FIGURES IN SNOW
1838
Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 1/8 in.
Moorash appears to have begun work on this picture on 10 November 1837, that is to say, the very day following his night of furious pacing. Elizabeth’s terse entry for 10 November reads: “Edmund working like mad.” On 22 November she notes that he has been taking long walks in the snow “for his snow picture”; considering his slow habits of composition, it is reasonable to assume that he was still at work on the picture begun on 10 November. In mid-December he put it aside for a Stormy Night (letter to William Pinney, 3 December 1837) that he apparently abandoned or destroyed. He was back at work on his “snow picture” by the first week of January and appears to have completed work on it by the middle of February. It remains uncertain to what extent Figures in Snow was composed in accordance with the new method he is known to have adopted by the summer of 1840. Instead of discarding canvas after canvas until he achieved the effect he wanted, he began in the summer of 1840 to work obsessively on a single canvas, painting out unwanted portions repeatedly, or else scraping them out with a piece of pumice, so that he gradually built up thick, uneven layers of paint, often with distinct ridges. Figures in Snow appears to be transitional; several portions are painted over, but the overall accumulation is notably less than it was to become.
A letter from William Pinney (7 June 1838) to his sister Sophia reports that Moorash was “exhilarated” while working on the painting, and it is reasonable to suppose that part of his exhilaration lay in his triumphant return to the technique of Elizabeth in Dream. The heavy, swirling snowfall blurs and distorts the two figures barely glimpsed through the raging whiteness, with its eerie tints of brown and violet. A streak of red in one figure, perhaps indicating a scarf, is carried over in paler and paler tones, as if the redness is staining the storm, or as if the snow is dissolving the figure into liquid.
A pencil study that appears to be connected with the finished picture shows the two figures clearly as William Pinney and Elizabeth, coming up the front path of Stone Hill Cottage; the Journal entry for 6 January 1838 speaks of a visit by William “in wild snow.” Evidently Moorash made a quick sketch, which he referred to in completing the painting. If the sketch was in fact made on 6 January, then the two figures were a late addition to the snow picture, but abundant evidence for the composition of other paintings attests that Moorash’s conception of a picture often underwent a significant shift during the course of composition, after which he pursued his new vision relentlessly. William Pinney, by now an architect of growing reputation, was a frequent visitor at Stone Hill Cottage; in the spring of the following year he built a cottage of his own on the far shore of Black Lake, about two miles from Stone Hill. It is not certain when he fell in love with Elizabeth Moorash, although his letters to his sister in 1837 and 1838 make it clear that he found Elizabeth enchanting. In the light of later events Figures in Snow may seem to have an ominous suggestiveness, as if Moorash foresaw the whole dark history, but nothing in the surviving correspondence or in Elizabeth’s Journal lends support to such interpretations. Moorash cannot have been unaware of his friend’s growing interest in his sister, but in January of 1838 William was the eagerly awaited friend of the family, who was welcome to stay for a day or a month and who had not yet disturbed the harmony of things by his declaration of love for Elizabeth. Figures in Snow is best seen as a study in white, by a young master sure of his way.
ELIZABETH AT DUSK: BLACK LAKE
1838
Oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 37 5/8 in.
Elizabeth often walked down to the shore of Black Lake, the large, gloomy lake bordered by cattails that lay some two miles from Stone Hill in a bleak setting of stony fields, clusters of conifers, and a dead ash split by lightning. On the far shore lay the low pine-covered hills where in the spring of 1839 William Pinney was to build his cottage. Edmund sometimes accompanied Elizabeth to Black Lake, where brother and sister would walk along the lakeshore in animated conversation broken by long, peaceful silences. Sometimes they would pull out of the reeds an old rowboat that Edmund had named Sacagawea and row about the dark, quiet lake, Elizabeth at the oars and Edmund lying back against the pillow with a novel by Scott or Bulwer that he held open but did not read.
Of the thirty-one surviving Elizabeth paintings — that is, the nineteen paintings in which Elizabeth appears alone, and the twelve paintings in which she appears with another figure or figures — twenty-three show her as a blurred, distorted, or unrecognizable figure, while the remaining eight do not contain any face or figure at all, and are classified as Elizabeth paintings solely on the basis of titles. In a sense, Moorash never painted his sister. And yet there can be no question of her presence in the paintings to which she lends her name. Moorash’s use of his sister in the Elizabeth paintings was inspirational, and at times erratic, but it was not only that: even in the earliest paintings he was working out a method. It is significant that he continually asked her to pose for him, as if he were painting a meticulous, highly finished portrait of the popular academic kind. Elizabeth’s Journal is filled with accounts of long posing sessions, after which she might discover that a portion of canvas had been covered with a rich shade of brownish black. Moorash’s method was not, as Havemeyer supposes, “expressionistic,” except in the most general and unhistorical sense. On 12 April 1838 Elizabeth wrote: “In the afternoon I posed for three hours before the window. E very pleased with me, commends my fortitude. Scornful of imitating nature — that old saw. Spoke of his attempt to dissolve the natural world onto its components and reassemble them in order to reveal true nature.” On 3 September 1841: “Edmund wants to dissolve forms and reconstitute them so as to release their energy. Art as alchemy.” These hints suggest an esthetic that is neither expressive nor imitative, but transformative: Moorash appears to be seeking a way to reveal or release another order of being, a deeper structure than the accidental and physical one that presents itself to the innocent eye.
In the painting Elizabeth is alone, a small, shadowy figure almost swallowed up by the immensity of dark lake and dark sky, which flow into each other indistinguishably. The swirling array of many-hued browns all stream from the dark Elizabeth figure at the center. A mood of deep melancholy pervades the picture, as if a stain of brown sadness has seeped through a crack in the universe. Elizabeth’s brief Journal entry for 6 June 1838 reads: “Upon seeing the picture I was seized with a terrible agitation. Edmund has seen into my very soul.” Three days later, on 9 June, she writes: “My spirits have lifted on this glorious morning. How deeply I feel the presence of a benevolent Spirit in the hills and valleys. I must pray for guidance.” Elizabeth’s tantalizing comments have been taken to refer to the coming crisis in her relation with her brother, but it is possible that she had already begun to show signs of the nervous disorder that was to reveal itself more decisively in the years to come.