Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art

Introduction

Everything in a picture, it must be added, depends on the composition; if it be the subject that makes the interest, it is the composition that makes, or that at any rate expresses, the subject. By that law, accordingly, our boxful of ghosts [the correspondence of W. W. Story] “compose,” hang together, consent to a mutual relation, confess, in fact, to a mutual dependence. If it is a question of living again, they can live but by each other’s help, so that they close in, join hands, press together for warmth and contact. The picture , before it can be denied, is therefore so made; the sitters are all in their places, and the group fills the frame. We see thereby what has operated, we both recognise, so to speak, the principle of composition and are enabled to name the subject. The subject is the period—it is the period that holds the elements together, rounds them off, makes them right. They partake of it, they preserve it, in return; they justify it, and it justifies the fond chronicler. Periods really need no excuses. —Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) This book is an interpretation of the art writing of James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Clarence Chatham Cook (1828–1900), and William James Stillman (1828–1901). As significant critics from the mid-nineteenth-century art world, they have much to say about art’s definition and aesthetic requirements in a moment of supposed transition—the era of the Civil War, whose upheavals left no aspect of American society untouched. These three writers are the central figures of this study not because they are the only important introduction 2 critical shift critics from the era; they are not. Rather, they figure here because they are, each in his own way, closely associated with key nineteenth-century critical tenets, aesthetic schemata, and classificatory ideas that the book will argue to be central to modern histories of nineteenth-century American art. In comparing these critics’ positions with how we have historicized their words, the book hypothesizes that there exist deep structures in the field: ways of organizing time, style, and meaning in histories of nineteenth-century American art, which are not necessarily reducible to one methodological approach or another. The goal might also be explained by recourse to Henry James’s fanciful “composition” from the epigraph. This composition is nothing less than the form that calls into being the picture of history—that which gives the outline , substance, and collectivity to disparate objects that might well remain invisible without this ordering principle. The “confession of mutual dependence ” allows fragments from the past to exist again, not simply to be meaningful . Transparent and insubstantial, they are otherwise ghosts, James says, but they take on solidity and firm contours when they are juxtaposed in the “right” way. The reembodied ghosts then constitute a subject, the historical period. But James admits that the subject and the composition are actually one and the same. The subject of this book is also a group of figures and the composition that has helped form their present outlines. The period that draws them into relief is the Civil War era, or roughly the 1860s and 1870s. It is a sociopolitical moment that, perhaps not surprisingly, has often been conflated with an art historical period. The war has been perceived as the bold line, the profound rupture, the trauma that drove America forward—to putative freedom, to international stature, to economic expansion, to aesthetic modernism , and so forth. It is the supposedly defining event that runs between and even creates distinct art historical periods. This book looks closely at the rhetorical structures and the critical language employed by the three critics to consider the ways in which their words have helped modern scholars constitute an era by means of classificatory, rhetorical, and linguistic mechanisms . It seeks to analyze how such mechanisms give structure and coherence to the individual components existing in the chronological moment, which we then take to form a meaningful picture that allows us to define as history the art of the nineteenth century. With this condensed and stratified statement of the overall goals, we need to back up several paces and situate the study within the larger discussions to introduction 3 which it aims to contribute: How has nineteenth-century art criticism figured in...