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The most successful years of Edgar Allan Poe’s life happened during his stay in New York City from April 1844 to March 1846. Coincidentally, these were the very same years that New York was becoming recognized as the nation’s center for the arts. When Poe arrived in April 1844, he was relatively freed of debt (at least for a short while) because of his successful petition in December 1842 under the 1841 Bankruptcy Act.(1) Poe had rid himself of over $2000 worth of debt — not a small amount of money in those times, considering that Poe’s average payment for publishing one of his stories was about $30. That Poe was able to move beyond the abstract world of his writing to facilitate the legal processes necessary to have a successful bankruptcy petition and to do so during the short time that the Act was in place — it lasted less than two years — shows us a side of Poe that most readers do not think of when they think of him.(2)

The New York Poe found when he arrived at age 35 was much different than the one he had left seven years prior. The city had recovered from the great fire of 1835 and the economic panic of 1837. Its population had grown by 75% in those few years, but, nonetheless, most commerce and residences were still concentrated below 14th Street. While he was there, Poe saw the city’s first railroad being built in Manhattan. Finished in 1846, it extended from City Hall twenty-seven miles north to White Plains. In that same year, the first telegraph line connected New York with Philadelphia.(3) These new communication resources indicate that the city was thriving by the mid-1840s.

This prosperous time for New York allowed wealthy merchants like Jonathan Sturges and Charles Leupp, for example, to patronize the arts, and, not surprisingly, as a result, a growing number of artists began to settle in the city. Because of these confluences, the visual arts scene rapidly expanded during the two years that Poe lived there. The New-York Gallery of Art, the city’s first permanent-exhibit art gallery, was founded in 1844 by a group of patrons organized by Jonathan Sturges. Both the National Academy of Design founded in 1823 and the American Art Union founded in 1835 enjoyed large profits during these two years from the marked increase in attendance at their exhibits.(4)

This was an exciting time for the arts in New York, and Poe’s career finally enjoyed a similar excitement. When he first arrived in the city, his story, “The [page 3:] Balloon-Hoax,” was issued as a one-page broadside of the New York Sun, and it was published again two days later in Mordecai Noah’s Sunday Times. “The Balloon-Hoax” created quite a stir, if we can believe Poe’s account in his column written for the small Pennsylvania newspaper The Columbia Spy. A month after he arrived in New York, Poe had been invited to write weekly “letters” for this newspaper to provide its readers with gossip about New York City. In the May 21st entry, Poe wrote this about his “Balloon Hoax”: “On the morning of its announcement, the whole square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building. was literally besieged, blocked up — ingress and egress being alike impossible, from a period soon after sunrise until about two o-clock P. M. I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a paper.”(5) Whether this level of excitement actually occurred could be questioned; nonetheless, Poe unabashedly promoted his “premier” publication in his new hometown of Manhattan.

Seven months later, the most important stage of Poe’s career began with the publication of “The Raven;” it first appeared on January 29, 1845, in The New-York Evening Mirror and was reprinted numerous times during that year — and for years afterwards — in magazines and newspapers ranging from the American Review to The Southern Literary Messenger as well as in a book of his poetry, The Raven and Other Poems, published by Wiley and Putnam in September 1845. Poe read his poem at various soirees around the city, and I discovered a curious Poe-like coincidence in my research that has yet to be mentioned: on the evening of July 19th, 1845, Poe was invited to give a reading of “The Raven” at one of Miss Lynch’s soirees. While he read his poem to a rapt audience, a great section of the city smoldered from a wide-spread fire that rivaled the great fire of 1835; it had started that morning around 3:00 a.m. and destroyed blocks of buildings and killed 35 people.

The moon was full and the air was tinged with the smell of smoke and death while Poe read his poem, later described by Miss Lynch in a letter to Helen Whitman as “electrifying.”(7) Poe’s “Raven” had made [page 4:] him the talk of the town, and he enjoyed much celebrity and many invitations to read and give lectures about his work. In that same year Poe also fulfilled a life-long dream of becoming owner of his own literary magazine — The Broadway Journal — and his personal life was enhanced by living in the most fashionable part of town near Washington Square Park at 85 Amity Street.

As mentioned earlier, these two years were also a prosperous time for the arts in New York. By 1844, for example, visitors at the National Academy of Design’s annual show numbered in the thousands.(8) These annual shows, opening each April and closing in July, included about three hundred works of art by American artists such as Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Henry Inman, among others. By the mid-1840s, the National Academy of Design was considered “the most influential of all serial exhibitions in this country.”(9) Patterned after the Royal Academy in London, the National Academy of Design exhibits were “limited to contemporary American art[;] . . . exhibitions were planned and executed by contemporary artists for contemporary artists,”(10) and works could only be shown once. The shows attracted viewers who wanted to see the newest work by their favorite artist or those who looked forward to the possibility of discovering a new artist whose work they could follow and support. Unlike the American Academy of Art founded in 1802 in New York, which was “primarily concerned with the promotion of civic virtue”(11) and exhibited mostly European “masters,” the National Academy of Art was established by artists to promote American art and train American artists. The quality of the shows at the National Academy of Design enhanced New York’s reputation as a place for ambitious and promising artists.

Poe, like other members of the literary and art world, would have been caught up in the city’s enthusiasm for the visual arts. He would have had plenty of opportunities to attend art exhibits at all three of these arts venues, and especially those at the New-York Art Gallery and the American Art-Union, since both charged minimal admission fees to encourage New Yorkers to gain an appreciation of American art. Poe also lived in a neighborhood with painters and other members of the arts community; in fact, painters Asher Durand, for example, who would become the director of the National Academy of Design in 1846 lived at 91 Amity Street, only 2 buildings away from Poe’s residence, and James Hamilton Shegogue, painter and member of the National Academy of Design’s Committee of Arrangements lived at 7 Amity. Also, while Poe worked closely with Charles Briggs, founder of The Broadway Journal, from January 1845 until July of that year, Poe would have come into contact with artists who knew Briggs, since Briggs not only wrote all of the art criticism in [page 5:] The Broadway Journal while he was its owner, but for three years from 1842 to 45, he served on the Committee of Management for the American Art-Union.(12)

This introduction is meant to provide a bit of the background and the setting for what will be discussed next: that is, Poe’s relationship to the visual arts scene in New York during these two formative years and a sense of his aesthetic principles related to the visual arts. Although Poe is known for his tales of horror, mystery, pseudo-science and violent imagery — “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” “The Case of M. Valdemar,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for example — there is another Poe, one who wrote “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.” Poe had not intended to be a writer of sensationalist fiction; instead, his dream was to have made his living as a poet; however, financial circumstances forced him to do otherwise, to write stories that would sell — and the decades of the 1830s and 40s were ones flooded with sensationalist writing, as David Reynolds, author of Beneath the American Renaissance, points out: “all types of popular sensational literature . . . [easily became] lurid pamphlet literature, most if it scabrous and some of it perversely pornographic . . . the sensational, the erotic, and the pseudoscientific were often linked in the antebellum imagination.”(13) Poe knew how to write that kind of story to please that public, and he did. But there is “another Poe,” the one discussed below who loved beauty and who found that beauty in the works he saw by artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Asher Durand, and in the sculpture and paintings he saw in New York galleries or “rooms at Broadway” brought from Europe and displayed there.

I will begin with a discussion of Poe’s aesthetics revealed in his article, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” that appeared as the first article in the 3 May 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal when Poe was co-editor with Charles Briggs. The article, ostensibly about home decoration, incorporates a set of aesthetic principles that apply as much to art and art criticism as to home decoration. Poe argues in this sketch that those aspects of home decoration found “offensive to the eye” can also be seen in inferior paintings. In fact, Poe explicitly states that the critical principles he uses to judge the layout and “keeping” of a room also apply when analyzing paintings: “both the picture and the room are amenable to those undeviating principles which regulate all varieties of art; and very nearly the same laws by which we decide on the higher merits of a painting.”(14) When Poe discusses the “keeping” of a room, his foremost consideration is overall “effect.” The carpet, Poe asserts, is “the soul of the apartment” (I:497) and like the background of a painting must be chosen in relation to all aspects of the composition. Yet, Poe complains, this “ground” is most often offensive because [page 6:] of excessive mixtures of color, pattern and texture. Poe’s prose in this section of his essay becomes frenetic, culminating in an angry rant against capitalism and its disastrous influences:

Cloths of huge, sprawling, and radiating devices, stripe-interspersed, and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible, — these are but the wicked invention of a race of time-servers and money-lovers — children of Baal and worshippers of Mammon — Benthams, who to spare thought and economize fancy, first cruelly invented the Kaleidoscope, and then established joint-stock companies to twirl it by steam. (I:498)

Clearly, Poe finds rooms filled with dizzying colors and shapes offensive and blames those who have the power to promote such bad taste. In this case, Poe implied that the popular fascination with the kaleidoscope (invented at the end of the 18th century and very popular in the beginning of the 19th) had a disastrous influence on the choices people made in their home decoration.

As Poe’s narrator of “The Philosophy of Furniture” discusses the importance of light in room decoration, he continues his rant against popular taste. He finds the pervasive attraction to glare, cut glass and glitter a reflection of those “blindly subservient to the caprices of fashion” (I:499). The focus on light and its effects applies as much to painting as it does to home decoration, of course. Just as the play of light in a painting can distract or enhance the subject matter, so, too, does bad lighting destroy the overall effect of a room’s “keeping.” Good composition and engaging content can be completely destroyed by ineffectual lighting, especially, Poe argues, by the “unquiet light” produced by cut glass. “The cut-glass shade is a weak invention of the enemy” (I:499).

Overall, the overt purpose of “The Philosophy of Furniture” is to admonish Americans for their willingness to decorate their homes merely based on what’s “fashionable,” to value costliness over aesthetics, and to choose glitter and glare over repose. Poe applies these criteria to his responses to the visual arts. For a work of art to be aesthetically pleasing, Poe suggests, its composition must revolve around a focal point, lighting must reflect mood, color and texture must combine in harmonious ways, and an overall sense of spirituality would emanate from quietude. All that notwithstanding, the final aesthetic measure, Poe seems to say, depends on the viewer’s pleasurable response to a painting or home décor. Although Poe acknowledges that most people would not be [page 7:] able to articulate why a good painting or a tastefully decorated room provokes a sense of pleasure, he believes the viewer can feel difference:

The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bedizzened, would be instantly aware of something wrong, although he might be altogether unable to assign a cause for his dissatisfaction. But let the same person be led into a room tastefully furnished, and he would be startled into an exclamation of pleasure and surprise. (I:500)

Poe was keenly aware that the reception of art is key, that the viewer’s perspective — not only his aesthetic sensibility but quite literally his physical vantage point or perspective — makes all the difference in how something is seen and whether or not the intended effect can be brought into play.

Poe revealed other insights on landscape painting, the plastic arts, and art criticism in “The Domain of Arnheim” (1845). Many of the claims in this sketch about landscape gardening as art would have been influenced by his exposure to the landscape paintings on display in New York by Frederic Church and Thomas Cole at the National Academy of Design’s annual shows in 1844 and 1845.(15) Poe’s narrator in “The Domain of Arnheim,” for example, [page 9:] believes that in landscape painting, unlike in portraiture or sculpture, the best artists portray nature as “exalted and idealized” through the embodiment of the artist’s “sentiment.” The truth of this principle, the narrator insists, comes from “[h]aving, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera” (II:1273). The artist “positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter constitute and alone constitute the true beauty” even though an analysis of the means the artist uses to accomplish this “have not yet been matured into expression” (II:1273). Nonetheless, the narrator argues, the artist’s feeling it so makes it true.

On October 18, 1848, Poe wrote to Helen Whitman that “The Domain of Arnheim” “expresses much of my soul.(16) As Thomas O. Mabbott points out in his introduction, Poe furthered this sentiment when he sent Mrs. Whitman a copy of the New York Columbia Magazine where “The Domain of Arnheim” appeared in March 1847. On it, Poe wrote: “This story contains more of myself and of my inherent tastes and habits of thought than anything I have written” (II:1266). Poe’s analysis of painting in “The Domain of Arnheim” just described and his claim in the letter to Whitman that this story best expressed his “inherent tastes,” indicate that Poe would have had a positive regard for the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Asher Durand.

Art critic, Sarah Burns, however, only relates to the Gothic Poe in her book, Painting on the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2004). She contends that both Poe’s and Thomas Cole’s works were influenced by politics: “For Cole and Poe alike, the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline.”(17) She bases this conclusion on Cole’s images of ruins, seen in this popular series, “The Course of Empire.” Burns, like many others, focuses her analysis of Poe’s sensibility on his stories of Gothic horror and fear.(18) She maintains this argument throughout her book, ignoring the “other Poe.”

Cole’s scenes of ruined castles and towers find a literary analogue in the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, [who was] obsessed like Cole with contempt for and dread of the multitude that the new democratic order had spawned, and bedeviled like Cole by the conflicting demands of art and an increasingly commercial market.(19)

However convenient that comparison may be for some of Poe’s works, Burns totally ignores Poe’s other aesthetic, one that he repeats numerous times [page 10:] throughout his life, especially near its end. Poe’s work is not simply about Gothic horror and fear. Burns’ claim that Cole’s paintings were influenced by “the gothic effects of Salvator Rosa . . . whose landscapes were visual textbooks of terror for romantic painters”(20) does seem apt, on one hand, since Poe directly describes some of the landscape in “Landor’s Cottage” as “Salvatorish,” referring to Rosa’s paintings. However, Burns ignores how Poe uses Rosa in this passage. The passage begins with “Salvatorish” imagery that Burns chooses to observe, but she ignores the way the landscape description moves from the sublime to the beautiful, as the narrator approaches Landor’s cottage. Here is the narrator’s description of what he sees:

To the north — on the craggy precipice — a few paces from the verge — upsprang the magnificent trunks of numerous hickories, black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with occasional oak; and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the walnuts especially, spread far over the edge of the cliff. Proceeding [page 11:] southwardly, the explorer saw, at first, the same class of trees, but less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character; then he saw the gentler elm, succeeded by the sassafras and locust — these again by the softer linden, red-bud, catalpa, and maple — these yet again by still more graceful and more modest varieties. (II:1332)

In this passage, the narrator’s vision moves away from the dramatic precipices or “Salvatorish” imagery toward a more pastoral, more cultivated and designed landscape that evidences man’s influence, an influence that moves away from dread that the politics Burns associates with both Cole and Poe would suggest. Instead the imagery resolves itself into peaceful domesticity designed by human effort. In trying to link Poe to “the dark side” of American experience, Burns chooses to ignore the aspect of Poe’s domestic sensibility expressed in “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage,” and revealed, in a most personal way, in his love letter to Helen Whitman when he writes:

I suffered my imagination to stray with you, and with the few who love us both, to the banks of some quiet river, in some lovely valley of our land. Here, not too far secluded from the world, we exercised a taste controlled by no conventionalities, but the sworn slave of a Natural Art, in the building for ourselves a cottage which no human being could ever pass without an ejaculation of wonder at its strange, weird, and incomprehensible yet most simple beauty. Oh, the sweet and gorgeous, but not often rare flowers in which we half buried it! — the grandeur of the little-distant magnolias and tulip-trees which stood guarding it — the luxurious velvet of its lawn — the lustre of the rivulet that ran by the very door — the tasteful yet quiet comfort of the interior — the music — the books — the unostentatious pictures — and above all, the love — the love that threw an unfading glory over the whole!(21)

Such is the sentiment that Poe longs for, not only in his life but also in his work. The paintings Poe saw by painters like Cole, Church and Durand portray images of natural beauty or idealized portraits of human intercourse with nature. This latter description is especially true of Asher Durand’s “An Old Man’s Reminiscences,” a painting on exhibit in the 1845 National Academy of Design show. The painting depicts an old man in the foreground observing and, as the title suggests, “reminiscing” about a peaceful life full of love (the intimate couple), fun (men playing baseball), fruitful employment (the man guiding his cart overfilled with the harvest of hay), domestic tranquility (the cows grazing in the pasture), and natural beauty (the light clouds, the blue sky and the sweep of the composition towards a distant light). Nothing here is critical or threatening or remiss.

In “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe’s narrator also argues that the art of landscape gardening exhibits those qualities of the poet Poe regarded with high esteem.(22)

[t]he landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty . . . . In the multiform and multicolor of the flower and the trees, [Ellison] recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort — or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth — he perceived that he should be employing the best means — laboring to the greatest advantage — in the fulfillment, not only of his own [page 13:] destiny as a poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man . . ... Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma: — I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as glowed on the canvas of Claude. (II:1272)

Here Poe refers to Claude Lorain rather than Thomas Cole or Frederic Church most probably because he preferred, at this point in time, to distance himself from Charles Briggs, his former employer at The Broadway Journal, who often praised Cole and Church in his reviews of the exhibits at the National Academy of Design.

Not only was Poe taken by the landscape images he saw by American painters, he directly expressed his aesthetic values in relation to paintings and sculptures he saw from European artists like Titian, De Cuyper, and an obscure sculptor from Italy in short reviews of these works that he wrote for The Broadway Journal. In two separate entries, for example, Poe comments on Titian’s Venus on exhibit in rooms on Broadway: “There is a picture exhibiting in Broadway which the proprietors say is a duplicate, made by Titian’s own hand of the celebrated picture now in Florence.”(23) In the first entry on 17 May 1845, Poe addresses the difficulty of assessing whether or not the painting is an original or a copy, offers an opinion on the need to consider such issues when viewing a work of art, and ends his review by deprecating the restriction placed women who wished to see the painting. [page 14:] Poe’s initial concern in his review was the question of the painting’s authenticity since it was common practice for American artists such as John Vanderlyn (1776-1842), for example, to make copies of important European paintings so that Americans who could not afford a trip abroad could see the work of the celebrated artists of the past. Because of this common practice, Poe questions the painting’s authenticity in this review, and asks why “no story is told of the manner in which so remarkable a work came to this country. All this looks very suspicious” (116). He then calls into question the probability that the painting is what it claims to be: that is, a copy of the original made by Titian himself. Poe discounts the daily newspapers’ claim of its authenticity. “We have seen it stated, [Poe writes] in some of the daily newspapers that it once formed a part of the collection of the Louvre, but had been removed at the restoration of the Boubons. This is a mistake. The Louvre possessed 23 paintings by Titian, but there was no Venus among them” (116). Poe, then, quickly moves away from the issue of authenticity to the question of aesthetics and argues that the value of a work of art depends not on the “name” of the artist or the work’s authenticity but on the amount of pleasure the viewer receives when he or she looks at it. “The only test . . . by which we should try a work of art is the delight it gives us; and we believe that there are very few persons who could honestly say that Titian’s real paintings gave them more real pleasure than this of Venus” (116).

In the end of the article, Poe expresses his dismay that women could only see the painting on one single day of the week with no men allowed in the viewing room at the same time. In short, and with a pointed wit, Poe ends his review with the following wry statement: “For ourselves we think that very old and very young men would do well not to give the Venus exhibiting in Broadway a call” (116).

In another art review in The Broadway Journal, Poe encourages “all lovers of the true and beautiful in art . . . to [make] a visit to the Ivory Christ, brought from Italy . . .. and now being exhibited in Broadway opposite the Park”(282).(24) Poe praises the sculptor’s craftsmanship that allows the sculpture to reveal the artist’s integrity and enthusiasm for his subject: “A deep enthusiasm . . . seems to have been in this case at once the instigation and the instruction” (282). The reputation of the artist is not the major concern in this instance; the artist who sculpted the Ivory Christ was, in Poe’s words, “an educated man, but with little knowledge of art” (282). Despite the sculptor’s anonymity, Poe praises the artist’s ability to express Christ’s “intellectuality,” an attribute much different, Poe concludes, from other representations of Christ that portray characteristics [page 15:] that are “merely benevolent, dignified, meek, self-sustained and beautiful” (282). In this representation of Christ, Poe points out, the artist was able to express the “intellectuality “ that this “God-man” possesses.

Poe also calls attention to the sculpture’s “absolute truth of the entire design” (282), which he finds in the “perfect” anatomy of the figure and in the way the Christ figure “depends” from the cross. Poe’s method of evaluating works of visual art, then, appears to be similar to the method he used to assess poetry. In his reviews of poetry, Poe emphasized the value of craftsmanship; since form is the vehicle for artistic expression both in writing as it is in the visual arts. His admiration for “absolute truth of the entire design” in sculpture is much like his requirement that poetry attend to a keen sense of meter, rhyme and rhythm or that fiction only use of details that contribute to the overall dénouement. And, most importantly, the writer of both fiction and poetry must be concerned with producing a desired effect.

The familiar beginning of Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” asserts a similar concern for craftsmanship. Poe uses the example of the way Bulwer wrote fiction to suggest that an admirable story must reveal, like a poem marked by its “first foot,” a fiction writer’s “rationale.” By this, Poe means the writer must have the ability to conceive the end of his story before he begins to write; he must employ the tools of composition to accomplish this end, but only after he has the dénouement set. Artistic method (i.e., the path of prosody or plot) is crucial to Poe’s aesthetic, but as always, Poe acknowledges over and over that art must inevitably offer something more than accurate form. As the anonymous letter-writer in Poe’s Eureka concludes, truth and beauty come from “the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of ‘path.’ ”(25)

Poe finds such beauty in a sculpture by “de Cuyper,”(26) called “La Sortie du Bain,” which he reviews in The Broadway Journal. Here Poe refers to Jean-Baptiste De Cuyper (1807-1852), a Belgian sculptor and painter.(27) In the first of three entries Poe wrote on this sculpture, he informs his readers that it was brought by “an American gentleman, who saw it in Belgium, and being struck by its extraordinary merit, purchased it at a great price” (247). The gentleman gave Poe a private viewing of the sculpture at the Academy of Design’s Society Library, and although Poe writes he would “defer his critical accounting of it” until the exhibit was opened to the public, he could not refrain from extolling its merits: “in all attributes of female loveliness, delicacy and roundness of [page 16:] form, perfection of proportion, intellectuality, gentleness, and modesty, it could hardly be excelled” (247). The sculpture was also highly praised by Thomas Cummings, then Treasurer of the National Academy of Design as “one of the most exquisitely beautiful creations of the chisel that ever appeared in the city.”(28)

Jean Baptiste De Cuyper was part of the new arts movement that emerged after Belgium’s independence from Northern Netherlands in 1830. An example of a sculpture Le lion amoureux by one of his Belgian contemporaries Guillaume Geefs demonstrates the style similar to De Cuyper’s.

One of De Kuyper’s sculptures that is accessible as part of the collection of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp where several Rubens’ paintings also hang. The [page 17:] overall design of De Cuyper’s cupido would have pleased Poe, had he had the opportunity to see this figure. The gentleness of the cupid’s hands and the ease of repose reflected in the position of the legs and toes catch the eye. The beauty of the figure emanates from these features and the ease of yearning repose. Poe used words like these to describe the figure in “La Sortie du Bain”: “The attitude is easy, and full of truth” (297). The same is true of this “cupido.” As a side note, De Cuyper also specialized in sculptures for graveyard monuments, a detail Poe would have certainly appreciated.

Despite the mixed reviews De Cuyper’s sculpture received by the New York press, Poe’s careful description of the sculpture the delight he must have felt when seeing this life-sized nude.

The figure — of white marble, slightly impaired by blue veins — is the size of life, and represents a young and exquisitely beautiful woman, reclining on the sea-shore . . . the shell-strown shore on which we see the girl — denotes that she has lately emerged from the sea, in which she has been bathing. She has thrown herself listlessly on the sand . . . . [her] face is of surpassing loveliness — its expression that of girlish innocence, and the languor consequent from bathing. The attitude is easy, and full of truth. The toes, in especial, convey the idea of one luxuriating in the sense of comfort — of refreshment — of animal life and health. . . . La Sortie du Bain is undoubtedly the work of genius; and should be visited by all who have a regard for the pure and truthful in Art.

Poe’s references to paintings, sculptures and home decorations, fill his work and will be given expanded attention in my forthcoming book, Poe and the Visual Arts.

[page 18:]

Notes

1.  http://www.enotes.com/major-acts-congress/bankruptcy-act

2.  Barbara Cantalupo, “Interview with Jefferson Moak,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review VIII.2 (Fall 2007): 92-98.

3.  Information taken from I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, 6 volumes. Reprint of 1915-1928 edition. New York: Arno Press, 1967.

4.  For a concise, narrative overview of the history of art galleries in New York from 1800-1850, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect. New York: Knopf, 1987, 126-30.

5.  Edgar Allan Poe, “Doings of Gotham [Letter II],” Columbia Spy Vol. XV, no. 5 (May 25, 1844), 3.

6.  “The Lower Part of the City in Ruins — Millions of Property Destroyed.” New-York Mirror Vol. II, whole no. 42, no. XVI. (July 26, 1845): 1.

7.  Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log. (1987), 553.

8.  Kenneth John Meyers, “The Public Display of Art in New York City, 1664-1914.” In Rave Reviews. Ed. David Dearinger. New York: National Academy of Design, 2000, 37.

9.  David Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865.” In Rave Reviews. Ed. David Dearinger. New York: National Academy of Design, 2000, 57.

10.  Dearinger, 57.

11.  Myers, 37.

12.  Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union, Introduction, 1816-1852. New York: New York Historical Society, 1953, 106. See also Garrett McCoy, “‘I am right and you are wrong’: Letters of Advice to an Artist of the 1840s.” Archives of American Art Journal 28.4 (1988): 15-21.

13.  David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, 170.

14.  Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, Vols. I & II. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 497. Further references to Poe’s work will be from this edition and noted parenthetically.

15.   According to the National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826-1860, 2 volumes. New York: New-York Historical Society, 1943, the following paintings by John Gadsby Chapman, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Henry Inman and William Sidney Mount were shown at the National Academy of Design in 1844 and 1845:

16.  Edgar Allan Poe. The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: 1847-1849, Third Edition. Ed. John Ward Ostrom, Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye. New York: Gordian Press, 2008, 712.

17.  Sarah Burns, Painting on the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 21.

18.  See Jeffrey A. Hess, “Poe’s Landscape Fiction.” American Quarterly 22.2, Part 1. (Summer 1970), especially pp. 181-84, where he argues that Poe carefully alludes to Cole’s painting, “Youth,” part of his “Voyage of Life” series. See also Joy S. Kasson, “The Voyage of Life: Thomas Cole and Romantic Disillusionment.” American Quarterly 27.1 (Mar. 1975): 42-56, who, on the other hand, sees Cole’s series as influenced by Poe’s work, especially Pym, in Cole’s rendering of the abyss: “The vision of the abyss which yawns in the middle of Cole’s otherwise peaceful series finds its most dramatic analogue in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who was almost exactly Cole’s contemporary. The whirlpools which swallow his unsuspecting voyagers, the cracks in the earth which open beneath their feet, the walls which turn red-hot and begin to close around them, are all version of this radical despair which strikes down the unsuspecting, optimistic youth in the midst of his quest” (55). [page 19:]

19.  Burns, 3.

20.  Burns, 7.

21.  Poe, Letters, 712.

22.  See Robert Jacobs, “Poe’s Earthly Paradise.” American Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 1960), 406. See also Charles L. Sanford. “Edgar Allan Poe: A Blight Upon the Landscape.” American Quarterly 20.1 (Spring 1968), 55.

23.  Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: Writings in The Broadway Journal, Nonfictional Prose, Part 1, The Text. Ed. Burton R. Pollin. New York: The Gordian Press, 1986, 116. Further references will be noted parenthetically in the text.

24.  See C. Edwards Lester, The Artist, the Merchant and the Statesman. New York: Paine & Burgess, 1845. Poe could have come to this positive appraisal of “The Ivory Christ” based on his own aesthetic principles, but he also was aware of Hiram Powers’ praise when Poe reviewed Lester’s The Artist, the Merchant and the Statesman; Lester makes note that this sculpture was “esteemed by Powers to be the best representation of the Saviour he had ever seen” (155).

25.  Edgar Allan Poe. Eureka. Ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 14. [page 20:]

26.  Poe’s spelling, “de Kuyper,” does not conform to the preferred spelling, “De Cuyper.”

27.  Mieke Marx and Cor Engelen. “Jean-Baptiste De Cuyper.” In Algemeen Rijksarcief en Rijksarchief in de Provinciën, Studia 90. Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 393.

28.  Thomas. S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design, NewYork Drawing Association, Etc., with Occasional Dottings by the Way-Side from 1825 to the Present Time. Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1865, 189.