Walt Whitman’s writing reveled in a 19th century America that swept far past, in place and reference, the Long Island region that had once been his childhood home. Still, Whitman’s prose and poetry often reveals the Long Island that he loved. This exhibition, marking the great American bard’s 200th birthday celebration, pairs Whitman’s words with contemporary artist’s painted depictions of Long Island.
Introduction
As 19th-century Americans peered out windows, down country lanes, over tidal waves, or across vast craggy mountainsides, how did they describe what their eyes took in? Like other American writers and artists of his lifetime, Walt Whitman illuminated a land and a people previously ignored. Art and its potential sources seemed to be limitless. As Whitman’s contemporary, the artist William Sidney Mount wrote in his diary, in 1865, “ideas are to be found in everything if the Poet, sculptor & painter can pick them out.”
Long Island was a portion of the American landscape that Whitman and an increasing number of artists knew intimately and treasured. “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,” the poet wrote of his native region, in “Song of Myself.” As influential art theorist John Ruskin counseled, Whitman and American artists sought to authentically portray that soil and air. Whitman had observed the island “sometimes riding, sometimes boating, but generally afoot, absorbing fields, shores, marine incidents, characters, the baymen, farmers, pilots.” The bard valued an honest reportorial style and many artists agreed. “An artist should have the industry of a reporter,” stated Mount.
A number of artists in this exhibition – such as Mount and the Luminist Hudson River School painter John Frederick Kensett – were well known to Whitman. The poet was a serious observer of visual arts and on March 31, 1851, delivered the keynote address to the Brooklyn Art Union’s opening meeting. Whitman believed art had a powerful role in democratic society. He believed with every fiber of his being that its’ nurturement was a source of strength for both the nation and his beloved Paumanok, the 120-mile island that was, in so many ways, his spiritual home.
The Cottage Door
John Frederick Kensett painted this tribute to his friend and fellow National Academy member William Sidney Mount, based on Mount’s 1834 work The Studious Boy (now lost). The painting was owned, for a time, by prominent engraver, publisher, and art collector Samuel P. Avery. Active, rambunctious childhood provided great subject matter in the developing American Art world of the 19th century, and also was a topic written about by Walt Whitman in the years after his time as a schoolteacher.
School Boys Quarreling
When Mount completed this highly symbolic painting of a schoolyard scrap, an 11-year-old Walt Whitman was just finishing his own schooling in Brooklyn, at District School No. 1 on Concord and Adams Streets. After tight family finances forced the young Whitman to work, he left his one-room school behind, but that was far from the end of his classroom experiences. From 1836 until 1841, Walt Whitman taught at eight different “district” schools across Long Island, from as far west as Whitestone and Jamaica Academy to as far east as Southold.
At Montauk
Arriving in the United States as a young man from his native Netherlands on the eve of the Civil War, de Haas studiously improved his marine painting over the years. A critic described one of his works in 1872, in a manner that could also summarize what is seen in this sketch of stormy Montauk: “the motion of the water, the grand roll…is very fine, the color is remarkably transparent and the gradations are excellent.” For his own part, de Haas suggested that a lifetime of meticulous observation led him to beautiful renderings of oceanic movement. "Waves never exactly repeat themselves; but a similar wave always comes back, so that, in making studies of them, I watch the appearance of just such a wave as I wish to represent, draw it at once, and take its colour from a second wave."
Portrait of Reuben Merrill
Whitman and William Sidney Mount shared a passion for capturing and elevating the image of common rural folk through their respective mediums. Around harvest time in the fall of 1832, Mount did this portrait of English immigrant field hand Reuben Merrill, who worked for the artist’s sister Ruth and her husband Charles Saltonstall Seabury. The painting meets its subject on level ground, absent of condescension, depicting a man of energy and quiet dignity. Like Mount, Whitman knew and revered people of humble origins in both the city and the country and often made them central to his work.
Farmer Whetting His Scythe
Walt Whitman agreed with many art theorists of antebellum America that proscribed landscape painters be as “true” as possible to nature’s forms and colors. The poet condemned paintings which “distort honest shapes.” As he suggested, “most works are beautiful without ornament.” He might therefore have agreed with one contemporary journalist’s view of this painting which stated that Mount’s “natural effect of the noonday sun with its cool, clear, transparent shadows, impressed us with so much truth that we were painfully reminded of the black, opaque, unmeaning shadows (so called) in another class of pictures which are before the public. Effect is too much sought and in the wrong way.”
Long Island Potato Patch
Primarily known as a muralist and a large-scale easel painter, Turner completed this work and also Queen of the Montauks (1886, current whereabouts unknown) during his years of summer residence in East Hampton. Decades earlier, Walt Whitman had drawn artists’ attentions to the region through a series of articles for Brooklyn’s Standard newspaper. In one column, Whitman reveled over the same rustic beauty captured by Turner in this canvas: The soil is rich, the grass is green and plentiful; the best patches of Indian corn and vegetables I saw last autumn are within gun shot of the salt waves of the Atlantic…
A Long Island Farm, Springtime
Whitman’s poem “A Farm Picture” beautifully describes the rural existence that remained true of much of Long Island throughout the 1800s:
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.
Clam Gathering, at Head of Little Neck Bay
Clamming once seemed to be a Long Island native’s birthright, and certainly an activity that Walt Whitman often cheerfully referenced. “I come with my clam-rake and spade,” he writes, in “A Song of Joys” – I come with my eel-spear, Is the tide out? I join the group of clam-diggers on the flats, I laugh and work with them Known as a picturesque painter of Long Island’s 19th century bucolic and coastal scenery, Charles Henry Miller regularly displayed his work at the National Academy of Design. One contemporary critic referred to him as “the artistic discoverer of the little continent of Long Island” – a title which Whitman, the literary “discoverer” of the region, might have appreciated.
Catching Crabs
One of Mount’s last great genre paintings, "Catching Crabs" contains many typical everyday activities of Long Island’s shoreline in the 19th century: a team of workers cutting salt hay, boaters raising a sail for their skiff, and a man and boy spearing crabs amid shallow waters. The scene feels nostalgic in its depiction of a place seemingly un-impacted by modernization and expanding development. Both Whitman and Mount, near the end of their lives, yearned to preserve the island of their childhoods that was quickly fading.
The Rock on the Green
Bequest of Ward Melville, 1977. After the Civil War which had claimed the lives of 620,000 and wounded some 480,000 people, many American artists and writers took stock of both the grief and the moment of reunification. Mount’s hopeful scene of a girl in Confederate red holding a white surrender kerchief and a boy waving a victorious American flag from atop one of the most venerable local landmarks, a boulder on the Setauket green, seemed appropriate. In Whitman’s Drum-Taps, published that same spring, the flag spoke more to a deeper sacrifice: Flag of stars! Thick-sprinkled bunting! Long yet your road, fateful flag!—long yet your road, and lined with bloody death!
Crane Neck Across the Marsh
Did William Sidney Mount and Walt Whitman know one another? Other than a single 1851 newspaper article in which Whitman reviewed a Mount painting, no existing correspondence nor archival materials provides evidence of a relationship. Nonetheless, it is tantalizing to imagine that the great poet and painter, separated by only a dozen miles and years in birthplace and birth date, and operating in overlapping New York cultural circles, were likely well aware of each other.
