2017 Stevens Helen 1333274
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Paradise Closed Energy, inspiration and making art in Rome in the works of Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James, 1847-1903 Stevens, Helen Christine Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Paradise Closed: Energy, inspiration and making art in Rome in the works of Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James, 1847-1903 Helen Stevens 1 Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD King’s College London September, 2016 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... 5 Abstract........................................................................................................................ 6 List of Illustrations ...................................................................................................... 8 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 9 I. GOING HOME TO THE ‘LAND OF ART’ ....................................................................... 9 II. ARTISTIC ENERGY IN THE ETERNAL CITY .............................................................. 40 Chapter One: Rome the Mine: Excavating, Accessing and Harnessing Artistic Energy........................................................................................................................ 57 I. ‘OBJECTS OF CURIOSITY’: MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS IN ROME ................................ 57 The Discovery of the Porta Portese Venus ................................................................ 57 Roman Things ........................................................................................................... 60 Relics, Art and Storage .............................................................................................. 67 Experiencing Roman Things ..................................................................................... 74 II. ‘A VERY WONDERFUL ARRANGEMENT OF PROVIDENCE’: EXCAVATING ROMAN ENERGY ...................................................................................................................... 78 Excavation and the ‘Providential’ Mine .................................................................... 78 III. EXCAVATING THE MODEL: MAKING NEW ART FROM OLD THINGS ........................ 92 Sexual Desire and Harnessing Artistic Energy ............................................................. The Subterranean and the Subconscious ................................................................. 104 Chapter Two: Rome the Factory: Recycled energy, repetition and the anxious mechanics of copying .............................................................................................. 114 I. Recognition and Repetition in Rome ................................................................... 114 Ideas of New and Old in an Eternal City ................................................................. 114 Inspiration and the Receptive Imagination .............................................................. 119 Recycled Tales of Roman Recognition ................................................................... 122 II. UNEASY RECYCLING AND AURA .......................................................................... 138 ‘Thousands of Venuses, but no Women’: The Paradox of the New in Neoclassical Sculpture .................................................................................................................. 138 Dilution and ‘Merely Mechanical Reproduction’ ................................................... 154 III. THE ORIGINAL COPY: AUTHENTICITY AND ENERGY TRANSFER IN ROMAN COPYING .................................................................................................................. 162 ‘Spiritual’ Copying as Preservation......................................................................... 162 Locating the ‘Spiritual’ in Print Culture: Tauchnitz Editions of The Marble Faun 179 Chapter Three: Rome the Séance: Un-dead artists and the rejection of loss ........... 184 I. ‘BE EARNEST’: SPIRITUALISM, ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND ROMAN ENTROPY ......... 184 3 ‘A distinct Romeward trend’: Transatlantic Spiritualism in Rome ......................... 184 Spiritualist Practice amongst the Expatriate Artists ................................................ 194 II. SPIRITUALISM AND ROMAN ENTROPY .................................................................. 202 Entropic Rome and the Search for Continuity ........................................................ 202 William Wetmore Story’s Anti-Entropic Musical Energy ...................................... 206 The Science of Spiritualism and Rome’s Energetic Ghosts .................................... 213 III. SPIRITUALIST THINGS, ROMAN THINGS AND COLLABORATIVE SPIRITUAL ART . 218 ‘Each man would ask of all objects what they mean’: Spiritualist Things ............. 218 Anti-Entropic Spiritual Collaboration with the Past ............................................... 224 IV. ‘ALL THE GRAVEN IMAGES WE HAVE MADE […] PURSUE US’: GALATEA AND THE FANTASY OF ANTI-ENTROPIC ARTISTIC RESURRECTION ............................................. 237 Conclusion: Rome the Threshold: Roman triangulation of Anglo-American transatlanticism and the legacy of ‘lives that shrink’ .............................................. 248 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 262 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Clare Pettitt, for her generosity, patience, clear thinking and guidance. I am grateful for the AHRC award that supported me during my three years at King’s, and especially for the additional AHRC grant that enabled me to visit archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. To the staff and researchers at the HRC, thank you for making my time there so productive and so happy. My parents, Margaret and Richard, and my brother, Simon, know far more about academia, research and perseverance than I do, and have made possible the existence of this thesis. 5 Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which the artistic practice of key members the expatriate community in mid- to late nineteenth-century Rome related to contemporary ideas of energy and inspiration. William Wetmore Story, a central figure in the expatriate community, arrived in Rome in 1847. Between 1847 and 1859, the number of American artists living in Rome grew from four to 400; these American arrivals joined the British community of artists already established in the city. Rome, for all these expatriate artists, acted as a creative force field: it was experienced as a source of artistic energy, the conception of which was informed by contemporary scientific theories of energy and entropy viewed through the filter of the Romantic notion of Rome as a site that enabled ‘spontaneous creation’. William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Hosmer explored ways in which Roman artistic energy could be accessed and repurposed in their own work. This recycling of Roman artistic energy was an attempt to navigate the paradox of a city that was considered both ‘eternal’ and ruined. These artists formulated an idea of Roman artistic energy that could be separated from the art object and transferred between artworks that therefore acted as storage for that energy. Artists thus participated in the recycling of Rome’s artistic energy from old to new art, a practice that worked to counteract prevailing fears inspired both by the entropy of the city of Rome, and the entropy of universal energy, of which Rome’s ruins were evocative. The publication of Henry James’ group biography of the community, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, in 1903 provides the end date for this study. In the biography, James identified Rome as a ‘Paradise Closed’: a city that simultaneously figured as a closed system in which energy could be endlessly recycled, and