The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture

Catherine Holochwost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429615306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination's potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.

1 Historicizing the Imagination

In 1832, the Boston artist Alvan Fisher wrote to his friend, the painter and engraver Asher B. Durand. There was some news to report—Fisher had recently painted a portrait of the phrenologist Gaspar Spurzheim that he wanted Durand to see, and he relayed some praise of Durand’s portrait of George Washington. The artist was given more to reflection than gossip, however; as he wrote, “Many faults, or foibles I know I have, more probably that I do not know and probably I am the happier for that ignorance.” One fault rose above all the others, and that was his “rambling, speculating, theorizing, rattling” imagination. How much better it would be to switch places with the less imaginative Durand! “I feel, I know, that I should be the gainer by the advantage of your chaste taste and improved judgement [sic],” Fisher asserted. Instead, the artist wrote, he was stuck with an imagination that was “like an unbroken colt” or an “unruly vagrant that so much posseses [sic] my mind.” This sounds very bad indeed, but Fisher inexplicably followed it with an appreciation of sorts. “[Y]et why do I rail at this power of imagination? I live by it and [am] made happy by it—tho’ it do lead me to the brink of folly.” Perhaps sensing that he had said too much, Fisher then withdrew entirely from the subject, writing a terse “but enough of ego” before moving on to supplying more desultory news from Boston.¹

There is a good deal in this brief exchange that is puzzling. The idea that the imagination had to be carefully monitored is revealed in both the metaphors Fisher chose (an “unbroken colt” and a “vagrant”) as well as the rhetorical shape of the sentences themselves, which are littered with changes in direction (“yet,” “tho’,” and “but”), as if navigating some hidden threat. What lies beneath? And why would an artist, of all people, worry about having too much imagination? For many today, imagination is a pleasant faculty that can facilitate delightful shifts from humdrum, everyday life to the South Seas or the moon, something that helps tell stories from the perspective of an insect or an anthropomorphized dog. Contemporary critics often praise novels or films as tours de force of the imagination, and, although too much whimsy can become tiresome or confusing, it is seldom thought of as dangerous.

In the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, however, the imagination was regarded as a tool of despots and tyrants, capable of encouraging “the vitious gratification of grosser appetites,” as the refined statesman Gulian Verplanck warned in an address to the American Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824. One would rarely read a description of the imagination in the nineteenth century without encountering some kind of caveat about its inherent dangers and its need to be regulated. At the same time, however, it was also an astonishingly fundamental term for Anglo-American aesthetic theory. The Connecticut painter Samuel F. B. Morse declared that pleasing the imagination was the “central aim” of the fine arts, a claim he placed in the opening section of the first of four lectures on art theory that he delivered for the New York Athenaeum in 1826. Not only were these lectures one of the most serious attempts at a comprehensive theory of the fine arts in antebellum America, Morse continued to use these lectures as a teaching tool for his students.² Making a statement like this would have been thoroughly uncontroversial, however, and echoed the great British theorist and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who had stated in similarly unambiguous terms, “The great end of all those arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling.”³ Imagination and sensibility formed the “fundamental ground, common to all the arts” that Reynolds thought worthy of the name. Rather than being “false and delusive,” he instead called the imagination “the residence of truth,” and warned that merely imitative and mechanical mimesis was nothing without it.⁴

We might wish to dismiss these concerns as elitist and esoteric, but in the early national period, aesthetics was central to public discourse. People in this era “[spoke] the philosophical language of the imagination fluently and vociferously,” as the literary scholar Edward Cahill has argued in his study Liberty of the Imagination. The imagination and its adjuncts—beauty, sublimity, genius, pleasure, taste, and more—were celebrated, dissected, and analyzed in newspapers, periodicals, commonplace books, sermons, and, of course, face-to-face conversation. These terms spring from aesthetics, a mode of knowledge that Cahill succinctly defines as a “diverse constellation of concepts similarly concerned with discovering truth in pleasure, emotion, and non-rational modes of knowledge.” As Catherine Kelly has shown, exercises in aesthetic discernment like penmanship and dancing not only structured much of the curriculum of early national academies, they also rendered these individuals socially visible by endowing them with a form of “politicized virtue.” These educational institutions were private and their reach was somewhat limited, but even so, Kelly has shown that ordinary men and women, too, were drawn into their culture of learning.⁵ Furthermore, the philosophy underpinning this culture of learning was remarkably cohesive. Beginning at the College of Philadelphia in 1755 and spreading to conservative schools like Yale as well as the more liberal and Unitarian Harvard soon after, the Scottish commonsense school supplied the philosophical curriculum for generations well into the nineteenth century. This influence extended to “small liberal arts colleges and the state colleges, too,” as well as to smaller, privately-run academies.⁶

Fisher’s vivid metaphors describing his imagination in his letter to Durand compels us to acknowledge, however, that the imagination, the pivot around which this aesthetic discourse turned, was built upon shaky ground. This book is about how artists and audiences navigated these treacherous conditions and asks what these negotiations might have looked like in visual, material, and rhetorical terms. Although the word “imagination” might bring to mind weird and wonderful Gothic outsiders like John Quidor and David Gilmour Blythe, this study is instead concerned with standard-bearers who sought to uphold the traditions of what was variously called the beau ideal in France and the Grand Manner in Britain. It therefore examines works by artists who were academically trained or who aspired to an academic style, including Henry Sargent, Thomas Sully, Washington Allston, Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Bird King, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Daniel Huntington, as well as the Europeans like François-Marius Granet and Thomas Gainsborough whom they emulated. Just as the French and British had done before them, these American artists sought to create works of art in an imaginative and ideal cast, thereby building credibility and acclaim for a national school. Rather than taking the sunny declarations of boosters of the arts in America at face value, analyzing the rhetoric of the imagination asks us to see how conflicted and vexed their project was from the start.

Whose Imagination?

For many, the combination of “imagination” and “antebellum American art” will seem like a contradiction in terms. “Little has been written about the rise of the imagination in American art,” the esteemed Americanist Wayne Craven wrote in a footnote to an essay published in 2001. Craven noted that “[o]ne of the few scholars to consider this important matter” was Elizabeth Johns on Washington Allston’s theory of the imagination, but found little else besides two other Allston scholars.⁷ Lest one think that this is only an American art history problem, a similar pattern has held in American literary studies. In 2008, K. P. van Anglen admitted in another footnote, “Relatively little has been written on the history of the imagination in New England per se.”⁸ As recently as 2016, Christopher Castiglia agreed. After calling for increased attention to imagination’s revolutionary potentials, he allowed that, “As things stand … literature as an enactment of imaginative world making has little traction in early American literary studies, easily dismissed in favor of weightier critiques.”⁹

This scholarly lacuna is due in no small part to the fact that many influential scholars either explicitly stated that Americans were not concerned with the imagination, or implicitly accomplished the same goal by ignoring it. Terence Martin, in his 1961 book The Instructed Vision, definitively stated that Americans had a widespread “fear of imaginative experience.”¹⁰ And the literary scholar James Engell whose synthesis of imagination’s post-Enlightenment history has served as an indispensable resource, nevertheless claimed that, “The great split between man and nature, the dualism that scarred so much European thought, simply was not a factor in America before 1820 or 1830, and so the imagination was not required to stitch it up.”¹¹ Likewise, the art historian Barbara Novak argued that “pure imaginary romanticism was rare in America,” arguing that “romanticism was more likely to appear … in the super-real techniques” that were “appropriated” by twentieth-century surrealists.¹² In Novak’s later book on nineteenth-century American landscape art, the term “imagination” surfaces from time to time, but it is often synonymous with the idea of falsity. We are told that “the stress on poetic vision found in the Germans and in Ruskin leads to Turner’s imagination rather than to Constable’s eye.” Elsewhere, the idea of the artist’s imagination “tamper[ing] with God’s nature” is likened to the blasphemy of “[c]ivilization’s axe.”¹³ Even books that seemed to promise dedicated analysis of the topic like Ellwood Parry’s 1988 monograph Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination did not critically examine the specific meanings that attached themselves to the imagination, perhaps because the benefits of doing so were unclear.¹⁴

Indeed, the Romantic imagination can seem like shapeless pabulum, everywhere and nowhere at once, and corresponding to a set of dated concerns that historians of the modern and contemporary periods have shuffled off. As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted of this inclination, “cultural critics and historians [tend] to refer unreflectively to tendencies such as emotionalism, sentimentality, and idealism as ‘merely’ romantic phenomena that have been superseded by tough-minded modernism or even more wised-up postmodernism.”¹⁵ In contrast, the supercharged theories of the imagination put forth in the twentieth century could hardly be more significant, and, although I lack the space here to unpack them in any detail, I can at least gesture at their importance. Jacques Lacan, for instance, dubbed the imaginary one of the three symbolic orders that helped structure the psyche, identifying it with his famous “mirror stage” by which infants established a concept of idealized selfhood. The intricacies of the Lacanian imaginary continue to guide analyses in a range of fields. The influential concept of the “social imaginary” was developed by the philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur in the mid-1970s, and, by the 1980s, the imagination was made central to the study of nationalisms by the political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson’s now-canonical Imagined Communities. Anderson’s text later served as one of the theoretical foundations for the “modern social imaginaries,” of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, one of the most influential philosophers of modernity living today.

Largely as a result of Ricoeur, Anderson, and, most of all, Taylor, there are more imaginaries and imaginations today than one could possibly count. There is a cultural imagination, a technical imagination, a religious imagination, a literary imagination, and a bioregional imagination. Subgroups within these imaginations also have their own imaginations, parceled out by historical period, religious or ethnic identity, or political affiliation. As the literary historian Sean Silver has helpfully pointed out, however, “imaginary” and “imagination” have become “short-hand” for “coordinating large groups and large historical movements … installing a (perhaps appropriately) weak theoretical center at the very heart of the method that seeks to read those conditions.”¹⁶ The many recent books that use the term “historical imagination,” Silver has emphasized, “generally mean the term in no particularly historical sense at all, but rather as a heuristically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Historicizing the Imagination
• 2 A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim
• 3 Staying on the Surface
• 4 Race-ing the Embodied Imagination
• 5 Culturing the Embodied Imagination
• Index