In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This chapter studies the critical writing of the book’s last central figure, William J. Stillman. Stillman’s writing was well known in the antebellum American art world, though today his name is less familiar than Jarves’s or Cook’s. In addition to his antebellum work, Stillman authored archeological studies and political reports in the latter half of the century that appeared regularly in the era’s most respected journals and daily newspapers.1 From his earliest days as a new graduate of Union College in 1848, Stillman was in the midst of the American art world. He was apparently an avid and persuasive debater, taking up the heavy questions of art and nature with the profound convictions of his time, augmented by his personal experience with landscape painting, wilderness life, and even Ruskin. Convinced by his friends to make his views more public, he undertook the project of cofounding the country’s first journal dedicated solely to art and art criticism. He and John Durand, son of the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, thus initiated the Crayon in 1855 with no real precedent to follow and very meager resources at their disposal.2 It was an evangelizing enterprise, “an apostolate of art,” as Stillman himself subsequently referred to it in his retrospective narrative Autobiography of a Journalist .3 Stillman edited the journal in its first two years; his writing and his ideas about art fill its pages. In fact, aside from the few contributions he obtained from his literary acquaintances, most of the unsigned articles are his work. Consequently, Stillman may be less familiar as a name, but his writing is a key source of antebellum art discourse. 4 william j. stillman’s ruskinian criticism Metaphor and Essential Meaning william j. stillman’s ruskinian criticism 77 This chapter focuses on his Crayon writing in order to take a step further into the structure of nineteenth-century American art discourse. It delves deeper into the language itself, examining the tropes that turn up repeatedly in Stillman’s expression of his art theory. His principles were expressed in metaphorical language that his conception of art could not do without. This definition of art was fundamentally similar to that which we have already seen with the other critics. The figurative language thus offers additional means by which to understand how such a definition operated. Stillman’s tropes take on extra significance when we then consider how, in the late 1860s, he rejected his earlier Ruskinian understanding of art and his critical language changed. These two important phases of Stillman’s career are taken up here, in part because they suggest immediately that perhaps his work follows the paradigm described by our periodization in a way that, as we saw, Jarves’s and Cook’s did not. While the general features of Stillman’s life are not unknown,4 two recurring themes turn up in his autobiographical narrative that were repeated less self-consciously in his many published articles. They are particularly relevant here. These are not necessarily the aspects of his life that other modern scholars have used to define him.5 While there is unanimous recognition of Stillman’s important role as editor of the Crayon—and his primary reputation as an American follower of Ruskin—it is less widely recognized that he later adamantly rejected Ruskin’s philosophy. Stillman’s early writing repeated time and again (in a dogmatic fashion that he himself retrospectively identified and critiqued) the widespread belief in an essential identity of art and American nature, as well as with divine and national virtue—concepts that held sway beyond just the Ruskinians. These ideas are well known and much discussed in the literature of American art history. Stillman subsequently rejected this early theory of art, writing in many contexts about the mistaken premise of Ruskin’s philosophy and defining instead the principles of “true art.” This important feature of his career has gone largely unnoticed by modern historians.6 Yet it does indeed fit the shift identified in our periodization, making it a bit ironic that Stillman’s change of heart has generally been overlooked. It is particularly pertinent because, as in all of his writings from the late 1860s onward, Stillman was very articulate and very insistent on the subject. In many ways, this change of philosophy defined his art criticism for the great majority of his long career. Also, in the frankness of his apostasy, he...

Share