by the intimate couple under the trees next to the old man), peaceful pastimes (men playing baseball across the stream), fruitful employment (the man guiding his cart overfilled with the harvest of hay), domestic tranquility (the cows grazing in the pasture), and natural beauty (the wispy clouds in the blue sky and the general sweep of the composition toward a distant light). Durand depicts the various stages of the old man’s life in a way that suggests it has been full, satisfying, and peaceful. Durand’s painting evokes the peaceful domesticity found in “Landor’s Cottage,” a sketch Poe wrote just before his untimely death. It is as if we are looking at Landor many years after the narrator finds him in his home, which is simply but tastefully decorated and full of repose, two of Poe’s most admired aesthetic principles.
The exhibition of An Old Man’s Reminiscences at the National Academy of Design’s annual show was a turning point for Durand’s acceptance as a landscape painter, and from then on he depended less and less on portraiture. Upon Thomas Cole’s unexpected death in 1848, Durand assumed his role as leader of the Hudson River school of painting.
Thomas Cole (1801–1848)
Sarah Burns argues in Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America that Poe’s and Cole’s work shared a similar concern for politics: “For Cole and Poe alike, the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline.”35 Burns maintains this argument throughout her book, aligning Poe’s tales of gothic horror and fear with Cole’s paintings: “Cole’s scenes of ruined castles and towers find a literary analogue in the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, obsessed like Cole with contempt for and dread of the multitude that the new democratic order had spawned, and bedeviled like Cole by the conflicting demands of art and an increasingly commercial market.” However convenient that comparison may be for some of Poe’s works, Burns totally ignores Poe’s other aesthetic regarding the importance of beauty, which he expressed numerous times throughout his life in essays like “The Philosophy of Composition” and in sketches like “The Domain of Arnheim.” Poe’s work is not simply about gothic horror and fear. Burns’s claim that “Cole’s paintings were influenced by the gothic effects of Salvator Rosa . . . whose landscapes were visual textbooks of terror for romantic painters” does seem to connect some of Poe’s work to Cole, and Poe does refer to Rosa in “Landor’s Cottage.”36 However, Burns ignores how Poe uses Rosa in this sketch.
The scene in question begins with the “Salvatorish” imagery that Burns observes, though she ignores the way that that landscape moves from the sublime toward the beautiful as the narrator approaches Landor’s cottage. Poe uses the reference to Rosa to create a contrast between the aesthetic the narrator approaches and the one he leaves behind. He comes down from the ragged peaks to find solace in the landscape surrounding Landor’s cottage. The narrator shares the following description in remembering his travels through the mountains to the valley that houses the cottage:
To the north—on the craggy precipice—a few paces from the verge—upsprang the magnificent trunks of numerous hickories, black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with occasional oak; and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the walnuts especially, spread far over the edge of the cliff. Proceeding southwardly, the explorer saw, at first, the same class of trees, but less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character; then he saw the gentler elm, succeeded by the sassafras and locust—these again by the softer linden, red-bud, catalpa, and maple—these yet again by still more graceful and more modest varieties. (Tales, 2:1332)
In this passage, the narrator’s vision shifts from the dramatic precipices or “Salvatorish” imagery to a more pastoral, cultivated, and designed landscape that evidences man’s influence. This human influence moves the landscape away from the dreadful, sublime terror that Burns associates with both Cole and Poe and toward a beauty resulting from the artistic transformation of landscape gardening and peaceful domesticity. In an effort to link Poe to the “dark side” of American experience, Burns ignores this more domestic aspect of his sensibility—a sensibility also expressed in “The Domain of Arnheim” (a pendant to “Landor’s Cottage”) and seen in the landscape paintings composed by Asher Durand and Frederic Church during the mid-1840s. This sensibility and its importance to Poe are revealed in a most personal way in his letter to Helen Whitman dated October 18, 1848:
I suffered my imagination to stray with you, and with the few who love us both, to the banks of some quiet river, in some lovely valley of our land. Here, not too far secluded from the world, we exercised a taste controlled by no conventionalities, but the sworn slave of a Natural Art, in the building for ourselves a cottage which no human being could ever pass without an ejaculation of wonder at its strange, weird, and incomprehensible yet most simple beauty. Oh, the sweet and gorgeous, but not often rare flowers in which we half buried it!—the grandeur of the little-distant magnolias and tulip-trees which stood guarding it—the luxurious velvet of its lawn—the lustre of the rivulet that ran by the very door—the tasteful yet quiet comfort of the interior—the music—the books—the unostentatious pictures—and, above all, the love—the love that threw an unfading glory over the whole! (Letters, 2:712)
Such is the sentiment that Poe longed for not only in his life but also in his work. The paintings he saw by Cole, Church, and Durand are portrayals of natural beauty or idealized portraits of human intercourse with nature. The latter description is especially true of Asher Durand’s An Old Man’s Reminiscences. Nothing in the painting is threatening or remiss, bringing to mind Poe’s sketch of Ellison’s life in “The Domain of Arnheim” and Landor’s life in “Landor’s Cottage.”
Poe’s fascination with landscape and landscape gardening is evident in his mature sketch “The Domain of Arnheim,” written in 1846. This sketch not only reflects a desire for peace but also articulates Poe’s visual aesthetics. Here the narrator asserts that “the art of landscape gardening exhibits those qualities of the poet” that Poe held in high esteem:37
The landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flower and the trees, [Ellison] recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort—or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth—he perceived that he should be employing the best means—laboring to the greatest advantage—in the fulfillment, not only of his own destiny as a poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man. . . . Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma:—I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvass of Claude. (Tales, 2:1272)