The Pinneys left for Boston in mid-September and did not return to the cottage on Black Lake until the late spring of 1844, when Moorash had almost certainly begun the Totentanz. On 8 August 1844, according to Elizabeth’s Journal, the four friends were walking in a small wood when Edmund grasped William by the arm and invited him to “come along to the barn,” where he still worked during the warm summer months and where the Totentanz stood on an easel among bits of straw. When the women returned to Stone Hill Cottage they found William and Edmund in animated discussion in the kitchen-parlor. “Pinney,” cried Edmund, springing up from the sofa when Elizabeth and Sophia entered the room, “you’re the best friend a raving madman ever had!” William laughed aloud, Sophia looked away with the shadow of a frown, and Elizabeth, who knew that Sophia thought Edmund a little mad, watched the scene tensely. In her Journal she noted that “E never behaves naturally before Sophia.” But the elation was genuine: William had been “overwhelmed” by the Totentanz and had urged his friend not to abandon it. In doing so he made use of a curious argument that left a strong impression on Moorash. Whether you hate or love the painting, Pinney had argued, makes no difference: you must work on it as if the painting were a destiny, you must work on it as if you were dead.
DEATH SONATA
1844–45
Oil on canvas, 46 × 54 1/2 in.
The Death Sonata is first mentioned by Elizabeth in April 1844, although the entry leaves it uncertain whether Moorash had actually begun the painting or was merely speaking of a possible subject. The picture was definitely in progress by October 1844; there is no mention of it again until June 1845, when he appears to have taken it up for the third or fourth time, after an interval of several months, and we last hear of it in September. Although work on the Death Sonata alternated with work on the Totentanz (and other paintings), the evidence suggests that the Totentanz was begun earlier, and served as an inspiration for or challenge to the Death Sonata, which in turn appears to have influenced the earlier painting. The technical relation of the two, although complex, is undeniable; and they are the only two surviving paintings to employ the method of “haunting” a canvas.
The Death Sonata is in some respects a more difficult and challenging work than the Totentanz, because in it Moorash confined himself almost entirely to black. Indeed the first impression one has is of a uniform black, applied thickly with visible brushwork. The first impression yields to a second, deeper one: barely perceptible black forms are visible in or on or through the blackness. It is tempting to speak of “black on black,” but such a description would be misleading: there is properly speaking no background, but rather a thick layer of dark paint (black, purple, burnt sienna) that gradually reveals what might be called “presences.” The presences are so elusive, so deeply concealed by the very paint that reveals them, that their precise nature appears to change with different viewings; again as in the Totentanz, a deliberately uncanny effect is sought and achieved. Most responsible viewers agree that there is a presiding death-figure, a black-robed faceless figure (Havemeyer detects “an intimation of eyes”) who may or may not be seated at a piano. There is a window, with a view of black distances, and perhaps a black moon; in the presumed room, four or more other figures, flowing and shadowy, hover between the visible and the invisible. The effect of the canvas, when it is not merely exasperating, is to haunt the viewer — to draw him or her into its elusive depths with the promise of some dark revelation. The method is in certain respects more radical and mystifying than that of the contemporary Totentanz; if it seems less successful, less fully achieved, this may be due not simply to its experimental nature or its state of incompletion, but to our own failure to follow Moorash into the enigma of his art — in other words, our failure to know how to look at it.
The fact that Moorash devoted two of his last paintings to the theme of death should not mislead us into supposing that he had intimations of his untimely end. Quite apart from the attractiveness of Death as a subject for romantic painters, poets, and composers, there were good reasons in 1844 and 1845 for Moorash to be preoccupied with mortality. He was hopelessly in love with a woman who spurned him, and who must at times have made him feel that death was the only way out. He was at the traditional middle of life (his thirty-fifth birthday fell on 16 July 1845), without a shred of worldly success; despite his aggressive self-confidence, he must sometimes have felt himself a failure. His emotional life was entirely bound up in a four-way friendship that had begun to show serious signs of strain — were they not all fools of Death, dancing merrily to the grave? In addition, the Journal makes it clear that he was racked by financial worries, and by guilt over his dependence on his sister’s slender annuity. But above all, in these years he witnessed Elizabeth’s decline into a disturbing species of illness. By late 1844 the occasional headaches of earlier years had blossomed into crippling two-day or three-day headaches, often accompanied by fits of vomiting. At the same time, Elizabeth begins to record — always very briefly — mysterious “aches” in her legs, as well as occasional attacks of “vertigo.” In September 1844 Moorash traveled with her to Boston to consult a specialist in nervous disorders; Elizabeth was placed on a rigorous diet that did not cure her headaches and led swiftly to general weakness and a series of bronchial infections, which ended soon after she returned to her old eating habits. A second specialist, a friend of William Pinney’s who traveled up from New York, prescribed pills that contained a mixture of quinine, digitalis, and morphine; the pills had no result other than to dull her pain and make her lethargic, and she began to grow dependent on the soothing effects of morphine. Moorash, who was closer to Elizabeth than to any other human being, and entirely dependent on her, cannot have failed to imagine, during her worst hours, his sister’s death and his own death-in-life afterward; and it is possible that the continual, restless turn from painting to painting in these years was a sign of his fear that, once Elizabeth was gone, there would be no reason for him to go on painting.