Francis William Edmonds: The Beggar’s Petition; The Image Pedler; Sam Weller; Vesuvius, from Sorrento; Aqueducts on the Campagna of Rome; Florence from the Arno
Charles Loring Elliott: five portraits
George Whiting Flagg: Half-Length of a Lady; Bianca Visconti (owned by N. P. Willis); Portrait of J[ames] G. Percival; Thomson’s Lavinia; Girl’s Frolic (owned by N. P. Willis); The Widow
Henry Peters Gray: Portrait of His Wife; Magdalen; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of Himself; Portrait of a Lady
Henry Inman: Portrait of the Late Bishop Moore, of Virginia; The Ladye with a Mask; Landscape
William Sidney Mount: Portrait of Rev. S[amuel] Seabury, D.D.; Girl Asleep; Portrait of Benj[amin] Strong, Esq.; Boys Hustling Coppers; Farmers Nooning (engraved by Alfred Jones for the Apollo Association [sic] from the original picture by Mount)
Peter Frederick Rothermel: De Soto Discovering the Mississippi; The Novice
John Sartain: engraving in mezzotint, from an original picture by Thomas Lawrence
Joshua Shaw: View in Wales, Near Abagavany; Scene on the Coast of Cornwall; Italian Landscape
James Hamilton Shegogue: Senora de Goni; The Gift from Brazil; Eugene, Alfred, and Marion; Fire Island, a Sketch; two portraits
Thomas Sully: The Sisters
Charles Weir: Compositor Setting Type; Boy Feeding Chickens; Fish, a Study from Nature; Fruit; three portraits
Francis William Edmonds (1806–1863)
As one of the organizers of the 1844 exhibit, Francis William Edmonds chose six of his own paintings to be hung. Edmonds was by profession a banker, as well as “an artist of considerable talent . . . [and] a man of great personal charm, who played an important part in the cultural life of New York City.”20 His popularity in the arts community is evidenced by his participation in its most important venues. Samuel Morse, the first president of the National Academy of Design, encouraged Edmonds in his artistic pursuits, and his reputation at the Academy grew, as reflected by his quick move through its ranks from student to associate in 1837 and to academician by 1840.21 Additionally, Edmonds became treasurer of the Apollo Society (later renamed the American Art-Union) in 1839 and was appointed vice president of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts when it was founded in 1844. In 1844, as well, Edmonds’s painting The New Scholar was selected as the engraving to be distributed by the American Art-Union to its members.22 As Jane Adams explains in her study of nineteenth-century American art unions, “The benefits from purchasing a five-dollar annual subscription were an engraving, a chance in the yearly lottery distribution for a painting or other original art work, free admission to the gallery and a subscription to the Bulletin, which was a monthly (published from April to December) compendium of art news, reviews, instruction and engravings.”23 The New Scholar also appeared in the National Academy of Design’s 1845 annual show.
Edmonds was a member of the Sketch Club, founded in 1829 as a gathering place for painters, patrons, and writers. Its members included Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, William Cullen Bryant, John Inman, Jonathan Sturges, and Washington Irving; guests invited to the club included James Fenimore Cooper, James Kirke Paulding, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edmonds remained a member of the organization when, in 1844, the Sketch Club became the Artists’ Sketch Club, with only painters and sculptors as its members. The first meeting of the new club took place at Edmonds’s home at 216 Thompson Street, where he lived from 1844 to 1845. His residence was near the corner of Thompson and Amity Street and was thus quite close to his good friend Asher Durand, who lived at 91 Amity, two buildings away from Poe’s residence at 85 Amity. We have no documentation that Poe ever met Edmonds or Durand in their neighborhood or at a social gathering, but since all three were members of the cultural community, it is probable that they knew each other; if not, they certainly would have known of each other.24 Since Edmonds was friends with William Page, who, in turn, was friends with Charles Briggs, who published a series of essays by Page in the Broadway Journal, Poe might well have made Edmonds’s acquaintance through Briggs. However, since Poe did not share Edmonds’s aesthetic or political propensities, neither would have desired the other’s friendship.
Edmonds often used literary subjects in his art, but his overall concern was to paint homely scenes with an egalitarian bent in the Dutch tradition, such as The New Scholar. He was a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson and, later, Martin Van Buren, and his patrons were merchants, bankers, and railroad executives with primarily Democratic sympathies. Politics assumed a prominent role in genre painting during the antebellum decades and is significant to understanding Edmonds’s art.25 Despite the differences between Poe’s and Edmonds’s political leanings, the cross-references to each other’s subject matter suggest that the two men knew of each other’s work. This is especially true for Edmonds’s painting Facing the Enemy, which Poe certainly would have noticed in the National Academy of Design’s annual show in 1845 (fig. 7).
Charles Briggs reviewed Facing the Enemy in the May 10, 1845, number of the Broadway Journal as part of his article on the National Academy of Design exhibit. Briggs praises Edmonds’s painting and his storytelling, “which is a point that Mr. Edmonds rarely or never fails in.” Briggs describes the “old toper” pictured in Facing the Enemy as “one of those hard drinkers with carbuncled noses and crispy hair, who used to be common enough twenty years ago but are now growing very rare.” Speaking with all the messianic fervor of a Temperance Movement adherent, Briggs voices his belief that there will come a time in the future when “drinking shall have gone entirely out of fashion; the world will scarcely believe that it was indulged in to the excess that books and songs and pictures will tell of” (BJ, 1:306). That Poe read Briggs’s comments on this painting is unquestionable; that he agreed with Briggs’s ardent prediction is highly unlikely.
Poe’s “The Black Cat,” published in the August 1843 number of the United States Saturday Post, can easily be read as a parody of Temperance Movement stories, as T. J. Matheson so convincingly argues. Matheson points to Poe’s acquaintance with Timothy Shay Arthur, whom Poe knew in Baltimore in 1833 when both were members of the literary society Seven Stars. Poe was undoubtedly familiar with Arthur’s temperance tract Six Nights with the Washingtonians, published serially by Godey’s Lady’s Book, since Poe wrote to Joseph Snodgrass in 1841 about Arthur’s stories.26 The unrealistic expectations of the Temperance Movement—the disappearance of all drinking, as Briggs’s review suggests and movement enthusiasts predicted—and the dire stories of drunken debauchery that the movement circulated to scare people away from drinking are subverted in Poe’s own story of drunkenness and death.
That Poe knew Edmonds’s painting is undeniable. Facing the Enemy was not only shown in the 1845 National Academy of Design exhibit but also issued as an engraving by the American Art-Union in 1844. Thus, it would have been widely known. Edmonds’s painting of the “old toper” was picked up by publisher John Ridner as a good illustration for a broadside that appealed to temperance groups. Ridner wrote a tract around the theme of Edmonds’s painting to use in the broadside:
To give a better idea of this picture, it may be well to relate the incident which supplied the subject. Some years ago, when the cause of Temperance was first agitated, a certain mechanic who had long been addicted to habits of drunkenness, became a convert to the Temperance reform, conscientiously adhering to his “PLEDGE.” While sitting with his wife some time afterwards, she observed that he was unusually pensive and his mind apparently disturbed; suddenly he called out to