Reviewers’ Comments
Peter Hassrick, Former Director, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming, and Director of one of the Denver, Colorado Art Museums:
I thoroughly enjoyed your treatment of Mr. Bierstadt. It was well written, conceptually well developed and the characters were presented fully and with great empathy. The story read smoothly and was quite compelling. The research into and observations about the period and into the artistic, aesthetic and social/political trends of the day were especially revealing. Your tale embraces an age and inserts the central cultural characters who defined and were defined. The book will make a valuable contribution to the field as well as being an enjoyable read.
Melissa W. Speidel, Director, Albert Bierstadt Raisonné Project:
You have brought to life the world of an American artist living in New York City in the late nineteenth century—and I appreciated your pattern of weaving together Bierstadt’s life and the events of the time. A definite strength is your ability to discuss and describe Bierstadt’s paintings in artistic terms. You have added an important volume to our understanding of the life and art of Bierstadt.
***
The Heroic Journey of Albert Bierstadt:
(The Uncut edition)
Foreword
The Life of an Artist-Priest
Let me tell you the story of a hero—a man of talent and dedication. He was an artist who spent his life behind an easel, and spent every nickel he earned to fuel his life-consuming ways.
His journey through life replicated the cycle of the hero described by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces. Like all heroes, he left home to face trials and rites of passage. In a single decade he honed his skills, retreated, meditated, met and captured his goddess, and rose to stardom. In the second decade, he made flawed choices, and the gods deserted him.
In his decline, he lost his reputation and his income. Then he lost his castle with hundreds of his paintings, his collections of western paraphernalia, and all of his mementoes. Finally, he lost the wife he adored—the woman he’d taken from a friend.
In this story you will follow the search, the challenge, and the fulfillment of youth; witness rapid success and notoriety; savor passion and love; and mourn failure and loss. This is the moral story of a man who learned too late in life about the nature of the fall after earthly temptations had pulled him from his course.
Yet this story, like all heroic tales, includes Illumination and Reconciliation with the grave, and sometime after his death, Apotheosis. Come, let me share his journey. His name was Albert Bierstadt. He was an Artist-Priest of the West.
***
The Heroic Journey of Albert Bierstadt:
(The Uncut Edition)
©2011 by David M. Delo
Smashwords Edition
ISBN 978-1-4524-3508-4.
This e-book is licensed for your enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
***
Author’s Note
This historical biography of Albert Bierstadt, is the author’s full version of the novel.
***
Table of Contents
Book I: Call To Adventure
PART I: 1853-1857
Chapter 1: The Herald and the Psyche, 1853
Chapter 3: The Acolyte, 1854-1855
Chapter 4: Metamorphosis, 1854-1855
Chapter 5: Rites of Passage, Switzerland, 1856
Chapter 6: Rites of Passage, Rome, 1857
Chapter 7: Rites of Passage, The Italian Coast, 1857
PART II: 1857-1862
Chapter 8: Assimilating Changes, 1857
Chapter 9: Meditation and Preparation, 1858
Chapter 10: South Pass Adventure, 1859
Chapter 11: The Tenth Street Studios, 1860
Chapter 12: Marketing Art in New York, 1860
Chapter 13: Competitors of New York, 1861
Chapter 14: Civil War and the City, 1862
BOOK II: FULFILLMENT
Part III: 1863-1865
Chapter 16: Across the Continent, 1863
Chapter 17: The Majesty of Yosemite, 1863
Chapter 18: The New York Sanitary Fair, 1864
PART IV: 1866-1869
Chapter 21: Transfiguration, 1867
Chapter 22: Return of the Son, 1868
Chapter 23: Haute Bourgeoisie, 1869
BOOK III: THE ULTIMATE BOON DENIED
PART V: 1870-1874
Chapter 24: Pride Before the Fall, 1870
Chapter 25: Coast to Coast, 1871-1872
Chapter 26: Manic in California, 1873-1874
Part VI: 1875-1887
Chapter 27 Pivot Points, 1875-1876
Chapter 28, Struggling, 1877-1879
Chapter 29: Insult on Injury, 1880-1882
Chapter 30: A Wilting Rose, 1883-1887
PART VI: 1888-1902
Chapter 31: Rejection and Flight, 1888-91
Chapter 32: The Ultimate Boon Withheld, 1892-1900
Chapter 33: Illumination & Reconciliation, 1901-02
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL OF ART: 1830-1853
They came from New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, mostly self-taught artists or engravers who coalesced into an American school of art. A few of them painted fruit, still life, portraits, and genre scenes of American life; the majority explored the pastoral scenes of the American landscape. Collectively, they became identified as artists of the Hudson River School of Art. Their paintings accented realism, a technical fluency due to drawing from nature, a study of light, and a smooth, diaphanous surface.
American art philosophy of the day had evolved from philosophers who explored the relationship between man, God, and nature, wherein nature was viewed as God's creation. They men argued that the individual was influenced primarily by what he experienced, and that by reason based on learning he could improve himself. In a parallel manner, by focusing attention on nature, a man could improve his relationship with God.
Guided by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the 1830s, this art philosophy, known as Romanticism, emphasized the cultural relationship between mankind and the wilderness. “Nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity that nature cannot repair,” voiced Emerson in his 1836 essay “Nature.” He stressed the romantic aspects of man’s nature as a source of truth, and God’s nature and God-in-nature became virtually synonymous.
By mid-century, art in America, especially landscape art, was fused with religion. Poets spoke of the moral value of the aesthetic experience and of the moral benefit of contemplating nature. The act of landscape painting had acquired a moral root, and the artist was transformed into a spiritual leader.
The artist’s task was to discover and paint the truth of nature. The axiom of the day—“What one felt within was true”—did not, however, provide artists carte blanche to create an image as they thought best. Through the mid-1800s, a landscape painting would be judged (particularly by the press) on how realistically the painter captured the essence of the scene. If he presented a scene of a known landmark, yet no one could identify the place, the work, regardless of technique or composition, would be considered a failure.
Artists were also held responsible to use their gifts of perception to reveal the ideal, the perfection within a scene. To do this, they had to recognize and discriminate between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful, characterized by a harmonious approach to nature, was often captured by a balanced landscape whose forms and colors generated feelings of delight.
To accurately portray the sublime, artists needed to generate within the viewer a sense of astonishment if not terror from that was threatening or overpowering in nature—intense moments within a thunderstorm, dramatic contrasts of scale and light, even the dizzying height of a cliff—anything that portrayed the power and passion of nature.
Prominent art critic Henry T. Tuckerman observed that American artists of the mid-1800s painted to live, yet aspired for the time when they would live to paint. The pell-mell rush to develop the continent west of the Appalachian Mountains quickly had created, by the 1850s, an American middle class that sported money and leisure time. This new strata of society became a primary source of art patrons, whose interest in collecting art elevated the role and social status of the American artist.
By mid-century these artists came to know one another, study and paint together, and travel together, especially to the Hudson River Valley and the White Mountains. Theirs was a harmonious and idealistic cabal of benevolence and good fellowship where each encouraged the other. They enjoyed the same artistic philosophy and the same stylistic approaches to landscape. At the same time, critics praised landscape painting for having a dignity and character that no other branch of the fine arts could claim. It became a democratic endeavor because so many were able to appreciate it.
During this period of change in the attitude toward art and the role of the American artist, Albert Bierstadt was awakened by his call to become an artist.
***
BOOK I: THE CALL TO ADVENTURE
PART I: 1853-1857
For a tale to be worth telling there must be a hero, one with a problem, a challenge, or an adventure. If he accepts the call, he enters a transit into the sphere of rebirth known as the Threshold. His first task is to retreat from the world to causal zones of the psyche where true difficulties reside. He must clarify and eradicate them, then break through to direct experience. The Threshold leads the hero first to realization, then to a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces.
Paraphrased from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
***
Chapter 1: The Herald and the Psyche, 1853
Albert Bierstadt was not born a hero. His parents were not of noble lineage, and nothing of a dramatic nature occurs on the day he was given life. Nor did he astound humanity by performing unusual feats as is the wont of natural child-heroes. Instead, Bierstadt possessed an unusual latent talent that was released by a psychic event which alerted him to his true path in life. It happened in New Hampshire in the company of his mentor. (Every mythological hero had one: he’s called the Herald.)
***
The dream was back!
Albert twisted and turned on the mattress of his old slatted bed, and snarled the covers about him. His sleep was never restful when he experienced the dream. He’d decided that the event marked a meeting of his subconscious mind and other voice inside him, the one he called the viewer. He tried to make sense of the dream when awake, but the viewer also monitored every facet of the dream while he was dreaming!
The first time the dream had occurred was more than a month ago, long after he had moved to Boston. He had tried but couldn’t discover any reason to connect the dream to his move away from home (as significant as that event was) or, actually, to any other happening in his life. What was there to make sense of? It was just a blurry, nocturnal vision that repeated itself almost every other night, with one exception: the dream’s storyline kept getting longer. Its primary features to date were fog and blurred objects. They made the dream so bizarre that he mentioned it only once to one other person—his brother Edward.
They shared a flat in Boston, but saw little of each other because Edward had a regular job. Albert was occupied with his art and with what he referred to as his “quest” to find his path in life. Edward was Albert’s quintessential opposite. He was never introspective and had no issue with who he was or was not. He had simply applied himself to the careful accomplishment of a well-defined task and became a wood turner. In a very German way, he focused, became skilled and reliable, and worked steadily to improve his products and technique. He felt a sense of pride and accomplishment from what he did. He remained thrifty and made regular financial contributions to his parents who resided in New Bedford. Edward was at peace with life. He was the perfect German son.
When Albert broached the topic of the dream to Edward, his brother listened politely. After a few quiet moments, he frowned as though he was trying to memorize the size, shape, and characteristics of a foreign piece of wood. It was obvious to Albert that his brother did not understand. And he was right—after another moment, Edward shrugged but said nothing.
Albert was not superstitious, but he had no doubt that his dream contained a significant message. Tonight, as his dream appeared, Albert watched billows of gray fog slither once more across a blurred terrain like some primordial snake. Fascinated but bewildered, Albert was helpless to alter the content or pace of the scene. Next, in shades of gray, a man appeared and sat down on something that resembled a stool. The image was clear enough that Albert knew he was dressed in a dark-colored suit and sat with his back to him. The man bent forward and engaged in some small act that took place in front of him.
Although Albert couldn’t look over the man’s shoulder, he concluded that the dream must be getting closer to the end because tonight for the first time the fog receded from the figure and separated into three layers. Like segments of a painting, the darkest was the closest and the lightest was the most distant. Then the layers of fog thinned and revealed a landscape of hills and trees. Albert saw a horizon, then rocks, grass, and for the first time, color!
Albert lurched to a sitting position and stared into the darkness. He had his arms crossed and his heart was racing. The man, he thought, must be my father. He sensed power in the man, power that came not from his posture or whatever he was doing, but from within. The energy flooded Albert’s mind, leaving him with the feeling that all ambiguity about what he was going to do with his life had just evanesced like New Bedford’s early morning fog. Unfortunately this feeling did not reveal what his future occupation was going to be.
Why did the man have his back to him? Was it to say that his preoccupation with drawing was nonsense, that running back and forth between New Bedford, Newport, and Boston pawning his skills as an artist and art teacher was going nowhere, and that the man would accept his youngest son only after he settled down and began to earn a living as his brothers had been doing since their teens?
“You’re twenty-three years old, Albert!” his father yelled. (In Albert’s mind, his father’s voice was always louder and more strident than it was in reality.) “A grown man. German. Aren’t you ashamed? Your childish behavior has become the talk of the town. When I was your age, I was a soldier in the Prussian army.”
Albert rubbed his arms, bent forward on the bed, and dropped his head to his knees. How many times had he and his father argued? How many times had he seen the anger in his father’s eyes and watched the semaphore arm dismiss both the discussion and son? Yes, he thought, he was ashamed, but only because his father made him feel that way. If he couldn’t explain to himself his need to explore and unveil the fabric of his future, how could he explain its importance to his father?
Albert rocked slowly back and forth on the bed. He knew in his heart that art was his calling. Why then did it not feel right? he wondered. Why did he sense he was going nowhere? What was he not doing? He was ashamed, not because of the nature of his promotions such as his public show of landscapes using large lantern slides, but because none had matured as planned. Time and again he had lost money—money he still owed both of his brothers, Edward and Charles.
Albert unwound the covers, walked to the window, and pushed open the shutters. The light from the quarter moon outlined his longish face and jutting chin, and made his deep-set eyes look blacker. A bit taller than average with broad shoulders that tapered to a tight waist and powerful legs, Albert had always been a strong lad with a quick walk and a powerful grip.
A thin glow to the east lifted the edge of night. Some day, thought Albert, that light will reveal my path. A stirring ran through him, warming him like the texture of truth. Out there somewhere was his destiny, and it wasn’t in the woodturning trade. His dream was a prelude to that destiny. It had to be! Doubts hammered him, but he knew if he stopped believing in the validity and force of his quest, he would forever be lost to the guilds. Then he would founder and wither like a whaling vessel without wind.
Today was June twenty-fourth, 1853. What meaning would it have? Only what he could put into it. He was in New Bedford, visiting his parents and sisters, sleeping in the room where he and his brothers had grown up. Both sisters, Helen and Eliza, had hugged him and were fun to talk to. His mother was still spry but looking very old in her early sixties. His father’s next birthday would be his seventieth. He had not mellowed an ounce per decade, and the tension between the two had marred Albert’s homecoming.
Albert had spent most of his visit looking into New Bedford shops and chatting with the Hathaways and members of the Howland family, old hallmark family friends. He hadn’t been in the mood to draw; instead he stuck his head in the office of the new Daily Evening Standard at Union and North Water streets to see what the new newspaper was going to be like, and out of habit, he visited New Bedford’s prominent artist William Wall.
Wall had opened his studio at the age of twenty-five, and advertised his skill to paint portraits and miniatures. Albert had been looking at Wall’s paintings, asking questions, and talking with him about art for nearly a decade. Wall was a fairly handsome Quaker with a straight nose and full mouth. A pull of hair flopped over his forehead from a receding hairline. The large-hearted gentleman with a good sense of humor had taken a liking to Albert and was forever encouraging him to continue his art.
Wall was a good role model, always attacking a new painting, working from some inner flow of energy while he talked freely of new portrait commissions, his exploration into watercolors, or his earlier trips to Europe. He’d been to London, Paris, Florence, and Rome, and spent time in Switzerland with Ralph Waldo Emerson. His favorite topic was the art of the Italian masters, and he could talk endlessly about Titian, Veronese, Tintorello, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and San Raphael.
Yesterday, however, Albert discovered that even Quakers had bad days. Wall’s studio door had been open when he arrived and Wall was putting finishing touches on the habits of individuals who populated his latest painting, Birth of the Whaling Industry. It was a large picture of nearly twenty square feet. Wall stopped work and nodded gravely at Albert who watched silently from the doorway, and then he stepped back from his painting until he stood next to his visitor.
“This is the last historical painting I’ll ever do in this town,” said Wall shaking his paint stick in Albert’s face. He walked away to add a highlight of cream to bring out the edge of a coat collar. “And do you know why, laddie?” he asked. Without waiting for a response he bent forward again to attend to his picture. When he straightened, he answered his own question: “Because no one in this town will ever buy one, that’s why. There’s no market for historicals here.”
His unusually stern voice unsettled Albert, who yearned to ask, Then why do you spend so much time painting historicals? But portraits, Wall’s stock-in-trade, had declined in popularity, and he had sold a number of earlier, successful historical paintings: The Landing of Columbus, The Death of Copernicus, The Nativity of Truth, and the highly successful Gosnold at the Smoking Rocks.
Albert left Wall’s studio feeling shaken for the artist’s parting remark rang in his head. “I’m going to give it all up, Albert. I’m going to paint flowers, pastoral scenes, and innocuous views of New Bedford. People are no longer interested in art, and I need money to pay my bills. Bah!”
On this last morning of his visit, Albert walked quietly down the stairs of his old home. The fire in the double fireplace in the center of the living room snapped at the first layer of wood. He heard noises in the rear, first-floor bedroom that sounded like his father putting on his boots. Not wanting another discussion about his “errant days and ways,” Albert moved quietly to the kitchen, cut a piece of meat from a roast, tore off a chunk of bread, then collected a handful of grapes and tucked everything into his rucksack.
He’d already said good-bye to his mother, informing her that he was going to spend a few days in New Hampshire before he returned to Boston. No, he wouldn’t be going alone; he’d have the company of the Reverend Thomas Starr King. He knew his mother would approve of that. All of her boys—Edward, Charles, and Albert—now lived away. Somehow, that was very American, and very un-German.
Albert lifted the latch on the front door and left the house where he’d been spent the first twenty years of his life. The New Bedford morning air was cool and heavy, saturated with an ocean-based fog. As usual, it tasted of salt and smelled of whale oil. A breeze moved the fog parallel to the shore. When it obliterated the lines between land and sea, there was little to look at, but the last few days had been clear, so Albert knew that the fog would be gone by the time the shops opened.
Still immersed in remnants of the dream from last night, Albert paid little attention to the waking activities of New Bedford. However, at the crossroads of Water and Union, he glanced toward the docks. Because of the fog, all he could see was the faint outline of a row of tall-masted whalers which rolled with the slap of waves as they waited for captains and crews who lusted after whales.
New Bedford was a good town to be raised in, yet Albert didn’t realize how lucky he had been, in spite of the all-penetrating scent of rendered whale blubber. In thirty years since 1800, the population of Bedford Village had grown from 1,000 to more than 15,000 people. Aside from the cotton mill which the Wamsutta Company put up on the outskirts, the whaling industry owned the soul, pockets, and youth of the town. Its whaling industry now employed close to 10,000 men, more than half of whom crewed two hundred-fifty whalers. Over the past fifty years, profits from whaling had stimulated development of New Bedford’s shipbuilding, banking, oil refining, brokerage, and crafts. A quiet, sweet-smelling town she was not; a proud and prosperous town she was.
Albert was too preoccupied this morning to open his mind to memories of his earlier, carefree years in New Bedford, but as a kid he’d played hide and seek among the oil barrels, each covered with the rubbery fronds of seaweed to keep the staves from drying out. Sometimes he tried try to creep along the deck of a whaler from the bowsprit, past the fore hatch and workbench to the after house without being noticed. More than once he had had to scurry beneath the harpoons of a whale boat or dive off the bow when a coxswain’s eye was quicker. His buddies had been the sons of Frederick and Thomas Hathaway, and Caleb and Gideon Howland. Their fathers, like his, were coopers, barrel-makers for the whaling industry.
The boys’ endless search for amusement always took them to the stage station. The lads sat on sagging wooden rails of the corrals and with wide eyes and considerable giggling they had listened to the swearing teamsters who smelled of horse sweat and wet leather. When that became boring, there was always a good battle with dry horse turds.
The year the town had incorporated Albert was fifteen. At age seventeen he had quit his less-than-a-year-long apprenticeship at Shaw’s Picture Frame and Looking Glass factory. Something had told him that working in a shop would be his death. It was then that he first heard angry words of a disappointed father.
The Pearl Street horse corrals had disappeared. Now the town had a depot and ticket office, each with Egyptian-styled carvings at each end of the building, like the entrance to the catacombs. They were clever but very out of character with the rest of town which was composed of straight, stiff fronts of weathered wood. The air inside the ticket office was warm but Albert shivered once as he stood in line for his ticket for he wondered if he should try to explain his dream to Reverend King. As he boarded the eight o’clock train to Taunton, he decided he would not; it didn’t feel right.
***
The Reverend Thomas Starr King was waiting on the platform at the Boston terminus. He stuck up a bony hand when he saw Albert. King stood out from the crowd today not because of a white collar and black frock but because of his brown shorts, knee-length socks, short-sleeve cotton shirt, and Swiss-cut tricorn. He also carried a small day pack. They shook hands, walked to where the train to New Hampshire waited, and found seats halfway down the first car. “Well, Albert,” said King, rubbing his hands together, “I sense grand happenings from our trip.”
“I hope so,” muttered Albert with a sigh as he removed his rucksack and placed it on the floor. Then he thought of what King had said. What did he mean by that? As if understanding Albert’s thoughts, King continued. “In the first place, Albert, being in New Hampshire means you can’t help but feel God’s presence: after all, they are His mountains, His streams, and His foliage—some of His finest, I should add.”
Albert had heard this line often enough. “And?” he asked with a bemused smile. In response, King shook a finger at him. He could do that without being impolite, for he was never known to scold, only to encourage, if perhaps on occasion to challenge. Besides, his finger was backed by a mischievous grin. King found life full of delight, excitement, and learning. He was the same today as the preacher he became in the pulpit, fiery but positive in his passion, quick to choose the right word for his messages, and knowing when to talk and when to be silent. Always ready to listen, he was both a scholar and a student, eager to share yet always ready to learn.
“Have you been reading the Boston Transcript?” King asked with a raised eyebrow. “They’ve been publishing my letters on the White Mountains. Oh, glory, what a time I’ve been having.”
Albert faked a slow recollection. “Oh, yes, I do recall something to the effect that the Gates to Paradise will soon be discovered within sight of North Conway.”
King’s boyish face burst into a wide grin, and he clapped his hands. “Yes, indeed!” Raising his arms like a conductor, he added, “All the grand mountain scenery that will greet us when we get to heaven.”
“What’s your rush, Thomas? I haven’t even found the key to the earthly side yet.”
In King’s fount of enthusiasm, he’d almost forgotten he’d put together this trip for Albert, a youth struggling with his path in life, an explorer and entrepreneur, possibly artist-to-be, so he lightly chided himself. It was easy for a person like himself to preach, but when one’s mirror of life was fogged, there was work to do.
King and Albert had met a year ago when both attended an exhibit of the New England Art Union in Boston. King was less interested in what Boston’s artistic youth was creating than in chatting with one of the directors, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, about the uniqueness of the American landscape. When the famous poet failed to appear, King turned his attention to the exhibit. He liked Samuel Gerry’s View of Meringen, Switzerland, Fitzhugh Lane’s View of Glauster Harbor, and some of the landscapes by Alvin Fisher and Benjamin Champney. Albert had entered a painting labeled Landscape. It was done in pastels. The work had little to say for it, but upon meeting Albert King was impressed, for he saw a hungry, restive glint in the lad’s eye, and felt an energy that said he was going to amount to something.
Six months passed before the two met again. King was giving a talk titled “Mountains and the Lessons They Taught,” at the Boston Mercantile Library Association in New Bedford. His talk compared the features of the American landscape to great men of the world. After spotting Albert, he encouraged him to submit any new work he had to the Massachusetts Academy of Fine Art. The academy was planning an exhibit toward the end of January that would run for three months. King could invite Albert to submit work because King had recently been chosen the academy’s new director.
“Enough about my writing,” said King as the train rattled along. “Have you sold any more pictures to Mr. Thompson?”
The pointed question made Albert respond with a shame-faced smile. “He’s such a gentleman,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to pay my share of the rent last month if he hadn’t been so kind. I mean the pieces were OK, I guess; it’s just that you don’t find too many Mr. Thompsons in Boston.”
“You know his story, don’t you?”
“You mean the fire?”
“Thomas Thompson’s father, unlike mine who God on called very early,” added King only because his mind made the connection, “had the Midas touch, so young Thomas was able to attend Harvard. While he looked for a line of work to which he could attach his life and his energies—and, of course, his comfortable inheritance—he began to browse Boston’s art galleries.
“In time, he bought a few paintings. After a while he was accosted every time an art agent or gallery owner saw him because Thomas tends to be very open-minded, listens well even when he’s not interested, and when he buys, he pays cash. He’s an art agent’s dream.
“Well,” continued King, “after a few years, he discovered he had a collection of paintings worth more than $90,000 dollars.”
The figure startled Albert, and his expression showed.
“Yes,” nodded King slowly, “quite a sum.” He raised a hand. “I’ll tell you how I know that in a minute.”
In the pause, Albert asked, “Were those the paintings that burned—.”
“Yes, yes, Albert; but don’t rush me. Mr. Thompson enjoyed portraits, so in Boston he bought work from European artists. But because of something in his background, he decided to spend a portion of his inheritance on Boston’s emerging artists. In some cases he might just as well have given money to the artist and let him keep his work,” said King empathetically. “He admitted as much to me, but he said when he often saw a spark of talent he felt that his money was going to support an artist of potential. Unfortunately, he decided to store his entire collection in the Tremont Temple in Boston, which, as we both know, went up in flames last March.”
“No one—I mean no Boston artist—talked about anything else but the fire for weeks thereafter,” injected Albert. “There aren’t many art buyers like Mr. Thompson running loose in Boston.”
“Well, I believe we will see an increase in Mr. Thompson’s purchases in the future, Albert. America is waking up to the importance of her artists and their work. Art critics now say landscape painting has a dignity and character no other branch of the fine arts can claim.”
“If you say so,” responded Albert.
“He has purchased some of your work, has he not?”
“Mr. Thompson? Oh, actually quite a few,” mumbled Albert.
King held is hands open as though he were giving a benediction. “Did you know that the pieces he recently bought from you are some of the first in his new collection?”
Albert shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” said King. “He told me he was starting over, that he planned to create a larger collection than before. He is quite determined, so don’t turn your back on him. I believe he has also been a major benefactor of Mr. Shattuck, Mr. Cropsey, and that Bellows fellow.
“He’s another Albert.”
“Yes, right. Albert Bellows. He’s with the New England School of Design, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” said Albert with a forced smile. Talking about others who had succeeded in art made him feel uncomfortable.
“Look, Albert, some fellows have a calling from birth; others, because they are good at more than one type of work, require more time to find the best road. You should be encouraged, if only because you have diverse talents.”
“Diverse. Right—as in unfocused,” said Albert, remembering how much money he still owed his brothers. “But I hear you, Thomas, and I understand what you are saying; keep Mr. Thompson informed about my new work.”
“Yes. Good,” said King encouragingly.
Albert hadn’t meant to sound negative or sarcastic, although he certainly had the capacity. King was a good friend, and the two of them had a lot in common including their German roots. Above everything else, the Reverend was a man with a clear, simple path and goals. He knew who he was and what would occupy his future: God and nature. That was it: he was devoting his life to spreading the message of how landscape was not only God’s work but an avenue to knowing Him.
Sometimes Albert wanted to dismiss the Reverend with the notion that he had always known who he was and where he was going, but that wasn’t true. King’s father had died when he was twelve years old. That left him to provide for his mother, three brothers, and two sisters, so he quit school to work as a jeweler’s apprentice. Somewhere along the line he took time out to visit the White Mountains where he climbed a number of the peaks. He returned to Boston with a lifelong enthusiasm for nature, dropped jewelry-making, and became a schoolteacher. By age twenty, he was a school principal and started preaching. Now he was one of the most popular lecturers in the country. He never had a doubt or a hesitation. He just did it.
“It was past time you took a break from the Boston art scene, Albert. You’ve been too close to the forest to see the trees. Where we’re going, you’ll have plenty of both.” He smiled to soften his play on words. “Between a little hiking and relaxing in God’s pocket, you’ll better understand who you are. Before we return to Boston, I sense that a solution to your quandary will appear like the first star of evening.”
God knows, thought Albert, it’s time. Since his late teens, he had put his energy into various entrepreneurial activities, but they were either impractical or ephemeral one-offs. Instinctively he kept coming back to his art, but art as his future occupational path seemed as far off today as it had for the past two years. Aside from King’s support, he couldn’t say he had received much encouragement—not from other artists, his brothers, and certainly not from William Wall, who seemed to be telling him to be careful about considering art as a profession. In the meantime, everything Albert did and everyone he talked to added more pressure on him to make a commitment, to choose a profession before his father chose it for him.
In the rhythm of their thoughts, the train belched black smoke and rattled on toward the wilderness of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
***
“In the mountains of New Hampshire,” artist Thomas Cole had written in the 1830s, “there is a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent. There, the bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds, while the valleys and broad bases of the mountains rest under the shadow of noble and varied forests.” The wilderness of New Hampshire fed the idealist Cole ideas for large religious paintings in which allegorical figures were trapped in the throes of subliminal nature.
By the early 1850s, landscape artists began to flock to the White Mountains. The Saco River Valley and North Conway were the most popular destinations. The landscape of the region was a complex puzzle of exquisitely interlaced pieces. “If the traveler would behold the beautiful, the sublime, and the grand in co-mingled harmony,” said a local guide book, “let him turn his steps toward this mountain metropolis, and thread his way among its winding gorges or stand among its solitary turrets.”
Recently, entrepreneurs had stumbled over one another to extend railroad lines into the White Mountains and began to raise humungous hotels; and traffic, once measured in hundreds per year, now measured in thousands per month. The railroad brought these prim travelers to the glistening facades of Glen House within eight miles of Mount Washington, and to Crawford House and Thompson’s Tavern. The White Mountain Station House at Gorham and the Glen House at Pinkham Notch, both T-shaped, multistory structures, were the first to specialize in comfort and convenience.
The little hamlet of North Conway, five miles to the south of Glen House, faced North Moat Mountain. From there, one could see the whole line of the White Mountains from Mount Chorcorua on the south to Mount Washington fifteen miles to the north. It was to this romantic wonderland that King and Albert traveled by stagecoach that summer of 1853. Unknown to either man that afternoon, Albert would have a peak experience, a merging of forces rarely experienced in a normal lifetime that would offer him a clear and enthralling vision of his future.
***
Thomas and Albert faced each other inside the stagecoach. The sounds of horse hooves and creaking carriage wheels complemented the mixed scents of oiled leather, horse sweat, and the warm richness of the summer breeze. They tasted dust from the road, felt the coldness of the river water they crisscrossed, and inhaled scents of wild herbs and bee pollen from the wind. The air, humid and palpable, pressed on their skin. Its thickness shrouded the details of distant hills, thinned the intensity of the colors, and reduced the contrast between light and dark that played on the flanks of the mountains.
Silence reigned, for conversation had proved too difficult. Rocks and potholes in the road to the Saco River Valley caused the coach to leap abruptly in a rude, unannounced manner. After a few attempts, the duo laughed and contented themselves to share the view through the coach door window. It served as a picture frame through which they watched the moving landscape. The view included close-cropped canopies of slender trees, and wide-angle glimpses of buff-colored fields backed by gray-green mountains. Their eyes caught random patterns of a playful wind that made swift, short runs through meadow grasses. They glimpsed snapshots of symmetrical mountains and became heady with anticipation of their arrival and their first walk amongst the wilder elements of God’s handiwork.
Turbulent clouds, linked like a series of interlocking hands, topped the pastoral scene. These living convolutions of energy constantly altered in form and color. Pinks, purples, and light blues tossed about in kaleidoscopic chaos as they stretched and multiplied. By squinting into the sky, Albert and Thomas discovered ribbons of cerulean blue, pockets of dark magenta, and flickers of iridescent pink.
King was enthralled by the overlapping hills where the lines of the horizon were best seen by looking at them indirectly. Suddenly his distant view was cut, replaced by a close-up shot of a rocky path enclosed by blurred trees and a streambed. The scene assumed the texture of a puzzle, a mosaic of shapes that validated nature’s unending variability. “When you experience the wilderness this intimately,” thought King, “you become an active player surrounded by panoply of delicacies, each scene stamped by its own unique, stage-like presence.”
Blinding light reflected from nearby leaves while more distant tree trunks blocked the sun. Deeper in the forest, trees gave up their individuality; branches crossed haphazardly, and clusters of leaves hung as though suspended. The deepest plane in the wooded scene was simple light and shadow; lines and space formed a mishmash of scattered brightness held in place by black abstract mats.
Albert watched King’s hand flying across the page of his notebook. With thoughts for another letter, King wrote “and when you travel to a new place, you not only move through time, but through the fingers of God. And where does every trail lead if not to a new adventure replete with opportunities for repose, where the mind may consider the essence of being human, the meaning of life, and the existence of Him?”
***
After reaching North Conway in the early afternoon, Thomas and Albert walked to the edge of a large field. They lay on wild grasses and flowers at the edge of a copse of yawning poplar trees. Nothing obstructed their view across the meadow to the mountains. To the west, overlapping mountains dropped to the edge of the Saco River Valley; their north edge ended in the lofty dome of Mount Washington.
Like a sigh of appreciation, they exuded a measure of laziness mixed with a dollop of contentment and a coating of conversation. As they finished their sack lunches, a mat of clouds covered the sky. From time to time a few strands of light broke through, but the patches of blue Albert had seen earlier had disappeared. Now the wind buffeted him from a direction opposite the course of the clouds as though to nudge him toward the mountains.
Albert fixed his eyes on colors that splashed across the landscape. He searched for reds, greens, and yellows in the moving grasses, examined tertiary yellow-greens and greenish-grays on the sides of the hills. The horizon, at first softly penciled beneath a light paste of blue-gray, was now etched beneath a deeper ultramarine blue. He noticed how the lines of the hills tumbled atop one another until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. He then realized that everything was separated by degrees of light, and he understood that if he painted the changing color of air, he could separate the hills.
The Reverend King glimpsed the landscape as a pastoral feast and found it impossible to remain silent. He chose his opening line carefully, for he did not want to lecture Albert, only to increase his awareness—to help him understand that personal choices come from a mix of understanding and faith, not from pressured gambles.
“Unless you truly believe that God has a guiding hand in all things,” he said casually, “I believe that what we do with our lives is mostly a matter of chance. Would I have become a preacher had I not walked into the White Mountains that summer of ’37? I don’t think so. What made me do that? I do not know, but it called to me.”
Albert looked sharply at King and tasted his words, for they reminded him of a recent event in his dream: a voice had begun to call to him, “Albert!”
King knew nothing of Albert’s dream, so the lad’s reaction simply told him that he had chosen the right words to begin his message. “The point, Albert, is that I listen to my inner voice,” he said. “My wilderness trek changed my outlook on life. It helped to form my priorities and my values and shape my destiny. I still reach out on occasion to check my balance, but most of my decisions since then have been natural choices based on a new understanding of who I am, where I need to go, and what I need to do.” King’s passion emerged as a whisper.
“As an artist, filled with the power of God, you could record your personal version of the nature of truth. Your moral posture would add power to your sincerity, insight to your watchfulness, and inspiration to your love. You would become not only a recorder, but an interpreter. Your works would become your truth, reflect your insights. You would become a spiritual leader in America, Albert, conveying His message to thousands of people who would otherwise remain ignorant of what He has given us. And by the time you find your stride, Albert,” said King aloud, “landscape painting will be huge in America.”
No sooner had his words emptied into the void than the landscape was plunged into shadow as though someone had turned off the sun. The afternoon heat had not so much abandoned them as it had been pushed aside by a large, cool bubble. Dense air reduced the contrast between highlights and shadows, and its windy currents carried a fresh acidic scent.
King’s imagery had moved him to a higher plane. He now spoke the message that “Nature is God,” and he no longer needed attribution. He was on autopilot, at one with his gospel. “Mountains are His undefiled works,” said King using a series of gestures. “Amid scenes of solitude, from which the hand of nature never lifts, is God the creator—and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.”
In his joy, King turned to Albert and bade him stand by his side. He draped his left arm across his younger friend’s shoulders and pointed his right hand toward Mount Washington. “You cannot turn your back on this, Albert. Nature has spread a rich, delightful banquet for us. We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”
The more he spoke, the more his language became enriched with the transcendental words of Emerson, Walden, and Shelley, for King was a Romantic in the truest sense. He was aware of life’s complexities and loved to explore so that he might discover and find wonder in his discoveries. At the moment he was simply full of God.
Albert watched the colors behind Mount Washington turn purple as clouds on the sides of the mountain grew darker. He was pulled by a sensation that here before him was the making of a classic landscape painting. The scene framed itself; lines from a row of trees took him to the horizon where a large patch of light pulled him to the mountaintop. It was as though he had never truly understood the relationship between foreground, middle ground, and background of a scene, how they were connected, the defining role of diagonals and perspective, the unifying attributes of line, light and shadow, and color.
King stood with his arms cast wide as wispy stands of his hair were lifted by the wind. He shouted, “Do you understand, Albert? Those who paint landscapes are closer to God than most men, and the best of those, who God calls to do his bidding, are his Artist-Priests. I see that as your destiny.”
Now the wind teased them, and light played over the scene. The temperature dropped and a shroud of dark purple lined the horizon while clouds that were highlighted in pink crowded the mountain. A deep roll of thunder brought the storm and the mountain range closer. King stood alone now, for—being at one with his vision—he had walked into the meadow. His dialogue locked on to the relationship between landscape and God, and he became mesmerized by the sublimity of the scene, the presence of God, and the rapture of his own message.
Albert watched King walk through the frenzied grasses as the full shape of the storm clarified before them. It swept over the prow of Mount Washington like a giant wave rising from the sea on its way to the throne of Zeus as though pushed by the irrepressible hands of Jupiter and Thor.
King’s words blended with the sound of the storm while Albert, becoming one with his own experience, was dissecting the landscape into interlocking pieces. Albert’s eyes raced across the scene, landing on key bands of light and dark that crisscrossed the pasture. They jumped from the horizon to the storm to shafts of light that lifted portions of the meadow from its shadows. Branches behind him rattled in the wind like cheering bystanders attending the unfolding of a great drama.
The wind chilled Albert’s face and brought forth heat from his sunburned cheeks. This was the first time in his life that landscape had appeared to him as a composition with multi-hued textures, merging lines of perspective, and bands of warm and cool color. He felt as though he was being ushered into a plane of higher understanding.
King had stopped a dozen paces into the field. He was now speaking about landscape, sky, and God, and how mankind should respond to the presence of His most majestic works. “How can mankind fail to understand you?” he cried as he raised his hands above his head. “They must celebrate your works, my God!”
As though in direct response, a tremendous clap of thunder announced that the storm had breached the crest of the mountain. Albert saw sunshine penetrate the clouds, highlight segments of the scene, and create a chiaroscuro landscape in bands of light and dark. The storm fused its transitional shadows and majestic streams of light into one magnificent scene. Albert and King stood transfixed while the wind while a thick band of rain rushed toward them like minions of the Lord.
Albert’s hands itched to hold a paintbrush. In the back of his mind he heard only every other word from King, who now spoke of his personal relationship with God. “And when I am surrounded by nothing but nature, am I not invited to become one with it?” King asked the heavens. “Am I not entreated to re-enter the womb and accept the nurture, the kinship, and the bond? Are both nature and man not products of His mind and His hand?”
The storm raced across the open meadow and, inhaling all before its path, seemed to hesitate at their feet. Then its sublimity became too apparent; the wind gusted fiercely, and diagonal sheets of rain hammered them as though in a baptism.
When a huge bolt of lightning lit the heavens, King immediately shouted, “God is here!” He peeled away his clothes as one who would meet his maker one-on-one as a child of the universe. “Here I am, God,” shouted King in his naked rapture as he quoted Emerson’s vision of man in nature: “Standing on bare ground, head bathed by the blithe air and lifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I am a transparent eyeball; I see all; I am part or particle of God.”
Then, like original man, King kneeled with his arms reaching outward and upward, bowing as a representative of mankind, who must yield to the sublime power of God’s message. Another bolt of lightning pealed out of the sky and momentarily illuminated the scene, and the ground trembled as a nearby tree split and burst into flame.
***
The night air in the bedroom of the inn was cool, but Albert was sweating because his dream had reappeared. In the same way that the storm had embraced him and its light had penetrated every shadow in the land, his dream had cleared. For the first time he saw a solidly-shaped man with black hair wearing a wide-brim straw hat walk to the center, and seat himself on a stool. With a paintbrush and mal stick, the apparition leaned forward to apply paint to the canvas in front of him. He paused and then turned his head toward Albert, the dreamer. The man’s eyes twinkled, and the corners of his mouth lifted. “Yes, Albert, I’ve been calling you.”
At first, all Albert saw was a large black beard and mustache. Then he recognized the man for who he was, and he virtually levitated into a sitting position. His heart was hammering and his fingers were stinging. He had been looking at himself in the future! Without thinking of where he was, he blurted: “Jumping Jehosaphat! I’m going to be a landscape artist!”
From the other half of the bed, King’s eyes fluttered. “Of course you are, Albert. God has finally spoken to you, and now you know who you are. Why do you think I brought you up here?”
Albert commits to the hero’s journey by accepting Separation and Withdrawal. As he proceeds toward the Threshold, a dark and foreign land, he is full of trepidation, for he knows not the structure, the fiber, or the duration of his challenge. He had experienced an intrepid inner pull, a force to which he believed he had to respond. Now our hero guesses correctly that he may undergo extensive Tests and Trials. If he responds in proper fashion, he will succeed; if he hesitates or fails to fully commit himself to his trial, he will fail, abandon his calling, and return home in the shroud of defeat.
***
The brigantine Porpoise, driven by a steady wind, chased an endless row of brittle waves in the feisty sea. Each time she caught one, she lifted, then nodded her great, sharp bow, cleaved the water, and plunged toward the next line in her path. Her two-hundred-foot-long deck rolled and swayed like a dancer caught in the slow rhythm of a pagan dance. More than a dozen bark-rigged sails held taut before the wind, while on the poop her coxswain watched the rise and fall of the horizon and made routine adjustments to her head with easy turns of the helm.
All boded well aboard ship this December 16, 1853. The temperature was well above freezing, and breaking swells rarely breached the bulwarks. The Porpoise pounded along at twelve knots on its easterly heading, a fine but not excessive pace for the seagoing cargo clipper. She moved more quickly than most of her sea-bound sisters and went anywhere she was pointed. Today would be the thirteenth day of the eastern leg of her round-trip voyage. Her hold held barrels of tobacco, rice, and whale oil and bales of cotton. In about a week she would stop in Liverpool and then head for the Rhine, where she would start her return trip to America with her belly full of British finery, German wines, and more than a hundred German immigrants.
Her east-bound human cargo included two British families, a handful of American merchants, and a representative of the American government, none of whom were sufficiently interested in bracing themselves against the chilled salt air to catch the colors of the setting sun. The only passenger on deck that late afternoon was a young, husky lad with a full mustache and beard and thick black hair. The wind off the water pushed and pulled at him, but he did not appear to mind, for he had energy to match.
He strode across the deck without the need to balance, his hands deep in the pockets of his knee-length, single-breasted Inverness. To anyone watching, he might have appeared as calm and patient as one who had regularly crossed the Atlantic in all seasons. On closer inspection, one would have noticed that he rocked with the changing tilt of the ship as though to add his weight to her momentum to bring her to distant shores more quickly than dictated by the prevailing wind.
The day that Albert embarked from New Bedford had signaled a separation from everything he had ever known. Beneath a layer of acute anxiety he welcomed the sailing, for he felt as though he’d been called to a new land replete with dark, unknown trials and the promise of unasked-for delights. The young man was anxious to hear the yell of “land ho!” and the slap of the gangplank. He had already pictured himself half running onto the wharf at Düsseldorf, striding toward downtown, confident, proud, and filled with anticipation. For a moment, he turned his back to the wind and glanced west. The ship’s jagged wake created a string of bubbles that disappeared behind the waves, but the heave of the sea did little to change the horizon, and the rays of the lowering sun made the edge of the sky look like the flange of an endless ruler.
He watched the main hatch click open and the Porpoise’s boatswain appear. The sailor came to attention, put a metal tube to his lips, and piped the end of the noon-to-four shift and the beginning of the first dogwatch. Albert heard the scuffle of quick feet and watched the next shift take over the wheel on the poop and begin the painstaking routine of checking the stays, guys, braces, and sails from stern to bow as they bristled stiffly like outstretched arms from the mizzen-, main-, and fore-topmasts.