Abstract
If philosophers paint pictures, as William James once wrote, what did the Cosmopolitan painters and sculptors do? Although paintings and sculptures do not often convey messages as precisely as the written word, their plasticity gives these media more freedom to represent novel ideas and discoveries. This plasticity is derived, in part, from the potential of these images to convey ideas and feelings in nonlinguistic terms. The Cosmopolitan artists, then, drew pictures and sculpted figures that expressed some of the ineffable aspects of novel Cosmopolitan experience.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 134
For the classic history on Jim Crow laws, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, rev. and enlarged edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
Augustus Saint Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint Gaudens, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 2: 59.
La Farge’s teacher in Newport, Rhode Island, William Morris Hunt, was trained by Jean-François Millet. See Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 117–118.
Henry Adams, “The Mind of John La Farge,” in John La Farge: Essays by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, and James L. Yarnal (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 18–19.
Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 51.
In 1926, Mumford argued that the country’s intellectual high point, its “golden day,” occurred between 1830 and 1860, the age of Emerson: “That world was the climax of American experience. What preceded led up to it: what followed, dwindled away from it.” See Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1926), 91. Many art critics of the early part of the twentieth century, as H. Barbara Weinberg points out, followed this exceptionalist trend. See H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991), 8–9.
Meredith Martindale, “Lilla Cabot Perry: A Study in Contrasts,” in Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist (Washington, DC: The National Museum of Women and the Arts, 1990), 44–45, 131–32.
Richardson to Hayden, quoted in Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works: With 97 illustrations and a new introduction by William Morgan (New York: Dover, 1969), 11.
Charles Adams Platt to his family, June 5, 1883, in Platt family papers; quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 27.
“These torsos are the foundation of instruction. One must be suckled on these things in youth.” See ibid., 27.
Ibid., 55–57.
Lilla Cabot Perry, “Tokyo,” in The Jar of Dreams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 97.
A small canvas of 1877 entitled Small Infant, though modest, does succeed in conveying the innocence of an infant without resorting to overly romantic imagery. See Meredith Martindale, Perry, 19. Unless otherwise cited, biographical informaton about Lilla Cabot Perry’s life is derived largely from this source.
Henry James to Lilla Cabot Perry, January 3, 1912, quoted in Martindale, Perry, 136.
Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 206. See also J. F. F., “William Sturgis Bigelow,” in Dictionary of American Biography, 21 vols., ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Scribners, 1928–1964), 2: 261.
Ibid., 209–213. See also L. W., “Ernest Francisco Fenollosa,” in Dictionary of American Biography, 9: 325–26.
Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead, and White, Architects (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 131.
Edward Conze, Further Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1975), 152.
Charles S. Prebish, Historical Dictionary of Buddhism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993), 60.
Ernst Scheyer, “The Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint Gaudens,” Art Quarterly 18 (Summer 1956): 180. Many of the details of the genesis and completion of the Adams Memorial in this chapter come from the information in this article.
Henry Adams to Theodore F. Dwight, January 25, 1891 in Marion Adams, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 455–56.
Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 316.
Both La Farge and William James took lessons in Newport around 1860 from William Morris Hunt. See Feinstein, Becoming William James, 103, 118, 120–22. For Henry James’ relationship with La Farge, see Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1847–1870 (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1953), 159–63.
See H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer of the American Mural Movement” in John La Farge: Essays, 165; and Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1985), 79–80.
Henry Adams, Novels: The Education, Mont Saint Michel, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: The Literary Classics of America, 1983), 1215.
John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), vii.
Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, November 11, 1891, in Henry Adams: Selected Letters. ed. Ernest Samuels (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992), 272.
Just a few of the works that have explored this topic include Walter Lippmann’s contemporary Drift and Mastery (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), Henry Adams’ The Education, and Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Adams writes in his Education: “St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like Benvenuto.” Henry Adams, Education, 387.
John La Farge, Considerations on Painting: Lectures Given in the year 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (New York: MacMillan, 1895), 39, 8, 43.
For Okakura Kakuzu’s relationship with Isabella Stewart Gardner, see Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 251–57, 261–65.
For descriptions of the ceremonies surrounding the Shaw memorial, see The Shaw Memorial: A Celebration of an American Masterpiece (Conshohocken, PA: Eastern National, 1997); and The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1897). See especially George C. Schwarz, “The Shaw Memorial: A History of the Monument,” in Shaw Memorial, 11–15 and Edward Atkinson, “History of the Shaw Monument,” in Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, 7–14. In his recent work on the depiction of race Civil War monuments, Kirk Savage has found that in the Shaw Memorial Saint Gaudens “accomplished what other sculptors before him … had failed to do, which was to make the black body more than a mere foil for whiteness…. With Saint-Gaudens’ revisions [of the statue], the soldiers in effect moved forward … acquiring a concreteness and individuality that African Americans had never before had in public sculpture.” Savage goes on to argue that Saint Gaudens was not prompted to revise because of any commitment to racial equality; rather, it was the “self-imposed demands of art, not racial ideology, that compelled the sculptor to portray these men as he did.” See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 202–203. Although I agree that Saint Gaudens did express some patronizing and racist attitudes toward his black subjects, the many years the sculptor devoted to creating statues of a wide variety of black soldiers along with his belief that the approval of the memorial by the surviving members of the 54th amounted to a consecration of his work show that his patronizing attitudes were often tempered by respect for these soldiers.
William James to Henry James, June 5, 1897, in Henry James and William James, The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry, 3 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 3: 9. William James quoted a line from Tennyson’s “To E. L. on His Travels to Greece.” See James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 10.
For accounts of this plantation venture, see R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 162–67, 259–64; see also Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 77–78.
William James to Henry James, February 7, April 4, and May 9, 1897, in James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 1, 6, 8.
William James, “Oration,” in The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Cambridge: Riverside, 1897), 77.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid.
Ibid., 87.
For a differing interpretation of James’ decision to focus on civic rather than military courage, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, 205–207. Savage asserts that James’ underplaying of the military significance of the statue marginalized the black soldiers by not commenting on the fact that in their military roles they were quite “uncommon” soldiers. Savage does not address the fact that one of the few white soldiers of the regiment was William James’ brother. This fact complicated James’ motivations to minimize the military heroism of the fifty-fourth and to focus instead on the idea of civic courage, as I have discussed.
William James to Henry James, June 5, 1897, in James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 9.
Saint Gaudens to Eugenie Nichols, undated, archives of the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish New Hampshire; quoted in Lois Goldreich Marcus, “The Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (1979): 17.
Copyright information
© 2008 Mark Rennella
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rennella, M. (2008). Expressing Cosmopolitanism through Art. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37186-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61121-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)