Introduction

The Art of Haunting

My training as a historian of American art was based on a canonical narrative that still commands authority. In this narrative, the most representative, most "American," painting was the celebration of landscape as type and emblem of national identity. Significantly, the most American of all landscape genres was so-called Luminism, in which all-pervading light took on the status of transcendental signifier, standing in for the divine, and for the divinity in nature. Light flooded the grandiose paintings of the Hudson River school; light blazed in the sunset skies of Frederic E. Church and sparkled in the canvases of the American Impressionists. The genre painters we studied likewise produced radiant, mythic images of daily life: farmers harvesting, children romping in sunny fields. When race entered into the picture, it seldom had a threatening edge. Black men and women appeared on the margins as harmless, often laughable figures. If violence occurred, it was far off on the western frontier, where Indians slaughtered buffalo and threatened pioneers. We now know all too well how selectively (and for what political and cultural ends) such images represented the American scene. Notwithstanding, they still constitute the mainstream of our historical inquiry, although the emphasis has shifted from celebration to interrogation.¹

Scholars tended to explain the many exceptions to the rule of sunny side up as just that, ranking those artists with oddballs and misfits who, for whatever contrary reason, broke out of the mold. Indeed, the title of Abraham Davidson's 1978 study, The Eccentrics and Other American Visionary Painters, says it all.² The "eccentrics," whose art bears little resemblance to that of "mainstream" painters, lingered at the margins of American art history, unincorporated into the larger, canonical picture. By and large, I accepted that model, though I always nursed a secret preference for the oddballs. It was not until I began to think about Thomas Eakins's Gross Clinic that I stumbled into the boneyard of American art history.

Admired and praised in the twentieth century as a powerful and uncompromising masterpiece of American realism, this portrait of a distinguished surgeon in action excited controversy in its earliest years; ambivalence toward the painting persisted long after the hullabaloo had subsided. A full quarter century after its first appearance in public the art critic Sadakichi Hartmann found it both morbid and macabre. As late as 1931 the critic Frank Jewett Mather was describing The Gross Clinic as a "witches' kitchen," where a "beneficent magus" presided over "eager young men" clutching at the patient's "gashed thigh" in a mysterious ambience of "general black fustiness."³ Looking back at the virulent critical reaction in 1879, when the painting was on display at the Society of American Artists in New York, I discovered the same pattern. I wondered, what could account for such disgust before a work many now consider a monumental and unparalleled representation of modern surgical achievement? Was there another side, a darker side, to The Gross Clinic and the artist who made it?

My research strongly suggested that there was. If Eakins—a mainstream artist if ever there was one—had a dark side, I wondered, did this hold out possibilities for reconsidering those oddballs and eccentrics so far from the center?⁴ That is, if Eakins's dark side was as much a part of him as the systematic, scientific, fact-finding sensibility that structured his work and constituted his image as an authentically American genius, then why not revisit the eccentrics and reconsider them in relation to the mainstream? Why not regard their visual production as equally "American," with equally compelling things to say about America in the nineteenth century? Was there a way to connect artists otherwise widely separated, socially, geographically, and chronologically? And were there other mainstream painters besides Eakins who ventured into the dark side?

I knew that there was a substantial and rapidly expanding body of history and criticism on the gothic tradition in American literature, stretching from the novelist Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville in the nineteenth, to William Faulkner and beyond in the twentieth. Why was there no similar corpus of work on a gothic tradition in American art? How could the gothic in American culture be limited to one medium? Was it possible to trace a gothic strain in the history of American art, tying together misfits and mainstream painters? And how might the answers to those questions alter the contours of the American art-historical canon? I determined to find out. In this book, I explore and interpret the dark side: the gothic imagination in nineteenth-century American painting.

My "gothic" is at some remove from the "Gothic" architectural and decorative style that enjoyed a romantic and ecclesiastical revival in the nineteenth century.⁵ It is also at some remove from the English literary gothic tradition initiated by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliff, and "Monk" Lewis. The gothic novel in England was the product of an age in upheaval. Centering on themes of terror, mystery, and the supernatural, gothic tales mapped out the struggles and desires of the self, haunted by the dark forces of the ancestral past or oppressive feudal institutions. Fictions of a revolutionary era, these narratives featured wicked monks and corrupt aristocrats as villains bent on persecuting innocent maidens and brave youths. Their landscapes were brooding and their settings ruinous or sublime: rotting castles, labyrinthine dungeons, medieval fortresses on crags. In the pictorial arts, the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli achieved perhaps the epitome of gothic expression in works such as the memorable Nightmare (1781; Detroit Institute of Arts), with its swooning woman, scowling incubus, and ghostly nag's head peering through theatrical curtains. Early in the nineteenth century, English and Continental artists explored other gothic themes: ruined churches, apocalyptic disasters.⁶

What had all this to do with America? Born out of revolution, the young country had no ruins and (in comparison with the Old World) only a shallow past—and what seemed an infinitely bright future. As a product of the Enlightenment, it meant to be a republic of reason, dominated by neither church nor king. Tradition and culture still bound independent America to England, but there was little to foster the transplantation of the English gothic to American soil. Yet it did take root here, shifting shape in response to different and varying sets of historical and social circumstances.

In this project I follow directions traveled by the literary and cultural historians who in recent decades have historicized the American gothic. Leslie Fiedler's landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel remains important, even though scholars have, with good reason, criticized his figuration of American gothic as an exclusively masculine genre centering on a "flight from society to nature, from the world of women to the haunts of womanless men." For Fiedler, American gothic was "a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation." But as Teresa Goddu notes, Fiedler translated the "dark spectacles" of the gothic into the "more meaningful symbolism of psychological and moral blackness." That is, he sought mythic, universalizing transcendence for the gothic in America and, although he discussed racial conflict and oppression, gave comparatively little weight to the racial, political, and economic meanings that have more recently engaged scholarly energy. Nonetheless, his vision of the haunted American literary landscape moved criticism into new territory, both troubling and shadowy.⁷

These shadows have lengthened over the panoramic expanse of our history as scholars continue to dismantle the myths of America as enlightened and progressive republic. In Nightmare on Main Street, Mark Edmundson examines the resurgence of the gothic in the millennial 1990s, tracking it everywhere, from the insatiable public appetite for violence and horror to repressed-memory syndrome and Goth subcultures. Focusing on the antebellum decades, David S. Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, explores the cultural "basement" of the period and argues that canonical writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, tapped into a teeming, murky world of popular fascination with sex, crime, vice, and perversion. Although Reynolds is concerned with literary form more than social critique, his research shows how vast a chamber of horrors underlay the polished surfaces of American literary culture. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen focuses more specifically on a pervasive, enduring public fascination with horrific, savage criminality, from the earliest years of settlement.⁸

I also draw heavily on the important work of Toni Morrison and Teresa Goddu on the subject of race. Although I focus on the social, the sexual, and the psychological, the racial is an overwhelming and compelling presence in the territory I explore. The institution of slavery and, more generally, racial oppression and violence have haunted and disfigured history and society alike. In "Romancing the Shadow," Morrison insists urgently that we must recognize the connotations of the "darkness" that pervaded American romantic expression. "Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities," Morrison writes. "For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination." Even the Enlightenment can be understood only in relation to the institution of slavery: "the rights of man and his enslavement." Whiteness, the fundamental term of American identity, means nothing without its foil of blackness. The "Africanist" presence in our literature, therefore, is a "dark and abiding" one that shaped the "imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed." Yet more often than not this presence, unmentionable for many reasons, appeared in a vocabulary "designed to disguise the subject."⁹

In Gothic America, Goddu examines "a number of sites of historical horror—revolution, Indian massacre, the transformation of the marketplace—[but] is especially concerned with how slavery haunts the American gothic." Gothic stories, she argues, intimately connected to the culture producing them, "articulate the horrors of history." The nation's narratives "are created through a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion. By resurrecting what these narratives repress, the gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history." Oozing into other genres and appearing in unlikely places, the gothic brings "the popular, the disturbing, and the hauntings of history into American literature."¹⁰

In the course of my research, I came to realize that similar gothic patterns infused American visual culture. Above all, the Africanist presence identified by Morrison could be glimpsed in a variety of disguises, some obvious, others oblique. Where graphic caricature spoke bluntly of racial tension and unease, the language of painting was characteristically indirect and required careful unraveling to reach the racial dimension. Slavery was not the only divisive and explosive American social ill. Pernicious inequities of gender, class, and ethnicity also found utterance in gothic visual speech. But slavery and its legacy, looming large in our history, stand for all. In these pages, therefore, slavery is the keystone of my gothic arch.

The scholarly works that have informed my own thinking point clearly to a radically alternative vision of America, haunted by specters of otherness: psychological, familial, social, and especially racial. Yet they focus almost exclusively on the printed word. Even when they include illustrations from the period—pictures from trial pamphlets, grotesque political cartoons, and the like—those pictures amplify or reinforce the argument of the text rather than define a gothic visuality. Painting the Dark Side, by contrast, imports the gothic into the realm of the visual.

I seek to broaden and complicate our ideas of the gothic and its meaning in nineteenth-century American visual culture—especially in painting. I define this "gothic" as the art of haunting, using the term as container for a constellation of themes and moods: horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity. The art of haunting was an art of darkness, often literally: several of the artists I study shared a dark style, characterized by gloomy tonalities, deep shadows and glaring highlights, grotesque figures, and claustrophobic or chaotic spaces. The gothic is hardly limited to such visual traits, however; we see it in Elihu Vedder's sunstruck beaches and the highly descriptive and strictly controlled drafting of William Rimmer or Thomas Eakins. If there is no consistent set of gothic conventions, what connects these disparate works across the nineteenth century?

Beyond the question of style, the gothic is a mode of pictorial expression that critiques the Enlightenment vision of the rational American Republic as a place of liberty, balance, harmony, and progress. Gothic pictures are meditations on haunting and being haunted: by personal demons, social displacement (or misplacement), or the omnipresent specter of slavery and race. They explore the irrational realms of vision, dream, and nightmare, and they grapple with the terror of annihilation by uncontrollable forces of social conflict and change. Gothic pictures trade on terror, ambiguity, and excess while inverting or subverting the status quo. They conjure up disturbing spectacles of grotesque bodies in which the monstrous, the animal, and the anomalous threaten the social construction of the normal. They push and occasionally dissolve boundaries designed to segregate social and cultural space, crisscrossing between high and low, elite and popular, painting and caricature.

The dark side remains for the most part unknown, although several studies in addition to Davidson's Eccentrics have done significant work in mapping out the territory. Bryan Jay Wolf uses deconstruction and psychoanalysis to probe gothic dimensions in the art of Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, and John Quidor, who also figure largely in Painting the Dark Side. David Miller explores the image and connotations of the swamp, which he construes as the dark side of the nineteenth-century American landscape both in painting and in literature. Michael Fried dips into certain dark and haunted regions of Thomas Eakins's psyche, and, more recently, Gail E. Husch has revealed the cultural meanings embedded in the disaster genre, which enjoyed a great resurgence in the years from 1848 to 1854.¹¹ Rich in ideas, these studies are also highly selective, focusing on a specific time period, artist, genre, or method.

I want to account for the gothic pictorial imagination in a broader and more unified historical, social, and cultural framework. But my narrative does not weave itself into a seamless whole, nor does the book function as a systematic, all-inclusive survey of the gothic in nineteenth-century art.¹² My aim is to suggest how the gothic, in its many forms, gave certain artists—in and out of the mainstream—a potent, fluid language for dealing with darker facets of history and the psyche that seldom intruded into the optimistic domains of more conventional landscape and genre painting.

Gothic pictures stand as visual metaphors for an ever-shifting tangle of secrets, obsessions, fears, and dread. In them disquieting forces, impossible to address directly, find expression in disguise, and things kept in the dark return in the form of veiled, coded, or elliptical messages. Elihu Vedder, for example, could never have expressed outright in a painting his hidden fears of female power. But his images of gigantic sea serpents, dead Medusas, and devouring Sphinxes allowed him to displace and distance those terrors, to push them to the dark side, where veils of fantasy shroud a raw anxiety. Nor could the Boston painter Washington Allston erase or acknowledge his identity as a slaveholding southerner in any acceptable, pictorial form. His gigantic unfinished opus Belshazzar's Feast (see Plate 5) gave him a covert channel for managing a past that never ceased to haunt him.

There was more to it than personal expression, however. Were the pictures by these artists and others I investigate merely visual diaries, written in code and dedicated to the exorcism of personal demons, they might be very interesting indeed, but would remain unconnected—a diverting array of tormented psyches and guilty consciences. Instead, however, on the gothic picture plane the personal and the political interlace in complex ways. Vedder's serpents, Medusas, and Sphinxes reference not only his own anxieties but also those of middle-class masculinity, socially adrift and threatened by the destabilizing forces of emergent feminism. Allston's fear and guilt were also the fear and guilt of a white society—North and South—stained, haunted, and torn by the curse of slavery. Gothic picture were slates on which the cultural unconscious inscribed itself in cryptic symbols and expressed itself in terms at once subjective and social, private and public. This is the gothic strain, the gothic pattern, that I trace in Painting the Dark Side.

The gothic in my account (as in Fiedler's) is an almost exclusively masculine province, one in which images map the terrain of white male anxiety, fear, and repression. Social, economic, and political tensions splintered nineteenth-century American life into myriad shards as opposing groups sought to gain or aggrandize power. For men, art became one of the sites where these conflicts and others simmered or raged. Women artists and artists of color were in the extreme minority through most of the century, and few, if any, ventured into the gothic visual territory I survey here. For such groups literature served as the vehicle of gothic expression while men colonized the pictorial domain. White masculine status and identity, far from stable and unified, constantly faced social, political, and economic challenges. Those may partly explain why male artists manufactured gothic visual languages to express (and repress) their fears or deployed the gothic vocabulary in acts of pictorial and social transgression. All were haunted by visions of social cataclysm and fantasies of regression and personal dissolution. The dread of losing control—or the delights of surrender—permeated the space of the gothic picture.

Another connecting thread besides whiteness ties together the eight painters I study. All were, in one way or another, outsiders. Cole was an immigrant who never rooted himself deeply in the soil of his adopted country. Allston was a displaced southern aristocrat trying to conceal his profoundly southern roots in a quintessentially northern town. Blythe and Quidor were at the extremes of marginality, socially, economically, and even geographically. Vedder was a cultural migrant, adrift in wartime New York and subsequently a permanent expatriate, Rimmer a man of precarious balance, always on the brink of poverty and madness. Ryder, a working-class outsider, sedulously cultivated the weirdness that fascinated his largely middle-class clientele. Eakins, a Philadelphian of respectable family and impeccable professional credentials, though he might seem the odd man out here, made himself an outsider. His provocations to the status quo ranged from the gory Gross Clinic to the flagrant pursuit of nudity in the service of art. Pushed to the margins, these painters stood on the brink and gazed down into frightening depths.

From the beginning, I wondered if there was a way to bring the emerging gothic pattern in nineteenth-century painting into line with the gothic strain in American literature. As the work progressed, the figure that came back again and again in different guises was that of Edgar Allan Poe, although Hawthorne or Melville both make appearances here, along with the earlier gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown. In The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne probed the personal, familial, and social dimensions of the past as a haunting weight on the present. Brown's haunted landscapes suggest an approach to Cole's, and Melville in Benito Cereno (1856) produced an elaborate metaphor for the haunting presence and evil of race in America. Yet it was Poe who, like the repressed, kept returning.

Poe, as Goddu has noted, fits awkwardly with a national literary canon, functioning most often as "the demonized 'other' who must be exorcised from the 'mainstream' of our 'classic' American literature."¹³ To integrate him, Goddu argues, literary historians and critics resorted to tactics designed to transcend Poe's region (the South) and its politics. Thus despite his reputation Poe's standing in the canon remains problematic. As outsider and southerner haunted by personal demons and racial fears, Poe offered a striking pattern for understanding the gothic facets of the nineteenth-century American painters I chose to study. Indeed, for the pictorial gothic Poe turned out to be a hall of mirrors, offering up the possibility of complex, multiple reflections. Like Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer, he spoke of the horrors of slavery and the nightmare of racial fears in elliptical, metaphorical language fraught with images both terrifying and bizarre. Displaced, dispossessed, a would-be southern aristocrat, Poe seemed an intriguing reference point for Thomas Cole, a displaced Briton stranded somewhere between gentleman and lowly artisan. As a downwardly mobile inebriate hopelessly defeated by the culture of the marketplace, Poe furnished a striking parallel to David Gilmour Blythe, spiraling downward, increasingly out of control. Indeed, like all the painters in this book, Poe struggled in the unrestrained capitalist economy of urbanizing, industrializing America and, like most of them, fell victim to it. Like Blythe, he explored the dark side of modernity and the modern urban wilderness; like Ryder at the century's end, he probed the gothic layers of modern subjectivity: the guilty conscience, the tortured mind. Poe, more than any other writer, haunts both the gothic pictorial imagination and this book.

The narrative that follows falls into three sections. The first, embracing Cole and Quidor, ventures into the gothic spaces of nature and the metropolis. The centerpiece or keystone section examines the racial fears and fantasies embedded in works by Allston, Quidor, and Blythe. The last section is a voyage into gothic pathologies of mind and body in the art of Vedder, Eakins, and Ryder. My approach varies, depending on focus, but each chapter revolves around one or two "puzzle pictures," and each attempts to discover the key, or keys, to their gothic secrets. Because I view these pictures as haunted ground, inhabited by demons both personal and social, biography plays a crucial role here. Where possible I identify traumas and personal crises or conflicts that might return to the canvases in pictorial disguise. In a complementary move, I examine the historical landscape—social, political, cultural—for signs of trauma, danger, rupture, and dread; that is, repressed, disturbing, or taboo material that might reappear, in masquerade, within the space of the gothic picture. Though the biographical and the social occur in varying proportions from chapter to chapter, they work together to open up hidden layers and suggest gothic meanings.

My turn to biography involves risk. It is something like walking a postmodern art-historical plank. That is, sooner or later (following in the footsteps of the artists I examine here) I am bound to stumble off into some murky depths. Beyond certain concrete markers—birth date, father's occupation, education, date and duration of marriage, date of death—biography furnishes a rich body of unreliable evidence, and a life story may be subject to variation in successive retellings. Even a subject's diaries or letters or the recollections of relatives, friends, and enemies give us no more than selective, distorted, deceptive, and contingent slices of a life irretrievable in its totality. And in the case of David Gilmour Blythe and John Quidor, only scraps of evidence can be found. All this means that I often journey into the foggy reaches of speculation.

Nevertheless, I cannot imagine writing this book without biography. In recent years, art historians have tended to privilege the external social matrix, market forces, and the discourses of race, class, and gender as devices to excavate art's meaning. The artist, operating at the intersection of social and historical forces, is also their product and their tool, a creature of limited agency enjoying only the most illusory of freedoms. I do not dispute the importance and utility of that model, and it is fully operational here. Taken to an extreme, though, it can reduce art to the function of a machine for meaning, predictably decodable (or predictably ambiguous). As I ventured further and deeper into the research for Painting the Dark Side, I was drawn again and again into the artists' own private lives, so richly and strangely textured (or riddled) with obsessions, illusions, quirks, weaknesses, disappointments, and secrets. Surely those leaked out, somehow, onto the murky surfaces of the gothic picture or seeped up from its depths. Not to factor in that dynamic—however fluid, elusive, and ultimately indeterminate—would only flatten the lattice of public meaning and private feeling that constitute the gothic. I am not in sympathy or complicity with the eight painters I study here; I do not seek to excuse them or explain away their mistakes, delusions, bigotry, and flaws. I will say, though, that they continue to fascinate me, and that, in the end, may be one of the principal reasons for this book.

In Painting the Dark Side, finally, I did not set out to overturn the established canon or to set up another in its place. The book is not a counternarrative or carnivalesque inversion of the status quo. Rather, it expands and complicates the canon and suggests productive ways of rethinking it. Inclusive rather than exclusive, it makes new sense of artists hitherto considered misfits while revealing darker dimensions in the work of canonical masters and patrolling the spongy borderlands where popular visual culture and the elite medium of oil so often mixed, mingled, and traded places. More than anything else, Painting the Dark Side seeks to add strangeness and shadow to the familiar well-lit terrain of nineteenth-century American art. Only if we consider the dark side, indeed, can we better comprehend the light.

Notes

Introduction

1. See Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969); and John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, exhibition catalogue (New York: Harper and Row for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980), as representative (and influential) models of this canon-building enterprise.

2. Abraham A. Davidson, The Eccentrics and Other American Visionary Painters (New York: Dutton, 1978).

3. Sadakichi Hartmann, A History of American Art [1901], rev. ed., 2 vols. (Boston: L.C. Page and Company, 1932), 1:204; Frank Jewett Mather, Estimates in Art, series 2 (1931; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 216.

4. David Lubin, "Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins," Art Bulletin 84, no. 3 (September 2002): 519, comments suggestively on the importance of considering the dark side of Eakins's work and the "dark shades" of the artist himself.

5. See Katherine S. Howe and David B. Warren, The Gothic Revival Style in America, 1830-1870, exhibition catalogue (Houston, Tex.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1976); and Alice P. Kenney and Leslie J. Workman, "Ruins, Romance, and Reality: Medievalism in Anglo-American Imagination and Taste," Winterthur Portfolio 10 (1975): 131-63.

6. The literature on the gothic is vast. For a useful general overview and history of the gothic in various media, including literature, see, for example, Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, 1999). For painting, see Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979); and Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).

7. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; reprint, Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 76, 29; Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 7, 95.

8. Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Also see Donald Ringe, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1982); and Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, eds., American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998).

9. Toni Morrison, "Romancing the Shadow," in Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 38, 42, 46, 50.

10. Goddu, Gothic America, 3, 2, 10, 8.

11. Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000).

12. I do not, for example, discuss Rembrandt Peale, whose large, sensational allegory The Court of Death (1819-20; Detroit Institute of Arts) was a profit-generating public showpiece meant to promote moral reform and right-minded virtue.

13. Goddu, Gothic America, 77.