Ethel Reed: Model with Lily, 1897

Poster Girl

From "Play's the Thing,"Woodstock Times,December 25, 2008:

Some years ago when I wrote regularly for this paper on art, I devoted two successive columns to Edmonia Lewis, a sculptress, as they called her back in the day, of mixed Negro and American Indian breed ... again as they used to say. She was a fantastic character with a propensity for self-invention, so not all the strange stories about her could be corroborated as fact, but what did it matter if her art was fine? Born near Albany on the Fourth of July 1844, according to her passport application, she lived on a reservation as a child, was educated at Oberlin, and came to fame in Boston during the Civil War. Her sculpture was at first of indifferent quality, the critics wrote, but there was to be said for it the splendid novelty of brown hands on white marble.*

Her supporters sent her to Rome in 1865 to advance her art, which she did: her crowning achievement, Cleopatra, was exhibited to acclaim at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. By the turn of the century the vogue for neoclassical sculpture had waned, and Lewis ended her days in Europe. No one knows precisely where or when. I came across a census listing for her from 1901, locating her at 154 Store Street in London, near Bloomsbury, where she worked at home as an “artist/modeller.” Scholar Marilyn Richardson places her back in Rome by decade’s end, but there the trail vanishes. All along for Edmonia Lewis, the life and the art had competed for public attention; at the end both receded from view.

The same could be said, almost eerily, of another Boston girl who made good, poster artist Ethel Reed, in whom I have taken a frankly obsessive interest lately since winning one of her posters in an internet auction. Like Lewis, she was a natural, a phenomenon — essentially self-taught, with only a smattering of formal instruction. Her meteoric burst of fame in the mid-1890s was followed by a failed romance, flight to Europe in mid-1896, disappearance from the published record after 1898, when she was only 24, and an end to her visible career.

Prowling on Project Wombat, an online discussion list for difficult reference questions, I came across scholar Donna Halper’s discovery of a 1901 census listing in London for an Ethel Reed residing at 106 Grosvenor Road in Pimlico with four-month-old son Anthony and servant Mary Gay, but no husband. Her occupation was recorded as “Artist (Painter)” with “Sculpt.” overwritten.

Could these two Boston emigre artists have known about each other’s presence? Could they have chatted over tea, or absinthe? We will never know, but Google Maps made clear that, at least in mid-1901, Lewis and Reed lived only 3.1 miles apart. This is the stuff of which novels are made, I am thinking.

Ethel Reed was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on March 13, 1874 to photographer Edgar Eugene Reed and wife Elizabeth Mary. They moved to Amherst sometime before 1880. Ethel’s precocious artistic talents were recognized at age 12 when she entered a crayon work at the Essex County Agricultural Society Fair and was awarded a 50-cent “gratuity.” In this year she had begun some schooling with Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952), whose attraction to Ethel dated back to a sketch of her executed six years before. Coombs went on to paint a miniature on ivory of Ethel as one of “Seven Pretty Girls of Newburyport,” shown at the Boston Water Color Club in December 1893.

At this time Reed, age 19, was engaged in an unsuccessful pursuit of employ in New York City. But she soon returned to Boston, to which her family had repaired in 1890, and took on a studio of her own at 367 Boylston. She had been taking classes at the Cowles School of Art and exhibiting landscapes at the Boston Arts Students’ Association. Like many artistic souls of her generation, she was consumed with the romanticism of Keats, the exoticism of Omar Khayyam, and the formalism of Japanese art, as introduced to Boston by Harvard Professor Ernest Fenollosa.

It was during this period that her flamboyant personality was evidenced in costume balls, dance parties, pageants, and nonconformist life styles. Three months earlier, the Boston Journal (March 25, 1893) reported: “As the time for the artists’ festival approaches, society gets more and more excited over it. Young people who are born with the love of dressing up do not by any means have it all to themselves. Mr. Goodhue, the architect, is to head the King Rene group, as the regal ruler himself, with Miss Alexander of Cambridge as King Rene’s daughter; Ethel Reed, who danced so well at the pageant, as the Queen, and Mr. Herbert Copeland, Mr. Fred Day, and Mr. Abbott will be in the long train of courtiers.... Ralph Adams Cram is to be Pope Nicholas V., and will be surrounded by eighteen Cardinals.”

Several of the above-named revelers would be at the core of Bohemian Boston in the years to come. Reed would be involved in a menage a trois with the architects Goodhue and Cram; would pose nude for the photographer Fred (Holland) Day; and would execute book designs and posters for Messrs. Copeland and Day, as well as publishers Lamson, Wolffe & Co., the Boston Herald, and others. She would become engaged to one of the Hub’s most eligible bachelors, artist Philip Hale—son of Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man without a Country—and then disengaged, fleeing to Europe in heartbreak and shame.

She had ridden the new wave: a fad of Orientalism, experiments in free love and hashish, and, crucially for the history of art in America, a craze for posters. The boom had begun in France two decades earlier, when Jules Cheret and others pioneered a new form of advertising, favoring images over text and color over monochrome. The lines between art and commerce were blatantly blurred, and the streets of Paris became an art gallery for the common man: in the words of A. Hyatt Mayor, they were “pictures meant to be seen by people who did not mean to see them.” By the 1890s the posters became more prized than the products they advertised, and connoisseurs lined up to buy the lithographs not earmarked for the walls and kiosks of the city.

In America the first posters went primarily to advertise magazines and books. Edward Penfield heralded the new simplified, straightforward style in his posters for Harper’s in 1893. In May 1894 Will H. Bradley contributed a more sinuous style — influenced, no doubt, by England’s master of decadence, Aubrey Beardsley — to the cover of the Chap-Book.

Reed, meanwhile, was sending sentimental hackwork to magazines without much success. A syrupy vignette titled “Butterfly Thoughts” became her first published work when St. Nicholas magazine ran it in the June 1894 issue. In the winter of 1894-95 an unnamed friend came to Reed’s studio, saw a portrait she had painted, and suggested that she copy it to become a poster promoting the Boston Sunday Herald, with which he was associated. “You can see,” she told an interviewer in 1895 as she pointed to her painting, “that the reproduction flattened and quite spoiled the effect of the original.”

She missed the point, seemingly. It was precisely the flatness, the simplicity, the atonality, the graphic quality that made “Ladies Want It,” issued on February 24, 1895, a milestone. In that portrait and nearly all those of women that followed, a critic noted “a certain uniformity of type began to assert itself as I glanced from one to another, and it dawned upon me at last that the original of these studies was the artist herself. Later, when she confirmed my observation, I had the pleasure of congratulating her on her choice of a model.”

Ethel Reed was a striking woman, not exactly beautiful by the standards of today, and with a wide-eyed gaze that hints at madness. But in her day she was universally regarded as a dish. A writer in the Chap-Book offered: “Lamson and Wolffe’s first book was published on Washington’s birthday, ‘so timed to call attention to what we intended to make the keynote of the firm, healthy Americanism, as opposed to the general tendencies of the younger publishers toward imported realism.’ It naturally followed that the new firm should ‘discover’ Miss Ethel Reed: no healthy American would lose any time in discovering Miss Reed, if she were anywhere in sight.”

The Boston Daily Advertiser described her well in 1896:

Large, dark eyes, looking out under a wide, white brow; a rather broad, firm face, the skin clear, with what the French call a ‘fine pallor,’ set in a mass of dull black hair above a strong neck; expressive features, the mouth begins sad; a supple figure, though sturdy withal, and of just medium height, neither tall nor short—that is Ethel Reed, the Boston girl of 21 [actually 22], whom critics have hailed as the greatest woman designer of that latest creation of modern art, the poster.

“I am governed by moods in my work,” she says, “and I cannot work when the mood is not on. It does not come at my bidding, and sometimes for a fortnight I can accomplish nothing. Then in a few hours I can dash off all that I wished to do in that fortnight.”

Fleeing Boston in the wake of being jilted by Philip Hale, she landed a position in London as the replacement for Aubrey Beardsley, who had been dismissed as editor of The Yellow Book. She commenced an affair in late 1897 with the writer Richard Le Gallienne while he was engaged to Julie Noiregard, the woman who would become his second wife.

And then she was done. A drawing of a girl with a cat appeared in the Studio Magazine of March 1898, a sad pierrot in The Sketch. Le Gallienne wrote a poem for her in 1910.

TO ONE WHO IS BLIND

I said I had forgotten her,

That I had put away

Our memories of Paradise

Until the Judgment Day;

That never more the laughing earth

Should see us hand in hand,

That I long since had shut the door

Of the old fairyland.

Then on a sudden came strange news

Upon the gossip wind

My love of those sweet years ago

Great God — my love was blind!

I said — the news must be a lie,

Cruel as are the years,

They could not be so merciless

To such great eyes as hers.

Little child of long ago,

God grant the news untrue!

Except for one strong selfish thought —

That I may come to you

And sit beside you in the dark,

And, as in Paradise

I gave you all my breaking heart,

Now bring to you — my eyes.

The special poignancy of Reed’s story deserved a better poem and less egotistical a poet. A. E. Housman will do:

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

___________

* For those interested to learn more, see “Inventing Edmonia Lewis” at:

http://hudsonriverbracketed.blogspot.com/2006/04/inventing-edmonia-lewis.html

and

http://hudsonriverbracketed.blogspot.com/2006/04/inventing-edmonia-lewis-part-ii.html

--John Thorn

Tom and Sally, who sent Harry to jail.

Of Croswell and Cocktails

From "Bubbly," in the Mid-Hudson Post Pioneer, by Erica Freudenberger:
There are few things in life I enjoy as much as a smart cocktail.

So imagine my chagrin when I realized I had missed its bicentennial. My oversight was compounded when I realized the first official mention of the cocktail (actually, “cock-tail”) was made in the Hudson Valley on May 6, 1806, by Harry Croswell in the City of Hudson newspaper Balance and Columbian Repository.

If ever there was a man who needed a stiff drink, it was Croswell. Two years earlier he had been convicted of sedition by going after Thomas Jefferson. Undeterred, he continued to publish – and undoubtedly to drink.

I can say, as someone who has in the past been given the task of producing newspapers on a regular basis, that the lure of alcohol can be strong.

It was strongest when running a daily newspaper, which I did in the same block where Croswell toiled. A restaurant a mere block away from that auspicious location serves grapefruit margaritas that blend the perfect bite of hesperidium with the tang of tequila. So enamored of this delightful concoction, I set myself the task of learning how to mix one perfectly. After several failed attempts, I finally managed to get the perfect blend of tequila, lime juice, and Cointreau with the merest hint of grapefruit.

I don’t know what Croswell was sipping when he decided, apparently unchastened by his earlier legal fracas, to publish “Rum! Rum! Rum!,” a detailed account of how Jefferson’s minions were liquoring up voters before they hit the polls. He highlighted the 32 Gin-Slings, 411 Glasses Bitters, and 25 glasses “cock-tail” doled out by Jeffersonians. Asked by a correspondent to explain this nefarious “species of refreshment,” Croswell wrote in the issue of May 13, 1806: “Cock-tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters; it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.”

Perhaps. Whether Jefferson’s willingness to pay the bar tab of voters managed to determine an election or not, it’s certainly a more palatable approach to stealing an election than having the Supreme Court anoint a president. And a whole lot more fun than counting hanging chads.

I don’t drink to go to the polls. Nor do I imbibe with the intent of doing foolhardy things; I am capable of astounding idiocy when perfectly sober.

I have a cocktail because I enjoy it. A perfectly mixed drink brings me great pleasure, something Barbara Holland, in her book Endangered Pleasures, convincingly argues is becoming increasingly un-American. We are a nation that lives in fear of overindulgence, which is often equated with disease. Our pursuit of happiness has been thoroughly infused with Puritan overtones: hard work and steady denial will bring us our just reward. At some point we forgot – or became too guilty – to stop and smell the roses, or in this case, to sip a cocktail.

SIDEBAR:
Feeling parched? Try out the original cock-tail recipe, or receipt, as they would have spelled it back in 1806:

Bittered Gin Sling
1.5 oz gin
0.75 oz sweet vermouth or sherry
0.5 oz lemon juice
0.75 oz simple syrup
dash or two of Angostura bitters
Soda water

Shake all but the soda water with ice, strain into a tumbler or highball over ice, top with soda, and garnish with a lemon peel.

--Erica Freudenberger

The Balance, in which Harry Croswell's fate hung.

Let Freedom Sting: Addendum

Readers of "Let Freedom Sting" (in two parts, see below) will recall the story of Harry Croswell, the Hudson printer of The Wasp whose libel case represents the foundation on which rests our country’s freedom of the press. Between his 1803 conviction and the commencement of his appeal in mid-February of 1804, Croswell continued publishing in The Balance and Columbian Repository material that frankly denounced the actions of Thomas Jefferson and his cronies. Here reproduced is one such work wherein Croswell expresses unreservedly his love for the American virtues, as embodied by Washington and Adams, and his abhorrence of their adulteration by Anti-Federalist “snakes” such as Jefferson. By way of explanation: when Croswell mentions “hireling pens” he alludes to his rival printer, Charles Holt, and to political writer James T. Callender, and when he speaks of the “sharpest sting” of conscience, he surely alludes to his discontinued paper, The Wasp.—MARK THORN

THE BALANCE
NEWS-BOY’S NEW YEAR’s
ADDRESS.

[Written by the Editor.]
CHANG’D be the News-Boy’s wonted jocund song,
For strains more serious to this verse belong:
In times like these, but little cause of joy
Inspires the poet, or awakes the boy—
In times like these, when great malignant foes
Condemn the press—the voice of truth oppose—
When upstart pow’r lifts high its ruthless hand,
Dejection deep pervades an injur’d land.

When our lov’d Washington, the great and good,
First in the councils of his country stood—
When his successor Adams, firm and just,
Discharg’d with faith, a nation’s dearest trust,
The Press was free—truth sanction’d by the law—
Falshood and malice kept in proper awe;
Then did a sland’rous, base, and factious band,
The scourge, the curse, the ruin of our land,
With ceaseless clamour pour their loud complaints
Of fetters, gags, infringements and restraints—
Restraints, the good were never doom’d to feel—
Restraints like those which say “Thou shalt not steal”—
Infringements, of those rights which bad men claim,
The just and wise to slander and defame—
Gags, which the mouth of falshood only knew—
Fetters, impos’d not on the just or true.

Then, to dam up the torrent of abuse,
Which flow’d from hireling pens, in streams profuse;
To blunt the arrows aim’d at virtue’s head—
O’er Truth’s fair form a coat of mail to spread,
Was deem’d a wrong, too great for those to bear,
Who breed in filth, and breathe infectious air;
A reptile race, in Envy’s bosom nurs’d
With other snakes—of all those snakes the worst.

But that refulgent Sun, whose golden ray
Appris’d our nation of the break of day,
Whose op’ning morning beam, whose noontide light,
Cheer’d our forefathers with a prospect bright;
Whose mild, whose steady, whose unerring course,
Of all our blessings was the certain source,
Alas, is set, and nothing guides our way,
Save a dim planet’s poor and cheerless ray—
A feeble, changing, wav’ring, waning moon,
Which scarcely glimmers at its highest noon.

Such dark and gloomy times, all things invite,
That shun the day, and basely shrink from light;
Knaves quit their lurking-holes, and range at will,
Usurp all pow’r, and all the places fill.
And should, perchance, a faithful watchman deign
To sound th’ alarm, and midnight wrongs restrain,
Quick is he mark’d, and ev’ry upstart’s arm
Is rais’d in might to do the victim harm.

And must we always grope our darksome way?
Must gloom forever shroud the beams of day?
Must discord, anarchy, confusion reign,
And virtuous freedom ne’er her pow’r regain?
Forbid it, Heav’n! fair freedom’s Sun must rise,
Illume the world, and gild Columbia’s skies;
Justice and truth shall meet a better fate,
Nor longer fear derision from the great.

Then let the storm of party-spirit rage;
Let foes a war of persecution wage;
Let the strong arm of power be rais’d in might,
To crush, and triumph o’er defenceless right;
Let a gigantic faction proudly vaunt;
Let human tigers after victims pant;
Let upright freedom, fetter’d, gagg’d and bound,
Be scoff’d, and spurn’d, and trampled to the ground;—
Truth unappall’d, will meet the deadly blow,
And hurl defiance at the vengeful foe;
E’en from the dust will raise its potent word—
E’en from the dungeon’s depths it shall be heard.
Tyrants themselves, shall tremble at its voice—
Th’ oppress’d shall hear, and hearing, shall rejoice.

Nor let the tyrant think himself more blest,
When, on the couch of down, he seeks for rest:
Let him not think that e’en the shades of night
Can yield him comfort, or repose invite;
For here shall conscience, with her sharpest sting,
Affright and terror to his bosom bring—
Plant in his pillow such a deadly thorn,
That e’en his solitude shall be forlorn—
Whisper such awful warnings in his ear,
His black and haggard soul shall start with fear.

Such, such are my hopes—such my wishes are,
And this my fervent and my constant prayer—
God grant, the virtuous may live to see
THE PRESS TRIUMPHANT, AND OUR NATION FREE!

Hudson, January 1, 1804.

First in war, first in peace, last in public recognition.

George Clinton: A Bridge to the Future?

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, July 20, 2006:
When public works in our region have been named for private figures the result has seldom been a happy one. Who thinks of Joe DiMaggio when they are driving along New York City’s West Side Highway? Did you know that the Holland Tunnel does not reference the nation that founded New Amsterdam but instead Clifford Milburn Holland, the tunnel’s chief engineer? Does anyone speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike experience a frisson of dread at how close the Alexander Hamilton Rest Area is to where he met his earthly rest in a duel with Aaron Burr?

Our neighborhood, however, is blessed, as the bridge connecting Kingston and Rhinecliff is actually an apt memorial for its honoree, George Clinton. Not exactly a Founding Father — he didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence, as he was occupied in battle to achieve what it propounded; nor did he sign the Constitution, as he and Patrick Henry, among others, withheld their assent until they were assured that a Bill of Rights would be added — Clinton was nonetheless a great figure of his day, a patriot and, well, a bridge to the Republic that improbably survived its fledgling period. With his July 26 birthday celebration upon us this week, let’s pause at his burial monument in the graveyard of Kingston’s Old Dutch Church and reflect upon who he was, what he did, and why he still matters.

It is a measure of the man’s humility and unassuming way, not any paucity of accomplishment, that his personality was little known to the public, then as now. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and many more may be cited without credentialing — even without first names — in confidence that they are recalled at least through grade-school lessons. But George Clinton was a Gary Cooper type of hero —disinclined to trumpet himself and putting himself forward for public service reluctantly. Extraordinary times can make heroes of ordinary men, and that may well explain Clinton’s enduring place at the center of power. Though he left behind public papers that were published in ten volumes, he was neither an incisive writer like Hamilton nor a silver-tongued orator like Henry. It is left largely to others to testify to his stature ... and there is the undeniable record of dedication.

The bare bones are these: born in Little Britain, New York in 1739 (then in Ulster County, now in Orange), Clinton was a British soldier in the French and Indian and War, and later a Brigadier General against the British with the onerous and, as it proved, futile duty of defending Kingston against the incendiaries of General Vaughan on October 16, 1777. Undermanned and, it has been alleged, unprepared, the patriot forces mustered no meaningful opposition. No one claims for General Clinton martial genius, only a solid, reliable ability to get things done.

As a politician he served in the Continental Congress, voted for the Declaration of Independence and, in 1777, while still on active duty in the military, became first Governor of the State of New York. This post he held for 21 years (six consecutive terms from 1777 to 1795 and a seventh from 1801-1804), which is still the longest tenure of any U.S. Governor. Aging and tired, he nonetheless accepted his party’s nomination for Vice President in 1805. Following the acrimonious Aaron Burr as Jefferson’s sidekick, like Burr he balanced the ticket geographically and was chosen again in 1809 as running mate to Madison, another Virginian.

For a while as Jefferson’s second term neared an end, Clinton had thoughts of becoming president, though at his age and coming off an uninspired performance as vice president that left Senators shaking their heads and reminiscing about the brilliance of Burr, he had no realistic chance of nomination; even his old ally Jefferson turned against his effort. All the same, he remained the best choice to run alongside Madison, whose victory he assured by assuaging the worry of the Northern states that agrarian interests were beginning to monopolize the Presidency.

Clinton died in 1812, the third year of his second term, and was buried with honors in Washington. In 1908, largely at the instigation of historian Benjamin Myer Brink and Chaplain Roswell Randall Hoes, Clinton’s remains and funerary monument were transported to Kingston amid pomp and circumstance all along the way, particularly in New York City. On May 30 Kingston, amid celebration of the 250th year since its founding, welcomed the return of New York’s first governor to New York’s first capital.

George Clinton was especially admired, even revered, for his efforts to keep New Yorkers’ taxes low: he confiscated Tory lands and he used New York City port fees to buttress real-property collections. During the war, he was concerned that New York taxes would have to make up for a shortfall in funds from other states, laggardly in their obligated deliveries, and accordingly he backed Hamilton’s move for a strong Federal government that had the power to raise revenues. But when the Federal government moved to expropriate New York City’s port revenues for itself via a national tariff, Clinton reversed course, becoming vigorously anti-Federalist. In truth he was neither doctrinaire in his political beliefs nor idealistic in his political machinations; he was simply a pragmatist, and above all a New Yorker.

Concerned that a Federal government that could strip his state of its revenues might also trample individual liberties, Clinton became a prime backer of what became the Bill of Rights. He may have placed himself on the wrong side of national renown by preferring the loose Articles of Confederation to the centralizing force of the Constitution, and by casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that in 1811 abolished the National Bank. However, he is inextricably lodged in the hearts of his countrymen and in the pantheon of those dedicated to the rights of man.

In 2006, George Clinton may offer a further bridge, this time to New York’s future. At the turn of the last century, New York opened the golden door to millions of European immigrants, who swelled the population and increased the demand for support services and state revenues. After World War II, as Southern states held welfare payments beneath subsistence level, the indigent and unemployed migrated to the North, where more humane benefits were available. Today New York and other “blue” states seem to represent not only an old manufacturing economy and a discredited welfare state, but also an antiquated attitude toward the common weal. Conservative and liberal New Yorkers alike are, or ought to feel, as alienated from the national course as the South felt in the 1850s. We have seen a drift of talent and treasure to the rest of the country, as frightening to us as the draining of the Port of New York coffers was to George Clinton. Maybe New York, and no longer Alabama or Georgia, is the future home of state’s rights.

--John Thorn

Harry Croswell, waspish hero.

Let Freedom Sting: The Wasp, The Bee, and the Valley; Part II

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, July 6, 2006 (Part I appears below and might profitably be read first):

Since we commenced this tale of how our nation’s freedom of the press came to be created in the Hudson Valley more than 200 years ago, Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) has repeated his call to prosecute the New York Times for treason. Joining the chorus have been Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky), and the editors of the Wall Street Journal (the last-named to the horror of its reporters). And the National Review, in a deliciously servile bit, has called on the White House to revoke press credentials for the Times. To all these folks we extend our heartfelt thanks for blowing the dust off our story and making it seem, alas and alack, fresh. Let’s get back to it.

We concluded last week’s installment with the Federalists, led by Hamilton, Madison, and Adams, about to reap the whirlwind they had created with their Sedition Act of 1798, which had permitted the Administration to mark key opposition editors for prosecution. Among these had been Charles Holt of The Bee, which he had launched in New London, Connecticut, to provide an impartial lens through which the public might view society and politics. His attempts at neutrality, however, were ill-received: Federalist views were greeted with mild interest, but whenever he published an article of Democratic sentiment, New London’s preponderantly Federalist population would voice its displeasure via boycott. Holt was even sentenced under the Sedition Act to three months in prison and a $200 fine for publishing an article that reflected poorly on President Adams. Angered by his treatment and discouraged by his impecunious state, he accepted a proposition from a group of Democrats residing in Hudson, New York, in 1802 to relocate The Bee there, but this time as a plainly partisan paper. With Jefferson in the White House, it was a good time to be an anti-Federalist.

Holt’s transformation was not an isolated phenomenon. The political climate was so superheated that journalistic attempts at objectivity appealed to no one; to attain a readership, a printer had overtly to endorse one party or the other. And while Holt managed to find subscribers for his Hudson Bee, he found also a local rival in Harry Croswell, who would seek to destroy him and the ideology for which he stood. In response to The Bee Croswell, who had entered journalism with The Catskill Packet, created a personal newspaper, The Wasp. This he published in the garret of Hudson’s Balance and Columbian Repository, a Federalist paper in which he was a one-third partner. The Wasp, under Croswell’s pen name of Robert Rusticoat, undertook “To lash the Rascals naked through the world.” It addressed Holt thus:

It is well known that you was bro’t here by virtue of $500 raised for that purpose by the leading Democrats in this city. That the public may know, therefore, with how much purity and independence you will conduct in your editorial labors, would you be kind enough to answer the following questions:

Did the contributors to the $500 purchase you, as they purchase Negroes in Virginia, or hire you as they hire servants in New England?

Are you not a mere automaton in the hands of your masters: pledged to publish whatever slanders or falsehoods they shall dictate? And by your contract with them if you refuse to pollute your sheets have they not a right to ship you back again to your 350 subscribers in New London?

Holt chose not to reply in kind, maintaining his dignity and assuring his continued utility to the Jeffersonians, who dominated Hudson in any event. However, it was the fiery Croswell and not the decorous Holt who would leave an indelible impression upon American journalism. Croswell did not limit his attacks to Holt or his Hudson crowd but went after Jefferson himself. As reported here last week, the President regarded Croswell’s claims as all the more outrageous because they were true. Most outrageous of these was a remark that Croswell actually quoted from James Callender, the disaffected Federalist whom Jefferson had bribed to slander Adams and Washington in the run-up to the election of 1800: “Mr. Jefferson has for years past while his wife was living and does now since she is dead, keep a woolly headed concubine by the name of Sally—that by her he had had several children, and that one by the name of Tom has since his father’s election taken upon himself many airs of importance, and boasted his extraction from a President.”

Jefferson, although he had disapproved of the Sedition Act because it empowered the Federal government to prosecute those who printed or uttered allegedly treasonous statements, nonetheless believed that state governments had the right to try matters of libel, and that they ought to do so on a selected basis: “a few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect,” he wrote. Croswell was not the only printer to incense Jefferson. William Coleman, the editor of the New York Evening Post—created after their defeat in 1800 by well-heeled Federalists including Alexander Hamilton—published similar criticisms of the President. Coleman was not prosecuted, however, because Jefferson’s minions were reluctant to square off against the brilliant Hamilton in court. As we shall see, however, their attempt at evading Hamilton by prosecuting Croswell proved ineffectual.

Croswell was brought to trial in Columbia County in July, 1803, before Chief Justice Lewis. The indictment read, in part:

... it is represented that Harry Croswell, late of the city of Hudson, in the county of Columbia aforesaid, printer, being a malicious and seditious man, of a depraved mind and wicked and diabolical disposition, and also deceitfully, wickedly, and maliciously devising, contriving and intending, Thomas Jefferson, Esq., President of the United States of America, to detract from, scandalize, traduce, vilify, and to represent him, the said Thomas Jefferson, as unworthy the confidence, respect, and attachment of the people of the said United States, and to alienate and withdraw from the said Thomas Jefferson, Esq., President as aforesaid, the obedience, fidelity, and allegiance of the citizens of the state of New York, and also of the said United States; and wickedly and seditiously to disturb the peace and tranquility, as well of the people of the state of New York, as of the United States; and also to bring the said Thomas Jefferson, Esq., (as much as in him the said Harry Croswell lay) into great hatred, contempt, and disgrace, not only with the people of the state of New York, and the said people of the United States, but also with the citizens and subjects of other nations....

Peter King’s blast against the Times seems rather mild after that.

Croswell’s lawyer, Elisha Williams, argued convincingly that the veracity of the “slander” was of paramount importance; how, he wondered, could American citizens “pluck down the vicious demagogue and raise and support the virtuous patriot unless their variant conduct could he faithfully represented? And what printer would dare to represent such conduct if the truth of the fact so represented could not shield him from destruction?” Nevertheless, once Judge Lewis, a staunch Jeffersonian, made it clear that neither the truth of the allegations nor the motives of the accused were defenses under New York law, the jury had no choice but to convict Croswell, unless they were to echo the jury nullification that had marked the Zenger trial of 1735.

Croswell was convicted. But the Federalists were not disposed to let a small-town printer take the fall for their crusade. His attorneys requested that his case be heard at the New York Supreme Court. The appeal was granted, and Croswell would be represented gratis by none other than Alexander Hamilton.

In 1804 the State Supreme Court was comprised of four justices: Chief Justice Lewis, who had presided over the previous trial; Brockholst Livingston, another Jeffersonian advocate; Smith Thompson, also an enemy of Federalism; and James Kent, a solitary Federalist. On Croswell’s behalf on February 13 and 14, Hamilton presented rich examples from common law, both English and Roman, which stressed the importance of truth in cases of libel. He argued that freedom of the press consisted in the right to print the truth, if with good motives and for justifiable ends, even if this truth reflected on “the government, magistracy or individuals.”

Hamilton easily persuaded Kent, the loyal Federalist. He even convinced Livingston and Thompson, two men accustomed to opposing Federalist sentiments. Chief Justice Lewis, however, entrenched in Jeffersonian doctrine, remained adamant and even convinced Livingston to switch his vote. Thus the court was split two to two. The prosecution could have moved immediately for a judgment against Croswell but, fearing further dueling with Hamilton, no such motion was made, and the case was dropped. Croswell’s case proved an implicit victory for Hamilton and for the press, as it stimulated the formulation of truth-in-libel bills across several states, thereby securing by the following year what we today consider to be America’s historic freedom of the press.

Unfortunately for Hamilton, his celebration of his legal victory would meet an abrupt end. At a dinner party held in Albany during the trial, he delivered several criticisms of Vice President Aaron Burr, labeling him “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reigns of government.” When Burr—and many who read newspapers, for the remark was widely reprinted—discovered this insult months later, he challenged Hamilton to a duel. And although Hamilton openly disapproved of dueling, for two years earlier it had been the means of his son’s demise, he agreed to participate, perhaps fearing the injury to his reputation that might follow his declining the challenge. On the morning of July 11, 1804, Burr shot and killed Hamilton, thereby eliminating his personal rival and the primary Federalist intellect.

What of the other players in this high drama? Charles Holt went on to New York City, where in 1810 he commenced a new paper, The Columbian, for which he sought Jefferson’s support in a sycophantic reference to their former alliance on behalf of The Bee. Jefferson replied, “I remember too well the principles and intrepidity of the Bee in the gloomy days of terrorism, to entertain any doubt on the principles of your present paper; but I wish to indulge myself in more favorite reading, in Tacitus & Horace, and the writers of that philosophy which is the old man’s consolation and preparation for what is to come.”

After his trial, Croswell resumed his role with the Balance and Columbian Repository, though The Wasp was no more. After relocating to Albany, he recommenced his frank denunciation of public figures and was promptly tried for libel again, this time successfully, at the behest of Ambrose Spencer, who as New York’s Attorney General had prosecuted him in the great trial of 1804. Embittered, Croswell renounced politics altogether and entered the pulpit. He served temporarily as the rector at Christ Church in Hudson, and then at Trinity Church in New Haven, where he would remain for forty-three years. But Croswell had already left his imprint on American journalism. Editor of a fourth-rate paper in a third-tier city, he had emerged from Jefferson’s assault scarred yet victorious. For the freedom of the press we now consider our natural and inalienable right, we hail Harry Croswell, local and national hero.

--Mark Thorn and John Thorn

Harry Croswell published The Wasp as "Robert Rusticoat."

Let Freedom Sting: The Wasp, The Bee, and the Valley

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, June 29, 2006:
Recently Administration defender William Bennett suggested that prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act, rather than the Pulitzer Prizes they garnered, was a more fitting reward for reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post who had revealed the existence of, respectively, warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency and the CIA’s secret prisons in Eastern Europe. This past Sunday, Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for criminal prosecution of the Times for yet another revelation of classified activity: government surveillance of confidential banking records.

“By disclosing this in time of war, they have compromised America’s anti-terrorist policies,” King fumed on a TV talk show. “Nobody elected the New York Times to do anything. And the New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people.”

Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.) were concerned, but less inclined to throw reporters and editors in jail. Both, in fact, cited the same Thomas Jefferson quote that is so often dragged out for such occasions: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” For those who know something of the history of the Fourth Estate, this elevation of Jefferson to press defender is particularly droll, as we shall see.

Blaming the press is nothing new. Government officials have always wished newspapers to be pliant servants of transitory majorities and policies, and printers have always understood that speaking truth before power placed them at peril. Freedom of the press in our fair land has not so much evolved as it has lurched forward, only to be yanked back, then inching ahead again. In elementary school we learned of John Peter Zenger, who was headed to the hoosegow for libeling colonial Governor William Cosby until a brave jury acquitted him in 1735. What we did not learn was that this famous acquittal was mere jury nullification, as in the O.J. Simpson trial. The judge advised the jurors that the truth of Zenger’s allegations was not an issue for them to consider at trial, that their sole concern ought to be whether or not the defendant had printed a disparaging comment about a person of high station. The jurors instead disregarded the judge’s instruction and set Zenger free, which was fine for Zenger, but the case formed no precedent in the law. Future journalists brought to trail on charges of libel or even treason could not claim the truth of their allegations as a defense ... until a series of events in the Hudson Valley changed all that.

We start our tale with four printers in New York and their responses to the British capture of the city. James Rivington, who had commenced his New York newspaper in 1773, was clear in his devotion to the crown. The lengthy title of his loyalist paper was Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, or the Connecticut, New Jersey, Hudson’s River, and Quebec Weekly Advertiser. On November 25, 1775, Sons of Liberty broke up his press and ran off on horseback with the types, which were subsequently melted and cast into bullets. Rivington had to suspend publication, but when the British took over the city in September of the following year he proudly resumed his newspaper as Rivington’s New-York Loyal Gazette. As the tide turned and the patriots neared victory, Rivington changed heart and gave good service as a spy for General Washington. This enabled him to resume business after the British evacuated the city on November 25, 1783, but he never regained the stature he had enjoyed as printer to the crown and he died in poverty.

Another sunshine patriot, in Tom Paine’s immortal phrase, was Hugh Gaine. Unlike Rivington, he had supported the patriots when the British took control of the island and thus felt compelled to flee across the river to Newark with his press and types. But cut off from his New York subscribers and his Philadelphia paper supply, he switched horses and returned to New York under the crown’s patronage, leaving his types in New Jersey, where they were confiscated by the Provisional Government.

Two patriot printers who also fled New York were Samuel Loudon and John Holt, but they headed to Fishkill and Kingston, respectively. Loudon’s New-York Packet began publication in January 1776. Its sentiments were clearly patriotic, so its novice proprietor hightailed it for Fishkill, where he published an emigre Packet on October 1, 1776, making it the first newspaper in Dutchess County. As the provisional state printer, he published military and political documents as well as the first state constitution. But when the capital was located in Kingston in 1777, he found he had a rival for the state’s business. Holt was the superior printer, through long years in the trade, but where Holt seemed to careen from one disaster to another, Loudon was nimble. When he lost the state printing contract, he became a black marketer, speculating in wartime supplies and captured British equipment.

Holt was a Virginian who, after starting the Connecticut Gazette, that colony’s first newspaper, came to New York in 1759. In 1766 he founded his fourth paper, the weekly New-York Journal, or General Advertiser, whose banner was ornamented with the King’s arms. This device he discarded with the issue of June 23, 1774, replacing it with a snake cut into parts, with “Unite or Die” for a motto. Six months later the snake appeared in a new form, joined and coiled, with the tail in its mouth, forming a double ring; within the coil was a pillar standing on the Magna Carta and surmounted by the liberty cap. No printer wore his patriotic passion more openly than Holt, who on July 11, 1776 devoted a whole page to the Declaration of Independence, using a large typeface and embellishing it with a border of printers’ decorations. Holding on as long as he could, he published a last New York issue of his Journal on August 29, 1776, then fled to Kingston with his press.

It took nearly a year for Holt to establish his new print shop. His first issue of the emigre New-York Journal was not issued until July 7, 1777, making it the first newspaper in both Kingston and Ulster County. It carried this editorial message: “After remaining for ten months past, overwhelmed and sunk, in a sea of tyrannic violence and rapine, The New-York Journal, just emerging from the waves, faintly rears its languid head to hail its former friends and supporters-to assure them, that unchanged in its spirit and principles, the utmost exertions of its influence as heretofore, will ever be applied, with a sacred regard to the defense of American rights and freedom, and the advancement of true religion and virtue, and the happiness of mankind.”

When the troops of General John Vaughan burned Kingston on October 16, 1777, Holt removed to Poughkeepsie, under orders of George Clinton. Impoverished and without the rudiments of his trade, Holt was provided with charity and the confiscated type of Hugh Gaine. He published his Journal intermittently there from May 11, 1778 until the peace of 1783, when he returned to New York and resumed publication under the title of the Independent Gazette, or the New-York Journal Revived. Within a year the great patriot succumbed to yellow fever.

In the period after the War of Independence, many newspapers started. As of 1798, barely 10 percent were Federalist, by which was meant support for a strong Federal government, fear of the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, and fond regard for Mother England in matters of law and political conduct. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were the leading advocates of this party. Anti-Federalists—whose party name confusingly evolved from Democratic-Republican to Republican to Democratic—distrusted centralized government and believed that power should be distributed primarily among the states. Led by Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, this group embraced the French experiment in making all things new, including the code of law.

As feelings on both sides intensified, newspapers became ever more vitriolic in their attacks—even upon such revered figures as Washington and Adams. The Alien Act of 1798, passed by a Federalist Congress with Washington’s public approval, gave President Adams the power to deport any foreigners (i.e., Frenchmen) he deemed dangerous. The Sedition Act, passed in that same session of Congress, empowered the Federal Judiciary to punish anyone convicted of uttering, writing, or printing any “false, scandalous and malicious” statement “against the Government of the United States; or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame ... or to bring them ... into contempt or disrepute.”

In its brief three-year life, the Sedition Act nearly eliminated the opposition press. The 1800 election turned, in large part, on these two laws. Jefferson reviled them. Adams supported them. Jefferson won and, even with the Sedition Act expired, still had ways of dealing with a dissenting press. The Federalists had been spreading stories about him that were all the more uncomfortable for being true: (1) that he had fathered children with a slave concubine; (2) that he had attempted to seduce the wife of a close friend, John Walker; and (3) that during the Presidential campaign he had paid $100 to James Callender to write the vitriolic pamphlet “The Prospect Before Us,” which attacked not only Adams but also Washington (“twice a traitor”).

The new President Jefferson wrote Thomas McKean, the governor of Pennsylvania, that the “press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible.... I have therefore long thought that a few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect.... Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.” In Hudson, New York, the selected victim was Harry Croswell, an obscure twenty-four-year-old printer whose garret-published quarter-sheet The Wasp stung not only that city’s Republican paper, The Bee, and its editor Charles Holt (no relation to John), but the President himself.

The trials that followed, which we will detail in our next installment, established the libel law without which freedom of the press would be timorous indeed, exposed the clay feet of President Thomas Jefferson, and brought Alexander Hamilton from a final triumph to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

--John Thorn and Mark Thorn

Cleopatra, head thrust back yet, for sculptors to come, forward.

Inventing Edmonia Lewis, Part II

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, April 20, 2006:
Last week’s column concluded with African American and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, after an appalling brush with racism in Ohio and a skyrocket success in Boston, sailing for Europe in the autumn of 1865. Following a brief stay in Florence, where famous sculptors Thomas Ball and Hiram Powers furnished her with tools of the trade, she joined a vibrant expatriate community of American artists, especially independent women, living in Rome. Commencing a decade of growing skill, flurried productivity, and worldwide acclaim, Lewis came into her own as an artist and her studio in Rome became a guidebook destination for American and European travelers. “Prejudice against my color and race are not known in Rome,” she said. “I never hear of them there. I am invited everywhere, and am treated just as nicely as if the bluest of blue blood flowed through my veins.”

Although given a stone-cold shoulder in the Eternal City by William Wetmore Story, regarded at that time as the greatest American sculptor, Lewis was welcomed warmly by fellow woman artists Harriet Hosmer, Margaret Foley, Emma Stebbins, and Anne Whitney, as well as actress Charlotte Cushman. Story termed them “a set whom I do not like” and Henry James, his biographer, delivered a memorable putdown, calling them “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white, marmorean flock.” James further zinged Lewis: “One of the sisterhood was a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame....”

Lewis returned home frequently, going as far as San Francisco to exhibit and sell her sculptures. On her first return home, in 1867, she brought along a plaster of “New England’s poet,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had sat for his likeness at her studio in Rome. The Christian Register noted, “It has been proposed by some of Longfellow’s friends to have it put in marble, for Harvard. It would be a beautiful thought that the author of ‘Hiawatha’ [a Chippewa, as was Lewis’s mother] should be embalmed in stone by a descendant from Minnehaha.” Indeed, this marble is now at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, though an exquisite Longfellow of her s has recently turned up in Liverpool.

Another notable work of 1867 was The Freedwoman, also known as Forever Free. Said to have been inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation, its exhibit at Boston’s Tremont Temple prompted The Register to a rapture of high sentiment and low rhetoric: “The noble figure of the man, his very muscles seeming to swell with gratitude; the expression of the right now to protect, with which he throws his arm around his kneeling wife; the ‘Praise de Lord’ hovering on their lips; the broken chain, — all so instinct with life, telling in the very poetry of stone the story of the last ten years.”

Lewis further referenced her dual heritage in such sculptures as The Old Arrow-Maker and his Daughter, with its direct homage to Longfellow’s Hiawatha (the composition depicts Minnehaha “plaiting mats of flags and rushes” and her father “making arrowheads of jasper”); Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, cast out into the wilderness; and busts of abolitionist heroes Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment, William H. Carney, also a hero of the 54th and the first black Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and Charles Sumner, whose bust was exhibited at Atlanta’s Cotton States Exposition of 1895, probably her last formal showing in this country. Lewis’s crowning achievement also honored her race: Cleopatra, exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.

William Wetmore Story’s most celebrated sculpture had also been a Cleopatra, described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (first published in Great Britain in 1859 as Transformation):

Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as the beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of Octavius. A marvellous repose — that rare merit in statuary, except it be the lumpish repose native to the block of stone — was diffused throughout the figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and turmoil of her life, and for one instant — as it were, between two pulse throbs — had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for Octavius had seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments. But still there was a great smoldering furnace deep down in the woman’s heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature’s latent energy and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat.

Lewis’s sculpture, on the other hand, “was not a beautiful work,’” wrote artist William J. Clark, Jr., two years after seeing it at the Centennial Exhibition, “but it was a very original and very striking one.... The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant — and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.” Where other sculptors had depicted Cleopatra in life or, asp in hand, contemplating her end, Lewis showed her post mortem, her head thrown back. The dramatic gesture signaled a break with sculpting conventions in the same way that Jacques Louis David’s Death of Marat had marked a new direction for historical painting.

Cleopatra and its sculptor would move on to Chicago in 1878. When the exhibit there closed, Lewis returned home without her two-ton masterpiece, unable to sell it or pay for its transport. It went into storage and was not seen publicly again until 1892, when it graced a saloon on Chicago’s Clark Street. Next it was acquired by gambler and racing aficionado “Blind John” Condon, who placed it atop the remains of his favorite pony, named Cleopatra, within view of the grandstand of his Harlem Race Track in Forest Park.

And that Chicago suburb is where the statue remained, even after the race track became a golf course, and then a torpedo manufactory. When a U.S. Postal Service facility overtook the site in the 1970s, Lewis’s Cleopatra went to a storage yard in Cicero. There a fire inspector recognized a diamond in the rough and contacted the head of the Forest Park Historical Society, in the person of Frank J. Orland, a dentist who decided to pretty Cleo up with some paint and some “restoration” by a monument carver from a nearby cemetery.

Enter Marilyn Richardson, at that time a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and reigning expert on Edmonia Lewis. She convinced Orland, though not easily, that the sculpture’s optimal display might be at some location other than the shopping mall adjoining the bulk mail center in Forest Park. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art took over and in 1996 restored Cleopatra to public view in an irretrievably damaged but thoughtfully restored form in “Lost and Found: Edmonia Lewis’s Cleopatra.”

Oddly, the outsized success of Lewis’s Cleopatra at Philadelphia in 1876 not only marked the apex of her achievement, it also signaled the onset of her decline (just as for Augusta Savage a monumental sculpture for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 had marked the beginning of the end). For the rest of her life she would scramble to make ends meet, making inspid terracotta putti and busts of long-ago celebrities.

The last American traces I have found of her, in my necessarily limited research, are in Indianapolis in 1878-79 and in New York in October 1879, where she was exhibiting her Veiled Bride of Spring, a sculpture that may not survive. From abroad, we find mention of her in a census report of 1901 that locates her in London — St. Giles in the Field and St. George Bloomsbury, to be precise — with her age given as 59 (birth year of 1842), her profession as “artist and modeller,” and her race as Indian. Marilyn Richardson reported that Lewis signed a guest book in Rome in 1909.

Where and when Mary Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis died remains unknown, but in the week between publication of the first and second parts of this story, a fevered back-down-the-rabbit-hole search may have revealed her disputed birthdate.

Last week I wrote, “Like others, I failed in my attempts to find her or her family in 1850 census data in Rensselaer County or anywhere else, as Mary or Edmonia or Wildfire.” Now, spurred by a tip from Richardson, with whom I had begun to correspond in recent days, I can state with confidence that Edmonia’s brother who placed her at Oberlin in 1859 was named Samuel; that he had also placed her, previously and unsuccessfully, in the preparatory program at the experimental New York Central College in McGrawville, New York; and that he had made his California “gold-rush fortune” as a barber rather than as a prospector.

I was able to locate this Samuel Lewis in the 1860 census record for California, a mulatto barber born in New Jersey ca. 1830, and then again in Bozeman, Montana in 1870 and 1880. In 1883 he is identified in the Helena Independent as Edmonia’s brother. I was also able to backtrack to 1850 and find him in the first ward of Syracuse, New York, as part of a basketmaking family that was well situated to sell “bead baskets and pin-cushions [to the tourists at] Niagara Falls and Watkins-Glen,” as Edmonia had reported her family’s activity in 1878. Living with Samuel Lewis in 1850 were his widowed father Charles and several children also born in New Jersey, including a girl named Mary, age 17.

This is not the end of the trail. The search for Edmonia Lewis, who covered her own tracks so well, has simply opened onto another direction. The game is afoot.

--John Thorn

Edmonia Lewis, fabulous in both senses of the word.

Inventing Edmonia Lewis

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, April 13, 2006:
Last week in this space we touched upon the dispiriting story of African American sculptor Augusta Savage, whose biography was shrouded in myth, whose renown exceeded her abilities, and whose career had been shaped at the outset, for better and worse, by racial discrimination. Born in Florida, her link to the Hudson River Valley began with her move to New York City in 1920 and to Saugerties in 1945.

This week we move on to an earlier and greater African American woman sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. By her own varying accounts, Lewis was born as “Wildfire” on July 4 or 14, in 1845, 1843, or 1842, in Greenbush, New York (just outside Cobleskill) to an African American father and a Native American mother. She was orphaned at age three or age nine and, as Mary Edmonia Lewis, enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1859 thanks to a gold-rush fortune mysteriously earned by a mysterious brother. It was at Oberlin, an underground-railroad destination and a beacon of racial tolerance, that she felt the sting of racism in a singularly brutal way that shaped her, her career, and, it may be argued, the future of African American art.

When Lewis died in obscurity in Italy — where she had lived for the better part of half a century — sometime after 1910 (we don’t know when, exactly) her fame had long since flown and there was no one at hand to mourn her. “Mannish,” she had lived alone in her last years. In the past decade, however, her sculptures have emerged from museum basements, been cataloged and exhibited, and some that had been in private hands have recently sold for significant sums at auction. Her reputation as an artist stands higher today than at any time since 1876, when her massive Cleopatra was the sensation of the Centennial Exhibition. You’ll have to wait till next week for the details of Cleopatra’s passage from high-class exhibits in Philadelphia and Chicago to a saloon display to a graveyard marker for a racehorse to a golf course ornament to a salvage yard derelict and, in 1996, to an exhibit at the Smithsonian.

But let’s not race ahead of ourselves in telling the story of Edmonia Lewis, whose first act as an artist appears to have been her own invention. Like others, I failed in my attempts to find her or her family in 1850 census data in Rensselaer County or anywhere else, as Mary or Edmonia or Wildfire. Every later clue led back to an account by Edmonia herself. Below, as reported in The Liberator of February 19, 1864, is an illuminating account of a first meeting between Edmonia and the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child, at an Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Boston. Child wrote:

“I told her I judged by her complexion that there might be some of what is called white blood in her veins. She replied; ‘No, I have not a single drop of what is called white blood in my veins. My father was a full-blooded Negro and my mother was a full-blooded Chippewa.’ ‘But it is a long way from the Chippewa to sculpture,’ said I. ‘How came you to get upon that road?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘My mother was always inventing new patterns for moccasons [sic], and other embroidery; and perhaps the same thing is coming out in me in a more civilized form.’ ‘And have you lived with the Chippewas?’ ‘Yes. When my mother was dying she wanted me to promise that I would live three years with her people, and I did.’ ‘And what did you do while you were there?’ ‘I did as my mother’s people did. I made baskets and embroidered moccasons, and I went into the cities, with my mother’s people to sell them.’ [In an 1878 interview she said of this period in her life, “I sold moccasins and bead baskets and pin-cushions at Niagara Falls and Watkins-Glen...”] ‘And did you like that kind of life?” ‘Oh, yes; I like it a great deal better than your civilized life. There is nothing so beautiful as the tree forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities, if it were not for my passion for Art.’”

Tripe of this sort was not debuted in Madonna’s prattle about the Kaballah after all. Lewis was no one’s dummy. Child was using her as Exhibit A for the cause, and so were others in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist set. But she was using them too. By the end of 1864 she had exhibited at the Colored Soldiers’ Fair in Boston a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the young white Boston Brahmin who died leading the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Anna Quincy Waterston not only commissioned Lewis to create a sculpture of herself, she published a poem titled “Edmonia Lewis” in The Liberator of December 16, 1864, in which she wrote, “‘Tis fitting that a daughter of the race/ Whose chains are breaking should receive a gift/ So rare as genius....”

Only a year earlier she had been indigent, sitting on the steps of City Hall, according to the Christian Register, “to eat the dry crackers with which alone her empty purse allowed her to satisfy her hunger; but as she sat and thought of her dead brother, of her homeless state, something caught her eye, the hunger of the stomach ceased, but the hunger of the soul began. That quiet statue of the good old [Benjamin] Franklin had touched the electric spark.... For weeks she haunted that spot and the State House, where she could see Washington and Webster. She asked questions, and found that such things were first made in clay. She got a lump of hard mud, shaped her some sticks, and, her heart divided between art and the terrible struggle for freedom, which had just received the seal of Col. Shaw’s blood, she wrought out, from photographs and her own ideal, an admirable bust of him. This made the name of Edmonia Lewis known in Boston. The unknown waif on the steps of City Hall had, in a few short months, become an object of interest to a large circle of those most anxious about the great problem of the development of the colored race in their new position....”

Press agentry of this high hokum could scarcely be improved upon. But how had she come to have crackers and clay as her only companions? For this we go back to Oberlin, where as Mary E. Lewis she had completed two uneventful years when, in the recess between semesters of the 1861-62 academic year, all hell broke loose.

On January 27, 1862, two of Edmonia’s twelve white roommates at Reverend John Keep’s home set off on a sleigh ride with two gentleman friends, Oberlin students E.R. Pelton and Prentice Loomis. The young women, Maria Miles of Vermilion and Christina Ennes of Birmingham, had been teasing Edmonia earlier. Just before they set out, according to Oberlin professor Geoffrey Blodgett, Edmonia “invited her two friends to her room and offered them a drink of hot spiced wine she had prepared to fortify them against the cold.... Later medical testimony plainly indicated that one item in the mix was cantharides, the aphrodisiac popularly known as Spanish Fly.... A powder made from dried beetles native to Southern Europe, the drug was an effective irritant, whatever its power to promote sexual ambition. Applied externally, it reddened and blistered the skin; taken internally, it could prove highly toxic. Serious sickness, including inflammation of the kidneys, as well as stimulation of the genital organs could result from its use.”

In the course of their sleigh ride the girls became violently ill and their beaux sought medical attention. Examination and questioning prompted the doctors to declare the case one of poisoning, with a clear culprit, but the justice system of little, sleepy Oberlin was ill equipped to act. After a week without an arrest, locals took matters into their own hands: One evening Edmonia was seized, Blodgett wrote, “dragged to a nearby empty field, and brutally thrashed. It was hours before a search party, hunting the fields with lanterns in the night, found her lying in the cold, her clothing torn and her body badly beaten.”

Once Lewis had healed from her injuries, the case went before an inquest to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to go to trial. John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin graduate and the only practicing black attorney in Ohio in 1862, represented Lewis. Pointing out that the contents of the women’s stomachs had not been retained for analysis, he moved that the case be dismissed. The two judges agreed, and Lewis was freed.

Lewis is said not to have returned to Oberlin for the remainder of the 1862 academic year, but records indicate that she re-enrolled for the fall of 1863 but was not permitted to graduate. Although her studies had not concentrated especially in art, she found her way to Boston where the abolitionist Garrison introduced her to sculptor Edward Brackett, who became her first mentor. Following her whirlwind success in Boston in 1864, she taught briefly in post-Civil War Richmond, Virginia. By year end in 1865, with proceeds from plaster casts of the bust of Colonel Shaw, she was welcomed warmly into an American expatriate art colony in Rome.

Still, back in Ohio, not far from Oberlin College, the Lorain County News noted on April 4, 1866: “The papers are noting the advent in Rome of a young colored artist and sculptor—Miss Edmonia Lewis—who is creating something of a sensation in the Eternal City. Report hath it that she is none other than a Miss Mary E. Lewis, who had her brief notoriety here—and for other than artistical efforts—a few years since. If Mary E. is none other than Edmonia, she is indeed enjoying a checkered career.”

Next week we’ll look at that checkered career, across forty years, two continents, and a subsequent sea change of critical opinion.

--John Thorn

Art Deco at its nadir.

The Legendary Augusta Savage

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, April 6, 2006:
Two summers back, this newspaper’s pages were riddled with vituperative letters concerning a road sign that had been erected four years earlier to honor a Harlem Renaissance sculptor who had resided obscurely in Saugerties from 1945 to 1962. State Comptroller H. Clark McCall had come to town on April 5, 2000, to dedicate Augusta Savage Road, a replacement for Niger Road, from whose name one “g” had been removed half a century earlier in a half-baked civic gesture.

“To heal old wounds is to rid ourselves of a symbol that harkens back to those racist days,” McCall said. “She was a fierce opponent of racism. Her life is an inspiration to us all ... [and] by replacing this hateful name, we send a hopeful signal to the children passing this way.” That few children would pass this dead-end road by the Winston Farm, one on which Savage, by the way, had never lived, troubled some. That Saugerties had not thought to honor her previously, and was now using her to whitewash a bothersome bit of its history, disturbed others.

Lost in the debate were Augusta Savage and her sculpture, but perhaps that should not have been surprising. By coming to Saugerties she had sought to disappear from the art scene she had helped to construct, and she may even have had a hand in the destruction of most of her documented work. Turning away from a career in ruin and a biography encased in myth, in her last years she managed to reconnect with her real past.

Born Augusta Christine Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida, on February 29, 1892, she was the seventh of fourteen children of Cornelia and Edward Fells, both of whom had been born into slavery some thirty years earlier. Her mother was a washerwoman and her father was a housepainter and fundamentalist preacher who frowned upon graven images. “My father licked me four or five times a week,” Savage once recalled, “and almost whipped all the art out of me.”

In 1908 Gussie, as she was known then, gave birth to a daughter, Irene. She is said to have married a man named John T. Moore the year before, who is said to have died sometime before her marriage to James Savage in or around 1915, when the Fell family relocated to West Palm Beach. In the 1920 census Augusta resides at 916 Banyan Street and works as a laundress for a private family; James works as a chauffeur; and 12-year-old Irene Moore lives with them. Two houses down the street, at Number 912, live Augusta’s mother and five siblings.

One of the many fanciful stories attaching to Augusta Savage’s development as a sculptor has her ceasing to craft figurines from the time she left Green Cove Springs around 1915 because of the unavailability of clay in her new county. Yet in 1919 a local potter (!) is said to have given her 25 pounds of clay from which she created clay ducks and chickens that won a prize in the West Palm Beach County Fair. With a letter of recommendation from the fair superintendent to New York sculptor Solon Borglum (brother of Gutzon of Mt. Rushmore fame), in late 1920 or early 1921 she left her husband, deposited her daughter with her mother and, with $4.60 in her purse, headed to New York City.

Admitted to tuition-free Cooper Union at Borglum’s behest, Savage cleaned houses and took in laundry to support herself. All the same, she was nearly compelled to drop out of the program in 1923, until admirers arranged commissions for her to create busts of W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. Being in the presence of these charismatic champions of the race influenced her philosophy profoundly.

The event that had the greatest impact on Augusta Savage’s art also took place in that year. Receiving a scholarship to attend a summer art school in France, she successfully raised funds for the passage. However, as the New York Times reported on April 24, “Augusta Savage, a negress 23 years old, of 228 West 138th Street, who is studying sculpture at Cooper Institute, has been refused permission to attend the Fontainbleau School of Fine Arts in France by a committee of American painters, sculptors and architects.... Ernest Peiexotto, who had charge of the girl’s application as a member of the committee, admitted that refusal was based on the ground that she is a negress and that a number of Southern girls intended sailing on the same ship she had chosen, to begin art studies at the same academy.”

This blatant discrimination raised a furor that went all the way to President Harding. Although her rejection stood, Savage, 31 years old rather than the 23 to which she admitted, had won sympathy as struggling artist and even a measure of fame as a black nationalist. She married Robert T. Lincoln Poston, a newspaper editor and journalist who contributed to Negro World, the newspaper of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. He perished at sea in 1924 while returning from a UNIA mission to Liberia.

Continuing to struggle financially, with only occasional commissions, Savage hung on long enough to make her mark with a small jaunty statue of her nephew, Ellis Ford, which she called “Gamin.” This won her an $1800 fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund that enabled her, in 1929-32, to study in France and travel in Germany and Belgium.

Returning to New York, she established the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts at 163 West 143rd Street. Some of the brightest aspiring young artists, such as Ernest Crichlow, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Morgan and Marvin Jones, William Artis, and Norman Lewis, came under her tutelage or at least shelter. And in 1934 she became the first of her race to gain admittance into the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Her influence as a cultural icon was increasing in both black and white circles, but her relevance as an African American artist was already past its peak, if indeed it ever had one.

Augusta Savage had struggled to gain the respect of an art community dominated by white males, and despite her gift for black physiognomy, her sculptural precepts were Eurocentric. Her students, on the other hand, were largely in tune with the proposal by Howard University’s Alain Locke that African Americans should pay attention to the use by several European modernists — notably Picasso and Matisse — of African figural conventions in the development of 20th-century art forms.

What at the time appeared to be the crowning achievement of her life as an artist commenced in 1937, when she was appointed the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center and was commissioned by the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to create a sculpture symbolizing the musical contributions of African Americans. Inspired by the lyrics of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” she took a leave of absence from her newly won job and spent nearly two years on a 16-foot-tall plaster harp, lacquered to resemble black basalt, that was exhibited in the court of the Contemporary Arts Building. The kitschy sculpture amasses twelve black singers in graduated heights with crania in a disquieting diminuendo. The sounding board was formed by the hand and arm of God, and a kneeling man holding sheet music represented the foot pedal. Fairgoers bought pot-metal reproductions of the statue, cast from the original maquette, prized by collectors today.

In the spring of 1939 her career seemed at its zenith. She was given a one-woman show for 15 of her sculptures at the Argent Galleries in New York. But then doors began to close all around her. Upon returning to the Harlem Community Art Center, Savage learned that her “temporary” replacement, Gwendolyn Bennett, was not disposed to relinquish her post. Striking out on her own, she opened an entrepreneurial venture, the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art in Harlem. It closed weeks later for lack of funding. No funds were available to cast “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” nor were there any facilities to store it. After the fair closed it was demolished. In 1940 or ’41 many of the plaster works that had been displayed at the Argent Galleries were shipped to a Midwestern art show, and have not been seen since; Savage may, it is speculated, have destroyed them upon their return.

In 1941, in a turn previously unreported, she divorced James Savage, a technicality she had neglected to pursue before marrying her “third” husband, Robert T.L. Poston. By 1945 it was clear that the 53-year-old sculptor was a legend without a lifeline. She removed to a former chicken shack in West Saugerties, on Old Route 32, and resolved that all of her friends would now become strangers. Savage is said to have turned to writing, though none of her work was published, and occasionally took on young students for art instruction. She ceased to sculpt in a serious way.

But then a former stranger, her daughter, now Mrs. Irene Allen, returned into her life, befriending and financially supporting her until her death from cancer on March 26, 1962 at Abraham Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx.

What is Augusta Savage’s legacy? That she was strong for her race. That she was a champion of and inspiration to a generation of artists who have not forgotten their debt. And that she was born too soon, or possibly too late, to write her name with fire in the sky: she is a major figure but a minor talent. Next week we will examine an earlier and greater black female sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, with whom Augusta Savage is spiritually linked.

--John Thorn

The wonder of the age, Morse's telegraph of 1844.

What Hath Morse Wrought? (Part II)

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, February 2, 2006:
{Oddly, on the day this story was published, Western Union, a company founded in 1851, announced that it would cease to deliver telegrams. Part I, which ran in the issue dated January 26, 2006, is available below, or by direct link to: http://hudsonriverbracketed.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-hath-morse-wrought.html}

“Th' invention all admir'd, and each, how hee
To be th' inventer miss'd, so easie it seemd
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible...” JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost, Book 6

After the death of his wife in February 1825, Samuel Finley Breese Morse returned to his easel and completed his portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. In addition to having three young ones to support, he had a passion for the arts and a longing for fame that even personal tragedy could not detour. He also had an unquenchable organizational, administrative, and entrepreneurial instinct. After arranging for the care of his children in New Haven, he went on to create, in that same tragic year, the National Academy of the Arts of Design. As William Cullen Bryant would refer to the Academy in his funeral oration on the death of Thomas Cole in 1848:

This great enterprise, for such I must call it, was principally effected by the exertions of one who has since been lost to art, though translated perhaps, so far as the mere material interests of society are concerned, to a sphere of greater usefulness. I may speak of him, therefore, as an academician, as freely as if he had departed this life.

By that time Morse had long since abandoned the palette, but the translation of his artistic essence into pragmatic clay had not come overnight. Neither, for that matter, had the electric telegraph and Morse Code, or Telegraphic Chirography [penmanship], as it was first known. Morse’s invention proceeded not from a single brainstorm but a series, some scientific, some commercial.

In November 1826, almost certainly at Morse’s instigation, Colonel John Stevens and his sons, the foremost family of Hoboken, New Jersey — and linked in the invention of steam navigation with the late Robert Fulton — commissioned twelve paintings by six of the foremost American artists to adorn the gallery of their new steamboat Albany, which plied the Hudson from 1827 until 1845. In an 1826 letter to his mother, Morse reported that the collection was to include “historical pictures of Allston, Vanderlyn, Sully, and myself, and landscapes of the principal landscape painters.” In fact Allston, Morse’s mentor, proved not to be included, but the others were, along with Thomas Birch, Thomas Doughty, and Thomas Cole. In the years before the Civil War, this floating gallery may have presented more Americans with a glimpse of first-rank art than any gallery in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.

(For the Albany’s gallery Vanderlyn copied his voluptuous Ariadne at Naxos, which had been exhibited scandalously to separate male and female audiences in New York in 1816. This oil on wood was yanked from the steamboat after less than one year, replaced by Robert Weir’s Landscape of Lake George. This steamy Ariadne now hangs decorously at the Senate House in Kingston.)

In 1830 Morse created an improved semaphoric code for telegraphs of the sort then prevalent in France, in which signals were relayed optically along a chain of towers radiating from Paris. Invented by the brothers Chappe in 1790, the system originally sent messages via rectangular wooden frames with five sliding panels. These panels could be displayed or obscured individually with pulleys, yielding 32 possible combinations (2 to the 5th power). From that dubious start Claude Chappe advanced to a semaphoric system consisting of a long horizontal beam with a smaller wing at each end. Military and financial signals could be transmitted from tower to tower, though not in fog, nor at night.

What the brothers Chappe failed to pick up on was the promise inherent in an earlier experiment by one of their countrymen. In 1746, according to Tom Standage in The Victorian Internet, “about 200 [Carthusian] monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking line. Each monk held one end of a twenty-five-foot iron wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbor on either side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires formed a line over a mile long. Once the line was complete, the Abbe Jean Antonine Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of monks — giving them all a powerful electric shock.”

The idea of electric telegraphy came to S.F.B. Morse in 1831-32 when, as James Fenimore Cooper recalled, Morse had excitedly raised the subject with him:

We pretend to no knowledge on the subject of the dates of discoveries in the arts and sciences, but well do we remember the earnestness, and single-minded devotion to a laudable purpose, with which our worthy friend first communicated to us his ideas on the subject of using the electric spark by way of a telegraph. It was in Paris and during the winter of 1831−32 and the succeeding spring, and we have a satisfaction in recording this date that others may prove better claims if they can.

As things turned out, Cooper’s recollection was to prove helpful as others indeed made such claims. Morse’s sketchbook revealed that he had formed his first thoughts about electric telegraphy on a voyage back from Europe to America in 1832 in which he had exchanged insights with fellow passenger Dr. Charles T. Jackson, who later sued him for stealing his ideas. Jackson lost. In that same sketchbook Morse prototyped an electromagnetic recording telegraph and a dot-and-dash code system (a signaling alphabet).

Morse never claimed to have invented any electrical principle but simply the first mechanical device that effectively sent messages on electromagnetic principles. All the same, the formidable scientist Joseph Henry tangled with Morse by asserting to have been the first to unlock the secrets of electromagnetism — although earlier claims might be made for the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted in 1819-20. Accidentally placing a magnetic compass next to an electrical wire, he noticed that whenever current flowed through the circuit, the compass needle swung 90 degrees to the line of the wire. Thus Oersted discovered the direct link between electricity and magnetism, though it was left to Louis Ampere to explain precisely what was occurring. The upshot was that pulsing an electric current through the circuit could be used to make things happen at the other end of the circuit — the basic principle of the electric telegraph.
In 1835 Morse gave a demonstration of wire as a conductor of electricity at Castle Garden, New York’s entertainment hall that still stands at the Battery. In 1836 he demonstrated the ability of a telegraph system to transmit information over wires by combining short signals (originally referred to as dits and represented as dots) and long signals (referred to as dahs and represented as dashes). But progress was slow and when, in 1837, Morse read a newspaper article about two French inventors working on a concept that he had thought existed solely in his notes, he was thrown into a panic. Impoverished and about to see glory whisked out from under his feet, wrote to fellow passengers on that ocean voyage of 1832, some of whom responded that they recalled mention of his telegraph notion.

With his grand-scale painting a failure and his invention not yet assured of success, Morse struggled to maintain appearances:

My telegraphic apparatus existed in so rude a form that I felt a reluctance to have it seen. My means were very limited--so limited as to preclude the possibility of constructing an apparatus of such mechanical finish as to warrant my success in venturing upon its public exhibition. I had no wish to expose to ridicule the representative of so many hours of laborious thought....

Prior to the summer of 1837, at which time Mr. Alfred Vail’s attention became attracted to my telegraph, I depended upon my pencil for subsistence. Indeed, so straitened were my circumstances that, in order to save time to carry out my invention and to economize my scanty means, I had for months lodged and eaten in my studio, procuring my food in small quantities from some grocery, and preparing it myself. To conceal from my friends the stinted manner in which I lived, I was in the habit of bringing my food to my room in the evenings, and this was my mode of life for many years.

Vail’s personal fortune permitted Morse to construct a superior prototype, and the wolf was barred from the door. Yet by 1844, when Morse transmitted to Vail his famous message of “What hath God wrought” and success finally seemed assured, the lawsuits came flying in. Although he emerged victorious and personally unsullied, the constant struggle took its toll. As his son Edward Lind Morse wrote in Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals:

While thus harassed on all sides by those who would filch from him his good name as well as his purse, his reward was coming to him for the patience and equanimity with which he was bearing his crosses. The longing for a home of his own had been intense all through his life and now, in the evening of his years, this dream was to be realized. He thus announces to his brother the glorious news:

POUGHKEEPSIE, NORTH RIVER,
July 30, 1847.

In my last I wrote you that I had been looking out for a farm in this region, and gave you a diagram of a place which I fancied. Since then I was informed of a place for sale south of this village 2 miles, on the bank of the river, part of the old Livingston Manor, and far superior. I have this day concluded a bargain for it. There are about one hundred acres. I pay for it $17,500.

I am almost afraid to tell you of its beauties and advantages. It is just such a place as in England could not be purchased for double the number of pounds sterling. Its “capabilities,” as the landscape gardeners would say, are unequalled. There is every variety of surface, plain, hill, dale, glens, running streams and fine forest, and every variety of different prospect; the Fishkill Mountains towards the south and the Catskills towards the north; the Hudson with its varieties of river craft, steamboats of all kinds, sloops, etc., constantly showing a varied scene.

By the following year Morse was sufficiently confident of a turn in the tide of his fortune that he married again, this time to the 26-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Griswold, with whom he would have four children. With the help of architect Alexander Jackson Davis, Morse remodeled the house in the then-popular Tuscan style, and it remains a splendid home and landscape well worth a visit.

--John Thorn

S. F. B. Morse, ca. 1845

What Hath Morse Wrought?

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, January 26, 2005:
“Neither pony expresses, flying Childers*, carrier-doves, nor swiftest iron horse are longer valued for speed in bearing news. A still swifter steed has been captured from its elemental freedom, bitted, bridled, and reined up, as our message-bearer. As long as his wiry track vibrates to his silent tread, will the fame of Morse be proclaimed with the lightning’s tongue.” [Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing- Room Companion, August 16, 1851; for footnote see below.]

The pole-strung wires or sub-aqueous cables of Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) tingle no longer with the electromagnetic messages of the world. Western Union is now in the business of helping distressed individuals short of funds for rent or bail; American Telephone and Telegraph was so embarrassed by the 120-year-old brand’s reference to its reasons for founding that it changed its name, formally, to its initials. But the Victorian Internet, as Morse’s telegraph may aptly be called, changed the world more profoundly than any new means of locomotion or message delivery. As the invention of an unusually fertile mind, it stands only behind Edison’s light bulb as the mechanical invention that most transformed daily life..

Morse had been famous long before the day, in 1844 at age 53, he sent the coded words “What hath God wrought?” (Numbers, 23:23) over 40 miles of wire strung from Washington, DC to Baltimore. He had been the leading organizer of the artists who formed the National Academy of Design in 1825 as a rival to the established New York Academy of the Fine Arts, which was driven by individuals of means and sustained by the notion that patronage was the essence of art. He was a passable poet, an essayist and lecturer, a candidate for Mayor of New York City, the man who created the first photograph in America, and a portrait painter of the first rank.

Yet this trade in likenesses Morse scorned, dreaming like his colleague John Vanderlyn of the historical scenes he could paint if only the public taste were elevated sufficiently to permit recompense for his efforts. In 1832 he painted Gallery at the Louvre, hoping to attract admission-paying viewers. When his entrepreneurial effort failed, just as Vanderlyn’s panoramic exhibition space at his self-built Rotunda had in the mid-1820s, Morse resolved to put aside his brushes. Yet 150 years later his mastery was validated, as his huge canvas (6 feet by 9 feet) sold at auction for $3.25 million, a new record for an American painting, exceeding the one established by Frederic Church’s Icebergs in 1979.

This American Leonardo, who may rightly share the accolade only with Benjamin Franklin, was a product of an age that, unlike ours, honored broad leaning and distrusted narrow specialization. An education in the liberal arts and sciences was the mark of a cultured individual, a gentleman, a man useful to his country and countrymen; such an education and temperament would ward off sudden and intemperate enthusiasms, would moderate America’s otherwise relentless drive for the dollar or expansion or might.

Our subject’s father, Jedediah Morse, was an American Congregational clergyman of conservative ideals and dour mien. He tended to neglect his clerical duties for the pleasures of mapmaking: he produced a series of textbooks whose popularity caused him to be called the “father of American geography.” He was also interested in improving the lot of Native Americans and his 1822 Report to the Secretary of War was reprinted as recently as May of last year. Despite his own evident distractability, the elder Morse encouraged his ten-year-old son, then in his fourth year (!) at Phillips Academy, to do as he said rather than as he did:

CHARLESTOWN, February 21, 1801.
Your natural disposition, my dear son, renders it proper for me earnestly to recommend to you to attend to one thing at a time. It is impossible that you can do two things well at the same time, and I would, therefore, never have you attempt it. Never undertake to do what ought not to be done, and then, whatever you undertake, endeavor to do it in the best manner....
Your affectionate parent, J. MORSE.

The advice did not take, as the young Morse determined to fulfill his destiny in a roundabout way at both Phillips and Yale. He did not know precisely what he wished to do all his life long, but he knew he wished fame. He may have been drawn to fame’s promise of immortality by his father’s abounding piety and the constant presence of death in his home. The following letter to his brothers was written while he was temporarily called home at age 14:

CHARLESTOWN, March 15, 1805.
MY DEAR BROTHERS,−−I now write you again to inform you that mama had a baby, but it was born dead and has just been buried. Now you have three brothers and three sisters in heaven and I hope you and I will meet them there at our death. It is uncertain when we shall die, but we ought to be prepared for it, and I hope you and I shall.
I read a question in Davie’s “Sermons” the last Sunday which was this:−− Suppose a bird should take one dust of this earth and carry it away once in a thousand years, and you was to take your choice either to be miserable in that time and happy hereafter, or happy in that time and miserable hereafter, which would you choose? Write me an answer to this in your next letter....
I enclose you a little book called the “Christian Pilgrim.” It is for both of you.
We are all tolerable well except mama, though she is more comfortable now than she was. We all send a great deal of love to you. I must now bid you adieu.
I remain your affectionate brother,
S.F.B. MORSE.

The classic admonition is Live not as though you would not die, and die not as though you had not lived. Samuel Morse was raised in accordance with the first half of that dictum, but to the other half he struggled to find a clear path. After graduating from Yale in 1810 he studied painting in England under Washington Allston and exhibited evident promise, notably in his Dying Hercules of 1812. Upon his return to the United States he worked demeaningly, as he saw it, as an itinerant portraitist in New Hampshire, then relocated briefly to Charleston, South Carolina, before returning north in 1818. In October of that year he married Lucretia Pickering Walker of Concord, to whom he had become engaged two years earlier.

In the brief span of their marriage, the amiable Lucretia was to bear him three children who survived infancy. She died suddenly of an incurable “affection of the heart,” as her father-in-law described it, on February 7, 1825 at their home in New Haven, less than three weeks after having given birth to a son. Her husband was in Washington, commencing work on the most glorious commission of his career: a full-length portrait of the General Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the Revolution only recently returned to these shores.

In a letter to his wife on February 10, not yet knowing of her death given the four-day period for a letter to travel from Connecticut to the capital, the painter wrote:

I am making progress with the General ... and do not doubt but I shall succeed entirely, if I am allowed the requisite number of sittings. The General is very agreeable. He introduced me to his son by saying: “This is Mr. Morse, the painter, the son of the geographer; he has come to Washington to take the topography of my face.” He thinks of visiting New Haven again when he returns from Boston....
I have left but little room in this letter to express my affection for my dearly loved wife and children; but of that I need not assure them. I long to hear from you, but direct your letters next to New York, as I shall probably be there by the end of next week, or the beginning of the succeeding one.
Love to all the family and friends and neighbors. Your affectionate husband, as ever.

His father’s letter to him of February 8, received on February 12, added, “I expect this will reach you on Saturday [the 12th], the day after the one we have appointed for the funeral....” Traveling as fast as he could, he arrived home the following week. His wife had been buried before he even learned of her death. In America in 1825, messages could be conveyed as fast as a coach or a man on a horse could carry them.

That was about to change. Next week, Morse the inventor.

------------
* Flying Childers is the name of the first thoroughbred racehorse champion, born in 1714 and bred by Colonel Leonard Childers of Cantley Hall, Doncaster in Yorkshire. Its speed also inspired the name of a new clipper ship built in Boston that, emblematic of her name, bore the figurehead of a racehorse.

--John Thorn

Christmas Eve, 1862, by Thomas Nast: a family apart and nation apart. Look for Santa and his reindeer at the top.

Happy Holidays, Part II

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, December 15, 2005:
Last week we established that Christmas is a Mister Potato Head reconstruction of older holidays, traditions, and even birthday celebrants. The Puritans banned it and the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists closed their churches on December 25 to signal their disapproval of this clandestine celebration of ancient Rome’s Saturnalia. Even the ubiquitous tree and church decorations at Christmas have their roots in the Saturnalian greening of the temple (in old church calendars, Christmas Eve is marked Templa exornantur — churches are decked).

Far from the remembered cry of “restoring Christ to Christmas,” or the current bandwagon to restore Christmas to seasonal marketing, the Colonial period in America was marked by a widespread revulsion against the holiday’s grafted origins and its wintry wantonness, as if Oliver Cromwell ruled the New World. The abstemious tract author Hezekiah Woodward had written thus of Christmas in 1656: “The old heathens’ Feasting Day, in honor of Saturn, their Idol-God, the Papists’ Massing Day, the Profane Man’s Ranting Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol Day, the Multitudes’ Idle Day, Satan’s — that Adversary’s — Working Day, the True Christian Man’s Fasting Day....”

All this began to turn with the century, as the former colonies directed their vitriol against not Christmas but John Bull. Still needing heroes and traditions, however, New Yorkers especially reflected on their region’s Dutch heritage, older than that of the English, more tolerant and fun-loving. In 1804 the New-York Historical Society was founded with Nicholas as its patron saint. Five years later Washington Irving, as “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” went a step further, reinventing St. Nick to become the prototypical American Santa Claus. (Coincidentally, ten years later Irving would transplant the German legend of Peter Claus to the Catskills, rename its protagonist Rip Van Winkle, and reinvent the Hudson Valley.)

Irving’s History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty was published on St. Nicholas Day, December 6, 1809. In it he made dozens of references to a pipe-smoking elf who brings gifts down chimneys. Describing the love of the Dutch for Saint Nicholas, Irving wrote:

And the sage Oloffe dreamed a dream – and lo, the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees in that selfsame wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children; and he came and descended hard by where the heroes of Communipaw had made their late repast. And the shrews Van Kortlandt know him by his broad hat, his long pipe, and the resemblance which he bore of the bow of the Goede Vrouw. And he lit his pipe by the fire and he sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked the smoke from his pipe ascended into the air and spread like a cloud overhead.... And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose gave the astonished Van Kortlandt a very significant look; then mounting his wagon he returned over the tree tops and disappeared. (Book II, Chapter V)

The phrase “laying his finger beside his nose” would reappear soon enough. Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker further observed:

... in the sylvan days of New Amsterdam the good St. Nicholas would often make his appearance in his beloved city of a holiday afternoon, riding jollily among the tree tops or over the roofs of the houses, now and then drawing forth magnificent presents from his breeches pockets and dropping them down the chimneys of his favorites. Whereas in these degenerate days of iron and bass he never shows us the light of his countenance nor ever visits us, save one night in the year; when he rattles down the chimneys of the descendants of the patriarchs, confining his presents merely to the children in token of the degeneracy of the parents. (Book III, Chapter II)

Finally, the ironist contrasted the Peter Stuyvesant years with those of Anglicized New York:

The good old Dutch festivals, those periodical demonstrations of an overflowing heart and a thankful spirit, which are falling into sad disuse among my fellow citizens, were faithfully observed in the mansion of Governor Stuyvesant. New Year was truly a day of open-handed liberality, of jocund revelry and warm-hearted congratulation—when the bosom seemed to swell with genial good-fellowship — and the plenteous table was attended with an unceremonious freedom and honest broad-mouthed merriment, unknown in these days of degeneracy and refinement. Paas and Pinxter [Easter and Whitsuntide] were scrupulously observed throughout his dominions; nor was the day of St. Nicholas suffered to pass by without making presents, hanging the stocking in the chimney, and complying with all its other ceremonies. (Book VII, Chapter IX)

In 1821 William B. Gilley of New York published a sixteen-page booklet titled A New Year’s Present for the Little Ones from Five to Twelve, Part III was published with eight wood engravings. Sold for 25 cents colored and 18 cents plain, it was the first work to depict a fur-clad Santa Claus in a sleigh drawn by (a single?) reindeer. The booklet’s author is unknown but is worthy of credit:

Old Santeclaus with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty night,
O’er chimney tops, and tracks of snow,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.
The steady friend of virtuous youth,
The friend of duty, and of truth,
Each Christmas eve he joys to come
Where love and peace have made their home.
Through many houses he has been,
And various beds and stockings seen;
Some, white as snow, and neatly mended,
Others, that seem’d for pigs intended.
Where e’er I found good girls or boys,
That hated quarrels, strife and noise,
I left an apple, or a tart,
Or wooden gun, or painted cart;
To some I have a pretty doll,
To some a peg-top, or a ball;
No crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets,
To blow their eyes up, or their pockets.
No drums to stun their Mother’s ear,
Nor swords to make their sisters fear;
But pretty books to store their mind
With knowledge of each various kind.
But where I found the children naughty,
In manners rude, in temper haughty,
Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,
Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers,
I left a long, black, birchen rod.
Such as the dread command of God
Directs a Parent’s hand to use
When virtue’s path his sons refuse.

On Christmas Eve of 1822 another New Yorker, Clement Clarke Moore, is said to have read to his children a series of verses; the poem was published anonymously a year later in the Troy, New York Sentinel as “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas.” It is more commonly known today by its opening line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas.” In 1837 Moore claimed authorship, but today there is reason to believe that the real poet may have been Henry Livingston, Jr., of Poughkeepsie. In either event, the poet gave St. Nick eight reindeer (and named them all), and he devised the now-familiar entrance by chimney. This Nicholas was still a tiny figure, however, like Irving’s — the poem describes a “miniature sleigh” with a “little old driver.”

The finishing touch to Santa Claus as we know him today was provided by Thomas Nast, the Bavarian-born caricaturist famous for bringing the Boss Tweed Ring to heel with his scathing illustrations for Harpers Weekly. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine recorded that to the boyish Nast had come “the German Santa Claus, Pelze-Nicol, leading a child dressed as the Christkind, and distributing toys and cakes, or switches, according as the parents made report. It was this Pelze-Nicol — a fat, fur-clad, bearded old fellow, at whose hands he doubtless received many benefits — that the boy in later years was to present to us as his conception of the true Santa Claus....” Nast supplied such enduring details as Santa’s workshop at the North Pole (although reindeer could hardly have grazed there, so maybe the workshop was really in Finnish Lapland) and Santa’s list of the good and bad children of the world.

Surely among the best children in the world was one Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street in New York City. Her letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and his fervent reply, are as fresh today as when they were first printed on September 21, 1897. Virginia had written:

Dear Editor,
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Francis Pharcellus Church at first “bristled and pooh-poohed the subject,” wrote Edward P. Mitchell, his editor in chief, “but took the letter and turned with an air of resignation to his desk.” Church replied on the editorial page that day, and his reply was reprinted annually for the remaining fifty-two years of The Sun’s life:

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus? Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Sinterklass, Sint Nicolaas, or Sancteclaus; Jesus, Horus, Dionysus, or Tammuz; September 15, December 6, or December 25; Saturnalia, Feast of the Nativity, or Multitudes’ Idle Day; Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa.

Happy holidays to all.

--John Thorn

St. Nick before he became chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.

Happy Holidays

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, December 8, 2005:
There is a campaign underway to “restore Christmas” to the national retailers who, sensitive to our nation’s diverse religious and cultural traditions, have frequently substituted “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” for narrowly Christian felicitations in this month of the equinox. The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using “Merry Christmas” in its advertising. Bill O’Reilly — the Fox anchor who so amused the judge hearing the case by suing Al Franken for stealing his words “fair” and “balanced” — returns to the linguistic fray, offering on his website a chart of stores that use the phrase “Happy Holidays,” along with a poll that asks, “Will you shop at stores that do not say ‘Merry Christmas’?”

This red-state vision of a liberal Grinch is silly stuff, of course. It was not so long ago that clerics overwhelmingly disapproved of how America had “taken the Christ out of Christmas” to make the birthday of the Savior into the economy’s savior. Now our corkscrew friends on the right are hell-bent on reuniting Christ with commerce.

Their attempt to impose homogeneity on our country’s December festivities is a little late, as Christmas is but one of many holidays associated with the harvest or the solstice. In fact, just as the Jesus of legend is a composite of other savior heroes, from Horus to Tammuz to Dionysus and more — Dionysus was born of Zeus and the virgin Semele; Horus was born to the virgin Isis-Meri on December 25 in a cave or a manger; Tammuz was born to the virgin Mylitta in a cave on December 25 — Christmas is an amalgamation of pagan festivals. Unmentioned in the New Testament and invented a good deal later, Christmas has been from its onset more a secular and political celebration than a religious one.

So maybe the red-staters are right to storm the barricades by decking the hall at the mall ...

Them’s fightin’ words to some, I recognize, so let me recount briefly how Christmas came to be our nation’s principal holiday, one so powerful that it transformed the way American Jews celebrated Hanukkah, sparked a new African-American holiday in Kwanzaa, and provoked nonbelievers to institutionalize the Seinfeldian anti-Christmas of Festivus. In the second part of this story, next week, we will focus on the two New Yorkers who created Santa Claus as the world knows him today — Washington Irving and Thomas Nast. But first let’s trace the early evolution of the infant Jesus, St. Nicholas, and Christmas itself from ancient times to the New World.

Contemporary scholars, working from textual evidence in the Bible, astronomical charts, and supporting historical documents — including such documented events as the tax decree of Caesar Augustus, the death of Herod, a lunar eclipse in 4 BCE and the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces in 7 BCE—offer a birthdate for Jesus as early as April 17 (why, they ask, would shepherds be herding in the middle of winter?), or as late as September 15, in either 5, 6 or 7 BCE. (Yes, paradoxically, Christ was born before the Christian era.)

The Magi would have arrived at the inn at Bethlehem with their presents for the Christ child on the day the star stopped over that town—by modern calculation, December 1 in the year 7 BCE. In today’s Greek and Russian orthodox churches, however, Christmas is celebrated 13 days after the 25th, which is also referred to as the Epiphany or Three Kings Day, for it is believed to be the day that the three wise men found Jesus in the manger. Unanswered in all Christian scenarios is whether Jesus was a newborn in December or January, or a child of six to eight months, as historians think more likely.

It was Pope Julius I (with a reign of 337 to his death in 352) who chose December 25, almost certainly in an effort to co-opt the still robust pagan festival of the Saturnalia. In Rome, slaves would become masters for a week and peasants were in command of the city. Also around the time of the winter solstice, Romans observed Juvenalia, a feast accompanied by gift-giving — particularly clay dolls — that honored the empire’s children. Likewise early Church leaders, unable to stamp out the widespread pagan “Yule” (midwinter) customs in the Celtic and Teutonic regions, pragmatically put a Christian spin on them.

Isaac Newton observed that “the heathen were delighted with the festivals of their gods, and unwilling to part with these ceremonies,” and that the Church, “to facilitate their conversion, instituted annual festivals to the Saints and Martyrs: hence the keeping of Christmas with ivy, feasting, plays and sports came in the room of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia; the celebration of May Day with flowers in the room of the Floralia; and the festival of the Virgin, John the Baptist, and the divers apostles in the room of the solemnities at the entrance of the sun into the signs of the zodiac in the old Julian calendar.”

The end of December was when fresh meat was plentiful as most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter; also, most wine and beer made in the fall was fully fermented and ready for drinking. By placing the Feast of the Nativity, as Christmas was first called, at the same time as traditional winter solstice observances, Church leaders increased the chances that their new holiday would be popularly embraced (Easter was the high holy day of the early Christian era; the birth of Jesus was not marked). However, they had no control over how it was to be celebrated. By the Middle Ages, even though Christianity had largely replaced paganism, on Christmas believers attended church, then celebrated in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today's Mardi Gras. In an original Christmas tradition that survives as Halloween’s trick or treat, the poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. Not only was an inversion of the natural order in which the rich had to answer to the poor a key element of pagan festivities, it was later invoked by the Church as an argument against gambling — that in its redistribution of wealth it inspired pagan sentiments.

Now on to St. Nicholas, whose historicity underwent a similar makeover to that of Jesus. Bishop Nicholas of Smyrna lived in what is now Turkey in the 4th century A.D. The legend came down over the years that that he was rich, generous, and so loving toward children that he would anonymously throw gifts in through their windows. The unsanitized story, though, was that Nicholas threw gold into the window of a pious but impoverished Christian so that he could provide his three daughters with dowries; the father had been had been ready to sell them into prostitution to support the rest of his household. The life of St. Nicholas, listing all his miracles, was recorded by Methodius, Bishop of Constantinople, in 842, and about a decade later the clergy of Cologne Cathedral were commemorating the saint’s death day (the feast day of December 6) by giving fruit and cookies to the boys of the cathedral school.

Nicholas became patron saint of a motley crew: seamen, merchants, archers, children, prostitutes, lawyers, pawnbrokers, prisoners, pharmacists, the city of Amsterdam and the whole of Mother Russia. He came to the New World in 1626 as the figurehead on the Dutch ship Goede Vrouw (Good Wife). The seafarers named their village Niuew Amsterdam, celebrated Kerstrydt (Christmas), and erected a statue in the square to St. Nick. (Even today, Sinterklaas or Sint Nicolaas) celebrations in the Netherlands on December 6 feature the arrival of St. Nick, or Sint, on a steamer from Spain, accompanied by his helpers the Zwarte Pieten, or Black Peters, who are sooty from going down chimneys and because they are Moors. A fragment from a poem of the Middle Ages attests to the antiquity of this tradition: “Ride he may to Amsterdam, / From Amsterdam to Spain / Put your finest tabard on, / So may you ride to Spain / With little apples from Orange.” The Pieten would climb on the roofs and shinny down the chimneys while Sint stayed on his white horse atop the roof and tells them which child has been good or bad. Accordingly, the Pieten would bring the children toys to play with or switches to be beaten with.)

The Puritans, who had preceded the Dutch by landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, took the Bible as their sole inspiration for religious truth, and as the birthdate of Jesus was nowhere to be found, they declined to observe what they saw as an illegitimate celebration. On Christmas the church was closed and the able-bodied were set to work. In 1621 Governor Bradford wrote in his diary of a confrontation with some young men who wished to mark the day as a holiday:

One ye day called the Christmas-day, ye Govr called them out to worke, (as was used), but ye most of this new-company excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on ye day. So ye Govr tould them that if they made it mater of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away ye rest and left them; but when they came home at noone from their worke, he found them in ye streete at play, openly; some pitching ye barr, & some at stoole-ball, and schuch like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and tould them that was against his conscience, that they should play & others worke. If they made ye keeping of it mater of devotion, let them kepe their houses, but ther should be no gameing or revelling in ye streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.

In 1651 the State of Massachusetts made all observation of Christmas, “by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way,” a crime. But the English, who likewise banned it and the Dutch version of St. Nicholas upon their wresting control of New Amsterdam and renaming it New York, later came to accept the pleasures of the festival of the saint on December 6th, but with no connection to Christmas. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on December 25 because “they do not accept the day as a Holy One.”

But the tide had begun to turn against the naysayers in 1804, when the New-York Historical Society was founded with Nicholas as its patron saint. In 1809 Washington Irving revived St. Nicholas in his History of New-York by “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” describing the figurehead on the ship Goede Vrouw, as being ...”equipped with a low brimmed hat, huge pair of Flemish hose and a pipe that reached to the end of the bowsprit....” When Irving became a member of the Society the following year, the annual St. Nicholas Day dinner festivities included a woodcut of the traditional Nicholas figure (tall, with long robes) accompanied by a Dutch rhyme about “Sancte Claus.”

Next week, Irving, Nast, Clement Moore ... and more, up to the present day.

--John Thorn

Unknown are Abbey's feelings about inclusion in such anthologies as The Humbler Poets (McClurg, 1888).

The Bard of Kingston

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, November 17, 2005:
Consider the plight of the regional musician, the coterie painter, the provincial intellectual … the local newspaper columnist. All may descend upon the coffee shop as demigods yet know in their hearts that, having never truly tested themselves in deeper waters, they are no more than small-pond fish. Some, untroubled by aspiration, are content in their modest celebrity; others burn with the indignation of the righteous that their genius has eluded talent scouts from the big city.

The genial Henry Abbey (1842-1911) fit neither description. The most famous poet our region has produced — the Bard of Kingston, according to his tombstone at Montrepose Cemetery — this Shakespeare-loving flour-and-feed merchant had his feet on the ground, his head in the clouds, and his pen in constant swirl. National magazines — The Galaxy, Appleton’s, Overland Monthly, Old and New, Chambers — published his poems regularly (this in the age when no thoughtful journal would go to press without some poetic contributions) even as his eight volumes of verse elicited reviews that might have withered another poet’s soul. Abbey thought he was good, wished he were better, and bore ill will toward none as he indefatigably secured his hold on a lower rung of the literary ladder. Famous long ago, forgotten today, he merits another look.

Born to Stephen and Caroline Vail Abbey in Rondout on July 11, 1842, Henry Abbey was educated in the state of New York at Kingston Academy, Delaware Literary Institute in Delhi, and the Hudson River Institute in Columbia County. His family, which included a sister, Anna, and a brother, Legrand, worshiped at the Fair Street Reformed Church in Kingston. He gravitated toward verse early on, self-publishing his first collection, May Dreams, in his twentieth year. He dedicated the volume to William Cullen Bryant, who noted in it “the marks of an affluent fancy — though, I must say that this faculty in your verses appears somewhat unchastised.”

Praise so faint might have damned another young poet to oblivion, but Abbey returned to his father’s grain depot more determined to improve his versification. In 1866 his prosaically titled Ralph and Other Poems met with some kind notice.

Abbey also commenced to write and edit for the new Rondout Courier and to become something of a literary man about town, in New York City as well as Rondout and Kingston. When Mark Twain came to Rondout in the course of his northeastern lecture tour of 1868 (his talk was titled “The American Vandal Abroad,” on December 2), it was Abbey who befriended him and elicited a promise to return the following year. In August 1869 the increasingly famous author wrote to Abbey:

Yes, I have a pleasant remembrance of our ride & would like to repeat it. And I remember promising to lecture for you, too, in case I lectured any of any consequence next winter — at least I suppose I remember it — & I believe I promised [Henry M.] Crane [of Kingston] to lecture for him under the same conditions, though I am not sure about that, for it would have been absurd to make two engagements so close together as your two towns. But circumstances have altered things greatly. I was under contract to make a New England tour next winter, but I have been obliged to write there & ask to be excused. I have bought into this paper [the Buffalo Express, on whose letterhead Mark Twain wrote], & business will compel me to stick to my post. If my promise was a positive one I hope you will be merciful to a fellow journalistic sinner & let me off for this time. I see you had a notion to have me lecture on my wedding day! (Jan. 10.) — but this is strictly private & you must not mention it.

Excuses to the contrary, Mark Twain did lecture for Abbey at Rondout on January 12, 1870, and again on November 2, 1871, but only after negotiating a higher fee. As he wrote to his agent, “I got $100 the first time I ever talked there and now they have a much larger hall. It is a hard town to get to — I run a chance of getting caught by the ice and missing next engagement. Make the price $150 and let them draw out.”

Big man in a small town, Abbey soon became friendly with John Burroughs and with him joined the metropolitan circle of literary Bohemians; in August 1882 they even received visits from Oscar Wilde (Burroughs was less favorably impressed than Abbey, who had met him during the prior year’s lecture circuit). Abbey and Burroughs also became auxiliary members of the group inhabiting Pfaff’s Café in the basement of 653 Broadway in New York, famed as a hangout for such “aesthetic” characters as Walt Whitman, Ada Clare, Thomas Nast, Adah Isaacs Menken and Artemus Ward. Charles Pfaff had established the basement rathskeller in 1856, at a time when beer was new to New York and the Parisian artist lifestyle celebrated in Henri Murger’s Scenes de la vie de Boheme had inspired an artists’ enclave in Greenwich Village. As Whitman recalled in an unfinished poem of his late years, glassed-over caves allowed light to filter into:

The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse,
While on the walk immediately overhead, pass the myriad feet of Broadway
As the dead in their graves, are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, recking not of them, …

It was a good time to be a poet in America, even a minor one, and while Abbey was no Bohemian in his personal lifestyle he showed his colors when a literary critic proposed to dismiss Byron’s work because of the poet’s personal “depravity.” Abbey wrote to the editor of the Literary World: “To say that you do not like his poetry because you do not like the life he led is the same as saying you dislike a house because you do not like the architect who planned or the carpenter or mason who built it…. It seems to that always, and undeniably in the republic of letters, the thing done is the sole thing to be considered.” If Byron was a bad man and a good poet, Abbey was the obverse.

He became one of the literary elect by the sheer proliferation of his periodical poems, many of a romantic and fantastical sort with such titles as “The Roman Sentinel,” “The Bedouin’s Rebuke,” “The Caliph’s Magnanimity,” and “Irak.” There were localized poems too — generally reserved for book publication — from “A Colonial Ballad” (about the burning of Kingston) to “Vanderlyn,” from “On the Rondout” to “Onteora.” Most of these, however, were no less bombastic than his historical fustian, although “May in Kingston,” which is the only one of his poems referenced on his headstone at Montrepose, is more modest and thus less dreadful (see below). The same may be said of “What Do We Plant?”—a parable about trees and values, children and patriotism, that Aaron Copland set to music in 1936.

Abbey’s contemporary critics were unsparing of his feelings. This, from the Atlantic Monthly of September 1869: “The different ‘Stories in Verse’ abound in such kaleidoscopic effects as this, —
‘As to the heliotrope comes fluttering down
The peacock butterfly, who sips and flies,
So each glad day, gold-winged, came to the land,
And sipped its sip of time and fled away’;
and this, —
‘He tarried here until along the hills
The red-lipped whisper of the morning ran’;
and many others equally discouraging, with the same preposterously unmeaning color and glitter.”

Or this, from The Century of July 1884: “Mr. Abbey’s art is frequently at fault … none but an amateur in verse would be capable of writing such an awkward couplet as the following: ‘With her through the city go, / She thee it will fully show.’

“She thee it!” the reviewer concluded amazedly.

The Chap-Book of Nov. 15, 1897 included a merciless “tribute” to Abbey as the quintessence of “The Very Minor Poet.” The author, Pierre La Rose, gives special attention to Abbey’s masterpiece of dreadfulness, “The Giant Spider,” containing “a line which I defy anyone to match in very minor poetry: ‘An early knuckle smote against my door.’” One could go on, and La Rose did.

So too did Abbey, in 1900 retiring from his grain and banking interests to wrestle un-distractedly with The Muse for the final decade of his life. In the year before he died of heart disease (June 7, 1911, his wife Mary having predeceased him), he issued his final volume, The Dream of Love, a Mystery. The New York Times panned it.

Reading much of Abbey’s verse in preparation for this column, I came away with an odd respect for him. As Clint Eastwood said in Dirty Harry, “A man's got to know his limitations” … and Abbey forthrightly recognized his. I located a poem he wrote for Liber Scriptorum, a collection by members of the Authors Club, in which he plainly stated his credo:

To Baffle Time

To baffle time, whose tooth has never rest,
And make the counted line, from page to page,
Compact, fulfilled of what is apt and best,
And vibrant with the key-note of the age,
This is my aim; and even aims are things;
They give men value who have won no place.
We pass for what we would be, by some grace,
And our ambitions make us seem like kings.
But never yet has destiny’s clear star
For aimless feet shed light upon the way.
So have I hope, since purpose sees no bar,
To write immortally some lyric day,
As Lovelace did when he informed the lay
Inspired by Lucasta and by war.


***

May in Kingston

Our old colonial town is new with May:
The loving trees that clap across the streets,
Grow greener sleeved with bursting buds each day.
Still this year’s May the last year’s May repeats;
Even the old stone houses half renew
Their youth and beauty, as the old trees do.

High over all, like some divine desire
Above our lower thoughts of daily care,
The gray, religious, heaven-touching spire
Adds to the quiet of the spring-time air;
And over roofs the birds create a sea,
That has no shore, of their May melody.

Down through the lowlands now of lightest green,
The undecided creek winds on its way.
There the little willow bends with graceful mien,
And sees its likeness in the depths all day;
While in the orchards, flushed with May’s warm light,
The bride-like fruit trees dwell, attired in white.

But yonder loom the mountain solid and grand,
That off, along dim distance, reach afar,
And high and vast, against the sunset stand,
A dreamy range, long and irregular –
A caravan that never passes by,
Whose came-backs are laden with the sky.

So, like a caravan, our outlived years
Loom on the introspective landscape seen
Within the heart: and now, where May appears,
And earth renews its vernal bloom and green,
We but renew our longing, and we say:
“Oh, would that life might ever be all May!

“Would that the bloom of youth that is so brief,
The bloom, the May, the fullness ripe and fair
Of cheek and limb, might fade not as the leaf;
Would that the heart might not grow old with care,
Nor love turn bitter, nor fond hope decay;
But soul and body lead a life of May!”
—Henry Abbey

--John Thorn

Calvert Vaux in repose at Montrepose.

Photo by Mark Thorn.

Grave Matters

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, October 20, 2005:
The Rondout Courier of May 24, 1850 contains a modest and to modern eyes refreshingly low-key advertisement for a general store — no double-cents-off, no two-for-one promotion, no seasonal special, no can-can fest. “NEW ARRIVAL,” it reads, “E. SUYDAM would inform his friends and the public generally that he has just received a fresh supply of Groceries and a good amount of Crockery, to which he calls particular attention.”

Life was different in 1850: it may have been slower, gentler. But Death was neither slow nor gentle, only nearer, on the printed page as in everyday things. A mere two inches up from Suydam’s notice, in the same column, perched above the “Fashion Reports” and “Summer Mail Arrangements,” are the death announcements of the past week in Kingston and Rondout (then two separate villages) and a posting of the newly created Montrepose Cemetery Association, now legally organized and open for public inspection. “The area of Montrepose, deducting for roads, paths, shrubbery, &c., leaves space for 1000 lots of 600 square feet each. The price of the lots is now at the low rate of $12 each,” and of that only half need be paid up front.

Groceries, crockery, burial grounds, one was sold as matter-of-factly as another. The undulating Montrepose grounds formed a beautiful landscape — “peculiarly adapted to the formation of a rural cemetery,” wrote the Courier’s editor, “as it is of a varied surface” — that was inspiring to traverse and not the least bit morbid or scary. Death casts no shadow here.

Among the prominent Kingston and Rondout denizens residing peacefully here today are architect Calvert Vaux and his accomplished sons Bowyer and Downing, all related by marriage to painters Jervis McEntee and his cousin Julia McEntee Dillon; painter Joseph Tubby and illustrator Anton Otto Fischer; poet Henry Abbey; and industrialists Thomas Cornell and his son-in-law Samuel Coykendall, whose expansive family plot is marked by an imposing pergola, built-in seats, a winding walkway, and a curving stone facade. Patent-medicine king David Kennedy has a mausoleum upon a hillock. (Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defines mausoleum as “the final and funniest folly of the rich.”)

There is even a memorial to Kingston’s founder and Lord of the Manor of Fox Hall, Thomas Chambers, who had been buried on his land along the Strand in 1694 but was re-interred at Montrepose in the year of its founding. Vaux and McEntee have been the subjects of previous “Wake the Echoes” columns — December 23, 2004 and January 13, 2005, respectively — and certainly all the others named above will have their own space here as well as in Montrepose, Providence and my editors permitting.

Montrepose was an outgrowth of the rural cemetery movement that swept the country after the creation of Mt. Auburn in the Boston area in 1831 and Green-Wood in Brooklyn seven years later. Pleasure grounds for the living as well as harmonious lodging for the remains of the departed, the sylvan settings presaged the public parks and ball fields that in the latter half of the century provided a bit of countryside to urban toilers.

But make no mistake about it: while cemeteries may be good for contemplative strolling or even, a century ago, picnicking, what they are truly about is death. The inspiration for the rural cemetery was not only beauty but also the beast: pestilence and epidemic, borne by water or air. Headlines today radiate fear of avian flu (which virologists term H5N1) reaching our shores from Asia. Often these stories employ chilling reference to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 that is said to have claimed 50 million lives worldwide. HN51 has already moved beyond chickens, ducks, and the occasional person who handles them, to cats — killing tigers at the Bangkok zoo — and pigs, which in the past have been intermediary carriers of flu from birds to humans.

The fear of exogenous, invisible, cargo-hold-borne disease hit home locally with the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, both of which ravaged the port of Rondout. New York City, similarly afflicted in those plague years, by mid-century banned further burials, diverted streams, drained ponds, and plowed under or built over graveyards, all in the name of sanitation and progress though often enough the motive was profit, too.

The cholera pandemic of 1832 was not America’s first instance of virulent disease. There had been outbreaks of measles in Boston in 1657 and 1687; influenza throughout the colonies as early as 1732; smallpox in South Carolina in 1738; and the dreaded yellow fever, beginning in Philadelphia in the 1790s and wreaking havoc in New York in 1803 and 1822. Death seldom provides a pleasant passage, but cholera was uniquely gruesome. In the early 1830s the West waited in terror for the disease, which originated in Asia, to make its way from Moscow to London and Paris and, ultimately, the New World. In a now famous letter dated April 9, 1832, the German poet Heinrich Heine (1796-1856) described the outbreak of cholera in Paris:

On March 29th, the night of mi-careme, a masked ball was in progress, the chabut in full swing. Suddenly, the gayest of the harlequins collapsed, cold in the limbs, and, underneath his mask, ‘violet-blue’ in the face [drowning in their own blood as fluid leaked into their lungs]. Laughter died out, dancing ceased, and in a short while carriage-loads of people were hurried from the redoute to the Hotel Dieu to die, and to prevent a panic among the patients, were thrust into rude graves in their dominoes [masks]. Soon the public halls were filled with dead bodies, sewed in sacks for want of coffins. Long lines of hearses stood en queue outside Pere Lachaise. Everybody wore flannel bandages. The rich gathered up their belongings and fled the town. Over 120,000 passports were issued at the Hotel de Ville [as translated in Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty, Epidemics, Scribner's, 1976].

This is the specter that confronted Rondout and Kingston at midcentury. Some worker housing had been burned to the ground to check the spread of the disease, but this succeeded only in part. It was imperative that the dead had to be distanced from the living. In the May 21, 1850 issue, The Rondout Courier’s editor had noted: “We may remark here that the village burial ground in Rondout scarcely affords room for another interment, and its situation would be a serious objection to farther [sic] burials there, even were it not thus. The two Kingston burial grounds, (we are informed) afford no room for new lots, thus rendering it desirable that another place for the dead be provided as a measure of present necessity, besides the prospective reason of a probable general law forbidding interments in village bounds, which will close both.”

Today, a century and half later, we await the avian flu with a dread born of previous pandemics — even the flu epidemics within living memory, those of 1957 and 1968. Let us hope that the plentiful space at Montrepose for additional gravesites proves not to be its way out of current financial straits. Very recently lot prices rose from $475 to $600, still a bargain and not yet enough to assure that Montrepose will remain the garden spot that “cannot be exceeded for beauty and scope in this region,” as it was described at its founding.

As Joshua Brustein wrote recently in The Gotham Gazette of another notable resting place, New York City’s Marble Cemetery: “Not having the money for continued maintenance is a serious concern for aging cemeteries. In the past some have disappeared below new development, a fate that theoretically won't happen now because the restrictions for new development on cemetery land are even tougher than those keeping cemeteries from developing new land. But the threat of falling into disrepair or abandonment is real, say some who manage historic cemeteries in the city. To avoid this, they are looking beyond burials to other fundraising possibilities....”

Montrepose may need to give up on the idea that it is simply a beautiful cemetery, though it is all of that. It can also be an outdoor theater, in which actors and writers take on the parts of the illustrious dead in a scripted theatrical presentation. It can host spooky films at Halloween. It can become Kingston’s Central Park.

--John Thorn

Kingston's Old Dutch Church, western view

Ghost World

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, October 6, 2005:
Fifty years ago my parents, looking to move from our apartment in the Bronx, brought me along for a realtor’s tour of an attractively priced row house in Maspeth, Queens. Everything seemed neat and agreeable until, walking into the kitchen at the back of the house, my mother gasped at the view out the back window: a massive cemetery. She rushed my brother and me out of the house as my father lingered to offer a hurried apology to the home’s owner.

Today I would guess that sea of headstones to have been Calvary Cemetery, but it might have been another of the seventeen necropoli that shot up in western Queens after the latest cholera epidemic put an end to Manhattan burials in 1852. No matter; the point was that my mother had witnessed her fill of death in Europe and had no wish to flash back while standing over the dishes.

For the past four years I, however, have looked down quite happily from the north window of my second-floor office in Kingston onto the Old Dutch graveyard, which fronts on Main Street between Fair and Wall. Its weathered markers of past lives, some commenced in the seventeenth century, seem to me not the least bit chilling or morbid, but calming and serene. Although no ancestor of mine rests here, I know these old Dutch names — Hardenbergh, Dubois, Hasbrouck, Tappen, Bruyn, and more — by custom and tradition; my familiar walk among them might as well be familial.

Actually, my office location compounds my distant-relation feelings, as it is in the one-time parsonage, constructed in 1836, of the Dutch Reformed Church, dedicated in 1852. That seeming discrepancy (why build a parish house first?) points to an odd chain of events into which St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, in view as I swivel my desk chair to the west, also figures. It was built by the congregation of the Old Dutch Church in 1832 as a sturdy brick successor to the log construction of 1661 as well as the stone structure of 1679 that was rebuilt in 1752, burned by the British in 1777, and rebuilt again. My odd perspective on St. Joseph’s eastern roofline reveals its 1830s Greek Revival origins, utterly camouflaged to Main Street strollers by the 1898 Beaux Arts refacing of its frontage.

In 1850 the Old Dutch congregation commissioned celebrated architect Minard Lafever to design a new house of worship at its old location on the south side of the street. (The slate roof was not Lafever’s idea; this locally inspired brainstorm caused the eastern wall to begin to bow almost immediately, and the predictable long-term effect is visible today — inside the church, with its tilted columns, and outside, with its ungainly buttresses.) This bluestone church, the noble edifice that has come to define Stockade Kingston today, was inspired in part by Sir Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The first to be buried from the new church was the painter John Vanderlyn, who reposes in Wiltwyck Cemetery and was the subject of my first “Wake the Echoes” column last year.

So what happened to the Old Dutch congregation’s 1832 brick church? It was leased to several commercial interests, served as an armory in the Civil War, and ultimately was sold to St. Joseph’s.

Returning to the storied stones of the Old Dutch churchyard, let’s start with the tablets embedded on each side of the entrance, which derive from the Old Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street in New York City, erected in 1729 and given over to civic uses in 1844. With Biblical inscriptions in Dutch on the sandstone and in English on the granite, the tablets read, “I have loved the habitation of thy house” and “My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

These stones were presented to the Old Dutch Church in 1876 by one of its most celebrated parishioners, General George H. Sharpe. He also caused the statue called “Patriotism,” very recently refurbished, to be erected in 1896. Twelve years later the remains of George Clinton — first governor of New York State and Vice President under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — were removed from Washington, D.C. to a memorial in the west lawn of the cemetery.

Bronze tablets of interest adorn the front as well, one detailing the history of the church and the other a 1932 commemoration of George Washington’s visit, 150 years earlier, to the church then on this site. That church and the Lafever church of 1852 both fronted onto Main Street, but the latter was sited some distance north, directly above the graves of 81 congregants whose earthly remains the Old Dutch directors deigned to move. They lie under the church still, though their grave markers were relocated to the Fair Street side of the cemetery. These sadly fated souls and their death dates are cited on four marble tablets within the church, two on each side of the altar. One may identify their disembodied headstones by the “X” (St. Andrew’s Cross) incised on the backs. The marker for one of these unfortunates fronts on Main Street, just inches from pavement passersby:

HERE LIES THE BODY OF
COLL GILBERT LIVINGSTON
BORN YE 3RD DAY
OF APRIL 1690.
DIED YE 25TH DAY OF
APRIL 1746
AGED 56 YEARS & 22 DAYS

Several of the stones on both sides of the graveyard are cracked, their information lost to view though retained in the church records. Some are copper-clad at the top to hold the crumbling stone together. Many of the inscriptions are rubbed to the point of being indecipherable, or have splintered off into fragments that still lie on the turf, presenting a perplexing jigsaw puzzle. Bronze emblems placed by the Sons of the American Revolution to honor veterans of the War of Independence ornament the lawn like dandelions. Jagged obelisks, stone spears of more primitive times, mark the graves of Dutch parishioners such as Andries DeWitt, who died on July 22, 1710.

Why do we bury our dead in such sylvan settings and see that their graves are kept clean? Why not a funeral pyre or catacomb or pyramid? Because in Judeo-Christian cultures of the West we are nostalgic for the Garden of Eden, from which we so long ago were banished, never in life to return. We imagine that in death our heroes cavort on the fields of Elysium, les Champs Elysees, the Elysian Fields of Gold. In colonial America a headstone or urn under a weeping willow in back of the farmhouse was sufficiently affecting, as was a country churchyard setting like that of the Old Dutch. But as the nation urbanized, the need emerged for a park within the city, one that not only honored the fallen but gave recreation and clean air to the generations on the rise.

The national response may be measured equally by the new landscaped cemeteries — notably Mt, Auburn outside Boston (founded in 1831 by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society) and Green-Wood in Brooklyn (the first rural cemetery in New York, incorporated in 1838) — and such playing fields as the tellingly named Elysian Fields or Fenway Park. All were designed for the living, not for the dead, to provide country air and freedom from care for an afternoon’s picnic or amatory frolic (yes, boneyards were not always daunting).

When New York was swallowing up country retreats in its midst such as Lispenard’s Meadow while stingily repurposing military parade grounds such as Madison Square Park for public amusement, the open-spaces movement came into being. William Cullen Bryant proposed a vast park along the East River; Alexander Jackson Downing proposed a Central Park in very nearly its current location. From the cemetery to the ballfield to the public park is but a matter of degree.

So ... as we rush headlong into the Season of the Witch and the mercantile bonanza that October has become in our fair land, the question springs to the tip of the tongue: when and how did cemeteries become scary? And ghosts malevolent? When did we begin to feel the need to whistle in the graveyard rather than reverently touch the headstones?

More on this next week, when we visit the rolling landscape of Montrepose Cemetery.

--John Thorn

Increasingly in his later years, Melville began to identify with Rip.

Saint Rip

From "Wake the Echoes, Kingston Times, September 1, 2005:
Last week we unmasked Washington Irving as a plagiarist, Rip Van Winkle as a Teutonic shepherd named Peter Klaus, and the Catskills as a hornets’ nest of folkloric sleeper cells from Scandinavia, Japan, Ireland, Greece, and Turkey. In this last mentioned locale, during the persecutions of the Roman emperor Decius ca. 250 CE, seven Ephesian Christians were given a chance to recant their faith. They instead gave their possessions to the poor and retired to a mountain cave to pray and there, as they slept the night, Rome’s soldiers walled the mouth of the cave with stones. More than a century later, during the reign of Christian emperor Theodosius I (379-395) or II (408-421) — one ought not press too hard for the factual base of this tale, especially as Aristotle had written of the “Sleepers of Sardes” some seven centuries earlier — the cave was unsealed and therein the masons found seven Ephesians awakening from what they believed to be a single night’s slumber.

One of these seven sleepers, Malchus, walked into town and was startled by the crosses atop several buildings. Like Rip, he had slept through a revolution.

Attempting to buy bread with his ancient coin, Malchus was interrogated by the townfolk, who suspected that he had come across an ancient treasure and was holding out on them. A bishop intervened to save Malchus from mayhem and returned with him to the cave, where he was amazed to see the other six with “theyr visages lyke unto roses flouryng,” as the story was recorded in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a popular medieval celebration of the lives of the saints, written ca. 1260 (though the story had been recorded in Syriac as early as the year 500). The seven tell their tale to the bishop and then die praising God.

These Seven Sleepers of Ephesus — Maximian, Martinian, Dionysius, John, Serapion, and Constantine, in addition to Malchus — were honored as saints for centuries thereafter. During the Crusades their remains were removed to the Church of Saint Victoire in Marseilles, where pilgrims flocked. In 1927-28 an excavation at Ephesus, underneath the ruins of a church, revealed several hundred graves from the fifth and sixth centuries, some with inscriptions referring to the Seven Sleepers. This grotto remains a tourist destination today, even though the sleepers’ feast day of July 27 was suppressed as mythical (i.e., of pagan origin) with the reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy in 1969.

Luckily, that was the year of the Woodstock Music Festival, the height (or should we say Haight) of all hippiedom. And our beset and bedraggled Catskillian hero was ready to become its patron saint, even if this ripeness is evident only in retrospect. Rip was the quintessential hippie, the one who made a success of failure by tuning in, turning on, and dropping out.

Irving’s genius had lain not in his stealthy adoption of the nondescript Peter Klaus as his archetype, but in creating Rip with a twist, as an apolitical antihero, a henpecked laggard, at the very moment in history when America was most insufferably vainglorious. Irving had left native soil in 1815, created Rip in 1819, and did not return until 1832. An Addisonian stylist with no hatred of Mother England — like Rip, Irving was apolitical—he had struck a popular chord with American readers with his evocations of a Knickerbocker tradition that was nearly vanished. And by making ethnic jokes of the Dutch—as a dwindling minority, they were popularly portrayed as dumb, cowardly, and gluttonish—he indirectly flattered those of English stock.

By making Rip literally a good-for-nothing Irving created a role model not only for a distant counterculture but also for art — which, like play, may have no purpose but itself or it becomes no longer itself. In the years after Irving’s death, America became ever more practical, pragmatic, and utilitarian, reinventing itself with every generation, relentlessly conflating change with progress. The seeming idler — the writer, the painter, the philosopher, prized in past times for performing his work far from the madding crowd — increasingly was termed the useless man. For the artist — the man outside — Rip provided the perfect symbol.

Mind you, Irving did not intend his hero this way. It was for the next generation of writers like Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville to see in their own commercial struggles, their own ineffectuality, the specter of Rip.

***

For Melville in particular, Rip possessed untapped allegorical, even spiritual possibilities. His star had fallen from the firmament of American authors after Typee (16,320 copies sold in his lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic) and Omoo (13,335). His masterwork, Moby-Dick, published in 1851, sold only 3,715 copies. His last attempt at fiction, The Confidence Man, sold even more poorly and his 1866 volume of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, sold a pathetic 471 copies, compelling the author to reimburse the publisher for its production costs. In that same year he gave over all hope of making a living from his writing and accepted a job as an outdoor customs inspector, a post he held for 19 years.

Melville’s death in 1891 passed almost unnoticed. But in 1919 it emerged that he had never stopped writing, and had left behind work that future generations would cherish: the novella Billy Budd, today perhaps his most widely read book, and a volume of poems titled Weeds and Wildings with a Rose or Two. One of the sections in this astounding volume is called “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” an experimental combination of prose and poetry that transforms and elevates Rip to nothing short of sainthood.

Melville introduces a new character, a “certain meditative vagabondo” who comes upon Rip’s vacant but picturesque abode some years before the hero’s awakening. “And the gray weather-stain not only gave the house the aspect of age,” Melville wrote, “but worse; for in association with palpable evidences of its recentness as an erection, it imparted a look forlornly human, even the look of one grown old before his time.” Yet the vagabondo is drawn to the ramshackle ruin of fallen willow, roof-shingle mosses and Lilac (Melville always capitalizes it) gaily sprouting from Rip’s planting on the day he last saw home. Exhorted by a passing stranger —“gaunt, hatchet-faced, stony-eyed”— to paint a trim white church in the distance rather than the shambles before him, he demurs, only to have the stranger press on:

“You will stick to this wretched old ruin, then, will you?”

“Yes, and the Lilac.”

“The Lilac? And black what-do-ye-call-it — lichen, on the trunk, so old is it. It is half-rotten, and its flowers spring from the rottenness under it, just as the moss on those eaves does from the rotting shingles.”

“Yes, decay is often a gardener.”

When Rip returns to his broken-down home some years hence he recalls having set a Lilac on the day of his departure for the hills:

That Lilac was a little slip,
And yonder Lilac is a tree!

The poet here intrudes:

But why rehearse in every section
The wildered good-fellow’s resurrection,
Happily told by happiest Irving
Never from genial verity swerving;
And more to make the story rife,
By Jefferson acted true to life.
Me here it but behooves to tell
Of things that posthumously fell.

Many years after Rip was “remanded into night,” the Lilac continued to bloom:

Each June the owner joyance found
In one prized tree that held its ground,
One tenant old where all was new,--
Rip’s Lilac to its youth still true.

To the end of his life, Melville had kept on his desk this motto: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”

And the poem concludes:

See, where man finds in man no use,
Boon Nature finds one—Heaven be blest!

R.I.P., Rip.


ART
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.
--Herman Melville, 1891

--John Thorn

The genial Irving, in an 1840s daguerreotype.

The Real Rip Van Winkle

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, August 25, 2005:
Patron saint of the Catskills, Rip Van Winkle has belonged to all America from the moment he was born, by passage through Washington Irving’s pen, in 1819. Only seven years later there was a Rip Van Winkle House along the road from Palenville to the nation’s first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House; in 1850 there was another Rip Van Winkle House on the corner of Pacific Wharf and Battery Street in San Francisco. Rip’s real-life presence was attested by nonagenarians who claimed to have known him and his virago Dame. Other Hudson Valley denizens claimed to have heard as children, whenever thunder rumbled in the mountains, the tale of Henrik Hudson and his gnomish bowlers, as if it were a folk tale eons old rather than Irving’s invention. Today Rip is more prevalent — perhaps more real — than ever, the figure for whom every writer grasps when trying to convey our era’s dizzying rate of change.

In 1872 William Cullen Bryant wrote, in Picturesque America: “As you climb up this steep road [to the Catskill Mountain House] ... here, by the side of a little stream, which trickles down the broad, flat surface of a large rock, is the shanty called “Rip Van Winkle’s House....”

In a June 1906 issue of 4 Track News, an overwrought Charles B. Wells wrote: “Rip’s ‘Village of Falling Water,’ Palenville, lies at the base and from the summit, looking far out over a field of fleecy cloud-tipped peaks, the gilded dome of the capitol at Albany tosses back the sparkling sunlight which glistens in the silvery Hudson below as though seeking to detain it in its mad onward rush to the pathless sea.”

In 1947 Rufus Rockwell Wilson, wrote, in New York in Literature: “Most of the dwellers in present-day Leeds are prompt in their denials that such a man as Rip Van Winkle ever lived in the town, but there is one wrinkled veteran, far spent in years who, if discreetly questioned, will tell you in confidence that were he again a lad he would lead you to the rock, a little way this side of Palenville, where Rip used to camp and sleep on his hunting trips.”

The real Rip is more interesting. Let’s hurtle back to the eighteenth century.

Washington Irving was born in New York in 1783, the year in which the American Revolution was won. In 1800 he made his first voyage up the Hudson. Writing of it long after, he said: “The Kaaterskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. As we slowly floated along I lay on deck and watched them, through a long summer day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere.” Presumably he gathered up stories on his travels in the Valley, as he did on subsequent journeys to Canada and, in 1804-6, Europe. Upon his return he elected not to go into the law, even though he had been admitted to the bar. Instead he published, with his literary cohorts, the Salmagundi papers (1807) and, in 1809 as “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a comic History of New-York that is fresh and funny today.

Flush from success on both sides of the Atlantic, he suffered a blow with the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman; he was never to marry. A morose Irving entered the literary business, where his celebrity could not keep his Analectic Magazine from failing. In May 1815 he went to Europe and took charge of the family business in Liverpool, but in 1818 it failed too. He now had nothing on which he might capitalize but his fame: he had to write for a living.

Irving visited his admirer Walter Scott at Abbotsford and learned from him of the wealth of unused literary material in Scottish and especially German folk tales. Irving feverishly taught himself rudimentary German so that he might read (and borrow from) these tales. “Rip” met the light of day in May 1819 as the last sketch in the first installment of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., No. I, published in New York by, oddly, C.S. Van Winkle. Six installments followed until in 1820 the publisher issued them all in one volume.

Today we might say that with The Sketch Book, which also included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving invented not only the American short story but the Catskills as a source of legend and enchantment. Yet even in his own day, Irving’s critics pointed out that some passages in “Rip Van Winkle” were not mere borrowings but in fact direct translations from the German of Otmar’s Volksagen, published in Bremen in 1800.

In a note appended to the legend, Diedrich Knickerbocker (among whose posthumous writings the tale was supposedly located by editor Geoffrey Crayon) informs us that he himself has talked with Rip Van Winkle, and that “the story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.” Crayon introduces this note by saying that without it one would suspect that the tale had been “suggested by a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart and the Kyffhauser Mountain.” This clue led a generation of scholars off onto a Barbarossan snipe-hunt, as Rip Van Winkle is certainly not based on the legend of the Mountain King who would rise with his entombed army to defend his nation. Irving’s location was indeed the Kyffhauser Mountain, but his model was plainly Otmar’s Peter Klaus, described by Bayard Taylor in By-ways of Europe, 1869:

Peter Klaus, a shepherd of Sittendorf, pastured his herd on the Kyffhauser, and was in the habit of collecting the animals at the foot of an old ruined wall. He noticed that one of his goats regularly disappeared for some hours every day; and, finding that she went into an opening between two of the stones, he followed her. She led him into a vault, where she began eating grains of oats which fell from the ceiling. Over his head he heard the stamping and neighing of horses. Presently a squire in ancient armor appeared, and beckoned to him without speaking. He was led up stairs, across a court-yard, and into an open space in the mountain, sunken deep between rocky walls, where a company of knights, stern and silent were playing at bowls. Peter Klaus was directed by gestures to set up the pins, which he did in mortal fear, until the quality of a can of wine, placed at his elbow, stimulated his courage. Finally, after long service and many deep potations, he slept. When he awoke, he found himself lying among tall weeds, at the foot of the ruined wall. Herd and dog had disappeared; his clothes were in tatters, and a long beard hung upon his breast. He wandered back to the village, seeking his goats, and marveling thathe saw none but strange faces. The people gathered around him, and answered his questions, but each name he named was that upon a stone in the church-yard. Finally, a woman who seemed to be his wife pressed through the crowd, leading a wild-looking boy, and with a baby in her arms.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Maria.”

"And your father?”

“He was Peter Klaus, God rest his soul! who went up the Kyffhauser with his herd, twenty years ago, and has never been seen since."

***

Sound familiar? I won’t burden you with side-by-side German and English, but trust me, the congruency is shocking. When confronted by his critics, Irving seemed confused, responding that legends were for all to use, as writers of the past had done. Eventually he issued a sort of apology:

“In a note which follows that tale ['Rip Van Winkle'], I alluded to the superstition on which it is founded, and I thought a mere allusion was sufficient, as the tradition was so notorious as to be inserted in almost every collection of German legends. I had seen it myself in three. I could hardly have hoped, therefore, in the present age, when every ghost and goblin story is ransacked, that the origin of the tale would escape discovery. In fact I had considered popular traditions of the kind as fair foundations for authors of fiction to build upon, and made use of the one in question accordingly.”

Irving lived long enough to see his own invented and adapted legends become in turn the legends which others used for their tales and stories. And to be fair, sleeper tales went back far earlier and wider than that of Peter Klaus, to Scandinavia’s “Girl at the Troll Dance,” to Ireland’s Clough na Cuddy, to Japan’s “Urashima Taro,” and more. In an ancient Greek tale Epimenides, a shepherd, went to the mountains in search of stray sheep, fell asleep in a cave, and woke up 57 years later to find himself unrecognized by all until his youngest brother, now an old man, finally recognized him. And then there is Ulysses, who returned home after 20 years to be recognized only by his faithful dog Argus. And Woody Allen’s Sleeper. All, no matter how dimly, echo the greatest Resurrection story we know, which itself is the product of legend and fable from prior millennia.

But the mother lode for the Christian Era appears to be The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, saints whose feast day is July 27. Maximian, Malchus, Martinian, Dionysius, John, Serapion, and Constantine ... these are the men who, in our next column, will wake to restore Irving to his pedestal. And Herman Melville, in a posthumous and little-known work, will arise once more to canonize, truly, our beloved Rip.

--John Thorn

Hoyt House: the remains of the day.

Hudson River Bracketed

From "Wake the Echoes" in the Kingston Times, August 4, 2005:
In June I received an email from Tom Rinaldi, one of the proprietors of the wonderful website www.hudsonvalleyruins.org, to which I direct you as soon as you’ve finished reading this. He had enjoyed some of the architectural essays posted to my then new blog.

“I have a quick question and you seemed like just the person to ask,” Tom wrote. “Where did Edith Wharton get that Downing quote that she used as the front piece for Hudson River Bracketed? The one that goes something like ‘AJ Downing identified four types of architecture - gothic...and the Hudson River Bracketed.’ I imagine it was in the Horticulturalist or in one his books but I wondered if you might have a specific citation.”

I did not have a ready answer, but as “Hudson River Bracketed” is the name I chose for my blog — actually, it is displayed as “[Hudson River]”) — I thought I ought to find one. I regarded myself as something of an expert on Downing, or at least a first-class buff (see “Try a Little Wilderness,” below on this blog). Anyway, this kind of bibliographic sleuthing is fun, and it called upon all the bloodhound traits I had honed in hunting oldtime baseball players to their lairs.

After some digging I was able to reply to Tom: “Checked out your site and it is great. I will add it as a link on my blog. As to Ms. Wharton, she identified five styles in her epigraph”:

A. J. Downing, the American landscape architect, in his book on Landscape Gardening (published in 1842) divides the architectural styles into the Grecian, Chinese, Gothic, the Tuscan, or Italian villa, style, and the Hudson River Bracketed.

Wharton got the publication date wrong, I noted. It was 1841, and Downing’s book was properly titled A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Adapted to North America; with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences. But to my knowledge the phrase ‘Hudson River Bracketed’ appeared nowhere in Downing’s writing.

What Downing actually wrote in this book [with my highlighting in bold] was:

There is still an intermediate kind of architecture, originally a variation of the classical style, but which, in becoming adapted to different and more picturesque situations, has lost much of its graceful character, and has become quite picturesque in its outlines and effects. Of this kind are the Swiss and the bracketed cottage, and the different highly irregular forms of the Italian villa. The more simple and regular variations of these modes of building, may be introduced with good effect in any plain country; while the more irregular and artistical forms have the happiest effect only in more highly varied and suitable localities.

The Egyptian, one of the oldest architectural styles, characterized by its heavy colossal forms, and almost sublime expression, is supposed to have had its origin in caverns hewn in the rocks. The Chinese style, easily known by its waving lines, probably had its type in the eastern tent. The Saracenic, or Moorish style, rich in fanciful decoration,is striking and picturesque in its details, and is worthy of the attention of the wealthy amateur.

Neither of these styles, however, is, or can well be, thoroughly adapted to our domestic purposes, as they are wanting in fitness, and have comparatively few charms of association for residents of this country.

The only styles at present in common use for domestic architecture, throughout the enlightened portions of Europe and America, are the Grecian and Gothic styles, or some modifications of these two distinct kinds of building. These modifications, which of themselves are now considered styles by most authors, are, the Roman and modern Italian styles, which have grown out of Greek architecture; the Castellated, the Tudor, the Elizabethan, and the rural Gothic or old English cottage styles, all of which are variations of Gothic architecture.... A modification, partaking somewhat of the Italian and Swiss features, is what we have described more fully in our “Cottage Residences” as the Bracketed mode.

Here was the clue! What Edith Wharton had got wrong was not her publication date but her book. Landscape Gardening contained a valuable chapter on “Rural Architecture” that discussed the Bracketed style among the Tuscan, Castellated, Tudor, Elizabethan, and more, but it was basically a book about gardening. Cottage Residences was the book published in 1842, and its chapters were indeed titled as designs. Design VI, for example, is for “An Irregular Villa in the Italian Style, Bracketed.”

So there, dear readers, is the true derivation of an architect’s term devised by a novelist. Hudson River Bracketed today refers to a cottage style still prevalent in our region in which overhanging roofs and verandas receive plain rustic supports, whether required structurally not, to declare their frankly rural character. This patent structuralism pointed the way to Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even the designs of the concrete-and-steel ballparks discussed in last week’s “Play’s the Thing” column. No Grecian temples for Mr. Downing, though he did endorse the clean lines of the Tuscan villa and the romanticism of the Gothic or pointed style, made famous by his delineator, architect Alexander Jackson Davis.

Only one building from a Downing plan survives today in the Hudson Valley: Culbert House (most recently known as the City Club) on Grand Street in Newburgh, but as an urban site it bears none of the rural features Downing (and Wharton) favored. But we do have a few such houses in Kingston, there is a notable Swiss Bracketed example tucked away on the Annandale Road, and some splendid examples embellish Rhinebeck. Of the styles Wharton referenced in her epigraph, the Castellated or Tudor may be see at Sunnyside and Lyndurst in Tarrytown; the Tuscan may be seen at Martin van Buren’s home in Kinderhook; and Egyptianate pylons are on display at the splendid mausoleum of Henry Robinson in Newburgh’s Old Town Cemetery on Grand Street, just a stone’s throw from Culbert House. If not Chinese, then perhaps Saracen or Moorish might be words to apply to Wilderstein, another architectural treasure just south of Rhinebeck, or to Olana, across the river from Catskill. Grecian is everywhere, but one of my favorite residential constructions in this style is the the ca. 1840 Reverend Hoes house on Pearl Street in Kingston, mainatined in fine style by its current occupant, a medical group.

However, if there is one building you must see now — today, before it is taken by the wind and the vandals, it is Hoyt House in Staatsburg. Commissioned by Lydig Munson Hoyt and his wife Blanche in 1853, it was designed in the year after Downing’s death by his surviving assistants, Calvert Vaux and F.C. Withers. A gingerbread cottage tucked into the woods but not far from a promontory overlooking the Hudson, the house remained in the Hoyt family for over a century until New York State, looking to establish a wide buffer around its newly acquired Ogden Mills Mansion, seized the Hoyt House by eminent domain in 1961, booting out the superannuated occupant but vowing to maintain the house for the public’s benefit. Why wouldn’t they? The cottage was an early Vaux masterpiece in the Italian Villa style that sprouted up like dandelions in the American landscape of the 1850s and ’60s.

Francis R. Kowsky wrote, in Country, Park, and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux: “This magnificent dwelling now stands boarded up and silently communing with the river in a setting uncommonly lovely and remote. Fortunately, the State of New York (the present owner) is committed to restoring this masterpiece of High Victorian discourse between architecture and nature.”

It is now 44 years since the building was seized. After no maintenance by the State in all that time except to board up windows after thieves stripped the house bare—even the plumbing pipes disappeared—Hoyt House was opened to bidding. Any private citizens who could demonstrate an ability to pay some $2 million in restoration expenses might have it. The rub was that the State was not selling the property, but only offering a 40-year lease, at the end of which title to the improved property would revert to the State. Some deal.

Go to the Mills Mansion along Route 9 in Staatsburg, between Rhinebeck and Hyde Park, and stroll down the sloping back lawn, keeping to the left. Walk along the Hudson’s edge, into the woods and there it is—its skin stripped like that of an old buffalo, standing erect in its indictment.

--John Thorn

Hicks the Pirate, my favorite murderer.

The Saugerties Bard, Part II

Last week I suggested that Henry Sherman Backus, “The Saugerties Bard,” had become equal parts folklorist and folklore. He composed sad songs about murderers and their victims, pandering to the public’s taste for sensationalism with a winking touch of piety. As John Wesley is said to have grumbled before setting down his five directions for singing hymns, “It’s a pity that Satan should have all the best tunes.”

Backus was something of an entrepreneur, paying job printers to run off his ballads, then selling them from his pack as he roamed from town to town. He even produced a now exceedingly scarce Ulster County Almanac for 1855, which he promoted with an advertisement in the Saugerties Telegraph: “[It] contains besides a good calendar some of the best effusions of the author. The bard will present it to the inspection of the public as soon as issued and probably sing most of the ballads as he is wont to do, accompanied by instrumental music. The approach of the Almanac will be announced by music from fiddle and flute.’”

Benjamin Myer Brink, in his Early History of Saugerties, wrote in 1902, “All through the counties of Ulster and Greene, at least, was he well known in the years from 1835 to 1860; and often was he seen all down the Hudson River valley, and even upon the streets of New York, and westward along the Mohawk he had occasionally wandered, and into Canada. He was harmless, eccentric, impulsive, and at times incoherent, with a faculty for impromptu rhyming [a prototype rapper?].... The writer can see him now pass by, clad in a suit of gray, with long gray locks covered with a cap.” Louis C. Jones offered another view in the quarterly New York History forty years later: “Although Backus died in 1861 a few old people in the Saugerties area still cherish him among their earliest memories. Mr. J.H. Kerbert, a bard himself, recalled him with remarkable clearness. I have in my possession a drawing made from memory by Mr. Kerbert, which shows Backus in his big hat, with long hair, grizzled beard, peg-leg, and cane.”

But how did Henry Sherman Backus, born February 4, 1798 in Coxsackie, become The Saugerties Bard? This has been a mystery that lifts a bit through genealogical research yet is by no means settled. Henry’s father, Electus Mallory Backus (1765-1813), and mother, Sabra Judson Backus (1764-1838), had both been born in Connecticut, where they wed in 1784. They relocated to West Camp, New York, sometime before 1787, and thence to Coxsackie. Of their eleven children, all but one lived to adulthood and married — so Henry, the seventh, would go on to enjoy a cornucopia of nieces and nephews, a fact difficult to gibe with his later solitary life and death.

Electus Backus was a military man by election, before the outbreak of war in 1812: commissioned as major of the First Light Dragoons in October 1808, he would die in action at Sackett’s Harbor in June 1813. (For decades thereafter Sabra Backus petitioned Congress unsuccessfully to provide her with a widow’s pension.) Henry’s younger brother Electus, Jr., would also become a military man, matriculating at West Point and serving with distinction in the Mexican and Civil Wars. According to Brink, Henry too “grew to manhood with a passion for what concerns a soldier. He possessed a peculiarly correct ear for martial music, and in early years was an efficient teacher of the fife, the drum, and the bugle. Later he taught school, and coming to Saugerties he married a Miss Legg, with whom he lived for a number of years. After her death his mind received a peculiar bias and he began to lead the life of a wandering minstrel.”

According to Pauline Hommell, a Saugerties schoolteacher and historian who wrote an anecdote-laden profile of Backus in her 1958 volume Teacup Tales, Miss Legg was an orphan. In her ghostly tale “The Face at the Window,” she has Cornelis [Cornelius] Post comment to Backus, recently arrived in Saugerties to accept a position as schoolteacher, “‘You’ve been seeing our neighbor’s cousin, Alida Legg. Ach, but she is good to feast one’s eyes on.” Hommell was not above inventing dialogue and spooky stories but I suspect she was not a fabricator of basic fact. Katsbaan Church records show that an Alida was born to Lodewijk Smit [Anglicized as Lodowick Smith in the 1800 census] and Neeltje Post on March 3, 1799, and when she was baptized 17 days later, her sponsors were William Legg and Debora Post. (Born to this couple five years earlier had been Debora Smit, sponsored by Petrus Post and Debora Post.) According to Hommell, Alida wed Henry in the early 1820s and died in May 1845, though Teacup Tales makes no mention of children.

Other sources give Mrs. Backus the name Eliza or Ann Eliza — possibly Anglicizations, possibly a confusion with Henry’s older sister Eliza. Alida/Eliza is also given a maiden name of Legg, which she might well have taken upon an adoption. In the 1830 census the age of Henry “Baccus”of Saugerties is listed as over 30 but under 40. He has one daughter older than 5 but younger than 10. His wife is listed as over 20 but under 30, close enough to the truth and perhaps flattering. Burial records of Mountain View Cemetery show that their daughter Sara Ann died June 6, 1830, at the age of 1 year and 12 days. In the 1840 census Backus, still residing in Saugerties, presides over a household with six females: two daughters under 5, two more between 5 and 10, another between 15 and 20, and his wife. Yet in the 1850 census, he shares an abode with laborer Abraham Wing, age 58; he himself is listed with no profession. At some point in the 1840s he is said to have spent time in the lunatic asylum in Hudson. The likely dispersal of his daughters to other homes following the death of his wife might have driven any man to despair; it appears to have sent Henry Backus on the road.

So, may we conclude that the Saugerties Bard’s odd demeanor was born of trauma? Or might it have been at least in some measure calculated? In The Catskills Alf Evers wrote, “Local eccentrics found the [Catskill] Mountain House an irresistible target and they often served to brighten a dull day. Among them was Henry Backus, ‘the Saugerties Bard, a Cosmopolitan, a Travelling Minstrel,’ as he was inscribed on the hotel register. Backus sang songs he composed and sold printed copies of them to guests. He put together a Mountain House ballad in 1856.” Clearly eccentricity was a solid marketing tactic then as now; Backus may have been the Tiny Tim of his day, ridiculed by his audience but laughing all the way to the bank. Certainly his mind was sufficiently composed to produce lyrics that generally scanned and always told a story.

Reviewing his list of songs, it is clear that the “Mountain House Ballad” (printed June 30, 1856 according to an undated newspaper clipping) marked very nearly the end of Henry Backus’s rural phase. His brother Electus had been installed as the Army’s Superintendent of General Recruiting Services at Fort Columbus on Governor’s Island in New York harbor. Though he and his brother had seen little of each other for decades, The Saugerties Bard boldly headed south to the city of lights and shadows. In the four years remaining to him he would publish at least 15 and perhaps many more with the three prolific New York song-sheet publishers, Andrews, Wrigley, and De Marsan. Indeed, no one knows precisely how many song sheets, slip ballads and poetical broadsides The Saugerties Bard may have composed and/or published, and additional ones may yet appear, especially those that may have been printed in newspapers but not distributed as stand-alones.

Living in New York and Hoboken, Backus, nearing the age of 60, did some of his best work. There were the songs about famous riots (“Dead Rabbits’ Fight with the Bowery Boys,”), boxing matches (the 156-round affair celebrated in “Bradley & Rankin’s Prize Fight for $1000 a Side”), and especially notorious villains such as Mrs. Cunningham (“Dr. Burdell, or the Bond Street Murder”), Francis Gouldy (“Heart Rending Tragedy”), and my favorite murderer, Albert W. Hicks (“Hicks the Pirate”), the man who for a few months virtually pushed Abe Lincoln and secessionist rumbling off the front page.

Hicks was a waterfront thug, not a pirate, who in March 1860 was drugged by a rival gang member and woke up to find himself “shanghaied” onto the oyster sloop E.A. Johnson bound for Virginia. Knowing from past practice just what to do, he murdered the entire crew — the skipper Captain Burr and the brothers Watts — with an axe, gathered up their clothing and valuables, and threw them overboard. Managing the sloop badly as he turned it back toward New York, he collided with the schooner J.R. Mather, outbound for Philadelphia. Hicks lowered a boat piled high with his victims’ belongings and made for shore at Staten Island. When the wrecked E.A. Johnson was brought ashore awash in blood, Hicks’ day of reckoning neared. Chased from New York to Providence, Hicks was apprehended, tried on Federal charges of “piracy on the high seas,” and won a nickname that he took to his grave and beyond.

There would be no schoolboy mewling for this hardened criminal who, with a 21st century sense of commerce, hired a writer to make his confession suitably blood-curdling to sell to a publisher, with the proceeds to go to his widow. I wish that space permitted me to quote more but this will give the picture: “I have killed men, yes, and boys too, many a time before, for far less inducement than the sum I suspected I should gain by killing them; and I had too often dyed my murderous hands in blood in days gone by, to feel the slightest compunctions or qualms of conscience then.”

Convicted of the triple murder, Hicks was slated for execution on July 13, 1860 at a gallows constructed on Bedloe’s Island (a.k.a. “Gibbet Isle”) out in the harbor, where the Statue of Liberty has stood since 1886. His procession from jail to gallows took on the aspect of a circus and a general holiday atmosphere prevailed. Excursion boats had been lined up beforehand for the 12,000 spectators (New York Times estimate) to have a memorable outing: “HO! FOR THE EXECUTION” read the headline on one classified ad. Peanut vendors and lemonade stands did a brisk business to the beat of the fife and drum. The thirsty “imbibed lager-beer,” reported the Times, and in rowboats there were “ladies, no, females of some sort, shielding their complexion from the sun with their parasols, while from beneath the fringe and the tassels” they viewed the grisly scene.

Soon after Hicks was buried his body was dug up by grave robbers, spawning a long-standing rumor that he had somehow defeated the hangman and was running around wreaking havoc under an alias; in fact his body had been sold to medical students. Within a month of the hanging, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum featured a wax image of Hicks among its other notorious figures. The Great Showman’s newspaper ad described his sundry marvels:

Not these alone attention draw; Figures in wax are found;
Classic and modern; Christian Sage and heathen of renown;
All characters whose names have a very familiar sound.
A Mummy here, a Judas there — a “Tommy” done up brown;
A John Brown or an Albert Hicks — a Lambert and his wife.
The Siamese Twins and Albert Guelph — all true to life.

“Hicks the Pirate,” The Saugerties Bard’s ballad published right after the hanging, marked the end of a tradition. Songs about solo murderers would soon pale before the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of our best in blue and gray. The young Henry Backus had not gravitated toward the military as his father and brother had done; he would not do so now. Out of fashion and perhaps increasingly addle-pated, he headed back north. “During the winter,” according to Brink, “he was hardly seen.”

On Monday, May 13, 1861, Backus slept in an old shed in Katsbaan outside a hotel maintained by James H. Gaddis, who found him the following morning, emaciated and unconscious. The Bard was taken to the village of Saugerties, where he was fed, charged with vagrancy, and taken to Kingston’s jail. There he lingered unattended until he died on May 20. His body was given a pauper’s burial in Saugerties. Few members of his extensive family had stood by him in life; none now came in death. His remains were placed, in Pauline Hommell’s aptly chosen words, “into the six-foot cavity which is the common portion of all the sons of Adam.”

--John Thorn

The unfortunate Dr. Burdell and his alleged slayer Mrs. Cunningham inspired six ballads, all of them said to have come from the pen of The Saugerties Bard.

The Saugerties Bard

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, July 1, 2005:
On Friday, August 19, 1853, Hiram Williams, an itinerant peddler of German-Jewish origins, was on the first leg of his journey home, 113 Walker Street in New York City. He had completed a successful tour of the villages of Ulster and Greene counties in which he had sold $100 worth of jewelry and lace. Arriving in Greenville too late to make the Austin Line stage coach to Coxsackie, he was prepared to wait for the next one until he crossed paths with an inebriated thirty-year-old alumnus of Sing Sing who had likewise missed a stage from Albany to Durham and was walking east.

On the Plank-Road, in Greenville town,
A Jewish Pedlar was shot down.
Ah, by a wretch, called Warren Wood,
Who shot the Pedlar in cold blood.

With murder rankling in his heart
From the Empire City did depart,
Arm’d with revolver, six-barrel’d true,
With which he shot the peddling Jew.

In a statement the mortally wounded Williams was able to give while clinging to life, he said that his assailant had come up to him and, after some perfunctory repartee, said, “‘You are a foolish fellow to take the stage; if you walk down with me, we can get there before the stage does, and you will save your money.’ Persuading the peddler to stop at taverns along the way on this hot summer’s day, Warren Wood inquired how much money the peddler typically made on such a trip. “I said sometimes one, and sometimes two hundred dollars; as we came near the bridge, about half way down the hill, [the man whom he later identified as] Wood stepped back, and I saw him pull a pistol from his pocket; he fired it and shot me down; the ball entered my back, and passed through my body, so that the doctor took it out of my abdomen; he shot again, twice, striking me about the head; I fell on the road, and he took me by the legs and threw me off the bridge and threw down my pack; he then dragged me to one corner, under the bridge, and asked me what I had in my small box, and I told him nothing but spectacles; he then threw stones on me, and went away.”

When first he shot, the Pedlar cried,
Whate’er you want shall be supplied.
His pocket-book to Wood he gave,
In hopes by this his life to save.

Again he shot! O, cruel man!
What mortal can your feelings scan.
Infernal spirits astonish’d stood,
Awhile to gaze on Warren Wood,

Who did the Pedlar’s head then pound
As he laid bleeding on the ground,
Until he thought him truly dead,
And then the monster quickly fled.

In an affidavit following his capture in New York City, Wood admitted he had shot Williams “two or three times” but denied other seemingly less pertinent details. “The peddler handed me his pocket-book; I never asked him for it; neither did I pile any stones on him, or ill-use him. If he went off the bridge, he must have fell off himself; I did not throw him off.” Tossing his revolver into a swamp, after which he “felt somewhat easier,” Wood paid a local farmer the large sum of “one gold dollar, a fifty cent piece and two quarter dollars” to drive him to Catskill Point. From there he crossed the Hudson, took the “way-train” to Tivoli, and then the express to New York, where he arrived near midnight that same Friday.

In Gotham he hooked up with his paramour, Emma, who noted that he had more money at hand than was usual; on Saturday, with the ill-gotten gain, they visited the Great Exhibition of Art and Industry at the Crystal Palace (on the site of today’s New York Public Library), which had opened its doors to the public barely a month earlier, and a Daguerrean parlor where the capture of Emma’s likeness was to aid in the capture of her lover. When Wood was apprehended in New York, he had among his possessions several items that had indisputably belonged to the peddler. Hauled back upstate, before being incarcerated at the Catskill jail he was brought before the dying Williams, who could not be moved from his bed at Moore’s Tavern near Greenville.

Back to New York he sped his way,
To promenade with Ladies gay.
In Cherry Street they did him take:--
He now his pleasure must forsake.

Though filled with dread and guilty fear,
Before the Pedlar must appear,
Thou art the man, the pedlar said,
As he then raised his dying head.

I know that coat, the boots likewise—
A dying man will tell no lies,
To Jail the murderer then was sent,
His awful crimes there to lament.

Hiram Williams died on September 2, and was buried after services at the Albany synagogue. The charge against Wood was no longer for attempted murder. In the trial that took place on November 25, he was convicted and sentenced to hang on January 20, 1854. In between those two milestones in Wood’s wretched life, a ballad was printed in the job shop of the Greene County Whig. That ballad, quoted in part above and concluded below, was composed by Henry Sherman Backus, a sometime Saugerties resident who may have felt an affinity for Williams as he too was an itinerant peddler, though his pack was filled with songs rather than notions. Publishing under the pen name of “The Saugerties Bard,” Backus specified that “The Murdered Pedlar” was to have been sung to the tune of “Burns' Farewell,” an anonymous air of distant times that was known to anyone who had spent a bit of time in a saloon or road house. Though an accomplished musician who accompanied his recitations with fiddle and fife, Backus never composed original music for the ballads he published, as the convention was to supply buyers with lyrics to tunes they already knew.

In Christ, the Saviour of mankind,
Repentance he may truly find:
O, soon he will suspended be,
To pay the law’s just penalty.

A faithful Jury did convict,
The Sheriff must the law inflict,
The penalty to justice due,
To all the guilty, as to you.

No costly gems or diamonds bright,
Disarms the law or aids his flight,
Nor thousand tons of shining gold,
Yet for a groat Wood’s life was sold.

No more, poor man, while here you stay,
The birds will chaunt their cheering lay,
Or friendly neighbors greet again
The wretch that hath the Pedlar slain.

On January next, the twentieth day,
The Sheriff must the law obey,
Upon the gallows him suspend,
And thus poor Wood his life will end.

Let all a solemn warning take,
And every wicked way forsake,
For soon we all will ush’rd be
Into a vast eternity.

On the day that he was appointed to meet his Maker, only twenty minutes before being led to the Catskill jail’s rigged-up gallows, Wood made a long and rambling statement, the essence of which was that yes, he shot the peddler, but he didn’t know what he was doing or why, and so on. Then he attacked the integrity of his attorney, the officers who arrested him in New York, a reporter for the New York Herald, and one other: “A man from Saugerties has written some verses about me, and they have been published by the publishers of the Green[e] County Whig, and circulated over the country at sixpence apiece. I want to ask one question, and that is, if a man in my situation is not entitled to sympathy, rather than to be held up to ridicule and abused in that way? ... Those degraded, low, mean, miserable verses are not worthy of the respect of any man, and I am sorry that anyone claiming responsibility [by which he meant the editor of the Whig], should suffer his press to give to the public such verses, and shamefully abuse me.” Mr. Ward, the editor, concluded his story of the execution and the strange scenes preceding it with Wood “suspended by the neck until he was dead. His body hung fifteen minutes, when it was taken down, placed in the coffin, and conveyed in front of the jail, where the spectators might view it. The body was buried about 2 o’clock, in the village burial yard.”

The brutal detail is offered here because life was more short and brutish then, with death and retribution the stuff of everyday concourse, and consequently grist for ballads and folklore, too. Murder, disaster, tragedy, and sorrow were the stock in trade of The Saugerties Bard. Henry Backus was beginning to become well known as a folk balladist, an honored practitioner of the “people’s press” that links 17th century one-sheets and broadsides to 19th century penny dreadfuls and dime novels, on up to story songsters Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan. Backus was perhaps a better social historian than he was a poet but he was a master of concision, able to tell a story that would go straight to the heart in a way that myriad columns in the newspaper could not.

While ballads have traditionally been about the proximity of love and death — the rose and the briar — The Saugerties Bard found his calling in the briar patch, perhaps because life had strewn few roses in his path. His existence, which commenced on February 4, 1798 in Coxsackie, has been festooned with so many garlands of whimsy if not outright fakery that it is difficult to separate the man from the myth. His death on May 20, 1861, followed by a pauper’s burial in Saugerties, is a tale so sad that it is a pity Backus himself could not have used it as a subject. In between those dates, he endured the death of his father in the War of 1812, became a schoolteacher, wed, had children, buried his wife and one of his children, became estranged from the others, spent some time in the Insane Asylum in Hudson (today that city’s public library), and more.

It is a life worth recounting in brief, but appealing as it may be, the romantic figure of this balladist — a combination of poet, moralist, entertainer, lunatic, and huckster — is less worthy of attention than the ballads themselves. We will have more to say about both the life and the work of The Saugerties Bard in next week’s column, especially as we follow his winding path south to New York City, where he composed some of his most notable work. In the latter half of the 1850s Backus composed ballads about famous murders (for example, the unfortunate Dr. Burdell and his scheming wife), riots (notably the July 4, 1857 fracas involving the Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Bowery Boys, brought to screen in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York), and executions (those of the antisocial lad named Rodgers and my personal favorite, the “pirate” named Hicks). What follows is a listing of the ballads of plausible authorship by The Saugerties Bard as they have come into view in my research. (Some, notably “Uncle Sam’s Farm’ and “The Dying Californian,” have conventionally been assigned to other pens.) Full lyrics survive for most of them, as do MIDI versions of the tunes or — in a handful of cases — newly recorded versions, all of which I will be pleased to share with anyone who contacts me at: jthorn@newworldsports.org. Corrections and additions are also most welcome.

SONGS OF THE SAUGERTIES BARD:
The Powder Mill Explosion at Saugerties, New York. 1847.
The Dying Californian. ca. 1850.
Uncle Sam’s Farm. ca. 1850. Air — Walk in de Parlor and Hear de Banjo Play.
Dunbar, the Murderer. 1851.
The Burning of the Henry Clay. 1852.
Explosion of Steamer Reindeer. On the Hudson at Malden, September 4th, 1852.
The Burning of the Reindeer, September 10th. 1852.
Whipoorwill, or American Night-bird: A Poem, 1852.
John Mitchel, Irish Patriot in Exile. ca. 1853-54. Air — Hail to the Chief.
The Murdered Pedlar, Catskill, 1854. Air — Burns' Farewell.
The Baptist Preacher or the Drowned Woman and Child, Kingston, May 1854. Air — The Rose Tree.
My Heart’s in Old ‘Sopus Wherever I Go. Kingston. June 1855.
"Catskill Mountain House Ballad" [actual title not known]. June 30, 1856.
Dr. Burdell, or the Bond Street Murder.Which Took Place Jan. 30, 1857, in the City of New York. Air — Burns' Farewell.
The Great Police Fight (Riot at City Hall), June 15, 1857. Air — Root Hog or Die.
Dead Rabbits’ Fight with the Bowery Boys. July 4, 1857. Air — Jordan.
The Murdered Policeman, Eugene Anderson, Who Was Shot by the Desperate Italian Burglar, Michael Cancemi, Cor. of Centre and Grand Streets, July 22, 1857. Air — Indian Hunter.
The Bellevue Baby Mrs. Cunningham’s Adopted. 1857. Air — Villikins [and His Dinah].
Mrs. Cunningham and the Baby. 1857. Air — Villikins and His Dinah.
The Cunningham Baby. Or The Heir from Over Jordan. 1857.
That Baby on the Half Shell. 1857.
Bradley & Rankin’s Prize Fight for $1000 a Side. At Point Abino, Canada, August 1, 1857. Air — Old Virginia’s Shore.
The Queen’s Telegraphic Message, and President Buchanan’s Reply., August 18, 1858. Hudson.
The Thirtieth Street Murder. A Horrible Tragedy. 1858. Air – Burns' Farewell.
Heart Rending Tragedy, or Song No. 2 on the 30th Street Murder. Oct. 26th, 1858. Air — Meeting of the Waters, or Indian Hunter.
Execution of Rodgers. 1858.
The Press Gang. 1860. Air — Tom Haliard.
Hicks the Pirate. March 1860. Air — The Rose Tree.
The American Flag. No date.
Warren’s Address. To the American Soldiers Before the Battle of Bunker Hill. No date. Air. — Bruce’s Address.
Pocahontas. No date.
Johnny Bull and Brother Jonathan. Air — Yankee Doodle. No date.
Four Germans Drown’d in Rondout Creek. No date.

--John Thorn

This one will bring the weeps. 

Way Down upon the Hudson River

From "Wake the Echoes". Kingston Times, February 11, 2005:
We have been singing his songs for more than 150 years – “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Old Folks at Home,” the one we called “Swanee” – with not much thought about who created them, for they seem to have sprung into life spontaneously, like folk songs. The appeal of the songs has been so broad and so enduring that their composer has faded into the folk tradition, where the facts of one’s real life pale before the legend, as they do for John Henry, Casey Jones, Johnny Appleseed, or Babe Ruth.

Those of us who thought we knew a thing or two about Stephen Collins Foster (1826 – 1864) regarded him as an impractical dreamer; an untutored country boy with a lucky gift for melody; a naif who permitted publishers to pirate his songs and others to take credit for their composition; a spendthrift alcoholic who died with 38 cents to his name; a racist or at least a highly effective publicist for the South’s peculiar institution. All of these things prove, upon examination, to possess elements of truth without being true, and thus leave us no better prepared than the folk tradition to understand Foster’s life as an artist.

In fact, Foster came from the outskirts of Pittsburgh, spent some formative years in Cincinnati and his last years in New York, and never living in the Deep South. He hit upon “Swanee,” a river that started in Georgia and ran through Florida to the Gulf of Mexico, as a two-syllable alternative to “Pedee” and “Yazoo,” the earlier names he and his brother had plucked from an atlas. He never saw the Swanee, before or after composing the song. Given his rhythmic requirements, Foster might as well have chosen “Hudson,” and with more reason, as it was the current of the music industry, centered in New York (and to a lesser extent Boston, Baltimore, and Cincinnati) that determined his voyage of life. And Monongahela had too many beats.

Foster had little formal schooling but was no untrained country bumpkin, having been exposed to Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber at home or in one-on-one instruction. When he composed “negro songs” for his friends in Pittsburgh in the mid-1840s it was for his own amusement and theirs; he was liberal in drafting duplicates of his compositions, and even made copies for members of visiting musical troupes. This practice led to the rampant piracy of “Oh! Susanna,” which was copyrighted without Foster’s name in New York many months before a Cincinnati publisher issued it in 1848 (again without credit, though Foster may have been paid) in a collection called Songs of the Sable Harmonist. Was Foster naive or clever? Consider that he may have seen the need to make a name for himself, and that a minstrel-show composer without a show might be a long shot to launch a career in field in which no American was as yet fully employed.

The music industry before Foster was centered on performers, theater owners, and publishers of sheet music, whose income was provided largely by foreign composers because their copyrights were not recognized in the U.S. Performers and venue owners could make a living, but Foster became America’s first professional composer, a man who neither performed nor solicited students. Furthermore, Foster crafted his own contracts – the first in the business – that provided for royalties and vested copyright in the composer unless he deemed it advantageous to sell his song outright. He also evaluated the future sales potential of his “catalogue” and sold songs if the sums that publishers offered came close to matching his projections.

He was no rube, no bumpkin. He was a pioneer. If he died in the gutter it is because that is where almost all solo acts end up in America, whether you’re a prizefighter, performer, painter, or composer. Classical scholar Moses Finley wrote something in The World of Odysseus that resonates across the millennia for Foster and for all sole entrepreneurs. “A thes [an unattached propertyless laborer who works for hire], not a slave, was the lowest creature on earth that Achilles could think of. The terrible thing about a thes was his lack of attachment, his not belonging. The authoritarian household, the oikos [from which is derived, via the Latin form oecus, the word “economy”] , was the center around which life was organized ... a thes was no part of an oikos, and in this respect even a slave was better off.”

So if we are wrong about Foster’s business sense, might we also be wrong about the music? The musicologists see links from “Oh, Susanna!”and “Jump Jim Crow” to “After the Ball” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” and thence to “West End Blues,” “Rocket 88,” and “Born in the USA.” But if Foster is merely a progenitor and a link (black to white, rhythmic to harmonic, etc.), then we are trivializing him just as we reduce the real genius of Louis Armstrong in making him a springboard to Elvis and Chuck Berry and Outkast. In recent years Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris have recorded fine new interpretations of Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More,” one of the composer’s favorites (and mine) that paled in popularity before “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and the plantation songs. And there is a recent, somewhat startling, baroque rendition of Foster by countertenor Jeffrey Dooley and harpsichordist Kathryn Cok. It is as if confronting Foster head-on were taboo, that no one today would be willing to make the leap of historical imagination required to hear the music as it was played in its year of composition. Must we “modernize” Shakespeare, or Donne? Are remakes of 1930s movies superior because they have modern backdrops and are rendered in wide-screen color? Don’t get me started.

Indigenous American music before 1840 is very nearly an oxymoron, as airs were “borrowed” from across the pond for everything from our national anthem to sentimental ballads like “Annie Laurie” or “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” Foster’s genius was to jump on the success of the new (as of 1843) minstrel show, to absorb the sounds and patter along the banks of the Ohio River (he worked as a bookkeeper in Cincinnati in 1846-50), and to write songs that folks instantly recognized as American. Even when in later years he shifted from “Ethiopian” melodies to gorgeously harmonic ballads, his songs continued to reflect a longing for home and the past that was sweeping the newly urbanized and industrialized nation. As John Tasker Howard, Foster’s biographer, wrote: “While the minstrel shows helped to produce Stephen Foster by providing a market for his songs, they were also a medium which Stephen himself reformed. He found their songs crude, vulgar ditties which struck the popular fancy, and he made into a folk-literature something that had reeked of the alley and the barroom. Foster’s songs are full of the spirit of the pioneers, full of the carefree impertinence that snaps it fingers at fate and the universe. Unconsciously, and without any attempt to be a nationalist, Stephen Foster wrote into his songs the subtle traits that characterize Americans.”

Because the lyrics of Foster’s plantation songs are often marked by dialect that people of all colors find offensive today (“All de world am sad and dreary,/ Ebry where I roam...”), it is an easy matter to call Foster a racist and Confederate sympathizer, even though Frederick Douglass commended his characterizations of black people. Similarly, today Dan Emmett’s is seen as a racist vestige akin to flying the stars and bars at an NAACP meeting, no matter that the song was Lincoln’s favorite and was sung by both sides in the Civil War, as was Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” The chord that Foster and Emmett both struck was not love of slavery but love of home, a home and a way of life that seemed beyond recapture.

The only verse of “Dixie” ever to be censored was this original first stanza, regarded as blasphemous:

Dis worl’ was made in jiss six days,

An’ finished up in various ways;

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!

Dey den made Dixie trim and nice,

But Adam called it “paradise,”

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!

Yet our noses wrinkle today at “I wish I was in de land ob cotton,/ Old times dar am not forgotten.” I think it is a gift to be able to place oneself backin 1859,when the song was composed, and listen with old ears to this “walk-around” in the “git-up-and-git style.”

Birchet “Kit” Clarke, America’s first famous press agent, told this story in a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle in 1893: “About the middle of June, 1863 ... I do not remember the exact date ... Stephen Collins Foster, Daniel Decatur Emmett and myself were seated in what had been the Collamore house, corner of Broadway and Spring street, New York talking over ... war matters in general. Presently we heard music and, stepping to the window, saw a brigade of boys in blue coming down Broadway, journeying to the front, led by a band, playing, ‘I wish I was in Dixie.’”

“‘Your song,’ said Foster.

“‘Yes,’ replied Emmett.

“A regiment passed by, when another band came along playing ‘The Old Folks at Home.’”

“‘Your song,’ said Emmett.

“‘Yes,’ answered Foster.

“And there stood I, a beardless young man, between the parents of the two most popular songs this country has produced, waiting impatiently to seize my diary and fasten the incident and the words of the moment.”

Foster died in the following year, striking his head against the sink in the Bowery room where, broke and despondent, he was lodging. A third attempt at reconciliation with his wife and child had failed and they had returned to the Pittsburgh area, leaving him to write a song a week in his last year, all of which were sold for cash; he knew he would not be around to collect royalties. The song first published after his death, “Beautiful Dreamer,” is today his most popular of all.

--John Thorn

Cedar Grove: The Thomas Cole National Historic Site

Cole's palette and other tools of the trade, on view in his studio at Cedar Grove. Photo by Mark Thorn.

Cole's easel is a particular object of veneration in his restored studio. Photo by Mark Thorn. 

Cole's afternoon vista of the Catskills. Photo by Mark Thorn 

The front porch of Cedar Grove, looking west. Photo by Mark Thorn. 

On the day before writing the story below ("That Wilder Image: The Dilemma ofThomas Cole"), Mark Thorn and I visited Cedar Grove, where beginning in 1825 the painter made his summer studio, married, raised, a family and, on February 11, 1848, died. Above is a sampling of Mark's photos taken on site. All appear by courtesy of Cedar Grove: The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, located at 218 Spring Street in the village of Catskill, New York. For additional information go to http://www.thomascole.org.

--John Thorn

The Architect's Dream, perhaps Cole's greatest disappointment, today seems a triumph.

That Wilder Image: The Dilemma of Thomas Cole

From "Wake the Echoes," Kingston Times, May 2, 2005:
Thomas Cole, father of the nativist approach to landscape painting called the Hudson River School, never heard that term spoken in his lifetime. It came to be applied to the early nature painters in derision by the ascendant Dusseldorf school painters of the 1870s. A nativist but not a native, Cole was born in Lancashire, England, on February 1, 1801. He arrived on these shores with his parents at Philadelphia on July 3, 1818. There he worked as an engraver’s assistant and then traveled to the West Indies before joining his parents in the textile trade in Steubenville, Ohio in mid-1819. His “western” period included some time in Pittsburgh as well before he returned to Philadelphia in 1824, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, drawing from classical casts and old master paintings. But no one detected any glimmer of talent, let alone greatness, until Thomas Cole moved to New York in April 1825.

Living in a garret of his father’s house in Greenwich Street, he produced four pictures that he bravely priced at $10 each and sold them all. This gained for him the interest of a neighboring merchant, George W. Bruen, who paid Cole’s steamboat fare up the Hudson that summer to explore the Catskills. Returning with sketches, Cole executed three paintings that were “exhibited” in the window of Michael Paff’s frame shop at 221 Broadway. Passing by one day John Trumbull, the revered historical painter, was struck by their merit and purchased one, Kaaterskill Upper Fall, Catskill Mountains (now lost) for $25 and invited the young painter to call on him. On his arrival, the elder artist was impressed by Cole’s modesty. “You surprise me,” he said, “at your age to paint like this. You have already done what I, with all my years and experience, am yet unable to do.” This legendary moment has also come down to us as conversation in which Trumbull said to William Dunlap that “this youth [Cole] has done what I have all my life attempted in vain.”

Days later Dunlap purchased another of the paintings in the window, Lake with Dead Trees, also for $25. Asher Durand, who bought the last of the three frame-shop paintings, View of Fort Putnam (lost until the 1990s, when it was found in a warehouse after a fire), said of Cole, “His fame spread like fire.”

Commissions poured in as Trumbull introduced Cole to the city’s small circle of private collectors. Dunlap wrote articles lauding the prodigy’s self-taught technique, the inspired product of his enterprising youth and “Americanness.” He exhibited all three paintings at the American Academy of Fine Arts in autumn. While Durand owned his 1825 Cole until he died in 1886, Dunlap and Trumbull were soon convinced to sell theirs, at a combined price of $125, to Philip Hone, New York’s mayor in 1825-26.

In 1833 Hone would write in his celebrated diary, “I think every American is bound to prove his love of country by admiring Cole.” Cole the nature painter, however, had not yet become a naturalized American. His heart was surely in the American wilderness — in particular the Catskill Mountains and Cedar Grove, the Thomson family home in the village of Catskill where he established his studio (and met his future bride, Thomson niece Maria Bartow) in the epochal summer of 1825. Yet his was a wandering mind, irresistibly drawn to his native Europe, where tastes were elevated and reputations were to be made. Cole wanted to be not the American Turner but a painter whose vision and craft would be foremost in any company.

Bryant had invited Cole and Durand to provide illustrations for The Talisman, a literary annual he started in 1827 and in its third issue, in 1829, he published the following sonnet, entitled “To Cole the Painter on his Departure for Europe”:

Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies
Yet, Cole, thy heart shall bear to Europe’s strand
A living image of thy native land,
Such as on thine own glorious canvass lies.
Lone lakes - savannahs where the bison roves -
Rocks rich with summer garlands - solemn streams -
Skies where the desert eagle wheels and screams -
Spring bloom and autumn blaze of boundless groves.
Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest - fair,
But different - every where the trace of men,
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
Gaze on them, til the tears shall dim thy sight;
But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.

This proved to be the challenge of Cole’s entire career — keeping bright that earlier, wilder image of such rugged paintings as Lake with Dead Trees. Hailed as a pioneering force in American painting, Cole had broken thrillingly from the pastoral tradition, in which serene landscapes had provided aid to contemplation. Touring Europe in 1829-32, he visited Constable’s studio and met Turner, whose paintings he professed to admire (“they appear to me, however, to have an artificial look . . . chiaroscuro, colour, form, should always be subservient to the subject, and never be raised to the dignity of an end”). Cole preferred the style of Salvatore Rosa, whom he had studied as a novice in Philadelphia.

Upon his triumphant return to America Cole began to paint The Course of Empire, the first of his three grandiose historical and allegorical series (the other two were The Voyage of Life and The Cross and the World, uncompleted at his death in 1848). “These idealized landscapes gained him a popular reputation,” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Holger Cahill wrote in Art in America, “but they now seem heavily laden with viscous morality.”

The returning hero of American painting was no longer a mere painter, scuffling for commissions. He was a published poet and essayist, an architect (the Ohio State capitol at Columbus is largely his design), a spiritualist, a conservationist. But America in the 1830s was an unpropitious setting for men of genius. There were now two Coles — the emotional and the cerebral, the describer and the prescriber. In a journal entry for May 10, 1838 he wrote:

“This I know, I have the ambition, the desire and industry to do as much as any man has done, the capacity I may not have; that however, has not been fairly tried; no sufficient field has yet opened to me. I do feel that I am not a mere leaf painter. I have higher conceptions than a mere combination of inanimate, uniformed nature. But I am out of place; every thing around, except delightful nature herself, conflicts with my feelings; there are few persons of real taste; and no opportunity for the true artist to develop his powers.”

Cole had made his mark in the wild, but now he felt constricted by it; no primordial wilderness was as vast as the vistas in his mind, and no painting is more illustrative of his conflicted state than The Architect’s Dream, executed for Ithiel Town who, with his partner Alexander Jackson Davis, had shaped the antebellum course of the nation’s architecture. Cole, who fancied himself an architect on Town’s level, had pushed him to approve a grand allegorical scheme on a scale much larger than what Town had in mind. When an appalled Town saw what Cole had wrought, he asked for a do-over, something more on the lines of Claude Lorrain, with manmade elements dotting a terraced natural landscape. After some discussion about litigation, Cole refused to execute another commission for Town, no matter the price, and reclaimed the painting. In storage at Cedar Grove in his lifetime, it emerged to take a place on the north wall of the front parlor after his death.

In a journal entry of May 31, 1841 Cole wrote:

“I am not the painter I should have been had there been a higher taste. Instead of working according to the dictates of feeling and imagination, I have painted to please others, in order to exist. Had fortune favored me a little more than she has, even in spite of the taste of the age, and the country in which I live, my imagination would not have been cramped as it has been….”

For all his accomplishment in founding a truly American style of painting, Cole wished to elevate landscape to a Neoplatonic ideal rather than be elevated by its natural wonder. The Hudson River School followed Cole, yes, but in the path he forsook early on.

--John Thorn

Kindred Spirits, 1849 

Walm-Art

From the Woodstock Times, may 19, 2005:
Now we know how Egyptians feel about the Rosetta Stone and why the Greeks fume at mention of the Elgin Marbles. Our treasure has been lost, and we — those of us with the Hudson at our backs as we cast our gaze over the Catskills — feel particularly diminished. Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits has been sold down river. In a Sotheby’s auction on behalf of the New York Public Library, the famous landscape was hammered down at $35 million, the largest sum ever paid for an American painting, to Alice L. Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. It is headed for Bentonville, Arkansas, corporate headquarters of the retailing empire, for display at “Crystal Bridges,” a museum scheduled to open in 2009.

Moving a Catskills painting to the Ozarks seems comical, and losing a regional monument hurts. But most of what we are feeling is referred pain, the cultural confirmation of what the marketplace has been telling us for decades now: the small cities, towns, and villages of the Northeast have become vast grazing lands, colonies for plunder by more prosperous sections of the country. We have been losing industry, jobs, population, and brainpower — our children cannot return home from college to work where they grew up — as if we were bathing in a tub with a slow leak, wondering why we are feeling chilled. Our cultural artifacts seep into the heartland via Ebay. The time is not distant when our steepled churches and clapboard and fieldstone houses will survive only as part of a historical theme park for the rest of the nation, a Yosemite of quaint lifestyle and vernacular, a time capsule of an America that used to be.

Writing a profile of Asher Durand in these pages last month*, I suggested that Kindred Spirits is more an important painting than a great one. Commissioned in 1849, it memorialized not only Thomas Cole, the pioneering artist who had died the previous year, and William Cullen Bryant, the poet who delivered his eulogy, but also the American wilderness itself, at a time when it was being threatened by the industrial revolution. From Cedar Grove, his home in the village of Catskill, Cole lamented the pillaging of the hickory forests by the tanning industry, which also polluted his beloved Catskill Creek. Durand’s painting was an exercise in nostalgia, a valedictory for a time fast slipping away when Americans might enjoy a direct spiritual relationship with nature. As Bryant wrote, in “A Forest Hymn”:

The groves were God’s first temples.
Ere man learned
To hew the shaft and lay the architrave
And spread the roof above them--ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication.

Miss Walton may hope for some of this effect from Moshe Safdie’s design for Crystal Bridges, a glass-and wood construct traversing a stream. Fat chance.

Although the painting’s title references Cole and Bryant, Kindred Spirits might as easily describe the odd couple of art and money, as nettlesome to Cole and Durand in their day as it is stimulating to New York and Arkansas today. Were it not for their common patrons — Luman Reed and Jonathan Sturges — neither painter would have been able to stay at his easel and the nation would today be immeasurably poorer. In fact, it was Reed who kept Cole busy with commissions and Sturges who backed Durand to paint Kindred Spirits as a gift for Bryant. In presenting the picture to him, Sturges wrote:

MY DEAR SIR: Soon after you delivered your oration on the life and death of our lamented friend Cole, I requested Mr. Durand to paint a picture in which he should associate our departed friend and yourself as kindred spirits. I think the design, as well as the execution, will meet your approbation, and I hope that you will accept the picture from me as a token of gratitude for the labor of love performed on that occasion. Very truly yours,
JON. STURGES.

This is very different from buying the paintings of dead artists at auction. Miss Walton is no Sturges or Reed, not even a Medici, no matter her largesse to the New York Public Library via Sotheby or her civic beneficence to Bentonville. A buyer at auction may conspire to benefit art but seldom artists — except insofar as they are safely dead, capping the supply — and thus represent reasonable investment, not rank speculation. An auction-house record may help to validate neglected artists (Roy Lichtenstein, recently) or whole movements (the Hudson River School languished in estimation until 1979, when Frederic Church’s Icebergs brought $2.5 million, then the highest price for an American painting).

For more than a century zealots of all stripes, from the right no less than from the left, have railed against chain stores for choking the local and regional flavor out of American life and squashing indigenous small business. It is hard to imagine today, when we have warm fuzzy feelings at the mention of the vanished five-and-dime, that millions were violently opposed to Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, even Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. I will not toss historical perspective overboard to excoriate Wal-Mart for its business, real-estate, aesthetic, and labor practices … it is too easy a target.

So what has been gained and what lost, and by whom? Oddly, New York City and its great research library are huge beneficiaries and thus, indirectly, so is the worldwide community of scholars. The New York Public Library is not, after all, a museum, and probably ought not to have held this painting any longer, even though it had been donated by Bryant’s daughter; $35 million will buy a lot of books and research materials, and that is the proper business of the institution. Oh, and those collectors who hold Hudson River School paintings, well, they are winners, at least on paper.

Arkansas and Bentonville are both winners, too, for they will now be on the cultural map; it will be harder to think of L’il Abner as a snap response to a question about Ozark culture. Folks in Bentonville have every right to see good and great art in person; anyway, how many New Yorkers have ever seen Kindred Spirits except in reproduction?

Miss Walton is a winner, because it didn’t dent her pocketbook to place a sealed bid that was way out ahead of the combined effort of the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery. Wal-Mart’s heiress is our sad country’s new royalty.

So who are the losers? You and I, neighbor, you and I.

* See story immediately below.

--John Thorn

Distilled Spirit: Asher Durand

Updated from "Wake the Echoes," the Kingston Times, April 28, 2005:
In the first half of April 2005 a headline in the New York Times caught my eye: “New York Public Library to Sell Major Artworks to Raise Funds.” The Library’s president, Paul LeClerc, said that it had little choice but to divest itself of art that might bring $50 to $75 million at auction, given the soaring cost of books, the city and state cutbacks, and the shrinkage of the library’s endowment in a seesaw stock market. Of the nineteen pieces slated to go up at Sotheby’s, including two Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington, only one brought to me a pang of regret: Kindred Spirits, a large oil by Asher Durand of his friends Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant that had long adorned the central hall outside Room 315, the main reading room in which I have researched happily for decades.

Now the other shoe has dropped. On May 12, in a silent auction in which the Metroplitan Museum and National Gallery collaborated to form a competitive bid, Kindred Spirits was sold for $35 million, the highest amount ever paid for an American painting, to Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton. She intends to exhibit the painting at a new museum to be completed in 2009 near corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

But Kindred Spirits merits our care not merely for sentimental reasons. Durand painted it in 1849, one year after Bryant had delivered the eulogy at Cole’s funeral. The three had known each other as early as 1825, when Bryant had been a disgruntled lawyer with literary ambition, Cole an aspiring painter new to New York, and Durand an established engraver just coming off a three-year, $3,000 commission to engrave a steel plate from John Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence. In that year Durand, Trumbull, and painter William Dunlap each paid now legendary visits to Cole in his Greenwich Street studio and each, awed by the newcomer’s Turner-like grandeur, came away with a painting under his arm. From this visit may be dated the birth of the Nativist style of landscape painting, even though Cole was not native-born and had no followers until the next decade.

By the time Kindred Spirits was completed, Bryant was now a noted editor, an advocate for the construction of a Central Park in New York, and a poet famous for his deep attachment to nature, particularly in Thanatopsis, a poem so long loved that I was compelled to memorize it in high school. Cole’s gorgeous if sometimes clunkily allegorical landscapes had made him the paramount American artist of his day, creating a craze for the genre in a manifest-destiny-mad nation that had never valued any art but portraiture. And Durand, the featured character in this column (look for Cole and Bryant to follow), had exchanged his graver for the brush in 1836 and was now set to succeed Cole as the spiritual leader of the burgeoning Hudson River School.

Kindred Spirits depicts Cole and Bryant on a rock ledge overlooking two Hudson River shrines, the Kaaterskill Falls and the Kaaterskill Clove, rendered contiguous in the painting as they are not in nature. Although Durand thought of himself as a master of detail, one who delighted in the slightest twists, turns, and gestures of nature, he was not insensitive to hidden meaning: later he would write, “The artist as a poet will have seen more than the mere matter of fact but no more than is there and that another may see if it is pointed out to him.” Yet for Durand to have depicted Cole, in a tribute to his friend’s art, as pointing to an impossible geological construct represents a level of abstraction that might be viewed as prefiguring Picasso.

In truth Durand had long been distilling spirit and meaning from the quotidian press of material existence. We tend to regard him today as a sweetly primitive painter of sylvan glades and bucolic vistas – of a lesser ambition than Cole and Church, less technically accomplished than Kensett and Gifford, and less visionary than Bierstadt and Moran. I suggest, however, that Durand’s journey in art – from the practical craft of engraving through the way stations of portraiture and genre paintings (“fancy subjects,” as they were called in his day) to a depiction of the divine hand at work in landscape – makes him a greater artist than all of these arguably greater painters.

Asher Brown Durand was born in August 21, 1796 in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey. The son of a watchmaker and silversmith, he evinced an early interest in the meticulous flourishes and curlicues his father etched on watchcases and so at age 15 he was apprenticed to engraver Peter Maverick in Newark. Durand soon became a master of his trade, relegating his boss to lettering while he engraved the figures. It is hard to imagine today, but before the advent in 1880 of the halftone process of reproducing photographs, engraved images were the mass media of their era and just about the only way to make money from art, either as the painter of the original or the delineator in copper or steel. Moreover, engraving in the hands of a skilled practitioner was regarded in its day as a fine art, not merely a mechanical one, and thus engravers were invited to join the artistic societies alongside painters and sculptors.

Durand’s commission for the Trumbull plate made his reputation but fractured his partnership with Maverick, in which neither had prospered. The completion of the work in 1823 enabled Durand to take an active part in the New York art community, helping to organize the New-York Drawing Association in 1825 (reconfigured three years later as the National Academy of Design). “His higher aspirations for art were constantly clogged by servile work,” according to an 1880 profile in the Times (unsigned but very likely penned by the artist’s son John), “such as the composition and engraving of business cards…. The human figure, an approach to the nude, in all its chastity, he thought worthy of his skill. There was no model, no painting to copy, so he made a design for himself, engraved it, and, in 1825, the Musidora was produced. It was not appreciated at the time, though today amateurs and print-collectors are eager to obtain it. ‘It never paid me the price of even the copper,’ remarked Durand….”

In 1827 he joined forces with his brother Cyrus, who perfected a geometric lathe for swirling uncopyable linear whirlpools onto banknotes, a venture made profitable by the dissolution of the National Bank two years before and the instant need for every local bank to design its own distinctive currency. (Durand’s influence may still be seen in the vignettes adorning stock certificates, that weird subgenre in which classical elements contend with locomotives, cattle, and power lines.) Prosperity beckoned as demand for his services in the commercial sector grew.

Yet Durand knew by now that his vocation was to be that of a creative artist, not a glorified tradesman. And he longed to test his mettle once more with the human figure. Determined to work from a superior rendition of the nude than the one he had drawn for Musidora, he purchased Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, exhibited scandalously in New York in 1816 (separate exhibitions for men and for women) and long since under wraps. The result, published in 1835, was Durand the engraver’s masterpiece, in many ways superior to the painting from which it sprang.

“Engraving alone he was sure did not give sufficient outlet,” wrote the Times scribe in 1880. “It was a subsidiary art, which was not called to originate. From its nature it had to be passive. The love of color, which was born in him, wanted another expression than in black and white.” As The New-York Mirror wrote in May 1836, “Mr. Durand has almost relinquished the graver. Perhaps he thinks he cannot go beyond his Ariadne. No one else can.”

With the encouragement of his friend and patron Luman Reed, Durand ended his engraving career. Forty-five years later, he spoke with heartfelt gratitude of Reed, “who first told him to put aside forever the copper and steel plate; to quit the close work-room; and in the wide, broad fields, in the open air, to open his sketch-book, and in it, with a free pencil, catch each twist of limb and each crevice of bark in the spreading oak.” Reed commissioned from Durand portraits of the nation’s first eight Presidents, genre paintings based on Irving’s History of New-York, even panels for the doors to his gallery (Durand painted four and so did Cole). Incredibly, almost all of Luman Reed’s collection may still be viewed in his reconstructed gallery at the New-York Historical Society.

As James Flexner wrote, “portraiture was for Durand, despite his great ability in the mode, only a stepping stone that bridged the gap between his early activity as an engraver and his life’s work as a landscapist.” An 1837 sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the company of Cole confirmed Durand in his allegiance to nature. His whole life long to that point, on Sundays Durand had not attended church, “the better to indulge reflection unrestrained under the high canopy of heaven,” he recalled in later years. “This mode of passing the Sabbath became habitual with me in early life.” Thereafter, as a landscapist he entered into a tacit pact with God to depict His handiwork through his own, the better to apprehend Him.

Durand died on September 17, 1886, on the family property in Maplewood where he had been born 90 years earlier. His long life had been an exemplar of the uniquely American path to spiritualism through pragmatism.

--John Thorn

George Inness, Pastoral Landscape at Sunset, 1884. Oil on canvas. 25 1/2 x 33 3/8 in. The Grey Collection
 

American Chameleon: Inness Exhibit at Cole House

From the Kingston Times and Saugerties Times, May 5, 2005:
“There was a lofty striving in Cole,” George Inness (1825-94) wrote. “There was in Durand a more intimate feeling of nature. ‘If,’ thought I, ‘these two can be combined, I will try.’” That Inness succeeded in imbuing landscape with sentiment is evident in the fine exhibition of his paintings at Cedar Grove, The Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Opening last weekend, it will remain on view through October 30, and if you care about Inness — or indeed the course of American painting — you cannot miss it.

As with any exhibit mounted in this wonderful restored landmark in the village of Catskill, the exhibited artist must compete with his host, still the paterfamilias of all American painters. The spirit of Cole is everywhere—on the grounds, in the materials and easel in his restored studio, in the sketches and studies on the walls of his home, in the vistas from his porch that inspired him daily. Cedar Grove, built by the Thomson family in 1815, provided Cole with his summer studio by 1826 or so. A decade later he married Maria Bartow, a Thomson niece who had grown up in the house. In 1848 he died there.

Cole’s descendants live at Cedar Grove until the 1960s, and the property endured many misadventures until 1998, when the Greene County Historical Society purchased it and began the restoration process that has produced such remarkable results in so short a time. If you have not visited in the past few years, you have denied yourself a singular pleasure of living in our region.

Given the high interest that this shrine holds for any visitor, credit must be accorded the curator of the present exhibition, Elizabeth Stevens, for mounting a jewel of a show in a room that is an oasis of repose. Although the Inness paintings number only eight, they have been selected with care and are mounted in such a way as to reveal the painter’s flowering in both his craft and in his ever more ethereal depiction of the natural world. Additionally, the technique of his atmospheric landscapes may be compared to that of his fellow friend Ralph Albert Blakelock, whose paintings and palette are on display in the hall outside the Inness exhibit.

On loan to the Cole House from notable institutions and public-spirited individual collectors, the paintings include:
· an undated Landscape from the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College that reflects Inness’s initial leap from Cole and Durand into a Barbizon-influenced luminism;
· the muscular play of light and shade in The Coming Storm, an 1878 oil from the Museum of Art in Utica;
· the mistily religious Pastoral Landscape at Sunset (1884) from the Grey Collection; and
· the undated Sunset in the Catskills, a minuscule oil on canvas that may have been one of the hundreds of barely finished works (“I have never completed my art,” he once proudly declared) sold at a vast auction upon his death in 1894, or in the sale occasioned by the death of his widow ten years later.

Born near Newburgh, New York, Inness was a grocer’s son who, like both Durand and Cole, was steered by his father toward engraving as a practical way to translate his artistic impulses into a livelihood. While his early influences as a painter included Durand and Cole, he appears to have been shaped more strongly by French landscapists such as Corot and Lorrain and the Barbizon painters Rosseau, Millet, and Daubigny. The lighter brushstrokes, the thinner color values of his paints, also made him seem briefly to be part of the second wave of the Hudson River School that included Kensett, Lane, and Silva. Some have even characterized him as an Impressionist, or at least a father figure to such American Impressionists as Childe Hassam, despite his professed disgust with that sort of painting (he also scorned Turner, another to whom he had been compared). Strangely perhaps, the chameleon-like Inness thought of himself as a realist, relying upon “the solidity of objects, and the transparency of shadows in a breathable atmosphere through which we are conscious of spaces and distances.”

In attempting to capture the interaction of the visible and invisible worlds, his greatest influence was in truth neither Cole nor Durand, nor any painter at all, but the eighteenth-century Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg. The result was that his most “poetic” work may be challenged as theosophical soup ladled thin. “A work of art,” he once said, “is beautiful if the sentiment is beautiful; it is great if the sentiment is vital. Details are to be elaborated only enough to produce the sentiment desired. A picture in which the evident intention has been to reach the truth is the picture that the true artist loves.”

Inness became the landscapist of choice for “refined” parlors from the 1880s to the end of his life, much as Thomas Kinkade has become in our own absurd time, though of course the two may be compared only as commercial phenomena, not as artists. Inness remained the star of the auction houses for years thereafter, until the rediscovery of Church’s Icebergs in the late 1970s sparked a revival of interest in the older Hudson River School.

To read Inness’s spiritual twaddle is to suspect every brushstroke. Fortunately, we will elect to see the work and discount the words. And the selection on view at Cedar Grove is well worth the visit.

Cedar Grove is located at 218 Spring Street in Catskill. It is open Friday though Sunday, 10 am to 4 pm by guided tour. For further details, consult http://www.thomascole.org/ or call 518-943-7465.

--John Thorn

How I first met the great white whale

Catskill Eagle: Herman Melville

From the Kingston Times, January 27, 2005:
Herman Melville, author of the Great American Novel if ever there was one, died forgotten in 1891, some 40 years after the critics had greeted publication of Moby-Dick with a scorn that Queequeg would have termed savage. By his own admission highly sensitive to criticism, Melville had endured little in that line with his first five books – Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) – and yet he resented his fame, won more as “the man who lived among cannibals” than as a masterful writer. In Moby-Dick he returned to the sea, pleasing his publisher, but he went his own way, as artists are wont to do, annoying the critics and perplexing the public.

Moby-Dick was based on two stories that would have been well known to his readers: a truly murderous “whale as white as wool” about whom Jeremiah N. Reynolds had written a story in The Knickerbocker Magazine of May 1839; and Owen Chase’s 1821 account of a naval disaster that ended in cannibalism, breathlessly titled, “Narration of the most unusual and shaking sinking of the ‘Essex,’ a whaler from Nantucket, which was attacked in the Pacific Ocean by a sperm whale and finally sunk, including a report of the incomparable suffering of the captain and crew during 93 days in open boats in the years 1819 and 1820.” What readers today might find hard to believe – a willfully murderous whale – was by no means incredible to the literary audience of 1851; it was the author’s prose-poem approach to a massive novel that stretched patience.

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819, the same year as Walt Whitman, into an illustrious family of English and Dutch descent. His grandfather had taken part in the Boston Tea Party and his father was a cultivated man whose sudden death in 1831 had followed a bankruptcy the year before. Herman, seven siblings, and his mother were left destitute. After his graduation from Albany Academy, he clerked in a bank, tried his hand at farming, and taught at the Sykes District School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1839 he shipped as a cabin boy to Liverpool, commencing a lifelong love of the sea. Two years later he signed on aboard the Acushnet, a New Bedford three-master headed for the whale-killing fields in the South Seas. This trip became the basis of Typee, the book which through all his life remained his most famous. It was the commercial success of this book that emboldened Melville to marry, to summer in the Berkshires with the companionship of such literary figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes and in 1852 to repurchase (and rename as Arrow-Head) his family’s old homestead in Pittsfield, which had fallen into other hands in the time of financial woe.

Yet it was the friendship with Hawthorne that may have been the emotional centerpiece of these years. Both men saw a darkness in American life and letters that cast a gloom upon their beings. In June 1851 Melville wrote to his friend:

“In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now,--I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,--that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,--I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches…. But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he's in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I'm going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”

The Whale is the title under which Melville’s magnum opus was published first, in Great Britain, in three volumes. Enfuriatingly, the publisher, J. Bentley, censored certain politically charged passages and somehow forgot to include the essential epilogue, without which the reader is given to believe that Ishmael perished in the sinking of the Pequod and thus was in no position to tell its tale. The scathing London Spectator review read, in part:

“It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish. Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this rule, and he continually violates another, by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative. His catastrophe overrides all rule: not only is Ahab, with his boat’s-crew, destroyed in his last desperate attack upon the white whale, but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board into the depths of the illimitable ocean. Such is the go-ahead method.”

The intent of this last comment was to skewer not only Melville’s craft but also his well-known (though secretly waning) support for American exceptionalism, an ascendant nation whose manifest destiny it was to span the continent, shucking its English past along the way. In his previous novel, White-Jacket, he had denounced the British Navy’s practice of flogging while arguing passionately for it to be eradicated from the U.S. Navy: “Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians.” Further, he wrote, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

Some weeks after the British publication, Harper and Brothers printed fewer than 2,000 copies of the novel in one ungainly volume as Moby-Dick. In the most unkindest cut of all, the reviewer for The United States Democratic Review, the virtual house organ for “Young America” and Manifest Destiny, wrote in part:

“‘Typee’ was undoubtedly a very proper book for the parlor, and we have seen it in company with ‘Omoo,’ lying upon tables from which Byron was strictly prohibited, although we were unable to fathom those niceties of logic by which one was patronized, and the other proscribed. But these were Mr. Melville’s triumphs. ‘Redburn’ was a stupid failure, ‘Mardi’ was hopelessly dull, ‘White Jacket’ was worse than either; and, in fact, it was such a very bad book, that, until the appearance of ‘Moby Dick,’ we had set it down as the very ultimatum of weakness to which its author could attain. It seems, however, that we were mistaken….”

In early 1853, as Melville readied “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “The Encatadas” for publication in Harper’s Monthly, the publishers’ headquarters went up in flames. It was simple enough to pass the stories on to Putnam’s Monthly (where they appeared on either side of Jervis McEntee’s valedictory for John Vanderlyn, whose life stories echo Melville’s). However, what proved truly ruinous was the incineration of Harper and Brothers inventory, including 300 copies of Moby-Dick, and worse yet, the stereotype plates of all Melville’s books, from which reprints might be struck. The result was that no additional copies of Melville’s masterpiece appeared for a dozen years, and no more after that until the year following his death. Even before he decided to silence himself, the fates conspired to silence him.

In 1859 Mrs. Melville was said to have observed to a friend, ““Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get about.” In fact, he had been writing poetry all along, though in the guise of prose. Whitman would have been honored to have written this passage from White-Jacket:

“Oh, give me again the rover’s life--the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.”

As disappointments piled up over the ensuing decade, Melville retreated from public life and made silent peace with the world and himself. Perhaps anticipating that Moby-Dick would prove his professional undoing, he had written in Chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” of the saving light of a fire after a frightful darkness at sea:

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Melville could have retained his hold on the public by continuing to write exotic romances, as his publishers encouraged him to do. But his response was that of his most enigmatic creation, Bartleby the Scrivener: “I would prefer not to.”

--John Thorn

Tenth Street Studio; bearded McEntee left of center. 

Jervis McEntee: Last Leaf Fallen

Jervis McEntee is by no means the greatest of Hudson River School painters but he is to me the most fascinating. Like John Vanderlyn a Kingston-born prodigy who took formal instruction only in adulthood, McEntee stood in a direct line of descent from Thomas Cole, whose only pupil had been Frederic Church, and from Church, whose second pupil and lifelong friend McEntee became. When the term “Hudson River School” became one of scorn in the 1870s as American tastes shifted to the luminous and crisply detailed Parisian and Munich styles, McEntee persisted in the old ways of addressing the emotions rather than the intellect, in an often anachronistic but always affecting evocation of season and place.

Unlike Cole and Church and such grandiloquent landscapists as Albert Bierstadt, McEntee rejected the Sublime, instead documenting the Commonplace. In 1874 he wrote: “Perhaps what would mark my work among that of my brother artists is a preference for the soberer phases of Nature, the gray days of November and its leafless trees as well as the Winter landscape.” Think of McEntee as a JMW Turner in grayscale.

When McEntee exhibited The Melancholy Days in 1860, the painting that won him full admission to the National Academy of Design, he appended to the painting these lines from William Cullen Bryant:

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere,
Heaped in the hollows of the groves the withered leaves lie dead,
They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbits tread.

So, you well might ask, what is it about this dour second-tier painter that one might term interesting, let alone fascinating? A depressive personality, unhappy in art and perpetually fretting about money, he was nonetheless fortunate in his choice of a wife and beloved by his friends and family. His diary, kept meticulously from 1872 to his death in 1891, chronicled the art world of the period and provides us with much of what we know about the rise of the business affairs and relationships among the artists living in the mecca of nineteenth century art, the now destroyed Studio Building at Tenth Street in New York City.

As one who earlier wrote about the sad figure of Vanderlyn dying in want in Kingston in 1852, long past his time of acclaim, I had been struck by the parallels between Vanderlyn, the historical painter and panorama exhibitor accused of being “Frenchified,” and McEntee, the downbeat landscapist who struck a blow for a distinctly American form of art yet succumbed to the public’s fancy for the Beaux Arts and the Barbizon School. These painters viewed art from different ends of the spectrum -- indeed, the public deserted Vanderlyn’s historical style for McEntee’s landscape style -- yet were united in their ultimate inability to meet the public halfway. And only this week did I come upon an unsigned reminiscence of the aged painter of Ariadne and Marius in Putnam’s Magazine of June 1853 in which I now recognize the pen of the youthful McEntee. His eulogistic remarks about Vanderlyn reveal that this misunderstood genius, dying from “the melancholy effects of penury and want, silently endured,” set the psychological course for McEntee’s entire life in art.

Born in Rondout (since 1870 a part of Kingston), Jervis McEntee was named for John Jervis, the famous chief engineer of the Erie Canal, under whom his father had worked. Educated in Clinton, New York, he returned to the Rondout and commenced a lackluster commercial career there in 1851. (It was not Jervis but his brother and brother-in-law who founded the McEntee & Dillon Rondout Iron Works on Garden Street. The McEntee and Dillon mark may still be seen in the cast-iron pilasters ornamenting what is today the Mariners’ Harbor restaurant.) At the same time, Jervis McEntee commenced his training with Church and by 1853 exhibited a painting at the National Academy. His father’s wealth permitted a Calvert Vaux design and construction of a studio/residence in the “Weinberg” (the hill atop Broadway, roughly Chestnut Street) for Jervis and his new wife, the former Gertrude Sawyer. However, Jervis was slow to come into his own as a painter, if rapid in his business failure. In Vaux he made a lifelong friend and, happily, another brother in law. (McEntee’s studio no longer exists but a woodcut of it survives in Vaux's Villas and Cottages; its former location has been assessed as the west side of what is now called Dietz Court.)

McEntee took summer sketching tours of the Catskills and in 1857 set up in New York along with Church as one of the charter tenants in Richard Morris Hunt’s Tenth Street Studio Building. This experiment in group housing for artists was an instant success. As Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote in 1866, “on the ground floor are the studios of Whittredge, Bradford, Dana, Beard, Thompson the sculptor, Le Clear, Guy, and Bierstadt. The second floor is occupied by Church, McEntee, Leutze, Hays, Hart, and Gignoux. Mr. Tuckerman, the author, has a pleasant study and library on this floor. On the third story are Gifford, Hubbard, Suydam, Shattuck, Thorndike, Haseltine, de Haas, Brown, Casilear, and Martin. Here they are all together,-- historical figure, portrait, landscape, marine, animal, fruit, and flower painters.”

Since many of these men were either bachelors or commuters, and since McEntee was the only married member of the “fraternity” and his wife was a lively, well-liked hostess, the couple became the center of a spontaneous salon within the Studio Building. Their apartment was the only one that had a kitchenette, and a summons to dinner was highly prized. The McEntees stayed in New York in the winter months, returning to Rondout or the West for the summer to sketch or paint in plein air. In 1868 they went to Europe with Church and his wife, there meeting Sanford Gifford and an army of American expatriates. “Americans are as plentiful here as ants in an ant hill,” Church wrote to his patron William Henry Osborn. American subjects were already on the wane by this time in fashionable art circles, and European subjects seemed commercially prudent.

Church and McEntee and friends wandered and sketched in and around the Roman countryside. Together with George P. A. Healy, the two started working on The Arch of Titus, which was completed back home in 1871. The large oil depicts the three painters in the foreground with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter in the distance. But this was an uncharacteristic and uncomfortable endeavor for McEntee, whose previous paintings in the 1860s had borne such titles as The Melancholy Days, Indian Summer, and Late Autumn. It would not be long before he returned to his muted palette in such works as October Snow (1870); Sea from Shore (1873); and Autumn, Old Mill in Winter, Autumn Day, Wood Path, and Winter in the Mountains (all from 1878). Like Vanderlyn a generation before, McEntee was painting for a market that had slipped away.

When Gertrude died on October 14, 1878 at the age of 44, McEntee stayed on at the Studio, an increasingly morose bachelor. His lifelong tendency to depression, hinted at in the essay on Vanderlyn he wrote in the year of his marriage, took fierce hold of him, as is revealed in his diaries and copious letters. A few months before her death he wrote in his diary, “I am more unhappy than I have ever been before for I have not the faith and hope I once had. It seems a sad conclusion that after twenty years spent in New York during which I had won some distinction to find myself today actually unable to pay my rent and my living.”

In 1876 McEntee had inscribed in his diary, “My Salvation is going on and improving my pictures and it is fear that I may not be able to do this, that often caused me anxiety. There is great danger that a man in need of money will be induced to work for popular favor and so prevent him from following out his own ideas. An artist above all men should be free from money troubles and I think constantly of how I can order my life so as to be independent in this respect.” More than twenty years earlier, writing of Vanderlyn, he had mused: “Too often the melancholy effects of penury and want, silently endured, mark on the surface of fine and sensitive natures, hard and repulsive lines, even while the soul wells up genially and kindly as before; and smothered griefs and disappointments, borne alone and unshared, have often so completely shut out from the sympathy of their fellow-men, the most generous and beautiful of characters, that they for ever moved among them like frowning clouds along the open sky, or glittering icebergs across a summer sea…. Here was the companion of kings and emperors, the friend of Madison and protégé of Burr, with the frost of almost eighty winters upon his head, a heartbroken suppliant in the very village where he was born, and upon which he had reflected so much honor, discouraged and disheartened by the coldness and indifference he had everywhere met, come back to die in the place of his birth, to lay down his reverend head, a beggar among his ungrateful countrymen.”

Like Vanderlyn, McEntee seemed, as in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem on the subject, a “last leaf.”

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

This 1831 poem was written about Thomas Melvill, a hero of the Boston Tea Party who had wandered into old age still wearing his tricorn hat. This defiant if confused gentleman was grandfather to Herman Melville, author of Bartleby the Scrivener, about whom I will write next.

--John Thorn

Walt Whitman, Hudson River Hall of Famer

The Hudson River Hall of Fame

From the Woodstock and Kingston Times, March 10, 2005:
Writing this column about the great figures in our region’s remarkably rich past has sparked a big idea, for which I invite your collaboration: to wake the echoes literally in a Hudson River Hall of Fame. Such a setting, whether bricks and mortar or virtual (or, ideally, both), will make the past come alive for young people who think history is something that happens elsewhere and for grownups out of touch with their native sense of place. Uniquely in the Hudson Valley, this cradle of national culture with so many tangible remains of its storied past, ghosts are our everyday neighbors.

To those who would wish to enter into their largely vanished world and learn about how it still shapes us, the Hudson River Hall of Fame is an idea whose time is now. It will bring regional and national attention to its host city and county, and it will extend the educational and community development efforts of the Valley’s museums, libraries, and historical societies.

A hall of fame, as distinguished from a museum, forms a superior educational and inspirational institution for young people especially, focusing as it does on individuals rather than chronological periods, movements, or events (although of course these come into focus soon enough). The physical installation would be the hub for a constellation of web and other media extensions, so that the HRHF will have broad exposure (and in some measure financial support) to a community larger than, say, Ulster County, or New York State. Let me put forward two sites for purposes of example, though possibilities abound throughout the Valley: the Carnegie Library on Broadway in Kingston and the Dutch Reformed Church in Newburgh, both of them historic buildings crying out for adaptive reuse.

Where would the HRHF be located? Who would pay for it? Who would manage it? These are big questions subject to public debate and political process, but the siting will surely be in one of the ten counties defined as the Hudson River National Heritage Area, whose creation was spurred by the efforts of Congressman Maurice Hinchey. Some level of public funding will be welcome if not absolutely necessary, though I believe it should be in the form of a matching grant; the community that wants to host the HRHF must be able to demonstrate its enthusiasm with contributions in cash or in kind. The HRHF could create its own initially skeletal management infrastructure, but its directors would be wise to tap into the ready audience of the public schools and the knowledge base of the local historical societies.

How would the public be served? Could the HRHF, once founded, sustain itself in whole or in part? How would the candidates be nominated and inducted? These are operational issues, for which useful precedents are available, both of them in the State of New York.

The original American Hall of Fame was not the baseball institution in Cooperstown, which opened its doors in 1939, but the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, dedicated in 1901 on what was then a Bronx campus of New York University. In its early years this brainchild of NYU’s Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken was a sensation, engaging the public and the press in spirited debate about who merited inclusion. The NYU Senate, which acted as a nominating committee back in 1900, received nominations from the public and if seconded by a member of the Senate, that candidate advanced to the vote. Initially 50 outstanding Americans were inducted; five people were to be added each fifth year. Designed by Stanford White as a sweeping semicircular arc with wings at either end, the Hall of Fame’s 630-foot colonnade provides niches for the busts and commemorative plaques of up to 150 honorees.

However, to date the institution has honored only 102 individuals. The election process appears to have stalled as society’s notion of what constitutes fame or greatness has changed over time to become more nearly synonymous with achievement or even that contemptible darling of our day, celebrity. To that point, it is instructive to look at the original 16 categories from which nominees to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans might arise (to quote from the official 1900 “Rules for Election”):

1. Authors (Editors, Poets, Novelists, Philosophers, Economists, etc.).
2. Educators.
3. Preachers, Theologians.
4. Reformers.
5. Scientists.
6. Engineers, Architects.
7. Physicians, Surgeons.
8. Inventors.
9. Missionaries, Explorers.
10. The Military.
11. Lawyers, Judges.
12. Statesmen.
13. Business Men, Philanthropists.
14. Artists (Musicians, Painters, Sculptors, Actors, etc.).
15. Naturalists.
16. Men and Women outside the foregoing classes.

The quaintness of certain of these categories became increasingly evident and eventually stimulated thoughts of companion, if not rival, pantheons. As Richard Rubin wrote in “The Mall of Fame” (Atlantic Monthly, 1997), “It was inevitable that something as popular and prestigious as the Hall of Fame would inspire spinoffs. One of the first was the Baseball Hall of Fame, which opened in Cooperstown, New York, in 1939. Four decades had passed since the establishment of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, and the country had changed quite a bit. We had conquered the world’s greatest military power, only to be ourselves laid low by the world’s greatest economic crisis. Radio had emerged and ushered us into the media age. Inventors and scientists and statesmen and thinkers were no longer the heroes of the day. Athletes were. Yet not a single one had made it into the Hall of Fame, and none ever would. The hall’s standards of admission – indeed, its defining mission – made that impossible.”

By honoring achievement in a single field, the Baseball Hall of Fame seemed more in tune with the times. Indeed, its model was so successful that few people today know of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and believe that Cooperstown patented the very notion. Of the 500 or more physical halls of fame in the world today, most of them in the United States, 140 are devoted to sports, and barely a handful are interdisciplinary. If athletes could have their own halls of fame, why couldn’t policemen, businessmen, clowns? Today they do, in Miami Beach, Chicago, and Delavan (Wisconsin), respectively. While many of these institutions seem gratuitous or obscure (Crayola Hall of Fame? Shuffleboard Hall of Fame?), the best halls of fame have done the public a service in following baseball’s model – a shrine that honors its past, highlights its heroes, displays its artifacts, and stimulates research. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was a great idea, but noble statuary in a forlorn venue no longer fires the imagination.

The Hudson River Hall of Fame would aim to provide the best of both models: the specificity and educational thrust of the Baseball Hall of Fame with the sweeping vision of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Artists and architects, novelists and poets, military and political figures, and more … all inductees into the HRHF ought to be “great Americans” – individuals who won renown on a national scale in substantial measure through their regional accomplishments – not merely local bigwigs and benefactors. Noble mayors and revered teachers would not find their names on the ballot unless their accomplishments were notable on a national level.

The HRHF would offer memorials (plaques and artifacts being more likely than busts); permanent, rotating, and circulating exhibits; and interactive kiosks that would link with local and national libraries and museums. It would be a destination for students, a boon to scholars, and a complementary tourist attraction to its home city and the Hudson Valley Greenway. Honorees might include some of the men who have been featured in this column – Alexander Jackson Davis, Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, John Vanderlyn, et al. – as well as such no-brainers as Washington Irving, Robert Fulton, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, George Clinton, Sojourner Truth, George Washington, and on. Finding suitable candidates for nomination and election is a simple if contentious matter. Indeed, it is the contention surrounding each year’s election process that gives continuing interest and media focus to the HRHF’s educational efforts and annual induction event, which might be in the form of a banquet supported by corporations that wish to heighten their standing in the region they serve. Other specifics might include:

1. The annual induction event, constituting a day or a weekend, will be the HRHF promotional centerpiece and will spin off yearlong educational opportunities centered on the new inductees.
2. The HRHF website will be the educational, day-to-day hub of the larger plan. Emphasis will be on Hudson River history education and communication via online collections, virtual exhibitions, chats with prominent figures, and access to a Q&A forum with historians.
3. An HRHF club for children, either as a function of a “Friends of the HRHF” program or free (i.e., corporate-sponsored), with publications, trading cards, discount coupons, etc.
4. A quarterly magazine directed toward young adults that will connect the region’s past to its present, and vice versa, making the pursuit of knowledge relevant and fun.
5. Historians and docents to address schools and community organizations about the HRHF and the story of its members.
6. Documentary Film/Video Production: not for PBS but mini-docs for broadband streaming from the website; student films would be welcome.
7. Interactive Learning Center: a hands-on, “living history” approach to the region’s story.

In a region where adaptive reuse is the watchword, the Hudson River Hall of Fame would give a public-spirited new focus to some grand but troubled old building. It would generate substantial publicity for other historical attractions in the Valley. It would drive daily foot traffic without prohibiting the “private sector” use of the main space to generate income through special events. It would be home to the personalized history of our region, and restore to us our heroes.

In its own description of its mission, the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area Program declares its intent to be “to recognize, preserve, protect and interpret the nationally significant cultural and natural resources of the Hudson River Valley for the benefit of the Nation.” Is there a better idea than this out there? Let me know what you think.

--John Thorn

Central Park Bridge, Calvert Vaux

A.J. Downing gravesite. Photo by Mark Thorn 

Dutch Reformed Church, A.J. Davis. Photo by Mark Thorn

John Vanderlyn gravesite. Photo by Mark Thorn 

Vanderlyn the Artist

From the Woodstock and Kingston Times, November 15, 2004:
Someone told me, four years ago, that after decades of neglect the old Kingston Hotel at 20 Crown Street had finally been torn down. I knew its story, how in an upstairs room on Thursday evening, September 23, 1852, John Vanderlyn, the man who had once been the most famous painter in America, had died alone without a penny in his pocket. I rushed over to pick among the rubble, like a child imagining that Providence would reveal to me a paintbox, a stickpin, a tangible remnant of the artist and his dream.

The atomized shrine offered nothing, of course, but splintered clapboard and shards of tin ceiling. And I knew full well that Vanderlyn’s legacy was gloriously intact only two streets away, at the Senate House Museum. Yet to revive the meaning of the man and understand his lifelong course against the grain would indeed take some clearing of rubble, filtering through received opinion and modern interpretation, returning to contemporary accounts.

John Vanderlyn was born in Kingston on October 15, 1775. His reasonably prosperous family lived on Green Street, between the still extant Van Keuren and Tappan houses, and was able to send him to the Kingston Academy when he was 11, where he soon became fluent in French as well as in Dutch and English. His early gift for drawing, however, had been a family trait, most evident in his grandfather Pieter, whose portraits survive. At age 16 he sought employment in New York and found it with Thomas Barrow, a print dealer, in whose shop he met Gilbert Stuart, just returned from Paris and already a famous portrait painter. Stuart encouraged Vanderlyn to pursue his studies, which he did at the Robertson brothers’ Columbian Academy of Painting, at 79 Liberty Street, from 1792 through 1794. In 1795 he moved to Philadelphia to apprentice with Stuart, whose portrait of Aaron Burr he copied. The New York senator so admired the oil that he backed the young man’s further education in Paris, where he remained from 1796 to 1801.

At this time there was no nativist tradition of historical painting, nor landscape. Portraiture was the only form of painting that Americans appreciated and, in the days before photography, for which they would pay. Furthermore, American artists of high promise in the years before the Revolution regarded London as their finishing school. As a Democratic-Republican, Burr drew his inspiration from France, not England, the maternal shrine of the Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton.

Burr’s financial straits in 1798 compelled Vanderlyn to support himself by executing portraits, but his heart was already elsewhere. Studying at the Académie de Peinture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Francois-Andre Vincent, he improved his draughtsmanship, working from life, from old masters, and from antique casts. As James Flexner wrote in The Light of Distant Skies, “This, he was told, was the necessary preparation for painting great historical pictures. When Vincent pulled him away to study landscape he complained — ‘I do not intend to adopt this branch of my art’ — and as for the portrait work of his forbears, he considered it ‘millhouse drudgery.’ Vincent agreed that painting likenesses was a waste of time.”

That concord rendered all of Vanderlyn’s subsequent years fraught with financial peril as he continually failed to make foreign seed sprout in native soil. The painter Samuel F.B. Morse was to become similarly afflicted in his years of study in Paris; returning home with a passion to paint grand allegorical subjects, he found a public that admired only his commissioned portraits. Where Morse eventually turned away from painting altogether, devoting his energies to invention (the telegraph, of course, but also the first American photograph), Vanderlyn tried to make his art palatable through entrepreneurial ventures.

“The tide of utility sets against the fine arts,” Thomas Cole once said, and the observation is equally apt today. The European tradition of patronage of the arts — and individual artists — was as yet unmatched in America, where those with money were dedicated only to acquiring more of it. This devotion to the almighty dollar earned the scorn of Europeans, who believed that pursuing amusement was the key to enjoying life. All the same, Vanderlyn returned in 1801 to find commissions stacked up in advance, as Aaron Burr was now Vice President of the United States and thus restored to financial health. In the two years before his return to Europe, Vanderlyn painted portraits not only of his patron but also of his daughter Theodosia, a famous beauty in her day and a captivating heroine in Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr.

Edward and Robert Livingston of the New-York Academy of Fine Arts, newly formed to import popular casts to sell by subscription, funded Vanderlyn’s trip in 1803 by assigning him to return with copies of old paintings and sculpture from Paris, Florence, and Rome, in return for which he would receive a salary and a line of credit. However, once again the artist’s financial tether to America was cut without notice. Scrambling for commission work, Vanderlyn managed to create three of the paintings regarded then and now as his masterpieces: The Death of Jane McCrea, Caius Marius Amidst the Ruins of Carthage, and Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos. The first was notable for its bosomy victim and the last for its scandalously undraped nude form.

Marius won a medal from Emperor Napoleon in 1808 as the best painting exhibited at the Paris Salon, but Vanderlyn later sold it cheaply and pawned the medal twice. It was Ariadne and a copy of Correggio’s Antiope that inspired him to visions of filthy lucre. He speculated that while such pictures might prove too naked “for the house of a private individual … on that account it may attract a greater crowd if exhibited publicly.” Ariadne is important as the first formal nude in American art, but is more important in the history of hucksterism, with which the sale and public display of art in America has so often been linked.

When Vanderlyn returned to the States he had his former benefactor Burr in tow, traveling under a pseudonym after four years of ignominious exile in France. Having shot Hamilton dead in the duel at Weehawken in 1804, Burr followed with an adventure in Western expansion that brought a treason charge upon his head. Hounded and broke, Burr returned to New York only because Vanderlyn paid his passage by painting portraits of three fellow passengers.

In 1816, Vanderlyn opened his first American exhibition in New York. In it, he exhibited Ariadne, Marius, his Antiope, portraits of James Monroe and James Madison, and copies of paintings by the masters. Separate viewings were arranged for men and women; America was not France. The exhibition toured Philadelphia, Charleston, Montreal, Washington, and Boston, but lost money.

Those with money may think about art, fancying themselves artists but for lack of time if not talent. Artists, however, are always thinking about money.

When Vanderlyn had applied to the New-York Academy of Fine Arts, the organization that had sent him to Europe in 1803, to display his Ariadne, he was turned down on the grounds that his painting offended public decency. Now he leapt upon an idea he had nurtured since 1814-15, when he had sketched the palace and gardens of Versailles. Not only would he paint a panorama of unprecedented scale and beauty -- the form had been invented by the Scottish painter Robert Barker, who exhibited in Edinburgh in 1788 a panoramic view of that city -- he would also construct and manage a building for its exhibition. He would curry no favor with societies and academies but appeal directly to the public, a public that might otherwise never see the splendor of France.

On March 31, 1817, Vanderlyn the Entrepreneur announced his plan to erect a rotunda for the exhibition of panoramic as well as conventional art at Chambers and Cross Streets, directly east of the despised Academy of Fine Arts. He soon solicited $14,000 (a huge sum at a time when average annual salaries ran to $250) from 100 patrons, including John Jacob Astor. He persuaded the Common Council to grant him a ten-year lease of the land in exchange for one peppercorn, as the city’s demonstration of its newfound recognition that New York had been “too long stigmatized as phlegmatic, money making & plodding.” At the conclusion of the lease, however, the building would devolve to the city, and the proprietor’s right to renew was not assured.

Theodore S. Fay, in Views of New-York and Its Environs (1831), wrote of the Rotunda, which was constructed during the summer of 1818: “It is constructed of brick, is fifty-three feet in diameter, and forty feet in height, surmounted with a pantheon-shaped dome and skylight, through which the interior is lighted.” Among the panoramas exhibited were “the palace and gardens of Versailles, painted by Mr. Vanderlyn, and the city of Paris, by Mr. Barker; also, the cities of Mexico and Athens, and the city and lake of Geneva….”

On October 6, 1818, this gem of a building opened not with The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, which Vanderlyn had been busily painting in both New York and in Kingston, but instead with Barker’s City of Paris as the panoramic offering. This was followed on January 22, 1819 by the Attack of the Allied Forces on Paris. Vanderlyn’s panorama, complete at 3,000 square feet of canvas, 167 feet long and 12 feet high (early reports pegged its height as 18 feet), debuted on May 26, 1820. It was a sensation, and was soon mimicked by a “Cosmorama” at Scudder’s Museum (predecessor of P.T. Barnum’s American Musum, and housed in the same building with the Academy of Fine Arts). However, Versailles was not a financial success, having cost so much to execute that it could never be exhibited at profit.

Vanderlyn’s hold on the Rotunda was threatened. On December 6, 1824, he petitioned the City for extension of his lease and was denied. Still hoping to win approval, he invited members of the Common Council to attend the debut of a new panorama of the City of Athens on July 18, 1825. Not only were they unmoved, but the vultures were circling above. On May 8, 1826, the newly formed National Academy of Design petitioned the Common Council for a lease of the Rotunda. Vanderlyn had been approached to be one of its founding members, but thus betrayed he declined the invitation, the only artist to do so. A month later Dr. Hosack, creator of the city’s botanical garden, and others also petitioned for the lease. Despite entreaties by Vanderlyn’s friends, on March 23, 1829, the Common Council ordered him to vacate.

Financially crushed and embittered, he kept body and soul together with private commissions for portraits. He took the panorama on tour in the 1830s, frequently stopping at Kingston, where his siblings, nieces, and nephews still resided. A large government grant came his way to paint one of eight panels of the Capitol rotunda with a historical painting of Columbus, for which he traveled to Cuba for research. By the time this latter commission came to him he was in his sixties and enlisted the assistance of French limners, a concession to age for which he was excoriated in the press.

All the while Vanderlyn was abroad, readying his Landing of Columbus, the panorama of Versailles lay rolled up in storage in Kingston, under the watchful eye of his nephew, John Vanderlyn Jr., himself an artist of some ability. After the painting’s creator died in 1852, the nephew continued to secure it until his own death, when it passed to his sister Catharine, a dressmaker who lived at 44 Green Street. Upon her death it descended to the Senate House Association, which had neither the funding nor the venue to exhibit it. In 1952 Senate House made a gift of the panorama to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it may be seen today in very nearly its original magnificence, in a specially constructed oval room. (The Rotunda’s architect had been Martin Euclid Thompson, whose most notable work may have been the 1822 Branch Bank at 15-1/2 Wall Street, whose full façade also adorns the American Wing of the Met.)

Vanderlyn’s Rotunda improbably survived, first as a naturalization office, then as a marine court of sessions; after the Great Fire of December 1835 that destroyed much of lower Manhattan, it served as the city’s post office. For two years in the 1840s it became once again an art gallery, and then was refitted as city office space in 1848. When it was demolished in 1870, there were few who recalled Vanderlyn’s panorama. A generation later there were few who recalled Vanderlyn; at a May 27, 1892 auction in Kingston, his painting of George Washington, now on display at Senate House, was knocked down at five dollars.

Why does this obstinate artist seem more significant today than he did a century ago? Not because he was a formidable painter, though he was; not because he withered sadly, though he did. Not for the carny-barker wink with which he exhibited Ariadne, nor the optimism and ambition with which he created the Rotunda. I think it is because his struggles and triumphs epitomize the ever swirling waltz of art and money, which he mastered no better than we. I like to imagine that when the money was gone, and life very nearly so, he saw what truly endures.


A MODEST PROPOSAL

In 1842 an indifferent engraving by Stephen Alonso Schoff of Vanderlyn’s Marius was a gift to subscribers of the Apollo Association, an entrepreneurial venture on behalf of American artists that unlike the Rotunda succeeded wildly. As Russell Lynes wrote in The Tastemakers, “The scheme was this: People were invited to pay $5 for an annual subscription to the Apollo Association. Each subscriber would then receive ‘a large and costly Original Engraving from an American painting.’ He would also receive a ticket with a number on it which would entitle him to a long shot at one of a number of genuine, hand-painted pictures by American artists in an annual lottery to be held by the Association….”

In 1844 the Apollo Association changed its name to the American Art-Union, and its membership rose to more than 2,000. In 1848 it distributed more than 450 prize paintings, for which the Art-Union had paid the artists $40,907. When Thomas Cole’s painting Youth was chosen for the gift engraving (it was part of the series called “The Voyage of Life”) and was also one of the grand prizes, the number of subscribers jumped to 18,960. The stimulus to American art and artists was overwhelming … but the courts struck the Art-Union down for violating the anti-lottery laws, and by 1851 it was dead.

Now that anti-lottery laws are themselves dead (“ya gotta be in it ta win it”), isn’t it time to revive this idea?

--John Thorn

Silent Partner: Calvert Vaux

From the Kingston and Woodstock Times, December 23, 2004:
On Wednesday July 28, 1852, the red-hot boilers of the steamer Henry Clay exploded just short of Yonkers, flinging passengers and crew into the Hudson. Two days later The New York Times continued its coverage of the catastrophe, in which to that point 47 bodies had been located. “The workmen who are engaged in grappling for the dead assert their belief, that there are yet many more bodies lying under the wreck, which bears upon them, and fearing they would mutilate the remains they deferred extricating them, until such times as the timbers can be raised. While scouring the bottom of the river, pieces of clothing were hooked up with the grapples, but the bodies could not be pulled out, unless tearing the limbs and flesh.”

On the very afternoon of the catastrophe, the Westchester County Coroner impaneled a jury to commence taking testimony from the survivors, even as bodies were being piled along the beach, “covered over with green branches from the woods adjacent” to resist decomposition in the summer heat. Caroline Downing had been rescued and was taken home to await news about her celebrated husband, Andrew Jackson Downing (the subject of last week’s column), who had last been seen on the top deck, throwing wooden chairs to those already in the water.

As corpses continued to be brought on shore through the night of the 28th, Calvert Vaux stood watch. The 27-year old Englishman had come to America not even two years before, to be Downing’s architectural assistant and soon business partner. By mid-Thursday, he would address the coroner’s inquest, as The New York Times reported:

“As to the body of ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING, Calvert Vaux was called and sworn: I reside at Newburg; I am the partner of deceased in business; I was not on board of the Clay; I have seen the body of Mr. DOWNING, and recognized it [the Albany Argus further quoted Vaux as saying, ‘it was taken Out from near the wreck’]; deceased was thirty-six years of age; I have no doubt of the identity; deceased was drowned from the Henry Clay; he was accompanied by the following persons: Mrs. DOWNING, (saved;) Mrs. DE WINT, (lost.) wife of JOHN PETER DE WINT, Fishkill; FRANK DE WINT, MARY C. DE WINT, (saved;) and Mrs. MATILDA WADSWORTH, lost.)” [sic as to spelling and punctuation]

One week after the wreck of the Henry Clay, the death toll had risen to 70, and the heart-rending testimony of confusion, despair, and heroism riveted the nation. But now Calvert Vaux, stranger in a strange land, bereft of his mentor and friend, feared that his career might well become casualty No. 71. He had been the architectural partner in Downing & Vaux, the backroom wizard who executed the commissions that the flamboyant Downing drew to the firm through his transcendentalist literary musings. On August 5, Vaux placed this whistling-in-the graveyard notice in the classified section of The New York Times:

“DOWNING & VAUX ARCHITECTS, Newburg—In consequence of the death of Mr. DOWNING, the business of the firm is now carried on by his surviving partner, Mr. CALVERT VAUX, and all communications addressed to him at Newburg will be immediately attended to. Mr. VAUX has been in close professional connection with Mr. DOWNING from the time that he commenced the practice of Architecture, and trusts for a continuance of the confidence that has been extended to the firm.”

And somehow it worked. Clients flocked to Vaux & Withers (Frederick Clarke Withers, whom Downing had imported from England the year after Vaux) as they had to Downing & Vaux. The duo set up shop in Crawford House, today the home of Newburgh’s historical society, and they worked together fruitfully. The Tuscan and Elizabethan villas that Downing had favored soon became the pointy, ecclesiastical Gothic Revival style in which both young Englishman had apprenticed in London. Now the firm’s designs were being executed in stone as well as in the wood that Downing and his mentor, Alexander Jackson Davis, had favored in the 1840s. By 1857 Vaux would publish a well-received pattern book of his own, Villas and Cottages; a year later he would win the most important commission of his life, for Central Park in New York; and for the next thirty-five years or so he would remain a vital force in American architecture—landscape, domestic, and institutional.

But none of this came easily to Calvert Vaux, who after he left Newburgh in 1857 seemed always to need the sheltering arm of a business partner to win the job, to navigate the political thickets, to be the public face while he worked in relative privacy. He had been content to play Lou Gehrig to Downing’s Babe Ruth, even while holding a highly skeptical view of his mentor’s technical competence. In the years to come he would seek the partnership of Frederick Law Olmsted yet grumble more openly about laboring in his formidable shadow.

Calvert Bowyer Vaux had been born at the house of his father’s practice as “surgeon and apothecary” at 36 Pudding Lane, London on December 20, 1824. When the senior Vaux suffered a stroke in 1831 and died soon afterward, the gifted boy’s chance for an education was threatened. Yet he was accepted as a “worthy lad” (without tuition charges) at the Merchant Taylors’ School, where he continued until age 14. He left without graduating to apprentice with architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, whose specialty was in Gothic churches and the occasional commission for Gothicated homes. Vaux made some money on the side by lettering railroad maps, enough so that he could tour Europe a bit, but he recognized that his prospects in England were not rosy, so when Downing offered him a passage to America and a job, he leapt at it.

In the year that Downing fetched Vaux he also proposed a new location for a vast public park in New York City — a Central Park that would be located between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, running north from 59th Street. Poet William Cullen Bryant had proposed a public park six years earlier, but his idea was to place it along the yet rustic eastern shore of Manhattan Island, on the site then known as Jones’ Wood. “The heats of summer are upon us,” Bryant wrote, “and while some are leaving the town for shady retreats in the country, others refresh themselves with short excursions to Hoboken or New Brighton, or other places among the beautiful environs of our city. If the public authorities who expend so much of our money in laying out the city, would do what is in their power, they might give our vast population an extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation in these sultry afternoons, which we might reach without going out of town…. All large cities have their extensive public grounds and gardens, Madrid and Mexico their Alamedas, London its Regent’s Park, Paris its Champs Elysées, and Vienna its Prater. There are none of them, we believe, which have the same natural advantages of the picturesque and beautiful which belong to this spot.”

By 1851 Downing’s vision won out over Bryant’s, as New York State passed enabling legislation so that a large parcel could be purchased by the city in mid-Manhattan. After amendment in 1853, by which time Downing was out of the picture, purchases commenced and continued until 1856, elongating the park’s territory from 59th Street to 106th Street (and in 1863 up to 110th Street). In 1857, at the urging of one of the installed commissioners, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) applied for the position of superintendent of the park’s development … and somehow won it. The commissioners then announced a competition for design of the entire park grounds. Of the 33 anonymously submitted entries, the one named “Greensward” was adjudged the winner — and was then revealed to have been submitted by Olmsted and Vaux in collaboration.

How did these two come to put their heads together? Surely Vaux realized that he had no political cachet; being the artistic successor to the nation’s leading landscape architect may have been an honor, but it was not enough to prevail with the Tammany crew. Olmsted was neither an engineer nor an architect, but he came from a notable Hartford family and his newspaper and political connections were solid. Also, he had come to Newburgh to sit at the feet of Downing in 1851, at which time he and Vaux may have met. Olmsted called himself a “practical farmer” — that is, one who was convinced, like Downing, that planned landscape, agriculture, and horticulture should serve a social and democratic purpose — yet at this time he was principally a journalist. Soon after meeting with Downing, he would be off to England for a stroll through the southern countryside that would become, in book form, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, published by his father’s friend George Putnam. Vaux certainly read this book, and was impressed.

In Liverpool Olmsted paused to admire Joseph Paxton’s 120-acre Birkenhead Park, which he described in Walks and Talks. This park, which because it was paid for with tax dollars was dedicated to public use, had also made quite an impression on Vaux. As Richard Amero observed, “Following the example of Regent’s Park in London, Birkenhead Commissioners amortized the costs of developing the park by selling home-building lots surrounding the site. One of the chief reasons for developing public parks from that time onward was that they would enhance property values and increase city revenues.” This point, with its vast potential for money-making, was not lost on New York’s political set.

Once the Greensward plan was anointed, Olmsted miraculously moved up from superintendent to architect-in-charge and chief engineer — no matter that he had been been trained for neither position. Vaux, to his chagrin, was named assistant to Olmsted though later he was elevated to “consulting architect.” As Amero notes, “Possessed with many well-placed friends and an easy fluency in speaking and writing, Olmsted so overshadowed Vaux that commentators referred to Olmsted as the designer of the parks that he and Vaux created together.” This held true not only for Central Park but also for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Riverside suburban development outside Chicago, the interconnected park system of Buffalo, and the State Reservation at Niagara Falls … to name just a handful of the Olmsted-Vaux collaborations to follow. The great landscape architect Samuel Parsons, Jr., who was Vaux’s last partner, noted: “Mr. Olmsted was a leader of men, a man of magnetism and charm, a literary genius, but hardly the creative artist that Mr. Vaux was.”

Vaux and Olmsted worked together for all but one year in the period 1858 to 1878, forming the firm Olmsted, Vaux and Company in 1865. Other notable architects to work with Vaux in subsequent years included Jacob Wrey Mould, with whom he designed the original buildings of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, as well as George Kent Radford, Samuel Parsons, Jr. and of course Fred Withers, with whom he created the fabulously polychromatic Jefferson Market Courthouse, now used as a library, in Greenwich Village.

Vaux served as Landscape Architect for New York City from 1881 until his death, often with stormy outbursts, threatened resignations, and ultimate acceptance of political featherbedding where professional architectural work was called for. The Tweed Ring had been run out of town, but they were replaced by new frock-coated racketeers. He no longer had Olmsted to run interference for him, and observers noted that his mood and demeanor suffered.

As New York affairs increasingly ground him down. Vaux began to spend more time in Kingston (Rondout, actually). He had married a Rondout girl, Mary Swan McEntee, sister of Hudson River School landscapist Jervis McEntee, in 1854; they had two sons and two daughters. The family liked to put on theatrical programs at the Sampson House (also known as The Opera House, later as the Kingston Freeman building, and today as the site of the restaurant Mariners’ Harbor). Vaux designed a number of residences in Rondout or Ponckhockie, all now vanished.

Vaux is buried in Kingston’s Montrepose Cemetery, in the same row as Jervis McEntee and other members of their families, even though he died in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, while visiting his son Bowyer. He walked off the end of a pier into Gravesend Bay, and while the family maintained he was confused and had left the house on a foggy day to take a walk without bringing along his eyeglasses, the newspapers reported the death as a suicide. From The Brooklyn Eagle of November 21, 1895, the day of the drowning:

“A workman on Fry’s coal dock first saw the body being tossed about in the rough water, but when he rushed to the shore to secure the corpse it disappeared. It was some minutes later before Mr. Fry himself saw it drifting alongside the bulkhead out to sea again. With a boat hook he succeeded in bringing it close to shore…. It was finally necessary for someone to go right in after it…. The son was much affected. He made the identification certain by examining the marks on the clothing, not daring to trust himself to look at the features.”

In a final, touching collaboration with Olmsted, the pair had reunited in 1889 to design Newburgh’s Downing Park, in tribute to the man who had inspired both of them and who had made Central Park possible. Vaux would not live to see it completed in 1896, and by that time Olmsted was confined to an insane asylum, so the project was completed by their sons, Downing Vaux and John C. Olmsted.

SOME EXTANT VAUX SITES IN THE HUDSON VALLEY
W.E. Warren House, Montgomery Street, Newburgh
Crawford House, Montgomery Street, Newburgh (Vaux offices in mid-1850s)
Rev. E.J. O’Reilly House, 55 Grand Street, Newburgh (with Withers)
Halsey R. Stevens House, 182 Grand Street (with Withers)
(Former) Design Studio for Jervis McEntee, Rondout NY (site: Dietz Court)
(Former) Samuel D. Coykendall House, Rondout 1890-92 (with Radford)
Olana (Vaux initial design, later changed by the owner, painter Frederic Church)
Idlewild at Cornwall, commissioned as home of poet N.P. Willis, now drastically altered
Hoyt House, Staatsburg (in spectacular ruin on grounds of Ogden & Ruth Mills State Park)
Hall-Rice Building, Troy (featured in Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence)
National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, NYC (former Samuel J. Tilden residence)
Hudson River State Hospital and Grounds, Poughkeepsie (with Olmsted and Withers)
Wildertstein (Vaux landscape design)
Montrepose (Vaux burial site)
Downing Park, Newburgh (two Vauxes, two Olmsteds)

--John Thorn

Alexander Jackson Davis, Picturesque American

From The Kingston and Woodstock Times, November 24, 2004:
I collect buildings, the way some people collect baseball cards or lovers: the more seemingly unattainable the object of my desire, the more ardent is my longing. While buildings that escape the wrecker’s ball have tangible charms, those that have been lost, or survive in ruin and whose loss is imminent, are to me most romantic, most alluring. Reconstruction, however responsible (think Williamsburg, Virginia), is to me a bore, a classroom diorama for credulous grownups. Renovation is a term that gives me the willies, too; well-intentioned but ghastly examples may be found around the corner. Restoration and preservation, however, are decidedly on the side of the angels – and there is a spectacular work in progress in our midst, in the architectural museum that is Newburgh, about which there is more to be said.

Galvanically attractive to me are the buildings that never were – the ones that were planned but never built, those that failed to prevail in civic competitions, or the flights of fancy that architects sketched knowing they would never be built. That is why I like reading about buildings almost as much as I do visiting them, or prowling around their former sites, sensing the presence of ghosts in a most agreeable manner.

For more than a decade my regular companion on such literary or actual perambulations has been Alexander Jackson Davis (1803 – 1892), an architect who worked in a dazzling variety of styles: Greek Revival, Italianate or Tuscan, Gothic Revival, Tudor, Egyptian, Swiss. He invented the style we know as "Hudson River Bracketed," which Edith Wharton referenced in her 1929 novel of the same name. He co-designed the first apartment building in America in 1833 (La Grange Terrace or Colonnade Row in New York), and beginning twenty years later he designed Llewellyn Park, in East Orange, New Jersey, America's first great picturesque suburban community – a continuous landscape of winding streets, shaded sidewalks, and undulating lawns.

But if there is one word to describe the vast terrain over which Davis was master, it would be Picturesque. His buildings have survived to an astonishing extent (although many splendid examples were razed in the name of progress) and his own copiously detailed record of his life and art has been preserved in four major collections, all in New York City: the Avery Library at Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It is from the collections of the Met that I obtained Davis’s serene plan for “A Villa in the Italian Style,” for which construction commenced in 1836 at Rondout on the Hudson (since 1870 a part of Kingston). The precise site of this villa has continued to elude me, despite research among Ulster County deeds of the period, but it is likely that the land was owned by Smillie’s father-in-law, Lambert Van Valkenburg. Alas, the avant-garde residence was abandoned halfway when the expense began to overwhelm the client, New York City engraver James Smillie, who like Davis had won fame with his delineations for the New-York Mirror.

Davis was an artist whose renderings of New York buildings in the 1820s had been so widely admired that painters John Trumbull and Rembrandt Peale advised him to turn his hand to architecture. Joining Ithiel Town and Martin Euclid Thompson as an “architectural composer,” Davis designed public buildings and even residences in the Greek Revival style that was the firm’s hallmark. Among his many notable commissions in this style were the home of poet James Hillhouse in New Haven, Connecticut (demolished in 1943), the Custom House in New York (which survives on Wall Street as the Federal Hall Memorial), and the Dutch Reformed Church in Newburgh (deconsecrated in 1967 but still holy to those who revere fine buildings).

By 1836 Davis had parted ways with Town (and with James Dakin, who had joined the practice after Thompson left it; it was Dakin with whom Davis had designed La Grange Terrace). His work at Blithewood for patron Robert Donaldson had convinced him that Grecian temples in rustic settings constituted a wretched excrescence. Donaldson (1800-72) was a Carolinian who not only commissioned Davis to design Blithewood but also a key addition to Edgewater, Donaldson’s later residence at Barrytown that may be seen from the west bank of the Hudson (it remains a private residence to this day). Donaldson was also one of the sponsors of Davis’s only book, Rural Residences, in 1838.

By 1841 Davis would supply designs for the first of many books by Andrew Jackson Downing, for whom, like Davis, Donaldson was a most sympathetic patron. The two AJDs collaborated throughout the ensuing decade to cure Americans of the “Greek temple disease,” as Downing put it, and to embrace a picturesque style that became known as Hudson River Gothic, and ultimately American Gothic. Their most harmonious hands-on collaboration of landscape and architecture is permanently on view at Montgomery Place, just a bit further north.

The first Gothic Revival cottage in America was the now demolished structure erected for Donaldson at Blithewood and depicted in Rural Residences: “This building has been erected in Dutchess County, near Barrytown, on the Hudson River, as a gate-house to Blithewood, the seat of R. DONALDSON, Esq. Its prominent features are the rustic porch, bay and mullioned windows, high gables, with ornamented carved vergeboards, and the chimney-shafts. The form and size of the mullion is of considerable importance in giving the cottage window its peculiar character. The bay, or projecting window, and picturesque chimney-tops, are also distinguishing features in this style of building. If this design should be adopted for a summer retreat, it may be much improved by enlarging the porch and windows.”

In 2001 Bard College students began excavating around the former structure, in preparation for the siting of the new Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a Frank Gehry design. Due to the historic significance of the Blithewood site, and the discovery of significant artifacts, the college decided to relocate the facility a mile north. In absentia, Davis’s rustic cottage at Blithewood forms a ghostly tandem with Smillie’s white elephant across the Hudson, each the progenitor of a style. However, still standing is Davis’s bracketed gatehouse for Donaldson, which functions as a part of Bard College and may be seen along the Annandale Road. And a fine example of Davis’s pointed Gothic style may be enjoyed – even as an overnight guest – at the house Davis designed in 1844 for Henry Delameter at 44 Montgomery Street in Rhinebeck; today it serves as a guest house of the venerable Beekman Arms.

Driving south on Route 9 from Montgomery Place, Bard College and Rhinebeck, we come to another significant Davis monument: the additions commissioned by painter and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse to Locust Grove, the home he purchased in 1847. I cannot think of that lovely mansion without envying its billiard room.

Further south, in Tarrytown, one comes upon what many regard as Davis’s greatest Gothic Revival work, Lyndhurst. Designed in 1838 for William and Philip Paulding (when it was called The Knoll) and greatly enlarged in 1867 for George Merritt, Lyndhurst may be the most complete Davis tour de force; he even designed the Gothic furniture. Yet fantastic as it is, my sentiments are not much different from those of Philip Hone, who wrote in his celebrated diary of a visit to The Knoll in July 1841:

“In the course of our drive, we went to see Mr. William Paulding’s magnificent house, yet unfinished, on the bank below Tarrytown. It is an immense edifice of white or gray marble, resembling a baronial castle, or rather a Gothic monastery, with towers, turrets, and trellises ; minarets, mosaics, and mouse-holes; archways, armories, and air-holes ; peaked windows and pinnacled roofs, and many other fantastics too tedious to enumerate, the whole constituting an edifice of gigantic size, with no room in it; great cost and little comfort, which, if I mistake not, will one of these days be designated as ‘Paulding’s Folly.’”

Jumping back across the Hudson at last to Newburgh, I must report that the Dutch Reformed Church is my favorite extant Davis building. Stately, vast, monolithic, and noble, its exterior belies a delicate jewel of an interior that has been unseen for generations except on special open-house days. (See sidebar below for details about visiting this and other Davis sites in the region). Improbably extant despite decades of neglect, the DRC has at last been designated a National Historic Landmark and its preservation and restoration now seem assured.

While my private pleasure will continue to be the buildings that aren’t there or never were, my public delight is in the survivors, the buildings that bear testament to other times, other views of the nation and the cosmos. As citizens of both, we cannot leave the fate of our heritage to the academics and the experts anymore than we can trust that public officials will act as guardians of history. Preservation may sometimes appear to be public policy but it is always personal duty; how we regard our past says much about our future.

Davis Buildings in the Hudson Valley

Plumb-Bronson House
Worth Ave (Route 9), Hudson. Perhaps the earliest “Hudson River Bracketed” residence. For generations the best way to see this building has been to commit a felony, as it is located on the grounds of a state prison. I drove up to it a few years ago and was told in no uncertain terms to turn around by an officer who thought I was there to facilitate a jailbreak. Recently listed as a National Historic Landmark, this Davis gem may soon be open to the public.

Montgomery Place
River Road (Route 103), Annandale-on-Hudson
Expanded over time by the Livingston family. Davis renovated the structure in 1842 and
again in the 1860s. Downing’s horticultural and landscaping genius are evident.

Locust Grove
2683 South Road (Route 9), Poughkeepsie.
Davis added two wings to the north and south, creating the octagon, porte-cochère
and billiards room to the east, plus a four-story tower.

Dutch Reformed Church
120 Grand St, Newburgh.
“Open House” 12-4 on December 12 as part of the Newburgh Historical Society’s Candlelight Tour. According to J. Winthrop Aldrich, former New York Deputy Commissioner of Historic Preservation, the DRC is “the greatest surviving ecclesiastical commission of America's greatest architect of the era.”

Lyndhurst
635 S. Broadway, Tarrytown.
A National Historic Landmark, the house is owned and operated by the
National Trust for Historic Preservation.

--John Thorn

Try a Little Wilderness: Andrew Jackson Downing

From the Kingston and Woodstock Times, December 16, 2004:
“So long as men are forced to dwell in log huts and follow the hunter’s life,” wrote Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), “we must not be surprised at lynch law and the use of the bowie knife. But, when smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established.” But Downing was not merely an apostle of taste, an Emily Post arbiter for the masses. Architect, landscaper, pomologist, and author, he campaigned for the artful domestication of America’s wilderness in book after book, as well as in his monthly editorial in The Horticulturist.

He was truly one of the most celebrated figures of the pre-Civil War period, and that he accomplished so much in the mere 36 years of his life is a marvel and a reproach to slackers like me. Almost single-handedly, Downing created the profession we now call landscape architecture. More than any man he created solid, affordable housing plans that borrowed from half a dozen different cultures and thus were distinctively American. He was a dreamer and a schemer, a Ben Franklin crossed with a Phineas T. Barnum, and at the time of his death he had a commission to lay out and plant the public grounds of the Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian buildings, and another to create a Central Park in the city of New York.

Downing’s books remain in print, though as curios. Only one of his many landscaped gardens survives (brewer/philanthropist Matthew Vassar’s Springside, in Poughkeepsie), and that in ruin. Only five buildings executed from his designs are extant – one of these, a Dr. Culbert’s house, later modified by Henry Hobson Richardson to become the City Club – stands amazingly in the same Newburgh block that hosts Alexander Jackson Davis’s Dutch Reformed Church of 1835. Indeed, so little of Downing’s prodigious efforts survives that he has been largely forgotten outside academic circles, and even there he may be said to be famous for having been famous.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

-- A.E. Housman

Downing preserved, even enhanced, his genius by dying young. He died when, for all his accomplishments, he was still seized with a sense of his own potential – he dreamed of an agricultural college in the Hudson Valley, for example. For him there was no thought of loss through aging, change, even growth. Cut off in his prime, he joined other such deified national figures -- mostly martial ones like Nathan Hale or Davy Crockett. Those golden boys who die young, from Arthur Rimbaud to Buddy Holly, from Stephen Crane to Elvis, are forever young in the land of might have been, safe.

So it may seem churlish to say that his cottage and landscape books are derivative of two Britons, Humphry Repton and John Claudius Loudon; that his residence designs, with their obligatory verandas attached to Tuscan or Gothic or Swiss cottages, owe a great deal to Davis; that his love of chimneys and blind turrets seems, well, childish. All of these are positions that a critic might reasonably adopt, and Downing was not immune from such comment in his own day. In 1847, for but one example, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review condemned him for “corrupting the public taste, and infecting the parvenues with a mania of Gothic Castle-building.” To which his advocates would say, better to have humble board-and-batten construction, in woodland colors, than stark white Grecian temples. So before I come down on the side of the churls or the defenders, let me tell you a bit about this romantic yet scientific, darkly brooding yet cheerfully companionate bundle of contradictions.

Born in Newburgh on October 30, 1815 to Samuel and Susanna Downing, Andrew was a precocious child of some social standing and means, as his father had exchanged his trade of wheelwright for that of nurseryman, in a business that Andrew and his brother Charles would come to manage. By age 16 Downing was a published author, writing in an unsigned piece called “Rural Embellishments” in the New-York Farmer that the “branch of Horticulture called Landscape Gardening is, as yet, completely in its infancy among us.” In 1835, not yet 20, he published two stories in the prestigious New-York Mirror, for whom Davis had long been a contributor of architectural delineations.

On June 7, 1838 he married “up,” to Caroline De Windt, whose family estate was Cedar Grove at Fishkill Landing (now Beacon), directly across the Hudson from the Downing nursery. The wife’s considerable dowry derived from the family’s sugar interests in the Virgin Islands; her pedigree came from blood relation to Presidents John Adams as well as John Quincy Adams. Downing would later dedicate one of his volumes to the latter.

No less important to Downing’s future fortunes were two other events of that year – his construction of an Elizabethan “cottage” in Newburgh, which he called Highland Gardens, and his introduction, through Carolinian Robert Donaldson, to Davis, who would be his collaborator and close friend for all of his remaining years. “My friend, R. Donaldson,” Downing wrote to Davis on December 12, 1838, “has informed me that he has mentioned my name to you and that you were so kind to offer to show me any work, views or plans in your possession which might be of any service to me.”

After Downing had his first authorial success with Treatise and Practice of Landscape Gardening in 1841, with its resultant commissions for landscape work, his Cottage Residences in the following year established him as an architect and a man of the people. Downing was a workmanlike artist, but he enlisted Davis for most of the designs published in that volume, and architectural commissions flowed principally to the more experienced man. Fruit and Fruit Trees of America, issued in 1845, revealed Downing to be a botanist, a naturalist, a true man of science … no mere gardener. All of his books were bestsellers, going through many reprintings and new editions for decades to come. In 1846 Downing became editor of the newly founded Albany-based Horticulturist.

In 1849 Downing approached Davis about joining him in a Newburgh-based “bureau of architecture” – a partnership to which Davis turned a cold shoulder. So the following year Downing published his Architecture of Country Houses, including Designs for Cottages, Farmhouses, and Villas, and in midyear went to England in search of an architectural assistant or, as he termed it, “pencil.” In September he came back with his man, a 25-year-old apprentice architect named Calvert Vaux.

The commissions for architectural work that had formerly gone to Davis now deluged Downing and Vaux, whom he soon elevated to full partnership and paired with another British import, Frederick Clarke Withers. In addition to the aforementioned commissions in Washington and New York, the firm took on many domestic assignments, from Rhode Island to Virginia. And then on July 28, 1852, Downing along with his wife and his mother-in-law boarded the steamer Henry Clay at Newburgh. It had left Albany at 7 a.m., for New York, and the Downing party planned to continue their journey up to Newport. They had no way to know that the Henry Clay had been engaged in a race with the steamer Armenia that, by the time the Henry Clay reached Kingston, had produced a smoky scent on the decks according to passenger John E. Cubbage of Hoboken, at his later testimony during the coroner’s inquest. The Henry Clay burst into flames some two and a half miles north of Yonkers, and all on board leapt into the Hudson. Downing, a strong swimmer, perished because, according to eye-witness accounts, he went to the top deck to throw wooden chairs into the water so that others might float to shore, then he attempted to save his mother-in-law and instead drowned with her.

In the sad aftermath of the disaster, which claimed 70 lives, luggage continued to wash ashore at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields a week later. A list of the 60 identified dead was published in the papers (ten more would be identified later, but body no. 34 was listed as “A.J. Downing, aged 37, merchant, Fishkill”). Downing’s remains were interred at the Old Town Cemetery in Newburgh, but in 1872 the sarcophagus was moved to Cedar Hill Cemetery, north of town.

The Downing home and grounds were sold at auction to satisfy the estate, but the wining bidder, an iron manufacturer named Alger, permitted Vaux and Withers to continue to work from the office at Highland Gardens for another ten months. A decade later, Alger put the property up for sale (“elegant country seat … contains about six acres of land, in a high state of cultivation, filled with rare trees and shrubs of all descriptions; the dwelling, carriage-houses, grapery and green-house are of a fine order of architecture; will be sold for much less than cost; … G. Alger”), and it stands no longer.

Vaux went on to a notable career as an architect, for which he had been trained in England, and as a landscape architect, for which he had Downing to thank. (Indeed, one might think of Vaux as a blend of the technical brilliance of Davis and the romantic brilliance of Downing.) In 1858 he, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, won the New York City competition with their Greensward plan that placed Central Park in the heart of the island, not at its eastern bank, and thus did he pick up his mentor’s fallen torch. “In their Central Park,” wrote Michael J. Lewis, “picturesque planning was overlaid with transcendentalist themes to produce something near the landscape equivalent of philosophy.”

For Vaux and Olmsted, as it had been for Downing, land and one’s attitude toward it was what defined the vast space that was America: it was more than real estate.

With Downing gone, without that personal charm so frequently noted, his tangible work seemed suddenly a balloon with the air let out. No longer would he alight from his carriage, as George William Curtis recalled, appearing as a “tall, slight Spanish gentleman, with black hair worn very long, and dark eyes.” Fredrika Bremer, the Swedish novelist, recalled “a gentleman dressed in black, with … a pair of the handsomest brown eyes I ever saw … dark hair, of a beautiful brown and softly curling – in short of poetical appearance.” Had Downing hypnotized a nation into thinking he was special, and that he had something special to say? Was Vaux correct to write, in 1860, “The value of Downing’s books here has been great not because of their technical excellence, for they are very poor in that quality, but because they are full of life and interest.… It is the man and not the architect that wins the popular ear.”

Yes and no. Downing was an aggregator, a compiler, a democratizer for the sometimes elitist ideas of others. But he did not co-opt greater minds and visions, he made them palatable and popular. As Robert Donaldson wrote to Davis in 1863: “My recollection of the initial steps (taken in 1834 or 1835 by late Mr. Hillhouse & Ourselves) sometimes recurs to me – of the rural Architecture & Villa embellishments which have gone on to the great improvement of country life notwithstanding the overdone gingerbread work & begabled houses which abound. Downing stole your thunder, for a while – but I always, on suitable occasions, claimed for you the seminal ideas which have been so fruitful.”

If Downing was a mere vapor, a perfume that wafted over the land for a generation, its effect was so long-lasting that, to several architectural historians’ way of thinking, Downing’s advocacy of wooden cottages, often in a Gothic Revival mode and harmonizing with their rural environment, prefigured twentieth-century architecture and, in its Romantic functionalist theory, Frank Lloyd Wright in particular.

As Russell Lynes wrote of Downing more than 50 years ago, in The Tastemakers: “There is scarcely a monument left, scarcely a garden or a house or a terraced hillside, to which we can now point and say Downing did that. But there is scarcely a building still standing from the 1840s and ’50s or a city park in which Downing’s ideas, sometimes distorted almost beyond recognition, cannot be detected.”

--John Thorn