Pinney is shown in the fashionable dress of the day: the black coat with its glimpse of lining, the white linen shirt and high collar, the rippling neckcloth. The coat is unbuttoned below to reveal the vest, to which is attached a delicate chain and a small key; a dark jewel set in pearls is visible on the shirt front. Pinney wears his hair curling, long, and a little wild. Moorash has captured a peculiar expression: Pinney seems to have been caught unawares, and he is shown half-rising, looking at the viewer with a kind of irritated surprise.
RAT KRESPEL
1835
Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 1/8 in.
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Rat Krespel” appeared in 1819 in Volume One of Die Serapionsbrüder. Although it is not known whether Moorash was able to read German, his sister Elizabeth was well read in both German and French; she may have translated the story for him directly from the German, or from the French translation by Loève-Veimars of the Oeuvres complètes (1829–33). Moorash has depicted the scene of Councillor Krespel’s wild grief after learning of the death of his daughter:
Deeply shaken, I sank into a chair. But the Councillor, in a harsh voice, began singing a merry song, and it was truly horrible to see how he hopped about on one foot, the crepe (he still had his hat on) fluttering about the room and brushing against the violins hanging on the walls. In fact, I couldn’t help giving a loud shriek when the crepe struck me during one of his sudden turns; it seemed to me that he wanted to enfold me and drag me down into the horrible black pit of madness.
The details of the scene are faithfully recorded in the painting: the violins on the wall are draped in black, in place of one violin there hangs a wreath of cypress, and Krespel wears a black sword-belt beneath which is tucked a violin bow instead of a sword. What is striking, however, is not the careful rendering of detail but precisely the opposite: the furious distortion of details as they are swept up into lines of force, the deliberate and expressive blurring of form. Thus the streaming of Krespel’s hair and coat is seen in the violins, which in the dark radiance of the candlelight seem to writhe like snakes, and the ripple of the fluttering band of crepe is echoed in the curve of the piano’s music rack, while the piano itself appears to be dissolving into reddish darkness. The effect is of a center of violent energy diffusing itself throughout the entire painting. Krespel himself, partially plunged in blackness and partially illumined by the red candleflames, has the distorted features of a grimacing dwarf. Despite such distortions, the painting retains a number of illusionist features, such as definite though at times ambiguous perspectival lines and a stable, centralized vantage point.
If the scene attracted Moorash for its painterly possibilities, the story itself has significant implications in light of what is known of Moorash’s theory of the demonic properties of art. It will be recalled that Krespel’s daughter is blessed with a supernaturally beautiful singing voice, which derives in part from a defect of the lung; if she continues to sing, she will die. The dubious origin and fatal effect of art — twin themes that haunted the romantic imagination (see Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” for a later variation) — is here given one of the earliest and most memorable expressions by the German fabulist.
The painting, believed lost until 1951, when it was discovered in the attic of a descendant of William Pinney’s maternal uncle, shows some damage: the paint surface is abraded in the top right corner and in a small area to the right of the cypress wreath. There is also some loss of paint along the upper and lower edges of the picture, where the canvas has deteriorated.
Note. Because Rat Krespel is frequently connected with the Phantasmacist movement of the early 1830s, it may be worthwhile to distinguish Moorash’s work from the paintings of that minor and short-lived school. In works such as The Headless Horseman (1832) by John Pine and Lenore (1833) by Erastus Washington we see the typical Phantasmacist interest in macabre scenes drawn from literature, the use of violent contrasts of light and dark, and the attraction to shrill discords of color, but in essence the technique of this school is diametrically opposed to that of Moorash. The Phantasmacists attempt to capture the macabre, the eerie, the fantastic by the method of scrupulous precision; even their fondness for unusual effects of light (flickering lantern-light, cloudy moonlight, stormy daylight, the flames of hell) is expressed in an almost scientific method of distortion. Their concern for detail, for exact representation, for high finish and smooth facture, connects them with the academic art against which they appear to be rebelling. But Moorash, even in this early painting, has begun to dissolve the outlines of objects, to blur linear identity, to infect all parts of a painting with an energy that appears to erupt from within the canvas.
It would nevertheless be interesting to know whether Moorash ever visited the Boston studio of Erastus Washington, whom he once ambiguously praised in a letter to William Pinney (5 December 1843): “All the same, I’d rather have painted one devil by old Erastus Washington than all the landscapes by Hudson.” (Moorash liked to speak of an imaginary artist called Hudson who was supposed to have painted all the pictures of the land-scapists working in the Hudson River valley and not yet known as the Hudson River School.) Erastus Washington (1783–1857), one of the more eccentric artists of the 1830s, spent ten years completing a cycle of over five hundred paintings in red, burnt sienna, and black called The Underworld, which he intended as Part I of a three-part cycle and which he burned along with his entire library after a mystical revelation at the age of sixty. He spent the last fourteen years of his life writing religious tracts in which he inveighed against the idolatry of art and asserted that Nature itself is a great painting composed of images that obliquely reveal an unseen Master. If Moorash ever admired him, it was for his wildness and sincerity rather than for his art.
LANDSCAPE WITH FOG. STONE HILL,
EARLY MORNING
1836
Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in.
In the early spring of 1836, at the urging of fellow painter Edward Ingham Vail, Moorash left Boston, where he had been struggling for two years, for the village of Strawson in northern New York. Here he rented a cottage “dirt cheap” on the outskirts of town. The country appeared to agree with him, and in June he moved to the nearby village of Saccanaw Falls, where he rented a rural cottage about half a mile from the village center on sixteen acres of fields, woods, and streams. He was soon joined by his sister Elizabeth, who had been living restlessly with her parents in Hartford, Connecticut. She had recently been left a small annuity upon the death of a favorite aunt, and saw in the move a chance both to free herself from unhappy domestic circumstances and to watch over her beloved and careless brother. The property contained a decaying barn that Moorash used as a studio.