Authors: Steven Millhauser
[6]
THE INFERNAL PICTURE GALLERY
1837
Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 46 3/4 in.
Elizabeth’s Journal for 15 December 1836 records a visit by John Pope Coddington, a New York art collector and amateur painter, whom she describes as “most bewildered by our kitchen-parlor.” Coddington appears to have been even more bewildered by the canvases he was shown, but three days later he wrote to commission a cycle of eight paintings on “The Power of Art.” Moorash labored over his unlikely commission for nearly a year before abandoning it after a third painting. He liked to refer to the cycle as his “punishment,” which it quickly became despite the attraction of the theme and the lure of income; certainly the first two paintings are disappointing performances and represent a step backward in the development of his art.
As an undergraduate Moorash had frequented the Boston Athenaeum, and in his two years abroad with William Pinney he had spent many days in the art galleries, auction rooms, and temporary exhibition halls of London and Paris, as well as in a number of private collections to which Pinney had entry, but Moorash was at best a restless, impatient visitor of picture galleries, “those most fashionable of graveyards with their numbered headstones” (letter to Elizabeth, 14 May 1833). His refusal to accompany Pinney to Italy is well known; he argued that the
entire country was “an interminable picture gallery decorated with olive trees” (letter of William Pinney to Sophia Pinney, 6 June 1833). The only pictures he is known to have viewed with pleasure were not paintings at all, but satirical mezzotints hung in the windows of printsellers’ shops. A row of paintings in a gallery, he once remarked to Edward Vail, reminded him of a line of prisoners waiting to be shot. This irritable response to what he called the “necessary evil” of art museums no doubt partly accounts for the infernal theme, but it would be a mistake to see in the painting no more than revenge for the “months of smothering boredom” he claimed to have suffered among the numbered headstones. Moorash believed profoundly in the power of painting to affect the beholder. In a letter to Pinney (undated, c. 1835) he speaks of the
“impressive
nature of art, that is, its power of impressing itself onto the mind and soul, as a knife impresses itself in flesh,” and behind the playfulness and mockery of
The Infernal Picture Gallery
we hear the unmistakable note of this deep theme.
The Infernal Picture Gallery
is based on no known art museum or private collection. It shows two soaring walls crowded with pictures in carved and gilded frames (in all, thirty-eight paintings are visible), as well as the statue of a naked nymph emerging from her bath on a marble pedestal in one corner. A doorway opens onto a vista of arched galleries. Two copyists are seated at their easels in opposite corners of the room. The gallery holds some half dozen well-dressed visitors, all of whom look up aghast or press their gloved hands to their frock coats and frilled bosoms. From the thick frames, figures are emerging. A fat naked woman who appears to have descended from an allegorical banquet stands smiling before a stiff, startled gentleman in a frock coat, while a red-faced colonel ogles her through his monocle. A naked Jove, covering his genitals with a bunch of green grapes, appears to be abducting a terrified woman in a fashionable cloak; an Indian in war paint brandishes a tomahawk. But it is not always
possible to tell which figures are visitors to the gallery and which have escaped from the frames—a confusion that is surely part of Moorash’s intention. Indeed this satirical questioning of the boundaries between the illusory and the real is given further complexity by a striking comic detail: one of the copyists is shown leaning uneasily away from his canvas, from which a leg in a shiny black boot is emerging. Since the canvas is a precise copy of a painting on the wall, Moorash has introduced a figure who is twice removed from life. But his artistic playfulness does not end here: the emerging boot casts a clearly delineated shadow on the picture frame, while the boot remaining in the picture casts its own painted shadow. Thus two orders of shadow are established, one “real” and one “painted,” although the viewer is meant to be aware that the “real” shadow is itself painted; and to complicate matters a little, the picture being copied contains a statue that casts a shadow, and the copyist himself casts a shadow on the gallery floor. But despite such elements of epistemological playfulness and outright satire,
The Infernal Picture Gallery
has a darker impulse, for a number of the images are disturbing: a lion holds in its jaws the bitten-off leg of a man-about-town, who lies staring in horror at his blood-gushing stump from which hang shreds of veins and sinews; a bandit with a red scar on his cheek is plunging a dagger into the neck of a kneeling woman; and in a dark corner a lady with a torn bodice and disheveled hair is struggling to free herself from a leering satyr, who is pulling her head back by the hair and squeezing the nipple of one bared breast. The painting, with its clearly drawn figures and its reddish light, hovers uneasily between humor and horror.
The grotesque and at times sadistic elements of
The Infernal Picture Gallery
have raised questions about its connection with the Diabolist movement (fl. 1835–36), especially in light of Moorash’s defense of their work against the bloodless academicism of the day, but aside from a few features so general as to be
meaningless there is little to connect Moorash’s satirical painting with the dubious productions of that school. Typical Diabolist works treat subjects that are intended to be shocking and titillating: torture, slaughter (especially of half-naked women by Turkish soldiers in colorful uniforms), orgiastic Roman banquets full of overturned flagons and bared breasts, and studies of bleeding women mangled by wild animals. John Pine (1805–1849), who after his defection from the Phantasmacists became the acknowledged leader of the Diabolist school, was noted for his meticulous studies of partially dissected female corpses, his chained women gnawed by rats, and his forest scenes in which satyrs with very hairy haunches sodomize pale prepubescent girls with dreamy blue eyes, rosy lips, and ivory buttocks. Pine was arrested in 1836 and after his release became a fashionable still-life artist specializing in moist bunches of grapes, bloody slabs of meat, and sunstruck wineglasses half-filled with ruby wine. Moorash’s alleged praise of Pine (in a conversation with Edward Ingham Vail) should not be misconstrued as praise for pornography and the eroticism of death, but rather must be understood as an attack on the fashionable correctness and tameness of Vail and his set.
[7]
GALATEA
1837
Oil on canvas, 44 × 35 1/4 in.
The second painting of the “Power of Art” cycle was begun in the last week of March and completed on 21 April, a comparatively rapid rate of composition for Moorash. The broad, free brushstrokes of
Elizabeth in Dream
have here been replaced by the tight, controlled brushwork of a neoclassical academician striving for the scrupulous rendition of minute detail and a high
degree of linear definition. So extreme is Moorash’s retreat from his earlier experiments in the loosening of contour that one cannot but suspect the artist’s deliberate and almost parodic effort to satisfy a taste not his own.
The source of the Galatea legend is Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
(243–97), in which, it should be noted, Pygmalion’s statue is unnamed; but Moorash treats the incident freely, in a manner without precedent. Galatea is shown in a state of transition, half marble and half flesh: the living half is struggling to free itself from the cold stone. It is a disturbing conception, in which the living creature appears to be trapped in marble. The living half is nearly as white as the marble half, but very faintly suffused with a ghostly flesh tone. Nothing is shown of the sculptor except his tense hand, from whose veins and sinews we infer a response of terror.
[8]
THE UNVEILING
1837
Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 29 1/2 in.
The dark sinister light that obscures sharpness of outline, the deliberate sketchiness of the uplifted faces, the flattening of the picture plane, the emphasis on atmosphere, all separate this painting from the first two of the “Power of Art” cycle and show Moorash returning to the true direction of his art after forcing himself to submit to the imagined taste of his improbable patron. The artist, half-concealed in darkness, is here presented as a demonic figure deliberately exercising a spell on the audience, who gaze up fearfully. The uncertain vantage point appears to be above the audience, on a level with the stage, a strategy that permits Moorash to carry through his plan of not showing the masterwork. We see nothing but a piece of velvet
drapery trailing on the stage; it is impossible to tell whether a painting, a statue, or something else entirely has been unveiled.
In her Journal (8 November 1837) Elizabeth noted that “Edmund’s devil picture has given me a fright.” This entry must refer to
The Unveiling
, which was begun in early October, and not to a lost painting, as Havemeyer supposes. On 9 November Elizabeth had a night of “bad dreams” and recorded that she woke “to hear Edmund’s footsteps overhead, pacing, pacing. I longed to run to him, and take his beloved head upon my shoulder, but knowing that the suspicion of having waked me would distress him, I could not tell him of my fearful dream, whereupon I held my bitter peace.” The painting apparently continued to make a strong impression, for nearly a year later (4 August 1838) we find: “William and Edmund at a quarter past midnight. Merits of painting and literature. William argued for the cumulative force of arts that move in time. Edmund violently opposed: a painting strikes you
all at once
, with its full force, instead of dispersing its effects. A painting
strikes a blow.
William (smiling): Is art then so dangerous? E: Painting is devil’s work—let the beholder beware! I instanced the devil picture. Edmund laughed, and said it had given him a month of headaches, but now he thought it a pretty piece of work to frighten a child withal.”
[9]
FIGURES IN SNOW
1838
Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 1/8 in.
Moorash appears to have begun work on this picture on 10 November 1837, that is to say, the very day following his night of furious pacing. Elizabeth’s terse entry for 10 November reads: “Edmund working like mad.” On 22 November she notes that he has been taking long walks in the snow “for his snow picture”;
considering his slow habits of composition, it is reasonable to assume that he was still at work on the picture begun on 10 November. In mid-December he put it aside for a
Stormy Night
(letter to William Pinney, 3 December 1837) that he apparently abandoned or destroyed. He was back at work on his “snow picture” by the first week of January and appears to have completed work on it by the middle of February. It remains uncertain to what extent
Figures in Snow
was composed in accordance with the new method he is known to have adopted by the summer of 1840. Instead of discarding canvas after canvas until he achieved the effect he wanted, he began in the summer of 1840 to work obsessively on a single canvas, painting out unwanted portions repeatedly, or else scraping them out with a piece of pumice, so that he gradually built up thick, uneven layers of paint, often with distinct ridges.
Figures in Snow
appears to be transitional; several portions are painted over, but the overall accumulation is notably less than it was to become.
A letter from William Pinney (7 June 1838) to his sister Sophia reports that Moorash was “exhilarated” while working on the painting, and it is reasonable to suppose that part of his exhilaration lay in his triumphant return to the technique of
Elizabeth in Dream.
The heavy, swirling snowfall blurs and distorts the two figures barely glimpsed through the raging whiteness, with its eerie tints of brown and violet. A streak of red in one figure, perhaps indicating a scarf, is carried over in paler and paler tones, as if the redness is staining the storm, or as if the snow is dissolving the figure into liquid.
A pencil study that appears to be connected with the finished picture shows the two figures clearly as William Pinney and Elizabeth, coming up the front path of Stone Hill Cottage; the Journal entry for 6 January 1838 speaks of a visit by William “in wild snow.” Evidently Moorash made a quick sketch, which he referred to in completing the painting. If the sketch was in fact made on 6 January, then the two figures were a late addition to
the snow picture, but abundant evidence for the composition of other paintings attests that Moorash’s conception of a picture often underwent a significant shift during the course of composition, after which he pursued his new vision relentlessly. William Pinney, by now an architect of growing reputation, was a frequent visitor at Stone Hill Cottage; in the spring of the following year he built a cottage of his own on the far shore of Black Lake, about two miles from Stone Hill. It is not certain when he fell in love with Elizabeth Moorash, although his letters to his sister in 1837 and 1838 make it clear that he found Elizabeth enchanting. In the light of later events
Figures in Snow
may seem to have an ominous suggestiveness, as if Moorash foresaw the whole dark history, but nothing in the surviving correspondence or in Elizabeth’s Journal lends support to such interpretations. Moorash cannot have been unaware of his friend’s growing interest in his sister, but in January of 1838 William was the eagerly awaited friend of the family, who was welcome to stay for a day or a month and who had not yet disturbed the harmony of things by his declaration of love for Elizabeth.
Figures in Snow
is best seen as a study in white, by a young master sure of his way.
[10]
ELIZABETH AT DUSK: BLACK LAKE
1838
Oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 37 5/8 in.
Elizabeth often walked down to the shore of Black Lake, the large, gloomy lake bordered by cattails that lay some two miles from Stone Hill in a bleak setting of stony fields, clusters of conifers, and a dead ash split by lightning. On the far shore lay the low pine-covered hills where in the spring of 1839 William Pinney was to build his cottage. Edmund sometimes accompanied
Elizabeth to Black Lake, where brother and sister would walk along the lakeshore in animated conversation broken by long, peaceful silences. Sometimes they would pull out of the reeds an old rowboat that Edmund had named
Sacagawea
and row about the dark, quiet lake, Elizabeth at the oars and Edmund lying back against the pillow with a novel by Scott or Bulwer that he held open but did not read.