but ideas which he felt were needed in the development of talking about the arts, particularly. . . . “Graphicality” is one of the things that Poe aimed at in his tales, at least, and to a certain extent in his poems, it is something an artist can latch onto quite easily—images that are striking and startling, in their nuances and the particular adumbrations that Poe gives to those objects, images, call them what you will, in language, because they convey something to him that he feels has never been done before. That’s why the Impressionists were so enormously influenced by Poe, or the Symbolists, people like Redon, for example, or Manet.14
Pollin’s observation echoes what Washington Irving wrote to Poe in an 1839 letter. After reading “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Irving had this to say: “I am much pleased with a tale called ‘The House of Usher,’ and should think that a collection of tales, equally well written, could not fail of being favorably received. . . . Its graphic effect is powerful.”15 Poe’s profound influence on visual artists demonstrates the “graphicality” of his tales.
Poe’s keen sense of visual aesthetics was additionally enhanced by exposure to the work of American artists whose paintings appeared as engravings in the magazines and gift books that he reviewed or where his own work was published. For example, Henry Inman’s The Newsboy appeared in The Gift Book for 1843 alongside “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and William Sidney Mount’s The Trap Sprung was included in The Gift Book for 1844 along with “The Purloined Letter.” In sketches and short stories such as “The Assignation,” “Landor’s Cottage,” and “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe included references to painters and artworks, and many of his tales focus on the art of seeing or the ways visual tricks can be used to dupe, deter, or detract.16 In addition, Poe’s working relationship with Charles Briggs, who wrote most of the reviews of the exhibits at the National Academy of Design and the American Art-Union, brought Poe into close contact with a style of art criticism that went beyond a mere listing of paintings on display—the usual fare found in the daily and weekly newspapers of the time. Poe’s own forays into art criticism highlight his visual aesthetics found in sketches and tales such as “The Landscape Garden” and “The Philosophy of Furniture.”
The stories, sketches, and art criticism Poe wrote in his later years were enhanced by the art he saw on display in Philadelphia and New York and by his acquaintance with visual artists. In Philadelphia the prominence of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts provided a rich resource, as did Poe’s friendships with artists Felix O. C. Darley, John Sartain, John Gadsby Chapman, Thomas Sully, and the latter’s nephew Robert Sully. Thomas Sully’s father, an actor, appeared onstage alongside Poe’s mother, and Poe was childhood friends with Robert Sully in Richmond, where the boys attended school together. They renewed their friendship as adults, and “according to tradition, [Robert] Sully entertained Poe and his bride Virginia in 1835.”17 Of special importance is Poe’s relationship with Felix O. C. Darley, who signed a contract with Poe and publisher Thomas C. Clarke in 1843 to provide illustrations for Poe’s literary journal Stylus. Darley also illustrated Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.”18 Writing for the Home Journal in 1854, E. Anna Lewis observed that Darley’s “pictures not only seem to breathe, they seem to think, which is the highest commendation. They exhibit in the midst of broad humour and satire, a moral pathos which awakens the mind and expands the heart.”19
Later, when Poe lived in New York, he became acquainted with Hudson River school painter Frederic Church as well as Gabriel Harrison, a painter and daguerreotypist. The latter, “who was also the owner of a tea store on the corner of Broadway and Prince Streets,” met Poe when the writer visited his shop. In 1875, Harrison wrote in a reminiscence in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “From this moment Poe and I became well acquainted with each other, and from 1844 to 1847, whenever he was in the city we frequently met” (Poe Log, 472). In the 1850s, Harrison created allegorical daguerreotypes that “found support only in academic, elitist circles.”20 In addition, through his acquaintance with the poet Frances Osgood, Poe would have had conversations about art with her husband, Samuel Stillman Osgood, who also painted a portrait of Poe. Samuel Osgood had two paintings in the 1845 National Academy of Design show—Girlhood and Portrait of a Lady—that Poe certainly would have seen and discussed with the Osgoods.21
Toward the end of Poe’s career, his focus on visual aesthetics and the importance of beauty intensified. The two years he spent in New York from 1844 to 1846 were filled with the excitement of a burgeoning arts scene and that of his own newfound fame established by the public’s praise for “The Raven,” published in January 1845.22 New York was fast becoming the nation’s arts center, and Poe found himself in the midst of this excitement in his varying roles at the Broadway Journal. This was a very important time in his career.
Since Poe was drawn to the visual throughout his writing career, this study not only examines his maturing visual appreciation evidenced by his time in Philadelphia and Manhattan but also provides background on his visual allusions, cues, and tricks found in stories, criticism, and sketches written prior to this time. Poe’s aesthetic sensibility never faded as he continued to meet the public’s desire for “sensational” literature; he never forgot his youthful attachment to beauty. In effect, then, the intent of Poe and the Visual Arts is to show how Poe’s initial commitment to beauty and his ability to see not “as others saw” affected his work, especially in the last and most productive years of his life.
Setting the Context
Poe spent six years in Philadelphia, from early 1838 to April 1844. He lived in the same “small house” in Philadelphia near Locust Street and North Eighth Street (now Sixteenth Street)23 for four years after a brief stay at a boarding house at 202 Arch Street in 1839.24 According to an 1843 map, Poe’s North Eighth Street residence was one block west of the Philadelphia Railroad and one block north of the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (fig. 1). This daunting building, which exists now as Hamilton Hall of the University of the Arts on Broad Street, must have made quite an impression on Poe in all its neoclassical majesty. It brings to mind two lines from Poe’s “To Helen,” a poem he revised for publication in the February 23, 1843, issue of the Saturday Museum, a year before he left Philadelphia for Manhattan: “To the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (Poems, 166). As T. O. Mabbott points out, “[These] two most famous lines, first published in 1843, are among those Poe changed with consummate art” (164).
Within walking distance of Poe’s residence lived one of his colleagues: painter, editor, and engraver John Sartain.25 Sartain’s daughter Anne Clarke remembered Poe’s visits to her father’s home “at Twelfth and Walnut Streets on [Poe’s] way home to Sixteenth Street.”26 Felix O. C. Darley, whose sister married a Sully, was also among Poe’s friends in Philadelphia. According to E. Anna Lewis, “Among the literati who took special interest in [Darley] . . . were N. P. Willis [and] Major Noah,” both of whom were friends with Poe.27 Poe clearly admired and trusted Darley because Poe asked Darley to be the illustrator for the Stylus, the literary journal Poe tried to establish for so long.
When Poe moved to Philadelphia, the city was still feeling the desperate effects of the economic panic of 1837, and violence was not unusual. In 1838, rioters destroyed Philadelphia Hall only four days after it was dedicated as an office space for “free discussion,” which included but was not limited to abolitionist speech; it was open “for any purpose not of immoral character.”28 John Sartain was at the scene of the Philadelphia Hall fire and documented it in an engraving (fig. 2). As Kathryn Wilson and Jennifer Coval have observed, “Violence in fact permeated the antebellum city and was often not indiscriminate but highly discriminating, revealing the fears, anxieties, and challenges of an evolving city and nation. . . . Violence in