Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s

8. Conclusion: THE ASCENDANCY OF NEW YORK, AND MARKET STRATIFICATION

160 8 Conclusion THE ASCENDANCY OF NEW YORK, AND MARKET STRATIFICATION As early as January 1844, George Graham looked nervously to the New York publishing houses. In a January 1844 “Review of New Books” column, he swooned over the “swarm of new works” coming out of the “prolific press of the Harpers” (46). In 1848 Charles Peterson also wondered what the brothers would be up to next. As a new decade dawned, new forms of competition arrived on the art reproduction scene, threatening the supremacy of the Philadelphia pictorials, and one from the very source Graham and Peterson most feared: in June 1850 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine made its debut (Mott, II, 383). The remaining Philadelphia pictorials circled the wagons by repeating the assertion that they were truly “American.” Graham, apparently the most nervous about his New York publishing brethren, attempted to dismiss Harper’s, sneering in his “Editor’s Table” for March 1851 that it was a good “foreign magazine” because it featured European writers, not American ones (280). Graham had good reason to fret, since his was a decidedly more literary magazine like Harper’s. Godey remained noticeably silent on the matter; evidently, as the publisher of the leading “ladies” magazine, he feared little direct competition from Harper’s, at least in terms of his primary audience. Godey faced competition from another corner, and notice of this new threat surfaced in the pages of his magazine in 1849. Godey spent the decade of the 1840s tirelessly promoting the work of American artists and engravers , most of them Philadelphia artists and engravers. By decade’s end, their names were like familiar friends to the 100,000 readers regularly buying his magazine and clipping out his full-page embellishments. However, a singular engraving featured in his August 1849 presaged change. The mezzotint was FIGURE 8.1 Taking the Queue, frontispiece, Godey’s, August 1849. Engraved by H. S. Wagner for Godey’s. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. 162 THE ASCENDANCY OF NEW YORK, AND MARKET STRATIFICATION engraved by Henry S. Wagner, a portrait engraver active in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s.1 Titled Taking the Queue, the engraving is a curious blend of the anachronistic and the new (see fig. 8.1). The bewigged male slumberer harks back to paintings of an earlier era. The verbally punning title (queue/ hair braid; queue/cue), the playful kittens, the kitchen interior, everything right down to the clothing and hair style on the superintending domestic matron, all scream “Lilly Martin Spencer.” Although Godey does not identify this engraving as originating from a Spencer painting, or as a portrait of Spencer, and although no Spencer painting by this title is known to exist, the visual evidence is certainly suggestive of Spencer’s work from this era. Lilly Martin Spencer relocated from Cincinnati to New York by late 1848, and Sartain had taken notice of her work in his arts column for January 1849. She exhibited a painting, Domestic Happiness, or Hush! Don’t Wake Them in Philadelphia in 1849.2 Sartain later featured a biographical sketch of Spencer in his August 1851 issue (152–54), accompanied by a crude woodcut portrait of the artist. The biographical sketch notes that she had recently exhibited two paintings at the Philadelphia Art Union, The Flower Girl and Domestic Felicity, that had “attracted considerable attention” from viewers. Regardless of whether or not Taking the Queue is an echo of a lost Spencer work, from historical hindsight, the presence of this image in Godey’s late in the decade of the 1840s inadvertently advertised the shift in cultural and artistic influence that would be clearly under way by the early 1850s. Taking the Queue puns verbally on another Lilly Martin Spencer connection to the shifting cultural tides that Godey noted in his pages in 1849—by the mid1850s Spencer would be “taking the cue” from other struggling New York artists , and selling her canvases to the French firm of Goupil, Vibert & Co. for print distribution. As Spencer scholar April Masten has noted, Spencer sold dozens of paintings to the firm in the 1850s, and this firm distributed nearly one million prints of her paintings in the 1850s.3 Godey had fumed about Goupil and company’s invasion of the New York art market in a column entitled “AMERICAN ART-UNION, NEW YORK” in December 1849 (468). Godey charged that the French firm, “by...