John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828)

John Quidor’s (1801–1881) works are closely linked to the writings of Washington Irving. Nearly two-thirds of his extant canvasses depict scenes drawn from Irving’s tales of old Dutch New York. Such marked allegiance to a single author would seem to suggest that Quidor found in Irving’s work plots, characters, and themes which admirably suited his own artistic ends. As many scholars have noted, however, Quidor was rarely content merely to illustrate Irving’s tales or echo his themes. ¹ He rather used the stories as a base from which to explore ideas more distinctively his own.

Figure 1.

John Quidor (1800–1881), Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman. Oil on canvas; 225/9” x 30 1/6”. Yale University Art Gallery; Mabel Brady Garvan Collection.

This is certainly the case with Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman of about 1828, a painting inspired by Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (figure 1). In none of Quidor’s other works does he distance himself so far from his literary source; in none of his other literary paintings does he suppress the narrative or subvert the themes of the text to the extent that he does in this, his earliest extant treatment of an Irving subject. In transferring the tale from printed page to canvas, Quidor altered both its mood and its message. Although both Irving and Quidor take the imagination as a central theme of their work, the painter offers a far bleaker, more frightening vision of this cerebral faculty.

In the early nineteenth century, suspicion and hostility tinged American attitudes towards the imagination. ² In a nation founded on Enlightenment principles, adhering to the doctrines of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and committed to progress, rationality, and practicality, indulgence in imaginative endeavors was widely regarded as an avoidance of responsibility, as an activity that could render one incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, and, hence, as a significant threat to the social order. Such attitudes deeply affected the way American artists and writers felt about their calling, evoking responses that ranged from defensive defiance to guilt and anxiety. Since their feelings about imaginative activities were central to their sense of their own self-worth and the value of their productions, it is hardly surprising that many explored them in their works—as Irving and Quidor did in their differing ways.

Bryan Wolf, in his brilliant comparison of Quidor and Irving in Romantic Revision, has drawn out Quidor’s conservative attitude towards the imagination; the painter seems to have internalized his pragmatic society’s fear and distrust of it. Irving, on the other hand, while sharing some of Quidor’s trepidation, also saw positive uses for the imagination, deploying it to combat, in his own rather mild way, what he saw as the relentlessly rationalist and materialist tenor of his times. ³ A comparison of Quidor’s Ichabod with Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings the distance between the two men into sharp focus.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of the tales from Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819–20). Set a decade or so after the Revolutionary War, the story takes place in a drowsy Dutch village on the eastern shore of the Hudson River. The slim plot revolves around a rivalry between the Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the burly local hero Brom Bones, both of whom are set upon winning the hand of the plump Dutch coquette Katrina van Tassel. Through his delineation of the hapless Ichabod, whose name means “inglorious” or “without honor,” ⁴ Irving lampooned contemporary Yankee American culture—its restlessness, its instability, and, above all, its crass materialism. ⁵ Ichabod’s desire for Katrina, for example, was less an affair of the heart than a passion of the pocketbook. Her rosy cheeks and dainty feet, though appealing, roused him less than the thought of her paternal domain. This, he imagined, could “be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and...