The lake is Black Lake, as a preliminary sketch, which includes identifiable foreground objects, clearly shows; among the black line of hills is the hill where William Pinney had built his cottage. A letter from Sophia to her friend Fanny Cornwall on 3 September 1839 reveals that on the night of 31 August William proposed to Elizabeth, whose Journal remains strangely silent about the entire episode. The proposal shocked Moorash, who was deeply bound to his sister, and who, in a sense that must not be misunderstood, was virtually married to her, but who believed profoundly in her right to lead whatever life she chose. Elizabeth’s feelings are more difficult to grasp, in part because of her refusal or inability to write a single syllable about Pinney’s proposal. It is clear that she liked William immensely; she may even have loved him; his proposal threw her into a profound state of uncertainty, amounting at times to despair, which lasted three days. On the fourth day, the day William was to return to Boston, she refused him. What she had to overcome in renouncing William, and therefore a “normal” life, cannot be known; certainly her love for Edmund played its part, but her ardent and complex love for her brother should not be twisted into a banal perversion. Among other things, she feared that her absence might harm him, for he was careless about himself in every way, and once quipped that if it weren’t for Elizabeth he would starve to death out of sheer absentmindedness. If she sacrificed anything — and it is far from certain that she ever was in love with William Pinney — it was for the sake of Edmund’s art.
Moorash was at work on Clair de lune by mid-September, less than two weeks after Elizabeth’s refusal. It is possible to see in the painting a retreat from the violence of his sensations to an extreme calm, as he returned in thought to the early days of that summer, when the two brother-sister couples visited back and forth night after night across the enchanted lake. Many entries in Elizabeth’s Journal suggest his happiness that July and August, painting all day in the barn and wandering the warm and sweet-smelling summer nights in the company of his sister, his friend, and his friend’s sister, who was also his sister’s friend. It is difficult not to see the doubleness of Clair de lune as in some sense a reflection of the two harmonious couples, each itself a double. The friendship among the four was to last for seven more years, but it never recaptured the ease and innocence of that summer.
NACHTSTÜCK
1840
Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 30 5/16 in.
A more deliberate contrast to Clair de lune can scarcely be imagined: here all is oppressive, shut in, brooding, menacing, suffocating. A shadowy, unnameable creature hangs in the night like black smoke, looming over the dark landscape, which seems to shrivel beneath it. The placement of the black line of hills near the base of the picture creates a paradox that increases the sense of suffocation and menace: an eye accustomed to the expansive effects of immense skyscapes, which seem to lead the mind upward to a higher world far from the petty cares of earth, here confronts a dark, oppressive force that crushes it back to the frail line of hills that appear to be cowering under a blow. The sky-filling creature or monster is rendered with supreme skill, for the slightest touch of exaggeration would have pushed it into caricature; the creature is disturbingly elusive, at once present and absent, now a mere illusion produced by thundery cloud-shapes with swirls of black instead of eyeholes, now a shadowy form brooding over the world.
The title of the painting may seem to derive from Schumann’s Nachtstücke, op. 23, but Schumann’s “night pieces,” or nocturnes, were not published until 1840 and are never mentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal. It is more likely that the choice of title was influenced by Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, the collection of eight piano pieces (including the stormy In der Nacht) that Elizabeth liked to have Sophia play for her when the four friends were gathered late at night in the music room of the cottage on the far shore of Black Lake. It nevertheless remains possible that the painting does not derive its title from Schumann at all, but rather from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories Nachtstücke (1816–17). The effect of the title, whatever its origin, is to darken the painting with Germanic consonant clusters and so to oppose it in yet another way to Clair de lune.
It is not clear when Moorash began the Nachtstück, which appears to have been preceded by two or possibly three paintings that remained unfinished and presumably were destroyed. The first mention of a Nachtstück occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 30 March 1840, but on 18 June she records that “Edmund has begun his Night Piece again,” which opens the possibility that the Nachtstück of 30 March was one of the destroyed paintings, about which nothing whatever is known. What is certain is that Moorash took unusual pains with this canvas, which was not completed until the end of September.
It was during the long composition of this painting that an event occurred which must take its place among the more bizarre episodes in the annals of American romanticism. In late June, at Strawson, Edward Vail’s beloved wife, Charlotte, fell ill with a mysterious wasting disease. She could not rise from her bed; she ran a continual low temperature; she could scarcely eat. A local doctor diagnosed pleurisy and recommended mountain air, but a specialist in respiratory diseases summoned from Philadelphia declared her lungs to be sound and urged that the patient be moved to a warm, dry climate. A third physician, from Boston, noted for his work in nervous diseases, prescribed bed rest and absolute quiet and warned that under no circumstances should the patient be moved. In despair, Vail sat by the bedside of his bride from dawn to midnight, holding her limp hand and gazing at her with tender, moist eyes. As the days passed he watched her cheeks grow hollow, her dark eyes grow large, her face fill with weariness and suffering. One night when the end seemed near, Charlotte was seized with a sudden, desperate animation, and struggling up in bed she confessed in a torrent of tears that she had fallen in love with Edmund Moorash. Edward Vail was a mediocre artist, but he prided himself on being a good-hearted man, and he was capable of imagining a noble, perhaps too noble, gesture. Shattered by the news, he at once sat down and wrote a remarkable letter, which has not survived but is summarized in the diary of Elizabeth Moorash’s friend Ann Hudley. In it Vail revealed his wife’s terrible secret and earnestly entreated Moorash to come to Strawson and save her by any means in his power. Did he understand that he was asking Moorash to become his wife’s lover? After reading the letter Moorash stayed shut up in his studio for two days; on the night of the second day he walked the six and a half miles to Rose Cottage and did not return until morning. Precisely what happened during that visit will never be known, but Moorash began visiting Strawson three times a week, and Charlotte’s health swiftly improved. All of Charlotte’s letters to Moorash were later destroyed, but a fragment was discovered in a trunk in Boston in 1957. It reads as follows: