WILLIAM PINNEY
1844–46
Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 29 1/16 in.
Contemporaneously with the Totentanz and Death Sonata, as well as with the lost paintings of 1844–46, Moorash turned to portraiture of a startling and original kind. Perhaps it is misleading to speak of these paintings as portraits, although several features of portrait painting remain; rather, they are dream-visions, intimations, soul-studies — what Elizabeth felicitously calls “inner landscapes” (Journal, 4 January 1846). The immense, ethereal figures have the look less of human creatures than of mythic beings; it is as if only by smashing what he once called “the mimetic fetters” that Moorash could release into paint the human mystery.
Moorash appears to have begun a portrait of William Pinney in February 1844, destroyed it or set it aside for the Totentanz and later the Haunted Paintings, and returned to it briefly in December. He was at work on it again during the early summer of 1845, at a time when he had taken up the Death Sonata after an apparent break; it is unclear whether he laid it aside or proceeded with it intermittently during the next eight months, but he was at work on it once again in March 1846, before abandoning it and all other work in May for what was to prove his final painting.
More than any other painting by Moorash, including Dornröschen, the disturbing portrait of William Pinney impresses the viewer as an illustration for a book of fairy tales. A transparent and shadowy giant bestrides a dark lake and rises into the night sky, where his streaming hair forms fiery stars and comets. He is naked and powerful; through his body we see night clouds and a glimmer of moonlit hills. But what is striking is the expression on the face: a doubting, brooding expression, a kind of suspiciousness ready to burst into anger but held in check by uncertainty. His hands are half-clenched beside his sinewy transparent thighs. The giant gives an impression of a great prisoner in chains — of power mysteriously baffled or frustrated. He radiates a peculiar aura of anguish, weakness, and danger. The figure is deliberately a creature of myth or legend, yet a comparison with the conventional chalk sketch of Pinney from 1829 (see [2]) reveals an uncanny kinship. Elizabeth writes on 4 June 1845: “My soul recognized him before my eyes did — in that terrible dream-change — a shudder passed over my body—? has seen into W’s very soul — I could not bear to look long, but turned away with a feeling of dread.”
Although Pinney remained an unwavering admirer of Moorash’s art, and a close friend to the very end — Moorash was to say that Pinney was the only friend he ever had — nevertheless the friendship was subject in an unusual degree to unhealthy strains and tensions. Pinney had courted Elizabeth Moorash and lost; and after a struggle he had resigned himself, with a certain good-natured wistfulness, to the not unattractive role of rejected lover. When Moorash fell violently in love with Sophia Pinney in the summer of 1843, William cannot have been unaware of the almost comical repetition of a pattern, including the rejection of the suitor. But a difference quickly revealed itself. That difference was the difference in temperament between Pinney and Moorash — for Moorash was not a man to resign himself good-naturedly to anything. His passion for Sophia, though he was able to tamp down its outward expression for the sake of being in her company, remained strong, tormenting, and obsessive. Pinney, a sensitive student of Moorash’s moods, was therefore forced to endure the continual sense of his friend’s suppressed passion, of his suffering and disappointment — and this from the very man whom he partially blamed for his own well-mastered suffering and disappointment. Moreover, Moorash’s passion, if successful, would have meant for William the loss of his own sister, so that he was continually threatened by a kind of theft. Meanwhile his relation to Elizabeth was to undergo another change. As her illness became increasingly apparent, William drew closer to her. Often he sat with her for long afternoons while Moorash, deeply grateful to his friend, painted in the barn. But William’s new closeness to Elizabeth rekindled his old sense of grievance: in large part he came to blame Moorash for Elizabeth’s illness. For, as Sophia put it in a letter to Fanny Cornwall, if Elizabeth had been allowed to flourish as a wife and mother, to establish her own life independent of her brother’s, would she not have been far healthier than under the conditions of “an unnatural attachment”? (Sophia appears to be blind to her own life with her brother, but in fact she always insisted on a difference: Elizabeth lived permanently with Edmund in an isolated cottage, whereas Sophia joined her brother only in the warm months and otherwise lived with a maiden aunt in Boston.) But Elizabeth’s illness had a further effect. Sophia, despite her apparent insensitivity and even hostility to Moorash himself, was profoundly responsive to Elizabeth’s moods; and as Elizabeth’s headaches grew more serious, and her health more frail, Sophia herself began to experience sharp, dizzying headaches that left her prostrate for entire afternoons. William, often with two sick women to attend to, could not prevent himself from tracing the harm to his friend. At times he wondered whether his duty lay in protecting Sophia from the ailing Elizabeth; and a desire arose in him to escape from all this, to vanish somewhere into a peaceful place, even as his heart drew him to Elizabeth’s side.
Such strains and dangerous tensions do much to account for the darker aspect of the portrait of William Pinney, for Moorash was acutely sensitive to Pinney’s moods and cannot have failed to sense his friend’s secret doubts and disapprovals. It is not surprising to learn that he showed the portrait to Pinney (on 14 August 1845); Elizabeth witnessed the event. Pinney looked at the painting a long time in silence. He then turned, threw Moorash “such a look as I cannot describe, for it was scarcely a human look,” and walked away without a word. It was the only time he had failed to say something about one of his friend’s paintings. As for Moorash, he turned to Elizabeth with a look of “angry triumph” and said: “See! He’s hit!”
SOPHIA PINNEY
1844–46?
Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 28 in.
The earliest direct mention of a portrait of Sophia is in Elizabeth’s Journal for May 1844, although it is not certain that this is the same canvas as the one Moorash is said to have been working on in December. He appears to have begun two paintings, abandoning the first in favor of the surviving one, which betrays a clear kinship with the portrait of William Pinney and may have been influenced by it. Sophia was shown the painting on 31 August 1845, two and a half weeks after William had viewed his own portrait; nevertheless, Moorash appears to have continued working on it during the next few weeks, setting it aside in late September for the Death Sonata. He may have taken it up again briefly in the early months of 1846; the evidence (see Havemeyer) remains inconclusive.