adopted by political opponents to describe the corrupt deal-making of Democrats.”30 Wordplay thus gives Mount’s paintings what Poe called undercurrents of meaning. Bird-Egging (1844), another example, initially seems to be a glancing look at a spring day in the country; three children walk along a sunlit, fence-lined pathway, the oldest holding a bird’s nest. The narrative turns on the word “egging,” which describes what the girl is doing to her older brother—that is, “egging him on”—as well as the actual act of stealing eggs from a bird’s nest. The girl is either pleading with her older brother to allow her to carry the nest of eggs or begging him to give it back to the younger brother, who had “egged” it but lost it to the older, bigger boy. The younger boy hides his face, crying because he lost the nest or perhaps because he is ashamed of his older brother’s “egging” and, unlike his sister, isn’t swayed by the lure of the treasure. This last interpretation would be ironic, of course, since the younger boy is wearing a large plume in his hat, suggesting that he was not altogether innocent of a similar pillage in the past. In either case, the narrative sequence is hardly sentimental.
The children’s disregard for nature’s cycle contrasts sharply with their innocent, gentle physiognomies. The resulting tension pushes the painting beyond a simple pastoral scene; it becomes a comment on man’s relationship to nature and his apparent obliviousness to the destruction that his whims can cause. The viewer is initially drawn into the scene by its homely and pastoral nature, the quiet lighting, and the mannered depiction of the three children walking beneath the trees; these elements signal a safe, domestic space not far from home. However, within this pleasant, comforting space, the viewer can see a forlorn bird sitting on a dead branch in the otherwise verdant, ancient tree whose trunk fills more than a third of the background.
Mount’s The Trap Sprung (fig. 9) also pictures children drawn in the same mannered way, but the narrative is hardly one of youthful innocence. Two boys, trudging uphill through a late autumn snowfall, eagerly approach a rabbit trap, anticipating the kill and the reward. Holding a dead rabbit in his hand, one boy, dressed warmly in an overcoat, scarf, cap, thick pants, and boots, encourages the other, dressed in a torn, lightweight jacket, to get the trapped rabbit. With no means of killing it except their bare hands, the boys’ smiles indicate the anticipated pleasure of wringing the rabbit’s neck. The cloud-filled sky and vast vista of the mountains in the background, along with the snow-covered hillside and the red leaves still lingering on the branches in the foreground, signal both the life that is and the cold death soon to follow.
Mount’s paintings were clearly more than depictions of pleasant pastoral life. As Johnson argues, “Mount [often] employed popular puns that themselves sprang from a nervousness in the culture about the discrepancies between what is seen and what is hidden.”31 Other critics discuss the political implications of his farmyard imagery. Differing from the landscape painters of what would become known as the Hudson River school, Mount preferred to paint the “everyday” in all its complex contradictions rather than simply portraying the beauty of nature.
The National Academy of Design’s 1845 Exhibit
The twentieth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 17, 1845, featuring 369 works by 145 artists. These included 152 portraits, 30 miniatures, 97 landscapes, 15 history paintings, 12 watercolors, and 2 sculptures.32 The following works by prominent artists of the time were exhibited in the 1845 show:
Frederick Catherwood: fifteen works, mostly scenes from Mexico and designs for a fountain in Gramercy Park, Gothic buildings, and the pedestal for a statue of Washington in New York City
John Gadsby Chapman: Portrait of a Boy; “Rachel Envied Her Sister”
Frederic Edwin Church: Twilight Among the Mountains; Hudson Scenery
Thomas Cole: Elijah at the Entrance of the Cave; The Mill, Sunset; View Across Frenchman’s Bay, from Mount Desert Island, Maine, After a Squall; A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning
Christopher Cranch: Landscape, Sunset; Landscape, Study from Nature; View on the Hudson, Near Cold Spring; Cloudy Twilight; View from the Palisades Opposite Hastings
Jasper Francis Cropsey: The Forest on Fire; Twilight, View in Sullivan County; View on Esopus Creek; Landscape, a Study from Nature
Thomas Doughty: Land Storm
Asher Brown Durand: Landscape, Composition, “An Old Man’s Reminiscences”; Close of a Sultry Day; Landscape, Composition; The Bride
Francis William Edmonds: “Facing the Enemy”; The New Scholar; Sparking (engraving by Alfred Jones from a picture by Edmonds)
Charles Loring Elliott: Portrait of an Artist; Capt. Ericsson; Frederick R. Spencer, N. A.; Study from Life; Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady; Horace Kneeland, Sculptor; Portrait of a Child
Henry Peters Gray: Cupid Begging for His Arrows; three portraits
Henry Inman: Rydal Water; Jacob Barker, Esq.
William Sidney Mount: Dance of the Haymakers; G[eorge] W[ashington] Strong, Esq.; Bird-Egging; Pencil Sketches of Children
Samuel Stillman Osgood: Girlhood; Portrait of a Lady
Peter Frederick Rothermel: Surrender of Guatemozin
Joshua Shaw: Landscape
James Hamilton Shegogue: Evening—Landscape Composition; Portrait of a Gentleman; Cabinet Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Gentleman; Sadi Edrehi; The Country Pedlar; Portrait of a Lady
Charles Weir: Portrait of a Gentleman; The Young Connoisseur; Blind Old Man Listening to His Nephew Reading; Fruit
Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886)
Unlike William Sidney Mount, Asher Brown Durand was not interested in social critique but was influenced, rather, by Thomas Cole’s spiritual landscapes. Durand was a good friend of Cole, who was held in high regard as a landscape painter by the mid-1840s and was considered the leader of the Hudson River school of painting. Unlike Cole, however, Durand had to depend on portraiture to earn his living in Manhattan. Nonetheless, Cole encouraged Durand “to come to live in the country” because Cole believed that Durand’s work would benefit. “The desire to produce excellence feeds the flame of our enthusiasm,” Cole wrote to Durand, “and I believe the product is worthier than that which is wrought out to the approbation of the many around us. In the country we have necessarily to defer the reward of the approbation of our fellows, and have time to examine critically our own works.”33 However tempting, Cole’s letter did not persuade Durand to move from the city, since he believed that proximity to his clients was essential; therefore, he remained in Manhattan. Yet, after a trip abroad in 1840, where he was joined by his friend and fellow artist Francis Edmonds, Durand returned home with a renewed sense of his own abilities and a strong desire to give up portraiture and concentrate on landscape painting. One of Durand’s paintings in the 1845 National Academy of Design exhibit, An Old Man’s Reminiscences (fig. 10), was inspired, according to his son, by “the sentiment of Goldsmith’s poetry” and marks the transition from Durand’s dependence on portraiture to his embrace of landscape painting.34
The painting