Authors: Steven Millhauser
Of the thirty-one surviving Elizabeth paintings—that is, the nineteen paintings in which Elizabeth appears alone, and the twelve paintings in which she appears with another figure or figures—twenty-three show her as a blurred, distorted, or unrecognizable figure, while the remaining eight do not contain any face or figure at all, and are classified as Elizabeth paintings solely on the basis of titles. In a sense, Moorash never painted his sister. And yet there can be no question of her presence in the paintings to which she lends her name. Moorash’s use of his sister in the Elizabeth paintings was inspirational, and at times erratic, but it was not only that: even in the earliest paintings he was working out a method. It is significant that he continually asked her to pose for him, as if he were painting a meticulous, highly finished portrait of the popular academic kind. Elizabeth’s Journal is filled with accounts of long posing sessions, after which she might discover that a portion of canvas had been covered with a rich shade of brownish black. Moorash’s method was not, as Havemeyer supposes, “expressionistic,” except in the most general and unhistorical sense. On 12 April 1838 Elizabeth wrote: “In the afternoon I posed for three hours before the window. E very pleased with me, commends my fortitude. Scornful of imitating nature—that old saw. Spoke of his attempt to dissolve the natural world onto its components and reassemble them in order to reveal true nature.” On 3 September 1841: “Edmund wants to dissolve forms and reconstitute them so as to release their energy. Art as alchemy.” These hints suggest an esthetic that is neither expressive nor
imitative, but transformative: Moorash appears to be seeking a way to reveal or release another order of being, a deeper structure than the accidental and physical one that presents itself to the innocent eye.
In the painting Elizabeth is alone, a small, shadowy figure almost swallowed up by the immensity of dark lake and dark sky, which flow into each other indistinguishably. The swirling array of many-hued browns all stream from the dark Elizabeth figure at the center. A mood of deep melancholy pervades the picture, as if a stain of brown sadness has seeped through a crack in the universe. Elizabeth’s brief Journal entry for 6 June 1838 reads: “Upon seeing the picture I was seized with a terrible agitation. Edmund has seen into my very soul.” Three days later, on 9 June, she writes: “My spirits have lifted on this glorious morning. How deeply I feel the presence of a benevolent Spirit in the hills and valleys. I must pray for guidance.” Elizabeth’s tantalizing comments have been taken to refer to the coming crisis in her relation with her brother, but it is possible that she had already begun to show signs of the nervous disorder that was to reveal itself more decisively in the years to come.
[11]
DORNRÖSCHEN
1839
Oil on canvas, 19 1/4 × 27 7/16 in.
On 23 December 1838 Elizabeth recorded a single quotation in her journal: “‘The fairy tales of my childhood have a meaning deeper than the truths taught by life.’—Schiller,
Wallenstein.”
There is no further mention of Schiller in the Journal, but among Elizabeth’s favorite books must be counted Grimm’s
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
, to which she refers frequently in 1839–40 and of which she possessed two different editions: the revised edition
of 1819 and the abridged edition, or
Kleine Ausgabe
, of 1825, with illustrations by a third Grimm brother, Ludwig Emil Grimm. It is possible that she read and translated directly to Moorash, although in the case of so well known a tale the memory of a childhood telling cannot be discounted.
Dornröschen
, usually translated “Briar Rose,” is the Grimm version of Perrault’s
La belle au bois dormant
(“The Sleeping Beauty”); it is one of the shortest and most powerful of the Grimm tales, far more evocative than Perrault’s lengthy version.
A surviving sketch (on the back of a bill for canvas and stretcher) reveals that Moorash at one point attempted to depict the great hedge of thorns bursting into blossom, but there is no trace of this vision in the final painting, in which the spell remains unbroken. In this study of darkness we are in Dornröschen’s tower room; only as the eye adjusts to the predominantly black tones do we distinguish the thick thorn branches that have pushed through the open casement window and fill the small chamber entirely. Dornröschen remains invisible except for her hauntingly long and vinelike hair, which winds about the thorny branches and hangs in thick, disturbing clusters, although she may also be present as a kind of faint glimmer that appears to come from somewhere in the depths of the dark thorns and permits us to make out the sharp thornpoints, the hair, the tones of blackness. The general effect is uncomfortable, suggesting on the one hand a dark peacefulness, a brooding tranquility, a yearning for annihilation, and on the other hand the oppressiveness of living entombment.
Why did Moorash turn to this tale and this image in the early months of 1839? Unfortunately there can be no clear or certain answer. Was he, as Havemeyer suggests, thinking of his beloved Elizabeth, entombed at Stone Hill Cottage, enwrapped in the thorns of his art and waiting for the unthinkable prince to come? Havemeyer does not mention a brief but crucial entry in Elizabeth’s Journal on 2 January: “Visit by Vail and his new bride,
Charlotte. Vail doting, Edmund charming, Charlotte pretty in a girlish way; shy; big clear eyes, pewter gray.” It is the first recorded visit of the forty-year-old Vail and his girlish wife, Charlotte (1823–1846), who was sixteen years old but looked two years younger. Moorash might have been thinking of the young bride, spellbound in marriage to the graying Vail—but in that case, whose footsteps would be heard on the tower stair when the thorns burst into blossom? Or should we rather think of Moorash himself as Dornröschen, asleep in the deep spell of his art?
[12]
FACES IN THE STREAM
1839
Oil on canvas, 25 × 32 1/2 in.
Moorash appears to have made a number of preliminary sketches, which have not survived, in April or May of 1839; the painting was completed in late summer, probably during the last week of July. The stream is almost certainly the picturesque rocky brook that flowed, and flows still, from the Saccanaw Hills across a wooded stretch of Moorash’s property to empty into Black Lake. A small, railed bridge, no trace of which remains, crossed the stream at the place where an old Indian trail led to the water. The bridge rail can be seen in the painting as a broken and scattered series of brown and yellow brushstrokes in the rushing water. The faces, though recorded as little more than energetic dashes of paint, are unquestionably those of Elizabeth, William Pinney, and Sophia Pinney, as an entry in Elizabeth’s Journal makes clear, although even without that entry the student of Moorash’s work can recognize the distinguishing marks of all three faces, however dissolved and scattered by the turbulent brook.
Sophia Pinney (1816–1846), William Pinney’s sister, had visited
at Stone Hill Cottage on three occasions in the mid-1830s but began to accompany her brother regularly in the spring of 1837. In that year alone William and Sophia stayed at Stone Hill Cottage for a week in April, two weeks in May, ten days in June, three weeks in August, a week in October, and four days in November. The frequent visits continued in 1838, and in the spring of 1839 William, now an architect in Boston, built a summer cottage on the far shore of Black Lake at the foot of a wooded hill. The cottage, which was twice the size of the cottage at Stone Hill, included a music room, a library, and a housekeeper’s chamber; in a stable behind the cottage Pinney installed a pair of bays equipped with English saddles in the latest style. Sophia had become close friends with Elizabeth, and in the spring and summer of 1839 the two couples visited back and forth almost daily, often rowing across the lake at dusk to one or the other cottage and separating long after midnight. At the Pinney cottage, Sophia, at Elizabeth’s bidding, would play selections from Schumann’s recently published
Fantasiestücke
, op. 12 (1838), or
Carnaval
, op. 9 (1837), sometimes adding a Chopin étude or nocturne, while Edmund sat with tense fingers and half-closed eyes in a “paradoxical state of dreamy alertness” (Journal, 18 July 1839). Elizabeth was not simply liked by her younger friend (Sophia at this time was twenty-three, Elizabeth twenty-five); rather, she seemed to have inspired in Sophia an outpouring of ardent admiration. At the same time she woke in Sophia a kind of maternal protectiveness that made Elizabeth restless and a little impatient. Sophia would insist that Elizabeth wear a shawl on cool summer nights; she tried to change Elizabeth’s careless eating and sleeping habits; she became acutely sensitive to Elizabeth’s moods and began to share her headaches. Elizabeth was fond of her passionately devoted friend but refused to permit herself to be reformed. Once, when Sophia reproached her for staying up all night and paying for it with a savage headache, Elizabeth spoke sharply to her, whereupon Sophia burst into
tears. The sharp exchange was an exception; the friendship was warm and ran deep, though one senses that Sophia was the more tightly bound of the two, perhaps because the deepest current of Elizabeth’s feelings ran toward her brother.
[13]
CLAIR DE LUNE
1839
Oil on canvas, 36 × 32 in.
This picture, which seems to breathe the air of a tranquil summer night, was in fact painted in the fall: begun in mid-September, it was completed during a week of snow flurries in early November. A curious stillness reigns (compare Moorash’s two other surviving night studies, the
Nachtstück
and
August Night):
the world seems to be caught in a spell of moonlight. The sense of spell, of enchantment, connects the painting to
Dornröschen
, but the feeling here is quite different: it is a study of calm, of harmony, of an almost weary peacefulness. As if to emphasize the harmony of earth and heaven, Moorash locates the horizon line at the center of the picture: a black line of hills, barely visible and dissolving at top and bottom into blue, divides the brilliant deep blue of the night sky and the slightly darker blues of the lake. The sky is in the lake, and the lake is in the sky, and all is mysteriously irradiated by the light of an unseen moon. Moorash here abandons his thick impastos for an uncharacteristically flat, even surface, though he gives his blues depth by the use of glazes. The dark, glowing blues, the mysterious stillness, the doubleness of earth and sky, all provoke in the viewer a sense of hidden meaning, as if the painting were on the verge of a revelation it refuses to make.
The lake is Black Lake, as a preliminary sketch, which includes identifiable foreground objects, clearly shows; among the
black line of hills is the hill where William Pinney had built his cottage. A letter from Sophia to her friend Fanny Cornwall on 3 September 1839 reveals that on the night of 31 August William proposed to Elizabeth, whose Journal remains strangely silent about the entire episode. The proposal shocked Moorash, who was deeply bound to his sister, and who, in a sense that must not be misunderstood, was virtually married to her, but who believed profoundly in her right to lead whatever life she chose. Elizabeth’s feelings are more difficult to grasp, in part because of her refusal or inability to write a single syllable about Pinney’s proposal. It is clear that she liked William immensely; she may even have loved him; his proposal threw her into a profound state of uncertainty, amounting at times to despair, which lasted three days. On the fourth day, the day William was to return to Boston, she refused him. What she had to overcome in renouncing William, and therefore a “normal” life, cannot be known; certainly her love for Edmund played its part, but her ardent and complex love for her brother should not be twisted into a banal perversion. Among other things, she feared that her absence might harm him, for he was careless about himself in every way, and once quipped that if it weren’t for Elizabeth he would starve to death out of sheer absentmindedness. If she sacrificed anything—and it is far from certain that she ever was in love with William Pinney—it was for the sake of Edmund’s art.
Moorash was at work on
Clair de lune
by mid-September, less than two weeks after Elizabeth’s refusal. It is possible to see in the painting a retreat from the violence of his sensations to an extreme calm, as he returned in thought to the early days of that summer, when the two brother-sister couples visited back and forth night after night across the enchanted lake. Many entries in Elizabeth’s Journal suggest his happiness that July and August, painting all day in the barn and wandering the warm and sweet-smelling summer nights in the company of his sister, his friend, and his friend’s sister, who was also his sister’s friend. It
is difficult not to see the doubleness of
Clair de lune
as in some sense a reflection of the two harmonious couples, each itself a double. The friendship among the four was to last for seven more years, but it never recaptured the ease and innocence of that summer.
[14]
NACHTSTÜCK
1840
Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 30 5/16 in.
A more deliberate contrast to
Clair de lune
can scarcely be imagined: here all is oppressive, shut in, brooding, menacing, suffocating. A shadowy, unnameable creature hangs in the night like black smoke, looming over the dark landscape, which seems to shrivel beneath it. The placement of the black line of hills near the base of the picture creates a paradox that increases the sense of suffocation and menace: an eye accustomed to the expansive effects of immense skyscapes, which seem to lead the mind upward to a higher world far from the petty cares of earth, here confronts a dark, oppressive force that crushes it back to the frail line of hills that appear to be cowering under a blow. The sky-filling creature or monster is rendered with supreme skill, for the slightest touch of exaggeration would have pushed it into caricature; the creature is disturbingly elusive, at once present and absent, now a mere illusion produced by thundery cloud-shapes with swirls of black instead of eyeholes, now a shadowy form brooding over the world.