sponsor any group exhibits; instead, the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia sponsored group shows at the Academy during this time. Peter Falk’s invaluable catalog The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts provides details of these shows during the time Poe lived in Philadelphia. A list of the most important artists on exhibit from 1838 to 1844 from this catalog follows.7
John Gadsby Chapman
1838 Boy Setting a Snare; Baptism of Col. James Smith, or Ceremony of His Adoption into an Indian Tribe, 1755
1840 View in Virginia; The Partridge Trap
1843 Special exhibit: Vignette—Cottage Scene; Vignette—Blacksmith; Vignette—Milk Maid; Vignette—the Wagoner; Vignette—Mowing; Vignette—Haymakers
Thomas Cole
1838 View on the Catskill
1840 Landscape—Schroon Mountain
1842 The Titan’s Goblet
1844 Special exhibit: The Voyage of Life (series of four paintings)
Asher Brown Durand
1841 Landscape
1843 Embarkation of Columbus
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée)
1844 Special exhibit: Marine View and Sea Port
Nicolas Poussin
1840 Deluge
Salvator Rosa
1843 Landscape and Figures
Clarkson Stanfield
1843 Caligula’s Bridge—Ischia and Procida in the Distance
Thomas Sully
1838 Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Lady Macbeth; The Lost Child
1840 Portrait of a Child; The Mantilla; The Country Girl; The Sleeping Girl (after Reynolds); Full-Length Portrait of Mrs. Darley and Son; Girl and Bird (after Reynolds); The Strawberry Girl (after Reynolds)
Special exhibit: Queen Victoria, St. George’s Society (full length, the original from life)
1841 Portrait of the Late William Kneass; Group of Children; The Farewell (cabinet picture); A Group of Children; Portrait of the Hon. Joel R. Poinsett; Portrait of a Lady
1842 Portrait of a Lady; Sleeping Infant; Portrait of a Young Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Charity
1843 Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady; Equestrian Portrait of Gen. Washington Reviewing His Troops, in the Year 1794, Pending the Whiskey Riots; Portrait of a Lady; Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop (vide Master Humphrey’s Clock); The Sisters; Portrait of a Gentleman; Portrait of a Lady
Special exhibit: Whole Length Child and Dog; Great Pitch of the Falls of Niagara, from the American Side; General View of the Falls of Niagara, from the American Side; View of the Falls, from Below, on the Canadian Side, Including Table Rock; Groupe of Children; Child and Dog; Study for a Whole Length, a Lady; Portrait of a Young Lady
Special exhibit: Mother and Child, from the Murder of the Innocents; “Isabel”—a Sketch; Full Length Portraits of Mother and Child; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of a Lady; Portrait of Major Thomas Biddle, 1812
Special exhibit: Madonna (after Battoni)
1844 Zerlina; The Chip Girl; Portrait of the Rev. T. H. Stockton; Young Harry; Portrait of a Lady; Lady Reading; “Cinderella”; Portrait of a Lady
Special exhibit: Portrait of a Lady with a Guitar; Portraits of a Brother and Sister; Whole Length of a Girl and Dog; Portrait of a Lady; Attala (after Girodet)
Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
Poe certainly would have noticed Nicolas Poussin’s 1664 painting The Deluge (fig. 5) at the 1840 exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its powerful depiction of nature and man’s vulnerability. During 1840 Poe was writing short pieces of an unfinished novel, The Journal of Julius Rodman, which included many framed images of rugged landscapes. Only four years earlier, Poe had reviewed Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians in 1835 in the May 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger; in “Letter 5,” Trollope deplores the Louvre’s “covering up” of Poussin’s paintings to give precedence to modern works. She specifically bemoans not seeing The Deluge, noting that its “eclipse” was troubling to her and her children. To support her claim that this painting was too important to have been left out of the exhibit, she quotes her brother Henry Milton’s response to The Deluge in his Letters on the Fine Arts, Written from Paris, in the Year 1815: “Colouring was unquestionably Poussin’s least excellence; yet in this collection there is one of his pictures—the Deluge—in which the effect produced by the mere colouring is most singular and powerful. The air is burdened and heavy with water; the earth, where it is not as yet overwhelmed seems torn to pieces by its violence: the very light of heaven is absorbed and lost.”8
In addition to its masterful use of color, this painting, created near the end of Poussin’s career, departs dramatically from his usual classical style, according to Richard Verdi. This striking deviation would have been a draw for any art lover but especially for Poe, who was attracted at this time not only to the beautiful but also to the sublime. As Verdi argues, The Deluge was “an early masterpiece of the horrific sublime . . . its figures being few and entirely subordinated to an awesome vision of the elemental fury of nature.”9 That “fury of nature” attracts the viewer, and the eye is first drawn to the lightning that breaks through the menacing, dark sky in the middle to left part of the painting. The drama of this white break in the blackened sky leads the eye to the mysterious, cloud-crossed full moon on the far left. The entire upper half of the painting is singularly devoid of man’s influence; it is only as the eye moves from the moon downward that a man is seen bathed in light and praying to heaven as his boat sinks into the raging water near a rocky precipice. Because of the way the light hits the waterfall behind the praying man, the eye sweeps upward to the upper-right corner of the painting, again to a scene of harsh, rocky terrain with swaying trees uprooted by the storm, and a barren, dark landscape. Only after that initial sweep does the eye move to the bottom of the painting, where humans are seen struggling, unsuccessfully, against the fury of the floodwaters. Quite to the left of the humans struggling to survive the flood, a huge snake, disproportionately large in comparison to the overall landscape, is seen moving up the rocky cliff.
Verdi recounts Horace Walpole’s response to The Deluge more than twenty years after he saw the painting on exhibit in Luxembourg in 1750 as part of Poussin’s four-painting series The Four Seasons: “Walpole observed that, of all the works then on view at the Luxembourg, this one was ‘worth going to see alone.’ ‘The three other seasons are good for nothing,’ he insisted, ‘but the Deluge is the first picture in the world of its kind.’” This striking evaluation of The Deluge did not lose its merit over time, and certainly Poe recognized the painting’s sublime quality when he saw it in 1840. As Verdi suggests, “The Deluge has appealed to an unusually diverse and distinguished series of critics and . . . sustained an almost bewildering variety of interpretations. . . . The critical history of this picture can be seen to have paved the way for the modern view of Poussin as an intensely emotional—and even passionate—painter,