that Poussin’s painting was on exhibit, Poe was publishing chapters from his unfinished novel The Journal of Julius Rodman in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. As Burton Pollin so succinctly states in his introduction to his edited edition of Julius Rodman, “There is no full study of the truncated novel in the exact context of Poe’s life and writings in Philadelphia at the time.”11 One such context would be Poe’s exposure to the art on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Even if Poe wrote this serial novel to make money, he nonetheless included passages of landscape description that appear as distinct paintings, suggesting that the landscape paintings he saw were becoming a more important influence on his work than they had been previously. Kent Ljungquist makes note of this textual conceit in his overview of Poe’s picturesque aesthetics: “Poe’s pictorialism aims . . . to produce the effect of a painting, a piquant combination of details that can be seen as within a frame.”12 Take, for example, the following passage from the third chapter of Julius Rodman:
The banks sloped down very gradually into the water, and were carpeted with a short soft grass of a brilliant green hue, which was visible under the surface of the stream for some distance from the shore; especially on the north side, where the clear creek fell into the river. All round the island, which was probably about twenty acres in extent, was a complete fringe of cotton-wood; the trunks loaded with grape vines in full fruit, and so closely-interlocking with each other, that we could scarcely get a glimpse of the river between the leaves. Within this circle the grass was somewhat higher, and of a coarser texture, with a pale yellow or white streak down the middle of each blade. . . . Interspersed among it in every direction, were myriads of the most brilliant flowers, in full bloom, and most of them of fine odor—blue, pure white, bright yellow, purple, crimson, gaudy scarlet, and some with streaked leaves like tulips. Little knots of cherry trees and plum bushes grew in various directions about, and there were many narrow winding paths which circled the island, and which had been made by elk or antelopes. Nearly in the centre, was a spring of sweet and clear water, which bubbled up from among a cluster of steep rocks, covered from head to foot with moss and flowering vines. The whole bore a wonderful resemblance to an artificial flower garden, but was infinitely more beautiful.13
Similar passages are inserted throughout the six installments of Julius Rodman. In the sixth chapter, to cite another instance, Poe describes a “range of high, snow-capped mountains. . . . Two rivers presented the most enchanting appearance as they wound away their long snake-like lengths in the distance, growing thinner and thinner until they looked like faint threads of silver as they vanished in the shadowy mists of the sky.”14 Such passages demonstrate Poe’s ability to write with “an artistical eye,” a skill that the narrator of “The Landscape Garden” admires in painters. According to this narrator, nature cannot arrange a landscape composition to the best visual advantage: “In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess. . . . The arrangement of the parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained, from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence, in what is technically termed the composition of a natural landscape” (Tales, 1:707).
Salvator Rosa (1615–1673)
Salvator Rosa’s painting Landscape with Figures (fig. 6) was on exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1843. In the painting, the distant light just left of center first attracts the eye, intimating a promised relief to the figures traveling through the rough mountainous terrain. Much in the way that the narrator of “Landor’s Cottage” traverses a “precipitous ledge of granite” to find vegetation “less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character” (Tales, 2:1331–32), so, too, do the travelers in Rosa’s painting approach treacherous terrain at the beginning of their trek through the mountains. Although the figures in the foreground immediately attract the eye, the movement of their party across the river to the mountain pass is quickly superseded by the grandeur of the mountain peaks and the brightly lit sky in the distance. As in most of Rosa’s paintings, the landscape dominates; man is diminished.
Rosa was best known for his rugged, rocky, wild, mountainous landscapes. Writing in 1846, T. C. Pickering observed that “Salvator Rosa’s great excellence lay in landscape. He delighted in representing scenes of desolation, solitude and danger, lonely defiles and deep forests, trees scathed by lightning and clouds lowering with thunder.”15 When Poe was assistant editor at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, he read (and most likely edited) “A Critical Notice of the Picture Galleries of the North of Europe” by “A Recent Visitor”; the visitor’s review of the work exhibited in a gallery in Copenhagen’s royal palace appears two pages after an installment of Poe’s Julius Rodman. The unnamed critic had been attracted to a very large painting by Rosa entitled Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites, which notably differs from “the gloomy forests and banditti, or the solitary caverns and rocky passes” that characterize much of Rosa’s work.16
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Lives of the Most Eminent Modern Painters (1754), admires Rosa’s ability to depict “savage and uncultivated nature. . . . What is most to be admired in him, is the perfect correspondence which he observed between the subjects he chose, and his manner of treating them. Everything is of a piece: his Rocks, Trees, Sky, even to his handling, have the same rude and wild character which animated his figures.”17 Years later, an 1801 reprint of William Mason’s Essay on the Different Natural Situations of Gardens (1774) included another favorable estimation of Rosa: “The author considers Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa the two greatest landscape painters; Salvator for ‘terrible and noble natural situations,’ with blasted trees and scarce sign of life, and Poussin for views of temples, palaces on hillsides, and rich verdure.”18
The National Academy of Design’s 1844 Exhibit
Although Poe arrived in New York City just before the nineteenth annual show at the National Academy of Design opened on April 25, 1844, he most likely did not attend the opening reception since admission was “on invitation by the Council ONLY.”19 Nonetheless, he certainly would have had the opportunity to see the works exhibited that year before the show closed on July 6. The exhibit featured 387 works, including paintings by many well-known artists: Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, William Page, and Thomas Sully, each with one painting on exhibit; Peter Frederick Rothermel, with two; Christopher Cranch, Henry Inman, and Joshua Shaw, each with three; Charles Loring Elliott, with four; Jasper Francis Cropsey, Henry Peters Gray, and William Sidney Mount, each with five; George Whiting Flagg, with six; Charles Weir, with seven; and John Gadsby Chapman and Asher Durand, each with nine. James Hamilton Shegogue and Francis Edmonds were on the Committee of Arrangements that year, and as a result they exhibited a large number of their own paintings.
Based on the information in the National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826–1860, the following popular artists’ paintings were exhibited in the 1844 annual show:
John Gadsby Chapman: Peasant Girl of Albano; Hebrew Women Borrowing the Jewels of the Egyptians; Portrait of a Boy in Indian Costume; “On the Fence,” Town or Country?; A Lazy Fisherman; The Brush-Wood Gatherer, a Sketch; Sketch from Nature; two portraits
Thomas Cole: Landscape
Christopher Cranch: Landscape; The Reapers; Landscape
Jasper Francis Cropsey: A Shower Coming Up, at Little Falls on the Passaic River; View in Orange County, with Greenwood Lake in the Distance; Evening, a Composition; View of Greenwood Lake; Falls of the Greenwood
Thomas Doughty: Landscape; View from Greenwood Cemetery, Looking over the Bay of New-York
Asher Brown Durand: The Solitary Oak; Full-Length of a Boy; Landscape, Composition; Study from