His new life delighted him, in part because he was happy to put distance between himself and Vail, whose dreamy landscapes and sentimental portraits grated on his nerves. The cottage was situated on a small rise known as Stone Hill, a name that in Elizabeth’s Journal refers sometimes to the hill itself, sometimes to the entire property, and sometimes to the cottage. Moorash’s life at Stone Hill was by no means as isolated as has been claimed (see Havemeyer, 56–58, for the classic statement of Moorash’s “romantic solitude”); Elizabeth records frequent visitors, such as William Pinney and his sister Sophia, Edward Ingham Vail, the miniaturist Thomas Swanwick, the itinerant folk artist Obadiah Shaw, who specialized in perspective views painted on cigar-box lids and Biblical scenes painted on glass, and the poet and portraitist Lyman Phelps (later a successful attorney-at-law). In addition, the Journal mentions numerous excursions to Strawson and the surrounding countryside, as well as twice-weekly walks into Saccanaw Falls, a small but bustling village of two churches, four taverns, a dry goods store, two bakeries, three butcher shops, a cooper’s shop, three smithies, a tannery, a mason’s shop, a furrier’s, a brewery, a hatter’s, two druggist shops, and even a musical instrument establishment.
The painting, completed in late summer, should be seen as an attack on the popular topographical views of the day, on the early contemplative landscapes of the Hudson River painters, and perhaps on the entire genre of landscape painting, which by mid-century would supplant portraiture in popular esteem. Indeed there is a distinct element of satire here, despite the absolute seriousness of the work. As one early critic put it: where is the landscape? Moorash has chosen to depict a thick, obliterating fog, in shades of gray, white, and black, with brown and green tints seeping through and, in the right-hand portion, a luminous yellow-ocherish burst where an invisible sun is glowing. Nothing whatever is visible in the picture, aside from the brilliantly rendered fog itself and a single, sharply emergent leafless branch in the lower left-hand corner; here and there dark, wavering forms appear indistinctly. Moorash has completely abolished perspective. There is no vantage point, no center; there is no image, except for the disturbing branch in the lower left hand corner, which serves the ambiguous function of anchoring the viewer in place, of providing stability, and also of radically confusing or destabilizing the point of view, for it is impossible to determine the relation of the branch to anything else. We tend to read it as a sign of height, but its position in the lower left-hand corner either contradicts that reading or forces us to imagine that we are looking down on the sceneless scene from an elevated point. The painting makes no attempt to induce in the viewer a state of revery, or to suggest deep religious meanings infused in a natural setting; rather, its effect is to disturb, to confound, to render uncertain.
ELIZABETH IN DREAM
1836
Oil on canvas, 26 1/2 × 36 in.
Moorash’s early masterpiece was refused by the National Academy of Design in New York and the Boston Athenaeum but accepted for exhibition by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where it attracted the attention of several critics who subjected it to ridicule mixed with moral indignation. The picture was begun in the spring, set aside for Landscape with Fog, and taken up again by the end of August, after which Moorash worked at it steadily until its completion in mid-November. As the weather grew colder he was forced to move from the barn to the house, where with Elizabeth’s help he converted the upstairs parlor to a studio and moved most of the parlor furniture down to the kitchen. The ground floor of the cottage was divided into two rooms — the large kitchen and Elizabeth’s bedroom — as well as a small room in back that served as a wash-house; the upper floor consisted of a large front room (Moorash’s studio, formerly the parlor) and two back rooms, one of which was Moorash’s bedroom and one of which served as a storage or guest room. William Pinney, a frequent visitor in 1836, has left a vivid description (in a letter to his sister of 8 September 1836) of the transformed cottage, where guests were entertained in a kitchen containing an armchair, a writing desk, and a sagging sofa, as well as a pile of canvases leaning against an old churn in one corner.
Elizabeth Moorash (1814–1846) was twenty-two at the time of the painting. We are fortunate to have a likeness of her dating from 1836: a miniature watercolor on ivory painted by Edward Ingham Vail. The glossy brown-black hair parted in the middle and bursting into side curls, and the dramatic blackness of the dress, which blends into the dark background, serve to throw into relief her striking face, which Vail rendered meticulously in delicate clear color: the large, heavy-lidded eyes look out with an expression of frankness and passionate intelligence, softened by a kind of dreamy, inward stare, as if her deepest attention lay elsewhere.
Elizabeth in Dream carries to fulfillment the technique first seen in Rat Krespel, in which a central image or character infects the entire world of the painting. Here the barely perceptible face, transparent and dissolving, of the dreaming Elizabeth is dispersed throughout the picture: her transparent hair streams into the night sky, her eyes are streaks of purple-black, her bare arms melt into the brilliance of the moon; and the night itself, under the influence of the dream-dispersed young woman, seems to melt into streams of bright darkness or dark brightness. The world and the dreamer intermingle and dissolve. And yet there is nothing soft, gentle, or revery-like about this dream world, which on the contrary is charged with an extraordinary energy, as if the night were composed of black fire.
THE INFERNAL PICTURE GALLERY
1837
Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 46 3/4 in.
Elizabeth’s Journal for 15 December 1836 records a visit by John Pope Coddington, a New York art collector and amateur painter, whom she describes as “most bewildered by our kitchen-parlor.” Coddington appears to have been even more bewildered by the canvases he was shown, but three days later he wrote to commission a cycle of eight paintings on “The Power of Art.” Moorash labored over his unlikely commission for nearly a year before abandoning it after a third painting. He liked to refer to the cycle as his “punishment,” which it quickly became despite the attraction of the theme and the lure of income; certainly the first two paintings are disappointing performances and represent a step backward in the development of his art.
As an undergraduate Moorash had frequented the Boston Athenaeum, and in his two years abroad with William Pinney he had spent many days in the art galleries, auction rooms, and temporary exhibition halls of London and Paris, as well as in a number of private collections to which Pinney had entry, but Moorash was at best a restless, impatient visitor of picture galleries, “those most fashionable of graveyards with their numbered headstones” (letter to Elizabeth, 14 May 1833). His refusal to accompany Pinney to Italy is well known; he argued that the entire country was “an interminable picture gallery decorated with olive trees” (letter of William Pinney to Sophia Pinney, 6 June 1833). The only pictures he is known to have viewed with pleasure were not paintings at all, but satirical mezzotints hung in the windows of printsellers’ shops. A row of paintings in a gallery, he once remarked to Edward Vail, reminded him of a line of prisoners waiting to be shot. This irritable response to what he called the “necessary evil” of art museums no doubt partly accounts for the infernal theme, but it would be a mistake to see in the painting no more than revenge for the “months of smothering boredom” he claimed to have suffered among the numbered headstones. Moorash believed profoundly in the power of painting to affect the beholder. In a letter to Pinney (undated, c. 1835) he speaks of the “impressive nature of art, that is, its power of impressing itself onto the mind and soul, as a knife impresses itself in flesh,” and behind the playfulness and mockery of The Infernal Picture Gallery we hear the unmistakable note of this deep theme.