. An interaction of factors triggered a poremial in an organism's germ plasm, rhar, once actualized, produced evolutionary changes independem of environmem, adaption, and usefulness" (Rainger l 99 l, p. 13 9.) Nevertheless, an exhibi rion on human evolution, which invariably raised in the public mind questions about whether humans and apes shared common ancestors, was bound to make many people uneasy, despite rhe fact rhar Osborn had come to believe rhar humans and apes evolved along separate lines of descent. As Peter]. Bowler observes: "Traditionally, our mental and moral faculties were seen as a the product of a distinct spiritual agency, the 'soul,' added to the physical body. Since animals were nor supposed to have souls - at least in rhe Christian interpretation - any theory requiring an animal ancestry for mankind seemed to deny our spiritual sratus," a belief rhar threatened to undermine the foundations of rhe emire social and moral order. On rhe development of the Hall of Man, see: Osborn r 920, pp.

229-46; Porter 1983, pp. 26- 34; Rainger 1991, pp. l69-8r.

and rhar any depiction of them clothed should attempt to be as convincing as possible. Henri Breuil to Osborn, 27 January 1919, [Knight Papers: box 1, file 3].

23. Knight wrote to Osborn concerning his mural of rhe woolly mammoth: "This decoration should of course, be primarily a work of art, in rhis way alone will ir be of any value and imeresr. The scientific part should be unquestionably kept subservient ... " Knight to Osborn, 5 February 1914 [AMNH: Correspondence: Individuals, Charles R. Knight, folder l]; Knight to Osborn, 19 February 1916 [AMNH: file 249c]. See also Knight to Osborn, 7 June 1915, and Osborn to Knight, 8 June 1915, 19 July 1916, 25 May 1917 [AMNH, DVP: box j!, file 58]; Osborn to Knight, 9 February 1914 [AMNH: Correspondence: Individuals, Charles R. Knight, folder l].

24. Osborn urged Knight to avoid drawing upon classical figures in rendering the Neanderthal and CroMagnon. Yer in calling for accuracy in representing rhe distam past, he recommended rhar Knight give rhe eanderrhal rhe "swarthy ran" complexion "of rhe Italian laborer greatly exposed to the sun." Osborn to Knight, 4 January 1921 [AMNH: file 249e]. Lucas complained on behalf of several of the museum's scientists that the "attitude" of rhe Neanderthal man chipping flint was "posed purely for artistic reasons and nor for mechanical work." Frederic A. Lucas ro Osborn, 26 June 1914 [AMNH: file 249b].

Writing about the reindeer and mammoth mural, Osborn commented: "I desire borh ro be drawn nor after living specimens (either the caribou or the European rangifer) but after the very numerous drawings and paintings of Paleolithic rimes." Osborn to Knight, 8 June 1915 [AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58]. See also Osborn to Knight, 27 September 1915; Knight to Osborn, 15 October 1915, 17 October 1915, 7 November 1915 AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58]; Osborn to Lucas, 26 May 1915, 27 May 1915, 21 October 191 5; Osborn to Knight, 21 October l 91 5; Lucas to Osborn, 26 May 1915; Lucas to Knight, 27 May 1915 [AMNH: file 249b] .

Paleontologist William King Gregory objected to rhe modern-looking feet of Knight's Neanderthal in the frontispiece of Men ofthe Old Stone Age (Osborn 1930). William King Gregory to Osborn, 6 January 1919 [AMNH: Correspondence: Individuals, Charles R. Knight, folder 2] . J . H. McGregor felt rhar Knight's Neanderthal woman in the mural looked too European. Osborn to Knight, 4 January 1921 [AMNH: file 249e].

20. Rainger 1991, p. 169.

2r. Knight was paid $5 500 and $15 00 respectively for the mammoth and mastodon murals, borh of which were approximately 9 feet by 50 feet. He received $4000 each for the other animal murals, which were smaller (4 by 25 feet), and$ 3000 for the Stone Age men pictures. The differences in paymems reflected revisions Knight undertook at the museum's request.

George Sherwood to Knight, 26 June 1918; Osborn to Morgan, 7 August 1918; Osborn to Frederic Lucas, 28 December 1920; memo about Knight murals, 28 December 1920 [AMNH: file 249].

22. According to Frederic Lucas, both Henry Goddard and Nels C. Nelson (the museum's principal archeologisr) agreed that "if the cave man wore any clothes, he did it for warmth and nor for modesty.... The loin cloth is of much later development on the path towards civilization and we none of us thought that the cave man should be attired in ir." Frederic A. Lucas ro Osborn, 26 June 1914 [AMNH: file 249b].

Henry Breuil, rhe preeminent authority of the day on paleolithic art, had written to Osborn that there was no reason to assume rhar rhe Cro-Magnon wore skins,

60

Knighr responded w Osborn concerning rhe Neanderrhal murals: "I shall, of course, look up my dara mosr rhoroughly and rhen draw my men carefully from Living models." "Of course," he indicated: my resrorarions will differ from those of any other person's. Fifry men working from the same dare will arrive at different results and in the matter of prehisroric men there can be no "final" word on chem from any one person ....

My restoration of rhe Neanderthal man will nor be like Dr. McGregor's as I can nor, by a careful study of the skull, agree with him in his resrorarion of the face. In my opinion it is coo human, the gaze coo concentrated for rhe type .... Upon a subject upon which so lirrle is known, every man who has made it a study is perfectly right in resroring rhe head as it appeals whim.

Knight w Osborn, 3 February 1919 [AM H, DVP: box 51, file 58].

25. Lucas wrore of the murals rhar "they are purely matters of conjecture, no matter how arrisric they may be, and as they throw no light upon primitive man and can illustrate his habits only in a conjectural way, it seems w me best nor w show them in connection with that hall." Lucas w Osborn, 26 June 1914 [AMNH: file 2-49b].

26. Responding w one of several efforts by Osborn w have his murals reviewed by an artists' advisory committee, Knight wrore Osborn: I am rather confused ... as w rhe purpose for which you are holding the meeting and feel that possibly you will enlighten me a lirrle further upon rhe subject. In any case, of course, I shall feel that all the arrisrs in question are merely confreres in rhe same field and as such I should be most happy w meet them. As a committee, however, or as critics of my work in any way, it would be quire our of rhe question.

You will I know realize the importance of this point w me as you undoubtedly know when an artist works under the direction of other artists rhar the work does nor rank as an original pro ducrion, rhe artists would be merely carrying our ocher men's ideas. For this reason if for no other you will readily see that in all my work for the Museum my own ideas from an artistic srandpoim are the only ones ro which I can sub scribe and rhar I must respectfully refuse all sug gestions by my fellow arrists which do not coin cide with these ideas.

Knight w Osborn, 15 Nov. 1919 [AMNH, DVP: box 5I, file 58].

Writing in the afrermarh of the advisory committee meeting, in which the group recommended changes in the composition, and in the proportion of the bull mammoth and the reindeer herd in rhe mammoth and reindeer mural, Knight responded: I shall be glad, as a fellow artist, w hear any remarks which Mr. [Will] Low and Mr. [Edwin] Blashfield make about my decoration. Ar rhe same rime, I shall, of course, reserve the privilege of accepring or rejecring any suggestions which they may possibly offer. This decoration is my own work and I can nor consent now w do it under any one's direction any more that [sic] I could in the beginning, when I told you rhar such a thing would be emirely our of rhe question.

If I accepted everyone's suggestion what a hodge podge in arr we would have! For every artist, no matter how high his standing, would have various different personal opinions and it will have w be assumed, in this case, that my opinion is of equal importance w rhar of any one else.

Every artist has w do his own work according ro his own ideas and nor according w those of other people. Although you will remember rhar our agreement was that afrer the small sketch had been decided upon that there were w be no changes made upon the large canvas, I am willing w make any minor ones rhar you suggest, bur it would be impossible, of course, w make any important ones without materially changing the composition, which would necessitate an entirely new idea.

Knight w Osborn, 3 February 1916; see also Osborn w Knight, 1 February 1916 [both AMNH: file 249c].

"Comperent judges" in Knight w Osborn, 7 January 1921 [AMNH: file 249e]; Knight w Osborn, 19 February 1916 [AMNH: file 249c]; Knight w Osborn, 7 January 1921 [AMNH: file 249e]; Knight w Osborn, 23 May 1925 [AMNH: Correspondence: Individual, Charles R. Knight]. See also Knight w Osborn, 15 Ocrober 1915, 7 November 1915, 15 November 1918 [AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58).

27. Knight w Osborn, 21 June 1919 [AMNH: file 249e]; Knighr w Osborn, 15 Ocrober 191 5 [AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58). Knight insisted rhar each ofrhe Hall of Man murals had w be rendered "with an eye w the other decorations which are w go in the same hall. We have in this particular hall the difficult combination of a very northern landscape with a far southern type and it will rake experience and skill in the artistic line w merge these extremes inro an arrisric

effect." Knight to Osborn, 27 January 1916 [AMNH, DVP: box 51, file 58].

Contemporary scholars now dispute the idea that Paleolithic arr wa produced as "Arr," with aesthetic aims in mind, as Osborn conceived of it; paleoanthropologisr Ian Tarrersal does argue, however, that it was Cro-Magnon's capacity to produce "arr" and symbolic artifacts that linked them ro modern Homo sapiens and distinguished them from other human ancestors like Homo neanderthalis. Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York, 1998). See also Tim Appenzeller, ''Arr: Evolution or revolution?" and Constance Holden, "How much like us were the Neanderthals?" in Science 282 (1998), pp. 1451-54, 1456. "Skull may alter experts' view of human descent's branches," New York Times, 22 March 2001: pp. A 1, 10.

28. Knight to Osborn, 7 November 1915; Osborn to Knight, 22 January 1916, Osborn to Knight, 2 May 1916 [AMNH, DVP: all in box 51, file 58].

In the back and forth berween Osborn and Knight over the derails, composition, and color of the mammoth and reindeer murals, Osborn wrote, in response to Knight's refusals to make changes: Your letter is a very great disappointment to me - Ir shows that the highest, the best, and the most kindly and friendly criticism and suggestion ... has no influence upon you.

Mammoths rwelve to thirteen feet high and reindeer as large as rhe wapiti elk - may look beautifully in a stare capital building, bur in a Museum our murals must also conform to the truth of nature because they bear rhe official stamp of approval of the Museum .... In rhe development of your arr, you are relying more upon your imagination, without being conscious of it - and less upon direct studies from nature.

Osborn to Knight, 7 February 1916; see also Knight to Osborn, 19 February 1916; Osborn to Lucas, 2 May 1916 [AM H: all in file 249c]; Osborn to Knight, 6 January 1919, 20 October 1919, 24 May 1920 [AMNH: file 249d].

30. Experts like Abbe Henri Breuil (author of a monograph on the cave paintings) advised that nudity was probably more accurate. Moreover, nudity enabled Knight to display rhe Cro-Magnon's superior physique compared to the "peculiar standing posture" of the Neanderthal. Breuil to Osborn, 27 January 1919 [Knight Papers: box 1, folder 3] . "Peculiar standing posture" in Osborn 1920, p. 236.

3 1. "Each man muse be in a pose natural to wild men, without chairs, who are accustomed to damp or stony ground, and therefore squat, or kneel on a rough piece of skin. Omit women from the CroMagnon picture entirely, and do not make the poses too classical or too artistic." Osborn to Knight, 28 July 1919 [AMNH: Correspondence: Individuals, Charles R. Knight, file 2].

29.

The strongest proof of the unity of heredity as displayed in the dominant Cro-Magnon race in Europe from early Aurignacian until the close of Magdalenian rimes is the unity of their arr impulse. This indicates a unity of mind and of spirit. Ir is something which could nor pass to them from another race, like an industrial invention, bur was inborn and creative. These people were the Paleolithic Greeks; artistic observation and representation and a true sense of proportion and of beauty were instinct with them from the beginning... . their arr shows a continuous evolution and development from first to last, animated by a single motive, namely, the appreciation of the beauty of form and rhe realistic representation of it.

Osborn 1930, pp. 315- 16. See also idem., Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory ofM an (Princeton, 1927), pp. 80-1 00, in which he explores rhe ecological factors that might have influenced the development of the extraordinary "inventive faculties" of the Paleolithic cave-dwellers.

31. Osborn 1920, p. 316.

33. There was, in face, an intriguing precedent for Knight's conception of rhe evolurionary development of artistic cultivation "from barbarism to civilization."

As early as 1869, rhe painters Albert Biersradr and William H. Beard had formulated a plan for a metropolitan arr museum that would have competed with the Metropolitan Museum of Arr and rhe Museum of Natural History for rhe same Manhattan Square locale on which the American Museum of arural History was ultimately built. According to Beard's plans, the "Keep" museum (named for Henry Keep, whose arr treasures were to have formed rhe core collection) would include a subterranean entranceway leading in from Central Park; "colossal stone figures" of Ignorance and Superstition, and "grotesque antediluvian animals" would guard rhe passageways, to symbolize the "rude origin of arr" and the obstacles that had to be overcome on the pathway to beauty and cul-

62

ture. It seems quire probable that Osborn and Knight were aware of the Beard plans, although the extant correspondence gives no indication of it. See "An american museum of art: The designs submitted by Wm. H. Beard," Scribner's 2 (August i871), p. 413.

Quotation "from barbarism to civilization" in The New York Herald, cited in Robert McCracken Peck, "William Holbrook Beard, 1824- 1900," Magazine Antiques 146: no. 5 (Nov. 1994), p. 695.

Knight no doubt was also aware of the contrasting example of one-time Bronxville neighbor Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, whose mural Primitive Woman adorned the Woman's Building of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. MacMonnies, however, represented "primitive" women laboring during an arcadian golden age; her interpretation, inspired by rhe work of Frenchman Puvis de Chavannes, reAecred borh rhe narrower scope of paleoanthropological knowledge in rhe early l 89os, and rhe prevalence of an aesthetically (rather rhan paleontologically) inAecred conception of "rhe primitive" as "rhe decorative" in rurn-of-rhe-century arrisric circles. On MacMonnies's mural, see Carolyn Kinder Carr and Sally Webster, "Mary Cassarr and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies: The search for their 1893 murals," American Art (Winter 1994), p.

53-69.

34. Charles R. Knight, "Mural paintings of prehistoric men and animals by Charles R. Knight," Scribner's 71 (March 1922), p. 282.

35. Osborn 192.0, p. 235; Knight 1922, p. 282.

36. Osborn described rhe Neolithic Srag Hunters as rhe "progenitors of contemporary man in Europe," who "introduced a new culture of polished stone and crude porrery, relied on dogs to help rhem capture rheir prey," and "either absorbed or displaced rheir upper Paleolirhic predecessors. " According to O sborn's description, rhey have "thrown off their fur garments" after "rhe ardor of rhe chase." They were, he continued, "a powerfully built people wirh brown or fair hair and narrow heads - closely related to rhe existing peoples of Scandinavia. The rigorous climate," he noted, "lirrle encouraged rhe fine arrs, bur promoted endurance, tribal loyalty, and rhe rudiments of family life. " Osborn 1920, p. 237.

37 . Osborn 1920, p. 237.

38. Knighr 1922, p. 283.

39. Knight found a much more congenial working atmosphere and reception of his work ar rhe Field Museum of atural History in Chicago, for whom he

produced rwenry-eighr evocative and pictorially nuanced murals of prehistoric life ( r 926-30). Osborn to Knight, r8 February r927 [AMNH: file 1262 (1927)]; Knight ro Osborn, 12 January 1927; memo of lo February 1927 [AMNH: file 1262 (1927)]; Knight to Osborn, 30 July 1928; Osborn to Sherwood, 16 August 1928, Annie Hardcastle Knight to Osborn, 14 November r928, Osborn to Annie Knight, 21 December 1928 [AMNH: all in file 12.62d (1928)]; Osborn to Sherwood, 29 July 1929; Knight to Sherwood, 12 November r929; Osborn to Knight, 27 November 1929 [AMNH: file l 262c]; Osborn to Annie Knight, 17 March 1930, 25 June 1930; Annie Knight to Osborn 28 April 1930, 24 June 1930; Knight to Osborn, 3 May l 930; Osborn to Knight, l 2 May 1930 [AMNH: file 12.62 (1930)]; Knight to Osborn, 9 May 1928 [Knight Papers: box l, file 5].

Cities, Excursions into Nature, and Late-Century Landscapes Elizabeth Johns HAT IS THE RELATION oflandscape painting in the latter part of the nineteenth century to citizens' experiences of nature? Art historians have tended to analyze these landscapes through the lenses of style, influence, development of individual artists, patronage group, and regional promotion. We have invoked such stylistic categories as "tonalism" and "Impressionism," looked at individual artists' gradual loosening of style (as in the work of William Merritt Chase, for instance), traced influences from the Barbizon artists in France, noted such artists' change of subjects as Homer's turn from land to sea, identified the social class associated with the various resort areas to which artists' patrons Bocked - the elite and upper classes' attraction to the Isle of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast, for example, and the middle and lower middle classes' trips to Long Branch, New Jersey - and assessed the popularity of New England as a locus of old-fashioned values. The insights that these approaches have brought us enable us to look now at landscapes as products of a shared understanding between artists and viewers that evoked their experiences of natural settings. Artists and viewers alike, I suggest, were caught up in "using" nature, and they participated in common rituals of verbal and visual vocabulary to anticipate, interpret, and remember their experiences.

Landscapes are demanded by and produced for a population that is urban. From about 1860 in American cities, especially in the Northeast, where so many carried out their business and domestic lives, citizens reaped the economic and social advantages of ambitious and fast-paced living that cities provided. However, they suffered under the ills of this heightened intensity and criticized the artificiality of urban living. They yearned to spend time in places they identified as "natural." Using the extensive train and tramway systems that were developed out from cities, they flooded natural areas that provided beauty and comfort. They used these cherished spots to enhance what they did in the city through the complementarity of what they could do only in the countryside. Some built year-round residences in rural localities so that they could enjoy "country living." Still others were able to spend several weeks or even entire summers away from the city. Others, lower on the economic totem pole, left the city on day excursions on Saturdays or Sundays. This phenomenon took place not only in the United States, but in Australia, to a lesser extent in Canada, and in Britain. I focus my attention here on examples from the United States and Australia.

W

Artists even more than "ordinary" citizens sought the refreshment of nature, for in their trips away from the city they could anticipate painting the landscape as a business enterprise. Such paintings appealed to a wide range of viewers; this is evident in the variety of styles that characterize late-century landscapes. Less well-traveled viewers, likely to be of the middle classes, preferred easily identifiable realistic depictions; more affluent patrons, who considered themselves cosmopolitan because of their knowledge of European painting, liked tonalist and Impressionist styles. Yet as people, artists shared experience with a wide swath of urban citizens, enjoying common ground in their relishing of the compensatory and regenerative experience that nature offered. I make the fulcrum of my analysis certain of nature's functions for artists and viewers that is, the utility that they gave to their experiences - so that we can see the delight in the non-urban outdoors as a common thread that unified many citizens of the period and that ties them to us as well.

Nature served a number of functions that seem to have fueled landscapes from the l 830s into the l 86os. We have associated the rise oflandscape painting with the rise of tourism in regions up the Hudson River from New York and as far west as Niagara.

Artists registered the popularity of visits to wilderness sites in such images as Alvin Fisher's Niagara Falls (1820; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), and Thomas Cole's KaaterskiLL Falls (1826; Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa). Yet an earlier shared experience of nature was citizens' confidence that the land was receptive to growing communities. Patrons and artists celebrated this reciprocity between nature and human settlement as early as the landscape by Thomas Birch, Fairmount "Waterworks ( l 82l; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). Birch noted the several types of activity on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River that had led prominent citizens to boast of the city as the ''Athens of the West": commerce on the river, tourism in the steamboat, a modern water-supply system in the waterworks, classically inspired architecture housing the waterworks, and gentlemen's estates and parks on the hills in the background.

This hospitality of nature to development was a dimension that artists and patrons continued to celebrate as Americans moved westward. A prominent example is John Mix Stanley's Oregon City on the Willamette River (1848; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth). This image is not only a clarion celebration of the new settlement's congenial environment, but (in the observing figures in the left foreground) assurance that the native Americans had been evicted from the land.

As settlement developed in the Northeast, artists and fellow citizens began to puzzle about whether development would out-pace nature's capacity both to be hospitable and to remain herself. Many came to see the essential characteristic of American nature as wilderness, a quality they did not identify with debasement (as their predecessors had) but instead with spiritual and political nourishment. Untouched wilderness represented America's difference from the decadent civilizations of Europe, where nature everywhere gave evidence of earlier, failed civilizations. The question of the fate of the wilderness after settlement led to such pictures as Thomas Cole's Schroon Mountain in

the Adirondacks (1833; Cleveland Museum of Art), in which Cole suppressed the evidence of settlers that he had found in his sketches so as to preserve the pristine appearance of the wilderness. Some citizens had begun to express anxiety about the long-term implications of the destruction of wilderness, a question that Sanford Gifford seems to raise in Twilight on Hunter Mountain (1866; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), in which tree stumps across the foreground of the picture work with the declining time of day in the background to convey a state of nature that can never be reclaimed. Yet, the open land seemed to beckon with endless promise. Most Americans longed to pinpoint a meaning of the national community in relation to a land that was uniquely wild and at the same time invited exploitation. This ideology was especially powerful in the lure of the great West, where awaited an exotic nature that might yield a fortune in minerals. Such was the subject matter again and again of Albert Bierstadt. His Rocky Mountains (fig. 5 5) and Bridal Veils, Yosemite (1871-73; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh), celebrated the unusual beauties that drew settlers westward with high hopes of profit and a new life. These hopes for economic success notwithstanding, the motif that we take as representative of nature's meaning for most Americans before the Civil War is presented by Asher B. Durand, in his Kindred Spirits (fig. 56) - the claim that the wilderness was in some way divine, an open book for citizens to read if they would be as sensitive as the poet and the artist. If nature was divine, then, of course, our nation could be, too, in all its undertakings.

The years immediately after the Civil War saw a clear shift in proportions. Whereas earlier, nature was primary and the collective community was secondary - mere recent arrivals trying to make sense of themselves in an environment - after the War nature became secondary, and the collectivity primary. Although citizens gave lip service to the ideal of the yeoman farmer and the nobility of self-sustaining farming because the farmer was a "natural" figure, the meanings of human activity were centered in the city, economically, politically, and socially.

Yet, such activity did not satisfy. With increasing intensity, nature became a talisman for urban citizens - as an experience and as an idea. It assuaged at least two hungers that they felt acutely: an emotional hunger for a slower pace and serenity, and their sensuous hunger for immersion in a world of earth and wind and vegetation that salved the sensuous deprivation of urban life. They traveled into nature to seek these comforts, and artists painted landscapes that registered the experience and encouraged viewers to participate in it, both in actuality and in their imagination. I see these hungers addressed and satisfied in four kinds of travel experiences registered in pictures.

Although these experiences overlap, they have a significant chronological sequence.

First, "nature" served as a stage for the display of city sophistication. The most popular venue for this function was conspicuously the shore. At resorts on the sea and at beaches popular for day trips, the sea refreshed in its fragrance and breezes. It had unending freshness in its vastness and unknowability. Yet, in journalism, fiction, and pictures, the sea does not work a direct sensual magic for these visitors so much as it

66

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, r 863. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIG . 5 5.

FIG. 56.

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, r 849. Oil on canvas. C ollection of the N ew York Public Library.

FIG. 57.

Winslow Homer, Long Branch, New jersey, 1869. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts,

Bosron.

FIG. 58. Charles Conder, A Holiday at Mentone, r 888. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of Somh Auscralia, Adelaide.

....2& ..

...-Li

rot ...

...

!Tl L- l '\.

68

provides a pleasant alternative venue for urban-rooted entertainment. In the limited strip of beach on which activities could take place, the shore permitted distinct types of clothing, which declared that the arena allowed, even justified, socially calculating behavior. In American painting, this phenomenon first appears most notably in the work of Winslow Homer, himself an avid visitor to various shore resorts. In his Long Branch, New jersey (fig. 57), Homer delighted in young women's display of themselves not only as fashion plates, but as fully in command of the social scene. The two young women in the front stand apart, looking across the crowd on the beach out of the picture to the left, as though waiting to find the right partners for flirtation. Further in the distance, three young women link arms as they move through the holiday crowd. In his High Tide: The Bathers (1870; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Homer holds up for thoughtful viewing women's outrageous bathing costumes, the near frightfulness of which when wet is registered by the startled reaction of the small dog who watches them. Samuel S. Carr, in his Beach Scene (1879; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton), caught the much broader phenomenon of the hard-packed sand serving as a platform for the promenade of children, governesses, older gentlemen, and courting couples. In Australia, Charles Conder, in his picture A Holiday at Mentone (fig.

58), of a beach resort that had recently been developed near Melbourne, put before the viewer a scene loaded with the innuendo of sexual awareness. A young woman having staked out a prominent place on the beach attends to her sketching to camouflage her interest in the elegant man behind her (just as conspicuously, she has let her parasol be carried off by the wind to a spot on the sand where it waits to be noticed and returned), and the gentleman in turn studiedly poses as he looks out to sea. Nature, then, was a backdrop for the theater of middle-class urban gentility. It was a stage set for a drama played out briefly in costumes readied off-stage.

Nature also provided a corrective for city failings, a function quite different from the one just discussed, that of serving as a display of city sophistication. When nature becomes physician, city manners and dress are put aside so that "nature,'' whatever it is, can do some repair work on the psyche and body. It slowed the pace of the visitors; it insisted that they notice it for its own sake. In this function in nineteenth-century cultural practice and pictures, nature was an active force - an essential auxiliary to city life and to health in its own quickly absorbed qualities of regeneration and refreshment.

This nature was typically forest or woods. Often even here, however, especially for the lower middle classes, "nature" had only a brief time to work her miracles. In the "Rush to the Adirondacks," for instance, set off in 1869 by clergyman William Murray's book Adventures in the Wilderness, citizens of all stripes headed up the Hudson for quick recovery. They jammed stagecoaches for the river boats, and once they reached the mountains for a three- or four-day stay, they metamorphosed from exhausted, pale Wall Street types to country "hayseeds." Women, more decorous by nature, took seriously the opportunity to walk mountain paths even in the long dresses in style, as in Homer's In the Mountains (1877; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York).

And there were mountain citizens who had lessons to teach. These woodsmen were typically city people who had long since fled urban life to take up a more "authentic" life in the wilderness. In such watercolors as Adirondack Guide (1894; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Old Friends (1894; Worcester Art Museum), Homer paralleled the endurance of a venerable nature with experienced and respectful humanity, guides who served as moral exemplars to urban sportsmen and their wives. The men in Homer's Two Guides (1875; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) embody the authenticity of such country people, whose knowledge of woodcraft and judgment about nature inspired urban citizens exhausted from the artificial cycles of the urban economic and social scene. That the men in this painting are from different generations was part of the reassurance that Adirondack experience offered visitors, that nature provided continuity between past, present, and future. Although city people dwelled in the utmost peril of the economic and social world turning upside down in a moment, sturdy men of the wilderness, Homer's picture proclaimed, were rooted in the enduring cycles of nature.

The most vigorous work of nature in offering repair, and of humanity in responding to the opportunity, took place in the challenging, even forebidding environment of the remote West. There dust and temperature extremes put urban character to the test.

The muscular fitness and bravado of western characters gave urbanites outdoor parallels to their own battles in the boardrooms. Some, like Theodore Roosevelt, traveled west for the actual experience. Artists like Frederic Remington, knowing the hunger of their urban viewers, painted pictures and made illustrations for those who could only dream. These landscapes showed an almost hostile nature in which the western characters demonstrated their manliness in the midst of hardship - their ability to use their bodies well in ways that urban professions did not demand, indeed, even made irrelevant. In Remington's Aiding a Comrade (fig. 59), for instance, male camaraderie was a model for East Coast behavior, and in Australia, Tom Roberts's A Breakaway! (fig. Go), the hardy and ever-alert sheepherder worked with skills deemed lost in city life. In both countries, this manliness and competence of a working class could be imaginatively absorbed by middle- and upper-class viewers who studied the pictures long enough. In this group of pictures, then, nature offered alternatives to urban artificiality. Even if experienced briefly, these alternatives worked to repair frazzled nerves.

In its third function during the late years of the century, "nature" served as "home. " This aspect of nature's meaning was sensuous and earthy. Visitors and artists and viewers rooted themselves in nature, an earthiness they sometimes merely imagined, but always in physical terms. They felt embraced by this nature in its full concreteness, as though they belonged in it permanently, not somewhere else. Artists painted landscapes of the seasons, the evidence of which was often so slight in the cities. The miracles of the shifting flora, colors, temperature, and moisture of the natural cycle brought forth such pictures as John Twachtman's Spring Morning (fig. 61), painted in Connecticut, and William M erritt Chase, Fairy Tale (1892; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J.

70

FIG. 59. Frederic Remington, Aiding a Comrade, ca. 1890. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston.

Tom Roberts, A Breakaway!, 1891. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

FIG. 60.

71

FIG. 61. John Twachtman, A Spring Morning, ca. 1890-1900. Oil on canvas. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

FIG. 62. George Inness, Home at Montclair, l 892. Oil on canvas.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamsrown.

FIG. 63. Walter Withers, Early Morning, Heidelberg, 1898. Oil on canvas, on composition board. Arr Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

72

Horowitz), a picture of a bright summer day's excursion. In Australia, Charles Conder celebrated the warmth with All on a Summer's Day (1888), and Tom Roberts with Summer Morning Tiff ( l 89 l; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, Australia). The last three of these pictures placed women, symbols of high civilization at its most virtuous and refined, in a nature that somehow completed, rather than simply complemented, their identity. The artists integrated person, costume, activity, and atmosphere - all are physical, all partake in the inflecting light and in turn produce that light.

Artists knowingly used the term "home" in many of their pictures. For a wide market, for instance, George Inness painted scenes of "home" at Montclair over at least twenty years, such as his Home at Montclair (fig. 62). Those who could afford it established alternative homes, or at least regular vacations, in small villages, especially in the valleys of New England. In rural communities they were absorbed even for only a few days in the daily life they found there. Artists reminded viewers of the old country ways of doing things, such as the squatness and old wood of carpenter-built homes, as in J. Alden Weir's The Laundry, Branchville (ca. l 894; Weir Farm Heritage Trust, Inc.).

Theodore Robinson touched a deep chord in picturing the small community in West River Valley, Townshend, Vermont ( l 89 5; private collection). Willard Metcalf's The Cornish Hills (191 l; Thomas Wand Ann M. Barwick) comforted his viewers with the stillness of a community deep in snow. The Australian artist Walter Withers appealed to his viewers' (and his own) desire to feel embraced by nature. In his Early Morning, Heidelberg (fig. 63), this nature hosts a village that can be lived in comfortably- grasped easily as a whole, it provides reassurance that life is manageable, that the bleak Australian continent could sustain cordial communities.

In this emphasis on community, so associated with "natural" life, artists hailed the virtues of old-fashioned tools and labor, as did ] . Alden Weir, in Midday Rest in New England (1897; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). In other pictures, artists heralded tourists' opportunities to taste the humble physical work in nature that was associated with "home." Visitors to villages in rural New England and upstate New York and to small seaside towns such as Gloucester participated in humble country work as though they actually lived there, and found themselves refreshed by the simplicity of the work and the sensory experience of sun, wind, and fragrance. And accordingly, artists chose their subjects and their styles in order to recover at least temporarily urbanites' desires to immerse themselves in the physical world. Homer's pictures of tourists' children berrypicking in Gloucester, in which we can practically feel the breeze and the warm sun, show the thoughtful peace that this activity was believed to provide.

In Eastman Johnson's Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (fig. 64) women soak up the warmth of sunlight on their backs and shoulders as they stand in the cranberry bogs. Orchards were a favorite subject, as in Theodore Robinson's In the Orchard (Museum of Art, Princeton University), with all their pleasant associations for visitors of small trees, pale and fragrant blossoms, and luscious fruit. Another sensuous experience was flower gardening, as in Childe Hassam's Celia Thaxter in Her Garden (1892;

73

FIG . 64. Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Harvest. Island ofNantucket, I88o. The Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of An, San Diego.

FIG. 65. Clara Southern, An Old Bee Farm, ca.

Melbourne, Australia.

1900.

74

Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria,

FIG.

66. Thomas Eakins, Mending the Nets, r88r. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

FIG. 67 . John Frederic Kensett, Coast Scene with Figures (Beverly Shore), r 869. Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, H artford.

FIG.

68 . John Twachcman, Icebound, ca. r 889. Oil on canvas. T he Arc Institute of Chicago.

75

FIG. 69 . Winslow H omer, On a Lee Shore, Providence.

1900.

Oil on canvas. M useum of Art, Rhode Island School of D esign,

National Museum of American Art, Washington), in which viewers could sense the breeze, feel the dirt on their hands, and imagine the aromas of this cultivated patch of wildflowers. In Australia, beekeeping was lovingly depicted by Clara Southern in An Old Bee Farm (fig. 65). Thomas Eakins's Mending the Nets (fig. 66) makes nearly palpable the dampness along the shore of the Delaware River. Even the more sophisticated and expensive pleasures such as sailing restored habitues to the physical world. John Twachtman's Sailing in the Mist (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) plunges both subject and viewer into the elements - moisture, the breeze, the sounds of the gently moving water, blazing light.

Beekeeping, berrypicking, gathering fruit from an orchard, gardening, fishing these immersed one in sound, in touch, in color, as well as in the creatures and cycles of nature. Not as vigorous as plowing, planting, and harvesting, these activities required skill, but more importantly, special knowledge of nature herself in her more complex, even delicate manifestations. Pictures of seasons, of blooming Rowers and trees, and of the earthiness of natural work, tied viewers, as had the experiences themselves, to their human genesis as creatures of clay. The meaning of nature that citizens and artists began to sense in landscapes in the last of the century seems at first glance to have brought them full circle to the faith of their forebears. For nature again pointed to the transcendent. For many artists and viewers in the increasingly secular late-century climate, nature in its mysterious workings was a clear sign of the Creator's presence in the world.

To probe this faith, artists and their viewers once again turned to the shore, and this time nature was no mere stage set. It was a symbol and it was a reality; it was evidence of what humanity could not know directly. Yet this allusion to transcendence was not the confident reading of matter so characteristic earlier in the century in such pictures as Durand's Kindred Spirits. Instead, in its increasingly recognized physical complexity, "Nature" pointed to the mystery of creation, and human beings dropped out of the landscape except as humble and even only implied viewers. Solitude and silence became integral to scenes of an empty or near-empty shore. In the 186os and 70s, Stanley Haseltine and Alfred Bricher painted scene after scene of a deserted New England coast, as in Bricher's Time and Tide (1873; Dallas Art Museum). In 1869, John Frederic Kensett, in Coast Scene with Figures (Beverly Shore) (fig. 67), had cherished the Massachusetts shore with his picture of a lone figure looking out into the ocean.

Later in the century, John Twachtman's series of snow pictures, such as his Winter Harmony (1892- 1900; National Gallery of Art, Washington), present nature as a virtually sacred unity - as physical in its integration of whites and moisture, water and earth - mystical and unknowable. Twachtman spoke of his Icebound (fig. 68) as "all nature is hushed to silence" as though the Creator might be heard if one listened carefully enough.

The most powerful expressions of artists' and viewers' absorption with the implications of the sea were the pictures in the late century by Winslow Homer. In the 189os, Homer pushed the viewer to the very edge of the land, to ponder the ocean's implica-

77

tions. With pictures of the "mysterious deeps" breaking against the cliffs of Prout's Neck right in front of his home, Homer depicted currents and waves, froth and rock ledges through the most physical of paint, placing the viewer both before and within the mystery. In West Wind ( r 89 r; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover), viewers join the watching woman in pondering this mystery. In On a Lee Shore (fig. 69), viewers both observe and experience the peril of the schooner subject to the winds and currents. And in West Point, Prout's Neck ( r 900; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), viewers become one with the ongoing action of nature - the ceaseless tides, the erosion of the rocks, and the rising and the setting of the sun.

Nature was no longer an arena; it had become a window into the unknowable.

Tourism and resort visiting, berrypicking and fishing, activities of material knowledge, had been succeeded by mystery, the mystery of nature's - and our - origins and destiny.

How the Canyon Became Grand Stephen J Pyne

THE CANYON has not always been grand. One of the first great marvels of the New World to be discovered by Europeans, what we now call the Grand Canyon, was one of the last to become marvelous. Spanish explorers probed the Colorado River before mariners discovered the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, or the Columbia.

The Coronado expedition peered over the South Rim in 1540, or 13 8 years before Louis Hennepin saw Niagara Falls and 293 years before Joseph Walker's party rode through the Yosemite. But for Captain Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, the gorge was more an absence than a presence and something for which perspective was utterly lacking. A party scrambling over the rim reported incredulously that what appeared as small boulders were actually taller than the great tower at Seville. For 317 years afterwards the Canyon was a place to avoid, or if seen, to dismiss. Even fur trappers-turned-guides steered expeditions away from the gorge. The Canyon made no point, and none existed from which to view it. 1 The fact is, the Grand Canyon was not so much revealed as created. The outcome was neither obvious nor inevitable. Popular instincts argued that river-dashed gorges were hazards, not adventures, and that immense chasms were geographic gaps, not gorgeous panoramas. A generation of intellectuals labored to instruct the public otherwise.

They interpreted erosion-molded buttes as natural architecture and sculpture, as the coliseums, temples, and statuary of an inspired Nature; they made folded blocks of crust into notebooks from the experimental laboratories of the Earth; they rendered the etched strata of hard sandstone and friable shale into landscape frescoes and bas-reliefs of geologic antiquity. They made rocky rims beckon instead of frighten, shaped limestone-fractured peninsulas into focal points for a perspective on Earth time instead of overlooks into voids. They elevated a ride through the gorge into the status of a national rite of passage. Until such transformations - until, in brief, the Canyon became a national monument as rich with cultivated meaning as a Saint Peter's Basilica or a Crystal Palace - it was shunned. But once endowed with significance, like a rough diamond cut and placed under light, it dazzled, and America declared it beyond price.

How this happened is curious; that it happened at all, improbable. The valorization of the Canyon came as suddenly and as unexpectedly as the Canyon's rim. No one anticipated it as they might a mountain sighted on the horizon or a river winding to its source. There was no folk presence that could be gradually distilled into meaning.

There would be no scholarly spading of cultural humus, no weeding of ideas and harvesting of sensibilities sown long before. There were no precedents to serve as esthetic

79

beacons, the way the Rhine could for the Hudson River or the Alps for the Rockies.

The Grand Canyon, as Clarence Dutton noted in 1882, is "a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery, and in our conceptions of the grandeur, beauty, and power of nature." 2 It was like nothing else. It demanded an understanding not easily transferred from other places and an esthetics so alien from prevailing landscape traditions that it might as well have come from the moons of Jupiter. "If any of these stupendous creations had been planted upon the plains of central Europe," Dutton observed, "it would have influenced modern art as profoundly as Fusiyama has influenced the decorative art of]apan."3 But it wasn't, and didn't. Instead meaning required an act of deliberate intellectual invention.

Without that collective feat of imagination the Canyon would likely have joined the throngs of forgotten and dismissed landscapes that litter the surface of the earth, a geographic freak, a landscape curiosity rather than a cultural oracle. It would continue to be the Big, not the Grand, Canyon. But the improbable happened, thanks primarily to four men, two of them - John Wesley Powell and Clarence Dutton - both once and present military officers who explored as self-trained geologists and adventurers, two of them - Thomas Moran and William Henry Holmes - painters who accompanied them; all of them in one way or another artists. With the rush of their ideas, the Grand Canyon cut a swath through the landscape of American history no less unique and grandiloquent than that which the Colorado River had excavated out of the Kaibab Plateau. How rim and river intersected remains a geologic mystery; how the place and its poets came together endures as something of an intellectual miracle. But a suitable perspective for viewing both exists along the Canyon's North Rim where a long peninsula narrows to a place Dutton named Point Sublime.

The contact of Big Canyon with American civilization began in earnest in the late 185 os. Through the medium of the Mexican War, Manifest Destiny had transferred the land to the United States, a country eager to substitute its abundant natural wonders for its relative poverty of cultural ones. Landscape arr grew in vogue; the bigger the canvas the better. Literature swarmed with travelogues and the personal narratives of explorers. What William H. Goetzmann has termed a Second Great Age of Discovery washed over the Far West along with the other frontiers of European imperialism, and sent back a tidal wave of information that forced new sciences into existence. 4 Geography struggled to cope with the proliferation of revealed places and peoples, while geology grappled with the terra nova of earth time as the calculated age of the earth accelerated a million-fold. The tools of appreciation that Cardenas had lacked, explorers now carried in their pack trains. Political unrest in Utah supplied the final catalyst that sent the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers into the gorge.

The 1857-5 8 expedition under Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives launched the Canyon's heroic age when it sent a steamboat up the Colorado River to measure the limits of navigation. They found it when the craft rammed into rocks near Black Canyon. The expedition then divided, one group returning down river, the other tramping twice from the

80

rim into the western Canyon. Ives declared the landscape "altogether valueless" for transport, farming, or settlement. "Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greatest portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed." 5 The expedition's scientific corps saw it otherwise. Heinrich Mi.illhausen painted scenes and collected specimens; F. W von Egloffstein mapped and sketched exaggerated, gothic landscapes, the first to reveal, through art, the character of the scenery. But John Strong Newberry, the expedition's physician and naturalist, recognized that the exotic landsculpturing and gorges were geologic texts, a kind of revealed scripture for Nature. Important lessons resided in the rocks. A year after the expedition, Charles Darwin published his Origin ofSpecies and the question of earth time and the place of humanity within natural history gave a significance to such scenes beyond their capacity to carry steamboats and grow melons.

Still, broken by the Civil War, it took another decade before someone rushed to the scene. In l 869, John Wesley Powell completed the exploration of the river by boating down the Colorado from Green River, Wyoming, and became a national celebrity.

Then he repeated most of the journey in l 871-72. The Colorado's canyons became a vehicle to fame. The Army counterattacked with an Ives-inspired expedition under Lt. George Wheeler in l 871, outfitted with a Newberry protege, Grove Karl Gilbert. (In his search for an attention-grabbing spectacular, Wheeler also directed his corps across Death Valley in July. One of their guides passed out from the heat and had to be thrown over a mule like a dusty rug. At mid-crossing Gilbert entered a single word into his diary: "Breeze.") 6 His stunts brought more ridicule than acclaim. In following Ives up the river the Wheeler Survey literally pushed against the current.

Powell meanwhile commenced a larger survey of the Colorado Plateau. In l 875 he blended his two voyages into one account, The Exploration ofthe Colorado River, a work that has fixed more or less permanently the genre of the river. That same year Powell also acquired both Gilbert, who transferred from the Wheeler Survey, and Capt.

Clarence Dutton, loaned by the War Department. In l 879, Congress consolidated the various western surveys into the U. S. Geological Survey, which quickly dispatched Dutton to what had now become known, after Powell, as the "Grand Canyon." In l 882, Dutton published the Tertiary History ofthe Grand Canon District as the Survey's first monograph.

Like those abrupt reversals of the earth's magnetism, the polarity of perception had suddenly inverted. Within 2 5 years - more exactly l 3 - the heroic age had taken a tangle of gorges and transmuted it into an emblem of our place in the Great Scheme of Things, a scientific Rosetta Stone for decoding earth time, and a proud icon of American nationalism. Serious tourism commenced when the Santa Fe railroad built a spur track to the South Rim in 190 1 and a luxury hotel, the El Tovar, to greet its passengers. Two years later Teddy Roosevelt, then president, declared the Canyon "one of

81

the great sights every American ... should see." 7 What for three centuries even explorers had shunned, tourists now sought out.

The scenery proved to be an acquired taste. First contact had led Lieutenant Ives not to gushing wonderment but to dismissal. Newberry ensured that the Big Canon mattered to geology, but why it should matter to anyone else was less clear. Arguments over the mechanics of Buvial erosion were not the normal fare of national identities.

Besides, there were many canyons along the Colorado; Newberry himself wrote eloquently about some during a later expedition to the junction of the Green and Grand rivers. The American West was chock-a-block with natural marvels, some deeper, some larger, many better scaled for human appreciation, most resonant with the familiar esthetics of mountains and woods, a kind of magnified Hudson River or the Forest of Fontainebleau. Why Big Canon?

The reason is that Powell and Dutton, and their artist alter-egos, Moran and Holmes, bonded the Canyon to larger themes and described the ways by which the place might be seen. Among them, they transformed lands into place and place into symbol, and between them Powell and Dutton defined the two perspectives, rim and river, by which we still view the Canyon today.

The river's was the simpler tale. However hazardous to travel, the Colorado was vastly easier to understand. The story rushes along with its waters. The Exploration of the Colorado River knew no difficulties of dramatic structure. Powell readily exploited a genre that had matured over the preceding century: the Humboldtean explorer plunging into the Great Unknown, the wonders of revealed nature, the Bow of the river supplying, effortlessly, the Bow of narrative. The story begins when the boats launch and ends, many adventures later, when they are finally hauled ashore. Yet there is little to distinguish the Grand Canyon apart from the somberness of its imprisoning gorge and the caliber of its rapids.

Powell himself admitted that the geology had gotten lost amid the whitewater. "All about me are interesting geologic records. The book is open and I can read as I run. All about me are grand views, too, for the clouds are playing again in the gorges. Bur somehow I think of the nine days' rations and the bad river, and the lesson of the rocks and the glory of the scene are but half conceived. " 8 From the twisting gorge, he hardly saw the Canyon. Remove the geology and the story stands. Powell's scientific insights went into the Geology ofthe Uinta Mountains (1876) where the river had sliced open a mountain like a knife through a melon. The Grand Canyon was more complex, too vast to comprehend from the sluice box of the inner gorge.

What Powell's voyage did, however, was to create the circumstances that led to that larger comprehension. Even before he had published the Exploration as a book, he enticed Thomas Moran, fresh from his triumphs at Yellowstone, to paint a portrait of the Canyon, what became the Chasm of the Colorado (fig. 70). The painting was as big (7 feet by 1 2 feet) as Powell's river vision had been constricted. But it was a peculiar Canyon because Moran disdained topographic realism. He rearranged buttes and mesas

FIG. 70. Thomas Moran, Chasm of the Colorado, I 873-74. Smirhsonian American An Museum, Washingron.

William Henry Holmes, Temples and Towers of the Virgin, from rhe Atlas ro rhe Tertiary History ofthe Grand Canon District. Lirhograph, r882.

FIG. 7I.

William Henry Holmes, The Grand Canon at the Foot ofthe Toroweap, from the Atlas Tertiary History ofthe Grand Canon District. Lithograph, 1882.

FIG. 72.

t0

the

7 3. William Henry Holmes, Panorama from Point Sublime, Looking East, from the Atlas to the Tertiary History ofthe Grand Canon District. Lithograph, 1882.

FIG.

as he thought they improved the overall "effect." Art, he emphatically declaimed, is "not Nature." 9 The outcome was stunning: the Chasm was a transcendentalist opera in oils.

Emerson's insistence that words were signs of natural facts, and natural facts only signs of spiritual facts, found perfect expression in Moran's Canyon. Paint replaces words.

The meticulously drawn foreground, so detailed a viewer can identify lichen species on limestone boulders, substitutes for the realm of natural facts. The cloud-filled background of soaring summits and light becomes the world of spiritual fact, no longer lashed to the laws or limitations of topographic or geologic reality but rearranged to convey the larger truths and sublimity of Nature and unified by transcendental mist.

The first nature of things becomes a second nature of spirit. The eye moves from Canyon Gloom to Canyon Glory. Yet for all its painterly grandiloquence the effect can confuse. Moran himself struggled, almost in despair, to find an organizing perspective, could not locate the precise point with which to organize the whole. (Recently a publisher declined to use the Chasm as a cover to a Canyon book because its marketing department couldn't identify the painting with the Canyon.) 1 0 Like Powell, whose Exploration he illustrated with engravings, Moran perceptually viewed the Canyon from its gorge, looked up to eroded mountains rather than down to revealed ravines. Often he had to invent false platforms to position his observers.

In truth, the Grand Canyon was not big because it was deep but because it was also wide. And it wasn't grand because it was huge but because it brought all the special features of the region together in a coherent and visually impressive way. The Colorado River had not alone made the Grand Canyon: its intersection with the Kaibab Plateau had. The view from the rim was as vital as that from the gorge. Until Glen Canyon Dam squeezed the rampage out of the river, fewer than 70 people had boated through the gorge. Tourists in the millions saw the Canyon from the rim. They needed someone to tell them what they were looking at and why it mattered. Though Major Powell announced his intention to write that larger story and had, in Clarence Dutton's words, a "prescriptive right" to do so, he never did. The task fell to Captain Dutton. 1 1 Dutton had a soldier's bearing, a scientist's mind, and an artist's eye, a man who participated in the great events of his day, who shared its cultural quests, who found the temptation irresistible to wander far outside the limits of his "prescribed field. " He had passed through Yale (class of 1860), joined the Connecticut 21st Volunteers, saw some "pretty rough service," and in 1864 transferred to the Ordnance Corps of the regular Army. After the war he began his self-education in geology. In 1871, detailed to Washington, D.C., he quickly "insinuated" himself into the burgeoning scientific clubs and, as he recalled, "cultivated the Survey men and became well acquainted with Powell. " 12 Thanks to Powell's connections with Ulysses S. Grant, the War Department detailed Dutton to the civilians for summer geologic work from 1875 to I 890. It was Dutton, moreover, who in 1878 recommended to Powell that they found the organization that became the Cosmos Club, and Dutton who realized that the rim as well as the river had a narrative.

It required special effort, however. Unlike the river, the rim offered no inherent organizing vision. There was no place for the eye to rest, no rhythm for the mind to catch. The scene threw up a profusion of peninsulas, gorges, cliffs, and buttes. The river itself was visible only in snatches. Something, some organizing principle, had to move it all from visual spectacle to story. Dutton discovered that informing theme in the drama of evolution by erosion. He disliked subjects that, as he put, had neither heads nor tails. In the Canyon region, he found his heads and tails with two enormous epochs of erosion, one (the Great Unconformity) buried in the Canyon's depths, the other (the Great Denudation) stripping back the strata of the High Plateaus to the north like so many peeling veneers. The Grand Canyon lay between them. What remained was a story to link those events and a place from which to tell it.

This Dutton achieved through a series of "imaginary journeys" to the premier displays of the region's natural features, specifically, to Zion Canyon carved out of the High Plateaus, to Toroweap overlook (fig. 72) in the western Canyon, and, for the climax, to a place he named Point Sublime in the eastern Canyon. The larger narrative he discovered in the directed flow of geologic time, in eras of deposition and erosion, an equivalent to the river's pools and rapids; and in the organization of Time that preoccupied so much of the nineteenth century's intellectual elite, he discovered an informing conceit for an epic history of the earth.

The Tertiary History narrated not only a geologic saga. It told also a story of America's Victorian era, an age that tried to cast its thoughts into evolutionary sequences, directed by single principles, and synthesized into teleological climaxes.

How appropriate that Dutton should publish the same year Herbert Spencer made his triumphant tour of the United States, for the evolutionism that Spencer had applied to human history Dutton applied to natural history. From the vague sweep of the Aquarius Plateau, Dutton's narrative had advanced, stage by stage, to a culmination at Point Sublime. The Grand Canyon, Dutton wrote, "is the sublimest thing of earth. It is not alone by virtue of its magnitude, but by virtue of its whole - its ensemble." 1 3 At Point Sublime that ensemble included literature, art, science, and nationalism as much as sculpted buttes, gorges, and the bold facades of the Coconino sandstone. From Sublime's perspective he summarized the geologic evolution of the landscape; celebrated the aesthetic cycle of a scenic day, from sunrise to sunset; and dramatized the values and vision of an era. The very strangeness of the place had become an asset. Here was American exceptionalism chiseled in stone.

Its companion Atlas silenced all but the most philistine critics. Here, as in the text, geology cross-bedded with art. The Atlas was the special triumph of William Henry Holmes, an artist-cum-geologist, who managed to transmute the dross of Paleozoic strata into golden panoramas that continue to startle as no other Canyon art ever has. 1 4 What Dutton did with words, Holmes did with ink, and this made his panoramas the perfect foil to Moran's vast oils. With its Atlas, the Tertiary History became a kind of

86

reverse prism that merged the separate cultural colors of nineteenth-century America into a white light of meaning.

Formally trained in art, Holmes was recruited as an illustrator for the Hayden Survey and sent West from 1872 to 77, very much in the American tradition of the reportorial artist, of one who preferred hard lines and commonsense realism to painterly flourish and vague idealisms. His keen eye soon made him a competent geologist and, from his experiences on the Colorado Plateau, a fine archaeologist (he later added administration to his talents, heading the Bureau of American Ethnology and the National Gallery of Art). The newly organized Geological Survey dispatched him in r 8 80 to assist Dutton.

For all their sweep, Holmes's panoramas were functional: they gave depth to the flat colors of the geologic maps with which they were interleaved, and visual texture as well to Dutton's prose which they complement. Yet behind their deceptive realism lay ideas. Holmes the illustrator evolves the great out of the tiny, collecting images as a geologist would fossils and rock samples. Each feature builds to a scene, each scene to a sweeping panorama, the panoramas to a culminating triptych centered at Point Sublime. Holmes understood the science and accepted Dutton's erosional narrative, such that a common set of concepts shapes both the text and the atlas. Representational art found a landscape that, thanks to Dutton's explanatory text, needed only representation. Point Sublime became a focal point for those centuries that had put perspective into landscape art.

Dutton became a geo-poet, Holmes a geo-painter. In his Panorama from Point Sublime - Looking East (fig. 73), Holmes captures this pairing perfectly. The Canyon exfoliates into view, strata by strata, butte by erosional butte, while in the foreground two figures contemplate it. One, seated, is an artist; the other, advising over his shoulder, clearly a geologist. That image expresses concisely the condominium of views that merged on Sublime, that came literally to a defining point. The Tertiary History completed the heroic age's interpretation of the Grand Canyon. An era's lines of thought had converged so completely that there was place further to go.

But what had come together could also come undone. Painting would pass through the focal point of representationalism and enter a looking-glass world beyond.

The great alliance of art, science, nature, and nationalism that had hurtled America down the gorge and set it upon the rim broke up. By the time Grand Canyon acquired national park status in r 9 r 9, the Second Great Age of Discovery had died on the Antarctic ice sheets, imperialism had fallen into exhaustion in the trenches of the Great War, and Western art and science were sucked into the maelstrom of Modernism. Even as the tourist Canyon became ever more popular, as visitation swelled and commercial interest boomed, the intellectual Canyon tumbled down the cliffs of high culture like boulders pushed over the rim by bored sightseers.

What had previously converged on the Canyon now scattered. In literature, in phi-

losophy, in mathematics, science, and the arts, avant-gardes appeared that had little use for the techniques with which the Grand Canyon had been revealed and valorized.

Intellectuals were more inclined to follow Joseph Conrad into a heart of imperial darkness or Sigmund Freud into the depths of the unconscious and the labyrinth of dreams than to gaze once more with John Wesley Powell into the Great Unknown of the granite gorge. Modernist painting and the plastic arts introduced new conceptions of perspective, broke down representational aesthetics, insisted that truth did not reside in the object bur in the viewing artist. The grand design of historicism shattered and became the subject of satire. The observer prevailed over the observed. Modernists privileged irony over purpose. Make it new, Ezra Pound insisted. Modernism did, with a vengeance.

The Grand Ensemble broke apart. The evolutionism with which Dutton had unfolded the Canyon's geologic history seemed quaint, or worse. Holmes' panoramas looked like naive realism, more cartography than art. Moran's transcendent gorges and buttes were consigned to a cultural attic of gilt-edged Victorian bric-a-brac. High culture left the high rims for other ideas and other places, though its legacy and many of its agents remained at the Canyon, lingering like the last refracted rays of an autumnal sunset. So when, in the 1950s, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed to frame the Grand Canyon with a pair of dams as part of its Pacific Southwest Water Plan, the Canyon seemed as vulnerable as when Ives, almost exactly a century earlier, had declared it valueless.

Bur the Canyon now had what it had lacked in Ives' day: a cultural past. In r 9 54 Wallace Stegner revived the history of the heroic age and put the Canyon back into literary discourse with his classic Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Three years later Joseph Wood Krutch announced the redefinition of the Canyon as wilderness. By the midr 96os political controversy regarding the high dams boiled over and forced intellectuals to elucidate just why the Canyon deserved not to be flooded. They did so now in the language of wilderness and ecology, not the narratives of Tertiary rime. Bur they could return because there was something to return to. That is why Glen Canyon, which had no such connections, was flooded and Grand, which had, was not. What a century before had been strange to the point of weirdness had become so familiar that Americans could not conceive a world without it.

Point Sublime endures, its sweep as immense as ever. Even today, though, it is not an easy place to reach. It remains, culturally, even harder to rediscover as a perspective.

It offers a gallery of scenes that are historic in the fullest sense, that stands as a museum of ideas, of images, of aesthetics, and of energies vastly different from the Modernism that, however grimly, informs today's official culture. From Point Sublime, you can see nineteenth-century American civilization as fully as you can Boucher Rapids, Sagittarius Ridge, and the deepening alcoves of the Redwall limestone.

But you cannot see any dams. Ir is doubtful you ever will. However improbably, we continue to see the meaning of the Canyon, both rim and river, more or less as

88

Powell, Moran, Holmes, and Dutton would have us see them. Science is short, art fleeting, and the landscapes of Spencerian evolution, Emersonian transcendentalism, and American monumentalism so many lost worlds. Yet the heroic age had found a way to imagine the Canyon that ensured that its significance would endure. They did it so well in fact that Point Sublime's geographic remoteness limits our perspective but little. We don't need to seek out the cracked limestone and dizzying flanks of that marvelous peninsula because we carry Dutton's point with us in our cameras and tour books, in the organic act that created a national park, in the fact that we can no longer imagine the Canyon as anything but Grand.

1. The Canyon has attracted a large literamre and an equally impressive bibliography in Earle E. Spamer, compiler, Bibliography of the Grand Canyon and the Lower Colorado River from r;40 [Grand Canyon Natural History Association: Monograph Number 8] (Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1990).

2. Dutton 1882, p. 141.

3. Dutton 1882, p. r 50.

4. See William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men:

The United States and the Second Great Age ofDiscovery (New York, 1986). Goetzmann's preceding histories of exploration are indispensable for understanding Canyon history: Exploration and Empire (New York, 1 966) and Army Exploration in the American West, 1803- 1363 (New Haven, 1959).

5. Lt. Joseph C. Ives, Exploration of the Colorado River ofthe West (Washington, r 861), p. r l o.

6. Quoted in Stephen ]. Pyne, Grove Karl Gilbert (Austin, 1980), p. 4r.

7. Quoted in Bruce Babbitt, Grand Canyon: An Anthology (Flagstaff, 1978), pp. 187- 88.

8. John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River ofthe West (Cambridge, r 962; rep rim of r 875 edition), p. 93.

9. Thomas Moran, quoted in G. W Sheldon, American Painters ( ew York, 1879), p. 124. ro. The Viking Penguin marketing group could not recognize Moran's Chasm ofthe Grand Canyon sufficiently to use as a cover for my book, How the Canyon Became Grand (New York, 1998), as I had proposed.

1 r.

Dutton r 8 82, p. xv.

r 2. Clarence Dutton letter of 2 0 Dec. I 886 in Marcus Benjamin Papers, Record Unit 70 85, Smithsonian Insrimtion Archives.

13. Dutton 1882, p. 143.

14. The best summary of William Holmes' comributions is in William H. Goetzmann, William H. Holmes: Panoramic Art (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1 977 ).

Visual Narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford Richard Slotkin Downing the Nigh Leader (fig. 74) is virtually identical in thematic conception and composition to a clip from Stagecoach, John Ford's classic Western released in 19 39 (fig. 75). The resemblance is not fortuitous. Ford was well F REDERI C REMINGTO

'S

acquainted with Remington's work, and frequently refers to it in his way of composing images of cowboys and cavalrymen. But there is more than homage intended here. Ford makes a critical change in the implied scenario of the painting: Remington's picture shows the Indian killing the lead horse, and freezes the action at the moment of crisis; but it is evident that, in a next second which the viewer readily imagines and anticipates, the coach will be wrecked and the Indians will capture and destroy the vehicle and its passengers. Ford's film takes us up to the moment in which the Indian has his chance to down the nigh leader - then breaks away from the painting's scenario to give us an improbable happy ending to the scene. Ford's remaking of the painter's realistic image serves the complex purposes of his cinematic narrative, which are, I will argue, comic and ironic. In referencing and making significant creative use of a popular image from nineteenth-century painting Ford is not unique among directors, though he is unique in the skill with which he uses such images.

But if the director has looked back to the painter for his imagery, the painter seems to be anticipating something like a cinematic narrative, images moving through time.

Although the framed image presents the viewer with a single frozen moment of time, Remington has clearly invited the viewer to imagine what will happen to the coach in a possible next frame: the physical arrangements inform any viewer that a wreck is imminent. Remington also assumes that the viewer can imagine the scenes that lead up to the pictured moment - the Indians springing an ambush and attacking the coach.

Ford relies on the same understandings in the scene that sets up the chase: an image of Indians looking down on the coach from a high mesa. As soon as we see the juxtaposition of Indians watching from the hills and the coach moving through the desert, we know exactly what must follow. Both artists are counting on the fact that their audiences bring to their pictures an internalized set of expectations, a model narrative of the kind of thing that must happen when Indians and stagecoaches - or any technologically advanced vehicles - inhabit the same space.

What undergirds both the painting and the film are a set of understandings that derive from national mythology: a set of traditional beliefs about the West as a frontier

91

L

\

'

FIG.

74. Frederic Remington, Downing the Nigh Leader, 1907. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

FIG.

75. Still from Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford. United Artists.

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between civilization and savagery, and as a crucible of American national identity. Since the beginning of this century, scholars and critics have systematically traced the verbal and literary traditions that created this myth in the nineteenth century. 1 But the contribution of the visual arts to this myth-malcing enterprise was treated marginally until the r 97os, when Bryan Wolf's and Barbara Novak's scholarly work on landscape painting alerted scholars outside the field of art history to the cultural importance of the visual arts in the nineteenth century - the era of westward expansion. 2 However, I think it is fair to say that this revision of cultural history still left the visual arts in a supporting role with respect to the verbal culture. This emphasis was perhaps appropriate, since the primary vehicles for developing and propagating nineteenth-century myths were printed books, papers, and dime novels. Art reproductions developed more slowly as items of mass consumption; and not until the end of the century did high-quality illustration become a normal feature of mass circulation magazines.

But in the twentieth century, the primary vehicle of myth has been film, and later television - both visual media. I want to trace the development of a tradition of visual narrative parallel to literary narrative, and show how it was appropriated and used by movie-makers in the heyday of the studio system. I'll begin by outlining the theory of myth on which my study is based; then trace the evolution of visual representations of the Frontier Myth; and conclude by showing how Ford uses that visual tradition in the malcing of Stagecoach.

Modern nations are to a large extent "imagined communities" (as the anthropologist Benedict Anderson has called them) - or, in Etienne Balibar's phrase, "fictive ethnicities." No one is really "born American." We are born into the "organic" communities of family, clan and tribe; we have to be taught to "imagine" ourselves as American nationals. The teaching is done through organized public rituals, in schools provided (mostly) by the state, and by mass media organized to address a national public.

Writers, artists, scholars and political leaders, worlcing through these institutions, translate the history of the state into a "myth of origins" - a set of symbolic narratives, based on history, which explains and sanctifies the origins and history of the state; places the nation in the flow of time; and provides models of heroic behavior to guide public thinlcing and behavior in the present. 3 In the sphere of mass culture, these myths appear in the form of genres: distinct and specialized groups or families of stories, organized around particular historical or social themes, which have (over several generations) become traditional forms of cultural expression. The nationalist writers of the pre-Civil War era, following the model of James Fenimore Cooper, used the genre of "historical romance" to create a mythological account of American history, a pantheon of heroic national types, and a standard set of racial, ideological, and cultural enemies. Later writers built upon, elaborated, and adapted these original forms over time, creating a complex of myths and genres whose history reflects the evolution of American nationality and the changing patterns of social and political conflict that shape our history.

93

This pattern of genre development, derived from print media, continued into the era of movies and television. However the shift to visual media entailed one crucial difference in the process. In literary mythmaking, the story - the structure of heroic action - is the central concern of the artist, and the scene or setting of the action is secondary.

A frontier historical romance in the Cooper vein has the same structure, the same characters, whether it is set in the forest during the French and Indian Wars or on the great plains of the Louisiana Purchase. But because film is above all a visual medium, the creation of a distinctive visual setting or landscape is critical to the establishment of a movie genre. The history of a movie genre is the story of the conception, elaboration, and acceptance of a special kind of space. The genre setting contains not only a set of objects signifying a certain time, place and milieu; it invokes a set of fundamental assumptions and expectations about the kinds of events that can occur in the setting, the kinds of motives that will operate, the sort of outcomes one can predict. The motives and actions we accept as plausible in a film that opens with a view of Monument Valley are utterly different from those we accept in a film that begins with a tracking shot through mean urban streets, or a castle in a thunderstorm with wolves howling in the distance. 4 The Western was the first distinct genre to emerge in American cinema; it was, for most of the century, the most prevalent and consistently popular form of action film; and its basic structures provided the recipe for most other action genres, such as the hard-boiled detective film, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Film historians no longer cite William S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) - the first Western as the first true narrative film. But Porter's film was the origin of the first film genre. Its commercial success invited imitation: competitors began to crank out film after film of cowboy bandits robbing trains: The Great Bank Robbery, The Boid Bank Robbery, The Little Train Robbery, The Hold- Up ofthe Rocky Mountain Express. By I 908 the genre was so well established that distributors' catalogues listed their products under the headings "D rama, " "C om1c, . " an d "'vr western." 5 The Western's priority as a genre, and its cultural power, arise from the fact that of all film genres, the Western has the deepest roots in pre-cinematic culture. Its setting, and the types of story possible in it, had been firmly established in both narrative and pictorial terms during the nineteenth century.

The Western's narrative basis is the oldest of American myths: the Myth of the Frontier, which sees the discovery, conquest and settlement of the West as the dominant theme of American history. Westward expansion had been a theme of American writers and politicians for a hundred years before a distinctive and nationalist schools of American novel writing, and landscape painting, developed early in the nineteenth century. Like their nationalist colleagues in Europe, these artists saw their mission as that of transforming the base materials of national "history" and scenery into an evocative mythology, rich in symbolic resonance, which they could celebrate. The problem of the American artist seemed to be that America does not have history on the European scale - no Roman ruins, no Druid groves, no relics of feudalism.

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76. Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776. Oil on canvas. William L. Clements Library, Universiry of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

FIG.

77. Cassilly Adams after Otto Becker, Custer's Last Fight, ca. r 880. Color lithograph. Buffalo Bill Hisrorical Center, Cody, Wyoming.

FIG.

\

95

Nationalist artists turned this lack into a positive advantage: they represented the American experience as an escape from history into purifying Nature, a return to primal origins for a new departure. Despite the anti-historical ideology of this program, what they created was indeed a historical paradigm: a narrative of American progress from primitive past to glorious future.

The model for this historical myth was most clearly developed in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, between 1823 and 1851; and Cooper's fictions were the models for historians as well as fiction writers for most of the nineteenth century. American history begins with an imaginative departure from civilization, a return to the state of nature, and a reversion to tribal roots, which lie below the veneer of European culture.

And this "reversion" to the natural and primitive produces, not a "European" present enriched by the cultural accretions of history, but the vision of a fature, an untransacted destiny - not an actual nation, but a program for nation building. When a Cooper hero like Hawkeye kills a "redskin" in some final shoot-out, the action prophesies the future triumph of America as a "White Republic."

A similar agenda, and a similar vision of its mythic elements, shaped American nationalist painting in the nineteenth century. This agenda pressured painters into the business of storytelling, in ways that strained the fixity of the painted image and the limitations of the frame.

Nineteenth-century painters inherited, and elaborated, several approaches to the task of making still images narrate.6 One obvious method is to paint a well-known historical episode. Although the image itself is static, its world of reference is dynamic. The audience is already familiar with the narrative behind the image, and can supply before and after. A few iconic elements easily suggest the ideological significances of the scene, again by invoking familiar concepts.

Benjamin West's painting of 1776, The Death of General Wolfe (fig. 76), transforms the historical event into a tableau symbolizing Britain's imperial triumph. The title informs the viewer of the event to which it refers; and even if the common viewer does not recognize the portraits of actual participants, the shape of events and their significance is clear: the kneeling Indian and American Ranger speak of Britain's imperial triumph. Of course, viewers unfamiliar with the event - of which there are all too many in my undergraduate classes - have a problem with making the picture narrate: given only the painting, they are unsure if the represented event is a defeat or a victory.

The more familiar the event, the clearer the reading. No American fails to read the narrative implied in an image of Custer's Last Stand. The first published image of the battle, an engraving by Alfred Waud, appeared in the year of the battle (1876) as an illustration in a popular biography of Custer. This event was so sensational, and had such lingering significance as an image of what happens when Americans lose their primitive racial wars, that both image and story have been continually reproduced in fiction and non-fiction, painting and illustration. Printed versions soon became formulas of popular writing, reproduced in series of Custer-related dime novels. But the

image also was reproduced and became a popular icon, carrying its story as an implicit part of its imagery. The so-called "Budweiser lithograph" of the Last Stand, by Cassilly Adams after Otto Becker (fig. 77), is said to have been the most widely circulated image of its kind. Copies hung in saloons and popular eateries from coast to coast, from 1885 to the 19 50s. In 1942, the War Department issued copies to be hung in Army mess halls in the United States, presumably to encourage the troops. 7 But once established as an icon, an image of this kind is understood as standing for ideas, abstractions, larger and more general than the specifics of the original event.

Thus Frederic Remington's 1899 The Last Stand, is not a Custer image (fig. 78). Rather it is a generalization of one of the meanings of the Custer image: a vision of the cool courage of the white Anglo-Saxon soldier in the face of ultimate catastrophe.

This pattern of development reflects a fundamental process of the popular arts. A story or image of special import becomes a subject for treatment; successful treatments are reproduced in quantity, over a period of time; habits of representation develop, the story or image becomes formulaic or generic; and at that point the tale and/or its imagery can be abstracted from its original referents, and used for a variety of ideological and artistic purposes. For a story like Custer's Last Stand, the specific historical associations are so strong that the original reference is never entirely absorbed in its generic representation. But any equally familiar story can acquire the same iconic force.

Minor historical episodes like Daniel Boone's guiding settlers through the Cumberland Gap (fig. 79) became familiar enough through popular history writing that paintings and statues commemorating the event proliferated through the first half of the nineteenth century.

Even historical fictions, if sufficiently popular, can acquire a similar cultural power through this process. Thomas Cole's 1827 Scene .from Last ofthe Mohicans (fig. 80) treats an episode from a Cooper novel in the same way he might have treated a historical event. As with the later images of the Last Stand, the viewer is invited to interpret the still image as an episode of well-known narrative, and imagine a "before" and "after" that Cole does not need to paint.

Images like Cole's Mohicans and Adams's and Becker's Custer work by reminding the viewer of a specific story he or she already knows. A more subtle sort of "narrative," which engages the imagination in a poetic way, is developed in landscape painting.

Here the "narrative" suggested is of a general or mythic sort - the story invoked is not the tale of a specific adventure, but the large pattern of American national development.

Representations of landscape enjoyed an exceptional popularity with both painters and audiences throughout the nineteenth century. This popularity was in part a by-product of nationalism: America lacked history, but was rich in natural scenery; and writers since the time of Crevecoeur had been asserting that closeness to nature, rather than culture, gave us our national character. Critics of the United States gave this idea a negative, "heart of darkness" twist, suggesting that the colonists had reverted to barbarism.

To counter this view, and assert national claims to the future, nationalist writers

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FIG.

78. Frederic Remington, The Last Stand,

I

899. Oil on canvas. Woolaroc Museum, Bardesville, Oklahoma.

FIG. 79. George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, r 851-p.. Oil on canvas. Washington University Gallery of Art, Saint Louis.

FIG. 80. Thomas Cole, Scene from Last of the Mahicans: Cora at the Feet o/Tamenund, r 827. Oil on canvas.

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hanford.

and painters Looked through the savage surface of American landscape, and asserted the immanence of a glorious and progressive future in the raw shapes of the undeveloped land. The first map of Kentucky, published by promoter John Filson in 1784, was watermarked with a plow and the slogan "Work and be Rich. " If the purchaser held the map to the light, the hidden meaning and future of the land appeared as if from within it.

In the 184os and 50s William Gilpin - a celebrated promoter of westward expansion and transcontinental railroads, who served as governor of Colorado - developed an elaborate "science" of geomancy, which showed how the very shapes and structures of American geography infallibly predicted a future of wealth, power, democracy and national unity.

While North America opens towards heaven [the] expanded bowl [of the Mississippi Valley] to receive and fuse harmoniously whatever enters within its rim; so each of the other continents presenting a bowl reversed [i.e. with mountains at the center] scatters everything from a central apex to a radiant distraction. Political empires and societies have in all ages conformed themselves to these emphatic geographical facts. The American Republic is then predestined to expand and fit itself to the continent .... Thus the perpetuity and destiny of our sacred Union find their conclusive proof and illustration in the bosom of nature.8 Visual artists were directly engaged in the work of promoting expansion. Painters and illustrators like John Mix Stanley and Thomas Moran accompanied exploring expeditions, and their works informed the making of policy; and when the time came to develop the new lands, illustrations aided in promoting investment and settlement. But even artists who were simply painting on their own account found such concepts of nature useful. The ideological subtext of their paintings enhanced their intelligibility to the general public, and increased popular demand.9 Painters of the Hudson River School, and Thomas Cole in particular, were adept at framing landscapes as implicit allegories of American progress. Cole's famous View from Mount Holyoke ( r 836), usually called "The Ox-Bow" (fig. 81), can be read like text, from left to right - which, on a standard map, is the same as west-to-east.

On the left or west is a tangled wilderness, in which trees struggle for survival, with dark and violent storm clouds overhead. To the east or right the sun shines on a peaceful valley of developed farmland, through which a train - symbol of advanced technology - threads its way. Here is the course of American history, from primal wilderness warfare to peaceful agrarian prosperity, in one image. Note that the artist, like Cooper's Hawkeye, stands on the frontier between the two phases, and interprets them for us. 10 Cole's allegory is a subtle one, and in other works of his the theme of progress is treated with greater ambiguity and even ambivalence. But other artists accepted the popular spirit that celebrated progress, and treated the theme in straightforwardly alle-

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FIG. 81. T homas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, 1836. Oil on canvas. Merropoli ran M useu m of An, New Yo rk.

82 . Emanuel Leurze, Westward the Course ofEmpire Takes Its Wtzy, r 86 r. Oil on canvas. mirhsonian American Arr Museum, Washingron .

FIG .

1 00

gorical terms. The imagery of American progress, imitated over the years, stylized and abstracted and reduced to formula, became a genre of American painting and illustration between 1825 and l 890. Emanuel Leutze's Westward the Course ofEmpire Takes Its \.Vtiy (fig. 82), commissioned for the U. S. Capitol and completed in 1861, takes an episode from the life of Daniel Boone (the passage of the Cumberland Gap) and enlarges it to a symbol of the westward (or leftward) march of civilization.

John Gast's American Progress or Manifest Destiny of l 872 (fig. 83) elaborates the allegorical connection of progress and pioneering, linking frontier images with symbols of modernity. The light of civilization rises in the east, from which issue waves of westward-going pioneers, pushing back the stormy gloom oflndian savagery in the west (or left) of the frame. Progress is suggestively linked with technologies of transportation and communication. The pioneers closest to the Indians ride horses, those that come after use wagons, then stagecoaches, and finally the railroad and telegraph.

So appealing was this imagery, and so apt as a formulation of American history, that there is actually a mini-genre of similarly themed and titled paintings, which were current during the era of transcontinental railroad building after the Civil War. In l 867-68, the painters Andrew Melrose, Theodor Kaufmann, and engraver F. F. Palmer for Currier & Ives, produced works titled (or subtitled) "Westward the Course" or "Westward the Star of Empire Takes its Way," in which American progress is symbolized by the railroad, which blazes its way into the West past iconic scenes and figures drawn from the visual cliches of Gast's American Progress. Through repetition, these paintings develop an association of story and setting very like that we find in film genres. In each picture, America progresses by heading west. The railroad, or any manufactured vehicle, symbolizes that progressive drive. The wilderness peels back before it; the Indian seeks to block or impede the road, but is brushed aside.

In these paintings, a single image is presented in such a way as to suggest that it has been culled from a larger narrative. But American artists and exhibitors were not content with the single frame as a vehicle for this kind of storytelling. They developed exhibition formats in which painted images were arranged sequentially to carry the viewer through a visual narrative. Here painting merges with the most crucial of mythmaking practices: public popular entertainment; and the ambition to make paintings tell stories becomes paramount.

Thomas Cole's Course ofEmpire and Ages ofMan series were designed to be exhibited as a group, so that the large narrative plan would be clear to the viewer. Cole's Empire series is particularly "cinematic" in the way it correlates the historical changes it depicts with shifts in point of view - or, figuratively, camera position. As history moves from early savagery, through the height of empire, to decadence and ruin, the point of view shifts from a distant to a close-up view of the site; and also moves from "left" to "right." The parallel between movement in space and movement in time is marked for the viewer by changes in the size and position of the dramatic rock promontory that, in the earlier "Savage" phase (fig. 84), appears in the distance to the left of

IOI

FIG. 83. John Gasr,

American Progress, 1872. Oil on canvas. Aurry Museum ofWesrern Herirage,

Los Angeles.

FIG. 84. Thomas Cole, Course ofEmpire: Savage State, r 836. Oil on canvas. Collecrion of rhe New-York Hisrorical Sociery.

1 02

FIG. 85. Thomas Cole, Course ofEmpire: Destruction ofEmpire, 1836. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Historical Society, ew York.

ew-York

center, and in the penultimate image (fig. 85) looms to the right over Cole's doomed imperial city. As we will see, Ford uses a similar device to create and complicate the image of the journey in Stagecoach.

On a more popular level, exhibitions of serial paintings and painted panoramas toured major cities and towns, offering virtual tours of the Mississippi River, recreations of western exploring expeditions, or histories of the Revolutionary or Mexican wars. 11 Panoramas were painted on long rolls of canvas, which could be scrolled through a large frame like a sort of film strip. With a painting serial, the viewer's movement from frame to frame develops the narrative - as in James Walker's Scenes of the Mexican "War (1848-50). After the Civil War, the cyclorama carried the art of panorama a step further. The cyclorama is painted on an immensely long canvas in a large circular room.

Instead of a series of framed images, representing fixed moments of time and stances in space, the cyclorama appears to present a single moment in which (for example) the viewer is immersed in the battles of Gettysburg or Atlanta. However, viewed in detail, the cyclorama typically develops a sequence of events, readable in one direction; but these events have no "edges,'' each blends seamlessly into the next in a proto-cinematic flow.

George Catlin took a different approach to the task of making paintings narrate, when he combined the features of panorama and live entertainment to produce his "Indian Gallery," which toured United States and European cities before the Civil War. Catlin's paintings of Plains Indian life were based on years of travel and study in the West, and his exhibitions were intended for both commercial gain and to promote efforts for the preservation of Native cultures. He staged performances by Native American dancers in the galleries where his ethnographic paintings were displayed: the dances brought the paintings to life, and also authenticated Catlin's observations with Native testimony. Catlin thus pioneered a form of entertainment that would become a major force in the evolution of mass culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century - Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

The Wild West was the most successful entertainment enterprise of its time, enjoying vast popularity, touring all over the United States and Europe from 1882 to I 917.

Its creator's ambition was to combine entertainment with a dramatized history lesson, in which the conquest of the frontier is seen as the defining fable of American nationality. Buffalo Bill's posters and programs proclaimed that the Wild West offered an "Object Lesson ... a living monument of historic and educational magnificence ... the only amusement enterprise of any kind recognized, endorsed and contributed to by Governments, Armies and Nations." One colossal billboard, longer than a football field, required a program itself, which was provided by two textual "bookends." At the left a panel entitled "Look Upon this Picture" asked the viewer to read the billboard from left to right (perhaps by walking its length), in order to see illustrated "the various Epochs of American History, from the primitive days of savagery up to the Memorable Charge of San Juan Hill," the battle that symbolized America's emergence as an imperial power on the world stage. The textual panel at the far right, ''An Object Lesson," summarized the historical and moral significance, and educational value, of the images so viewed.

The historical epochs referred to in the poster corresponded to the sequence of acts in the Wild West, which "faithfully reproduce" these historical scenes. 12 The Wild West combined rodeo-like exhibitions of cowboy skills and marksmanship with historical reenactments of scenes from the history of westward expansion, beginning with Plymouth Rock, passing through the attack on the settler's cabin by Indians and Indians attacking the Deadwood stage (fig. 86) - which Buffalo Bill represents as an important historical event - and ending with the re-enactment of an Indian fight, such as the Battle of Summit Springs, in which Buffalo Bill played a leading role, or Custer's Last Stand, the climactic act of the show for a decade (fig. 87).

Not content with celebrating the past, the Wild West treated the old frontier as a prologue to America's future as a great power, on the world stage. After I 898, William Cody (Buffalo Bill) presented re-enactments of America's overseas imperial battles, such as San Juan Hill or the capture ofTientsin during the Boxer Rebellion, as if they were simply continuations of the frontier story. 1 3

104

oNrttE FIG.

STAGE eoAeH 路

THE ORIGINAL DEADWOOD COACH .

MOST FAMOUS VEHICLE IN HISTORY.

86. On the Stagecoach, ca. 1887. Color lirhograph posrer. Buffalo Bill Hisrnrical Cemer,

Cody, Wyoming.

FIG.

87 . Custer's Last Stand,

1904.

Oil on canvas. Buffalo Bill Hisrnrical Cem er, Cody,

Wyoming.

105

FIG.

88. "Wesrward the Course of Empire."

F I G.

89. Still from Dodge City, 1939. Warner Bros., Michael C urriz, dir. Train versus stagecoach.

1 06

In staging his ritual re-enactment of the frontier myth, Cody drew on authentic sources - there were plenty of real frontier heroes still alive, and many (like Sitting Bull) performed in his show. But he also drew on the literary mythology of the frontier, for the elaborate historical hype that filled his programs. And he drew on the fine arts traditions of American painting. Cody's poster-artists plagiarized Leutze's famous Westward the Course of Empire (fig. 82) and substituted Buffalo Bill in the place of Daniel Boone as the genius of westward expansion (fig. 88). This kind of borrowing was not unique: a series of Wild West posters plagiarized Bucking Bronco and Episode in the Opening Up ofa Cattle Country, engraved illustrations by Frederic Remington. 1 4 The invention of movies put Buffalo Bill out of business. Films could stage and circulate their re-enactments of Custer's Last Stand more easily and cheaply than Buffalo Bill could tour his vast company of actors and animals. But the success of movies, and especially of Westerns, was built on the achievements of Buffalo Bill. The standard acts of the Wild West became the staple plots of Westerns. Thomas Ince actually staged the climax of his silent epic, Custer's Last Fight ( l 9 l 2) to conform to the iconography and composition of the popular Budweiser lithograph. 1 5 Even D. W Griffith acknowledged the Western basis of his concept for Birth ofa Nation (l 9 l 5): "We had had all sorts of runs-to-the-rescue in pictures and horse operas. The old United States Cavalry would gallop to the rescue .... Now I could see a chance to do this ride-to-the-rescue on a grand scale. Instead of saving one poor little Nell of the Plains, this would be a ride to save a nation." 1 6 The climactic scene of the movie restages Buffalo Bill's "attack on the settler's cabin" with Negroes in the role of Indians, and Klansmen as the rescuing cowboys. And of course, Ford's Stagecoach, recognized as a classic when it appeared in 1939, was in effect an elaboration of Buffalo Bill's stock performance of the "Indians Attacking the Deadwood Stage."

The Western continued to develop and retained its popularity through the silent era, but went into a temporary eclipse during the depths of the Depression. However, in 1939 the studios decided to revive the genre with a series of major releases. The easing of the Depression, and the rise in patriotic feeling on the eve of the Second World War, led them to conceive these movies as epic celebrations of the achievement of American progress and democracy. The studios therefore turned their research departments loose on the historical, the literary, and the pictorial record of the frontier experience. The resulting films recreated the Western as an idealized vision of American progress, in terms Cole or Gast or Leutze would have recognized. Compare, for example, Cast's American Progress (fig. 83) with a clip from Warner Bros. 1939 Western, Dodge City, which celebrates the transcontinental railroad as an instrument of progress by staging a race between a train and a stagecoach (fig. 89).

The standard cinematic use of iconography from the nineteenth-century visual arts tradition is just what we see in this image: a reproduction or imitation of both the traditional image and its traditional meaning, which serves as a kind of historical authenticating device, a testimony to the accuracy with which the film reproduces "history"

107

(or rather, history-as-myth). Griffith had pioneered this approach in Birth of a Nation by identifying certain scenes as "exact reproductions" of particular well-known photographs, illustrations, or paintings.

But Ford in Stagecoach goes beyond invocation and reproduction of the past. He uses traditional elements to make a new artistic statement. He invokes the traditional icons of myth and landscape, but does so in order to subject them to an ironic critique. 1 7 In Stagecoach a chance-met group of travelers, representing a variety of American social types, must journey from the fledgling frontier town of Tonto to the city of Lordsburg. These terminal points represent the beginnings and the final development of the "civilization" that has come to the West. Law and order have just arrived in Tonto, under the aegis of a group of female vigilantes led by the banker's wife. Their justice is crude and undiscriminating: they drive out of town two characters who will prove their high moral courage during the journey - dipsomaniac Doc Boone, and the prostitute Dallas.

In his set-up, Ford invokes all the understandings of the conventional Western: The Tonto-Lordsburg itinerary invokes the conventions of the frontier landscape tradition in which progress is equated with movement in space from east to west. We anticipate that as the characters travel from Tonto to Lordsburg they will pass through the wilderness or desert, the classic testing ground of progressive heroism; that the test will transform the community in positive ways, destroying the weak, discrediting the evil, exalting the heroic and deserving; and that the arrival at journey's end will celebrate the triumph of progress and democracy over both savagery and the social limitations of eastern sooety.

But Ford's take on the standard story is ironic. The characters who best embody American democratic principles are Ringo Kid and Dallas, an innocent man framed and driven to outlawry and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Initially, both are treated as pariahs by the respectable citizens of the community. As the journey proceeds, they emerge as the strongest, most skilled, most selfless members of the group. At the same time, the respectables in the coach are seen as socially bigoted, weak, or corrupt. The most pompous and bullying of the respectables, Banker Gatewood, who mouths Herbert Hooverish slogans like "what this country needs is a businessman for president," turns out to be an absconding embezzler. Arrival in Lordsburg does bring a measure of justice: Gatewood is arrested, Ringo kills the men who framed him and saves Dallas from going back to prostitution. But Lordsburg is a nightmare city in which all of the primitive vices of Tonto have been fully developed. In the end, Ringo and Dallas - the exemplars of American values, democracy, meritocracy, the chance for a fresh start - have to Bee to Mexico. When Dallas and Ringo ride out of the movie frame they are riding out of American history, like Twain's Huck Finn "lighting out for the Territory" to escape a "sivilization" gone wrong.

The irony is enriched and enlarged by the way Ford integrates narrative and landscape. He first evokes, then undercuts, the conventions of the progressive journey. The

108

evocation of progress is carried by the ceaseless movement of the stagecoach, the constant alternation of shots inside and outside the moving coach, the punctuation of the journey by stopovers at way-stations on the road. The foreground is full of such "progressive" movement. Bue something strange happens in the background.

Ford chose as his "wilderness" the part of the Navaho reservation known as Monument Valley. The Valley has become so well established as a "typical" landscape, emblematic of "the West," that it is difficult for modern audiences to see that in chis film (and his subsequent Westerns) Ford is inventing the Valley as a cinematic (and American) icon. The Valley is in fact as unique a landscape as can be imagined: the "Monuments" are huge red monoliths of volcanic stone shooting up out of rubble-piles, shaped like mittened hands or towered skylines or phallic spires, surrounded by the flat plane of a barren rocky desert. The landscape is the antithesis of the conventional views of "Nature" derived from nineteenth-century painting. The Monuments are neither feminine nor virginal, but solitary, masculine, and indifferent to animate life. The desert seems utterly impervious to human "improvements."

The peculiarity of these shapes makes them vivid and memorable as potential milestones against which to measure our journey. Bue Ford uses the most unique and memorable of the monoliths, the mittens, to negate the idea chat we are making progress through space. Shortly after Ringo boards the stage we see the coach climbing a hill in the foreground with the two "mittens" behind them in the distance; the coach's movement here is from the "left" mitten to the "right" (fig. 90). A few minutes later we see the coach in a long shot at the base of the mittens - which are still oriented lefthand/right-hand with respect to us - only now the coach is moving right to left (fig.

91). The coach is making no progress at all in relation to the two most striking markers of space in the film. This composition is not an inadvertence. Much lacer in the film, when the Indians attack, they look down on the coach moving past the same pair of mittens. Thus landscape subliminally clues us in to the movie's central irony: that our vaunted "progress" is an illusion.

The theme is reiterated through an analogous use of space in the Lordsburg sequence. Tonto was presented as one wide street seen in harsh daylight. The Lordsburg scenes are filmed in an expressionistic style that suggests an urban-Western nightmare.

Though the architecture is recognizably "Western," we move through a gas-lit darkness; and Ford fills the crooked streets with such crowds of people that even the open spaces have a claustrophobic quality. As Ringo walks Dallas "home" through these mean streets, the bars and bordellos they pass - brief bursts of garish light and harsh sound, hysterical laughter, cries - suggest a journey into hell. Each step brings closer to the surface the truth Dallas fears to cell Ringo: chat she is a whore, and is returning to a whore's life, and from here on things will only become worse for her.

The most threatening of these images is the figure of a woman sitting in a posture of despair on the stoop of a bordello. Ford shows Ringo and Dallas approaching and passing the woman - then shows the same sequence again from a slightly different cam-

90. Still from Stagecoach, r939. United Artists, John Ford, dir. Mittens, I: Coach moving left to right.

F IG.

FIG . 9r. Still from Stagecoach, 1939. United Artists, John Ford, dir. Mittens, II: Coach moving right to left.

110

era angle. It is as if Dallas and Ringo are on a treadmill, doomed to pass and re-pass the same terrible scene. Once again Ford has first evoked the idea of progress through space, then called it into question - playing dynamically with our understanding of space and movement to mal{e his narrative point: that the "progress" and personal redemption promised by the American myth are romantic illusions; that the reality of American life is a darker business altogether. Ford's ironic play with the visual and thematic tradition suggests that the film's fairy-tale ending - the escape of Ringo and Dallas into their dream of a new life across the border in Mexico - is just that. a fairy tale. Lordsburg is the reality: as, in Ford's recasting of Remington's Downing the Nigh Leader, the Indian's decision to leap on the horses rather than kill them is an exercise in fantasy, a deliberate violation of probabilities and of the painter's cruel realism. The viewer who knows this painting, or knows American history, and who has attended to the darker suggestions of Ford's narrative, will be aware as well of the bleak implications hidden in Stagecoach's "happy ending."

I I I

1. The treatment of the frontier and frontier myth in this essay is based on Slotkin 1985 and Slotkin 1992.

16. Ibid., pp. 240-41.

2. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, I82;-I87; (London, 1980).

Bryan Wolf, Romantic Re-vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago, 1982).

3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London, 1983; revised ed. London, 1991); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins ofNations (Oxford, 1987 ); Etienne Bali bar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, translated by Chris Turn er (London, 1991), chap. 4 and especially pp. 49, 81, 83, 94> 96, 99路 4. Slotkin 1992, chap. 2. On Cooper, see Slotkin 1985, chap. 5.

5. Slotkin 1992, pp. 231-37.

6. On the role of painting and the visual arts as myrhmaking media, and especially landscape, see: New York 1987; Joshua C. Taylor, America as Art (New York, 1976), esp. pp. 1-184; Washington 1994; Washington 199r.

7. Slorkin 1985, pp. 14-15.

8. Ibid., 1985, pp. 219-23.

9. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology ofthe American Frontier, I6oo-I86o (Middletown, 1973), p. 272; Slotkin 1985, chap. 10.

10. Washington 1994, pp. 51-77; New York 1987, pp.

21-48.

1r. Washington 1991, p . rn5; John Banvard, "Description ofBanvard's PANORAMA" in Before Mark Twain: A Sampler of Old, Old Times on the Mississippi (Carbondale, 1968), edited by John F. McDermott, pp. 126-3 9.

12. Slotkin 1992, p. 82.

13. Ibid., 1992, chap. 2.

14. The Remington illustrations are in Theodore Roosevelt: Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Lincoln, 1983), pp. 40, 106. The posters are in Jack Rennert, Ioo Posters ofBuffalo Bill's Wild West ( ew York, 1976). r 5. Brian W Dippie, Custer's Last Stand: The Anatomy ofan American Myth (Lincoln, 1976), caption on photo following p. 50.

II2

17. Ford understood the epic Western quite well: the basic elements of a progressive epic Union Pacific were already present in his silent epic, The Iron Horse.

Although identified with Westerns during his early career, Ford had not made a Western since the advent of sound. He had made his reputation in the 1930s as a director of prestige productions and social dramas for major studios. His return to the genre was undertaken with revisionist intentions: he wanted to develop and expand the latent capacities of the old form as a vehicle for cinematic expression; and his reputation ensured a more serious sort of critical attention for his film than would be accorded a routine Western. In the event, Stagecoach was both a critical and commercial success. The project was controlled by Ford from conception through execution, and is even more of an auteur's piece than the average of his work. See Tag Gallagher, john Ford, The Man and His Films (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 143-62.

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Index Adam s, C assilly 97, fig. 77 Adorno, Theodor xii Akeley, C arl 39 Alcott, Louisa May 38 n.r 6 American Museum of Natural History 39-57, figs. 3 I, 35, 37, 40, 4I , 43 Anderson , Benedict 93 Appalachians I 2 Appleton's j ournal )I, figs. i4, 17 Art j ournal 3 I Arr Studenrs League 43 Avery Gallery I 7 Balibar, Erienne 93 Bellew, Frank 24, fig. I 5 Beard, William Holbrook 28, 62 n. 33 Becker, Otto 97, fig. 77 Bierstadt, Albert 39, 62 n. 33, 66, 67, fig. 55 Bingham, John Caleb fig. 79 Birch, Thomas 65 Bogart, Michele xi, 39 Boone, D aniel 97, IOI, 107 Boston Evening Transcript 35 Breton, Jules 35 Bricher, Alfred 77 Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institure 43 Bryce, James 7 Budweiser 107 Buffalo Bill i 04 Buffalo Bill's Wild West 104, io7, figs. 86-88 Burns, Sarah ix, I 7 Burroughs, John i 2 California 7, io, i2 Capitol Building IOI Cardenas, Garcia Lopez de 79, 80 Carlyle, T ho mas 28 Carr, Samuel S. 69 Carlin, George Io4 The Century 43 Ch ase, W illiam M erritt 39, 64, 70 C ivil War 17, 66, 8I, I03, 104 C laflin, Tennessee 18 Cody, W illiam (Buffalo Bill) I04, 107

Cole, Thomas 65-66, 97, 107 Course ofEmpire IO I , Io3, fi gs. 84, 85 Scene from Last ofthe M ohicans 97, fig. 80 View from Mount H olyoke 99, fig. 8 I Colo rado 99 Colorado River 79-81 Conder, Ch arles 68, 69, 73, fig. 58 Conrad, Joseph 88 Cooper, James Fenimore 93, 94, 96, 99 Coronado 79 Cosmos Club 85 Coumre, Thomas 37 n.9 Crevecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de i 4 n. 37, 97 Cronon , William x C rystal Palace 41, 79 Cullercoats, England 17 Currier & Ives IOI C urtiz, Michael fig. 89 C uster, George 96, 97, 104, fig. 87 C uvier, Georges 41 D arwin, Charles Sr D avis, Sarah 43, 58 D eath Valley 8 r D e la Beche, H enry T hom as 41, 42, fig. F D elaware River 77 D eloria, Philip xi Disney, Walt r 2 D ordogne River 54 Durand, Asher B. froncispiece, 66, 77, fig. 56 Dutton, C larence 80, 8r, 85, 86, 87, 89 Eakins, T homas 75, 77, fig. 66 Egloffstein, F. W von 8 r Em erson, Ralph Waldo r, 2- 5, Io, 85, fig. I English Traits I England 1, 3 Fay, Gaston 24, fig. 14 Field Museum of atural History 54 Filson, John 99 Fisher, Alvin 65 Fonr-de-Gaume 54 Ford, John 91, i o3, 107- 9, I I I, figs . 75, 90, 91 Freud, Sigmund 88

Froebe! Academy 43

Johns, Elizaberh xi, 64 Johnso n, Easrman 73, fig. 64

Gase, John IOI, 107, fig. 83 Gloucesrer, Mass. 73 Gifford, Sanford 66 Gilberr, Grove Karl 81 Gilpin, William 99 "Girl ofrhe Period" 18, 21, 24, 26, fig. 16 glaciers 12 Goerzmann, William H. 80 Grand Canyon 79-90 Gram, Ulysses S. 85 Griffirh, D. W Io7, 108

Karsr, John fig. 17 Kaufmann, Theodor roI Kenserr, John Frederic 77, fig. 67 Kenrucky 99 Knighr, Charles R. 39-57, fig. 54 early career 4 3 Hall of rhe Age of Man murals 4 7, 5r, figs . 42, 44-54 painrings figs. 30, 36, 39 painrings of Cro-Magnon man 54-5 6, figs. 50, 51 sculprure fig. 3S Knighr, George Wakefield 43 Knighr, Lucy 4 3 Kolodny, Annerre ix Krurch, Joseph Wood 8S

Haraway, Donna 39 Harper's 17, 21, 24, 28, figs . 7, S, ro, 13, 15, I6, IS, I9, 21, 22 Haselrine, Sranley 77 Hassam , Childe 73 H awkins, Benjamin Warerhouse 4 r, 42, fig. 33 Heart and Home 10, 2 r, fig. 9 H egel, Georg xii H ennepin , Louis 79 Holmes, William H enry So, S2, S6, S7, figs. 71-73 Homer, Winslow ix, 17-1S, 21, 24, 26, 28, 31, 33, 35, 36, 64, 6S-70, 76-7S At the Spring, Saratoga 2r, fig. 9 Autumn 1S, 21, fig. 6 Beach at Long Branch 16, fig. r 7 Butterflies 2 I, fig. I r The Cotton Pickers 35, fig. 29 Croquet Scene 17, 26, fig. 5 Dinner Horn 2S, fig. 2 r Fresh Air 3 r, fig. 27 Fresh Eggs 3 r, fig. 23 Hark.' The Lark.' r 7, 35, fig. 2S Long Branch, New Jersey 69, fig. 57 Milking Time r 8, 3r, 33, fig. 24 Milkmaid 33, fig. 25 On a Lee Shore 78, fig. 69 Opening Day in New York 24, fig. r 3 Temperance Meeting rS, 33, 35, fig. 26 Hudson River 65, 69, 79, 80, 82 Hudson River School 99

Lamb,]. & R. 43, 58 Le Mousrier 54 Leurze, Emanuel roo, 101, 107, fig. 82 Lewis, Dio r 8, 24, 26, 33 Limon, Eliza Lynn 18 Long Branch, New Jersey 64 Lucas, Frederic A. 51, 60 Melbourne 69 Melrose, Andrew 101 Mercalf, Willard 73 Merropoliran Museum of An 43 M exican War So Miller, Jean-Fran<;:ois 35, 36 Mirchell, W J. T. 39 Mirman, G reg 39 Monrclair, New Jersey 73 Moran, Thomas B. 39, So, 82, 85, 8S, 99 Chasm ofthe Colorado S2, 85, fig. 70 Morgan,]. P. 43, 44, 54 Morgan Jr. , J.P. 44, 47 Morron, T homas ix Mounr Shasra r 1 Muir, John x, 7, 9-10, 12-13, fig. 3 Mountains of California 7, ro, fig. 4 Mi.illhausen, Heinrich Sr Murray, William 69

Ince, Thomas I 07 Inness, Geo rge 72, fig. 62 Isle of Shoals, ew Hampshire 64 Ives, Joseph Chrisrmas 80, 82

asr, Thomas 26, 2S, 31, figs. rS, 19, 22

The Nation Jameson, Frederick ix Jefferson, Thomas 3

r7

arional Women's Suffrage Associarion I 8 ewberry, John Srrong Sr, S2

II6

New York Evening Telegraph 24

Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District 8 r, 86,

iagara Falls 65, 79 Novak, Barbara 93

87, figs. 71-n

O sborn, H enry Fairfield 39, 41, 51, 57, 59-62, fig. 34 Owen, Richard 41 Palmer, F. F. 101 Parker, John xi Peale, Charles Willson 57 Perry, N ora 21 "Pilrdow n Man" 47 Plains Indians 104 Porrer, C harlotte 39 Porrer, William S. 94 Potomac River 3 Pound, Ezra 88 Powell, John Wesley 80, 81, 82, 85, 88 Prour's Neck, Maine q, 78 Pyne, Srephen xi, 79 Rainger, Ronald 39 Redding, Oris xii Reinharr, C. S. 21, fig. l o Remington, Frederic 70, 9 1, 97, 98, ro7 Aiding a Comrade 70, fig. 59 Downing the Nigh Leader 91, fig. 74 The Last Stand 97, fig. 78 Roberts, Tom 70, 73, fig. Go Robinson, T heodore 73 Roosevelr, Theodore 70, 8 r Rossetti, D ame Gabriel xu Rudwick, Martin 41 Sargenr, John Singer 36 Schuylkill River 65 Sherwood, John 21 Sherwood, M . E. W 21 Sierra C lub 6 Sierra Mo unrains l o, 12 Sirring Bull 107 Slorkin, Richard xi, 91 Sokal, Alan x Sorosis Club r 8, 28 Sourhern, C lara 77, fig. 65 Spencer, H erberr 86 squirrels r 2

Stagecoach 91, 10 3, 107- 11 Sranley, John M ix 65, 99 Sregner, Wallace 88 Taine, Hippolyte 24

T herien, Alex 5 Thoreau, H enry r, 5-6, fig. 2 Tocqueville, Alexander de 6 Twach rman, John H . 70, 77, fi gs. 61, 68 U.S. Geological Survey 81

Urah Bo Valenrine, Lawson 33 Vtmity Fair 2 1 , fig. r 2 Vedder, Elihu 28, fig. 20 Venus de Milo 2 r, fig. 7 Virginia 3 Walker, James 10 3 Walker, Joseph 79 Warner Bros. 106, l 07 Waud, Alfred 96 Weir, J . Alden 7 3 Wesr, Benjamin 96, fig. 76 Wheeler, George 81 Whire, Richard x, r W ilson , E. 0 . x W irhers, Walrer 73, fig. 63 Wolf, Bryan 93 Woodhull, V ictoria r 8, 24, 26 Worth, T homas 21, 24 Yellowstone 82 Zion Canyo n 86

PHOTO CREDITS American Museum of Nacural Hisrory, Courtesy D epartment Library Services: Fig. 30, Neg. No. 33 5199; fig. 31, Neg. No. 3 1 5077; fig. 34, Neg. No. 36106, Phoro by Julius Kirschner, 1916; fig. 35, Neg. No. 35422; fig. 36, Neg. No. 35806; fig. 37, Neg. No. 38715, Phoro by Kay C. Lenskjold; fig. 38, Neg. o. 35744; fig. 39, Neg. No. 35799; fig. 40, Neg. No. 310881, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. 41, Neg. No. 313086; fig. 42, Neg. No. 3913 1, Pho ro by E. M. Fulda; fig. 43, Neg. No. 313091, Phoro by Edison Lamp Works; fig. 44, Neg. No. 37225, Phoro by Kirschner.; fig. 45, Neg. No. 37227, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. .+6, Neg. No. 37953, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. 47, Neg. No. 37228, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. 48, Neg. No. 3986 1, Phoro

by Kirschner; fig. 49, Neg. No. 39442, Copy by Thane Bierwerr; fig. 50, Neg. No. 39441A; fig. 51, Neg. No. 322602; fig. 52, Neg. No. 37952, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. 53, eg.

No. 31 j2 1o, Phoro by Kirschner; fig. 54.

Arr Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide: Fig. 58, Southern Australian Government Grant with the assistance of Bond Corporation Holdings Ltd through the An Gallery of South Australia Foundations ro mark the Gallery's Centenary, 1981; fi g. 60, Elder Bequest Fund, 1899.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Fig. 5 5, Rogers Fund, 1907; fig.8 1, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Milwaukee Art Museum: Fig. 28, Acquisirion made possible through Museum Trustees: Robert 0. Anderson , R. Stanton Avery, B. Gerald Cantor, Edward W Carter, Jusrin D art, Charles E. Ducommun, Mrs. F. Daniel Frost, Julian Ga nz, Sr., Dr. Armand Hammer, Harry Lenart, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, Mrs. Joan Palevsky, Richard E. Sherwood, Maynard J. Toll, and Hall B. Wallis, m. n.68 .

Museum of Art, Rhode Isl and School of Design: Fig. 69, Jesse M etcalf Fund.

Museum of Fine Arts, Bosron: Fig. 57, The Hayden Collection.

Museu m of Fine Arts, Housron: Fig. 59, The Hogg Brothers Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg.

National Gallery of Arr, Washingron: Fig. 6, C ollecrion of Mr. and Mrs. Paul M ellon; fig. 23, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon; Fig. 25, Gift of Ruth K. Hensch el in memory of her husband, Charles R. Henschel.

Arr Institme of C hicago: Fig. 5, Friends of America n Art Collection; rhe Goodman Fund, 1942.35; fig. 68, Friends of Ameri can Art Collection.

ational Gallery of Vicroria, Melbourne, Australia: Fig. 65, Felron Bequest, 1942.

Bancroft Library, U niversity of C alifornia, Berkeley: Figs. 10, 18.

National Museum of Wales, Ca rdiff: Fig. p, D epartment of Geology.

Brooklyn Museum of Art: Fig. 27, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 41.1087.

Buffalo Bill Hisro rical Center: Fig. 77, Gift of The Coe Fo undation.

New Britain Museum of American Arr: Fig.1 1, Friends of William E. Brooks. Phorograph, E. Irving Blomstrann.

Delaware Arr Museum: Fig. 24, Gift of the Friends of Art and ocher donors.

New York Public Library: Fig. 56, Asror, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: Fig. 20, G ifr of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, 3fd, 1979.7.1 02.

Newberry Library, C hicago: Fig. 33.

Philadelphia Museum of Arr: Fig. 26, Purchased wirh the John Howard McFadden, Jr. Fund; fig. 66, G ift of Mrs. T homas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams.

Harvard U ni versity: Fig. 1, Phorograph by J. W. Black, Bosron , by permission of the Ralph Waldo Em erson Association and of Houghron Library, H arvard Universiry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Association: Fig. 1, Phorograph by J. W Black, Bosron. By permission of the Ralph Waldo Em erson Association and of H oughron Library, H arvard University.

Indiana University Library: Figs. 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22.

Library of Congress: Fig. 2, Courresy of rhe Library o f Congress; fig. 3.

Co urtesy of rhe Library of Co ngress.

Wadsworth Atheneum: Fig. 67, T he Ella Gallup Sumner and M ary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund; fig. 80, Bequest of Alfred Smith.

Los Angeles Museum of Arr: Fig. 29, G ift of Frederick Layron.

Washingron U niversity Gallery of Art, Saint Lo uis: Fig. 79, Gifr of Nathan iel Phillips, 1890.

National Museum of American Arr, Sm ithsonian Insticution: Fig. 82, Bequest of Saral1 Carr Upron.

1 18

CONTRIBUTORS T. J. Jackson Lears: Introduction Richard White: Transcendental Landscapes Sarah Burns: Winslow Homer and the Natural Woman Michele Bogart: Lowbrow/Highbrow: Charles R. Knight, Art Work, and the Spectacle ofPrehistoric Life Elizabeth Johns: Cities, the Day Excursion, and Late-Century Landscape Stephen Pyne: How the Canyon Became Grand Richard Slotkin: Visual Narrative and American Myth .from Thomas Cole to john Ford

Distributed by Antique Collectors' Club

Isabella Stewart Cjardner ~useum

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CONTR I BUTORS

Isabella Stewart r:ardner _.-71,,. 'd vv1useum Distributed by Antique Collectors' Club