Curator’s Note: This virtual gallery ‘exhibition’ will examine the self-image of America during the Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s derisive term for a period of U.S. industrial and cultural expansion during the last quarter of the 19th century. It offered rich material for some of America’s best-known artists and writers. This exhibition focuses specifically on the cities of the Northeast and their rural environs. The art selected for inclusion in not intended to illustrate the text in any direct or literal sense; any more than the narrative excerpts are meant to be descriptive of the meaning or intent of any painting. Rather, they combine to provide a contemporaneous view of the painters’ visible world and writers’ literary sphere. The pairing of ‘narrative’ painting with a ‘painterly’ narrative yields a multi-sensory experience for the virtual gallery visitor which will hopefully prove larger than the sum of its parts.

Part I of this ‘exhibition will focus on the late 19^th c. New England city. Readers may want to familiarize themselves with the text of William Howell’s The Rise of Silas Latham (1885). In it, the author offer a rich and colorful narrative ‘picture’ of city life in Boston at the turn of the century. His ‘naturalistic’ style of story-telling set the stage for a new brand of novel—one in which everyday events and the interior lives of his characters are central—clearly the way for a new form of ‘modern’ literature in the next century. xxxxxx Introduction

It was in the 1870s that a cadre of young American visual artists would offer the public a spectrum of work that would have a distinctly “modern American” sensibility. While many were European trained, they would return in search of fresh, uniquely American subject matter, having been exposed to the classical influences of French, Italian and English studio and plein air schools, or the Grand Tour with its ancient ruins scattered across pastoral vistas and bustling city skylines, dominated by towering cathedrals spires.

Among this group were young American-born artists, influenced by French Impressionism, but who were anxious to incorporate the methods of rapid brush strokes and painterly plays of color and light to their own stylistic repertoire and subject matter. The monumental canvases of the Hudson River school of painting had run their course by the start of the Civil War, and the persistence of allegorical and neo-Classical themes—so prevalent in the established galleries of New York, Chicago and Washington—had lost their appeal for artists and buyers, alike. No less an establishment artist than John Ferguson Weir, son of a drawing instructor at West Point (and older half-brother of American Impressionist, J. Alden Weir), who had begun to paint industrial themes in factories along the Hudson River near war’s end (1864-6), urged fellow artists to eschew European and historical themes in favor of contemporary American ones. “Art does not consist of merely picturesque conceptions of costumes,” referring to Millet’s portrayals of French laborers. “Our own life is teeming with similar subjects, perhaps less quaint, but far more worthy of engaging the thought of the painter…so cleverly and gracefully disposed [by] inferior artists.” As the newly-appointed director of the Yale School of Fine Arts, Weir’s opinion carried weight with those emerging artists looking to make a mark on the American scene.

Right: John F. Weir, ‘The Gun Foundry’ (1864-66)

Another critic, W. Mackay Laffan, echoed Weir’s comments by similarly urging artists to paint ordinary landscapes, rather than foreign ones. He declared, “There shall be no more joy over one honest and sincere American horse-pond, over one truthful and dirty tenement, over one unaffected sugar refinery, or over one vulgar but ostentatious coal wharf, than there shall over ninety and nine Mosques of St. Sofia, Golden Horns, Normandy Cathedrals, and all the rest of the holy conventionalities and orthodox bosh that have gone to gladden the heart of auctioneer and deprave American artists.”

In the later decades of the 19th century, this painterly transition from romanticism to realism and naturalism was being closely paralleled in the literary world. As cultural and economic conditions rapidly changed across the American landscape, beginning during Reconstruction and extending into the next century, the combined impact of the rise of the middle class, a growing population of urban poor, drawn largely from rural areas and immigrant communities, the emerging role of the city as an economic engine for expansion gave rise to a new awareness of what it meant to be an American, in a newly United States. A genre of literary realism soon emerged reflecting the country’s changing interpretation of such concepts as ‘The Natural World,’ to include the built environment of cities, a pastoral landscape in decline, an expanding Western frontier—and most radically and significantly, human nature.

Led by such literary visionaries as William Dean Howells—taking a stand against what he saw as “our deeply incorporated civilization,” he advocated for the democratization of prose fiction, “letting it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere.”

Left: Everett Longley Warner, ‘Along the Waterfront, New York’ (1912)

By the latter half of the 19th century, most Americans believed they were part of the Modern Age, with all of its challenges, risks and opportunities. The Machine served as a totem for the promises about to be ushered in by the new century. The Machine was both an instrument of war and destruction, as witnessed by the horrific killing power of new weapons and battlefield tactics introduced during the Civil War. Robert Hughes notes that, “in his novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane, who was born after the War of Unification ended and so, could not know it firsthand, nonetheless, had his protagonist see the conflict in industrial terms: “The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes fascinated him. He must get close to see it produce corpses.’”

But, the Machine also offered, as evidence of its efficacy, the scientific and industrial innovations and the promise of an improved lifestyle—however marginal—to all those living and working in the shadows of growing numbers of factories and billowing smokestacks, increasingly ubiquitous to urban and rural landscapes, alike. The notion of expanded opportunity for all, promised by urbanization and industrialization, whether one was native or foreign born, educated or marginally skilled, a man or woman, resulted in an egalitarian shift in taste for both art and literature for an expanding literate community…Realism was a reflection of the new modern. Vast numbers of people wanted in!

Right: Childe Hassam, ‘The Mill Pond’ (1902)

Later in the century, Howells was eager to validate his original cause for optimism regarding public appetite for realistic literature, when he wrote that in a country blessed by a “large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life,” it was only realistic that novelists (and by extension, painters) “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.” Thus, to fully appreciate the forces at work in the literary and visual arts during this period, it is important to recognize that there were both matters of taste and marketability being put into play. In the same way that Howells was actively promoting his own landmark novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, he was championing the writing of Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chestnutt and Frank Norris, through his editorial authority at Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly.

Left: Thomas Robinson, Man with a Scythe’ (1868)

Concomitantly, while early ‘modern’ artists, John Ferguson Weir, may have broken unlikely ground by traipsing his easel and paints into the fiery bowels of a Civil War gun factory, other American Impressionist artists would soon follow, considering everything in their line-of-vision as viable subject matter: whether a farmer at his plow; a housewife at her daily chores; factory workers on break or busy city streets—all were fair game for their ability to capture the moment on canvas. While embracing his “exacting demands of the real,” the visual artistic community of the period would not be limited by Howells’s vision of Realism and its representations of Gilded Age societal striving and manners, alone. Defining realism with a lower-case ‘r’ opened the floodgates for the American community to be represented, pictorially, at its emotional core, bursting the bounds of mere appearance and artistic precedent, unchallenged on this side of the Atlantic for more than one-hundred years .

The City

In the post-Civil War era, urbanization became a controlling factor in national life for the first time. Just as the plantation was the typical product of the antebellum South and the small farm a logical outgrowth of the Northern agricultural order, so the city was the ultimate achievement of a new industrialization. Cityscapes are an essential feature of any nation experiencing rapid growth. Within the concentrations of population that made up a city were all the essential ingredients for rapid and efficient production of good: rail lines; commercial ports-of-call for imported raw materials; a cheap and inexhaustible labor pool; factories and secure storage space; financial institutions, banks and other sources of capital to fuel production and growth; and an educated middle class to manage the manufacturing process from start to finish. On the other side of the ledger was sufficient population density to consume goods and services in a timely manner, as well as the transportation assets to get those goods to nearby markets for purchase.

By the same token, the city became the generating center for social and intellectual progress. As great American cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Boston defined themselves in a progressive climate of the late 19th century, they not only became centers for great universities, museum collections, libraries and scientific research, but also served as hubs for some of the most influential magazine and book publishing firms in the U.S., during the critical transition to a consumer-oriented literary marketplace.

Thomas Robinson, ‘Beacon Street, Boston’ (1884)

Foreign visitors to America’s cities during the 1880s offered many observations about their style and character. Most large urban spaces in the U.S. were planned environments, developed and expanded in response to a continent-wide phenomenon of a growing population and increased mercantile demand. They presented to the naïve eye as “possessing the same checkerboard arrangement of streets lined with shade trees, the middle class folk hurrying about their business, the same succession of unsightly telephone poles, the same hotels with seedy men lounging in the dreary lobbies.” And yet, this uniformity of design allowed quirky and idiosyncratic features of the largest cities to stand out.

Right: Fashionable Turnouts, Carriages, Central Park, NY (1869)

One visitor described New York in the 1880s as “a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at her boots. Fifth Avenue is a showplace of wealth and splendor, while the East Side, from Forty-second Street to One Hundred tenth, Irish squatters, goats and pigs live promiscuously together.” Boston, too, did not escape the discerning visitor’s eye, described in 1881 as “charming with the quiet tenor of her life, her atmosphere of intellectuality, her general English appearance; the city acquiring over one-hundred acres of filled land in back Bay, making possible its expansion southward and the development of straight, wide thoroughfares to Copley Square and beyond.”

Below: Childe Hassam, ‘Rainy Day, Boston’ (1883)

American painters of the period captured the contrast between leisure and working class living and laboring side-by-side. This casual juxtaposition of classes, so characteristic of urban life, differed dramatically from the intimate, closed world of the rural village. The anonymity of modern cities suited the new breed of American Impressionist painters who, like their European counterparts, often portrayed figures as mere daubs of paint— undifferentiated forms, moving in the shadow of umbrellas or shaded streets—where individual identity was sacrificed in the name of capturing the new urban reality of an anonymous crush of humanity.

William Howells’, The Rise of Silas Lapham

Along with the shift in economic realities associated with the rise of the city in the decades following the Civil War, Americans were experiencing a decided shift in the social and moral compass of their everyday lives. This transition associated with city living is captured in William Howells’s 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham. In it, he captures the awkward transition from rural to urban life in the character of his eponymous Lapham. As if reflective of Silas-the-Man, with his own humble origins in the dirt of rural Vermont, the source of his “colossal fortune…lay at the bottom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him.” The trajectory of Lapham’s success, in the years that follow, propels him from his pastoral roots to the periphery of the rapidly-growing cultural and economic environs of Boston.

Right: George Bellows, ‘Cliff Dwellers’ (1913)

What Howells wants the reader to appreciate about this move is that the newly-encountered spectrum of ‘choices’ that accompany the move are intended to blur the boundaries between free will and chance, between opportunism and moral courage; that is, to highlight the inherent contradiction extant between the established mores of country living and harsh survival skills needed in the city. Howells’s narrative tension grows as Lapham confronts these differences, exacerbated by themes like societal hierarchies, global competition, moral obligations to one’s self and others, and the encroachment of modern values within his own family life.

What Howells in reflecting on in this novel is the upheaval in models of behavior and decorum that would increasingly differentiate rural and urban centers in the second wave of U.S. industrial expansion in the fourth quarter of the 19th century. Lears describes this transition as one of true displacement, one that, for the individual, would foster a “sense of unreality…For the educated bourgeoisie, reality itself began to seem, something to be sought rather than merely lived.” As though unable to tease out this fundamental shift in consciousness for himself, Howells has the reporter, Bartley Hubbard (himself, a personification of urban duplicity) offer the observation that “Mr. Lapham spoke of his childhood[ memories]…with deep feelings and an abiding sense of their reality” (emphasis mine).

This corrosive effect of urban living on individual identity—with its newly-compressed ‘realities’ of time and space—led to changes in moral perception. Howells, himself a product of rural life, measured the impact of urban life through the ‘voice’ of another character in an 1890 novel that, the “solvent” of life in the metropolis seemed to bring out the “deeply underlying nobody” in everyone. Lapham, too, having fled the notoriety of his small Vermont village, confronted the anonymity of the city by striving for those symbols of bourgeois status that would help him become ‘visible’ in the eyes of his presumed peers. Lears again notes, “To affluent Americans reared with the agrarian bias of Republican moralism, urban ‘luxury’ could be a symptom of ‘over civilization’ as well as a sign of progress.” Lapham’s Back Bay house becomes a poignant symbol of his efforts to find acceptance among staid Boston families and their hereditary fortunes. Its destruction by fire (deliberately set, or otherwise) serves as the story’s climax , following which Lapham begins to reclaim his autonomous selfhood and Victorian moral boundaries in the face of the modern city’s influences, “standing firm for right and justice to his own destruction.”

Right: Ernest Lawson, ‘Excavation, Penn Station’ (1906)

In the end, “the hole that opened for [him], and that he crept out of” offered Lapham a metaphorical rebirth and a chance to reclaim a lifestyle more harmonious with the “moral spectacle formed in the hills (of Vermont) than he could ever have been of the Back Bay.” In the interview with newspaper reporter, Hubbard, in the opening pages, Lapham points out that, in spite of his extended family’s migration West, he “hung on to New England…Not because the paint mine was on it, but because the old house was— and the graves.”

Anchored to the past by an ill-defined obligation to these symbols of the familiar and the dead, Howells reveals a character trait of a man rooted in traditional Protestant probity (“religious, after the fashion of the time, and of sterling morality”). His fall, and subsequent “rise,” follows his moral course through the vagaries and moral turpitudes of urbanized society, only to be redeemed in the end by a return to the simple, country life. Lapham’s reclaimed existence includes a plain house, with “no luxuries, unless the statues of prayer and faith might be so considered.” Lapham’s last conversation in the novel—with the conservative, Reverend Sewell, a house guest in Vermont— illustrates the power of earned redemption through self-revealed wisdom, arising from a confessional recounting of his recent business ventures.

Left: George Bellows, ’42 Kids’ (1907)

Confronted with the allure of urban conveniences and material plentitude among the privileged class, the role of Christian faith— so essential to a rural life of hardship—was becoming increasingly isolated from experiences of the emerging middle class in New England cities. [see Trachtenberg 188] Religious beliefs , like the seasonal cycles of the land, itself, had historically defined individual reality. Lapham’s fall from grace—his misguided focus and direction upon arriving in Boston—and his ultimate return to the fold, epitomized the influence of urban enculturation and conspicuous consumption on those vulnerable to that message. This narrative motif points out the weakening grip that late Victorian Protestantism had on the growing metropolitan population. “As liberal Protestantism became assimilated to the secular creed of progress, as Satan became an Evil principle and hell a metaphor, the preferred personal style shifted from shrill earnestness to formulized benevolence.” Ironically, Sewell is clearer in his own mind about “tracing the operation of evil in the physical world [and] more and more puzzled about [its obscurity] in the moral world.” This logical inversion by Reverend Sewell, questioning the power of Biblically-grounded moral teachings to avoid evil in a possession-oriented world, points out the upheaval faced by traditional Christianity in the modern age, and the dream-like unreality that supplants long-standing ethical teachings its time-honored mores.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor and Virtual ‘Exhibition Curator’

Part II of this ‘exhibition’ will focus on the New England waterfront and countryside. Readers may want to familiarize themselves with the texts of Sarah Orne Jewitt’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Edith Warton’s Ethan Fromm (1911). Like, William Howell’s The Rise of Silas Latham, the authors offer a rich and colorful narrative ‘picture’ of rural life in American at the turn of the century. Artists, too, were busy capturing those same images on canvas and paper. The melding of the two perspectives offers a unique, well-rounded picture of our American past.

Note: The illustration used for the cover of the ‘exhibition’ catalogue is a detail from Winslow Homer’s, ‘The New Novel’ (1877), appearing here in its complete version.