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To catalogue the names of pictures without accompanying reproductions is wearisome and profitless, and I will not attempt it. (Willa Cather. "The Kensington Studio." Nebraska State Journal 17 August 1902: 11)
Abbey, Edwin Austin. American painter, water colorist, b. Philadelphia PA, 1852; d. London, 1911. Abbey served as a Carnegie Advisory-Board Member, a Member of Royal Academy of Arts in London, and belonged to the Societé des Artistes Français in Paris. He received an Honorary MA from Yale University.
The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (1900). Oil on canvas. 7' 1" x 4' 1". Listed as #1 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue where The Penance of Eleanor; acquired in 1902 by the Carnegie Museum of Art [afterward known as "Carnegie." Carnegie Institute, 440 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA. 15213-0480]. Illustrated in Lucas, E. V. Edwin Austin Abbey: Royal Academician, The Record of His Life and Works. 2 vols. London: Methuen; New York: Scribner's, 1920: opposite p. 352. Abbey's theme in the painting is derived from William Shakespeare's Henry VI (II.II.IV).
Cather: "Edna was much impressed by the Abbey, and the splendor of the nobles and prelates . . . " ("The Philistine in the Art Gallery." Pittsburgh Gazette 24 Nov. 1901: 6 [Crane D536]; W & P 867).
In 1895, Abbey executed "The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail," a series of fifteen wall paintings based on Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." The paintings decorate the Delivery Room in the Boston Public Library; Puvis de Chavannes and John Singer Sargent also painted frescoes there. These magnificent decorations caused Ernest Fenollosa, then the Curator of Oriental Art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to call the collection the "Assisi of American art" (See A Handbook to the Art and Architecture of the Boston Public Library. Boston: Associates, 1987: 41-45. Cather lived on nearby Chestnut Street when she researched [and primarily wrote] Mary Baker G. Eddy's life for S. S. McClure (see McClure's 29 (June 1907): 134 for an Editorial Announcement of Part II of "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy," in the forthcoming July, Aug., and Sep. issues). See Cather, Willa and Georgine Milmine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. Introduction and afterword by David Stouck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993.
Abbey also was a prominent illustrator for Harper's Magazine, and there was a great need for artists to make picturesque drawings at home and abroad since a new photogravure process, called the collotype method was developed. This process enabled magazines to print more illustrations so demanded by their readers. In due course, Abbey moved permanently to England where he concentrated on literary themes, especially those of Shakespeare.
Cather: "On either side of it [a Shropshire river] are the pollard willows to which Mr. Abbey, the painter, so utterly lost his heart when Harper Brothers sent him into rural England in his youth to make some drawings for them" (WCE 30).
In England Abbey was chosen by the new King to paint the royal portrait of the Coronation, The Coronation of King Edward VII (1902-04). That was same summer Cather first visited England. Abbey remained a steadfast friend of his fellow-artist from Pennsylvania, C. S. Reinhart, and Henry James admired the two of them. See James' erudite discussion of Abbey and Reinhart as he mused, with some envy, "It is true that what the verbal artist would like to do would be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the same fountain [of "genius and imagination"] (James, Henry. "Our Artists in Europe." Harper's 79 (June-Nov. 1889): 48-66). For commentary on James' interest in synaesthesia--the mixing paint and prose, see Winner, Viola Hopkins. "Art Devices and Parallels in the Fiction." Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1970: 71-93. Also see Murphy, John. "Nebraska Naturalism in Jamesian Frames." Great Plains Quarterly 4 (Fall): 231-37 [Arnold 1984.56].
Ácoma. Legendary altar-painting of St. Joseph, originally sent from Spain to the Ácoma Pueblo NM.
Cather: "At Ácoma," he said, "you can see something very holy. They have there a portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is dry, the Ácoma people take the picture down to their farms at Acomita, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when none falls in all the country, and they have crops when the Laguna Indians have none" (DCA 88, again on 197).
In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather leaves a question for reader as to whether or not the painting of St Joseph might be the lost St. Francis by El Greco; in any case the purpose of the painting shifts slightly from an interceding Saint devoted to the worker to become a fetish for rain-making. A painting still hangs above the Ácoma altar. Unfortunately photography is not allowed inside San Esteban de Ácoma Mission, and no slide is currently available (Tenorio, Mary. "Letter to author." 25 Oct. 1992. Pueblo de Ácoma, Acomita, NM 87034).
Cather: "Hundreds of years ago, before European civilizations had touched this continent, Indian women in the old rock-perched pueblos of the southwest were painting geometrical patterns on jars . . . " (1936 "Escapism," in On Writing 19).
Cather knew about the Ácoma Pueblo very early. In an 1897 article, "The Carnegie Museum," she reported on the Natural History Museum's display cases that portrayed the life of the ancient Native Americans. Four of the cases are in the Museum: two cases include a replicas in high-relief of the [Anasazi] Cliff-Dwellings at Mesa Verde, Rio Mancos in southwest Colorado (Case Acc.#140-4); another nearby case holds an architectural reconstruction of New Mexico's Ácoma Pueblo. The four cases of the ancient ruins and so-called "modern pueblos" were given to the Carnegie Museum in 1896 by Ward's National Scientific Company of Rochester, New York (Harding, Deborah G, Carnegie's Anthropological Collection. "Letter to author." 28 Mar 1991. Carnegie Museum of Natural History). A new Hall of Native Americans is planned for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the fate of the cases is unknown at the time of this writing. See "Talking to Marsha Bol." Carnegie Magazine (May/June 1991): 30-35, 38.
Cather: "[A] model of homes of the Cliff Dweller and one of Montezuma's well stand upon tables at each side of the door which opens into the first room" ("The Carnegie Museum." Home Monthly 6.8 (1897): 1-4).
Cather's mention of the clay models in these display cases are the earliest touchstones to the Southwest that suggest later fictional incidents in the Ácoma chapter in Death Comes for the Archbishop and the "Tom Outland's Story" in The Professor's House. Later in New York, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remarked on Cather's interest in the "cliff-dweller finds" at Natural History Museum in New York City (Sergeant 122).
Cather: "I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as a sculpture--and something like a composition
. . . . It was more like a sculpture than anything else" (The Professor's House 210). See Cases Cliff-Dwelling Display Case, Cliff Dweller's Tower, and Ácoma "Sky City." See Rosowski, Susan J. and Bernice Slote. "Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor's House." Prairie Schooner 58.4 (Winter 1984): 81-92. See Holmes, W. H. Report in the U. S. Geological Survey of the Territory, 1873, 1879. Also Harrell, David. From Mesa Verde to The Professor's House. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1993.
Aherns, Ellen Wetherald. Philadelphia, b. 1832; d. 1953. Aherns studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; Carnegie Medal Winner of the Second Class.
Sewing-A Portrait. Oil on canvas. #4 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus.; Aherns' painting was also exhibited at the Art Institute in 1901 (Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888-1950: 53).
Cather: "Hitherto Sergeant Kendall's 'Mother and Child' was the most popular picture which had ever received a prize at the Institute, but, in regard of the people who come and go, it has been quite overshadowed by Ellen Ahern's [sic] portrait of an old lady sewing, which was awarded the medal of the class" ("The Philistine in the Gallery." Review of the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition; W & P 865 [Crane D536]).
Alexander, Francis+. Painter of Charles Dickens (1842). At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA.
Cather described "Mrs. Fields reclining on a green sofa, directly under the youthful portrait of Charles Dickens (now in the Boston Art Museum)." (From "The House on Charles Street." New York Evening Post 4 Nov. 1922: 173-4 [Crane D584]; Cather's text was later extended in "148 Charles Street." Not Under Forty: 54 [Crane A21]). In this article Cather also refers to Annie Fields' friend, "Mrs. [Isabella] John Gardner." Her home is now the notable Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.
Alexander, John White. American painter and illustrator, b. Allegheny PA, 1865; d. New York City, 1915; Carnegie Jury of Award and Advisory Member. Alexander was represented in the Luxembourg, in collections in Vienna, St. Petersburg, New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh. This prominent Pittsburgh artist served as a member of several International Art Societies. He rose to become the President of America's National Academy of Design and was also a Member of the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Rose+ or A Woman in Rose. #7 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus. At the Carnegie, acq. in #[19]01.2.
Pot of Basil+ (1897). Listed as #6, it was exhibited at Carnegie Second Annual in 1897-89, and later won a Carnegie Medal in 1911. Now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, acq. #[18]98.181. It is highly probable that Cather saw Alexander's impressive oil painting either in Boston or Pittsburgh. Alexander's picture takes its name from John Keats' poem, "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil."
Cather: "Our painters are perhaps chiefly remarkable for their absolute mastery of their medium, the sureness and freedom of their technique. To realize how indisputably this is true one has only to examine the American pictures purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Gallery. In the room devoted to foreign art the pictures by Whistler, Alexander, Sargent, Ben Foster and Winslow Homer are conspicuous for their technical excellence and in this respect are comparable only to the work of the masters of modern France" (Written just after Cather's first trip to Europe for the Pittsburgh Gazette 30 Nov. 1902 [Crane D563]; W & P 883).
Pennsylvania artists Edwin Abbey and C. S. Reinhart met John White Alexander while they were working as illustrators for Harper & Brothers. They encouraged him to study in Paris, and eventually he did. As a promising young American artist in Paris, Alexander saw his work enter the distinguished Luxembourg Museum. Before returning to America, he visited Munich, met Whistler in Venice, and journeyed on to Florence to view its frescoes. Alexander is best known in this country for his subdued portraits of women and for his murals in the Library of Congress.
Near the end of his life Alexander returned to Paris. There he became interested in the Symboliste "notion of correspondances, where one sense recalls another" and soon adopted some of these theories. His late avant-garde style merged with his earlier "other-worldly" forms, best portrayed in his work The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh or The Crowning of Labor, that he executed for the Carnegie Institute around 1906. See the Exhibition Catalogue, John White Alexander: Corrrespondances. New York: Graham Gallery, 1014 Madison Ave at 78th, Oct. 30-Dec. 1985: 3. Also see Moore, Sarah J. "In Search of an American Iconography." Winterthur Portfolio 25 (Winter 1990): 321-39.
It is possible that one of John White Alexander's paintings, The Brooklyn Bridge, may have directly influenced Cather's choice of title for her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. In the Introduction to Alexander's Bridge, Bernice Slote quotes Cather's comparison of the novel's composition to a painted composition:
Cather: "My first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture" (AB. Ed. Slote 91; Cather's article originally appeared in the Colophon, part 6.4: 21; reprn't as "My First Novels," in OW 91).
After several suicides, the Brooklyn Bridge became a popular subject for artists, writers, and painters. Cather probably remembered The Brooklyn Bridge by Alexander [consequently, Alexander's Bridge] and then transposed the idea of the title to Alexander's Bridge in a kind of "artistic correspondance," used by the French Symbolist writers. Cather often merged various sources and images into one, as did her French contemporary writer Marcel Proust.
Upon publication of the novel Cather stated that "'The only kind of bridge in the story . . . is a cantilever bridge'" (New York Sun 25 May 1912; reprn't as "Explaining Her Novel" in WCP 6). Although the Brooklyn Bridge is technically a suspension-bridge, it is in part a cantilever-bridge located very near Cather's Washington Place apartment when she wrote the Alexander's Bridge (Woodress 217, 225). So, there seems a probable connection between Cather's title for Alexander's Bridge (whose character's last name is also Alexander) and John White Alexander's painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. (The story was also published in serial-form as "Alexander's Masquerade" (McClure's 38.4 (Feb. 1912) [Crane CCC1]).
Posthumously his peers praised Alexander for his popular city-scape style: "[H]is sense of pattern and of line, of long, sweeping curves, never failed him" (Edwin H. Blashfield. "Alexander." 1917 reprint. American Academy of Art and Letters: Notes and Monographs, 1922: 7). For a reproduction of John White Alexander's Brooklyn Bridge see p. 198a, 199 of the University of Michigan zeroxed version of Eddy, Arthur Jerome. Cubists and Post-Impressionists. McClurg & Co, 1914. The Brooklyn Bridge by Alexander apparently was mis-photocopied by the University of Michigan and substituted for another painting in the original version. This is the only illustration that can be found; see 1970 University Microfilms, University Microfilms Limited, High Wycombe, England, A Xerox Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U. S. A., available from the U. of Missouri--Columbia, page between 198 and 199. One might try the Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress, Wash DC 20540. For another nearly identical, postcard view of the Brooklyn Bridge that Cather sent to a friend see Ruzicka in this Catalogue.
Alma-Tádema, Sir Lawrence. Historical painter, sometimes classed as a Pre-Raphaelite, b. Dronrijp, Holland, 1836; d. Wiesbaden, Germany, 1912. Alma-Tádema was trained at the Antwerp Academy, moved to London in 1870; became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1876; exhibited in the 1896 First Carnegie International; and later became a Jury of Award and Advisory Member. He was knighted in 1899. Alma-Tádema painted authentic scenes of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. For his "Sappho" see Muthers, Richard. Muthers's The History of Modern Painting. 4 vols. Rev. ed. London: Dent, 1907: vol. 3, Plate 123. His work for rich Victorian patrons also included sumptuous nudes with erotic love as an underlying theme. Also see Rooses' Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth-Century, p. 141-64.
Hero+. #9 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue.
Cather: "[T]he Alma-Tadema she [Myrtle the Philistine] not undiscriminatingly remarked looked like Sarah Bernhardt" (Review: "The Philistine" [Crane D536] W & P 867). This is an example of Cather's wry humor since the Alma-Tádema's picture was called Hero.
Curiously, Cather was so interested in Alma-Tádema that she wrote an article about the artist and his home, but we know very little about her reason for doing so. Earlier, because of an illness, Cather had to miss giving a student lecture to the Haydon Art Club, in Lincoln, listed for:
Feb. 20, 1894: "Japanese and Chinese Architecture, and Interior Decorations," by Mr. Will O. Jones.
Feb. 29, 1894: "Houses and Homes of England and Germany," by Miss Cather. See "Houses and Homes of All Ages," Haydon Art Club Program for the Academic Year 1893-4. Available at Sheldon Art Gallery Library, MS #378 N 30, Lincoln NE. Also see Slote, Kingdom of Art p. 21, but date seems incorrect.
With improved methods of photo-reproduction of paintings, drawings, and photographs, and with reader demand for more pictures, McClure's Magazine had illustrations on nearly every page. The magazine often featured popular biographical sketches, portraying both the homes and lives of famous people such as Zola, Ruskin, and Daudet. Cather may have used this McClure's article about Alma-Tádema (Nov. 1896, pp. 32 ff.) as a basis for her own article on his London studio (Courier 7 Jan. 1899: 11; W & P 49). While in Pittsburgh and Washington Cather wrote several of articles about artists in their home studios that led her to visit those of other artists in England. For an article about Cather's Red Cloud home, see Magida, Arthur. "In the Land of Literary Lions." Historic Preservation 40 (Mar./Apr. 1988): 42-47.
Aman-Jean, Edmond-François. French painter, etcher, and color lithographer, b. Chevry-Cossigny, Seine-le-Marne, 1860; d. Paris, 1935.
Comedy. Listed as #10 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus.
Cather: "Aman-Jean's delicate and subtle 'Comedy' is passed with equal carelessness" ("The Philistine" [Crane D536] W & P 868). See Simon in this Catalogue for a painting of Aman-Jean's studio.
Anderson, Frederic A. Anderson illustrated three Romanticized watercolors for Cather's short story, "Three Women." Ladies' Home Journal Sep., Oct., Nov. 1932: 3, 18, 16 [Crane C59]; also titled "Old Mrs. Harris" without illustrations as it appears in Obscure Destinies.
André, Albert. French painter, b. Paris 1869.
The River Seine or Autumn Scene on the Seine. #12 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue. Several of André's works are at the Phillips Gallery, Washington DC. See Cather's Review: "Popular Pictures." Pittsburgh Gazette 24 Nov. 1901: 6 [Crane D537]; W & P 869. Also see Monro, Isabel Stevenson and Kate M. Monro. Index to Reproductions of European Painting: A Guide to Pictures in More Than Three Hundred Books. 1956. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1961: 31.
Angelico, Fra--Frate Giovanni da Fiesole or da Firenze, also known as "Guido di Pietro." Italian miniaturist, panel and fresco painter, b. Vicchio in the Mugello, c. 1400; d. Rome, c. 1455. Fra Angelico was a mystical and pious painter in the Early Italian Renaissance.
The Coronation of the Virgin+ (c. 1435). Panel. 6' 11" x 6' 11" at the Louvre.
Cather: "Above the mantel were delicate reproductions in color of some of Fra Angelico's most beautiful paintings" (WCCSF 283).
And again Cather: "A lovely soul; a saintly nature; a man who with the highest genius, in the midst of the fiercest temptations of turbulent times, learned the true secret of living, to 'render unto God the things which are God's,' such a man was Guido da Petri--Giovanni of Fiesole, Fra Beato, the painter of angels, the angelic painter" (signed Nixon, Mary F. [a.k.a. Willa Cather]. "Fra Angelico, The Painter of Angels, and His Famous Paintings." Home Monthly 7.9 (9 Apr. 1899): 1-3, with illustrations of Fra Angelico's [a.k.a. Guido] Easter Morning--Our Lord Appears to Mary Magdalene. The article was published before her first trip to Europe in 1902.
Cather: "She was just a wee mite of a thing, with brow hair that fluffed about her face and eyes that were large and soft like those of Guido's penitent Magdalen"
("A Resurrection" WCCSF 432).
As she refers to Fra Angelico's reproductions, Cather establishes her familiarity with the many art books held by the wonderful Carnegie Library. She wrote her friend that she thought the Carnigie owned every book possible (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Neddy: p. 6" C. 1898. Holograph letter in the Slote Collection, Library Archives, University of Nebraska). For listings of many art references see the End Notes of the early Carnegie Exhibition Catalogues, in Pittsburgh.
Fra Angelico was a member of the Dominican Order at San Marco's Monastery in Florence, Italy. His famous altarpiece graces the San Marco Church. More than forty marvelous cell and corridor frescoes [including The Annunciation] may be seen today in the adjoining Monastery, now the Museo di San Marco. He also painted vault frescoes in the Orvieto Cathedral, and the Cortona Triptych which is now in the Museo Diocesano, Cortona. Later Fra Angelico rose to become a Dominican Prior and eventually was entombed at San Maria Sopra Minerva, the Dominican Church in Rome (Pope-Hennessy, John. Angelico. Florence, Italy: Scala, 1981, passim).
There are no documents to indicate that Cather visited Florence where she could have seen Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco's. Yet she traveled in Italy and was as close as Venice in 1935. Logically, one may assume that she saw Fra Angelico's St. Stephen and St. Lawrence frescoes (1445-1499) in Rome's Chapel of Nicholas V, at the Vatican in 1908. Other than reproductions of Fra Angelico's work, she doubtless knew were his the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin+ and the Madonna della Stella+ which is a reliquary-panel at Isabella Gardner's Museum, in Boston.
Applegate, Guy Frank. New Mexico painter, ceramist, sculptor, poet, essayist; b. Atlanta IL, 1882; d. Santa Fe NM, 1934.
Cather mentions Frank Applegate in a letter to Mary Austin in which she responds to a call for financial assistance for their mutual friend (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mary Austin." 22 Oct. 1931. Huntington Library CA.
This letter is paraphrased in the Willa Cather Correspondence. Archives, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 68588).
Frank Applegate and Mary Hunter Austin worked together on the Spanish Colonial Arts Society to restore New Mexico's Sancturario at Chimayó. The Sancturario appears in Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. There is some question as to the amount of time and to the purpose of Cather's visit Mary Austin's home while writing Death; however, letters show that Cather did go there, as invited by Austin when away in 1926. Applegate had also advised Austin on the construction of her beautiful house on Camino del Monte Sol (now the Gerald Peters Gallery) in Santa Fé. The Gerald Peters Gallery recently showed his work in "Selections from the Estates of Ward Lockwood and Frank Applegate," from Oct. 11 to Nov. 11, 1991.
Obviously, the New York writers, painters, and publishers formed a tight, interconnecting community even while they were in New Mexico. Applegate also knew the Taos artist E. L. Blumenschein, who knew Cather when they both worked at McClure's Magazine. Two years after Knopf, Inc. released Death Comes for the Archbishop, Applegate published "Indian Stories from the Pueblos,"--a subject dear to Cather. Witter Bynner wrote the Introduction; he was also formerly at McClure's Magazine (Samuels, Peggy and Harold. The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artist of the American West. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976: 9).
It appears that at the very least there was a common interest in the Southwestern culture that existed between Cather and Applegate. Applegate's work resembles that of water-colorist John Marin in its Cubist's composition. Cather was interested in the geometrics and juxtapositions of Cubist art and related its methods to her own textual techniques. For example, Death Comes for the Archbishop could be thought of as an architectonical novel, because its chapters build on and around each other in cube-like composition. Applegate is listed here because of a review of Death Comes for the Archbishop by Arnold Ronnebeck in which he compares Cather's verbal artistry to Applegate watercolors (Denver CO Rocky Mountain News Autumn 1927, n. d., n. p [Arnold 1927.33]. See Armory Show in this Catalogue.
Armory Show. Properly titled The International Exhibition of Modern Art, the show was held at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, February 17, 1913. The Armory Show brought the foremost examples of radical Cubism and Fauvism to the attention of more than 70,000 American viewers.
Undoubtedly, given her documented interest in Post-Impressionist art, Cather was aware of this huge exhibit. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant described Cather as intensely interested in new European art-movements. By 1913 they were discussing the issue both in letters and in person (Sergeant 98). While Sergeant was still in France and before the Armory Show, she had already commissioned a portrait by the Cubist/Fauvist painter, Auguste Chabaud.
Sergeant concerning Cather and Cubism: "I must have written Willa about . . . my walks with Provençal artists and writers in the dry Alpilles; and how my portrait was painted by a Cubist from a vine-yard--un sauvage, a wild man, he called himself, a 'Fauve,' who had already exhibited in New York."
"Willa was intrigued, especially by the Cubist. She was determined I should expound modern art to her" (Sergeant 98).
"She asked me many questions about the wild man from a Provençal vineyard, a petit bourgeois by birth, who had got to painting in this new and startling way. In later life, nothing interested her less than what the French call le mouvement, in poetry or novels. The avant-garde. . . . But in 1913, the story of le sauvage, as his mother called him, and above all, his new way of painting, piqued her interest."
"I had told Willa that the artist's parents had opposed his study of painting until he ran away and shipped out as a sailor. That act of rebellion had made his family allow him to study at the Beau Arts. He found he was a Cubist, malgré lui--he'd never heard of cubism before he started practicing it. But the Cubists had a formula and that had alienated him."
"So he threw away cubism, and started hunting for his own style. . . . I showed Willa the abstract drawings mostly on the back of menus" (Sergeant, Elizabeth. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1953: 114-15).
The Armory Show Program lists Auguste Elisé Chabaud as entering Le troupeau sort après la pluie in the monumental exhibition (1913 Armory Show, illus. 180). John Quinn, the speaker who opened the Armory Show, bought one of Chabaud's paintings (1913 34). After a dynamic showing in New York City, the International Exhibition of Modern Art moved to the Art Institute of Chicago where it drew around 200,000 viewers from March to April (1913 35). Arthur Jerome Eddy, the noted Chicago attorney and collector of avant-garde paintings, owned another Chabaud entitled The Laborer (1913 185). Eddy even retired from his law practice to defend the Post-Modernist painters. His persuasive book, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, continues to be a definitive one. See Eddy, A. J. Cubists and Post-Impressionists. Chicago: McClurg, 1914. Organized by Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. New York: Henry Street Settlement, 1963: 4, 180, 185. Also see Rich, Daniel Catton. "Half a Century of American Exhibitions," p. 12; available at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.
As an art movement, Fauvism is generally identified with Henri Matisse and Cubism with Cézanne, yet, Matisse was the first one to use the word "cubism" while describing paintings by Picasso and Braque at the Paris Salon, in 1908. Formerly Matisse was a traditionalist painter and had studied with both the Academician Bouguereau and the Symbolist Moreau before becoming a skilled copyist at the Louvre. Much later an art-historian would write : "Behind all the daring of the Fauve paintings which Matisse showed at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 lay the experience and discipline of a mature mind, well-versed in the traditions of the French school" (Rewald, John. "An Introduction to the Fauve Movement." Les Fauves. New York: Simon and Schuster, for the Museum of Modern Art, 1952: 5-14).
In 1905, Matisse and other former students of Gustave Moreau held their first so-called "Fauve" exhibition at the Autumn Salon in Paris. The shocking and brilliant colors in the paintings caused the critic Louis Vauxcelles to call the exhibiting artists "fauves or wild beasts." Its larger group included such painters as Matisse, Georges Rouault, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, and George Braque. Fauvism virtually ended as a movement by 1908, yet its art looked forward to the twentieth century.
Conceivably Cather heard of the new movement while she was in Paris in 1906. At that time American expatriates Gertrude and Leo Stein were already collecting avant-garde French art including Matisse's Blue Nude. Or Cather may have visited Alfred Stieglitz's famous "291" Gallery in New York, where Matisse had a one-man show in 1908 (Elderfield 180). Photographer Edward Steichen, who was Stieglitz's partner in Europe, arranged for the show. In 1927, Steichen photographed Cather in her middy-blouse and tie, but there is little or no documentation showing that she knew either Stieglitz or Steichen in 1908. For Matisse, see Elderfield, John. Henri Matisse: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.
The New York-Chicago "Armory Show" exhibit later moved to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. There it aroused little interest from Boston patrons. Cather referred to Cubist painting in a tribute to Mrs. Annie Fields, in Boston before 1922, over ten years after its conception.
Cather: [Mrs. Fields] "was not, as she once laughingly told me, 'to escape anything, not even free verse or the Cubists!' She was not in the least dashed by either. Oh, no she said, the Cubists weren't any queerer than Manet and the Impressionists were when they first came to Boston, and people used to run in for tea and ask her whether she had ever heard of such a thing as 'blue snow,' or a man's black hat being purple in the sun!" ("The House on Charles Street" New York Evening Post 4 Nov. 1922: 173-4; later, "148 Charles Street" [Crane D584]).
Summing up, Cather had the opportunity to study the radical Post-Impressionist art in each of three cities and also in Paris and her quote reveals her grasp of Cubist techniques in painting. See 1913 Armory Show: 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1963.
Despite the fact that Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant felt that Cather had dismissed Cubisme or "le mouvement, in poetry and novels" Cather obviously experimented with similar techniques by using Cubism's fictional counterparts: the elimination of details, a distorted perspective, and the juxtaposition of both colors or characters:
Cather: "What I always want to do is to make the 'writing' count for less and less and the people for more. In this new novel I'm trying to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part."
"Just as if I put here on the table a green vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which neither of them will produce alone. Why should I try to say anything clever, or by any colorful rhetoric detract attention from those two objects, the relation they have to each other and the effect they have upon each other? I want the reader to see the orange and the vase--beyond that, I am out of it. Mere cleverness must go" (Bookman (3 May 1921); WCP 23).
Cather again confirms her awareness of a cubist technique in writing when she refers to D. H. Lawrence's short stories, Sea and Sardinia and The Woman Who Rode Away, calling his "the language of cubisme" (Sergeant 200). See Duryea, Polly. "Rainwitch Ritual in Cather, Lawrence, and Momaday." Journal of Ethnic Studies 18.2 (Summer 1990): 59-75. For an important comparison of D. H. Lawrence's stories--as well as visuals by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Laura Gilpin--as they relate to Cather's Southwest images, see Hönnighausen, Lothar. "Landscape with Indians and Saints: The Modernist Discovery of Native and Hispanic Folk-Culture." 36 (Amerikastudien [American Studies: A Quarterly]). München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag: 329-24.
Art Institute of Chicago. The museum was founded in 1879. The Palmer and Bartlett bequests enabled the Art Institute to assemble a fine collection of nineteenth-century French paintings. The collection includes Portrait of Manet by Fantin-Latour, Monet's Haystacks, Cézanne's Gulf of Marseilles, and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix. The Art Institute of Chicago was Cather's favorite American Museum.
Cather: "This city [Chicago] of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition,--beautiful because the rest was blotted out. She thought of the steps leading down from the Art Museum as perpetually flooded with orange-red sunlight; they had been like that one stormy November afternoon when Sebastian came out of the building at five o'clock and stepped beside one of the bronze lions to turn up the collar of his overcoat, light a cigarette, and look vaguely up and down the avenue before he hailed a cab and drove away" (Lucy Gayheart 136, my italics).
Bakst, Léon (Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg). Russian portrait painter, graphic artist, lecturer, author, and influential set-designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; b. Grodno, Russia 1866; d. Paris, 1924. Bakst, who painted Willa Cather's portrait, sat for both Picasso and Modigliani.
In an early story, "The Gold Slipper," Cather paid homage to Bakst's revolutionary impact on the fashions worn by wealthy women, fashions made in the House of Worth which spread to America. Bakst's fabulous costumes became so popular that Paris Couturiers patterned their dresses after them (Pruzhan 25). This fact was pointed out by Cather and confirmed by her character who wore a Worth dress with influence from Bakst. One of his dresses is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. For Bakst references, see Pruzhan, Irina. Léon Bakst: Set and Costume Designs, Book Illustrations, Paintings and Graphic Works. Trans. Arthur Shkarovski-Raffé. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1988.
Cather: "Today, after we have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Bakst and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the well-disposed ("A Gold Slipper." Harper's 134 (Jan. 1917): 166-74 [Crane C50]).
Bakst attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in Russia, and later he studied drawing in Paris with the Academician Jean-Léon Gérôme. At the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museums, Bakst admired the paintings of Velázquez, Rubens, and the Barbizons, especially those of Corot and Millet. His work even shows the flamboyant influence from Beardsley (Pruzhan 7-8, 10).
Bakst met Sergei Diaghilev while yet in Russia in 1890. After Diaghilev's spectacular 1909 Ballets Russes debut at the Théâtre du Chatâlet in Paris, Bakst became the company's leading stage designer. He moved permanently to Paris in 1910 and began his journeys to Italy, Spain, North Africa, and ancient sites in Greece. All of these cultures influenced his dynamic artwork.
In describing his own style, Bakst wrote to a friend that he had a "close relationship with Symbolist writers" (Pruzhan 218). He had adopted the Symbolist's 'correspondances' between the arts--similar to the methods Cather employed in her writing. Consciously he attempted to convey "the mood generated by the music through colour, to interpret in a painterly way the emotional sensuality inherent in the music" (Pruzhan 23).
Art Nouveau, a movement loosely allied with the Symboliste aesthetic then so popular in Paris, affected "not only the visual arts but also art criticism, the theater, music and literature. It set the stage for the flowering of Russian book illustration and largely contributed to the spectacular world-wide triumph of Russian ballet, Russian music, and Russian stage design" (Pruzhan 7-9).
After Cather won the Pulitzer Prize, her Nebraska fans commissioned and paid for a portrait of her for the Omaha Public Library. At first Cather considered both American and French artists, but she finally chose the same Léon Bakst who was in her story, "The Gold Slipper," six years earlier (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Irene Miner Weisz." Aug. 11 [1923]. The Willa Cather Papers. Modern MSS, Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago IL 60610). Judge Duncan M. Vinsonhaler acted as the liaison between Cather and the Omaha Committee. In Paris, she chose the artist, negotiated the price, arranged for the sittings and the specifics of portrait with Bakst during the summer of 1923 (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Judge Vinsonhaler." Letter #005; this letter and the following numbered letters, all from the Willa Cather-Duncan Vinsonhaler Correspondence are held in the Special Collections/Manuscripts, Clifton Waller Barrett Library-Alderman Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville VA. 22903-2498).
Bakst impressed Cather with his brilliant reputation from the Ballets Russes. His name was everywhere, and Marcel Proust even included him in three volumes of his novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Furthermore violinist Jan Hambourg, another Russian expatriate from Voronezh and husband of Isabelle McClung, probably urged Cather to choose Bakst. Cather stayed off and on with the Hambourgs while she was in France; their Ville d'Avray home was her mailing address the summer she sat for Bakst (Letter #010).
Cather and Bakst were both creative artists who left their rural background. They got on well together in Paris at the sixteen sittings for her portrait. Bakst arranged for them to be photographed together in his studio, probably to promote the painter's forthcoming exhibit in America (Letter #012). Other meetings occurred elsewhere, but in Cather's mind there was always an underlying concern about the portrait's lack of likeness (Letter #024).
In portraiture Bakst preferred quick sketches of people since "[t]o the artist's way of thinking, protracted work on a portrait, coupled with an attempt to convey every detail, inevitably resulted in the loss of inspiration, the portrayal becoming dry and lifeless" (Pruzhan 14). Bakst's pencil-sketches did capture his subjects's most revealed personality. In Cather's case Edith Lewis stated that the portrait entailed twenty sittings (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953: 131). An overworking on the artist's part contributed to the Committee's disappointment and to the hostile reviews that the Cather portrait received in Omaha, Nebraska.
Throughout his career Bakst flirted with Constructivism and Cubism in easel-painting (Pruzhan 28). Indeed, Cather's portrait reveals aspects of Cubism as the subject withdraws from the viewer, appearing reticent and retiring in a Cézannesque pose. By way of illustration, one may compare corresponding body positions in Cézanne's paintings, M. Cézanne in a Yellow Armchair+ and Woman with a Coffee Pot+. Bakst's portrait of Cather is a psychological study, one engaged in active symbolism. Sitting in a Classical robe, actually a comfortable silk dress (Letter #012), the subject is decidedly both logical and creative set before an earth-colored background. In her troubled left hand, one that bears no ring, Cather marks her place in her book of life. That side of her face reveals the empathy resulting from the stress and dehabilitation of her work. Her right hand echoes her famous peachy complexion and the vigor of her sharp, blue eyes strikes out beneath her dark hair. To her right a reflective brass planter with blurred rural landscape, interacts with the compelling pollarded plant. The plant appears to be a tortured symbol of her life's work and its associated sacrifices; its green leaves are cut well back yet carefully tended. See Bakst's original portrait of Cather that hangs next to author John Neihardt, at the third-floor Reading Room, Omaha Public Library, Omaha NE. Copies of several reviews are available at the Library. The portrait is reproduced on the wrapper of Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Sel. and ed. by L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986 [WCP].
Toward the end of his active life Bakst painted other women's portraits, including one of Diana Menuhin, wife of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Cather's great friend whom she met in 1930 in Paris. See Duryea, Polly. "Willa Cather and the Menuhin Connection." Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 36.2 (Summer 1992): 12-15. Also see Evelyn Haller for "Bakst and the Russian Dancers."
Barbizon School (1830-80). Barbizon is a small village near the Fontainebleau Forest. It lies some thirty miles south of Paris. Those artists generally thought of as Barbizon painters are Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jules Dupré, Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny, Constant Troyon, and Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who also painted Plains people and landscapes in America.
The Barbizons were known principally as genre painters who reacted both in style and politics against nineteenth-century Neoclassicism. The Barbizons idealized the natural setting, one that pictured a bucolic landscape and peasants laboring in the fields. Yet their paintings commented on the fatal hardships of those who worked the land. The rustic themes of the painters produced nostalgic scenes in the country-side that implied a stark contrast to ugly and industrialized urban centers. Their art became the cutting edge of a new art-movement whose remnants continue today. Although the Barbizon painters made preliminary sketches out of doors, they completed their work in the studio; yet the Barbizon's natural landscapes did much to influence the later plein-air artists like Monet and the Impressionists, who finished their canvases on site. See Barbizon Revisited. Essay and Catalogue by Robert L. Herbert. New York: Clarke & Way-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1962: 46. Also see La Farge, John. "The Barbizon School." McClure's Magazine 21 (Aug. 1903): 586-99; and Low, Will H. "Corot and the 'Barbizon' School.'" McClure's 6 (Dec. 1895 to May '96): 465-481. For the Barbizon influence in My Ántonia, see Murphy, John J. "Cather's Use of Painting." My Ántonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1989: 45-56.
Bastien-Lepage, Jules. French painter; b. Damvillers, 1848; d. Paris 1884. Bastien-Lepage studied with Cabanel at the Ecôle des Beaux-Arts. He moved independently toward plein-air painting in a naturalistic style. His realistic themes are compared to the poetic and rustic scenes of Millet and Bréton, but many of his subjects reveal a curious psychological twist.
A Peasant (1880). Acquired in 1898.#4 by Carnegie Art Museum. Oil on vertical canvas. 71" high x 29" wide.
Cather: "One is glad to turn away from this smug, vain, much be-powdered Miss to Bastien-Lepage's splendid peasant girl, who hangs beside her [Boldini's "Woman in Black"] in fatal contrast" (W & P 762).
The Gleaners+. Now at the Louvre.
Les Foins+. This detailed portrait of a peasant woman in the fields near Damvillers was accepted at the Luxembourg Museum in 1878.
Joan of Arc+ (1879). At the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bastien-Lepage painted his mystical Joan dressed in contemporary clothes, in a garden setting. Her "natural" reflection echoes her historical self who appears in the background. See Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York: Artabras, 1984: 26-27.
Cather: Claude Wheeler found a book illustration of Joan of Arc dressed in armor and reflected "that a character could perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a work, a phrase, it could renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again in the minds of children" (One of Ours 62).
Joan of Arc is illustrated in v. 3, p. 19 of Muthers, Richard. History of Modern Painting. Trans. Arthur Cecil Hillier. 3 vols. London: Henry and Co., 1896. This volume is recommended as a "Selected Book on Painting" in the 1896 Exhibition Catalogue and was available at the Carnegie Library to Cather as a reviewer. Joan of Arc is also illustrated in Weinberg, H. Barbara. The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their Teachers. New York: Abbeville P, 1991: Color Plate #177.
For a fascinating account of the transitional period from the "splendors of the last days of the Second Empire" see Will H. Low's "An Art Student in Paris in the Early Seventies," #9 in his series, "A Century of Painting" (McClure's 7 (June 1896-1896): 293-304. In his article Low quotes Degas, who dubbed Bastien-Lepage as the "Bouguereau of realism" (Low 299). Low wrote the article just before he dined with Cather at the 1897 Carnegie Exhibition Opening in Pittsburgh.
Bayeux Tapestry. The Medieval Bayeux Tapestry commemorates the events at the Battle of Hastings (1066). In that historic battle the Norman William the Conqueror defeated the Harold and his Anglo-Saxons and invaded England.
The Bayeux Tapestry, which is not a true tapestry at all but an embroidered wool-on-linen-hanging, continues to hang in the Bayeux Musée de Painter. It was commissioned there c. 1070 by the Bishop who was William the Conqueror's brother.
Bayeux is located near the English Channel coast between Rouen and Mont-Saint-Michel, and Cather probably saw the tapestry in Bayeux. Lewis states that the Hambourgs and Cather traveled to nearby St. Mâlo in 1931 (Lewis 158). Furthermore, Cather's character Mother Superior Catherine de Saint-August was trained by the Hospitalizes of the Abbey-au-Dames at Bayeux, and it is unlikely that Cather would write about a place she'd never seen (SOR 40) The Abbey-au-Dames was an aristocratic Norman abbey was built apologetically for Queen Matilda by her penitent husband, William the Conqueror; but that is another story for another time.
Cather's historian Professor Godfrey St. Peter delights in thinking of events that took place in his old house at holiday time: "Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,--working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,--alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories" (PH 101).
Nearly ten years before Cather wrote The Professor's House she received, as a gift from Ferris Greenslet, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The newly-published book, written by Henry Adams, sparked a passionate interest for her in the region around Bayeux (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mr. Greenslet." Jan. 1914. Houghton Library, Harvard University). Henry Adams mentioned "the charming tapestry of Bayeux which tradition calls by the name of Queen Matilda," and his words remind one of Godfrey St. Peter's words about Queen Matilde. See Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. [Privately printed in 1905; Elizabeth S. Sergeant verifies this in Willa Cather: a Memoir, p. 94. Printed for general sale by Houghton-Mifflin c. 1913]. Princeton: Princeton Paperback-PUP, 1989. Cather visited Chartres, at least once, in 1902 (Lewis 57).
Scholars now believe that an Englishman designed the tapestry and that it was worked by Anglo-Saxons, not Normans as previously supposed (Bernstein 8). The Bayeux Tapestry scrolls open to a fantastic size of nearly 230 feet long and is 20 inches high. Stylistically its descriptive battle-sequences may reflect the scenes in Trajan's Column, Rome (Bernstein 94). Yet the tapestry's inscriptions and figures find their source in English manuscript illumination (Bernstein 69). Yarns of eight colors of "red, yellow or buff, grey, two shades of green, one bright and the other dark, and three shades of blue" make up the decoration (Bernstein 14). Such tapestries often depicted specific personages set in a significant historical event. Like the later Cluny Tapestry, Lady and the Unicorn, the hangings were popular among the medieval aristocracy for their commemorative or instructive purposes, to cover cold stone-walls, to impress visitors or the faithful. They were displayed both for warmth and admiration in Romanesque Cathedrals, monastic priories, or English great halls (107). See Bernstein, David J. The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
An accurate, hand-colored photo reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry may be seen in London's Victoria and Albert Museum [London SW7 2RL]. See Birrell, F. F. L. Guide to the Bayeux Tapestry. 1914. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1921. For an excellent article accompanied by a running color illustration of the complete Bayeux Tapestry see Setton, Kenneth M. "The Norman Conquest." National Geographic 130.2 (Aug. 1966): 200-51.
Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent. English draftsman, illustrator with limited training, and writer, b. Brighton, 1872; d. Menton, 1898.
Cather: "Aubrey Beardsley and Paul Verlaine are both interesting artists in their way" (W & P 290; for Verlaine see W & P 284).
Early in his career Beardsley found his sources in the traditional drawings of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Dürer, and those from William Morris's Kelmscott Press. Beardsley's later, linear drawings addressed more erotic subjects. He illustrated Lysistrata, Pierrot of the Minute, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Pope's Rape of the Lock, Wagner's Das Rheingold, and did a series of pornographic drawings for The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser.
Cather: "Sometimes I fancied he would tarry long enough to sing a little like Keats, or to draw like Beardsley . . ." ("Jack-A-Boy." Saturday Evening Post (30 Mar. 1901): 4-5, 25 [Crane C27]; WCCSF 320).
Cather: "I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley's hands that recalled [Stephen] Crane's very vividly" ([Crane C493]; W & P 773).
Cather: "The old spell seems still to hold good, for we met occasionally a Columbine and her Pierrot" ([Crane D558] WCE 126).
Cather: "As she stepped out of the door the wind caught the black lace mantilla wound about her head and lifted it high in the air in such a ludicrous fashion that the substantial soprano cut a figure much like a malicious Beardsley poster" (WCCSF 333 [Crane C25]).
See p. 259 of Weintraub's Aubrey Beardsley for an illustration of The Death of Pierrot; and The Savoy 3.6 (Oct. 1896): 33 [Ed. Arthur Symons] for a Beardsley girl in a mantilla and other drawings. In general Cather's interest in Beardsley is marked in her early writings. But later on she had this to say:
Cather: "Their [books] power to seduce and stimulate the young, the living, was utterly gone. There was a complete file of the Yellow Book, for instance; who could extract sweet poison from those volumes now? A portfolio of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley--decadent, had they been called?" ("Double Birthday." Forum 81 (Feb. 1929): 72-82, 124-28; also in Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929. Ed. with an introd. by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986: 45).
Beardsley influenced his generation in their acceptance of the Art Nouveau movement at the end of the nineteenth century. While in Paris he stayed at the same Quai de Voltaire Hotel--across the Seine from the Louvre--as did Cather in later years (Reade 494). She knew his provocative work from his illustrations such as Morte d'Arthur (1893), the first six volumes of The Yellow Book (1894), and from eight numbers of The Savoy (1896). For Beardsley posters see Reade, Brian and Frank Dickinson. Aubrey Beardsley Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1966: #368-83.
Beaux, Cecelia. Portrait painter, b. Philadelphia, 1863; d. Gloucester MA, 1941. Beaux studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and traveled in Italy and England.
Portrait of a Lady. #17 in the Carnegie's Sixth Annual Exhibit, 1901-02 Catalogue, illus. Portrait presents an aristocratic woman in a light-colored dress, seated on an elegant sofa. Beaux's early work owes much to Whistler and Sargent. In an 1897 review Cather commented on Beaux's personal attire:
Cather: "Cecelia Beaux's dinner gown deserves a whole Courier. She paints such pretty clothes, I wonder why she wears such awful ones" ("Low and Bouguereau" [Crane D341] W & P 513).
Cather: "She enthusiastically admired Cecelia Beaux's disagreeable portrait, not for its exquisite painting, but for certain Ladies' Home Journalish mannerisms that have become more and more marked in Miss Beaux's work of late years" ("The Philistine" [Crane D536] W & P 867).
Ironically, Cather consistently omitted another woman from all her reviews, Pittsburgh native Mary Cassatt. She regularly exhibited at the Carnegie Art Gallery and also with the French Impressionists in Paris. Mary Cassatt was the American woman represented at the Luxembourg Museum. For Cassatt, see Gerdts 32-45.
Becher, Arthur E. Painter, illustrator, b. Ardsley NY, 1877; d. ?, Freiberg, Germany. See Who Was Who in American Art, p. 42.
Italian Landscape. Becher was a Carnegie exhibitor in 1901 ([Crane D537] W & P 868).
Benda, Wladyslaw Theodor. Czech-American lithographer, designer, illustrator, b. 1873, Poznan, Poland; naturalized American, 1911; d. 1948. W. T. Benda was known as McClure's "war-horse" artist, dependable, experienced, and reliable. Consequently, Cather knew his work well before selecting him to illustrate her novel, My Ántonia, whose heroine shared W. T. Benda's Old-World heritage. Benda's drawing of Ántonia plowing resembles Holbein's Ploughman, complete with spires on the horizon, in his Dance of Death series, perhaps a Cather suggestion.
For a complete study of the W. T. Benda-Cather-Houghton Mifflin collaboration for My Ántonia, see Schwind, Jean. "The Benda Illustrations to My Ántonia: Cather's 'Silent' Supplement to Jim Burden's Narrative." PLMA 100.1 (Jan.-May 1985): 51-67. For closer study see the Cather letters to Ferris Greenslet, Apr. 1917 through Dec. 1930. These letters, the basis for Schwind's study, are at Houghton Library, Harvard University.
For Benda's early work see McClure's 31 (1908): 702-03, for his pen-and-ink illustration of a ship wreck, decorated with an orange border. This particular drawing that accompanies Sarah Orne Jewett's poem, "The Gloucester Mother," and is reminiscent of decorations on illuminated manuscripts or in William Morris' Kelmscott Press Edition of Chaucer. Two special pages commemorated Jewett's passing by the McClure's staff, which then included Cather. See McClure's vols. 28, 29, 32 for other W. T. Benda work.
Benjamin-Constant, M. Jean-Joseph. French, b. in Paris, 1845; d. 1902. He studied with Cabanel. Two of Benjamin-Constant's portraits are in the Louvre. He served as Advisory Member to several Carnegie International Exhibitions.
The Favorite Tiger+. Listed as #278 in the Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I, 1896: 109, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.
The Last of the Rebels+. Shown at the Carnegie and Luxembourg Museums.
Benjamin-Constant was a contributor to the First Carnegie International Exhibition in 1896. He was known primarily for scenes depicting barbaric spectacles but later painted a number of portraits. Cather probably saw his painting, Les Derniers Rebelles+, at the Luxembourg in 1902. It's possible that she knew the painting as early as 1895 as pictured in the University of Nebraska's copy of Le Musée du Luxembourg by Benedite, n. p. (See Constant's listing under Benjamin-Constant).
Cather: "The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of the African coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness" ("Eric Hermannson's Soul." Cosmopolitan 28 (Apr. 1900): 633-44 [Crane C21]; WCCSF 373).
The book-plate illustration of Constant's painting of The Last Rebels only shows men in the picture, but Cather describes a female figure in her text. She may have referred to Les Femmes du Riff, listed as another major work by Constant. An example of Cather's text that is analogous to Constant's style also appears in the same story: "To him [Eric Hermannson] this beauty was something more than color and line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish color because all colors are there" (WCCSF 370).
Also see three other Cather references to Benjamin-Constant's work: (1) "Constant's portrait [fictional] of Eleanor" ("Eleanor's House." McClure's 29 (Oct. 1907): 492-97 [Crane C41]; WCCSF 108); (2) "Constant's Portrait of Queen Victoria." Home Monthly 6 (11 June 1897): 1-2; and (3) "Constant's Victoria." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3 [Crane D532].
Benson, Frank Weston. American Impressionist painter, etcher, influential teacher, and friend of Tarbell, b. Salem MA, 1862; d. there, 1951. Benson studied at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in Paris (see F. W. Benson and Edward C. Tarbell: Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1938).
Firelight. #93 in the Haydon Art Club Midwinter Exhibit 1894-95 Catalogue; also listed as #134, p. 83 in Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Firelight is illustrated in Frank W. Benson: A Retrospective. New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1989; and By Firelight: 1889 in Antiques 140 (Nov. 1991): 731.
Cather: "As to the impressionism in general, it is natural enough. The treating of phases and moods and incidents becomes more popular in every art. It should not occasion any very bitter warfare with the more conservative school. While Mr. Benson's "Firelight" does not at all put Rubens and Rembrandt to shame it is an excellent picture in its way. If a picture is good it does not denote whether it is done with a pin point or a palette knife, whether it must be seen through the big end or the small end of an opera glass. If a man gives good work to the world he should at least be allowed the privilege of choosing his own method. Beauty is not so plentiful that we can afford to object to stepping back a dozen paces to catch it" (Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1895: 13 [Crane C126]; KA 219; W & P 124-5).
Portrait of a Boy+. Acq. in #[18]97.6 at Carnegie, later lent to Boston. See Benson's son in F. W. Benson; A Retrospective. New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1989: 4; Fig. 43.
Profile+ (1896). Oil on canvas. 30" x 26 1/2". Loan: #19 in the 1901 Sixth Annual Exhibition Catalogue, illus.; also listed as #18 and #36, at Art Institute of Chicago in 1902-03. Illus. in Magazine Antiques 140 (Nov. 1991): 140. Later in 1907 Cather published a short story called "The Profile."
Eleanor+ (1907). Benson painted the portrait of Eleanor while Cather was in Boston. Although the Boston Museum of Fine Arts did not acquire the painting until 1908, Cather may have seen it before in a local Boston Galleries. Gerdts states that Benson exhibited Eleanor in 1902 (see Gerdts, William H., American Impressionism New York: Artabras, 1984: 216). See the Robert Vose Gallery on Newbury Street, a very old gallery near Cather's Chestnut Street neighborhood, for a Catalogue Raisonné of Benson's work. Also see Cather's reference to the fictional portrait of 'Eleanor' by Constant, or consider the possible Benson portrait of Eleanor of the same year as her story, "Eleanor's House" (McClure's 29 (Oct. 1907): 623-33 [Crane C41]). Also see Hiesinger, Ulrich. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters; and Frank W. Benson: The Impressionist Years. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1988.
Benson studied art in Boston and Paris and concentrated on the effect of light in his genre paintings of women and girls. In 1898 Tarbell and he helped to organize a group of artists associated both with French Impressionism and Realism called "Ten American Painters." They were commonly known as "The Ten." Both Massachusetts-born, Benson and Tarbell were considered a 'team' (See F. W. Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell: Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1938; available at the Reference Room, William Morris Hunt Library in the Museum).
Around 1912 Benson began making Homeresque etchings of wild fowl in a style that differed dramatically from his earlier Impressionist-portraits. See Modern Masters of Etching: Frank W. Benson. Introd. by Malcolm C. Salaman. London: The Studio, 1925, for Benson's dry-point etchings of birds. Benson also executed seven murals for the Library of Congress. Also see Seaton-Schmidt, Anna. "Frank W. Benson." American Magazine of Art 12 (1921): 365-72.
Birch, Reginald. Birch illustrated Cather's "Ardessa" with charming line drawings for the story's head- and tailpieces (Century 96 (1918): 105-16 [Crane C51]).
Blumenschein, Ernest Leonard. American painter, illustrator, muralist, teacher, and symphonic violinist. Blumenschein studied in Cincinnati and Paris, b. Pittsburgh, 1874; d. Taos NM, 1960. He taught at the Art Student's League, was a member of the Salmagundi Club, in New York City, and the American Art Association, in Paris. He co-founded a group of painters known as the Taos society of Artists. Blumenschein was an illustrator for McClure's Magazine.
The Namesake. Blumenschein illustrated the Cather story entitled "The Namesake" (McClure's 28 (Mar. 1907): 492-97 [Crane C38]). Under the story's title-line the McClure's credit reads, "Illustrated from Drawings by E. L. Blumenschein"; however, in the same issue the Index advertises it as a painting.
The complicated subject of "The Namesake" is important enough for a separate essay. Cather used "The Namesake" twice: once for a story [Crane C38]; earlier for a poem [Crane B32]; both poem and story paid homage to Cather's uncle, William Seibert Boak, a soldier killed in the Civil War. Boak appears fictionally in the canvas shown within Blumenschein's illustration. Regardless, Blumenschein's painted figures match Cather's opening prose:
Cather: "Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the Boulevard St. Michel" (WCCSF 137).
--Or possibly the words were drawn from the illustration. Cather's opening and Blumenschein's illustration are both indebted to yet another painting, L'Atelier des Batignolles (1870), by Henri Fantin-Latour. The painting is a tableau célèbre set in Edouard Manet's studio, or l'atelier, on Paris' Right Bank. Included in Fantin-Latour's painting are such artists as Manet, Renoir, Zola, Monet, and Fantin-Latour himself, etc. In L'Atelier des Batignolles, the number of figures and their activities are repeated by Cather's characters in "The Namesake" and Blumenschein's subjects in The Namesake.
Blumenschein probably had permission to copy the L'Atelier des Batignolles at the Luxembourg and later adjusted the figures for Cather's story. It would be an interesting study to identify each person in Blumenschein's painting. Furthermore, Fantin-Latour's early painting connects youngish Cather--then twenty-seven years old--to Manet as her favorite artist. Cather would have also known of Fantin-Latour's wonderful Portrait of Edouard Manet+ (1867). The Portrait of Manet was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, only two years before Cather wrote "The Namesake." Now at M. d'Orsay, L'Atelier des Batignolles was formerly held by the Musée du Luxembourg since 1892, and then transferred to the Louvre in 1930 (#832).
Cather was a frequent visitor to the neighborhood near both the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens. Her old friends the Hambourgs had an apartment in nearby Montparnasse. On different visits she stayed on the rue de Cluny, a street located between the Île de la Cité and the Panthéon, and on the Quai de Voltaire situated immediately across the Pont Carrosuel from the Louvre. Consequently, the convenient Left-Bank Latin Quarter was a favorite haunt not only for Cather but for bohemian writers and painters. In this relatively compact section of Paris old Norman architecture sits atop ancient Roman foundations. While in Paris Cather "wanted to live in the Middle Ages" (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953: 119).
Cather: "It must have been, I think, about the middle of October, for I remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the Luxembourg Gardens that morning . . . . and in the Quarter an occasional feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one's coat sleeve in the gay twilight of the early evening" (WCCSF 138).
One assumes that Cather met Blumenschein in New York at McClure's Magazine; however, they could have been acquainted through the Carnegie Art Museum, Pittsburgh. Only one month after "The Namesake's" publication in March 1907, Pittsburgh native, Blumenschein, and his wife, Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein, each entered paintings in the Carnegie Exhibit (see 1907 Carnegie Catalogue of the Eleventh Annual Exhibition, #52 Portrait of a Man, and #53 A Little Story). After she moved to New York in 1906, Cather often visited Pittsburgh friends and probably was eager to see the Carnegie Exhibition. Other well-known contributors to the 1907 exhibit were Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Gari Melchers, Robert Henri (an artist with Nebraska connections), John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast. Still, from 1902 to 1908 Blumenschein and his family lived in Paris. During this period he copied Old Masters at the Louvre, then a standard academic practice. He may well have done so at the Luxembourg Museum, where Fantin-Latour's L'Atelier was housed. This fact presupposes that Blumenschein painted The Namesake (1907) while in France.
In Taos, the Blumenschein Foundation has no knowledge of the painting's whereabouts and, unfortunately, Blumenschein's only daughter Helen is no longer living. No definitive biography exists for Blumenschein. Furthermore, in Taos neither the Director of the Blumenschein Foundation, nor the Harwood Foundation know of any other specific illustrations that Blumenschein did for Cather's works (Personal interviews in Taos by the author with the Director of the Blumenschein Foundation and David L. Witt. June 26, 1992). Posted signs in the Blumenschein Home misstate the fact that he illustrated Cather's novels. See Warren French's article for this confusion: "Even more in the spirit, as well as the style, of the novel [DCA] is 'Sangre de Cristo Mountains' (1926) by Ernest L. Blumenschein, an artist who had illustrated some of Willa Cather's works" (In "Afterviews." The Art of Willa Cather. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974: 238-47).
In the late 1890's, S. S. McClure sent Blumenschein to the Southwestern to make authentic sketches for Hamlin Garland stories, such as "Rising Wolf-Ghost Dances" and "Hitting the Trail" (see McClure's 12 (1898-99). Blumenschein traveled as far West as Fort Wingate AZ, and Gallup NM. On one now-famous journey from Denver to Mexico, Blumenschein and his fellow-artist, Bert Phillips, broke down near Taos NM. While laid up in Taos for wagon repairs, the painters became impressed by New Mexico's pristine landscapes and its diverse native culture. During the following summers Blumenschein returned to Taos. Soon, he was joined by other painters, and collectively, they called themselves the Taos Society of Artists. There in the summer of 1915, Cather and Edith Lewis visited with old friends Ernest Blumenschein and Herbert Dunton along with other Taos artists (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Ferris Greenslet." 13 Sep. 1915. bMS Am 1925 (341) Houghton Library, Harvard University). See Lewis for Cather's first visit to Taos (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953: 99). In 1919, Blumenschein moved his family moved permanently to Taos; consequently, he is recognized, quite correctly, as a New Mexico artist.
Blumenschein painted the New Mexico landscape and its people. Presumably Cather had him in mind when she created her character, Don Hedger. He portrayed Indian-peoples in a painting called Rain Spirits (1920); Hedger was "among the very moderns" to exhibit at "V--'s" [perhaps Vollard's, the avant-garde dealer's gallery] in Paris ("Coming, Eden Bower!" Uncle Valentine 165).
Dance at Taos+ (1923). Oil on canvas. 24" x 27". Gift of Miss Florence Dibbell Bartlett, 1947. Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico [P.O. Box 2087, Santa Fe NM 87504-2087]. This Blumenschein painting was acquired too late to claim influence on Cather's story, but it exemplifies the style proposed by Don Hedger. For Blumenschein's Dance at Taos illus., see Broder, Patricia Janis. Taos: A Painter's Dream. Boston: Little, Brown for the New York Graphic Society, 1980: 87. Also see Taos Mountain and Indian, illus. in Antiques (Nov. 1987): 977.
When Cather was writing Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Taos Society of Artists included painters like Hennings, Phillips, Higgins, Sharp, Couse, Berninghaus, Dunton, Adams, and Blumenschein. For a group portrait by Blumenschein entitled, Ourselves and Taos Neighbors (Stark Museum, Orange TX) see, Rudnick, Lois. Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984: 322.
Also see Coke, Van Deren. "Why Artists Came to New Mexico: 'Nature Presents a New Face Each Moment.'" Art News (Jan. 1974): n. p. Also Coke, Van Deren. Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment, 1882-1942. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P-Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and Art Gallery, 1963. For a contemporary view from Cather's friend, see Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Taos and Its Artists. New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1947.
Boeringer, N. Boeringer illustrated Cather's story, "On the Divide," which was published in the Overland Monthly in 1896 [Crane C8].
Boldini, Giovanni. Italian society portraitist, b. 1845 in Ferrara; d. 1931. Boldini studied in Florence and was well-traveled. He encountered paintings by Velázquez in Spain, Manet and Degas in France, Gainsborough in England, and Hals in Holland. Like Sargent, Boldini painted portraits of aristocrats in a palette of black and silver.
Woman in Black. Listed as #25 in the Carnegie First Annual Exhibition Catalogue 5 Nov. 1896-1 to Jan. 1897; see Plate II, p. 7 for illus.
Cather: "The woman [in "The Mark"] is of a worse sort than Boldini's "Woman in Black" . . . ("A Philistine" [Crane D487] W & P 762).
Bonheur, Rosa (Marie Rosalie). French painter and sculptor, b. Bordeaux, 1822; d. Melun, 1899.
The Horse Fair (1853). At the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art. For Cather reference see W & P, p. 929.
Bonnard, Pierre+. French Impressionist painter, b. 1867; d. 1947.
Boulevard+. This French color-print is from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection entitled Quelques Aspects de la Vie de Paris (1894). Boulevard was acquired by the Museum in 1960. Cather, of course, did not view it there. Even so, prints by the late Impressionists are typical of the "French prints" owned by Hilda Burgoyne (Alexander's Bridge 52). Color lithographs by Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Signac, and Edouard Vuillard often featured city scenes and were sold by many such art-dealers like Ambroise Vollard in Paris. For a review comparing Bartley Alexander's homes to "fine engravings" see, [N. a.] "Review of Alexander's Bridge." Living Age 274 (20 July 1912): 192 [Arnold 1912.8].
Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Cather scholars recognize the importance of this museum because of its fine collections from the Barbizon and Impressionist periods. Millet's Sower and Manet's Street Singer are here. The Museum is also famous for its Oriental and Egyptian art. See the Illustrated Handbook: Museum of Fine Arts. Boston MA, 1991.
Cather: "Mrs. Fields reclin[ed] on a green sofa, directly under the youthful portrait of Charles Dickens (now in the Boston Art Museum). . . . " (Not Under Forty 54).
Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro Filipepi). Florentine painter, b. c. 1445; d. 1510. Botticelli was praised by Ruskin for his graceful linear style. His work influenced all of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially Burne-Jones who was noted for his ethereal females.
Very early in her career Cather likened Anne Nevin, wife of her Pittsburgh friend Ethelbert Nevin, to a Botticelli Madonna. This leads one to conclude that Cather knew Botticelli primarily from his famous reproductions.
Cather: "[Nevin's] wife sat leaning against the piano, in black and white, looking more than ever like one of the more tender and compassionate of Botticelli's Madonnas" (Courier July 15, 1899: 4-5; W & P 630).
While in Italy some years later, Cather presumably did not go to Florence or its Uffizi Gallery. She did write an article in which she quoted from Vasari, Ruskin, and Mrs. Jameson. Cather's article included a street view of "The Uffizzi [sic], the Great Gallery of Florence" (Mary F. Nixon [a.k.a. Willa Cather; Cather sometimes had trouble spelling like the rest of us]. "Fra Angelico, The Painter of Angels, and His Famous Paintings." Home Monthly 7.9 (9 Apr. 1899): 1-3).
Botticelli's most famous Madonnas--Madonna in Glory with Seraphim, Madonna of the Rose Garden, Madonna of the Pomegranate, Madonna of the Magnificat are all held in Florence's Uffizi Gallery. However, while Cather was in Europe, she surely saw Botticelli's Venus and Mars and Mystic Nativity at London's National Gallery in 1902, and his frescoes for the Moses and Christ cycles in the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1908. One should note that many others were available to her in the Fine-Arts books in the Music and Art Department, Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh.
Bouguereau, Adolphe William. Third Republic French Academic painter known for his formal draftsmanship, b. La Rochelle, 1825; d. there, 1905. Bouguereau's mythological and religious scenes were influenced primarily by the frescoes of Raphaël and Giotto. Bouguereau probably was best known for his popular photo-realistic nudes. For an early biography see Vachon, Marius. W. Bouguereau. Paris: A. Lahure, 1900.
Gipsy Girl (1872). #340 was lent by H. C. Durand and is listed on p. 112 in Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896. This catalogue is available at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute. The Carnegie Art Museum records show former ownership of the Girl/Souvenir or Girl/Remembrance (1895) by Bouguereau. Souvenir (1895) was exhibited at the Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh 1890-1910 # 78, at the Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh PA, April 6-June 29, 1997.
Gipsy Girl may be the Bouguereau painting that Cather later described as a "little brown peasant girl" (Girl/Souvenir) in her art-reviews (W & P 513 and 761). Cather first mentions Bouguereau in a review of a slide-lecture given by Lorado Taft at Nebraska's Crete Chautauqua.
Cather: "The lecture platform was then occupied by Mr. Lorado Taft of the Chicago art institute [sic], who spoke on modern French art and artistic profusely illustrating his lecture with sterecoptican view [sic]. . . . He believed that the influence of French art is as great as itself, that it has awakened, inspired and given prodigally of its richness to all nations. His favorite among the modern French painters seem to be Millett [sic], Corot and Larolle [sic]. His admiration for Gerome and Bougereau [sic] is conscientious and dutiful rather than spontaneous" ("The Fourth at Crete." Lincoln Evening News 5 July 1894: 8 [Crane D66]).
Meditation+ (1885). #1974.54 at Joslyn Art Museum [2200 Dodge Street, Omaha NE. 68102] This painting has the typical features of Gipsy Girl. It portrays a prepubescent girl in local peasant dress--Bouguereau painted several canvases with this same theme and all of his young peasant girls were shown with an underlying touch of the erotic. See Sturges, Hollister III. Angels and Urchins: Images of Children at the Joslyn. Omaha NE: Joslyn Art Museum: 1980; for an illustration of Meditation, Fig. 27, p. 57.
Cather often praised Bouguereau's painting of the "little brown peasant girl" (W & P 513 and 761), yet she bitterly criticized him for his paintings of "sugary" nudes, who bore "white limbs and perfect curves." She said contemptuously that they were made for "gambling halls, and barkeepers and Americans" (W & P 513-14, 844)
The Bathers+ (1884). #1901.458 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bathers is an example of Bouguereau's large-scale painting with colors nearly the same as those of Puvis de Chavannes, but not as chalky-looking. Cather saw these fleshy nudes with their enormous hands at the Art Institute.
Birth of Venus+ (1879). This oil on canvas was Bouguereau's first at the Luxembourg. It is now is at the Musée d'Orsay. See the Guide to the Musée d'Orsay. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987.
Also see Joslyn Art Museum's publication, European Paintings and Sculpture, pp. 87-90, for a biographical sketch of Bouguereau. Included is a description of Omahans' violent attack upon the nudity found in his Return of Spring+ exhibited there in 1890. Public controversy sent shock-waves throughout the Midwest, and probably influenced Cather in her tirade against Bouguereau's "sugary" nudes (Lincoln Courier 30 Oct. 1897: 3; W & P 512-14).
For interesting new light on Cather and Bouguereau see "A Chronicle of Crow Court," by W. Bert Foster in the Home Monthly (May 1897): 5-6. Actually the story has little to do with a huge reproduction of Bouguereau's Cupid on Guard pictured on p. 6. Perhaps Bouguereau's little nude angel is a compromise between his Gipsy and the Bathers. The previously undocumented story is I believe, one of Cather's. --W. Bert Foster is undoubtedly a Cather pseudonym and a word-play on Willa Si-Bert F. The story's title, "A Chronicle of Crow Court," echoes another signed Cather story of a similar name, "The Count of Crow's Court." It ran in the Sept./Oct. 1896 issues of Home Monthly [Crane C12]. Notice also her repeated use of the alliterative "c," and of word "Court" found in her stories, "The Clemency of the Court" [1893, Crane C6], and "A Night at Greenway Court [1896, Crane C9]. In the story the "Crow's Nest" was a boarding house similar to Cather's domicile in her early Pittsburgh years. Order "A Chronicle of Crow Court" through Inter-Library Loan from Pittsburgh Carnegie Library, West. Penn Room, 440 Forbes Ave, Pgh. PA 15213-4080; it is also available on microfilm (Home Monthly) in the Slote Collection, U of Nebraska-Lincoln Library, or at the Willa Cather Historical Center in Red Cloud NE.
Bower, Maurice L. Bower illustrated "Neighbor Rosicky" in a fitting rendition of a rural environment; however, the illustration in Part Two has a curious eighteenth-century headpiece by another artist below Bower's picture (Woman's Home Companion 57.4 and 5 (Apr.-May 1930): 7-9, 13-14 [Crane C57].
Bréton, Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis. French Realist painter and poet, b. Courrières, Pas-de-Calais 1827; d. 1906. In an 1875 letter Victor Hugo saluted Jules Bréton: "'It has been your lot, dear sir, to be doubly a poet: for you are like Lamartine, and also like Corot, you are a poet by your strophe and also by your palette'" (Jules Bréton: A Biographical Note by S. P. Avery, 1827: 21; this very old book was labeled a "Gift of Henry Field" to the Art Institute of Chicago; available at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries). The Song of the Lark (1884). #1894.1033 in the Henry Field Memorial Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, acq. 1894. Oil on canvas. 43 1/2" x 33 3/4". Listed as #1 and illus. in the Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896: 70, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.
Bréton's painting shows smooth brush strokes in the pink sky that is backlighted before an orange-red sun. His bosomy, barefooted peasant girl holds a curved sickle, or a reaping hook, to the right of her looped-up apron. Her mouth is open, as if she were singing as she looks up at a lark flying above her. Five other birds are in the background, along with haystacks, a green hayfield, and a red-roofed French houses and a country church in the distance.
Cather: "You will find hundreds of merchants and farmer boys all over Nebraska and Kansas and Iowa who remember Jules Bréton's beautiful 'Song of the Lark,' and perhaps the ugly little peasant girl standing barefooted among the wheat fields in the early morning have taught some of these people to hear the lark sing for themselves" ("Chicago Art Institute." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3; W & P 842-46 [Crane D532]).
Cather: "But in that same room there was a picture--oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her. That was a picture indeed. She liked even the name of it, 'The Song of the Lark.' The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl's heavy face--well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there. She told herself that that picture was 'right.' Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain. But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture" (SOL 179 [Crane A8]).
As in The Song of the Lark Bréton used raking light to define his rural figures, the peasants of Lorraine. Cather's love for this particular Bréton's painting was so great that she borrowed exactly the same title for her novel, The Song of the Lark (1915). Her readers may recall that Cather said that as a nine-year-old she would have "gone under," after seeing the Nebraska plains for the first time, had it not been for the song of the meadowlark. By 1932, however, she was evidently embarrassed by Bréton as an old-fashioned artist when she dismissed his The Song of the Lark as a "second-rate French painting in the Chicago Art Institute" (Preface to SOL xxxi [Crane A8.a.ii. (e)]. One reflects rather sadly on the fact that Cather removed Bréton's girl from the book-jacket since the novel and the painting seem interconnected. Bréton painted French peasants in the same poetic manner as Millet but unfortunately was always considered less gifted than the more famous Barbizon artist (Brettell, Richard. French Salon Artists 1800-1900. New York: Art Institute of Chicago-Abrams: 107).
See Rosowski, Susan J. "Willa Cather and the French Rural Tradition of Bréton and Millet: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia." Ed. Hollister Sturges. The Rural Vision: France and America in the Late Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987: 53-61.
Bréton did exhibit three paintings at the Carnegie 1902 International Exhibition. One was The Haymakers, loaned by Lawrence C. Phipps. In Paris Cather surely saw Bréton's wonderful Le rappel des glaneuses, or Calling the Gleaners Home (1859), which was acquired there in 1862, and is now at the M. d'Orsay. In the painting women and children are coming from the fields at golden light of dusk (in raking light). They have gathered bundles of wheat in a field filled with red poppies. The harvest master calls to the workers from the left.
For a surprising likeness to Bréton's girl in The Song of the Lark, see W. T. Benda's drawing of a bosomy Lena Lingard knitting in similar dress in My Ántonia (164-65). Cather's Jim Burden describes his dream of this Brétonesque girl with a curved sickel, or reaping-hook, and reveals even more about her.
Cather: "One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them. Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to me with a soft sigh and said, 'Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you as much as I like'" (MÁ 125).
See Gelfant, Blanche H. "The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia." American Literature 43 (Mar.): 60-82 [Arnold 1971.11]; Gelfant's article is also in Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984: 147-64. For more about the W. T. Benda illustrations see Schwind, Jean. "The Benda Illustrations to My Ántonia: Cather's 'Silent' Supplement to Jim Burden's Narrative." PLMA 100.1 (Jan.-May 1985): 51-67. Also see Murphy, John J. "Cather's Use of Painting." My Ántonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1989: 45-56.
Brewster, Earl. Painter, b. Chagrin Falls OH. Brewster studied at the Art Student's League and the New York School of Art (Who Was 76). James Woodress identifies Brewster as a mutual friend of Cather and D. H. Lawrence.
Brown, Arthur William. Brown illustrated "The Bookkeeper's Wife," with a lithograph in Century 92 (May 1916): 51 [Crane C48].
Brown, Ford Madox. English Pre-Raphaelite painter.
Chaucer at the Court of Edward III+. Now #2036 at the Tate Gallery, London. See WCE, p. 76.
Brush, George de Forest. American traditionalist painter, b. Shelbyville TN, 1855; d. Hanover NH, 1941. Brush studied with Gérôme in Paris and won recognition at Chicago's Columbian World's Fair in 1893.
The King and the Sculptor. #39 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue. Illus. in Art Journal 44 (Spr. 1984): 76.
The Silence Broken. Listed as #40 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue.
Cather considered Brush's entries "popular" because of their narrative interest (W & P 868). He painted a portrait called Thea (c. 1910) that could possibly be compared with the naming of Thea Kronborg in Song of the Lark (1915); however, it wasn't entered at the Carnegie until the Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition in 1926 (see p. 88, George de Forest Brush 1855-1941: Master of the American Renaissance. New York: Berry-Hill Gallery, 1985). Also see Caffin, Charles Henry. American Masters of Painting. New York: 1902: 1913.
Burne-Jones, Edward Coley Sir. English painter and water-colorist; designer of tapestries, stained-glass windows, woodcuts, and mosaics, b. Birmingham, 1833; d. 1898. Burne-Jones studied and worked with Dante Gabriel Rossetti while decorating the Oxford Union, University of Oxford, England. He later collaborated with William Morris on the Kelmscott Chaucer. Burne-Jones' Study for Chaucer's Dream owes much to Raphaël's Sleeping Knight, held at the National Gallery, London. Burne-Jones has been called a Classical-Renaissance, a Pre-Raphaelite, and a Symbolist painter, yet he has a literary and mythic style that is uniquely his own.
The Merciful Knight+. Listed as #35 in the 1896 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue. Now at the Birmingham Art Gallery where many Burne-Jones paintings are held [Chamberlain Square, Birmingham B3 3DH, England]. Also pictured in Whistler: A Retrospective. Ed. Robin Spencer. New York: Wings Books-Random, 1989: 73.
The Marriage of Psyche+ (1894-5). Now in Musée d'Art Moderne, Brussels. Psyche's Wedding+ was exhibited as #40, at the Second Carnegie International Exhibition, 1897. Presumably this Burne-Jones painting influenced a Cather short story, "The Marriage of Phaedra." The story echoes sections of her news article entitled "The Kensington Studio" which describes the Burne-Jones studio, London ("The Marriage of Phaedra." The Troll Garden [Crane A4; C36] 1905; WCE 70-79 [Crane D552] 1902).
Burne-Jones was one of a group of artists like Bréton, Millet, Manet, Courbet, Holbein, Puvis de Chavannes, et al., who unquestionably informed a specific Cather work. George N. Kates, former Curator for Oriental Art at the Brooklyn Museum, was astute in recognizing that in Cather's early work painting and painters inspired her writing. Kates stated that later in Cather's career she moved from art to music as her "vehicle":
Painting . . . was for her at first perhaps even the major art. It did not remain so, although it took a while for this fact to become clear. Meanwhile, she also made use of sculpture to strike a lyric note. . . . Architecture she ever deeply enjoyed, and she uses it, as the years go by. . . . It is music, finally, that she will make her vehicle, especially in her full-lenght novels. . . . She found that she could more effectively describe on paper how one was moved by a song or an aria to mark the development in some splendid plot, than by a canvas or a bas-relief. (Kates, George N. "London: Burne-Jones's Studio." Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey. With an Introduction and Incidental Notes by George N. Kates. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988: 68-69)
While I agree with Kates that Cather did move "in another direction," I disagree with him that she left the "good material among the painters" in writing her novels. I believe that she integrated visual allusions and painterly techniques more deeply into the fabric of her novels, often synthesizing "art" with the other major arts. I offer this Catalogue as my support for this argument and wish especially to point to her novels Alexander's Bridge, The Song of the Lark, Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. For an excellent overview of Cather's textual allusions that were derived from Burne-Jones' paintings, see Bernice Slote's introductory remarks in April Twilights (Cather, Willa. April Twilights (1903): Poems by Willa Cather. Ed. with introd. by Bernice Slote. 1962. Rev. ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1968). Cather spoke of Burne-Jones long before she visited his studio.
Cather: "[H]ow heavy and dark and Circe-like are those tones, such as the witch of the Aegean isle might have used when she turned Odysseus' comrades into swine, and that tall creature with the silver serpents and the terrible eyes was the woman to sing it. She [Clara Butt] is wonderfully like Burne-Jones' women, like those tall, angular, bloodless women with the sensuousness of the soul in their pale, worn cheeks, chained by a fever that is never fed. . . . She recalls a little the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and somewhat the sorrows and deadly verse of Baudelaire" (before her Europe trip, in the Courier Jan. 6 Jan. 1900: 2-3).
For criticism on Henry James as a literary artist who was influenced by art and for Burne-Jones as a Symbolist painter of The Wine of Circe, see Tintner, Adeline R. "The Gallery of Dreamers." The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Research P, 1986: 135-150.
Cather: "The walls were hung with photographs of the works of the best modern painters--Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Corot, and a dozen others. Above the mantel were delicate reproductions in color of some of Fra Angelico's most beautiful paintings. The rugs were exquisite in pattern and color, pieces of weaving that the Professor had picked up himself in his wanderings in the Orient" (WCCSF 283, "The Professor's Commencement." New England Magazine 26 June 1902: 481-88 [Crane C29], also written before Cather's trip to Europe in 1902; also see her "mystical effects that Burne-Jones and Rossetti worked into their paintings" (W & P 377). Then refer to Cather's London article, "The Kensington Studio," in which she refers to the following Burne-Jones paintings (WCE 70-79; W & P 917-20 [Crane D552]):
The Passing of Venus (c. 1898). #3453 is an unfinished watercolor on paper then laid on canvas, surrounded by a 3" gilt frame. 43 1/8" x 98 1/8". Shown in 1900 at Burne-Jones' studio called, The Grange. The Passing of Venus was purchased by the President and Council of the Royal Academy of Arts under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest in 1919 for the Tate Gallery [Millbank, London SW1P 4RG]. Aloof and remote, Venus in a gold dress carries her vermilion-red torch as she soars in her winged car above the twelve classical maidens below.
Cather: "The picture Burne-Jones was working on when he died hangs in the studio. It is called 'The Passing of Venus,' and the realization of it seems to have caused him not a few low moments, for there are many impatient studies for it in chalk and crayon, and three canvases which were nearly finished and then thrown aside as inadequate" (WCE 76).
The theme for The Passing of Venus was presumably derived from the Triumphs of Petrarch, but it also may relate to Chaucer's The Romaunt of the Rose. This huge, mystical work by Burne-Jones was intended as a cartoon for a proposed tapestry in the tradition of those woven at Merton Abbey. It has the visual quality of an enormous pastel drawing. Burne-Jones had painted an earlier version of The Passing of Venus in oil, c. 1870. See Harrison, Martin, and Bill Waters. Burne-Jones. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989, Color Plate #30, for a reproduction of The Passing of Venus in the version in oil.
One may see the original watercolor in the Tate Storage Houses by previous written arrangement through the Tate Gallery, but the light there is too poor for photography. Unfortunately there is no record of a Cather visit to the Tate Gallery. If she did visit there, and it seems highly probable that she did so, she could have seen Burne-Jones' impressive The Golden Stairs (c. 1872), along with the other Pre-Raphaelite and J. M. W. Turner paintings. [I am deeply indebted to David Fraser Jenkins, Director of the Tate Galleries British Collection, for a draft of the catalogue entry on The Passing of Venus, and for kindly arranging to see the watercolor-on-canvas while I was in London, 1991.]
Lady Burne-Jones wrote that her husband worked on the watercolor replica the day of his death, and so the Tate Gallery's watercolor-on-canvas is probably the version that Cather described seeing in the artist's studio. Yet there is some question as to whether or not it was possible for Cather to visit Burne-Jones' studio in 1902, when it was reportedly "cleared out" (W & P 912). If so, perhaps she saw Burne-Jones' paintings in Watts' studio since some of his works were moved there earlier or at Lord Leighton's House in Kensington (WCE 78; Burne-Jones, Georgia. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1904: esp. pp. 208, 331, 347-51).
In any case, Cather captures the mood in Burne-Jones' canvases succinctly: "There is something that speaks from every canvas or study on the studio wall, from the long-limbed languid women, the wide, far-seeing eyes, the astonishingly bold, yet always delicate and tender experiments in composition and colour scheme, which speak from no other canvas stretched in English land" (WCE 72).
For photographs see Burne-Jones, Georgia. Memorials: vol. 2, pp. 209 and 353, for Edward Burne-Jones in Garden Studio, from a photograph by Miss Barbara Leighton and The House Studio-June 18, 1898.
Cather: "Among the finished pictures are the Venus Concordia and the companion Venus Discordia, a series of panels depicting the adventures of Perseus, and a Blind Love" (WCE 73).
Venus Concordia. This unfinished oil was a Predella figure for The Story of Troy (a.k.a., The Troy Triptych). Now at Plymouth Art Gallery, England.
Venus Discordia. An unfinished oil, it is now at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
Perseus Series (1875-1885). The series concerns the perils of Perseus, son of Jove and Danaë, as he captures the head of the Gorgon Medusa and escapes her stone-giving stare; some were reworked in 1897 in a different style. Three drawings are at the Tate Gallery, London (#3456-57). Others are now in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany. Gouache cartoons for the set are at Southhampton Art Gallery (this information from Mr. Stephen Wildman, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Birmingham's Art Gallery, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham B3 3DH England. "Letter to author." 6 Feb. 1991). The original canvases in the Perseus series were meant to decorate the music room in Arthur Balfour's home in Carlton Gardens, London.
The Perseus Series predicts Cather's use of the 'Medusa' title for her collection of stories in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). Furthermore, the book's board binding (and its wrapper decorated in black) show clearly Medusa's head outlined in a dark blue holding up the title-bar [Crane A10]. Young Cather--not unlike young Perseus--had conquered her own bright Gorgon of fiction, and now triumphantly compiled her lively stories, like the wiggling serpents on Medusa's head, under the title Youth and the Bright Medusa.
Studies for Blind Love. At the Tate Gallery #4347 iii and iv; the pencil and charcoal drawing of Blind Love are in the Department of Prints and Drawings and Paintings, Victoria and Albert Museum; whereabouts of the original watercolor are unknown.
Chaucer, Burne-Jones' set of drawings for the Legend of Good Women and Chaucer Asleep (1864). Sketch #E 2885-1977 shows "Chaucer's Dream" [Burne-Jones' own title] is found in the Department of Prints and Drawings and Paintings, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The panel represents Burne-Jones' interest in composition, figure placement, and in the proportionment of the body. To the left of the sketch Chaucer reclines, dreaming, obviously affected by the red poppies that grow at the right. The cartoon, done in red and black pencil on toned paper, was designed for a window in the Parlor at Peterhouse, Cambridge. It was never executed. Other sketches in the Chaucer series were intended for tapestry designs and probably inspired a watercolor later owned by Lord Leighton. Perhaps Cather saw it at Leighton's Studio; it was called Chaucer's Dream (now #22 listed in the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Catalogue. Birmingham, England: Allday Ltd, Printers, 1913: 3). Burne-Jones' figure of Chaucer again appears in the William Morris edition of the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896).
Cather: "There," remarked James, "are the drawings Sir Edward made for Mr. Morris to illustrate the book of Chaucer. This set are for the Legend of Good Women, and there is Chaucer hisself lyin' asleep a-dreamin' of them" (WCE 74 [sic]).
For a surprisingly close prototype for Cather's fictional "James, the valet to the arts," in "The Kensington Studio" [Crane D552], see Burne-Jones Talking: His Conversations 189-1898 Preserved by His Studio Assistant Thomas Rooke. Ed. Mary Lago Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1981. Thomas M. Rooke was born in London in 1842 and died in his hundredth year. He kept these interesting journals while working with Burne-Jones (Lago 4).
It is conceivable that Cather saw an original copy of The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, often known as the Kelmscott Chaucer, at the University of Nebraska Library. Cather and Mary L. Jones, "acting librarian for the university," were close friends and traveled together to Chicago in 1895 (Woodress 102). That was just before the book was published in 1896 and while Cather was still in Nebraska until June or July of that same year. Although there is no firm acquisition date for the University of Nebraska's copy of The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, one may assume that if it were acquired near the time of publication, such a valuable edition would not go unnoticed by Cather, who so loved books.
For Chaucer Sleeping, see the Burne-Jones' woodcut for William Morris in "The Legend of Goode Wimmen, Prologue" (in red; print in black) from a decorated page (Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hammersmith: The Kelmscott Press, 1896: 416. Available at University of Nebraska, Love Library Special Collections, Lincoln, NE 68588/ Folio Pr 1850 1896).
An excerpt from a clipping accompanying the edition describes the Kelmscott's The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer as: "Folio, original white blind-stamped pigskin. 87 woodcut illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones; decorative borders by William Morris. Printed in Chaucer type. In a full morocco box. In an edition of 438 copies this is one of forty-six bound at the Doves Bindery to a design by Morris. It is the seminal work in the history of the modern private press, and one of the grandest illustrated books of the nineteenth century--here in its most desirable state, in the wholly appropriate binding Morris designed for the book" (The Artist and the Book 45) Its estimated value at the time was $23,500.
The side notes and headings are colored in red. "Besides Burne-Jones' eighty-seven pictures, it contains a full-page woodcut title, fourteen large borders, eighteen borders or frames for the pictures, and twenty-six large initial words. All of these, besides the ornamental initial letters large and small, were designed by Morris himself." The Life of William Morris by J. W. Mackall, v. 2: 326.
Chaucer, the dreaming poet who is turbaned and classically robed, lies on the grass with his right arm supporting his head. Two elegant angels look on. Lining the canyons near an ominously dark pool stand classical maidens in rows of diminishing scale. Entranced and dreamy, each awaits her turn to tell stories to the sleeping Chaucer. A Decorated Initial-"A" is surrounded by grape vines with swirling tendrils that spill onto this text which follows:
A thousand sythes have I herd
men telle,
That ther is joye in heven, and peyne in helle;
And I acorde wel that hit be so;
But nartheles, this wot I wel also,
That ther nis noon that dwelleth in this
contree,
That either hath in helle or heven ybe,
Ne may of hit non other weyes witen,
But as he hat herd seyd, or founde hit
writen;
for by assay ther may no man hit preve.
But goddes forbode, but men shulde leve
Wel more thing then men han seen with yë!
Men shal not wenen everthing a lyë
Got wot, a thing is never the lesse so
Thogh every wight ne may hit nat ysee.
Bernard the monk ne saugh nat al, parde!
Chaucer's passage is important because of his reference to "Bernard the monk"; Cather was interested in the "time of Abelard and St. Bernard" and had "read widely on the subject long before she came to write the Archbishop (Lewis 147). Toward the end of her life "[s]he turned almost entirely to Shakespeare and Chaucer that last winter" (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953: 196). Also see Robinson, Duncan. William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Chaucer. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1982. For Cather's Chaucerian allusions see, Stouck, Mary-Ann, "Chaucers's Pilgrims and Cather's Priests." Colby Library Quarterly 9 (June) 1973: 531-37 [Arnold 1972.30]; and also see Haller, Evelyn. "The Iconography of Vice in Willa Cather's My Ántonia." Colby Library Quarterly 14 (June) 1978.14: 93-102 [Arnold 1978.14].
The largest collection of Burne-Jones' work is held in Birmingham, England; see the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Catalogue of the Permanent Collection of Drawings In Pen, Pencil, Charcoal and Chalk, etc., Including Cartoons for Stained Glass. Derby: Bemrose & Sons, 1939. Another useful guide for prints in England is A Guide to the Print Rooms in the United Kingdom and Eire. Prepared by the Department of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Paintings. London: June 1985; it is available at the Print Room, Victoria and Albert Museum. At the British Museum Print Room there is a marvelous Burne-Jones Sketchbook, on Michallet paper showing rondels done in watercolor, pastel, and conté, all bound together by hand-covered boards of natural Linen (#200 at the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum [Great Russell Street, London WC1 3DG, England]). Burne-Jones' work more than hints of Botticelli and his excellent Sketchbook exhibits the highest quality in materials and draftsmanship.
Also see Sewter, A. C. The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle. Yale, 1975. for a possible example of a Burne-Jones mermaid. For the "Merry Mermaid" see Burne-Jones, Georgia. Memorials: v. 2, pp. 195-198. The Merry Mermaid, shown on p. 198; for more about her, see p. 307. Perhaps the "study for the Mermaid" that Cather saw was a sea-nymph in Perseus and the Graiae, but not enough information is given to be sure.
Canfield, Flavia. Flavia Canfield was an American amateur painter, wife of University of Nebraska Chancellor James Hulm Canfield, and mother of novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Flavia Canfield painted at least two oil sketches of Willa Cather (Canfield Collection of Letters, Guy Bailey Memorial Library, the University of Vermont [TS 24]. Canfield-Fisher, Dorothy. "Letter to Cather." 26 [?] Oct. 1922, paraphrased in Slote Collection, U of Nebraska-Lincoln). See Lovering, Joseph P. "The Friendship of Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield." Vermont History 48 (Summer 1980): 144-54. Also see Madigan, Mark J. "Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Literary Correspondence." Thesis. University of Vermont, May 1987; and also Madigan's Introd., especially pp. 11-13, in Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Ed. Mark J. Madigan. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993.
A Tennis Player, A Duet, The Morning Prayer, and Soldiers. Cather mentions Flavia Canfield's paintings in her regular column, "As You Like It." Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1895: 13. Appearing on the same page is Jane Archer's review, "Among the Pictures," and also William Reed Dunboy's, "The Art Exhibit." Cather probably wrote all three reviews on the Haydon Art Club Exhibit. She stated that on Sundays she usually wrote four columns and received a dollar for each one [Arnold 1921.21]; W & P 124-7). Often times a regular reporter filled out a page while writing under the guise of such pseudonyms. Flavia Canfield's granddaughter states that an attic fire destroyed some of the Canfield family property, and possibly these paintings were included. To the best of her knowledge the whereabouts of the paintings are unknown ("Letter to author." 22 Apr. 1991).
Elements in Cather's story, "Flavia and Her Artists," should be compared to those in Cather's early play, "A Sentimental Thanksgiving Dinner." This latter work hints of Cather's disdain toward those so intensely devoted to the visual arts, in particular Flavia Canfield who had lived and traveled abroad. Cather's narrator said, "I met American women who drifted into Rome, but they were all one of two kinds, either they had studied art in Paris and were 'doing' Italy, or talked incessantly of art and impressionists and Corot or Bouguereau" ("A Sentimental Thanksgiving Dinner." Hesperian 22 (24 Nov. 1892): 4-7).
These words fit Flavia Canfield, a sophisticated American woman who pursued the arts with documented fervor. Another character in the play, a Miss Kelley, describes Cather herself. This character reads all of Ruskin and desperately "commits to memory the name of the painter of every picture she sees, and the date of his birth and death" (Hesperian 5).
Cather, a small town girl, probably felt intimidated by her cosmopolitan friends, the Canfields, the Geres, and the Pound family. Her painful self-consciousness about art reveals itself in her play. It's interesting to note that after a public tiff with Flavia Canfield about Cather's following remarks, the young reporter found it necessary to change the title of her newspaper column from "Utterly Irrelevant," to "As You Like It."
Cather: "One of the best pictures at the fair was a copy of a Corot by Miss [Cora] Parker. . . . The fact is that half of the crazy stuff that is sent about to state and county fairs is just a kind of fancy work on canvas, with which dear old ladies are wont to console their loneliness, when they had far better employ themselves with poodle dogs and parrots" ("Art Exhibits at the State Fair" in "Utterly Irrelevant," NSJ 16 Sep. 1894: 13. Unsigned. Also in KA 183, 362; W & P 976; [Crane D80]). Cora Parker taught painting at the University of Nebraska.
For Cather's story of a dilettante artist based on Flavia Canfield, see "Flavia and Her Artists." The Troll Garden (1905), pp. 1-54 [Crane C34]; also in WWCSF 149-172. Also see Rosowski, Susan J. "Prototypes for Willa Cather's 'Flavia and Her Artists': The Canfield Connection." American Notes and Queries 23 (May-June 1985): 143-45.
For more on the Canfields' objection to Cather's Hawthornesque story, "The Profile," see Bynner, Witter. "A Willa Cather Triptych." New Mexico Quarterly 23 (Autumn): 330-38 [Arnold 1953.5]; and found also in Bynner's manuscript concerning the troubled publication of "The Birthmark" ["The Profile"]--a bitter story about a French painter and his disfigured wives (Bynner, Witter. bMS Am 1891.4 (186), pp. 3 and 4 for "A Willa Cather Triptych." Houghton Library, Harvard University).
For a related essay see Madigan, Mark J. "Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Rift, Reconciliation, and One of Ours." Cather Studies Volume I. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 115-129. See Taylor in this Catalogue for befitting illustrations for "The Profile."
Canute's Carvings.
Cather: "The strangest things in the shanty were the wide window sills. At first glance they looked as through they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt its sting. . . . The skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of eternal hate" ("On the Divide." Overland Monthly 27 (Jan. 1896): 65-74 [Crane AA7]; WCCSF 494-504, my italics).
The carvings by the character, Canute Canuteson, in "One the Divide" are extremely important since they proclaim in a textual-visual metaphor of Cather's perception of herself. Compared artistically to painter Flavia Canfield, she felt as clumsy as Canute. Perhaps there is a sign in the very name, Canute, which sounds like cannot.
Throughout the canon of her fiction Cather used similar thematic devices, like those of Canute's carvings, in defining a character by her or his knowledge of the visual arts. For example in her 1903 story "A Death in the Desert," the urbane character Adriance Hilgarde is artistically elevated as sketches Spain's Moorish arches. Cather writes: "The subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten" (WCCSF 212, [Crane C31]). See Stewart, D. H. "Cather's Mortal Comedy." Queen's Quarterly 17 (1965): 244-59. For Cather's early exposure to art see Cather and Canfield in this Catalogue.
There is some question as to whether or not Cather even conceived the idea for Canute's drawings in the story. She stated later that her college professor had invented the idea for the drawings. But as in "One the Divide," Cather's reference to a "Dance of Death" or a series of pictures recurs in her writing. As late as 1931 she described Shadows on the Rock as "a series of pictures remembered." Aside from that, Canute's drawings do embody a painful and appropriate metaphor for Cather's deepest feelings, ones that she surely tried to hide. Furthermore the Dance of Death appears over and over in her work. See Woodress James. "Willa Cather's Biography." Cather Studies, Volume I. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 110.
On the other hand the carvings do reflect the primitive yet expressive thoughts from the depths of Canute Canuteson's darkest mentality, and in actual spirit the carvings pertain to Holbeins's wood-engravings of "Death Goes Forth," found in his volume Dance of Death. Unfortunately, Cather's reference to the source for the title of Death Comes for the Archbishop was changed, posthumously, from "Dürer's Dance of Death" to Holbein's Dance of Death (OW 11 [Crane AA2]). Earlier Cather's citation for the title was given to the Dürer Dance of Death (Commonweal 7 ( 27 Nov. 1927) [Crane D587]). To date, no one has pinpointed exactly who changed the source from Dürer to Holbein, either Cather or her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf (for Slote's comments this perplexing mix-up see KA 96). After searching at length and finding no appropriate visual counterwork by Dürer, for the purposes of this study I shall accept Holbein as the artist for the title-source. Indeed, I will argue even further that Cather did not limit Holbein's Dance of Death to the title of Death Comes for the Archbishop but to the very formation of her characters as well. In his Dance of Death Hans Holbein included a Ploughman, as did Canute, and there are other visually related themes to the story such as his engravings of The Temptation and The Bones of All Men. See Holbein in this Catalogue.
Carnegie Art Museum. Andrew Carnegie organized the Annual Exhibition in 1896, only one year after the Venice Biennale and the same year that Willa Cather moved to Pittsburgh. American and European artists exhibited forty paintings in a Juried competetion. The Carnegie Museum often purchased prize-paintings for its own galleries; others were lent by private collectors.
Cather: "Paderewski's theory of buying pictures and getting people to look at them has been exemplified in at least three cities in the United States: New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh. As a result those three cities contain nearly all the important private collections in the United States."
"There is no reason why Pittsburgh, for instance, should display any greater interest in art than Kansas City or Denver or Omaha or San Francisco. It is not a city of culture; the city is entirely given over to manufacturing industries, and the only standard of success recognized the the pecuniary standard. But one thing Carnegie did; he bought pictures and got people to look at them" (W & P 843).
Carter, Pruett. Pruett illustrated twelve dramatic pictures for Cather's "Lucy Gayheart," in Woman's Home Companion. His work was printed amidst a bevy of pictorial advertisements (Mar.-July 1935) [Crane CCC5]. Curiously the character's clothing suggests the "thirties" rather than the early nineteen-hundreds, the period in which the novel is set.
Cather, Willa as Illustrator.
My premise that Cather was at times her own illustrator finds support in her letter to Ferris Greenslet concerning the W. T. Benda drawings for My Ántonia. In the letter Cather wrote that she didn't want illustrations for My Ántonia unless they were done by W. T. Benda who was himself an Old World artist--typically Cather voiced her own preferences for any drawings that accompanied her work. In closing Cather admitted to Greenslet that she had even tried to draw the head- and tailpieces herself (Cather, Willa. "To Mr. Greenslet. 18 Oct. 1917. Houghton Mifflin Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University).
Consequently, I believe that a series of drawings were done by Cather herself while she was the Literary Editor of The Hesperian, at the University of Nebraska. Her drawings were done in the style of Elihu Vedder, an artist whom she greatly admired at that time; perhaps she identifies herself as an illustrator in the following passage:
Cather: "Without encouragement or appreciation of any sort, without models or precedents he built up that pure style of his that is without peer in the language, that style of which every sentence is a drawing by Vedder" (KA 385, Courier 12 Oct. 1895: 6-7, my italics).
Here is a partial list of some of the illustrations:
(1) This hilarious Frontispiece was drawn by a woman's hand, as shown by the ruffled sleeve, at a time when Cather was the only woman on the Hesperian staff. Pictured is a yokel ogling a nude statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with captions. See Hesperian 24 Nov. 1892: Frontispiece, 10, 12.
(2) In the same issue one should note the markedly linear head- and tailpieces for Cather's story, "Peter." Hesperian 22 Dec. 1892: 8 [Crane C1].
(3) See also the linear and curvey lines drawn for the Egyptian sketches that illustrate Cather's story, "A Tale of the White Pyramid." Hesperian 22 Dec. 1892: 11 [Crane C3].
(4) A Decorative Initial introduced Cather's first illustrated story, "On the Divide." Overland Monthly 27 (Jan. 1896): 65 [Crane C8]. The same hand as noted above drew the Decorated Initial-"N" that is intertwined with skull and smoking candle. See Canute's Carvings in this Catalogue.
Cather has now left Nebraska but the repetitive, linear-style drawing reappears:
(5) above the "Odds and Ends" headpiece in The Library 16 June 1900: 6, Pittsburgh,
(6) and in the headpieces for "The Affair at Grover Station." The Library 16 June 1900: 3 [Crane C24],
(7) and once more in "The Dance at Chevalier's." Library 28 Apr. 1900: 12 [Crane C22].
(8) Also see "The Conversion of Sum Lou." The Library 11 Aug. 1900: 4 [Crane C24].
(9) And finally see the feathery, linear head- and tailpiece for "The Joy of Nelly Deane." Century 82 (Oct. 1911): 859 [Crane C44].
(10) Note that the Dwiggins' drawings in My Mortal Enemy show a similar linear style which Cather undoubtedly approved or even demanded.
Cézanne, Paul+. French painter, b. Aix-en-Provence, 1839; d. there, 1906. Cather never wrote about Cézanne, but she knew his work from the Luxembourg Museum, and other Paris Galleries. He was not invited to a Carnegie International. Yet Cézanne probably characterized Cather's unnamed and abbreviated artist, "C---," with whom Don Hedger had painted in the South of France ("Coming, Eden Bower!" [Crane C54]); some of Cézanne's most famous pictures were painted in the South at L'Estaque.
L'Estaque (View of the Gulf of Marseilles)+. Entered Luxembourg in 1896, illus. #261 in Musée National du Louvre: Peintures École Française XIX Siècle. 4 vols. Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1959. Also, L'Estaque (c 1888) is held by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Le Vase Bleu+. Isaac de Camondo Collection at the Louvre in 1908. Illus. #264 in M. Louvre. Accordingly Walter Tittle said about Cather, "I was amazed at her accurate memory of the pictures in the Commondo [sic] collection in the Louvre" (WCP 85).
The painting Le Vase Bleu relates to Cather's discussion of Ántonia: "I want my new heroine to be like this--like a rare object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides. She moved the lamp so that light streamed brightly down on my Taormina jar, with its glazed orange and blue design" (Sergeant p. 139, quoted in 1916).
Pommes et Oranges+. Also in Isaac Camondo Collection. Illus. #269 in M. Louvre. Note Cather's own Cézannesque words in 1921: "Just as if I put here on the table a green vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which neither of them will produce alone" (WCP 23).
In 1861 Cézanne moved to Paris, following his friend Emile Zola. Soon the littérateur Zola wrote L'Oeuvre, a novel in which his character primarily described Cézanne. After being rejected by art critics and feeling insulted by Zola, Cézanne left Paris permanently around 1870 for Aix-on-Provence and L'Estaque, in the south of France. Interestingly, Cather had this to say about the
writing of Zola:
Cather: "He tells you about color and shape and size, the calix and the corolla, and the shape of the leaves. But he writes like a botanist, not a poet. Out of all his mass of floral detail you never catch a whiff of fragrance or a flash of color" (NSJ 30 Dec. 1894: 13; W & P 141).
At first Cézanne painted southern France's landscapes in the open-air in an Impressionistic fashion. Curiously he became more and more concerned with form than line, an effect not really found in nature. He began to apply his now-famous broad, flat brush strokes. He termed his work "research" and constructed geometric shapes--cones, cubes, cylinders, and spheres into the composition of his painting. He interlocked "brick-like" planes of color and form. Cézanne's techniques soon spawned and resulted in a new movement in art called Cubism that completely broke with the traditional Academic methods of the past. See Vollard, A. Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1920. For a Cézannesque influence on Cather's portrait see Bakst in this Catalogue.
Chase, William Merritt. American painter and teacher, b. Nineveh IN, 1849; d. New York City, 1916. Chase first studied art in Indianapolis; he then moved to New York City as a pupil and later became a member of the National Academy of Design. Chase spent five years in Munich where he was a Member of "The Secession," a group of painters.
When Willa Cather was an impressionable twenty-year-old in Lincoln, Chase acted as an Awards' Jurist at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Exposition was the pivotal event for bringing art to the American public. For a short time Chase instructed at the Art Institute of Chicago, but he later moved to the Art Student's League in New York City. (American painter Georgia O'Keeffe studied at both places.) In 1896 Chase opened his own art school in New York City. For similarities in Cather and O'Keeffe's artistic style see Duryea, Polly. "Cather and O'Keeffe: Spirits of the Southwest." Kansas Quarterly 19.4 (Fall 1987): 27-40.
What Did You Say? or "Did You Speak to Me?" Chase's painting is now in Toledo. His subject is his young daughter, Alice. Cather's review is in "A Philistine." Library 21 Apr. 1900: 8-9 [Crane D487]. She also mentions What Did You Say? in her column, "Pittsburgh People and Doings." Home Monthly 1.21 (28 July 1900): 7-10 [Crane D487]; W & P 764).
Alice+. Listed as #226 in the Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896: 10, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Alice was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; also see the catalogue, Official World's Columbian Exposition: The Art Gallery Illustrated. Ed. by Charles M. Kurtz. Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1893: 237, illustrated.
Cather: "Pretty little girls daintily posed and painted with exquisite refinement of color have as good a right to exist in the catholic kingdom of art as the pale, primeval shades of Puvis de Chavannes" ("Chase." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3 [Crane D532]; W & P 842. Here Cather probably refers to either Alice or What Did You Say?).
Japanese Print. Listed as #51 and illus. in 1901-02 Carnegie Loan Exhibition Catalogue. The painting is now in Munich. Chase paintings The Open Japanese Book #59, and The Japanese Book #60, were listed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1901. Although Chase was not a modernist, these entries imply an influence from seventeenth-century Japanese wood blocks which were so popular in Paris. Whistler, Manet, and Monet made use of techniques from Ukiyo-e prints.
Cather: "Both girls heartily admired Chase's 'Japanese Print.' Surely Chase has the trick of pleasing if ever a man had it; 'the fatal trick of pleasing,' the young art student terms it, with a curl of his lip, but he has an old grudge against Chase because he pleases so unfailingly and paints so well. Chase never painted a bad thing, and the young art student knows it, yet nobody calls him crazy, and American millionaires buy his pictures, therefore, he is a thorn in the flesh of unappreciated genius" ("The Philistine." Pittsburgh Gazette 17 Nov. 1901: 5 [Crane D536]; W & P 867).
Tenth Street Studio+ (1881-06). Then and now at Carnegie, acq. 1917.#22. Oil on canvas. 14" x 66". For an illustration, see "The Inner Studio Tenth Street," in Antiques 130 (Aug. 1986): 278. In 1917 the Carnegie purchased Chase's huge, impressive painting that seems to inform several of Cather's short stories. She was especially keen on his work.
Chase opened an actual working studio located at 51 West Tenth Street, New York City, in 1898. This studio was increasingly popular with his public until Chase closed it in 1900. Interestingly, Bartley Alexander, the protagonist in Alexander's Bridge, occupied a similar West Tenth Street Studio that once belonged to a "portrait-painter of international renown" (AB 105). Cather probably realized that Tenth Street location would act as a signal to sophisticated New Yorkers who remembered the Chase Studio. Cather even described Alexander's Bridge as being "very like what painters call a studio picture" (OW 91 [Crane D589], my italics).
The acquisition date by the Carnegie for Chase's Tenth Street Studio is too late to claim a correlation either to Bartley Alexander's studio-apartment (Alexander's Bridge), or to Kitty Ayrshire's painting of Lucien Simon's studio that hung in her nearby apartment, in Cather's short story, "Scandal" [Crane C52]. It is possible, however, that Cather may have known a reproduction of Tenth Street Studio, or various other paintings of the studio. For example the Brooklyn Museum of Art holds Chase's related painting, In the Studio. See Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York City: Artabras, 1984: 124-48.
As a writer Cather used some of the verbal techniques that imitate at least one aspect of Chase's painted compositions--his repeated use of pictures or mirrors within the outer frame. In constructing Bartley Alexander's studio, Cather used gilt-framed paintings, image-reflecting mirrors, and space-extending windows very like Chase did in his work around 1905. Chase owed part of this approach to Velázquez, Manet, and Whistler. Earlier on, these artists often incorporated other framed images within the canvas frame itself. In writing an analogous technique, one that employs narrative and/or iconic visuals in textual composition, was often used by Cather's literary ideal Henry James (for wishing to write like James see Cather, in WCP 37).
In a subsequent use of "framing within frames," the window in Bartley Alexander's studio anticipates Cather's animated, structural "open-window," in The Professor's House (1925). Here, the wind actually blows through the window. And as if she extrapolated the technique, Cather's structure in the novel contains a framed "novella" within the larger compositional frame of the "romance." In 1940 she described "Tom Outland's Story" as "the window" (OW 30 [Crane D595]). By explaining her textual structure in an analogous visual and musical context, Cather added that the "arrangement" resembled a Dutch genre painting, one that included a framed open window contained within the larger picture: "I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air . . . " (OW 31).
That "air" in that 1938 quote recalls the dedicatory poem to Isabelle McClung in The Song of the Lark (1915) by Cather. That was the year of her Southwestern vacation to the Blue Mesa. Once again Cather expresses herself in a correspondance of the major arts that combines painting, musical, architecture, and her own poetry:
On uplands,
At morning,
The world was young, the winds were free;
A garden fair,
In that blue desert air,
Its guest invited me to be.
See Rosowski, Susan J. and Bernice Slote. Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: "The Genesis of The Professor's House." Prairie Schooner 58.4 (Winter 1984): 81-92.
A Friendly Call+. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. This Chase painting recalls the women who gather together in My Mortal Enemy (1926). Cather, like Chase, used the framed image over and over again. As an example of a picture inside Cather's textual one that Nellie Birdeye remembers while visiting "very large rooms, much upholstered and furnished, walls hung with large paintings in massive frames, and many stiff, dumpy little sofas, in which women sat two-and-two, while the men stood about the refreshment tables, drinking champagne and coffee and smoking fat black cigars" (My Mortal Enemy 50).
It's not just a coincidence that Nellie Birdseye first sees Myra Driscoll Henshawe framed through a hallway door, and then again framed closer, dramatically reflected in a large mirror (MME 11). Cather actually described herself as a writer who painted Myra Henshawes's portrait from the reflected images as seen in the mirrors that were placed around the room (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Pendleton Hogan." 5 Feb. 1940. Willa Cather Collection. Alderman Library, University of Virginia 22903-2498).
Formerly the traditional view of the perspective was built on the Renaissance "vanishing-point"--like those of Chase or found in Dutch genre paintings, but this method was abandoned by Post-Impressionist artists as they set their broken planes in two-dimensional space lacking perspectival constraint. Aware of the Post-Impressionist method, Cather credited Stephen Crane for his early use of lack of "design" and undetailed "collections of impressions," and compared them to the techniques used later by the "Post-Impressionists," i.e., Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Van Gogh ("Stephen Crane's Wound in the Rain" OW 69 [Crane DD9]).
Correspondingly, Cather's reflections of Myra-in-the-mirror no longer show the traditional "window-perspective" but now define her manifold personality in fractured images that touch the Freudian subconscious. These distorted images recall Picasso's contorted and subverted subjects like those in his rendition of The Three Musicians+. His painting entered the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 1921, the same year that Cather wrote My Mortal Enemy. Her portrait of Myra Henshawe is one of a complex woman with an artistic personality; one tortured by a hasty marriage that deprived her from Church tradition and led her to a solitary death. Myra Henshawe seems reflected the following passage.
Cather: "Back in the beginning of art, when art was intertwined inseparably with religion there had to be great preparation for its ceremonials. The creature who hoped for an uplifted moment often endured privation in preparation for that moment" (from her speech at Bowdoin College just before publication of My Mortal Enemy; printed in the Christian Science Monitor (15 May 1925): 5).
Chabaud, Auguste Elisé+. French painter, b. 1882; d. ?. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant portrait (c. 1912-13). She said, "[M]y portrait was painted by a Cubist from a vine-yard---un sauvage, a wild man, he called himself, a "Fauve," who had already exhibited in New York" (Sergeant 60).
"Willa was intrigued, especially by the Cubist. She determined I should expound modern art to her" (Sergeant 98).
See Armory Show for Chabaud and Cubism. For an insightful essay on Cather's composition as it related to successive painters, see French, Warren. The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1974: 238-47.
Chiaroscuro is a descriptive Italian term applied to the opposition of light and shade in painting. It is known in French by the term clair-obscur. The painterly technique is primarily associated with Rembrandt, Velásquez, or Caravaggio. For Cather's use of it see "Light on Adobe Walls" in OW [Crane AA2, DDD10]. Also see Woods, Lucia. "Light and Shadow in the Cather World: A Personal Essay." Great Plains Quarterly 4.4 (1984): 245-263.
Cluny Tapestry. Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are found in the Chapel of the Cluny Musée du Moyen Age which is housed in the Hôtel de Cluny (1485-98) [6, Place Paul Painievé, 75005 Paris]. Edith Lewis stated that Cather used copies of the Cluny tapestries as inspiration while working on Shadows on the Rock: "One day she [Cather] went out and bought some full-size copies of the Lady and Unicorn tapestries which hang in the Cluny, and had them hung at the foot of her bed, so that when she was reading in bed at night she could look up at them instead of the blank hotel walls" (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York City: Knopf, 1953: 158).
The Cluny Museum's Lady and the Unicorn tapestries may well be the "series of pictures remembered rather than experienced" that Cather recollected while describing Shadows on the Rock (Letter to Governor Wilbur Cross in On Writing 15 [Crane D590]). The Cluny Tapestries are a more credible artistic influence on Cather's dark Medieval novel than the light, airy "pastels of Latour or Watteau." See Cross, Wilbur. "Review of Shadows on the Rock." Saturday Review of Literature 8 (22 Aug. 1931: 67-68) [Arnold 1931.15].
The very term "Rock" suggests the solidity and scale of cold Medieval castles and the huge tapestries on the walls in France. Wealthy men, like M. le Count de Frontenac, carried them across the Atlantic to Canada: "They [tapestries] were from his estate at Île Savary and represented garden scenes. One could study them for hours without seeing all the flowers and figures" (SOR 59). A tapestry's large scale and two-dimensional plane enabled Cather to weave the verbal ins-and-outs, the ups-and-downs of Quebec's winding streets and hills.
Cather: "Divest your mind of Oriental colour, and you saw here very much such a mountain rock, cunningly built over with churches, convents, fortifications, gardens, following the natural irregularities of the headland on which they stood; some high, some low, some thrust up on a spur, some nestlings in a hollow, some sprawling unevenly along a declivity. . . . Not one building on the rock was on the same level with any other,--and two hundred feet below them all was the Lower Town, crowded along the narrow strip of beach between the river's edge and the perpendicular face of the cliff. The Lower Town was so directly underneath the upper Town that one could stand on the terrace of the Château Saint-Louis and throw a stone down the narrow street below" (SOR 5-6).
See Stouck, David for a paraphrase of Cather's letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher comparing Shadows to a tapestry, plus Stouck's comments about Cather's tapestry-like structure. Willa Cather's Imagination. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1975: 153. For an opposing look at Shadows as a "fresco--beautiful, pale and rightly alien to the novel form," see Chamberlain, John. "Willa Cather's Tale of Canada." New York Times Book Review 2 Aug. 1921: Section 4, p. 1.
Taken as a whole series of hangings, the famous Cluny Tapestry was "discovered in 1844 by the famous novelist George Sand, in the château at Boussac. . . . Thirty-nine years later, it was acquired by the Cluny Museum" (Erlande-Brandenburg, Alain. Lady and the Unicorn. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1979: 11). Commissioned by Jean Le Viste between 1484 and 1500, the original weaver and number of tapestries are unknown. In George Sand's article in L'Illustration (1847), she refers to eight hangings, yet she does not re-state a specific number in her novel entitled Jeanne. The Cluny Museum [and Prosper Merimée] found only six tapestries available for acquisition (Erlande 67).
The Cluny Tapestries may in some obscure way be related to The Hunting of the Unicorn. This set of tapestries is held by the Cloisters Museum in New York City (Joubert 77) Cather probably saw the New York Tapestries, and the magnificent others at Isabelle Gardner's Boston home comparing them to the Cluny Tapestries in Paris. See "La tenture de la Dame à la Licorne" for superior color illustrations in Joubert, Fabienne. La tapisserie médiévale au musée de Cluny. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987: 66-92.
The mystery about the iconographical interpretation of the tapestries has changed throughout the years. A 1907 critic favored comparing the tapestries to the legend of a captive, love-struck prince, named Zizim. Other critics have identified the Lady with the Virgin Mary, and the Unicorn with Christ. In as much as Cécile symbolically carries the Holy Family Crèche to the New World on a ship called La Licorne (The Unicorn), I assume Cather adopted the latter interpretation concerning the tapestries. That assumption, however, does not exclude the possibility that Cather was familiar with other theories. Ironically some recent speculations see the tapestries as an "unspecified doctrine of the Cathare sect" (Joubert 67).
A third interpretation of the tapestries suggests double symbolism: First, that the Lady demonstrates the five senses, a view generally acknowledged by modern critics; Second, that the hangings seem to enact an allegory for a proposal of marriage. If one uses the marital interpretation, then the Lady gradually accepts the Unicorn as her suitor throughout the five tapestries. The Lion represents the Lady's happy father who sees the Unicorn as an acceptable suitor. The sixth tapestry, A Mon Seul Désire, is placed in the center of the set and indicates the Lady's freewill in her choice of a spouse (Joubert 81). In any case, Medieval symbolism is often read on several levels. For more about Christ portrayed as a Unicorn see Mâle, Emile. The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century). 1913. Trans. Dora Nussey. New York: Icon-Harper, 1972: 40.
It is generally agreed that the five views of the Lady represent the five senses--Taste, Smell, Seeing, Hearing, and Touch. The sixth tapestry either introduces or concludes the theme. I suggest that the following as Cather allusions that are embedded in Shadows on the Rock and that they correspond directly to the senses associated with Unicorn and the Lady. Indeed, the elegance and delicacy found in the Lady pictorially mirrors the carefully nurtured virtues that Cécile Auclair received from her sainted mother. Cather's characters Cécile and Jacques tie respectively to figures who are associated with religious conversions as found in the works of Chaucer ("The Second Nun's Tale") and Shakespeare (As You Like It; W & P 720). Moreover, the "virgin-saint" Cécile miraculously converts Jacques to the priesthood in a "marriage" to the Church:
1. Cécile is la Dame, or the Virgin Mary, and Jacques represents la Licorne, the Christ-figure, in a tapestry-like setting that takes place in or near the Church (SOR 63, 69). Cécile whispers the story of St. Anthony of Padua to Jacques.
Cluny Tapestry entitled L'Ouie (Hearing).
2. "Cécile told Jacques that she had found in her Lives of the Saints the picture of a little boy who looked very much like him." The little boy is St. Edmond, Archbishop of Cantorbéry, the Mother-Church of England (SOR 84). In this passage Cather connects the new Canadian Church to the Mother-Church in England, France, and Rome.
Cluny Tapestry entitled La Vue (Seeing).
3. Cécile offers Jacques chocolate from her silver cup [The Chalice], and "his nostrils quivered like a puppy's" (SOR 86).
Cluny Tapestry entitled L'Odorat (Smell).
4. Cécile carried her crèche from France on La Licorne (SOR 102). Jacques is afraid to "touch" the figures and the animals in the Nativity set (SOR 107).
Cluny Tapestry entitled La Toucher (Touch).
5. "Cécile and Jacques sat down on the Cathedral steps to eat their goûter" (SOR 99).
Cluny Tapestry entitled Le Goût (Taste).
6. Cécile's 'sacred' silver cup prefigures the chalice that Jacques will use when he becomes a priest (SOR 87).
Cluny Tapestry entitled A Mon Seul Désire indicates a desire for freewill. Cécile tells Jacques the story of the religious recluse, Jeanne Le Ber. The telling in turn works the miracle for his desire to become priest. "The people have loved miracles . . . because they are the actual flowering of desire" (SOR 137).
In Shadows on the Rock (1931) Cather essentially adopts expressive allusions that hint of the Symboliste Movement, used by French novelists Gustave Flaubert in Salammbô, and later by Marcel Proust, in the most direct manner, in À la recherche du temps perdu (Lehmann 75, 124, 135). There continues to be disagreement about the blurred boundaries of the Symbolist movement, and who was actually a Symbolist writer or painter, and who was not (Lehmann 17, 35, 75). Most scholars agree that Mallarmé was the leader of the original French Symbolist movement.
In general terms the symbolist style of writing often takes a corresponding word to form a freighted substitution that may be defined in a variety of ways. For instance, one could express a character's trait by using a lily as a sign for sanctity, or even sanctimony. Cather did so in naming Miss Lily Fisher in The Song of the Lark (57). A symbolist engages in successive, often mystical imagaic metaphors, allegories, abstractions, or invested signs to produce a "confusion between the perception of the different senses." Cather readily employed this technique in the previous passages that concern Cécile and Jacques. These writing techniques were clearly defined by Edmund Wilson, a sometime critic of Cather's books, the same year that she wrote Shadows on the Rock (Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. 1931. New York City: Scribner's, 1969: 13-21, passim.
For a tighter definition see Lehmann, A. G. The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1885. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950: 212, 306. For a longer Classical view of related arts see Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1958: passim.
Cootes, F(rank) Graham. New York City portrait painter and illustrator for leading magazines, b. Staunton VA, 1879. He studied with Chase and Robert Henri, one of "The Eight" who exhibited at the Carnegie (Who Was 130).
Cootes illustrated "Alexander's Masquerade" as it appeared in McClure's 38 (Feb., Mar., and Apr. 1912) [Crane CCC1]. Cather considered his sentimental, magazine-style illustrations for "Alexander's Masquerade" loathsome (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Zoe Akins." Mar. 14, 1912. The original letter is at the Huntington Library CA. It is also paraphrased in the Slote Collection, U of Nebraska Library). Despite Cather's opinion of him, four of Cootes' illustrations were used in her England publisher's edition entitled Alexander's Bridges (1912) [Crane-A5.a.i.(e)].
Constant, see Benjamin-Constant in this Catalogue.
Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille. French painter, b. 1796; d. Paris, 1875. One of the last Romantic painters who painted periodically at Barbizon and the Fontainbleau from 1822 to 1873 (Barbizon Revisited. Essay and Catalogue by Robert L. Herbert. New York City: Clarke & Way-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1962: Chronology, pp. 75-82).
Landscape. Three Corot landscapes are listed in the Henry Field Collection, 1896 Catalogue of Objects in the Museum: 72-73, Art Institute of Chicago.
The Forest at Fontainbleau+. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, acq. in 1890. See Poulet, Anne L. Corot to Braque French Painting from the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, MFA, 1979.
The Artist's Studio+. Corot prepared quick oil sketches in situ for later use in his studio. This early painting is at the Louvre in the Camondo Collection, a collection of paintings which Cather knew well (illus., # 435 M. Louvre); for Camondo Collection see Cézanne in this Catalogue).
Cather: "One of the best pictures at the fair [Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln] was a copy of a Corot by Miss Parker" (Nebraska State Journal Sep. 1894; KA 183). And "It is plainly a morning picture, a few hours later than the misty time that Corot loved to paint" (NSJ Jan. 1895; KA 217).
Corot was a skilled draftsman as shown in his figures and in his early plein-air sketches. Paradoxically he became famous for the misty, early-morning landscapes of his second artistic period that Cather admired. For an example of his figure painting, see Wounded Eurydice, a classical but natural figure at the Art Institute of Chicago, acq. 1894.
Corot traveled extensively in France and visited Italy three times. He actually had a house at Ville d'Avray. Cather probably saw a least two of his works, Bréton Women at the Fountain+ and Memory of Castel Gandolfo+ at the Louvre. Corot's clear, simple landscapes show a reflective use of light purples, grays, and creams interspersed with graduated darks in the same hues. His plein-air painting done in natural light was first exhibited in the Salon in 1849. These spontaneous oil sketches greatly influenced both the French Realists and the Impressionists. Yet like Constable, his English contemporary, Corot painted with a certain degree of Realism that was touched by Romanticism.
There are many Corot paintings, number 8 through 26, listed in the Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries: 70-73. Also at Art Institute of Chicago--a museum best loved by Cather--is Souvenir of the Environs of Lake Nemi+ (1865), acq. late, in 1979, but it may have been lent earlier by Florence S. McCormick.
Cather: "For some reason the institution is much nearer to the people of Chicago than the Metropolitan art gallery is to the people of New York. Perhaps it is because the spirit of caste is less perceptible in western cities, and the relations between employers and employees are more cordial. When any one of the Deerings or McCormicks buys an Inness or a Corot, he exhibits the picture in the Art Institute and their workmen drop in to have a look at it some Sunday and decide that they could have done something better with the money, if it had been theirs. The convenient and attractive location of the building may also have something to do with its popularity" (W & P 844).
Chicago's painting by Corot has a silvery grey and gold sky, silhouetted by an intensely green harp-shaped tree. This lovely setting, a classical Italian landscape that is associated with the Goddess Diana and her bathing nymphs, is oddly enough quite near the Pope's summer palace at Castel Gandolfo.
In The Song of the Lark young Thea Kronborg, a Dianaian nymph fresh from Moonstone, doesn't share Cather's formidable knowledge about Corot's art.
Cather: "'And Corots,' breathed Mrs. Anderson, tilting her head feelingly. 'Such examples of the Barbizon school!'" "This was meaningless to Thea, who did not read the art columns of the Sunday Inter-Ocean as Mrs. Anderson did. . . . The Corot which hung next to this painting she did not like or dislike; she never saw it" (SOL 178-79).
The Inter-Ocean reported on Chicago art since The First Annual Exhibition of American Paintings, in 1882 (see Rich, Daniel Catton. "Half a Century of American Exhibitions." Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Art Institute of Chicago).
Cather: "Fred whispered that they were Rousseaus and Corots, very fine ones which the banker [Mr. Nathanmeyer] had bought long ago for next to nothing" (SOL 248).
A possible prototype for Mr. Nathanmeyer may have been Henry O. Havemeyer. He was an early collector of many Corots, and his famous bequest is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1887 Paul Durand-Ruel, the Paris art dealer, opened a gallery showing works by Impressionist artists in Havemeyer's New York mansion. For photographs of the Havemeyer home on One East Sixty-sixth Street, his music room, and his library where the Corot paintings hung in 1892, see Weitzenhoffer, Frances. The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America. New York City: Abrams, 1986: 70-95.
Later in 1915 Mrs. (H. O.) Louisine Havemeyer, a close friend of the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, mounted a benefit loan exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery, New York City, in April. The purpose of the show was to raise money for the Women's Suffrage Movement. The exhibit was entitled "Masterpieces by Old and Modern Painters" (Weitzenhoffer 223). Perhaps Cather knew of show or actually attended it. References to the Nathenmeyers appeared in The Song of the Lark, which was published in October later that same year [Crane A8].
Another possible prototype for Mr. Nathanmeyer may be Mr. Samuel Untermeyer, who lent Millet's Returning Home, #108, to the 1902 Carnegie Loan Exhibition. Cather's character, Mr. Nathanmeyer, seems to combine the attributes, and the names, of several prominent American collectors. The Havemeyers, the Potter Palmers and other rich collectors also loaned their Corots, Millets, Monets, and other French paintings to the Foreign Gallery at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (See Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York City: Artabras, 1984: 142). For a video about collectors like the Havemeyers, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers, see Merchants and Masterpieces: Great Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Written by Suzanne Bauman. Metropolitan Museum of Art and WNET, New York.
Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung had several opportunities to see one or more versions of Corot's Ville d'Avray+ either in Pittsburgh or Paris. Perhaps Isabelle McClung Hambourg remembered Corot's painting when she selected a hundred-year-old house at Ville d'Avray, a suburb just west of Paris. For a photograph taken on Isabelle and Jan Hambourg's porch-steps at Ville d'Avray, one that shows Cather holding the Hambourg's dog Giotto, see Southwick, Helen Cather. "Willa Cather's Early Career." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65.2 (Apr. 1982): 85-98). The same photograph captioned, In the Garden at Ville d'Avray, France 1922, appears in the frontispiece for One of Ours, the 1937 Autograph Edition, vol. 5 [Crane A.11.b].
Matinée: Ville d'Avray+ (1867-70). #26 was loaned by Lawrence C. Phipps in the 1902 Carnegie International Exhibit. Now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Ville d'Avray+ (c. 1860). The Frick Collection, NYC.
Le Catalpa: Souvenirs de Ville d'Avray+. #Rf 1794 from the 1896 Paris Salon is now at M. d'Orsay, a 1919 Legacy of A. Chauchard. Le Catalpa is pictured as #376 in M. Louvre. For other book-illustrations see Ville d'Avray+ (1870) in Taillandier, Yvon. Corot. New York City: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1978: 142.
The Palace of the Popes, Avignon+. At the National Gallery in London. The subject of Corot's painting figures heavily in Cather's last, unfinished novel. For a photograph of Cather and Jan Hambourg standing in front of the Popes' Palace in Avignon, refer to the article by Southwick, Helen Cather. "Willa Cather's Early Career." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65.2 (Apr. 1982): 85-98. For Corot's painting see Monro, Isabel Stevenson and Kate M. Monro. Index to Reproductions of European Painting: A Guide to Pictures in More Than Three Hundred Books. 1956. New York City: H. W. Wilson Company, 1961: 141. Also see Catalogue of Selected Color Reproductions. 2 vols. New York City: Raymond and Raymond, 1936.
Avignon from the West+. See The National Gallery Collection. Sel. by Michael Levey. London: National Gallery Publications, 1987: 233. For Cather's newspaper article about the place read "Avignon." Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey. With an Introduction and Incidental Notes by George N. Kates. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1988: 128-141. Also and again see Kates, George N. "Willa Cather's Unfinished Avignon Story." Willa Cather: Five Stories. With an Article by George N. Kates on Miss Cather's Last Unfinished, and Unpublished Avignon Story New York City: Vintage-Random, 1956: 117-214.
And for Cather's "well-thumbed breviary" on Avignon as described by Lewis see Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York City: Knopf, 1953: 190. Cather's breviary was written by Okey, Thomas. Story of Avignon. Illustrated by Percy Wadham. 1911. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. Bedford Street, Covent Garden, W. C.; NY: Dutton, 1926: 27.
Corwin, Charles Abel. Painter, muralist, b. 1857, Newburgh NY; d. 1938, Chicago. Corwin studied in Munich.
St. Joe, Michigan. Haydon Art Club Exhibit in 1895.
Cather: "In sharp contrast to this wonderfully airy picture of Robinson's is Charles Corwin's 'St. Joe, Michigan,' which looks as if the atmosphere had been exhausted with an air pump. It has the dead lifeless effect of a scene worked upon tapestry" (Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1895: 13 [Crane D126]; KA 218).
Courbet, Gustave. French painter, b. Ornans, 1819; d. La-Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, 1877.
The Meeting+ or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet+ (1854). Oil on canvas. 50 3/4" x 58 5/8". Now at Montpellier, France in the Musée Fabre. See #19 for Color Plate in Faunce, Sarah and Linda Nochlin. Courbet Reconsidered. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1988. "The painting brings together the artist, the patron, and the humble working manservant in an image of ceremonial greeting that takes place on raised ground of a simultaneously concrete and symbolical crossroad. . . " (Faunce 116).
See E. K Brown for Cather's important and revealing statement concerning a painting that informed her writing: "She [Cather] told Alfred Knopf that she had in mind, as she wrote the story ["Two Friends" 1932], the paintings of Courbet . . . " (Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. Completed by Leon Edel. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1987: 292).
Cather: "There have been generous and bold spirits among artists: Courbet tried to kick down the Vendôme Column and got himself exiled" (1936, "Escapism" OW 20 [Crane D592]).
After the dethronement of Napoleon III in the war of 1870, Courbet joined the Paris Commune and headed the Arts Commission for social reform. He was imprisoned for six months for toppling the Vendôme Column with other communists and was charged for the Column's reconstruction (Faunce 15). Although he was revolutionary in his politics and in naturalistic painting, Courbet adhered to Realism for his visual forms, confirming that "naturalism in painting preceded naturalism in literature" (Schinz 6). His often erotic and explicit paintings of Whistler's mistress, Joanna Hefferman, caused a rift between the artists. For an example of one of Courbet's nude paintings of red-haired Joanna Hefferman that Cather could have viewed see Woman with a Parrot+ (1866) in the H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Courbet's painting is illustrated in Faunce and Nochlin, p. 50.
The Quarry (La Curée, 1856)+. Listed as #18.620 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Led by the efforts of William Morris Hunt in 1918, the Henry Lillie Pierce Fund acquired The Quarry for the Boston Museum. This painting was the first Courbet that was brought to America. For an interesting discussion of why William Morris Hunt and other Boston collectors accepted the works of Manet, Courbet and Millet, and for Millet's link with the French Naturalists, see Sawyer, Charles H. "Naturalism in America"; and also Schinz, Albert. "Naturalism in Literature." Both articles are in Courbet and the Naturalistic Movement. Ed. George Boas. Baltimore: John Hopkins P, 1938.
Couture, Thomas. French painter, b. Senlis, 1815; d. Villiers-le-Bel, near Paris, 1879. Puvis de Chavannes, Edouard Manet and his friend Antonin Proust, and the American John La Farge studied with Couture.
Portrait of George Sand. Cather owned Couture's actual engraving of George Sand--not a reproduced print--that hung over the fireplace (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York City: Knopf, 1953: 89; Sergeant 124, 202, 252; Moorhead 56; and Tittle 313; KA 69). Couture also executed prints of two of Cather's favorite novelists, Gustave Flaubert and Pierre Loti.
Cather: "Like George Sand, she has the temperament of an unbalanced woman and the imagination of a great artist" (KA 54).
La Décadence des Romains+ (1847). Now in the Louvre, it is a hard-to-miss painting. Couture's huge composition was awarded an Academic first at the 1847 Salon. The centrally placed nude in the orgiastic La Décadence des Romains lends her spirit again to Manet's painting of his own provocative courtesan, Olympia. By dropping Couture's use of Classical allusion and by placing Olympia in a brothel, Manet shocked members of the conventional French Academy. See Modern French Masters: A Series of Biographical and Critical Reviews by American Artists. Ed. Van Dyke. New York: Garland Publishers, 1896.
Cubism. The Post-Modern period in art essentially began in the years just prior World War I. Cézanne's geometric planes in his early landscapes and still lifes greatly influenced younger French artists like George Braque and Pablo Picasso. They were the first so-called "Cubists" to paint the "figure, and still life in geometric forms, especially the cylinder, cone, and pyramid" (McGraw). An example of Picasso's cubist painting is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07), found now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. For an excellent survey see Barr, Alfred H., Jr. Cubism and Abstract Art. 1936. New York City: Arno Press-Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
In her text Cather matched the geometrical shapes and juxtaposed color complements of cubismé. Godfrey St. Peter's observation of a storm in The Professor's House (1925) exemplifies this as: "He saw that a storm was coming on. Great orange and purple [complements] clouds [semi-spheres] were blowing up from the lake, and the pine-trees [cones] over the Physics laboratory [square/rectangle] were blacker than cypresses [cylinders] and looked contracted, as if they were awaiting something (PH 275, my italics).
By 1913 the Art Institute of Chicago was internationally famous for its Impressionist works. Generous Chicago collectors lent their foreign paintings from 1888 on, and consequently, the museum patrons saw works on the cutting edge of art. As a result the Art Institute was the first museum to show the radical new works in International Exhibition of Modern Art [Armory Show, New York] in which Cubism played a large part. During that period of public controversy about the direction of art "Chicago reeled to arguments over Cubists, Vorticists, and Futurists" (Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888-1950: 12).
For Cubism see Eddy, Arthur Jerome. Cubists and Post-Impressionists. Illinois: McClurg & Co., 1914; and also see a related article by Kruty, Paul "Arthur Jerome Eddy and His Collection: Prelude and Postscript to the Armory Show," Arts Magazine 61 (Feb. 1987): 40-47. Another important and influential book for Post-Impressionist color theory is by Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. London: Constable, 1914.
Dagnan-Bouveret, Pascal-Adolphe-Jean. French painter, b. Paris, 1852; d. Quincey, 1929. He was an academic painter who previously had studied with Gérôme and Corot. Dagnan-Bouveret sat on the distinguished Carnegie Advisory Committee in 1901-02. Known primarily as a colorist he interpreted classical, religious, and genre themes.
Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. #[18]98.5 at the Carnegie, a gift from Pittsburgh steel-magnate Henry Clay Frick in memory of his deceased daughter, Martha Howard Frick. This oil on panel, and several of its studies, were exhibited at the Frick Art Museum, the Frick Art and Historical Center, in Pittsburgh PA, April 6-June 29, 1997.
Cather [?]: "The Disciples at Emmaus," by Dagnan-Bouveret was given to the Carnegie by Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Frick in memory of their "little daughter Martha, who is asleep in Jesus." See "Pittsburg's Art Exhibits." Home Monthly (Dec. 1898): 8 for the unsigned editorial probably written by Cather.
Degas [de Gas], Hilaire Germain Edgar. French Impressionist painter, etcher, and amateur photographer, b. Paris, 1834; d. there, 1917. He studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris and later spent time in Florence, Naples, and Rome. In 1873 Degas visited for six months in New Orleans, Louisiana where he painted his brother and other family members at the Cotton Exchange. He is best known for paintings, pastels, drawings of elegant ballet dancers, and for his lively racing scenes. Although he was a close friend of Manet, Whistler, and Fantin-Latour, Degas does not appear in either of the latter's group portraits.
Dancers in the Rehearsal Room, with a Double Bass+. Oil on canvas. 15 3/8" x 35 1/4". At the Carnegie in 1896, now in the H. O.Havemeyer Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Ballet of Robert le Diable+. At the Carnegie in 1897; now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1929 Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.
The Race Course+. Listed as #65 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue.
Cather: "[Her face] was broadly and boldly painted, something after the manner of Degas, but handled less cruelly than his subjects. The name at the bottom of the picture was that of a young American painter, then better known in Paris than in his own country" (New England Magazine 24 (June 1901): 357-69; WCCSF 299-300).
Cather: "At his piano, under his Degas drawing in black and red--three ballet girls at the bar--or seated at his beautiful inlaid writing table, he [Albert Engelhardt] was still the elegant young man who sat there long ago" ("Double Birthday." Forum 81 (Feb. 1929): 78-82, 124-28). Cf. Cather's "Training for the Ballet: Making America's Dancers" [with photographs of dancers]. McClure's (Oct. 1912): 85-95.
De Ivanowski, Sigismond. De Ivanowski illustrated the dark, dramatic pictures that accompany "The Bohemian Girl." McClure's (Aug. 1912): 420-43 [Crane C46]. Cather probably selected this Old-World artist to better portray Clara Vavrika, a girl of Czech heritage. Clara Vavrika and Nils Ericson were lovers who prefigured Marie Tovesky and Emil Bergson in Cather's O Pioneers!.
Delacroix, Eugène. French painter, etcher, and watercolorist, b. Charenton, 1798; d. Paris, 1863. Delacroix was a self-trained Romantic painter of monumental, impressive compositions. At the Louvre he copied paintings by Rubens and Veronese. Delacroix was also influenced by Théodore Géricault, one of the founders of Romantic art, and by the British artist, John Constable who painted equally impressionistic landscapes on "six-foot canvases." He also painted the murals for the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the St. Sulpice Church, a church on the Left Bank that Cather mentions.
Liberty Guiding the People 28 July 1830+. In the Luxembourg in 1855, the painting was transferred to the Louvre in 1874; #669 in the Musée National du Louvre: Peintures École Française XIX Siècle. 4 vols. Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1959.
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople 12 April 1204+. This Delacroix painting shows his ability to produce at once a huge and powerful composition. In 1907, Entry of the Crusaders was held by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, then transferred to Louvre in 1934; see #701 listed in M. Louvre. Jean Schwind associates this painting with Professor St. Peter's tableaux vivant in The Professor's House (Schwind Diss. 73-74). For Delacroix's influence on Cather's Professor Godfrey St. Peter, see Bohlke, L. Brent. "Godfrey St. Peter and Eugène Delacroix: A Portrait of the Artist in The Professor's House?" Western American Literature 17 (May): 21-38 [Arnold 1982.9].
Tiger Resting+. #1894.1049 and Wounded Lioness+ #1894.1048 at Art Institute of Chicago. The artist was influenced by the plays of Shakespeare, the nudes by Rubens, and the orientalia of Byron's poems.
Delacroix's dramatic paintings were conspicuous at the Louvre from mid-nineteenth century on. Later his work was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (The Entombment, acq. 1896), and the Art Institute of Chicago (The Lion Hunt, which was purchased by Bertha Palmer in 1893, and perhaps lent earlier since a Delacroix is listed in 1896 Museum Catalogue: 142; acq. in 1922, the Potter Palmer Collection). Presumably Cather was familiar with them at each place, yet she never referred to Delacroix personally, only to a statue honoring him.
Cather: "He had wanted to revisit certain spots with him; to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after the rain; to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figures" (PH 260).
Deschamps, Jean and Pierre. French architects of second-half of the thirteenth and early-fourteenth century who designed the chevet chapels of Clermont-Ferrand Cathedral. Father Latour patterned his Cathedral in Santa Fé after this Cathedral in Clermont, France.
Deschamps, Louis. French painter, b. 1846; d. 1902.
Abandoned. #65 in Carnegie Sixth Annual Exhibition Catalogue.
Cather: "Certainly the most popular picture in the gallery is Louis Deschamps' 'Abandoned.' I shall be surprised if the artist does not sell the picture here"
(W & P 866).
Doré, Gustave Paul G. French graphic artist (including wood blocks), book-illustrator, religious painter, and sculptor, b. Strasbourg, 1832; d. Paris, 1883.
The Neophyte. Oil on canvas. 8' 2" x 9' 6". Seated in the Church Choir twenty-three monks surround "a Neophyte, or newly admitted monk," who is possibly Martin Luther. In Doré's protest painting the Neophyte realizes just after taking his monastic vows that "he has taken a step as fatal as it is irrevocable" (see #7 Descriptive Catalogue of Gustave Doré's Great Paintings, Chicago, 1896: 13; and also the Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue of the Doré Gallery. Chicago: Illinois Engraving Co., 1895-86. Plate #7 shows an illustration of Doré's own engraving of The Neophyte. Both catalogues are at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago).
In 1896 Cather wrote her friend that she had seen the Doré Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago on the way to her new job in Pittsburgh. It is interesting, in light of her later affection for the Church of Rome that of all Doré's paintings Cather liked only The Neophyte. (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mariel Gere." June/July 1896. Cather Correspondence is in the Slote Collection, Archives at the University of Nebraska).
Duchamp, Marcel+. French Cubist artist, b. 1887, d. 1968. Nude Descending a Staircase, #2+. Now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp's painting is synonymous with Cubism's arrival in America, and Cather surely knew of this painting shown in the New York City Armory Show. See Armory Show in this Catalogue.
Dunton, William Herbert "Buck". American painter, muralist, illustrator, and lithographer, b. Augusta ME, 1878; d. 1936. Dunton studied in Boston and later illustrated for Harper's and Scribner's using Western themes. He was a pupil of Blumenschein who encouraged him to go to Taos, New Mexico. Dunton opened a summer studio there in 1912, joining other American artists from the East such as Blumenschein, Sharp, Couse, Phillips, and Berninghaus.
In 1915 Cather mentions Dunton in a letter to Ferris Greenslet stating that she had visited Blumenschein, Dunton, and other acquaintances in the Taos Artist Colony (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Ferris Greenslet. 13 Sep. [1915]. Houghton Library, Harvard University). See Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Taos and Its Artists. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947, pp. 12, 18, 163.
Dupré, Jules. French landscape painter and lithographer, b. Nantes, 1811; d. L'Isle-Adam, 1889. Dupré was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, by Constable's English landscapes, and by Corot's misty mornings scenes. Rousseau was a friend with whom he worked at Barbizon (Mollett, J. W. The Painters of Barbizon. 2 vols. London, 1890).
Boats Fleeing Before the Storm+. Dupré exhibited both at the Carnegie and in Chicago. Cather reference is in World and Parish, p. 809
Dürer, Albrecht. German painter, engraver, and designer of woodcuts, b. Nürenberg, 1471; d. there, 1528.
Christ before Pilate for the First Time. #M8839, an engraving at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Cather: "In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose favorite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no idea of any country whatsoever" ("Coming, Aphrodite!" Youth and the Bright Medusa 27, c. 1920).
See The Engraved Passion+ (1512) in The Intaglio Prints of Albrecht Dürer: Engravings, Etchings, and Dry-Points. Ed. Walther L. Strauss. New York City: Abrams, 1981.
Until 1490 Dürer was instructed in painting and in the technique of woodcut illustration in workshop of Michael Wolgemut+. In 1493 the shop produced woodcuts for the profusely illustrated edition of Schedel's Neue Weltchronik. Dürer apprenticed with Wolgemut and possibly worked on the Neue Weltchronik (Panofsky 6-20 passim). For more about Dürer see Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. 2nd ed. Princeton UP, 1967. Especially see Fig. 9 for Dance of Death from the Nürnberg Chronicle (1486) by Michael Wolgemut.
Death, the Knight, and the Devil+. While Dürer himself cut no wood block for the "Dance of Death" he continued with Wolgemut's theme in the Knight, Death, and Devil. Cather first stated that Death Comes for the Archbishop was inspired by "Dürer's Dance of Death." This reference was changed later either by Cather, or her publisher to read "Holbein's Dance of Death." For critical comments see Schwind, Jean Denise. "Pictorial Art in Willa Cather's Fiction." Diss. University of Minnesota: page 149, note # 9. Schwind argues that Cather's "allegorical mode" is more important than the question of which artist Cather cited [Arnold 1983.29]. Also cf. "Dürer: Nürnberg's Hand Goes Through Every Land," by John La Farge. McClure's 20.3 (1902-03): 99-142, Death, the Knight, and the Devil is illustrated on p. 132.
Dutch Genre School. Cather said that seeing Dutch genre paintings and their windows in a Paris exhibit affected her textual composition in The Professor's House. A conundrum exists as to which specific paintings comply with her statement. Yet the truth is that she had already seen a multitude of Dutch genre and religious paintings before she wrote the novel. Her perplexing reference is found in Cather, Willa. "A Letter on The Professor's House." College English Association News Letter 2.6 (Oct. 1940) [Crane D595]; also in On Writing 31.
The Encyclopedia of World Art, vol. 5 illustrates several typical examples of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Dutch paintings with windows and interiors like J. Cornelisz van Oostsanen's Nativity, with Saints and Worshippers. This panel at Naples Museo di Capodimonte shows ships in background (Plate 287). Cather visited a Naples Museum in 1908.
Rogier Van Der Weyden's work The Annunciation+ places Gabriel and the Virgin Mary before a window with river in the background [at the Louvre].
Cather could have studied any or all of the following famous paintings. They should be recalled when she refers to "old Dutch pictures." For possible paintings see Aelbert Cuyp's The Maas at Dordrecht+; Pieter de Hooch's A Dutch Courtyard+ and Interior of a Dutch House+ at London's National Gallery; Frans Hals, Portrait of an Officer+ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. And foremost Cather saw Jan van Eyck's consummate Virgin and Child with the Chancellor Rolin+ / The Virgin of Autun at the Louvre, Van Eyck's Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth of Hungary and a Carthusian+ at the Frick Gallery in New York City, and Rogier Van Der Weyden's St. Luke Painting the Virgin+ in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Friedlander, Max J. From Van Eyck to Bruegel. Oxford: Phaidon, 1981, passim.
In addition to the previous museums the 1902 Carnegie Loan Exhibit Catalogue lists paintings shown by such Dutch artists as Frans Hals, Josef Israëls (Dutch genre), Meyndert Hobbema, and Nicholaas Maes, whose work Cather would have seen (#93, The Lacemaker+ was loaned by the Byers Estate). Other Dutch Masters also shown at the Carnegie Art Museum were Jacobus Maris, Anton Mauve, Rembrandt Van Rijn, Jacob Van Ruisdael, and Gerard Ter Borch. All become models of Dutch artists to whom Cather may have indirectly referred. The 1902 Carnegie Catalogue is available at the Carnegie Museum of Art Library in Pittsburgh. For my extended discussion of "windows" in Cather's prose, see Chase in this Catalogue; also see Proust and Dutch pictures in a 1921 Paris Exhibit in the Introduction to this Catalogue.
For another view of Cather's "Letter on The Professor's House," see Yongue, Patricia Lee. "Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Dutch Genre Painting." Renascence 31 (Spring): 155-67 [Arnold 1979.45]. For an important art-historical article dealing with this type of symbolic imagery see Eitner, Lorenz. "The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: an Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism." Art Bulletin 37.1 (1955): 281-87. To confound the issue Cather was probably familiar with the Roman-wall-frescoes in Pompeii in the so-called "architectural style," one that includes a picture inside a picture.
Dwiggins, William Addison. Designer, illustrator, b. Martinsville OH, 1880. After 1925 Dwiggins was the illustrator and graphic artist for several Cather editions. He also designed the labels found on her books after November 1927 (Alfred Knopf Papers: 8. Harry Ransom Library. University of Texas-Austin TX).
Dyck, Anthony Van. Flemish painter, draftsman, engraver of portraits found in his Iconographie, b. Antwerp, 1599; d. Blackfriars, near London, 1641. Rubens was his friend and collaborator.
Portrait d'un Abbé+ and two other Van Dyke paintings were shown in the Carnegie 1902 Loan Exhibit. Cather probably knew of Van Dyck's work from his book-illustrations prior to 1902.
Cather: "That gentlemanly figure made life at Crow's Nest possible to Buchanan; it was like seeing a Vandyke portrait in the gallery of daubs. The Count's whole conduct, like his person, was simple, dignified and artistic." See Home Monthly 6 (Sep./Oct. 1896): 9-11, 12-13, 22-23; WCCSF 452 [Crane AA6-7, C12].
Cather: He had a long brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close-trimmed Van Dyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair, he had a tawny skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and hawk-like eyes--brown and gold and green. They were set in ample cavities, with plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black eyebrows that turned up sharply at the outer ends, like military moustaches. His wicked-looking eyebrows made his students call him Mephistopheles--and there was no evading the searching eyes underneath them; eyes that in a flash could pick out a friend or an unusual stranger from a throng" (PH 12-13, my italics).
Van Dyck's portrait of Frans Snyders, now at the British Museum, resembles Cather's described features for Professor Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House (12-13). See Hind, Arthur M. Van Dyck: His Original Etchings and His Iconography. Boston: Houghton, 1915.
For a prototype of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and his scholarly work in The Professor's House consider another of Cather's Professor who may have reflected the author herself. In her 1902 story, "The Professor's Commencement," Cather's Professor was preparing "his History of Modern Painting, the Italian section of which was practically complete" (WCCSF 289, my italics).
Eddy, Arthur Jerome+. See Armory Show in this Catalogue.
England, Florence Pearl. England illustrated "The Count of Crow's Nest" [Crane C12]. In this instance Cather specifically refers to the [woman] artist who illustrated her story (Cather, Willa. "Letter to ......" 4 Aug. 1896. Willa Cather Correspondence. Slote Collection, Archives, U of Nebraska-Lincoln).
Everett, Walter. Everett produced two illustrations of a young girl and her two friends--R. E. Dillon [RED] and J. H. Trueman in "Two Friends," Woman's Home Companion, 59.7 (July 1932): 7-8. In serial form, "Two Friends" was published between "Neighbor Rosicky" and "Three Women" ["Old Mrs. Harris"]. The titles suggest a one-two-three sequence. Henry B. Quinan was the Art Director for the magazine.
Fantin-Latour+, Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore. French Realist painter who immortalized artists, writers, and relatives through his insight and excellent draftsmanship in his "homage" group-paintings. B. Grenoble, France 1836; d. 1904.
Un Atelier aux Batignolles [A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter]+. 1870. Oil on canvas. 204 cm x 273.5 cm. Acq. 1892 for the Luxembourg Museum; now at Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Cather: "Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Harwell's studio on Boulevard St. Michel" (McClure's 28 (1906-7): 492).
Although Cather does not refer directly to Fantin-Latour's painting, the echoing lines that open her short story "The Namesake" confirm that she admired the Luxembourg's "tableau célèbre." On the opposite page Ernest Blumenschein's nearly identical composition recalls Fantin-Latour's A Studio at the Batignolles. Even the dress of the "country-men" is similar. Cather probably met Blumenschein at McClure's.
A Studio at the Batignolles (1870) includes such famous people as Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Emile Zola, and Claude Monet. Fantin-Latour's painting was obviously the model for the Blumenschein illustration used for Cather's story, "The Namesake." One should note that the artists in Fantin-Latour's painting were familiar to Cather and Blumenschein. While living in Paris from 1902 to 1909 he copied the masters (Coke, Van Deren. Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment, 1882-1942. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P-Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and Art Gallery, 1963: 70).
In an earlier tableau, Homage to Delacroix (1864), Fantin-Latour painted "himself, Baudelaire, Manet, Whistler [a close friend] and others grouped around a portrait of Delacroix" (quote from Random 181). Fantin-Latour's Delacroix painting is echoed by Godfrey St. Peter's nostalgic wish for an "homage to Delacroix" found in The Professor's House. See Bohlke, L. Brent. "Godfrey St. Peter and Eugène Delacroix: A Portrait of the Artist in The Professor's House?" Western American Literature 17 (May): 21-38 [Arnold 1982.9].
See "Manet and Impressionism," by Charles S. Moffett in Manet. New York City: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983: 29-35; and for the quote that Manet was Cather's favorite artist see "Glimpses of Interesting Americans," by Walter Tittle, with drawing by the author in Willa Cather in Person (WCP 81-85 [Arnold 1925.37]). See Blumenschein in this Catalogue.
Fechin, Nicolai. Russian painter, sculptor, woodcarver, teacher, B. Kazan, Russia, 1881; d. Santa Monica CA, 1955. Nearly half of Fechin's paintings are still in Russia, other are in the Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City OK, and in the Balboa Park Museum, San Diego CA.
Willa Cather (c. 1923). Fechin painted a portrait of Willa Cather his New York City studio. The painting is now privately owned, and currently hangs in the Reading Room at the Hunt Library, at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh PA.
Fechin moved to America after the Bolshevik Revolution and became popular in New York City by painting portraits commissioned by celebrities. Fechin's daughter, Eya Fechin, remembers that the family moved twice after coming from Russia, and that Cather came to her family's second apartment in their second year [c. 1923-24]: "Cather knocked on the door and said she wanted her portrait painted. We didn't know who Willa Cather was, and she was insulted. Since we knew little English at the time, she later brought several of her books translated into French. We did not even see her while she was in Taos" (Author's interview with Eya Fechin [Branham]. 12 Apr. 1991. Fechin House in Taos). For a Fechin illustration, Eya with Cantaloupe, see Art & Antiques (May 1986): 11. For Fechin as a wood-carver see Pontello, Jacqueline M. "The House Fechin Built." Southwest Art 16 (Apr. 1987): 12.
Eya Fechin reported that her father was "pleased" with Cather's picture. Fechin's portrait exhibits an Impressionist's style, especially in the brush strokes and in Cather's dreamy-looking blue eyes. His rendition of her thrust-out chin reveals an impatience not found in the portrait of her by Bakst. Fechin's portrait of Cather is reproduced on the dust-jacket of James Woodress's biography.
Cather's request for a new portrait by Fechin probably relates to the fact that Léon Bakst's odd portrait of Willa Cather was finished the same year. Bakst's poor likeness of Cather, and the bad reviews by the Omaha critics, prompted her to offer a substitute for the Bakst painting (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Judge. Vinsonhaler." Sunday the 13th. Letter #024. Willa Cather Letters. Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA 22903).
Mabel Dodge Luhan+. Reproduced on the dust-jacket of Rudnick, Lois. Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984: 230.
In 1927 Fechin moved to Taos, New Mexico where he painted colorful portraits of people in the Southwest, including one of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Luhan and Cather were friendly correspondents. The year before the Fechins moved to Taos Cather last visited Mabel Dodge Luhan's compound near the Taos Pueblo. See my article Duryea, Polly. "Cather and O'Keeffe: Spirits of the Southwest." Kansas Quarterly 19.4 (Fall 1987): 27-40. Also see Luhan, M. D. Taos and Its Artists. New York City: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947: pp. 23, 26, 163.
Fin de Siècle. A French term meaning "the end-of-century." It calls up images from Art Nouveau, the William Morris Arts and Crafts Movement, frescoes by Puvis de Chavannes, and waterscapes by Monet. The Fin de Siècle was the most influencial and informative artistic period for Cather.
Fisher, Garrison. On the Avenue (1903). This charming print features a beautiful young woman in turn-of-the-century dress. The picture hangs in the Cather childhood home in Red Cloud NE.
Flaxman, John. English sculptor and draftsman, b. York, 1755; d. London, 1826. See Flaxman's illustrations for Homer's The Iliad. Flaxman was an artist who created Neo-Classical decorations for blue Jasperware produced by Wedgwood Potters in Stoke-on-Trent, England.
Cather: "The book he had given the child was a volume of Flaxman's immortal illustrations to Homer" ("Paul's Case." McClure's 25 (May 1905): 74-83; WCCSF 314). "Why should he have liked Flaxman's drawings better than his picture books?" (WCCSF 320).
Flaxmans's drawings for the "First Thoughts" for Homer's The Iliad are now in the British Museum. Drawings for The Council of the Gods from The Iliad, Book IV, pp. 3-4, are at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, along with "The Harpies Going to Seize the Daughters of Pandarus." See John Flaxman. Ed. David Bindman. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979: 86-99.
Forain, Jean Louis. French painter, etcher, and illustrator, b. Reims, 1852; d. Paris, 1931. "Among contemporary Frenchmen the powerful Forain spells for her [Cather] only horror and brutality" (Tittle, in WCP 85).
Foster, Ben. Landscape painter, water colorist, b. North Anson, ME, 1852; d. 1926. Foster studied in New York and Paris where he won many prizes (Who Was 210). Cather lists him as one of the American painters who exhibited abroad. Foster was a member of the Jury of Awards at Carnegie from 1903 to 1907. See his illustration of Connecticut Woods in Antiques 126 (Nov. 1984): 1074.
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. French Rococo painter, b. 1732; d. 1806. He studied with Chardin and Boucher. Before the French Revolution he painted semi-erotic landscapes with aristocratic figures for private patrons.
The Lover Crowned+. Oil on canvas, from a series of panels for Madame du Barry's Pavilion. 10' 5 1/4" x 7' 11 1/4". In the Frick Collection, New York City. Pictured in the Encyclopedia of World Art, vol. 5, Plate #372.
Cather reportedly visited the Frick Gallery with Yalta Menuhin in the 1920's, and again later with her niece, Helen Cather Southwick around 1943 to 1944 (Southwick, Helen Cather. "Letter to author." 26 Mar. 1991. For Letter from Yalta Menuhin Ryce see Romney in this Catalogue).
Cather: ". . . her [Geraldine Farrar, opera-singer] Manon is fickle, wilful, wayward, as beautiful and as elegant as a Watteau figure or a femme galante by Fragonard" ("Three American Singers." McClure's 42.2 (1913): 33-48).
Gardner [Isabella Stewart Gardner] Museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner built a Venetian-style palace in Boston which she furnished with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century furniture, sculpture, tapestries, vases, and other art-objects. Isabella Gardner was a close friend of Mrs. Annie Fields, whom Cather knew in Boston. Shortly after Isabella Gardner's death in 1924, her home became a public museum; however, as early as 1903 while she still lived upstairs, she allowed the Fenway Court on the ground-level to be opened for special occasions (Conroy xiii). It seems likely that Cather enjoyed seeing this magnificent International Collection. She mentions Mrs. Gardner on two different occasions and in one she comments on her ageless skin (NUF 54). See Conroy, Lois McKitchen. The Gardner Museum Café Cookbook. Harvard and Boston MA: Harvard Common Press, 1985.
Bernard Berenson, the expert on Renaissance art, advised Isabella Gardner in her selections of major works that included such masters as Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Bellini, Sanzio Raphael, Andrea Mantegna, Simone Martini. Titian's Rape of Europa and King Phillip IV by Velásquez hangs in the Titian Room.
Later artists represented in the Gardner Collection are J. M. W. Turner, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, H. G. E. Degas, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Bartolomé Murillo, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and John Singer Sargent. Sargent and Anders Zorn both painted Isabella Gardner. One painting hangs in the MacKnight Room, and the other in the Short Gallery. Several Rembrandts and a Vermeer--one with a background that looked out to the sea--were stolen from the Museum in 1990 in what is called the art-theft of the century. The unsolved robbery inspired a popular mystery novel. See the Introduction to this Catalogue for a Vermeer painting's influence on the writings of Proust.
Gérôme, Léon. French Academic painter, sculptor, and etcher, b. Vesoul, 1824; d. Paris, 1904. Gérôme's work entered the Luxembourg in 1846. His paintings depict historical themes from Greece and Rome and were sometimes erotic and sensual. He traveled to Egypt in 1856.
Cather: "It was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the old miseries and old sorrows of the world, that she [Thea Kronborg] ran up the wide staircase to the pictures. There she like best the ones that told stories. There was a painting by Gérôme called 'The Pasha's Grief' which always made her wish for Gunner and Axel. The Pasha was seated on a rug, beside a green candle almost as big as a telegraph pole, and before him was stretched his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there were pink roses scattered about him" (SOL 179).
The Grief of the Pasha. Oil on canvas. 36 3/8" x 29". Listed as #80 in the Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896: 77, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Painting is now #1990.1 at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha NE. Gérôme's painting portrays a green-turbaned Pasha who mourns the death of his beautiful pet tiger. The animal's head rests on a pillow atop an exotic Oriental rug that is covered with pink rose petals. Victor Hugo's poem of the same name inspired Gérôme's title.
In Cather's novel, The Song of the Lark, young Thea Kronborg looks at the picture while visiting the Art Institute of Chicago; it reminds her of her younger brothers, Gunner and Axel (SOL 179). James Woodress states that Cather read The Arabian Nights to her brother Jim (Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. U of Nebraska P, 1987: 105), and Cather may also have read Victor Hugo's poem about the Pasha's grief for his pet tiger to her younger brothers.
Two spectacular compositions in oil by Gérôme, Pollice Verso, #61 loaned by Mrs. Henry C. Potter, and The Two Majesties, #62, were entered in the 1902 Carnegie Exhibit.
Cather: "[Carreno] is like Gérôme and Meissonier, at her best in the brilliance of raw color, in the blazing high noon of the tropics" (W & P 398).
Gibson, Charles Dana. Illustrator, painter, b. 1867, Roxbury MA; d. 1944. He studied with Saint-Gaudens at the Art Students League in New York, and also in Paris. Gibson painted Anne Nevin, the wife of Ethelbert Nevin who was Cather's musical friend in Pittsburgh. For Charles Dana Gibson's illustrations during the Chicago-Renaissance period see "Two Women and a Fool." Chatfield-Taylor Chap-Book. Chicago, 1895.
Cather: "Mr. Gibson may be styled the artist of the Four Hundred, but Reinhart was the artist of the people" (W & P 512, #7; also see pp. 156, 427, 438, 629).
Giorgione da Castelfranco. Venetian painter, b. c. 1477; d. 1510. He painted frescoes in the Doge's Palace and as well as small easel paintings for private collectors. Giorgione's style influenced Titian and other Venetian artists. They in turn influenced the major painters in Europe until the Impressionist Period. See Sheard, Wendy Stedman. "The Genius of Venice." Art Journal 44 (Summer 1984): 174-49 for reproductions by Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.
Cather: "[T]he frescoes of Giorgione. will crumble away bit by bit in the old churches of Venice, no one will notice or care" (1896, W & P 300).
Giotto di Bondone+. Italian Master-painter of religious frescoes at Padua, Florence, and probably at Assisi; mosaicist for "The Ship of the Church" in Old Saint Peter's in Rome. Giotto designed the Campanile next to the Duomo, Florence, b. 1267; d. 1337. Giotto broke away from Byzantine frontalism and hieratism and the Greek iconic style in flat space. He expressed a new humanism with figures now set in the illusion of space. Giotto's principles founded the Western tradition of art. He was the first Cubist.
St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata+ (1300-35). 10' 3 1/2" x 5' 3 1/2". Panel at the Louvre.
Jan and Isabelle Hambourg had a pet dog while living at Ville d'Avray curiously named "Giotto" (See photograph in Southwick, Helen Cather. "Willa Cather's Early Career." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65.2 (Apr. 1982): 85-98).
Glintenkamp, H. Glintenkamp executed two woodcuts for Cather's story, "Double Birthday." Another artist, [Dadig ?] produced the lino-cut on p. 78 [Crane C56]. Cather preferred woodcut engravings and called for their look in drawings. Her preferences coincided with those of her character, Carl Linstrum who said:
Cather: "'Wood-engraving is the only thing I care about, and that had gone out before I began. Everything is cheap metal work nowadays, touching up miserable photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good ones. I'm absolutely sick of it all'" (O Pioneers! 72).
Greco, El (Domenikos Theotokopoulos; Domenico Theotocopuli, Greco, or Griego). Greek-Spanish painter, architect, and sculptor, b. in or near Candia, Crete, c. 1541; d. Toledo, 1614); known by his Spanish nickname, El Greco, or the Greek.
Saint Francis in Meditation. Or St. Frances in Prayer (Ca. 1580-85). Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha NE.
Cather: "He wheedled a good sum of money out of the old man, as well as vestments and linen and chalices--he would take anything--and he implored my grandfather to give him a painting from his great collection, for the ornamentation of his mission church among the Indians. My grandfather told him to choose from the gallery, believing the priest would covet most what he himself could best afford to spare. But not all; the hairy Franciscan pounced upon one of the best in the collection; a young St. Francis in Meditation, by El Greco, and the model for the saint was one of the very handsome Dukes of Albuquerque" (DCA 11).
It should be noted that Cather preferred the aristocratic French Monastics and Jesuits over those religious in the Franciscan Order. Unfortunately, the Franciscans were associated with historical excesses found both in Europe and the New World. Cather's use of the ownership of the painting Saint Francis in Meditation symbolizes how far the Franciscan Order had strayed from St. Francis' original doctrine of poverty. And according to tradition a portrait of St. Joseph (not St. Francis) was stolen from the Ácomas, (and recovered from) by neighboring puebeños at Laguna Pueblo. The painting had become an important fetish to ensure rain for the Pueblo people and its meaning also strayed from its original inspiration.
In her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop the El Greco painting of St. Francis may cryptically change into the portrait of St. Joseph, the altarpiece at Ácoma Pueblo (DCA 88, 197). Cather confuses the reader in what may or may not be a vague suggestion for the transmission from one painting to another. Notice in her statement to the press about Death Comes for the Archbishop her purposeful contradiction at the end of the following passage.
Cather: "I never should have said that the painting--the masterpiece that had strayed from the Old World to far New Mexico--was a painting by El Greco. Why, I had dozens of letters from readers of the novel, and they were sure they had found that 'missing El Greco' in their attics. They would ask me what art dealer they should sent it to, and some of them thought their fortunes were made. The next time I mention a painting, I'll invent a name for the artist. It was a painting, by the way, that made the first scene of that story for me. A French painter, Vibert, did a precise piece of work in the manner of his day, called 'The Missionary's Return'" ("Willa Cather Tells 'Secret'" by Harold Small. San Francisco Chronicle 23 Mar. 1931: 19; WCP 109).
Assumption of the Virgin+ (1577). #1906.99 in part of the permanent collection at Art Institute of Chicago.
El Greco worked with Titian in Venice studying his colors and his architectonic compositions. El Greco introduced, too, the vitality found in Tintoretto's paintings. After El Greco traveled to Rome, he went to Spain where his distinctive style was characterized by sinuous figures with small heads, distorted by attenuation. In a broken vertical movement he used a somber palette of blues in chiaroscuro, all found within a geometric whole of the frame. El Greco primarily painted religious figures including "The Penitent Magdalen." See Wittkower, Rudolf. "El Greco's Language of Gesture." Allegory and Migration of Symbols. Boulder CO, 1977: 147-58. Also Guinard, Paul Jacques. El Greco: Biographical and Critical Study. Trans. James Emmous. Lausanne, Switzerland: Skira, 1956.
Greer, Elizabeth S. Greer illustrated "Jack-a-Boy." In The Saturday Evening Post (Mar. 1901): 4-5.
Harding, George. Harding illustrated Cather's story by drawing pictures of steamy industrial complexes complete with American workers ("Behind the Singer Tower." Colliers (May 1912): 16-17, 23 [Crane C45])
Harrison, (Lovell) Birge. Painter, illustrator, b. Philadelphia, 1854; d. 1929. Harrison studied in Paris and exhibited often from 1899 (Who Was 265).
Christmas Eve. #107 in 1901 Carnegie Catalogue.
Cather: "Birge Harrison's 'Christmas Eve,' represent[s] a quiet village, shrouded in snow and a sort of holy stillness, under a blue winter night" (Review W & P 869).
Hassam, Frederick Childe. American painter, water-colorist, wood-engraver, illustrator, and graphic artist, b. Dorchester MA, 1859; d. East Hampton NY, 1935. He studied at Boston Art School before going to Paris in 1883. Influenced by Monet's plein-air paintings Hassam became one of the first American Impressionists. He was also a Charter Member of Ten American Painters, otherwise known as "The Ten."
Fifth Avenue in Winter (1892). Exhibited in 1899 at the Carnegie International. Fifth Avenue in Winter, at the Carnegie Art Museum then and now. For a possible Cather review, see "Midsummer Review." n. s. Home Monthly 1.21 (28 July 1900): 9.
The Sea. Illus. in the 1898 Carnegie Catalogue. Hassam's The Sea was also mentioned in "Pittsburgh's Art Exhibits." n. s. 7.5 Home Monthly (Dec. 1898): 8, from the Carnegie's Third Annual Exhibition.
Washington Arch, Spring+ (1890). Now in the Phillips Collection, Washington DC. This scene would have been a familiar one for Cather in New York when she lived near the Washington Arch. Hassam entered more than ninety paintings in the Carnegie Exhibitions confirming the fact that Cather knew his work very well. See Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York: Artabras, 1984: 90-104. Also see John J. Murphy for his paper, "Nellie Birdseye's Impressionism, and Childe Hassam's" (Western Literature Association Conference. Colorado, Oct. 1992).
Henner, Jean-Jacques. French painter, b. Bernweiler, Alsace, 1829; d. Paris, 1905. Henner painted various versions of the penitent Magdalen in what became his favorite theme.
The Penitent Magdalen (c. 1863). This version is at the Colmar Museum, Paris, France. See Champion, C. Le Musée d'Unterlindinà Colmar. Paris, 1924. Also illustrated in McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia, as listed under Henner.
Henner's painting of The Penitent Magdalen was strongly influenced by the Venetians. His Titianesque Magdalen is nearly nude but bears little relationship to Christ's penitent follower except in her allure and abundant red hair. The Magdalen's generous bosom and smoldering gaze recalls another courtesan--Manet's Olympia. Like his contemporary Henner, Manet borrowed elements from a famous Venetian's painting, that of the Venus of Urbino by Titian. In comparing the French pictures, however, Henner's Magdalen rests easily in a sumptuous Venetian landscape while Manet's Olympia in a bordello is much more shocking. Moreover, Henner's Magdalen lacks Olympia's provocative stare.
Cather: "In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose favourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no idea of any country whatsoever" ("Coming, Eden Bower!"/"Coming, Aphrodite!" [1920, C54]; for more see Dürer and Guido in this Catalogue).
Magdalen at the Tomb is owned by the Toledo Museum of Art. For three other sensuous Magdalens by Henner in four illustrated reproductions of her, see the Magdalen Kneeling, Magdalen Reclining, Magdalen in Meditation, Magdalen Reading. All are found in the catalogue Valuable Paintings by American and European Masters: The Collection of Joseph G. Syndacker (Chicago Sale #1638). New York: Anderson Galleries, 1922.
La Chaste Suzanne+. Formerly at Luxembourg, now at Louvre, #1071.
A Head+. Henner's picture was shown at 1902 Carnegie Loan Exhibition. Many paintings and drawings by Jean-Jacques Henner are in the Henner Musée, 43, avenue de Villiers, 75017 Paris.
Hills, Laura Combs. American miniature painter, b. 1859; d. 1952; Cather's friend in Boston.
Larkspur, Peonies and Canterbury Bells+ (c. 1915). Pastel on paper. Listed as #26.240 08.90 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Laura Combs Hills sent Cather a memorial tribute that pictured Sarah Orne Jewett. Hills painted delicate flowers on pale lavender satin surrounding a photograph of Jewett (courtesy of Helen Cather Southwick).
In 1921 Cather sent a letter to her friend with a clipped review from The Boston Transcript. The review concerned Miss Laura Combs Hills' miniature paintings shown at the Copley Gallery on Newbury Street, Boston. Larkspur and White Canterbury Bells was included in a collection of Old-Fashioned Flowers by Hills. Edith Lewis states that Cather's Chestnut Street apartment was "not far from the studio of that distinguished artist, Miss Laura Hills, who became one of her dearest and most delightful friends" (Lewis 64). Lewis mentioned an article that Cather wrote for the Boston Transcript (179), and Cather also may have written the Hills' review under the cryptic-initials, W. H. D. (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mary." 1 Dec. [1921]. The Willa Cather Papers. Newberry Library, Chicago). Also see color reproduction of Hills' Oriental India, a pastel in Architectural Digest 45 (Nov. 1988): 213.
In her letter Cather stated that she admired Hills' paintings because she rejected the Futurist style. The radical Futurist Movement was a political, social, as well as artistic revolt against those in power in Italy. The Futurist Manifesto appeared in Figaro on February 20, 1909. The aims of the manifesto were to glorify war, to denounce women and love as contemptible, and to rail against Italy's socialist government and the Italian clerics.
Some of the Futurists painters included Filippo Marinetti--who wrote the Futurist Movement's Manifesto, and Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. The Movement was most forceful between 1910 and 1915 and it was so controversial that its leader, Marinetti, was even wrongly accused of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in the theft of 1911 (Gaunt, William. The March of the Moderns. London: Jonathan Cape, 1950: 116). The following year Cather wrote to another friend, Dorothy Canfield Fisher who was in Italy, and again referred negatively to the Futurists (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher." 17 June 1922. University of Vermont holds the original letter; here, I have used a paraphrased version in the Slote Collection, Archives, U of Nebraska-Lincoln).
Hogarth, William. English painter, engraver, printmaker, b. London, 1697; d. there, 1764.
Peg Woffington+ was loaned by George A. Hearn for the 1902 Carnegie Exhibit. The Exhibition Catalogue quotes Theophile Gautier as calling Hogarth "the English Giotto."
Hogarth's original prints for The Idle Apprentice, Cruelty, The Harlot's Progress are held by the Department of Prints and Drawings, at the British Museum. Cather likened lower London streets to those portrayed by Hogarth in these series (WCE 64).
A Harlot's Progress (1732). Hogarth engraved this satirical series showing false gentility in six plates (British Museum D103). The engravings brought him immediate success. In varying degrees of light and dark lines Hogarth tracked a country girl, Mary Hackabout, from York to her demise after she meets a procuress, Mother Needham, in London's Drury Lane.
To study Hogarth's characters as symbols, including Mother Needham (the Procuress), Mary Hackabout (the Harlot), Colonel Francis Charteris (the 'Roman' Seducer), and the Parson, see Hogarth's Graphic Works: First Complete Edition. 2 vols. Design John O. C. McCreths and Arthur G. Beckenstein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965: 143-44, Plates #127-32.
Cather: "Of all the British painters, surely Hogarth was the only realist and the only man who knew his London. Lower London today is exactly what it was when he studied and hated it. Every day, faces from "The Idle Apprentice," "Cruelty," and "The Harlot's Progress" pass one in the streets like the hideous distortions of a nightmare" (WCE 63-64)
The Four Stages of Cruelty. Hogarth exhibited a freer and looser style, with larger cross-hatching than that found in his A Harlot's Progress series. Four engravings comprise the set. They include: The First Stage of Cruelty, The Second Stage of Cruelty, Cruelty in Perfection, and The Reward of Cruelty.
Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty may have informed Ivy Peter's cruelty when he blinded a woodpecker (A Lost Lady 24). The Reward of Cruelty, Plate IV, shows a practitioner sticking a knife into a cadaver's eye-socket during an autopsy. In another Stage two boys, one with a torch, and another with a stick burn out the eye of a dove. Hogarth's text warns:
Learn from this fair example--You
Whom savage sports delight,
How Cruelty disgusts the view
While Pity charms the sight.
Idle and Industrious 'Prentic'es. Six Plates.
See Dabydeen, David. Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain. London: Hansib Pub., 1987 for an explanation of Hogarth's politics; and also Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971 for the complete Hogarth and his work.
Holbein, Hans, the Younger. German painter and designer of woodcuts, b. Augsburg, c. 1497; d. London, 1453.
Several of Holbein paintings are in one of Cather's favorite museums, the Frick Gallery in New York City.
Dance of Death or Totentanz. Thirty to forty-one prints were designed and engraved on wood by Holbein. The prints were accompanied by either French descriptions or moralizing Latin texts like that for the Pastor: "I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad" (Matt. xxvi.3).
The artist's symbolic characters depict personae in different life-professions and invariably each one ends in death. Holbeins's wood engravings in Dance of Death are directly related to Cather's title for Death Comes for the Archbishop. Holbein's drawings may have influenced her short story called "On the Divide."
Furthermore, Cather may have patterned several characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop after Holbein's satirical woodcuts and then related a Chaucer-like tale for each one of them. The following Holbein's wood-engravings compare to Cather's characters:
The Expulsion from Paradise (Buck Scales and Magdalena).
The Bishop, The Parish Priest (Father Latour).
The Monk (Ácoma's Friar Baltazar Montoya).
The Old Woman (Old Sada).
The Miser (Father Lucero).
The Seaman (The Galveston Shipwreck).
The Lady.(Doña Isabella Oliveres).
Also see Fisher-Wirth, Ann W. Cather Studies Volume I. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 42-44. The following passage by Cather seems to have a special relationship to why she may have chosen Holbein's Dance of Death to form these characters.
Cather: [Mrs. Fiske] "will feed her art with her life; yes, that's it. Olive Schreiner once wrote a story of an artist who painted pictures in a wonderful red color that none of his fellow painters could imitate. They sought the world over for a color like that and never found it. He worked on, growing paler day by day, never revealing his secret. But after he was dead, when his fellows went to put his grave clothes on him, they found an old wound over his heart with open and calloused edges. Then they knew where he got his color" (1897 W & P 451). See Schreiner, Olive. "The Artist's Dream," in Dreams, 1891.
Homer, Winslow. American painter in oil and watercolor and early lithographer for Harper's Weekly, b. Boston, 1836; d. Prout's Neck ME, 1910; Carnegie Jurist. Despite some hints of Manet, Monet, and Degas in his work Homer showed little influence from his time in France. Homer's sea-scenes gave new meaning to American watercolors the way background description in a novel relates to landscape painting; and from this comes the exciting idea of relating Cather's friend, Sarah Orne Jewett to several Maine painters. The Maine artists also exhibited the effect of transition: from the late Romanticism of Homer, one of several former engravers who were painting realistically; to the expressionism, sometimes cubism, of Marsden Hartley; to the pre-abstractionism of John Marin; and finally to the post-modern Romantic Realism of Andrew Wyeth. .
The Wreck. Listed as #96.1 in the 1896 Carnegie Catalogue. Oil on canvas. 30" x 48". In 1896 Homer's The Wreck received the prize in the first Carnegie International. It was the first work purchased by the new Carnegie Museum. Homer worked on the shipwreck theme for years. In his painting The Wreck the focus is on the rescue crew and horrified spectators on the dunes. Women's red shawls suggest the bloody disaster concealed behind the spray of a huge white wave.
Cather: "[They are t]he same element that appeals to one in Winslow Homer's The Wreck" (W & P 470).
High Cliff+. #111, listed as a loan to the Carnegie and illus. in the 1901 Carnegie Catalogue.
Homer's Virginia sketches, wood-engravings and paintings of the Civil War, probably influenced Cather's formation of the portrait of the Color Sergeant in "The Namesake" (1907). Two of Homer's Civil War scenes were shown while he resided in Paris in 1866. Cather knew his work from magazines, the Carnegie Art Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. There she may have "got the notion" for Sgt. Hartwell (WCCSF 140). For more on "The Namesake" see Blumenschein in this Catalogue.
Cather: "We instantly recognized the boy of Hartwell's Color Sergeant. It was the portrait of a very handsome lad in uniform, standing beside a charger impossibly rearing" (WCCSF 139-40).
Prisoners From the Front. Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lawrence Brenton [? a.k.a. Cather] : "During the Civil War [Homer] was employed on Harper's staff doing war sketches for Harper's Weekly. During that time he did his first work in oils, 'Prisoners from the Front,' 'Home, Sweet Home,' and several others of less note" ("The Pittsburgh Art Exhibit." Home Monthly 6.6 (Jan. 1897): 10-11).
See The War for the Union 1862--A Cavalry Charge. Homer's wood-engraving appeared in Harper's Weekly (5 July 1862) and was reproduced in Simpson, Marc. Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. San Francisco CA: Bedford Arts, 1988: 20, 74. Also see Adams, Henry. "Winslow Homer's Impressionism and Its Relation to His Trip to France," Studies in the History of Art 26 (1990): 60-89. For an alternative choice for Cather's Hartwell, cf. Reinhart in this Catalogue.
House of the Tragic Poet and The Last Days of Pompeii. These are the engravings that hung on Mrs. Forrester's wall. See Lytton, Edward Bulwer. The Last Days of Pompeii. Illus. by C. H. White. New York: Scribner's, 1905, for Frontispiece. An engraving of William Tell's Chapel also appears in A Lost Lady. It is interesting that a watercolor entitled, Sacrifice of Iphigenia, from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii, was entered by Mrs. John Mcconnell in Third Annual Haydon Art Club Art Loan Exhibit, in 1890. That was the first year that Cather enrolled in the Latin Preparatory School in Lincoln. The catalogue is found now at University of Nebraska/Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln NE.
Hunt, William Holman. English painter, b. London, 1827; d. Kensington, 1910. Holman Hunt was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He is noted for symbolic details in his paintings.
The Light of the World. St. Paul's Cathedral, London.
Cather's refers to The Light of the World as an oil-chromo on the Templeton's parlor wall in "Old Mrs. Harris" (Obscure Destinies 115).
The engraved plate was a completely different entity from the original painting. Before photo-reproduction, colored lithographs, or chromo-lithographs, as they were sometimes called, were made from the engraved plate to reproduce a particular painting for decorative or publishing purposes. Generally an engraver tediously copied an original work by carefully brushing or drawing its likeness on a lithostone. Using a greasy crayon to draw the image on the limestone block, he tried duplicate the original work as closely as humanly possible. Oil-chromos were then made by passing the engraver's prints though a series of several or many different colored dyes, thereby separating and mixing colors in the same process. Sometimes lithographs and/or engravings were hand-painted with oil or watercolor.
The Awakening Conscience (1851-3). Oil on canvas. 29 1/4" x 21 5/8". Listed as #T. 2075 in the Collection of Sir Colin Anderson at the Tate Gallery, London. Although the Tate Gallery opened in 1897 to house modern British paintings (as did the Luxembourg for French paintings), Cather did not see it there because Hunt's painting was not acquired until 1976 (Tate 62). Evidently she knew Holman Hunt's picture of piety from a reproduced print.
Cather's Ray Kennedy: "It was in his sentimental conception of women that they should be deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and finally deny. A picture called 'The Soul Awakened,' popular in Moonstone parlours, pretty well interpreted Ray's idea of woman's spiritual nature" (SOL 125).
Ray Kennedy recognizes Thea Kronberg's singing as a pure gift from the Divine and as a sign of her purity. Hunt's painting pretends to show a moral conversion, yet his theme is heavy-laden with sexual overtones. If indeed Cather was thinking of The Awakening Conscience in the above passage the picture symbolizes Thea's leaving Ray, and at the same time prefigures her love affair with Fred Ottenberg. For a critic's view see "Fine and Folk Art in The Song of the Lark: Cather's Pictorial Sources," in Cather Studies Volume 1: 89-101.
Interestingly Hunt was influenced by both Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress and by Dicken's fallen girls in David Copperfield (see Landow, George P. William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven CT.: Yale UP, 1979: 44). Hunt like Hogarth was an artist who clarified the meaning of his engravings with accompanying rhymes, and in like manner Hunt painted symbolic pictures with religious and moralistic themes. He wrote his own explanations for his paintings. Hunt, W. H. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London, 1913.
Hünten, Emil. Hünten's painting may be a possible prototype for the piece picture by the German tailor in The Song of the Lark. Depicted is the defeat of Napoleon's troops by Bismarch's German Army. See The Battle of Sedan, reproduced by permission of the Berlin Photographic Company as illustrated in McClure's (Forbes, Archibald. McClure's 5 (1895): 80-88, illustrated on p. 81).
Ingres+, Jean-Auguste-Dominique. French painter and draftsman, b. Montauban, 1780; d. Paris, 1867.
Grande Odalisque+. Oil on canvas. 35 1/4" x 63 3/4." #1101 M. Louvre, acq. in 1899. While Cather doesn't directly refer to Ingres, in all probability she observed his painting at the Louvre. It's possible that Ingres' famous La Grande Odalisque was a model for "The Odalisque" in The Song of the Lark.
Cather: "[Ray Kennedy] even removed Giddy's particular pet, a naked girl lying on a couch with her knee carelessly poised in the air. Underneath the picture was printed the title, "The Odalisque" (SOL 100-01).
Art historians have remarked that Ingres' "reclining nude figure, is traditional, going back to Giorgione and Titian; but by converting her into an odalisque, an inhabitant of a Turkish harem he makes a strong concession to the contemporary Romantic taste for the exotic" (Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. 2 vols. 7th ed. New York: Harcourt, 1980: vol. 2, pp. 742-43). Other artists who painted the Odalisque were Bouguereau, Couture, and Manet. Concerning Ingres' Odalisque, Baudelaire once stated: "It is agreed, or recognized, that M. Ingres' painting is grey. __Open your eyes, you nation of boobies, and tell us if you ever saw such dazzling, eye-catching painting, or even a greater elaboration of color?" ("Charles Baudelaire: 'The Museum of Classics at the Bazar Bonne Nouvelle, in the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, 22.'" Sel. and ed. by Elizabeth Gilmer Holt. The Triumph of Art for the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics. Washington DC: Decatur House Press, 1980: 454-60.
Inness, George, Sr. American landscape painter of the Hudson River School who called Impressionism a "fad," b. near Newburgh NY, 1825; d. Scotland, 1894 ("fad" quoted from Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York: Artabras, 1984: 30). George Inness, Sr. saw the Barbizon paintings in France, and they influenced his loose brushwork and bright colors. He was interested in Swedenborg's mystical philosophy, as was William Blake.
The Clouded Sun. #99.9 in the 1900 Carnegie Catalogue, also owned and exhibited by Carnegie Museum in 1902 (see Cather [?] in "Midsummer Review," unsigned. Home Monthly 1.21 (28 July 1900): 9).
Cather: "Some of the most appreciative art criticisms I ever heard were make by two sun-browned Kansas boys as they looked at George Inness' 'Prairie Fire,' there in the Cyrus H. McCormick loan exhibition" ("Chicago Art Institute." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3; W & P 842-46; [Crane D532]). Also see Cather's poem, "Prairie Dawn" in April Twilights: 38.
The Afterglow (1856). #133 lent by Charles L. Hutchinson, in Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896: 83, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Also see #114 in Ireland, LeRoy. The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné. Austin: U of Texas P, 1965: 29 which shows #114, Landscape or On the Prairie, or Afterglow on the Prairie. After a search of the records at the Art Institute, I am convinced that The Afterglow is the Inness painting that Cather's called "Prairie Fire." Like Inness, Cather often uses luminous raking light--especially when the sun sees the moon--that accompanies the epiphanic moments when the course of the character's life is changed. The following passage is a colorful example by Cather analogous to the mystical-luminism found in Inness's painterly style.
Cather: "When I [Tom Outland] pulled out on top of the mesa [blue], the rays of sunlight [yellow] fell slantingly through the little twisted piñons [green],--the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire [red], they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that glorious feeling that I've never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa [blue], in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what air!--Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of piñons [green]--it was like breathing the sun [yellow-gold], breathing the colour of the sky [blue, gold, red]. Down there behind me was the plain [varied], already streaked with shadow [black], violet and purple and burnt orange until it met the horizon [blue/black plus sky]. Before me was the flat mesa top [blue], thickly sprinkled with old cedars [dark green] that were not much taller than I, though their twisted trunks [brown] were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black shadow going ahead (PH 240). For luminism in Cather's work see, Murphy, John J. "Cather's Use of Painting." My Ántonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1989: 45-56.
Israëls, Josef. A Dutch land and seascape painter who was interested in light and shadows. He often painted lyrical figures from everyday life; b. Groningen, 1824; d. the Hague, 1911. Israëls studied in Amsterdam, won various medals in Paris, and his work in major museums.
Mother and Child. Listed as #79 in the 1902 Carnegie Loan Exhibit Catalogue. Now at the Mauritshuis, the Royal Picture Museum, at The Hague in Holland.
Cottage Interior, with Mother and Two Children. #276, was lent by F. W. Gunsaulus. Catalogue of Objects in the Museum. Part I. Chicago: Art Institute, 1896: 109, at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.
Cather: "There are certain painters whom the Philistine seems to get quite as much pleasure from in his way as the Art Student does in his. Take, for instance, Josef Israels' Dutch interiors, and especially his pictures of mothers and children" ("Chicago Art Institute." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3; W & P 842-46; [Crane D532]). See Muthers, Richard. Muthers's The History of Modern Painting. 4 vols. Rev. ed. London: Dent, 1907: vol. 3: 239 for Israëls' A Mother's Care.
A Neighborly Visit+. #116 in the 1901 Carnegie Catalogue, shown again in 1902 when loaned by John G. Johnson.
Israëls was one of Cather's favorite artists at the turn-the-century. The Holland Impressionist was very popular, especially at the Art Institute in Chicago. His work is shown in the Chicago Art Institute Catalog of Josef Israëls and other Dutch Painters: A Loan Exhibition, 1904 at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. There are also many examples pictured in Muthers, vol. 4.
Israëls' subjects were often the Jewish poor. He painted in darks and lights that echoed Rembrandt's style: "Through a window composed of dull panes there falls, subdued by a muslin curtain, a grey, dreamy light, which tones the whole room with mysterious atmospheric harmonies . . . the soft air impregnated with damp, with the delicate bloom of silvery grey tones enveloping everything, produce of themselves 'the great harmony' which is so difficult to attainment in clear and sunny lands" (Muthers v. 3, pp. 239, 248).
Muthers' prose could have influenced Cather's plan for the composition of The Professor's House as it relates to the open windows found in Dutch genre paintings. See "A Letter on The Professor's House." College English Association News Letter 2.6 (Oct. 1940) [Crane D595]; also OW 31.
Cather: "Its popularity must be a source of chagrin to the Young Art Student. The simplicity of its directness and treatment, the somber tenderness of the coloring are in no wise [sic] lost upon the Philistine, though he may [not?] stop to reason about it, and may attribute the whole of the pleasure he experiences to the beauty of the subject--maternity. Yet he will go away with some sort of a notion that Israels was the tenderest painter of Dutch women; and that is the most important thing to know about Israels, though his technique was the best of one of the best schools in all the history of painting" ("A Philistine" W & P 761; and again in "The Chicago Art Gallery" W & P 844). See Eisler, Max. Josef Israëls. London: Studio Ltd, 1924 for many illustrated reproductions.
Israëls' melancholy sketches of the Old World peasantry anticipate the W. T. Benda drawings for My Ántonia (see the illustration of Springtime in Dutch Painting, p.93. For a contemporary view see, Meesler, J. A. "Joseph Israëls." Dutch Painting of the Nineteenth-Century. Ed. May Rooses. Vol.1: 83-100 [commonly known as "Rooses"]. London: S. Low, Marston, 1898-1901, especially Woman Sewing, p. 88. These art historical volumes were among those listed as recommended reading in the back of the early Carnegie Exhibition Catalogues when Cather was writing reviews.
Jefferson, Joseph. Painter and actor as were his father and grandfather, b. 1829, Philadelphia; d. Palm Beach, 1905. (Who Was 313). Jefferson earned a Master of Fine Arts at Harvard University.
The King of the Forest, After Trout, Forest and Streams, Moonrise, The Tug-Boat; A Smoky City, A Street Scene in St. Augustine are all listed in Cather's article in the Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1901: 14 [Crane D510]; and in "Winter Sketches in the Capital." Index to Pittsburgh Life (12 Jan. 1901): 10; W & P 808-09 [Crane D511]. All of Jefferson's paintings were showing in 1901 at the Corcoran Gallery [17th Street at New York Avenue, Washington DC. 20006-49]. "Our greatest American actors have been great men off the stage as well as on it, fit for any Olympian circle. Jefferson [a versatile actor and amateur painter] could be judged by his intimacies and by his avocation of painting almost as well as by the art in which he was so grand a master" (from a "Commemorative Tribute" by William Milligan Sloane. American Academy of Arts and Letters: Notes and Monographs. December 1910, vol. IV).
Kendall, William Sergeant. Painter, sculptor, b. Spuyten Duyvil NY, 1869; d. 1938. Kendall was a Carnegie Jurist and International Medalist. He studied with Eakins and was a member of the Art Students League and the Society of America Artists. Eventually Kendall became the Dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts serving from 1913 to 1922 (Who Was 332).
For Cather's reference see Nicklemann, Henry. "The Philistine in the Art Gallery." Pittsburgh Gazette (17 Nov. 1901): 6 [Crane D536].
Mother and Child. This painting was probably titled The End of Day. It was exhibited and illustrated in the 1900 Carnegie Catalogue. Cather referred Kendall's painting as an earlier prize winner that was popular with Carnegie's patrons.
A Fairy Tale+. Listed as #123 in the Carnegie Catalogue; see W & P: 865.
Kandinsky, Wassily+. Russian colorist who painted in Germany and France, b. 1866, d. 1944.
Improvisation, #27: the Garden of Love+. Cather did not mention Kandinsky, but he is important because of her references to Post-Impressionist painters. He began painting a series of abstracts in 1909. See his influential book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Also see Armory Show in this Catalogue.
Kleboe, Bernhardt. Kleboe executed two appropriate looking woodcuts and one head- and one tailpiece ("A Lost Lady." Part II. Century 106.7 (May 1923): 75-94; and also "A Lost Lady." Part III. Century 106.8 (June 1923): 289-319 [Crane CCC2]). His illustrations are similar to those of Lankes, who illustrated Part I of "A Lost Lady." Kleboe's tree-lined lane that leads to a gabled farmhouse better expresses the Midwest landscape than does the woodcut of a New England village done by Lankes.
La Farge, John. American painter, muralist, and stained-glass designer, b. New York City, 1835; d. Providence RI, 1910. Carnegie Jurist, 1901. Cather cites him for being on Carnegie's Committee (W & P 513).
At the Carnegie La Farge was the first American to initiate the modern style. In Paris, he studied with Couture and met Puvis de Chavannes. He became fascinated with flat-patterned Japanese prints. He also knew British artists Millais and Rossetti while in England.
Upon his return to America, La Farge expressed his increasing idealism when he decorated the interior and designed the colored-glass windows of the Trinity Church in Boston. He executed four other church windows and a mural in New York City. He influenced American muralists when he painted in Renaissance style the Ascension of Our Lord for the Church of the Ascension. The Church, located on Fifth Avenue at Tenth Street, was consecrated in 1841 and designated as National Historic Landmark in 1988. Edith Lewis commented on Cather's particular love for the Church of the Ascension because of La Farge's mural on canvas above the main altar (Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953: 151). For an illustration and description of La Farge's mural see "Mural Decoration in America." Century 51 (1895-96): 110-113. Also see La Farge, John. "100 Masterpieces of Painting." McClure's (Dec. 1908): 135 ff.
Laguna Pueblo. Cather described the painted back altar in the Laguna Mission Church. Cather and Edith Lewis spent a rainy week at the little pueblo, a fact that surely allowed for a close and accurate inspection of the altar decorations.
Cather: "[T]he church was clean and the doors were open; a small white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, [that are] linked together in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with a tapestry. It recalled to Father Latour the interior of a Persian chieftain's tent he had seen in a textile exhibit at Lyons" (DCA 90). For Cather's stories grouped together as an altarpiece, see Boye, Alan. "The Design of the Retablo in Death Comes for the Archbishop." Saltillo 3.2 (1974): 36-45 [Arnold 1974.6].
Lalla Rookh: An Eastern Romance with illustrations by Copeland.
Cather: "Lalla Rookh. Shall I ever forget the day I first discovered that book? . . . And O, the pictures in it. . . . That night, after my good old aunt had tucked me into bed, I lay trying to paint in the darkness a face frightful enough to be Mokanna's" (Helen Delay [a.k.a. Cather]. Home Monthly (June 1897): 14; W & P 350-51, my italics).
Lankes, J. J. Lankes designed two woodcuts to illustrate "A Lost Lady." Part I, only. Century 105.6 (Apr. 1923): 802-822 [Crane CCC2]. Bernhardt Kleboe illustrated Parts II and III with more appropriate-looking woodcuts. Cather may have made the change; see her comments on "an unwestern atmosphere" in Lorenze in this Catalogue.
La Tour, Georges de+. French painter of dramatic religious and genre scenes, b. Vic-sur-Seille, 1593; d. Lunéville, 1652. Also see Guido in this Catalogue.
Saint Joseph, the Carpenter+, and the Penitent Magdalen+ were both works referred to by Cather but with the painters unnamed. The Bishop in Death Comes for the Archbishop is named Latour. Cather probably recalled La Tour's Saint Joseph for the Ácoma Altar-painting of "St. Joseph" (DCA 88).
Lavery, Sir John. British portrait, genre, and landscape painter, b. Belfast, Ireland, 1856; d. 1941. Lavery was a close friend of Whistler (see Muthers, v. 4). Also see Sparrow. John Lavery and his Work. London, 1911.
Lady in Brown. Cather reference is in Brenton, Lawrence [a.k.a. Cather]. "Pittsburgh Art Exhibit." Home Monthly (Jan. 1896): 10-11.
The Bridge at Grez [France]. Lavery's painting is illustrated in "A Philistine." Library (Apr. 21, 1900): 8-9; or see W & P 763.
Lady in Black. Listed as #135 in the 1901 Carnegie Catalogue. See W & P: 763.
Leighton, Frederick [Lord]. British Classical painter and sculptor, b. 1830; d. 1896 in London. Leighton became the President of the Royal Academy.
Two large sales of paintings and furniture were held at the Leighton house after Lord Leighton's death. Even after the sales many of the original contents were in place when Cather visited there in 1902. In a news article for the Nebraska State Journal, she described the fabulous Arab Hall in Lord Leighton's House. The Arabian Hall is right out of the pages of Lalla Rookh--the book whose Oriental pictures Cather loved. There, beautiful Mediterranean blue tiles, Chinese vases, and mother-o-pearl inlaid tables decorate the exotic room, but Cather preferred Sir Edward Burne-Jones' "gloomy" studio and his paintings to Lord Leighton's elegant house and his art (WCE 78).
Cather: "I have spent some time in Watt's studio and in Rossetti's and in that house beautiful of Egyptian wood-work and Moorish tiles and priceless stone-work and glass-work from the Orient where Sir Frederick Leighton painted his pictures. . . . Neither the high, clear tinkle of the fountain which sings incessantly in the stone-faced Arabian hall at Leighton House, nor the balconies that hang over the little province of high-walled orchard, can altogether make one forget the pathetic ignominy of Leighton canvases, where flesh of man, woman, and beast are of one texture with drapery, earth, and sky, and where all are lost in muddy colour and the rigidity and flatness of death" (WCE 78-79).
Lord Leighton's Victorian house is filled with eclectic examples of the Aesthetic Movement in England. Formerly it was known as a "palace of art." It housed not only beautiful furnishings but was and still is celebrated for the musical performances held in the spacious, upper-floor studio. Decorative woodwork, marble-topped tables, velvet-covered chairs, bronze sculptures, India vases and brasses, along with exotic paintings by Leighton and several Old Masters and frescoes by Watts crowded its opulent rooms. The Leighton House Inventory Lists were graciously provided to the author by the Leighton House Curator, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14 8LZ. 4 Feb. 1991, following my visit there. See Rhys, Ernest. Frederic Lord Leighton: An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work. London: George Bell, 1900.
Leonardo da Vinci. Italian, painter, sculptor, engineer, architect, and scientist, b. near Florence, 15 Apr. 1452; d. Amboise, 2 May 1519. Leonardo initiated the High Renaissance style. He employed shades of light and dark later known as chiaroscuro. He invented a radical spiraling perspective, as opposed to a linear perspective, and additionally made use of contrapposto.
Cather: ". . . under the copy of the Mona Lisa . . . " ("A Death in the Desert." Scribner's (Jan. 1903): 109-121).
Mona Lisa (c. 1506). Panel. 3' 2 1/4" x 1' 8 3/4". At the Louvre where Cather undoubtedly gazed at it time and again.
Vierge, L'Enfant Jesus, et Saint Anne+ (1507). 5' 6 1/4" x 4' 3 1/4". This panel is in the Louvre. Leonardo's monochrome cartoon for it is at the National Gallery, London.
The Virgin of the Rocks+ (1483). Panel transferred to canvas. 6' 1/4" x 4'. At the Louvre.
Lerolle, Guillaume (Henry). French painter, b. 1848; d. 1929. In 1922 Lerolle represented the Carnegie Institute abroad in the International art world. See Weisberg, Gabriel P. "From the Real to the Unreal: Religious Painting and Photography at the Salons of the Third Republic." Arts Magazine 60 (Dec. 1985): 58-63 for an illustration of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.
Cather references: "The Fourth at Crete." Lincoln Evening News 5 July 1894: 8 as Larolle [sic] [Crane D66]; and also in Brenton, Lawrence [a.k.a. Cather]. "Pittsburgh Art Exhibit." Home Monthly (Jan. 1896): 10-11.
Long, Edwin. Diana or Christ (1881). Cather's character Enid Royce was the martyr in the tableaux vivante titled Christ or Diana (One of Ours 123). See Schwind's Dissertation, p. 237. For Long, see the Dictionary of Art and Artists. Eds. Meyers, Bernard S. and Shirley D. Meyers. 5 vols. New York: McGraw, 1969.
Lorenze, Richard. Painter, illustrator, b. Weimar, Germany, then moved to Milwaukee in 1886; d. 1915 (Who Was 379).
In the West. Shown at the 1895 Haydon Art Club Exhibit.
Cather: "Richard Lorenze's 'In the West' is at once strong and disappointing. The worst thing about it is the title. It is a western subject and a western man placed in an unwestern atmosphere. The position of the man, his bronzed, rugged face, his sun-browned beard, the way his hair grows, or rather does not grow on his head, that arm and hat and buckskin glove leave little to be desired. But for all that the picture is not western. The impressionists say it is keyed too low. Whatever that may mean, the lights are certainly at fault and the color is too tame. The sunlight is gentle, not the fierce, white, hot sunlight of the west. Sunlight on the plains is almost like the sunlight on the northern seas; it is a glaring, irritating, shelterless light that makes the atmosphere throb and pulsate with heat" (Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1895: 13; KA 218; W & P 125, my italics).
Low, Will Hicok. American painter and writer of art historical articles, b. Albany New York, 1853; d. 1932.
At the Spring+. The 1897 Carnegie Catalogue shows Low's nude nymph in a natural setting as she catches falling water. W. H. Low's painting reveals the French influence from Courbet's similarly luminous nude with a like title The Spring (1868), at the Louvre (illustrated in Faunce/Nochlin, Fig. 3.3).
Cather: "In his [Robert Louis Stevenson's] epilogue to the painter W. H. Low" (W & P 288, 562). One should note Cather's spunky behavior before she wrote her Pittsburgh interview "Will H. Low and Bouguereau," in the Lincoln Courier: "I basely bribed the hostess to ask Mr. Low to take me to dinner. . . . The next day Mr. Low smuggled me into the gallery--and particularly that part of the public which follows my occupation--are not yet admitted" (30 Oct. 1897: 3; W & P 512-14). Curiously Cather doesn't mention Low's provocative entry, At the Spring, in her article about him.
In New York City, S. S. McClure introduced Low as painter/art-historian to the public in "Will H. Low and His Work." The article was profusely illustrated by Cleveland Moffett (McClure's 5 (1895): 290 ff.). Also see the McClure's series, "A Century of Painting," by Will H. Low. In this extremely important series of articles W. H. Low discusses art movements in nineteenth-century art from the prospective of different artists, different countries, and different decades. W. H. Low covers such French artists as David, Delacroix, Corot, and Millet, and those of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England (see the Contents in McClure's 6 (Dec. 1895 to May 1896): iv for complete pagination).
W. H. Low's articles were so significant that S. S. McClure sent the artist abroad to actually see the original artwork. The paintings in turn were photographed and reproduced for McClure's Magazine. W. H. Low's series of articles were to be "more profusely illustrated than any articles yet offered by any magazine to its readers." See S. S. McClure's interesting editorial endnotes in which he explains that paintings could now be reproduced by a new photographic processes that made steel engravings a thing of the past (McClure's (June to Nov. 1895): 576). Later on in the nineteen-thirties, of course, when photo-lithography proved to be characterless, more traditional illustrators returned to handcut linoleum and wood blocks for prints. For more on W. H. Low see Bastien-Lepage in this Catalogue.
Luxembourg Museum. In 1750 the Luxembourg Museum only held the Royal Collections. By 1886 it began accepting works of contemporary French artists, particularly those shown at the Salon. In 1902 Cather stated that American painters were shown in a gallery for foreign artists (W & P 833). In 1920 the Luxembourg Museum gradually moved its collection to the provinces, to storage, to the Louvre--including the Galeries du Jeu de Paume. That small museum was first used for non-French exhibits after 1920, and then for Impressionist paintings after 1947. Recently the Jeu de Paume holdings went to the Musée d'Orsay. For this reason it is difficult to trace the provenance of the paintings except in named collections, such as the Isaac Camondo Legacy, that Cather experienced in Paris. For the 1902 Thomy-Thiéry Collection see the Louvre Catalogue 1903, and for the later 1908 Camondo legacy see the Louvre Catalogue 1912.
MacDonall, Angus. MacDonall illustrated Cather's "Roll Call on the Prairies." Red Cross Magazine (Aug. 1919). His two lithographs in a rural theme may be found in the Slote Collection [Box l.B.2.Q], Archives, U of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Macomber, Mary. Boston painter, b. Fall River MA, 1861; d. 1916. Macomber studied at Boston Museum of Fine Arts' School (Who Was 390).
Fides+ #149 and The Hour-Glass #150 (illus.) are listed in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue. Macomber won Honorable Mention. For Cather's comments on Macomber's The Hour-Glass see W & P: 868.
Saint Catherine+ (1898). Oil on canvas, at Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Also see Macomber's In Central Park in Antiques 138 (Sep. 1990): 360.
Manet, Edouard. Aristocratic French painter and graphic artist, b. 1832 in Paris directly across the Seine from the Louvre, and near the Ecôle des Beaux-Arts; d. 1883, Paris. Muthers credits Manet with being the "founder and head of the Impressionist School." An excellent resource for Manet's work is found in the catalogue, Manet 1832-1883. New York: Abrams for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 1983 [later known as Manet in this entry]. He was Willa Cather's favorite painter.
Cather: "Mr. and Mrs. Nathanmeyer were alone in their great library. . . . One could merely see that there were pictures there. Fred whispered that they were Rousseaus and Corots, very fine ones which the old banker had bought long ago for next to nothing. In the hall Ottenburg had stopped Thea [Kronberg] before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful Manet in the world" (The Song of the Lark 248). Manet's painting The Street Singer is that painting.
The Street Singer (1862). #57.38 at Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Bequest from Sarah Choate Sears, a wealthy Boston collector of Impressionist paintings, who bought the painting from Durand-Ruel around 1900. Illus. as Color Plate #32 in Manet. Manet's favorite model, Victorine Meurend, is pictured. Yet the idea for The Street Singer rose from an incident when Manet met a singer coming out of a cheap café. Emile Zola applauded Manet for his directness in painting the young Parisienne who is confronted by the hard realities in her life.
Manet's realistic and allegorical paintings shocked the conservative Academicians whose themes were taken from history and myth. Like the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Manet utilized conflicting values in his painting. The Street Singer reveals a dark but provocative stare. Dressed in rich silk-faille the Singer's expensive clothes don't characterize a pretty young woman of the streets. Peachy-faced and fresh she pushes out from the café through its swinging doors. As a symbolist painter Manet's doors probably signify chance in the singer's life. Manet allows the viewer to glimpse men in tall hats who are the Singer's audience inside the shoddy café. Nevertheless the Singer is aloof and on the move. Like a bacchante she pulls grapes or cherries one by one that suggest her random love affairs. Unlike a lady she eats directly from a brown paper bag, not from a silver plate as a lady might do. Her guitar pulls up her silk dress to reveal a white petticoat, indicating the tawdry underside of her life.
Olympia (1863). Cather first saw Olympia at the Luxembourg in 1902. Clemenceau moved it to the Louvre in 1907. Listed as #1190 in M. Louvre. Olympia is now at the Musée d'Orsay and is Manet's most symbolic painting (Moore 41).
Manet's model for Olympia was again Victorine Meurend, who issues the same provocative stare as did his Street Singer, painted the previous year. In his oil painting, Manet paid homage to the great nudes and odalisques found in earlier paintings by Titian, Velásquez, Goya, and Ingres, Couture, and others. Still, Manet's picture shocked an outraged Salon of 1865 when Olympia was first exhibited there. Embarrassed by a blizzard of criticism, he kept the painting until he died in 1872. John Singer Sargent told Claude Monet that the widow Madame Manet needed money and might sell Olympia to an American collector. Consequently, in order to purchase Manet's painting for the Luxembourg Museum, Claude Monet initiated a public subscription. Ironically, their defender in art Emile Zola, refused to subscribe (Manet 183. See Color Plate #64).
Cather: "Several days later, at the Luxembourg, he [painter Aaron Dunlap] met him [a Californian] again, standing in a state of abject bewilderment before Manet's Olympe" ("The Profile" WCCSF 127).
Le Balcon+ (168-69). The Balcony was in the Luxembourg Museum in 1896 where Cather surely saw it. In 1929 it was at the Louvre and it is now in the Musée d'Orsay. Illus. #1201 Musée du Louvre: Peintures: Ecole Francaise, XIXe, and Color Plate #115 in Manet.
Angels at the Tomb of Christ+. #94 was loaned by Paris art-dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, to 1902 Carnegie Exhibit. Very likely this painting is Manet's The Dead Christ and the Angels (1864). It is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Color Plate #74 in Manet.
Torrero Saluant+ (1866). Listed as #139 in the 1897 Carnegie International Exhibition Catalogue. A Matador or Matador Saluting was painted in Spain; now at the Metropolitan Museum, a 1929 Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer; Color Plate #92, illustrated in Manet. Also see Victorine Meurend in Mlle. V in the Costume of an Espada+ (1862) now at the Metropolitan Museum; Color Plate #33, in Manet.
Portrait of Emile Zola+ (1868). In the background Manet includes as symbols an eighteenth-century Japanese wood block, his own Olympia and Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and a Velásquez print. Illustrated as Color Plate #106, in Manet.
In 1886 Zola published his novel L'Oeuvre that concerned the lives of the Impressionist painters.
The process of Japan's Ukiyo-e prints that so stylistically influenced nineteenth-century painters like Manet, Monet, Whistler, Chase and Maurer, ultimately found its way to America. This revived process for illustration may have influenced Cather's own preference for the woodcuts found in several of her stories that were published in magazines.
Several of Manet's paintings were part of the Isaac Camondo Collection in 1908 at the Luxembourg. This collection, according to Walter Tittle, was one that Cather knew very well (WCP 85). For Cather's unique connection to Manet and the symbolic writers, like Flaubert, Zola, and Proust, one looks to E. K. Brown's important passage: "[S]he saw that if she abandoned the devices of massive realism, if she depended on picture and symbol and style, she could disengage her essential subject and make it tell upon the reader with a greater directness and power, help it to remain uncluttered in his mind. . . . Her fiction became a kind of symbolism, with the depths and suggestions that belong to symbolist art, and with the devotion to a music of style and structure for which the great literary symbolists strove, Pater and Moore and later Henry James" ("Homage to Willa Cather." Yale Review (Autumn 1946): 91, 340). See Moore, George. Modern Painting. London: Walter Scott, n. d.
This argument was set out earlier by Yvonne Handy, an American woman from Buffalo, New York, in her French thesis. She wrote that it is useless to constrain Cather's work in a particular style, since her writing shows qualities of Realism, the Romantic, and of the Néo-Symbolists. Handy argued that Cather has a style of her own that is mobile, sensible, penetrating, lucid, and always interesting (Handy, Yvonne. L'oeuvre de Willa Cather. Thése. Rennes: Imprimèries Oberthur, 1940: 173 [Arnold 1940.10]. #900/18389 in the British Library Reading Room, London. Most, if not all, of Cather's works are held here.
Also see Stéphane Mallarmé's article "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet." Art Monthly Review. 30 Sep. 1876: 117-22; also in Gazette des Beaux Arts 85 (Nov. 1975): 147-56. Mallarmé's article appeared only a month after W. M. Rossetti's "Pre-Raphaelitism, Its Starting-point and Its Sequel." Consequently Impressionism and Pre-Raphaelitism as new art-movements were closely aligned in time with the American artist, James McNeill Whistler who served as the conduit between France and England.
For the most important article devoted to Symboliste relationships in the Art Nouveau period, see "Between Literature and Visual Arts." Mukarovsky´, Jan. The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky´. Trans. and ed. by John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven CT.
Yale UP, 1977: 205-235. See "Literature and the Visual Arts: The Postmodern Ut Pictura Posesis," an unpublished paper by Anne Ciecko, University of Pittsburgh, given at the Graduate Student Conference in 1990, Lincoln NE. Also for symbolism, see Stouck, David. "Willa Cather and the Impressionist Novel." Ed. John J. Murphy. Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984: 48-66 [Arnold 1984.87].
A Bar at the Folies-Bergères+ (1882). At Courtauld Institute of Art, London; see Impressionism and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces: The Courtauld Collection. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987: 30-31, Catalogue #3, illus. One aspect of this Manet painting is interesting because of its conflicting reflective surfaces. Manet's composition looks back to the dislocated space in Velázquez's Las Meninas, and forward to a comparable use in Cather's textual reflections. Examples of her reflective-imaging are most readily available in her novels Alexander's Bridge [8-9, 52, 105, 138], and My Mortal Enemy [11, 45, 50, 78]; also see Chase in this Catalogue. The painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergères had a fugitive past before Samuel Courtauld purchased it in 1926. It is possible that Cather saw it exhibited at the Grafton Galleries, London, or she may also have seen it in an early reproduction. See Manet in Muthers, Richard. Muthers The History of Modern Painting. 4 vols. Rev. ed London: Dent, 1907, vol. 4. Also Color Plate #211, in Manet.
Cather: On the French as artists: "Read the life of Manet and Monet, both great artists, great masters. The French people had to be sure of their genius before it would acclaim them. Death almost took them before acknowledgment of their power was given them. It is good sense, deliberation, and an eagerness for the beautiful that keeps up the fine front of French art. That is true of her literature as well as of her painting" (1924, WCP 70).
Matisse, Henri Emile+. French painter, graphic artist, sculptor, designer and decorator for both ballet and buildings; perhaps one of the greater artists of the twentieth century, b. Le Cateau, Nord, 1869; d. Cimiez, Nice, 1954. Matisse studied briefly with Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Always a strong draftsman, he eventually became a copyist at the Louvre. Matisse turned first to Neo-Impressionism, then to the line, pattern, and color associated with his Fauvist period that began in the early 1900's. Matisse won a first at the 1927 Carnegie International Exhibition. Cather never directly refers to Matisse.
Blue Nude+. Matisse's entries, along with those of Derain, Dufy, and others, identified these artists as Fauves, or "wild-beasts" because of their radically spontaneous use of color and flattened space. Their paintings were exhibited at the Salon d'Automne (1905) in Paris. See 1913 Armory Show in this Catalogue. The following passage seems appropriate to describe an artist like Matisse as a "modern painter" who shifted away from draftsmanship.
Cather: "The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect" ("The Novel Démeublé." New Republic 12 Apr. 1922, supp. 5-6; OW 35-43 [Crane AA2]).
Maurer, Alfred Henry. American painter, commercial artist, b. New York City, 1868; d. there, 1932. He studied at the National Academy. While living abroad for seventeen years Maurer turned increasingly to Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstractionism. Back in New York City he became a part of Alfred Stieglitz's "291" group. Eventually Maurer lost popularity, became depressed, and took his own life. Maurer should not to be confused with his father, Louis Maurer, who was also a painter.
An Arrangement (1901). Oil on cardboard on strechers; 35" x 31 7/8". #155 illus. in 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue where Maurer was awarded the Medal of the First Class. The painting is now at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art. An Arrangement is illustrated in McGraw's Encyclopaedia, listed under Maurer. Maurer's charming work was painted while he lived in Paris. This painting echoes Whistler's use of the two-dimensional, eighteenth-century Japanese print.
Cather: "The picture, which was awarded the medal of the first class, is less fortunate. Will there ever be a first-prize picture of which our mothers and great aunts will approve? This 'Arrangement' of Maurer's they declare aimless and meaningless. 'It's nothing in the world, Myrtle, but a girl sewing the binding on her skirt,' declared the typewriter girl, in a tone of amazement and disappointment. The peculiar difficulties in the drawing, the remarkable painting of the white silk shirtwaist appealed not at all to Edna, the stenographer, because a shirtwaist is a thing of common use and how can it possibly have anything to do with art? She sees nothing in the picture simply because it tells no story, because her imagination finds no delight, no pleasurable suggesting in 'skirt binding.' If the girl were leaning over to pick up a child, or to solemnly burn love letters, or to weep beside a bier, both Edna and Myrtle would have found the picture resplendent with beauty, they would really have experienced pleasure in looking at it" ("The Philistine" W & P 865-66). Also see McCausland, A. H. Maurer. New York: Published for the [Minneapolis] Walker Art Center, 1951: 56 for best reproduction.
Meissonier, Ernest. Meissonier was a highly decorated French painter of the Napoleonic battlefield, b. Lyons, 1815; d. Paris, 1891; Legion of Honor, 1846, and was Medalist of note who was known for his accuracy in detail. Many other smaller Meissonier's are still at the Louvre. He also executed more than three-hundred woodcuts for book illustrations. See at the Carnegie Library-Pittsburgh: Gréard, Vallery C. O. Meissonier: His Life and His Art. New York. A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1892.
Campagne de France, 1814+ (c. 1864). 51.5 by 76.5 cm, oil on wood. Formerly in the Louvre; now at the Musée d'Orsay. An engraved version accompanies Ida Tarbell's impressive series "The Life of Napoleon" in McClure's (eight illustrated issues beginning in 1894). 1814 is reproduced as an engraving by Jules Jacquet after the Meissonier painting, in McClure's 4.5 (Apr. 1895): 415.
In Tarbell's Sixth Paper, "Last Campaigns," Meissonier's theme for his monumental painting depicts Napoleon regrouping rather than retreating. The subject and scale of Meissonier's paintings, which Cather obviously saw in Paris, seem to form her idea for the piece-picture in The Song of the Lark. See also Hünten; for other pictures of Napoleon's battles see Sloane, William M. Century 52.3 (July 1896): 266-97.
Meissonier served in the French National Guard with Napoleon III's troops in Italy. His military duty inspired him to document war scenes in an academic style, carefully composed with flawless technique. He actually staged models and horses to produce in detail his huge and colorful 1814. Many of Meissonier's colorful paintings are small in size; yet his few large-scale paintings retain their majestic force.
Meissonier's companion painting to his 1814 is titled 1807. It appears in McClure's 4 (1894-95): 215.
Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino+. Napoleon II presented this Meissonier painting to the Luxembourg in 1867; now #1242 at the Louvre.
Melchers, J. Gari (Julius Garibaldi). Prussian/American painter in the Dutch Genre tradition, b. Detroit, 1860; d. 1932. Cather was fond his paintings.
Melchers' work differed from his contemporaries; his style reflected a wide range of artists such as Puvis de Chavannes, Edouard Manet, Hilaire Degas, Claude Monet and John Twatchman. Melchers and Puvis de Chavannes became good friends while in Paris. He became aware of the Symboliste style on canvas and in murals of Puvis de Chavannes, and with his trademark of allegory painted in chalky, pale colors, outlined by dark contours, with forms set in shallow space. Later Melchers, too, painted murals that included one for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and others for the Library of Congress in 1895 (Dreiss 22-23). Melchers was as internationally famous as John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. He won prizes in competitions in Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Chicago, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Dreiss 38, 181).
The Ship Builder.
Cather: "Mr. Melchess [sic] is an American artist who lives in Paris and whose work is too well-known to need extended comment. He has a peculiarly strong way of painting these sturdy sea folk, and his 'Ship Builder's' face with its shrewdness and rugged wisdom might belong to Kipling's 'Captain Courageous'" (see an illustration in the "Pittsburgh Art Exhibit," by Lawrence Brenton [a.k.a. Cather]. Home Monthly 6.6 (Jan. 1897): 10-11.
The Sailor and His Sweetheart. Listed as #39 in the 1898, Carnegie Catalogue. Now at Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC. See #12 in the Carnegie Third Annual Exhibition. Catalogue for an illustration. Also see Dreiss, Joseph G. Gari Melchers: His Works in the Belmont Collection. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1984: 113).
Melchers painted thematically in several versions as in The Sailor and His Sweetheart See Dreiss, Fig. 42, p. 113. Also see illus. #18 [Israëls] and Fig. 14 [Melchers] for examples of Dutch Genre paintings with windows.
Cather: "I have heard Gari Melchers called a hard painter, but it must have been an Art Student who said that. He has got more of the poetry out of common life than any man since Millet. The Carnegie Gallery now owns his 'Sailor and His Sweetheart,' and this is a picture before which the Philistines throng. They are quick enough to appreciate the striking character touch in the big white buttons on the sailor's red shirt. One who has seen the woman can never forget her, the robust uncorseted figure, the heavy, thick hands with blunt fingers, on her head just a spoolful of that peculiar sandy shade of red hair that Melchers loves, yet, after Lepage's peasant girl, I think she is the prettiest girl of the lot, and it is a mighty subtle little touch of sentiment that makes her so" ("A Philistine in the Gallery." The Library (21 Apr. 1900): 8-9; W & P 763 [Crane D487]).
Cather: "The densest person cannot miss the beautiful and homely sentiment in 'The Sailor and His Sweetheart.' The Philistine is partial to fireside scenes and domestic and sentimental subjects generally. He knows that sentiment is the most vital motive in society, in his own life and in the lives of his friends" ("Chicago Art Institute." Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3 [Crane D532]; W & P 842-46). The Sailor and His Sweetheart was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1899, and again in 1907 (Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888-1950, p. 609-10). Mrs. Potter Palmer, the famous Chicago collector was a friend of Gari Melchers.
Melchers used a bright palette "while avoiding the degeneration of form that by this time had begun to trouble even many avant-garde painters working in the impressionist style" (Dreiss 1-6). In 1884, Melchers moved to Holland to paint Dutch sailors and, "especially women in domestic interiors . . . . amid the clutter of kitchen furnishings and utensils. A small luminous window provides the only light in this shadowy environment" (Dreiss 18-19, my italics).
Cather: "As a rule, the Philistine likes Gari Melchers, he catches the spirit of the painter's Dutch mothers and fisher folk as he did of James Herne's Shore Acres." See Dreiss Color Plate #8, Mother and Child with Orange (Detroit Institute of Arts) and his Cassatt-like Mother and Child, Color Plate #17. Maternity+, shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913, now is at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln NE.
Wedded. This painting is similar to The Wedding, also by Melchers, now at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY.
See Dreiss Fig. 38, p. 107 for similar work, Married (1894) a tempera and pastel on paper, and for notes on Melchers' wedding series. Also see the Sixth Annual International Catalogue at Carnegie Institute Art Museum Library (1901-2), Figure #158.
Cather: "I saw Edna's face light up as she came upon his 'Wedded.' Myrtle, indeed declared that the girl was insufferably ugly, and that the whole thing was horrid. 'Nobody could say that girl is pretty as a picture,' she remarked contemptuously, and thereby revealed much as to her attitude" ("The Philistine in the Gallery." Pittsburgh Gazette: 17 Nov. 1901: 6 [Crane D536]; W & P 867-69). See Dreiss, Joseph G. Gari Melchers: His Works in the Belmont Collection. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1984.
Meyer, Johann Georg, called Meyer von Bremen+. German artist who painted Biblical themes, b. Bremen, 1813; d. Berlin, 1886. Another Meyer painting was listed in the 1896 Catalogue at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Faggot Gatherer+. #105 in 1902 Carnegie Catalogue, loaned by Charles Donnelly. This directly entry relates to Mrs. Erlich's engraving of a "Swiss wood-cutter" who carries "faggots" in One of Ours, p. 83. Also see Millet's sketch of a woman who carries faggots, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Meylan, Paul Julien. Meylan illustrated the "The Willing Muse." Century (Aug. 1907): 550-557. The drawing was executed into a half-tone engraving by C. W. Chadwick. The story's tailpiece consists of two intertwined serpents in an art-nouveau style that contrasts greatly with Meylan's Romanticized illustration.
Michelangelo Buonarroti+. Most famous Florentine painter, sculptor, and architect, b. Caprese, Tuscany, 1475; d. Rome, 1564. According to Walter Tittle, Cather knew all the Old Masters.
Millet, Jean-François. French painter, b. Gruchy, 1814 ; d. Barbizon, 1875. Millet studied in Cherbourg and Paris. At first he painted portraits and nudes. Later when he moved to Barbizon in 1849, he concentrated on the French peasantry. Millet was accused of being a Socialist because he extolled the virtues of work in his paintings.
Woman Feeding Her Chickens+. Listed as and acq. in #1894.1048 by the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the Auvergne+ (1866). Acq. #1922.414. Henry Field Memorial Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.
Cather: "Somehow it seems as if Bernhardt atones and compensates for all the toil and suffering of those swart, misshapen peasant women Millet used to paint" (NSJ 30 Dec. 1894: 13; KA 117), and later: "Do we not all admit that the man who can make these homely subjects into art is the greatest of all artists, and that the peasant folk of Millet are worthier a man of genius than the ballet dancers of Degas" (1901, "The Chicago Art Institute" W & P 846).
The Gleaners+. In the Salle Thomy-Thiéry, Louvre. Acq. in 1890 and listed as #1328 in Musée du Louvre Peintures: Ecole Francaise, XIXe. Cather's verbal picture near the village of Barbizon describes the "gleaners--usually women who looked old and battered . . . . as Millet painted them." Her passage finds form in Millet's painting The Gleaners ("One Sunday at Barbizon." NSJ 21 Sep 1902: 18 [Crane D558]; WCE 122-23 [Crane AA5]).
The Angelus+. Possibly Millet's best known painting; #1329 at the Louvre; its pious figures inspired Puvis de Chavannes while painting the Sainte Geneviève frescoes. See Puvis de Chavannes in this Catalogue.
Many other Millet paintings are found today at the Louvre. They were given first as the Thomy-Thiéry Legacy, in a gift to the Luxembourg Museum in 1902, and in its Chauchard Bequest, given in 1906. Most of Millet's drawings are in Oxford and Cambridge. William Morris Hunt brought his work to Boston where many Millet oils, pastels, drawings of peasants and fishermen are in the Quincy Shaw Collection (1906-17), at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Cather admired his Millet's work in Boston and in the Thomy-Thiéry Collection in Paris. She knew others from the many reproductions.
The Sower or Le Vanneur (1850). #[19]17.1485 at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy A. Shaw, Jr. and Mrs. Marion Shaw Houghton. There is also a version of The Sower (1850) at the Carnegie Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, and Le Vanneur in the Salle Thomy-Thiéry at the Louvre.
Cather: "Millet did hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated, but when he came to paint 'The Sower,' the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. It was probably the hundred sketches that went before that made the picture what it finally became--a process of simplifying all the time--of sacrificing many things that were in themselves interesting and pleasing, and all the time getting closer to the one thing--It" (1913, KA 446).
The Sower strides through the open fields spreading the seeds. He is alone except for a tiny, enigmatic figure in the background. Millet showed The Sower at the Salon of 1850 where it "received considerable praise from leftist critics for its epic grandeur." Others disliked Millet's portrayal of the hopelessness of peasant life (Brettell, Richard. French Salon Artist 1800-1900. New York: Art Institute of Chicago-Abrams: 85). For Millet, see Will H. Low's significant article, "A Century of Painting." Article #6 in McClure's 6 (May 1896): 498-512. The Sower is illustrated on p. 509.
Cather: "She [Thea] loved, too, a picture of some boys bring in a newborn calf on a litter, the cow walking beside it and licking it. The Corot which hung next to this painting she did not like or dislike; she never saw it" (SOL 179).
Bringing Home the Newborn Calf (1864). Listed as and acq. in #1894.1063, Henry Field Memorial Collection, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Oil on canvas. Listed as #31 Catalogue of Objects in the Museum: 73. Part I. Art Institute of Chicago, 1896. Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. This is the picture of the boys and the calf that Thea Kronberg liked.
"The greatest of them is without doubt Millet's Bringing Home the Newborn Calf. The painting received intense criticism; its peasant figures were described by critic Ernest Chesneau as "types of cretins from the countryside." The solemnity with which Millet imbued so common and, to certain tastes, so vulgar a subject was considered offensive. Yet, in style, Bringing Home the Newborn Calf is among the most gentle, lovingly painted pictures of Millet's career. Each form, whether a stone, a man, or a tree, seems perfectly distilled from nature, conveying a message of pantheism, rather than vulgarity" (See Brettell 49, 50 for a Color Plate of Bringing Home the Newborn Calf).
Returning Home. #108 was shown as a loan from Samuel Untermeyer in the 1902 Carnegie Catalogue along with three other Millet paintings. Cather's character, Mr. Nathanmeyer's in The Song of the Lark, was probably modeled after several famous collectors, such as Samuel Untermeyer, a lender to Carnegie exhibits, and H. O. Havemeyer, whose bequests are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Havemeyer in this Catalogue.
See the exhibition catalogue, Herbert, Robert. Jean François-Millet. Arts Council of Great Britain. London: Graphis Press Ltd., 1976; and also Murphy, Alexandra R. Jean-François Millet. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1984.
Monet, Claude-Oscar. French Impressionist painter, b. Paris, 1840; d. Giverny, 1926.
Impression: Sunrise+ (1872). Upon seeing Monet's Impression: Sunrise--a painting of the harbor at La Havre--Louis Leroy wrote, "Impression, I was sure of it. I also thought, since I am impressed, there must have been an impression in it." Then he compared the painting to the early stages of wallpaper. Thus Monet's Whistler-like painting Impression: Sunrise initiated the name for an completely new Art-Movement--"Impressionism." For Whistler's influence on Monet see Seiberling, Grace. Monet in London. Atlanta GA: High Museum of Art, 1988: 42-45.
The new-style painters were tagged "Impressionists" soon after their first showing. Yet they had called themselves "Independents." The Independents held that exhibit at Nadar's photography studios on the Boulevard des Capucines, in 1874. That was the year after Cather's birth. Impressionist painters included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley, Pierre Bonnard, Armand Guillaumin, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot-Manet, and American-in-France Mary Cassatt. In addition, Turner, Whistler, Corot, Gauguin, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Cézanne, Raffaëlli,and others bordered on the Impressionist Movement. Their style of painting owed much to the Barbizon school in some of its early scenes. Monet favored Corot's in situ sketches and Courbet's naturalism. Like the other Barbizons, Monet painted at the nearby Fountainbleau Forest in 1863. Some of the other places that French Impressionists chose to paint were La Havre, Rouen, Dieppe, Ville d'Avray, and Giverny. In the South of France they favored Aix-en-Provence, L'Estaque, Arles, and Nice.
The Impressionist artist's subject was often a watery scene; the artist diminished the use of form, texture, even space, and emphasized line, tone, mass, and design. In addition as a technique the plein-air painters used brushwork whose strokes were broader, flatter and more evenly loaded with paint. New metal ferrules that secured the bristles to a brush's handle made this method of painting possible.
The chemists in Paris also had an enormous impact on the new range of pigments used by the French Impressionists the nineteenth century. Bright and powerful hues of cobalt, synthetic ultramarine, chrome yellow, chrome orange, emerald green, and viridian green began to dominate the Impressionist palette. While the painters based their works on observation of color and light in atmospheric perspective, they were well aware of scientific theory that color breaks apart under optical glass, i.e., a prismatic phenomenon.
Furthermore, the Impressionists knew that when the eye stares at a primary color (red, orange, yellow), then looks away, the mind will see its complementary color (green, blue, purple respectively). Thus, they spontaneously juxtaposed complementary colors against one another in overlapping planes; the viewer's eye was required to do its own color reckoning as the element of form diminished. The Impressionists tinted shadows with complementary highlights, as colors do in nature, and rejected the use of black pigment. Much of the foregoing data are taken from an exhibit, Art in the Making: Impressionism, in which fifteen works by Impressionist painters, along with their methods and materials were displayed Nov.-Jan. 1991, at The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. An invaluable resource is Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. 1946. 4th rev. ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
In several critical art reviews Cather applied the label philistine to those who viewed a particular exhibit. In fact, in her article "A Philistine in the Gallery" Cather actually signs herself as "Goliath," the writer. Thus as art-critic Cather considered herself larger or even more powerful than the "Philistine" masses [Crane D487]. The following passage about Monet's Impressionist-style provides a contemporaries' definition of Cather's familiar term the philistine: "Monet is subtle in his own way, so superbly successful within his own limits, that it is time wasted to quarrel with the convention-steeped philistine who refuses to comprehend even his point of view, who judges the pictures he sees by the pictures he has seen. He not only discovered a new way of looking at nature, but he has justified it in a thousand particulars" (here quoted from the 1902 Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie Institute, listed under Monet; there re-quoted from W. C. Brownell's French Art. New York: Scribner's, 1901: 124-37, my italics).
One feels that Cather sided with Lucy Gayheart in her own affection for the Impressionists.
Cather: "On the morning after they heard Otello, Lucy [Gayheart] cut out her practicing because Harry [Gordon] had asked her to take him through the Art Museum. . . . Last year when they went through the Museum together they had disagreed violently about almost everything, and had come away in a bad humour."
"What a fury she must have been in last spring! Not once did she catch that smart squint in his eyes. He did, occasionally, square his shoulders before a picture and twist his mouth awry, as if he would like to call the painter's bluff; but he did not try to be funny When they reached a loan exhibit of French Impressionists he broke down, and began pointing out figures that were not correctly drawn." "'Now, you'll admit, Lucy--' he would begin persuasively."
"'Certainly I admit, but I don't think it matters. I don't know anything about pictures, but I think some are meant to represent objects, and others are meant to express a kind of feeling merely, and then accuracy doesn't matter.'"
"'But anatomy is a fact,' he insisted, 'and facts are at the bottom of everything'" (Lucy Gayheart 100-01).
The following passage is perhaps the finest example of Cather's Impressionistic prose:
Cather: "The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour, and across the shining folds of country the low profile of the city barely fretted the skyline--indistinct except for the dome of St. Peter's, bluish grey like the flattened top of a great balloon, just a flash of copper light on its soft metallic surface. The Cardinal had an eccentric preference for beginning his dinner at this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence of the sun suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax--of splendid finish. It was both intense and soft, with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminating their mahogany trunks and blurring their dark foliage; it warmed the bright green of the orange trees and the rose of the oleander blooms to gold; sent congested spiral patterns quivering over the damask and plate and crystal. The churchmen kept their rectangular clerical caps on their heads to protect them from the sun. The three Cardinals wore black cassocks with crimson pipings and crimson buttons, the Bishop a long black coat over his violet vest" (DCA 4).
From Walter Tittle's 1925 interview we know that Cather preferred Impressionist painting. Although Tittle's interview coincided with America's resurgent interest in the Impressionist Movement, it's likely that Cather acquired her personal taste much earlier. There were early Impressionist paintings by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Benson, Hassam, Twatchman, and so on, exhibited or loaned by both to the Haydon Art Club in Lincoln and to the Carnegie International Exhibits. The Art Institute of Chicago was a leader in Impressionist art. Finally, Cather was surely influenced in the 1890's by Lorado Taft's paper "Impressions on Impressionism." For Chicago as "Paris on the Prairies" see Brettell, Richard R. Impressionism: Selections from Five Major Museums. Ed. Marc S. Gerstein. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1989: 17.
Cather once remarked on the artistic struggle of Monet and Manet (WCP 85). In her other writings she mentions Manet several times, but Claude Monet only twice. Nevertheless, at first she tried to first entitle One of Ours as "Claude." This may or may not be significant.
Cather: "Childe Hassam, whose work is after the French, Monet--the laying on of unmixed colors for distant blending" was awarded the silver medal for The Sea" ("Pittsburgh's Art Exhibits." Home Monthly (Dec. 1898): 8; unsigned, but probably Cather's editorial since she reviewed Carnegie Exhibitions).
With little documentation at hand, one can only make educated guesses at the specific Monet paintings that Cather either saw or cherished. Monet often painted a series of the same scene, testing the effect of light at different times of the day. Remarkably Willa Cather too preferred artistic works that were found in thematic series , i.e. Hogarth, Holbein, Henner, Romney, etc. The following examples by Monet were selected (1) by citing those shown at a Carnegie Exhibition, or (2) by selecting paintings of locales that she wrote about, or by places familiar to her in her travels.
Monet regularly entered his paintings in the early Carnegie exhibits. Among them were Red Poppies+ #195 in the 1896 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue and #156 again in 1897 Carnegie Catalogue, and A Field in Giverny+ (1885) in the 1899 Carnegie International Exhibition. Monet painted several versions of poppy fields. The former is now held by the National Gallery, Washington DC, and the latter by the Art Institute of Chicago, acq. #1922.2265 in the Potter Palmer Collection. These are the poppy fields that Cather remembered as "the yellow wheat fields sown thick with poppies, and tall Lombard poplars and pale willows and grey elms, such as Corot and Puvis de Chavannes so often painted" on the road to Rouen (WCE 98).
Grainstack (One of the 1888-91 series). The Haystack was shown at 1898 Carnegie International. For this series see Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism. New York: Abrams for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978: Color Plates #11-15.
Sailboats at Argenteuil (1872). At the Louvre. This painting on the Seine River may be the Boats at Argenteuil that was #164 in the 1900 Carnegie International Catalogue.
Willows at Vetheuil (1880-5). At Monet's early home on the Seine, Willows was exhibited at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition. Possibly it is the same as one at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Rouen Cathedral, Sunlight (1890?). This is only one in a famous series of paintings by Claude Monet in the early 1890's. Cather speaks of the same "stillness and whiteness and vastness" as seen in Monet's painting of Rouen Cathedral in her news article ("Dieppe and Rouen" WCE 99). At least five versions of Monet's Rouen Cathedral are in the Louvre. Four of these are included in 1908 Camondo Collection well known to Cather. In addition, nine other Monet paintings are there.
Monet painted several other places in France which were very familiar to Cather. One remembers that she first touched French soil at Dieppe near Monet's location for the Cliffs at Dieppe (1882). A painting in this series is at the Carnegie Art Museum. And Monet's Quai du Louvre, Paris (1866) is placed just across the Seine from the Quai Voltaire where Cather often stayed in the Hotel Voltaire (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mrs. Knopf." 12 June 1923. Knopf Inc. Collection, #19385. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. University of Texas-Austin, TX).
In Cather's Alexander's Bridge, Bartley Alexander, as did Monet, stayed at the Savoy Hotel while in London. She commented on London's East End from nearly the same view that Monet saw from the Savoy Hotel room when he painted his Thames series, The Houses of Parliament (1901).
Cather described it as "[t]he beautiful river front on the east side of the Thames called the Albert Embankment, from which one gets the most satisfying and altogether happy view of the Houses of Parliament up the river . . . ." (WCE 57). Monet painted the Thames series shortly before the time that Cather was in London (Seiberling 18). One version of the Thames series is at the Art Institute of Chicago and another is in the Brooklyn Museum. See Seiberling, Grace. Monet in London. Seattle: U of Washington P-High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, 1988.
Monet painted the Doge's Palace, Venice (1908). The painting is almost exactly the same scene as found on a postcard that Cather sent from Venice (Cather, Willa. "Postcard to Mrs. C. W. Weisz." 8 Sept. [1935]. Artist, Pittrice L. Migliavada. The Willa Cather Papers. Newberry Library, Chicago).
For Cather's textual use of Impressionistic techniques: (1) in Death Comes for the Archbishop, see Synnott, Kevin A. "'The colour of an adventure': Pictorial Dimensions in Cather's Archbishop." Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 31.3 (Summer 1987): 11-15.
(2) For Lucy Gayheart see "Painting 'The Tricks That Shadows Play': Impressionism in Lucy Gayheart." WCPMN 36.3 (Fall 1992): 37-39.
Morris, William. See Burne-Jones in this Catalogue.
Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban. Spanish painter, b. Seville, 1617; d. there, 1682.
Portrait of the Artist. #118 was loaned by R. Hall McCormick for the 1902 Carnegie Exhibit.
Cather: [M. Mounet-Sully] has the chisel of Praxiteles, he must forge[t?] the brush of Murillo" (KA 128).