New York: Art and Cultural

Capital of the Gilded Age

Fueled by a flourishing capitalist economy, undergirded by advancements in architectural

design and urban infrastructure, and patronized by growing bourgeois and elite classes,
New York’s built environment was dramatically transformed in the 1870s and 1880s.
This book argues that this constituted the formative period of New York’s modernization
and cosmopolitanism—the product of a vital self-consciousness and a deliberate intent
on the part of its elite citizenry to create a world-class cultural metropolis reflecting
the city’s economic and political preeminence. The interdisciplinary essays in this book
examine New York’s late nineteenth-century evolution not simply as a question of its
physical layout but also in terms of its radically new social composition, comprising the
individuals, institutions, and organizations that played determining roles in the city’s
cultural ascendancy.

Margaret R. Laster is an independent curator and scholar of American art. Previous

posts include associate curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society
and Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art. Her
research centers on art and material culture of the nineteenth century, including Gilded
Age collecting and patronage histories.

Chelsea Bruner is a member of the liberal arts faculty at Ringling College of Art and
Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she teaches design history. Her work centers on
architecture and interiors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis
on elite patronage and the professionalization of architectural design in the Gilded Age.
Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of
art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering
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promote quality art history research.
New York: Art and Cultural
Capital of the Gilded Age

Edited by
Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Laster, Margaret R., editor. | Bruner, Chelsea, editor.
Title: New York, art and cultural capital of the Gilded Age / edited by Margaret
R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge research in art
history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007119 (print) | LCCN 2018007792 (ebook) | ISBN
9781351027588 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138493629 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.)—Civilization—19th century. | New York
(N.Y.)—History—1865–1898. | Arts and society—New York (State)—
New York—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC F128.47 (ebook) | LCC F128.47 .N53 2018 (print) |
DDC 974.7/103—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007119
ISBN: 978-1-138-49362-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-02758-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This volume is dedicated to the late David Jaffee. We knew David as a brilliant,
committed scholar, and later, through his participation in this project, came to
consider him a friend. It is with great respect and admiration that we offer this
book in his memory.
Contents

List of Illustrationsix
Acknowledgmentsxiv

Introduction 1
MARGARET R. LASTER AND CHELSEA BRUNER

PART I
Creating the Art and Cultural Capital15

1 Looking West From the Empire City: National Landscape and Visual
Culture in Gilded Age New York 17
DAVID SCOBEY

2 The François Premier Style in New York: The William K. and Alva
Vanderbilt House 41
KEVIN D. MURPHY

3 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape

Painting at the Beginning of the Gilded Age 56
ALAN WALLACH

PART II
Institutionalizing Art and Culture in the Capital71

4 The Lenox Library: New York’s Lost Treasure House 73

SALLY WEBSTER

5 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World: Scribner’s

Illustrated Monthly, 1870–1881 90
PAGE KNOX
viii Contents
6 An Unsung Hero: Henry Gurdon Marquand and His 1889 Gift to
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 105
ESMÉE QUODBACH

7 Metropolitan, Inc.: Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the Genesis of

the American Art Museum 122
JOHN OTT

8 Un-Domesticating the Ideal: William Wetmore Story and

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 139
LAUREN LESSING

PART III
Depicting the Capital in Art and Culture161

9 Before the Farragut: Who Was Augustus Saint-Gaudens? 163

THAYER TOLLES

10 Crossing Broadway: New York and the Culture of Capital in the Late
Nineteenth Century 179
DAVID JAFFEE

11 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings: William Holbrook Beard’s Wall Street 192
ROSS BARRETT

Afterword208
JOSHUA BROWN

Selected Bibliography212
Contributors215
Index217
Illustrations

Cover
Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when
in Fourteenth Street, 1881. Oil on canvas (cropped slightly). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1895 (95.29)

Color Plates
Plate 1 John Gast, American Progress. Chromolithograph (1873) of
original Gast oil painting (1872). Library of Congress
Plate 2 “Japanese Parlor, North West Corner.” Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s
House and Collection, described by Edward Strahan [pseud.]. Two vols.
(Philadelphia: G. Barrie & Sons, ca. 1883–1884)
Plate 3 John F. Kensett, Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, ca. 1870–
1872. Oil on canvas. Carnegie Museum of Art, Purchase, Gift of the
Women’s Committee (80.51)
Plate 4 Richard Morris Hunt, Lenox Library, New York City. Perspective rendering,
1871. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. Library of Congress
Plate 5 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Richard Watson Gilder, Helena de Kay Gilder,
and Rodman de Kay Gilder, modeled 1879, cast ca. 1883–1884. Plaster.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of David and Joshua Gilder, 2002
(2002.445)
Plate 6 Domenico Ventura, Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902), 1852.
Watercolor with gouache. Collection of Edward Heimiller
Plate 7 William Wetmore Story, Semiramis, designed 1872, carved 1873. Marble.
Dallas Museum of Art, Gift of Morynne and Robert E. Motley in memory
of Robert Earl Motley Jr., 1942–1998 (1999.117.A-B)
Plate 8 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Farragut Monument, 1877–1880. Madison
Square Park, New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Plate 9 Currier & Ives, The City of New York, 1876. Color lithograph. Library of
Congress
Plate 10 William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market, 1879. Oil on
linen. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Purchase, Thomas Jef-
ferson Bryan Fund (1971.104)
x Illustrations
Figures
0.1 John William Orr, A Fashionable Promenade on Fifth Avenue, 1872.
Wood engraving. Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library 3
0.2 Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
when in Fourteenth Street, 1881. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Purchase, 1895 (95.29) 10
1.1 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.
Mural study. U.S. Capitol (1861). Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Bequest of Sara Carr Upton (1931.6.1) 18
1.2 Frances Palmer, Across the Continent. Lithograph. Published by
Currier & Ives (ca. 1868). Library of Congress 19
1.3 Frederic Church, The Heart of the Andes, as exhibited at
the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. Stereograph by unidentified
photographer, 1864. Collection of the New-York Historical Society 23
1.4 James Smillie, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. Engraving (1866)
of Albert Bierstadt oil painting with the same title (1863). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1974 (1974.211) 24
1.5 Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872.
Oil on canvas, mounted on aluminum. Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Lent by the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum
(L.1968.84.1)25
1.6 Photograph of Tenth Street Studio, street view, ca. 1870. Library of
Congress29
2.1 Fifth Avenue north from 52nd Street, 1898. H. N. Tiemann & Co./
Museum of the City of New York (X2010.11.4755) 42
2.2 Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II (neé Alice Claypoole Gwynne),
1883. Mora/Museum of the City of New York (F2012.58.1341) 44
2.3 West 54th Street near Fifth Avenue. Byron Company/Museum of the
City of New York (93.1.1.10178) 47
2.4 Richard Morris Hunt, Rendering of Doorways, 660 Fifth Avenue,
New York, ca. 1880. AIA/AAF Collection. Library of Congress 49
2.5 Francis I Wing, Château of Blois, ca. 1890–1900. Color
photomechanical print. Library of Congress 50
3.1 Picture Gallery of the Fair, Fourteenth Street Building, Harper’s
Weekly (April 16, 1864). Wood engraving. The Cleveland Museum
of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund (1942.1482) 58
3.2 Asher B. Durand, Portrait of Jonathan Sturges, ca. 1840. Oil on
canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Frederick
Sturges Jr., 1977 (1977.342.1) 59
3.3 Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855. Oil on canvas. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges
by his children, 1895 (95.13.1) 65
3.4 Sanford Robinson Gifford, Mist Rising at Sunset in the Catskills, ca.
1861. Oil and pencil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of
Jamee J. and Marshall Field (1988.217) 66
3.5 John F. Kensett, Passing Off of the Storm, 1872. Oil on canvas.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas Kensett,
1874 (74.27) 67
 Illustrations xi
4.1 Lenox Library, May 1909. Gelatin silver print. H. N. Tiemann &
Co./Museum of the City of New York (X2010.11.4893) 74
4.2 “Interior of the Lenox Library showing Statuary Hall, Lenox
Gallery, First Columbus Map of the Gulf of Mexico, Library
and Reading Room, Drexel Music Library.” Harper’s Bazaar
(September 16, 1893), 759. Art and Picture Collection, The New
York Public Library 75
4.3 Statuary Hall, second floor, Lenox Library, ca. 1890. The Miriam
and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs:
Photography Collection, The New York Public Library 83
4.4 Richard Morris Hunt, “Lenox Library. New York.” American
Architect and Building News (September 1, 1877), 88. Art and
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library 84
4.5 Detail of the east wall of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery, Lenox
Library, New York. Photograph, after 1881. The New York Public
Library Archives, R. G. 10, Box 54 85
5.1 Cover of Scribner’s Monthly, 1, no. 1, November 1870. Princeton
University Library 91
5.2 Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, ca. 1872. Oil on panel. Thyssen-
Bornemisza Museum, 591 (1983.25) 94
5.3 “A Flank Movement on the Hanging Committee.” Scribner’s
Monthly, 17, no. 3, January 1879 97
5.4 H. P. Share, “A Modern Meeting of the Salmagundi Club. (Drawn
by H. P. Share.).” Scribner’s Monthly, 19, no. 3, January 1880 99
5.5 Charles Reinhart, “The Tile Club and the Milliner of
Bridgehampton.” Scribner’s Monthly, 17, no. 4, February 1879 100
6.1 John Singer Sargent, Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902),
1897. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the
Trustees, 1897 (97.43) 106
6.2 Unknown photographer, Marquand residence, Madison Avenue and
Sixty-Eighth Street, New York. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt,
completed in 1884. Demolished in 1912. Albumen print. 109
6.3 Anthony van Dyck, James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and
Lennox, ca. 1633–1635. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889 (89.15.16) 112
6.4 Unknown photographer, “Music-Room, Marquand House.”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1897 113
6.5 “The Marquand Gallery of Old Masters, Metropolitan Museum of
Art,” 1897. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1897 115
7.1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the first museum building in
Central Park, 1880. Designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey
Mould. Photograph 123
7.2 “Seventh Regiment Armory.” Wood engraving, 1895. Art and
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and
Tilden Foundations 125
7.3 “Main Hall of the Building.” Harper’s Weekly 24:1215 (April 10,
1880): 232–33 126
xii Illustrations
7.4 “The Development of Archeology—How Modern Museums Are
Supplied With Genuine Antiquities.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper 62:1470 (November 24, 1883): 213 128
7.5 W. T. Smedley, “Autumn Reception at the Metropolitan Museum.”
Harper’s Weekly 33:1717 (November 16, 1889): 909 131
7.6 “Is the Museum of Art for Money Bags Only?” New York Press,
May 25, 1890. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Scrapbook,
1889–1891132
8.1 William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra (second version), 1858,
remodeled 1864, carved 1869. Marble. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of John Taylor Johnston, 1888 (88.5a–d) 140
8.2 William Wetmore Story, Polyxena, 1873. Marble. Brooklyn
Museum, Gift of George Freifeld (05.240) 141
8.3 John Serz, engraving of W. W. Story’s Medea. William J. Clark Jr.,
Great American Sculptures (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1878) 142
8.4 Wood engraving illustrating “Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Art
Journal 6 (1880): 237 143
8.5 Frank Bellew, “Donkeys at the Centennial.” Wood engraving.
Harper’s Weekly 1 (July 1876) 151
8.6 Frank Waller, Entrance Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art when in Fourteenth Street, ca. 1881. Oil on wood. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1920 (20.77) 152
9.1 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adoration of the Cross by Angels and
Cherubs, 1877. Composition material, paint. Saint Thomas Church,
New York. Destroyed by fire, 1905. Archival photograph 166
9.2 Timothy Cole, engraving of Saint Thomas Church reredos by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens. [Clarence Cook], “Recent Church
Decoration,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (February 1878): 576 169
9.3 Olin Levi Warner, J. Alden Weir, 1880; this cast, 1897–1898.
Bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the National
Sculpture Society, 1898 (98.9.2) 171
9.4 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 1875; this
carving, 1878–1879. Marble. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of
Hon. Edwards Pierrepont, BA, 1837; MA, 1840; LLD, 1873 (1880.5) 172
9.5 Robert Blum, pen sketch after Farragut Monument by Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. “The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly 22
(June 1881): 162 175
10.1 William Bennett, Broad Way from the Bowling Green, 1834.
Aquaitint. Eno Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of
Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library 180
10.2 Charles Parsons, City of New York/sketched and drawn on stone by
C. Parsons, N. Currier, 1856. Color lithograph. Library of Congress 183
10.3 “View of Broadway, Opposite Fulton Street, New York.” Harper’s
Weekly, February 18, 1860 185
10.4 Thomas Hogan, “Up Among the Nineties.” Harper’s Weekly,
August 15, 1860 186
 Illustrations xiii
10.5 Edward Anthony, Broadway on a Rainy Day, N.Y.C. Stereographic
photograph, Anthony’s Instantaneous Views No. 244, New York
(ca. 1859). Library of Congress 187
11.1 Drexel Building, Corner of Wall and Broad Streets, New York City,
ca. 1880–1890. Engraving. Art & Picture Collection, The New York
Public Library 196
11.2 Charles Hart and Hughson Hawley, The New York Stock Exchange,
1882. Chromolithograph. Library of Congress 197
11.3 “Wall Street in 1883—Sub-Treasury and Stock Exchange.” Wood
engraving. Martha J. Lamb, Wall Street in History (New York:
Funk & Wagnalls, 1883) 198
11.4 C. S. Reinhart, “The March of Modern Improvement—Destruction
of Old Buildings in Upper New York.” Harper’s Weekly,
October 28, 1871: 1020 202
11.5 Edward Lamson Henry, North Dutch Church, Fulton and William
Streets, New York, 1869. Oil on academy board. Bequest of Maria
DeWitt Jesup, From the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup,
1914. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15.30.66 205
Acknowledgments

The editors express their profound gratitude to the College Art Association for
supporting our 2015 conference session; to the staff at Routledge, including our
wonderful editor, Isabella Vitti, and the three anonymous peer reviewers whose
discerning comments helped shape this publication; to Nancy Later for her insightful
readings and to Merek Royce Press for his organizational mastery; to our authors for
their excellent work; to our families, friends, and colleagues for their encouragement;
and to New York, the capital of culture, a city we both love dearly.
Introduction
Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner

This book takes as its premise the idea that in a period of unprecedented economic
expansion and class consolidation after the Civil War, New York City grew to become
the country’s leading cultural capital, and that the interrelated developments that gave
rise to the city’s supremacy in this arena constituted the defining moment of the Gilded
Age, an era typically demarcated by the end of the Civil War and roughly the turn of
the twentieth century. Although some of the roots of the city’s evolution can be found
in the early years of the nineteenth century, the postbellum period cemented New
York’s ultimate ascendancy in the realm of American art and culture—a status it argu-
ably retains to this day.
The designation “Gilded Age” remains a complex and much-debated term in our
historical lexicon. The 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day—a ­collaborative
effort of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner—was inspired by the fantastic spec-
ulation, market manipulation, and malevolent influence of unchecked greed indicative
of this period.1 The authors’ use of “gilded” suggested that a thin covering, or veneer,
of opulence characterized the time rather than solid value or permanence. The descrip-
tor appropriately conveyed the aspirations of many of the era’s wealthiest citizens who
sought to legitimize not only their new and unprecedented fortunes (made in indus-
tries like steel production, manufacturing, and railroads as well as in less tangible
markets, such as finance, the stock market, and real estate speculation) but also their
unremarkable lineage (which they typically hid behind the sophisticated trappings of
aristocratic European culture).
More than a few of these striving capitalists were guilty of rapacious and manipula-
tive business practices, and for that reason, this post–Civil War era was also dubbed the
age of the “robber baron” in its time. Like Twain and Warner’s Gilded Age, this term is
inherently pejorative. To this day, scholars debate exactly how to characterize the indus-
trialists and businessmen of this period: on the one hand, they were guilty of ruthless
exploitation; on the other, they displayed extraordinary ambition and innovation—men
without whom the United States would never have risen to its twentieth-century sta-
tus as an imperial power. In this examination of cultural formation in late nineteenth-
century New York, we seek to uncover both perspectives: their contributions and their
underlying motivations. As art historian Wayne Craven reminds us, historical accuracy
requires a full consideration of the influence of this new elite—“that the benefactions of
Gilded Age society be examined, as well as the malefactions.”2
The American author and heiress Edith Wharton was not only an observer of New
York society but also a participant within it. She chronicled its transformation in
her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance. As Wharton noted, prominent families of
2 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
her parents’ generation came of age before private clubs and cultural activities were
commonplace for those of means and social standing. Her generation was dramatically
affected by “the coming of the new millionaires,” who founded libraries, established
museums, built big houses, and amassed collections of books, prints, and pictures.3
In Wharton’s telling, this group consisting of “a few men of exceptional intelligence”
had “at last stirred the stagnant air of Old New York, and in their particular circle it
was full of . . . new ideas.”4 These “millionaires” undeniably transformed New York’s
social and cultural landscapes, indelibly imprinting their particular visions and aspira-
tions on the city they called home.
Historians have often traced the genesis of New York’s eventual hegemony to the
developments of the pre–Civil War era, with such visionary infrastructural projects
as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the Erie Canal (completed in 1825), and the
Croton Waterworks of 1842. These initiatives served to map the city’s future geogra-
phy, linking its thriving ports—not to mention Broadway, its commercial thorough-
fare, and Wall Street, the epicenter of American finance—to expanding inland and
Western markets and fostering the population growth of an increasingly polyglot
metropolis. But in the realm of art and culture, the city also witnessed within this
period the establishment of the National Academy of Design in 1825, the short-lived
New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts (created in 1844, dissolved in 1858), and the design
and implementation of the Greensward Plan for Central Park in 1858 (an improve-
ment to the urban landscape that was promoted in cultural terms).5 The city’s antebel-
lum leaders were spurred by the idea of establishing New York as a cultural entity,
not merely a commercial one—a place in which brash material pursuits would be tem-
pered and tamed by a measure of sophistication—even if, as Dell Upton maintains in
his introduction to Art and the Empire City, New York 1825–1861, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s 2000 comprehensive study of this period, “The fine arts’ status as
commodity and spectacle inflected every attempt to assign them a significant role in
the creation of civilization and urbanity.”6
Picking up where their predecessors had left off before the Civil War split the nation
in two several years earlier, New York’s new generation of postwar leaders returned
to the idea that art and culture could elevate the Empire City and its inhabitants.
Their vision—and the means of realizing it—were dramatically affected by changes
that occurred during and immediately after the war, however. The transcontinental
telegraph (completed in 1861) and transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869)
offer but two examples of technological advancements that sped communications
and transportation, enabling the country’s economic engines to turn faster. Steering
this progress were men with managerial experience gained in the conflict, as well
as unmatched fortunes accumulated in the subsequent postwar boom of real estate,
industry, and finance. As historian Richard Slotkin asserts, in many ways the Civil
War raged on in the economic expansion of the Gilded Age industrial and financial
sectors. In the new postwar landscape, “the agents of progress would be the corporate
combinations,” and the new leaders, “wealthy, culturally elite, professionally expert,
charismatically managerial.”7 Perhaps most significantly, this generation’s objectives
were shaped by their consolidation as a socioeconomic group. As never before, a new
class of bourgeois and elite citizens consciously sought to transform their city into a
thriving cosmopolitan mecca that would rival the great historic capitals of Europe,
just as they themselves sought to redefine the terms of art and culture for their epoch.
How did New York become the “capital of culture” in this nation? As these essays
show, New York’s ascendancy in this realm was neither predestined nor the product
 Introduction 3
of happenstance. Instead, its status was affirmed by the self-conscious efforts of its
economic elites. Although prominent, well-traveled New Yorkers looked to the great
urban centers of Europe (Paris in particular, but London as well), their own city
differed from these historic capitals in significant ways. New York was neither the
oldest nor the most historic municipality in the United States; Boston or Philadelphia
made more solid claims on those grounds. Likewise, New York did not have the geo-
graphic centrality that would, in subsequent years, establish Chicago as an impor-
tant commercial center. Furthermore, New York was no longer the actual capital of
the country, the so-called Compromise of 1790 having realized Alexander Hamil-
ton’s desire for a national bank at the expense of moving the national capital south,
from New York to the newly named District of Columbia. This pivotal negotia-
tion removed the center of politics from the Northeast region entirely, but at the
same time, it secured New York’s position as the young republic’s economic center.
According to historian Thomas Bender, this relocation, initially experienced as a
disappointment, freed the city from the responsibility of defining an entire country:
“New Yorkers came to appreciate the possibility inherent in representing not the
nation but rather [the city’s] own metropolitan culture and economy.”8 Historian
Sven Beckert similarly foregrounds the emerging role of the Empire City, confirming
its significance in the dramatic transformation in American economy, society, and
politics in the second half of the nineteenth century: “Capital and capitalists gather
in cities, and nowhere did economic, social, and political power coalesce more than
in New York City.”9
This collection of essays situates New York’s post–Civil War transformation into the
American cultural capital when a new and powerful citizenry emerged (­Figure 0.1)—

Figure 0.1 John William Orr, A Fashionable Promenade on Fifth Avenue, 1872. Wood engraving.
Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library
4 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
one that built great houses and engaged in the production and consumption of artifacts
of high culture. These citizens sought to enhance the esteem in which they were held
through association with New York’s newly created civic institutions—most notably,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the city’s first encyclopedic art museum. In a rela-
tively short period of time, they cemented a national cultural patrimony centered in
Manhattan, which emulated, matched, and at times, surpassed the traditions of New
York’s European counterparts. Indeed, and as we will see, these acts were the product
of a vital self-awareness and of a deliberate intention on the part of the city’s elite. As
art historian Alan Wallach succinctly states in his essay in this volume, “The Gilded
Age, . . . in which the New York upper classes reinforced the city’s status as the art
capital of the United States, was essentially their creation.”10

Chronicling New York’s Ascent to Cultural Capital

Despite its extraordinary import, New York’s early postbellum period has not yet
received its due consideration. The impetus for this collection—as for the College Art
Association conference panel on which it builds—is to expand the narratives of this
period in New York’s history, not only in number but also in scope, to become more
interdisciplinary and multifaceted so as to better address the broad array of complexi-
ties they expose. The commonly held view that today the city may be experiencing
a “Second Gilded Age” has served to awaken some public and scholarly interest in
this earlier period. The 1999 tome New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in
the Gilded Age, which chronicles the brick-by-brick growth of the urban landscape,
stoked this interest while also providing scholars with an indispensable and compre-
hensive architectural reference.11 Monographs focusing on New York’s Gilded Age
artists and architects, patron-collectors, and business titans, along with documen-
tary explorations of the era’s notable mansions and interiors, have filled in additional
details. Craven’s 2009 Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society, for
example, focuses on the residential design of prominent citizens, such as the Vander-
bilt family, erected in and beyond New York, while such exhibition catalogs as the
Museum of the City of New York’s Gilded New York: Design, Fashion and Society
(2013) document the lavish interiors, decor, and fashions of this era.12 Each of these
publications has fleshed out an important part of the historical record, thus laying the
groundwork for more critical and interpretative treatments of these subjects.
Concentrating on the same period, Beckert’s 2001 The Moneyed Metropolis: New
York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie explores New York’s
evolution from a wholly different perspective. The historian of nineteenth-century
capitalism and American political economy reveals the processes of class consolida-
tion that shaped New York during the 1870s and 1880s. In a chapter titled “The
Culture of Capital,” Beckert maintains that

the combined effects of rising inequality . . . [and] greater sense of class identity,
as well as the overcoming of the deep divisions that characterized the age of the
Civil War, enabled wealthy New Yorkers to translate their ever-growing economic
power into unprecedented influence on the institutions and policies of the state.13

Yet as much as the monographic and documentary texts previously noted fall short
in integrating creative output within larger historical developments, comprehensive
 Introduction 5
studies of New York’s economic, social, and political evolution in the Gilded Age,
such as Beckert’s, have yet to absorb within their findings the implications of the visual
culture of the time—the artistic production, patronage, and institution-building that
helped to solidify New York’s status as a world-class cultural capital.
In New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age, we set out to distinguish
our work from recent publications focusing on Gilded Age artists, architects, collec-
tors, impresarios, and cultural institutions to create a more nuanced investigation
of these crucial years between 1870 and the early 1890s—decades we believe were
the formative period of New York’s cosmopolitanism and bourgeoning modernism.
Our end product is an anthology of distinct but thematically interconnected essays
examining the city’s late nineteenth-century evolution not simply as a question of
its physical layout—its bricks and mortar—but in terms of its radically new spatial
composition, comprising the myriad individuals, institutions, and related networks
that played such determining roles in its cultural ascendency. Thus formed, the
compilation places a dual emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between creative
endeavors and social and economic contexts and the complexities of the era’s visual
culture.
At the same time, the collection as a whole engages in meaningful dialogue with
publications that deal more broadly with issues of American visual culture in this
period. These include The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the
Nineteenth Century, edited by Beckert together with Julia B. Rosenbaum, of 2010,
and The Cultured Canvas: Perspectives on American Landscape Painting, edited by
Nancy Siegel, of a year later.14 More recently, Kimberly Orcutt’s 2017 investigation
of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia serves to highlight how this com-
memorative milestone played a significant role in the formation of a national canon
at this moment.15 Although aspects of the essays by our authors sometimes overlap or
complement these titles in terms of subject matter, our study remains laser-focused on
New York City.
In compiling this volume, we engaged a group of established authors, including
historians, art historians, and experts in architecture and material culture. Some have
written books specifically on New York while others focus on American art or archi-
tecture in this period. These contributors explore a broad array of topics from a mul-
tiplicity of approaches, arriving sometimes at contradictory conclusions, ultimately
enhancing our understanding of this transformative time in the city’s evolution. Their
essays are organized into three thematic sections, beginning with the most expansive
in scope and concluding with close readings of particular works.

Creating the Art and Cultural Capital

The first section analyzes transformational shifts that occurred in the structure and
content of cultural production. Looking beyond the physical confines of Manhattan,
they weave regional, national, and international imagery and influence into the rich
visual record of New York in this era and highlight the ways in which the Gilded Age
developments built on and decidedly transcended those of the antebellum years.
In the opening essay, “Looking West From the Empire City: National Landscape
and Visual Culture in Gilded Age New York,” historian David Scobey frames his
discussion of connections between the Empire City and the emerging West with an
analysis of John Gast’s widely disseminated 1872 lithograph, American Progress.
6 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
He explores vast networks of image-making, distribution, and reception that liter-
ally and metaphorically linked the metropolis with the frontier in the post–Civil War
years, establishing for the first time a truly national visual culture. Indeed, New York
became the epicenter of national narratives of Manifest Destiny.16 The production
and dissemination of prints and print culture, Scobey argues, took on a heightened
significance as the land and resources of the West were not only incorporated into the
national economy but also became central to aspirations of cultural integration in the
post–Civil War years. The author clarifies New York’s centrality to the production
and consumption of such imagery, arguing that even the city’s urban geography was
understood as a national landscape.
In “The François Premier Style in New York: The William K. and Alva Vanderbilt
House,” architectural historian Kevin D. Murphy reanimates a now-lost structure
completed in 1882 by Richard Morris Hunt. His exploration of the Vanderbilts’
“Petit Château” sheds light on the emergence of French Renaissance design in Amer-
ica and on its particular appeal for wealthy New York patrons, who at the time
were engaged in both acts of self-fashioning through civic philanthropy and ruthless
business pursuits. Murphy’s essay raises interesting questions about elite identity
formation as well as about the physical and conceptual construction of the cultural
landscape.
A similar drive for class identity and consolidation is the focus of Alan Wallach’s
“Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting at the Begin-
ning of the Gilded Age.” Wallach examines the critical reassessment of the Hudson
River School in the 1870s and 1880s, concluding that these artists not only fell out
of favor in the postbellum years but also were disparaged in segments of the art press
and by a new generation of patrons who characterized their work as “low” or “popu-
lar” art in contrast to the “high” art they sought to promote. The growing demand
for what Wallach coins “aestheticizing tendencies” in American landscape painting—
smaller, more sketch-like works intended for intimate viewing—was bound up with
the rise of New York’s upper class or bourgeois factions following the Civil War. Trac-
ing this development lays bare the ways in which the elite institutionalizes its prefer-
ences through the creation of cultural organizations.

Institutionalizing Art and Culture in the Capital

The year 1870 is a particularly significant one in New York’s cultural history: it
marks the incorporation of institutions as varied as the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Met) and the Lenox Library as well as the initial publication of Scribner’s Illustrated
Monthly. The second section of this volume presents five essays examining these insti-
tutions, born at the same moment.
In “The Lenox Library: New York’s Lost Treasure House,” art historian Sally Web-
ster seeks to recover the significance of James Lenox—Gilded Age philanthropist,
bibliophile, and collector—and of the Hunt-designed structure erected to house his
collection of art and rare books. Although the 1877 library no longer stands, its con-
tents became one of three foundational collections of the New York Public Library.
Using newly discovered archival photographs, Webster recaptures the design and early
organization of the library’s spaces and displays, the product of a single patron’s civic
will and largesse.
 Introduction 7
In “Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World: Scribner’s Illustrated
Monthly, 1870–1881,” Page Knox presents a reassessment of the magazine’s senior edi-
tor, Richard Watson Gilder, and the personal and professional networks he and his wife,
artist Helena de Kay, cultivated. Knox posits that the pages of Scribner’s functioned as a
gallery of sorts, this new brand of “art literature” capitalizing on New York’s growing
print culture to advance the agenda, taste, and particular point of view of Gilder and
his circle. The author exposes the means by which Gilder promoted a young generation
of European-trained artists returning to New York in the early 1870s “in opposition to
their antebellum predecessors.”17 Defending Gilder’s reputation as a champion of New
York’s nascent avant-garde, the author also highlights the role of the Fourth Estate as a
modernizing institutional force in the city’s visual culture.
In the three remaining essays of this section, the Met serves as a nexus for the inves-
tigation of seemingly disparate motivations of philanthropy and self-aggrandizement
on the part of the city’s elite. Esmée Quodbach’s essay explores the legacy of Gilded
Age financier, philanthropist, collector, and major benefactor Henry Gurdon Mar-
quand. The specialist in Dutch art and the history of collecting chronicles Marquand’s
collections and their display, delineating this patron’s landmark “tastes, intentions and
ambitions” and contextualizing the significance of his gift of Old Master paintings
to the Met. She argues that Marquand’s largesse “effected a sea change in the way
that New Yorkers—and, in a broader sense, Americans—were able to view art . . .
­introducing works until then only a privileged few would have been able to encounter
on their European travels.”18
Whereas Quodbach celebrates a Met benefactor and its first president, the remain-
ing two authors problematize the very notion of “selfless benefaction” by looking at
the Met’s establishment, organization, and display practices not as neutral acts but as
calculated efforts to advance the interests and status of elite shareholders. John Ott
examines institutional documents, period commentary, and popular illustrations from
the late nineteenth century to provide insight into the Met’s governance structure and
hybrid public-private status and to outline how these reflect the specific cultural and
economic interests of its elite supporters. Indeed, Ott builds a compelling case for his
assertion that the museum was “engineered to display and valorize privately owned
collections at public expense.”19 Although founders may have championed the neces-
sity of such a museum on altruistic grounds, the institution functioned to promulgate
a bourgeois class identity “defined by aesthetic taste, public service, and civic pride.”20
In a similar vein, the final essay of this section examines how the Met’s early dis-
plays deliberately reinforced “the trustees’ own values and standards.”21 Lauren Less-
ing analyzes four heroic female figures, the work of sculptor William Wetmore Story,
that were part of the museum’s inaugural installation in its permanent Fifth Avenue
location. The essay asserts that Story’s Medea, Semiramis, Polyxena, and Cleopatra
(carved during the 1860s and 1870s) functioned not merely as monumental histori-
cal sculptures but also as vehicles for contemporary critique and corrective. By un-­
domesticating and re-masculinizing these sculptural figures, Story and his patrons at
the Met “celebrated the fact that art education would no longer be a private, domestic
matter but . . . a public concern to be carried out by male professionals.”22 By contex-
tualizing works of art within the museum’s larger educational and curatorial agendas,
Lessing uncovers additional means by which the role of the museum and status of its
patrons are further codified or put into play.
8 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
Depicting the Capital in Art and Culture
The concluding section of the book contains close readings of specific works that
serve to illuminate issues central to New York’s emergence as the capital of art and
culture. In her essay, Thayer Tolles examines the 1881 unveiling of sculptor Augustus
Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut Monument in New York City, a commission often credited
with launching the national reputation of Saint-Gaudens overnight. An authority on
the sculptor’s work, Tolles demonstrates that the monument, its unveiling, and its
critical reception were “the result of a deliberately orchestrated breakthrough moment
for [Saint-Gaudens] and for American sculpture.”23 Saint-Gaudens was a member of
Richard Watson Gilder’s circle and a beneficiary of the promotional “art literature”
that appeared in Scribner’s and other print media outlets, and this essay expands our
understanding of how various mechanisms of promotion conspire to establish cultural
credibility in a seemingly transparent way.
The next essay in this volume, a work by David Jaffee, was still in progress at the
time of the historian’s passing. We were incredibly fortunate to include this pioneer
in the field of material culture on our panel at the College Art Association session,
and we feel privileged to include his essay in this publication, now dedicated to his
memory. In “Crossing Broadway: New York and the Culture of Capital in the Late
­Nineteenth Century,” Jaffee utilizes the imagery of Broadway as a lens through which
to explore what he defines as a new phenomenon of visuality: “Nothing stood out
more as a visual subject and spectacle than Broadway, the leading street of the metrop-
olis, for its constant motion and visual display of the cityscape,” he maintains.24 In the
work of image-makers such as Mathew B. Brady and Edward Anthony, New York
became both the subject of the image and the site of image production. The evolving
technological complexity of capturing images is revealed, in Jaffee’s prose, to mirror
the transformation of the New York cityscape itself.
As wealthy patrons such as the Vanderbilts reshaped the built environment in
elite enclaves uptown, so too did real estate interests and financiers reinvent Lower
Manhattan. As Ross Barrett articulates in our closing essay, the financial district
was both the physical site and the conceptual manifestation of Wall Street’s surg-
ing market forces. Barrett demonstrates how William Holbrook Beard’s painted
depiction of Wall Street in 1879 humorously turned the breathless promotion of the
downtown building boom of the 1870s and 1880s on its head. Responding to the
incongruity of orderly real estate development and, at the same time, chaotic market
fluctuations, the art historian states, “Reconsidered in this light, Beard’s wild stam-
pede would seem to offer a raffish refiguration of the ‘march of improvement.’ ”25
Through his investigation of a seminal work representing or located in New York,
Barrett, like Tolles and Jaffee, discloses the process by which images—their recep-
tion, their meaning, and even their making—were positioned and negotiated in the
evolving landscape of the postbellum city.
As the essays in this collection have established, the primary forces operating within
and acting on this complex landscape were citizens of the metropolis who must be
considered “elite.” This group encompassed the upper social echelons and wealthiest
members of society as well as several prominent artists, critics, and writers who, while
not necessarily economically privileged, wielded substantial cultural and social capi-
tal. Many of these figures—industrialists and entrepreneurs, artists, tastemakers, and
visionaries—relied on, profited from, and often orchestrated great financial and societal
 Introduction 9
disparities to reinforce their status. And yet these figures are especially significant in this
study because it was their very privilege that enabled the realization of a sweepingly
ambitious vision to transform New York City into a world-class cultural capital. To
remind us of Alan Wallach’s words, the Gilded Age was their creation.
That said, it is a given that these elites could not and did not exist in a vacuum, and
two of our essays explore the proliferation of images that were targeted to and con-
sumed by members of the vast middle class. As Jaffee explains, this group comprised
the primary buyers of guidebooks and prints in particular, which were used to help
navigate the increasingly complex city. The middle class also purchased “illustrated
newspapers with images of the rich frolicking at society balls or the poor huddled in
dismal dwellings,” and, as Jaffee argues, these kinds of representations of the extreme
socioeconomic poles contributed to its own sense of class consciousness. Similarly,
Scobey tracks the “proliferation of edifying commodities”—a range of objects and
images—that “democratized uplift for a new middle-class public” and were central
to the project of nation-building in the wake of the Civil War. Other authors tap into
underlying tensions between different factions of society, and still others question the
extent to which civic institutions were actually available to the very public they pro-
fessed to serve. None of the essays takes as its principal topic the responses of the least
affluent to the growing cultural ascendency heralded by the elites in the city that they
shared.
Although the role of such entities as commercial galleries, auction houses, and art
dealers is inherent in this volume’s analyses of art production, patrons, and institu-
tions, our essays do not deal explicitly with the constellation of those forces. James
Jackson Jarves’s observation in 1863 that “private galleries are becoming almost as
common as private stables” confirms that the acquisitive impulse, and the requisite
outlets to satisfy it, were already developing in his time.26 They would grow exponen-
tially during the decades of our study. We have sought to convey the groundbreaking
exploits of some individual collectors. While exploring their personal motivations for
amassing art, our larger aim was to reveal what these particular individuals envisioned
as the ultimate destination for their holdings. Although the subject of Quodbach’s
essay, Henry Gurdon Marquand, formed a collection for the interiors of his Fifth
Avenue mansion, it was what the author labels as his “second collection,” consisting
of Old Master paintings, that he compiled specifically “to elevate the modest picture
holdings” of the Metropolitan Museum. And as Webster reveals, James Lenox was
undoubtedly driven by “a desire to expand the nation’s cultural map” in the accu-
mulation of his collections and the establishment of his library. In this context, these
authors demonstrate that Marquand and Lenox each possessed distinct views about
how their cultural capital should be preserved but were united in their belief that it
should be left in the public domain.
Our cover image, Frank Waller’s 1881 oil study, Interior View of the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth Street (Figure 0.2), further suggests some of
the complexities of this time. One of two paintings in this book by Waller (see also
Figure 8.6), it portrays what he deliberately crafted as a visual record of the museum’s
interior, prior to the Met’s transfer in 1880 to its permanent Central Park location. Here
Waller depicts a figure surrounded by various works of art. Paintings of diverse subject
matter and size line the walls of the picture gallery, with decorative art, antiquities, and
other objet installed in a glass case in the sunlit room beyond. Fashionably dressed, the
female subject leans over a brass railing to examine a canvas more closely. Waller would
10 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner

Figure 0.2 Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth
Street, 1881. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1895
(95.29)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

write to the Met’s president, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, in 1887, six years after he finished
the painting, attesting to its accuracy—both in terms of the space and in the pictures
represented;27 yet his work serves a purpose beyond mere documentation. To viewers
of the late nineteenth century—as to us today—Waller’s canvas functions as a point of
intersection for a variety of ideas, many of which are explored in these essays.
By including the phrase “when in Fourteenth Street” in the title of the piece, the
artist has designated the crucial transitional aspect of the site he depicted. In 1873,
 Introduction 11
the fledgling museum, having outgrown its initial location in the Dodworth Dance
Academy Building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, relocated to the former
Douglas Mansion, pictured here, at West Fourteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh
Avenues. This multistoried, freestanding brick residence, designed by James Renwick
Jr., was considered one of the city’s grandest houses. At five times the space of the
previous location, it offered exterior grounds and a sufficient interior footprint to
accommodate the growing museum.28 During the Met’s seven years at this address,
construction was already underway for its final destination uptown (the city allocated
$1 million in 1871 for both this and another museum to be built on the west side of
Central Park).29 Although a viewer of Waller’s painting does not see details of the
streets beyond, the figure shown would have been able to juxtapose the interior space
around her with the city outside. To borrow a concept from Jaffee, the city is both
the site of production and the subject depicted. Waller’s painting was created in New
York and revealed an interior view of a specific site in the city. The peregrinations of
the early Met call to mind the vicissitudes of the New York real estate market at this
moment, a topic underlying Barrett’s essay.
In Waller’s canvas, the paintings on view represent the cultural capital of the Met’s
elite founders. As several of our writers argue, art loaned or donated by these patrons
catered to their desire for personal promotion and fulfilled a sense of civic purpose.
The dual aims of these benefactors reflect one component of the museum’s founding
principle: namely, to strike a balance between financial feasibility and public access.
As our essays reveal, from the museum’s earliest years, extensive debate ensued about
what the price of museum admission should be, although any charge would necessar-
ily preclude some members of the public from attending. This thorny issue continues
to this day, as reflected by the Met’s 2018 decision to change a long-standing sug-
gested admissions policy to one requiring payment from those living outside New
York State.30
Similarly, James Lenox was driven by several motivating factors in establishing
his library, including the desire to create a world-class repository of educational
and cultural artifacts in this city while also perpetuating the legacy of the Lenox
name. In fact, the coloration and lighting of the rooms, the cases and displays,
and the arrangement of the works by medium on Waller’s canvas call to mind
the interior displays of the contemporaneous Lenox Library, newly reanimated in
this compilation. That the figure in Waller’s painting engages intimately with a
small-scale landscape suggests the shift in taste outlined by several of our authors
in this volume. Additionally, Frank Waller’s own background—he studied at the
National Academy of Design and would be a founder and teacher at the Art Stu-
dents League—places him within the milieu shaped by Richard Watson Gilder and
Helena de Kay, explored in this book.
At the same time, the woman’s solitary presence in Waller’s painting infers that
the museum itself served not only as a space for quiet contemplation and study but
also as an appropriately refined setting for an unaccompanied woman of standing.
A woman’s point of view on art was valued then for its supposed refined feminine
­sensibility—inextricably tied to domesticity and to her primary roles as wife and
mother. As Lessing argues, “the founders of the Metropolitan Museum were wary of
the potential threat that any hint of femininity might pose to the seriousness of their
endeavor.”31 Reconsidering the female figure with this perspective in mind, we may
now understand that the very institution whose space she occupies may have been
12 Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner
conceived from the outset to subvert her own agency, and that of women generally, in
the city’s burgeoning culture industry of the 1870s and 1880s.
This lays bare an additional, significant thread that we recognize but did not
seek to untangle in its entirety: the issue of gender. Our authors reference individual
women and the roles they played in shaping the era’s cultural sphere throughout
this volume. Helena de Kay and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer provide two such
examples; both helped to cultivate a hospitable environment for new ideas in late
nineteenth-­century American art. Women also served as tastemakers and patrons;
Murphy ­discusses Alva Vanderbilt, and Ott references Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, the
first female benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum and the first person to bequeath
an entire collection to that institution to be housed in a gallery bearing her name. All
these women were privileged socially and financially—key factors in the influence they
did have—and yet, because of the time period in which they lived, when many societal
constraints were placed on them due to their gender, they were precluded from playing
as prominent and visible a role as did many of their male counterparts. It is admittedly
beyond the scope of this volume to recalibrate the gender equation of this era. Still, we
begin here to identify the roles played by some women and to uncover the processes by
which they influenced New York’s development in the Gilded Age. As with the role of
the less affluent, and of gallerists, auctioneers, and other purveyors of art, the role of
women in the emergence of New York as a cultural capital of the world offers fruitful
terrain for future scholarship.

Notes
1 See Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day (Hartford,
CT: American Publishing Company, 1873).
2 Wayne Craven, Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2009), 16.
3 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York and London: D. Appleton Century, 1934),
21, 148–49.
4 Ibid.
5 See David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Land-
scape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
6 Dell Upton, “Inventing the Metropolis: Civilization and Urbanity in Antebellum New
York,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, eds. Catherine Hoover Voor-
sanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2001), 37.
7 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industri-
alization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1998), 286.
8 Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York:
New Press, 2002), xi.
9 Sven Beckert, The Moneyed Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
­American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
10 See Alan Wallach’s essay in this volume, page 66.
11 See Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architec-
ture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli, 1999).
12 See Craven, Gilded Mansions; and Donald Albrecht and Jeanine Falino, Gilded New York:
Design, Fashion and Society (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2013).
13 Beckert, The Moneyed Metropolis, 237.
14 See Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, eds., The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and
Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Nancy
Siegel, ed., The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on Landscape Painting (Durham:
­University of New Hampshire Press, 2011).
 Introduction 13
15 See Kimberly Orcutt, Power and Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial
Exhibition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
16 Although the term Manifest Destiny was coined in the antebellum years, this essay locates
the origins of visual representation and commodification of Westward expansion in Gilded
Age New York.
17 See Page Knox’s essay in this volume, page 92.
18 See Esmée Quodbach’s essay in this volume, page 114.
19 See John Ott’s essay in this volume, page 124.
20 Ibid., page 134.
21 See Lauren Lessing’s essay in this volume, page 156.
22 Ibid., page 140.
23 See Thayer Tholles’s essay in this volume, page 164.
24 See David Jaffee’s essay in this volume, page 179.
25 See Ross Barrett’s essay in this volume, page 202.
26 James Jackson Jarves, “Art in America, Its Condition and Prospects,” Fine Arts Quarterly
Review 1 (May–October 1863): 399–400.
27 Frank Waller to Luigi Palma di Cesola, April 13, 1887, quoted in Natalie Spassky, American
Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. II, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born
Between 1816 and 1845 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 577.
28 Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: With a Chapter on the
Early Institutions of Art in New York (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 162.
29 Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1880, 173.
30 See Robin Progrebin, “Met Changes 50-Year Admissions Policy: Non-New Yorkers Must
Pay,” New York Times, January 4, 2018.
31 Lessing, page 154.
Part I

Creating the Art and

Cultural Capital
1 Looking West From the Empire City
National Landscape and Visual
Culture in Gilded Age New York
David Scobey

American Progress
American Progress (see Plate 1) was a cliché from the start, and it still is. In the late
nineteenth century, the image could be found in thousands of middle-class parlors in
New York City and beyond. Today it can be viewed in dozens of American studies
lectures, a handy meme for “Manifest Destiny” or “the frontier thesis.” The very title
underscores its ready-made, national meaning.1
The image was painted and printed by the lithographer John Gast in 1872. It was
commissioned by the publisher George Crofutt as a gift promotion for Crofutt’s Trans-
Continental Tourist, his popular guide to Western travel on the newly completed Union
Pacific railroad. Crofutt derived enormous publicity from the chromolithograph (as well
as the engraved version that served as the frontispiece in later editions of the guide). Yet
it is clear that American Progress had more than promotional value for him. He gave
Gast detailed instructions as to its composition and symbolic program, and the guides
conclude with a page-long prospectus carefully parsing its meaning for the public:

This beautiful picture . . . is purely national in design, and represents the United
States’ portion of the American Continent in its beauty and variety, from the
Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, illustrating at a glance the grand drama of Progress
in the civilization, settlement and history of this country.2

For George Crofutt, American Progress was nothing less than an epic tableau of
national time and space.
The image portrays a familiar story of westward expansion. Every commonplace of
the frontier myth is here: the homesteading farmer, the Pony Express rider, prospecting
miners, rail lines and telegraph poles stretching across the continent. All purposive activ-
ity moves the same way—even the oxen plough to the west. Presiding over the scene is
“a beautiful and charming female . . . floating westward through the air,” whom Crofutt
names “the Star of Empire.” She bears in her arms the instruments of American enlight-
enment, a common school reader and the telegraph wire; and before her, the native crea-
tures of the western regions are being routed. Unlike other versions of this narrative—for
instance, Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebrated essay on the historical significance of the
frontier—this image positively revels in the violence of the westward movement:

Fleeing . . . toward the blue waters of the Pacific . . . are the Indians, buffalo,
wild horses, bears, and other game, moving westward—ever westward—the
­Indians . . . turn[ing] their despairing faces toward, as they flee from, the presence
of this wondrous vision. The “Star” is too much for them.
18 David Scobey
What American . . . does not feel a heart-throb of exultation as they think of
the glorious achievements of PROGRESS since the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers
on staunch old Plymouth Rock!

American Progress, in short, makes the occupation, settlement, and ethnic-cleansing

of the West the ur-narrative of American progress. And there was no better way to
celebrate that narrative than to display it in every parlor: “Is there a home, from the
miner’s humble cabin to the stately marble mansion of the capitalist, that can afford to
be without this Great National picture,” the prospectus concludes. “Who would not
have such a beautiful token to remind them of our country’s grandeur and enterprise,
which have made the mighty wilderness to blossom like the rose!”3
“This Great National picture”: such scholars as Angela Miller and William Cronon
have written incisively about the braiding of national history, continental territory,
and visual culture in nineteenth-century America. They argue that “landscape” in
both its senses—terrain and its representation—held a privileged role in nationalist
discourse during the era of Manifest Destiny. In works like Emanuel Leutze’s mural
in the U.S. Capitol (Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way) (Figure 1.1) or

Figure 1.1 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. Mural study. U.S.
Capitol (1861). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Sara Carr Upton
(1931.6.1)
Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Sara Carr Upton
 Looking West From the Empire City 19
Currier & Ives’s popular lithograph Across the Continent (also subtitled “Westward
the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”) (Figure 1.2), the westering movement serves as
an allegory of national development. American Progress offers a particularly program-
matic example of this genre. Drawing on a set of conventions that Miller has called
the “sequential landscape”—conventions that present pictorial space as an unfolding
of American time—Gast’s image literalized Frederick Jackson Turner’s trope of the
continent as a page from a history book: a serial space in which civilization displaces
barbarism and fills the vacancy left behind.4
Yet one element in American Progress complicates this melding of Western space
and national time: the city in the Northeast quadrant of the painting. The frontier
myth is, of course, organized by the binaries of East and West, city and wilderness;
and the city tends to play two complementary roles. On the one hand, it stands for the
past: a point of departure from which settlers move into open space and freedom. On
the other hand, it stands for the future, the telos of a civilizing process that will raise
urban improvements and urban land-values out of the western wastes. The frontier
myth tends not, however, to treat cities (most of all Eastern cities) as the present: as
current agencies of national development, whose growth is coeval and interlinked
with the westward movement. That is just what American Progress does.
For the city in this landscape is not a generic “Eastern” element, an antitype to the
main story of westering expansion. It is the only well-specified locality in the paint-
ing. Its shape, its rivers, and the rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge make it identifiable

Figure 1.2 Frances Palmer, Across the Continent. Lithograph. Published by Currier & Ives
(ca. 1868). Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
20 David Scobey
immediately as New York. And this is a New York whose role in the economic and
cultural creation of “the West” is inscribed in the image. Cross-country railroads fan
out from Jersey City terminals; the telegraph winds its way back to Manhattan, as
it did after the consolidation of Western Union from six regional networks in 1866.
Even the schoolbook carried by the “Star of Empire” probably came from the Empire
City; by the late 1850s, the Appleton publishing house controlled the national market
in primers. Along with its hardy pioneers and fleeing Indians, then, American Progress
tells a story of metropolitan dominance, a counter-story that we might entitle “How
the West Was City-Made.”5
Equally important, New York is depicted not only as an engine or hub of westering
progress but also as its symbolic counterpart. The city mirrors the Western mountains
visually, like two arms enclosing the interior of the continent; the towers and cables of
the Brooklyn Bridge mimic both the mountain range and the rhythm of the telegraph
line. The bridge is in fact crucial to this linking of Western landscape and Eastern
cityscape. In 1872, when John Gast painted American Progress, only its Gothic tow-
ers had been built; the span would not be completed until 1883. Such anticipatory
touches appear often in prints of nineteenth-century New York, as if to portray a city
so dynamic that its future were already embedded in its present-day fabric. If this
sounds suspiciously like the discourse of “the West as America,”6 the embodiment of
American futurity, that is just the point. The presence of an unfinished, predestined
Brooklyn Bridge inserts New York into this image not as a place being left behind but
as an open site of history, undergoing its own heroic transformations in tandem with
the westward movement.
Nor was American Progress an anomaly: New York appears in other accounts of
the West as America and other “Great National pictures.” Thomas Nast created his
own sequential landscape, for instance, in the frontispiece to a popular travelogue,
Beyond the Mississippi (1869): vignettes of industrious farmers and miners surround
an onrushing locomotive that scatters Indians and buffalo before it, while scenes of
New York and San Francisco enclose the image, much like the city and mountains
of Gast’s picture. The 1870s gift-book, Picturesque America—a sumptuous collec-
tion of essays and engravings celebrating American places—similarly portrays the
Manhattan landscape as one of its frontispieces (framed, again, by the East River
­

bridge). Frederick Law Olmsted, in an 1865 proposal that Yosemite Valley be reserved
as a scenic park, evokes as precedent not only Leutze’s Capitol mural of the Sierras
and Albert Bierstadt’s Yosemite paintings but also New York’s National Academy of
Design and (his own) Central Park.7
It should come as no surprise that, during and after the Civil War, American art-
ists used the North American landscape to explore themes of national unity and
progress. Nor should it surprise us that Gilded Age consumers of visual culture
looked to the West for “Great National pictures,” as if to put the trauma of sec-
tional struggle at their backs. What is surprising is the presence of New York. Why
would artists, printmakers, publishers, and visual entrepreneurs include traces of
the Empire City—its landscape, its role in the course of destiny—as they made,
displayed, discussed, and purveyed images of the West as America? I offer several
answers to this riddle. Together they tell us much about the making of the West as a
national landscape, about the visual culture that did so, and about the role of New
York City in both.
 Looking West From the Empire City 21
Great National Pictures
By 1872, the year John Gast painted American Progress, the nation had undergone
several decades of territorial expansion, sectional conflict, and wrenching integration.
The Civil War was the crux of the process, but the defeat of the Confederacy was
itself part of a longer struggle for national unification from the Mexican-American
War to the Indian wars of the 1880s. Gast’s picture reflects this nation-building epoch
in myriad ways. Its iconography of railroads, telegraph lines, prospectors, Indian
removal, and homesteading ploughmen gestures to the nexus of forces—economic,
technological, legal, military—that incorporated the land and resources of the West
into a national economy and a national state.
But the picture also registers a process of cultural integration that was as conse-
quential in its own way as the Homestead Act or the Union Pacific. Here it is not so
much the imagery of American Progress that matters as the printed artifact itself—or
rather the linked artifacts of painting, chromolithograph, engraving, and guidebook.
These were part of an extraordinary proliferation of edifying commodities in the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, an explosion of popular books, periodicals,
parlor furniture, and objets d’art that fused affordability with “civilizing” purpose.
The Victorian culture industry was crucial to American nation-building. It democra-
tized uplift for a new middle-class public, and it used the artifacts of uplift to unify
and celebrate an America that seemed threatened (or so that public feared) by the
country’s commercialism, its sectional and social divisions, and its vast territorial
heterogeneity.8
This consumer culture was “national” in two linked senses. On the one hand,
its makers and entrepreneurs—John Gast and George Crofutt, or more famously,
­Currier & Ives and the Harper Brothers—took American history, topography, and
social character as key themes of their “product.” To cite only one example, vol-
ume 43 of Harper’s Magazine (1871) included visits to Maryland’s eastern shore, the
Florida coast, and Stockbridge Village; educative reports on the climate of the Great
Lakes, dinosaur expeditions to Montana, and Mormon Utah; and patriotic tours of
Monticello, the Naval Academy, and an 1812 battle site—all in six issues. Such a
table of contents composed an American subject matter and convened an American
public for whom Harper’s represented a shared source of cultural authority. On the
other hand, edifying commodities were “national” because they circulated in a unified
national market, knit together by a new regime of traveling salesmen, catalog adver-
tising, subscription selling, credit buying, and long-run production. “Dear Sir,” wrote
Currier & Ives to potential sales agents:

Herewith we enclose our new Catalogue of Popular Cheap Prints containing

nearly Eleven hundred subjects. . . . Our experience of over Thirty years in the
Trade enables us to select for Publication, subjects best adapted to suit the popular
taste, and to meet the wants of all sections.

For the first time, white middle-class Americans in Wichita, Charleston, Chicago, and
Troy were apt to surround themselves with the same objects of taste and leisure—
objects that mirrored back to them a national culture to which they belonged precisely
by putting it on display.9
22 David Scobey
It was a preeminently visual culture. In 1840, paintings and prints remained largely
luxury goods. Thirty years later, homes, businesses, and places of public resort were
filled with a “chromo-civilization” of lithographs, engravings, daguerreotypes, and
stereographs. Steam presses and refinements in wood engraving enabled the Harpers
and their rivals to offer high-end illustrations; economies in stone- and ink-making
made lithographers like Currier & Ives or Louis Prang household names. “Pictures
have now become a necessity,” proclaimed Currier & Ives, “and the price at which
they can be retailed is so low, that everybody can afford to buy them.”10
Landscapes were not the only popular subject in this visual culture, nor were they
its only means of exhibiting national pride. Parlors and offices displayed domestic and
regional genre scenes, equestrian and maritime pictures, patriotic portraits and heroic
episodes from U.S. history. But North American topography had a privileged role
in the representation of American identity—one that predated the rise of Victorian
consumer culture. Beginning in the 1830s, the artists of the Hudson River School had
used the conventions of romantic naturalism to create nationalist allegory. Paintings
like Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after
a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) (1836) or Asher B. Durand’s Progress (The Advance
of Civilization) (1853) offered sequential landscapes of civilizational progress. Other
works depicted “the unsettled landscape as a symbolic repository of values informing
national identity,” as Angela Miller writes, sacralizing wild places like the Catskills,
the White Mountains, or Niagara Falls as emblems of American freedom and great-
ness. One journalist marveled at Frederic Church’s Niagara (1857):

[I]t is grand and sublime; it is natural to the nation . . . ; it is a true development of

the American mind; the result of democracy. . ., of the liberty allowed to all. . . .
It is inspired not only by the irresistible cataract, but by the mighty forest, by the
thousand miles of river, by the broad continent we call our own, by the onward
march of civilization, by the conquering of savage areas.11

Niagara was the most celebrated of these symbolic landscapes, and it helped to
establish the template by which the nationalist “content” of Hudson River easel paint-
ing was grafted onto the Victorian culture industry. For Church was not only a virtuoso
landscapist but also a master impresario. He displayed Niagara in a solo exhibition
in New York—more than one hundred thousand visitors paid the twenty-five cent
admission—and toured it in the United States and Britain, selling chromolithographic
copies of the work. Two years later, Church doubled down on the strategy of block-
buster tours and high-end reproductions, exhibiting the even grander Heart of the
Andes in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building, taking it on an eighteen-month
tour and marketing lithographs and engravings all the while. Church extended the
reach of “Great National pictures” both commercially and geographically.12
The joining of visual culture and triumphant nationalism reached its apex in
April 1864 in New York’s Union Square. There a “Metropolitan Fair” organized by
Manhattan social elites raised funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a philanthropy
that provided medical aid to the Union army. For three weeks, in the heart of the city’s
amusement and shopping district, the fair displayed patriotic mementoes and sold
luxury goods in support of the Unionist cause. The “Picture-Gallery” in particular
was a shrine to the optics of nation-building. At one end of the exhibition-hall hung
Emanuel Leutze’s iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Nearby were
 Looking West From the Empire City 23
Church’s Niagara and The Heart of the Andes—the latter arranged in an ensemble
with famous portraits of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, lest anyone miss the con-
nection between Andean scenery and American patriotism (Figure 1.3).13
Opposite Church’s tropical tour de force—and evoking endless comparison with
it—was one other monumental landscape: Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains,
Lander’s Peak (1863). The painting was both an homage and a challenge to the
reigning master of the national landscape tradition. Like The Heart of the Andes, it
combined gigantic scale (six by ten feet), sublime scenery, and an almost hyperrealist
inscription of minutia. Like Church, Bierstadt debuted it in a solo show at the Tenth
Street Studio Building, and he promoted it cannily at the fair, stationing an assistant
in the Picture-Gallery to take orders for engravings (Figure 1.4). Based on sketches
that Bierstadt had made on Frederick Lander’s 1859 survey expedition, the canvas
is a grandiose bricolage, an ensemble of scenic fragments. As a geological and topo-
graphical document, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak is incoherent. Yet Bierstadt
presents it as an elemental celebration of American wilderness and a prophetic vision
of the grandeurs of settlement and progress—or so it was understood by contem-
porary viewers. “It is purely an American scene,” editor George W. Curtis wrote in
Harper’s Weekly. “It is the curtained continent with its sublime natural forms and its
rude savage human life . . . [yet] the imagination contemplates it as the possible seat
of supreme civilization.” Another critic waxed even more eloquent in the idiom of the
national landscape:

I feel that this is a glimpse into the heart of the continent towards which civiliza-
tion is struggling. . . . It is the romance of the new. This, to me, is the power of
the picture. I know that the nation’s future greatness is somehow dimly seen in the
great West. This picture is a view into the penetralia of destiny as well as nature.14

Figure 1.3 Frederic Church, The Heart of the Andes, as exhibited at the Metropolitan Sanitary
Fair. Stereograph by unidentified photographer, 1864. Collection of the New-York
Historical Society
Source: Collection of the New-York Historical Society
24 David Scobey

Figure 1.4 James Smillie, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. Engraving (1866) of Albert Bierstadt
oil painting with the same title (1863). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers
Fund, 1974 (1974.211)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

The heart of the continent . . . the romance of the new . . . the penetralia of destiny:
if Church’s Niagara Falls had proposed a marriage between nationality and visual cul-
ture, Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountain fantasia consummated it—by shifting it westward.
“Bierstadt invented the epic western landscape,” the art historian Nancy K. Anderson
writes, “the landscape that might carry a Rocky Mountain, Sierra Nevada, or Yosemite
title but was always, in the end, about the American quest, however illusory, for peace
and prosperity in a new golden land.”15 Bierstadt’s succès d’estime launched his career
as the first great painter of the West as America, but it also marked a broader wester-
ing of the culture industry. Especially after the Civil War, publishers, artists, and visual
entrepreneurs embraced the notion that (as the reviewer quoted previously put it) “the
nation’s future greatness is somehow dimly seen in the great West.” Magazines teemed
with accounts of scientific expeditions, railroad tourism, and the natural wonders of
Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Journalists’ travelogues whetted public
curiosity about the West, as did Ned Buntline’s best-selling dime fiction about Buffalo
Bill Cody. Currier & Ives published lithographs of wilderness and frontier scenes by
the firm’s most popular artist, Frances Palmer, including Yosemite Valley—­California:
“The Bridal Veil” Falls (1866), The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the Plains
(1866), and Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
(1868). A decade later, the chromolithographer Louis Prang published a portfolio of
reproductions of Thomas Moran’s watercolors of the Yellowstone region, widely con-
sidered (then and now) the crowning achievement of American lithography.16
 Looking West From the Empire City 25
Moran was the second great master of Western landscape art. (He followed and
competed with Bierstadt, much as the older painter had emulated and challenged
Church.) Moran began his career as a commercial artist for the new Scribner’s
Monthly. His inaugural assignment was to illustrate a report on Ferdinand Hayden’s
exploratory trip to the Rockies in 1869; two years later, the magazine sent him as an
expeditionary artist on Hayden’s survey of the Yellowstone region, alongside the pho-
tographer William Henry Jackson. Jackson’s photographs and Moran’s illustrations—
published in government reports as well as in Scribner’s—captivated viewers with
Yellowstone’s strange beauty. They played a crucial role in mobilizing public support
for the 1872 Act of Congress that established Yellowstone as the first national park (a
bill advanced by the politicos and rail barons who had financed the Hayden survey).
Meanwhile Moran set about creating his own masterwork in oil—The Grand Canyon
of the ­Yellowstone—and promoting his reputation (Figure 1.5). “The connoisseurs
who have seen this picture declare that it is superior to Bierstadt’s Yosemite,” wrote
one journalist, invited to the artist’s studio to report on its progress, “and that Moran
is certainly the coming man in art.” The promotional campaign was a success: the
“coming man in art” persuaded Congress to purchase the work for the stunning sum
of $10,000 and to display it in the Senate lobby.17
Moran’s genius for monumental but vivid scenography made him the ideal painter
of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and other landmarks of Western sublimity. His
ecumenical embrace of both “high” and “commercial” picture-making enabled him to
range across the visual marketplace, just as the public was growing fascinated with the
West. His political and business acumen made him surprisingly influential in national

Figure 1.5 Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872. Oil on canvas,
mounted on aluminum. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lent by the U.S.
Department of the Interior Museum (L.1968.84.1)
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior Museum
26 David Scobey
efforts to explore, exploit, and celebrate Western lands. Yet his individual success
underscores a larger process that braided together the development of the continent,
the growth of Gilded Age visual culture, and the project of American nation-­building.
This braid was shaped by many factors: by the on-the-ground activity of miners,
homesteaders, scientists, tourists, and soldiers; by the public’s intense curiosity about
the West and its equally intense impulse to leave behind the issues of slavery and war;
by the rise of a culture industry that stood ready to transmute these developments and
desires into pictures. But one additional factor proved crucial to the westering of the
national landscape: the rise of New York.

The National Metropolis

When George Crofutt and John Gast met to discuss the terms for American Progress,
it may have been at the Park Hotel on Nassau Street, “a regular haunt of printers,
­editors, and reporters,” in the words of Crofutt’s biographer, where the publisher
occasionally resided.18 He would have come around the corner from his Park Row
office; Gast, from his workshop at 116 Fulton Street, a block or two away. Yet their
meeting was also the outcome of longer journeys. Both had moved to New York within
months of each other in 1870. It was Crofutt’s second stint in the city: he had initially
come to Manhattan from rural Connecticut in the 1850s as a traveling sales agent in
the publishing trade. The Panic of 1857 bankrupted him and set him on more than a
decade of itinerant ventures, mainly as a journalist and freight-hauler in Colorado and
Utah. It was the transcontinental railroad that changed his luck: Crofutt realized that
the nascent market in travel and tourism would require a guide who knew both pub-
lishing and Western life. He launched the first edition of his Trans-Continental Tourist
from Chicago in early 1870 and then shifted his operation to New York. Gast, some
twenty years younger, grew up in St. Louis, having emigrated from Prussia as a small
child in 1846. The son and brother of lithographers, he studied in Berlin and Paris,
then artistic centers for chromolithography, during his twenties. When he returned to
the United States in 1870, it was to set up his own shop in New York. The commission
for American Progress must have brought a welcome measure of security and recogni-
tion to the new Gast Lithographic and Engraving Company.
It is hardly surprising that both the seasoned entrepreneur and the young artist felt
the gravitational pull of New York; this was precisely the era when the city established
itself as the hub of American commerce and culture. National development and met-
ropolitan growth were intertwined. It was the integration of capital markets in and
around Wall Street that underwrote the great nation-building projects of these years:
the provisioning of the Union army, the building of the continental rail network, the
funding of mining booms and cattle bonanzas in the Great West. It was the launch of
the Associated Press by a consortium of New York newspapers in 1846 and the con-
solidation of Western Union twenty years later that enabled real-time communications
throughout the national market. And it was in New York City that a new cultural
regime, comprising hundreds of editors, journalists, artists, printmakers, publishers,
and visual entrepreneurs, provisioned the American middle and upper classes with
periodicals, popular books, prints, and other edifying commodities.19
New York was by no means the sole center of the nation’s cultural production.
Grand Rapids led in the manufacture of middle-class parlor furniture; Boston boasted
 Looking West From the Empire City 27
the Atlantic Monthly and the great chromolithographer Louis Prang. Yet New York
was the Empire City of the Victorian culture industry, home to its largest, most power-
ful, and most innovative producers. D. Appleton and Company dominated the national
market in common-school primers. Manhattan story papers created mass, gender-
specific audiences for popular literature, with Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger lead-
ing the way in women’s domestic fiction and Street and Smith’s New York Weekly in
masculine adventure and mystery stories. Harper and Brothers inaugurated a periodi-
cal revolution with the launch of Harper’s Magazine in 1850, melding steam-powered
printing, rail-based distribution, lively commentary, and refined but vivid illustration
to build a national readership of some two hundred thousand. The firm followed up in
1857 with Harper’s Weekly (focused on news and politics) and Harper’s Bazaar (fash-
ion) a decade later. Other New York houses, such as Scribner and Appleton, emulated
the Harper formula of mass-produced, illustrated magazines for segmented, national
readerships. By 1890, two-thirds of the country’s large-circulation periodicals were
published in Manhattan.20
All this relied on and reinforced a dramatic expansion of visual culture. Production
economies and technical improvements made fine prints and well-illustrated publica-
tions available for the first time not only to elite connoisseurs but also to middle-class
consumers.21 Here again New York was the leading agent and beneficiary of change.
John Gast’s migration was no anomaly: the prospect of commercial work made the city
a magnet for aspiring artists, engravers, and lithographers. Young Winslow Homer left
Boston for New York in 1859 to earn his living as a free-lance illustrator, mainly for the
house of Harper; Thomas Moran moved from Philadelphia to Newark a decade later
on the strength of his commissions from Scribner’s Monthly. Wall Street contributed
directly to the demand: many engravers found work designing currency and financial
securities. New York was also “the great pillar of lithography.” The firm of Currier &
Ives was the largest purveyor of lithographic prints in the country, especially after Nath-
aniel Currier made bookkeeper James Ives his partner in 1857: the talented Ives stream-
lined production, expanded marketing, and refocused inventory on American scenery
and daily life. Yet the firm’s workshop on Nassau Street was only one of dozens in lower
Manhattan; by 1890, New York controlled nearly half the national market.22
The city’s cultural dominance was aesthetic as well. Metropolitan institutions, such
as the National Academy of Design (NAD) and the American Art-Union, and metro-
politan art journals like the Aldine saw themselves as tutelary guides for the nation:
“RESOLVED,” the American Art-Union asserted in 1845, “That it is the duty of this
Association to use its influence to elevate and purify public taste, and to extend among
the people, the knowledge and admiration of the productions of ‘HIGH ART.’ ” To be
sure, other cultural centers challenged such claims. Yet it was undeniable that an artist
whose work was selected for a NAD exhibition, or for engraved reproduction by the
American Art-Union or the Aldine, gained a stature that no other venue could confer.
And the aim of such stewardship was not only to elevate artistic excellence or public
refinement but also to distill a shared American nationality through artistic excellence
and public refinement. The Hudson River School was the crucial example of such met-
ropolitan nation-building. From Thomas Cole to Frederic Church to Thomas Moran,
three generations of landscape painters came to Manhattan, where they not only evolved
a new mode of landscape art as civilizational allegory but also used the city’s cultural
prestige and social networks to make it the ur-genre of national identity.23
28 David Scobey
These patterns of cultural production were embedded in the cityscape itself. The
third quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change in the built
environment: New York grew from a compact, chaotic port city to a vast, specialized,
integrated, but still chaotic metropolitan area. The mid-century boom gave the city’s
visual culture its own complex geography. The world of high art was concentrated in a
new uptown sphere of genteel sociability and refined amusements, anchored between
Union Square (site of the Metropolitan Fair) and Madison Square (home to the Ital-
ianate palazzo that the NAD built in 1869).24 But perhaps the most consequential
high-art venue was several blocks away on Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Ave-
nues, where in 1857 businessman James Boorman Johnson commissioned a building
“devoted entirely to the service of artists” (Figure 1.6). The Studio Building leased
workspace (and sometimes apartments) to dozens of painters, sculptors, architects,
and writers, including a veritable Murderers’ Row of eminences. Among its early ten-
ants were the landscape painters Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford,
Martin Johnson Heade, Jervis McEntee, and Worthington Whittredge—it was, as one
scholar writes, the “unofficial headquarters” of the Hudson River School—as well
as Emanuel Leutze, Winslow Homer, the sculptor John La Farge, and the architect
Richard Morris Hunt (who designed the building itself). Both The Heart of the Andes
and Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak were painted in the Studio Building and first
shown in its sky-lit exhibition hall. Leutze’s studies for the U.S. Capitol mural were
undertaken there, as were many of Homer’s best-known New England and Southern
scenes.25 The Studio Building was Ground Zero, in short, for the intersection of fine
art, national culture, and metropolitan dominance in Gilded Age America.
Yet it would be a mistake to isolate the uptown art world from the larger geography
of cultural production in New York. The Studio Building and the National Academy
were part of a complex landscape where “fine art” and “commercial culture” were
deeply entwined and mutually reinforcing. It included the Printing House Square
district of publishers, journalists, and pressmen east of City Hall Park (home to the
House of Harper and the Gast Lithographic and Engraving Company); a cluster of
magazines farther up Broadway (including Scribner’s and Appleton’s); and concen-
trations of engravers and lithographers east of the Bowery and south of Fourteenth
Street.26 Within this ecosystem, the creative and financial currents ran in all direc-
tions. Even as Homer moved up the cultural hierarchy (and uptown) from magazine
illustrator to celebrated painter, he continued to produce illustrations for Harper’s
Weekly from his Tenth Street studio. Even as the famed engraver James Smillie con-
tracted with Albert Bierstadt to reproduce Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, he was
retained by the National Bank Note Company to design financial securities. Smillie’s
son (also named James) assisted on the Bierstadt engraving; an accomplished land-
scape artist himself, he was sent to Yosemite by D. Appleton and Company a few
years later to prepare illustrations for Picturesque America. And even as Appleton
commissioned art for that gift-book, it issued a mass-market travel guide, Appleton’s
Handbook of American Travel: Western Tour, to compete directly with George Cro-
futt.27 Visual culture in the metropolis was a complex circuit board on which books
and pictures, paintings and prints, fine art and mass consumables were promiscu-
ously interconnected. It was the density of these integrated circuits that gave culture-
making so powerful a role in nation-building—and made New York so central to
both.
Thus, the westering of the national landscape took place, paradoxically enough, in and
around Manhattan. Bierstadt painted the Rockies and the Sierras on Tenth Street; Moran
 Looking West From the Empire City 29
memorialized Yellowstone in Newark; Frances Palmer made Across the Continent:
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way in the Nassau Street workshop of
Currier & Ives; Gast created American Progress on Fulton Street, a few blocks away.
This may be a paradox, but it is not a mystery. As we have seen, these pictures were

Figure 1.6 Photograph of Tenth Street Studio, street view, ca. 1870. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
30 David Scobey
produced at the culmination of, and in response to, a process of national integration
and continental expansion that also ratified New York’s rise to economic and cultural
dominance. For the artists and publishers who made and sold such images, the city
had become the best vantage-point from which to look west at the nation—and the
best place to make their own reputations and fortunes in the process.
Here, then, is the first answer to why traces of New York show up in the portrayal
of the West as America. They are tell-tales: something like watermarks, or printers’
bugs, or the geographical insignia that publishers included on title pages (“New York:
D. Appleton and Company, 549 & 551 Broadway”) or along the bottom of prints
(“Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau Street, New York”). They are traces of the
metropolitan conditions under which “Great National pictures” were made.

The Western Trek

In 1873, two years after his career-defining trip to the Yellowstone region, Thomas
Moran undertook a second western journey, accompanying John Wesley Powell’s
expedition down the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon. Already famous, Moran
carried commissions to depict the grandeurs of the Colorado not only for Powell’s
official reports but also for Scribner’s Monthly, the Aldine, and Appleton’s Picturesque
America project. “[I have] 70 drawings for Powell, 40 for Appleton, 4 for Aldine, 20
for Scribner’s all from this region,” he wrote his wife as he prepared to return home,
“beside the water colors and oil pictures.” Back in Newark, he made several paintings,
including the great Chasm of the Colorado, and many illustrations for official publica-
tions, periodicals, and books.28
Moran’s note underscores the creative circuits that linked different media and mar-
ket niches in the Victorian culture industry. But it also points to another theme that is
equally important to this story: the geographic circuits that linked New York with the
West in the production of the national landscape. The city served as the great switch-
board of American visual culture only because it was also a point of origin and return
in the circulation of picture-makers and their pictures.
Throughout the nineteenth century, artists’ travel and plein-air sketching were key
practices of American landscape art and Western pictorial representation. The growth of
the Victorian culture industry only enhanced their importance. New York print-makers
and publishers drew on the work of touring and expeditionary artists; ­Currier & Ives,
for instance, reproduced William Ranney’s pictures of trappers and many of George
Catlin’s Indian paintings.29 This bond between Western travel and New York picture-
making deepened in 1859 when Albert Bierstadt accompanied Frederick Lander’s sur-
vey of the Rocky Mountains—or more precisely, when he moved to New York upon
his return and painted his first Western landscapes in the Tenth Street Studio Building.
Bierstadt’s aesthetic and reputational breakout took two established modes of artistic
itinerancy—the American painter’s tour of Europe and the Hudson River painter’s plein-
air wanderings in the Northeast—and melded them into something new: the Western
trek. “Adventure is an element in American artist-life which gives it singular zest and
interest,” one journalist wrote in a biographical sketch of Bierstadt:

A few years ago the idea of a carefully studied, faithfully composed, and admi-
rably executed landscape of Rocky Mountain scenery, would have been deemed
 Looking West From the Empire City 31
chimerical, involving, as it must, long and isolated journeys, and no ordinary
risk and privation. And yet . . . the novelty and grandeur of [Rocky Mountains,
Lander’s Peak] . . . have made this first elaborate representation of a vast and
distant range . . . one of the most essentially representative and noble illustrations
of American landscape art.

Almost immediately other New York painters followed suit. Emanuel Leutze jour-
neyed to California in 1861, pursuing studies of the Sierras and the Golden Gate for
his U.S. Capitol mural. Landscapists like Sanford Gifford went on sketching tours.
Lesser-known artists, such as James Smillie, were sent to provide illustrations for
­Picturesque America. Thomas Moran was far from alone in trekking west with com-
missions and returning to New York with salable work.30
The purpose of such travel was more than simply documentary and commercial. The
Western trek became itself an act of aesthetic and cultural significance for ambitious
American artists. On the one hand, it conferred authenticity on their work, investing
it with the charisma of strenuously achieved, unmediated witness. On the other hand,
the very presence of the artist there, in the Western landscape, conferred authority on
the landscape itself, investing it with national meaning. It framed the West as a place
to be represented, a place where nature was already charged with the possibilities of
representation. Itinerancy made the artist’s eye and hand—the A ­ merican artist’s eye
and hand—part of the scene.
Nineteenth-century artists acknowledged and dramatized this tension between
immediacy and mediation in varying ways. Sometimes they created works that
marked their presence within the frame. William Henry Jackson shot a photograph
of himself shooting a photograph of Yosemite Valley, perched high in silhouette on
the rim of Glacier Point. Moran included a tiny vignette of himself, crouched over a
sketchbook, in The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. More frequently, the artist’s
presence was memorialized in the press. Bierstadt’s role on the Lander expedition,
for instance, was reported in his letters to an art journal and by a correspondent for
Harper’s Weekly (who was himself depicted, taking notes, in one of the artist’s illus-
trations). Bierstadt’s second tour four years later—the trip that produced his great
paintings of Yosemite—included a writer friend, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who posted
accounts in the Atlantic Monthly and revised them into a book, The Heart of the
Continent (1867).31
Such reportage signaled that the Western trek was noteworthy in its own right, a
cultural errand into a made-for-painting wilderness. “It was a great disappointment
to some of our kind friends,” Ludlow reported from Colorado Springs, “that our
artist did not choose the Garden of the Gods [a nearby rock formation] for a ‘big
picture.’ It was such an interesting place in nature that they could not understand
its unavailability for art.” Ludlow’s hosts were disappointed, of course, because
they were already schooled in the “big-picture” aesthetics of the national landscape
tradition. Perhaps they had seen reproductions of Church or Bierstadt; perhaps
they had read Ludlow’s first article in the Atlantic, published two months earlier.
For whatever reason, they knew to assume that their local grandeurs should be (in
Ludlow’s wonderful formulation) “available for art.” Anthony Trollope encoun-
tered much the same reality on the Mississippi in 1861; when his steamboat broke
down, leaving him marooned for the day, he was struck to find “Harper’s everlasting
32 David Scobey
magazine”—the American publisher of his own stories—in a small cabin near
Dubuque, Iowa. Here was the crucial difference between the travels of a George
Catlin in the 1830s and those of Bierstadt and his peers thirty years after. The later
generation explored a continent already saturated with mass-circulation magazines
and “big pictures.”32
Which is to say, saturated with the influence of New York. The Empire City occu-
pied a privileged position in these itineraries. It was simultaneously a destination,
a point of departure, and an entrepot: the central node in a complex geography of
cultural careers and a complex flow of cultural goods. Painters, printers, and publish-
ers gravitated to Manhattan to make their mark, to launch their enterprises, or to
just find work. Yet their journeys were rarely a simple vector from the provinces
to the metropole. Some emigrated from Europe and returned there for study (Leutze,
­Bierstadt, John Gast); many undertook American journeys in search of new subjects
and stature (Bierstadt, Moran, Homer) or new economic opportunities (Crofutt, Gast).
And at the same time, the goods they produced were circulated in a national consumer
culture arrayed around New York’s dominance. They gleaned visual and narrative
material from across the continent, used it to make pictures and stories in the metrop-
olis, reproduced these in various media for various markets, and re-­circulated them
back to middle-class and elite publics across the continent. We should not picture this
regime as unidirectional, with edifying commodities and taste edicts flowing outward
and downward from an all-powerful center. Rather, the itineraries trace a networked
world where people, money, and representations flowed back and forth, where bank-
rupts like Crofutt and aspiring artists like Moran ventured westward and returned
with new materials, sketchbooks, and projects in hand. It was through such flows that
New York projected and replenished its power and that Western places were recast
into national landscapes.
Here, then, is a second answer to our riddle about traces of New York in represen-
tations and accounts of the West. Much like the taste for “big pictures” that L ­ udlow
found in Colorado or the copy of “Harper’s everlasting magazine” that Trollope
found near Dubuque, the city was already out there, deposited like flood sediment
by the currents of the culture industry. This was, after all, the implication of Gast’s
American Progress: the Empire City was inside the scene, an ineradicable aspect of
the “Great National picture.” And that meant, in turn, that the West was inside New
York, deposited there by the same currents and circuits.

Metropolis and Wilderness

The West was inside New York: this phrase is less paradoxical than it may sound.
As an economic reality, it was literally true: New York’s national dominance, and its
mid-century boom, depended on incorporating the resources of the hinterland into
the markets of the metropolis. “The products of the wheat fields of the prairies, the
gold mines of the Pacific coast,” boasted the Manhattan real-estate booster William
Martin, “will heap up a portion of their accumulations here, just as accurately as if all
these fields of labor were within the city limits.” New York’s real-estate economy was
fueled by such national “accumulations.” The built environment served as “a savings
bank, or rather a safe deposit box,” as a leading business journal put it, “wherein
are gathered the fruits and profits of the general trade and business of the country.”
 Looking West From the Empire City 33
Western development in particular was understood as a material condition and a
strategic catalyst for New York’s local metamorphosis: “In a few months the great
chain will be completed which shall bind the Atlantic to the Pacific,” a group of
waterfront investors wrote of the transcontinental railroad. “Shall we not accept our
destiny, and make our port accommodations equal to our growing needs?”33
Destiny, landscape, development: such talk, of course, evokes nothing so clearly
as the discourse of the frontier myth and the visual tradition of “Great National pic-
tures.” It underscores that New York’s introjection of the West was not only economic
but also ideological. Metropolitan elites envisioned the city’s growth in much the same
way that Bierstadt and Gast envisioned the settling of the continent: as an allegory of
American progress. Just as journalists and artists discerned in the Western landscape
“the romance of the new,” “the possible seat of supreme civilization,” and “the pen-
etralia of destiny,” New Yorkers deployed the rhetoric of prophetic grandiosity to pro-
claim the city’s imperium over American time and space. “As Rome, in olden times,
was the mistress of millions in remotest provinces,” the leading reform coalition of the
1860s wrote, “so must imperial New-York fulfill a like destiny to the teeming States
and territories which commerce, science and other interests shall attract towards her
bosom.”34
And as with the discourse of the West as America, bourgeois New Yorkers invested
the landscape of Manhattan with heightened meaning. They viewed it as the embodi-
ment of New York’s predestined power—and therefore as a microcosm of the national
landscape and its expression of destiny and power. Here, for instance, is John Dix’s
1853 address to the New-York Historical Society on “The Growth of New York City”:

The great features of this continent seem to mark it out for . . . labors and desti-
nies of corresponding magnitude,—the Mississippi pouring into the ocean. . . ,—
the Niagara, collecting the waters of an inland sea . . . ,—the Rocky-Mountain
chain, pushing up its snowy summits to the heavens. . . . A country thus strongly
marked in its physical lineaments is a fit theatre for the great experiment we are
making of the competency of mankind to self-government, and for the social
developments which are in progress here on so vast a scale. This city, as the
metropolis of such a country, should correspond with it in the magnitude of its
improvements.

Dix was a Wall Street financier, a promoter of Western railroads, and a Democratic
senator, cabinet member, and governor of New York. It is not surprising that he should
weave correspondences between nation and metropolis, topography and history, the
flow of rivers and the energies of social development. What is striking is his final
pivot: from the sublime wonders of North America to the improvement of Manhat-
tan. He celebrates “the great features of this continent” in order to lift up city-building
achievements like the Croton Aqueduct and to call for new public works. Such gran-
diose framing was typical of bourgeois urbanists during the mid-century boom. “New
York is virtually our metropolis,” Charles Astor Bristed wrote in an essay on beautify-
ing Fifth Avenue, “and the appearance of a metropolis will always be accepted . . . as
an index of the national character.”35
There were, of course, obvious differences between urbanism in New York and
the iconography of the American West. The former dealt with the making of the
34 David Scobey
built environment; the latter, with the national meaning of wild and newly settled
places. Yet the symbolics of wilderness and settlement lurked unexpectedly in the
ways that New Yorkers discussed the city’s development and invested the results with
significance. The diarist George Templeton Strong, musing on Manhattan’s growth
in 1850, compared his “neat new house” in the uptown Gramercy Park development
to “a western prairie, or an unexplored tropical forest.” Basil March, the newlywed
protagonist of William Dean Howells’s novel Their Wedding Journey, describes the
Broadway crowds as a “Niagara roar swell[ing] . . . from human rapids.” Real-estate
boosters touted (as they still do) the “land rush” and “bonanza buildings” of the
development boom. The property developer Edward Clark unsuccessfully proposed
renaming the unsettled uptown avenues west of Central Park after the Montana, Wyo-
ming, Arizona, and Idaho Territories—and then christened his new apartment house
there the “Dakota,” laying the cornerstone carved with the image of an Indian chief.
Such talk turns our riddle on its head: here are New Yorkers finding traces of the West
in the metropolis, using the idioms of wild places, frontier settlements, and resource
booms to make sense of Manhattan’s growth.36
Perhaps the most striking example came in the recurrence of an aesthetic dis-
course that had long been central to the national landscape tradition: the discourse
of the sublime. So far as I know, scholars have not fully explored the figuration of
­nineteenth-century cityscapes in this mode.37 Yet late nineteenth-century New Yorkers
often described Manhattan in terms that evoked the power and terror of sublimity.
Howells’s Basil March describes a city of intoxicating dynamism: to “look down the
swarming length of Broadway, on the movement and the numbers . . . was always like
strong new wine to me,” he exults. “I don’t think that the world affords such another
sight.” An 1864 report of the Citizens’ Association celebrates the magnificent scale
and explosive energy of the metropolis.

New York is just bursting into giant life. The Atlantic washes its feet, the trop-
ics pour their riches into its lap . . . , the vast interior of our own country fills
its warehouses, while by the Pacific railroad . . . the East Indies are brought to
its doors.

And like the crags and torrents of the classic sublime landscape, the power concen-
trated in the urban environment could seem as dangerous as it was elemental: “Vast
spaces in the air, which had remained open and free from the morning of time . . .
are everyday enclosed with walls of masonry,” the New York Times wrote of the
building boom. “[P]rofound abysses yawn under your feet. . . . Far below you see
the adventurous excavator delving still lower and wonder if they will not soon break
through the crust and fall into the central fires.”38 Like the Western wilds, New York
seemed a site of extremity, magical energy, and gigantic scale, a place that could
overwhelm ordinary experience but also magnify it and sweep it into a larger cur-
rent of history.
Of course, there is something deeply weird in this conflation of metropolis and
wilderness. To such artists as Church and Bierstadt, scenes like Niagara and Yosem-
ite were sublime precisely because they were antipodal to the workaday realities of
economic and social life, radically purged of markets and people. In New York, by
contrast, sublimity consisted precisely of markets and people: it was embodied in the
 Looking West From the Empire City 35
intensity of the building boom, in the coursing energy of downtown street crowds.
This may help to explain why, for all the textual accounts of New York’s grandeur
and dynamism, we find few painted or graphic images of metropolitan sublimity. The
cityscape may have felt like a cataract or a chasm. But in a visual culture that equated
nation with nature, it was rarely visible as such.
Rarely, but not never. In 1876, four years after John Gast painted his continental
allegory, Currier & Ives issued an extraordinary lithograph that represents something
like a metropolitan version of American Progress (see Plate 9). Created by Charles R.
Parsons and Lyman W. Atwater, it shows a bird’s-eye view of the whole of Manhattan,
flanked by the Hudson and East riverfronts, from a vantage-point high above New
York harbor. The city is a tableau of dynamism, its port full of outsized steam-­shipping,
its Broadway teeming with traffic. As in American Progress, the ­Brooklyn Bridge is
rendered gargantuan and prematurely completed, a promissory note of p ­ redestined
greatness. And growth stretches uptown to the horizon. Indeed, the lithograph depicts
Manhattan Island in the form of an arrow, pointed north toward the infinite perspec-
tive point of an imperial future.39
It is one more sequential landscape, projecting the arc of time in space—except that
now the metanarrative of westward settlement is replaced by the uptown “march of
improvement.” And so the bird’s-eye view suggests a final answer to our conundrum.
New York lurks in the national iconography of the West because it was itself under-
stood as a national landscape, a landscape on which American progress was inscribed
and unfolding. This view could well have been entitled “Uptown the Course of Empire
Takes Its Way.” Looking off to its left, beyond the edge of the Jersey City waterfront,
we half expect to glimpse the Star of Empire, trailing schoolbooks and telegraph wire
as she floats west.

Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to workshops and symposia at the Universities
of Chicago and Wisconsin and to the University of Michigan’s program in the Compara-
tive Studies in Social Transformation. My thanks to the listeners for their responses and
suggestions.
1 For the popularity of American Progress, see J. Valerie Fifer, American Progress: The
Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century
West, Seen Through the Life and Times of George A. Crofutt, Pioneer and Publicist of the
Transcontinental Age (Chester, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1988), 16, 204. Examples of the
image’s currency in recent scholarship and teaching include the cover of Anders Stephan-
son, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1995); and Martha A. Sandweiss, “John Gast, American Progress, 1872,” Pictur-
ing United States History, http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/john-gast-american-progress-
1872/.
2 George A. Crofutt, Crofutt’s Trans-Continental Tourist, 6th ed. (New York and San
­Francisco: Geo. A Crofutt, Publisher, 1874), 157. Most editions of the guidebook in the
1870s include the engraving of American Progress as a frontispiece and the prospectus at
the back. Crofutt’s commission to Gast and the image’s role in his promotional work are
discussed in Fifer, American Progress, 191–205.
3 Crofutt, Trans-Continental, 157. American Progress has not received sustained art-­
historical attention but is discussed in Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest
Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991), 131–33; Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward
36 David Scobey
­Expansion,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed.
William H. Truettner (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 134–36; and
Brian W. Dippie, “The Moving Finger Writes: Western Art and the Dynamics of Change,”
in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, eds. Jules
David Prown et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 96–99. Gast’s career is
reconstructed in Samantha Rosenberg, “Beyond American Progress: The Legacy of John
Gast” (MA thesis, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012).
4 See Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American
­Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 82–87,
190–200; Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Land-
scape,” ­American Literary History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 207–29; William Cronon,
“Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change,” in Prown et al., Discovered
Lands, 37–86, esp. 37–44; and Boime, Magisterial Gaze.
5 For post-Turnerian work that stresses the role of metropolitan centers in the economic
organization of Western and frontier hinterlands, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropo-
lis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); and J. M. S. Careless,
Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities, and Identities in Canada before 1914 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1989).
6 This evocative phrase comes from the 1991 exhibition The West as America: Re-­interpreting
Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of
American Art. This important and provocative show became a battle royale in the “history
wars” of the 1990s; it also represented the first time since its original publication that Gast’s
American Progress was widely viewed.
7 Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean
(Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1867), frontispiece; William Cullen Bryant,
ed., Picturesque America: or, The Land We Live In, vol. II (New York: D. Appleton, 1874),
frontispiece; Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report Upon the Yosemite and Big Tree
Grove,” August 1865, reprinted in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. V, The
California Frontier, 1863–1865, eds. Victoria Post Ranney et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 488–89. The two-volume Picturesque America (1872, 1874) is
the subject of Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and
Cultural Landscape (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994). Thomas Nast’s illustra-
tion for Beyond the Mississippi is discussed in Dippie, “Moving Finger,” 97–99, and Hills,
“Picturing Progress,” 128–30.
8 The cultural history of nation-building in Victorian America, and the central role of edify-
ing commodities in that history, remains to be written. It can draw on much important
scholarship, including Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses,
Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Eco-
nomic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1950); Frank Luther Mott, A History of American
Magazines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), esp. vols. II and III; Peter
Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-Century America (Boston: D. R. Godine,
1979); and David Scobey, “What Shall We Do With Our Walls? The Philadelphia Centen-
nial and the Meaning of Household Design,” in Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the
Modern World, eds. Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn (Amsterdam: VU University Press,
1994), 87–120.
9 Table of Contents, Harper’s Magazine 43 (1871); Currier & Ives form letter to sales agents
(dated 187–), quoted in Marzio, Democratic Art, 62. See also the overview of Currier &
Ives’s inventory in Harry T. Peters, Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1942); and Bryan F. LeBeau, Currier & Ives: ­America
Imagined (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), as well as the two-
volume Picturesque America anthology, cited earlier in note 7.
10 Currier & Ives form letter, quoted in Marzio, Democratic Art, 62. On the democratization
of print and visual commodities, see Mott, History of American Magazines, vol. II; ­Marzio,
Democratic Art; and Joni L. Kinsey, “Moran and the Art of Publishing,” in Thomas Moran,
 Looking West From the Empire City 37
ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), 300–21. The
word chromo-civilization comes from E. L. Godkin’s jeremiad of that title in The Nation
­(September 24, 1874).
11 Angela Miller, “Albert Bierstadt, Landscape Aesthetics, and the Meanings of the West
in the Civil War Era,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001), 41;
and Adam Badeau, The Vagabond (1859), quoted in David C. Huntington, “Church’s
Niagara: Nature and the Nation’s Type,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25,
no. 1 (Spring 1983), 100. My understanding of the Hudson River School’s relationship to
American nationalism and Victorian culture owes much to Angela Miller’s work, includ-
ing Empire of the Eye, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” and “Albert Bierstadt”; to Boime,
Magisterial Gaze; to Tim Barringer, “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity
in America and Britain, 1820–1880,” in American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the
United States 1820–1880, eds. Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2002), 38–65; and to the essays in American Paradise: The World of
the Hudson River School, ed. John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Harry N. Abrams, 1987).
12 This account of the exhibition and reception of Niagara and The Heart of the Andes is
indebted to Huntington, “Church’s Niagara”; Kevin J. Avery, “ ‘The Heart of the Andes’
Exhibited: Frederic E. Church’s Window on the Equatorial World,” American Art ­Journal
18, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 52–72; Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building:
Artist-Entrepreneurs From the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists
(Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 1997), esp. 57–58, 62–66; Barringer, “Course of
Empires,” 54–57; and American Paradise, 38–44, 243–50.
13 For the Metropolitan Fair, see Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the
­American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 198–219. For the Picture-
Gallery and its paintings, see Avery, “ ‘Heart of the Andes’ Exhibited”; Blaugrund, Tenth
Street Studio Building, 62–63; and Jochen Wierich, Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Wash-
ington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park: Pennsylva-
nia State University Press, 2012), 20–48. Illustrations of the Picture-Gallery were published
in Harper’s Weekly (April 16, 1864) and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (April 23,
1864). Photographs of The Heart of the Andes, with its ensemble of patriotic portraits, can
be seen in Avery, “ ‘Heart of the Andes’ Exhibited,” 56, 57, 58; and Blaugrund, Tenth Street
Studio Building, 85.
14 Harper’s Weekly 8 (March 26, 1864): 194–95; and New York Leader April 2, 1864, quoted
in Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (Brooklyn,
NY: Brooklyn Museum, and New York: Hudson Hills, 1990), 75, 77–78, respectively. On
Rocky Mountain, Lander’s Peak and its reception at the Metropolitan Fair, see ibid., 32–33,
173, 179–80; and Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 141–55.
15 Nancy K. Anderson, “ ‘Curious Historical Artistic Data’: Art History and Western American
Art,” in Prown et al., Discovered Lands, 14. Here and throughout the essay, my account
of Bierstadt’s work, reputation, and travel and commercial practices draws especially on
Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West; Anderson and Ferber, Albert
Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise; Anderson, “ ‘The Kiss of Enterprise’: The Western Landscape
as Symbol and Resource,” in West as America, 237–83; and Martha A. Sandweiss, “The
Public Life of Western Art,” in ibid., esp. 129–31.
16 For a few examples of the voluminous “Western turn” in magazines, see A. W. Hoyt, “Over
the Plains to Colorado,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1867, 1–21; “Across the Continent,” an
illustrated series in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 1870; and N. P. Langford,
“The Wonders of the Yellowstone,” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no. 1 (May 1871): 1–17, and 2,
no. 2 (June 1871): 113–28. Popular journalistic travelogues include Richardson, Beyond the
Mississippi (1867); Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky
Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1865);
and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains
and in Oregon (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870). Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin
Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
38 David Scobey
1950), 102–11, describes the postbellum craze for Wild West stories about Buffalo Bill
Cody. LeBeau, Currier & Ives, 109–48, details the firm’s increasing focus on frontier and
Indian themes in the 1860s. For Louis Prang’s portfolio of Yellowstone chromolithographs
by Thomas Moran, see Marzio, Democratic Art, 107–11; and “The Prang Commission,” in
Anderson, Thomas Moran, 324–48.
17 “New York,” Boston Advertiser, April 1, 1872, quoted in Anderson, Thomas Moran, 53
(“coming man in art”).
18 Fifer, American Progress, 192. The biographical information in this paragraph is from
Fifer, American Progress (on Crofutt) and Rosenberg, “Beyond American Progress” (on
Gast).
19 I elaborate on the relationship between national and metropolitan development in Empire
City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2002), esp. 15–54.
20 For New York’s cultural dominance, see ibid., 25–28; Gerard R. Wolfe, The House of
Appleton (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), throughout (for references to the
national market in school primers); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels
and ­Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987), 17–26, and Richard Brod-
head, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
­(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 77–85, 99–106 (for story papers and the
fiction market); and Mott, History of American Magazines, vol. II, 4, 30–31, 383–405,
469–87, and vol. III, 26, 388–90 (for Harper’s and the magazine revolution).
21 For the role of technical improvements and production economies in democratizing visual
culture, see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 6–7, 13; Kinsey, “Moran and the Art
of Publishing,” 303–4; LeBeau, Currier & Ives, 22–30; and Ellen Bostwick Davis, “The
Currency of Culture: Prints in New York City,” in Art and the Empire City: New York,
1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 224.
22 Davis, “Currency of Culture,” 205 (for Homer’s move to New York), and 219–20 (for
employment of engravers for financial securities); Anderson, Thomas Moran, 52 (for
Moran’s move to Newark); Marzio, Democratic Art, 42 (for contemporaneous quotation
describing New York as “great pillar of lithography” and estimate of New York’s share of
the national market). For the influence of Currier & Ives and the innovative role of James
Ives, see Peters, Currier & Ives, 5–9; and LeBeau, Currier & Ives, 11–21.
23 American Art-Union, quoted and discussed in Davis, “Currency of Culture,” 206–7. My
discussion of New York’s cultural institutions and national aesthetic influence owes much
to Angela Miller’s analysis of “the first New York school,” as she calls it, in Empire of the
Eye, 76–79, 225–28.
24 See Scobey, Empire City, esp. 55–157. I analyze the Union Square-Madison Square district
of genteel sociability, shopping, and amusements in “Anatomy of the Promenade: The Poli-
tics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History 17, no. 2
(May 1992): 203–28; and “Nymphs and Satyrs: Sex and the Bourgeois Public Sphere in
Victorian New York,” Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 43–66.
25 Crayon 5 (February 1858), quoted in Blaugrund, Tenth Street Studio Building, 11 (“service
of artists”) and 14 (“unofficial headquarters”).
26 See Franklin B. Hough, Statistics of Population of the City and County of New York, as
Shown by the State Census of 1865 (New York: New York Printing, 1866), 253, 260 (for
the geographic distribution of engravers and lithographers by ward); and more generally,
Scobey, Empire City, 96–102.
27 For James Smillie’s engraving of Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, the contributions of his
son, and his work for the National Bank Note Company, see Brucia Witthoft, “The History
of James Smillie’s Engraving After Albert Bierstadt’s ‘The Rocky Mountains,’ ” American
Art Journal 19, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 40–51. For the younger Smillie’s career and illustra-
tions for Picturesque America, see also Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 104–5ff,
303–4. For Appletons’s Western tour guide and competition with George Crofutt, see ibid.,
9, and Fifer, American Progress, 183.
 Looking West From the Empire City 39
28 Thomas Moran to Mary Nimmo Moran, September 1873, quoted in Anderson, Thomas
Moran, 56. The paintings and prints that Moran made after the Colorado expedition are
discussed in ibid., 56–58; and Kinsey, “Moran and the Art of Publishing,” 312–13. For his
contributions to Picturesque America, see ibid., 315–16; and Rainey, Creating Picturesque
America, 164–75, 204–5, 237–38.
29 For artists’ Western travel in the first half of the nineteenth century and the reworking of
Western imagery by New York culture-makers, see Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Paint-
ing: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 60–99;
and Sandweiss, “Public Life of Western Art,” 117–33. For Currier & Ives lithographs of
works by Ranney and Catlin, see LeBeau, Currier & Ives, 131–48. As the firm expanded
its Western inventory to keep up with popular taste, James Ives had Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait
and other house artists study the works of Catlin and Karl Bodmer to better handle Native
American subjects; see Peters, Currier & Ives, 21.
30 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), 389.
(Tuckerman lived in the Tenth Street Studio Building from 1859 to 1871 and would have
been privy to both the painting and the initial exhibition of Rocky Mountain, Lander’s
Peak.) For Bierstadt’s participation in the Lander expedition and his first Western land-
scape paintings, see Anderson and Ferber, Art & Enterprise, and Miller, “Albert Bierstadt,”
45–48. For the Western tours of Leutze and other painters, see Blaugrund, Tenth Street
Studio Building, 30. For artists commissioned to do Western illustrations for Picturesque
America, see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 104–7.
31 For real-time press coverage of Bierstadt’s Western trips by Harper’s Weekly, Fitz Hugh
Ludlow, and the artist himself, see Gordon Hendricks, “The First Three Western Journeys
of Albert Bierstadt,” Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (September 1964): 333–65; Bierstadt’s July 10,
1859, letter to the Crayon is reproduced in full on page 337. Figure 1 is his Harper’s Weekly
illustration of a wagon train crossing the Platte River, with the Harper’s correspondent tak-
ing notes beside a seated circle of Indian women.
32 Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent, 180; Anthony Trollope, North (Philadelphia: Lip-
pincott, 1863). See Hendricks, “First Three Western Journeys,” n. 33, for the timing of
Ludlow’s reports to the Atlantic Monthly.
33 William R. Martin, The Growth of New York (New York: n.p., 1865), 18; Real Estate
Record and Builders’ Guide, October 9, 1880; New York Pier and Warehouse Company,
Piers and Wharves of New York, Remedy Proposed . . . (New York: n.p., 1869), 12.
34 Citizens’ Association of New-York, Report of the Executive Council to the Honorary
Council . . . , November 17, 1866 (New York: n.p., 1866), 17–18.
35 John A. Dix, “The Growth of New York City,” lecture before the New-York Historical
Society, New York, January 6, 1853, reprinted in Dix, Speeches and Occasional Addresses
(New York: D. Appleton, 1864), vol. II, 357; Charles Astor Bristed, A Few Words of Warn-
ing to New Yorkers, on the Consequences of a Railroad in Fifth Avenue (New York: W. C.
Bryant, 1863), 18.
36 George Templeton Strong, diary entry dated April 2, 1850, The Diary of George Temple-
ton Strong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1952), vol. II, 11–12; William Dean Howells,
Their Wedding Journey (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 35; “Big Bonanza Buildings,”
Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide 17 (April 8, 1876); “When New York City’s Build-
ings Lit Out for the Territories,” New York Times, December 12, 2014.
37 For the centrality of the sublime mode in the American landscape tradition, see Barbara
Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 29–38; and Andrew Wilton, “The Sublime in the
Old World and the New,” in Wilton and Barringer, American Sublime, 10–37. A distin-
guished line of scholarship traces the emergence of a “technological sublime” in Victorian
­America—including Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), who first coined the term;
John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–
1900 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); and David Nye, American Technological Sublime
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)—but it tends to focus on industrial structures and
monumental infrastructures rather than on urban space. Not until the twentieth-century
40 David Scobey
vertical city do scholars interrogate the cityscape as a site of sublimity; see Nye, “The Sub-
lime and the Skyline,” in The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories, ed. Roberta Moudry
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 255–70; and Christoph Lindner, Imagining
New York City: Literature, Urbanism and the Visual Arts, 1890–1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
38 Howells, Their Wedding Journey, 35; Citizens’ Association, Report of the Executive Coun-
cil, 18; and New York Times, April 19, 1852.
39 For a more detailed reading of this view—with a somewhat different focus—see Scobey,
Empire City, 62–65.
2 The François Premier Style in
New York
The William K. and Alva
Vanderbilt House
Kevin D. Murphy

As modernist architects would opine in the early years of the twentieth century, the
last decades of the previous one witnessed widespread adoption by the French upper
class and bourgeoisie of a plethora of period styles for interior decoration. Chief
among the critics was modernist architect Le Corbusier who, in his seminal text,
Vers une architecture (1923), lamented the domestic settings of bankers and business-
men, in which what he called a “sickening spirit” reigned “over so many shams.”1
Among the simulations of historic styles reviled by modernist critics but favored by
many homeowners, the French Renaissance mode had a particular caché because of
its associations with the deposed French nobility and royalty of the Ancien Régime.
Perhaps paradoxically, in light of its ideological implications, the French Renaissance
style became popular in the United States among Gilded Age patrons who fashioned
themselves the American equivalents of the French elite. As the historic French style
circulated internationally, it provided a spatial argument for the interconnectedness of
the decorating fashions, cultures, and elites on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in
Great Britain.2 Houses, then, spoke to the larger internationalization of design culture
in the nineteenth century, which mirrored the movement of capital and commerce at
the same time and under the aegis of the same industrialists who sponsored the con-
struction and furnishing of homes on the French model.
New York City’s commercial and industrial elite—the Vanderbilts among them—
occupied a paradoxical position in 1880. They sought through civic philanthropy to
provide the city with the cultural and educational institutions that befit a world capi-
tal. Yet they clung tenaciously to their personal privilege through a period of intense
labor unrest and public scrutiny of their wealth and lavish lifestyles. While some crit-
ics recoiled at the elite’s displays of wealth, others tracked their activities with great
avidity. Mark Twain decried this propensity of the public to look agog at the rich in
an open letter to “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt published in 1869. There Twain
professed to “pity” Vanderbilt:

Most men have at least a few friends, whose devotion is a comfort and a solace to
them, but you seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who
love to glorify your most flagrant unworthiness in print; or praise your vast pos-
sessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings
and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity.

Mark Twain ended by imploring Vanderbilt to “do something” worthy of his

wealth and position: “Go and surprise the whole country by doing something
42 Kevin D. Murphy
right.”3 The Commodore’s progeny would go on to use their inherited wealth for
institution-building in the Empire City and beyond; they also used a portion of the
money he had amassed to construct lavish urban houses that functioned simultane-
ously—through their appeal to historic architectural precedents—to proclaim the
city’s international status and to ground their own elite positions.
The French Renaissance style gained currency through Napoleon III’s transforma-
tion of the “New Louvre” as part of the Haussmannization of Paris during the Second
Empire and by the restoration of the Château of Blois and other exemplary castles
from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. These latter projects made France’s
version of Renaissance architecture known to the nation itself, as well as to the larger
world, in part as a consequence of the truly global influence of the École des Beaux-
Arts, which trained an international elite coterie of architects. Among them was Rich-
ard Morris Hunt (1827–1895), the first American architect to attend the École, in the
1840s and who went on to work on the New Louvre as a member of the architectural
office charged with its expansion and renovation.
Returning to the United States, Hunt brought with him knowledge of the French
Renaissance and its revival on the Continent. He then marketed that mode to his
wealthy patrons who were keen to style themselves French aristocrats. In this con-
text, the William K. and Alva Vanderbilt House at 660 Fifth Avenue in New York
City (demolished 1926) by Hunt is extremely illuminating. Completed in 1882, the
“Petit Château” or “little Château de Blois” (Figure 2.1), as it was variously known,
was inspired by castles in the François Iier style. Less well explored are the reasons

Figure 2.1 Fifth Avenue north from 52nd Street, 1898. H. N. Tiemann & Co./Museum of the
City of New York (X2010.11.4755)
Source: Courtesy, Museum of the City of New York
 The François Premier Style in New York 43
for which the Vanderbilts were drawn to the French Renaissance model. Certainly
the affiliation with the architecture of the French Renaissance substantiated the
­Vanderbilts’ self-perceptions as American counterparts to British and Continental
royalty and aristocracy, but in the United States—where the concentration of wealth
in the hands of a few was a source of controversy—the reference in architecture to the
French monarchy was a provocation deserving of further analysis. I will argue that
the use of the French Renaissance style signaled the “distinction” (to borrow the term
made familiar in cultural critique by Pierre Bourdieu) of the Vanderbilts’ château from
the surrounding cityscape and underscored their social and economic standing at a
time when wealth disparity was controversial. As Bourdieu summarizes, “[A]rt and
cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil
a social function of legitimating social differences.”4 Standing apart—both stylisti-
cally and physically—from the townhouses surrounding it, the Vanderbilts’ castle was
perceived as a municipal, even national, cultural treasure, and therefore its lavishness
could be accepted, indeed celebrated.
The significance of the house has been continually stated—and perhaps over-stated—
by historians, including Robert B. King, who, in his monograph on The Vanderbilt
Homes, concludes of the Petit Château that it was a “landmark, a unique structure
that broke with traditional styles of building and forever changed architecture in the
United States.”5 Alva Vanderbilt was probably also exaggerating when she said, “my
house was the death of the brownstone front,”6 but the design did spawn several other
French-style castles in Manhattan and other American cities, and it contributed to the
general shift in taste for building materials from brown sandstone to whitish limestone
at the end of the nineteenth century.
The house has also been considered to have played a central role in the Vanderbilt
family’s social ascent, which famously lagged behind their economic rise. Most impor-
tant in this regard is the role played by the Petit Château as the setting for an elaborate
costume ball held there by William and Alva Vanderbilt on March 26, 1883.7 As has
been recounted many times, Alva made the evening famous, or infamous, by contriv-
ing the attendance of Caroline Schermerhorn (Mrs. William Backhouse) Astor—then
the acknowledged doyenne of New York society who had previously shunned the
Vanderbilts as uncouth arrivistes. The social standing of the Vanderbilts was purport-
edly thereby secured.8 Alva’s jockeying for social standing worked in this way:

The story goes, that like all marriageable young girls Mrs. Astor’s daughter, Car-
rie, was anxiously awaiting her invitation and even began practicing for a qua-
drille with her friends. Then the unthinkable happened: all of her friends got their
invitations and hers never came. She immediately got her mother on the case. Due
to complex social customs, Alva claimed she could not invite Miss Astor since
Mrs. Astor had never called on the Vanderbilt home. Mrs. Astor really had no
choice but to drop her visiting card at 660 5th Avenue, thus formally acknowledg-
ing the Vanderbilts. The Astors’ invitation was received the next day.9

The press breathlessly recorded in the weeks and days leading up to the event the
painstaking preparation of elaborate costumes. Many guests attended as French
aristocrats, and Alice Claypoole Gwynne, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II (Figure 2.2),
appeared in the famous “Electric Light” dress produced by the House of Worth, the
famed couturier of the period, for the occasion.
Figure 2.2 Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II (neé Alice Claypoole Gwynne), 1883. Mora/
Museum of the City of New York (F2012.58.1341)
Source: Courtesy, Museum of the City of New York
 The François Premier Style in New York 45
Although the ball itself attracted a good deal of press coverage—in part because
Alva Vanderbilt courted reporters before the event to build excitement about it—and
the fact that it succeeded in “catapulting the formerly outré Vanderbilts to the very
pinnacle of New York society,”10 the very form of the house itself had already contrib-
uted to the family’s distinction. Hunt’s stylistic references to French châteaux in the
design of the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion—a process in which both William and
Alva Vanderbilt were deeply involved, as architectural historian Laurie Ossman has
shown11—were hardly obscure. By 1915, for example, Edward R. Smith could write
in Good Furniture that the François Iier style blended “flamboyant tracery with Renais-
sance detail.” “Gothic in its fundamental architectural quality,” Smith observed, the
style was “for the rest closely allied to the Lombard Renaissance.”12 The Vanderbilts’
Petit Château possessed certain details drawn directly from French sources as well as a
particularly Northern verticality at the roof level that was punctuated by dormers and
chimneys. (Indeed, at the time of the house’s completion in 1881, critic Montgomery
Schuyler regretted its “needlessly tormented” skyline.13) Moreover, it was constructed
of glistening Indiana limestone, and thus in its very materiality, the house contrasted
with the neighborhoods of brick or brownstone row houses elsewhere in Manhattan.
By employing the François Iier style for the Petit Château, Hunt and the Vanderbilts
lent the house broad cultural associations that were understood by the greater public.
William K. and Alva Vanderbilts’ interest in French royal architecture was part of the
larger attraction of the Vanderbilt family to French castles and palaces; for example,
William’s brother Frederick Vanderbilt purchased the château of Malmaison and used
portions of it for his own house at Hyde Park, New York, in the 1890s.14 Late in her
life, Alva Vanderbilt owned the well-known Palais Jacques Coeur in Bourges, which
was one of the sources for Hunt’s design of her house on Fifth Avenue decades earlier.
These acquisitions made literal the Americans' conceptual claim on historic French
interiors. To understand the international reputation of the French Renaissance, it
is useful to investigate its various resonances—artistic and ideological—as they had
emerged at the mid-nineteenth century with the restoration of the Château of Blois.
Before examining the ways in which the sources for the Vanderbilts’ townhouse
were ideologically freighted, however, it is important to establish the ways in which
the clients and architect came about their knowledge of France and its architecture.
Indeed, it was a consequence of Hunt’s being “too French,” too academic, and too
eclectic in his historic design sources, observes architectural historian François Loyer,
that he was underappreciated by modernist historians and critics who far preferred
the more original approach of his contemporary, Henry Hobson Richardson, likewise
the product of a French education. Hunt was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, the son
of a successful lawyer and politician whose early death from cholera in 1832 occa-
sioned his son eventually being sent to study in Geneva and subsequently, from 1846,
to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. A student of architect Hector Lefuel while he
was at the École, Hunt later worked for his teacher when Lefuel took over the design
for connecting the Louvre and Tuileries palaces from Louis Visconti in 1853. In that
capacity, Hunt drew the decorative treatment for the Pavillon de la Bibliothèque, a
component of the “New Louvre,” which became one of the key monuments in Paris
as it was reconceived and extensively rebuilt under the Emperor Napoleon III and his
Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann. At this early point, Hunt was inculcated with
an appreciation for the French Renaissance style, as the new pavilion was inspired, to
some degree, by the Pavillon de l’Horloge by Jacques Lemercier in the Cour Carrée
46 Kevin D. Murphy
of the Louvre (1639–1642).15 Lemercier’s approach, in turn, has been described as
an incomplete synthesis of “the French manner of the first years of the seventeenth
century” and the architecture he had experienced first-hand in Rome.16 Thus, Hunt’s
professional practice began with the emulation of the unique interpretation of Renais-
sance architecture that had been formulated under the aegis of royal patronage in the
seventeenth century.
Hunt found in the Vanderbilts patrons who shared his European experience and par-
ticularly his familiarity with French royal architecture. Alva Erskine Smith ­Vanderbilt
was born in 1853 in Mobile, Alabama, but her family’s wealth enabled her, after 1859,
to divide her time between New York, Newport, and Paris. Like Hunt’s, her initial
experience in France coincided with the early years of the Second Empire of Napoleon
III and his transformation of the capital. Her eventual spouse, William K. Vanderbilt,
the grandson of the family’s patriarch—“Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt—was
born in 1849, and like Hunt, studied in Geneva and spent a substantial amount of
time in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1867 fluent in French and well versed
in European culture, although he was often dismissed as a playboy whose greatest
interests lay in sports, yachting, and other pastimes of the wealthy.17 In 1908, it was
observed of William K. Vanderbilt that he was “so industriously engaged in having a
good time, that, in the main, he was content to let his brother [Cornelius, the Com-
modore’s grandson] manage the Vanderbilt [railroad] lines.”18
William K. Vanderbilt, known variously as “Willie” or “Willie K.,” is nonethe-
less credited with having approached Hunt in 1878 to design a house to be built
at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, in a
midtown neighborhood that was becoming more fashionable at that moment. Given
that ­Vanderbilt is reported to have requested “a house with air and breathing space
around it,” it is clear that from the outset he imagined not a row house but rather a
free-­standing townhouse, separate from its neighbors.19 Certainly in the late 1870s,
Vanderbilt would have known many examples of large attached houses in New York,
some of which—such as the Irad Hawley House (1852–1853) on Fifth Avenue in
Greenwich Village (now home to the Salmagundi Club)—had been built in the previ-
ous decades in the Italianate style. Like other mansions of its kind, the Hawley House
was twice the width of a typical row house, while its bold detailing, both inside and
out, suggested the expenditure that it represented and, by extension, the wealth of its
owner.20
Closer in date and geography to the Petit Château was the house purchased in 1877
by the society newcomer Arabella Worsham, who would later marry railroad magnate
Collis P. Huntington. Originally built in 1864, the house at number four West Fifty-
Fourth Street (just off of Fifth Avenue, Figure 2.3) was essentially a tall Italianate
brownstone with an empty lot to its east that provided space for a garden at that side
overlooked by numerous windows that would have been blocked in the more typical
row house arrangement. Huntington financed the purchase as well as the renova-
tions to the house that were undertaken in the spring of 1881.21 Such grand Italianate
houses were constructed from the same materials as the blocks of “brownstones”
that rose in Manhattan and Brooklyn at mid-century but were differentiated from the
more modest residences around them by their large sizes and elaborate details.22
The William K. and Alva Vanderbilt house thus broke with tradition, but it was not
conceived of in isolation. In fact it was part of a consolidated Vanderbilt building cam-
paign orchestrated by Willie’s father, William H. Vanderbilt, who envisioned a string
 The François Premier Style in New York 47

Figure 2.3 West 54th Street near Fifth Avenue. Byron Company/Museum of the City of
New York (93.1.1.10178)
Source: Courtesy, Museum of the City of New York

of important family houses along Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-Seventh Street. Fol-
lowing the death of the Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1877, who left an estate
valued at $200 million, his son and principal heir, William H., reportedly decreed that
the next generation should build a group of Vanderbilt mansions. The building per-
mits for the three houses of William H., William K., and Cornelius consequently were
all pulled on the same day in December 1879.23
In contrast to earlier Manhattan mansions, 660 Fifth Avenue achieved distinction
in its surroundings through its historic source and its material, both of which were
immediately evident from the outside. In plan, the house also represented a departure
from the previous massive townhouses of the rich, although there was nothing out-
landish about it. From a virtually central entrance on Fifth Avenue, one passed into
a vestibule and then to a rectangular hallway sixty feet long on axis with which was
the double-height banquet hall (fifty by thirty-five feet) running along the back of the
house. To the north of the entrance were the main staircase flanked by the library and
billiard room; to the south were the salon, parlor, breakfast room, and butler’s pantry.
Although the plan was not symmetrical, it was balanced and axial, in keeping with
Beaux-Arts principles. Moreover, it effectively responded to the main function of the
house (at least at the first story) as a place for receiving and entertaining guests.
48 Kevin D. Murphy
The principal Fifth Avenue facade clearly expressed the balanced arrangement of
interior spaces at the first floor yet avoided absolute symmetry. Although the section of
the facade to the south of the entry, behind which was the parlor, was wider than the
northern portion (housing the library), it was somewhat intruded upon visually at the
second story by the tourelle joined to the entrance bay, providing direct access from
Alva’s bedroom to the third story. The tourelle also relieved what otherwise would
have been the complete symmetry of the entrance pavilion, surmounted at the roof
level by an elaborately buttressed dormer.
The conventional view of this main facade was oblique, from the southeast corner
of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street. From that vantage point,
the longer south facade stretched toward the west in two sections: to the right (east)
were the parlor and salon; to the left were the breakfast room and butler’s pantry.
The hierarchy of these spaces registered in the higher east block that housed the more
public rooms and the relatively smaller scale of the block holding the more private
spaces to the left (west). This vantage point also compensated for what critic Mont-
gomery Schuyler felt was the disconcerting appearance of the different roof levels at
the facade. These resulted, in part, from the north section having been reduced in
height to three stories for budgetary reasons, creating what some felt was a lopsided
relationship between the building’s masses. This drawback too was diminished by a
corner perspective.24
On the outside of the house, the viewer’s attention was drawn to its public portions
by their relatively richer ornamentation, evident, for instance, in decorated bay win-
dows and dormers surmounted by finials. The surface of the stone itself was tooled
across the expanses of walls. As John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson explain,
“each block of stone, rather than being left smooth, was worked over with a hand
chisel. The result was a subtly textured surface surrounded by a smooth perimeter
border.”25 Moreover, the surface of the tourelle was covered with Bourbon fleurs-de-
lis that underscored the presence of skilled craftsmanship and made a visual connec-
tion with the French royal family. This emphasis on handcraftedness was notable in a
period in which the ubiquity of machine-produced ornamentation in architecture was
a contentious issue. In such a context, the careful working over of the surface of the
building contributed not only to the impression of cost, and consequently of wealth,
but also to its distinction from the surrounding cityscape.
The differentiation between the public and private parts of the house that was made
on the exterior was also evident in the formal treatments of the interiors. The distinc-
tions reflected different room uses as well as the hands of various decorators. The
two-story dining hall was the work of Herter Brothers, the American decorating firm,
working from Hunt’s design, while the “Regency Louis XV salon” on the south side
was produced by the firm of Jules Allard in Paris.26 Herter Brothers also produced
the parlor, but it was redone at the behest of Alva Vanderbilt relatively soon after
the house was completed. Such a division of responsibility for the interior spaces was
common in Gilded Age mansions, notably those by Hunt.
Despite the different hands at work, the French theme was evident throughout the
house. For example, the entrance hall was clad in Caen limestone (Figure 2.4) from
France to the dado level, and its ceiling was beamed oak. A stained glass window
depicted “the meeting of Francis I and Henry VIII on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.”27
From the hall, one passed to the main staircase, which had a newel post ornamented
with fleurs-de-lis that connected with the exterior treatment of the tourelle. The
 The François Premier Style in New York 49

Figure 2.4 Richard Morris Hunt, Rendering of Doorways, 660 Fifth Avenue, New York,
ca. 1880. AIA/AAF Collection. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress

mammoth dining hall underscored the meeting of France and England, for although
multi-story rooms could be found in French Renaissance châteaux, they were also a
central feature of British country houses in which they served as multi-purpose spaces.
The “Great Hall” was deemed an important element of the grand English house
and was given prominence in American Tudor Revival mansions—for instance, in
Agecroft Hall, an early modern English house near Manchester that was partially
reconstructed in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1920s.28
However hybrid were the references in the Petit Château to the ostentatious houses
of the past, its Frenchness was unmistakable. Even the negative response of critic
­Clarence Cook recognized, and perhaps over-emphasized, the foremost historic source
of Hunt’s design. He called it, “Nothing but a copy, and a slavish one, of the archi-
tecture at the time of Francis I, with its entrance an adaptation of a French Renais-
sance chimney-piece!” For Cook, the visual association of the decorative program
with identifiable precedents did not contribute to the meaning of the house but rather
detracted from its originality: “There does not appear to be in all this pretentious,
fussy building a single new motive; it has to the student an air of being nothing but
a patch-work of bits whose original could easily be identified with a little search.”29
Hunt’s references, however much they may have irritated certain critics, were certainly
legible to a broader public that extended beyond architectural circles, for the archi-
tectural and urbanistic campaign of Napoleon III during the Second Empire had been
widely reported in the then-expanding illustrated press in North America.
Furthermore, French Renaissance castles, notably Blois, had been the focus of ongo-
ing restoration by the national government from the mid-nineteenth century, and espe-
cially in the years that Hunt was in France. It is little wonder that he came to admire
50 Kevin D. Murphy
the building so much; that he did so is evident from a letter written to the architect
by a member of his office, Warrington G. Lawrence, while the Vanderbilts’ house was
being designed. Writing from Blois, Lawrence reported to Hunt,

We have been some time getting here-but now we are here, and I have seen the
Chateau [of] Blois-and am now ready to die-it is grand. I wish I could tell you all
I feel regarding it-I don’t wonder any longer that you admire so much the Francis
Premier wing[;] it is undoubtedly a fine piece of design, [but] my preference is still
for the Louis XII [wing]-I think that brick and stone combination on the Court
one of the finest things I have ever seen.30

In his enthusiastic report on the château, Lawrence distinguishes between two of the
principal sections of a building whose very long history of construction was reflected
in the visual differences between its parts and respected through the course of its res-
toration, as architectural historian Richard Wittman has demonstrated.31 “Around a
courtyard” (Figure 2.5), observes one French history of Blois, are brought together

four great monuments of French architecture, the Gothic of the Chamber of the
States General (c. 1210), the first introductions of the Renaissance in France

Figure 2.5 Francis I Wing, Château of Blois, ca. 1890–1900. Color photomechanical print.
Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
 The François Premier Style in New York 51
with Louis XII (1498–1503), its advance with François I (1515–1524) and the
er

classicism of the wing constructed between 1635 and 1638 by François Mansart
for Gaston d’Orléans.

This last piece was the final major architectural contribution to the complex, as there
followed after the death of the duc d’Orléans more than a century of near abandon-
ment of the castle.32
Recognized by the influential inspector general of historic monuments, Prosper
Mérimée, as an historically and architecturally significant building, Blois (in the Loire
Valley) was singled out for a special government appropriation for its restoration in
1845, alongside the medieval church of Saint-Ouen in Rouen (Normandy) and the
Roman amphitheater at Arles (Provence).33 It is significant that Blois was deemed
sufficiently important that it was identified in this way to represent the Renaissance
style, thereby complementing the classical and Gothic monuments on the same list.
Appointed as architect for the restoration was Félix Duban, a leader among the
younger, so-called Romantic Rationalist architects who had been successful at the
École des Beaux-Arts and gone on to significant government careers during the July
Monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830–1848).34 Prior to taking on the project at Blois,
Duban had distinguished himself with the renovation and additions to the buildings
of the École itself, between 1832 and 1840, as well as other prominent public and
private commissions.35
The restoration of the François I Wing followed between 1845 and 1848, and the
architect’s exquisite restoration drawings were exhibited at the Universal Exposi-
tion in Paris in 1855, where they garnered a gold medal. By that point, the Louis
XII wing and the Chamber of the States General had been turned over to the city of
Blois. Formerly, they had been under the control of the army, a disposition shared
by some other historic buildings in the post-Revolutionary period when new uses
were found for nationalized royal, aristocratic, and religious properties. The trans-
fer occasioned another special appropriation for the restoration of Blois, alongside
other canonical buildings, and the funds were made available in 1855. During the
time that Hunt was studying architecture in Paris, then, the restoration of Blois was
receiving international recognition in the city, and the interiors of the château were
being redone under Duban’s direction, to be completed by 1868.36 Hunt’s apprecia-
tion for Blois, as well as his use of the château as a model, demonstrate the way that
the actual restoration project instigated the international revival of the François
Iier style.37
Clarence Cook’s comparison of the entrance to 660 Fifth Avenue to a chimneypiece
at Blois is instructive, for it provides an entry itself into a consideration of the influ-
ence of Blois’s restored interiors on the Vanderbilt house. The Fifth Avenue entrance,
framed by pilasters and surmounted by a projecting bay, indeed possesses a very gen-
eral resemblance to the large fireplaces Duban restored to the Francis I and Louis XII
wings at Blois. These elements of the castle display extremely elaborate Renaissance
and Gothic detailing, as well as the Bourbon fleur-de-lis in some instances, and are
notable for the intense colors specified by the architect. These massive chimneypieces
embodied Duban’s approach to the restoration, which was inspired by historical evi-
dence but hardly archaeological. At this relatively early point in the development of a
preservation ethic in France, the architect comfortably took his cues from the physical
52 Kevin D. Murphy
evidence on-site, but where necessary, also from other buildings. This hybrid approach
stood behind Duban’s color choices, which, as Bellenger and Forest have observed,
were more those of a painter than of an architect.38
To compensate for the lack of furnishings in the castle, Duban richly ornamented
ceilings, walls, and floors to fill the interiors with color and a sense of the past. The
resulting scenographic approach to the restoration was one of the major contributions
of the restored François Iier interior to the new approach to interior design embod-
ied in 660 Fifth Avenue. The interior effect at Blois emphasized views through the
intensely ornamented and colorful spaces, which were juxtaposed in the viewer’s eye.
Bellenger and Forest compare the overall “scenography” to a “giant illumination
recalling the fantastic watercolors in which [Duban] blended invention and archaeol-
ogy to evoke and resuscitate the historic atmosphere dear to [him].”39 An analogous
emphasis on historic atmosphere distinguished the interiors of 660 Fifth Avenue from
other wealthy people’s homes of the mid- to late nineteenth century. To take but one
example for comparison, Willie Vanderbilt’s father, William H. Vanderbilt, employed
Herter Brothers for the interiors of his own Fifth Avenue brownstone mansion, and
although they made references to other times and cultures, notably in the “Japanese”
Parlor (see Plate 2), they did not attempt to be period rooms, however richly decorated
and furnished they were.40
Hunt’s and the Vanderbilts’ choice of the François Iier style as the historical touchstone
for the interiors was certainly not arbitrary, as it was believed to represent a particu-
larly French, and successful, synthesis of Renaissance and northern Gothic concepts.
At the same time, as Wittman has argued, the châteaux of the French Renaissance
were considered in the early nineteenth century to represent an important transition
in the castle type from the defensive form it had taken in response to the “violence of
the feudal Middle Ages” to a classicizing form reflecting “the more stable and refined
world of the Renaissance.”41
Given that Willie Vanderbilt commissioned the house in the immediate wake of
a major railroad workers’ strike in 1877, it is possible, as Ossman has suggested,
“that part of William H. Vanderbilt’s motivation in proposing the dynastic build-
ing program that included 660 Fifth Avenue was to create signs of the intractability
of the Vanderbilts in the face of organized labor.”42 Indeed, the “Great Strike” of
July 1877 represented an unprecedented challenge to the railroads. The strike was
part of a larger postbellum workers’ movement that saw strikes become a more preva-
lent and effective means of expressing grievances than they had been in the antebel-
lum period when dissatisfaction more frequently erupted in riots.43 The exceptionally
violent Great Strike’s immediate provocation was a 10 percent wage cut for railroad
workers in July, at the depths of an economic depression that had begun with the
Panic of 1873. The strike took the form of work-stoppages as well as the widespread
destruction of railroad property. The 1877 strikes were particularly significant given
their extent—“the whole East-West belt serviced by the railroad trunk lines”—and
their target: “the interlocking directorate of railroad executives, military officers, and
political officials, which constituted the apex of the country’s new power structure.”44
As the head of the New York Central Railroad, William H. Vanderbilt was a direct
target of workers’ demands and proved intractable through to the forced end to the
uprising by government-backed forces.45
 The François Premier Style in New York 53
In this context, Bourdieu’s proposition that art and architecture serve to legit-
imate social distinctions seems particularly apt. In light of the direct challenge
to their wealth, position, and power represented by the Great Strike, William
H. Vanderbilt’s directive that the family establish a bulkhead on Fifth Avenue and
Fifty-Seventh Street seems all the more aggressive and potentially urgent. His strat-
egy for creating acquiescence to the Vanderbilts’ position was not one of appease-
ment, as he flatly rejected worker demands; instead, he and his children and their
spouses sought to assert their social and economic authority through architecture.
We might imagine then that the glistening white, visibly French Renaissance pal-
ace that the Vanderbilts constructed on Fifth Avenue signaled their distance from
the very mass of working-class New Yorkers from whom the Commodore had
famously and spectacularly propelled them.

Notes
1 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923), quoted and discussed in Christopher Reed,
introduction to Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architec-
ture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 9. A version of this paper
was presented at a conference on the interior in nineteenth-century France and Belgium at
Queen’s University, Belfast, in September 2016. I thank Claire Moran for her kind invitation
to speak and the audience and participants for their useful feedback. I also thank the editors
of this volume for their helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay.
2 Sylvan Bellenger and Marie-Cécile Forest attribute the popularity of the French Renaissance
style in Great Britain to architects William Burgess and the Crace family; see their essay “Le
Château de Blois abandonné et redécouvert par l’histoire,” in Félix Duban, 1789–1870:
Les couleurs de l’architecte, exh. cat., eds. Sylvan Bellenger and François Hamon (Paris:
Gallimard, and Milano: Electa, 1996), 89. The Crace Family Papers, which are held in the
Victoria & Albert Archive of Art and Design in London, document the interior design work
of several of its members, including John Gregory Crace (1809–1889) and John Dibblee
Crace (1838–1919), who were influenced by contemporary historicism and by the revival
of the Renaissance styles.
3 Mark Twain, “An Open Letter to Commodore Vanderbilt,” Bruno’s Bohemia 1, no. 2
(April 1918): 28–29. The editor’s note indicates that the “Open Letter” was originally pub-
lished in Packard’s Monthly (March 1869) but was not widely reprinted.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 7.
5 Robert B. King with Charles O. McLean, The Vanderbilt Homes (New York: Rizzoli, 1989),
55.
6 Alva Vanderbilt, quoted in John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson, The Vanderbilts and
the Gilded Age: Architectural Aspirations, 1879–1901 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 37.
7 Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111.
8 The episode introduces the discussion of the house in Foreman and Stimson, The Vander-
bilts, 23.
9 Museum of the City of New York, “Vanderbilt Ball: How a Costume Ball Changed New
York Elite Society,” MCNY Blog, New York Stories, https://blog.mcny.org/2013/08/06/
vanderbilt-ball-how-a-costume-ball-changed-new-york-elite-society/.
10 Foreman and Stimson, The Vanderbilts, 23.
11 Laurie Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue” (MA thesis, University of Virginia, 1992), 6–10.
12 Edward R. Smith, “Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, His Work and Influence in Design,”
Good Furniture 5, no. 6 (December 1915): 355.
13 Montgomery Schuyler, “Recent Building in New York-V.: The Vanderbilt Houses,”
­American Architect and Building News 9 (May 21, 1881): 243–44, quoted in Foreman and
Stimson, The Vanderbilts, 31.
54 Kevin D. Murphy
14 Charles W. Snell, Vanderbilt Mansion (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1960), 8.
Also see “Palace Is Moved,” Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1898, 22.
15 François Loyer, “L’historicisme: Ses plaisirs et ses nécessités,” in La tradition française en
amérique: Richard Morris Hunt, architecte, 1827–1895, exh. cat. (Paris: Caisse Nationale
des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1989), 15–21.
16 Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700 (1953), rev. ed. (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 128.
17 Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 6–9.
18 Burton J. Hendrick, “The Vanderbilt Fortune,” McClure’s 32 (November 1908): 61.
19 John Vredenburgh Van Pelt, Monograph of the William K. Vanderbilt House (New York:
privately printed, 1925), 13.
20 Kevin D. Murphy, The Houses of Greenwich Village (New York: Abrams, 2008).
21 Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Nicholas C. Vincent, Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 6–7; originally published as Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (Winter 2016).
22 Charles Lockwood, Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783–1929, 2nd
ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 2003).
23 Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 17–18.
24 Paul R. Baker, Richard Morris Hunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 279.
25 Foreman and Stimson, The Vanderbilts, 37.
26 King and McLean, The Vanderbilt Homes, 51; Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 55–56.
27 Baker, Richard Morris Hunt, 281.
28 Kevin D. Murphy, The Tudor Home (New York: Rizzoli, 2015).
29 Clarence Cook, “Architecture in America,” North American Review 135 (September 1882):
250, quoted in Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 65.
30 Warrington G. Lawrence to Richard Morris Hunt, Blois, September 15, 1879. Hunt Col-
lection, AlA Foundation, Washington, DC, quoted in David Chase, “Superb Privacies: The
Later Domestic Commissions of Richard Morris Hunt, 1878–1895,” in The Architecture of
Richard Morris Hunt, ed. Susan R. Stein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 170,
n. 17.
31 Richard Wittman, “Félix Duban’s Didactic Restoration of the Château de Blois,” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 4 (December 1996): 412–34.
32 Bellenger and Forest, “Le Château de Blois,” 79.
33 Françoise Berçé, “Duban et les monuments historiques,” in Félix Duban, eds. Bellenger and
Hamon, 64.
34 On the group, see David T. Van Zanten, Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban,
Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
35 David T. Van Zanten, “Félix Duban and the Buildings of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 37, no. 3 (October 1978): 161–74.
36 Bellenger and Forest, “Le Château de Blois,” 80–85.
37 Ossman anticipates this point: “Taken together, Hunt’s use of motifs from these buildings
[Chaumont and Blois] suggests the possibility that he may have been particularly influ-
enced by the buildings that would have been ‘new restorations’ during his student years.”
­Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 101, n. 4.
38 Bellenger and Forest, “Le Château de Blois,” 82.
39 Ibid., 84.
40 King, The Vanderbilt Homes, 18–27; Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collec-
tion, Described by Edward Strahan [pseud.], 2 vols. (Philadelphia: G. Barrie & Sons, n.d.
[1883–84]).
41 Wittman, “Félix Duban’s Didactic Restoration of the Château de Blois,” 422.
42 Ossman, “660 Fifth Avenue,” 38.
43 David Montgomery observes, “Until the mid-40s, far more working people expressed
their grievances through riots than through strikes. . . . The neighborhood, rather than the
­workplace, was the locale of these crowd activities, they were seldom directed against the
crowd’s employers, the crowds themselves represented a mélange of social elements, and
 The François Premier Style in New York 55
some outrage against traditional popular customs and values provided the motif.” David
Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 4, no. 1
(Winter 1980): 86–87.
44 Ibid., 95.
45 Steve Fraser, “The Misunderstood Robber Baron: On Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Nation,
November 11, 2009, www.thenation.com/article/misunderstood-robber-baron-cornelius-
vanderbilt/; David O. Stowell, “Albany’s Great Strike of 1877,” New York History 76, no.
1 (January 1995): 31–55. The strike, including negotiations with William H. Vanderbilt, is
considered in greater detail in David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads and the Great Strike of
1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
3 Aestheticizing Tendencies in
Hudson River School Landscape
Painting at the Beginning of the
Gilded Age
Alan Wallach

Scholars have often linked the Hudson River School to romanticism and to popular
art and not without reason. During the period 1825 to 1880, Thomas Cole, ­Frederic
Church, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Cropsey, and Thomas Moran, among others, pro-
duced vast, crowd-pleasing canvases incorporating patriotic and religious themes. Yet
by the mid-1850s, another tendency was beginning to make itself felt within the school.
The work of such artists as Asher B. Durand, Frederick Kensett, Sanford R ­ obinson
Gifford, and James A. Suydam, often if mistakenly called “luminist,” marked a shift
away from an art that relied on subject matter and virtuoso realist technique for its
effect and toward modest, small-scale paintings that portrayed nondescript subjects
and embodied a heightened concern for nuances of light, color, and a­ tmosphere—
what I will refer to here as aestheticizing tendencies. For reasons I explore in this
essay, the Hudson River School fell out of fashion during the 1870s. Nonetheless, the
taste for the aestheticizing or proto-modernist work of Kensett, Gifford, and others
helped prepare the way for the growing interest during the 1870s and 1880s in the art
of James McNeill Whistler, George Inness, Ralph Blakelock, and Thomas Dewing.1
The appearance of aestheticizing tendencies in American landscape painting in the
period 1840 to 1880 was inextricably bound up with the growth of New York City’s
upper class, or bourgeois factions, which, as the historian Sven Beckert has shown,
coalesced in the years immediately following the Civil War to form a unified bourgeois
class, or bourgeoisie.2 This class’s patronage was crucial; so too were the art institu-
tions it sponsored and supported.
Before 1840, New York had only two art organizations of any substance: the
­American Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1802, and the National Academy of
Design (NAD), created in 1825 by artists fed up with the American Academy’s indiffer-
ence to their needs and intending to exert greater control over their market.3 The NAD
quickly superseded the American Academy, whose demise in the mid-1830s coincided
with a growing interest on the part of New York’s nouveau-riche merchants, bankers,
and financiers in acquiring something of the aura of aristocracy—the “distinction,” as
the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it—that accompanied the possession of works
of art.4 In 1844, a group led by the merchant-financier Jonathan Sturges and made up
primarily of wholesale grocers formed the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts. The
Gallery’s “object,” according to its organizational document, was “to establish in
the city of New York a permanent Gallery of Paintings, Statuary, and other Works
of Art.”5 Yet even before it opened, the gallery was mired in controversy. Surviving
less than a decade, in 1858 its collection was deposited in the New-York Historical
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 57
Society. A similar fate awaited the American Art-Union, established in 1839 and sup-
pressed in 1851 as an illegal lottery.6
And yet despite these institutional failures, the New York art world expanded at a
tremendous rate during the 1840s and 1850s. In 1847, the Century Association was
established to bring together artists, writers, and wealthy patrons, such as Sturges,
John Jacob Astor, and James W. Beekman.7 During this period, the NAD flourished
as never before. Its yearly exhibitions grew steadily, and by the mid-1850s, it began
contemplating a move to a larger building.8 The Tenth Street Studio Building, which
was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and opened in 1858, also helped bring together
artists and patrons.9 Openings and soirées at the academy, at the Tenth Street Studio
Building, and at other venues drew fashionable crowds.
Thus, although the history of New York’s art institutions during the period can be
read in terms of a series of contradictory and thwarted impulses toward the institu-
tionalization of high art, it can also be interpreted in opposite terms, as evidence of
the New York upper class’s growing determination to create art institutions as part
of their effort to consolidate their economic, political, and cultural power. This his-
tory came to a head in 1863 with the founding of New York’s Union League Club.
The league, formed in the early days of the Civil War, was a political movement that
spawned clubs in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and New Haven. As
Sven Beckert observes, the New York Club gave form and structure to the demands
of the most politically radical wing of the bourgeoisie.10 Against the anti-Union oppo-
sition of New York’s political machine dominated by Boss Tweed, and of the city’s
white working class, it called for national unification by force of arms, emancipa-
tion, and the strengthening of the nation state. In the short time between its founding
in 1863 and Union victory in 1865, the club’s membership ballooned from 350 to
800. The club included in its ranks members of once-competing upper-class factions—
merchants, bankers, industrialists, and professionals—as well as a surprisingly large
contingent of artists. (Gifford and Kensett, along with Martin Johnson Heade, Albert
Bierstadt, Jasper Cropsey, and Samuel Colman, were early members.) In defiance of
its political enemies, it sponsored two black regiments; raised money for the United
States Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross; and took the
lead in organizing the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, a fundraising event, which
included a highly successful exhibition organized by Kensett of American and Euro-
pean painting (Figure 3.1).11
In 1865, a few months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender, John Jay, a wealthy
New York financier and lawyer, and one of the league’s first presidents, addressed the
topic of an American art museum in an after-dinner speech at an elaborate Fourth of
July celebration held in Paris. Jay’s words spurred some of the men present to form
a committee that went on to lobby the Union League Club for “the foundation of
a permanent national gallery of art and museum of historical relics” to be located
in New York.12 In November 1869, the league, with John Jay once again serving as
president, organized a dinner at which three hundred of the city’s wealthiest men
gathered to hear some stirring oratory from the poet-journalist William Cullen Bry-
ant, who called for the establishment of a museum of art in the city of New York that
would rival the great art museums of Europe. The meeting resulted in the creation
of a provisional committee that went on to lay the organizational framework for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art—the name a deliberate echo of the name given to the
58 Alan Wallach

Figure 3.1 Picture Gallery of the Fair, Fourteenth Street Building, Harper’s Weekly (April 16,
1864). Wood engraving. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H.
Wade Fund (1942.1482)
Source: Courtesy, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. Through the efforts of a board of trustees, which included
New York’s leading merchants, industrialists, and financiers, as well as the landscap-
ists Church and Kensett, the museum received a grant of incorporation from the New
York State legislature in 1870. On February 20, 1872, the museum held a gala to mark
the opening of its galleries on Fifth Avenue in a building that had formerly served as
the home of Dodworth’s Dancing Academy. The museum later occupied the Douglas
Mansion on Fourteenth Street before taking up permanent residence in Central Park
in March 1880 in the “Venetian” or Ruskin gothic building designed by Calvert Vaux
and Jacob Wrey Mould (see Figure 7.1).13
That the situation changed so rapidly after the Civil War suggests that the crea-
tion of an art museum was a necessary stage in the New York upper-class’s post-war
consolidation of its economic, political, and cultural power. The museum helped to
validate the class’s claims to represent the public interest and simultaneously helped to
satisfy its own need for “distinction.” Thus, the class could emphasize the apparently
democratic and benevolent aspects of the institution it was creating. At the same time,
the new institution reinforced its developing sense of its inherent cultural superiority,
the “distinction” that allowed it to impose its standards of taste on society as a whole
and that, in part, justified its political and economic hegemony.
Probably no figure epitomizes the history of the upper class’s expansion and
consolidation more than Jonathan Sturges (1802–1874) (Figure 3.2), art patron,
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 59

Figure 3.2 Asher B. Durand, Portrait of Jonathan Sturges, ca. 1840. Oil on canvas. The
­Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Frederick Sturges Jr., 1977 (1977.342.1)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org

philanthropist, and pillar of the New York business community.14 Sturges was born
into a distinguished Connecticut family who had fallen on hard times. Lacking an
inheritance, he went to work in 1819 as a clerk in a dry goods store in Fredericksburg,
Virginia; in 1821, he became a clerk for the Manhattan dry goods firm of David Lee
and Luman Reed. In 1828, Reed broke with Lee and made Sturges a one-third part-
ner. A close relationship developed between the Reed and Sturges families that lasted
long after Reed’s untimely death in 1836. In that year, Sturges became the firm’s senior
partner, a post he held until his retirement in 1867.15
Like other wealthy merchants of his generation, Sturges went from the buying and
selling of goods to banking and finance. In 1851, he was part of the consortium of
Eastern capitalists who created the Illinois Central Railway, a vast enterprise that cost
60 Alan Wallach
$25 million to build. In 1855, he served as the line’s second president. In addition,
he was a director of the fledgling New York and New Haven Railroad, a founder
and director of the Bank of Commerce of New York, and an officer of the New York
Chamber of Commerce. Finally, as might be expected, he served as a founding mem-
ber of New York’s Union League Club. In 1863, he was elected the league’s second
president.16
Sturges’s alliance with Reed in the late 1820s provided him with entrée into the
world of new money men who were then supplanting New York’s fading commercial
“aristocracy.” By the 1850s, Sturges was moving in a world of high-powered finan-
ciers, including, among others, the railroad tycoon William H. Osborn, who mar-
ried Sturges’s daughter Virginia in 1853; the financier Cyrus Field; the banker Junius
­Morgan; and Morgan’s son J. P., who married Sturges’s daughter Amelia in 1861.17
Sturges was also well connected politically. According to an obituary in the New York
Times, the Sturgeses met presidents, socialized with leading politicians (Henry Clay,
Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun), and during the Civil War entertained prominent
military men, including Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, William T. Sherman,
Ambrose E. Burnside, and David Farragut.18
As a patron, Sturges followed in Luman Reed’s footsteps. In the early 1830s, Reed
built an art gallery on the top floor of his Greenwich Street mansion, which he filled
with paintings by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Sidney Mount, among
others.19 Sturges never added a gallery to his house at 34 Park Avenue, but like Reed,
he patronized the leading American artists of his day, including Cole, Durand (with
whom he was especially close), William Sidney Mount, John Gadsby Chapman, Fred-
eric Church, Henry Kirke Brown, Francis Edmonds, Henry Peters Gray, Charles C.
Ingham, Henry Inman, and Robert W. Weir.20 Sturges, who became known for his
generosity, found ways to support artists in need. He also used his wealth to create
and sustain art institutions. In 1827, he was a founding member of the Sketch Club,
which was succeeded in 1847 by the Century Association.21 In 1844, as already noted,
Sturges led the effort to create the short-lived New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts,
which had as its foundation Luman Reed’s collection. Sturges was, in addition, a
steadfast supporter of the NAD, lending it substantial sums to underwrite two build-
ing campaigns.22 In 1864, Sturges’s wife, Mary, “on account of [her] husband’s inter-
est in art,” became chairwoman of the Ladies’ Board that oversaw the art exhibition
at the 1864 Sanitary Fair. 23 And Sturges himself, although not a founding trustee,
was in the late 1860s deeply involved in the initial planning for the Metropolitan
Museum.24
What motivated Sturges’s lifelong interest in and advocacy for American art? Like
Reed and later patrons, patriotism very likely played a role in his thinking.25 But
patriotism was a part—perhaps only a small part—of his motivation. In a letter he
wrote to the academy in 1863, he described how “connections with Art and Artists
[had been] a source of great profit to myself and family in the refining influences it has
had upon us all for many, many years.”26 The association of art with refinement was
commonplace, but it nonetheless provides a clue to Sturges’s enthusiasm for collecting.
For Sturges, as for other members of his class, art refined and softened the hard busi-
ness of capitalist accumulation. It also served as a marker of culture and civilization.
To put the matter in Bourdieuian terms, an individual can exchange economic capital
for cultural capital, for example, by patronizing artists and purchasing works of art.
According to Bourdieu, cultural capital is a form of capital that enhances its owner’s
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 61
cultural authority and social standing. Of course, Sturges did not think in these
27

terms. Still, we might ask, how did art refine? Or rather: What type of art provided
the refinement he sought? In the 1860s, the work of mainstream Hudson River School
artists answered the needs of some of the most affluent New York collectors. By then,
however, a new type of aesthetic refinement was beginning to take hold.
John F. Kensett’s Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, Darien, Connecticut
(see Plate 3), which the artist painted between 1870 and 1872 and that depicts a
sunset over Long Island Sound, exemplifies the aestheticizing tendencies I am con-
cerned with in this essay. Close study of the painting reveals the artist’s attentiveness
to nuances of light, color, and atmosphere. Such details as the sailboat that pierces the
horizon, the spit of land—Contentment Island—that extends into the sound in the
distance, the clumps of grass that straggle into the water at the lower right, the rocky
shoreline and trees in the middle distance—these details make credible a composition
that otherwise appears to verge on abstraction. The basic arrangement of forms seems
disarmingly simple. The horizon line divides the painting into two unequal rectangles.
The sky, with its combination of soft pinks, blues, and grays, occupies more than
two-thirds of the canvas. The pale blue of the water contrasts with the luminescent
pinks of the sky. The shoreline and trees break up what would otherwise be a banal
composition. Linking earth and sky, they close off the right side of the composition
and form a contrast with the left, which opens onto a space that extends beyond the
edges of the canvas. These contrasts between left and right and top and bottom set
up a palpable tension between the three-dimensional space Kensett represents and the
canvas’s two-dimensional surface.28
Long Neck Point from Contentment Island readily speaks to what today might be
called aesthetic sensibilities. Indeed, it appeals to nothing much more than the viewer’s
capacity for visual pleasure. However, the mid-nineteenth century art public for the
most part assumed a painting should tell a story, teach a lesson, or depict a subject of
national or religious significance. When, for example, in 1872, Thomas Moran exhib-
ited Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (see Figure 1.5), a mammoth seven-by-ten-foot
canvas celebrating one of the nation’s greatest natural wonders, the painting proved
to be a popular sensation. Congress purchased it that same year and put it on display
in the Capitol rotunda where, two years later, it was joined by a companion piece,
Moran’s Chasm of the Colorado.29
Moran’s two paintings embodied on an epic scale the ambition present in the work
of leading Hudson River School artists. Consider, for example, Frederic Church’s The
Heart of the Andes (see Figure 1.3), a work that glossed American imperial aspira-
tions. With its panoramic sweep, its minute rendition of native flora, and its evocation
of Andean culture, Church’s painting excited great popular enthusiasm when the art-
ist exhibited it in New York and London in 1859.30 Or take Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky
Mountains, Lander’s Peak of 1863 (see Figure 1.4): this large canvas, which includes
in the foreground scenes in a Shoshone village, was carefully calculated to gratify
the curiosity of Eastern audiences about Western scenery and the United States gov-
ernment’s ongoing subjugation of Native American tribes. Two years after Bierstadt
exhibited Rocky Mountains at the NAD’s annual exhibition, he sold it for $25,000,
then the highest price ever paid for an American painting.31
Even though Kensett was closely associated with the Hudson River School, his
mature paintings stand at a far remove from the work of Moran, Church, and Bier-
stadt, a fact contemporary critics readily acknowledged. Kensett’s landscapes teach
62 Alan Wallach
no lessons in patriotism and offer no paeans to Manifest Destiny. Landscape is no
longer a sublime spectacle but an occasion for reflection (literally in the case of Long
Neck Point from Contentment Island). Indeed, it barely registers that for all their
careful detail, the canvases Kensett painted between the mid-1850s and his death in
1872 depict American scenes. Moreover, Kensett’s paintings were tiny by comparison
with such works as Church’s Heart of the Andes. The size of Kensett’s painting—it
measures 15 3/8 by 24 3/8 inches—indicates the artist anticipated an audience made
up of one or at most two viewers at a time as opposed to the crowds that lined up to
see The Heart of the Andes. The painting thus offered a more personal or subjective
experience than did the works of mainstream Hudson River School artists—an experi-
ence in which the viewer focuses on the artist’s choices, his technique, his touch. The
viewer might appreciate the extraordinary—one might say photographic—exactitude
of Long Neck Point from Contentment Island.
But if the painting could be considered a record of the appearance of nature, it is
also a record of a second nature. For it was the artist’s sensibility, his refined percep-
tion of qualities of light, color, and atmosphere, and his unique way of translating
visual experience into an artistic code or language that the viewer also admired. That
admiration was then reflected back upon the viewer, for the appreciation of Kensett’s
painting required skills associated with connoisseurship. Subject matter had lost most
if not all of its importance; the painting functioned more as an embodiment of a rare-
fied artistic sensibility than as a record of the appearance of a place. Viewers’ capacity
for appreciation, their cultivated aesthetic sensibility, demonstrated their love of art—
what Bourdieu sardonically described as “l’amour de l’art.”32
Kensett’s Long Neck Point from Contentment Island comes late in the history of
the Hudson River School—a history that is now well known. Artists associated with
the school—among them Thomas Cole, today remembered as the school’s founder, as
well as Durand, Church, Cropsey, Bierstadt, Kensett, and Gifford—flourished during
the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. However, from the mid-1850s onward, their work came
under increasing critical attack. By the mid-1870s, they were being lumped together
under the newly invented label “Hudson River School”—a term meant to reinforce a
growing critical consensus that the artists in question were limited and provincial.33 In
1883, Clarence Cook, a long-time critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune
and probably the most astute observer of the New York art scene from the 1850s on,
would write,

Nothing more alien to what is recognized as art everywhere, outside England at

least, has ever existed than the now defunct or moribund school of landscape once
so much delighted in as the American school, but now so slightingly spoken of as
the Hudson River School.34

Cook stood for the advanced taste of his day. By the late 1870s, he was champi-
oning William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman in literature and
Albert Pinkham Ryder, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck, and Augustus Saint-­
Gaudens in the visual arts. The sharp distinction Cook drew between “what is rec-
ognized as art everywhere” and the productions of the “moribund” Hudson River
School followed logically from his aversion to anything that smacked of the acad-
emy and from his fascination with Barbizon painting and the work of Courbet and
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 63
Manet. In 1883, Cook was willing to acknowledge that the Hudson River School
“had played its part and played it well” in “the pleasant and peaceful if a trifle tame
and tedious days ‘before the war.’ ”35 Yet by setting up an antithesis between the
academic (the Hudson River School) and the avant-garde, the provincial and the
cosmopolitan, he obscured a historical dynamic that had long been at work within
the school itself.
In Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, pub-
lished in 1988, Lawrence Levine described in broad terms the historical framework
for the decline of the Hudson River School.36 Before the Civil War, most Americans
made no hard distinction between high and popular art. Shakespeare appealed to
lower-class audiences, and the same can be said of most stage literature, of music,
including grand opera, and of the visual arts. There was in addition an indiscriminate
mixing of genres, of high and low art—what today we might call kitsch. Although
all this began to change after the Civil War, these changes were in fact rooted in the
antebellum period. Thus, in what follows, I focus on two interrelated developments
in the New York art world that, taken together, help to account for the appearance
of aestheticizing tendencies and with them a crucial shift in upper-class taste: first,
criticism that increasingly questioned the value of the dominant Hudson River School
aesthetic, and second, the growing popularity of the painted sketch among collectors
and the art public.
Between 1855 and 1861, an art journal called the Crayon was published in New
York.37 Edited by William Stillman and John Durand, the painter Asher B. Durand’s
son, the Crayon is usually remembered as an American vehicle for the ideas of John
Ruskin. However, in the second half of its relatively short life, the journal evolved into
a Unitarian-Transcendentalist critique of Ruskinian aesthetics. Although the Crayon
has been understood primarily in terms of the history of American aesthetic thought,
it can also be studied as an institution within the New York art world. The aesthetic
theories it promoted were never entirely disinterested but were connected with the
needs and concerns of a particular group of artists and patrons based primarily in
the Century Club. There are, of course, many ways to interpret the Crayon, but if we
read it with respect to contemporary artistic practice, we quickly discover not only a
tendency to favor quietist—or what the art historian Janice Simon calls “­Crayonist”—
landscape paintings but also a tendency to disparage the work of artists pursuing
what now appear to be more popular forms, for example, Church, probably the most
popular artist in the United States during the six years the Crayon was published
and the author of spectacular crowd-pleasers.38 Moreover, if the Crayon was mildly
disparaging toward Church, it was positively hostile to the work of Church’s teacher,
Thomas Cole, especially of his four-part allegorical series, The Voyage of Life, which
had, during the 1840s and 1850s, enjoyed critical acclaim and great popular esteem.
Throughout his career, Cole had been considered the United States’ leading landscape
painter, and his untimely death in 1848 had been represented in the press as nothing
short of a national calamity. Yet eight years later, the Crayon did not hesitate to con-
demn Cole’s Voyage of Life and his art in general in the harshest terms imaginable for
failing to incorporate

one earnest, faithful study from Nature, one object in which we can find
that Cole was reverent towards those truths which it is made the duty of the
64 Alan Wallach
landscape-painter to tell us (which, in fact, he never was, even when he professed
only to paint a landscape); rocks, trees, and shrubs, fall alike under the censure of
the student of Nature.39

What explains the vehemence of the Crayon’s assault upon Cole’s reputation? In
my view, it resulted from an ongoing effort to distinguish between a presumably
debased popular art and an elite or high art that conformed to Ruskinian (or later
Crayonist) ideals. In this respect, it is significant that the Crayon promoted relatively
small ­paintings—versus large-scale extravaganzas—emphasizing subtleties of individ-
ual perception—the artist’s unique sensibility. These qualities, as we have observed,
appealed only to those who possessed the ability to appreciate them.
Among New York landscapists active in the mid-1850s, Durand perhaps best
exemplified the Crayon’s aesthetic ideals. Durand, who was born in 1796, had been
a highly successful engraver until the 1830s, when he took up genre and portrait
painting, and then, with encouragement from Thomas Cole, switched to landscape.
In 1845, he was elected the NAD’s second president, a move that signaled the new
importance accorded to landscape painting. In 1847, he was a founding member
of the Century Association.40 After Cole’s death in 1848, Durand was one of three
landscape artists—the other two were Church and Cropsey—who were, in effect,
vying for Cole’s mantle. Yet unlike his rivals, Durand’s landscape vision became pro-
gressively less heroic. A disciple of Ruskin and emphatic in his insistence upon truth
to nature—he spelled out his beliefs in nine letters on landscape paintings published
in early issues of the Crayon—he had in the mid-1840s begun incorporating highly
detailed renditions of natural features in the foreground of his paintings (Figure 3.3).
Vertical rather than horizontal—the latter the preferred format of the majority of
Hudson River School painters—Durand’s sous bois landscapes were based upon plein
air studies, which the artist executed during summers spent in the Catskills and New
England. As Linda S. Ferber has observed, “Durand’s studies were recognized in his
day as vivid documents of practice and creative process, evidence of an artistic quest
for truth about the natural world deemed essential to the mission of the progressive
landscape painter.”41
Durand’s practice both reflected and contributed to the growing interest in the
painted sketch among artists, collectors, and the art public. Eleanor Jones Harvey has
detailed how “between 1830 and 1880 oil sketches, notably of landscapes, became
fixtures in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, studio soirées, and col-
lectors’ homes” and how Durand abetted the appreciation of the painted sketch as a
work of art not only through the example of his own work but also as president of the
NAD, which in accord with his wishes, featured a “sketch room” at its annual exhibi-
tions.42 The American Art-Union also exhibited and sold painted sketches, including
works by Church, Kensett, Gifford, and Durand. Harvey notes that the decade fol-
lowing Cole’s death in 1848 saw “the growing presence of the oil sketch, notably the
‘finished sketch’ as recognized works of art in exhibitions and private collections”—a
development that is central to my argument. Popular taste of the period ran toward
religious allegories like The Voyage of Life and to spectacle pictures like The Heart
of the Andes; appreciation of the painted landscape sketch points to far more self-
conscious forms of artistic enjoyment. As Harvey, Ferber, and others insist, the sketch
(in Harvey’s words) exudes “a palpable individuality that provides an intimate view
into the artist’s creative process.”43
Figure 3.3 Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges by his children, 1895 (95.13.1)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York
66 Alan Wallach
Representations of nature in nineteenth-century American art fall roughly into
three categories: naturalistic depictions of American scenery; paintings emphasizing
artistic sensibility (the artist’s unique response to color, light, and atmosphere); and
paintings in which natural beauty stands for an escape from meaning (aestheticism
or art for art’s sake).44 In this essay, I have attempted to account for historical factors
that prompted the move from the first to the second of these categories—from the
earnest, one might say Ruskinian, depiction of nature, still evident, for example, in
the work of Asher B. Durand, to this Crayonist sketch by Gifford in which technique
all but overwhelms the subject matter (Figure 3.4). We also observe the contrast in
larger works, for example, between Church’s Heart of the Andes of 1859 and Ken-
sett’s Passing Off of the Storm of 1872 (Figure 3.5), a very late painting in which
the distinction between sketch and finished work seems to have all but vanished.
Although category two appears to be the necessary precondition for category three
(art for art’s sake), the path from one category to the next was neither predetermined
nor inevitable. Still, the history I have outlined would have been impossible without
the spectacular rise of New York’s bourgeoisie, which, overcoming its internal divi-
sions, came into its own politically, economically, and culturally in the years imme-
diately following the Civil War. The Gilded Age that followed, in which the New
York upper classes reinforced the city’s status as the art capital of the United States,
was essentially their creation.

Figure 3.4 Sanford Robinson Gifford, Mist Rising at Sunset in the Catskills, ca. 1861. Oil and
pencil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Jamee J. and Marshall Field
(1988.217)
Source: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 67

Figure 3.5 John F. Kensett, Passing Off of the Storm, 1872. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874 (74.27)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org

Notes
1 I am indebted to a host of friends and colleagues who have over the years discussed with
me the issues I take up in this essay. I am especially grateful to Kenneth Myers and Andrew
Hemingway, who have shared their views of the history of romantic landscape painting in
England and the United States and of art criticism in New York in the 1860s. I am grateful
as well to Phyllis Rosenzweig for her support of this project and her critical reading of the
manuscript. The arguments I make here build on ideas I first set forth in “Rethinking ‘Lumi-
nism’: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth Century American
Landscape Painting,” in The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape
Painting, ed. Nancy Siegel (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011), 115–47.
I plan to develop these arguments further in future publications that will take up or elabo-
rate on such topics as the history of New York art institutions, collectors, critics, and deal-
ers, and how they encouraged or reinforced the aestheticizing tendencies described here.
2 See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York,
­
Charleston, Chicago and Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Edward
Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War (1973; rpt. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1990); E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a
National Upper Class (1958; rpt. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989); and
Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institu-
tions, Elites and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University
Press, 1982).
3 For the National Academy of Design, see Eliot Clark, History of the National Academy of
Design, 1825–1953 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); and Thomas Seir Cum-
mings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design (1865; rpt. New York: Kennedy
Galleries, 1869). See also Paul Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 149–74. The most comprehensive study of the American Academy is Carrie
Rebora, “The American Academy of the Fine Arts, New York, 1802–1842” (PhD diss., City
University of New York, 1989).
68 Alan Wallach
4 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbell, The Love of Art: European Museums and Their
Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990); originally published as L’amour de l’art (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1966). See also
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
5 For information about the gallery, see Maybelle Mann, “The New-York Gallery of Fine
Arts: ‘A Source of Refinement,’ ” American Art Journal 11, no. 1 (January 1979): 76–86;
and Abigail Booth Gerdts, “Newly Discovered Records of the New-York Gallery of the Fine
Arts,” Archives of American Art Journal 21, no. 4 (1981): 2–9.
6 For the American Art-Union, see Maybelle Mann, The American Art-Union, rev. ed. (­Jupiter,
FL: ALM Associates, 1987); Rachel N. Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York
City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union,” Journal of American History 81, no. 4
(March 1995): 1534–61; Patricia Hills, “The American Art-Union as Patron for Expansionist
Ideology in the 1840s,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, eds. Andrew Hemingway
and Will Vaughn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 314–39; Arlene Katz Nich-
ols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo Association and the American Art-Union” (PhD
diss., City University of New York, 2003); and Amanda Lett, ed., Perfectly American: The
Art-Union and Its Artists (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2011).
7 See John Hamilton Gourlie, The Origin and History of “The Century” (New York: W.
C. Bryant, 1856); Allan Nevins, “The Century, 1847–1868,” in The Century, 1847–1946
(New York: Century Association, 1947), 3–24; John K. Howat, “Kensett’s World,” in
John Frederick Kensett, an American Master, eds. John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat
(Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, and New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 35–37; and
Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 58.
8 See Clark, History of the National Academy of Design, 66–83.
9 See Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist Entrepreneurs From the
Hudson River School to the American Impressionists (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art
Museum, 1997).
10 See Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 130–31. See also Will Irwin, Earl Chapin May, and Joseph
Hotchkiss, A History of the Union League Club of New York City (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1952), 1–76.
11 For the art exhibition at the fair, see Evdokia Savidou-Terrono, “ ‘For the Boys in Blue’: The
Art Galleries of the Sanitary Fairs” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2002); and
Charlotte Emans Moore, “Art as Text, War as Context: The Art Gallery at the Metropolitan
Fair, New York City’s Artistic Community, and the Civil War” (PhD diss., Boston Univer-
sity, 2009).
12 See Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), vol. I, 99–100. See also Savidou-Terrono, “ ‘For the
Boys in Blue,’ ” 534–38; and Alan Wallach, “The Birth of the American Art Museum,” in
The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Sven
­Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 247–56.
13 See Howe, History of the Metropolitan Museum, vol. I, 101–223; and Calvin Tompkins,
Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rev. ed. (New
York: Henry Holt, 1989), 11–59.
14 The best account of Sturges’s career as a patron is Christine I. Oaklander, “Jonathan
Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn: A Chapter in American Art Patronage,”
Metropolitan Museum Journal 43 (2008): 173–94. See also Christine I. Oaklander, “Fasci-
nating Information Revealed: The Jonathan Sturges Receipt Books,” Archives of American
Art Journal 53, nos. 1–2 (2014): 121–35.
15 See Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 173–80; and
Mrs. Jonathan Sturges [Mary Pemberton Cady Sturges], Reminiscences of a Long Life
(New York: F. E. Parish, 1894), 37.
16 See Complimentary Dinner to Jonathan Sturges (New York: n.p., n.d. [1868]), 11; Mrs.
Sturges, Reminiscences; and National Historic Landmark Nomination, Jonathan Sturges
House (Washington, DC: National Park Service, n.d. [1994]), 12–18, https://npgallery.
nps.gov/GetAsset/4e074967-4d4e-47eb-ad23-4a671db7413f/. For the Illinois Central, see
 Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting 69
Howard G. Bronson, “The History of the Illinois-Central Railroad to 1870,” University of
Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 4 (1915): 285–466.
17 Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn”; and Jean Strouse,
Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 79–101.
18 “Mrs. Mary Pemberton Sturges,” obituary, New York Times, July 31, 1894, rpt. in
­Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 174–75. See also
Mrs. Sturges, Reminiscences.
19 See Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery (New York: New-York Historical
Society and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).
20 See Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 174. See also
“Our Private Collections, No. II,” Crayon 3, no. 2 (February 1856): 57–58.
21 Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 179. See as well
note 7, this essay.
22 Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 179.
23 See Mrs. Sturges, Reminiscences, 240–42.
24 Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William C. Osborn,” 179.
25 See Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
26 National Academy of Design Council Meeting Minutes, March 30, 1863, transcript,
67. National Academy of Design records, 1825–1925, reel 798 [no frame], Archives of
­American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, quoted in Oaklander, “Jonathan
Sturges, W. H. Oxborn, and William C. Osborn,” 179.
27 See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986),
241–58, www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-cap-
ital.htm.
28 For Kensett’s late work, see Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, “The Last Summer’s Work,” in
John Frederick Kensett, an American Master, eds. John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat
(Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, and New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 136–61.
29 See Joni Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 43, 63–66, 95, 115–16, 149–50.
30 See “Heart of the Andes,” in American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
vol. II, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1816–1845, eds. Natalie Spassky
et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 269–75; J. K. H. [John K. Howat],
“Heart of the Andes, 1859,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School,
ed. John K. Howat (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 246–50; Frank Kelly, Frederic
Edwin Church (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 54–58; and Jennifer
Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2015), 65–85.
31 “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,” in Spassky et al., American Paintings in the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, vol. II, 321–26; and Nancy Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, eds.,
Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, and New York:
Hudson Hills Press, 1991), 194–95.
32 See note 4, this essay.
33 See Gerald Carr, “Initiating and Naming ‘The Hudson River School,’ ” Thomas Cole
National Historical Site Newsletter (Fall 2011): 5–6. For a discussion of the context in
which the term first appeared, see Kevin Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River
School,” in Howat, American Paradise, 3–4.
34 Clarence Cook, “Art in America in 1883,” Princeton Review 11 (May 1883): 312.
35 Clarence Cook, “Society of American Artists,” New York Daily Tribune, April 11, 1880, 7,
cited in Barbara Jean Stephanic, “Clarence Cook’s Role as Art Critic, Advocate for Profes-
sionalism, Educator, and Arbiter of Taste in America” (PhD diss., University of Maryland,
1997), 82–83.
36 See Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
­America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
37 See Janice Simon, “The Crayon, 1855–1861: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and
the Fine Arts” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1990). For an earlier discussion, see
70 Alan Wallach
Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). See also William James Stillman, The Autobiography
of a Journalist, vol. 1 (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 222–31.
38 See Simon, “The Crayon,” 338–58.
39 “Allegory in Art,” Crayon 3 (April 1856): 113–14. In all likelihood, either Stillman or his
coeditor, John Durand, wrote the review.
40 For a biographical outline, see Sarah B. Snook, “Chronology,” in Kindred Spirits: Asher
B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn
Museum, and London: D. Giles Limited, 2007), 202–24.
41 Linda S. Ferber, “Asher B. Durand, American Landscape Painter,” in Ferber, Kindred ­Spirits,
181.
42 See Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature, 1830–
1880 (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1998), 35–36, 64–65.
43 Ibid., 99.
44 I am indebted to Kenneth Myers for his observations on the nature of aestheticizing ten-
dencies, which he set forth in a paper entitled “Eugene Benson and the Epistemology of
Landscape Production in New York in the 1860s.” Myers presented the paper at the College
Art Association’s annual meeting on February 6, 2016, in the session “The Hudson River
School Reconsidered, Part I.”
Part II

Institutionalizing Art and

Culture in the Capital
4 The Lenox Library
New York’s Lost Treasure House
Sally Webster

The Lenox Library was incorporated in 1870 by James Lenox (1800–80) and a board
of eight New Yorkers for the express purpose of creating “a public library in the city
of New York. . . . To receive from the said James Lenox his collection of manuscripts,
printed books, engravings and maps, statuary, paintings, drawings, and other works
of art.”1 Lenox also contributed the land and paid for construction of the building.2
The library’s elegant exterior, graceful proportions, high, broad windows (see
Plate 4), and intelligent floor plan were designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt
(1827–95) in the Neo-Grec style with which Hunt was familiar through his study at
the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and his training with French architect Hector Lefuel.
A few years after the library opened in January 1877, a contemporary boasted that
“the building in point of architectural beauty, value, and design is superior to any
library building in the United States.”3 Equally noteworthy were the library’s modern
interiors in which Lenox organized priceless treasures in elegant and systematic ways.
This display was in marked contrast to the crowded installations of the New-York
Historical Society (then located at Second Avenue and Eleventh Street) and the dark,
German Romanesque interiors of the Astor Library.
Surviving photographs (Figure 4.1) reveal a carefully ordered, classically inspired
exterior of ashlar granite with two protruding wings and a deep entrance court. In
keeping with the Neo-Grec style, its appearance was austere, differing from the ornate
chateaux Hunt would later design for members of the Vanderbilt family, including
William K. Vanderbilt (see Figure 2.1).4 The building’s interiors (Figure 4.2) were
more inviting than its facade. The first floor reading rooms housed Lenox’s collection
of rare books in elegant cases “of the finest glass, framed in black iron mountings.”5
Stained-glass windows cast a prismatic light that illuminated the cases and their exotic
contents. Upstairs, the donor’s collections of “mosaics, porcelains, enamels, casts,”
medals, and medallions from all over Europe were arrayed.6 In his Picture Gallery,
in the center of the second floor, Lenox exhibited his collection of European and
­American paintings, while he positioned his sculptures outside in the Statuary Hall.
During the Lenox Library’s first year, 15,000 people were admitted by ticket. The
trustees remarked that this large attendance “indicates extraordinary public interest”
and that visitors

seem to be much impressed by the tone and character of the exhibitions; and
there is no room for doubt as to the prevailing sense of grateful pleasure and real
satisfaction among the people who have availed themselves of their privilege to
visit the library.7
74 Sally Webster

Figure 4.1 Lenox Library, May 1909. Gelatin silver print. H. N. Tiemann & Co./Museum of
the City of New York (X2010.11.4893)
Source: Courtesy, Museum of the City of New York

Sadly, less than forty years after its opening, the Lenox Library would be demol-
ished and its contents transferred to the New York Public Library (NYPL). In 1906,
Henry Clay Frick purchased the Fifth Avenue site on which the building once stood.
Here Frick built a home and repository for his art holdings, which later became the
acclaimed Frick Collection.8 In contrast, the Lenox Library’s riches and its donor,
James Lenox, subsequently faded from memory. No designated room was set aside in
the NYPL for Lenox’s holdings, which were scattered throughout the building. Lenox’s
books went to the Rare Book Room, his maps to the Map Room, his engravings to
the Print Room, and his papers to the archives. His art was installed throughout the
building and at its branches, with many works eventually sold at auction. Thus, the
totality of James Lenox’s gift to the citizens of New York is difficult to reconstruct.9
There are, however, a few public reminders of this once-admired literary and artis-
tic mecca. One is a bust of the library’s architect, Richard Morris Hunt, placed in
an exedra on the Central Park side of Fifth Avenue at Seventieth Street.10 The other
is on the exterior of the main branch of the NYPL at Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second
 The Lenox Library 75

Figure 4.2 “Interior of the Lenox Library showing Statuary Hall, Lenox Gallery, First ­Columbus
Map of the Gulf of Mexico, Library and Reading Room, Drexel Music Library.”
Harper’s Bazaar (September 16, 1893), 759. Art and Picture Collection, The New
York Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library

Street.11 Here, carved on its entablature, are the names of the three entities—the Astor
Library, the Lenox Library, and the Tilden Trust—that merged in 1895 to form New
York’s premier public research library. Fortunately, the NYPL retains rich archives of
James Lenox and Lenox Library material. These repositories include trustees’ minutes,
guides to its collections, correspondence, architectural drawings, and photographs, all
of which make a re-imagining of Hunt’s building and its interiors possible. Collec-
tively, they form the foundation of this study.
The importance of resurrecting the appearance, history, and collections of the Lenox
Library is manifold. Foremost, it is a testament to the ambitions of nineteenth-century
American collectors—ambitions rooted in a desire to expand the nation’s cultural map
by adopting European literary and aesthetic models and by acquiring European treas-
ures. In the 1870s, the Lenox Library’s newly incorporated board of trustees, along
with their contemporaries at other fledgling institutions, led the way in determining
what America’s libraries and museums should look like; what they should contain;
how objects—books and art—be displayed; and how they would be managed and
financed.
James Lenox is best remembered as an early and preeminent collector of rare books
in the United States. From the beginning of the Republic, bibliophiles and antiquarians
76 Sally Webster
were committed to amassing the papers of the Founding Fathers and documents
relating to the early history of the United States. However, it was not until the mid-
nineteenth century that Lenox, John Carter Brown, and others began to purchase rare
books from Europe, including Gutenberg bibles and Shakespeare portfolios. Unlike
Brown, Lenox was also an enthusiastic collector of paintings, sculpture, engravings,
medals, maps, and decorative porcelain. Ironically, it was the library’s art collections
that were better known to the public, as access to its rare books was limited. These
artworks were installed on the second floor in the Picture Gallery and in an adjacent
hallway, known as Statuary Hall, where fifteen sculptures were on view. In 1878,
Lenox added fifty-seven

rare vases and other forms of porcelain, enamel and glass; carved ivories, carv-
ings of wood, staghorn, etc. carefully studied and admirably executed models
in antique marble and alabaster of famous architectural works and remains of
ancient art; various objects in bronze, etc.12

All these works were listed in an annual guide known as the Lenox Library Guide
to the Paintings and Sculptures.13 Not included in the Guide but continuously on
exhibit were Lenox’s extensive holdings of reproductive engravings, many of which
were housed in display cases in the Picture Gallery.
Little is known about Lenox’s intentions; neither his reasons for donating to the
public his vast collections and the property he had inherited from his father, Robert
Lenox, nor for financing the construction of a building of great distinction. We can
conjecture that his public largesse was influenced by his deep devotion to the educa-
tional and charitable precepts of Presbyterianism. Both he and his father were devout
in their faith and were instrumental in the establishment of New Jersey’s Princeton
Seminary. Lenox’s civic generosity can also be attributed to the tenor of the times. He
was one of a number of wealthy Americans who, following the Civil War, expressed
a burgeoning enthusiasm for the trappings of high culture. Elite society’s embrace of
the fine and decorative arts, rare books, natural history displays, and elegant archi-
tecture was fueled by grand tours to Europe financed by northern merchants’ profits
from the war and by the extraordinary wealth the founders of the nation’s railroads
amassed.
There was also a linking of the fine arts with national purpose, which was publically
acknowledged when American art made a poor showing at Paris’s 1867 Universal
Exposition. Frank Leslie (then editor and publisher of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News-
paper) wrote the official report critical of America’s fine arts display, noting that it
was marked by a lingering chauvinism that, when viewed alongside contemporaneous
European pictures, exposed America’s provincialism.14 The lack of sophistication and
connoisseurship among American artists and collectors was due, in Leslie’s opinion, to
the lack of “galleries of national [meaning American] art, [with] no public collection
of pictures that have stood the test of exhibition and criticism.”15
Several influential Americans, including Lenox, took Leslie’s admonition to heart
and began to donate their art treasures to new public institutions, which led to the
construction of new civic buildings often designed by the nation’s best architects.
These individuals included William Corcoran who, before the Civil War, hired James
Renwick to design his gallery, which opened in Washington, DC, in 1874. An even
earlier institution, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, opened
 The Lenox Library 77
a new building in 1876 designed by Frank Furness. Both the Metropolitan Museum of
Art (Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, 1874–80) and the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston (John H. Sturgis and Charles Brigham, 1876), were founded in 1870, the same
year as the Lenox Library (1870–77).
There were also important antebellum collections housed in historical societies and
athenaeums, such as the Boston Athenaeum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, and the
New-York Historical Society, which were precursors to the efforts of this institution-
building generation.16 The Lenox Library, with its collection of fine, decorative and
graphic arts, and rare books, was a hybrid, a transitional cultural institution that tran-
scended the athenaeum model and anticipated the turn-of-the-century establishment
of the Morgan and Huntington libraries.

Creating a Collection
Even though the Lenox Library was much admired in the late nineteenth century,
neither the institution nor the man himself are well known today, nor has Lenox’s
contribution to the early history of the nation’s cultural institutions been adequately
acknowledged. He did not play a visible role in New York’s cultural life: rather than
belonging to its clubs or attending high-society galas, Lenox confined himself to
working with the Presbyterian Church and like-minded civic leaders while enjoying
a strong affiliation with a small cadre of highly competitive bibliophiles, librarians,
and bookdealers. What little we know of the man stems primarily from an 1883 talk
given by the son of his London-based bookseller, Henry Stevens, and later published
as Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library.17
In it, Stevens focuses primarily on Lenox’s book collecting and depicts him as a recluse
(which in his seventies he no doubt was), but the author fails to mention that Lenox
had a trusted circle of advisers. How else to explain Lenox’s extensive philanthropy,
which included the founding of Presbyterian Hospital (now New York Presbyterian),
the funding of the Lenox Library, and of the Princeton Theological Seminary? For
these projects, he worked closely with Richard Morris Hunt and a hand-picked board
of trustees. James Lenox’s deep personal involvement with these institutions is not
reflected in Stevens’s portrait.
Lenox was a native New Yorker, the only surviving son of Robert and Rachel ­Carmer
Lenox. Robert emigrated from Scotland before the American Revolution to work with
his uncle, David Sproat, a Philadelphia importer. During the Revolutionary War, he
and his uncle, who remained loyal to Great Britain, moved to New York. How Robert
would end up on the right side of history is unknown, but by the turn of the century,
he was one of the richest merchants in the city. In 1783, he married Rachel, a daughter
of one of his clients, and over the next twenty years they had eleven children, only
six of whom survived to adulthood. The burgeoning family settled into a home just
north of Bowling Green, then the most desirable residential area in ­Manhattan. As evi-
dence of their social standing and cultural ambitions, the Lenoxes hired John ­Trumbull,
the city’s most fashionable and sought-after portrait artist, to undertake half lengths
of two family members. Five years later, the family engaged the country’s most famous
painter, Gilbert Stuart, to paint two of their daughters, Isabella H ­ enderson Lenox
Banks and Elizabeth Sproat Lenox Maitland. (Husbands and children of both women
would later serve as trustees of the Lenox Library.) These commissions were followed
by two more portraits of Lenox family members by John Wesley Jarvis, who succeeded
78 Sally Webster
Trumbull as the city’s leading portraitist. All these paintings, which remain on view
in the Salomon Gallery of the NYPL, were a part of the Lenox Library collection
and confirm that from an early age James Lenox was part of a milieu that supported
American artists.
It is not surprising that Lenox was extremely well educated. He went to Columbia
College, which at that time was about ten blocks north of his home on lower Broadway.
He graduated in 1818 and then went on to obtain a master’s degree from his alma
mater the same year, 1821, that he received an honorary degree from Princeton.
This marked the beginning of a long and deep association with these universities
and with the unaffiliated Princeton Theological Seminary, no doubt because his
father served as a founder and treasurer, overseeing the seminary’s investments.
Both father and son remained staunch Presbyterians, a faith that informed James’s
philanthropy.18
In 1823, Lenox embarked on a two-year grand tour of Europe, further indication of
the family’s cultural ambitions. In all likelihood, Lenox began in London where he met
the American painter Charles Robert Leslie, whose patrons provided introductions
to influential people in that city, including the American painter Washington Allston,
the poet Samuel Coleridge, and the Knickerbocker writer Washington Irving. Leslie’s
friendship with writers influenced his interest in literary themes, and by the 1820s,
he was well known as one who recreated anecdotal scenes of the great writers. In his
1834 biographical compendium of American artists, William Dunlap lauded Leslie as
a great American painter. Dunlap himself may have been a common bond between
Leslie and Lenox.19 Although few details are known of their relationship, Lenox’s
first purchases of paintings were works by Leslie. According to the Lenox Library,
A Guide to the Paintings and Sculptures, these included a portrait of a gentleman and
one of a lady. Neither has been located.20
Lenox may well have traveled from London to Italy at the suggestion of Leslie and
of other Americans in London. As souvenirs of his travels, he purchased three sculp-
tures in Rome.21 Two sculptures were replicas, one of George Washington, the other
of Napoleon by Raimondo Trentanove. The third was a marble of an unusual subject
called Cyparissus, carved by the little-known Francesco Pozzi.22
In 1826, Lenox returned to New York and joined his father in their mercantile
business, where he would work for the next sixteen years. When Robert Lenox died
in 1839, he was reputedly the fifth richest man in New York, and he bequeathed to
his son his entire estate, which included thirty acres of what would become prime
real estate. This land, known as the Lenox Farm, extended from today’s Fifth to
­Madison Avenues from Sixty-Eighth to Seventy-Fourth Streets and became the locale
for Lenox’s Presbyterian Hospital and his library.23
His father’s death and the money he inherited freed the younger Lenox of any busi-
ness obligations, allowing him to indulge his passion for collecting as a full-time voca-
tion. First on his list, however, was a new home for himself and two of his sisters at
Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue, south of Union Square. In the James Lenox archives,
there is a drawing of Lenox’s lower Fifth Avenue home attributed to Alexander ­Jackson
Davis, an influential mid-century New York architect. The rendering conforms to the
Italianate style that Davis favored for other homes of New York’s merchant princes.
There is no record of this commission in Davis’s files, but there is an untitled drawing
in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that dates from the same decade
 The Lenox Library 79
and was undoubtedly a study for Lenox’s mansion. That Lenox would be prompted
24

to hire someone of Davis’s ability and reputation is in keeping with his later hiring
of Hunt.
Lenox, who never married, moved into his new home in 1846, along with two of
his sisters: Mary Lenox Shaefe with her husband John (no children), and Henrietta
­Anderson Lenox. Here he hung portraits of his family, the paintings and sculptures he
had purchased in Europe, and those that he inherited. He would then turn his atten-
tion to seriously collecting art and books.
Lenox first bought American paintings in the 1840s, including several by Henry
Inman, who had earlier painted miniatures of the Lenox family.25 In the mid-1840s,
Inman, after several decades of success as a portraitist and genre painter, was down
on his luck. His earlier acquaintance with Inman no doubt made Lenox sympathetic
to the artist’s plight, and he commissioned three paintings that helped finance Inman’s
trip to Europe: a copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Heads of Children; a portrait of the
eminent Scots-Presbyterian theologian Dr. Thomas Chalmers (1844), and a View of
Dunrennan Abbey near Kirdkcudbright, a landscape of the countryside near Robert
Lenox’s hometown.26
Following his Inman commissions, Lenox began to collect art that was more
distinguished, including Gilbert Stuart’s 1800 George Washington, a replica of the
artist’s ­Lansdowne Washington, which Lenox purchased from the estate of Peter Jay
Munro, its original owner.27 He also acquired J. M. W. Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave
(1832), the first painting by Turner to enter an American collection.28 Charles Les-
lie purchased this painting on Lenox’s behalf, later recounting that it took Lenox a
while to get used to what he described as Turner’s indistinctness. Lenox later wrote
to Leslie that he had come to admire the picture greatly, “and I have brought one or
two of my friends to see it. . . . I can now write to Mr. Turner, and tell him conscien-
tiously how much I am delighted with it.”29 Leslie was one of Lenox’s few known art
advisers since, based on the annotations in the Lenox Library Guide to the Paintings
and Sculptures, Lenox bought most of the artworks himself, sometimes at auction or
directly from the artist.
In the 1840s, Lenox also purchased two works by the highly admired Sir Joshua
Reynolds: Portrait of Miss Kitty Fisher—with Doves and Mrs. Billington as Saint
Cecilia, along with Thomas Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise (1826, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston).30 Lenox also commissioned three works from one of Inman’s pupils,
Daniel Huntington: a female head titled Melancholy, a portrait of Christopher
Columbus, and a copy of a Trumbull painting of Alexander Hamilton.31 Huntington’s
reputation was on the rise in the 1840s following the exhibition of his best-known
work, Mercy’s Dream (1841), based on an incident from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress. Over the years Lenox would purchase innumerable copies of Bunyan’s sev-
enteenth-century work in all languages and from all periods, ultimately making the
NYPL one of the largest repositories of Bunyan material in the world. Their shared
interest in the promotion of Bunyan’s work may have prompted Lenox to appoint
Huntington, who for many years was a leader of the New York art world, to the
Lenox Library’s first board of directors.32
In 1850, the busiest year of his collecting, Lenox set out on his second European
trip. When Lenox reached London, he purchased several paintings that enlarged his
holdings of British artists. These included works by Thomas Gainsborough, Edwin
80 Sally Webster
Landseer, William Mulready, George Morland, David Wilkie, and a second Turner
painting, A Scene on the French Coast with an English Ship of War (1831, private
collection). He also authorized his American agent to purchase paintings from two
auctions—the J. P. Beaumont sale in New York and the David Claypoole auction
in Philadelphia, from which he purchased the artist James Peale’s 1778 portrait of
George Washington, based on one of his brother Charles Peale’s earlier likenesses
of Washington. Later Lenox traveled to Italy, where he commissioned The Children
in the Wood by the expatriate sculptor Thomas Crawford, who modeled and com-
pleted the work “to order” in Rome in 1854.33 Lenox returned to New York, and
before leaving for a third European trip, he bought, through his Paris contacts, two
paintings at auction: The Field of Battle by Paul Delaroche and Siege of Saragossa
by ­Horace Vernet, the only acquisitions he made of the then fashionable French
academic painters.34
He returned to Europe in 1855 and remained until 1857, purchasing several paint-
ings by continental artists as well as porcelain vases and plaques, many of which were
decorated with illustrations of famous paintings. Not quite souvenirs, they served a
didactic purpose, much like his reproductive engravings. He traveled again to Italy,
this time acquiring mementos of the countryside by two American painters: George
Loring Brown’s The Falls of Tivoli and John G. Chapman’s I Pifferari.35
Over the next two decades and until his death in 1880, Lenox bought mostly
American pictures, including three paintings from the 1864 Metropolitan Fair: Albert
Bierstadt’s Valley of the Yo Semite (1864, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Asher B.
Durand’s Ruloff Jansen’s Kill—study from Nature at Hillsdale, Columbia County,
N.Y., and John Kensett’s A Coast Scene.36 Earlier he bought a view of Cotopaxi (1863,
Detroit Institute of Art) from Frederic Church as well as Charles Leslie’s portrait of
Washington Irving (ca. 1820, NYPL) from the artist’s estate. Lenox also added to
his paintings of the Colonial and Early Republican eras with the purchase of John
Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mrs. Robert Hooper (ca. 1767) from a granddaughter
of the artist and Robert Edge Pine’s Portrait of David Garrick (unlocated), plus two
portraits of George Washington, both by Rembrandt Peale, still at the New York
Public Library.37
Lenox bought only a few paintings during the 1870s, as he was then occupied with
the plans for his hospital and library. What he did purchase included Copley’s Portrait
of Lady Frances Deering Wentworth (ca. 1813, NYPL) and three paintings by con-
temporaneous Spanish artists. The latter were purchased from Samuel Putnam Avery,
one of the most respected art dealers of the era, who traveled abroad and worked
closely with other collectors, such as William and Henry Walters.38 Avery, a great
proponent of the artistic print as opposed to reproductive prints, amassed one of the
finest collections of nineteenth-century etchings and engravings in the United States.
His collection of nearly 18,000 prints was originally housed at the Lenox and then
later transferred in its entirety to the NYPL.

Designing a Library
By the late 1860s, Lenox recognized that his collections, which filled his lower Fifth
Avenue home, needed to be better organized and maintained. He also wanted to
make his holdings accessible to the public, and he turned to Hunt for help. The
 The Lenox Library 81
architect had recently returned from Paris, where he had served as one of the U.S.
commissioners for the 1867 Paris World’s Fair. According to Hunt’s wife, Catherine
Howland Hunt, Lenox met the architect through Dr. George Prentiss, a Presbyterian
minister and professor of pastoral theology, who was on the board of Union Theo-
logical Seminary when it was planning a new building. Hunt had submitted a pro-
posal that was not accepted, but his introduction to Lenox more than compensated
for this loss, as Hunt would go on to design three institutional buildings for Lenox
in the following decade.
Lenox and Hunt also knew each other through their attendance at a series of meet-
ings at the Union League Club in 1869 and 1870 to discuss the formation of an art
museum for the city. The initial meeting was convened by George P. Putnam, a book
publisher and early book agent for Lenox, who was also the chairman of the league’s
Art Committee. Putnam’s committee prepared a list of resolutions, calling several
influential New Yorkers—including Hunt and Lenox—to a subsequent meeting to
discuss the establishment of a “museum of art.”39 Lenox did not continue his associa-
tion with the museum committee, nor are his thoughts known about the establish-
ment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet the discussions and attendant publicity
this initiative garnered occurred concurrently with Lenox’s own desire to establish a
library and art gallery.
Among the issues that occupied the committee for the Metropolitan and founders
of other museums during the 1870s was the question of what models to follow. Those
discussed included the new South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert),
with its heterogeneous displays of paintings, decorative arts, and casts. The other was
the Louvre and its historic arrangement of works of art. In her 2016 volume, Invention
of the American Art Museum, Kathleen Curran notes that the Metropolitan Museum,
like its contemporary, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, first conceived of its “mis-
sion as an institution for artisans,” based on the South Kensington model, but later
shifted to one in which collections illustrated the “historical progression from early
periods to the present,” similar to the installation practices of the Louvre.40 However,
in this formative decade of American museum establishment, no one model can be
clearly identified. That clarification came later through the efforts of better-trained
museum professionals and more sophisticated boards of directors. In the early days,
display practices were dictated more by practicality—by gifts that had been received,
for example—than by a comprehensive methodology. If there was one predominant
model for Lenox in the 1870s, it was the athenaeum model, with its varied agglomera-
tion of books and works of art. Additionally, Hunt’s sophisticated and elegant interior
design reflects the architect’s training abroad and his familiarity with institutions, such
as the Louvre; as a student, he had been employed on the design of its expansion.41
Although little is known about Lenox’s private life, his friendship with the archi-
tect Richard Morris Hunt is one of the few that can be documented. In her diary,
Catherine Hunt, the architect’s wife, described Lenox as “patient reserved, but large
hearted and large minded, with Scotch caution fully developed” and noted that the
bibliophile “became warmly attached to Richard, and showed his affection” by urging
the architect to give up smoking cigars.42 Lenox enjoyed Hunt’s “companionship and
the two had long talks in New York and Newport,” and according to Catherine, who
learned from Lenox’s sister, “Richard’s was the only house her brother ever visited
outside his own family.”43
82 Sally Webster
When Lenox first approached Hunt professionally, it was not for a library design
but for a new hospital. Lenox was dedicated to expanding hospital facilities in New
York and invited others to join him in his effort to establish a new hospital under the
auspices of the Presbyterian Church. Lenox volunteered to contribute $100,000, as
well as the land, on a site not far from his future library. (The Presbyterian Hospital
buildings, completed in 1872, were demolished late in the 1920s when the hospital
moved to its present location at Broadway and 168th Street, changing its name to
Columbia Presbyterian.)
Lenox was no doubt pleased with Hunt’s hospital design because he soon thereaf-
ter hired the architect to design his library.44 There is a sizable correspondence in the
NYPL archives between Hunt and Lenox, and also among Hunt, his assistant, Mau-
rice Fornachon, and the various building contractors. Most of it is business related—
invoices, details of construction, and instructions to contractors. There are, however, a
few personal notes between architect and client, including one that was hand delivered
to Lenox shortly after construction began on his library. In mid-August 1871, Hunt
stopped by Lenox’s home with a birthday present, a small copper globe now known
as the Lenox or Hunt-Lenox globe, which he had purchased in Paris and intended as
a contribution to Lenox’s renowned map collection.45 The globe, which dates from
the early sixteenth century, is today regarded as one of the earliest terrestrial globes
in the world.
Meanwhile, with the building still under construction, Lenox hired George Henry
Moore away from the New-York Historical Society and appointed him superinten-
dent of the Lenox Library to oversee the building, along with the transfer of Lenox’s
collections from his lower Fifth Avenue home to the library. Moore worked tirelessly
alongside the Lenox’s librarian, Samuel Austin Allibone, to unpack, catalog, and
shelve Lenox’s rare books.46
The Lenox Library opened to the public on January 15, 1877. It was a three-story,
192-foot-long, 114-foot-deep building that fronted Fifth Avenue between Seventi-
eth and Seventy-First Streets. Its cost, including furnishings, was $1.2 million, a sum
entirely paid for by Lenox. He also created an endowment of $250,000 to cover pur-
chases and operating expenses.
One entered the building through a wide entrance court that opened onto an inte-
rior vestibule. With white marble floors and dove-gray wainscoting, the hallway
also served as the sculpture gallery where Roman portrait busts of Caracalla and
his mother, Julia Pia, were installed.47 At the north and south ends were two wood-
paneled, high-ceilinged reading rooms. Outside the reading rooms were two staircases
with balustrades decorated with iron scrollwork. The north staircase led to a mez-
zanine with an apartment for the superintendent. At the top of both sets of stairs,
was a second-story hallway that held a varied grouping of statues (Figure 4.3). The
hallway opened onto the forty-by-fifty-foot Picture Gallery at the back of the building.
According to an 1877 article in American Architect and Building News (Figure 4.4),
the gallery was “well lighted from above by three large skylights, the ceiling gradually
inclining downward from these to the cornice, which is carried around four sides of
the room without breaks.”48
One of the challenges of trying to describe the interior of the Lenox Library is that
the location and configuration of gallery spaces and displays evolved over time. For
instance, in 1892, twelve years after Lenox's death, the Robert L. Stuart art and book
 The Lenox Library 83

Figure 4.3 Statuary Hall, second floor, Lenox Library, ca. 1890. The Miriam and Ira D. W
­ allach
Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York
Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library

collections were donated to the Lenox Library and installed in a second-floor gal-
lery on the north side of the building adjacent to the Lenox Library Picture Gallery
(Figure 4.4). Originally this north gallery space held Lenox’s decorative arts and
engravings; after the Stuart donation, they were relocated to the second-floor hallway.
As far as we know, the arrangement of the Picture Gallery remained stable.
There is, however, a remarkable set of nine photographs taken sometime after 1881,
when the painting collection was complete, which documents every painting on exhibit
(Figure 4.5). The photographs confirm that the paintings were hung salon style. With
the addition of penciled numbers on the mats of the photographs that correspond to
the Guide, the location of every painting can be identified. These photographs also
appear to be unique. Images of other contemporaneous exhibition spaces exist—the
newly opened galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were documented in
a rich and attractive series of paintings by the little known Enrico Meneghelli, but
Meneghelli’s paintings do not show all the works on view there.
The Lenox Picture Gallery photographs are especially compelling because, when
seen together, several organizational themes emerge. For instance, along the west wall
are several paintings of animals and small landscapes expressing aspects of the natural
world, while against the east wall are Lenox’s paintings of George Washington, along
with portraits of him and his family, implying a consanguinity. These photographs
84 Sally Webster

Richard Morris Hunt, “Lenox Library. New York.” American Architect and
Figure 4.4 
­Building News (September 1, 1877), 88. Art and Picture Collection, The New York
Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library

also reveal that the walls of the gallery were hung with a faintly etched aesthetic
movement design, the color of which is undecipherable. The addition of wallpaper is
not mentioned in a letter Hunt wrote from Paris in 1874 to his assistant, Fornachon.
Hunt preferred that “the large picture gallery should be a dull deep red brown—after
interior of Luxembourg and Louvre.” He also requested that the bottom of the wall
include a “stone base” and a wainscoting painted red. The ceiling color was to be a
gray tone, and he recommended that if there was to be any “ornament in plaster” it
should be in “some positive color . . . but very delicate in tone.”49
After Lenox’s death in 1880, the running of the library was effectively left in the
hands of Moore, Allibone, and later Wilberforce Eames, who oversaw the relocation
of the Lenox Library’s contents to the Forty-Second Street building. In the years before
the transfer, the collections housed in the Lenox Library were greatly expanded by the
addition of the Astor paintings in 1890, the Robert L. Stuart books and paintings in
1892, the library of Evert Augustus Duyckinck, and other collections. All these were
elegantly displayed in the Lenox Library as attested by images published in 1893,
shortly before consolidation of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden trust to
form the NYPL.50
 The Lenox Library 85

Figure 4.5 Detail of the east wall of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery, Lenox Library, New
York. Photograph, after 1881. The New York Public Library Archives, R. G. 10,
Box 54
Source: The New York Public Library

Assessment
James Lenox was one of the most ambitious rare book collectors in the United States.
His collection of bibles, works by John Milton, and maps and manuscripts relating
to the Age of Discovery rivaled the efforts of his contemporaries John Carter Brown
in Providence and George Brinley in Hartford. Earlier in the century, there were book
collectors—Jared Sparks, Parson Weems, and Hubert Bancroft—who focused on
papers of the Founding Fathers as well as broadsheets and pamphlets that docu-
mented the founding of the United States. Yet the collecting of rare books, primarily
from Europe, was a new, cosmopolitan enterprise led by members of Lenox’s genera-
tion. Their acquisitive enterprise was aided by a cadre of bookdealers, bibliographers,
and librarians whose services often overlapped. For example, it was not unusual for
a bookdealer to also be an experienced bibliographer who in the course of prepar-
ing his lists was adept at compiling information on the condition and provenance of
his offerings. Chief among these experts were Joseph Green Cogswell (John Jacob
Astor’s librarian), George Moore (the librarian of the New-York Historical Society),
and Henry Stevens (an American bookseller, based in London, who counseled and
sold books to Brinley, Brown, and Lenox as well as to the antiquarian Peter Force).
Lenox’s decision in 1870 to create a library and museum for the benefit of his fellow
citizens may have been a long-held desire, part of his civic philanthropy. Even though
86 Sally Webster
the press was initially critical of the library’s admittance policies, Lenox’s commitment
to use his own funds to create a public art gallery and library was unique and exem-
plary. His rare book collection was widely lauded, and his art collection was signifi-
cant enough to warrant inclusion in Henry T. Tuckerman’s 1867 Book of the Artists.51
Later in the century, James Wilson’s Memorial History of New York cited Lenox as
one of “a number of collectors of discriminating taste and art-loving spirit.”52 John K.
Howat, in the Metropolitan Museum’s 2000 exhibition catalog, Art and the Empire
City, reminds us that “although the Lenox Library no longer exists . . . [he] still
remains one of the greatest and most influential of New York’s early collectors.”53
Until the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there were no encyclopedic
museums in New York City, and most Americans did not have first-hand familiarity with
the art of Europe. This may be the reason for Lenox’s collecting engravings, primarily of
Old Masters.54 Many antebellum collectors included a sizeable number of reproductive
engravings in their holdings, evidence that the practice was widespread.55 Perhaps Lenox
envisioned creating a virtual history of art through his reproductive prints, decorative
porcelains, and contemporary paintings. As a writer for the New York Times noted
in an article on the library’s picture gallery, published in 1877 shortly after the library
opened, “[I]t will be more valuable as a gallery of reference for artists and art lovers than
a place of amusement for those who merely like to see pictures.”56

Conclusion
James Lenox was a dedicated philanthropist who devoted his energy and fortune to the
establishment of two major New York institutions: Presbyterian Hospital and the Lenox
Library, a national democratic repository of great books and works of art. Inspired by
religious conviction, a collecting obsession, and national pride, he left a treasure house
that evolved into one of the great libraries of the world. Much as Lenox’s collections
were absorbed into the New York Public Library, so too did the private collections of
his peers become the basis of newly established American cultural institutions. Lenox
and his contemporaries set the stage for the later Gilded Age generation who continued
their commitment to creating repositories of enduring value. They provided the organi-
zational groundwork for the contributions of and participation by better-known mem-
bers of the Gilded Age, such as J. P. Morgan (New York), Henry E. Huntington (San
Marino), Henry Clay Frick (New York), Isabella Stewart Gardner (Boston), Henry and
Louisine Havemeyer (New York), and Charles Phelps Taft (Cincinnati). These later
collectors continued the legacy established by Lenox and his peers.

Notes
1 [First] Annual Report for the Year 1870 of the Trustees of the Lenox Library of the City
of New York (Albany, NY: Argus Company, 1871), 9. My work on James Lenox and the
Lenox Library constitutes part of a larger research project. A portion of this research will
be published in Sally Webster with Carlo Diego, Cara Jordan, Leonidas Maliokas, Lauren
Ritz, David Schwittek, and Bruce Weber, “A Digital Reconstruction of the Lenox Library
Picture Gallery: A Contribution to the Early History of Public Museum Installations in the
United States,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2018).
2 Lenox donated $300,000 in bonds and mortgages, with $100,000 allocated to the general
fund and $200,000 to the building fund. He also bequeathed “ten lots of land, on the easterly
side of Fifth avenue, in the 19th ward . . . eight of which comprises the whole front of the block
 The Lenox Library 87
between Seventieth and Seventy-first streets. . . . The site is opposite the Central park, and is
two hundred feet and ten inches long, by one hundred and twenty-five feet deep.” Ibid., 6.
3 “Lenox Library,” National Repository, June 1880, 496.
4 A detailed analysis of Hunt’s design for William K. and Alva Vanderbilt House at 660 Fifth
Avenue is contained in Kevin D. Murphy’s essay in this volume.
5 “Lenox Library,” 7.
6 Ibid.
7 Eighth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Lenox Library for the Year 1877 (Albany, NY:
Jerome B. Parmenter, 1878), 6, 7.
8 Frick offered to move the building, a proposal the board of the New York Public Library
declined, as all available monies were then assigned to the construction and establishment
of its new Forty-Second Street building.
9 The only overview of Lenox’s entire collection is found in Lenox Library Short-Title Lists
(New York: New York Public Library, 1887–90)—a catalogue of his books, manuscripts,
engravings, caricatures, paintings, sculpture, and the like.
10 The bronze bust was crafted by Daniel Chester French and the exedra designed by Bruce
Price. Commissioned by the Art Societies of New York, it was completed in 1898.
11 Now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
12 Ninth Annual Report for the Year 1878 of the Trustees of the Lenox Library of the City of
New York (Albany, NY: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1879), 6. In the New York Public Library
archives, there is a two-page sketch in Lenox’s hand that details how some of these decora-
tive artworks were to be hung. However, it is still not known where in the building they
were displayed. NYPL Archives R. G. 2, “Lenox Library Records,” Box 26. Archives and
Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York.
13 Lenox’s art collection is documented in Lenox Library: A Guide to the Paintings and Sculp-
tures Exhibited to the Public (New York: The Trustees, 1877). It was published annually
until the art collection was moved to the New York Public Library in 1911. It also includes
the date of the object, the year it was purchased, and often where it was bought.
14 Similar criticisms had been voiced earlier by the influential art critic and collector of early
Italian art James Jackson Jarves in his The Art-Idea (1864; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960). See esp. chap. 13.
15 Frank Leslie, Report of the Fine Arts (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868),
9. Also see Carol Troyen, “Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition
Universelle,” American Art Journal 16 (Autumn 1984): 2–29.
16 How these earlier endeavors were linked to later nineteenth-century museums and libraries
has begun to receive broader attention. See Hina Hirayama, “With Éclat”: The Boston Ath-
enaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Boston Athenaeum,
2013). For the early history of the New-York Historical Society, see R. W. G. Vail, Knick-
erbocker Birthday: A Sesqui-centennial History of the New-York Historical Society (New
York: New-York Historical Society, 1954).
17 Henry Stevens, Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His
Library (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), published after Stevens’s death by his son
Henry N. Stevens and based on a paper that the son gave at the Annual Meeting of the
Library Association of the United Kingdom in Liverpool, September 1883.
18 “The Presbyterian tradition in the main, however, has been to encourage its members to
devote themselves as individual citizens to promoting all forms of charity and social reforms
and to feel that in so doing they were expressing their religion.” Theodore Fiske Savage,
The Presbyterian Church in New York City (New York: Presbytery of New York, 1949),
101–2. Another author noted, “there was no more progressive man in the city [than Robert
Lenox] . . . he was not only a leader in business but in philanthropy as well.” Lenox helped
found Bellevue Hospital following the yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s, was a member
and officer of the New York Chamber of Commerce, was a founder of New York Lying-In
Hospital, and was on the Board of Governors of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor. M. L. Crimmins,
“The Story of the Lenox Farm and Its Owners,” Spur, March–June 1936, 2.
19 William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States
(1834; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1969), vol. 2, pt. 1, 239–40. Some thirty years
later, in 1867, Henry T. Tuckerman included a chapter on Leslie in his Book of the Artists:
88 Sally Webster
American Artist Life, mentioning the Leslie paintings owned by Lenox; see p. 181 of the
1870 ed. (rpt. New York: James F. Carr, 1966).
20 Lenox later asked for Leslie’s help in his efforts to obtain a painting by William Turner, and
he continued to buy pictures by the artist—many of them religious subjects—over the next
twenty years. All told, Lenox bought seven paintings and several engravings by Leslie.
21 Although little is known of Lenox’s first European tour, it is important to note that, as an
amateur (as opposed to a writer or an artist), he was among the earliest of Americans in the
period following the American Revolution to spend two years abroad in leisurely pursuits.
See Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience,
1760–1814 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), 39–41.
22 Lenox’s bust of Washington was an 1825 copy of an original completed in 1820 that was
commissioned and purchased for the Boston Athenaeum. Both in turn were no doubt based
on the visage of Washington undertaken by Trentanove’s teacher, the much better known
Antonio Canova, who had been commissioned to create a seated Washington for the North
Carolina state house (1816–21). The original bust of Napoleon was completed in 1818;
Lenox’s replica dates from circa 1824. The two are still owned by the New York Public
Library. The Pozzi sculpture is unlocated.
23 “The Lenox Farm was quite different in appearance in the old days. Fifth Avenue was not
graded above 59th St. until the 1870s, and it was 1870 before the gas-lamp posts extended
as far north as 59th Street.” Crimmins, “Lenox Farm and Its Owners,” 4. There are photo-
graphs of the farmers harvesting hay behind the Lenox Library. Presumably the hay was for
horses stabled nearby.
24 Amelia Peck, ed., Alexander Jackson Davis, American Architect, 1803–1892 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1992), colorplate, 6.
25 These paintings are in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. See www.­nyhistory.
org/exhibits/search?words=lenox.
26 None of these paintings has been located. The best known of the Inman works bought by
Lenox is Dismissal of a Village School on an October Afternoon, 1846, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.
27 Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), 186–90. The Munro/Lenox Washington was completed circa 1800 and sold
at auction; it is now privately owned. It is currently on view, on a long-term loan, in the
American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
28 Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave is now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New
Haven, Connecticut.
29 Stevens, Recollections of Mr. James Lenox, 54.
30 The portrait of Kitty Fisher can be seen in the Salomon Gallery at the New York Public
Library; the portrait of Mrs. Billington is unlocated.
31 Only the copy of Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton remains at the New York Public Library;
the other two Huntington paintings are unlocated.
32 Wendy Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” Winterthur Port-
folio 31, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1996): 103–40.
33 Also known as The Babes in the Wood, the sculpture is now in a private collection. See
Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, A Cata-
logue of Works by Artists Born before 1865 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1999), 40, n. 6.
34 Both paintings were sold at auction in 2008. Their current whereabouts are unknown.
35 There are several etchings of Brown’s Falls of Tivoli, 1854, in Lenox’s collection of engrav-
ings as well as in American collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Collection,
Washington, DC. The original is unlocated, as is Chapman’s I Pifferari.
36 The latter two paintings by Durand and Kensett were both sold at auction in 1943 and are
presently unlocated.
37 Entries number 84 and 85 in the Lenox Library: A Guide to the Paintings and Sculptures
(New York: Lenox Library, 1889) have the following printed annotations: “84. Portrait of
George Washington. Rembrandt Peale. Copy from the original in Arlington House, painted
by Charles Willson Peale in 1772”; and “85. Portrait of George Washington, Rembrandt
Peale. Copied to Order.”
 The Lenox Library 89
38 These were Josė Jiménez y Aranda, A Spanish Cafė; Leon y Escosura, The Parrot Dealer, at
the Château of Blois in the Time of Louis XIII; and Edouard Zamacois y Zabala, The Court
Fool, Portrait of the Painter. Their present locations are unknown.
39 A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York (New York: The Committee, 1869),
19.
40 Kathleen Curran, The Invention of the American Art Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2016), 82.
41 Paul Baker, Richard Morris Hunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 58–60.
42 Catherine Howland Hunt, “Unpublished Biography of Richard Morris Hunt,” typescript,
196. Photos, Prints, Drawings Department, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
43 Ibid., 197.
44 Several years later Hunt would design one more library for Lenox, the library for the Prince-
ton Theological Seminary (now destroyed).
45 Richard Morris Hunt to James Lenox, August 19, 1871. “This morning I left my [William
J.] Hoppin globe at your house—I beg you to accept it as a birthday present. Wishing you
many happy returns of the day I remain with great esteem Very truly yours, Richard M.
Hunt.” NYPL Archives R. G. 2, “Lenox Library Board of Trustees,” Box 4. Hoppin, a close
friend of the Hunts, was chairman of the Fine Arts Committee for the United States at the
Universal Exposition in Paris of 1867.
46 Harry Miller Lydenberg, History of the New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations (Boston: Gregg Press, 1923), 103.
47 Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Lenox Library (Albany, NY: Weed, Parson,
1875), 4.
48 “The Lenox Library, New York, N.Y.,” American Architect and Building News, Septem-
ber 1, 1877, 281. The incline mentioned in the text was at the rear of the building and can
be clearly seen in a cross section of the building featured on page 88.
49 Richard Morris Hunt to Maurice Fornachon, Paris, November 4, 1874. NYPL Archives R.
G. 2, “Lenox Library Board of Trustees,” Box 4.
50 “The Lenox Library, New York City,” Harper’s Bazar, September 16, 1893, 759.
51 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 624–25.
52 James Grant Wilson, The Memorial History of the City of New York, vol. 1 (New York:
New York History Co., 1892–93), 369.
53 John K. Howat, “Private Collectors and Public Spirit: A Selective View,” in Art and the
Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2001), 98.
54 The engravings were not listed in the Guide. They can be found instead in the Short-List
Catalogue, part VI, 5–9.
55 Howat, “Private Collectors and Public Spirit,” 89–93.
56 “Fine Arts: Picture Gallery of the Lenox Library,” New York Times, January 18, 1877, 4.
5 Publishing and Promoting a
New York City Art World
Scribner’s Illustrated Monthly,
1870–1881
Page Knox

The evolution of Scribner’s Illustrated Monthly (Figure 5.1), from a small religious
journal at its founding in 1870 to a lavishly illustrated art periodical by 1881, mirrors
larger transformations that were taking place within the publishing industry generally
and also within the growing metropolis in which that industry thrived. Under the lead-
ership of senior editor Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), Scribner’s mined New
York City’s burgeoning art scene as its primary source of material, introducing its
artists, collections, associations, and institutions to readers across the nation. Its rise
to prominence as a “MAGAZINE OF ART”1 is emblematic of the decade’s cultural
shift, as centers of artistic production moved from Boston to New York. Cognizant of
his Brahmin colleagues’ desire to isolate high art from the popular, commercial culture
industry, Manhattan-based Gilder sought instead to bridge the gap in the pages of
Scribner’s, covering high culture in a popular monthly journal that reflected the inter-
ests of its editor and his magazine’s New York origins.
Contemplating what had been his role in the rise of the periodical after its final vol-
ume in 1881, when Scribner’s became the Century, Gilder boldly confirmed the power
of his position to mold and shape public opinion:

The monthly magazine is the great modern intellectual amphitheater, and the pub-
licity it is able to give to works of excellence of widely differing kinds is a per-
petual stimulus to the intellectual activity of the nation. . . . [T]here is no function
in modern life more difficult or responsible [than the work of a monthly maga-
zine editor]. The literary and artistic judgment of the editor who stands between
the author and his readers—the artist and his public—must directly and strongly
affect the taste and culture of the people, while the energy, originality and enter-
prise of the magazine publisher become modifying forces in art, literature and
life.2

But if Scribner’s was, as Gilder says, the “amphitheater” of the nation’s intellectual
activity, it was the emerging artistic community of New York in the 1870s and early
1880s that provided its players and its drama. Gilder supported many of its members
not only by offering them vital publicity and critical acclaim but also by hiring them as
illustrators who contributed to the periodical’s extensive visual imagery. Both in fea-
tured articles and on the editorial page, Gilder became a confident spokesperson for
the new urban avant-garde and sought to stimulate a cultural environment in which
its work could be put on display. Gilder promoted this up-and-coming generation
Figure 5.1 Cover of Scribner’s Monthly, 1, no. 1, November 1870. Princeton University Library
Source: Princeton University Library
92 Page Knox
of artists who had returned to New York after training in Europe in the early 1870s
and in the journal positioned them in opposition to their antebellum predecessors.
For example, Gilder consistently identified his close friend, sculptor Augustus Saint-
Gaudens, as a rising star in the New York art world. He worked behind-the-scenes
to help the artist win the commission for the Farragut Monument (see Plate 8) and
published a laudatory article about the piece upon its completion in 1881.3 In similar
fashion, in an April 1877 review of the Water-Color Exhibition, Gilder alerted the
public to the work of artists he favored, noting the “originality and force” of Winslow
Homer’s work as well as praising that of Robert Swain Gifford, Samuel Colman, and
Edwin Austin Abbey. At the same time, he denounced the “sentimentalism” in East-
man Johnson’s pictures, which he described as “dangerously bad.” Gilder went so far
as to equate Johnson’s painting to the “value of a mere photograph,” a comparison
reaffirming Gilder’s preferences for what he described as the imaginative and expres-
sive style of the “new men.”4
A close examination of selected editorials, exhibition reviews, and excerpts from
the periodical’s prolific “art literature,” all of which drew heavily on work produced
and displayed in New York, confirms the role Scribner’s assumed as a catalyst for the
expansion and development of cultural capital in the Empire City during the Gilded
Age.
That said, Gilder would be dismissed as a “gatekeeper of the Brownstone tradition”
by urban intellectuals in the generation that followed, such as turn-of-the-century
journalists and bohemians Vance Thompson and James Gibbons Huneker, whose fin-
de-siècle journal M’lle New York attacked Gilder by name as a reactionary representa-
tive of the genteel elite.5 Given Gilder’s central engagement with, and promotion of,
the city as a vital environment for emerging American artists, his legacy begs reconsid-
eration. This essay will demonstrate that, although admittedly a product of his time,
Richard Watson Gilder was in fact an innovator—not only in his prescient recognition
of the central role of print media but also in his endorsement of culture and the essen-
tial role he believed it could play in New York’s future.
Published over the course of the 1870s, Scribner’s pages reflect a complex and
vibrant period in New York City’s cultural history. The decade witnessed the establish-
ment and growth of new artistic organizations as varied as museums, galleries, acad-
emies, collections, and informal clubs, all of which helped fuel an increasing demand
for artistic imagery. In providing coverage of recently formed institutions, Gilder
responded directly to his readers’ appetite for visual information as well as for guide-
lines and instruction to aid in their pursuit of culture and refinement. The concept of
“culture” prevalent at the time—as defined by such contemporary critics as Matthew
Arnold and embraced by the urban upper middle class—provided the basis for much
of the subject matter covered in Scribner’s, as it endorsed the city’s more refined leisure
activities as positive social and political forces.6 By offering a window into the New
York art world, Scribner’s provided its readers, through both text and image, with the
means to participate in that environment while supporting and publicizing emerging
urban artistic organizations.
The variety of cultural institutions established in the antebellum period included the
National Academy of Design (founded in 1825), the New-York Gallery of the Fine
Arts (opened in 1845 in John Vanderlyn’s Rotunda, its collection donated to the New-
York Historical Society in 1858), and the Bryan Gallery of Christian Art (opened
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 93
in 1852, transferred to the New-York Historical Society in 1867). Gilder tends to
7

ignore the influence of these institutions, however, suggesting instead that New York
had little to offer those interested in the arts during these years. In making his case
for the need for more “cultural uplift,” Gilder describes the city’s most popular muse-
ums as places with a decidedly lowbrow flavor that offer more spectacular forms of
entertainment.8
Until the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in 1870 and the
opening of its doors to the public in 1872, there was no encyclopedic museum of
art in New York City. As art historian John Ott articulates in another essay in this
volume, the Met’s admissions policies excluded many New Yorkers, and its early
exhibitions tended to privilege the display of private collections of board members
and museum founders.9 Editorials from early issues of Scribner’s responding to the
Museum’s recent formation were pointed in their critique of the fledgling institu-
tion and framed the direction of Gilder’s agenda for New York’s cultural landscape.
One such piece chastised trustees for charging admission; another lamented what
it perceived as the capitalist-driven, meager, materialistic, and uninspiring cultural
condition of the new museum and the city at large.10 In order to address what Gilder
and his cohorts characterized as a shortage of refined pursuits in the city, an 1874
editorial declared,

If New York is to be worthily great, she must be something more than a commer-
cial city. . . . Visitors find the city absorbed in its trade and speculation, full of the
vulgar display of wealth, and devoted to driving and light amusements.11

The same article makes a plea to citizens who have profited most from the mercantile
nature of their city to support a substantial collection intended to inspire and instruct
its artists, visitors, and residents:

What we need is a great gallery. . . . We need it for home education, for the cul-
tivation of public taste and refinement. We need it as a diversion from frivolous
pursuits and from no pursuits at all. . . . If those who have superabundant wealth
would but unite and give us a gallery worth ten millions, it would do more for
New York, socially, morally and financially than a similar expenditure would
give us in any other way. . . . It would greatly change for the better the tone of
society, and powerfully modify the civilization of the country. It would build up in
America a school of art that would be worthy of the republic and command the
respect of the world. It would cultivate a taste for pictures that would keep our
artists busy and prosperous. . . . Without it as a great city we are poor, and in a
very notable respect, contemptible.12

These words, written four years after the Met’s founding, indicate that for the editor
and his circle, the new museum had not, at that point, filled the cultural void.
New York’s status as the nation’s commercial and financial center, with its extreme
levels of social inequalities in the second half of the nineteenth century, caused many
of its citizens to consider the arts an inessential part of urban life. With so many of
Scribner’s contributing authors and artists having recently returned from Paris, discus-
sions regarding the nature of the art scene in the two urban centers seemed inevitable,
94 Page Knox
with New York suffering by comparison. Gilder believed that someone had to step in
to fill the cultural vacuum in the city, establish standards, and address the need for
greater artistic awareness. His commentary reveals that Gilder saw himself as the man
for the job. The establishment of the Met would enable Gilder to respond to what he
hoped would become his audience’s expanded interest in “culture” to foster increased
exposure, education, and coverage of the arts; his goal was to create an environment
on these shores that might at last compare favorably to those found in such interna-
tional capitals as London and Paris.
Gilder’s crusade for reform was driven by a growing awareness of Parisian models
of art schools, art academies, and art associations extolled by artists returning from
study abroad. Gilder was introduced to these artists and their experiences through
his 1874 marriage to the painter Helena de Kay (1846–1916) (Figure 5.2). De Kay
and her circle had a substantial effect on Gilder’s desire to disparage New York’s cur-
rent cultural climate, with the goal of stimulating a new level of interest in what they
considered “high culture.” De Kay worked to establish important artistic institutions
in the city, such as the Art Students League (ASL, founded in 1875) and the Society
of American Artists (SAA, created in 1877). An example of her influence can be seen
in Gilder’s close association with the artist Wyatt Eaton, a colleague of de Kay’s,
who had just completed study with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-François Millet in
Paris. Hired to teach drawing at the Cooper Union (founded in 1859), Eaton offered
art historical lectures that, although designed for his students, were also open to the
public; de Kay encouraged Gilder to attend. During this period, Eaton corresponded

Figure 5.2 Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, ca. 1872. Oil on panel. Thyssen-Bornemisza
Museum, 591 (1983.25)
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_-_Portrait_of_Helena_de_Kay.jpg
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 95
frequently with Gilder on a variety of aesthetic issues ranging from the art of Millet
and the teaching methods of the École des Beaux-Arts to the need for improved aca-
demic art education in America and the development of the SAA. As a result of their
friendship, Eaton became a regular contributor to Scribner’s.
De Kay also transformed the home she shared with Gilder into what the painter
Will Low would call “an oasis” for these newly emerging artists.13 With her weekly
Friday night gatherings in their East Fifteenth Street residence, de Kay effectively fash-
ioned an environment that allowed Gilder to become entirely ensconced in the New
York art scene. In 1882, Stanford White renovated their townhouse to create one large
space on the first floor.14 Christened “The Studio,” the room provided the ideal setting
for sketch clubs, organized by de Kay during the day, as well as for bringing together
writers, artists, and actors at night. Frequenters included Low and other painters, such
as Eaton, J. Alden Weir, Walter Shirlaw, and John La Farge; sculptors Saint-Gaudens
and Daniel Chester French; and writers Walt Whitman and William Dean Howells.
With little apparent regard for New York’s growing Gilded Age society and its nou-
veau riche members, Helena de Kay sought to recreate the cultural atmosphere of
Paris in a city that, to her way of thinking, had little to offer in terms of an intellectual
salon tradition.
Thus, through his marriage to de Kay, Gilder was able to cultivate social and profes-
sional relationships with the city’s young painters and sculptors. One such alliance—
with Augustus Saint-Gaudens—resulted in a work of sculpture depicting Gilder, de
Kay, and their young son Rodman (see Plate 5). (The sculptor created this intimate
portrayal of the Gilders during the family’s trip to Paris in 1879.) Adopting many
of the ideas borne from exchanges with artists in their salons, Gilder engaged in a
dialogue with his readers on the pages of Scribner’s in an effort to encourage oppor-
tunities for artistic display while also encouraging reforms in instruction. It is for this
reason that de Kay and her colleagues looked beyond the NAD to form the SAA.15
Scribner’s reviews of the city’s exhibitions in the mid-1870s tended to prioritize
the work of SAA artists over the traditional landscapes and genre scenes of the NAD
painters, deeming the work of the SAA more intellectual, more refined, and more
“modern.” Early issues of Scribner’s in 1871 and 1872 featured NAD members,
such as Asher B. Durand, Daniel Huntington, William Page, and Albert Bierstadt,
whose paintings were described (but not reproduced) as evoking “fear and majesty”
in their detailed depiction of grand landscapes. By contrast, the series “The Younger
Painters of America,” published ten years later in 1880 and 1881, was lavishly illus-
trated and discussed the more expressive, less highly finished styles of the SAA art-
ists, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt. This
shift not only reflects the advancing state of the print industry but also the changing
aesthetic Gilder espoused.16 In a Scribner’s article strategically placed following a
negative review of the National Academy’s annual exhibition, the author encour-
aged readers to visit the small inaugural show of SAA artists. The piece presented
the intimate exhibit as

designedly made up in such a way as to represent only a certain style, or several

kindred styles, of painting (especially those with which the Academy has little
sympathy); and the circumstance suggests that it would be interesting to have fre-
quent exhibitions on some such plan, in order to keep fully before our eyes what
is going on in different directions among these artists.17
96 Page Knox
Constructing and often encouraging a division between the two camps—the NAD
and the SAA—Scribner’s endorsed the more sketch-like brushwork and expressionist
approach generally used by the painters who formed the society and promoted it to a
readership eager to embrace the new style. The overall coverage of the SAA was dic-
tated by Gilder and de Kay, both of whom recognized the effectiveness of art criticism
in a widely read periodical as a suitable platform on which to support and validate the
society. Gilder was able and willing to generate “press,” thereby providing the neces-
sary publicity to keep the society in the public eye through featured articles, editorials,
and even satirical cartoons. One such image was “A Flank Movement on the Hanging
Committee” (Figure 5.3), which commented on the treatment of these new artists by
the more established figures of the academy, who “skied” the younger generation’s
pictures when they were shown at annual exhibitions.18
Gilder used his position, then, to present the work of these artists as a modern
alternative to that of the previous generation. His involvement in the conception and
formation of the SAA and the promotion of its members was critical. Although the
twentieth century would witness the rising power of the art critic in validating art
movements, Gilder, as a voice of the burgeoning art press in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, played an unusually vital role.
Similarly, Scribner’s reviews of ASL exhibitions praised the students’ efforts, their
teachers, and the fellowship inspired by the organization. In 1875, de Kay had been
one of seventy students who worked to establish the ASL as an alternative to the
NAD. She played an integral role in the creation and development of the league’s cur-
riculum, which implemented a program mirroring that of the École des Beaux-Arts.19
Not surprisingly, many ASL students also exhibited with the SAA. Reviews of the
league’s exhibitions, as well as a variety of other smaller gallery shows, such as the
American Water-Color Society and the “Black and White” exhibition, were regularly
featured in Scribner’s and generally favored the work of artists in the Gilder circle.20
Promoting smaller exhibitions along with the SAA shows as more engaging alterna-
tives to those at the NAD, Scribner’s worked hard to present the style of these “new
men” (and women) as distinct from and preferable to that of their antebellum prede-
cessors. Thus, the publication, in its promotion of “The Younger Artists of America,”
effectively established for American readers the reputation of such artists as Albert
Pinkham Ryder, John Twachtman, and Abbott Thayer, among others, as the “ones to
watch.” By the end of the decade, the formation of the SAA was hailed by Scribner’s
as the solution to what its editors perceived as the inadequate cultural condition of the
city cited just four years earlier:

A movement like that of the new Society, so far from being a “foreign” thing, is a
most gratifying augury of the true sort of nationality in our art, and has been rec-
ognized as such by the most intelligent part of the public and the press; it means
not merely that hereafter foreign study will be less important, but that art is to
have a congenial home in this new world. . . . Certainly New York is not yet all
that the artist could desire as a home; but . . . he is certainly better off now than
ever before and the future is full of promise.21

At the close of the 1870s, readers of Scribner’s found themselves inundated with exten-
sive articles on every possible aspect of the New York art scene: art schools, artist life,
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 97

Figure 5.3 “A Flank Movement on the Hanging Committee.” Scribner’s Monthly, 17, no. 3,
January 1879
Source: Butler Library, Columbia University

art exhibitions, expatriate artists, art associations, art criticism, and art gossip—all
of it filled with lavish illustrations by the new young artists. Gilder sought to publish
genres that drew from a variety of categories of art criticism to create a brand of jour-
nalistic art writing that would instruct and entertain. Through this “art literature,”
Gilder was able to generate a newfound celebrity for young American artists working
in New York.22
98 Page Knox
The article “The Art-Schools of New York” represents the first of many impor-
tant pieces of art literature in Scribner’s written by W. C. Brownell, an experienced
art critic who allied himself with the “new men” at the beginning of his career and
in many ways exemplified the emerging professional, learned critic whose writing
on art was not merely reporting but also literary in style.23 Although Brownell’s
article covered the art institutions in the city during the 1870s, its leitmotif was the
increased awareness on the part of New Yorkers to the places and spaces where one
could experience works of art. Brownell discussed in detail the three predominant
art schools of the period: the NAD, the Cooper Union, and the ASL, the last, unsur-
prisingly, judged the most progressive of the three. Brownell urged New Yorkers
and other Americans to recognize the importance of supporting these institutions
and visiting their exhibitions. Moreover, the article strongly endorsed the ASL and
its instructors, who were in sync with de Kay’s personal artistic style, as well as with
the philosophical ideas driving the SAA and with Gilder’s goals for a new direction
in art.
Scribner’s popularized new urban artistic groups with behind-the-scenes articles,
such as “Young Artists’ Life in New York” (1880).24 This piece revealed the world of
New York’s young artists: their studios, their clubs, and their youthful optimism and
revelry. Conveying a suggestion of privileged intimacy, illustrations by members of
the Salmagundi Club (founded in 1871), for instance—many of whom were already
employed as illustrators for Scribner’s—offered an up-close view of urban artistic life.
Writer William Bishop depicted what he observed as the artists’ communal living and
working conditions, fostering the pursuit of artistic ideas at the expense of financial
well-being. Bishop described the New York art world as an open community where
“social distinctions are not rigidly drawn.”25
Although presented as a classless society of artists reveling in their bohemian trap-
pings, this utopian portrayal would be belied by an 1880 illustration published in
Scribner’s of the current members finely dressed in evening attire at a “modern meet-
ing” of the Salmagundi Club (Figure 5.4). Young artists did in fact join these clubs for
their confraternity but also for the possible monetary gain and artistic exposure that
could follow from personal connections and public exhibitions, which membership
would provide.
Bishop characterized these European-trained artists as the metropolis’s new creative
force, attempting to seek out the romantic and original American experience and the
picturesque capabilities of modern life in the city. Often members of Gilder’s cadre
who held positions of authority in the city’s art schools, these painters and sculp-
tors became the new leaders of the contemporary New York art world. Bishop’s arti-
cle asserted that, in spite of its individual members’ more conventional pursuits, the
­Salmagundi Club as a whole continued to cling to its free-spirited roots, still meeting
in what can only be described as dingy, crowded studios. Yet Bishop concluded, “With
all this . . . the once happy-go-lucky Salmagundi Club may well flatter itself on hav-
ing become one of the most improving agencies in the whole artistic community.”26
Rather than challenging its middle-class readers with the contentious social issues
of the city, such as labor and immigration, Bishop’s article, in its soft, satirical tone
and comic, appealing illustrations, encouraged readers to connect with and appreciate
artistic life in New York.
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 99

Figure 5.4 H. P. Share, “A Modern Meeting of the Salmagundi Club. (Drawn by H. P. Share.).”
Scribner’s Monthly, 19, no. 3, January 1880
Source: Butler Library, Columbia University

Scribner’s extensively illustrated coverage of the Tile Club also explored contempo-
rary artists working in New York City and its environs (Figure 5.5).27 The Tile Club
was comprised of artists who met regularly for almost a decade. The group possessed
a fun-loving spirit: they not only painted but also went on excursions together, as such
article titles as “The Tile Club at Play” and “The Tile Club Afloat” suggest. But the
organization also called attention to some of the concerns artists of the period had
regarding decorative work. Their gatherings, where the artists executed versions of
their work on ceramic tiles, offered painters and sculptors (including Homer, Abbey,
Weir, Chase, Saint-Gaudens, Twachtman, and Elihu Vedder) an opportunity to raise
questions about decorative media in a relaxed and congenial atmosphere. The club’s
members assumed amusing sobriquets that referenced particular aspects of their work;
for example, Arthur Quarterly was known as “Marine” because he tended to paint
seascapes.28
100 Page Knox

Figure 5.5 Charles Reinhart, “The Tile Club and the Milliner of Bridgehampton.” Scribner’s
Monthly, 17, no. 4, February 1879
Source: Butler Library, Columbia University

Co-mingling elements of fact and fiction, the Tile Club series in Scribner’s enabled
readers to follow their favorites through a thinly veiled plot from article to article,
thereby engendering a feeling of comradeship with the club and its individual mem-
bers. It is no accident that many of the Tilers were also members of the SAA and
close friends of the Gilders.29 The connections between the Tile Club and Scribner’s
were wide and deep, resulting in numerous commissions and articles as well as in the
formation of long-standing relationships.30 Funds from the Scribner’s articles under-
wrote the Tile Club’s travels and paid for its annual expenses; yet, even more signifi-
cantly, the magazine provided its artists with their own gallery space in what was then
arguably the most popular monthly in America. Coverage of the Tile Club was thus
emblematic of Gilder’s engagement with and promotion of artistic groups and institu-
tions in New York City.
In 1881, one year after the opening of the new Metropolitan Museum building
in Central Park, Scribner’s Monthly changed ownership. To acknowledge this devel-
opment, the periodical was renamed, at Gilder’s suggestion, the Century Illustrated
Monthly Magazine. The selection of the new title was inspired by the Century Asso-
ciation, a prominent gathering spot established in 1847 for the New York cultural
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 101
literati on East Fifteenth Street, a block from the Gilders’ home. Gilder spent the
remainder of his life as editor-in-chief of the Century.
After his death in 1909, a new community of liberal, progressive thinkers would
brand Gilder a leading member of the “genteel tradition,” dismissing him and his
colleagues as reactionary, conservative, and narrow minded.31 Although undeniably
idealistic and emblematic of his time, Gilder was actually quite forward thinking in
his engagement with the rising industry of print media as a vehicle through which to
express the significance of the visual arts in the Gilded Age and the vital role it could
play in the emerging Empire City. Responding to rapid changes in technology and
communication in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Richard Watson Gilder
anticipated the importance cosmopolitan artistic institutions would have in New York
City. In his encouragement of them, the editor helped prepare the way for the city’s
standing as a global cultural capital in the twentieth century.

Notes
1 Advertising Section, Scribner’s Monthly 17 (December 1878): 16. For an in-depth discus-
sion of the history of the periodical and the role of Richard Watson Gilder and Helena de
Kay Gilder, see Page Stevens Knox, “Scribner’s Monthly, 1870–1881: Illustrating a New
American Art World” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012).
2 “The Rise and Work of a Magazine: The History of The Century Magazine (Scribner’s
Monthly,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 23 (November 1882): addendum, 17–28.
On April 4, 1881, Charles Scribner agreed to sell his rights in Scribner’s Monthly, pro-
vided that the name be changed beginning with the November 1881 issue. Members of the
editorial, art, and business departments were unchanged, and the magazine, renamed the
­Century, transitioned seamlessly with Gilder as editor-in-chief.
3 See Richard Watson Gilder, “The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (June 1881):
161–67. For a thorough analysis of Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut Monument, see Thayer Tolles’s
essay in this volume.
4 “The Old Cabinet,” Scribner’s Monthly 13 (April 1877): 866.
5 Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from
1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), 208.
6 For a larger discussion of “culture” in the late nineteenth century, see Alan Trachtenberg,
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1982), 142–43.
7 For more on these antebellum galleries, academies, and other cultural institutions, see
­Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, eds., Art and the Empire City: New
York, 1825–1861 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001), esp. the essays by Carrie Rebora Barratt (“Mapping the Venues:
New York City Art Exhibitions,” 47–81) and John K. Howat (“Private Collectors and Pub-
lic Spirit: A Selective View,” 83–107).
8 Here he seems to be referencing the popular American Museum, most commonly known as
Barnum’s Museum, which was founded in 1790 by John Scudder as the Tammany Museum,
a natural history museum and cabinet of curiosities. Changing its name to the American
Museum in 1810, the institution was taken over by P. T. Barnum in 1841 and remained in
operation in various locations in New York City until 1874. Although Barnum did occa-
sionally mount exhibitions of paintings and sculptures, the museum was better known for
its lowbrow attractions, such as the Feejee Mermaid, Ned the Learned Seal, and the Siamese
twins Chang and Eng.
9 For an analysis of the dynamics at play in the early history of the Metropolitan Museum,
see John Ott’s essay in this volume.
102 Page Knox
10 “Esthetics at a Premium,” Scribner’s Monthly 4 (May 1872): 107; and “New York,” Scrib-
ner’s Monthly 8 (July 1874): 366.
11 “New York,” 366.
12 Ibid.
13 Will H. Low, A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873–1900 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1908), 79.
14 Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly,
and Century Magazine, 1870–1909 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 1.
15 For more on the unique relationship between de Kay and Gilder and the New York City art
world, see the journal of Richard Watson Gilder and Helena de Kay Gilder, 1874–1878.
Gilder Manuscript Collection, Lilly Library Manuscript Collections, Lilly Library, Indiana
University, Bloomington.
16 Compare D. C. O’Downley, “Living American Artists,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (May 1871):
40–49; (August 1871): 401–8; and 3 (March 1872): 599–609; with William Crary Brownell,
“The Younger Painters of America, First Paper,” Scribner’s Monthly 20 (May 1880): 1–15;
“The Younger Painters of America, Second Paper,” Scribner’s Monthly 20 (July 1880):
321–35; and “The Younger Painters of America, III,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (July 1881):
321–34.
17 “Some Other Pictures” in “Culture and Progress,” Scribner’s Monthly 10 (June 1875):
253.
18 In a letter that has historically been seen as identifying the beginning of the SAA, de Kay
wrote to Mary Hallock [Foote], “It [the rejection of John La Farge as well as her other
colleagues] was so wholesale—Lathrop, Ryder, Mrs. [Susan] Carter, M[aria]R[ichards]
O[akey] and me. So we are conspiring! Cottier through F.[rancis] Lathrop, has offered his
room. Mr. La Farge who was very angry, will countenance and admit. Lathrop will execute.
R.[ichard Watson Gilder] will send the press. . . . In a week probably we will have a jolly
little ‘new school’ collection at Cottiers.” Helena de Kay Gilder to Mary Foote, April 12,
1875. Papers of Mary Hallock Foote, Huntington Library, University of California, Berke-
ley, rpt. in Jennifer A. Martin Biesenstock, “The Formation and Early Years of the Society of
American Artists, 1877–1884” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1983), 32. Foote,
a lifelong friend of de Kay’s, was also a featured artist in Scribner’s; she would go on to
provide images of the West for the magazine after she relocated there with her husband. Her
illustrations were among the periodical’s most popular.
19 Enrolled in the NAD’s Antique School from 1869 to 1875, de Kay experienced the growth
of the school in size and popularity but also witnessed its shortcomings. In early 1875,
financial difficulties led the NAD to suspend its classes and close the Life School for the
remainder of the year, causing de Kay and her fellow students to form the Art Students
League (ASL) in June of that year. An alternative to the academy, the ASL was organized “to
provide a systematic curriculum and a consistent program of study,” with Lemuel Wilmarth
chosen to “take charge and conduct these [studies] on the principle of the Parisian ateliers.”
Edward Prescott, “Art Students League,” quoted in Marchal Landgren, Years of Art: The
Story of the Art Students League (New York: R. M. McBride, 1940), 18–19. The league
was managed entirely by its students with a board of control. De Kay held the position of
women’s vice president (the highest position available to a woman) during the pivotal years
of 1875 and 1879.
20 In a review published in “The Old Cabinet,” his column in the American Water-Color Soci-
ety Exhibition, in April 1878, Gilder privileged the work of SAA artists, calling attention to
images by R. S. Gifford, Samuel Coleman, L. C. Tiffany, Alexander Wyant, Thomas Eakins,
E. A. Abbey, and Charles Rinehart. He concluded his column by describing John La Farge’s
sketch of a “figure with iridescent butterfly wings” (most likely his Spirit of the Water-Lily)
as an imaginative experiment, placing it on par with an image of A Ballet by Degas, also
included in the show. “The Old Cabinet,” Scribner’s Monthly 14 (April 1878): 888–89. The
review of the Black and White Exhibition featured engravings, etchings, and drawings by
such artists as Eaton, Rinehart, Abbey, Foote, Frederick Dielman, and Maria Oakey, who
were frequent contributors of illustrations to Scribner’s and also members of the SAA. Ibid.,
888.
 Publishing and Promoting a New York City Art World 103
21 “On the Formation of the Society of American Artists,” in “The Old Cabinet,” Scribner’s
Monthly 15 (May 1878): 147.
22 For more on the concept of “art literature,” see Julius von Scholsser, Die Kunstliteratur. Ein
handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: Scholl, 1924). Scholss-
er’s ideas are discussed in Dario Gamboni, “The Relative Autonomy of Art Criticism,”
in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Michael Orwicz,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 182–94. In his methodological study
of the relationship between art and literature, Jean-Paul Bouillon determined provisional
categories of texts that are included in this notion of “art literature”; these were helpful
in my analysis of Scribner’s art criticism. These categories of “art writing” include press
articles, the art chronicle, the exhibition review, the museum guide, the travel account, the
monograph, the historical study, the polemical text, the manifesto, the collection of apho-
risms, the novel on art, the art novel, and art correspondence. Jean-Paul Bouillon, “Mise au
point theorique et methodologique,” Revue d’histoire litteraire de la France (November–­
December 1980): 880–99.
23 William Crary Brownell, “The Art-Schools of New York,” Scribner’s Monthly 16 (Octo-
ber 1878): 761–81.
24 William Bishop, “Young Artists’ Life in New York. Illustrated by the Salmagundi Club,”
Scribner’s Monthly 19 (January 1880): 355–68.
25 Ibid., 368.
26 Ibid.
27 See William Mackay Laffan, “The Tile Club at Work,” Scribner’s Monthly 17 ­(January 1879):
401–9; William Mackay Laffan and Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], “The Tile Club at Play,”
Scribner’s Monthly 17 (February 1879): 457–78; and William Mackay Laffan and Edward
Strahan [Earl Shinn], “The Tile Club Afloat,” Scribner’s Monthly 19 (March 1880): 641–71.
For more on the Tile Club’s origins, tiling, and travels, see Ronald Pisano, “Decorative Age
or Decorative Craze? The Art and Antics of the Tile Club (1877–1887),” in The Tile Club
and the Aesthetic Movement in America, ed. Ronald Pisano (New York: The M ­ useums at
Stony Brook, and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).
28 Ibid., 14.
29 Most of the other members of the original Tile Club were frequent illustrators for ­Scribner’s,
including Edwin Austin Abbey, Charles S. Reinhart, J. Alden Weir, R. Swain Gifford, and
Arthur Quarterly. All these artists, with the exception of Abbey, were members of the
­Society of American Artists.
30 A letter from Earl Shinn describing a Tile Club dinner in honor of Edwin Austin Abbey in
1878 underscores the close connections between the club and Scribner’s: “My own idea
would have been that a little private meal among friends would have been the enjoyable
thing. But it occurred to Laffan and Smith that it was a good occasion to make a distinct
assertation of the Tile Club as a social power. So the literary and art editors of Scribner’s
[were] there.” Earl Shinn to Elizabeth Haines, December 13, 1878. Morris-Shinn Maier
Collection, Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Invited by
William Merritt Chase to join the group, Elihu Vedder attended a Tile Club gathering in
December 1879, where he met Gilder’s associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson; their
meeting resulted in a thirteen-page, fully illustrated article on Vedder written by Charles de
Kay and published in Scribner’s in November 1880, directly following an important serial
piece on Jean-François Millet.
31 As Thomas Bender points out in his discussion of the modern literary intellectuals of New
York, Gilder was recognized as a “gatekeeper” for the Brownstone culture of New York and
sought to shape the literary expression of that class’s ideals. The intellectuals of this Brown-
stone tradition, such as Gilder and Brownell, wanted to introduce the literary and artistic
traditions from the Continent (and specifically France) into American cultural institutions.
Bender notes that “the modern intellectuals of the twentieth century defined themselves
in opposition to that culture, attacking Gilder by name, and, more importantly rejecting
the Victorian definition of the relation of intellect to the class system.” Bender, New York
Intellect, 208–9. According to Bender, Gilder saw himself as a member of the “significant
class, and thought that intellectual culture was the finest representation of the possibilities
104 Page Knox
of that class” [209]. In response, modern thinkers of the next generation, such as Randolph
Bourne, George Santayana, Harold Stearns, and Sinclair Lewis, fully rejected such class
affiliation, establishing a “modern distaste for the form, content and even the hypocrisy of
the genteel tradition” [209]. However, Bender admits that this distaste “should not obscure
for us the extraordinary significance of the shift in the intellectual culture of the city and
the nation [at the beginning of the twentieth century]. It represents an abandonment of
the ideal of a cultured minority committed to public life, extending itself out into society”
[208–9]. For more on this discussion of why liberal progressive thinkers dismissed Gilder as
a reactionary advocate of the genteel tradition, see Bender’s chapter “The Modern Literary
Intellectual,” in ibid., 206–62, esp. 213–17.
6 An Unsung Hero
Henry Gurdon Marquand and
His 1889 Gift to The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
Esmée Quodbach

Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902) (see Plate 6 and Figure 6.1), banker, broker,
and railroad financier, was a noted member of the burgeoning class of newly rich busi-
ness magnates of Gilded Age New York. Now too often overlooked, he was also one
of the city’s most remarkable art collectors and philanthropists and, as such, one of
a number of moneyed New Yorkers who not only sought to enrich their city and its
many budding cultural institutions but also, at the same time, aimed to establish New
York as the capital of American culture in the late nineteenth century.1 ­Ambitious,
socially conscious, and exceptionally generous, Marquand gave his support to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art from its earliest days onward. By the time of his death
in 1902, he had donated nearly 2,400 art objects and $100,000 in monetary funds
to support its programming and new purchases. However, it was in the 1880s that
Marquand truly made his mark, both through his many gifts and through the extraor-
dinary vision he carved out for the Metropolitan Museum. The New York Times,
describing him in an obituary as the institution’s “steadiest and most persistent ben-
efactor,” observed that it was through Marquand that it had become “really one of the
museums not merely of the United States, but of the world.”2 A prominent tastemaker,
he was also responsible for the Old Masters craze that swept New York in the final
years of the nineteenth century. Marquand’s tastes, intentions, and ambitions have
shaped the history of the Metropolitan Museum, and more indirectly, the history of
many other American museums.
Born in New York in 1819, Marquand was the tenth of the eleven children of
Mehitable [Mabel] and Isaac Marquand, a successful silversmith and merchant of
French Huguenot extraction. Young Marquand left school when he was sixteen years
old and started working under his older brother Frederick in the family’s silversmith
firm, Marquand & Company. After their father’s death in 1838, the brothers sold
the firm and concentrated on several other branches of business, including real estate
investment and banking. In 1868, Henry Marquand also became involved with the St.
Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, serving as its vice-president from 1875 to 1881
and then as its president for a year, until the railroad speculator Jay Gould, one of
the most notorious “robber barons” of the Gilded Age, succeeded him. The resulting
forced sale in December 1880 of 20,000 shares of railroad stock left Marquand with
$1 million, a vast fortune at the time.
Marquand was well traveled—he made his first journey to Europe in 1843, when
he was twenty-four years old. It was then, reportedly after a meeting in Rome with
the American sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, that he became interested in the arts.3
106 Esmée Quodbach

Figure 6.1 John Singer Sargent, Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902), 1897. Oil on canvas.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Trustees, 1897 (97.43)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org

Marquand is known to have returned to Italy in the early 1850s, when he made
an extended tour of Europe with his new wife, Elizabeth Love Allen.4 An informal
portrait, hitherto unpublished, by the Italian Domenico Ventura shows Marquand in
1852, when he was thirty-two or thirty-three years old (Plate 6).5 Few Americans had
the means to travel to Europe in the era prior to the Civil War, but many of those who
did cross the Atlantic made an effort to visit Rome, where they often became infatu-
ated with the city, its history, and its artistic treasures. Often these American travelers
were also inspired to purchase works of art to take back to their native soil. “Men
 An Unsung Hero 107
who would never have thought of buying a picture or statue at home, are infected
by the contagion of the place the moment they arrive,” William Cullen Bryant, the
American poet and journalist, wrote from Rome in 1858:

No talk of the money-market here; no discussion of any public measure; no con-

versation respecting new enterprises, and the ebb and flow of the trade; no price
current except of marble and canvas; all the talk is of Art and artists.

In Rome, the rich man who was at home contented “with mirrors and rosewood” was
initiated into a new set of ideas, got a taste, and ordered “a bust, a little statue of Eve,
a Ruth, or a Rebecca, and half a dozen pictures for his luxurious rooms in the United
States,” Bryant observed.6 (In the following decade, Bryant would become a leading
force in the founding of the Metropolitan Museum.)7
Marquand began collecting art in the 1840s or 1850s, first focusing on purchasing
contemporary paintings and decorative objects. A man with a talent for friendship,
he counted many artists in his wide circle of friends, among them a large number of
­expatriate Americans, who advised him on his art acquisitions. Like many prosper-
ous New Yorkers, Marquand was also a member of several gentlemen’s social clubs,
among these the influential Union League Club, which was closely associated with the
arts and whose members included other important collectors, such as the retail mag-
nate Alexander T. Stewart, the railroad baron Collis P. Huntington, and the banker-
financier J. Pierpont Morgan, as well as artists Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt, and
Samuel Colman.
A strong sense of public purpose characterized Marquand’s interest in the arts and
influenced his collecting practices. In 1869, he became a member of the so-called Provi-
sional Committee whose aim was to establish an art museum in New York. He became
a trustee of the then newly founded Metropolitan Museum in 1871 and its treasurer in
1882. The museum’s founders, Marquand among them, aimed to assemble an encyclo-
pedic collection, comprising paintings and sculpture, as well as decorative arts, and even
industrial arts. As George Fiske Comfort, one of the founders, argued in 1869, “A great
museum—one worthy of New York City and of our country—should represent the
History of Art in all countries and in all ages, of art both pure and applied.”8 With this
mission in mind, Marquand presented gifts to almost every curatorial department of the
museum, starting in 1879, with the donation of a collection of pre-Columbian Native
American ceramics, known as Mound-Builders pottery.9 Various other Marquand
gifts followed, among these, in 1881, the Jules Charvet collection of 400 pieces of so-
called ancient glass, reportedly the finest collection of its kind in France.10 That same
year—five years before the museum established a department of paintings—Marquand
made his first gift of a picture, John Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton of 1804–06.11
The following year, in 1882, he presented the museum with a large sculptural work,
The Assumption of the Virgin, an altarpiece then attributed to Luca della Robbia.12 In
addition, Marquand made generous monetary donations—for example, in 1884, he
sponsored a loan exhibition of the works of the British painter George Frederic Watts;
immensely successful, it was the museum’s first show dedicated to a living artist.13 Two
years later, in 1886, Marquand gave the institution $10,000 for the acquisition of sculp-
ture casts and, the following year, $30,000 for the endowment of a Museum Art School,
which provided evening classes for workmen, initially free of tuition.14
108 Esmée Quodbach
An ardent advocate of the arts of his own time, Marquand frequently commissioned
and bought paintings from living artists, American and British in particular. One note-
worthy commission took place in 1887, when Marquand asked the young expatriate
John Singer Sargent, then based in London, to paint a portrait of his wife, Elizabeth,
at Linden Gate, the Marquand “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island.15 Initially reluc-
tant, Sargent, who had visited the United States just once, apparently accepted the
commission only after Marquand agreed to pay the exorbitant honorarium of $3,000
he had requested. Sargent’s fine full-length portrait of Mrs. Marquand—inspired by
the grand portraits of Anthony van Dyck, one of the most admired Old Masters in
the Gilded Age—was not only his first American commission but it also propelled his
American career after it had been exhibited in Boston in 1888.16 As his friend Henry
James wrote that same year, “Mrs. M. will do him great good with the public—they
will want to be painted like that—respectfully, honourably, dignement.”17 Later, Sar-
gent thanked Marquand, calling him “a constant friend” and “a bringer of good
luck,” while describing the commission as “a turning point in my fortunes.”18 In 1896,
the Metropolitan Museum’s trustees would commission Sargent, by then a famed
society portraitist on both sides of the Atlantic, to paint Marquand’s likeness
(Figure 6.1) “as a permanent memorial of their regard for [Marquand], and of their
grateful sense of his earnest devotion and munificent liberality.”19 The following
year, the portrait of Marquand was the first work by Sargent to enter the museum’s
collections.20
Of course, not all the artists who were supported by Marquand and his circle
were to become as successful as Sargent. In 1886, Marquand was one of “Several
­Gentlemen” who gave the Metropolitan Museum The Glass Blowers of Murano,
by Charles F ­ rederick Ulrich, a New York-born painter of genre scenes of European
life.21 Notably, among the gentlemen was also the Baltimore railroad financier William
T. Walters, Marquand’s exact contemporary and one of his many collector-friends.
Another such gift followed in 1887, when “Several Gentlemen” donated a work by the
Irish-American landscapist Edward Gay, Broad Acres, painted earlier that same year.22
This time, the gentlemen included, in addition to Marquand and Walters, the shipping
and railroad heirs Cornelius Vanderbilt II and William K. Vanderbilt, the judge and
oil heir W. M. Rockefeller, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, and the department
store owner Benjamin Altman. A third such gift followed in 1892, with the donation
of William Coffin’s The Rain of 1889, presented by a group that included, in addition
to Marquand and Altman, the dealer Michael Knoedler, the architect Stanford White,
and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.23
During these decades, Marquand also amassed a private picture collection, which
by the later 1880s consisted of a large and eclectic group of works, mainly nineteenth-
century French landscapes and British and American paintings—the kind of works
that appealed to many New Yorkers of his day. A large history picture commissioned
from Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer of 1885, served as the col-
lection’s centerpiece.24 Marquand displayed his personal collection at his opulent four-
story residence at 11 East Sixty-Eighth Street (Figure 6.2), on the northwest corner
of Madison Avenue, not far from Millionaires’ Row and the Metropolitan Museum,
which had just opened at its permanent site on Fifth Avenue in 1880.25 The exterior
of Marquand’s house, designed in the French Renaissance style by his friend Richard
Morris Hunt, then New York’s most sought-after architect, was completed in 1884.
 An Unsung Hero 109

Figure 6.2 Unknown photographer, Marquand residence, Madison Avenue and Sixty-Eighth

Street, New York. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, completed in 1884. Demol-
ished in 1912. Albumen print.
Source: Cornell University Library, A. D. White Architectural Photographs

(Hunt, who was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum, later designed the
institution’s Great Hall and its Fifth Avenue facade.)
The elaborate interior of the Marquand mansion, influenced by the aesthetic
movement and executed in a variety of styles—Japanese for the living room, English
Renaissance for the dining room, Moorish for the smoking room, and so on—took
several years longer to finish. Unlike some other major collectors’ residences in the
city—for example, those of Alexander T. Stewart, John Taylor Johnston (the Metro-
politan Museum’s first president), and William H. Vanderbilt, all on Fifth Avenue—
Marquand’s house did not have a separate art gallery. Instead, his many paintings,
as well as his sculptures and other art objects, formed an integral part of the man-
sion’s interior decoration, perhaps at Hunt’s insistence. As such, Marquand’s inte-
rior arrangements not only spoke to the unification of the arts—a much-desired
and much-discussed concept at this time—but also to Hunt’s perception of interiors
and art collections in a more European sense, in which works of art were fully
integrated into residential settings rather than displayed in separate art galleries.
After the young Bernard Berenson visited “Old Marquandt” [sic] in 1894, he wrote
that his residence was “tremendously luxurious and beautiful” and “a feast for the
eyes.”26
However, Marquand was also the owner of what can be considered a second col-
lection of paintings.27 Even though he preferred to buy contemporary works for his
110 Esmée Quodbach
personal collection, he recognized that a group of acclaimed Old Masters would
significantly elevate the still modest picture holdings of the fledgling Metropolitan
Museum. Like many collectors and patrons of his day, Marquand believed that Ameri-
can art should emerge out of Europe’s artistic traditions, and that, therefore, Old Mas-
ter paintings needed to be available for study for artists in the United States. With this
in mind, he had assigned himself an exceptional mission: in the early 1880s, after his
retirement from business, he set out to acquire a group of first-class Old Masters for
the institution, then a decade old. After all, only a few Old Masters had been added to
the 174 paintings—of varying quality—that came to the Metropolitan in 1871, as its
founding collection, the so-called Purchase of 1871. “That is a very noble and public
spirited idea of yours to enrich the Met. Mus. of New York with your magnificent
works. I wish there were a few more like you!” wrote Marquand’s principal picture
adviser George Henry Boughton, a successful Anglo-American landscapist and genre
painter who lived in London, in 1882, in response to Marquand’s intention. Boughton
continued,

Never mind it will be a grand example. With this destiny of your pictures in view
I shall ever strive to get you the best to be had and to see that your money is well
laid out. . . . I can always find time for so good a purpose.28

As Marquand wrote that same year to the dealer Charles Deschamps, another agent
in London, “I care not to buy common place good things—it is more desirable to go
slowly and acquire the best.”29 Marquand “felt sure that a group of paintings of the
highest order would be unique and invaluable,” an observer later wrote.30
During the time Marquand was collecting, America’s domestic market for Old
­Masters was still small; like most of his collecting contemporaries, he bought the
majority of his Old Masters in Europe, mostly in Britain, where he was assisted by
an extensive network of agents and advisers, among them, besides Boughton and
Deschamps, expatriate painters such as Francis Davis Millet and J. Alden Weir, and
London dealers such as Martin Colnaghi and Thomas Humphry Ward. Of course,
Marquand’s choices—or often those of his intermediaries—were not only deter-
mined by his tastes and his ambition to collect comprehensively but also by what
was available. Compared to Europe’s old aristocracy, Americans like Marquand may
have come late to collecting Old Masters, but they entered the art market at an
unusually opportune moment: the United States, in contrast to Europe, experienced
a period of unparalleled growth, as its industry boomed, its trade flourished, and
its railroads spread ever further. It was the spectacular rise in private income that
allowed America’s new millionaires to start amassing their collections. At the same
time, the dire economic situation of Britain’s landed aristocracy played to the benefit
of Marquand and other Americans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as its
position, inviolable for centuries, was thoroughly undermined. In order to survive,
most landlords preferred to try to keep their estates intact—the traditional bases
of their social, economic, and political power—rather than hold on to their artistic
treasures.
Marquand, who was willing to pay high prices for paintings he desired, was a
strong competitor in the Old Master market and often profited from the deteriorating
financial circumstances of Britain’s aristocrats, many of whom sold off some of their
most valuable works of art. In 1883, he bought—for a lofty $25,000—the painting
 An Unsung Hero 111
that was perhaps America’s first authentic Rembrandt, Portrait of a Man, previously
in the illustrious Lansdowne collection.31 About this time, Rembrandt was arguably
the most coveted Old Master on both sides of the Atlantic, and Marquand’s acquisi-
tion may well have been inspired by the lack of a work by the artist in the Metropoli-
tan Museum’s collections. “Now we will have one very remarkable picture of which
the country will be proud, it is a gem of the first water,” J. Alden Weir, Marquand’s
agent for the Rembrandt, wrote to his parents on the day of the purchase.32 “What a
gorgeous thing! You can’t tell how I feel and how proud I am to get it,” Marquand
wrote to Weir after he had received the painting. “If one fine thing in a year could be
had, what a gallery I would get in time. . . . The pleasure of owning such a work is
great.”33
A few years later, in 1886, Marquand bought the picture that his collecting peers,
the press, and the public often considered the prize among his Old Masters, James
Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox by the much-admired Anthony
van Dyck, for which he paid a steep $40,000 (Figure 6.3). (By comparison, the cost
of the construction of his grand residence was reported to be $125,000.)34 Interest-
ingly, the Van Dyck had been recommended to Marquand by none other than Sar-
gent, through Charles Deschamps.35 Like the Rembrandt, the Van Dyck came with
a respectable British pedigree: it was previously with the Barons Methuen. “I know
it must be a struggle to part with such old friends,” Marquand wrote to Deschamps,
his middleman in the negotiations with Lord Methuen. “They will, however, educate
a new country & do good service I trust wherever they are going.”36 “I know your
­Vandyck well; it is superb; there could not be a finer specimen of the master,” Sir Fred-
eric Leighton, then president of London’s Royal Academy, wrote to Marquand, whom
he also advised occasionally.

Of course my heart bleeds that it should leave this country; you will understand
that; and so much granted, there is no one in whose hands I would rather know it
beyond our shores than yours. I heartily wish you joy of it.37

Among Marquand’s other notable Old Master purchases of the 1880s were, for
example, Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, thought to be the earliest
surviving double portrait in Italian painting, which was bought by Marquand as a
Masaccio and is now thought to be the work of Filippo Lippi; and Portrait of a Man,
purchased as a self-portrait by Velázquez, although now considered a workshop piece,
perhaps a self-portrait by Juan Bautista del Mazo.38 Another remarkable acquisition is
Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, likely the first work by the
master to cross the Atlantic. At the time considered one of Marquand’s lesser picture
purchases, it is now celebrated as one of the most important Old Masters he brought
to America.39
According to several later authors, Marquand’s Old Masters went straight to the
Metropolitan Museum upon their arrival in the United States, never even entering the
Marquand mansion.40 However, this is not the full story, as is clear from the writings
of the critic Montezuma (pseudonym of Montague Marks), who visited the residence
in 1887 and published his observations in the Art Amateur.41 Montezuma records
that he saw some of Marquand’s most esteemed Old Masters on view in the entrance
hall: on the left wall, Van Dyck’s “splendid” James Stuart was flanked by Rembrandt’s
Portrait of a Man and a presumed Velázquez; on the opposite wall hung “two upright
Figure 6.3 Anthony van Dyck, James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox, ca.
1633–1635. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marquand Collec-
tion, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889 (89.15.16)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org
 An Unsung Hero 113
Constables.” Evidently, the entrance hall served as a showcase for some of Mar-
42

quand’s recent Old Master acquisitions.43

Montezuma also visited the mansion’s so-called Music Room—a gray-and-gold
drawing room designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema in the Neo-Greek-Pompeian
style and also known as the Greek Room.44 Still unfinished, the room was already
“much-talked-of,” as Montezuma noted. (Soon, after the arrival of its centerpiece,
Marquand’s very expensive and much-discussed pianoforte, designed by Alma-Tadema
and painted by Sir Edward John Poynter, the Music Room would become even more
famous.)45 On the room’s walls, Montezuma saw “many modern paintings” as well as
“several old masters”—including “a Franz Hals, a Van der Meer of Delft, a Terborg,
a Van der Meer of Leyden, and a portrait of a young lady, full of style and delightful
in color by Gainsborough.”46 (Several photographs of the Marquand Music Room in
its later, finished state, and hung with different paintings, survive; see, for example,
Figure 6.4, which shows the interior as it appeared ten years later, in 1897.)47 In the
English Renaissance-style “dining-room,” Montezuma noted “two very fine paint-
ings”: a Turner and a (purported) Rembrandt.
The mansion was not open to the public. Apparently, Marquand gave serious
thought to the idea of adding a picture gallery to his residence in 1887, perhaps
with his Old Masters in mind; plans for a gallery were drawn up by Richard Morris
Hunt that year but not executed.48 In December 1888, Marquand, eager to show his

Figure 6.4 Unknown photographer, “Music-Room, Marquand House.” Harper’s New Monthly

Magazine, March 1897
Source: Collection of Margaret R. Laster
114 Esmée Quodbach
Old Master acquisitions to a larger audience, lent a group of thirty-seven paintings
to the Metropolitan Museum, where they were exhibited in its new South Wing.49
His loan effected a sea-change in the way that New Yorkers—and, in a broader
sense, Americans—were able to view art, introducing them directly to some of the
most renowned Old Master painters, whose works until then only a privileged few
would have been able to encounter on their European travels. “[We] went up to
the reception at the Art Museum on the occasion of the opening of the new wing,”
wrote Hudson River School painter Jervis McEntee in his diary on December 18,
1888.

There were a great many people and some of the galleries were crowded. . . . We
saw the fine Van Dycks, Rembrandts, Constables &c belonging to Marquand and
also the Sir Joshua. . . . They are getting some very interesting things and really it
is fast becoming a great center of attraction in the city.50

The press was equally enthusiastic. “Those who have seen the examples of Van
Dyck, Rembrandt, Constable, Turner and other masters which are owned by Mr.
Henry Marquand will appreciate the value of the opportunity offered by their pub-
lic exhibition,” wrote the New-York Tribune that same day. “These paintings . . .
furnish an illustration of great art such as we have not had before. We trust that it
may not be judicious to express a hope that these superb paintings may remain at
the Museum.”51
The responses to his paintings appear to have deeply affected Marquand and led
him to embark on his greatest act of philanthropy: on January 10, 1889, less than
a month after he had lent his pictures to the museum, Marquand donated them to
the institution. In a letter to its executive committee, he wrote that he had noticed
the public’s interest in his works with “sincere pleasure,” adding that they would be
“of far greater service to the public to remain where they are, and in a public gal-
lery, rather than in a private house.” Marquand offered his paintings uncondition-
ally to the museum’s trustees in the hope that they would prove to be “of lasting
service to the public” and requesting that they be kept together “as much as prac-
ticable.”52 The Marquand gift of Old Masters transformed the museum overnight.
As the Boston Daily Advertiser wrote, the institution now possessed “far and away
the finest collection of painting to be seen in this country.”53 A month later, Mar-
quand was elected the museum’s second president, a position he would keep until his
death, and a gallery on the museum’s second floor was named the Marquand Gallery
(Figure 6.5).54
“A gift representing at a low estimate half a million dollars!” the critic Monte-
zuma wrote in the Art Amateur in April 1889. “All credit, then, to the foresight and
noble self-effacement of the President of the Metropolitan Museum for having made
this possible!”55 Reactions to Marquand’s gift also came from across the Atlantic.
For example, Marquand’s adviser Thomas Humphry Ward wrote on February 21,
1889,

I send you a copy of the sheet of today’s [London] Times with a note of your noble
gift to the Museum. Everyone here who cares for art is much interested in this
step of yours: but we tremble a little at the thought of what might happen to our
institutions if our “Old Masters” become a fashion over there!56
 An Unsung Hero 115

Figure 6.5 “The Marquand Gallery of Old Masters, Metropolitan Museum of Art,” 1897.
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1897
Source: Collection of Margaret R. Laster

“Honor be to the broad-minded and patriotic donor,” wrote a Dutch critic two days
later. “[M]ay his noble deed evoke the emulation of all right-thinking men!”57
Marquand felt obliged to use his riches to improve society and thus to justify his
expenditures on art; it was his wish that the American public, and artists in particu-
lar, benefit from his collecting efforts for years to come. At the same time, however,
Marquand’s charitable acts—and his 1889 gift in particular—were meant to serve
as examples for his moneyed collecting peers. After all, as his acquaintance and
fellow philanthropist Andrew Carnegie argued in his essay “Wealth”—published
in June 1889, merely months after Marquand made his gift—the best way of deal-
ing with the phenomenon of wealth inequality was for the rich to give away their
fortunes during their lifetimes in such a manner that these would be redistributed
responsibly and thoughtfully.58 Indeed, as Carnegie famously put it, “The man who
dies thus rich dies disgraced.”59 Although very few American millionaires took Car-
negie’s advice literally, the broader concept of his essay—better known under its
British title, “The Gospel of Wealth”—resonated widely among them, inspiring a
wave of philanthropic acts. In October 1889, the Detroit newspaper publisher James
E. Scripps donated seventy European paintings to the Detroit Museum of Art (now
the Detroit Institute of Arts); it seems quite possible that Scripps was in part inspired
by Marquand’s many gifts to the Metropolitan Museum, or by Carnegie’s writings,
or even by both.60
116 Esmée Quodbach
Marquand’s generosity did not end with his grand gift of 1889; for several years,
he continued buying paintings at a rapid rate, donating two smaller groups to the
Metropolitan Museum in 1890 and 1891, respectively.61 Included in these gifts were
such pictures as Girl with Cherries, bought by Marquand as a Leonardo da Vinci
but now attributed to Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis; a small Lamentation, pur-
chased as by Jan van Eyck although now ascribed to Petrus Christus; and a Frans
Hals, Portrait of a Man.62 After 1891, however, Marquand made only a few more
purchases with the museum in mind. Ironically, the market for Old Masters that
he had helped to create only a decade or so earlier was now quickly becoming too
expensive for him.
In 1893, Wilhelm Bode, the eminent director of Berlin’s Royal Gallery of Paint-
ings and a leading tastemaker for Old Masters, came to the United States, where he
visited several of its “new” museums—among these the Metropolitan Museum—as
well as various private collections. Bode remarked that he was “surprised” by what
he saw in New York, as he confessed to the New York Times: “The public feeling for
art, the architecture, the fortunes spent in public and private collections, the general
interest in doing things that are magnificent, are the characteristics about which I con-
stantly think.” Gifts were much more frequent in New York than in Berlin, observed
Bode, who was much impressed by what he saw at the Metropolitan Museum. As the
New York Times wrote, “the treasures gathered by Mr. Marquand made [Bode’s] eyes
scintillate.”63
Six years later, in 1899, the critic Alfred Trumble described the Marquand gift in
the Art Collector as “rather the finest thing of its kind that has yet been done in
this country.”64 Nevertheless, Trumble also noted that Marquand’s example had as
yet not encouraged similar gifts to the Metropolitan Museum by other collectors.
The Marquand Collection had been on display long enough to have brought, by the
sheer force of its own example, other roomfuls of pictures to the museum, Trumble
argued—and it would have been a small matter for many others in New York to have
presented other such galleries to the public. So far, however, Marquand had only a
small following.
Large gifts eventually did come, though, and Marquand would live to witness sev-
eral exceptional bequests. For example, in 1900, two years before Marquand’s death,
the railroad financier Collis P. Huntington left the Metropolitan Museum a large group
of old and modern masters.65 The following year, in 1901, Jacob S. Rogers, a New
Jersey steam locomotive manufacturer, left the institution a major monetary bequest—
more than $5 million in endowment funds for the purchase of art objects and books.66
Other important bequests that may well have been inspired by Marquand’s gifts were
made after his death. For instance, John Stewart Kennedy, another New York railroad
financier, left $2.6 million in acquisition funds in 1909, while Benjamin Altman, the
department store magnate, left his picture collection—which included thirteen authen-
tic and assumed Rembrandts, along with many other treasures—to the museum in
1913.67
Today Marquand’s legacy is frequently forgotten. His personal art collection was
auctioned off in New York in 1903, while his grand mansion on Madison Avenue was
demolished nine years later, in 1912, after it had sat empty for a decade.68 (A luxury
apartment building, Marquand House, was erected on the site the following year.) The
 An Unsung Hero 117
Marquand Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum was dismantled long ago as well, and
the Old Masters that were once part of the Marquand gift have since been dispersed
through the galleries; a few have been deaccessioned. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of
Marquand (Figure 6.1) is on view to this day, be it in the museum’s study collection,
in the Henry Luce Center.
Still, Marquand’s generosity lives on in many other galleries: for more than a cen-
tury now, the museum has used monies from the Marquand Fund to add at least
eighteen divergent works of art to its collections, ranging from a large history picture
by Nicolas Poussin (Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man, purchased in 1924)
to a watercolor by J. M. W. Turner (The Lake of Zug, purchased in 1959) and a pastel
by Anton Raphael Mengs (Pleasure, purchased in 2005).69 Most recently, in 2008,
Marquand funds contributed to the purchase of an oil on copper by Domenichino
(The Lamentation); in 2010, to an oil on paper by a member of the circle of Hugo van
der Goes (Portrait of a Man); and, in 2017, an oil on panel by Marcus Gheeraerts the
Younger (Ellen Maurice [1578–1626]).70
After Marquand’s death in February 1902, the New York Times described him
as “the steadiest and most persistent benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art.” Indeed, it was through Marquand, and through others who followed his
lead, that the Metropolitan Museum has become “really one of the museums not
merely of the United States, but of the world,” as the New York Times wrote more
than a century ago.71 Marquand’s grand vision for the new museum and his many
gifts not only greatly enriched the institution’s life and spirit but his unprecedented
contributions at this formative moment also greatly enhanced the prestige of the
city that housed it, thus helping to ensure New York’s status as America’s cultural
capital.

Notes
I thank Margaret R. Laster, Chelsea Bruner, and Inge Reist for their insightful comments on an
earlier draft of the present essay.
1 This essay elaborates on my talk “Collecting Pictures for the Empire City: Henry ­Gurdon
Marquand’s 1889 Gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” presented at the annual
conference of the College Art Association, New York, January 2015, and on my paper
“Collecting Old Masters for New York: Henry Gurdon Marquand and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9, no. 1 (Winter 2017):
1–11, where some of the following information is published in a different form. Many
documents pertaining to Marquand’s life—among these, passport applications, shipping
records, and census records—are available online through ancestry.com. A comprehensive
account of Marquand as a collector, patron, and philanthropist remains to be written;
for various aspects, see Calvin Tomkins, Merchants & Masterpieces: The Story of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 73–75; Cynthia Saltzman,
Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures, 1880–World War
I (New York: Viking, 2008), 20–26; and Adrianna M. Del Collo, “Cultivating Taste:
Henry G. Marquand’s Public and Private Contributions to Advancing Art in Gilded Age
New York” (MA thesis, Hunter College, City University of New York, 2011). The Henry
Gurdon Marquand Papers (hereafter HGMP), held in the Archives of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (hereafter MMA), contain Marquand’s correspondence with
artists and dealers as well as other materials that document his activities as a collector and
patron.
2 “Henry G. Marquand,” obituary, New York Times, February 27, 1902.
118 Esmée Quodbach
3 See E. A. Alexander, “Mr. Henry G. Marquand,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 94,
no. 562 (March 1897): 563. For the identification of “Brown,” see Daniëlle O. Kisluk-
Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 29 (1994): 151.
4 The Marquands were married on May 20, 1851, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Their
­European journey may well have been their honeymoon. Their first child, Linda, was
born in Rome on May 1, 1852. The Marquands returned to New York on November 15,
1852.
5 The portrait of Henry Marquand is signed and dated 1852 on the mount. It is part of a
personal album, “Remembrances of Artists,” that was owned by Marquand and that also
includes a smaller, informal portrait by Ventura of Mrs. Marquand. The album, currently
no longer complete, is in the collection of Edward Heimiller. I am grateful to Mr. Heimiller
for allowing me to publish the portrait of Henry Marquand here.
6 W. C. Bryant, letter from Rome, May 21, 1858, published in “Foreign Correspondence,
Items, etc.,” Crayon 5 (1858): 203.
7 On November 23, 1869, Bryant, as the chairman of New York’s Union Art League, gave an
opening speech in which he detailed the need for a public art museum in the city.
8 A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York: Proceedings of a Meeting Held at
the Theatre of the Union League Club, Tuesday Evening, November 23, 1869 (New York:
Trow & Smith, 1869), 13.
9 MMA, acc. no. series 78.9.
10 MMA, acc. no. series 82.1.
11 MMA, 81.11.
12 MMA, 82.4, now attributed to the workshop of Andrea della Robbia.
13 As noted in Melody Barnett Deusner, “ ‘In Seen and Unseen Places’: The Henry G. ­Marquand
House and Collections in England and America,” Art History 34, no. 4 (September 2011):
758.
14 All classes except those in architecture were abolished in 1894; see Del Collo, “Cultivating
Taste,” 82.
15 See Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings,
vol. 1, The Early Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1998), 197–99, cat.
no. 92. The portrait is now in the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
(y1977.77).
16 Sargent’s portrait of Mrs. Marquand is closely related to Van Dyck’s so-called Portrait
of the Genoese Senator’s Wife (now titled Portrait of a Distinguished Genoese Lady,
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. 782c), a celebrated picture, then with the descendants of
Sir Robert Peel, its earlier owner. In 1886, the year before Sargent painted Mrs. Mar-
quand’s portrait, her husband had acquired another celebrated “British” Van Dyck; see
Figure 6.3.
17 Henry James to Henrietta Reubell, April 1, 1888, quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray John
Singer Sargent, vol. 1, The Early Portraits, 199.
18 John Singer Sargent to Henry Gurdon Marquand, March 18 [no year], quoted in Ormond
and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, vol. 1, The Early Portraits, 199. This letter is in the
Allan Marquand Papers, Princeton University Library.
19 Again, Sargent used the portraits of Van Dyck as a source of inspiration, among these
­possibly also Marquand’s own James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Richmond and Lennox
(see Figure 6.3), especially with regard to its color scheme. For Sargent’s portrait of Mar-
quand, see also Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864, ed. Kathleen
Luhrs (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 251–53. The quotation appears on p. 251.
20 Among the many works by Sargent that entered the MMA in later years is also an informal
portrait of Marquand’s daughter Mabel, probably painted circa 1891–94 and bequeathed
by her husband in 1930 (Mrs. Henry Galbraith Ward, 30.26).
21 MMA, Gift of Several Gentlemen, 1886 (86.13). Earlier that year, Ulrich’s painting had won
an award at the National Academy of Design’s second Prize Fund Exhibition.
22 MMA, 87.18.
 An Unsung Hero 119
23 MMA, 92.16.
24 It is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (George W. Elkins Collection,
1924, E1924–4–1).
25 For the Marquand mansion, see William S. Ayres, “The Domestic Museum in ­Manhattan:
Major Private Art Installations in New York City, 1870–1920” (PhD diss., University of
Delaware, 1993), 68–71; Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” 151–81; ­Deusner,
“ ‘In Seen and Unseen Places,’ ” 754–73; and Melody Barnett Deusner, “Building a
­Reputation: Henry Gurdon Marquand’s New York Mansion,” in Orchestrating Elegance:
Alma-Tadema and the Marquand Music Room, ed. Kathleen M. Morris and Alexis Goodin
(Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2017), 37–61.
26 Quoted in Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 204.
27 The distinction between the two collections formed by Marquand was made as early as
1903, in the Times (London), as noted in Del Collo, “Cultivating Taste,” 6.
28 George Henry Boughton to Henry Gurdon Marquand, June 9, 1882. HGMP, MMA, box 1,
folder 1, item 10. For the correspondence between Marquand and Boughton, see also
­Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” 176, n. 3.
29 Henry Gurdon Marquand to Charles Deschamps, August 16, 1882. HGMP, MMA, box 1,
folder 5.
30 Alexander, “Mr. Henry G. Marquand,” 566.
31 Marquand gave the painting, whose attribution to Rembrandt is hampered by its abraded
condition, to the MMA in 1890 (91.26.7). It seems more likely that Herman Doomer
(then often referred to as “The Gilder”), which arrived in New York in 1884, was the
first authentic Rembrandt to arrive in America; see Esmée Quodbach, “ ‘Rembrandt’s
‘Gilder’ Is Here’: How America Got Its First Rembrandt and France Lost Many of Its Old
Masters,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 31, nos. 1–2 (2004):
90–107. Herman Doomer entered the MMA in 1929 as part of the Havemeyer Collection
(29.100.1).
32 Quoted (without date) in Dorothy Weir Young, ed., The Life and Letters of J. Alden Weir
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 159.
33 Ibid., 160.
34 For the cost of the house, see Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” 177, n. 12,
citing the Real Estate Records and Builders’ Guide, July 30, 1881, 776.
35 See Saltzman, Old Masters, New World, 30.
36 Henry Gurdon Marquand to Charles Deschamps, October 12, 1886, quoted in ibid., 36.
37 Sir Frederic Leighton to Henry Gurdon Marquand, quoted in Alexander, “Mr. Henry G.
Marquand,” 566.
38 MMA, 89.15.19 (Lippi) and 89.15.29 (workshop of Velázquez), respectively.
39 MMA, 89.15.21. For Marquand’s acquisition of this work, see Esmée Quodbach, “­America’s
First Vermeer: ‘Young Woman with a Water Pitcher’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” in
Collecting for the Public: Works That Made a Difference, eds. Bart Cornelis et al. ­(London:
Paul Holberton, 2016), 78–83.
40 This may well have been first stated by Albert Ten Eyck Gardner in “Metropolitan People
and Pictures,” Art News 52, no. 9 (January 1954): 33. It has been repeated by others; see,
for example, Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” 151; and Del Collo, “Cultivat-
ing Taste,” 7, n. 6.
41 Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal
Devoted to Art in the Household 18, no. 1 (December 1887): 2.
42 For identification of the paintings, see Quodbach, “Collecting Old Masters,” 9, n. 12.
43 Saltzman notes that Marquand invited members of the public to study Van Dyck’s James
Stuart “between three and six o’clock on Monday afternoons” in his mansion’s front hall
after the picture’s arrival in December 1886 (Saltzman, Old Masters, New World, 36).
According to Deusner, this open invitation was “highly unusual” for Marquand and appears
to have been extended only once (Deusner, “Building a Reputation,” 49).
44 For the Music Room and its contents, see Morris and Goodin, Orchestrating Elegance, esp.
Kathleen M. Morris, “Unrivaled in Originality: The Marquand Music Room,” 95–125.
120 Esmée Quodbach
45 The piano arrived in late 1887. Reportedly, its case cost $46,000; see “What Cost the
Most,” New York Times, May 21, 1888. The piano is now in the Clark Art Institute,
­Williamstown, Massachusetts (1997.8).
46 For identification of the paintings, see Quodbach, “Collecting Old Masters,” 9, n. 13.
47 For additional images, see Morris and Goodin, Orchestrating Elegance, 86–93,
plates 2–10.
48 See Del Collo, “Cultivating Taste,” 48–51. According to Del Collo, Marquand may well
have considered a domestic gallery to be “inadequate” for the public display of his Old
Masters collection.
49 See General Guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition of 1888–89 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1888), 9–10.
50 Jervis McEntee, diary, entry dated December 18, 1888. McEntee’s diary is in the Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
51 “The Metropolitan Museum, Winter Opening,” New-York Tribune, December 18, 1888.
52 Henry Gurdon Marquand to the trustees of the MMA, January 10, 1889, cited in Del Collo,
“Cultivating Taste,” 89; also paraphrased in “The City’s Art Treasures,” New York Times,
January 17, 1889.
53 Quoted in Tomkins, Merchants & Masterpieces, 74.
54 There seem to have been several “Marquand Galleries” at the Metropolitan Museum,
both during and after Marquand’s lifetime. A “Marquand Gallery” in which both Mar-
quand paintings and important works from other collections were shown opened in
1911; see “The Marquand Gallery,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 6, no. 1
(1911): 3–6.
55 Montezuma [Montague Marks], “My Note Book,” Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal
Devoted to Art in the Household 20, no. 5 (April 1889): 98.
56 Quoted in Del Collo, “Cultivating Taste,” 88–89.
57 A. C. Loffelt, “Zwervers tot rust gekomen,” De Nederlandsche Spectator, February 23,
1889, 62. (My own translation from the Dutch.)
58 See Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, no. 391 (June 1889):
653, 657–62. Soon after, Carnegie’s essay was published under the title “The Gospel of
Wealth,” in the Pall Mall Gazette (London). The relationship of Marquand and Carnegie
and the possible connection between their philanthropic ideals and efforts remain to be
explored.
59 Carnegie, “Wealth,” quoted in David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin,
2006), 350.
60 For Scripps’s gift, see Detroit Museum of Art, Catalogue of the Scripps Collection of Old
Masters, ed. James E. Scripps (Detroit: John F. Eby, 1889). Interestingly, both Scripps and
Carnegie were present at the Eugène Secrétan sale, one of the great art sales of the late
nineteenth century, held in Paris in July 1889. Many other Americans who would later
make major museum donations also attended the sale, among them Louisine and Henry
Havemeyer and Collis P. Huntington, for example.
61 Both groups were accessioned by the MMA in 1891 and are part of acc. no. series 91.26.
62 MMA, 91.26.5 (de Predis), 91.26.12 (Christus), and 91.26.9 (Hals), respectively.
63 “Criticised by an Expert. Dr. Wilhelm Bode Talks About Art in this Country,” New York
Times, October 11, 1893.
64 Alfred Trumble, quoted in Ayres, “The Domestic Museum in Manhattan,” 104.
65 For Huntington’s gift, see Tomkins, Merchants & Masterpieces, 190–91. Although
­Huntington’s bequest dates to 1900, the paintings did not enter the MMA until 1925, after
Huntington’s widow, Arabella, had died and after their son, Archer Huntington, had relin-
quished his usufruct rights.
66 For Rogers’s gift, see ibid., 87–91. As Del Collo argues, there may well have been a con-
nection between Marquand’s advocacy of an endowment fund for the MMA and the
institution’s receipt of the Rogers bequest in 1901; see Del Collo, “Cultivating Taste,”
111–12.
67 For Kennedy’s bequest, see Tomkins, Merchants & Masterpieces, 165. For Altman, see
Francis Haskell, “The Benjamin Altman Bequest,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 3 (1970):
259–80.
 An Unsung Hero 121
68 See The Collection of the Late Henry G. Marquand, sales cat., American Art Association,
New York, January 23–31, 1903.
69 MMA, 24.45.2 (Poussin), 59.120 (Turner), and 2005.231 (Mengs), respectively.
70 MMA, 2008.72 (Domenichino), 2010.188 (Circle of Hugo van der Goes), and 2017.249
(Gheeraerts), respectively.
71 “Henry G. Marquand,” obituary.
Plate 1 John Gast, American Progress. Chromolithograph (1873) of original Gast oil painting
(1872). Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
 “Japanese Parlor, North West Corner.” Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and
Plate 2 
­Collection, described by Edward Strahan [pseud.]. Two vols. (Philadelphia: G. B
­ arrie &
Sons, ca. 1883–1884)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org
Plate 3 John F. Kensett, Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, ca. 1870–1872. Oil on
canvas. Carnegie Museum of Art, Purchase, Gift of the Women’s Committee (80.51)
Source: Courtesy, Carnegie Museum of Art
Plate 4 Richard Morris Hunt, Lenox Library, New York City. Perspective rendering, 1871.
Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress

Plate 5 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Richard Watson Gilder, Helena de Kay Gilder, and Rodman
de Kay Gilder, modeled 1879, cast ca. 1883–1884. Plaster. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of David and Joshua Gilder, 2002 (2002.445)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org
Plate 6 Domenico Ventura, Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902), 1852. Watercolor with
gouache. Collection of Edward Heimiller
Source: Collection of Edward Heimiller

William Wetmore Story, Semiramis, designed 1872, carved 1873. Marble. Dallas
Plate 7 
Museum of Art, Gift of Morynne and Robert E. Motley in memory of Robert Earl
Motley Jr., 1942–1998 (1999.117.A-B)
Source: Courtesy, Dallas Museum of Art
Plate 8 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Farragut Monument, 1877–1880. Madison Square Park,
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photographer: Bruce Schwarz
Plate 9 Currier & Ives, The City of New York, 1876. Color lithograph. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
Plate 10 William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market, 1879. Oil on linen. Col-
lection of the New-York Historical Society, Purchase, Thomas Jefferson Bryan Fund
(1971.104)
Source: Collection of the New-York Historical Society
7 Metropolitan, Inc.
Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the
Genesis of the American Art Museum
John Ott

This essay examines the formative years (1870–1899) of New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art (Met), the first public museum dedicated to the fine arts in the United
States (Figure 7.1). The proliferation of all manner of exhibitionary spaces during the
antebellum era—art academies, historical societies, world’s fairs, mechanics’ institute
fairs, commercial galleries, for-profit museums, private collections, and even subscrip-
tion services like the American Art-Union—offered innumerable organizational pos-
sibilities. Thus, the Met’s founders’ preference for a corporate governance structure
and hybrid public-private status, which remains the prevailing model for civic cultural
institutions today, was not inevitable but, as this essay will argue, the product of a
particular social elite at a discrete historical moment. Like other corporations, which
were becoming the most dominant American businesses at precisely the same time, the
Metropolitan Museum combined private operation, benefit, and access with public
subsidy and legitimating claims of public service.
The Met’s conventional genesis account has for decades charted an irresistible tra-
jectory of institutional triumph and narrated a tale of its founders’ selfless benefac-
tion.1 By contrast, this study builds on a foundation of important scholarship, which
has argued that museums are not neutral institutions but respond to and reflect the
interests of their stakeholders.2 At the same time, this seminal museum studies litera-
ture has often advanced arguments about institutions’ ability to promote elite ide-
ologies and create social distinctions in more generalized ways. They also focus on
the symbolic, cultural capital that elites accrued through cultural philanthropy rather
than on the material rewards they also reaped. By digging more deeply into the archi-
val record, this essay reveals that tensions between private interest and public welfare
have been hard-wired into this first art museum and its many institutional progeny.
Furthermore, extensive commentary in both New York City newspapers and the art
press reveals that various rival constituencies carefully scrutinized and at times vocally
critiqued and opposed the trustees’ efforts to exploit the museum’s public financial
support for private gain.3
From its charter in 1870, the museum’s exploitation for private financial gain was
commonplace. In a striking conflict of interest that did not escape public censure,
Met Superintendent (and later Director) Luigi Palma di Cesnola and longtime board
member and gallery owner Samuel P. Avery together personally received a total of
$175,000 for the sale of their collections to the Museum Corporation over the course
of the 1870s. Observers openly protested these transactions. “The museum is heav-
ily in debt,” complained Art Amateur.4 In other cases, museum officials used exhib-
its of their holdings in the Met’s galleries to increase the market value and accredit
 Metropolitan, Inc. 123

Figure 7.1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the first museum building in Central Park, 1880.
Designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. Photograph
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

the importance of their private collections. For example, the museum’s first president
from 1870 to 1889, railroad executive John Taylor Johnston, displayed his substan-
tial art holdings at both the Met and the National Academy of Design for several
months prior to their disposition at auction in 1876. The New York Post reported that
museum officials had even authorized the renovation of the galleries to provide a more
suitable habitat for Johnston’s esteemed collection.5 That December, the sale of his
works at posh Chickering Hall set an auction sales record slightly north of $328,000.6
In one especially inventive marketing scheme that similarly transformed the Met
into a refined billboard and posh sales floor, the proprietors of the gallery and auc-
tion house, the American Art Association, developed and operated an annual Prize
Fund Exhibition from 1885 to 1889. Subscribers to this fund judged competition
entries from contemporary American artists, and cultural institutions like the Met
each received one of the prizewinning artworks and displayed them alongside placards
that acknowledged the association by name. At no cost to the association, then, these
wall labels both advertised this commercial enterprise to the Met-going public and its
patriotic support for domestic artistic production despite the fact that the association
made most of its money trading in European imports. Such transparently commercial
and self-interested activities, however, were not especially common and were ­generally
met with harsh criticism from local newspapers and the art press alike. The New York
124 John Ott
Star, for example, condemned the Prize Fund as “a clever advertising dodge,” while
the Art Union considered it “nothing less than a declaration of war against the Acad-
emy and other artists’ societies.”7
But most of the prerogatives granted to and financial gains made by museum offi-
cials came in more indirect ways. Put simply, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was
engineered to display and valorize privately owned collections at public expense.
Temporary exhibitions of loans drawn from the collections of trustees and high-level
members dominated the Met’s early programming, and those select few who owned
collections of sufficient prestige to contribute to these events were handsomely com-
pensated for their participation.8 In addition to free admission, lenders received at
no cost numerous premiums enumerated in detail in exhibition catalogs: tickets for
guests, copies of exhibition catalogs, professional photographs of their works, and the
transportation of loans to and from owner’s residence.9 And for many bourgeois lend-
ers who spent their summer months out of town or abroad, the Met ably functioned
as a secure private vault. “Fire-proof and well guarded,” a loan exhibition “offers
advantage from the mere standpoint of storage alone,” the journal Art Union attested
in 1884.10 Many contemporaries divined this fundamental purpose in the institution’s
very facade. When the Met first opened in Central Park in 1880 (Figure 7.1), the new
building “conveyed somewhat the impression of a safe-deposit building” in the view
of the Art Journal, which concluded that “the fitness of the building for display must
be in some measure subservient to the careful policing of the building.” 11 And indeed,
Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould’s design shares the same Gothic Revival ver-
nacular and fortress-like appearance as Charles Clinton’s Seventh Regiment Armory
(Figure 7.2), which opened that very same year.12
Officials’ preference for exhibitions of costly original works of art not actually
owned by the institution was both responsible for ballooning operational budgets
and atypical for period art museums. Early annual reports prior to 1880 continu-
ally lamented that the museum’s first two homes near Union Square had inadequate
space and light for the favorable presentation of members’ loans.13 This demand for
larger accommodations specially designed for the handsome presentation of art, as
well as the acquisition of the Cesnola and Avery collections, noted earlier, compelled
the Met’s costly migration to Central Park. The elements necessary for the display of
art to lenders’ satisfaction, including capacious halls, high ceilings, glass vitrines, and
gas lighting (Figure 7.3), swelled annual budgets still further.14 And generally the pub-
lic underwrote these expenses, as when the New York State Legislature apportioned
$60,000 for the equipment and furnishing of the Met’s new uptown venue.15 Accord-
ing to one estimate, by 1885 the public had provided $1.91 million for museum con-
struction, furnishing, operation, and maintenance.16 By contrast, the acquisition of
plaster reproductions of masterpieces of ancient sculpture, which was the normal
practice for American museums at the time, would have greatly reduced outlays for
security, transportation, and insurance, not to mention the need for a fire-proof stone
structure.17
Even after lenders donated artworks to the institution, the museum continued to
bear collateral financial obligations to safeguard these gifts and to present them in the
most flattering manner possible. Donor bequests often mandated particular accom-
modations for their gifts, as in the case of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s 1887 posthu-
mous bequest of 187 artworks, which stipulated that “the trustees and managers and
said institution shall provide and set apart exclusively for said collection a suitable,
 Metropolitan, Inc. 125

Figure 7.2 “Seventh Regiment Armory.” Wood engraving, 1895. Art and Picture Collection,
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
Source: The New York Public Library

well-lighted fire-proof apartment, gallery or separate space.”18 Wolfe did grant the
Met an additional $200,000 to support these auxiliary display costs, but most gifts
came to the museum unaccompanied by such provisions for overhead expenses and
accordingly compelled further budgetary demands for more space, furnishing, secu-
rity, and so on. But even without such legally binding provisions, museum staff needed
to ensure the proper pampering of gifts in order to maintain advantageous relation-
ships with donors and their descendants.19
The substantial public financing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an unprec-
edented phenomenon in the history of civic cultural institutions; founded in the same
year as the Met, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, for example, received no public sub-
sidy until 1966.20 Government subsidy did not, however, translate to public govern-
ance. With the exception of a handful of non-voting ex officio positions for political
officials, the Met’s Board of Trustees was a self-perpetuating body of wealthy indus-
trialists and financiers who had final authority over the institution. Over the course
126 John Ott

Figure 7.3 “Main Hall of the Building.” Harper’s Weekly 24:1215 (April 10, 1880): 232–33
Source: Collection of Lauren Lessing

of its first hundred years, the board included just one artist, sculptor Daniel Chester
French, and just one writer, William Cullen Bryant. For other organizations, such as
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, by contrast, regional institutions of higher learning
like Harvard and MIT could appoint members to the museum board.21 The Met’s
institutional ancestry in a stalwart Republican entity, the Union League Club, partly
explains its disdain for public governance, which for nineteenth-century New York
was synonymous with the Democratic Party machine commonly known as Tammany
Hall. At the 1869 Union League Club meeting that initiated the museum project,
publisher George Putnam hopefully promised listeners that an incorporated museum
would be “free . . . from bungling government officials.”22
The absence of public input in the museum’s creation and evolution was an open
sore for many New Yorkers. “The fact is,” Art Amateur complained in 1879,

that while the taxpayers of New York may pay a very large sum of money for the
storing of collections for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they have no control
over the collections, which may at any time be removed at the pleasure of the
Board of Trustees, who are in fact the real owners. . . . [Funds] are asked for in
the name of the public; but the public has no voice in the matter of their expendi-
ture, which is controlled entirely by the corporation of trustees who manage every
thing [sic] to suit their own ideas.23
 Metropolitan, Inc. 127
Over the years, letters to editors in local papers complained variously of the exclusiv-
ity of the organizational meeting sponsored by the Union League Club, the lack of
artists on the board, the restriction of fundraising efforts to the city’s moneyed classes,
the closed election of trustees by board members alone, and the convocation of trus-
tees’ meetings in private and often at board members’ own homes.24
The conflicts of interest inherent in the private governance of a public institution
became plain to many observers during a four-year spat over the authenticity of objects
from the Met’s Cesnola collection of Cypriote antiquities. The controversy erupted in
August 1880, when the French dealer Gaston Feuardent accused the Met director on
the pages of Art Amateur of falsifying the restoration of sculptures out of unassociated
stone fragments; it remained in the public eye until February 1884, at the conclusion
of Feuardent’s unsuccessful libel suit against Cesnola (Figure 7.4).25 Initially the vast
majority of commentators sided with the Met and its director, but after the trustees
convened their own committee of inspection, which quickly cleared Cesnola of all
charges in January 1881, public outrage rapidly mounted.26 The trustees’ refusal to
refer the matter to an external review, and their subsequent public silence during the
debate, directly contributed to a growing chorus of skeptics, drawn from even the
most enthusiastic of the museum’s early supporters. “One thing that seems quite evi-
dent,” concluded the once-sympathetic New York Times, “is that the committee did
their best to shield the person from whom they had bought the collection from the
charges.”27 Many critics soon compared the Met’s board to the infamous Tammany
Ring against which so many trustees had once inveighed.28
The board’s deliberate and tactical segregation of public and private sources of
funding into discrete expenditures allowed them to leverage greater authority over the
museum far beyond their proportion of institutional subsidy.29 They restricted public
financing to operating expenses while building museum collections with strictly pri-
vate support. Beginning in 1871 with the inaugural purchase of 174 European paint-
ings, subscription funds underwrote the acquisition of museum collections.30 Thus,
from the outset the board privatized the museum’s only fungible assets while reserving
public funding for expenditures with little or no exchange value. Had the trustees ever
decided to sever their arrangement with the city government, they would have retained
the museum’s precious contents, while the city would be left with the white elephant
of a mammoth building, specifically designed for the exhibition of art, without any-
thing to display. Indeed this was a threat they frequently made, as in 1892 while
soliciting for increased public subsidy for operating expenses. “The refusal of this
sum,” reported the New York Post, “will raise the question of whether the Museum
Corporation shall terminate its contract with the city, remove its collections, and erect
buildings of its own.”31
The felicitous marriage of public financing to private governance was at once cause
and product of another unlikely union: the trustees’ frequent and lofty professions of
public service and the realities of private access. The Met’s founders resorted to the
institutional form of an ostensibly public museum at least partly because private ven-
ues strongly intimated private purpose. The display of art in luxurious domestic gal-
leries too readily invited accusations of social exclusivity, while exhibitions in the tony
clubrooms of the Union League Club, for one, too easily smacked of partisan political
motives. Trustees rebuffed an early offer to house the institution within the lavish
Tiffany & Company building in Union Square, arguably out of this precise desire to
avoid the appearance of commercial or other self-interested motives.32
128 John Ott

“The Development of Archeology—How Modern Museums Are Supplied with

Figure 7.4 
Genuine Antiquities.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 62:1470 (November 24,
1883): 213
Source: Gale | Cengage Learning

At the opening exercises for the museum’s new Central Park abode in 1880, Trustee
Joseph Choate explicitly promised wealthy listeners that their support of the museum
would not only transform their economic into cultural capital but also spotlight their
personal generosity.33

Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you
only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into
 Metropolitan, Inc. 129
priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculpted marble, and railroad
shares and mining stocks . . . into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters. . . .
The rage of Wall Street is to hunt the Philosopher’s Stone, to convert all baser
things into gold . . . ours is the higher ambition to convert your useless gold into
things of living beauty that shall be a joy to a whole people for a 1000 years.34

A collector’s commitment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art thus became not only
a sign of good personal taste but also a shining badge of civic benevolence. Arguably
the most important corporate lawyer of the nineteenth century, Choate had personally
drafted the Met’s charter and, much later, helped persuade the U.S. Supreme Court of
the unconstitutionality of income tax in 1895, and so no one had more experience in
spinning the straw of private commercial interest into the gold of public service. And
as a member of both the Union League Club at its founding and the Committee of 70
that successfully prosecuted the Tweed Ring, he was also a prominent member of local
Republican Party circles.35
This rhetoric of selfless community spirit and commitment to the social welfare con-
trasts unfavorably with museum officials’ actual disassociation from people in alleged
need of improvement at the museum site.36 In terms of location, cost, and access, the
Met actively discouraged broad public participation. Its uptown relocation to Central
Park in 1880, for example, made it substantially less accessible to New Yorkers not in
possession of a private stable and carriage, as “A Friend of the Museum” had warned
in the letters page of the New York Tribune in 1875:

It should be a school for the masses of the people. . . . A site such as the present
makes it accessible to almost everybody in the city and suburbs, but as soon as the
Museum shall have been removed to Central Park, it will be impossible for a large
number of its present visitors to frequent the place.37

The site’s relative isolation likewise occasioned the Tribune’s critique of the institution
“as an exclusive social toy” at the time of the new building’s grand opening. Bemoan-
ing the half-mile walk from the elevated platform at Third Avenue and Eighty-Fourth
Street that was necessary for pedestrians, the writer tartly observed that “people who
keep their carriage will, of course, find it easy to visit the Museum at any time.”38 As
noted, loan exhibitions and the Avery and Cesnola collections created the hunger for
space that drove the museum into the park, but the quickening tide of gentrification
uptown played no small part. After the Civil War, the epicenter of exclusivity in New
York had migrated north from Union Square into the thirties and forties and by the
1880s had pushed still further into the east sixties.39 Effectively, the city’s elite brought
the Met along with them as they decamped for more fashionable environs.
In addition, despite extensive public subsidy, the museum charged admission fees
that the trustees relaxed only when bought off with further state support. At first, an
annual subscription was required for admission, before one-time entrance fees were
set at fifty cents, and then reduced to twenty-five in 1873.40 This policy of paid admis-
sion, moreover, stemmed as much from a desire for selectivity as from more prac-
tical budgetary concerns. “We don’t want people in the Museum,” Studio quoted
one unnamed trustee in 1885, “who have to think about twenty-five cents.”41 Only
with the appropriation of $560,000 for the construction of the Central Park structure
were politicians able to obtain a guarantee that the museum would be open for free
four days of the week.42 And at special events like exhibition previews, the institution
130 John Ott
became still more restrictive. Some 8,000 individuals applied for tickets to the grand
opening of the Central Park building, for example, but of the 3,000 issued, 2,500 were
reserved for “trustees, patrons, fellows and members of the Museum.”43
Most period imagery likewise presents the Met’s gallery interiors as elegant, club-
like spaces reserved for an uptown clientele. The lush kaleidoscope of bourgeois view-
ers in W. T. Smedley’s cover illustration of a museum reception for an 1889 issue
of Harper’s Weekly (Figure 7.5) rather typically teems with coattails and top hats,
canes, and even a pair of opera glasses wielded by the woman at center. It also char-
acteristically emphasizes female gallery-goers in the latest fashions in order to accent
the stylishness of the proceedings. And by rhyming the draped wall fabrics with the
ladies’ gowns, and the subjects of the Old Master portraits on views with the visitors
in attendance, the scene figures New York’s new-money elites as inheritors and succes-
sors of the European aristocracy. Smedley even positions a frame around the head of
the man just left of center as if to ensure his honored place among the ancien régime.
But the most heated and protracted battle over public access was fought over
whether the museum should be open on Sundays.44 Citing considerations of religion,
budget, and security, the board defended its decision to close the institution on the
Sabbath, which notably diverged from practices standard to period museums both
stateside and abroad. In response, a broad coalition of critics argued, among other
things, that Sunday was the only day when working New Yorkers could allocate the
necessary time for the commute uptown and that the Boston MFA had always kept its
doors open on Sundays.
Never popular, the trustees’ refusal to open the Met on Sundays met with increas-
ing public outrage following a string of damning revelations. First, reports circulated
that the board members often arranged surreptitious visits to the museum on Sundays
for themselves and their friends.45 Then the art press learned that they had rebuffed
an offer from Baltimore collector William T. Walters to privately underwrite the addi-
tional expenses associated with Sunday openings for five years.46 The Met received
still more negative coverage when a park policeman evicted two Italian immigrant
men from the museum during a free day in May 1889 for allegedly “dirty and ragged”
attire. Although the director defended the decision by declaring that “it has been the
rule here for some time past never to admit to the Museum on free days any persons
who are uncleanly or not properly clad,” an eyewitness disputed this account of their
appearance in the pages of the New York World.47
Editorial cartoons on the subject that disparaged the trustees were both common
and caustic. In one New York Press caricature, “Is the Museum of Art for Money Bags
Only?” (Figure 7.6), its caption pointedly demands “Why Not Open It on Sunday for
the Benefit of the Working Man, Who Cannot Go on Week Days?” The illustration
presents New York’s museum-going elite as visually synonymous with the swollen
sacks of currency familiar from Thomas Nast cartoons. By this, the subjects’ corpu-
lence emblematizes their greedy monopoly over a public institution. Here the presence
of opera glasses suggests short-sighted self-interest, not sophistication.
For more than two decades, the trustees held fast against public opinion. Their posi-
tion on the matter was never unanimous—Robert Hoe, for one, was a vocal advocate
of Sunday openings—but in 1887 di Cesnola informed the Herald that two-thirds of
the board opposed such a public accommodation.48 “The Trustees have canvassed the
patrons of the institution, the persons who pay the greater part of the bill,” declared
Met President Henry Gurdon Marquand (see Figure 6.1) in 1889, “and have decided
that at present it is inexpedient to open on Sundays.”49 By consistently citing those
Figure 7.5 W. T. Smedley, “Autumn Reception at the Metropolitan Museum.” Harper’s Weekly
33:1717 (November 16, 1889): 909
Source: HarpWeek LLC
132 John Ott

Figure 7.6 “Is the Museum of Art for Money Bags Only?” New York Press, May 25, 1890. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art Scrapbook, 1889–1891
Source: Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

handful of bequests that stipulated that the museum stay closed on Sundays, the
­trustees clearly signaled that they privileged the views of a few members over the
needs of the city’s majority.50 Cornered by broad public opposition, the trustees fell
back on the museum’s status as a private corporation. In one 1890 interview with the
New York Post, Met President Marquand complained that “the noise comes from
those who have never paid a dollar for what there is in the building. It is very easy,”
he continued, without apparent irony, “to spend other peoples’ money.”51 During this
controversy, the trustees regularly and openly threatened to relocate the museum’s
privately held collections to another venue rather than succumb to public pressure and
only relented in 1892 when they secured a threefold increase of their annual operating
budget from the state government.52
And so, throughout this period, the trustees repeatedly reneged on their public
pledge to make the Met an educational center for the city’s working classes as soon as
this constituency left the theoretical realm of high-minded rhetoric and actually tried
 Metropolitan, Inc. 133
to gain physical access to the collections. At the museum’s grand opening in Central
Park in 1880, Joseph Choate had nobly orated that it was the Met’s mission

to promote the general welfare, to make education practical, to foster commerce,

to instruct and encourage the trades, and to enable the industries of our people to
keep pace with, instead of falling hopelessly behind, those of other States and
other Nations . . . now that art belongs to the people, and has become their best
resource and most efficient educator.53

Trustees like Choate liked to invoke the South Kensington Museum in London as their
model but invariably neglected to inform their listeners of its direct governance by the
British state.54
At every turn, the Met board favored loan exhibitions of original art over practices
of more obvious educational purpose. The trustees’ long-promised development of
comprehensive collections of industrial arts never came to fruition, while its short-lived
industrial art classes (1889–1896) were never conducted on-site, in the same hallowed
company of members’ loans and bequests.55 Plaster reproductions of the art histori-
cal canon—the chalky ancestors of art history survey textbooks—would have been
more instructive to the uninitiated than the museum’s highly idiosyncratic collections
of original works of art. Initially, the trustees gladly welcomed reproductions, whether
plaster or photograph, as they greatly helped to round out the meager holdings of its
institutional infancy; and as late as the 1890s, the museum was raising funds for casts.
But as art historian Alan Wallach has shown, Director di Cesnola objected to their
inclusion in the museum amid originals, and accordingly the Met devoted fewer of its
galleries to reproductions than did such early contemporaries as the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. And these plaster copies were
often cloistered in the building’s least desirable real estate. Casts of ancient art and
architecture donated by Joseph Drexel and Richard Morris Hunt in 1883, for example,
moldered along the south wall of the basement, where they received no direct light.56
Furthermore, the Met displayed its holdings in a manner that privileged aesthetic
delectation by connoisseurs. As late as 1892, commentators continued to lament the
lack of explanatory labels for the collections.57 The Met’s print catalogs, meanwhile,
cost visitors additional money but were of limited utility given the constantly chang-
ing nature of the loan exhibitions.58 Floor plans and illustrations of the Central Park
site, finally, reveal a clear hierarchy of institutional priorities: members’ loans and the
permanent collection dominated the first and second floors, while the anemic indus-
trial art collection, regularly touted as a chief attraction for the city’s mechanics and
artisans, languished in a dimly lit basement level that opened several months later than
the rest of the building.59
Depictions of the museum interiors in sympathetic publications, such as two
vignettes from Harper’s Weekly in 1880 (Figure 7.3) and 1889 (Figure 7.5), likewise
present the institution as a place for art appreciation by sophisticates. Gallerygoers in
both images exhibit aesthetic sensitivity through body language and comportment.
Standing with easy poise and at rest, these museum patrons seem to have been contem-
plating particular artworks for extended intervals. Individuals keep their arms close
to their bodies and their hands folded, behind their backs, or in pockets, as though
to signal that they know to look but not to touch. And those figures who do examine
134 John Ott
individual pieces do not gawk or gape but rather lean slightly forward or gently cock
their heads in order to convey at once familiarity and perspicacity. In the 1880 print,
the visitors stand next to or in front of such protective fixtures as guard ropes and
glass vitrines, not only to broadcast the monetary worth of the collections but also to
indicate how these viewers observe a respectful and disinterested distance from artistic
masterworks. Even William Wetmore Story’s statue of Medea, positioned at the left
margin of the 1880 illustration, seems to model this kind of contemplative aesthetic
discernment as she rests her weight on her back foot and lifts the knuckle of her left
index finger to her chin.60 Take her down from her pedestal, remove her dagger, and
costume her in period dress, and she would be indistinguishable from the refined audi-
ence that surrounds her.
Rather than fulfilling its charter as an educational institution, then, the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art played a critical role in articulating and ennobling bourgeois class
identity. Its galleries and receptions functioned much like the paneled halls and ban-
quets of the Union League Club but without the taint of selfish commercial interest or
divisive partisan politics. In Smedley’s illustration for Harper’s Weekly (Figure 7.5),
although many figures scrutinize individual canvases or consult catalogs, the series
of engaged pairs that comprise the front tier of patrons suggest that conversation
and camaraderie among the cognoscenti are as important here as connoisseurship.
In its first report to the full board in 1870, the Met’s Executive Committee correctly
predicted that a steady diet of loan exhibitions would ably serve to coalesce this com-
munity of elite art-lovers:

It has been suggested that a Loan Exhibition would be a powerful means of creat-
ing an institution and increasing knowledge of the objects of the institution . . .
in the course of the necessary arrangements the lovers of art, and the individuals
upon whose personal interest and exertions the museum has to depend, will come
to know each other and work together.61

Articulated at the very moment of the creation of the institutional form of the art
museum, this fundamental desire for a class identity defined by aesthetic taste, public
service, and civic pride played a formative role in the Met’s governance structures,
acquisition practices, display conventions, programming, and admission policies. It
is an impulse that finds its truest expression in the lists of members and sponsors that
grace art museums’ annual reports, exhibition catalogs, and marble foyers, carefully
tiered by level of financial support. This was as true in 1870 as it is today.

Notes
1 For example, Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New
York: Gillis Press, 1913); Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970); and Nancy Einreinhofer,
The American Art Museum: Elitism and Democracy (London: Leicester University Press,
1997), 32–52. Authors like Einreinhofer have greatly overstated the public outreach efforts
of the Met and take the founders at their word by describing their objectives thusly: “[T]he
museum would be an educational institution, it would have a moral mission, and it would
foster national pride and prestige.” Einreinhofer, The American Art Museum, 32. Even
social art historians like Carol Duncan occasionally take these early trustees’ rhetoric at face
value: “There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Met’s trustees in their espousal of
this democratic ideal.” Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 58.
 Metropolitan, Inc. 135
2 Key texts include Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics ­(London:
Routledge, 1995); Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century
Boston, Part I: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,”
Media, Culture & Society 4 (1982): 33–50; Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship
in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,”
Media, Culture & Society 4 (1982): 303–22; Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 48–71; Carol Dun-
can and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3 (December 1980):
448–64; Neil Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,”
American Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Winter 1962): 545–66; Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contra-
diction: Essays on the American Art Museum in the United States (Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1998), 9–21; and Vera L. Zolberg, “Conflicting Visions in American
Art Museums,” Theory and Society 10, no. 1 (January 1981): 103–25.
3 Andreas Huyssen has urged scholars to undertake more bottom-up perspectives on the
museum. Andreas Huyssen, “Escape From Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium,” in
Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17.
4 “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Amateur 2, no. 4 (March 1880): 68. See also
“Metropolitan Museum Finances,” Art Amateur 3, no. 2 (July 1880): 24.
5 On the exhibition of Johnston’s collection, see “The Summer Exhibition at the Academy,”
New York Evening Post, June 13, 1876, 4; and “Metropolitan Museum of Art,” New York
Evening Post, June 10, 1876, 4.
6 On the auction, see John Ott, “How New York Stole the Luxury Art Market: Blockbuster
Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in Gilded Age America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42, nos. 2–3
(Summer–Autumn 2008): 133–58.
7 Newspaper clipping, New York Star, April 7, 1889. Archives of American Art, Washington,
DC, reel NMM 26, frame 246; Charles Kurtz, “The American Art Association and the Prize
Exhibition,” Art Union 1, nos. 8–9 (August–September 1884): 161. On the Prize Funds,
see also Gerald Bolas, “The Early Years of the American Art Association” (PhD diss., City
University of New York, 1998), 177–95.
8 By one account, the museum owned only about 330 of the approximately 1,300 works
exhibited at the eight loan exhibitions mounted during its first decade. “American Art
Chronicle,” American Art Review 2, no. 2 (1881): 81.
9 See, for example, Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Paintings at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1874), 19.
10 “An Interesting Exhibition,” Art Union 1, no. 6 (June–July 1884): 118. “These praisewor-
thy summer lendings are a double-edged benefit, the wealthy owner obtaining fire-proof
storage and watching during the dog-days hegira, and the public the educational advantage
of the loan.” “Notes,” Chronology of the American Connoisseur 1, no. 3 (June 1883): 35;
also noted in Zolberg, “Conflicting Visions,” 105.
11 “Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Journal 6, no. 6 (1880): 181.
12 For a complete analysis of the Armory project, see Chelsea Bruner, “The Seventh Regiment
Armory Commission and Design: Elite Identity, Aesthetic Patronage and Professional Prac-
tice in Gilded Age New York” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013).
13 See, for example, “To the Members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Annual Report of
the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2 (1872): 22; and “To the Members of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art 3 (1873): 40.
14 Annual reports document the high cost of these improvements: on vitrines, see “To the
Members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art 4 (1874): 48; on transportation, see “To the Members of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art 8 (1878): 129; and on lighting, see “The Centennial Loan Exhibition,” New York
Evening Post, September 11, 1876, 2.
15 “To the Members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art 9 (1879): 146–47.
16 “New York Museums: The Sunday Opening Question,” Studio 1 (n.s.), no. 20 (May 9,
1885): 236.
17 The classic study on the proliferation of casts in early art museums and their educational
function appears in Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction, 39–54.
136 John Ott
18 John Taylor Johnston and Louis P. di Cesnola, “To the Members of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 18
(1887): 383. See also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 71–73; and, for a thorough
examination of Wolfe’s patronage and support of the Metropolitan Museum, see Margaret
R. Laster, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: Collecting and Patronage in the Gilded Age” (PhD
diss., City University of New York, 2013).
19 On the longtime costs of bequests, see Peter Temin, “An Economic History of American Art
Museums,” in The Economics of Art Museums, ed. Martin S. Feldstein (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1991), 182–83.
20 On the atypicality of the Met’s public subsidy, see Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum
from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 213; and Temin,
“An Economic History,” 180–86.
21 On the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, see Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited,” 549–50; and
Karl E. Meyer, The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics: A Twentieth Century Fund Report
(New York: Morrow, 1979), 225–26.
22 William Cullen Bryant et al., A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York: Pro-
ceedings of a Meeting (New York: The Committee, 1869), 5. On the Union League Club
and its art collection, see Henry W. Bellows, Historical Sketch of the Union League Club
of New York, Its Origin, Organization, and Work, 1863–1879 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1879), 141–42; Will Irwin, A History of the Union League Club of New York City
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952), esp. 85–89; Linda Skalet, “The Market for American
Painting in New York, 1870–1915” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980), 84–96;
and Union League Club of New York, Union League Club Historical Illustrations of the
War for the Union (New York: Union League Club, 1864).
23 “Who Owns Our Museums,” Art Amateur 1, no. 5 (October 1879): 90. Similar senti-
ments appeared in the Studio in 1885. “The money paid by the city during the last fourteen
years,” the author complained, “will show the absurdity of the Director and Trustees of
the ­Metropolitan Museum that the institution under their charge is a private affair.” “New
York Museums: The Sunday Opening Question,” 236.
24 For laments about the exclusiveness of organizational meetings, see “A Museum of Art
in New York,” New York Evening Post, October 27, 1869, 1; of fundraising, see “The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,” New York Mail, March 14, 1871, 2; and of the election of
trustees, see “Public Rights in a Public Museum,” Art Amateur 2, no. 6 (May 1880): 113.
25 Gaston L. Feuardent, “Tampering with Antiquities,” Art Amateur 3, no. 3 (August 1880):
48–50. See also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 62–68.
26 The internal review was published in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reports of Committees
Printed for the Information of Members of the Museum (New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1881–82), 9–15.
27 Quoted in “General di Cesnola ‘Restored,’ ” Art Amateur 4, no. 4 (March 1881): 68. The
trustees’ continued silence also made American Art Review increasingly suspicious as it
discussed the case over the course of the year. Sylvester Koehler, “Inquiry Into the Changes
Against General di Cesnola,” American Art Review 2, nos. 4–8 (February–May 1881):
162–64, 210–13, 250–51, 37–38, 82, respectively.
28 Invocations of the Tweed Ring appear in “Damaging for General di Cesnola,” Art Ama-
teur 4, no. 5 (April 1881): 90; “New Light in the Cesnola Case,” Art Amateur 6, no. 3
­(February 1882): 48; and “A Word With Friends,” Studio 1 (n.s.), no. 12 (January 17,
1885): 141.
29 Peter Temin has discussed American art museums’ exploitation of these dual budgets; see his
“An Economic History,” 179–80.
30 Catalogue of the Pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1872). See also Howe, A History, 135–46.
31 “Sunday Opening,” New York Post, November 9, 1892, 2.
32 On the Tiffany’s proposal, see Metropolitan Museum of Art, Address of the Officers of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the People of New York (New York: Francis & Loutrel,
1871), 7–8; and “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” New York Times, February 14, 1871,
5. DiMaggio has also observed the reluctance of entrepreneurial elites to support cultural
philanthropy in the context of for-profit organizations. DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneur-
ship, Part I,” 36–37.
 Metropolitan, Inc. 137
33 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
34 Choate, quoted in Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 10
(1880): 178.
35 On Choate, see Meyer, The Art Museum, 26–27; and D. M. Marshman Jr., “The Four Ages
of Joseph Choate,” American Heritage 26, no. 3 (April 1975): 33–40ff.
36 As Paul DiMaggio writes, these entrepreneurial elites preferred “institutions that could
claim to serve the community, even as they defined the community to include only the
elite and upper-middle classes.” DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship, Part I,” 38. These
­contradictions have also been discussed in Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 54–57; Daniel J.
Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 173–75; and Zolberg,
“Conflicting Visions,” 105–8.
37 A Friend of the Museum, “The Metropolitan Museum,” New York Tribune, October 9,
1875, 4.
38 “Fine Arts: Metropolitan Art Museum,” New York Tribune, March 28, 1880, 7.
39 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 715, 960, 1077.
40 Howe, A History, 163.
41 “A Ray of Hope,” Studio 1 (n.s.), no. 14 (February 14, 1885): 167.
42 John Taylor Johnston, “Annual Report to May, 1881,” Annual Report of the Trustees of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art 11 (1881): 193.
43 “Notes,” Art Journal 6, no. 5 (1880): 159.
44 The debate over Sunday openings is outlined in Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces,
75–79.
45 “The Sunday-Opening Question,” Studio 2 (n.s.), no. 1 (July 1886): 1–2; “Recent Gifts to
the Museum,” Studio 2 (n.s.), no. 10 (April 1887): 173; and “Art Notes,” Critic 15, no. 380
(April 11, 1891): 200.
46 “Sunday-Opening of the Metropolitan Museum,” Studio 4, no. 4 (March 1889): 57; and
Ripley Hitchcock, “New York’s Art Museum,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 28, no. 6
(December 1889): 673.
47 “Is Our Museum a Class Show?,” New York World, May 6, 1889, 6; “A Reply to Gen.
Cesnola,” New York World, May 7, 1889, 6; and “A Reply to Gen. Cesnola,” New York
World, May 9, 1889, 6. See also Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 84–85.
48 “Di Cesnola Boils Over,” New York Herald, January 2, 1887, 2. The Met director almost
immediately claimed that he had never said any such thing. See “Opening Museums on
Sunday,” New-York Tribune, January 5, 1887, 2. On Hoe, see “Sunday Opening at the
Museum,” New York World, October 19, 1885, 4.
49 “Sunday-Opening of the Metropolitan Museum,” Studio 4, no. 4 (March 1889): 59.
50 I have only been able to identify two bequests with such a requirement: a $4,000 gift from
an unnamed donor and the donation of the Robert and Mary Stuart collections. See “The
Museum and Sunday,” New York Evening Post, May 29, 1880, 3; and “Opening the
Museum on Sunday,” New-York Tribune, May 22, 1885, 5.
51 Marquand, quoted in “Sunday-Opening of the Metropolitan Museum,” Studio 4, no. 4
(March 1889): 60.
52 After extensive negotiations with the board, the state increased annual allocations from
$25,000 to $82,000. See “American Notes,” Studio 7, no. 14 (March 5, 1892): 133; and
“Taxpayers Must Meet It,” New York Times, December 20, 1892, 9.
53 Choate, quoted in Annual Report 10, 174.
54 Choate cited South Kensington in his grand opening address in 1880, as quoted in Annual
Report 10, 174–75. On the South Kensington Museum, see Malcolm Baker, “Museums,
Collections, and Their Histories,” in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, eds. Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1997), 17–21; and Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in Art
and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2003), 7–11.
55 On the Met’s early industrial arts programs, see Francis Pohl, “Art, Education, and Labor: The
Metropolitan Museum’s Workers Education Program,” Kunst und Politik 7 (2005): 43–44.
138 John Ott
56 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Report of the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art to the General Committee (New York: C. S. Westcott, 1870), 17; and “The
Reopening of the Metropolitan Museum,” Art Amateur 8, no. 2 (January 1883): 28. On
casts, see DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship, Part II,” 306–7; and Wallach, Exhibiting
Contradiction, 39–54.
57 See “A Defect of the Metropolitan Museum,” New York Evening Post, December 28,
1892, 5.
58 On the comparably exclusionary function of museum catalogs in France, see Sherman,
­Worthy Monuments, 115–17, 191, 216–17.
59 Floor plans are reproduced in Howe, A History, 195; and Ripley Hitchcock, “New York’s
Art Museum,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 28, no. 6 (December 1889): 664–65.
60 For a gender-based interpretation of William Wetmore Story’s Medea, see Lauren Lessing’s
essay in this volume.
61 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Report of the Executive Committee, 12.
8 Un-Domesticating the Ideal
William Wetmore Story and The
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lauren Lessing

After eight years in rented quarters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to
the public in its new, permanent building at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Second Street
on April 1, 1880. By early May, ten thousand people a day were visiting the still-­
incomplete Renaissance revival building, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey
Mould (see Figure 7.1).1 An article in Harper’s Weekly described the experience of
walking through its Central Park-facing entrance:

You pass through a vestibule so covered with heavy matting that even if you do
not comply with its legend, “Wipe your feet,” the profane dust will have left them
before you have traversed its length and reached the west entrance hall. Here you
find yourself surrounded by groups of marble statuary, artistically arranged.2

Centrally placed among these statues were four larger-than-life female figures in
marble by the American sculptor William Wetmore Story (1819–1895): Cleopatra,
Polyxena, Medea, and Semiramis (Figures 8.1–8.3 and see Plate 7). A double-page
wood engraving accompanying the article in Harper’s Weekly (see Figure 7.3) and
another published in the Art Journal (Figure 8.4) depict the museum’s west entrance
hall from two different angles, with Story’s sculptures prominently featured in both.
In the Harper’s Weekly engraving, Medea and Semiramis appear on either side of a
wide entryway into the museum’s central exhibit hall. In the Art Journal illustration,
Medea and Semiramis appear in profile, as do the seated figures Cleopatra and Pol-
yxena positioned against heavy square columns in the center of the gallery and facing
the opposite direction. An 1883 article in the Art Loan Record confirms that Story’s
sculptures were placed directly in the sightlines of visitors as they entered the museum
and as they left its central exhibition space, effectively framing their visit:

In the sculpture room of the Metropolitan Museum in New York occupying the
most conspicuous positions in the room, stand four remarkable statues by an
American artist of whom we may justly feel proud. . . . the statues are much larger
than life and are very imposing figures, seeming to pervade the whole place with
their silent grandeur.3

In this essay, I will attempt to account for the prominence of Story’s sculptures within
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inaugural installation and speculate about the role
that the museum’s trustees and first director hoped they would play there. To this
end, I will examine Story’s work and reputation in the shifting cultural landscape of
the United States—and in New York City in particular—in the 1870s. During this
140 Lauren Lessing
decade, as a new class of elite, bourgeois Americans laid the foundations for public art
museums, a growing number of artists, critics, and philanthropists celebrated the fact
that art education would no longer be a private, domestic matter but a public concern
to be carried out by male professionals supposedly free from feminine, sentimental

Figure 8.1 William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra (second version), 1858, remodeled 1864, carved
1869. Marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of John Taylor Johnston,
1888 (88.5a–d)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 141
biases. This new conception of art education was—like the project of museum build-
ing itself—tightly bound to the perceived threat that immigrants posed to American
culture and to the United States’ new imperial ambitions. Story’s pedantic and decid-
edly unsentimental works, which told cautionary tales of rampant female and foreign
power, were well suited to support art education’s new civilizing mission.

Figure 8.2 William Wetmore Story, Polyxena, 1873. Marble. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of George
Freifeld (05.240)
Source: Courtesy, Brooklyn Museum
Figure 8.3 John Serz, engraving of W. W. Story’s Medea. William J. Clark Jr., Great American
Sculptures (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1878)
Source: Collection of Lauren Lessing
Figure 8.4 Wood engraving illustrating “Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Art Journal 6 (1880): 237
Source: Collection of Lauren Lessing.
144 Lauren Lessing
William Wetmore Story, a Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin, was the son of an
associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Story became a successful lawyer only to
abandon the law for a career as a sculptor, poet, and essayist after his father Joseph
Story’s death in 1845.4 Encouraged by a host of intellectual friends, Story left Boston
for Rome, where he made several extended stays before settling there permanently with
his family in 1856. Like other American sculptors, Story took advantage of the low cost
of living and the access to high-quality marble as well as the trained models and studio
assistants that Italy provided. However, he distanced himself from most other expatri-
ate American sculptors, whom he viewed as social and intellectual inferiors. In an 1861
letter to Charles Eliot Norton, he complained, “At Rome who is there?—only such rub-
bish as [Joseph] Mozier, [Randolph] Rogers, & Co. among the artists, fellows whose
brains are an inch deep . . . and who degrade Art into Trade and money-making.”5 He
thought no better of his colleagues in Florence, describing the work of Hiram Powers
and his “school of imitators” as “not only wanting grace but meaning nothing.”6
Story’s contempt stemmed, in part, from professional rivalry. Despite his personal
wealth, which gave him some independence from the art market, he had hoped to ben-
efit as Rogers, Mozier, and Powers had from the steady stream of wealthy A ­ merican
travelers passing through Italy on the Grand Tour, many of whom ordered marble
statuary for their parlors and front halls. Looking back on the middle decades of
the nineteenth century in 1882, Story’s friend F. Marion Crawford (the son of the
­American sculptor Thomas Crawford) recalled that, in order to capitalize on this mar-
ket, artists had to address the tastes of women in particular.

[American men] soon found out . . . as it became easier to cross the ocean, that
what they wanted was art, or, to speak accurately, the sensations produced by
objects of art; and with scant time but unlimited money at their command, they
handed over to wives and daughters, by tacit and very willing consent, the task of
supplying the deficiency.7

No one was more successful at courting this audience of well-to-do female travelers
than Rogers, who claimed to have sold more than one hundred copies of his 1853
sculpture Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii.8 Nydia’s success almost certainly
inspired Story’s 1857 sculpture Hero in Search of Leander, which similarly presents
a distraught young woman searching in the darkness for her beloved.9 Yet despite the
prediction of one journalist that Story’s “timid, beautiful girl, over-mastered by one
sentiment, will probably reappear in a hundred imitations and become a household
form,” Hero remained unsold. Story’s relatively staid and classicizing figure, drawn
from Greek and Latin texts, lacks the absorbing drama and accessibility of Rogers’s
heroine—a character in a popular historical romance by the British author Edward
Bulwer-Lytton.10
Although outwardly friendly and supportive of his female colleagues, Story also
harbored profound ambivalence about the growing number of American women
sculptors working in Italy. Of the young Harriet Hosmer, for instance, Story wrote to
James Russell Lowell in 1853:

Miss Hosmer is also, to the say the word, very willful and too independent by
half . . . She is doing very well and shows a capitol spirit, and I have no doubt
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 145
will succeed, but it is one thing to copy and another to create. She may or may
not have inventive powers as an artist, but if she have will not she be the first
woman?11

To Story’s dismay, the “white, marmorean flock” of American women sculptors had
become so popular by the 1860s that he began losing commissions for public statues
to them. In 1860, Emma Stebbins was chosen over him to create a bronze memorial
depicting Horace Mann for Boston’s State House Yard. Following Abraham Lincoln’s
assassination in 1865, Vinnie Ream won a federal commission to create a statue of the
martyred president for the U.S. Capitol, provoking Story’s friend, Massachusetts Sena-
tor Charles Sumner, to deliver an extended tirade disparaging her abilities on Story’s
behalf. Agreeing with Sumner that the commission should have gone to Story, Senator
Jacob Howard of Vermont added, “in view of [Ream’s] sex, I shall expect a complete
failure of her work.” The widely shared belief that women sculptors were incapable of
executing serious, heroic work was echoed in 1871 by the critic James Jackson Jarves,
who wrote, “Women, by nature, are likewise prompted in the treatment of sculpture
to motives of fancy and sentiment, rather than to compete with men in realistic por-
traiture, or absolute creative imagination.”12
Frustrated by the taste of his bourgeois audience and responding to growing anxiety
within elite circles that the sentimental predilections of female sculptors and patrons
were eroding the intellectual rigor of American art, Story set out to undomesticate
and re-masculinize ideal sculpture. He announced his intentions in an 1860 letter to
Sumner. After describing his idea for an allegorical figure that would represent “Africa
seeing her fate in the future” (a conception that would become The Libyan Sibyl), he
noted resignedly,

I am well aware that the African Sybil never can be as popular as a child & dog
under the name “Fidelity” . . . [but] what satisfies the middle class must be of the
middle class—a large popularity shows a medium quality.

The proper role of a sculptor, he believed, was to educate his audience by elevating
their taste.13 This belief became deeply entrenched in Story’s understanding of his own
career, and he reiterated it in the lecture “What Is Art?” which he delivered in various
East Coast cities, including New York, in 1877.14
At the time that he wrote to Sumner, Story had already modeled his first ver-
sion of the imposing seated figure, Cleopatra. He began work on The Libyan Sibyl
shortly afterward. By 1861, both figures had been carved in marble and were on
view in Story’s studio. Together they embodied the sculptor’s new understanding
of art’s educational role. In its first iteration, Cleopatra depicts the first-century
BCE Egyptian queen as an African woman seated on a lion-footed throne. Her legs
extend before her, and her sandaled feet emerge only partially from her sagging,
voluminous robes. Her right hand plucks idly at the fabric covering her knee, while
her left arm is propped on the back of the throne and her left hand supports her
slightly bowed head. The bodice of her garment has slipped down to reveal one
shoulder and breast. Her face, framed by an Egyptian headdress, is broad-featured
and brooding. Unlike Cleopatra, The Libyan Sibyl (which Story described as his
“anti-slavery sermon in stone”) leans forward, her chin resting in the palm of her
146 Lauren Lessing
right hand as she gazes into space. She too wears heavy, sagging drapery, although it
covers only her legs, which are crossed like a man’s. Story wrote, “It is a very mas-
sive figure, big-shouldered, large-bosomed, with nothing of the Venus in it, but, as
far as I could make it, luxuriant and heroic.”15
As art historian Jan Seidler Ramirez has argued, Story’s use of pyramidal seated
postures in Cleopatra and The Libyan Sibyl is based on classical prototypes and
effectively conveys a mood of melancholic introspection.16 Beyond this, however, the
arrangement of these figures and their heroic size (the figures would be roughly seven
feet high if standing) greatly increases the floor space that they consume, making
them unwieldy domestic ornaments. Although the houses that wealthy Americans
built after the Civil War grew dramatically in size and included more overtly theatri-
cal spaces, Cleopatra and The Libyan Sibyl were unusually large, even by postbel-
lum standards. Only a mansion equipped with a sizeable domestic art gallery could
comfortably accommodate them. Certainly they are nothing like the “ordinary parlor
statues, Eves, Greek Slaves, Judiths and the like” that James Jackson Jarves derided in
his 1869 book, Art Thoughts.17
Story’s sculptures’ subject matter is even less domestic than their size. With regard
to Cleopatra, cultural historian Joy S. Kasson has argued that Story domesticated the
Egyptian queen by showing her in a moment of capitulation and defeat.18 Yet as Nath-
aniel Hawthorne noted in his celebrated description of the sculpture in The Marble
Faun, the figure appears neither submissive nor harmless:

There was a great smoldering furnace deep down in the woman’s heart. The
repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or foot again;
and yet, such was the creature’s latent energy and fierceness, she might spring
upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing
midway in your throat.19

Rather than showing her dead or during the moment of her suicide (as had most
earlier artists), Story depicted a still-dangerous woman whose restless right hand
and intense expression convey barely contained aggression. Historian Barbara
­Welter famously defined the ideal of the “true woman”—the pivot around which
­mid-nineteenth-century sentimental domesticity turned—as “passive, pious, pure and
domestic.”20 This ideal was also fair skinned. Cleopatra and The Libyan Sibyl vio-
late the ideal of true womanhood in every way possible. Although he carved them in
marble, Story gave them the features of dark-skinned African women. Nor do these
works invite sentimental readings. Rather than eliciting the protective or empathetic
responses typical for ideal sculptures, they keep viewers at arm’s length. Again and
again, ­nineteenth-century critics stressed their inscrutability.21 Femininity, as presented
by Story’s sculptures, is not a benign, spiritually elevating influence but a dark, myste-
rious, and potentially destructive force.
In 1862, Pope Pius IX invited Story to exhibit both Cleopatra and The Libyan Sibyl
in the modern Roman court at the International Exhibition in London, where they
were an instant sensation. Story emerged in reviews as a different kind of s­ culptor—
one who created ideal marble figures that were decidedly undomestic. Critics dwelled
on Cleopatra’s and The Libyan Sibyl’s difference from other sculpture on view,
describing them as powerful, intellectual, and political rather than pretty, emotional,
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 147
or sentimental. Of the Sibyl, for instance, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Maga-
22

zine declared,

No figure that can be named in modern sculpture is finer. It is full of power,

full of meaning, and, unlike most of the noted works of later sculpture, is some-
thing more than a graceful, expressive figure, exquisitely wrought. . . . In Story’s
statue . . . there is an idea. It is not a Venus, nor a dancing-girl, nor Diana, nor
Psyche, nor Flora, nor a Muse, nor a Grace; but it is a woman of an African race,
so endowed that, as you see her sitting and solemnly pondering, she becomes to
one in the marble, as she would become in life, the genius of that race, forecasting
its destiny.23

Although Jarves disliked most American ideal sculpture, he admired Story’s Cleopatra
and The Libyan Sibyl:

Their greatness consists in the originality of thought. They are the growth of new
art-blood. . . . Sculpture of this character displays a creative imagination and dar-
ing of no common order. Born of, and yet in the same degree forestalling, the great
political ideas of the age, it is high art teaching noble truth.24

William Rosetti described Story as both “unconventional” and “potent,” and the
­German author Adolf Stahr pronounced him an “entirely new creative power . . . [in
the] realm of historic-national art.”25 Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, a champion of
moral influence within the domestic sphere, expressed the fervent wish that Cleopatra
and The Libyan Sibyl would one day “adorn the Capitol at Washington.”26
The Sibyl is, as Story himself declared, an overtly political, abolitionist work. In
fact, Stowe later claimed that the sculptor had based the figure on Stowe’s description
of the black American abolitionist Sojourner Truth. The meaning of Story’s Cleopatra
is far more ambiguous, and nineteenth-century critics’ inclination to view it as a politi-
cal sculpture depended in large part on its 1862 pairing with The Libyan Sibyl.27 In
the United States, the Civil War raised questions about what future roles women and
black Americans would play in the public sphere. Members of both groups lobbied for
the franchise, giving rise to widespread anxiety about a possible postbellum erosion of
white male power—an anxiety felt by even relatively enlightened, liberal abolitionists
like Story. While The Libyan Sibyl pondered the fate of black Americans, Cleopatra
served as a cautionary figure, expressing what Kasson has termed “the problematics
of female power” and also deep reservations about the ability of non-white people
to govern wisely or temperately.28 Together, then, these figures expressed a particular
ideological position to their audience in 1862—one that decried slavery while insisting
on the continuing need for a white, male monopoly on public power.
Story reworked Cleopatra in 1864, giving her a low footstool and a beaded neck-
lace, altering her gown so that it flowed more gracefully across her torso and legs,
and parting the fingers and thumb of her left hand. Although this last change may
seem insignificant, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian recalled his father and Story
discussing the best position for Cleopatra’s hand while the figure was still in clay.
“Should the forefinger and thumb meet or be separated? If they were separated, it
meant the relaxation of despair; if they met, she was still meditating defiance or
148 Lauren Lessing
revenge.”29 By opening Cleopatra’s hand in his second version, Story symbolically
moved the defeated queen one step closer to death. It was this revised version of the
sculpture that enraptured John Taylor Johnston, a future founder of the Metropoli-
tan Museum.
Johnston, a Yale-educated lawyer who had made a fortune investing in railroads
and suburban real estate, embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe in 1868, arriving
in Rome with his family on December 22. He and his wife visited various American
artists as they toured the city, and Johnston took careful note of what each had avail-
able for sale. They arrived at Story’s studio on January 9, 1869, and were surprised
to find the sculptor “very pleasant though he is considered as aiming to avoid his
countrymen and cultivate English society. His Cleopatra is superb, and his Libyan
Sybil almost as good.” After making a survey of other American sculptor’s studios,
Johnston concluded that “Cleopatra is still the handsomest modern statue we have
seen in Rome.”30 He ordered a copy of it a month later for his Fifth Avenue mansion,
where he maintained a spacious gallery above his stable that he opened to the public
every Thursday afternoon (a practice that other wealthy New York collectors also
adopted). Probably because Johnston was so generous in sharing his collection, he
was elected president of the nascent Metropolitan Museum just a few months after
he returned from Europe. He spent the next decade attentively shaping the museum’s
mission, promoting it to the public, and securing funding for a collection, a permanent
building, and operating expenses. Financial difficulties and failing health forced him
to sell his art collection in 1876, but he held on to Cleopatra, lending Story’s sculpture
to the museum in 1878 when its Fifth Avenue building was nearly finished.31
Johnston was aided in his work for the museum by the varnish manufacturer and
real estate investor William Tilden Blodgett, who served as chair of the Met’s Executive
Committee and later as one of its first vice presidents. It was Blodgett who brokered
the institution’s purchase of its first significant collection—a large group of Dutch and
Flemish Old Master paintings.32 Like Johnston, Blodgett was an avid art collector,
and letters exchanged between the two men in the 1870s show that they assisted each
other in art purchases while maintaining a friendly rivalry. Traveling in Europe a year
after Johnston installed Cleopatra in his private gallery, Blodgett followed his friend’s
footsteps to Story’s studio. In a March 1872 letter to Johnston, he wrote that “Story
has a Semiramis which tempts me—one of his very best things, a superb classical fig-
ure. I have a good mind to purchase it.”33 Within a week, he had. Possibly intending
to outdo Johnston in philanthropy as well as in collecting, Blodgett arranged to lend
the sculpture directly to the new Metropolitan Museum. He wrote to the museum’s
superintendent to ensure that his loan would receive adequate publicity.

Have published something like the following (this is entre nous). . . . Mr. William
T. Blodgett, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Museum of Art, now in
Rome, we understand has ordered the chef d’oeuvre of our countryman Mr. Story
the celebrated sculptor. A life size [sic] figure of Semiramis sitting on a couch in
marble. It is regarded by all artists and connoisseurs as one of the sculptor’s hap-
piest efforts and has excited general interest in Rome.

Like Cleopatra, Semiramis is a seated figure representing a queen of the ancient

world—an early ninth-century BCE ruler of Assyria. Story, a lover of theater and Ital-
ian opera, likely based the sculpture on Voltaire’s tragedy Semiramis of 1748 or on
Gioachino Rossini’s 1823 opera, Semiramide.34 In either case, the sculpture seems to
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 149
illustrate the moment when Semiramis begins to repent her crimes. She has just sent
her son to kill her lover, with whom she murdered his father many years earlier, and
will soon end her life by throwing herself in front of her son’s sword. In Story’s sculp-
ture, the doomed queen half reclines in her low-backed chair, her brow furrowed in
concentration and the fingers of her right hand nervously plucking at a cushion. She
is swathed in a voluminous robe and (as in The Libyan Sibyl) her legs are crossed—
a shockingly unfeminine posture by nineteenth-century standards. Critics described
Semiramis’s aura of malevolent and foreign femininity.

Story’s new and superb statue of Semiramis is one of the boldest things he has ever
modeled, and one of the most beautiful. . . . [The statue] expresses cruelty, pas-
sion, intellect and coldness with that peculiar beauty Story gives to the Syrian face
he models . . . it is the face of one of those beautiful, tigerish women history tells
us have existed, have sinned, ruled, and made humanity suffer.35

By the time Blodgett’s Semiramis arrived at the museum, another sculpture by Story—
Medea—had already been lent by former trustee Henry Chauncey. A writer for the
Art Journal observed both figures in the spacious entrance hall of the museum’s rented
quarters at 128 West Fourteenth Street.

Of the two, the Medea is in our estimation much the more striking and powerful.
The brooding and stern expression of her face finds a response in her entire pose,
in the draperies, which leave the upper portion of her figure free as if for action
in the meditated deed of blood, in her massive proportions, and the power of her
polished arms.36

Kasson has convincingly argued that Story’s Medea was inspired by Ernest Legouvé’s
1855 tragedy, Médée. In keeping with the sentimental ethos of the mid-nineteenth
century, Legouvé softened the myth of the Greek hero Jason’s barbarian consort, who
murdered her own children in a jealous rage. In his play, Medea is a sympathetic
character who kills her sons in a misguided attempt to protect them. However, there is
little softness or sentimentality in the figure Story modeled. Like Cleopatra and Semi-
ramis, Medea broods as she prepares to take terrible action.
When another copy of Story’s Medea was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia the following year, it provoked strong reactions. The sculpture was dis-
played directly beneath a skylight—a position that displeased Story, who complained
that his figure was “illuminated by reflection from the floor.”37 Despite its poor light-
ing, most visitors were enraptured. “The statue par excellence, Story’s ‘Medea,’ has at
last arrived, and everyone is in ecstasies over it,” declared one critic. Another described
the mixture of sympathy and excitement that the sculpture elicited:

The stern knitted brow, the vehement, resolute mouth, and the expression of min-
gled determination, sorrow, and despair reveal the awful secret of the murderous
knife clasped in the right hand. The pose of the figure is very graceful, and the
entire work interesting and thrilling.38

The centennial judges awarded Medea a medal of artistic excellence; however, not
all responses were positive. Despite a guardrail and signs discouraging visitors from
touching artwork, a vandal snapped off Medea’s dagger. Ramirez has attributed this
150 Lauren Lessing
offense to souvenir hunters; however, it seems equally likely that (as Kasson has
argued) the vandal acted on an impulse to symbolically castrate Story’s statue of a
threateningly phallic woman. Regardless, the incident confirmed the sculptor’s worst
fears about the incivility of American audiences. “At the Centennial they broke my
Medea,” he wrote mournfully to a friend. “I was a fool to send it.”39
Exactly when Story’s sculpture was attacked is uncertain; however, a cartoon that
appeared in Harper’s Weekly on July 1, 1876, suggests that its defacement was not an
isolated incident (Figure 8.5). In “Donkeys at the Centennial,” Frank Bellew depicted
bipedal asses in human clothes attacking paintings and sculptures. In a vignette at
upper left, above a caption that reads “Art Critics of Sculpture,” a donkey jabs
Antonio Canova’s 1804 statue, Venus Italica, with a knife. In a scene below labeled
“Statue Returned to the Artist,” a shocked sculptor finds his just-uncrated artwork
covered with graffiti and missing a hand. The social and political implications of
this cartoon are clear. The donkey has been a symbol of the Democratic Party since
1828. Furthermore, in a vignette at lower right, a caricatured Irishman sells “blades
and spikes” to the long-eared hooligans. For the affluent Republican editors and
readers of Harper’s Weekly, Bellew’s donkeys were humorous stand-ins for working-
class immigrants—the Democratic Party base in New York and Philadelphia. But if
this cartoon pillories the disrespect that immigrants and other members of the lower
classes supposedly had for art, it also extolls the power of art to control the rabble.
In the center of the scene, framed by a crown of thorns denoting noble suffering, an
imposing, classically garbed female figure holds a cringing donkey by the shoulder
as she prepares to chastise him with a raised cat-o’-nine-tails. The eagle above her
suggests that she represents Columbia; however, she shares Medea’s “stern, knitted
brow” and “vehement, resolute mouth,” and like Medea, she holds a weapon in her
right hand. Unlike Story’s maimed marble figure, however, this neoclassical sculpture
is fighting back and has already placed one donkey in the stocks “for defacing works
of art.”
Bellew’s cartoon reflected a real belief, shared by many elite New Yorkers, in the
civilizing power of art. “Donkeys at the Centennial” echoes the opinion of William
Stillman, coeditor of the art journal the Crayon, who declared in 1860 that

a marble female form, pure in fancy and material, may greatly assist in preserving
order. A fine ideal statue . . . would, wherever it could be seen, be more effective
in any given area than twenty policemen. We would have one visible in the Park
at every turn, and placed in the Park solely on account of order.40

The last sculpture by Story lent to the museum before it moved to its Central Park
building was Polyxena, which depicts the beautiful daughter of Priam, the legendary
King of Troy, as a thoughtful and straight-backed young girl. According to ancient
sources, ­Polyxena lured the Greek warrior Achilles to his death to avenge his killing of
her brother, Hector. In reprisal, the victorious Greeks sacrificed Polyxena at the tomb
of their fallen hero. In Polyxena, as in Cleopatra and Semiramis, Story presented a
seated femme fatale meditating on her past sins and impending death. In 1873, he sold
the sculpture to John Munson Bixby, a wealthy New York lawyer, real estate developer,
and novelist, and Bixby’s son lent it to the museum six years later. Although Polyxena
received comparatively little critical attention, the sculpture clearly impressed Frank
Waller, who made it a focal point for his oil study of the museum’s rented Fourteenth
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 151

Figure 8.5 Frank Bellew, “Donkeys at the Centennial.” Wood engraving. Harper’s Weekly 1
(July 1876)
Source: Collection of Lauren Lessing

Street building41 (Figure 8.6). The sketch shows a fashionably but modestly dressed
woman standing in the museum’s entrance hall directly in front of Polyxena, looking
down at a guidebook in her hand. Both the woman and the sculpture are shown in
profile, and the fall of the woman’s skirt echoes the folded drapery around Polyxena’s
lower legs.
152 Lauren Lessing

Figure 8.6 Frank Waller, Entrance Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth
Street, ca. 1881. Oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1920
(20.77)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

Waller was the first president of the Art Students League, which opened its doors in
New York in 1875. In order to institute the best modern curriculum for his painting
school, he spent much of 1878 visiting art academies in Europe, where he found that
access to museum collections was a crucial component of European art education. He
subsequently negotiated with the Metropolitan Museum’s trustees to give his students
free access to the museum’s galleries with sketching privileges. It is not surprising,
then, that Waller’s oil study celebrates the museum’s educational mission. His politely
comported female art viewer is the polar opposite of the rowdy fairgoers depicted
three years earlier by Bellew. In the stillness of the nearly empty hall, she stands rev-
erently consulting one of the museum’s early handbooks to properly understand the
work of art before her. Her mere presence here, without a male escort, signals that the
museum is a safe, genteel public space—an impression confirmed by the family with a
young child climbing the stairs behind her.
From the Metropolitan Museum’s inception, its founders—all of whom were
wealthy, reform-minded Republican men—described its mission as three-fold: to raise
the international profile of New York City and, by extension, the United States; to
provide a wholesome alternative to dissolute urban entertainments like drinking and
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 153
gambling; and (most importantly) to provide free public education to citizens of all
classes. During the 1869 dinner at the Union League Club that launched the museum,
speakers reiterated these goals. The poet William Cullen Bryant declared,

The influence of works of art is wholesome, ennobling, and instructive. Besides

the cultivation of the sense of beauty—in other words, the perception of order,
symmetry, proportion of parts, which is of near kindred to the moral sentiments—
the intelligent contemplation of a great gallery of works of art is a lesson in his-
tory, a lesson in biography, a lesson in the antiquities of different countries. Half
our knowledge of the customs and modes of life among the ancient Greeks and
Romans is derived from the remains of ancient art.42

George Fisk Comfort (a lecturer in art history at Princeton University) drew on his
knowledge of European museums and outlined what would be required for the new
museum to fulfill its educational mission: regular days when admission would be
free; an encyclopedic collection expertly arranged to teach the history of world art;
public lectures; a school visit program for children; partnerships with universities
and art academies to benefit members of the professional classes; and (following the
lead of London’s South Kensington Museum) industrial art schools for working-
men. By the time the museum opened in its new building in 1880, most of Comfort’s
proposals had been implemented or were planned for the near future. Although
its early collection was far from encyclopedic, published handbooks (the first in
1872 to coincide with the museum’s first public opening) categorized the exhibits by
period, culture, and medium and offered at least basic information about each art-
work, helping visitors connect what was on view to an art historical framework. In
an 1872 letter from Rome to the museum’s first secretary, George Putnam, Blodgett
expressed concern that these guidebooks be modestly priced so that all visitors could
purchase them.43
Although altruism was a powerful motivating force in the founding of the museum,
other less explicitly stated motives were also at work. Speaking at the opening of the
new museum building in 1880, Board Vice President Joseph Choate declared, “[The
founders of the museum] believed that the diffusion of the knowledge of art in its
highest forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate, and refine a
practical and laboring people.”44 In other words, the museum’s educational mission
was rooted in the goal of reform and targeted the working classes in particular. As
Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach have pointed out, the wave of municipal art museum
building that swept through northern cities in the United States after the Civil War was
generated by bourgeois elites seeking to consolidate their cultural power.45 Through
works of art arranged in grand architectural spaces, low-cost educational programs
and materials, and restrictive standards of etiquette, the founders of the Metropolitan
Museum hoped to transform members of the unruly masses (and immigrants in par-
ticular) into cultural aspirants who would willingly adopt their own standards of taste
and behavior, along with their values and worldview.
Within the prevailing middle- and upper-class value system of the mid-nineteenth
century—the so-called cult of domesticity—virtue had been viewed as a personal mat-
ter best taught at church and in the home. Ideal sculptures (most of which were cre-
ated specifically for domestic interiors) were intimately intertwined with this process
of private moral education.46 The popularity of Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, for
154 Lauren Lessing
instance, rested in part on its capacity to strengthen domestic bonds, elicit love and
sympathy, and encourage genteel behavior through its embedded sentimental narra-
tives of Christian stoicism and ruptured family ties. Even in the un-domestic setting
of a public exhibition hall, viewers sometimes imagined themselves as the slave’s lost
mother or as the slave herself, longing for her distant family. Not surprisingly, an
1858 engraving showing The Greek Slave temporarily on display in the gallery of the
Cosmopolitan Art Association shows men listening attentively as women explain the
sculpture to them.47 Middle-class women’s authority to interpret ideal sculpture rested
on their vaunted feminine sensibility and their role as the guardians of the home.
Writing of Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, Amy Woodson
Boulton has argued that “museums, libraries, and parks took on the qualities associ-
ated with the domestic sphere . . . offering refuge, beauty, and morality.”48 Yet, at least
in the United States, the museum movement of the 1870s coincided with the rise of a
new culture of professionalism that displaced the domestic sphere as a locus of cultural
power and disempowered women as authorities on art.49 The normative image of the
professional after the Civil War was masculine, rational, independent, and expert—an
identity that Gilded Age critics, curators, and art historians embraced.50 In an 1870
essay, Jarves, for instance, praised museums run by “competent experts,” which could
provide a new and better form of aesthetic education.

Public galleries and museums . . . by providing adequate sources of comparison

and instruction, will enable the people better to decide on the relative merits
of artists and schools of art, and thus do fuller justice to their teachers and
themselves.51

This point of view, which was widely shared by the elite bourgeois philanthropists
who founded American museums after the Civil War, flips the rhetoric of sentimental
domesticity on its head: civilization, order, and enlightenment do not flow from the
feminine domestic sphere but emanate instead from professionally organized public
institutions. In light of this new ideology, the founders of the Metropolitan Museum
were wary of the potential threat that any hint of femininity might pose to the serious-
ness of their endeavor. They all belonged to at least one of two exclusive New York
men’s clubs—the Union League or the Century—and they established a board of trus-
tees that would allow no female members until 1952.52
Story and his historicizing, pedantic sculptures were closely aligned with the
museum founders’ cultural goals and professional ideals. By the late 1870s, he had
successfully cultivated a reputation as a scholar of history and art. Among the books
and essays that he wrote before 1880 are a history of modern Rome, a theoretical
treatise on the proportions of the human figure in art, and a study of “The Art of
Casting in Plaster Among the Ancient Greeks and Romans.”53 Unlike Powers’s The
Greek Slave or Rogers’s Nydia, the four sculptures by Story installed in the west
entrance hall of the new museum building in 1880 require specialized knowledge
of ancient literature, history, and mythology to be properly understood. Further-
more, through their compositions and embedded themes, these artworks advocate
white, male stewardship of both women and culture. Their subjects are not min-
istering angels ennobled by sensibility but dangerous women whose unregulated
emotions and intemperate use of power ultimately destroy them, along with all who
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 155
love them. As Kasson has argued, Story’s figures served as warnings to the many
American “new women” who pursued agency outside the domestic sphere in the
second half of the nineteenth century.54
Story’s Orientalizing subjects also reflect (and complement) the rising tide of Ameri-
can imperialism that made the assembly of the museum’s early collection possible.
Cleopatra depicts an Egyptian woman, Semiramis and Polyxena represent figures
from the Middle East and Turkey, respectively, and Medea depicts a “barbarian” who
traveled to Greece from present-day Eastern Europe—all areas under the control of
the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1880. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,
American businessmen eyed these regions with great interest, hoping to exploit their
resources, by force if necessary. As one journalist wrote in 1873,

The interests of America in her citizens in the Ottoman Empire, it seems to me,
would justify the presence of one or more ship-of-war on that coast. The Moslems
[sic] have a healthy fear of big guns, breech loaders, and Yankee courage.55

At the Union League Club in 1869, the Congregational minister Joseph Parrish
Thompson described the founding of the Metropolitan Museum as a logical extension
of the nation’s postbellum imperial project:

This very year, now drawing to its close, has witnessed the completion of three
stupendous works, any one of which in times past, would have done honor
to a century: the building of the Pacific Railroad; the successful laying of
another chain across the Atlantic; and the opening of the Suez Canal. What is
there remaining to be done in the simple interest of industrial and commercial
enterprise?

Following vigorous applause, Thompson answered his own question by asserting,

We are garnering the fruits of this vast enterprise for things that alone are of a
substantial and permanent value; namely, the development of a higher national
life, and the perfection of our social culture, through the improvement of each
individual man and woman, in all that is noble and beautiful and good.56

The growing strength of the United States as an international power and the weak-
ness of the Ottoman Empire made it possible for Luigi Palma di Cesnola, U.S. consul
at Cyprus in the early 1870s, to excavate thousands of priceless Cypriot antiquities
on the island, amassing a collection that included Near Eastern, Egyptian, Roman,
and Hellenistic objects that had been brought to ancient Cypress as trade goods.
Cesnola smuggled this collection to London and, eventually, sold it to the Metropoli-
tan Museum.57 It was almost certainly Cesnola, who became the museum’s first direc-
tor in 1879, who decided where to install Story’s statues in the Fifth Avenue building.
Their prominent placement in the west entrance hall compelled visitors entering or
leaving the gallery, where the Cesnola collection was installed, to confront heroically
sized marble statues of women from the very regions where many of the displayed
antiquities originated. Thus Cleopatra, Semiramis, Medea, and Polyxena became fem-
inized embodiments of these subjugated regions, perfectly reflecting how they were
156 Lauren Lessing
viewed by Western imperialists—beautiful, exotic, irrational, dangerous, and in need
of external regulation.
In both the Harper’s Weekly and Art Journal engravings of the museum’s west
entrance hall, well-dressed visitors adhere to new standards of museum etiquette as
they attentively observe Story’s brooding marble figures. In the Art Journal illustration,
a young woman stands gazing at Medea and a family with a child lingers to one side
of Cleopatra. While the little boy gestures impatiently toward the cases of antiquities
in the central hall, his mother converses with her husband, an open guidebook in her
hands. The Harper’s Weekly engraving depicts an older woman and two young men
gazing at Semiramis while a couple leaving the Cesnola collection strolls past Medea.
In both engravings, the bodies of the modern women echo the forms of the sculptures,
as if the illustrators were trying to draw a parallel between them and the savage but
now subdued subjects of Story’s works. The museum as it appears in these images
reflects its founders’ fondest wishes that it function as a civilized and civilizing space
where visitors’ bodies could be controlled (and their worldviews shaped) by the trus-
tees’ own values and standards.

Notes
1 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 6, 1880, 2.
2 “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Harper’s Weekly, April 10, 1880, 234.
3 Helen P. Jenkins, “Four Great Statues,” Art Loan Record (Detroit), September 12, 1883,
53.
4 Biographical information about Story can be found in Mary Elizabeth Phillips, Reminis-
cences of William Wetmore Story, American Sculptor and Author (Chicago: Rand McNally,
1897); Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends; From Letters, Diaries, and
Recollections Being Incidents and Anecdotes Chronologically Arranged, Together With an
Account of His Association With Famous People and His Principal Works in Literature
and Sculpture, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903); Jan Seidler Ramirez, “A Critical
Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819–1895): American Sculptor and
Man of Letters” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1985); Nichols B. Clark, A Marble Quarry:
The James H. Ricau Collection of Sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art (New York:
Hudson Hills Press, 1997), 174–76; Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, vol. I, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1865 (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 86–87; and Kathleen Lawrence, “Aesthetic
Transcendentalism and Its Legacy: Margaret Fuller, William Wetmore Story and Henry
James” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2003), 104–60.
5 William Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot Norton, August 15, 1861 (Houghton Library,
­Harvard University), quoted in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 623.
6 William Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot Norton, September 28, 1868 (Houghton Library,
Harvard University), quoted in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 701.
7 F. M. Crawford, “False Taste in Art,” North American Review 135 (July 1882): 95.
8 See Lauren Keach Lessing, “ ‘So Blessed Now That Accustomed Darkness’: Randolph
­Rogers’s Nydia the Blind Girl of Pompeii and the Female Gaze,” University of Michigan
Museums of Art and Archaeology Bulletin XIII (2000–01): 53–73.
9 Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, modeled 1853–54, carved
1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; William Wetmore Story, Hero in Search of
Leander, modeled 1857, carved 1858, High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
10 The Spectator, June 1863, quoted in Phillips, Reminiscences, 110. See also Ramirez,
“A Critical Reappraisal,” 335–45.
11 William Wetmore Story to James Russell Lowell, February 11, 1853, quoted in James,
­William Wetmore Story and His Friends, vol. I, 256–57; for Story’s ambivalence about women
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 157
sculptors in Italy, see also David Bernard Dearinger, “American Neoclassical Sculptors and
Their Private Patrons in Boston” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1993), 414–20.
12 Respectively, Charles Sumner, Art in the National Capitol (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1866);
“Statue of Abraham Lincoln,” Congressional Globe, July 27, 1866, 4230–36; and James
Jackson Jarves, “American Sculpture,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 February 1871, 3.
13 William Wetmore Story to Charles Sumner, June 22, 1860 (Houghton Library, Harvard
University), quoted in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 502–3.
14 See “A Lecture on Art,” New York Herald, November 15, 1877, 1.
15 William Wetmore Story to Charles Summer, May 13, 1861 (Charles Summer Papers,
Houghton Library, Harvard University) and William Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot
Norton, August 15, 1861 (Charles Eliot Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
­
­University), quoted in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 503, 511.
16 Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 473–74.
17 James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts: The Experience and Observation of an American
Amateur in Europe (New York: Hurd & Houghton, and Cambridge: Riverside Press,
1869), 306.
18 Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American
Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 208–17.
19 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni (Boston:
­Ticknor & Fields, 1860), 126–27.
20 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18,
no. 1 (1966): 151–74. In the last forty years, several scholars have questioned the degree
to which women actually conformed to the ideal Welter described; however, it is precisely
because there was no consensus about women’s nature and proper role that the ideal of
“true womanhood” was a powerful cultural tool—it presented the viewpoint of the white
bourgeois elite as natural and universal.
21 See Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 474–537. The Sibyl, in particular, was praised
for “the brooding mystery of her attitude” and “the African mystery deep in the brood-
ing brain.” “An American Sculptor,” Scientific American 7 (October 25, 1862): 266; and
“International Exhibition,” Athenaeum (London) 39 (May 10, 1862): 631.
22 See Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 407–565.
23 “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 27 (September 1863): 566.
24 James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea: Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture in America (New
York: Hurd & Houghton, 1865), 224.
25 “Art Notes,” Round Table 1 (December 19, 1863): 12; Stahr, as quoted in Bayard Taylor,
“Literature, Science and Art Abroad,” Putnam’s Magazine 15 (February 1870): 260.
26 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl,” Atlantic Monthly 11
(April 1863): 482.
27 It’s uncertain whether Story ever considered Cleopatra and The Libyan Sibyl to be pen-
dants; however, most commentators treated them as such, and they were purchased together
by Charles Morrison of Basildon Park, Berkshire, England, where they were displayed as a
pair for more than a century.
28 Edward Everett Hale, for instance, saw Cleopatra as an allegory of tragic but inevitable polit-
ical failure. “You are looking,” he wrote, “on an African Queen,—the first since Sesostris to
hold sway over the conquered heroes of Europe; and her sway is broken now, and Europe
is thundering at the gates of her citadel. You have the same old story of Africa,—always
outwitted by Asia, always outfought by Europe.” Edward Everett Hale, Ninety Days Worth
of Europe (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1861), 141–42. For another discussion of how Story’s
Cleopatra constructs ideas of race and gender, see Mary Hammer, “Black and White? View-
ing Cleopatra in 1862,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Menston: Scholar
Press, 1996), 53–67.
29 Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle (New York: Harper Brothers, 1903), 290.
This passage is discussed in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 470.
30 John Taylor Johnston, diary, 1868–69, typescript. John Taylor Johnston Papers, Archives,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
158 Lauren Lessing
31 The Collection of Paintings, Drawings, and Statuary, The Property of John Taylor John-
ston, Esq. to Be Sold at Auction December 19, 20 and 22, 1876. Archives, Metropolitan
Museum of Art; “Sale of a Famous Gallery: Mr. John Taylor Johnston’s Remarkable Collec-
tion of Painting to Be Sold,” New York Times, November 26, 1876. For biographical infor-
mation about Johnston, including his early work for the Metropolitan Museum, see Calvin
Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New
York: Henry Holt, 1989), 33–39; and Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History
of the Moguls and Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: R ­ andom
House, 2009), 36–37.
32 Katharine Baetjer, “Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871,” Met-
ropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004): 161–245. For Blodgett and his early work for the
Metropolitan Museum, see Robert W. de Forest, “William Tilden Blodgett and the Begin-
nings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 1, no.
3 (February 1906): 37–42; Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces, 36–38; Susan Boettger,
“Eastman Johnson’s ‘Blodgett Family’ and Domestic Values During the Civil War Era,”
American Art 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 50–67; and Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery, 37–40.
33 William Tilden Blodgett to John Taylor Johnston, March 7, 1872. John Taylor Johnston
Papers, Archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is interesting that Blodgett
chose Story’s new sculpture Semiramis rather than purchasing a copy of the more celebrated
Libyan Sibyl. As both Susan Boettger and Alan Hirsch have pointed out, Blodgett—a liberal
abolitionist who nevertheless hired a substitute to avoid fighting in the Civil War—harbored
feelings of guilt and ambivalence about slavery, which may explain his preference for the
less well-known sculpture. Susan Boettger, “Eastman Johnson’s ‘Blodgett Family,’ ” 63–64;
Alan Hirsch, “Eastman Johnson’s Guilt,” Notes in the History of Art 34, no. 3 (Spring
2015): 36–43.
34 Adelaide Ristori, an actress Story greatly admired, performed the title role in Voltaire’s
play in 1867. For Story’s admiration of Ristori, see Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives,
223–30. For Ristori’s 1866 performance as Semiramis, see “Madame Adelaide Ristori,”
American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated 45, no. 1 (January 1867): 6.
35 Anne Brewster, “Story’s New Sculpture,” Alexandria Gazette, March 7, 1872, 4.
36 “Metropolitan Museum of Art: Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures,” Art Journal
1 (1875): 63.
37 William Wetmore Story to John Field, October 6, 1876 (Pierpont Morgan Library), quoted
in Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal,” 637.
38 “The Centennial: Ruhama Among the Artists,” National Republican (Washington, DC),
June 1, 1876, 4; and “The Centennial,” Cincinnati Daily Times, June 28, 1876, 3.
39 Story to Field, October 6, 1876. See Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 240.
40 “Sketchings: Domestic Art Gossip,” Crayon 7 (August 1860): 231.
41 Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. II, A Cata-
logue of Works by Artists Born Between 1816 and 1845 (New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1995), 575–76.
42 A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York: Proceedings of a Meeting Held at
the Theatre of the Union League Club, Tuesday Evening, November 23, 1869 (New York:
Union League Club, 1869), 10–11.
43 William T. Blodgett to George P. Putnam, March 11, 1872, Archives, Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
44 Quoted in Tenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Association, May 1880 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1880), 13.
45 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995),
53–56; and Alan Wallach, “The Birth of the American Art Museum,” in The ­American
Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Sven Beckert and Julia
B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 247–55.
46 Michelle Helene Bogart discussed this function of sculpture in the home in “Attitudes Toward
Sculptural Reproduction in America, 1850–1880” (PhD diss., University of C ­ hicago, 1979),
68–70. Bogart cites a wealth of primary sources in support of her claims, including “Art
and Its Future Prospects in the United States,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 46 (March 1853):
217–21; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, October 25, 1856, 308; Andrew
 Un-Domesticating the Ideal 159
Jackson Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton, 1853),
332; Benjamin Silliman and C. R. Goodrich, The World of Science, Art and Industry Illus-
trated From Examples in the New York Crystal Palace (New York: Putnam, 1854), 29;
and Christopher Crowfield [Harriet Beecher Stowe], House and Home Papers (Boston:
­Tichnor & Fields, 1867), 56.
47 See Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 46–72; Lauren Lessing, “Ties That Bind: Hiram
Powers’ Greek Slave and Nineteenth-Century Marriage,” American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring
2010): 40–65.
48 Amy Woodson-Boulton, “The City Art Museum Movement and the Social Role of Art,” in
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Fel-
luga, www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=amy-woodson-boulton-the-city-art-museum-
movement-and-the-social-role-of-art. In support of this idea, Woodson-Boulton cites Susan
Pearce, who argued, “The moral centres of museum collections and of femininity are clearly
the same: endorsing market values while remaining apart from the market, and enabling
the broadly capitalist modern economic discourse to proceed but pretending not to be by
keeping the eyes closed while it all happens.” Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation
Into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995), 409.
49 See Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Develop-
ment of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 57–65.
50 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern
American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6.
51 J. Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art,” Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 52.
52 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Mrs. Ogden Reid, Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse and Mrs.
­Vincent Astor Elected Trustees: First Time Women Have Served on Governing Body of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,” press release, March 18, 1952, http://libmma.contentdm.
oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16028coll12/id/545.
53 William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (London: Chapman & Hall, 1863); William Wet-
more Story, Proportions of the Human Figure (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864); and
William Wetmore Story, “The Art of Casting in Plaster Among the Ancient Greeks and
Romans,” The International Review 7 (November 1879): 508–30.
54 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 203–41. Historian Francis Parkman used Semi-
ramis as an example of rampant female power in his argument against giving women
the vote; see his “The Woman Question Again,” North American Review 130, no. 278
­(January 1880): 19.
55 Henry Day, “The Ottoman Empire,” Christian Advocate, July 24, 1873, 233.
56 A Metropolitan Art-Museum in the City of New York, 20.
57 See Gross, Rogues’ Gallery, 21–64.
Part III

Depicting the Capital in

Art and Culture
9 Before the Farragut
Who Was Augustus Saint-Gaudens?
Thayer Tolles

On a sunny afternoon in May 1881, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s monument to A ­ dmiral

David Glasgow Farragut (see Plate 8) was dedicated at the northwest corner of
­Madison Square. The highly anticipated unveiling was attended by 10,000 people
who admired the statue of the celebrated Civil War admiral standing windblown,
with spyglass in hand and sword at his side. Modeled in an energetic Beaux-Arts
style, the bronze figure was installed atop a high-backed bluestone exedra featur-
ing low-relief allegorical figures of Courage and Loyalty amid stylized waves. The
ensemble, designed in collaboration with architect Stanford White, was set within a
landscaped environment, in dialogue with the surrounding pathways, trees, shrubs,
and buildings.
The new monument and the sculptor who created it generated considerable cover-
age in New York newspapers as well as in art and general-interest periodicals. The
prevailing response was decidedly positive; the Critic, a journal of cultural criticism
run by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder, noted in June, “There has been little or no public
expression of dissatisfaction.”1 The press quickly sanctioned the Farragut as a turning
point in the history of American sculpture. Previewing the monument five days before
its dedication, the New York Herald predicted,

We think we are not far wrong in expecting that the city will have in it one of
its finest works of art, and the distinguished naval officer a memorial worthy
both of his fame, and of what may justly be called the new school of American
sculpture.2

So too agreed the eminent critic Clarence Cook, writing in the Daily Tribune that the
Farragut will be

generally accepted as one of the best works of its kind that our times have pro-
duced. . . . [It was] clearly the birth of a new time, it is a sign of better days for art,
not only in our city, but in our country.3

Then as now, critics and scholars establish defining chronological and concep-
tual markers, many of which become assimilated as oft-repeated truths, in this
case the symbolism of the Farragut’s unveiling. Sculptor and writer Lorado Taft
observed it was “the beginning of a new era” in his History of American Sculpture
in 1903.4 And when Wayne Craven published his mighty Sculpture in America in
164 Thayer Tolles
1968, he reiterated that it “marked a new era in American sculpture.”5 Although
the significance of this event should not be questioned, in reality the circumstances
are nuanced and complex. Far from unknown in New York in May 1881, Saint-­
Gaudens (1848–1907) was well positioned before the Farragut to launch into the
national public eye, the result of a deliberately orchestrated breakthrough moment
for him and for American sculpture.6
As a young sculptor returned from Rome in 1875, Saint-Gaudens struggled in the
burgeoning, competitive art circles of New York. Yet his innate talent (to his advo-
cates, “genius”), schooling at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and tena-
cious networking granted him the mantle of the American sculptor of promise just two
years later. Although Saint-Gaudens’s French-Irish immigrant roots and Lower East
Side grade school education were far from their own more patrician backgrounds,
his most steady advocates—foremost among them journalists Richard Watson Gilder,
Charles de Kay, and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer—were among a segment of
upper-middle-class New Yorkers who believed that culture served to inoculate against
the encroaching ills of post–Civil War society. Once Saint-Gaudens asserted himself as
a gifted artist in sympathy with their viewpoints—not to mention their agendas—he
became their sculptor of choice to exemplify these ideals, an artist cosmopolitan in
spirit and training, yet American in his subjects and values.
Upon his return to New York in 1875, Saint-Gaudens began a calculated effort to
circulate his name among prospective patrons, as he put it, “to pursue orders.”7 Above
all, he actively sought out commissions and forged ties with critics and fellow artists.
Within months, the sculptor befriended painter-decorator John La Farge, architects
Stanford White and Charles McKim, and journalist and civic activist Gilder and his
wife, artist Helena de Kay (see Plate 5). He eagerly accepted their tutelage in the social
and professional mores necessary to establish a foothold in the New York art world.
Such effectiveness at spreading his name landed the sculptor several lucky breaks early
in his career, especially becoming La Farge’s preferred choice for commissions that
involved sculpture, culminating in interior work for Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house at
Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street (1880–83).
Saint-Gaudens also embarked on a concentrated course of lobbying for the Farragut
order, the most sought-after monumental commission of the day. The sculptor had
learned about a potential memorial from his patron Edwin D. Morgan while he was
still in Rome and began working on a bust study. As soon as Saint-Gaudens returned to
New York, he received a letter of introduction from Morgan to William H. Appleton,
a member of the Farragut Monument Committee.8 Over the next few months, Saint-
Gaudens systematically gained entrée to the well-placed individuals who comprised
the executive committee responsible for the selection of the sculptor. He visited mem-
bers of the Farragut family, and from the admiral’s widow he obtained photographs
in order to do a plaster head study, a move calculated to raise her awareness of him.
He also wisely approached the leading New York sculptor of the day, John Quincy
Adams Ward. In spite of Ward’s willingness to endorse Saint-Gaudens (“I should most
cheerfully express my faith in your ability to give them an earnest and most interesting
statue”),9 the Farragut commission was awarded to Ward by six votes to five. Ward,
however, declined because of other commitments, an act that testifies to his belief in
the younger sculptor’s promise. Saint-Gaudens thus officially earned the commission
in December 1876, his persuasive powers of salesmanship honed. As he wrote to his
 Before the Farragut 165
future mother-in-law, “I have not allowed the slightest or most remote chance for my
bringing influence to bear to escape me without taking advantage. I cannot think of a
step that I have neglected to take.”10
The late 1870s and early 1880s saw propagandistic writings by the Gilder cir-
cle in the form of well-timed puffs, unilaterally positive exhibition reviews, and
articles meticulously crafted in collaboration with Saint-Gaudens. The currency
of a prominently placed monument was but one step in a shared march to pro-
claim Saint-Gaudens’s uncontested status as the leading sculptor of a new school
of younger, foreign-trained artists. Other significant commissions in his early career
and the New York-based responses they stimulated have been undervalued with
respect to the launching of his reputation, specifically his role in the decoration of
Saint Thomas Church (1877–78) and the exhibition of a marble portrait of Theo-
dore Dwight Woolsey (1875–79) at the Society of American Artists in 1880. It was
against these events that the groundwork for the Farragut’s successful unveiling was
deliberately laid and must be assessed.
In June 1877, Saint-Gaudens returned to Paris, principally to model the Farragut,
remaining there until mid-1880. With the establishment of a critical and professional
network during his two years in New York and his role in founding the progressive
Society of American Artists, Saint-Gaudens became an unquestioned leader among the
new movement artists. During his three years in Paris, he remained in the A ­ merican
critical consciousness, with his name recurring frequently in the New York press,
which habitually labeled him a “young” New York sculptor of “rising talent.” In
particular, Richard Watson Gilder, senior editor of Scribner’s Monthly, was the sculp-
tor’s staunchest partisan, while Clarence Cook, art critic for the Daily Tribune, also
remained loyal.
In Paris, Saint-Gaudens’s immediate obligation was to complete polychrome alto-
reliefs for the chancel of Saint Thomas Church, Richard Upjohn’s neo-Gothic Epis-
copal church located at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street
(destroyed by fire on August 8, 1905).11 The chancel was to be decorated by La Farge,
and in the spring of 1877, he requested that Saint-Gaudens model a reredos of kneel-
ing angels to flank a central Latin cross set above the altar (Figure 9.1). Eight square
panels of adoring angels separated by unadorned bands were placed on either side
of the cross with a frieze of cherubs across the top. La Farge’s large encaustic can-
vasses, Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene (Noli Me Tangere) and The Angel at the
Tomb, were installed on the left chancel wall while The Arrival of the Three Marys
at the Tomb of Christ was on the right. This innovative fusion of painting and sculp-
ture comprised one decorative ensemble, its unifying iconography the subject of the
Resurrection.
The Saint Thomas commission held the potential to validate Saint-Gaudens’s tal-
ent on a large, public scale. That he felt his individual reputation hanging in limbo is
revealed in his fretful remarks about the hasty execution of the work—completed in
just six weeks. Once he cast the reliefs in cement composition material, he colored the
sculptural ensemble with the assistance of Will H. Low and shipped it to New York.
Saint-Gaudens offered warning to those who served as his most stringent critics. To
La Farge he wrote he was “anxious about the impression it will produce particularly
of the color.”12 The sculptor relayed a similar sentiment to Gilder when providing
him with photographs of the reliefs in an uncolored state. Reporting that he had also
166 Thayer Tolles

Figure 9.1 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adoration of the Cross by Angels and Cherubs, 1877.
Composition material, paint. Saint Thomas Church, New York. Destroyed by fire,
1905. Archival photograph
Source: Upjohn Collection, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

sent Cook a photograph, along with an explanation of the sculptural program, he

revealed, “I am anxious to know the impression the work produced and also to let
those that judge me know in how short a time I made the work.”13 La Farge’s written
reaction to the sculptor’s work was equivocal. On the one hand, he praised the reredos
as “a living work of art,” noting that “your bas-relief is thought by others as well as
by myself to be a great success.”14 On the other hand, he objected to Saint-Gaudens’s
changing the proportions of the angels, which he felt disturbed the harmony of the
overall decorative program.
In contrast to La Farge’s reserve, Gilder and his circle were quick to praise Saint-
Gaudens’s latest effort. Wyatt Eaton, painter and secretary for the Society of ­American
Artists, reported that “two things are talked of in N.Y. at present—The A.A.A.
 Before the Farragut 167
[American Artists’ Association, renamed the Society of American Artists] and the
decorations of St. Thoms’ Church.”15 Helena de Kay Gilder wrote the sculptor in
November:

You have had unqualified praise from all sources the old as well as the new spirits.
Really there is in your angels something religious which we never see in modern
churches. It is more like the Early Italians, & their religiousness is so pure—so
spiritual, so unsentimental. . . . I say we because Mr. Gilder, my brother [Charles
de Kay], Mr. Eaton & I all feel the same way.16

Her assimilation of Saint-Gaudens’s work into an early Renaissance ideal was both
perceptive and calculated. In August 1877, La Farge had instructed the sculptor to
draw on art of the early Renaissance, and Saint-Gaudens responded by studying paint-
ings at the Louvre.17 His concerns for a unified aesthetic scheme, as well as his enthu-
siasm for the decorative potential of the early Renaissance style, by necessity became
Saint-Gaudens’s as well. Through a reconstitution of artistic sources into a new for-
mal language, La Farge and Saint-Gaudens promulgated in Saint Thomas the fluid
dynamic of tradition and innovation that would become the guiding leitmotif of the
so-called American Renaissance.
Notices assessing Saint Thomas Church ran over a period of months, from the initial
placement of the chancel decorations during the autumn of 1877 to the installation of
La Farge’s final mural in April 1878. Saint-Gaudens kept abreast of critical reaction
through clippings sent to him by the Gilders. On October 31, 1877, the Times ran a
lengthy article on the partially installed chancel decorations. Although focusing on the
awkward interior space and La Farge’s canvasses, the writer, presumably the Times art
critic Charles de Kay, devoted space to Saint-Gaudens, noting his angels were modeled

from sketches by La Farge. . . . Saint-Gaudens has followed the original drafts, but
to all of them he has given great beauty, both of figure and expression, so that they
reflect the highest credit on the young sculptor.18

Likewise, an article in the World noted, “The general design is Mr. La Farge’s, of
course, and is extremely poetical.”19
If one may judge from Saint-Gaudens’s subsequent comments to Gilder, the sculp-
tor was upset about articles inferring that he was dependent on La Farge for artistic
direction. He wrote to “correct what is wrong”:

The impression is given in all that I was merely a kind of smart modeler who
carried out the work faithfully and handsomely from Mr. La Farge’s designs. The
idea of placing angels in sculpture around the cross is Mr. La Farge’s—I think it [a]
very fine one and to me was entrusted the carrying out of the idea with no other
design from him but a sketch not six inches in size.

He continued, “What worries me in the articles you sent is that I am given no credit
for that which was my principal ‘souci,’ the general composition feeling and sentiment
of the work as a whole.”20 Evident is Saint-Gaudens’s determination to elevate him-
self to the status of an independent multi-dimensional creative talent rather than an
apprentice working as a derivative artist reliant on the directives of others.
168 Thayer Tolles
In a gesture that underscores not only Gilder’s belief in Saint-Gaudens’s promise
but also his power to promote and not insignificantly, to rectify, Gilder requested that
the well-known engraver Timothy Cole produce an engraving of the Saint Thomas
reredos (Figure 9.2). Gilder also commissioned Clarence Cook to write a feature arti-
cle for Scribner’s Monthly in which the engraving was published and Saint-­Gaudens’s
contribution endorsed. 21 The article, “Recent Church Decoration,” appeared in the
­February 1878 issue.22 Cook equated the current movement in ecclesiastical decoration
to a similar development in fifteenth-century Florence and concluded that Florentines
were likely as unaware of the artistic revolution going on about them as Americans
were of their own progress.
Cook discussed Saint-Gaudens and his work at length. Although something of
a propagandistic exercise on Gilder’s behalf, and by extension Saint-Gaudens’s,
Cook was too principled to praise that which he did not esteem. Cook character-
ized Saint-Gaudens as a “young” artist in a rite of passage from private to public
eye:

Mr. St. Gaudens comes for the first time before our public as a sculptor in this
work, in which he expresses himself and his own aims, however slight and sketchy
may be reckoned the execution of his work. It is not his work in the immediate
conception; but the essential part, the whole spirit, sentiment and detail are his
and his alone.

Cook then codified the symbolic lineage between the sculptor and his Italian Renais-
sance predecessors (rather than his American ones) while sustaining his claim to artis-
tic originality and stylistic modernity and therefore progress:

It is true that the young sculptor’s work suggests the early Italian sculpture, but
only as one spring-time suggests another. There is no slavish imitation, nor any-
thing out of date or out of time. Art can never deny her lineage, and Mr. St. Gaud-
ens’ art is a shoot from a stock full of health and vigorous life, and strong enough
to engraft a new branch upon with the hope of happy fruit.23

Although Saint-Gaudens was disappointed by the overall tenor of the Saint Thomas
reviews, not surprisingly Cook’s writing pleased him. In a March 1878 letter to White,
he remarked, “Cook has been very kind to me in his article.”24
After the chancel decorations were fully in place in April 1878, the Times published
a lengthy article on Saint Thomas’s decorative program, likely authored by de Kay.
Telling is his description of the angels by the

young sculptor St. Gaudens . . . after a hasty sketch by La Farge. . . . They might
have been conceived, although not executed, in Florence, during the ages when
Florence was still full of the traditions of the great sculptors.25

In de Kay qualifying the sketch as “hasty,” it is tempting to presume that something of

Saint-Gaudens’s diatribe to Gilder had been filtered to him as well as to Cook.
Saint Gaudens’s work on Saint Thomas codified his persona for public art. It pro-
claimed his allegiance to Italian Renaissance art as a springboard for modern decora-
tive interpretation. It established a pattern that saw critics more often comparing him
to Italian Renaissance masters than to contemporary foreigners. And it bought him
 Timothy Cole, engraving of Saint Thomas Church reredos by Augustus Saint-­
Figure 9.2 
Gaudens. [Clarence Cook], “Recent Church Decoration,” Scribner’s Monthly 15
(February 1878): 576
Source: Butler Library, Columbia University
170 Thayer Tolles
the pedigree of inclusion in a distinguished artistic lineage, pleasing and reassuring
writers eager to proclaim American artistic prowess as symptomatic of larger cultural
progress.
For these critics, 1880 was a landmark year for sculpture at the Society of Ameri-
can Artists, an organization founded in 1877 by Saint-Gaudens, Helena de Kay
Gilder, Wyatt Eaton, and Walter Shirlaw in the presence of Richard Watson Gilder
and Clarence Cook. An alternative to the conservative National Academy of Design,
the society encouraged individual creative expression and promoted impartial selec-
tion standards for its exhibitions. The exhibition of 1880 represented a dramatic
turning point toward the dominant French Beaux-Arts naturalism and offered crit-
ics a platform to address timely issues—notably the acceptable degree of finish in
paintings and sculpture and the nationalistic concept of an American school of art-
ists. A respectable eighteen sculptures were shown, two capturing critical fancy and
monopolizing exhibition reviews: Olin Levi Warner’s tinted plaster bust of painter
J. Alden Weir (­Figure 9.3) and Saint-Gaudens’s life-size half-length marble portrait
of Theodore Dwight Woolsey (Figure 9.4), president of Yale College from 1846 to
1871.
Saint-Gaudens began work on his portrait of Woolsey in 1875, a commission from
Edwards Pierrepont, who sat for him in New York in 1872. Pierrepont, in turn,
ordered a likeness of his teacher Woolsey, which he presented to his alma mater, Yale
College, in 1880. The sittings with Woolsey took place during the spring of 1875 in
New Haven; however, Saint-Gaudens did not begin to translate the portrait to marble
until 1878 while he spent the winter in Rome. In the final result, completed in 1879,
the septuagenarian appears in a contemplative, scholarly guise. His head is inclined
to his right and ample sideburns frame a long face with a receding hairline. His arms
are casually crossed, right over left, and in his right hand he holds a book, its pages
propped open with his index finger. Woolsey is attired in an academic gown with bil-
lowing puffed sleeves and neckline open to reveal contemporary dress.
The Woolsey portrait was intended as a public presentation piece, underscored by
its commanding scale, marble medium, half-length termination, and accompanying
rectangular wood pedestal, completed in collaboration with Stanford White. It was a
noticeable departure from Saint-Gaudens’s small low-relief portraits of friends from
the late 1870s, executed in a sketchy aesthetic, some of which had been exhibited and
well received in New York.26 Saint-Gaudens’s decision to display the Woolsey, in hind-
sight stylistically atypical, was a calculated effort to prove his range and to distinguish
him from other young sculptors now working in this faddish sketchy style. Further,
the repute of the sitter, who was from an old New York family, also served to heighten
interest in the portrait and in Saint-Gaudens, whose name thus far rested primarily
on his work for Saint Thomas Church. That the sculptor perceived the potential sig-
nificance of the portrait to the making of his artistic reputation is revealed in a draft
letter to Pierrepont: “I have made the bust very large and in fact quite an important
work. . . . I trust you will allow the bust to be exhibited at the Ex. of the Society of
Am. Artist.”27 The delay in the marble’s completion in fact resulted in fortuitous tim-
ing for Saint-Gaudens’s advancement, as he had yet to submit a significant sculpture
to the society.28
If forward-thinking critics had been frustrated by the lack of appropriate A ­ merican
sculpture to explicate their aesthetic preferences, the Weir and Woolsey collectively
provided a perfect pedagogical model, tangible three-dimensional expressions of
American cultural maturity. In the Daily Tribune, Cook proclaimed, “Nothing so
Figure 9.3 Olin Levi Warner, J. Alden Weir, 1880; this cast, 1897–1898. Bronze. The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, Gift of the National Sculpture Society, 1898 (98.9.2)
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org
172 Thayer Tolles

Figure 9.4 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, 1875; this carving, 1878–
1879. Marble. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Hon. Edwards Pierrepont, BA,
1837; MA, 1840; LLD, 1873 (1880.5)
Source: Courtesy, Yale University Art Gallery

marks the new time as the presence here of two pieces of sculpture, the like of which
for beauty and for purely sculpturesque quality has not been seen before at any
American exhibition.”29 Similarly, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, writing for the
American Architect and Building News, judged the Weir and Woolsey as “enough to
settle the question of whether or no truly good sculpture is possible in our day and
country.”30 To the likes of Cook and Van Rensselaer, identifiable historical pedigree
combined with an assured modern style were desired traits for American sculpture.
This intangible combination of elements was fully recognized in Warner’s bust of Weir,
likely executed as a demonstration of artistic camaraderie, and here celebrated for a
classical tone transcending mere portraiture.31
If the Weir was admired for its expression of spirit, the critical appeal of the Woolsey
lay in its degree of reality and finish. The Evening Post called it “a refined, speaking,
charming portrait.”32 The quality of realism that writers recognized in the Woolsey
 Before the Farragut 173
was distinguished from a merely clever transcription of facial features. Instead, they
sanctioned the thorough and artistic manner of execution, unanimous in their judg-
ment of Saint-Gaudens’s Woolsey as a paradigm of sculptural finish. Van Rensselaer
wrote of this admiration:

Mr. St. Gaudens’s half-length of President Woolsey . . . was the wonder of critics,
so accurate the likeness, so unconventional yet simple and artistic the conception,
so beautiful the execution. . . . It was as different from the mechanical smoothness
of the average modern work as from the inartistic over-elaboration in detail and
accessories, that has usually characterized a desire for less insipidity.33

The Woolsey’s degree of finish, from hindsight unusual in his oeuvre, served Saint-
Gaudens well, especially in light of more disparaging discussions about the sculptural
sketch surrounding other artists’ submissions to the show.
To be fair, not every comment about the Woolsey was favorable. The World com-
pared the installation of the half-length portrait on its pedestal as “stimulat[ing] the
profane suggestion of a Punch and Judy show.”34 Further, several reviewers found
the treatment of costume detracted from the overall effect. Even Gilder’s Scribner’s
Monthly offered equivocal praise, commenting on the “stiff academic robe which by
no means aids the general aspect. Nevertheless, it may be said that the beauty and
truth of expression in pose and features overcome this drawback.”35
Such infrequent criticism notwithstanding, the society’s exhibition of 1880 repre-
sented a significant turning point in critical writing. It arguably was the most extensive
consideration of sculpture in an American annual exhibition setting to date and a
coalescing moment for the nationalistic concept of an American school of sculpture.
Across the board, writers for the major newspapers and art periodicals weighed in on
the plastic arts, often at length. New York critics had become savvy about the direc-
tion American sculpture was taking, or more properly, they wished it would take:
the writing went beyond mere description of subjects to delve into the most engaging
formal issues of the day. Submitting the Woolsey—what Saint-Gaudens considered
a major work—was a calculated, successful move, ensuring that he remained at the
center of critical discourse and that his reputation did not languish during the months
before the Farragut unveiling.
Seen against this background, the broadly positive critical response to the Farragut
takes on a different cast. Beginning in July 1880, Saint-Gaudens spent his first few
months back in New York occupied with the completion and installation of the monu-
ment. His return and the impending dedication of the statue—shown at the Salon of
1880 in plaster and then cast in bronze in Paris—were topics of ongoing interest in
the press. Even while in France, Saint-Gaudens had attempted to control published
notices concerning the appearance of the monument as well as the circumstances of its
completion. His efforts to regulate information during 1880 and 1881, however, were
largely futile. An announcement in the Art Journal, puffing Saint-Gaudens’s reputa-
tion, offers evidence:

Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens is coming home, after acquiring fame in Paris. His
sculptures in St. Thomas’s Church, and at the recent exhibitions of the Society of
American Artists entitle him to high rank in New York also. He brings with him
his large statue of Admiral Farragut.36
174 Thayer Tolles
Despite Saint-Gaudens’s exertions to keep out of the press, publications diligently
charted the particulars of the Farragut’s acceptance by the city parks commissioners as
well as their deliberations about its siting and resistance to the unique pedestal design,
a course of events well traced by other scholars.37 Once the Farragut was unveiled,
critical response centered on themes codified in writings about Saint Thomas Church
and the Woolsey portrait, specifically the relationship of sculpture to the allied arts,
the legacy of the Italian Renaissance, and the sculptor’s ability to expertly project
American character and formal qualities. Although most discussion was given over to
the appearance of the monument, some focus was paid to the sculptor, his reputation,
and his talents. De Kay in the Times ventured so far as to proclaim Saint-Gaudens in
his decorative instincts a “genius,” while the Art Journal decreed that, in his “genius,”
“he is a natural, a born sculptor.”38 Cook qualified him as “not of genius, but of
extraordinary talent.”39 This labeling of Saint-Gaudens as “genius” fit into a larger
trend of associating younger artists of talent with this quality. In turn, such individual
“genius” was saluted as symptomatic of progress toward a national school of art.
Further, these journalists selectively pronounced genius in order to promote their own
status as tastemakers while forwarding the careers of their artist-friends.
Articles by Gilder and Van Rensselaer demonstrate that nothing was left to chance
in the Farragut’s reception and the opportunity to promote Saint-Gaudens. The most
significant and far-reaching coverage appeared in the June 1881 issue of Scribner’s
Monthly, in which Gilder printed “The Farragut Monument,” his most extensive
accolade of Saint-Gaudens to date.40 He commissioned Robert Blum to complete a
pen sketch of the entire monument (Figure 9.5) as well as details to be used as illustra-
tions. Savvy to his powerful platform, Gilder knew that an article in this high-profile
nationally circulated journal radiated outward from New York, with excerpts picked
up by regional papers.
In fact Gilder, Saint-Gaudens, and Stanford White had carefully choreographed the
article’s contents for many months. In April, Saint-Gaudens received a proof for his
approval and correction. He responded by thanking Gilder “for your very kind notice
of my work and of myself but you have judged me in too favorable a standpoint.” He
insisted that part of a more personal reference be omitted and recommended a substi-
tution, adding, “I feel very strongly in regard to it and should be very disappointed if
the alteration were not made.”41 Thus, in the final product, Gilder and Saint-Gaudens
collaboratively advanced their personal and mutual agendas.
For Gilder’s part, he used the monument as a teaching tool to stress the potency of
art in public places and its reformative and moralizing potential. As Knickerbocker
New York’s elite cultural circles had contended since the early nineteenth century, he
maintained that a great metropolis should be adorned with great public sculpture.
He opened his article with a lament about the sub-standard quality of New York’s
sculpture, expressing his hope that by elevating public taste, the quality of monuments
would likewise improve. To him, Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut was a “work of extraordi-
nary artistic value and . . . a sign of the increase of the art spirit in America.”42 Ideally,
the success and novelty of the Farragut would be harbingers of increased appreciation
for this public art form.
Gilder rightly observed that when Saint-Gaudens received the Farragut commission,
he was “young and accomplished, though then not widely known.”43 The middle
of the article was devoted to his career, education, and stylistic inspirations. Noting
that educational opportunities in New York for the sculptor were soon exhausted,
 Before the Farragut 175

Figure 9.5 Robert Blum, pen sketch after Farragut Monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
“The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (June 1881): 162
Source: Butler Library, Columbia University

Gilder discussed his time in France, surrounded by “the most severe, the most power-
ful, the most beautiful, the best, modern sculpture.” However, Gilder was quick to
instead link Saint-Gaudens to a lineage that emanated from the acme of the plastic
arts, ancient Greece. “Paris points to Rome, Rome to Athens.” While championing
the tenets of Greek art and Saint-Gaudens’s affinity to the principles of humanistic
naturalism, Gilder also tied him to Greece’s cultural successor, the Florentine Renais-
sance: “Saint-Gaudens’s bronze Farragut might almost be called the work of some
new Donatello.”44 Specifically, Gilder was alluding to his Saint George (1415–17;
Museo Nationale del Bargello, Florence) that served as the inspiration for Farragut’s
pose. That Saint-Gaudens was the original artist, while part of an illustrious con-
tinuum, was Gilder’s ongoing rallying cry.
Van Rensselaer assessed the Farragut in the September issue of American Archi-
tect and Building News, echoing many of Gilder’s points in her elegant prose.45 She
found the press’s efforts to promote the sculpture unprecedented: “Seldom has there
been so much said in the way of technical criticisms of a public monument. Seldom
has the conscientious work of an artist been more conscientiously approved.”46 She
176 Thayer Tolles
assessed Saint-Gaudens’s reputation against the background of national progress in
the arts and his fitness as a role model. Noting that the artist’s esteem had increased
greatly between the awarding of the commission and the dedication of the sculpture,
she observed the jury had remained out: “the works which he had produced were of
a different sort . . . and it still remained doubtful whether he could successfully deal
with a civic monument destined for the open air.” He succeeded brilliantly, she felt,
not the least because of the Farragut’s “strong national accent”: the sculpture incor-
porated technical ability, individualized realism, and informed taste. These qualities
were “absolutely indispensable,” Van Rensselaer wrote, “if our art is to become at all
characteristic of ourselves, if it is to be anything more than an echo of foreign schools,
a reproduction of foreign impressions.”47 This union of technical command and dis-
tinctly American subject matter resulting in a uniquely national art was the theme that
preoccupied the Gilder circle critics above all.
The Farragut’s success was all but assured due to Saint-Gaudens’s relationship
with powerful critics who constructed and expedited his reputation in tandem with
their own messianic agendas for a new national art. Riding on the achievements of
Saint Thomas and the Woolsey bust, the Farragut empowered the thirty-three-year-
old artist as an independent and monumental sculptor, the major sculptural talent
of the era. It expanded his reputation beyond the artistic and journalistic circles of
New York to emerging national awareness that would coalesce in the 1887 unveil-
ing of Abraham Lincoln: The Man (1884–87) in Chicago, when again his critical
trumpeters bolstered him. In 1903, Lorado Taft referred to Gilder’s article on the
Farragut in Scribner’s Monthly as one “which deserves to become historic because
of its sympathetic comprehension and its bold claims for the newly discovered mas-
ter.” Taft continued, “Time has justified these claims; but who can say how long a
period might have been required had not the modest sculptor found such champions
to vouch for him and for his unfamiliar art.”48 The interdependent agenda of the
artist and his writers to promote a new school of American sculpture was a win-win
situation for all.

Notes
1 “The Fine Arts: Farragut’s Monument,” Critic 1 (June 18, 1881): 167. Jeannette and Joseph
Gilder were sister and brother of Richard Watson Gilder.
2 “Fine Arts: The Farragut Statue—History of the Work and Some Detail Previous to Critical
Notice,” New York Herald, May 20, 1881, 8.
3 “St. Gaudens’s ‘Farragut,’ ” New York Daily Tribune, May 25, 1881, 5.
4 Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1903),
288.
5 Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (1968) rev. ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
and New York: Cornwall Books, 1984), 382.
6 For extended consideration as well as discussion of Saint-Gaudens’s relationships with
the individual critics, see Thayer Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, His Critics, and the
New School of American Sculpture, 1875–1893” (PhD diss., City University of New York,
2003).
7 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Augusta Homer, March 17, 1875. Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire,
reel 21, frame 154 (hereafter Saint-Gaudens Papers).
8 Lois Goldreich Marcus, “Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture: Augustus
Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907)” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1979), 42.
 Before the Farragut 177
9 John Quincy Adams Ward to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, [Summer 1876], quoted in The
Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint-Gaudens (New York: Century
Co., 1913), vol. 1, 171 (hereafter Reminiscences).
10 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Mrs. Thomas J. Homer, May 31, 1876. Saint-Gaudens Papers,
reel 17, frame 515.
11 On La Farge’s decoration of Saint Thomas Church, see H. Barbara Weinberg, The Decora-
tive Work of John La Farge (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1972, published New York:
Garland Publishing, 1977), 146–67.
12 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to John La Farge, September 10, 1877 (draft or copy). Saint-­
Gaudens Papers, reel 9, frame 162.
13 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Richard Watson Gilder, [November 1877]. Saint-Gaudens
Papers, reel 7, frame 495.
14 John La Farge to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, [November 1877]. Saint-Gaudens Papers, reel 9,
frames 294–95.
15 Wyatt Eaton to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, November 12, 1877. Saint-Gaudens Papers, reel
5, frame 748.
16 Richard Watson Gilder to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, November 11, 1877. Saint-Gaudens
Papers, reel 7, frames 412–13.
17 Reminiscences, vol. 1, 192–93.
18 “Altar Decorations at St. Thomas,” New York Times, October 31, 1877, 4.
19 “St. Thomas’s Chancel,” New York World, October 28, 1877, 4, reprinted with changes
in “St. Thomas’s Chancel,” American Architect and Building News 2 (November 3, 1877):
354.
20 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Richard Watson Gilder, November 16, 1877. Saint-Gaudens
Papers, reel 7, frames 491–92.
21 Gilder subsequently praised the results of Cole’s work (with an overt plug for Saint-­Gaudens)
in “The Old Cabinet,” Scribner’s Monthly 16 (June 1878): 292.
22 [Clarence Cook], “Recent Church Decoration,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (February 1878):
569–77. The engraving appears on page 576.
23 Ibid., 574.
24 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Stanford White, [March 1878] (copy). Saint-Gaudens Papers,
reel 13, frame 888.
25 “Art Work in the Chancel,” New York Times, May 6, 1878, 5.
26 See Thayer Tolles, “ ‘Refined Picturesqueness’: Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the Concept of
Finish,” in Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848–1907: A Master of American Sculpture, exh. cat.
(Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art, 1999), 59–64.
27 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Edwards Pierrepont, [ca. early 1880] (draft). Saint-Gaudens
Papers, reel 11, frames 651–52.
28 Thus far Saint-Gaudens had shown only several bronze low-relief portraits of friends in the
society’s exhibition of 1879. See Tolles, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” 152–57.
29 [Clarence Cook], “Society of American Artists. The Coming Exhibition,” New York Daily
Tribune, March 16, 1880, 5.
30 M. G. Van Rensselaer, “Spring Exhibitions and Picture-Sales in New York.—I,” American
Architect and Building News 7 (May 1, 1880): 191.
31 On the Weir, see George Gurney, “Olin Levi Warner (1844–1896): A Catalogue Raisonné
of His Sculpture and Graphic Works” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1978), 437–46.
32 “Society of American Artists. Opening of the Third Annual Exhibition This Afternoon,”
New York Evening Post, March 15, 1880, 4.
33 Van Rensselaer, “Spring Exhibitions and Picture-Sales,” 191.
34 “The Society of American Artists,” New York World, March 21, 1880, 4.
35 “Culture and Progress: The Art Season. Society of American Artists,” Scribner’s Monthly 20
(June 1880): 314.
36 “Art in the Cities: New York,” Art Journal (New York) 6 (August 1880): 254.
37 Marcus, “Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture,” 33–102; and Joyce Karen
Schiller, “The Artistic Collaboration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White” (PhD
diss., Washington University, Saint Louis, 1997), 62–167.
178 Thayer Tolles
38 “The Farragut Statue,” New York Times, May 25, 1881, 4; and “Art Notes: The Farragut
Statue,” Art Journal 7 (August 1881): 255.
39 “St. Gaudens’s ‘Farragut,’ ” New York Daily Tribune, May 25, 1881, 5.
40 Richard Watson Gilder, “The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (June 1881):
161–67.
41 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Richard Watson Gilder, April 4, 1881. Saint-Gaudens Papers,
reel 7, frames 520–21.
42 “The Farragut Monument,” Scribner’s Monthly, 163.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 164.
45 M. G. Van Rensselaer, “Mr. St. Gaudens’s Statue of Admiral Farragut in New York,”
­American Architect and Building News 10 (September 10, 1881): 119–20.
46 Ibid., 119.
47 Ibid.
48 Taft, History of American Sculpture, 288, 291.
10 Crossing Broadway
New York and the Culture of Capital
in the Late Nineteenth Century
David Jaffee

Nineteenth-century New York City was a visual experience, a spectacle for resident
and visitor alike. By the time Currier & Ives made available The City of New York
in 1876 (see Plate 9) with its prominent buildings, prescient Brooklyn Bridge, and a
cityscape stretching as far as the eye could see, images of the city, such as the bird’s-
eye view and the lithograph (in textual and graphic form), had been circulating for
several decades, taking advantage of new technologies and new genres. Nothing stood
out more as a visual subject and spectacle than Broadway, the leading street of the
metropolis, for its constant motion and visual display of the cityscape, as in this 1876
lithograph with its exaggerated width that dramatically crosses the view.1
At the same time, every guidebook writer’s and traveler’s account featured vivid
descriptions of Broadway that palpably relayed the visuality and spectacle of the
metropolis’s central thoroughfare. Cornelius Mathews entitled his 1853 work
­Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New-York City, opening with an invitation to his readers
to accompany him on “a panoramic exhibition” to “paint a home picture,” beginning
with Broadway, “a great sheet of glass, through which the whole world is visible as
in a transparency”—echoing other writers in seeing the street as the microcosm of the
city, the nation, and indeed, the world. Mathews ended his panorama with another
new visual wonder of the age: “the Bird’s-Eye View of New York.”2 Others, particu-
larly the illustrated periodicals, took their readers and viewers down to street level:
William Bobo warned that merely crossing the intersection could be “at the peril of
your life or limbs,” relating the anecdote of two young women who became separated
for over an hour before the traffic allowed them to be reunited, mirroring a contem-
poraneous Harper’s Weekly image, “Crossing Broadway.”3 In words and especially in
images, these writers and graphic artists, publishers and printers, were convinced that
the nineteenth-century city could only be captured and understood in visual terms.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, New York was not only the site of
production and distribution of this new domestic culture but also its critical subject.
Seeing the city and being seen in the city became paramount in new spaces for display,
such as Central Park or the city streets. Central to this transformation was the explo-
sion of image-making and mechanical reproduction, signs of the onset of industriali-
zation and a mass visual culture. This essay focuses on the image makers who emerged
in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—in lithography, Harper’s, and Edward
Anthony’s stereo views. (The stereo view was an early form of three-dimensional
photography that used a pair of two-dimensional images to be viewed in a special
viewer called a stereoscope; Anthony was its largest supplier.) These makers and the
images they created continued to rise in popularity so that, by 1880, New York stood
180 David Jaffee
atop the national production and distribution of images, which promised new visions
of the spectacle of modern life. A visual examination of these material forms reveals
the growing prominence of the bird’s-eye view of the sprawling metropolis as well as
street views of the city’s booming commercial districts and its working classes.
Images of early nineteenth-century New York frequently featured a placid harbor
view with the steeples and shores of Manhattan in the background, such as New York
from Weehawk (John Hill after William Guy Wall, 1823), and William Bennett’s 1834
Broadway from the Bowling Green (Figure 10.1) pictures a genteel street view with
upper-class figures. But by the 1870s, those scenes had changed. The 1875 Broadway
New York, from the Western Union Telegraph Building, looking North by Currier &
Ives shows a teeming, chaotic jumble of pedestrians and vehicles seen from above.
Images of the city at street level reveal a new fascination with the deprivations endured
by those who lived in the Bowery and the Five Points section of the city as well as the
crime sweeping through those neighborhoods. Interior views illuminated such sites as
tenements that were unseen by the rest of the population.
New technologies and new genres revolutionized the business of making images for
public consumption. But the technologies of the lithograph, photograph, and news-
paper illustration did not themselves cause the dramatic rise in images of urban life.
Rather, it was the heady mix of culture and commerce in making and distributing
these products that marked American cultural production in general and New York

Figure 10.1 William Bennett, Broad Way from the Bowling Green, 1834. Aquaitint. Eno
­Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs,
The New York Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library
 Crossing Broadway 181
in particular. The first generation of British artists and German lithographers crossed
the Atlantic in the first half of the nineteenth century seeking commercial success.
Although they brought the aquatint and the lithograph to an American market, they
did not always meet with financial prosperity, as the careers of William Bennett and
August Kollner demonstrate.4 But these lithographers did firmly establish New York’s
central role in the business of making the city’s urban growth into familiar images—
from the bird’s-eye or the street-level view—which would become commercially viable
for mass-market entrepreneurs, such as Edward Anthony and Nathaniel Currier, in
the post–Civil War decades. These postbellum producers and their contemporaries
found a ready supply of young men and women to work in their Manhattan manu-
factories. Despite the mounting number of lithographs and stereo views produced by
those shops, these were not industrial factories with steam-powered machines but
instead were manned by many poorly paid employees working at high speed.
In one rich example, Currier & Ives’s production process utilized an efficient divi-
sion of labor. The “factory” occupied the third, fourth, and fifth stories of 33 Spruce
Street. The third floor, lined with racks, was entirely devoted to storing the lithograph
stones; they were ground and reground on the fourth floor. “Best-sellers” remained
at the ready; an image in great demand might be drawn on several stones and printed
simultaneously on multiple presses. Other stones were reused for new prints.5 Staff
artists, or “delineators,” and lithographers occupied the rear of the fourth floor. Not
all the artists worked on-site; many freelance artists, who received about ten dollars
a picture and no royalties, brought their work to Ives for possible sale. Generally, the
firm did not rely on the work of well-known artists (unlike competing printer Louis
Prang, who aimed at the fine arts print market).6 The presses and printers, needing
good light, operated in the front areas of the fourth and fifth floors. Before 1880, Cur-
rier & Ives prints were hand colored:

The “stock prints” were colored, in the shop on the fifth floor at 33 Spruce Street,
by a staff of about twelve young women and girls, all trained colorists and mostly
of German descent. They worked at long tables, from a model. . . . The model
was put in the middle of the table. . . . Each colorist would apply one color, and
then pass the print on to the next colorist, and so on until the print had been
fully colored. It would then go to the woman in charge, who was known as the
­“finisher,” and who would touch it up where necessary.7

Various methods sped up production. For large-volume productions, stencils were cut
for different colors and extra hands brought in to wash on those colors. Larger folio
prints were sent out to colorists. For both inside and outside production, competi-
tion among available workers “pushed down wages for these women” while making
available “mountains of colored pictures for sale at the cheap print-shops.” The divi-
sion of labor and assembly-line production process facilitated rapid output, perhaps
a new lithograph on average every three days. The firm established a national, indeed
international, distribution system with agents outside New York, dealers in all major
American cities, and offices in Europe. They distributed large and detailed catalogs
of their prints and included sales letters when sending them to agents. They did not
neglect the local marketplace; beyond the print shop, a network of pushcart peddlers
arrived each day to pick up their stock for sale throughout the city, Brooklyn, and
northern New Jersey.8
182 David Jaffee
Eventually, some institutions did embark on machine production: Currier & Ives
turned to steam power toward the end of the century, and Harper & Brothers con-
verted to mass production in their cast-iron building on Pearl Street. Although New
York did become a manufacturing mart with tanneries and sugar refineries, the city
never resembled Lowell, Massachusetts, with its low-slung factory buildings, nor Pitts-
burgh, with its belching steel mills. Instead, it was the mass of smaller-scale producers
of clothing, furniture, or photographic images that marked the distinctive mode of
New York’s manufacturing sector in the later nineteenth century.
The infrastructure of culture—how culture was delivered through commercial
channels and institutions—mattered greatly in nineteenth-century New York. P. T.
Barnum’s American Museum and A. T. Stewart’s department store, the “Marble Pal-
ace,” made frequent appearances in the visual record, but they represented only the tip
of the iceberg in New York’s surging importance as an emporium of culture and com-
merce. In his promotion of Jenny Lind, Tom Thumb, and other popular attractions,
Barnum sought ever-larger audiences, and in a city of ever-wider social divisions, all
classes flocked to Broadway and Ann Street for entertainment as well as shopping.
The owners of these enterprises, including the daguerreotypist Mathew Brady, took
advantage of the new culture of celebrity that they had helped to create by exploit-
ing the mass circulation press and the burgeoning middle-class market. The popular
theme of “The Two Great Classes of the Metropolis” was dramatic visual and liter-
ary fodder for scenes of plenty and poverty, of sunshine and shadows, and helped to
establish the careers of writer George Foster and illustrator Winslow Homer, among
others. It was the thick band of the growing middle class, however, that represented
the prime market for the “Printmakers to the American People,” as Currier & Ives
called their firm, or for the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to Harper’s Weekly.
Indeed, it was this middle class that provided the bulk of the visitors and residents
who used guidebooks and prints to navigate the streets of New York and to compre-
hend the complexities of the growing urban world of the nineteenth century. They
bought the illustrated newspapers with images of the rich frolicking at society balls or
the poor huddled in dismal dwellings. They also flocked to new stores for commodi-
ties, such as John Rogers’s sculptural figures. People went to commercial centers to see
and be seen and to understand themselves as a class in such genteel settings as Brady’s
Daguerreian Gallery or A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace. The process of class consolida-
tion entered the home by the purchase and display of lithographs, photographs, and
illustrated periodicals in middle-class parlors.9
Currier & Ives produced their first bird’s-eye view of New York in 1856 (Figure 10.2).
The first of more than a dozen of the metropolis, this large-scale view from the south
featured thirty-three landmarks in the key. Drawn by Charles Parsons for Nathaniel
Currier, it established an iconic view that continued to sell well after Parsons became
head of Harper’s art department. This print presents the city as compact and relatively
homogeneous, defined by its harbor and waterways; its most impressive visual elements
are Castle Garden, the Battery, and Trinity Church.10 In the 1876 print, by contrast, the
city explodes outward (see Plate 9). By this time, the artist’s point of view had become
more elevated, thus diminishing the harbor’s significance and heightening the sense
that the island stretches as far as the eye can see.
In the earlier map, the viewer’s eye could make out only the point where Broadway
and Bowery converge on Union Square. In the 1876 image, that same point is now at
the center, and a viewer can discern Grand Central Depot and the new Central Park.
 Crossing Broadway 183

Figure 10.2 Charles Parsons, City of New York/sketched and drawn on stone by C. Parsons,
N. Currier, 1856. Color lithograph. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress

In 1856, the Trinity Church spire dominates; in 1876, a succession of large white
buildings has formed a downtown business district, graced by high-rises, including the
Western Union Building. The key boasts numerous other commercial buildings with
the names of their companies, along with more traditional public buildings, such as
churches and hotels, and public works projects, such as Central Park. The Brooklyn
Bridge dominates visually with its grand scale, even though in 1876 only its towers
had actually been completed. Tanneries, sugar refineries, and other manufactories line
the city’s periphery along the East River. This differentiated cityscape depicted an
uptown and a downtown and separate commercial and manufacturing districts. It is
monumental in scale. Broadway has become grander and wider, with more lanes of
traffic. We see the world’s first elevated railway system, starting at the ferry terminal
at the southern tip of the island and stretching up Ninth Avenue.11
Although intended to promote map-like realism, bird’s-eye views blended artistic
and cartographic conventions. The artists seemingly drew these scenes from an eleva-
tion of approximately two or three thousand feet; in actuality, they walked the streets
and sketched individual buildings or groups of buildings and put them together as a
composite oriented toward representing the city in three dimensions and rotated to
emphasize the particular place or story, harbor or park.12 As John F. Kasson notes,

Bird’s-eye views converted the city into a kind of concrete abstraction, displacing
the profusion of sensory experience [at the street level] by the cold, distant grasp
of the eye. Such views flattered their beholders’ power by subjecting the city for
their inspection as privileged readers.13
184 David Jaffee
But more than mere scale, legibility was significant, according to Jonathan Prude, who
argues that their “key function . . . turned on their ability to make the total shape of
urban settings readily comprehensible.”14 Similarly, John Reps has noted the multiple
sites of display for these prints, along with their multidimensional purpose:

Owners of these prints displayed them on the walls of parlors, offices, and such
public places as banks, hotels and government buildings. Everyone regarded
these urban views as convincing evidence of their city’s prosperity and impor-
tance and looked on them with pride, consulted them for information, sent
them to friends, or admired them as decoration for their homes or places of
business.15

Charles Parsons was chiefly responsible for most, if not all, of the firm’s city views in
the years following the Civil War. Many were large folio views, some printed as chro-
molithographs in multiple stone processes, with heavy oil-based paints that account
for the some of the garish coloration of the 1876 New York bird’s-eye.16 “Chromos”
sold by the tens of thousands, contributing to the dramatic increase in availability
of industrial objects that constituted art in the domestic interior. The third quarter
of the nineteenth century, Michael Leja has argued, saw “the invention of a mass
visual culture,” requiring not just technological changes in illustrated newspapers and
reproducible photographs but also the growth of a mass market for images.17 “The
‘illustration’ mania is upon our people,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal wrote in 1857,
when Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was two years old and Harper’s Weekly
had just been inaugurated.18 Wood engravings helped transform illustrated periodi-
cals into a mass-market phenomenon.19 Both journals called New York their home
and featured images of the urban scene.
While lithographs detailed the dynamism of the expanding metropolis, photographs
and illustrated periodicals pulled in for a closer view, offering street scenes and charac-
ter studies. The London Illustrated News served as one model for American publish-
ers; indeed, English immigrant Frank Leslie brought his knowledge to the American
print scene, initially in Boston’s Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, with
its “sharply curtailed . . . vision” of what constituted newsworthy events.20 Illustrated
newspapers took advantage of new technologies, including the telegraph network and
transatlantic cable, as well as the growing centralization of American publishing in
New York. The electrotyping of pages composed of wood engraving and type enabled
tens of thousands of impressions to be struck with little wear on them.21 Other indus-
trial processes facilitated “the illustration mania.” After the artist drew an approved
version, it was rubbed down in reverse on Turkish boxwood, many small sections
composing a larger block, with each artist working on his or her particular section.22
Harper’s Weekly first featured a front-page illustration in April 1857. The next
month, the editors boasted that

Harper’s Weekly has already reached a regular issue of more than Sixty Thousand
Copies. . . . The proprietors beg to say that they will be happy to receive sketches
or photographic pictures of striking scenes, important events, and leading men
from artists in every part of the world, and to pay liberally for such as they may
use.23
 Crossing Broadway 185
Winslow Homer and other artists often sketched the more refined side of the city.
Increasingly through the 1860s and 1870s, contrasting visions of high and low, pas-
toral and urban, entered the pages of the pictorial press. For example, depictions of
riotous street scenes and images of overcrowded housing were featured in illustrations
of the era.
Even the everyday practice of crossing Broadway elicited copious commentary in
image and text. In 1860, a “View of Broadway, Opposite Fulton Street, New York,”
revealed far too many vehicles and passengers converging on the same bit of urban
space (Figure 10.3). Policemen raise batons and whips against horses and, perhaps,
pedestrians. Meanwhile, another policeman attempts to escort two well-dressed
women across the intersection. The text accompanying the image details the unpleas-
antness that attended the chaos of urban life:

Broadway, opposite Fulton Street, is, in its way, the most striking place in the
United States. No other spot conveys so good an idea of the bustle and the stir
of the great commercial city of America. Even in pleasant weather . . . there is
always a monstrous crush, and throng, and hurry, and noise, and clatter oppo-
site Barnum’s. But when snow has fallen, and has begun to melt; when . . . the
streets are crowded with sleighs . . . when the slush and the slime render walking
a trial to booted men, and a cruel punishment to ladies; when, between the fear

Figure 10.3 “View of Broadway, Opposite Fulton Street, New York.” Harper’s Weekly,
­February 18, 1860
Source: Courtesy, Bard Graduate Center; Photographer: Bruce White
186 David Jaffee
of being run over and the dread of soiling white underskirts, fair pedestrians
suffer the agonies of death in endeavoring to cross Broadway at this central
point; when the shouts of policemen mingle with the roar of omnibus-drivers,
the shrieks of girls, the shrill cries of mischievous boys, the brass horns on the
Museum balcony, and perhaps the hoarse rattle of a fire company in the dis-
tance, the scene then becomes one to be never forgotten. As such we hand it
down to posterity.24

The illustrated periodicals promised a “faithful picture presenting an everyday scene”

by their artist-correspondents, and their popularity was based on the growing sense
of the pictorial quality of urban life.25 The pictorial press did print bird’s-eye views,
such as Harper’s remarkable “New York, from a Balloon” published in a supplement
on May 6, 1871, but their streetscape view adopted what John F. Kasson has called
“the mole’s-eye view,” an inside view of the chaos and divisions.26 In Thomas Hogan’s
contrasting views of the entertainments, Up Among the Nineties (­Figure 10.4), the
toffs enjoy their ice cream in a parlor-like setting and the accompanying text refers
to the “elegant saloon” and “stylish dresses,” while the poorly clothed children have
their treats in the open air or at the “nuisances of street eating-counters.” The text
explained,

Every citizen of New York will recognize instantly the accuracy of the picture;
nothing could more clearly convey to the minds of the thousands of distant

Figure 10.4 Thomas Hogan, “Up Among the Nineties.” Harper’s Weekly, August 15, 1860
Source: Courtesy, Bard Graduate Center; Photographer: Bruce White
 Crossing Broadway 187
readers, who are always wishing to know more about New York, the vast differ-
ence between the two great streets, and the two great classes of the metropolis.27

What was invisible to the ordinary citizen or visitor because of its shadowy ­existence—
or occluded by bird’s-eye or panorama representations—was first made known
through textual accounts, such as George Foster’s New-York by Gaslight, but they
attained vivid and visual form in the illustrated periodicals.28
Edward Anthony’s Broadway on a Rainy Day promised a new, three-dimensional
vision of the city on both sides of a rectangular orange card (Figure 10.5). The view
of the city outside Anthony’s window became a significant statement for the firm and
for the stereoscope itself, partly because the Anthony business, a thriving “palace of
commerce,” was located on the great avenue, and Broadway symbolized the bustling
metropolis.29 The stereo’s dual images featured a long perspective along glistening
streets and crowded sidewalks, filled with umbrella-covered pedestrians and horse-
drawn vehicles, all caught in mid-motion, except for a small carriage in the immediate
foreground. This “instantaneous” view of Broadway and New York itself was a very
different image of the city from its photographic predecessors, which had offered
either blurred figures or streets devoid of activity because of their long exposures. The
daguerreotype Chatham Square has barely visible shoppers or pedestrians but offers a
disorderly scene with a diverse mix of emporia selling furniture, window shades, and
other household goods.30 In addition, Anthony claimed, the “instantaneous” stereo-
graph represented an article of modernity.
Urban views became a staple of the stereo catalog, replacing the daguerreotype’s
portraits. By concentrating “on the encyclopedic, ‘objective’ documentary potential of
the stereoscope and its view,” Laura Schiavo has argued, “the vogue in stereoscopic

Figure 10.5 Edward Anthony, Broadway on a Rainy Day, N.Y.C. Stereographic photograph,

Anthony’s Instantaneous Views No. 244, New York (ca. 1859). Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
188 David Jaffee
views turned to landscapes, city views, and other subjects far more suited to the delin-
eation of national, political, and cultural identity.” 31 In 1860, Oliver Wendell Holmes
discussed this very view of Broadway:

It is the Oriental story of the petrified city made real to our eyes. . . . But what a
wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it rushed by in all its
multitudinous complexity of movement!32

In Anthony’s Broadway views, we can start to discern the formulaic qualities that
marked all his city views. When Anthony held his camera out a second-floor balcony,
the goal was to obtain the greatest depth down the street by minimizing foreground
areas in which motion might be blurred. Anthony released the shutter when the max-
imum amount of activity would be registered with its arrested movement, as had
caught Holmes’s and others’ imagination, and he framed the arrested movement with
a triangular wedge of sky balanced against the triangular angle of the street.
Edward Anthony’s success as a stereographic entrepreneur was built on a series of
innovative commercial and technical practices. He started by importing European
stereographs but soon built his business around American views, and his fortunate
location in New York City contributed to his success. He improved the sensitiv-
ity of the collodion negative emulsion and the shutter technology of the camera so
that exposures were only about 1/40 of a second, compared to most others of thirty
seconds or longer. His cameras were small, simple and lightweight affairs with tiny
negatives. Expensive and cumbersome stand-alone viewers were replaced by the light
and simple Holmes-Bates stereoscope with its small board, two lenses, and a pro-
jecting arm in which to place the stereograph, which could be held up to the user’s
eyes. Anthony ventured into mass production, employing over fifty women, as well
as some male workers, to select the prints, trim, mount, and finish the pictures. The
views were printed on albumen paper using the glass collodion negatives; this activ-
ity took place in a separate building with plenty of light. An albumen paper factory
staffed by women workers opened at 65 Broadway to meet the mounting demand.
Although most of the process was not mechanized, the assembly-line system allowed
the Anthony employees to produce two to three thousand cards a day, or over a mil-
lion a year.33 New York was the subject of many Anthony stereographs and was also
the center of Anthony’s national system of production and distribution. By 1873,
their trade list included over eleven thousand items.34 Peter Hales has insightfully
argued that Anthony’s stereographs take an innovative approach to the representa-
tion of the city as process while also utilizing conservative characteristics in their
visual depiction and business practices to maximize their adoption in the American
home.35
New modes of vision, promoted by innovative technologies, such as the stereoscope
and the lithograph, made possible more than a plethora of prints. Objects such as
these prints, along with other items that entered the parlor, enabled the social world
to happen, rather than serving as mere illustrations of it.36 As pastoral prospects and
genteel Georgian townscapes gave way to bird’s-eye views and chaotic street scenes,
New York became the primary model for how an exploding urban scene might be
understood in visual terms. Bird’s-eye views and stereo views offered the possibilities
of glimpsing a bounded urban space, caught in time—an effort to capture the flux of
 Crossing Broadway 189
Broadway on a rainy day or a burgeoning metropolitan region that was increasingly
imperceptible on the ground. More and more, places for display fostered an urban
visual regime based on the construction of a middle-class viewing public.37 Currier &
Ives, Edward and H. T. Anthony, Harper Brothers, and their fellow image producers
actively shaped the domestic configuration that constituted middle-class culture in the
post–Civil War era. Their visual products offered increasingly standardized images
of the city, only occasionally disrupted by disquieting events or individuals, such as
the fires that demolished Barnum’s American Museum or the Crystal Palace. Their
body of images circulated to a national and international market. There were certainly
divides between the classes, but there were also exciting visions of bustling streets and
panoramic metropolitan vistas that came into view in the 1860s and 1870s so that, by
1880, New York signified the modern commercial city.

Notes
Editors’ note: This essay was still in progress at the time of the author’s death. For this reason,
the endnotes that follow may not annotate the essay as fully as is customary. Culled from the
scholar’s personal notes, however, we hope they will reflect the spirit of his intent.
1 Key sources consulted here include John Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America:
Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and
Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825–1925 (Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 1984); David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Ante-
bellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and David M. Scobey,
Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (­Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002).
2 Cornelius Mathews, Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New-York City (New York: Johns S. Taylor,
1853), 32–33, 203. For additional context, see Frederick Saunders, New York in a Nut-
Shell, or Visitors’ Handbook to the City (New York: T. W. Strong, 1853), 101.
3 William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City (Charleston, NC: J. J. McCarter, 1852),
13–14; and “Crossing Broadway,” Harper’s Weekly, March 2, 1867, 147.
4 On Bennett, see Gloria-Gilda Deak, William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View
(New York: New York Public Library, 1988); and Marilyn F. Symmes, Impressions of New
York: Prints from the New-York Historical Society (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2004), 38–41. On Kollner, see Nicholas Wainwright, “Augustus Kollner: Artist,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1960): 325–51; Helen Comstock,
“Kollner’s Views of American Cities,” Old Print Shop Portfolio 3 (1944): 195–96; and
Roberta J. Olsen, Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the
New-York Historical Society (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 247–49.
5 This account is taken from Anthony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to
the History and Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 104, quoted
in Kirsten Purtich, “From Stone to Street: Biography of a Currier & Ives Lithograph,”
in Visualizing 19th Century New York (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2014), http://­
visualizingnyc.org/essays/from-stone-to-street-biography-of-a-currier-ives-lithograph/.
6 Harry T. Peters, Currier & Ives, Printmakers to the American People (New York: Double-
day, 1942), 35.
7 Ibid., 53–54.
8 “Labor in New-York: Its Circumstances, Conditions and Rewards. No. V . . . The Map-
Colorers,” New-York Daily Tribune 25 (August 25, 1845): 2; and April Masten, Art Work:
Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York (Philadelphia:
­University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). See also Peter, Currier & Ives, 40.
9 See David Jaffee, “John Rogers Takes His Place in the Parlor,” in John Rogers: American
Stories, ed. Kimberly Orcutt (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2010), 167–79.
190 David Jaffee
10 Scobey, Empire City, 62. Parsons had arrived from England at age nine, was apprenticed to
George Endicott’s New York lithography establishment, and worked on city views before
he moved over to Currier in the mid-1850s. Peters, Currier & Ives, 134–40.
11 Scobey, Empire City, 62–65; Reps, Views and Viewmakers, 160–61; and Julia Hollett
Courtney, “The Artists Who Worked for Currier & Ives,” in The Legacy of Currier & Ives:
Shaping the American Spirit (Springfield, MA: Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of
Fine Arts, 2010), 22–24.
12 Reps, Views and Viewmakers, 160–61; Deak, Picturing America, vol. 1, 403–4.
13 John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1991), 73.
14 Jonathan Prude, “Engaging Urban Panoramas” Common-Place 3, no. 7 (April 2007),
http://common-place.org/book/engaging-urban-panoramas/.
15 John Reps, Cities of the Mississippi (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 4.
16 For a description of the process, see Reps, Views and Viewmakers, 196–98; The Wood, Stru-
thers & Winthrop Collection of Currier & Ives (New York: Wood, Struthers & W ­ inthrop,
1996), 14; and Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Chromolithography 1840–1900:
Pictures for a 19th-Century America (Boston: David R. Godine, 1979), 83.
17 Michael Leja, “Scenes from a History of the Image,” Social Research 78 (Winter 2011):
1012–15.
18 “Art Gossip,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 4 (September 1860): 126–28.
19 Sally Lorenson Gross, Toward an Urban View: The Nineteenth-Century American City in
Prints (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 22–26; and Michael Clapper, “ ‘I Was
Once a Barefoot Boy!’: Cultural Tensions in a Popular Chromo,” American Art 16, no. 2
(Summer 2002): 17–39.
20 Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life and the Crisis of
Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 19.
21 David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2003), 24.
22 Brown, Beyond the Lines, 20.
23 “Publisher’s Notices,” Harper’s Weekly 1 (May 2, 1857): 273. See also Tatham, Homer and
the Pictorial Press, 68.
24 “Broadway, Opposite Fulton Street,” Harper’s Weekly 4 (February 18, 1860): 106.
25 David Jaffee, “Introduction” to Visualizing 19th Century New York, http://visualizingnyc.
org/introduction/.
26 Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 74.
27 “Up Among the Nineties,” Harper’s Weekly 12 (August 15, 1868): 521.
28 George G. Foster, New York by Gas-light, and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also James Dabney McCabe, The
Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries,
Miseries and Crimes of New York City (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers, 1868).
29 The term palace of commerce comes from John Werge, The Evolution of Photography
(London: Piper & Carter, 1890), 200–1, and is quoted in Virginia Spofford, “Prosperous
Partnership: Edward and Henry Anthony’s Production of ‘Instantaneous Views,’ ” in Visu-
alizing 19th Century New York, http://visualizingnyc.org/essays/prosperous-partnership-
edward-and-henry-anthonys-production-of-instantaneous-views/.
30 See Jeff L. Rosenheim, “ ‘A Palace for the Sun’: Early Photography in New York City,”
in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, eds. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger
and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale
­University Press, 2000), 218; William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg,
PA: Darrah, 1977), 21–22; and Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social
History, 1839–1889 (1939: rpt. New York: Dover, 1964), 173–76.
31 Laura Schiavo, “ ‘A Collection of Endless Extent and Beauty’: Stereographs, Vision, Taste
and the American Middle Class, 1850–1880” (PhD diss., George Washington University,
2003), 161.
32 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864),
232.
 Crossing Broadway 191
33 See William Marder, Anthony: The Man, the Company, the Camera (Plantation, FL: Pine
Ridge, 1982), 113, 122; Reese Jenkins, Images & Enterprise: Technology and the American
Photographic Industry, 1839 to 1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975),
50–52; and Rosenheim, “ ‘Palace for the Sun,’ ” 234–35. See also Paul Wing, Stereoscopes:
The First One Hundred Years (Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 1996).
34 Marder, Anthony, 113; New Catalogue of Stereoscopes and Views Manufactured and Pub-
lished by E. Anthony, American & Foreign Stereoscopic Emporium (New York, 1862).
35 Peter Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939, rev. ed.
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 162–66.
36 On the stereoscope, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Moder-
nity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 124–36. See also John
Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 16; and John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds.,
Introduction to Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–
1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 22.
37 See Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 59–86; T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern
Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984); and M.
Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural
Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 250–57.
11 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings
William Holbrook Beard’s Wall Street
Ross Barrett

William Holbrook Beard’s 1879 painting The Bulls and Bears in the Market (see
Plate 10, New-York Historical Society) is immediately recognizable as a comic vision of
the stock market. Picturing a stampede of cattle and bears surging past the New York
Stock Exchange building, the painting visualizes the animal rhetoric that many period
observers used to describe the opposing market tactics—investing on the basis of antici-
pated value rises or price declines—employed by financial operators. F ­ ocusing on the
stampede, Sarah Burns has shown that Beard’s scene offers a concentrated vision of the
wild conflict that came to be associated with New York’s stock market after the Civil
War.1 Many nineteenth-century viewers addressed The Bulls and Bears in the Market in
these terms, interpreting the painting variously as an “amusing” spoof of the “antics of
the . . . members of the stock board,” a soothing “antidote for the blues” engendered by
financial chicanery, or a moralizing “lesson . . . on stock speculation.”2
By turning our attention to the background streetscape, however, we can recapture
another dimension of the painting’s engagement with New York’s high-flying postwar
economy. The Bulls and Bears in the Market offers what seems to be the era’s only
detailed painterly rendering of the topography of New York’s business district. More
specifically, Beard’s picture records the built environment around the intersection of
Broad and Wall Streets, which was the epicenter of a wave of building and booster-
ism that remade the spaces and image of the financial district in the 1870s and 1880s.
Seeking to raise their public profiles and capitalize on New York’s surging real estate
market, banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies renovated older struc-
tures and put up luxurious new office buildings around the business district in the
decades after the Civil War. A new crop of real estate journalists and business boosters
chronicled every phase of this building campaign, churning out breathless editori-
als, chromolithographs, popular histories, and other promotional representations that
reimagined New York’s once modest and musty financial district as a glittering mecca
of order, profit, and grandeur, prefiguring the apotheosizing fantasies of Wall Street
that would proliferate in the twentieth century.
As I will show, The Bulls and Bears in the Market registers the effects of post­
bellum improvement on the neighborhood, incorporating many of the area’s lavish
new edifices within its composition. In so doing, however, Beard’s picture weaves these
buildings into an alternative urban view that evokes, humorously exaggerates, and
ultimately subverts promotional imaginings of the financial district’s development.
Read together with the foreground stampede, Beard’s cityscape visualizes the tenuous
character of real estate values around Wall Street, the fundamental ephemerality of the
district’s urban fabric, and the chaotic nature of downtown city building. Countering
booster fantasies of certain profit and measured growth with a wild vision of loss,
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 193
impermanency, and disorder, The Bulls and Bears in the Market upended prevailing
understandings of city view painting and gave striking expression to the anxieties and
ambivalences that the real estate boom inspired among many New Yorkers.
In the process, Beard’s painting worked in some small way to contest the aggrandiz-
ing forces that animated New York’s art world and broader public sphere after the
Civil War. As the authors in this collection demonstrate, Gilded Age arts advocates
strove to solidify New York’s cultural dominance by establishing preeminent arts insti-
tutions, reorganizing the city’s public spaces around edifying aesthetic experiences,
and expanding the local art press. Local artists likewise worked in various ways to
buttress New York’s status as a social, political, and creative center: sculptors filled
the city’s public spaces with striking monuments, painters celebrated its business and
political leaders, and decorative artists embellished its grand new edifices with glass,
tile, and metalwork. Reveling in the chaos and failure engendered by bold enterprise,
The Bulls and Bears in the Market advanced a humorously pointed rejoinder to these
creative productions and the outlook that underlay them—the shared commitment to
improvement, progress, and modernization that linked New York’s transforming art
world to its business and political realms at the end of the nineteenth century.

Beard and New York Real Estate

William Holbrook Beard (1824–1900) took an active interest in city-building and real
estate and regularly made his own, impish contributions to local debates about urban
development. In the fall of 1885, for example, the artist contributed an essay to the
North American Review roundtable, “Grant’s Tomb: What Shall It Be?,” which sought
to work out a design for a monument to the late president that would be located in New
York. Taking up this challenge, eight prominent public figures—including Calvert Vaux,
Clarence Cook, and Horatio Seymour—argued earnestly for the respective virtues of
classicized temples, ornate mausoleums, equestrian statues, and other potential designs
for the memorial. Beard’s essay took up the matter in more mischievous fashion. Rather
than argue straightforwardly for a specific design, the essay hints at a proposal that it
never quite delivers, using various tactics to raise and then frustrate the reader’s expec-
tations that the text will convey a clear plan for the monument. After a brief opening
paragraph, Beard’s essay outlines a set of design principles for the monument that seem
at first glance to be usefully specific:

This monument should be replete in all its parts, though not crowded or overdone;
should be full of meaning in every line and form from base to apex; it should be sim-
ple, though full; pure, grand, unique, though not strained, and indigenous to the soil.3

When read closely, the apparently concrete prescriptions of this passage unravel into
humorous ambiguity. Considered on their own, clauses calling for a monument that is
“full of meaning in every line and form from base to apex” or “replete in all its parts,
though not crowded or overdone” appear enigmatically vague or self-contradictory.
When read in sequence, these clauses function in turn as a series of intensely specific
qualifications that undercut any possibility (invoked by the initial clause “this monu-
ment should be”) that the passage will convey a firmly declarative statement about the
ideal form of the memorial.
The rest of Beard’s essay refuses to elaborate on this initial, amusingly evasive account
of the memorial. After the design passage, the text shifts to imagine a series of potential
194 Ross Barrett
obstacles to the realization of the monument project; it then rhapsodizes about the vir-
tues of an open design competition, qualifies this by admitting that “no satisfactory
results are often obtained by an open competition,” calls instead for a “competition lim-
ited to a few . . . established artists,” and finally concludes by proposing that the “work
might be given into the hands of two, possibly three, persons of divergent qualities.”4
Invited to make his own statement about the Grant memorial, then, Beard submitted a
text riven with qualifications, generalities, and contradictions, a humorous non-state-
ment that rejects the conventions of promotional writing and quietly pokes fun at the
bold assertions and pious declarations of his fellow participants.
Fourteen years before he participated in the Grant memorial roundtable, Beard
made a similarly complicated intervention in the public dialogue that unfolded as trus-
tees finalized a design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.5 In 1871, the artist drew
up plans for a subterranean entrance to the museum that would lead visitors through
a series of caverns filled with allegorical sculptures intended to evoke the transition
from ignorance to enlightenment.6 As Jennifer Greenhill has shown, Beard’s design
spoofed the transformative rhetoric used by museum supporters and the aesthetic
hierarchies cherished by cultural elites.7 In so doing, the design also lampooned the
material aspirations propelling the museum project. The primary public statement in
support of Beard’s scheme—a celebratory notice the artist had placed in Scribner’s—
explicitly linked the new museum with real estate development, noting that “whatever
makes New York pleasanter for a permanent residence . . . must add to the value of
every house on it,” and that “When . . . it was recently proposed to found . . . a great
Museum of Art . . . the project was soon recognized as practical.”8 Considered in this
light, Beard’s bizarre design—which set a dark hole under an institution that many
saw as a potential hub for a new wave of city-building on upper Manhattan—can be
considered as a humorous act of symbolic sabotage calculated to undercut promoters’
visions of substantial development and certain profit.

Wall Street’s Building Boom

Given his interest in the creative and comic potential of urban development, Beard was
likely intrigued by the building boom that arose in downtown New York in the late
1870s. As David Scobey has shown, banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies
began to channel capital into Wall Street real estate at mid-century; this trend accelerated
in the decade after the Panic of 1873, a period of gradual recovery that saw the rapid
expansion of the financial sector and a shift in attitude within that sector about real
estate.9 Taking measure of this shift, a New York Daily Graphic editor declared in 1873,

New York is building up a series of business palaces which will be without

rival. . . . Once it was thought that money spent in such improvements was
wasted, but experience has shown that a liberal expenditure in architecture is a
good investment.10

Seeking outlets for the capital they accumulated during the panic, New York’s finan-
cial institutions seized on the construction of lavish “business palaces,” filled with
rentable office suites, as a primary mode of investment in the 1870s and 1880s. As
capital began to flow through the financial district, banks and brokerage companies
came to see stylish architecture as a central selling point for potential customers and
an effective means of communicating the virtues of their businesses to the broader
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 195
public. Demand for “improved” corporate edifices accordingly surged, and rents
across the financial district skyrocketed. In the maelstrom of activity that ensued,
financial companies and real-estate developers put up or renovated dozens of office
buildings across the district. The epicenter of this boom was the intersection of Broad
and Wall Streets. Between 1872 and 1883, nine lavish structures arose within 500 feet
of the intersection, including the Drexel Building (corner of Broad and Wall, 1872–
73), Queen Insurance Company Building (37–39 Wall, 1877), Orient Building (41–43
Wall, 1876–77), James Renwick’s renovated stock exchange (14–20 Broad, 1879–82),
the Mills Building (15 Broad, 1880–82), and Henry Herdenbergh’s Western Union
Building (16–18 Broad, 1882–83).
The financial district’s building boom was sustained by a wave of promotional texts
and images. Countless articles in the business, real estate, and popular presses tracked
the progress of rising structures, touted the conveniences and style of finished build-
ings, and studied real-estate expenditures and returns in the financial district with
exuberant intensity.11 Real-estate reporters delighted in recounting the skyrocketing
sales prices of Wall Street properties, speculating about the rents earned by given edi-
fices and working out the astronomically high per-unit values of neighborhood land.
A widely reprinted 1875 article on rents in New York, for example, eagerly enumer-
ated the market value of and likely returns from Drexel, Morgan, and ­Company’s
grand new structure on the corner of Broad and Wall:

The new Drexel Building, corner of Wall and Broad streets, probably yields a better
rent than any similar property on the continent. The owners are not willing to let
their rent-roll be seen, but it is estimated at $110,000. They paid for the plat at the
rate of $14,000,000 per acre, a price which has never been equaled in America.12

Echoing other accounts that gleefully bandied about sales prices and rental figures, the
report casts the Drexel Building as a balance sheet in built form, a matrix of immense
outlay and unthinkable returns. Advanced in a wide variety of cultural venues, this
argument encouraged potential investors and the broader public to see development
in the financial district as a sure path to unimaginable profit.13
The claims made by reporters and real-estate boosters were amplified by a wave of
promotional print and photographic images of the financial district. Building trade
journals regularly published detailed illustrations of new office structures in the neigh-
borhood.14 Financial corporations employed similar images to supplement advertise-
ments and company prospectuses. In the 1870s, for example, Drexel, Morgan, and
Company ran advertisements in the financial press that featured a wood engraving
of the company’s grand building (Figure 11.1).15 Using a low viewpoint and tightly
cropped frame to heighten the verticality and massiveness of the structure, the engrav-
ing recasts Drexel and Morgan’s New York headquarters as an icon of solidity, per-
manence, and grandeur; paired with text enumerating the company’s various branches
and financial services (including the provision of credit and bills of exchange), the
engraving worked to persuade the potential client of the credibility and power of the
international banking house.
Other promotional images used distanced perspectives to visualize the broader
material transformation of the financial district. Looking southwest from an imagi-
nary point near Federal Hall (an early nineteenth-century structure at the corner
of Wall and Nassau Streets), Hughson Hawley’s chromolithograph The New York
Stock Exchange (Figure 11.2, 1882) shapes a more expansive view of the Broad/Wall
Figure 11.1 Drexel Building, Corner of Wall and Broad Streets, New York City, ca. 1880–1890.
Engraving. Art & Picture Collection, The New York Public Library
Source: The New York Public Library
 Charles Hart and Hughson Hawley, The New York Stock Exchange, 1882.
Figure 11.2 
­Chromolithograph. Library of Congress
Source: Library of Congress
198 Ross Barrett
intersection that incorporates the dazzling forms of two new building projects: the
Drexel Building (at the left edge) and the newly renovated stock exchange building
(at center).16 Linked by various details (light-toned facades, red columns, similar
­temple-like entry portals, and angling flagpole) and looming above the older structures
around them, the paired edifices appear as glittering emblems of the neighborhood’s
monumental remaking. Filled with bourgeois conversation groups and slowly moving
carriages, the print’s foreground suggests in turn that redevelopment has yielded a
genteel financial community that is lively but temperate, dynamic but orderly.
Other streetscape scenes used deep prospect views to affirm the rationality and
coherence of the financial district’s transforming urban fabric. The 1883 booster text
Wall Street in History, for example, features an illustration of the Broad/Wall inter-
section (Figure 11.3) that centers on a plunging view down Wall Street. Situating
Renwick’s renovated stock exchange building (at left) in a scene that is rigorously per-
spectival, teeming with repetitive geometrical forms, and studded with architectural
emblems of moral (Trinity Church at right center) and government authority (Federal
Hall at the right edge), “Wall Street in 1883” imagines the booming neighborhood
as a fantastic embodiment of social and spatial order. Many other streetscape and

Figure 11.3 “Wall Street in 1883—Sub-Treasury and Stock Exchange.” Wood engraving.

­Martha J. Lamb, Wall Street in History (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883)
Source: Collection of Ross Barrett
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 199
bird’s-eye views made similar claims for the developing district. In so doing, these
17

views contributed to a vibrant promotional discourse that celebrated the effects of

Wall Street’s redevelopment and worked to affirm the prospects of real estate invest-
ment in the financial district.

The Bulls and Bears in the Market

Composed even as the rebuilding of Wall Street reached a crescendo, The Bulls and
Bears in the Market playfully engaged the campaign’s material forces and promotional
discourses. In exploring the themes of construction and capital, Beard may have taken
a cue from the original owner of his painting. Although it has thus far gone unnoticed
by scholars, The Bulls and Bears in the Market appears to have been a commission.
Several early twentieth-century reviews of the painting (which represented the first
public commentary on the work since the 1880s) associated Beard’s work with the
New York banker and politician Roswell Pettibone Flower (1835–99), identifying The
Bulls and Bears in the Market as “a commission given the artist by Roswell P. Flower”
and “a lively satire. . . [that] the artist painted especially for Governor Roswell P.
Flower, and which used to hang in his private office.”18 Although perhaps best known
as a single-term governor of New York (1892–94), Flower was also a prominent finan-
cier, an important player in development circles, and an active land speculator. During
the last three decades of the century, Flower served as commissioner of the New York
subway system and trustee of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, a conglomerate
formed to consolidate streetcar lines in Brooklyn and Queens; during these years he
also developed properties in Chicago and bought up city lots in Queens around the
proposed lines of the BRT.19 As one of many postwar developers who worked to inte-
grate local investment and real estate sectors, Flower may have been especially recep-
tive to creative imaginings of New York’s transforming, and increasingly financialized,
urban fabric.
Whatever role Flower may have played in the work’s genesis, The Bulls and Bears
in the Market advanced a detailed view of Broad Street that registered the transforma-
tions remaking the business district in the moment. The painting thus wedges several
important structures associated with the postwar building spree into its compressed
pictorial space.20 A narrow slice of the Drexel Building appears at the right edge of the
scene (just past Federal Hall); completed in 1872, the seven-story structure was the
tallest, most expensive, and most technologically advanced building on Broad Street
at the time. The mansard clock tower of John Kellum’s 1871 Mutual Life Insurance
Company Building, moreover, is visible in the painting’s background above the mid-
century Continental and Union Bank Buildings (and the leaning red telegraph pole
between them). The stock exchange building at the heart of Beard’s scene, lastly, was
also implicated in the postwar boom. Built in 1865, the exchange was on the cusp of a
major renovation (overseen by James Renwick) when Beard composed The Bulls and
Bears in the Market; the building would reopen in 1882 with a wider footprint and a
showy new marble facade (Figure 11.2).
Beard’s painting arranges these signs of material transformation in a carefully
constructed view that evokes, reworks, and refutes the fantasies proffered by local
boosters. The Bulls and Bears in the Market thus works in various ways to compress,
cut down, and compromise the monumentalizing visions advanced by promotional
200 Ross Barrett
images. The painting firstly takes a very different approach to the representation
of the financial district’s new landmarks. While promotional building views and
streetscapes typically centered these grand edifices in pictorial space, Beard’s paint-
ing employs a viewpoint that refigures the Drexel and Mutual Life Buildings as
fragmentary marginalia, insubstantial bits of pictorial dross set at the edges of the
composition. At the same time, the painting’s vantage collapses the distanced per-
spectives that such promotional views as “Wall Street in 1883” (Figure 11.3) used
to cast the neighborhood around the Broad/Wall intersection as a coherent, unified,
and monumental whole. Beard’s low-angle view crops out the roofline of the stock
exchange and other structures; the painting simultaneously compresses the Broad
and Wall intersection, situating the Federal Hall and Union Building in close proxim-
ity to the end of Broad. Taken together, these strategies downplay the monumental
scale of the neighborhood, heighten its density, and undercut any sense of Broad
Street as a unified mass; instead, the street appears as a dense agglomeration of piled-
up structures.
Even as it reimagines the financial district as an overbuilt warren, Beard’s paint-
ing quietly underscores the tenuousness of local real estate investment. As previously
noted, Wall Street promoters reveled in the astronomical returns realized by develop-
ers. Many believed the meteoric rise of property values and rents would never cease. In
1879, the Real Estate Record declared, “Wall Street will always be the leading finan-
cial center of the city and [as such] the rental of offices . . . will . . . steadily and whole-
somely advance.”21 Three years later, a real estate reporter noted that in the financial
district “you cannot name a price high enough to deter purchasers.”22 As if to counter
these fantasies of ever-escalating values, Beard’s scene inscribes a palpable evocation of
decay and obsolescence at the heart of the Broad Street corridor: the darkened facade
of the stock exchange building. Period photographs show that the exchange’s original
white marble facade dimmed slightly in the decade after its opening; Beard’s painting
exaggerates this tonal shift, rendering the first floor in dark browns and stale yellows
that magnify the effects of time and environment on the facade and separate it from
the lighter-toned edifices around it.23 In so doing, the painting elaborated on claims
made by period observers concerned about the declining utility of Kellum’s exchange.
These arguments culminated in 1879, when the Real Estate Record published a series
of articles calling on the members of the exchange to update their facilities. An edito-
rial in the October 4 issue thus declared, “There is great and just complaint respect-
ing the accommodations of the regular Stock Exchange . . . The present building is
not credible to the Exchange or to the architect who designed it.”24 One week later,
another editorial similarly complained, “At present the Exchange here is not large
enough. . . . We want a much larger building and a much finer one, architecturally.”25
Organizing its streetscape around an edifice associated with rapid deterioration and
heightening its markers of disrepair and depreciation, The Bulls and the Bears in the
Market quietly casts the financial district as a realm in which architecture, and by
extension property values, are highly tenuous.
An array of suggestive details subtly extends this interpretation of the area’s built
environment. While readable as a destroyed “nest egg” (and thus an emblem of
the destructive effects of stock-market chicanery on savings), the cracked egg that
appears on the foreground pavement at left center also raises the themes of struc-
tural fragility, lost potentiality, and spoilage. In the picture’s right corner, a group
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 201
of bears gathers around a weirdly deflated steer carcass; with a bit of probing, the
bears have revealed an apparently solid form to be weightless and insubstantial.
Although spoofing the chimerical quality of stock values, this vignette subtly offers
a kind of interpretive key to the streetscape above it. A close look reveals that the
seemingly solid edifices on Broad are less and less concrete as they recede into the
distance. The painterly handling of the exchange building gives way to a series of
facades rendered with ever-thinner applications of pigment; the vertical blue form
of the last visible structure on the street breaks down almost completely, revealing
an area of barely painted brown canvas just above the picture’s vanishing point. The
dry-brushed dust cloud that hovers in front of this and other distant structures fur-
ther undermines their solidity. Beard’s streetscape thus visualizes the idea raised by
its gruesome foreground vignette: like the deflated skins examined by the bears, the
seemingly substantial environment of Broad Street shows itself to be airily immate-
rial with further inspection.
The Bulls and Bears in the Market counters promotional imaginings of Wall Street
development, then, by aligning the neighborhood’s built environment with disorder,
material transience, and the rapid deterioration of value. When reconsidered in this
light, the foreground stampede would seem to extend the painting’s critique of booster
fantasy. Indeed, the wild rushing mass invokes and inverts a rhetorical trope central
to period real estate promotion. As David Scobey has shown, real estate boosters
invariably used the phrase the “march of improvement” when describing the broad
dynamics of financialized city-building in New York; imbued with connotations of
purposeful and gradual movement, this idiom recast the city’s spasmodic building
cycles as a steady, deliberate, and inexorable process.26 Many accounts used this
idiom to describe the city’s growth in general terms. Noting that “The Jersey shore
of the Hudson . . . will be ours in due course of time,” an 1873 Real Estate Record
article thus declared, “The march of improvement must go on, and whoever doubts
this mistakes the mission of the great American metropolis.”27 Other commentators
employed the phrase to describe more localized patterns of development in downtown
Manhattan and the northern and eastern suburbs; thus, while an 1882 New York
Herald article described development around lower Broadway as one phase in the
“march of improvement,” a contemporaneous New York Times essay on Brooklyn
real estate declared that “the march of improvement in the direction of Prospect Park
has begun.”28
The 1871 Harper’s Weekly illustration “The March of Modern Improvement”
(­
Figure 11.4) imagines local city-building in similar terms, juxtaposing a central
vignette of demolition with a scene of construction (the row house rising at left) and a
view of a gleaming new edifice (the bright mansion at right). Aligning spatial recession
with a sequence of destruction, construction, and completion, the scene’s composition
affirms the momentum of urban development in New York. So too does the illus-
tration’s suggestive central vignette: picturing workers demolishing a colonial home
(it bears the date 1776), the scene suggests that improvement’s march will not be
slowed by any force, even patriotic nostalgia. The crowd of onlookers that appears in
the foreground points, lastly, to another idea often raised by march of improvement
narratives: that city-building was a closely watched venture. If the Harper’s illustra-
tion suggests the range of responses provoked by urbanization (note the juxtaposition
of calm and agitated men at the lower left), other accounts imagined the attentive
202 Ross Barrett

Figure 11.4 C. S. Reinhart, “The March of Modern Improvement—Destruction of Old

­Buildings in Upper New York.” Harper’s Weekly, October 28, 1871: 1020
Source: Collection of Ross Barrett

public as an ordering influence on city-building. An 1878 Real Estate Record essay

thus noted,

Any attempt to forestall the march of improvement by leaping over some . . .

vacant space is sure to meet the condemnation of the public. . . . Consequently, the
speculative builder is forced to . . . exercise his finest abilities . . . in determining
good . . . locations.29

In this and other accounts, boosters used the framework of the march to reimagine
speculative development as a publically monitored, logical process that yielded a uni-
form urban fabric.
Reconsidered in this light, Beard’s wild stampede would seem to offer a raffish
refiguration of the “march of improvement.” If the latter trope aligned real estate
speculation with steady and rational city-building, Beard’s surging mass evokes an
unpredictable, disorderly, and destructive torrent of capital unleashed on the urban
environment. Dirt, blood, flesh, and froth appear throughout the mad scene, evoking
the wild energies animating this flood of wealth. Alternating lines of ducking and rear-
ing cattle suggest the dramatic pulsations of speculative capital; passages depicting the
frenzied exodus of animals from buildings (such as the rush of cattle out of the stock
exchange) evoke the rapid and capricious shifts of value into and out of New York
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 203
real estate. Period viewers seem to have followed these formal cues and read Beard’s
stampede as an evocation of finance capital’s violent effect on urban space. Describ-
ing the stampede as “the wild animals of Wall Street let loose and laying havoc with
things generally,” a New York Evening Express review construed the animal mass as
a pictorial metaphor for investment that conjured both the wild dynamism of finance
capital and its chaotic effects on the city.30
Taken together, then, the figures and setting of The Bulls and Bears in the Market
work to evoke and overturn the central tropes employed by boosters to sell New
­Yorkers (and Americans more generally) on the redevelopment of the financial dis-
trict. Reimagining that district as a space destabilized by speculation’s chaotic ener-
gies, Beard’s picture advanced a bold retort to the promotional culture of the real
estate market. At the same time, the picture gave voice to a particular understand-
ing of New York’s developing cityscape that crystallized during the postwar boom.
Dazed by the transformations that unfolded during the building sprees of the 1870s
and 1880s, New Yorkers came to see their city as a place defined by permanent
spatial flux, a disorienting cycle of construction and demolition that William Dean
Howells famously described as the “eternal building up and pulling down” in his
1872 novel, Their Wedding Journey.31 This outlook found expression in outraged
editorials, fiery sermons, and poetic elegies lamenting the destruction of the city’s
familiar landmarks and historic architecture. Edmund Clarence Stedman’s 1874
poem, “Fuit Ilium,” for example, mourned the destruction of an “ancient manse”
that had stood for “sevenscore years.”32 Countless articles in the popular press simi-
larly bemoaned the destruction or endangerment of historic homes, cherished monu-
ments, and age-old neighborhoods; traces of this sentiment can also be detected in
the Harper’s illustration “The March of Modern Improvement” (discussed earlier)
and many other popular images from the period.33 Even the Real Estate Record,
typically the loudest local champion of intensive development, voiced occasional
anxiety about the rapid transformation of New York; an 1881 article thus anguished
over

the great tide of building that has been sweeping over our city . . . [and] has been
reducing the landmarks of “ye ancient time,” until the Knickerbocker of three-
score years can scarcely find the well-known spots of his youth.34

The city’s propensity for self-destruction inspired still others to write dystopian tales
that imagined a post-apocalyptic future in which all of New York was a vast ruin-
scape.35 Like other works in this genre, John Ames Mitchell’s 1889 novel, The Last
American, offered dazzling narrative and pictorial descriptions of modern landmarks
(including the stock exchange) turned into crumbling ruins.36
William Holbrook Beard was one of a small number of late nineteenth-century
artists who participated in this wave of cultural activity and explored the dynamic
impermanence of New York’s built environment in paint. Working in the midst of a
real estate boom, Beard composed a scene of the developing city that gave striking
visual form to the dawning feeling—shared by many concerned urbanites—that the
familiar and concrete spaces of the metropolis had transformed into something like
an uncanny dreamscape, a bewilderingly transitory terrain animated by the strange
instruments and inexorable forces of capital.
204 Ross Barrett
Aligning improvement with disorder, loss, and disorientation, The Bulls and Bears
in the Market challenged the aggrandizing ethos that linked New York’s transform-
ing art world with the city’s business and political sectors. And in so doing, Beard’s
canvas broke new aesthetic ground. In the years after the Civil War, American artists
gradually began to experiment with urban view painting. At least two artists—Louis
Comfort Tiffany and Edward Lamson Henry—enjoyed modest successes working in
this genre. Sometime around 1877, Tiffany painted Duane Street (ca. 1877, Brooklyn
Museum), a streetscape of a working-class thoroughfare in lower Manhattan.37 In the
late 1860s and early 1870s, Henry made a series of urban views of historic churches
in New York, including North Dutch Church (Figure 11.5, 1869) and St. George’s
Church (1875, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Tiffany’s and Henry’s pictures struck a
similar chord with their audiences: Duane Street won acclaim when it was exhibited at
the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and Henry’s views received a warm response
when they appeared at local art institutions. Critical responses to these works suggest,
more specifically, that period spectators appreciated Tiffany’s and Henry’s pictures as
symbolic rejoinders to, or soothing escapes from, the disorienting forces of urbaniza-
tion. Although Tiffany’s picture offers a detailed view of contemporary working-class
life—the scene depicts two African-American figures (possibly an employee and cus-
tomer) posed near a plumber’s shop—critics read Duane Street as a document of the
urban past. One reviewer thus asserted that Tiffany’s picture “represents a group of
old houses, shops, and booths of the previous century.”38 A New York Evening Post
critic similarly aligned Henry’s pictures with the past:

Mr. E.L. Henry’s “North Dutch Church” in Fulton street is remarkable for its
fidelity and microscopic finish; in the space of a few square inches he has pre-
served the most minute details of that beautiful and historic church. This artist is
deserving of great praise, for he is industriously working with the love of an anti-
quary, and the enthusiasm as well as the skill of an accomplished artist, to record
with his pencil objects of interest fast passing away.39

Celebrating North Dutch Church as a faithful painterly documentation of an endan-

gered structure, the Evening Post review casts Henry as an “antiquary” or preserva-
tionist concerned with recording the appearance of urban buildings and landscapes
that were “fast passing away.” Postwar audiences embraced Tiffany’s and Henry’s
urban views, then, as symbolic antidotes to the physical destruction and mnemonic
losses of urbanization. Carefully preserving the details of the architectural past, their
city views helped spectators negotiate the destabilizing processes of urban change by
offering consolatory and reorienting refuges from the transformations of the moment.
Even as it humorously overturned promotional fantasies of New York’s real estate
boom and tapped into the anxieties that urbanization provoked, The Bulls and Bears
in the Market radically recalibrated prevailing models of urban painting. Shaping a
humorously hyperbolic vision of surging capital and ethereal urbanity, Beard’s scene
straightforwardly confronted the uncanny forces and transitory spaces of the devel-
oping city—phenomena that other postwar urban painters sought to downplay or
evade. In taking up the dynamic forces of urban change, Beard’s picture set the stage
in turn for the many early twentieth-century artists—from such urban realists as
George ­Bellows or Ernest Lawson to early abstract painters like John Marin and Max
Weber—who would creatively explore the wild energies and destabilizing metamor-
phoses of urbanization in New York.
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 205

Figure 11.5 Edward Lamson Henry, North Dutch Church, Fulton and William Streets, New
York, 1869. Oil on academy board. Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, From the col-
lection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
15.30.66
Source: Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org

Notes
1 See Sarah Burns, “Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard and the Bears of
Wall Street,” American Art Journal 30 (1999): 8–35.
2 “New Pictures by W. H. Beard: His Experience With a Monkey,” New York World, rpt.
Buffalo Daily Courier, April 21, 1879, 1; “The Fine Arts Academy,” Buffalo Evening News,
June 6, 1882, 1; and “Art Notes,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 1, 1880, 12.
3 William Holbrook Beard, “Grant’s Memorial: What Shall It Be?,” North American Review
141 (September 1885): 279.
206 Ross Barrett
4 Ibid., 280.
5 On the Metropolitan Museum, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A His-
tory of New York City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 963–65; and Jay Cantor,
“The Museum in the Park,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26, no. 8 (April 1968):
333–40.
6 Beard’s design is reprinted in J. R. G. Hassard, “An American Museum of Art. The Designs
Submitted by Wm. H. Beard,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (August 1871): 409–15.
7 Jennifer Greenhill, Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley:
­University of California Press, 2012), 77–107.
8 Hassard, “An American Museum of Art,” 410.
9 David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 55–103. See also A History of Real Estate,
Building, and Architecture in New York City (New York: Real Estate Record Association,
1898), 67–114.
10 “A Telegraph Palace,” New York Daily Graphic, June 3, 1873.
11 See, for example, “A New Building in Wall Street,” American Architect and Building News,
May 3, 1879, 141; and “A New Stock Exchange,” New York Times, October 31, 1879, 10.
12 “Rents in New York,” Cincinnati Gazette, February 6, 1875, 5. This article also appeared
in the Macon Weekly Telegraph, February 23, 1875; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
March 6, 1875; and Baltimore Sun, April 14, 1875.
13 For other similar accounts, see “Real Estate,” Utica Morning Herald, July 1, 1882, 1;
“Fourteen Millions an Acre,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, June 28, 1876, 3; and
Martha J. Lamb, Wall Street in History (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883), 94.
14 See, for example, “14–18 Wall Street,” American Architect and Building News, May 1,
1880, 191.
15 See, for example, “Banking House of Drexel, Morgan & Co.” advertisement, The Banker’s
Almanac and Register (New York: Banker’s Magazine, 1882), 334.
16 On Hawley, see New York on the Rise: Architectural Renderings of Hughson Hawley (New
York: Museum of the City of New York, 1998).
17 See, for example, “Broad Street, North to Wall Street,” in Illustrated New York: The
Metropolis of Today (New York: International Publishing Company, 1888), 46.
18 “Two Paintings of Interest,” New York Times, March 16, 1916, 12; and “Art Satire on Wall
Street in Picture Sale,” New York Herald, March 14, 1916, 11.
19 John D. Barry, “Roswell. P. Flower,” Belford’s Magazine 1 (September 1891): 84–90; and
“Broad Street, North to Wall Street,” 46. On Flower’s speculations, see “Annual Record
of Assessed Valuation of Real Estate in the City of New York: Borough of Queens, First
Ward,” City Record (New York) 36 (1908): 8–9, 12–16, 29, 31, 32, 35–37.
20 For reviews that identify specific structures, see “Art Satire on Wall Street in Picture Sale”;
and “Two Paintings of Interest.”
21 “Business Centres Fixed,” Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, October 4, 1879, 780.
22 “Our New York Letter,” Independent Statesman, July 6, 1882. See also “Rents in New
York,” Cincinnati Gazette, rpt. Georgia Weekly Telegraph, February 23, 1875; “Fourteen
Millions an Acre,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, June 28, 1876; and “Growth of
New York’s Wealth,” Hartford Times, rpt. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Octo-
ber 10, 1881.
23 See, for example, “New York Stock Exchange, N.Y.,” in Stereoscopic Gems: New York &
Vicinity, 1870s, stereocard. New York Public Library, New York.
24 “Business Centres Fixed.”
25 “A New Stock Exchange,” Real Estate Record, October 11, 1879, 1.
26 Scobey, Empire City, 114–20.
27 “A Favored Locality,” Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, July 5, 1873. See also
“Growing Metropolis,” New York Herald, October 26, 1882, 4.
28 “The Streets of New York,” New York Herald, May 10, 1882, 13; and “Brooklyn’s Surplus
Land,” New York Times, November 14, 1881, 5.
29 “Failures,” Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, February 9, 1878, 110.
30 “Our Feuilleton: Thirty Minutes at the Academy,” New York Evening Express, March 27,
1880, 1.
 Bulls, Bears, and Buildings 207
31 William Dean Howells, Their Wedding Journey (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), 27.
32 Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Fuit Ilium” [1874], in The Poetical Works of Edmund
­Clarence Stedman (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 244–47.
33 In the early 1880s, for example, the New York Herald ran a series of articles chronicling
the redevelopment of the old West Washington Market. See “Washington Market,” New
York Herald, March 16, 1880, 6; “Changing Washington Market,” New York Herald,
March 20, 1880, 9; and “Will They Have to Vacate?,” New York Herald, December 31,
1882, 4.
34 “Another Old Landmark to Be Removed,” Real Estate Record, December 3, 1881, 1117.
35 On ruins, dystopian novels, and finance, see Nick Yablon, “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins:
Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909–1919,” American Quarterly,
June 2004, 308–47.
36 On The Last American, see Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination
of Disaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 287–88; and Nick Yablon, Untimely
Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 171–79.
37 I am indebted to John Davis for directing me to Tiffany’s virtually unstudied painting.
38 William Wetmore Story, “Fine Arts,” in Reports of the United States Commissioners to the
Paris Universal Exposition, 1878 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878),
115.
39 “Fine Arts,” New York Evening Post, February 12, 1869, 2.
Afterword
Joshua Brown

Interest in the Gilded Age appears to have surged in both academic and popular dis-
course in the last few years. In no small part, this is likely due to the perception, sup-
ported by convincing data, that we have entered a new Gilded Age in America, most
conspicuously in terms of income inequality and its deleterious effect on the lives and
livelihoods of working Americans.1 But it also stems from the rediscovery by social
and cultural historians, art historians, and American studies scholars, beginning in the
1970s, that the view of the Gilded Age as reduced to robber barons, mediocre presi-
dents, political stalemate, and corruption missed the formative, let alone turbulent,
nature of the era.2 Reflecting the general consensus of historical and art historical
scholarship, the essays in this collection see the Gilded Age as a foundational moment
in the consolidation of power and influence of the American bourgeoisie.
The essays also view New York City emerging in the post–Civil War period as the
cultural capital of capital, the site where the ideological and cultural hegemony of the
elite was defined and legitimated via the establishment of enduring arts institutions
and industries and by extension the invention of new ways of seeing and of being seen.
The essays in New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age, representing
different disciplines and methodologies and posing different questions, demonstrate
that the era—and particularly its cultural realm—remains a rich terrain for scholars to
explore. There is much these essays teach us about Gilded Age institutions, constituen-
cies, individuals, and, of course, works of fine and popular art while also pointing to
additional avenues still open for investigation. In this brief afterword, I will go down
only a few of those less-explored thoroughfares, following my social and cultural his-
tory inclinations but, regrettably, leaving unaddressed many of the substantive theses,
observations, and insights characterizing this rich collection.
In addition to representing several disciplines, this volume offers a diversity of per-
spectives that diverge in their evaluations of the significance, motivations, and influ-
ence of the era’s cultural manifestations of power. Some of the authors take a more
benevolent view of major figures in the establishment and definition of the city’s pre-
dominant art institutions and their missions. Sally Webster argues that the Lenox
Library established a standard for Gilded Age and later private libraries but does not
claim to divine the motivations behind the elusive James Lenox’s formation of his
collections, which would later become part of the New York Public Library. On the
other hand, Page Knox and Esmée Quodbach propose correctives to the longtime dis-
missal of prominent founders of and advocates for the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(the focus of several essays). Reclaiming the influence and contribution of Scribner’s
Monthly editor Richard Watson Gilder and railroad financier and collector Henry
 Afterword 209
Gurdon Marquand to the commonweal of the city and nation, Knox assesses Gilder’s
response as addressing “his readers’ appetite for visual information as well as for
guidelines and instruction to aid in their pursuit of culture and refinement,” while
Quodbach views Marquand’s largesse as “characterized by a strong sense of public
purpose.” Thayer Tolles and John Ott view such men and their circle of critics and
artists through eyes of a more jaundiced hue. Complicating the philanthropic and
educational thrust of the benign perspective, they envision the Gilded Age art world
as one rife with career calculation, self- and group aggrandizement, elite institutional
control, and private gain, exposing the close symbiosis between their advocacy of
culture and stark commerce.
These are not necessarily irreconcilable interpretations, especially in light of the
limited scope of reform in Gilded Age America: a constricted impulse that rational-
ized fortunes built on the unprecedented rapaciousness of unregulated industries with
a social Darwinist determinism that situated the elite as naturally duty-bound to play
a broader cultural role and, in their view and under their purview, improve society.
The limitations of Gilded Age reform and its cultural manifestations must be evalu-
ated in the context of an era of unprecedented growth and affluence that also pro-
duced, up to that point in the nation’s history, unmatched misery. Almost half of the
years between 1865 and 1900 were stricken by economic crises, including repeated
periods of national recession and depression.3 Following the Panic of 1873, sparked
by the collapse of the great investment banking house of Jay Cooke and Company,
one-quarter of New York’s working population was unemployed. As Kevin Murphy
argues in his essay on William K. and Alva Vanderbilts’ “Petit Chateau,” the consoli-
dation of elite economic, social, and cultural power, in combination with a persistent
economic crisis unmet by government intervention to ameliorate its impact, also pro-
pelled strikes and social unrest the extent and violence of which startled even hardened
European radicals. That working-class resistance, Murphy notes, also prompted social
elites, eager to distinguish themselves by the ostentatious display of their wealth and
status, to make cultural choices that rearranged the style and topography of the city.
Similarly, as Alan Wallach, Lauren Lessing, and David Scobey discuss, self-­conscious
elite class distinctions were entwined in the alteration of cultural practices governing
painting aesthetics, choices of subject matter, prescribed ways of seeing, and the locus
of the guardianship of taste. Underlying these essays is an acknowledgement of the
effect of the class conflict of the era, one that set off fine arts and their cultural and
social purposes (including professionalization and cultivating the exclusive knowl-
edge of connoisseurship) from a vast commercial visual culture. That culture was
predicated on conveying information that at times provided alternative accounts and
expressed oppositional views as well as a range of social uses (not the least of which
was entertainment).4
The effect of thirty-five years of boom and bust and concomitant want and protest
only occasionally disrupted representation in the fine arts of the Gilded Age, but the
gap was bridged and the affluence and inequality evident in the visualization of the
city produced by a mushrooming, industrialized, nationally accessible culture industry
discussed in David Scobey’s and David Jaffee’s essays. The publishers and firms pro-
ducing and distributing the prints, photographs, pictorial publications, and other vis-
ual media were located in New York—the veritable fount feeding a popular thirst for
the visual across the country. In this visual culture nurtured by a “frenzy of the visible”
(in filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli’s phrase),5 the city itself became a favorite subject,
210 Joshua Brown
its depictions collectively comprising a blueprint for the American metropolis—as a
model and as a cautionary tale. The culture industry also provided the materials that
filled the family parlor, the spatial and symbolic embodiment of a burgeoning, self-
conscious middle class.
But the constituency and consumers of these publications, prints, stereo views, illus-
trated periodicals, and other visual media were larger than the middle class (the defini-
tion of which remains imprecise in an era when class position too often was swayed
by the winds of fortune and misfortune), nor was it necessarily governed by the pre-
scriptions of respectability (the admonitions of which, in itself, suggested widespread
failure to adhere to those precepts). Systematic scholarship about the “less respect-
able” part of the era’s visual market is still in its formative stage, but the archives
offer us a clear (if sometimes frustratingly ephemeral) view of the pictorial comic
magazines, crime and scandal newspapers, theatrical and sporting publications, pro-
vocative prints, and cartes de visite featuring notorious Americans that were no small
part of the commercial industry, some of which were published by leading firms—
although without public acknowledgement of their proprietorship. We need to know
more about that side of the market to better establish the distinctiveness of parlor-
destined visuals. The construction of a middle-class viewing public that David Jaffee
discusses also encompassed what we might consider a complementary gendered sector
that included middle-class and working-class men, most visibly in such male enclaves
as barbershops, clubs, and saloons. As for the under-the-counter trade available in
New York’s downtown book and print shops and via the U.S. mail, recent scholarship
suggests that, despite Anthony Comstock’s strenuous efforts, pornography constituted
an insistent part of Gilded Age visual culture.6
Whether inside or outside the parlor or respectability, discerning the nature and
extent of Gilded Age visual culture may reorient our thinking about how the public
discerned the city around them; assessing the composition of the visual metanarrative
people carried about may readjust how we evaluate the significance of certain images
in the past. Ross Barrett’s exploration of William Holbrook Beard’s The Bulls and
Bears in the Market situates this painterly riposte to Wall Street boosterism and the
visual assertion of the financial district’s orderly development and operations as a sin-
gular and influential city view that expressed popular trepidation about the dominant
“march of improvement” narrative. But a surprising rejoinder in easel painting was
common fare in the larger visual culture. The persistence of economic and social con-
flict and crisis from the late 1860s onward engendered a new popular visual repertoire
that was all too familiar to readers of topical visual media. Fantastical illustrations
of orderly urban improvement notwithstanding, they were more than matched by
news engravings and lithographs of rioting Wall Street investors, railroad collisions
and infrastructural collapse, and maimed and dead victims of factory fires and mine
explosions. These and other “vernacular” images provided Gilded Age readers with
insistent reminders of the chaos and bitter fruits of the unaccountability, irresponsibil-
ity, and greed of the era’s financiers and industrialists.7
As the essays in New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age forcefully
demonstrate, visualization—as activity, pastime, craft, information, guide, territory
to be conquered and defended, and as a resource for individual and group identity—
expanded in means and meaning in the years following the Civil War. The contribu-
tors’ visions of the construction of a new visual order, set in a particular era and place,
are sometimes in dispute but also are enriched by a range of studies that, over the last
 Afterword 211
decade, has constituted a cross-disciplinary dialogue. Similarly, the individual essays
in this volume may be identified as representing specific humanities fields but are also
informed by the methods, evidence, and insights of others. The resulting collective pic-
ture may not be elegant in its extended and multiple gazes, but just as we have come
to realize that understanding the era requires us to expand the purview of our work to
encompass its many peoples and pasts, these essays and the insights they provide, as
well as the questions they raise, should prompt us to continue to widen our historical
field of vision to ascertain the many ways of rendering, exhibiting, viewing, perceiv-
ing, and evaluating that comprised Gilded Age New York’s essential visual realm.

Notes
1 Paul Krugman, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books 61, no. 8
(May 8, 2014).
2 This shift in the reevaluation of the era was particularly acute and influential in the “new
social history” that recognized the critical importance of addressing class, community, race,
gender, and conflict in the era. For one assessment, see Ira Berlin, “Introduction: Herbert G.
Gutman and the American Working Class,” in Power and Culture: Essays on the American
Working Class, eds. Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman (New York: New Press, 1987), 3–69.
3 Economic depressions and recessions characterized the period between 1873 and 1877, 1882
and 1885, and 1893 and 1897.
4 For the necessity of a leading pictorial newspaper to address the views and experiences of
a broad “middle” readership that stretched from unskilled workers to small businessmen,
see Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of
Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
5 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de
Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 122–23.
6 On male “sporting” publications, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Bat-
tles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Knopf, 2002); Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater
and the Popular Press in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 2004); and Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American
Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). On pornography, see Donna
Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century
New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Amy Werbel, Lust on
Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
7 As one example, the October 28, 1871, issue of Harper’s Weekly that published the engraving
of “The March of Modern Improvements” also included substantial pictorial coverage of the
Chicago Fire.
Selected Bibliography

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Ayres, William, S. “The Domestic Museum in Manhattan: Major Private Art Installations in
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Barrett, Ross. Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century
­American Art. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.
Beckert, Sven. The Moneyed Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American
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———, and Julia B. Rosenbaum, eds. The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in
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Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, From
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———. The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: New Press,
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Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge,
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Blaugrund, Annette. The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist Entrepreneurs From the Hudson
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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice.
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Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded
Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Bruner, Chelsea. “The Seventh Regiment Armory Commission and Design: Elite Identity,
­Aesthetic Patronage and Professional Practice in Gilded Age New York.” PhD diss., City
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Burns, Sarah. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
———. “Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard, and the Bears of Wall Street.”
American Art Journal 30, nos. 1/2 (1999): 8–35.
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
Craven, Wayne. Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2009.
———. Sculpture in America (1968) rev. ed. Newark: University of Delaware Press, and
New York: Cornwall Books, 1984.
Curran, Kathleen. The Invention of the American Art Museum. Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2016.
 Selected Bibliography 213
Deusner, Melody Barnett. “Building a Reputation: Henry Gurdon Marquand’s New York
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Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Einreinhofer, Nancy. The American Art Museum: Elitism and Democracy. London: Leicester
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Ferber, Linda S. Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape. Brooklyn, NY:
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Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney, and Nicholas C. Vincent. Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age.
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Greenhill, Jennifer. Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2012.
Harvey, Eleanor Jones. The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature, 1830–1880.
Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1998.
Howat, John K., ed. American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. New York:
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1913.
Irwin, Will, Earl Chapin May, and Joseph Hotchkiss. A History of the Union League Club of
New York City. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952.
Jaffee, David. A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Kasson, Joys. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture.
Cambridge and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
Knox, Page Stevens. “Scribner’s Monthly, 1870–1881: Illustrating a New American Art World.”
PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012.
Laster, Margaret R. “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: Collecting and Patronage in the Gilded Age.”
PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013.
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York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Lessing, Lauren Keach. “ ‘So Blessed Now That Accustomed Darkness’: Randolph Rogers’s
Nydia the Blind Girl of Pompeii and the Female Gaze.” University of Michigan Museums of
Art and Archaeology Bulletin XIII (2000–01): 53–73.
Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.
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Miller, Angela. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Poli-
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Moudry, Roberta, ed. The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Murphy, Kevin D. The Houses of Greenwich Village. New York: Abrams, 2008.
———. The Tudor Home. New York: Rizzoli, 2015.
Orcutt, Kimberly. Power and Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhi-
bition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017.
Ott, John. “The Manufactured Patron: Staging Bourgeois Identity Through Art Consump-
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­Nineteenth Century, eds. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, 257–76. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
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Prown, Jules David, et al., Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the
American West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Quodbach, Esmée. The Age of Rembrandt in New York: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan
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Scobey, David, M. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Siegel, Nancy, ed. The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on Landscape Painting. Durham:
University of New Hampshire Press, 2011.
Skopcol, Theda. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic
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Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrializa-
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Spassky, Natalie. American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. II, A Catalogue
of Works by Artists Born Between 1816 and 1845. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
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Stein, Susan, ed. The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New
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Stern, Robert A. M., Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman. New York 1880: Architecture and
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Symmes, Marilyn F. Impressions of New York: Prints From the New-York Historical Society.
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Tolles, Thayer, ed. American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. I, A Catalogue
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Tompkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Trachtenberg, Alan. Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New
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Voorsanger, Catherine Hoover, and John K. Howat, eds. Art and the Empire City: New York.
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———. “Rethinking ‘Luminism’: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-­Nineteenth
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Contributors

Ross Barrett, associate professor of history of art and architecture at Boston University,
is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-
Century American Art (2014), coeditor of Oil Culture (2014), and is currently
working on a book-length study of American artists who painted and speculated
on land during the long nineteenth century.
Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project/Center
for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
He is currently working on The Divided Eye: Studies in the Visual Culture of the
American Civil War, for which he received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Fellowship.
Chelsea Bruner is a member of the liberal arts faculty at Ringling College of Art and
Design in Sarasota, Florida, where she teaches design history. Her work centers
on architecture and interiors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an
emphasis on elite patronage and the professionalization of architectural design in
the Gilded Age.
David Jaffee was professor and head of New Media Research at the Bard Graduate
Center. He wrote extensively on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, includ-
ing The New Nation of Goods: Artisans, Consumers, and Commodities in Early
America, 1790–1860 (2010), which was awarded the Fred Kniffen Book Prize of
the Pioneer Society of America.
Page Knox teaches art humanities and American art at Columbia University and
lectures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work explores the expansion
of illustration during the Gilded Age and its influence on late nineteenth-century
American art. She is a contributor to the textbook History of Illustration (2018).
Margaret R. Laster is an independent curator and scholar of American art. Previous
posts include associate curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society
and Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art.
Her research centers on art and material culture of the nineteenth century, including
Gilded Age collecting and patronage histories.
Lauren Lessing is director of the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and
co-executive editor of Panorama. Her research interests include ideal sculpture in
the nineteenth century and the relationship between painting and popular theater.
Her publications have appeared in such journals as American Art and Winterthur
Portfolio.
216 Contributors
Kevin D. Murphy, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, professor and chair,
Department of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, has published widely on
American architecture of the nineteenth century. His awards and fellowships
include a College Art Association Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication
Grant for his book, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine (2010).
John Ott is professor of art history at James Madison University and author of
­Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy,
Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His current book project, Mixed
Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954, is supported by a
Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humani-
ties Summer Stipend.
Esmée Quodbach is assistant director of the Center for the History of Collecting at
The Frick Collection. Her publications include The Metropolitan Museum’s Bul-
letin on the formation of its Dutch paintings collections (2007) and two edited
volumes, Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Ver-
meer, and Hals (2014) and America and the Art of Flanders: Collecting Paintings
by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Their Circles (forthcoming).
David Scobey has taught history, American studies, and architecture at the University
of Michigan and Bates College and was executive dean at The New School. He is
author of Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape
(2002), among other studies of U.S. cultural and urban history. His fellowships
include a Rhodes Scholarship and a Senior Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of American History.
Thayer Tolles is Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is editor and coauthor of American Sculpture in
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1999 and 2001) and has published extensively
on Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Her exhibitions and accompanying catalogs include
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and The
American West in Bronze, 1850–1925 (2013).
Alan Wallach is Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of
American Studies Emeritus at the College of William and Mary. In 2010, he was
Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the John F. Kennedy Insti-
tute for North American Studies at The Free University, Berlin. Wallach has pub-
lished extensively on Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, and the history of
art museums.
Sally Webster, professor of American art, emerita, Lehman College and The Gradu-
ate Center, City University of New York, is an authority on American art of the
nineteenth century and historic murals and monuments. Her recent publications
include The Nation’s First Monument and the Origins of the American Memo-
rial Tradition (2015). Webster is currently a Writer in Residence in The New York
Public Library’s Wertheim Study.
Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure on the corresponding page.

Abbey, Edwin Austin 92, 99 Appleton’s Handbook of American Travel:

Abraham Lincoln: The Man Western Tour 28
(Saint-Gaudens) 176 architecture see specific buildings
Across the Continent: Westward the Course Arrival of the Three Marys at the Tomb of
of Empire Takes Its Way (Palmer) 19, 19 Christ, The (La Farge) 165 – 6; see Saint
(1.2), 24, 29 Thomas Church commission
Adoration of the Cross by Angels and (Saint-Gaudens) 166 (9.1)
Cherubs (Saint-Gaudens) 165, 166 (9.1) Art Amateur 111, 114, 116, 122, 126 – 7
aestheticizing tendencies in Hudson River Art and the Empire City, New York
School landscape painting 56 – 67 1825 – 1861 (exh. cat.) 2, 86
Agecroft Hall 49 art education 7, 95, 140 – 1, 145, 152 – 4
Aldine 27, 30 Art Journal 124, 139, 143, 149, 156, 173 – 4
Alexander Hamilton (Trumbull) 79, 107 art literature in Scribner’s 97 – 8
Allen, Elizabeth Love 106; see also Art Loan Record 139
Marquand, Elizabeth Art Students League (ASL) 11, 94, 96, 98, 152
Allibone, Samuel Austin 82, 84 Art Thoughts (Jarves) 146
Allston, Washington 78 Art Union 124
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 108, 113 Assumption of the Virgin, The (Della Robbia)
Altman, Benjamin 108, 116 107
American Academy of the Fine Arts 56 Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn (Mrs. William
American Art Association 123 Backhouse) 43
American Art-Union 27, 57, 64, 122 Astor, John Jacob 57
American Bourgeoisie, The: Distinction Astor Library 73, 75, 84
and Identity in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Monthly 27, 31
(Beckert and Rosenbaum) 5 Atwater, Lyman W. 35
American Museum, Barnum’s 182, 185, 189 Avery, Samuel Putnam 80, 122, 124, 129
American Progress (Gast) 5, 17 – 21, 26, 29,
32 – 3, 35, see Plate 1 Backward Glance, A (Wharton) 1 – 2
American Renaissance 167 Bancroft, Hubert 85
American Water-Color Society 96 Banks, Isabella Henderson Lenox 77
Anderson, Nancy K. 24 Barnum, P. T. 182, 185, 189
Angel at the Tomb, The (La Farge) 165 – 6; Barrett, Ross 8, 11, 210
see Saint Thomas Church commission Beard, William Holbrook 8, 192 – 4,
(Saint-Gaudens) 166 (9.1) 199 – 204; The Bulls and Bears in the
Anthony, Edward 8, 179, 181, 187 (10.5), Market 192 – 4, 199 – 204, 210, see Plate
187 – 9 10; Grant’s Tomb essay 193 – 4
Appleton, William H. 164 Beaumont, J. P. 80
Appleton publishing house (D. Appleton Beckert, Sven 3, 4 – 5, 56 – 7
and Company) 20, 27 – 8, 30 Beekman, James W. 57
218 Index
Bellew, Frank 150, 151 (8.5) casts 73, 61, 107, 133
Bellows, George 204 Catlin, George 30, 32
Bender, Thomas 3 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
Bennett, William 180 (10.1), 180 – 1 5, 149 – 50, 151
Berenson, Bernard 109 Central Park, Greensward Plan for 2
Beyond the Mississippi (Nast) 20 Century Association (Century Club) 57, 60,
Bierstadt, Albert 20, 23 – 5, 24 (1.4), 28, 63, 100, 154
30 – 4, 56 – 7, 61 – 2, 80, 95, 107 Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
bird’s-eye view 35, 179 – 84, 186, 188 – 9, 199 90, 100 – 1
Bishop, William 98 Cesnola, Luigi Palma di 10, 122, 124, 127,
Bixby, John Munson 150 129 – 30, 133, 155 – 6
Blake, William 62 Chapman, John Gadsby 60, 80
Blakelock, Ralph 56 Chase, William Merritt 62, 99
Blodgett, William Tilden 148 – 9, 153 Chasm of the Colorado (Moran) 30, 61
Blum, Robert 174, 175 (9.5) Château of Blois 45, 49 – 52, 50 (2.5)
Bode, Wilhelm 116 Chatham Square (daguerreotype) 187
Bonner, Robert 27 Chauncey, Henry 149
Book of the Artists (Tuckerman) 86 Children in the Wood, The (Crawford) 80
Boston 3, 26 – 7, 90, 108 Choate, Joseph 128 – 9, 133, 153
Boston Athenaeum 77 Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene
Boughton, George Henry 110 (Noli Me Tangere) (La Farge) 165 – 6;
Boulton, Amy Woodson 154 see Saint Thomas Church commission
Bourdieu, Pierre 43, 53, 56, 60, 62 (Saint-Gaudens) 166 (9.1)
bourgeoisie 56 – 7, 66, 208 Christus, Petrus 116
Brady, Mathew B. 8, 182 chromolithography 5, 17, 19, 19 (1.2), 21 – 2,
Brigham, Charles 77 24, 26 – 7, 28, 35, 179 – 83, 183 (10.2), 184,
Brinley, George 85 188, 192, 195, 197 (11.2), 210
Bristed, Charles Astor 33 Church, Frederic 22 – 3, 23 (1.3), 24 – 5, 27 – 8,
Broad Acres (Gay) 108 34, 56, 58, 60 – 4, 66, 80
Broadway 2, 8, 28, 30, 34, 35, 78, 82, 179–89, City of New York/ sketched and drawn on
180 (10.1), 185 (10.3), 187 (10.5), 201 stone by C. Parsons (Currier) 182, 183
Broad Way from the Bowling Green (10.2)
(Bennett) 180, 180 (10.1) City of New York in 1876, The (Currier &
Broadway New York, from the Western Ives) 35, 179, 182 – 3, see Plate 9
Union Telegraph Building, looking North Clark, Edward 34
(Currier & Ives) 180 Claypoole, David 80
Broadway on a Rainy Day (Anthony) 187, Cleopatra (Story) 7, 139, 140 (8.1), 145 – 50,
187 (10.5) 155 – 6
Brooklyn Bridge 19 – 20, 35, 179, 183 Clinton, Charles 124
Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company 199 Coast Scene, A (Kensett) 80
Brown, George Loring 80 Coffin, William 108
Brown, Henry Kirke 60, 105 Cogswell, Joseph Green 85
Brown, John Carter 76, 85 Cole, Thomas 22, 27, 56, 60, 62 – 4, 79
Brownell, W. C. 98 Cole, Timothy 168, 169 (9.2)
brownstones 43, 45, 46, 52, 92 Coleridge, Samuel 78
Bryan Gallery of Christian Art 92 – 3 Colman, Samuel 57, 92, 107
Bryant, William Cullen 57, 107, 126, 153 Colnaghi, Martin 110
“built environment” 1, 8, 28, 32, 34, 192, Comfort, George Fiske 107, 153
200 – 1, 203 Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 2
Bulls and Bears in the Market, The (Beard) Comolli, Jean-Louis 209
8, 192 – 3, 199 – 204, 210, see Plate 10 Compromise of 1790 3
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 144 Comstock, Anthony 210
Buntline, Ned 24 Cook, Clarence 49, 51, 62 – 3, 163, 165 – 6,
Bunyan, John 79 168, 170, 172, 174, 193
Cooper Union 94, 98
Carnegie, Andrew 108, 115 Copley, John Singleton 80
Cassatt, Mary 95 Corcoran, William 76
 Index 219
Corcoran Gallery 133 Duveneck, Frank 62
Cosmopolitan Art Journal 184 Duyckinck, Evert Augustus 84
Cotopaxi (Church) 80
Craven, Wayne 1, 4, 163 Eames, Wilberforce 84
Crawford, F. Marion 144 Eaton, Wyatt 94 – 5, 166 – 7, 170
Crawford, Thomas 80, 144 École des Beaux-Arts 42, 45, 51, 73, 95–6, 164
Crayon 63 – 4, 150 Edmonds, Francis 60
Critic 163 electrotyping of pages 184
Crofutt, George 17, 21, 26, 32 Ellen Maurice (Gheeraerts the Younger) 117
Crofutt’s Trans-Continental Tourist Entrance Hall of the Metropolitan Museum
(Crofutt) 17 of Art when in Fourteenth Street (Waller)
Cronon, William 18 152, 152 (8.6)
Cropsey, Jasper 56, 57, 62, 64 Erie Canal 2
Croton Aqueduct 33 Expulsion from Paradise (Cole) 79
Croton Waterworks 2
“cultural capital” 1 – 12, 60 – 1, 92, 101, 117, Falls of Tivoli, The (Brown) 80
122, 128, 208 Farragut Monument (Saint-Gaudens) 8, 92,
cultural integration 21 163 – 5, 173 – 6, 175, see Plate 8; Blum pen
Cultured Canvas, The: Perspectives on sketch after Saint-Gaudens 174, 175 (9.5)
American Landscape Painting (Siegel) 5 Fashionable Promenade on Fifth Avenue, A
Curran, Kathleen 81 (Orr) 3
Currier, Nathaniel 27, 181 – 2, 183 (10.2) Federal Hall 195, 199 – 200
Currier & Ives 19, 21–2, 24, 27, 30, 35, Ferber, Linda S. 64
179–82, 189; Across the Continent Feuardent, Gaston 127
lithograph 19, 19 (1.2), 24, 29; bird’s-eye Field, Cyrus 60
view of New York (1856) 182, 183 (10.2); Field of Battle, The (Vernet) 80
bird’s-eye view of New York (1876) 35, 179, Fifth Avenue: A Fashionable Promenade on
182–3, see Plate 9; production process 181–2 Fifth Avenue (Orr) 3 (0.1); Alexander T.
Curtis, George W. 23 Stewart home on 109; Dodworth Dance
Cyparissus (Pozzi) 78 Academy on 11; Henry Clay Frick home
on 74; Henry Gurdon Marquand home
D. Appleton and Company 20, 27 – 8, 30 on 9, 108, 109, 109 (6.2); James Lenox
Daguerreian Gallery, Brady’s 182 home on 78 – 80, 82; John Taylor Johnston
daguerreotype 22, 182, 187 home on 109, 148; Lenox Library 6, 73,
Davis, Alexander Jackson 78 – 9 74, 74 (4.1), 82, 84 (4.4), see Plate 4;
De Kay, Charles 164, 167, 168, 174 Metropolitan Museum of Art building 7,
De Kay, Helena 7, 11 – 12, 94 – 6, 98, 164, 11, 58, 108, 109, 123 (7.1), 139, 148,
167, 170, Homer portrait of 94 (5.2); 155; New York Public Library building
Saint-Gaudens portrait of Gilder family on 74 – 5; Richard Morris Hunt bust on
see Plate 5 (Central Park) 74; St. Thomas Church on
Delaroche, Paul 80 165; Vanderbilt homes on 42 (2.1), 42 – 53,
Della Robbia, Luca 107 49 (2.4), 73, 109, 164
Deschamps, Charles 110, 111 financial district 8, 192 – 204, 210; see also
Dewing, Thomas 56 Wall Street
District of Columbia 3 financial securities, designing of 27 – 8
Dix, John 33 Flower, Roswell Pettibone 199
Dodworth’s Dancing Academy 11, 58 Force, Peter 85
Domenichino 117 Foreman, John 48
Drexel, Joseph 133 Fornachon, Maurice 82
Drexel Building 195, 196 (11.1), 198, 199–200 Foster, George 182, 187
Duane Street (Tiffany) 204 Fourth Estate 7
Duban, Félix 51 – 2 François Premier Style in New York 41 – 53
Duncan, Carol 153 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 76, 184
Dunlap, William 78 French, Daniel Chester 95, 126
Durand, Asher B. 22, 56, 59 (3.2), 60, 62 – 4, French Renaissance style 6, 41 – 53
65 (3.3), 66, 80, 95 Frick, Henry Clay 74, 86
Durand, John 63 Furness, Frank 77
220 Index
Gainsborough, Thomas 79, 113 of 27, 184; The March of Modern
Gardner, Isabella Stewart 86 Improvement 201, 202 (11.4), 203;
Gast, John 5, 17 – 21, 26, 27, 29, 32 – 3, 35; Autumn Reception at the Metropolitan
see Plate 1 Museum 130, 131 (7.5), 134; Metropolitan
Gay, Edward 108 Museum of Art and 130, 131 (7.5) 134,
George Washington (Stuart) 79 139, 156; Up Among the Nineties 186,
Gérôme, Jean-Léon 94 186 (10.4); View of Broadway, Opposite
Gheeraerts, Marcus the Younger 117 Fulton Street, New York 185 (10.3),
Gifford, Robert Swain 92 185 – 6; Winslow Homer and 28
Gifford, Sanford Robinson 28, 31, 56, 57, Hart, Charles 197 (11.2)
62, 64, 66, 66 (3.4) Harvey, Eleanor Jones 64
Gilded Age, The: A Tale of To-day (Twain Havemeyer, Henry 86
and Warner) 1 Havemeyer, Louisine 86
Gilded Age, 1 – 12, 20, 26, 28, 41, 48, 66, 86, Hawley, Hughson 195, 197 (11.2), 198
92, 95, 101, 105, 108, 156, 193, 208 – 11; Hawley House 46
origin and meaning of term 1; “Second Hawthorne, Julian 147 – 8
Gilded Age” 4, 208 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 146, 147
Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and Hayden, Ferdinand 25
High Society (Craven) 4 Heade, Martin Johnson 28, 57
Gilded New York: Design, Fashion and Heart of the Andes, The (Church) 22 – 3, 23
Society (exh. cat.) 4 (1.3), 28, 61 – 2, 64, 66
Gilder, Jeannette 163 Heart of the Continent, The (Ludlow) 31
Gilder, Joseph 163 Helena de Kay (Homer) 94 (5.2)
Gilder, Richard Watson 7, 8, 11, 90 – 104, Henry, Edward Lamson 204, 205 (11.5)
164 – 8, 170, 174 – 6, 208; Gilder family Henry Gurdon Marquand (Sargent) 106,
portrait by Saint-Gaudens 95, 154, 106 (6.1), 108, 117
see Plate 5 Henry Gurdon Marquand (Ventura) 106,
Girl with Cherries (Predis) 116 see Plate 6
Glass Blowers of Murano, The (Ulrich) 108 Hero in Search of Leander (Story) 144
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Herter Brothers (decorating firm) 48, 52
Companion 184 Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of
Good Furniture 45 Cultural Hierarchy in America (Levine) 63
Gothic Revival 124 Hill, John 180
Gould, Jay 105 History of American Sculpture (Taft) 163
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, The Hoe, Robert 130
(Moran) 25, 25 (1.5), 31, 61 Hogan, Thomas 186, 186
Grant’s Tomb memorial 193 – 4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 188
Gray, Henry Peters 60 Holmes-Bates stereoscope 188
Great Strikes of 1877 52 – 3 Homer, Winslow 27, 28, 32, 92, 94 (5.2), 99,
Greek Slave, The (Powers) 153 – 4 182, 185
Greeley, Horace 62 Homestead Act 21
Greenhill, Jennifer 194 Hosmer, Harriet 144 – 5
Gwynne, Alice Claypoole (Mrs. Cornelius Howard, Jacob 145
Vanderbilt II) 43, 44 (2.2) Howat, John K. 86
Howells, William Dean 34, 95, 203
Hales, Peter 188 Hudson River School 6, 22, 27, 28;
Hals, Frans 116 aestheticizing tendencies in 56 – 67;
Hamilton, Alexander 3; Trumbull portraits decline of 62 – 3
of 79, 107 Huneker, James Gibbons 92
Harper Brothers 21 – 2, 192 Hunt, Catherine Howland 81
Harper’s Bazaar 27 Hunt, Richard Morris 77, 133; bust of 74;
Harper’s Magazine 21, 27 Lenox Library 6, 73, 75, 80–2, 84, see Plate
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 147 4; Marquand residence 108–9, 109 (6.2),
Harper’s Weekly 31, 182; on Bierstadt’s 113; Parisian education of 45–6, 49, 51, 81;
Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak 23; Tenth Street Studio Building 28, 29, 29 (1.6),
Crossing Broadway 179; Donkeys at the 57; Vanderbilt House 6, 42, 42 (2.1), 45–6,
Centennial cartoon 150, 151 (8.5); front- 48–51, 49 (2.4), 73
page illustration 184; inauguration Huntington, Collis P. 46, 107, 116
 Index 221
Huntington, Daniel 79, 95 Lamentation (Christus) 116
Huntington, Henry E. 86 Lamentation, The (Domenichino) 117
Huntington Library 77 Lander, Frederick 23
Hunt-Lenox globe 82 landscape(s): national 17 – 35; painters in
Manhattan 27 – 9; of the west 17 – 26;
illustrations: in late nineteenth century see also Hudson River School
179 – 89; newspapers 180, 182, 184; Landseer, Edwin 79 – 80
periodicals 179, 182, 184, 186 – 7, 210; Last American, The (Mitchell) 203
see also lithography; specific publications; Lawrence, Warrington G. 50
specific titles Lawson, Ernest 204
imperialism, reflected in Story’s sculptures Le Corbusier 41
155 – 6 Lee, David 59
infrastructural projects, pre-Civil War 2 Lefuel, Hector 45, 73
Ingham, Charles C. 60 Legouvé, Ernest 149
Inman, Henry 60, 79 Leighton, Frederic 111
Inness, George 56 Leja, Michael 184
Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum Lemercier, Jacques 45 – 6
of Art when in Fourteenth Street (Waller) Lenox, Henrietta Anderson 79
9 – 12, 10 (0.2) Lenox, James 6, 9, 11, 73 – 86, 208; art
In the Woods (Durand) 64, 65 (3.3) collecting 75 – 80, 86; education of
Invention of the American Art Museum 78; European travels of 78, 79 – 80;
(Curran) 81 Presbyterian faith of 76 – 8
I Pifferari (Chapman) 80 Lenox, Rachel Carmer 77
Irad Hawley House 46 Lenox, Robert 76, 77, 78
Irving, Washington 78 Lenox Library 6, 9, 11, 73 – 86, 83 – 5, 208;
Italian Renaissance 168, 174 cost of 82; endowment of 82; exteriors 73,
Ives, James 27 74 (4.1), 84 (4.4), see Plate 4; interiors 73,
75 (4.2), 81 – 3, 83 (4.3), 85 (4.5); opening
J. Alden Weir (Warner) 170, 171 (9.3), 172 of 82
Jackson, William Henry 25, 31 Lenox Library Guide to the Paintings and
Jaffee, David 8, 9, 11, 209 – 10 Sculptures 76, 78, 79
James, Henry 108 Lenox Library, New York City, Perspective
James Stuart (1612–1655), Duke of Rendering (Hunt) 73, see Plate 4
Richmond and Lennox (Van Dyck) 111, Leslie, Charles Robert 78 – 9
112 (6.3) Leslie, Frank 76, 184
Jarves, James Jackson 9, 145, 146, 147, 154 Lessing, Lauren 7, 11, 209
Jarvis, John Wesley 77 – 8 Leutze, Emanuel 18, 18 (1.1), 20, 22, 28,
Jay, John 57 31 – 2
Jay Cooke and Company 209 Levine, Lawrence 63
Johnson, Eastman 92, 107 Libyan Sibyl, The (Story) 145 – 7, 149
Johnson, James Boorman 28 Lippi, Filippo 111
Johnston, John Taylor 109, 123, 148 lithography 17, 21 – 2, 24, 26 – 7, 179 – 82,
Jules Allard (decorating firm) 48 184, 188
London Illustrated News 184
Kasson, John 183, 186 Long Neck Point from Contentment Island,
Kasson, Joy S. 146, 147, 149 – 50, 155 Darien, Connecticut (Kensett) 61 – 2,
Kellum, John 199 – 200 see Plate 3
Kennedy, John Stewart 116 Louvre 45, 46, 81, 84, 167; “New Louvre”
Kensett, John Frederick 56 – 8, 61 – 2, 64, 66, (Haussmannization of Paris) 42, 45
67 (3.5), 80, see Plate 3 Low, Will H. 95, 165
King, Robert B. 43 Lowell, James Russell 144
Knoedler, Michael 108 Loyer, François 45
Knox, Page 7, 208 – 9 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh 31
Kollner, August 181
Maitland, Elizabeth Sproat Lenox 77
La Farge, John 28, 95, 164 – 8, 166 (9.1) Manifest Destiny 6, 17 – 18, 62
Lake of Zug, The (Turner) 117 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne) 146
Lamb, Martha J. 198 (11.3) Marble Palace, A. T. Stewart’s 182
222 Index
Marin, John 204 reproductions in 133; Story and 139–56;
Marks, Montague (Montezuma) 111 Sturges and 60; Sunday openings 130, 132
Marquand, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Love Allen) Metropolitan Sanitary Fair 22 – 3, 23 (1.3),
106, 108 57 – 8, 58 (3.1), 60
Marquand, Henry Gurdon 105 – 17, 208 – 9; middle class 9, 17, 21, 26, 27, 32, 98, 145,
European travel by 105 – 6; fortune of 153 – 4, 182, 189, 210
105; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Miller, Angela 18, 19, 22
7, 9, 105 – 17, 130, 132; Old Masters and Millet, Francis Davis 110
105, 108, 110 – 17, 115 (6.5); ; residence Millet, Jean-François 94 – 5
108 – 9, 109 (6.2), 112 – 13, 113 (6.4), 116; Milton, John 85
Sargent’s portrait of 106 (6.1), 108, 117; Mist Rising at Sunset in the Catskills
Ventura’s portrait of 106, see Plate 6 (Gifford) 66, 66 (3.4)
Marquand, Isaac 105 Mitchell, John Ames 203
Marquand, Mehitable (Mabel) 105 M’lle New York 92
Martin, William 32 Moneyed Metropolis, The: New York City
Mathews, Cornelius 179 and the Consolidation of the American
Mazo, Juan Bautista del 111 Bourgeoisie (Beckert) 4
McEntee, Jervis 28, 114 Montezuma (pseudonym of Montague
McKim, Charles 164 Marks) 111 – 13, 114
Medea (Story) 7, 134, 139, 142 (8.3), Moore, George Henry 82, 84, 85
149 – 50, 155 – 6 Moran, Thomas 24 – 32, 25 (1.5), 56, 61
Médée (Legouvé) 149 Morgan, Edwin D. 164
Melancholy (Huntington) 79 Morgan, J. Pierpont 60, 86, 107
Memorial History of New York (Wilson) 86 Morgan, Junius 60
Meneghelli, Enrico 83 Morgan Library 77
Mengs, Anton Raphael 117 Morland, George 80
Mercy’s Dream (Huntington) 79 Mould, Jacob Wrey 58, 77, 123 (7.1), 124, 139
Mérimée, Prosper 51 Mount, William Sidney 60
metropolis, wilderness and 19, 32 – 5 Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection,
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) 4, 208; described by Edward Srahan (Shinn) 52,
admission fees 11, 93, 129–30; Art and see Plate 2
the Empire City, New York 1825–1861 2, Mrs. Billington as Saint Cecilia (Reynolds) 79
86; Beard’s design for 194; bequests to in Mulready, William 80
early 1900s 116; Bryant and 107; Central Munro, Peter Jay 79
Park building location 123 (7.1), 124, Murphy, Kevin D. 6, 12, 209
128–30; criticism/commentary in local Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 77, 83, 125 – 6,
newspapers and art press 122–4, 126–7, 130, 133
128 (7.4), 129–30, 132 (7.6); depictions of Museum of the City of New York 4
the museum interiors 9–11, 10 (0.2), 126 Mutual Life Building 199 – 200
(7.3), 131 (7.5), 133–4, 143 (8.4), 152 (8.6);
establishment of 57–8, 81; exploitation Napoleon III 42, 45 – 6, 49
for private financial gain 122–4; female Nast, Thomas 20, 130
benefactors 12; formative years (1870– National Academy of Design (NAD) 2, 11,
1899) 122–34, 123 (7.1); founding of 6, 77, 20, 27, 28, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 92, 95 – 6,
86, 93, 94, 107; Fourteenth Street location 98, 123, 170
9–11, 10 (0.2), 150, 151 (8.6); function national landscape 17 – 35
as a secure private vault 124; funding of nation-building 9, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28
77; Gilder and 93–4; governance structure New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism
7, 122, 125–7, 132, 134; Hunt and 109; in the Gilded Age (Stern, Mellins and
hybrid public-private status 122, 127; Fishman) 4
imperialism and 155; incorporation 6; New-York by Gaslight (Foster) 187
industrial art collection 133; John Taylor New York Daily Graphic 194
Johnston and 148; locations 9, 58, 124, New York from Weehawk (Hill) 180
129, 139; Marquand and 7, 9, 105–17, 130, New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts 2, 56,
132; mission of 152–3; Museum Art School 60, 92
107; Old Masters paintings 110–17, 112 New-York Historical Society 33, 56, 73, 77,
(6.3), 115 (6.5), 148; opening of 58; public 82, 85, 92 – 3
financing of the 124–5, 127, 129, 132; New York Ledger 27
 Index 223
New York Public Library 6; formation of 75, Powell, John Wesley 30
84; Lenox Library and 74 – 5, 78 – 80, 84, Powers, Hiram 144, 153 – 4
86, 208 Poynter, Edward John 113
New York Stock Exchange, The (Hawley) Pozzi, Francesco 78
195, 197 (11.2), 198 Prang, Louis 22, 24, 27, 181
New York Weekly 27 Predis, Giovanni Ambrogio de 116
Niagara (Church) 22 – 4 Prentiss, Dr. George 81
North Dutch Church (Henry) 204, 205 (11.5) Presbyterian Hospital 77 – 8, 82, 86
Norton, Charles Eliot 144 Princeton Theological Seminary 76, 77 – 8
Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii Progress (The Advance of Civilization)
(Rogers) 144, 154 (Durand) 22
Prude, Jonathan 184
Old Masters 86, 105, 108, 110 – 17, 115 Putnam, George P. 81, 126, 153
(6.5), 148
Olmsted, Frederick Law 20 Quarterly, Arthur 99
Orcutt, Kimberly 5 Quodbach, Esmée 7, 9, 208 – 9
Orr, John William 3 (0.1)
Osborn, William H. 60 railroad: Illinois Central 59 – 60; New
Ossman, Laurie 45, 52 York and New Haven Railroad 60;
Ott, John 7, 12, 93, 209 transcontinental 2, 26, 33; New York
Ottoman Empire 155 Central 52; St. Louis and Iron Mountain
105; Union Pacific Railroad 17, 21
Page, William 95 Rain, The (Coffin) 108
Palmer, Frances 19 (1.2), 24, 29 Ramirez, Jan Seidler 146, 149 – 50
Panic of 1857 26 Ranney, William 30
Panic of 1873 52, 194, 209 rare books, collectors of 6, 75 – 6, 82, 84 – 6
parlor furniture 21, 26 Reading from Homer, The (Alma-Tadema) 108
Parsons, Charles 35, 182, 183, 184 Real Estate Record 200 – 3
Passing Off of the Storm (Kensett) 66, 67 Ream, Vinnie 145
Peale, Charles 80 Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York
Peale, James 80 and the Formation of His Library (Stevens) 77
Peale, Rembrandt 80 Reed, Luman 59 – 60
Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New-York City Reinhart, Charles 100 (5.5), 202 (11.4)
(Mathews) 179 Rembrandt 111, 113, 114, 116
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 76 – 7 Renaissance style 51, 167, 168, 174, 175
Petit Château 6, 42 – 3, 45 – 6, 49, 209 Renwick, James Jr. 11, 76, 195, 198, 199
Picturesque America 20, 28, 30 – 1 Reps, John 184
Pierrepont, Edwards 170 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 79
Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 79 Richard Watson Gilder, Helena de Kay
Pine, Robert Edge 80 Gilder, and Rodman Gilder
Pius IX, Pope 146 (Saint-Gaudens) 95, 164, see Plate 5
Pleasure (Mengs) 117 Richardson, Henry Hobson 45
Polyxena (Story) 7, 139, 141 (8.2), 150–1, 155 “robber barons” 1, 105, 208
pornography 210 Rockefeller, W. M. 108
Portrait of a Man (Hals) 116 Rocky Mountains, The: Emigrants Crossing
Portrait of a Man (Rembrandt) 111 the Plains (Palmer) 24
Portrait of a Man (van der Goes) 117 Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (Bierstadt)
Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a 23 – 4, 28, 31, 61
Casement (Lippi) 111 Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (Smillie
Portrait of David Garrick (Pine) 80 engraving of Bierstadt painting) 24 (1.4)
Portrait of Jonathan Sturges (Durand) 58, 59 Rogers, Jacob S. 116
(3.2) Rogers, John 182
Portrait of Lady Frances Deering Wentworth Rogers, Randolph 144, 154
(Copley) 80 Rosenbaum, Julia B. 5
Portrait of Miss Kitty Fisher - with Doves Rosetti, William 147
(Reynolds) 79 Ruloff Jansen’s Kill-study from Nature
Portrait of Mrs. Robert Hooper (Copley) 80 at Hillsdale, Columbia County, N.Y.
Poussin, Nicolas 117 (Durand) 80
224 Index
Ruskin, John 63 – 4 South Kensington Museum (Victoria &
Ryder, Albert Pinkham 62, 96 Albert Museum) 81, 133, 153
Sparks, Jared 85
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 62, 108, 163 – 76; Sproat, David 77
commissions in his early career 165; St. George’s Church (Henry) 204
Farragut Monument 8, 92, 163 – 5, 173 – 6, Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (Turner) 79
175 (9.5), see Plate 8; Gilder family Stahr, Adolf 147
portrayal 95, see Plate 5; Saint Thomas Stebbins, Emma 145
Church commission165 – 8, 166 (9.1), 169 Stedman, Edmund Clarence 203
(9.2); Tile Club 99; J. Alden Weir 170, 171 stereoview 179, 181, 187 (10.5),
(9.3), 172; Theodore Dwight Woolsey 165, 187 – 9, 210
170, 172 (9.4), 172 – 4 Stevens, Henry 77, 85
Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man Stewart, Alexander T. 107, 109, 182
(Poussin) 117 Stillman, William 63, 150
Saint Thomas Church 165 – 8, 166 (9.1), Stimson, Robbe Pierce 48
169 (9.2), 170, 174, 176 Stock Exchange building 192, 195, 195 (11.2),
Salmagundi Club 46, 98, 99 (5.4) 198, 198 (11.3), 199–200, 202, 203
Sargent, John Singer 95, 106, 106 (6.1), 108, Story, Joseph 144
111, 117 Story, William Wetmore 7, 134; femininity
Scene on the French Coast with an English as represented in sculptures 146, 149;
Ship of War, A (Turner) 80 Metropolitan Museum of Art and 139 – 56;
Schiavo, Laura 187 – 8 on role of a sculptor 145; women in
Schuyler, Montgomery 45, 48 sculptures of 139 – 51, 154 – 6; on women
Scobey, David 5 – 6, 9, 194, 201, 209 sculptors 144 – 5
Scribner’s Illustrated Monthly 28, 90–101; art Stowe, Harriet Beecher 147
literature 7, 97–8; ASL (Art Students League) Strong, George Templeton 34
exhibition reviews 96; Beard and 194; Stuart, Gilbert 77 – 8, 79
cartoons 96, 97 (5.3); cover 91 (5.1); Gilder Stuart, Robert L. 82 – 3, 84
and 208–9; initial publication 6; Moran and Sturges, Jonathan 56 – 61, 59 (3.2)
25, 27, 30; SAA (Society of American Artists) Sturges, Mary 60
and 95–6; Saint-Gaudens and 165, 168, Sturgis, John H. 77
173–4, 175, 176; Salmagundi Club 98, 99 Sumner, Charles 145
(5.4); Tile Club coverage 99–100, 100 (5.5) Suydam, James A. 56
Scripps, James E. 115
Sculpture in America (Craven) 163 Taft, Charles Phelps 86
Semiramide (Rossini) 148 Taft, Lorado 163, 176
Semiramis (Story) 7, 139, 148 – 50, 155 – 6, Tammany Hall 126 – 7
see Plate 7 telegraph, transcontinental 2, 17, 20, 21, 35,
Semiramis (Voltaire) 148 184, 199
sequential landscape 19, 20, 22, 35 Tenth Street Studio Building 22, 23, 28, 29
Serz, John 142 (1.6), 30, 57
Seventh Regiment Armory 124, 125 (7.2) Thayer, Abbott 96
Seymour, Horatio 193 Their Wedding Journey (Howell)
Shaefe, Mary Lenox 79 34, 203
Share, H. P. 99 Theodore Dwight Woolsey (Saint-Gaudens)
Shirlaw, Walter 95, 170 165, 170, 172 (9.4), 173, 174, 176
Siegel, Nancy 5 Thompson, Joseph Parrish 155
Siege of Saragossa (Vernet) 80 Thompson, Vance 92
Simon, Janice 63 Thoreau, Henry David 62
Sketch Club 60 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 204
Slotkin, Richard 2 Tilden Trust 75, 84
Smedley, W. T. 130, 131 (7.5), 134 Tile Club 99 – 100, 100
Smillie, James 24 (1.4), 28, 31 Tolles, Thayer 8, 209
Smith, Edward R. 45 Trans-Continental Tourist (Crofutt) 17, 26
Social Darwinism 209 Trentanove, Raimondo 78
Society of American Artists (SAA) 94 – 6, 98, Trollope, Anthony 31, 32
100, 165 – 7, 170, 173 Trumble, Alfred 116
 Index 225
Trumbull, John 77 – 8, 79, 107 visual culture 5, 77, 179, 184, 209 – 10;
Truth, Sojourner 147 geography of New York’s 28; national
Tuckerman, Henry T. 86 landscape and 17 – 35
Turner, Frederick Jackson 17, 19 Voyage of Life, The (Cole) 63 – 4
Turner, J. M. W. 79 – 80, 113, 114, 117
Twachtman, John 96, 99 Wadsworth Athenaeum 77
Twain, Mark 1, 41 – 2 Wallach, Alan 4, 6, 9, 133, 153, 209
Waller, Frank 9 – 10, 10 (0.2), 11, 150 – 2,
Ulrich, Charles Frederick 108 152 (8.6)
Union League Club 57, 60, 81, 107, 126 – 7, Wall Street 2, 8, 26, 27, 33, 129, 192 – 204,
129, 134, 153, 154, 155 196 (11.1), 198 (11.3), 210
Up Among the Nineties (Hogan) 186, 186 (10.4) Wall Street in History 198
Upjohn, Richard 165 Walters, Henry 80
Upton, Dell 2 Walters, William 80, 108, 130
U.S. Sanitary Commission 22, 57 Ward, John Quincy Adams 164
Ward, Thomas Humphry 110, 114
Valley of the Yo Semite (Bierstadt) 80 Warner, Charles Dudley 1
Van der Goes, Hugo 117 Warner, Olin Levi 170, 171 (9.3), 172
Van Dyck, Anthony 108, 111, 112 (6.3), 114 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze) 22
Vanderbilt, Alva Erskine Smith 12, 43, 45, Watts, George Frederic 107
46, 48 Weber, Max 204
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, II 44 (2.2), 46 – 7, Webster, Sally 6, 9, 208
108, 164 Weems, Parson 85
Vanderbilt, Frederick 45 Weir, J. Alden 95, 96, 99, 110, 111, 170,
Vanderbilt, William H. 46 – 7, 52 – 3, 109; 171 (9.3)
Earl Shinn’s, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Weir, Robert W. 60
Collection, described by Edward Srahan Welter, Barbara 146
52, see Plate 2 Western Union 20, 26
Vanderbilt, William K. 41 – 2, 45, 46 – 7, 52, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
73, 108 Way (Leutze) 18, 18 (1.1)
Vanderbilt family, homes of 4, 6, 41 – 53, Wharton, Edith 1 – 2
42 (2.1), 49 (2.4), 73, 164, 209, Whistler, James McNeill 56, 95
see Plate 2 White, Stanford 95, 108, 163 – 4, 170, 174
Vanderbilt Homes, The (King) 43 Whitman, Walt 62, 95
Vanderbilt House, William K. and Alva Whittredge, Worthington 28
41 – 53 Wilkie, David 80
Vanderlyn, John 92 Wilson, James 86
Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold 12, 164, Witman, Richard 50, 52
172 – 6 Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard 12, 124 – 5
Vaux, Calvert 58, 77, 123 (7.1), 124, 139, 193 women 11 – 12; authority to interpret ideal
Vedder, Elihu 99 sculpture 154; cult of domesticity 153 – 4;
Ventura, Domenico 106, see Plate 6 nineteenth century art market and 144,
Vermeer, Johannes 111 145; sculptors 144 – 5; in sculptures of
Vernet, Horace 80 William Story 139 – 51, 154 – 6
Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier) 41 Worsham, Arabella 46
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton,
Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm Yellowstone 24, 25, 29, 30
(Cole) 22 Yosemite Valley - California: “The Bridal
View of Dunrennan Abbey near Veil” Falls (Palmer) 24
Kirdkcudbright (Inman) 79 Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
Visconti, Louis 45 (Vermeer) 111