art history

"Precisely These Objects": Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail

Author(s): Jennifer Raab

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 95, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 578-596

Published by: College Art Association

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"Precisely These Objects": Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail

Jennifer Raab

"Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?" Henry David Thoreau asks in Waiden while observing the landscape around his cabin in the woods.1 The attempt to reconcile part and whole, the visible and the vast, is also the key issue for Thoreau' s contemporary, the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Both men struggled to integrate science and belief, the minutiae of observable na- ture and the immensity of God's nature. In August 1851, three years before the publication of Waiden , Thoreau wrote in his journal, "I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct & scientific - That in exchange for views as wide as heaven's cope I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope - I see details not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, & say 'I know.' "2 Church's works reveal the difficulty, or even impossibility, of both seeing "precisely these objects" and saying "I know."

Nineteenth-century viewers expected landscape paintings to balance precision and generality, detail and effect, but Church's pictures often seemed to upset this balance, espe- cially as his career progressed. While an early painting like The Andes of Ecuador (Fig. 1) encompasses its details under the sun's celestial light, The Heart of the Andes (Fig. 4) dizzies with a proliferation of botanical specimens, and The Icebergs (Fig. 12) seems to withhold narrative signs. Such canvases elicited celebratory, as well as conflicted, responses at midcentury. Did Church's scientific proclivities, his "avidity to gather new and strange facts,"3 disrupt his ability to offer a broader, allegorical message? "Study the foreground of a Church," one critic wrote, reflecting on the artist's career shortly after his death in 1900, "and you will find a constant struggle between the desire to say everything and to say also the large and appealing thing."4 Such a struggle - in Church's paintings and also in critical responses to them - raises questions about the function of detail in a work of art and its particularly contested status during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Church's paintings visualize and historicize a fundamental shift in representation during this period. This is a shift from knowledge to information, from the assumption that all de- tails could be contained in one great system to a realization that details might delineate difference and even undermine order. Whereas earlier in the nineteenth century the term "knowledge" implied the pursuit of a unifying structure, "in- formation" - a word more commonly used as the century progressed - made no such promises.5 A system of represen- tation based on universal knowledge became marked instead by a discontinuity of information. Like Thoreau's writing, Church's landscapes are poised between these paradigms. While embracing the microscopic, both painter and writer find that such details do not necessarily "make a world." Church's landscapes compellingly represent the problems

and possibilities of seeing and knowing in a culture of detail.6

Church's works have most often been interpreted in terms of national identity; my aim is instead to emphasize the visual and epistemological rather than the political or ideological.7 Such an approach emerges from a fundamental question: Why are these paintings so detailed? And thus: What might that mean in the nineteenth century? As Albert Ten Eyck Gardner writes about The Heart of the Andes in one of the first modern réévaluations of Church: "An examination of the

painting today leads one to muse upon the possibility that there was something behind its popularity which is now com- pletely lacking."8 Church's paintings were enormously popu- lar at midcentury, generating voluminous responses that, though tending toward praise, also included compelling ac- counts of confusion, ambivalence, and even passionate frus- tration. To look closely at these pictures is to ask what history may have erased or diminished.

For Church's audience, the conventions of landscape painting were intimately bound up with the role of detail.9 Smaller elements should move the eye and mind toward a larger effect. In allegorical terms, nature's details revealed God's greatness. Even if explicit symbols were absent, most critics and viewers expected landscape painting to provoke higher associations. The seventeenth-century canvases of Claude Lorrain still provided the basis for conceptualizing and critiquing a landscape composition: a tripartite structure consisting of a darkened but detailed foreground; a strongly lit middle distance; and a background of warm, inviting light. Trees in the foreground, or another type of repoussoir object, frame the scene and push the eye into deeper space. Such a visual course had a conceptual correspondence: the small and specific aspects of nature or narrative - those details that the eye is drawn to first - should yield to a greater wholeness inherent in the natural world and reflective of the divine.

Church's details, by contrast, often seemed to emerge from "the field of the microscope" and the world of things. Such material specificity brought the artist his fame, but it also produced the anxiety that Thoreau described. G. W. Shel- don, the author of American Painters , lamented that Church's

pictures neglected "the higher and spiritual verities of Na- ture" that had traditionally defined landscape painting. Al- though the artist's works were all "well known" and "exceed- ingly popular," Sheldon pointed to the elaboration of detail as their clear fault: "it is scarcely necessary to stop here and explain what their principal defect is, because, by this time, that defect must have been recognized by almost every intel- ligent American lover of art. It consists in the elaboration of details at the expense of the unity and force of sentiment." Writing in 1881, Sheldon assumes that his readers, "by this time," already understand this.10 Earlier reviewers more often marveled at Church's elaborate canvases, although some crit-

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 579

1 Frederic Edwin Church, The Andes of Ecuador, 1855, oil on canvas, 48 X 76V£ in. (121.9 X 194.3 cm). Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, N.C., Original Purchase Fund from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

icized the artist on such terms. The painter had a habit of "crushing himself beneath his subject," one wrote in 1863. "He has, that is to say, often sacrificed general effect to a multiplicity and elaboration of detail."11 Donald Kuspit, writ- ing in 1976, called Church a "highly ambiguous vision- ary ... a visionary of matter."12 That "desire to say everything" gave Church's paintings a perceived weight and volume. The optical closeness that the works provide complicated, or even denied, those "views as wide as heaven's cope."

If the representation of the natural world became too particular to yield to generalities, then the very assumptions about the genre - about how a landscape painting should look and how it should be interpreted - had to be reconsid- ered. In other words, if harmony was not the end result, what was? What if details did not add up to that "large and appeal- ing thing"? How much detail was too much? And how much was not enough? I want to take detail seriously - as a key component of Church's visual language, as a defining aspect of nineteenth-century American culture, and as a concept fundamental to the practice of art history.

Synthesis and Suppression At twenty-two, Frederic Church became one of the youngest artists ever elected as a full member of the prestigious Na- tional Academy of Design. Instead of sending his major can- vases - works like Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.), The Heart of the Andes, and The Icebergs - to the academy's annual exhibition, he chose to display them alone, for an admission fee, attracting tens of thousands of viewers as these "Great Pictures" toured the United States and

crossed the Adan tic. 13 Newspapers speculated on the paint- er's studio production, reported on his wide-ranging travels, and reviewed his exhibitions. Frederic Church, as one art

historian has argued, was "the nation's first artistic celeb- -, »14

nty.

The painter's earliest and arguably most formative trip took him not to Europe but to South America. In 1853, when he was twenty-seven, Church traveled through Ecuador and Colombia, returning in 1857 for another trek through the Andean range.15 As Charles Darwin had done before him, Church was following the path of the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had spent five years exploring South America from 1799 to 1804. Church owned all of the

scientist's important books, including all five volumes of Cos- mos, and much of the artist's library - which remains intact at his home, Olana, in Hudson, New York - is made up of key scientific texts of the time, including those that attempt to reconcile the scientific and the divine.16

Humboldt had a broad audience in the United States, and

he specifically addressed landscape painters, encouraging them to travel to the tropics and directly observe nature to enrich their art.17 By looking past Europe's familiar terrain to

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580 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4

2 Church, The Andes of Ecuador , detail showing the sun (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

3 Church, The Andes of Ecuador ; detail showing tropical foliage (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

the tropics, landscape painters could "seize ... on the true image of the varied forms of nature." Nature, Humboldt argued, was "a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes."18 Such harmony, however, was predi- cated on "the suppression of all unnecessary detail." Only then could reason "grasp all that might otherwise escape the limited range of the senses."19 Unnecessary detail threatened to cause confusion by pulling the viewer away from the pri- mary narrative. Details and differences must ultimately be absorbed into a greater whole. Cosmos , as the tide implies, was based on humanistic unity.

The Andes of Ecuador , Church's first major picture, best visualizes Humboldt's words. The painting provides a multi- tude of foreground details but emphasizes effect, that "blend- ing together [of] all created things." Golden light pervades the painting. The sun's white orb is placed in the top center of the canvas, a pupil-like form that appears at eye level (Fig. 2). The picture's elevated perspective allows the viewer to see the expanse of climate zones below: from palm trees to grasslands to snow-clad peaks. For Church, who was a reli- gious man, such wholeness had an inherently spiritual connotation, and critics at the time interpreted the painting this way. "It literally floods the canvas with celestial fire," one wrote, "and beams with glory like a sublime psalm of light."20 This light forms a cruciform shape, extending hori- zontally across the sky and vertically down the center of the canvas.

The painting conforms to the Romantic notion of the sublime: nature as both awe-inspiring and overwhelming, imaginable but too vast to fully comprehend.21 Thomas Cole, Church's mentor, felt that a painter must first forget those details that he had seen in nature before he could begin to paint a landscape. Time must "draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts, which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in

the mind."22 As in Humboldt's version of nature, suppression allows for synthesis, the whole is only graspable through "a generalization of particular facts."23 In The Andes of Ecuador , the particular facts of the tropics (Fig. 3) - palm fronds and

clusters of red blossoms and jagged boulders and grazing animals - are all present, but they are subordinated to the sunlight that demands our primary attention. Church's light "veils" the foreground details, consumes the broad swath of sky, and nearly obliterates the mountain peaks in the center of the canvas. Science is still subject to the sublime.24

Darwin's Details

If The Andes of Ecuador is Humboldt's painting, The Heart of the Andes (Fig. 4) is Darwin's. Whereas the 1855 picture presents a cohesive, cosmological narrative, the larger 1859 canvas constantly tests the limits of symbolic order. The Heart of the Andes is a landscape of expansive optical competition. Yet Church undoubtedly intended quite the opposite effect. It was supposed to be a stunning homage to Humboldt, a catalog of botanical and geological and meteorological won- ders, all part of one great cosmos. Church had hoped to ship the massive canvas to Germany so that the eighty-nine-year- old Humboldt could see it, but the scientist died just before these plans could become a reality, and The Heart of the Andes never went to Berlin.25 That same year The Origin of Species was

published. Humboldt's concept of nature - what he called "one great whole animated by the breath of life"26 - would come to seem like a beautiful, but impossible, vision.

The Heart of the Andes displays an exuberance that flirts with disorder. This is exactly what one feels when reading Darwin. Each plant or mammal or mollusk is meticulously described, the result of countless hours of observation and study. The scientist might discuss a flying lemur on one page and a Swedish turnip on another. At one point, "the teeth and talons of the tiger," the "plumed seed of the dandelion," and "the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle" all appear in two sentences.27 The text is both precise and wide-ranging. But such a broad scope does not translate into an easily apprehensible unity. About natural selection, Darwin wrote: "I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings."28 This was the anxiety for Darwin's audience: not the existence of such complexity and contingency, but the fact that harmony was not the result. Here was a world driven by

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5gļ

4 Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, 66V6 X 119V4 in. (168 X 302.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909, 09.95 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)

adaptations at the smallest level of life rather than by an inherent impetus toward wholeness.

Humboldt's cosmology was based on nature's infinite vari- ety. This was the point of departure for both Darwin and Church: an observational practice that privileged detail and a mode of representation, on the page and on the canvas, that evoked a sense of the staggering abundance of life. The effect, though, was quite different: not a cosmos that could be definitively mapped and known but a system constantly in flux. Darwin's theory, wrote Thoreau in his journal one day in 1860, "implies a greater vital force in nature because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation."29 Such "constant new creation," as

exhilarating as it is unpredictable, is apparent on every page of Darwin's book and on every inch of Church's canvas. Each is also founded on a certain kind of struggle, a struggle for survival in Darwin's theory of evolution, and a struggle for attention in Church's canvas. Where does one look first?

What should one focus on? What is important and what is insignificant, and how can one be sure of the difference?

Church observes the world with Humboldt's eye for diver- sity and wonder. And Darwin does as well. While traveling in South America on the Beagle in 1832, Darwin wrote in a letter to his mentor, J. S. Henslow, "I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on entering the trop- ics."30 In Darwin's autobiography, written at the end of his life, he names Humboldt's Personal Narrative - about those

South American travels that would inspire both Darwin's Beagle journeys and Church's treks through the Andes - as

one of the two books that "stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble struc-

ture of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books

influenced me nearly so much."31 Church owned Darwin's journals from the Beagle voyages of

the 1830s, as well as a later volume entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. Conspic- uously absent is the major book between them: The Origin of Species . Church would certainly have been aware of the book's claims. But, despite his passionate interest in science, it seems that the painter could not reconcile Darwin's theory of evo- lution with his Protestant faith. He certainly would never have intentionally created a Darwinian composition. Yet, in a strangely poignant paradox, it is his attempt at a visual tribute to Humboldt that brings him closer to Darwin.

Darwin and Church are both, in a sense, too good at the details. Darwin looked too closely at too much for too long to deny what he observed: the brutal but beautiful process of natural selection. Church is brilliant at representing the nat- ural world, and a kind of giddy enthusiasm for his own ability permeates The Heart of the Andes. Church pushes scientific realism to its limit. He exceeds Humboldt's advice to the

artist, and the result is a landscape that reveals an aesthetic of information, a painting that tries to "say everything" and that therefore cannot be resolved into that "large and appealing thing."

The Heart of the Andes has no declarative focal point. The sky is nearly filled with darkened mountaintops and dense clouds, blocking the metaphoric possibility of heavenly tran- scendence. At the margins, roots form a twisted network of

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582 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

5 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing tree roots (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metro- politan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)

dark veins and arteries (Fig. 5); a calla lily is set close to the artist's signature (Fig. 6); branches cast a precise tangle of shadows on an exposed rock; leaves are pocked with insect bites (Fig. 7). The eye jumps from one spot to another. Individual details may take on symbolic significance, such as a white cross that appears beside a path in the left fore- ground. Placed against the dark shadows, it is much more arresting than the stone cross camouflaged by vines at the lower left of The Andes of Ecuador. But here the bright trail abruptly stops, disappearing into the underbrush, with no apparent continuation. Symbolism does not extend beyond the single detail. In the middle ground white buildings on the banks of a body of water are visible, among them what seems to be a mission, but because this church is so small and

removed from any discernible path, it is easy to miss this religious marker.

What is impossible to miss, however, is a much more worldly sign: the date and the artist's signature "carved" into the tree at the lower left (Fig. 6) . It is as if a spotlight in the exhibition hall had been trained on this part of the painting. This is a sign of the artist's presence, a version of "I was here" as well as "This is mine." Placed in the immediate fore-

ground, Church's illuminated signature is more prominent than the cross farther along the trail. The sign of the indi- vidual precedes the icon of Christian salvation. The artist also

6 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing the artist's signature on a tree trunk (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)

7 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing branches, shadows, and leaves (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)

references himself through the inclusion of a waterfall in the foreground, an element that echoes Niagara. The artist's body of work and the artist's body - his signature "on" the

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5g3

8 "The Heart of the Andes , " by Frederic ChurcĶ as Exhibited at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair , 1864, stereograph, negative no. 61263. The New-York Historical Society (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by The New-York Historical Society)

9 Homage to Church 's Picture , " The Heart of the Andes" cover of "Marche di Bravura, the Andes/' by George William Warren (New York: William A. Pond, 1863). Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, OL. 1983.279 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation)

white bark - locate the self in the extravagant landscape. Subjectivity is highlighted over spiritual symbolism.

On May 1, 1859, just four days after The Heart of the Andes was first presented to the public, Thoreau wrote in his jour- nal, "Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. . . . With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature."32 The whole- ness imagined by Romanticism and the organic unity theo- rized by scientists like Humboldt no longer seemed possible by 1859. Church and Thoreau both appear to sense this, their work consumed ever more by details, while their desire to transcend the "insignificant" detail remained.

Grasping Crowds flocked to see The Heart of the Andes. Over a mere three-week period, more than twelve thousand people paid twenty-five cents each to view Church's painting when it was first unveiled in New York City. The painting debuted in an exhibition hall on Broadway before being moved to the gallery at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where Church had begun renting a studio the year before.33 Several police- men had to be called in to keep the street clear.34 The picture was shown alone, in an elaborately carved black walnut shad- owbox frame (Fig. 8), surrounded by swags of jewel-toned fabric, and strikingly illuminated.35 Booklets were published about the painting, poems written, sermons given, and a musical score - a march by George William Warren (Fig. 9) - composed in its honor. Church had achieved a status unlike any other American artist in history.36

Announcements for The Heart of the Andes "requested" that visitors bring opera glasses to view the painting.37 Opera glasses provided a means to see the picture from afar amid the crowds of people while also cutting out the periphery - all those jostling bodies competing to see the landscape, as if they themselves were enacting the competition between de- tails on Church's canvas. Such magnification also intensifies the painting's dizzying effect. The spectator was therefore invited to see the picture in two ways: as a whole, with the naked eyes, from a relative distance; and as isolated details from a magnified proximity. Each viewer could also move between part and whole, detail and effect, creating an ever-

shifting narrative for the painting through the subjective act of looking.

A shrewd businessman and self-promoter, Church em- ployed an agent who took his celebrated canvas to eight other American cities and across the Atlantic to London following its debut in New York. Mark Twain, then a young riverboat

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584 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

captain named Samuel Clemens, saw the canvas three times when it traveled to Saint Louis in 1861, each time using opera glasses. "I have just returned," he wrote to his brother, "from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen - Church's 'Heart of the Andes.' " He proclaimed in his letter that it was "always a new picture - totally new - you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first." While the composition may be "tame" and "ordinary-looking," the details make increasing demands on his attention, each possessing "a marked and distinct person- ality." By the final visit he is overwhelmed.

your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder 11. . . . You will

never get tired of looking at the pictuj e, but your reflec- tions - your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something - you hardly know what - will grow so paini al that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture - it remains with you still. It is in my mind now - and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detect- ing it. So much for the "Heart of the Andes."38

Twain's language points to the difference between looking and interpreting, between seeing and knowing. Although "[y]ou will never get tired of looking at the picture," that "intelligible Something" remains painfully elusive. Visual "re- lief' may be possible by simply "go [ing] away from the thing," yet intellectual relief is not as easy. You may stop "gasping" but the mind will continue its "efforts to grasp" meaning. Forgetting even "the smallest feature" becomes nearly impos- sible. The landscape is "so much" to see that it can only, finally, be left behind: "So much for the 'Heart of the An- des.' " This final phrase flirts with dismissal and yet, in the context of the letter, seems more like necessity. Even Twain's attempt (literally and figuratively) at writing off the painting contains what remains in the mind - "so much." His words

reveal the painting's visual power and the interpretative toll it exacts.

Cutting Seeing in detail - epitomized by seeing with opera glasses - does not necessarily lead to greater understanding. This is a critical point about Church's picture, and about the poten- tially paradoxical role detail can assume in visual art. Georges Didi-Huberman provocatively explores this question of detail and knowledge or, rather, the difference between knowing and looking. "We can never know, heuristically speaking, how to look at a painting," he writes. "That's because knowing and looking absolutely don't have the same mode of being." Yet when confronting a painting, an art historian will often say, " T haven't seen it enough; to know something more about it, now I ought to see it in detail.' "39 What, then, is the burden that we place on details? Why do we assume that seeing in greater detail will lead to greater knowledge?

According to Didi-Huberman, "to detail" means, first, to get close, then to cut up - as if "this intimacy entails some violence" - and, finally, to put together. Paradoxically, one "gets closer the better to cut up, and cuts up the better to make whole."40 The very word "detail" comes from the

French verb détailler , tailler ; meaning "to cut." To describe a painting in detail is to feel, very personally, the effects of such cutting apart. Gaston Bachelard characterizes the detail as marked by an "intimate conflict that it can never wholly pacify,"41 which Didi-Huberman elaborates:

It's as if the describing subject, in the very "tearing-to- pieces" movement that constitutes the operation of the detail, instead of proceeding to the serene reciprocity of a totalization, redirected despite himself and onto himself the first, violent act of disintegration. A cognitive subject cut- ting up the visible the better to totalize, but undergoing himself the effect of such a scission.42

The attempt to grasp an interpretable whole, to find a satis- fying and significant meaning, entails tearing apart the work of art. But how to put it back together again? For viewers like Twain The Heart of the Andes seemed to resist cohesion.

Like Didi-Huberman' s art historian, Twain begins by want- ing ' to know something more" about Church's painting and so looks at it in ever greater detail, goes to see it again and again. In describing the picture, he is "cutting up the visible the better to totalize." In the process, though, Twain finds his own language repeatedly challenged and even threatened by all that detail. Despite himself, he cannot make Church's picture whole again - he cannot return to the simple serenity of that "wonderfully beautiful painting" - nor can he remove those details from his mind when they refuse to become an "intelligible something." Like small shards of glass or difficult memories, they remain embedded in his consciousness, caus- ing the pain that is, in a sense, the cost of detail.

As if it were possible to "write" the painting back together again, other authors of the time attempted to resolve the conflicts perceived in Church's work through their prose. William M. Bryant, author of Philosophy of Landscape Painting (1882), argues that The Heart of the Andes embodies "the universal theme," which he also calls "the unifying theme," "the eternal principle," and "the principle of unity," referring to it approximately fifteen times in five pages. Yet he never succinctly defines what exactly this omnipresent term means. He claims that The Heart of the Andes , like other "epic land- scapes," contains a "center of gravity" toward which "lower forms of existence" - exemplified by "the river-plain with its multiple complex of life and activity" - "perpetually struggle." To achieve unity, this struggle "must unfailingly result in the cancellation of their identity." Details must, in other words, cede to the whole. Two pages later, however, Bryant seems to forget his own emphasis on "cancellation." The painting, he insists, symbolizes the world as "an infinite process in which every possible phase of existence is realized at every mo- ment." "This," he states, "is the 'eternal now.' "4S While claim-

ing that The Heart of the Andes has a clear and comprehensible theme, Bryant's analysis itself reveals the struggle that threat- ens that theme.

The Heart of the Andes , with its regenerative power, demands that the viewer remain in the present tense. Bryant and Twain may make very different claims for Church's picture, but their discussions both center on a visual experience that, like the details themselves, seems to infinitely perpetuate itself. Church's painting runs the risk of always being in the process of speaking, and of never saying just one thing.

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5g5

Writing about Church's works in 1875, Henry James as- serted that there was "nothing that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church's pictures."

One can't say what one means about them; the common critical formulas are too inflexible. It would be the part of wisdom perhaps to attempt and to desire to say nothing; simply to leave them to their tranquil destiny, which is apparently very honorable and comfortable. If you praise them very highly, you say more than you mean, if you denounce them, if, in vulgar parlance, you sniff at them, you say less. It is the kind of art which seems perpetually skirting the edge of something worse than itself, like a woman with a taste for florid ornaments who should dress

herself in a way to make quiet people stare, and yet who should be really a very reputable person. As we looked at Mr. Church's velvety vistas and gem-like vegetation, at Goupil' s, we felt honestly sorry that there was any necessity in this weary world for taking upon one's self to be a critic, for deeming it essential to a proper self-respect to be analytical. Why not accept this lovely tropic scene as a very pretty picture, and have done with it?44

James's response begins, and ends, with Twain's first asser- tion about The Heart of the Andes: here is a beautiful painting. But James, writing nearly fifteen years later, seems to resist engaging with Church's pictures as Twain did, choosing in- stead to question the very efficacy of criticism in the face of such works. The risk was too great. One might say too much, or not enough. He also proposes a yet more troubling aspect of detail: embarrassment. Here is detail, in 1875, as feminized

ornamentation, as an excess that offends taste and puts mo- rality into question, as what Naomi Schor has called "the refuse of aesthetic verisimilitude."45 As the century contin- ued, Church's works were dismissed with greater frequency using related terms; they were judged to be theatrical, loud, decadent, too elaborate, or simply - merely - beautiful.

James does not exactly dismiss Church, although he wishes to, as Twain wishes to forget. James was all too aware of the risks of "excessive interpretation."46 In his preface to the novella In the Cage , which Schor cites, James states: "My central spirit, in the anecdote, is, for verisimilitude, I grant, too ardent a focus of divination; but without this excess the

phenomena detailed would have lacked their principle of cohesion."47 The author here defends his own use of detail, as "anecdote" and "divination." Such "excess" - which his

sentence itself displays - is necessary, he claims, to achieve cohesion. James and Church share a commitment to detail in the name of "verisimilitude." Excess becomes a consequence of such a (realist) project, while an " anxious detailism, preoc- cupied with ensuring its own legitimacy," characterizes the endeavor.48

James's words about Church's paintings reveal an anxiety about the nature of detail and its threats to semantic and

visual propriety. His review - or, rather, his protestations against the possibilities of interpretation - also points to a shift in opinion, one that would last for almost a century until Church's works began to be discovered and discussed again. These highly detailed landscapes came to represent, as the

nineteenth century continued, "the kind of art which seems perpetually skirting the edge of something worse than itself." Such pictures became identified as "popular" art in the neg- ative sense, an opiate for the masses. Viewers might loudly proclaim their delight, but critics grew suspicious of the kind of "melo-dramatic effect"49 or "Arabian Nights' Entertain- ment" that would be "the favorite with a large class."50 Crowded galleries could signify "low" art; excessive detail might conceal aesthetic vulgarity. Church's canvases began to be viewed with a sense of embarrassment, or even disgust. By the turn of the century, the artist was largely ignored, as if it were best to say nothing.51

Narrative Luxury But at midcentury, critics and writers were eager to speak about Church's works, and The Heart of the Andes above all. The painting captivated its nineteenth-century audience and invited an intensely subjective viewing experience. Details moved the eye around the canvas, rather than charting a clear path through it. Opera glasses enabled the spectator to assem- ble the picture through the act of looking, deciding what to include and what to exclude, what to concentrate on and

what to ignore, what to bring in and out of focus. Two booklets sold at the exhibitions of The Heart of the Andes attempted to make Church's landscape more "intelligible" for the spectator, even though the painting's details seem, at times, unwilling or unable to conform to the writers' narratives. One author describes "heavily-wooded moun- tains . . . richly clothed with trees and all the appendage of the forest," which he parenthetically admits are "not visible in the picture." His scenery is not entirely invented, however; the mountains are signified by "the foot of each jutting into view."52 Such visual (and textual) moments raise the problem of the marginal detail. What about those small things that are only partially visible and pushed to the edges? What about those details that cannot easily be explained, that may seem strangely insignificant?

Roland Barthes, in his essay "The Reality Effect," asks this question. "Is everything in narrative significant, and if not, if insignificant stretches subsist in the narrative syntagm, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignifi- cance?" If "description" is "purely summatory," "narrative" provides "choices and alternatives," giving "the appearance of a huge traffic-control center." What if not everything settles easily into its given place? What if, "even more disturb- ing" - to quote Barthes again - the details "seem to corre- spond to a kind of narrative luxury , lavish to the point of offering many 'futile' details and thereby increasing the cost of narrative information"?53

The Heart of the Andes is Church's most "disturbing" act of "narrative luxury While details in other large tropical pic- tures flirt with excess, they are ultimately subordinated to a central feature or defining effect - the globe of the sun and all-encompassing light in The Andes of Ecuador, a cloud of smoke in Cotopaxi (Fig. 10), the full curve of a rainbow in Rainy Season in the Tropics (Fig. 11). These are pictures that conform more to Cole's version of the sublime, works that

"veil . . . the common details." But in The Heart of the Andes , a different mode of visuality is at work. The use of opera glasses allowed spectators to become participants, moving through

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586 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

10 Church, Cotopaxi , 1862, oil on canvas, 48 X 85 in. (121.9 X 215.9 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Bridgeman Art Library)

11 Church, Rainy Season in the Tropics , 1866, oil on canvas, 56 XA X 84V4 in. (142.9 X 214 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1970.9 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

the "lavish" details, exploring the "choices and alternatives" and uncertainties that the painting provides. Viewing means discovering not narrative structure but narrative information: details that seem more "futile" than useful, that resist sum-

mation and indulge the eye.54 Luxury, then, can be seen as having two meanings. First, in

the Barthesian sense, luxury signifies narrative excess, details that "increase the cost of narrative information." Second, in

the more traditional sense that Barthes's language plays with, luxury refers to the enjoyment of the best and most costly things, those potentially rare and precious objects that offer pleasure far beyond necessity. This is the initial delight of "gasping," to use Twain's term, while the connotation of excess in Barthes's definition provides the other, and more traumatic, element of Twain's response to The Heart of the Andes: "grasping." The opera glasses may have brought the details of the painting visually into focus, but seeing "so much" means knowing, or possessing, comparatively little.

The painting subordinates the stability of structure to the thrill, and frustration, of optical immersion.

Americans had strongly conflicting feelings about materi- alism and possession during the mid-nineteenth century, and these feelings permeate The Heart of the Andes and responses to the picture. The Atlantic Monthly assured its readers, in its review of Church's painting, that "we Americans, amidst the confusion and stir of material interests, are not inattentive to

the progress [of the arts] ,"55 Culture is placed here in oppo- sition to the "confusion" of materialism. Landscape painting was often lauded as a visual tonic to the strains of modern life.

During the late 1850s, the influential journal the Crayon repeatedly ran articles that, as Janice Simon notes, "endorsed the curative effects of landscape scenery on the 'diseased' commercial soul." The journal also advocated a Ruskinian truth to nature that demanded a strict allegiance to natural facts. As Simon argues, "It is as if an art rich in natural detail redeemed materialism from its sinful essence."56

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5g7

Church was often compared with the Pre-Raphaelites who, following John Ruskin on both sides of the Atlantic, pro- duced canvases notable for their exacting specificity.57 Such "loyalty to nature," as Harper's Weekly described it, was ex- pressed through detail.58 Critics sympathetic to the Pre- Raphaelites equated greater detail with greater truth, and thus such works acquired a moral cast. But a painting that seemed to be all foreground was also subject to the opposite charge: a too-close reproduction of nature that neglected larger meaning. As with the criticism of Church's works, at stake here was the function of representational detail: Did it provide, at best, merely a convincing simulation of the mate- rial world - the "real" - or was it capable of evoking more abstract concepts? Could one even make such a distinction between objective fact and subjective response?59 If detail was regarded as the imagination's antithesis, then Church's aes- thetic - and the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelite painters - could be accused of favoring matter over idea, the "thing" over "Art."

Yet defining detail and its role in aesthetic and cultural production was far from clear. Writers like Adam Badeau criticized the Pre-Raphaelites for their "worship of the mate- rial." Rather than depicting nature as an ideal, they pre- sented, according to Badeau, merely a "careful delineation of trivialities."60 James elided commercial materialism and artis- tic material fact when describing Church's "velvety vistas" and "gem-like vegetation." An intense struggle developed during the period between an emerging consumer culture that made tantalizing promises and a fear of the insubstantial and even sinful nature of a culture built on such material con-

cerns.61 Deeply held Puritan ethics emphasized plainness and transparency. "The genius of American life," declared Har- riet Beecher Stowe, who kept a print of one of Church's tropical paintings on her wall, "is for simplicity and absence of adornment."62

Such morality was increasingly difficult to translate into mid-nineteenth-century American society. To see someone or something was not to know them. Natural facts were not necessarily symbols of spiritual facts, the equivalence Ralph Waldo Emerson had made in Nature (1836).63 In Walt Whit- man's poem of 1860, "Of the Terrible Question of Appear- ances," the things of the world had become mutable and even unknowable.

Of the doubts, the uncertainties after all,

That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,

That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,

May-be the things I perceive - the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,

The skies of day and night - colors, densities, forms - May-be these are, (as doubtless they are,) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known,

(How often they dart out of themselves, as if to con- found me and mock me!

How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them;)64

Whitman desires to know that "real something" but wonders if all the "things" of the world around him are "only appari- tions," the products of individual perception rather than an immutable substance. The first lines of the next poem in this 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass seem to respond even more directly to this cultural anxiety: "Long I thought that knowl- edge alone would suffice me - O if I could but obtain knowl- edge!"65 The "terrible question of appearances" is that there may only be appearances; identity and meaning must be created by the individual. Whitman's skepticism about vision and knowledge gives his poems a sense of both disorientation and ecstatic liberation, heightened by the fact that they reject traditional rhyme and meter.

The reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly , by contrast, tries to find that "real something" behind those many "things" in The Heart of the Andes. Americans "need the thing" and, in Church's painting, "we have it; no spectral cloud-pile, but a real Chimborazo, with the hoar of eternity upon its scalp."66 This "thing" is what Whitman perceives but doubts, those elements of the world that can be touched and seen and

described. The Atlantic Monthly author searches for an ethics that would explain an American desire for those things. The writer searches, in other words, for that "real something." This provides an essential distinction between two types of "things." The first type is often equated in contemporary discussions with "details." These are the "things" that appear materially or are visually graspable and that have an intimate, and at times troubling, connection with the physical world. These are also things as commodities, populating depart- ment stores as well as Charles Dickens's novels, necessitating the production of new words in the second half of the nine- teenth century to describe "thingness" either more particu- larly or more generally: gadget, dingus, thingamaj ig, jigger.67 The second type is the "real something," or what Twain calls "an intelligible Something," which could conceptually bind together all those individual things. Yet Twain and Whitman, as well as Thoreau, find a disturbing incompatibility between the two types. Twain expresses this as a breakdown between perception and conceptualization. Thoreau worries about the blinding specificity of scientific inquiry. Whitman most explicitly states the problem as a cultural condition: "How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows," what he sees.

The writer for the Atlantic Monthly , meanwhile, endeavors to explain why Americans "need the thing." The desire re- veals a 'Yankee knowingness, its clear, intellectual power, with its delicate sentiment and strong self-reliance." Church's details - all those things - are equated with a pragmatic intel- lect and temperament. It is "ours," the reviewer concludes, speaking as much about the painting as the mode of thought that created it. "We delightfully feel that it belongs to us, and that we are of it."68 The author ignores the question of appearances, preferring to link the details of The Heart of the Andes to a Puritan work ethic, giving them a historical identity and validity. Such a need for legitimization points to the central and unstable place of the thing in American culture during this period.69 Was it revelatory or superfluous? How should art respond to what Whitman called the city's "shifting tableaux, your spectacles," and "the bright windows, with goods in them"?70

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588 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

12 Church, The Icebergs , 1861, oil on canvas, 64V£ X 112V4 in. (163.8 X 285.8 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Norma and Lamar Hunt (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)

With its emphasis on elusive possession, an excess of choice, and the delights of viewing many things, The Heart of the Andes creates visual appeal using the nascent logic and language of consumer culture. Through the simulated prox- imity provided by the opera glasses, the midcentury American viewer would be given the illusion of grasping the painting's many parts, while remaining at a distinct remove. This is the function of vision in the new marketplace, epitomized by the department store window.71 Whitman writes of "Looking in at the shop-windows in Broadway the whole forenoon . . . press- ing the flesh of my nose to the thick plate-glass/'72 The prom- inent theologian and social activist Henry Ward Beecher, in the essay "Object Lessons," observed that Americans had "trained their eyes to take in at a glance, from a shop-window, from a store full of varieties, from the face of books in a

library, the greatest number of things."73 Here surfaces are always new and endlessly appealing, but they also refuse solidity and easy intelligibility, as Whitman found. A stable and comprehensible whole remains out of reach. Instead, the viewer-consumer sees himself seeing and thinking. In "look- ing at the picture," Twain finds his own "reflections." In looking at the city, Whitman sees himself. The Heart of the Andes, , like

Whitman's poetry, makes the process of thought itself visible. This is not merely an image of a South American landscape; this is a painting about seeing and the questions, frustrations, and pleasures attendant on the very act of looking.

Whiteness

In 1859, the year of The Heart of the Andes and The Origin of Species , Frederic Church traveled to the Newfoundland and

Labrador coasts to sketch. The terrain was constantly shifting as glaciers and icebergs remade the map. Expeditions em- barked to chart the region and never returned. Geologists struggled to write the history for such a strange, icy land- scape. The polar North was a place of mystery, where writers, politicians, explorers, and scientists projected their fantasies and pursued their ambitions. Even more than the tropics, the Arctic was a site of particular cultural fascination at midcen-

74

tury.

Church's 1861 painting of icebergs (Fig. 12) offers neither the excess of The Heart of the Andes, whose size it nearly equals, nor the order of The Andes of Ecuador. The broadside available at exhibitions promised an instructive picture of glacial ter- rain (Fig. 13).75 But this vast, icy wilderness actually diagrams the problems of representation. When the first shots of the Civil War were fired twelve days before the painting's debut in 1861, Church patriotically titled his canvas The North.76 Yet the picture ignores the allusions of its tide, offering no visual reference to the conflict between the states nor any invita- tions to read it as a patriotic manifesto. Many viewers were baffled, even disturbed, by the painting's emptiness. The ice, water, and looming bergs were all meticulously rendered, but such details did not tell a story, suggest a moral, or even give the particular geographic facts of a newly discovered land.

The painting was and remains dramatically unclear. "The eye feels the first shock," wrote the reviewer for the New-York Daily Tribune , "and anticipates in a moment the slow agonies that shall wind . . . about the tender tissues, and the unsus-

pecting blood-vessels."77 The critic for the New York World found that the painting could not be "taken into the soul with

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5gg

13 The North. Painted by F. E. Church , from Studies of Icebergs made in the Northern Seas, in the Summer of 1859 ' Boston, 1862. Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, OL. 1986. 146 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation)

a glance. We shall be surprised if those of acute sensibilities do not look upon it at first with a positive feeling of pain, akin to that which we sometimes feel in the presence of the terrible visions of sleep."78 Another writer warned viewers that the picture would "follow them home and haunt them for weeks."79

The North did not sell. Of course, wartime concerns may have been largely to blame, although one can also imagine that the lack of symbolic details would have made finding a buyer for such a large, pricey painting particularly difficult. So, after two years, the artist decided to change the tide, and the painting itself. This is the painting we know today. The North became The Icebergs just before it was sent to London for exhibition in June 1863. In the foreground, Church added a broken ship's mast (Fig. 14), the one sign of humanity in an otherwise barren landscape. The crosslike wreckage claims symbolic meaning, but it cannot export such meaning to the entire canvas. The mast's crow's nest - that perch from which to see into the distance, into the ship's future - lies useless on the ice. Literally and figuratively, this is a detail of fallen vision. The addition of the mast indicates Church's desire to

make the painting cohere around an allegorical message of faith or an intelligible story of the heroism and tragedy of exploration. The fate of the crow's nest suggests otherwise.

The mast was intended to create a more legible, and more

14 Church, The Icebergs , detail showing mast with crow's nest (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)

marketable, painting. Arctic exploration had particular reso- nance with the British, and although Church was careful not to give his mast the marks of any particular expedition, British viewers would almost certainly have been reminded of Sir John Franklin, the most famous Arctic explorer of the period.80 With two ships and 128 men, Franklin had set out to navigate a Northwest Passage - a more direct route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic - in May 1845. After three years without word from the expedition, rescue mis- sions were dispatched. Franklin's fame, his wife's insistent public profile, and promises of monetary awards kept the disappearance of the explorer's fleet in the public eye for decades. In 1850 eleven British and two American ships searched the polar North for clues, and the first relics from the lost crew were found. Rescue and recovery missions con- tinued as the century progressed, with hopes of finding the official expedition records or even survivors living among the Inuit. Instead, evidence of cold, starvation, disease, and even

cannibalism surfaced. It became clear that all had perished, and most of the details remained unknown.81

The mast in The Icebergs is the relic that was never discov- ered. The eye first moves to these splintered pieces of wood, and the canvas now seems to be adamantly about Something - the idea of exploration, a tribute to a real person, the mem- ory of an actual journey. However, the mast most convinc- ingly, and paradoxically, references disappearance: of a commander, his ships, his crew, their hopes for new discov- eries, and, later, basic survival. It also represents the act of speculation in response to such disappearance. In the wake of death and uncertainty, the mast is like the small, tentative tale that aims to reassure by constructing a means to remem- ber. The mast is a crosslike gravestone that makes the white- ness less threatening, as if a story that ended in death were more comforting than emptiness.

The mast also appears to chart a visual course through the rest of the painting. It points across the canvas to the grotto area on the right (Fig. 15) and is also connected by the repetition of both the brown and bright aquamarine colors. The mast's position initially seems like a clear directive: there. But the viewer is redirected away from the only signs of humanity - the mast and, next to it, the artist's signature on

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590 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4

15 Church, The Icebergs , detail showing grotto and boulder (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)

16 Joseph Wright of Derby, A Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno , Sunset , 1780-81, oil on canvas, 40 X 50 in. (101.6 X 127 cm). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981. 25.710 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Yale Center for British Art)

17 Church, The Icebergs , detail showing central iceberg (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)

a slab of ice - to an eerie green space of ghostly, submerged icebergs. The scale of this area is difficult to decipher, as is the distance between mast and grotto. Instead of moving from foreground to middle ground to background through the center of the picture, following landscape convention, the painting makes a sharp turn, pointing away from the looming iceberg in the middle of the canvas to the strange- ness of an icy grotto.

There is a wealth of possible symbolism here. The brown boulder and glacial formations might reference geologic time. Debates about erratic boulders, those huge, oddly placed rocks that dot the earth, had provoked a rethinking of

geologic history during the mid-nineteenth century, and sci- entists proposed competing theories - a great flood or an ice age - to explain these boulders and glaciers.82 The grotto formation, meanwhile, can be read as a more mythological element or Romantic trope, a common motif in works by artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby (Fig. 16). Critics, finding The Icebergs difficult to articulate, often turned to figurative language to fill the gap. According to the London Daily News , the grotto in Church's painting could be the "haunt of fairies ... or some lovely sirens,"83 while the London Review imagined "hiding places for the mermaids."84 Others described human faces, marble ruins, classical monuments,

and Gothic cathedrals emerging from the ice. From mast to grotto and boulder, our eyes move next to

the largest iceberg (Fig. 17). The boulder, like the mast, even appears to point to this central iceberg. The rock is shaped like a cannon, the barrel of the gun tapering as it faces the pyramid of white ice. Yet if there is a dramatic arc created by moving from mast to grotto to boulder, the central iceberg - the painting's namesake - interrupts it, absorbing any narra- tive momentum into whiteness. The iceberg blocks the view of the horizon and knowledge of what lies beyond. The shadows on the central iceberg seem to indicate that the sun must be located to the left, but the play of reflections and refractions among water, ice, and sky makes locating the sun's precise position difficult. An optical and symbolic path into the heavens is denied by a large mass of white paint, a surface both blank and exquisitely detailed with every chip, crack, and fissure. The iceberg becomes its own canvas, a white painting within a painting.

Without a focal point, like the sun in The Andes of Ecuador , the eye is led back to the left foreground. The entire left edge of the canvas is consumed by a wall of ice, which creates a sense of visual entrapment and, at five feet four and a half inches high, actually replicates our own vertical form. The addition of the mast - to address the painting's lack of nar- rative direction - in fact makes the picture more boldly un- clear. The instability of this single detail begins a journey that

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 59J

18 Sir Edwin Landseer, Man Proposes , God Disposes , 1864, oil on canvas, 36 X 95% in. (91.4 X 243.7 cm). Royal Holloway, University of London (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Bridgeman Art Library)

leads us away from conclusive interpretations, that ends with a boundary that cannot be crossed or overcome.

The mast added in 1863 indicates an absence that moves

beyond simple signification, a piece of a lost ship, to point to a more profound and unsettling sense of disappearance that the rest of the painting constructs. There is a startling lack of sentiment or drama. This is not a Romantic homage to a fallen hero. In The Icebergs , nature is not the stage for God's grand and moralizing gestures, as in Sir Edwin Landseer's contemporaneous work, Man Proposes , God Disposes (Fig. 18). Nor does Church's canvas monumentalize loss, as does Cas-

par David Friedrich's The Polar Sea (Fig. 19), a painting that confronts the viewer with the power, and order, of the natu- ral world with its bold, triangular composition. The Icebergs suggests a Darwinian world in which nature is a source of uncertainty as much as - or more than - structure.85 Those elements that would seem typical of Romantic painting - the grottoes of Wright of Derby or the shipwreck in Friedrich' s painting - are made smaller but more problematic, quieter but more disturbing, in The Icebergs.

Following David Miller's compelling interpretation of the iconography of wrecked boats, Church's orphaned masthead and the final painting of 1863 can be read as part of a reconceptualization of time during the mid-nineteenth cen- tury. With greater knowledge of natural history, Americans' sense of time shifted from a "God- and human-centered,

historicist" notion of the world to a "radically impersonal" one. "If there is an elegiac quality in these depictions of wrecks mouldering on the shore," Miller writes, "any such traditional pattern of feeling struggles to express itself through their minimal forms and in spite of their momentum toward blankness - a 'dumb blankness full of meaning,' to invoke Ishmael's phrase in Moby Dick"86

The Icebergs has such a "momentum toward blankness." Whiteness in Church's painting seems both excessive and insufficient. The painting provokes questions perhaps best expressed by Ishmael, when he is considering the terrifying paradox of that "dumb blankness, full of meaning."87

19 Caspar David Friedrich, The Polar Sea, 1824, oil on canvas, 38 X 49% in. (96.7 X 126.9 cm). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Bridgeman Art Library)

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this white- ness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous - why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heart- less voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs

us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible

absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb

blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of

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592 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?88

Church's "wide landscape of snows" does not propose anni- hilation or atheism. Neither, of course, does Ishmael. He

wonders about the possibility , asking why whiteness can appeal to the soul as "the most meaning symbol of spiritual things" while it also "stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation." There is too much meaning, but also a terrify- ing "indefiniteness." Whiteness is the "intensifying agent" - creating "voids," "immensities," "depths," and "absence." Without fixity, faith is compromised. What if all this meaning might mean nothing?

Herman Melville's novel is a quest for knowledge - an "epistemological Odyssey," as Michael Gilmore has called it - but the conclusion is that the cost of such a search is too high; indeed, the price is the annihilation of self.89 The desire to know must, in the end, be abandoned. There is something beautifully wrenching about Melville's phrase, "a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows." If dumbness is the inability to speak, the description resonates in a particularly provocative way with Church's painting. It is not for lack of meaning that the painting cannot communi- cate; it is, in fact, full of meaning, a landscape of depth and immensity. But blankness blocks speech. Spiritual symbols are rendered inaudible.

The Burden of Detail

The stakes of detail have changed in Church's Arctic paint- ing. In The Heart of the Andes , the proliferation of "so much" is both a source of visual delight and interpretative anxiety. The painting's plentitude raises questions about the differ- ence between seeing and knowing. In The Icebergs, though, there is no abundance of life. There is a sign of death in the foreground that becomes a mark of deception: luring us over to the grotto, setting us up to expect a story, but moving the eye instead into whiteness and, finally, back to a wall of ice. These details all seem, to use Barthes's terms, "detached from

the narrative's semiotic structure."90 Even more disturbing, such narrative structure does not even appear to exist.

Although details still retained an iconographie and narra- tive resonance in the mid-nineteenth century, looking more closely at them made the creation of an overall narrative more tenuous. Narrative becomes a fundamentally unstable and subjective experience, created and re-created by the viewer's participation and marked by the accumulation of more and more information.91 Perhaps this is what is "lack- ing" for us as present-day viewers, to return to Albert Ten Eyck Gardner's speculation about Church's popularity. We are not unsettled by a painting that appears to be more interested in itself than in our interpretation of it. But this was an anxiety for nineteenth-century viewers. What does it mean to see in detail and be confronted by white paint? One might have to "go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief' or try to politely ignore it, render it merely "a very pretty picture." The irony is, of course, that neither Twain nor James is able simply to dismiss Church's paintings - Twain keeps looking, James keeps writing. In lieu of a narra- tive, they describe how they see, the pleasures and the diffi- culties and even the risk.

"There is a danger," wrote Emma Darwin to her husband in 1839, "in giving up on revelation."92 Charles Darwin - delay- ing the publication of his seminal work, worried about its reception - felt this acutely: the danger of rejecting a system based on revelation, one that always led back to Something or, rather, a divine Someone. Church, like Thoreau and even

Melville, did not give up on such a possibility, but later canvases like The Icebergs begin to suggest the doubts that increasingly characterized the culture as the century contin- ued. Instead of "views as wide as heaven's cope," a new sense of "indefinitenesss," even "blankness," emerged. The status of detail traces this shift. Detail becomes not a means toward an

end - knowledge, wholeness, unity - but, rather, a vital, and unsettling, mode of expression in its own right.

Didi-Huberman argues that "every painting threatens us" with an ultimatum of sorts: " 'The painting or the detail!' "93 The threat that Church's works pose begins here but extends beyond the canvas to expose the cultural stakes of that choice at this particular historical moment. Church's details signaled a turn toward a scientific realism while still adhering to Romanticism's structural elements. His paintings are based on an aesthetic of detail that retains a desire for a greater system. Through recourse to ever-greater particulars, he un- dertakes a visual defense of what Carol Christ has called "the

reality of universais."94 Church is trying to make an older model relevant, as if all those details could furnish positivistic proof that Romantic ideals were still possible, observable, natural. This is not, in other words, the emergence of a new mode of representation - not what we can arguably see in Édouard Manet or in Impressionism - but an attempt to work from within an existing visual paradigm. Church's land- scape paintings, in some sense, give visual form to Darwin's entangled bank, assuring us, as Darwin did in the final para- graph of The Origin of Species , that "the war of nature" may have produced life, but that life had been "originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."95 Yet, as is well known, Darwin added this reference to God in the

second edition of his book, in a clause - a kind of belatedly reassuring gesture - as if with one word he could bind to- gether what his theories so majestically undid. God, in Dar- win's paragraph, becomes just one detail, not a symbolic entity capable of bringing structure to those "endless forms."96

Frederic Church's details emerge from the material world, from nature's "things." An obsession with such details - with ordering them and accounting for their significance or insig- nificance - characterizes paintings like The Heart of the Andes and the discourse surrounding it. The picture pushes these impulses to an epistemological limit. Paint is still conceived of in a traditional manner, as a means to represent the world rather than replicate optical experience. Paint is meant to be forgotten, a mere mediator between icon and index, between thought and thing. But the effect of so many representational details is, in fact, a new optical experience. What results is not knowledge but a surfeit of information. Each detail, each identifiable part of the landscape, refuses to dissolve into paint or effect. All these parts retain their "objective" repre- sentational references - to flowers, leaves, rocks, birds - and

therefore a definitive symbolic meaning becomes what is "not visible in the picture." "A little world of the beautiful," Louis

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 593

Legrand Noble called the painting, in which Church "gathers rules of composition for himself."97

One may look more closely to gain visual precision and expect a corresponding interpretative clarity, but seeing in detail can lead to semiotic instability. The problem, and even the appeal, of Church's works for mid-nineteenth-century viewers was, in a sense, just that; the detail is not the painting, not a metonym for it. Rather, the details present a viable challenge to the painting: the painting or the detail. They exist in excess of meaning, resulting in a narrative luxury that is at once mesmerizing - think of those long lines to see The Heart of the Andes , the hours people spent looking at it - and also disturbing. In this way Church's paintings are increas- ingly about the very burdens placed on details, the need that they signify more than themselves.

Church's works insist on close looking. It is this kind of vision that reveals the detail's "essential chaotic vocation" or, in

Aristotelian terms, "close-up knowledge of a painting loosens its formal cause from its material cause."98 Thus, looking closely means confronting the fundamental materiality of painting. This is what the eye encounters in The Icebergs:, white paint, the stuff that representation is built from, but that also produces, on close inspection, "a veritable tyranny of the material."99 Seeing in detail does not lead to a more compre- hensive knowledge, as Ishmael discovers, no matter how much the object in question is cut apart, analyzed, or chased. The "close-up gaze produces nothing more here than inter- ference, obstacle, 'contaminated space,' " writes Didi-Huber- man, using Ernst Bloch' s phrase.100 But this is not "nothing." This is detail acting in violation of narrative, insisting that we see the significance - the tyrannical power - of interference and obstacle. Speculation and even skepticism are here given material form. If The Heart of the Andes presents a new model of visual subjectivity, The Icebergs suggests the implications of such a model: the isolation, or even muteness, that results

when details speak against themselves.

Jennifer Raab is assistant professor of American art and visual culture at Yale University [History of Art Department , Yale Univer-

sity , 190 York Street, New Haven , Conn. 06520 ' jennifer.raab @y ale.edu].

Notes

This article is drawn from my book manuscript, "The Art and Science of Detail: Frederic Church and Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting." I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alexander Nemerov and Tim Barringer, who have been engaged with the project since its inception. The ideas presented here have been shaped, challenged, and refined by too many people to name, but I would especially like to thank Carol Armstrong, Ned Cooke, David Peters Corbett, Margaretta Lovell, David Lubin, Angela Miller, Jennifer Rob- erts, Edward Sullivan, Veerle Thielemans, and Alan Wallach. This article also profited greatly from the comments made by the two anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin and the guidance of Karen Lang and Fronia W. Simpson. A research fellowship at the John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität, Berlin, and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, provided the luxury of time to think and write. I thank my colleagues at those institutions and particularly Winfried Fluck at the JFK and Patricia Rubin at the IFA.

1. Henry David Thoreau, Waiden (1854; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 179.

2. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 19, 1851, in Material Faith: Tho- reau on Science, ed. Laura Dassow Walls (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1999), 25.

3. William James Stillman, "Exhibition of the National Academy: First Article," Crayon 3 (April 1856): 116.

4. Frank Jewett Mather Jr., "Worthington Whittredge, Landscape Painter," Outlook, July 2, 1904, 533.

5. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Em- pire (London: Verso, 1993), 5. Richards (1, 4-7) traces the epistemo- logica! shift in Victorian culture from an assumption of a "superin- tending unity of knowledge" - the belief that "all knowledge in the world fell into a great standing order" - to a realization, by the end of the century, that achieving such "comprehensive knowledge" was "eas- ier said than done." His subject is nineteenth- and early twentieth- century British literature and his contention is that these texts reveal an obsession with the control of knowledge bound up with the impe- rial project. In these pages the empire is "united not by force but by information."

6. In considering the concept of detail, I am indebted to the few but powerful works on the subject, most notably Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2007) ; and Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).

7. The foundational monographs on Church began with David C. Hun- tington's pioneering dissertation, "Frederic Edwin Church, 1826- 1900: Painter of the Adamic New World Myth" (PhD diss., Yale Uni- versity, 1960), and his subsequent book, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: George Braziller, 1966). Franklin Kelly's 1989 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art brought the artist's major works together for the first time and pro- duced an indispensable catalog: Kelly et al., Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989). See also Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); idem, Frederic Edwin Church: In Search of the Promised Land (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 2000) ; Franklin Kelly and Gerald L. Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845-1854 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1987); Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian In- stitution Press, 1988); and John K. Howat, Frederic Church (New Ha- ven: Yale University Press, 2005).

8. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, "Scientific Sources of the Full-Length Land- scape: 1850," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 4 (October 1945): 62. Gardner was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

9. Kelly {Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape, 125) has pointed out that "whether or not precise and realistic detail was even desirable in landscape painting" became a subject of increasing de- bate after the Civil War, when Church's paintings were more fre- quently criticized for their "insistent detail." Angela Miller's argument that Church's paintings display a "synecdochic nationalism," where part stands for whole and the local becomes the national, is, in many ways, an argument about detail and effect. See Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825- 1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 167-208. Barbara Novak discusses the "fundamental dialectic" between detail and effect

in Church's paintings, their reliance on a Claudian compositional structure, and the "reconciliation of detail and effect stressed by con- temporary esthetics." Although Novak is often dismissive of Church's works, she is keenly attuned to the issue of detail, and its particular relation to Alexander von Humboldt's writings, and I am indebted to her analyses of nineteenth-century American painting. Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 17-33, 47-77, 123, 228-31.

10. G. W. Sheldon, American Painters (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 13.

11. "Fine Arts: National Academy of Design, Second Notice," Albion, May 2, 1863, 213.

12. Donald B. Kuspit, "19th-century Landscape: Poetry and Property," Art in America 64 (January-February 1976): 69.

13. The "Great Picture" originated in late eighteenth-century England, where the American John Singleton Copley exhibited The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1781) on its own instead of sending the canvas to the Royal Academy of Arts. In six weeks, Copley's painting attracted more than twenty thousand visitors and made five thousand pounds. As Richard D. Altick notes, the American painter also made five thou- sand new enemies by draining attendance and ticket revenue from the academy, despite the fact that seven canvases by Thomas Gains- borough and fifteen by Sir Joshua Reynolds were on display that year. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Har- vard University Press, 1978), 105. For detailed accounts of Copley's single-picture exhibitions, see Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), vol. 2, 280-357; and Emily Ballew Neff, "The History Theater: Production and Spectatorship in Copley's The Death of Major Peirson," in John Sin-

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594 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

gleton Copley in England (London: Merrell Holberton; Houston: Mu- seum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995), 60-90.

14. J. Gray Sweeney, "An 'Indomitable Explorative Enterprise': Inventing National Parks," in Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert , by Pamela J. Belanger (Rockland, Maine: Farnsworth Art Museum, 1999), 143.

15. On Church's South American travels, see Katherine Emma Man- thorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin Amer- ica, 1839-1879 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and idem, Creation and Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Ed- win Church (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985). A recent book explores Church's first trip to South America in depth: Pablo Navas Sanz de Santamaría, The Journey of Frederic Edwin Church through Colombia and Ecuador, April-October 1853 (Bogotá, Colombia: Villegas Editores and Universidad de los Andes, 2008) .

16. For the intímate relations between artists, including Church, and sci- entists during the mid-nineteenth century, see Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

17. According to one article, Humboldt also "called himself half an Amer- ican; and others designated him as the scientific Columbus, who re- vealed to the old world the natural wonders of the new." "Humboldt, Ritter, and the New Geography," New Englander 70 (May 1860): 280. Humboldt's influence on Church has often been discussed. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, "Church, Humboldt, and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Science," in Kelly et al., Frederic Ed- win Church , 94-107; Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 41-42; Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape , 54-55, 74-75; Kelly and Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church , 65, 75; and Novak, Nature and Culture, 66-74.

18. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, 5 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849- 58), vol. 1, 24. This is the edition that Church owned.

19. Ibid., vol. 1, 48.

20. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1867), 378.

21. For the relation between British Romantic landscape painting and an "American sublime," see Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (London: Tate, 2002).

22. Thomas Cole to Asher B. Durand, January 4, 1838, in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, N.A. (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1856), 248.

23. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 3 (1851), 9.

24. Bryan Wolf argues that The Andes of Ecuador , with its cross of light, creates an Emersonian image of the "egotistical sublime," negating the natural world and rewriting it as the self. Wolf, "When Is a Paint- ing Most Like a Whale? Ishmael, Moby-Dick, and the Sublime," in New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 141-79.

25. Church wrote to his friend Bayard Taylor, the diplomat and popular travel writer, to explain that the "principal motive in taking the pic- ture to Berlin is to have the satisfaction of placing before Humboldt a transcript of the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago - and which he had pronounced to be the finest in the world." Frederic Ed- win Church to Bayard Taylor, May 9, 1859, Bayard Taylor Correspon- dence, Letters to Taylor, box A-Cr, letter no. 1, Cornell Regional Ar- chives, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.; transcription in the Olana Research Collection, Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. Many writers at the time understood Church's ambitions to be Humboldtian. "At length, here is the very painter Humboldt so longs for in his writings," wrote one London reviewer. W. P. Bayley, "Mr. Church's Pictures. 'Coto- paxi,' 'Chimborazo,' and The Aurora Borealis.' Considered Also with Reference to English Art," Art Journal (London) 4 (September 1, 1865): 264.

26. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, vii. For the intersections between Church, Humboldt, and Darwin in 1859, see Gould, "Church, Humboldt, and Darwin."

27. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 72. The book was originally published under the title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Strug- gle for Life. Darwin removed the first word, "On," in the second edi- tion.

28. Ibid., 96.

29. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1860, in Material Faith, 109. Both Dar- win and Thoreau are interested in the violent struggle that character-

izes the creation of life in the natural world. Thoreau delights in it in Waiden (252): "I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myri- ads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one an- other; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!" Darwin, in a similar passage ( Origin , 61), unmasks the destruction that we might like to "forget": "We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey."

30. Charles Darwin to J. S. Henslow, May 18, 1832, quoted in Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 57.

31. Church, of course, owned Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America: During the Years 1 799-1804. The other book that Darwin named as influential was J. F. W. Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Mur- ray, 1902), 23.

32. Thoreau, Journal, May 1, 1859, in I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 396.

33. On April 27, 1859, the painting was unveiled to a private audience of five hundred invited guests at Lyric Hall on Broadway. The first venue suffered from poor lighting conditions, and the picture remained at Lyric Hall only one day. It was promptly moved to the Exhibition Room in the Tenth Street Studio Building. In the few short weeks that the picture was on view, five hundred visitors a day came to see it, and two thousand packed the exhibition hall on the final day. Kevin J. Avery, "'The Heart of the Andes Exhibited: Frederic E. Church's Window on the Equatorial World," American Art Journal 18 (Winter 1986): 52-54. This article, along with Avery's short book Church's Great Picture: "The Heart of the Andes " (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), are invaluable sources for the painting's exhibition history and the broader cultural context of such display.

34. "Frederic Edwin Church: Noted Artist Native of Hartford, Dead," Hartford Daily Courant, April 9, 1900, 4, transcription in the Olana Re- search Collection.

35. The picture was dramatically lit by gas lamps dunng the evening and by a skylight during the day. The critics tended not to like Church's use of artificial lighting, and natural light was used more often for later exhibitions of the painting. Avery, " The Heart of the Andes Exhib- ited," 53-55.

36. By 1863 Harper's Weekly stated that Church "alone, with the confidence of success, exhibits his single works as they are completed. No other name, perhaps, among our artists would summon such crowds as his." "Cotopaxi," Harper's Weekly 7 (April 4, 1863): 210. During the height of his fame, Church painted major works without a commission, con- fident that they would find a buyer.

37. An advertisement ( Boston Daily Evening Transcript, January 13, 1860) for a later exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum stated: "Visitors are

requested to bring Opera Glasses." Avery, Church's Great Picture, 35. The first recommendation to bring opera glasses to view Church's painting was in a notice for the exhibition in the New York, Herald (May 19, 1859, 4), which notes that, with opera glasses, "the details of perspective will ... be clearly brought out." When the painting trav- eled to other cities, notices continued to make the suggestion. A writer for the Chicago Daily Tribune (January 17, 1861, 1) found that the spectator "needs the glass to bring distant objects within the range of vision." The Boston Daily Evening Transcript (December 15, 1859, 2) commented that "an opera glass is of great advantage in looking at this picture." See Avery, uThe Heart of the Andes Exhibited," 70 n. 45, 71 n. 46, 72 n. 84.

38. Samuel L. Clemens to Orion Clemens, March 18, 1861, in Mark Twain's Letters, vol. 1, 1853-1866, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1988), 117. Twain's letter is quoted in Avery, Church's Great Picture, 43-44. It is worth noting that Twain would later become a friend of Church and visit him at Olana.

39. Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Aporia of the Detail," in "Appendix: The Detail and the Pan," in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Penn- sylvania State University Press, 2005), 229.

40. Ibid., 230.

41. Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Paris: Vrin, 1927), quoted in Didi-Huberman, "The Aporia of the Detail," 232.

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 595

42. Didi-Huberman, "The Aporia of the Detail," 233.

43. William M. Bryant, Philosophy of Landscape Painting (Saint Louis: Saint Louis News Co., 1882), 261-65. Church owned a copy of this book, which was inscribed and sent to him by Bryant.

44. Henry James, "On Some Pictures Lately Exhibited," Galaxy 20 (July 1875): 89-97, in American Art, 1700-1960: Sources and Documents , ed. John W. McCoubrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 168. The "lovely tropic scene" at Goupil's was Valley of the Santa Ysabel (ca. 1875, Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.). Although this paint- ing (and a few others that were simultaneously being exhibited at the National Academy of Design) presented the occasion for the review, James seems most interested in reflecting on Church's oeuvre - and even that "kind of art" - more generally.

45. Schor, Reading in Detail, 101. The "rise of the detail," Schor argues (xlii), is "inseparable from the all too familiar story of the demise of classicism and the birth of realism" while being irreducible to that story. "To focus on the detail and more particularly on the detail as negativity is to become aware, as I discovered, of its participation in a larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose 'prosiness' is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women." The detail, in other words, "is gendered and doubly gendered as feminine."

46. Ibid., 153.

47. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner, 1962), 157, quoted in Schor, Reading in Detail, 152.

48. Schor, Reading in Detail, 176.

49. "The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair," New-York Daily Tribune, April 9, 1864, 12.

50. James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland Jr. (1864; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 191.

51. Reporting on the artist's death in 1900, a Brooklyn paper noted that the news "came to a generation which had personally almost forgot- ten him." T. C. E., "Church, the Artist," Brooklyn Eagle, April 15, 1900, 25, Olana Research Collection. An exhibition of his works at the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art, which Church helped to establish, followed his death that year. The New York Times review was tepid at best, find- ing that his paintings could often be "crude," although the artist was "unquestionably a painter of ability and of imagination." The Heart of the Andes, which the paper noted had "been in retirement for some years," was judged to be both "a remarkable piece of composition" and a painting with "too much detail work." "The Week in Art," New York Times, May 26, 1900, 348.

52. Rev. Louis Legrand Noble, Church's Painting: The Heart of the Andes (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 9, Olana State Historic Site (OL.1986.135).

53. Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 141, 143. Schor, in her analysis of Roland Barthes (Reading in Detail, 100-101, 109), notes that a Barthesian detail is marked "by its participation in an economy of excess . . . [it] is always supplemental, marginal, decentered." In "The Reality Effect," "what is at stake is nothing less than the legiti- macy of the organic model of literary interpretation, according to which all details - no matter how aberrant their initial appearance - can, indeed must be integrated into the whole, since the work of art is itself organically constituted. To accredit the existence of a truly inessential detail, to make of it a distinctive trait of ordinary Western narrative is tantamount to attacking the foundation of hermeneutics which is constantly engaged in shuttling between the part and the whole. Worse: to privilege the insignificant detail is to practice a sort of decadent criticism, to promote a poor management of linguistic capital." It is this "decadent criticism" that James seeks to avoid when confronting Church's paintings and that he hedges against in his preface to In the Cage, assuring his readers that an excess of details can (indeed, must) create a cohesive whole.

54. Guy Jordan's dissertation explores a new form of aesthetic absorption, both visual and corporeal, during the antebellum period in the United States. I am grateful to him for suggesting that we exchange our work. Our analyses of The Heart of the Andes and The Icebergs often overlap, albeit to different ends. For Jordan, The Heart of the Andes "registers and ultimately seeks to resolve the epistemic conflict be- tween rational and emotional modes of cognition that lay at the 'heart' of American romanticism." Church's painting, Jordan argues, presumes "a passive, non-thinking, purely corporeal subject" by "do- ing all the work and leaving nothing to the imagination." I disagree with this point but find Jordan's larger claims about the painting's engagement in an "aesthetics of intoxication" during this period very convincing. Jordan, "The Aesthetics of Intoxication in American Art and Culture" (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007), 187, 233.

55. "Art: The Heart of the Andes," Atlantic Monthly 4 (July 1859): 128.

56. Janice Simon, "The Crayon ," 1855-1861: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1990), 76, 236.

57. On the influence of Ruskin in the United States, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

58. "Church's Heart of the Andes," Harper's Weekly 3 (May 7, 1859): 291. 59. David C. Miller discusses Ruskin 's "desire to eliminate the distinction

between subjective and objective" and the lack of a "common under- standing" of such categories in American culture, an issue that, he argues, art in the United States confronted in the 1870s and 1880s. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 146-50.

60. Adam Badeau, "Pre-Raphaelitism," in The Vagabond (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 236-37.

61. Jackson Lears, "Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America," in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 82.

62. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Chimney Corner (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 246, quoted in Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hum- mingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickin- son, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (New York: Penguin, 2008), 47-48. Benfey notes (151) that "for inspiration" Stowe had a print of Church's painting Morning in the Tropics (ca. 1858; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) on her wall.

63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 49.

64. Walt Whitman, "Of the Terrible Question of Appearances," in Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 352-53. In the next edi- tion (1867), Whitman changed the poem's tide to "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," as if to "question" was no longer sufficient. This is the tide that has been used since.

65. Whitman, "Long I Thought That Knowledge," in Leaves of Grass, 354. 66. "Art: The Heart of the Andes," 129.

67. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertis- ing and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 2. A review of The Heart of the Andes appeared in the same issue of Harper's Weekly (May 7, 1859) as the first chapter of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

68. "Art: The Heart of the Andes," 129. The Heart of the Andes may be a South American landscape, but critics were eager to claim the aes- thetic language of the painting as indigenous to the United States and - it should be noted, as this was the eve of the Civil War - the northeastern United States.

69. Bill Brown has examined the idea of things in American literature from a slightly later period (the 1890s), considering how authors like Twain and James negotiate "the slippage between having (possessing a particular object) and being (the identification of one's self with that object) ." Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Litera- ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13.

70. Whitman, "City of My Walks and Joys," in Leaves of Grass, 363.

71. Church's "Great Pictures" were contemporaneous with the advent of the American department store. Lord 8c Taylor, a store known specifi- cally for its window displays, opened in 1859, the same year that The Heart of the Andes was completed and first exhibited. The store was located about a dozen blocks from Church's studio and the exhibi-

tion venue for the painting. A. T. Stewart's Cast Iron Palace was just two blocks from the Tenth Street Studio Building, and Macy's, which first opened in 1858 on Sixth Avenue near Fourteenth Street, was four blocks from Church's studio. The stores formed the retail corri-

dor known as the "Ladies' Mile." With its seemingly limitless choice and emphasis on browsing, the visual experience of the department store bears similarities to how viewers, with their opera glasses, were instructed to approach Church's works.

72. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1855), 37. The first set of ellipses are his. These lines appeared in this first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass and then in all subsequent editions. Whitman designed and published this edition of Leaves of Grass himself; the book was printed in the shop of Andrew Rome in Brooklyn.

73. Henry Ward Beecher, "Object Lessons," in Eyes and Ears (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 246. The essays in this book originally ap- peared as short articles in the New York Ledger under the title "Thoughts as they Occur, by one who keeps his Eyes and Ears open." Beecher introduces the collection by stating (n.p.): "Nothing could be less

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596 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

studied or pretentious than these papers, thrown off almost as rapidly as a photograph is printed."

74. For the American fascination with the Arctic, see Michael Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

75. The North. Painted by F. E. Church, from Studies of Icebergs made in the Northern Seas, in the Summer of 1859 (Boston: Prentiss and Deland, 1862), Olana State Historic Site (OL.1986.146).

76. Gerald L. Carr notes that Church donated revenue from the paint- ing's exhibition to the Union Patriotic Fund, a charity established to support soldiers' families. The painter therefore expressed his "sympa- thies" through both a patriotic action and an evocative, albeit "cum- bersome," tide. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), 80. Eleanor Jones Harvey argues that the title was a "critical concession to current events," although "curi- ously . . . few [critics] commented on the significance." Harvey, The Voyage of the "Icebergs": Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002), 61. I am indebted to the work of Carr and Harvey on the critical reception of The Icebergs.

77. "The Bostonian in New-York," New-York Daily Tribune , May 12, 1861, 3.

78. "The North," New York World , April 29, 1861, 5, quoted in Harvey, The Voyage of the Icebergs , 91.

79. IL C., "Picture Galleries," Boston Christian Register , February 22, 1862, 26, quoted in Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs, 85.

80. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 86.

81. Martin W. Sandler, The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and fohn Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen 's Ghost Ship (New York: Sterling Press, 2006), 31-44, 87-109, 135-48.

82. As Timothy Mitchell argues, the erratic boulder is "an index to one of the most controversial issues in the history of nineteenth-century geol- ogy." Mitchell, "Frederic Church's The Icebergs:. Erratic Boulders and Time's Slow Changes," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3 (Fall 1989): 4. For Darwin's consideration of erratic boulders, see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 431-33, 440-41.

83. "Fine Arts: An Iceberg Picture," Daily News (London), June 25, 1863, 3, quoted in Harvey, The Voyage of the Icebergs, 94; and Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs, 93.

84. "Fine Arts: A Painter among the Icebergs," London Review, July 11, 1863, 49, quoted in Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs, 93.

85. For recent work on Darwin and the visual arts, see Diana Donald and Jane Munro, eds., Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Pamela Kort and Max Hollein, eds., Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins (Cologne: Wie- nand, 2009); Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, eds., The Art of Evolu- tion: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Dart- mouth College Press, 2009); Philip Prodger, Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

86. David C. Miller, "The Iconology of Wrecked and Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture," in American

Iconology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 196, 206. Miller references The Icebergs but does not specifically analyze it.

87. The comma in this phrase, omitted in Miller's essay, is critical. The pause that the punctuation provides expresses the uncertainty and caution with which Ishmael proceeds with his questions, even as his pace quickens and he gains a kind of wild philosophical velocity.

88. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1988), 211-12.

89. Michael T. Gilmore, Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in Ameri- can Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 87-89, at 89.

90. Barthes, "The Reality Effect," 142.

91. The 1857 edition of Webster's dictionary gives the first definition of "information" as "Intelligence: notice, news or advice communicated by word or writing." Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the Eng- lish Language (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857), 540. The term became associated with accumulation and communication. In the

mid- to late nineteenth century, compound forms of the word began appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary, among them "information bureau" (1869), "information agent" (1871), "information gap" (1891), and "information gathering" (1893). For the first use of the last term, the Oxford English Dictionary cites W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of fohn Ruskin : "The intelligent analysis of words and thoughts and feelings of great authors, as opposed to . . . superficial information-gathering." By the end of the century, "information" as- sumes an increasingly random, dispersed, and superficial connotation. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. "information," http://www.oed .com/view/Entry/95568 (accessed October 27, 2011).

92. Emma Darwin wrote this note to her husband, Charles, shortly after their marriage in January 1839, expressing her concerns about his growing religious doubts. Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896, ed. Henrietta Litchfield, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1915), vol. 2, 174.

93. Didi-Huberman, "The Aporia of the Detail," 234.

94. Carol T. Christ sees a similar shift in Victorian poets as they depart from their Romantic predecessors. Poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins - all Church's contem- poraries - contend with "the problem of transcending the particular." Christ, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), ix, 6. For a more wide-rang- ing cultural discussion of this "finer optic," see Kate Flint, The Victori- ans and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

95. Darwin, Origin, 384. 96. Ibid.

97. Noble, Church s Painting, 9, 23.

98. Didi-Huberman, "The Aporia of the Detail," 235.

99. Ibid., 236.

100. Ibid. Bloch's phrase, per Didi-Huberman' s note, is from Experimentům mundi, Question, catégories de l'élaboration, praxis, trans. G. Raulet (Paris: Payot, 1981), 14-15, 67, and so forth.

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