Authors: Steven Millhauser
The subject is taken from Book II, canto vi of
The Faerie Queene
, in which Spenser introduces the temptress Phaedria: her
aim is to draw knights across the Idle Lake to her pleasant isle and lull them into a life of drowsy sensual pleasure. Like Spenser’s more sinister temptress in the Bower of Bliss, Phaedria derives from a rich tradition of Renaissance sorceresses in enchanted gardens, in particular Ariosto’s Alcina and Tasso’s Armida, both of whom are modeled after Homer’s Circe. Phaedria is presented as “loose” and “light,” but she represents a powerful temptation: to swerve away from a difficult task, to rest awhile, to relax the will. She is the secret voice whispering in the ear of all those whose lives are bent toward difficult achievement: she is the song the sirens sang, the same song heard by Ulysses lashed to the mast and by Gustav von Aschenbach relaxing on the beach. Moorash, who lived to work, must often have entertained the dream of some other life, in some other world: a life of peace, sweetness, and sensual ease.
Moorash wisely makes no attempt to imitate Spenser’s description, but instead seeks to render the island’s power of enchantment: the dark island looms before us in an unearthly light, parting here and there to reveal dim, green-shadowy recesses that wind back into velvet darkness. The island, a gloomy mass of overlapping blues, greens, and violets painted in free, flowing brushstrokes, appears to beckon us inward, to soothe us with the scents of green summer dusks, to drug our senses with a dreamlike melting sweetness: it invites us to yield, to bow our weary heads. But even as it does so we are aware of a counterpressure. That dark is too dark, those mossy recesses close too quickly. The unseen bristles everywhere. There are hints that we will never return from the inviting darkness, and that what presents itself as sensual surrender is nothing but Death. Moorash’s vision, in fact, reaches to the deep place where love becomes death: the desire to surrender, the longing to lose oneself in another, becomes the final surrender, the longing for annihilation.
The question of the influence of Spenser-derived paintings on Moorash’s
Phaedria
remains unanswered. Since the 1770s
The
Faerie Queene
had inspired a host of paintings in England and America; Moorash may have known West’s three Spenser paintings of the 1770s (
Una in the Woods, The Cave of Despair
, and
Fidelia and Speranza)
, Copley’s
Red Cross Knight
(1793), and Allston’s
The Flight of Florimell
(1819), although there is no evidence that he ever gave a moment’s thought to a single one of these solemn academic studies, and in any case his approach to Spenser is entirely his own. Influence, however oblique, is far more likely to have come from the mysterious Spenser cult that raged in Cambridge during Moorash’s first two undergraduate years (1826–28) before ceasing abruptly under suspicious circumstances, and that took its most distinctive expression in the form of a secret society who called themselves the Sons and Daughters of the Faerie Queene. This group of men and women from Cambridge’s highest social circle adopted names of characters in
The Faerie Queene
(Busirane, False Florimell, Scudamore, Queen Malecasta, Belphoebe, Sansjoy), met weekly at midnight in the homes of various members, and enacted elaborately costumed
tableaux vivants
based on scenes from their beloved poem, in which women of impeccable moral standards and unquestioned virtue were said to dress like nymphs, shepherdesses, temptresses, and fleeing maidens, in scant and semitransparent costumes, while pillars of male society assumed the garb of satyrs, wicked enchanters, and lustful hermits. The tableaux were enhanced by elaborate stage scenery designed and painted by Richard Henry Daw, later a minor member of the Phantasmacists but at this time known to be an acquaintance of Chester Calcott and William Pinney. Can Moorash have been present at one of the midnight meetings of the Sons and Daughters of the Faerie Queene, who occasionally issued highly coveted invitations to friends outside the charmed circle? Daw’s backdrops were destroyed by fire in 1832 but are said to have produced remarkably suggestive atmospheric effects, especially in the dark forest scenes favored by the group, in which he was adept at conveying
sensations of lurking evil and hidden menace by means of mossy rocks, shadowy grottoes, gnarled branches, and twisting paths, murkily illumined by red-paned lanterns and obscured by the smoke of concealed braziers.
Moorash had unusual difficulty with
Phaedria’s Isle
, taking it up and abandoning it all through the spring and summer, beginning work on several paintings that he never finished and evidently destroyed, and completing it only in November, with the remark that it was “botched work.” It is not hard to understand his struggle if we recall that the painting expresses in part a desire to be released from painting. But Phaedria is also a temptress who has a “loose lap” (II. vi. 14); the delights she offers, like those of Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss, are sexual. The precise state of Moorash’s feelings toward Sophia at the time of the painting are difficult to determine. His relation to her had become more problematic after the completion of
Sophia Daydreaming;
she refused to sit for him again and did not accompany William on his ten-day visit in January 1842, at the very time Elizabeth had begun to read
The Faerie Queene
aloud. She returned to Black Lake with William in the spring, and the mutual visits across the lake resumed, but an incident of the summer is perhaps indicative of what was to come. On a warm night in July the four friends decided to walk all around Black Lake. They proceeded in continually shifting pairs: Edmund-William and Sophia-Elizabeth, Edmund-Elizabeth and Sophia-William, Edmund-Sophia and William-Elizabeth. At one point when Edmund was walking with Sophia, she lost her footing on a loose stone and started to fall. Edmund seized her and prevented her fall; but she began struggling, wrenched herself free, and fell to the ground. William came running up and helped her to her feet. Elizabeth wiped dirt from her dress. When Elizabeth looked up, she saw Edmund standing unnaturally still with a wild look in his eye. A moment later he bent over, picked up a stone, and threw it violently into the lake. He stood watching
the moonlit ripples before turning back to Sophia with an anxious inquiry about her fall. Sophia started walking and suddenly clung to William’s arm; the party returned to the Pinney cottage, for Sophia had twisted her ankle.
[19]
AUGUST NIGHT
1843
Oil on canvas, 40 5/8 × 34 1/4 in.
Immediately after completing
Phaedria’s Isle
in November 1842, Moorash began a series of sketches for a second Spenser-inspired painting called
The Cave of Despair
, which he worked at through the end of the year; neither the painting nor the sketches have survived. His difficulties continued. In February he traveled to Boston with Elizabeth—his first trip since the move to Saccanaw Falls in 1836. There he looked up old acquaintances whose letters had remained unanswered for seven years, stopped in at the Athenaeum, visited three or four studios, and dined with the Pinneys. Within a week he was restless and fretful, and traveled with Elizabeth to Hartford, where they spent the night with their parents and fled the next morning. They traveled south—Baltimore, Charleston, Richmond—and were back at Stone Hill Cottage on 2 March. A window had broken; snow lay drifted on the kitchen floor. By 4 March Moorash was back at work, on a painting that appears to have been an early version of one of the lost works of 1844. William and Sophia returned to Black Lake at the end of April. Edmund sketched outdoors, took long walks, stayed up all night, and slept till noon. On 31 July he tripped in the barn and cut his forehead. On 2 August, as he and Elizabeth were leaving the Pinney cottage after midnight, he broke away from Elizabeth and returned to the front door, where he said something to Sophia that caused her to step
back with a hand raised to her throat. Precisely what he said is unclear, but it appears to have been a declaration of love. The next day he shut himself in his upstairs studio—he had been working in the barn—and began
August Night
, which he completed in two weeks.
It is a remarkable painting, which has retained its power to shock. The startling sky, which appears to crack open and release a violent radiance, is painted with a new freedom of brushstroke, a stroke that makes no attempt to conceal itself, as if the paint and the night it represents are one and the same. The entire picture pulses with a strange, intoxicating energy, as if the hills, the wood, and the swirling night-sky have been swept up into the all-annihilating brilliance of the unseen moon. The picture has been called a celebration, but it evades easy description; it affects the viewer as a release of energy, with the doubleness implied by release: liberation and destruction.
Elizabeth records in her Journal that on the morning of 18 August Edmund called down to her in a “strange, agitated voice.” When she entered his workroom she saw two things: the painting, which she calls “a whirlwind,” and Edmund, lying on his back on the floor. She cried out and ran to him, but he smiled up at her and said that he had been studying his picture at a new angle. He thought it was done—what did she think? Elizabeth looked at
August Night
“through tears of terror and joy.” She never got over the sense that the violent painting had struck him dead.
[20]
ANGER
1843
Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 × 20 1/2 in.
According to Elizabeth’s Journal, Moorash rose from the floor, dusted himself off, and immediately began work on another
painting, which he completed in the last week of September.
Anger
is unusual in Moorash’s oeuvre both for its explicit statement of mood and for its treatment of the small foreground figure: she is drawn in firm outline and heavily stylized—white dress, yellow hair—so that she almost resembles a child’s drawing of an angel. She stands with her back to the viewer and is looking out over a red lake. The landscape is sketchy and generalized, suggested in a few bold and flowing lines—shore, lake, hills, sky—and is painted entirely in shades of red, built up with layers of glazes. The red world appears to be streaming out of the little foreground figure, like rays around a sun.
Havemeyer is surely mistaken to attribute the anger of the title to Moorash himself. The evidence of Elizabeth’s Journal is decisively against such an interpretation. Moorash reproached himself bitterly for offending Sophia by his words, by his very existence—how dare he sully her purity with his filth? Immediately upon beginning the painting he sent Elizabeth across Black Lake to effect a reconciliation, which she appears to have done; as if nothing had happened, the nightly visits were resumed, even as Moorash painted in red.
[21]
TOTENTANZ
1843?–45
Oil on canvas, 44 1/4 × 52 1/8 in.
The dating of Moorash’s final paintings must remain uncertain, for two reasons. First, in the last months of 1843 he began to make a regular habit of putting aside a painting-in-progress and returning to it weeks or months later after having begun a new painting that also would be put aside after an intense bout of work; there is evidence from Elizabeth’s Journal that during a single summer month in 1844 he worked on four different paintings
(only two of which have survived). Second, the Journal itself becomes spottier in the final years, often omitting whole weeks at a time as Elizabeth becomes increasingly incapacitated by severe headaches and a variety of obscure illnesses that prevent her from making detailed entries. With the possible exception of the final, fatal painting, we have no evidence that any of the last works is complete.
The first definite mention of the
Totentanz (Dance of Death)
occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 23 June 1844: “A gray day. Edmund has returned to his Death Dance—says he
has
it now.” This obscure entry suggests that Moorash was returning to a painting begun earlier, and a number of entries in the fall of 1843 (see Havemeyer for a full account) make it likely that he had begun or was thinking of beginning a painting with a death theme in late October. We last hear of the
Totentanz
in the spring of 1845: “Edmund has put aside his Death Dancers
[sic]
again” (2 May 1845). Whether he took it up again before his death in the summer of 1846 is a matter of speculation; Havemeyer finds some evidence for two periods of work, whereas Sterndale argues that he never returned to it after beginning the final series of portraits.
Moorash possessed engravings of Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of drawings
Der Totentanz
(1524) and
Das Todesalphabet (The Alphabet of Death
, 1524), as well as engravings from
La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femmes
printed by Nicolas Le Rouge in 1496, but his handling of the subject is so radically his own that the search for a model is surely mistaken: he need have had no more than the broadest sense of a Dance of Death for his imagination to have taken fire. The conception is bold, stark, and disturbing: from a dark ground that at first appears empty and black emerges a line of five milky, transparent figures, who at one moment seem to melt into the darkness and at another to float into a kind of ominous half visibility. The figures, which seem to repel close inspection, appear to be dancing or reveling—they
carry sticks, bells, a tambourine—and are oddly distorted, as if displayed in gestures that have been unnaturally arrested. The first figure, with its hollow eyes, snub nose, and sticklike forearm, emerges after many viewings as a dim, shifting skeleton; the four followers appear to be two men and two women (with their long, eerily floating smokelike hair). But what is most striking and uncanny about the
Totentanz
is the way it continually presents itself as
different from
the way it appeared a moment before—one is continually stepping closer, and farther back, and to the side, simply in an effort to see what is there. The background alone is a masterpiece of murk, a tone poem of dissonant darknesses. Dim forms appear to be visible, only to reveal themselves as the curves of bold brushstrokes, which again seem to tease the eye into evoking shapes that may or may not be there. From Elizabeth’s Journal we know something of Moorash’s methods: we know, for instance, that over a ground of white lead and oil he painted a more or less conventional landscape, the sole purpose of which was to be covered by a layer of black pigment applied in such a way as to permit a shadowy sense of the obscured landscape to show through at certain angles or under certain kinds of illumination. We know that Moorash experimented with scumbles and glazes. We know that for a while he became obsessed with the literal thickness of applied pigment and attempted to use that thickness to permit buried images to emerge. It is in this context that we first hear of a series of paintings, all lost, called variously the Haunted Paintings, the Ghost Paintings, and the Ghost Canvases, to which it will be useful to turn for a moment.