Little Kingdoms

Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810–1846)

THE BELLE AFTER THE BALL

Circa 1828

Ink and brown wash on paper, 9 1/2 × 11 5/8 in.

As an undergraduate (Harvard College, 1826–1830), Moorash composed a series of six satirical drawings in the lively vein of Hogarth, only one of which has survived. Despite a certain crudity of execution, it possesses the boldness of his more mature work, as well as a savage and almost disturbing air of mockery. The Belle is shown among her partially cast-off clothes, with her wig at her feet and her teeth on the table, but Moorash carries the well-worn theme much further: one glass eye lies beside her mask, one naked breast lies under the table, her left arm, still gloved, lies on the floor beside a bouquet of withered roses, and in her lap she holds her bald, toothless, and half-blind head, which stares at the viewer with an expression of malignant hatred. The details of the grotesque scene are scrupulously observed; each minuscule link in the graceful gold chain that hangs from the headless neck is drawn with a miniaturist’s precision.

WILLIAM PINNEY

1829

Black chalk, heightened with white, on buff paper, 10 × 8 1/4 in.

William Osgood Pinney (1808–1846) was born in Philadelphia, the son of Thomas Pinney (a lawyer and publisher of legal papers) and Ann Osgood. Although two years older than Moorash when they met at Harvard College in the fall of 1828, he befriended the younger man and introduced him to others of his set. Moorash’s moody nature and fierce independence of spirit made him a difficult friend, but he warmed to Pinney as to no other man. Chester Calcott, an undergraduate friend of Pinney’s who later became a fashionable portrait painter and a harsh critic of Moorash’s work, noted in his diary a difference between the two men: “In any gathering, Pinney will cross the room to greet you with his hand held out and a smile of welcome on his lips, but Moorash will always hang back, looking at you as if you intended harm.” Moorash once said of Chester Calcott that he had the looks of a god, the mind of a devil, and the esthetic sense of a brewer’s assistant.

Pinney intended to study law but appears to have been deflected from that purpose by his association with Moorash. Upon graduation he sold his share of the family property to finance his study of art in London, where he was joined by Moorash in the following year. Pinney returned to Cambridge in 1832 and spent two unhappy years as an apprentice in the studio of Henry Van Ness, a leading portraitist who was noted for his brilliant rendition of transparent silk sleeves, ermined capes, velvet armchairs, and ostrich plumes, and who permitted William to paint backgrounds and draperies under close supervision. After a year of indecision Pinney became an architect’s apprentice in Boston, where Moorash, who refused to paint portraits, was working in cramped quarters and eking out what he called an “unliving” by a series of obscure jobs, including the painting of panels for the backs of fire engines.

Pinney is shown in the fashionable dress of the day: the black coat with its glimpse of lining, the white linen shirt and high collar, the rippling neckcloth. The coat is unbuttoned below to reveal the vest, to which is attached a delicate chain and a small key; a dark jewel set in pearls is visible on the shirt front. Pinney wears his hair curling, long, and a little wild. Moorash has captured a peculiar expression: Pinney seems to have been caught unawares, and he is shown half-rising, looking at the viewer with a kind of irritated surprise.

RAT KRESPEL

1835

Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 1/8 in.

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Rat Krespel” appeared in 1819 in Volume One of Die Serapionsbrüder. Although it is not known whether Moorash was able to read German, his sister Elizabeth was well read in both German and French; she may have translated the story for him directly from the German, or from the French translation by Loève-Veimars of the Oeuvres complètes (1829–33). Moorash has depicted the scene of Councillor Krespel’s wild grief after learning of the death of his daughter:

Deeply shaken, I sank into a chair. But the Councillor, in a harsh voice, began singing a merry song, and it was truly horrible to see how he hopped about on one foot, the crepe (he still had his hat on) fluttering about the room and brushing against the violins hanging on the walls. In fact, I couldn’t help giving a loud shriek when the crepe struck me during one of his sudden turns; it seemed to me that he wanted to enfold me and drag me down into the horrible black pit of madness.

The details of the scene are faithfully recorded in the painting: the violins on the wall are draped in black, in place of one violin there hangs a wreath of cypress, and Krespel wears a black sword-belt beneath which is tucked a violin bow instead of a sword. What is striking, however, is not the careful rendering of detail but precisely the opposite: the furious distortion of details as they are swept up into lines of force, the deliberate and expressive blurring of form. Thus the streaming of Krespel’s hair and coat is seen in the violins, which in the dark radiance of the candlelight seem to writhe like snakes, and the ripple of the fluttering band of crepe is echoed in the curve of the piano’s music rack, while the piano itself appears to be dissolving into reddish darkness. The effect is of a center of violent energy diffusing itself throughout the entire painting. Krespel himself, partially plunged in blackness and partially illumined by the red candleflames, has the distorted features of a grimacing dwarf. Despite such distortions, the painting retains a number of illusionist features, such as definite though at times ambiguous perspectival lines and a stable, centralized vantage point.

If the scene attracted Moorash for its painterly possibilities, the story itself has significant implications in light of what is known of Moorash’s theory of the demonic properties of art. It will be recalled that Krespel’s daughter is blessed with a supernaturally beautiful singing voice, which derives in part from a defect of the lung; if she continues to sing, she will die. The dubious origin and fatal effect of art — twin themes that haunted the romantic imagination (see Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” for a later variation) — is here given one of the earliest and most memorable expressions by the German fabulist.

The painting, believed lost until 1951, when it was discovered in the attic of a descendant of William Pinney’s maternal uncle, shows some damage: the paint surface is abraded in the top right corner and in a small area to the right of the cypress wreath. There is also some loss of paint along the upper and lower edges of the picture, where the canvas has deteriorated.

Note. Because Rat Krespel is frequently connected with the Phantasmacist movement of the early 1830s, it may be worthwhile to distinguish Moorash’s work from the paintings of that minor and short-lived school. In works such as The Headless Horseman (1832) by John Pine and Lenore (1833) by Erastus Washington we see the typical Phantasmacist interest in macabre scenes drawn from literature, the use of violent contrasts of light and dark, and the attraction to shrill discords of color, but in essence the technique of this school is diametrically opposed to that of Moorash. The Phantasmacists attempt to capture the macabre, the eerie, the fantastic by the method of scrupulous precision; even their fondness for unusual effects of light (flickering lantern-light, cloudy moonlight, stormy daylight, the flames of hell) is expressed in an almost scientific method of distortion. Their concern for detail, for exact representation, for high finish and smooth facture, connects them with the academic art against which they appear to be rebelling. But Moorash, even in this early painting, has begun to dissolve the outlines of objects, to blur linear identity, to infect all parts of a painting with an energy that appears to erupt from within the canvas.

It would nevertheless be interesting to know whether Moorash ever visited the Boston studio of Erastus Washington, whom he once ambiguously praised in a letter to William Pinney (5 December 1843): “All the same, I’d rather have painted one devil by old Erastus Washington than all the landscapes by Hudson.” (Moorash liked to speak of an imaginary artist called Hudson who was supposed to have painted all the pictures of the land-scapists working in the Hudson River valley and not yet known as the Hudson River School.) Erastus Washington (1783–1857), one of the more eccentric artists of the 1830s, spent ten years completing a cycle of over five hundred paintings in red, burnt sienna, and black called The Underworld, which he intended as Part I of a three-part cycle and which he burned along with his entire library after a mystical revelation at the age of sixty. He spent the last fourteen years of his life writing religious tracts in which he inveighed against the idolatry of art and asserted that Nature itself is a great painting composed of images that obliquely reveal an unseen Master. If Moorash ever admired him, it was for his wildness and sincerity rather than for his art.

LANDSCAPE WITH FOG. STONE HILL,

EARLY MORNING

1836

Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in.

In the early spring of 1836, at the urging of fellow painter Edward Ingham Vail, Moorash left Boston, where he had been struggling for two years, for the village of Strawson in northern New York. Here he rented a cottage “dirt cheap” on the outskirts of town. The country appeared to agree with him, and in June he moved to the nearby village of Saccanaw Falls, where he rented a rural cottage about half a mile from the village center on sixteen acres of fields, woods, and streams. He was soon joined by his sister Elizabeth, who had been living restlessly with her parents in Hartford, Connecticut. She had recently been left a small annuity upon the death of a favorite aunt, and saw in the move a chance both to free herself from unhappy domestic circumstances and to watch over her beloved and careless brother. The property contained a decaying barn that Moorash used as a studio.

His new life delighted him, in part because he was happy to put distance between himself and Vail, whose dreamy landscapes and sentimental portraits grated on his nerves. The cottage was situated on a small rise known as Stone Hill, a name that in Elizabeth’s Journal refers sometimes to the hill itself, sometimes to the entire property, and sometimes to the cottage. Moorash’s life at Stone Hill was by no means as isolated as has been claimed (see Havemeyer, 56–58, for the classic statement of Moorash’s “romantic solitude”); Elizabeth records frequent visitors, such as William Pinney and his sister Sophia, Edward Ingham Vail, the miniaturist Thomas Swanwick, the itinerant folk artist Obadiah Shaw, who specialized in perspective views painted on cigar-box lids and Biblical scenes painted on glass, and the poet and portraitist Lyman Phelps (later a successful attorney-at-law). In addition, the Journal mentions numerous excursions to Strawson and the surrounding countryside, as well as twice-weekly walks into Saccanaw Falls, a small but bustling village of two churches, four taverns, a dry goods store, two bakeries, three butcher shops, a cooper’s shop, three smithies, a tannery, a mason’s shop, a furrier’s, a brewery, a hatter’s, two druggist shops, and even a musical instrument establishment.

The painting, completed in late summer, should be seen as an attack on the popular topographical views of the day, on the early contemplative landscapes of the Hudson River painters, and perhaps on the entire genre of landscape painting, which by mid-century would supplant portraiture in popular esteem. Indeed there is a distinct element of satire here, despite the absolute seriousness of the work. As one early critic put it: where is the landscape? Moorash has chosen to depict a thick, obliterating fog, in shades of gray, white, and black, with brown and green tints seeping through and, in the right-hand portion, a luminous yellow-ocherish burst where an invisible sun is glowing. Nothing whatever is visible in the picture, aside from the brilliantly rendered fog itself and a single, sharply emergent leafless branch in the lower left-hand corner; here and there dark, wavering forms appear indistinctly. Moorash has completely abolished perspective. There is no vantage point, no center; there is no image, except for the disturbing branch in the lower left hand corner, which serves the ambiguous function of anchoring the viewer in place, of providing stability, and also of radically confusing or destabilizing the point of view, for it is impossible to determine the relation of the branch to anything else. We tend to read it as a sign of height, but its position in the lower left-hand corner either contradicts that reading or forces us to imagine that we are looking down on the sceneless scene from an elevated point. The painting makes no attempt to induce in the viewer a state of revery, or to suggest deep religious meanings infused in a natural setting; rather, its effect is to disturb, to confound, to render uncertain.

ELIZABETH IN DREAM

1836

Oil on canvas, 26 1/2 × 36 in.

Moorash’s early masterpiece was refused by the National Academy of Design in New York and the Boston Athenaeum but accepted for exhibition by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where it attracted the attention of several critics who subjected it to ridicule mixed with moral indignation. The picture was begun in the spring, set aside for Landscape with Fog, and taken up again by the end of August, after which Moorash worked at it steadily until its completion in mid-November. As the weather grew colder he was forced to move from the barn to the house, where with Elizabeth’s help he converted the upstairs parlor to a studio and moved most of the parlor furniture down to the kitchen. The ground floor of the cottage was divided into two rooms — the large kitchen and Elizabeth’s bedroom — as well as a small room in back that served as a wash-house; the upper floor consisted of a large front room (Moorash’s studio, formerly the parlor) and two back rooms, one of which was Moorash’s bedroom and one of which served as a storage or guest room. William Pinney, a frequent visitor in 1836, has left a vivid description (in a letter to his sister of 8 September 1836) of the transformed cottage, where guests were entertained in a kitchen containing an armchair, a writing desk, and a sagging sofa, as well as a pile of canvases leaning against an old churn in one corner.

Elizabeth Moorash (1814–1846) was twenty-two at the time of the painting. We are fortunate to have a likeness of her dating from 1836: a miniature watercolor on ivory painted by Edward Ingham Vail. The glossy brown-black hair parted in the middle and bursting into side curls, and the dramatic blackness of the dress, which blends into the dark background, serve to throw into relief her striking face, which Vail rendered meticulously in delicate clear color: the large, heavy-lidded eyes look out with an expression of frankness and passionate intelligence, softened by a kind of dreamy, inward stare, as if her deepest attention lay elsewhere.

Elizabeth in Dream carries to fulfillment the technique first seen in Rat Krespel, in which a central image or character infects the entire world of the painting. Here the barely perceptible face, transparent and dissolving, of the dreaming Elizabeth is dispersed throughout the picture: her transparent hair streams into the night sky, her eyes are streaks of purple-black, her bare arms melt into the brilliance of the moon; and the night itself, under the influence of the dream-dispersed young woman, seems to melt into streams of bright darkness or dark brightness. The world and the dreamer intermingle and dissolve. And yet there is nothing soft, gentle, or revery-like about this dream world, which on the contrary is charged with an extraordinary energy, as if the night were composed of black fire.

THE INFERNAL PICTURE GALLERY

1837

Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 46 3/4 in.

Elizabeth’s Journal for 15 December 1836 records a visit by John Pope Coddington, a New York art collector and amateur painter, whom she describes as “most bewildered by our kitchen-parlor.” Coddington appears to have been even more bewildered by the canvases he was shown, but three days later he wrote to commission a cycle of eight paintings on “The Power of Art.” Moorash labored over his unlikely commission for nearly a year before abandoning it after a third painting. He liked to refer to the cycle as his “punishment,” which it quickly became despite the attraction of the theme and the lure of income; certainly the first two paintings are disappointing performances and represent a step backward in the development of his art.

As an undergraduate Moorash had frequented the Boston Athenaeum, and in his two years abroad with William Pinney he had spent many days in the art galleries, auction rooms, and temporary exhibition halls of London and Paris, as well as in a number of private collections to which Pinney had entry, but Moorash was at best a restless, impatient visitor of picture galleries, “those most fashionable of graveyards with their numbered headstones” (letter to Elizabeth, 14 May 1833). His refusal to accompany Pinney to Italy is well known; he argued that the entire country was “an interminable picture gallery decorated with olive trees” (letter of William Pinney to Sophia Pinney, 6 June 1833). The only pictures he is known to have viewed with pleasure were not paintings at all, but satirical mezzotints hung in the windows of printsellers’ shops. A row of paintings in a gallery, he once remarked to Edward Vail, reminded him of a line of prisoners waiting to be shot. This irritable response to what he called the “necessary evil” of art museums no doubt partly accounts for the infernal theme, but it would be a mistake to see in the painting no more than revenge for the “months of smothering boredom” he claimed to have suffered among the numbered headstones. Moorash believed profoundly in the power of painting to affect the beholder. In a letter to Pinney (undated, c. 1835) he speaks of the “impressive nature of art, that is, its power of impressing itself onto the mind and soul, as a knife impresses itself in flesh,” and behind the playfulness and mockery of The Infernal Picture Gallery we hear the unmistakable note of this deep theme.

The Infernal Picture Gallery is based on no known art museum or private collection. It shows two soaring walls crowded with pictures in carved and gilded frames (in all, thirty-eight paintings are visible), as well as the statue of a naked nymph emerging from her bath on a marble pedestal in one corner. A doorway opens onto a vista of arched galleries. Two copyists are seated at their easels in opposite corners of the room. The gallery holds some half dozen well-dressed visitors, all of whom look up aghast or press their gloved hands to their frock coats and frilled bosoms. From the thick frames, figures are emerging. A fat naked woman who appears to have descended from an allegorical banquet stands smiling before a stiff, startled gentleman in a frock coat, while a red-faced colonel ogles her through his monocle. A naked Jove, covering his genitals with a bunch of green grapes, appears to be abducting a terrified woman in a fashionable cloak; an Indian in war paint brandishes a tomahawk. But it is not always possible to tell which figures are visitors to the gallery and which have escaped from the frames — a confusion that is surely part of Moorash’s intention. Indeed this satirical questioning of the boundaries between the illusory and the real is given further complexity by a striking comic detail: one of the copyists is shown leaning uneasily away from his canvas, from which a leg in a shiny black boot is emerging. Since the canvas is a precise copy of a painting on the wall, Moorash has introduced a figure who is twice removed from life. But his artistic playfulness does not end here: the emerging boot casts a clearly delineated shadow on the picture frame, while the boot remaining in the picture casts its own painted shadow. Thus two orders of shadow are established, one “real” and one “painted,” although the viewer is meant to be aware that the “real” shadow is itself painted; and to complicate matters a little, the picture being copied contains a statue that casts a shadow, and the copyist himself casts a shadow on the gallery floor. But despite such elements of epistemological playfulness and outright satire, The Infernal Picture Gallery has a darker impulse, for a number of the images are disturbing: a lion holds in its jaws the bitten-off leg of a man-about-town, who lies staring in horror at his blood-gushing stump from which hang shreds of veins and sinews; a bandit with a red scar on his cheek is plunging a dagger into the neck of a kneeling woman; and in a dark corner a lady with a torn bodice and disheveled hair is struggling to free herself from a leering satyr, who is pulling her head back by the hair and squeezing the nipple of one bared breast. The painting, with its clearly drawn figures and its reddish light, hovers uneasily between humor and horror.

The grotesque and at times sadistic elements of The Infernal Picture Gallery have raised questions about its connection with the Diabolist movement (fl. 1835–36), especially in light of Moorash’s defense of their work against the bloodless academicism of the day, but aside from a few features so general as to be meaningless there is little to connect Moorash’s satirical painting with the dubious productions of that school. Typical Diabolist works treat subjects that are intended to be shocking and titillating: torture, slaughter (especially of half-naked women by Turkish soldiers in colorful uniforms), orgiastic Roman banquets full of overturned flagons and bared breasts, and studies of bleeding women mangled by wild animals. John Pine (1805–1849), who after his defection from the Phantasmacists became the acknowledged leader of the Diabolist school, was noted for his meticulous studies of partially dissected female corpses, his chained women gnawed by rats, and his forest scenes in which satyrs with very hairy haunches sodomize pale prepubescent girls with dreamy blue eyes, rosy lips, and ivory buttocks. Pine was arrested in 1836 and after his release became a fashionable still-life artist specializing in moist bunches of grapes, bloody slabs of meat, and sunstruck wineglasses half-filled with ruby wine. Moorash’s alleged praise of Pine (in a conversation with Edward Ingham Vail) should not be misconstrued as praise for pornography and the eroticism of death, but rather must be understood as an attack on the fashionable correctness and tameness of Vail and his set.

GALATEA

1837

Oil on canvas, 44 × 35 1/4 in.

The second painting of the “Power of Art” cycle was begun in the last week of March and completed on 21 April, a comparatively rapid rate of composition for Moorash. The broad, free brushstrokes of Elizabeth in Dream have here been replaced by the tight, controlled brushwork of a neoclassical academician striving for the scrupulous rendition of minute detail and a high degree of linear definition. So extreme is Moorash’s retreat from his earlier experiments in the loosening of contour that one cannot but suspect the artist’s deliberate and almost parodic effort to satisfy a taste not his own.

The source of the Galatea legend is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (243–97), in which, it should be noted, Pygmalion’s statue is unnamed; but Moorash treats the incident freely, in a manner without precedent. Galatea is shown in a state of transition, half marble and half flesh: the living half is struggling to free itself from the cold stone. It is a disturbing conception, in which the living creature appears to be trapped in marble. The living half is nearly as white as the marble half, but very faintly suffused with a ghostly flesh tone. Nothing is shown of the sculptor except his tense hand, from whose veins and sinews we infer a response of terror.

THE UNVEILING

1837

Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 29 1/2 in.

The dark sinister light that obscures sharpness of outline, the deliberate sketchiness of the uplifted faces, the flattening of the picture plane, the emphasis on atmosphere, all separate this painting from the first two of the “Power of Art” cycle and show Moorash returning to the true direction of his art after forcing himself to submit to the imagined taste of his improbable patron. The artist, half-concealed in darkness, is here presented as a demonic figure deliberately exercising a spell on the audience, who gaze up fearfully. The uncertain vantage point appears to be above the audience, on a level with the stage, a strategy that permits Moorash to carry through his plan of not showing the masterwork. We see nothing but a piece of velvet drapery trailing on the stage; it is impossible to tell whether a painting, a statue, or something else entirely has been unveiled.

In her Journal (8 November 1837) Elizabeth noted that “Edmund’s devil picture has given me a fright.” This entry must refer to The Unveiling, which was begun in early October, and not to a lost painting, as Havemeyer supposes. On 9 November Elizabeth had a night of “bad dreams” and recorded that she woke “to hear Edmund’s footsteps overhead, pacing, pacing. I longed to run to him, and take his beloved head upon my shoulder, but knowing that the suspicion of having waked me would distress him, I could not tell him of my fearful dream, whereupon I held my bitter peace.” The painting apparently continued to make a strong impression, for nearly a year later (4 August 1838) we find: “William and Edmund at a quarter past midnight. Merits of painting and literature. William argued for the cumulative force of arts that move in time. Edmund violently opposed: a painting strikes you all at once, with its full force, instead of dispersing its effects. A painting strikes a blow. William (smiling): Is art then so dangerous? E: Painting is devil’s work — let the beholder beware! I instanced the devil picture. Edmund laughed, and said it had given him a month of headaches, but now he thought it a pretty piece of work to frighten a child withal.”

FIGURES IN SNOW

1838

Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 1/8 in.

Moorash appears to have begun work on this picture on 10 November 1837, that is to say, the very day following his night of furious pacing. Elizabeth’s terse entry for 10 November reads: “Edmund working like mad.” On 22 November she notes that he has been taking long walks in the snow “for his snow picture”; considering his slow habits of composition, it is reasonable to assume that he was still at work on the picture begun on 10 November. In mid-December he put it aside for a Stormy Night (letter to William Pinney, 3 December 1837) that he apparently abandoned or destroyed. He was back at work on his “snow picture” by the first week of January and appears to have completed work on it by the middle of February. It remains uncertain to what extent Figures in Snow was composed in accordance with the new method he is known to have adopted by the summer of 1840. Instead of discarding canvas after canvas until he achieved the effect he wanted, he began in the summer of 1840 to work obsessively on a single canvas, painting out unwanted portions repeatedly, or else scraping them out with a piece of pumice, so that he gradually built up thick, uneven layers of paint, often with distinct ridges. Figures in Snow appears to be transitional; several portions are painted over, but the overall accumulation is notably less than it was to become.

A letter from William Pinney (7 June 1838) to his sister Sophia reports that Moorash was “exhilarated” while working on the painting, and it is reasonable to suppose that part of his exhilaration lay in his triumphant return to the technique of Elizabeth in Dream. The heavy, swirling snowfall blurs and distorts the two figures barely glimpsed through the raging whiteness, with its eerie tints of brown and violet. A streak of red in one figure, perhaps indicating a scarf, is carried over in paler and paler tones, as if the redness is staining the storm, or as if the snow is dissolving the figure into liquid.

A pencil study that appears to be connected with the finished picture shows the two figures clearly as William Pinney and Elizabeth, coming up the front path of Stone Hill Cottage; the Journal entry for 6 January 1838 speaks of a visit by William “in wild snow.” Evidently Moorash made a quick sketch, which he referred to in completing the painting. If the sketch was in fact made on 6 January, then the two figures were a late addition to the snow picture, but abundant evidence for the composition of other paintings attests that Moorash’s conception of a picture often underwent a significant shift during the course of composition, after which he pursued his new vision relentlessly. William Pinney, by now an architect of growing reputation, was a frequent visitor at Stone Hill Cottage; in the spring of the following year he built a cottage of his own on the far shore of Black Lake, about two miles from Stone Hill. It is not certain when he fell in love with Elizabeth Moorash, although his letters to his sister in 1837 and 1838 make it clear that he found Elizabeth enchanting. In the light of later events Figures in Snow may seem to have an ominous suggestiveness, as if Moorash foresaw the whole dark history, but nothing in the surviving correspondence or in Elizabeth’s Journal lends support to such interpretations. Moorash cannot have been unaware of his friend’s growing interest in his sister, but in January of 1838 William was the eagerly awaited friend of the family, who was welcome to stay for a day or a month and who had not yet disturbed the harmony of things by his declaration of love for Elizabeth. Figures in Snow is best seen as a study in white, by a young master sure of his way.

ELIZABETH AT DUSK: BLACK LAKE

1838

Oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 37 5/8 in.

Elizabeth often walked down to the shore of Black Lake, the large, gloomy lake bordered by cattails that lay some two miles from Stone Hill in a bleak setting of stony fields, clusters of conifers, and a dead ash split by lightning. On the far shore lay the low pine-covered hills where in the spring of 1839 William Pinney was to build his cottage. Edmund sometimes accompanied Elizabeth to Black Lake, where brother and sister would walk along the lakeshore in animated conversation broken by long, peaceful silences. Sometimes they would pull out of the reeds an old rowboat that Edmund had named Sacagawea and row about the dark, quiet lake, Elizabeth at the oars and Edmund lying back against the pillow with a novel by Scott or Bulwer that he held open but did not read.

Of the thirty-one surviving Elizabeth paintings — that is, the nineteen paintings in which Elizabeth appears alone, and the twelve paintings in which she appears with another figure or figures — twenty-three show her as a blurred, distorted, or unrecognizable figure, while the remaining eight do not contain any face or figure at all, and are classified as Elizabeth paintings solely on the basis of titles. In a sense, Moorash never painted his sister. And yet there can be no question of her presence in the paintings to which she lends her name. Moorash’s use of his sister in the Elizabeth paintings was inspirational, and at times erratic, but it was not only that: even in the earliest paintings he was working out a method. It is significant that he continually asked her to pose for him, as if he were painting a meticulous, highly finished portrait of the popular academic kind. Elizabeth’s Journal is filled with accounts of long posing sessions, after which she might discover that a portion of canvas had been covered with a rich shade of brownish black. Moorash’s method was not, as Havemeyer supposes, “expressionistic,” except in the most general and unhistorical sense. On 12 April 1838 Elizabeth wrote: “In the afternoon I posed for three hours before the window. E very pleased with me, commends my fortitude. Scornful of imitating nature — that old saw. Spoke of his attempt to dissolve the natural world onto its components and reassemble them in order to reveal true nature.” On 3 September 1841: “Edmund wants to dissolve forms and reconstitute them so as to release their energy. Art as alchemy.” These hints suggest an esthetic that is neither expressive nor imitative, but transformative: Moorash appears to be seeking a way to reveal or release another order of being, a deeper structure than the accidental and physical one that presents itself to the innocent eye.

In the painting Elizabeth is alone, a small, shadowy figure almost swallowed up by the immensity of dark lake and dark sky, which flow into each other indistinguishably. The swirling array of many-hued browns all stream from the dark Elizabeth figure at the center. A mood of deep melancholy pervades the picture, as if a stain of brown sadness has seeped through a crack in the universe. Elizabeth’s brief Journal entry for 6 June 1838 reads: “Upon seeing the picture I was seized with a terrible agitation. Edmund has seen into my very soul.” Three days later, on 9 June, she writes: “My spirits have lifted on this glorious morning. How deeply I feel the presence of a benevolent Spirit in the hills and valleys. I must pray for guidance.” Elizabeth’s tantalizing comments have been taken to refer to the coming crisis in her relation with her brother, but it is possible that she had already begun to show signs of the nervous disorder that was to reveal itself more decisively in the years to come.

DORNRÖSCHEN

1839

Oil on canvas, 19 1/4 × 27 7/16 in.

On 23 December 1838 Elizabeth recorded a single quotation in her journal: “‘The fairy tales of my childhood have a meaning deeper than the truths taught by life.’—Schiller, Wallenstein.” There is no further mention of Schiller in the Journal, but among Elizabeth’s favorite books must be counted Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen, to which she refers frequently in 1839–40 and of which she possessed two different editions: the revised edition of 1819 and the abridged edition, or Kleine Ausgabe, of 1825, with illustrations by a third Grimm brother, Ludwig Emil Grimm. It is possible that she read and translated directly to Moorash, although in the case of so well known a tale the memory of a childhood telling cannot be discounted. Dornröschen, usually translated “Briar Rose,” is the Grimm version of Perrault’s La belle au bois dormant (“The Sleeping Beauty”); it is one of the shortest and most powerful of the Grimm tales, far more evocative than Perrault’s lengthy version.

A surviving sketch (on the back of a bill for canvas and stretcher) reveals that Moorash at one point attempted to depict the great hedge of thorns bursting into blossom, but there is no trace of this vision in the final painting, in which the spell remains unbroken. In this study of darkness we are in Dornröschen’s tower room; only as the eye adjusts to the predominantly black tones do we distinguish the thick thorn branches that have pushed through the open casement window and fill the small chamber entirely. Dornröschen remains invisible except for her hauntingly long and vinelike hair, which winds about the thorny branches and hangs in thick, disturbing clusters, although she may also be present as a kind of faint glimmer that appears to come from somewhere in the depths of the dark thorns and permits us to make out the sharp thornpoints, the hair, the tones of blackness. The general effect is uncomfortable, suggesting on the one hand a dark peacefulness, a brooding tranquility, a yearning for annihilation, and on the other hand the oppressiveness of living entombment.

Why did Moorash turn to this tale and this image in the early months of 1839? Unfortunately there can be no clear or certain answer. Was he, as Havemeyer suggests, thinking of his beloved Elizabeth, entombed at Stone Hill Cottage, enwrapped in the thorns of his art and waiting for the unthinkable prince to come? Havemeyer does not mention a brief but crucial entry in Elizabeth’s Journal on 2 January: “Visit by Vail and his new bride, Charlotte. Vail doting, Edmund charming, Charlotte pretty in a girlish way; shy; big clear eyes, pewter gray.” It is the first recorded visit of the forty-year-old Vail and his girlish wife, Charlotte (1823–1846), who was sixteen years old but looked two years younger. Moorash might have been thinking of the young bride, spellbound in marriage to the graying Vail — but in that case, whose footsteps would be heard on the tower stair when the thorns burst into blossom? Or should we rather think of Moorash himself as Dornröschen, asleep in the deep spell of his art?

FACES IN THE STREAM

1839

Oil on canvas, 25 × 32 1/2 in.

Moorash appears to have made a number of preliminary sketches, which have not survived, in April or May of 1839; the painting was completed in late summer, probably during the last week of July. The stream is almost certainly the picturesque rocky brook that flowed, and flows still, from the Saccanaw Hills across a wooded stretch of Moorash’s property to empty into Black Lake. A small, railed bridge, no trace of which remains, crossed the stream at the place where an old Indian trail led to the water. The bridge rail can be seen in the painting as a broken and scattered series of brown and yellow brushstrokes in the rushing water. The faces, though recorded as little more than energetic dashes of paint, are unquestionably those of Elizabeth, William Pinney, and Sophia Pinney, as an entry in Elizabeth’s Journal makes clear, although even without that entry the student of Moorash’s work can recognize the distinguishing marks of all three faces, however dissolved and scattered by the turbulent brook.

Sophia Pinney (1816–1846), William Pinney’s sister, had visited at Stone Hill Cottage on three occasions in the mid-1830s but began to accompany her brother regularly in the spring of 1837. In that year alone William and Sophia stayed at Stone Hill Cottage for a week in April, two weeks in May, ten days in June, three weeks in August, a week in October, and four days in November. The frequent visits continued in 1838, and in the spring of 1839 William, now an architect in Boston, built a summer cottage on the far shore of Black Lake at the foot of a wooded hill. The cottage, which was twice the size of the cottage at Stone Hill, included a music room, a library, and a housekeeper’s chamber; in a stable behind the cottage Pinney installed a pair of bays equipped with English saddles in the latest style. Sophia had become close friends with Elizabeth, and in the spring and summer of 1839 the two couples visited back and forth almost daily, often rowing across the lake at dusk to one or the other cottage and separating long after midnight. At the Pinney cottage, Sophia, at Elizabeth’s bidding, would play selections from Schumann’s recently published Fantasiestücke, op. 12 (1838), or Carnaval, op. 9 (1837), sometimes adding a Chopin étude or nocturne, while Edmund sat with tense fingers and half-closed eyes in a “paradoxical state of dreamy alertness” (Journal, 18 July 1839). Elizabeth was not simply liked by her younger friend (Sophia at this time was twenty-three, Elizabeth twenty-five); rather, she seemed to have inspired in Sophia an outpouring of ardent admiration. At the same time she woke in Sophia a kind of maternal protectiveness that made Elizabeth restless and a little impatient. Sophia would insist that Elizabeth wear a shawl on cool summer nights; she tried to change Elizabeth’s careless eating and sleeping habits; she became acutely sensitive to Elizabeth’s moods and began to share her headaches. Elizabeth was fond of her passionately devoted friend but refused to permit herself to be reformed. Once, when Sophia reproached her for staying up all night and paying for it with a savage headache, Elizabeth spoke sharply to her, whereupon Sophia burst into tears. The sharp exchange was an exception; the friendship was warm and ran deep, though one senses that Sophia was the more tightly bound of the two, perhaps because the deepest current of Elizabeth’s feelings ran toward her brother.

CLAIR DE LUNE

1839

Oil on canvas, 36 × 32 in.

This picture, which seems to breathe the air of a tranquil summer night, was in fact painted in the fall: begun in mid-September, it was completed during a week of snow flurries in early November. A curious stillness reigns (compare Moorash’s two other surviving night studies, the Nachtstück and August Night): the world seems to be caught in a spell of moonlight. The sense of spell, of enchantment, connects the painting to Dornröschen, but the feeling here is quite different: it is a study of calm, of harmony, of an almost weary peacefulness. As if to emphasize the harmony of earth and heaven, Moorash locates the horizon line at the center of the picture: a black line of hills, barely visible and dissolving at top and bottom into blue, divides the brilliant deep blue of the night sky and the slightly darker blues of the lake. The sky is in the lake, and the lake is in the sky, and all is mysteriously irradiated by the light of an unseen moon. Moorash here abandons his thick impastos for an uncharacteristically flat, even surface, though he gives his blues depth by the use of glazes. The dark, glowing blues, the mysterious stillness, the doubleness of earth and sky, all provoke in the viewer a sense of hidden meaning, as if the painting were on the verge of a revelation it refuses to make.

The lake is Black Lake, as a preliminary sketch, which includes identifiable foreground objects, clearly shows; among the black line of hills is the hill where William Pinney had built his cottage. A letter from Sophia to her friend Fanny Cornwall on 3 September 1839 reveals that on the night of 31 August William proposed to Elizabeth, whose Journal remains strangely silent about the entire episode. The proposal shocked Moorash, who was deeply bound to his sister, and who, in a sense that must not be misunderstood, was virtually married to her, but who believed profoundly in her right to lead whatever life she chose. Elizabeth’s feelings are more difficult to grasp, in part because of her refusal or inability to write a single syllable about Pinney’s proposal. It is clear that she liked William immensely; she may even have loved him; his proposal threw her into a profound state of uncertainty, amounting at times to despair, which lasted three days. On the fourth day, the day William was to return to Boston, she refused him. What she had to overcome in renouncing William, and therefore a “normal” life, cannot be known; certainly her love for Edmund played its part, but her ardent and complex love for her brother should not be twisted into a banal perversion. Among other things, she feared that her absence might harm him, for he was careless about himself in every way, and once quipped that if it weren’t for Elizabeth he would starve to death out of sheer absentmindedness. If she sacrificed anything — and it is far from certain that she ever was in love with William Pinney — it was for the sake of Edmund’s art.

Moorash was at work on Clair de lune by mid-September, less than two weeks after Elizabeth’s refusal. It is possible to see in the painting a retreat from the violence of his sensations to an extreme calm, as he returned in thought to the early days of that summer, when the two brother-sister couples visited back and forth night after night across the enchanted lake. Many entries in Elizabeth’s Journal suggest his happiness that July and August, painting all day in the barn and wandering the warm and sweet-smelling summer nights in the company of his sister, his friend, and his friend’s sister, who was also his sister’s friend. It is difficult not to see the doubleness of Clair de lune as in some sense a reflection of the two harmonious couples, each itself a double. The friendship among the four was to last for seven more years, but it never recaptured the ease and innocence of that summer.

NACHTSTÜCK

1840

Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 30 5/16 in.

A more deliberate contrast to Clair de lune can scarcely be imagined: here all is oppressive, shut in, brooding, menacing, suffocating. A shadowy, unnameable creature hangs in the night like black smoke, looming over the dark landscape, which seems to shrivel beneath it. The placement of the black line of hills near the base of the picture creates a paradox that increases the sense of suffocation and menace: an eye accustomed to the expansive effects of immense skyscapes, which seem to lead the mind upward to a higher world far from the petty cares of earth, here confronts a dark, oppressive force that crushes it back to the frail line of hills that appear to be cowering under a blow. The sky-filling creature or monster is rendered with supreme skill, for the slightest touch of exaggeration would have pushed it into caricature; the creature is disturbingly elusive, at once present and absent, now a mere illusion produced by thundery cloud-shapes with swirls of black instead of eyeholes, now a shadowy form brooding over the world.

The title of the painting may seem to derive from Schumann’s Nachtstücke, op. 23, but Schumann’s “night pieces,” or nocturnes, were not published until 1840 and are never mentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal. It is more likely that the choice of title was influenced by Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, the collection of eight piano pieces (including the stormy In der Nacht) that Elizabeth liked to have Sophia play for her when the four friends were gathered late at night in the music room of the cottage on the far shore of Black Lake. It nevertheless remains possible that the painting does not derive its title from Schumann at all, but rather from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories Nachtstücke (1816–17). The effect of the title, whatever its origin, is to darken the painting with Germanic consonant clusters and so to oppose it in yet another way to Clair de lune.

It is not clear when Moorash began the Nachtstück, which appears to have been preceded by two or possibly three paintings that remained unfinished and presumably were destroyed. The first mention of a Nachtstück occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 30 March 1840, but on 18 June she records that “Edmund has begun his Night Piece again,” which opens the possibility that the Nachtstück of 30 March was one of the destroyed paintings, about which nothing whatever is known. What is certain is that Moorash took unusual pains with this canvas, which was not completed until the end of September.

It was during the long composition of this painting that an event occurred which must take its place among the more bizarre episodes in the annals of American romanticism. In late June, at Strawson, Edward Vail’s beloved wife, Charlotte, fell ill with a mysterious wasting disease. She could not rise from her bed; she ran a continual low temperature; she could scarcely eat. A local doctor diagnosed pleurisy and recommended mountain air, but a specialist in respiratory diseases summoned from Philadelphia declared her lungs to be sound and urged that the patient be moved to a warm, dry climate. A third physician, from Boston, noted for his work in nervous diseases, prescribed bed rest and absolute quiet and warned that under no circumstances should the patient be moved. In despair, Vail sat by the bedside of his bride from dawn to midnight, holding her limp hand and gazing at her with tender, moist eyes. As the days passed he watched her cheeks grow hollow, her dark eyes grow large, her face fill with weariness and suffering. One night when the end seemed near, Charlotte was seized with a sudden, desperate animation, and struggling up in bed she confessed in a torrent of tears that she had fallen in love with Edmund Moorash. Edward Vail was a mediocre artist, but he prided himself on being a good-hearted man, and he was capable of imagining a noble, perhaps too noble, gesture. Shattered by the news, he at once sat down and wrote a remarkable letter, which has not survived but is summarized in the diary of Elizabeth Moorash’s friend Ann Hudley. In it Vail revealed his wife’s terrible secret and earnestly entreated Moorash to come to Strawson and save her by any means in his power. Did he understand that he was asking Moorash to become his wife’s lover? After reading the letter Moorash stayed shut up in his studio for two days; on the night of the second day he walked the six and a half miles to Rose Cottage and did not return until morning. Precisely what happened during that visit will never be known, but Moorash began visiting Strawson three times a week, and Charlotte’s health swiftly improved. All of Charlotte’s letters to Moorash were later destroyed, but a fragment was discovered in a trunk in Boston in 1957. It reads as follows:

My dearest Edmund,

Today I looked through the window toward Stone Hill and saw you in the Heavens all fiery bright. Come to me come to me in a shower of fire — O my bright angel — my King — you are a stag of the forest — a lion of the mountains. How my soul aches for you. May God forgive

Vail’s journal was also destroyed, but the incidents at Strawson did not pass unnoticed and found their way into several diaries, in particular that of Vail’s brother Thatcher, from which we may reconstruct the apparent course of events. It appears that Vail absented himself every other day from Rose Cottage, leaving before dawn and returning late at night. For at least one month and probably two, until the end of August, Moorash visited Charlotte Vail regularly. They never left the house. Where could they go? Thatcher Vail’s diary speaks of “disgusting licentiousness” and the “shrill laughter of devils behind muslin curtains”; in assessing such statements it must be remembered that he speaks not only as the outraged older brother but also as a man who, two years earlier, unsuccessfully courted the fifteen-year-old Charlotte Singleton and was rejected in favor of his own brother. The love of Moorash and Charlotte Vail was certainly physical, and desperately unhappy. Charlotte, who had always admired and even loved her husband, was anguished by guilt; Moorash, always scrupulous to a fault, was conscious of injuring his friend in the very act of fulfilling his request; and despite his fierce attachment to Charlotte, he kept waiting for her to ask him to go, please go, and was always conscious of holding himself back. Vail himself could no longer bear the sight of his former friend; he was simply waiting for the hellish summer to end. In early September he wrote a second letter to Moorash, in which he offered to release his wife to him, on the condition that he marry her. This letter appears to have brought about a crisis: Charlotte declared hysterically that she could never abandon her husband, and she and Moorash vowed to “die” to each other forever. The vow was broken in a week, when Charlotte in a state bordering on madness arrived unannounced at Stone Hill Cottage shortly before midnight. Moorash would not see her; she spent the night in Elizabeth’s arms, weeping uncontrollably. In the morning Elizabeth returned with her to Rose Cottage, where Vail declared that he was leaving for Boston the next day, and that Charlotte was welcome to accompany him as his lawful wife or to leave him forever. Elizabeth spent the night at Rose Cottage and saw Charlotte into the coach the next morning. Vail settled in Boston and began his swift rise to fame as a portraitist, noted for the clarity of his flesh tones; he never returned to Strawson. A portrait of him in 1846 by Chester Calcott shows a man with melancholy eyes and a stern mouth. Charlotte remained his devoted wife; only, she was often tired, and liked to keep to herself, out of the social whirl. Moorash shut himself up in his studio and finished the Nachtstück before the end of September.

THE HOUSE OF USHER

1840

Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 37 3/8 in.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Although Moorash might well have read a copy of the book, there is no reference to it in Elizabeth’s Journal, which does, however, mention “The Fall of the House of Usher” in passing (8 December 1840) and never refers to any other tale by Poe. It is therefore possible that Moorash read the story in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1839), a copy of which might have been brought to him or Elizabeth by William Pinney or any one of several other visitors during 1839 and 1840. The painting was begun some time in October and completed before Christmas.

The picture has been taken to represent the collapse of the House of Usher in the famous last paragraph (see Havemeyer, p. 79), but such a reading presents two difficulties: the word “fall” is conspicuously absent from the title of the painting, and the painting does not actually show the dreamlike house falling into the tarn. The second objection is perhaps the less decisive, for Moorash might well have intended to represent the fall in a non-literal fashion, but the title cannot so easily be explained away. The striking presence of red tints, like flakes of fire, that flash up among the browns and blacks are supposed by Havemeyer to represent the murky light of the blood-red moon, but the red tints may with equal justice be seen to allude to other reds in the tale, such as the “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light” that make their way through the trellised panes of Usher’s studio, or the drops of blood on Madeline’s white robes. It is more to the point that the dissolving, vanishing, visionary house, painted in nervous small strokes separated by intervals of brown or black, is mirrored in the dark tarn. The whole effect is less that of a fall than of the dissipation of a fever-vision: a dream-house over its dream-reflection vanishing into black depths. It is as if Moorash had imagined the House of Usher to be insubstantial by nature, to be perpetually on the verge of dissolving or disappearing.

The motif of doubling, so reminiscent of Clair de lune, and the allusion to a brother and sister, suggest that the painting, and the tale itself, must have had a strong personal meaning for Moorash. If Moorash saw himself as Roderick Usher, and Elizabeth as Usher’s sister, then the painting may express his sense of guilt over burying Elizabeth alive at Stone Hill Cottage, and over their mutual, fatal interdependence; but in the last analysis, the picture remains enigmatic.

ELIZABETH AND SOPHIA

1841

Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 × 34 5/8 in.

After Pinney’s marriage proposal to Elizabeth on the last day of August 1839 he returned with Sophia to Boston, but we read in Elizabeth’s Journal of a Thanksgiving visit at Stone Hill Cottage, and during the following spring, when Pinney returned to Black Lake, the four friends were once again often in one another’s company, though not quite as often as during the first summer. Moorash’s summer affair with Charlotte Vail was apparently kept secret from William and Sophia, who nevertheless must have heard rumors and noted his frequent and uncharacteristic absences. The precise state of knowledge among the four remains uncertain, but it appears to have been as follows: Edmund and Elizabeth never spoke of Charlotte Vail to William or Sophia, who half-knew about it and chose not to investigate. William’s relation to Elizabeth had by now taken its new shape: he resigned himself gracefully to the role of rejected suitor and resumed, with a touch of wistfulness, his enjoyment of her company. His friendship for Edmund underwent no discernible change, though there is evidence in Sophia’s letters to her friends Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton that he must at times have felt he had lost Elizabeth to her own brother. The one striking change was in Sophia: she grew markedly cool to Edmund, criticized him to her brother, and grew still more devoted to Elizabeth.

A preliminary sketch of Elizabeth and Sophia was made during a walking tour with the two women on a day in April 1841 when William was unable to be with them, having had to return to Boston on business and having left Sophia with Elizabeth and Edmund at Stone Hill. The freely drawn pencil sketch shows both women distinctly — Sophia is wearing her straw hat, Elizabeth is bareheaded — but the painting shows only their shadows stretching across a field in the too-yellow light of late afternoon. The long shadows have a slightly sinister air as they ripple distortedly across the darkening grass. The heads are bent close, as though sharing a confidence; below the shoulders the two shadows flow into each other.

SOPHIA DAYDREAMING

1841

Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 × 34 in.

We know from Elizabeth’s Journal that Sophia disliked being painted and agreed to pose for this picture only at Elizabeth’s “urgent entreaty” (3 July 1841). It is not clear whether she disliked posing in general, or posing for Moorash in particular; she appears to have felt uneasy at being stared at and “studied to death” (Journal, 6 July). It is difficult to avoid the inference that she was disturbed by the intimacy of a prolonged sitting, in which she had to endure passively Moorash’s sustained gaze. Sophia had always had to fight a secret disapproval of her brother’s eccentric friend; after the failed marriage proposal she held Moorash responsible for Elizabeth’s refusal. Nor did she share her brother’s enthusiasm for Moorash’s painting: Sophia viewed the pictures with bewilderment and growing distaste, always preferring the meticulously detailed and elegantly precise portraits of Chester Calcott and Edward Ingham Vail.

The sittings began on 3 July and continued for more than a week before they were terminated by Sophia. She appears to have relented, for on 23 July Elizabeth notes another sitting; the last recorded session took place on 8 August. Moorash worked on the painting all summer but did not complete it until October, long after Sophia and William had returned to Boston. Sophia’s opinion of the painting is not known, but from what we know of her taste she cannot have cared for it. The painting is reminiscent of Moorash’s earlier masterpiece, Elizabeth in Dream, although here he makes use of the device of the landscape seen from a window. Part of a window frame divides the painting into two realms, an inner realm indicated by a portion of wall on which part of a picture (unidentified) is visible, and an outer realm of darkening garden and dusky sky. But the contrasts are deliberately undermined and thrown into question, for it is impossible to make a neat distinction between the world of art and the world of nature, or the world of imagination and the world of experience: the room flows into landscape, which in turn echoes the room, and Sophia herself flows wraithlike through the window into the garden, thereby binding the inner and outer worlds. Both worlds of the painting appear to be Sophia’s daydream, but she herself is no less dreamlike. It is as if Moorash had attempted to paint the experience of daydream itself, in which the boundaries between inner and outer grow uncertain. Elizabeth was “deeply affected” by the painting, which she considered “masterful” (16 October). Moorash promptly gave it to her, and she hung it in her bedroom between two windows looking out over the garden.

PHAEDRIA’S ISLE

1842

Oil on canvas, 32 1/16 × 42 in.

In the long winter evenings of 1841–42 Elizabeth read aloud to Edmund, night after night, Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, Quentin Durward, and The Black Dwarf, Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (the edition of 1837), Byron’s Manfred, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. She appears to have read the latter at the rate of one canto a night, over a period of seventy-four consecutive nights (six complete Books of twelve cantos each, and the two Mutabilitie cantos). During the readings Edmund liked to lie on the sofa in the kitchen with his ankles crossed and his head on a pillow, warming his hands on the bowl of his pipe and staring off into bluish smoke-clouds.

The subject is taken from Book II, canto vi of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser introduces the temptress Phaedria: her aim is to draw knights across the Idle Lake to her pleasant isle and lull them into a life of drowsy sensual pleasure. Like Spenser’s more sinister temptress in the Bower of Bliss, Phaedria derives from a rich tradition of Renaissance sorceresses in enchanted gardens, in particular Ariosto’s Alcina and Tasso’s Armida, both of whom are modeled after Homer’s Circe. Phaedria is presented as “loose” and “light,” but she represents a powerful temptation: to swerve away from a difficult task, to rest awhile, to relax the will. She is the secret voice whispering in the ear of all those whose lives are bent toward difficult achievement: she is the song the sirens sang, the same song heard by Ulysses lashed to the mast and by Gustav von Aschenbach relaxing on the beach. Moorash, who lived to work, must often have entertained the dream of some other life, in some other world: a life of peace, sweetness, and sensual ease.

Moorash wisely makes no attempt to imitate Spenser’s description, but instead seeks to render the island’s power of enchantment: the dark island looms before us in an unearthly light, parting here and there to reveal dim, green-shadowy recesses that wind back into velvet darkness. The island, a gloomy mass of overlapping blues, greens, and violets painted in free, flowing brushstrokes, appears to beckon us inward, to soothe us with the scents of green summer dusks, to drug our senses with a dreamlike melting sweetness: it invites us to yield, to bow our weary heads. But even as it does so we are aware of a counterpressure. That dark is too dark, those mossy recesses close too quickly. The unseen bristles everywhere. There are hints that we will never return from the inviting darkness, and that what presents itself as sensual surrender is nothing but Death. Moorash’s vision, in fact, reaches to the deep place where love becomes death: the desire to surrender, the longing to lose oneself in another, becomes the final surrender, the longing for annihilation.

The question of the influence of Spenser-derived paintings on Moorash’s Phaedria remains unanswered. Since the 1770s The Faerie Queene had inspired a host of paintings in England and America; Moorash may have known West’s three Spenser paintings of the 1770s (Una in the Woods, The Cave of Despair, and Fidelia and Speranza), Copley’s Red Cross Knight (1793), and Allston’s The Flight of Florimell (1819), although there is no evidence that he ever gave a moment’s thought to a single one of these solemn academic studies, and in any case his approach to Spenser is entirely his own. Influence, however oblique, is far more likely to have come from the mysterious Spenser cult that raged in Cambridge during Moorash’s first two undergraduate years (1826–28) before ceasing abruptly under suspicious circumstances, and that took its most distinctive expression in the form of a secret society who called themselves the Sons and Daughters of the Faerie Queene. This group of men and women from Cambridge’s highest social circle adopted names of characters in The Faerie Queene (Busirane, False Florimell, Scudamore, Queen Malecasta, Belphoebe, Sansjoy), met weekly at midnight in the homes of various members, and enacted elaborately costumed tableaux vivants based on scenes from their beloved poem, in which women of impeccable moral standards and unquestioned virtue were said to dress like nymphs, shepherdesses, temptresses, and fleeing maidens, in scant and semitransparent costumes, while pillars of male society assumed the garb of satyrs, wicked enchanters, and lustful hermits. The tableaux were enhanced by elaborate stage scenery designed and painted by Richard Henry Daw, later a minor member of the Phantasmacists but at this time known to be an acquaintance of Chester Calcott and William Pinney. Can Moorash have been present at one of the midnight meetings of the Sons and Daughters of the Faerie Queene, who occasionally issued highly coveted invitations to friends outside the charmed circle? Daw’s backdrops were destroyed by fire in 1832 but are said to have produced remarkably suggestive atmospheric effects, especially in the dark forest scenes favored by the group, in which he was adept at conveying sensations of lurking evil and hidden menace by means of mossy rocks, shadowy grottoes, gnarled branches, and twisting paths, murkily illumined by red-paned lanterns and obscured by the smoke of concealed braziers.

Moorash had unusual difficulty with Phaedria’s Isle, taking it up and abandoning it all through the spring and summer, beginning work on several paintings that he never finished and evidently destroyed, and completing it only in November, with the remark that it was “botched work.” It is not hard to understand his struggle if we recall that the painting expresses in part a desire to be released from painting. But Phaedria is also a temptress who has a “loose lap” (II. vi. 14); the delights she offers, like those of Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss, are sexual. The precise state of Moorash’s feelings toward Sophia at the time of the painting are difficult to determine. His relation to her had become more problematic after the completion of Sophia Daydreaming; she refused to sit for him again and did not accompany William on his ten-day visit in January 1842, at the very time Elizabeth had begun to read The Faerie Queene aloud. She returned to Black Lake with William in the spring, and the mutual visits across the lake resumed, but an incident of the summer is perhaps indicative of what was to come. On a warm night in July the four friends decided to walk all around Black Lake. They proceeded in continually shifting pairs: Edmund-William and Sophia-Elizabeth, Edmund-Elizabeth and Sophia-William, Edmund-Sophia and William-Elizabeth. At one point when Edmund was walking with Sophia, she lost her footing on a loose stone and started to fall. Edmund seized her and prevented her fall; but she began struggling, wrenched herself free, and fell to the ground. William came running up and helped her to her feet. Elizabeth wiped dirt from her dress. When Elizabeth looked up, she saw Edmund standing unnaturally still with a wild look in his eye. A moment later he bent over, picked up a stone, and threw it violently into the lake. He stood watching the moonlit ripples before turning back to Sophia with an anxious inquiry about her fall. Sophia started walking and suddenly clung to William’s arm; the party returned to the Pinney cottage, for Sophia had twisted her ankle.

AUGUST NIGHT

1843

Oil on canvas, 40 5/8 × 34 1/4 in.

Immediately after completing Phaedria’s Isle in November 1842, Moorash began a series of sketches for a second Spenser-inspired painting called The Cave of Despair, which he worked at through the end of the year; neither the painting nor the sketches have survived. His difficulties continued. In February he traveled to Boston with Elizabeth — his first trip since the move to Saccanaw Falls in 1836. There he looked up old acquaintances whose letters had remained unanswered for seven years, stopped in at the Athenaeum, visited three or four studios, and dined with the Pinneys. Within a week he was restless and fretful, and traveled with Elizabeth to Hartford, where they spent the night with their parents and fled the next morning. They traveled south — Baltimore, Charleston, Richmond — and were back at Stone Hill Cottage on 2 March. A window had broken; snow lay drifted on the kitchen floor. By 4 March Moorash was back at work, on a painting that appears to have been an early version of one of the lost works of 1844. William and Sophia returned to Black Lake at the end of April. Edmund sketched outdoors, took long walks, stayed up all night, and slept till noon. On 31 July he tripped in the barn and cut his forehead. On 2 August, as he and Elizabeth were leaving the Pinney cottage after midnight, he broke away from Elizabeth and returned to the front door, where he said something to Sophia that caused her to step back with a hand raised to her throat. Precisely what he said is unclear, but it appears to have been a declaration of love. The next day he shut himself in his upstairs studio — he had been working in the barn — and began August Night, which he completed in two weeks.

It is a remarkable painting, which has retained its power to shock. The startling sky, which appears to crack open and release a violent radiance, is painted with a new freedom of brushstroke, a stroke that makes no attempt to conceal itself, as if the paint and the night it represents are one and the same. The entire picture pulses with a strange, intoxicating energy, as if the hills, the wood, and the swirling night-sky have been swept up into the all-annihilating brilliance of the unseen moon. The picture has been called a celebration, but it evades easy description; it affects the viewer as a release of energy, with the doubleness implied by release: liberation and destruction.

Elizabeth records in her Journal that on the morning of 18 August Edmund called down to her in a “strange, agitated voice.” When she entered his workroom she saw two things: the painting, which she calls “a whirlwind,” and Edmund, lying on his back on the floor. She cried out and ran to him, but he smiled up at her and said that he had been studying his picture at a new angle. He thought it was done — what did she think? Elizabeth looked at August Night “through tears of terror and joy.” She never got over the sense that the violent painting had struck him dead.

ANGER

1843

Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 × 20 1/2 in.

According to Elizabeth’s Journal, Moorash rose from the floor, dusted himself off, and immediately began work on another painting, which he completed in the last week of September. Anger is unusual in Moorash’s oeuvre both for its explicit statement of mood and for its treatment of the small foreground figure: she is drawn in firm outline and heavily stylized — white dress, yellow hair — so that she almost resembles a child’s drawing of an angel. She stands with her back to the viewer and is looking out over a red lake. The landscape is sketchy and generalized, suggested in a few bold and flowing lines — shore, lake, hills, sky — and is painted entirely in shades of red, built up with layers of glazes. The red world appears to be streaming out of the little foreground figure, like rays around a sun.

Havemeyer is surely mistaken to attribute the anger of the title to Moorash himself. The evidence of Elizabeth’s Journal is decisively against such an interpretation. Moorash reproached himself bitterly for offending Sophia by his words, by his very existence — how dare he sully her purity with his filth? Immediately upon beginning the painting he sent Elizabeth across Black Lake to effect a reconciliation, which she appears to have done; as if nothing had happened, the nightly visits were resumed, even as Moorash painted in red.

TOTENTANZ

1843?–45

Oil on canvas, 44 1/4 × 52 1/8 in.

The dating of Moorash’s final paintings must remain uncertain, for two reasons. First, in the last months of 1843 he began to make a regular habit of putting aside a painting-in-progress and returning to it weeks or months later after having begun a new painting that also would be put aside after an intense bout of work; there is evidence from Elizabeth’s Journal that during a single summer month in 1844 he worked on four different paintings (only two of which have survived). Second, the Journal itself becomes spottier in the final years, often omitting whole weeks at a time as Elizabeth becomes increasingly incapacitated by severe headaches and a variety of obscure illnesses that prevent her from making detailed entries. With the possible exception of the final, fatal painting, we have no evidence that any of the last works is complete.

The first definite mention of the Totentanz (Dance of Death) occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 23 June 1844: “A gray day. Edmund has returned to his Death Dance — says he has it now.” This obscure entry suggests that Moorash was returning to a painting begun earlier, and a number of entries in the fall of 1843 (see Havemeyer for a full account) make it likely that he had begun or was thinking of beginning a painting with a death theme in late October. We last hear of the Totentanz in the spring of 1845: “Edmund has put aside his Death Dancers [sic] again” (2 May 1845). Whether he took it up again before his death in the summer of 1846 is a matter of speculation; Havemeyer finds some evidence for two periods of work, whereas Sterndale argues that he never returned to it after beginning the final series of portraits.

Moorash possessed engravings of Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of drawings Der Totentanz (1524) and Das Todesalphabet (The Alphabet of Death, 1524), as well as engravings from La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femmes printed by Nicolas Le Rouge in 1496, but his handling of the subject is so radically his own that the search for a model is surely mistaken: he need have had no more than the broadest sense of a Dance of Death for his imagination to have taken fire. The conception is bold, stark, and disturbing: from a dark ground that at first appears empty and black emerges a line of five milky, transparent figures, who at one moment seem to melt into the darkness and at another to float into a kind of ominous half visibility. The figures, which seem to repel close inspection, appear to be dancing or reveling — they carry sticks, bells, a tambourine — and are oddly distorted, as if displayed in gestures that have been unnaturally arrested. The first figure, with its hollow eyes, snub nose, and sticklike forearm, emerges after many viewings as a dim, shifting skeleton; the four followers appear to be two men and two women (with their long, eerily floating smokelike hair). But what is most striking and uncanny about the Totentanz is the way it continually presents itself as different from the way it appeared a moment before — one is continually stepping closer, and farther back, and to the side, simply in an effort to see what is there. The background alone is a masterpiece of murk, a tone poem of dissonant darknesses. Dim forms appear to be visible, only to reveal themselves as the curves of bold brushstrokes, which again seem to tease the eye into evoking shapes that may or may not be there. From Elizabeth’s Journal we know something of Moorash’s methods: we know, for instance, that over a ground of white lead and oil he painted a more or less conventional landscape, the sole purpose of which was to be covered by a layer of black pigment applied in such a way as to permit a shadowy sense of the obscured landscape to show through at certain angles or under certain kinds of illumination. We know that Moorash experimented with scumbles and glazes. We know that for a while he became obsessed with the literal thickness of applied pigment and attempted to use that thickness to permit buried images to emerge. It is in this context that we first hear of a series of paintings, all lost, called variously the Haunted Paintings, the Ghost Paintings, and the Ghost Canvases, to which it will be useful to turn for a moment.

In addition to the six surviving paintings of 1844–46, there are an unknown number of paintings now lost — presumably destroyed by Moorash himself — about which we hear from time to time in Elizabeth’s Journal and in occasional letters of Elizabeth and William Pinney to friends. Among the lost paintings, variously estimated at between seven and fifteen, are a small number known collectively as the Haunted Paintings, on which Moorash worked from time to time, but especially in the summer and early fall of 1844. There appear to have been at least six of these paintings, several of which are described in some detail in the Journal, for they disturbed and attracted Elizabeth. From her description it appears that all of the Haunted Paintings were characterized by thickly painted dark backgrounds, pale transparent figures that seemed to sink into the thick paint, and an ambiguous manner of impressing themselves on the eye: Elizabeth was never certain exactly what she was seeing. Moorash referred dismissively to the canvases as his “ghost tricks,” but kept on painting them. The paintings troubled Elizabeth; she calls them “brilliant but sinister” and begins to feel haunted by them. On 12 August 1844 she records an interesting exchange:

ELIZABETH: I’m beginning to feel I live in a haunted house!

EDMUND (shrugging): Nothing new here. All paintings are ghosts.

After the concentrated work on the Haunted Paintings of the summer and early fall of 1844, Moorash appears to have dropped them for other projects, returning briefly to them in December; we last hear of a Haunted Painting in March 1845, shortly before his return to the Totentanz.

The Totentanz, then, may be thought of as the culmination of a particular series of experiments; its uncanny effects derive directly from the “ghost tricks” of the Haunted Paintings. The effect of the Totentanz on Elizabeth was extraordinary — she calls it “dangerous to look at” and adds: “Edmund has turned us all into ghosts.” There was no doubt in her mind that the four figures led by Death were Edmund, William, Sophia, and herself.

It will be recalled that shortly after Moorash’s offending words to Sophia on the night of 2 August 1843, a reconciliation appears to have been effected with the help of Elizabeth; in any case we find the four friends visiting back and forth across Black Lake as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. From all indications it seems clear that Moorash was now desperately in love with Sophia, but forced to suppress his feelings in her presence. Elizabeth, always keenly sensitive to every nuance of her brother’s moods, cannot have felt at ease in her friend’s company: she was confused and even frightened by Edmund’s passion for another woman, perhaps hurt and jealous, secretly hoping they could all return to a more innocent time — yet even as she suffered his obsession she remained the devoted sister who longed for Edmund to be happy, to have what he wanted. Alongside her jealousy and fear, therefore, another strain sounds in the Journal: her resentment toward Sophia for refusing Edmund. She imagines (4 September 1843) the marriage of Edmund and Sophia: “And why should I not continue to live in the same house with them, loving her as a sister?” She will not have to give up Edmund: she will simply add Sophia to their ménage. What threatens this idyllic vision is not a possible hesitation on the part of Edmund or Sophia to include Elizabeth in their marriage: what threatens it is Sophia’s refusal to love and marry Edmund in the first place. But meanwhile new difficulties in friendship had arisen for both Sophia and William. Sophia, who did not return Edmund’s passion, was forced to suffer his mute gazes, his pain, his noble suppressions, his deliberate coolnesses; above all she was forced to feel Elizabeth’s distraction and unhappiness, for which Sophia felt obscurely responsible. Had she in some way caused Edmund to fall in love with her? (she asks in a letter to her friend Eunice Hamilton). She will not permit him to mistake her feelings a second time; yet she does not relish the role of cruel stony-hearted refuser, and she is aware that, in some way she cannot grasp, her refusal of Edmund has injured her relation to Elizabeth. As for William, his warm friendship for Edmund had already been severely tried during the time of his own unsuccessful suit of Elizabeth — in a sense, he had lost Elizabeth to Edmund — and he cannot have watched calmly his friend’s sudden obsession with Sophia. It must at times have seemed to William that Edmund was trying to draw all the women to his side and leave William with no one. In addition, William’s own decision not to marry, as well as his decision to live with his sister, was at least in part influenced by Edmund’s life with Elizabeth; and now his friend, by throwing himself at Sophia, was rejecting the very world of tidy domestic arrangements that he himself had brought into being and presented to William as a model.

The Pinneys left for Boston in mid-September and did not return to the cottage on Black Lake until the late spring of 1844, when Moorash had almost certainly begun the Totentanz. On 8 August 1844, according to Elizabeth’s Journal, the four friends were walking in a small wood when Edmund grasped William by the arm and invited him to “come along to the barn,” where he still worked during the warm summer months and where the Totentanz stood on an easel among bits of straw. When the women returned to Stone Hill Cottage they found William and Edmund in animated discussion in the kitchen-parlor. “Pinney,” cried Edmund, springing up from the sofa when Elizabeth and Sophia entered the room, “you’re the best friend a raving madman ever had!” William laughed aloud, Sophia looked away with the shadow of a frown, and Elizabeth, who knew that Sophia thought Edmund a little mad, watched the scene tensely. In her Journal she noted that “E never behaves naturally before Sophia.” But the elation was genuine: William had been “overwhelmed” by the Totentanz and had urged his friend not to abandon it. In doing so he made use of a curious argument that left a strong impression on Moorash. Whether you hate or love the painting, Pinney had argued, makes no difference: you must work on it as if the painting were a destiny, you must work on it as if you were dead.

DEATH SONATA

1844–45

Oil on canvas, 46 × 54 1/2 in.

The Death Sonata is first mentioned by Elizabeth in April 1844, although the entry leaves it uncertain whether Moorash had actually begun the painting or was merely speaking of a possible subject. The picture was definitely in progress by October 1844; there is no mention of it again until June 1845, when he appears to have taken it up for the third or fourth time, after an interval of several months, and we last hear of it in September. Although work on the Death Sonata alternated with work on the Totentanz (and other paintings), the evidence suggests that the Totentanz was begun earlier, and served as an inspiration for or challenge to the Death Sonata, which in turn appears to have influenced the earlier painting. The technical relation of the two, although complex, is undeniable; and they are the only two surviving paintings to employ the method of “haunting” a canvas.

The Death Sonata is in some respects a more difficult and challenging work than the Totentanz, because in it Moorash confined himself almost entirely to black. Indeed the first impression one has is of a uniform black, applied thickly with visible brushwork. The first impression yields to a second, deeper one: barely perceptible black forms are visible in or on or through the blackness. It is tempting to speak of “black on black,” but such a description would be misleading: there is properly speaking no background, but rather a thick layer of dark paint (black, purple, burnt sienna) that gradually reveals what might be called “presences.” The presences are so elusive, so deeply concealed by the very paint that reveals them, that their precise nature appears to change with different viewings; again as in the Totentanz, a deliberately uncanny effect is sought and achieved. Most responsible viewers agree that there is a presiding death-figure, a black-robed faceless figure (Havemeyer detects “an intimation of eyes”) who may or may not be seated at a piano. There is a window, with a view of black distances, and perhaps a black moon; in the presumed room, four or more other figures, flowing and shadowy, hover between the visible and the invisible. The effect of the canvas, when it is not merely exasperating, is to haunt the viewer — to draw him or her into its elusive depths with the promise of some dark revelation. The method is in certain respects more radical and mystifying than that of the contemporary Totentanz; if it seems less successful, less fully achieved, this may be due not simply to its experimental nature or its state of incompletion, but to our own failure to follow Moorash into the enigma of his art — in other words, our failure to know how to look at it.

The fact that Moorash devoted two of his last paintings to the theme of death should not mislead us into supposing that he had intimations of his untimely end. Quite apart from the attractiveness of Death as a subject for romantic painters, poets, and composers, there were good reasons in 1844 and 1845 for Moorash to be preoccupied with mortality. He was hopelessly in love with a woman who spurned him, and who must at times have made him feel that death was the only way out. He was at the traditional middle of life (his thirty-fifth birthday fell on 16 July 1845), without a shred of worldly success; despite his aggressive self-confidence, he must sometimes have felt himself a failure. His emotional life was entirely bound up in a four-way friendship that had begun to show serious signs of strain — were they not all fools of Death, dancing merrily to the grave? In addition, the Journal makes it clear that he was racked by financial worries, and by guilt over his dependence on his sister’s slender annuity. But above all, in these years he witnessed Elizabeth’s decline into a disturbing species of illness. By late 1844 the occasional headaches of earlier years had blossomed into crippling two-day or three-day headaches, often accompanied by fits of vomiting. At the same time, Elizabeth begins to record — always very briefly — mysterious “aches” in her legs, as well as occasional attacks of “vertigo.” In September 1844 Moorash traveled with her to Boston to consult a specialist in nervous disorders; Elizabeth was placed on a rigorous diet that did not cure her headaches and led swiftly to general weakness and a series of bronchial infections, which ended soon after she returned to her old eating habits. A second specialist, a friend of William Pinney’s who traveled up from New York, prescribed pills that contained a mixture of quinine, digitalis, and morphine; the pills had no result other than to dull her pain and make her lethargic, and she began to grow dependent on the soothing effects of morphine. Moorash, who was closer to Elizabeth than to any other human being, and entirely dependent on her, cannot have failed to imagine, during her worst hours, his sister’s death and his own death-in-life afterward; and it is possible that the continual, restless turn from painting to painting in these years was a sign of his fear that, once Elizabeth was gone, there would be no reason for him to go on painting.

WILLIAM PINNEY

1844–46

Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 29 1/16 in.

Contemporaneously with the Totentanz and Death Sonata, as well as with the lost paintings of 1844–46, Moorash turned to portraiture of a startling and original kind. Perhaps it is misleading to speak of these paintings as portraits, although several features of portrait painting remain; rather, they are dream-visions, intimations, soul-studies — what Elizabeth felicitously calls “inner landscapes” (Journal, 4 January 1846). The immense, ethereal figures have the look less of human creatures than of mythic beings; it is as if only by smashing what he once called “the mimetic fetters” that Moorash could release into paint the human mystery.

Moorash appears to have begun a portrait of William Pinney in February 1844, destroyed it or set it aside for the Totentanz and later the Haunted Paintings, and returned to it briefly in December. He was at work on it again during the early summer of 1845, at a time when he had taken up the Death Sonata after an apparent break; it is unclear whether he laid it aside or proceeded with it intermittently during the next eight months, but he was at work on it once again in March 1846, before abandoning it and all other work in May for what was to prove his final painting.

More than any other painting by Moorash, including Dornröschen, the disturbing portrait of William Pinney impresses the viewer as an illustration for a book of fairy tales. A transparent and shadowy giant bestrides a dark lake and rises into the night sky, where his streaming hair forms fiery stars and comets. He is naked and powerful; through his body we see night clouds and a glimmer of moonlit hills. But what is striking is the expression on the face: a doubting, brooding expression, a kind of suspiciousness ready to burst into anger but held in check by uncertainty. His hands are half-clenched beside his sinewy transparent thighs. The giant gives an impression of a great prisoner in chains — of power mysteriously baffled or frustrated. He radiates a peculiar aura of anguish, weakness, and danger. The figure is deliberately a creature of myth or legend, yet a comparison with the conventional chalk sketch of Pinney from 1829 (see [2]) reveals an uncanny kinship. Elizabeth writes on 4 June 1845: “My soul recognized him before my eyes did — in that terrible dream-change — a shudder passed over my body—? has seen into W’s very soul — I could not bear to look long, but turned away with a feeling of dread.”

Although Pinney remained an unwavering admirer of Moorash’s art, and a close friend to the very end — Moorash was to say that Pinney was the only friend he ever had — nevertheless the friendship was subject in an unusual degree to unhealthy strains and tensions. Pinney had courted Elizabeth Moorash and lost; and after a struggle he had resigned himself, with a certain good-natured wistfulness, to the not unattractive role of rejected lover. When Moorash fell violently in love with Sophia Pinney in the summer of 1843, William cannot have been unaware of the almost comical repetition of a pattern, including the rejection of the suitor. But a difference quickly revealed itself. That difference was the difference in temperament between Pinney and Moorash — for Moorash was not a man to resign himself good-naturedly to anything. His passion for Sophia, though he was able to tamp down its outward expression for the sake of being in her company, remained strong, tormenting, and obsessive. Pinney, a sensitive student of Moorash’s moods, was therefore forced to endure the continual sense of his friend’s suppressed passion, of his suffering and disappointment — and this from the very man whom he partially blamed for his own well-mastered suffering and disappointment. Moreover, Moorash’s passion, if successful, would have meant for William the loss of his own sister, so that he was continually threatened by a kind of theft. Meanwhile his relation to Elizabeth was to undergo another change. As her illness became increasingly apparent, William drew closer to her. Often he sat with her for long afternoons while Moorash, deeply grateful to his friend, painted in the barn. But William’s new closeness to Elizabeth rekindled his old sense of grievance: in large part he came to blame Moorash for Elizabeth’s illness. For, as Sophia put it in a letter to Fanny Cornwall, if Elizabeth had been allowed to flourish as a wife and mother, to establish her own life independent of her brother’s, would she not have been far healthier than under the conditions of “an unnatural attachment”? (Sophia appears to be blind to her own life with her brother, but in fact she always insisted on a difference: Elizabeth lived permanently with Edmund in an isolated cottage, whereas Sophia joined her brother only in the warm months and otherwise lived with a maiden aunt in Boston.) But Elizabeth’s illness had a further effect. Sophia, despite her apparent insensitivity and even hostility to Moorash himself, was profoundly responsive to Elizabeth’s moods; and as Elizabeth’s headaches grew more serious, and her health more frail, Sophia herself began to experience sharp, dizzying headaches that left her prostrate for entire afternoons. William, often with two sick women to attend to, could not prevent himself from tracing the harm to his friend. At times he wondered whether his duty lay in protecting Sophia from the ailing Elizabeth; and a desire arose in him to escape from all this, to vanish somewhere into a peaceful place, even as his heart drew him to Elizabeth’s side.

Such strains and dangerous tensions do much to account for the darker aspect of the portrait of William Pinney, for Moorash was acutely sensitive to Pinney’s moods and cannot have failed to sense his friend’s secret doubts and disapprovals. It is not surprising to learn that he showed the portrait to Pinney (on 14 August 1845); Elizabeth witnessed the event. Pinney looked at the painting a long time in silence. He then turned, threw Moorash “such a look as I cannot describe, for it was scarcely a human look,” and walked away without a word. It was the only time he had failed to say something about one of his friend’s paintings. As for Moorash, he turned to Elizabeth with a look of “angry triumph” and said: “See! He’s hit!”

SOPHIA PINNEY

1844–46?

Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 28 in.

The earliest direct mention of a portrait of Sophia is in Elizabeth’s Journal for May 1844, although it is not certain that this is the same canvas as the one Moorash is said to have been working on in December. He appears to have begun two paintings, abandoning the first in favor of the surviving one, which betrays a clear kinship with the portrait of William Pinney and may have been influenced by it. Sophia was shown the painting on 31 August 1845, two and a half weeks after William had viewed his own portrait; nevertheless, Moorash appears to have continued working on it during the next few weeks, setting it aside in late September for the Death Sonata. He may have taken it up again briefly in the early months of 1846; the evidence (see Havemeyer) remains inconclusive.

Again we have the familiar lake and line of hills, this time in the dwindling light of a summer evening. Brooding over the scene, like a spirit of the lake, is an elongated and ethereal Sophia, whose lower body vanishes in the water and whose long upper body winds serpentlike across the lake and back; her flowing hair continues the liquid lines of her body, and is shown winding among the hills. The sweeping lines of the creature, twisting back and forth along the canvas, create a paradoxical feeling of energy and repose, as of a bird in flight; the barely human face is stricken with grief. Elizabeth, who first saw the portrait in company with Sophia, wrote in the Journal (31 August 1845): “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance. Why does S’s sorrow waken in me such a clash and hubbub of feelings? She looks at me as though I were all princess-white in my coffin. Away! I crave the physic of laughter. Am I grown so cruel?”

Moorash’s vision of a sorrowing Sophia may have been “prophetic,” as Havemeyer puts it, and it may have been a “psychic reversal’ (Altdorfer, p. 216) in which Moorash transposed his own love-sorrow onto the features of the woman who had rejected him, but the facts suggest that Moorash was not making an imaginative leap in the dark. Sophia Pinney may have lacked spiritual greatness, but she was by no means the shallow egotist she has sometimes been made out to be. She did not love Moorash or understand his work, but she behaved admirably in extremely trying circumstances; and in her passionate devotion to Elizabeth she rose above herself to spiritual heights from which she sometimes looked down aghast. Elizabeth was a powerful woman who exercised a kind of spell over Sophia, even more so than Moorash did over William Pinney. Under that spell, Sophia bent her life into a shape that more and more came to resemble the shape of Elizabeth’s life; for although she liked to deny it, Sophia’s decision to live with her brother on Black Lake was clearly influenced by Elizabeth’s decision to live with Edmund. Sophia was as open to Elizabeth as she was closed to Elizabeth’s brother, and we have seen that her acute sensitivity took the disturbing form of empathic suffering. In the early days of Elizabeth’s illness, Sophia liked nothing better than to sit with Elizabeth in her sickroom for whole afternoons, reading aloud to her or remaining absolutely quiet if necessary, tending to her slightest needs, and passing the long hours by knitting a shawl for Elizabeth or rummaging among the supplies in Elizabeth’s sewing table for the thread, thimble, needle, and scissors that she used for mending Elizabeth’s frayed clothes. But as her friend’s illness worsened, Sophia’s own symptoms became more pronounced; and as many letters to Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton attest, Sophia’s suffering was increased by the knowledge that because of her own prostrating headaches she was not always able to come to Elizabeth’s side. In any case she felt utterly useless in preventing Elizabeth’s decline. She believed passionately that Elizabeth’s life with her brother was harming Elizabeth’s health; and she never forgave Moorash for keeping his sister, as Sophia saw it, from marrying William. Her desire for Elizabeth’s marriage to William appears to have been genuine, although it is difficult to believe she would not have experienced jealousy; it is possible that she desired what she could not permit herself to desire, a life alone with Elizabeth. Certainly, at the very least, she was deeply jealous of Elizabeth’s devotion to Edmund. In the summer of 1845 that devotion took a strange turn, which appears to have shocked Sophia.

On an afternoon in late June when the men had walked to Saccanaw Falls to buy a bag of nails and drink a pint of ale at the Cat and Robin, Elizabeth on her sickbed made to Sophia a remarkable proposal. Staring earnestly at Sophia, she offered to marry William if Sophia would marry Edmund. The proposal threw Sophia into confusion and turmoil, as she reports in a letter (unsent) to Fanny Cornwall. She understood immediately that the wild scheme had been hatched for the sake of Edmund: Elizabeth, whose entire life had in Sophias view been a continual sacrifice to Edmund, was willing to sacrifice herself even further for the sake of giving Edmund what he so desperately wanted: Sophia. Sophia, angry at the proposal’s secret cause, nevertheless felt it as a fearful challenge: was she willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her brother’s, and even more for the sake of Elizabeth, who would be delivered from her prison and would regain her health? The thought of moving into Stone Hill Cottage, of, as it were, replacing Elizabeth, struck her as strange and dreamlike, and not wholly unpleasing; but to marry Moorash, who made her feel “cold all over,” was out of the question. Sophia spent an anguished night and rose at dawn no longer knowing how she felt. After a dreamlike breakfast she rowed across Black Lake with William in the “fierce light” of a cloudless blue day and walked with him the two miles to Stone Hill Cottage, where William left to look for Edmund in the barn. In the dusk of Elizabeth’s curtained sickroom Sophia felt dazed; she was on the verge of saying yes, as if acceding to a terrible fatality, when Elizabeth, who was feeling better, immediately retracted her proposal of the other day, calling it “a wild idea bred of illness.” Sophia, feeling faint, sat down quickly. The entire episode goes unmentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal.

Later that month there occurred another incident that must be taken into account in any consideration of Moorash’s portrait of Sophia. She had spent the morning confined to her room in the cottage on Black Lake, unable to accompany William to Stone Hill Cottage, where he was to read to Elizabeth for an hour before returning to Sophia. In the course of the morning her mood darkened and she experienced a sharp premonition of Elizabeth’s death. William returned to find her tense and agitated; after assuring her that Elizabeth was well, he took Sophia with him on horseback to Stone Hill Cottage, where he left her to ride into town. He returned to find her lying with her eyes closed on the sofa in the kitchen, being read to by Elizabeth while Moorash paced anxiously. Elizabeth recorded the incident in her Journal: she had been asleep, and woke to find Sophia sobbing hysterically and shrieking her name. Edmund, hearing the shouts from the barn, hurried to the house, where he discovered Elizabeth attempting to revive Sophia, who had fainted. When Sophia came to, she said that she had entered the darkened sickroom with a feeling of oppression and had been struck by Elizabeth’s extreme pallor and stillness. She had spoken to Elizabeth, who lay with closed eyes; she had called out her name and shaken her shoulder, but Elizabeth lay motionless; her cheek felt deathly cold. It had been too much for Sophia, and she had burst into tears — after that, all was darkness. Elizabeth, with her usual sharpness, noted two things about her brother in the doorway: that he had “hesitated, with a kind of modesty, from intruding into the room, as if by coming to Sophia’s aid while she was unconscious he would be taking advantage of her — until I summoned him to me,” and that he had a spot of red paint on the side of his nose, which at first she had mistaken for blood.

Elizabeth also recorded the viewing of Sophia’s portrait, an event arranged for the last day in August. William’s absence on this occasion is not explained. It was Elizabeth who persuaded Sophia to walk with her down to the barn, where Edmund had covered the portrait with a white cloth. Was he thinking at that moment of The Unveiling [8], his painting of 1837? He stood for a moment staring at the cloth, then crying “So!” removed it with a flourish. Elizabeth, as we have seen, was violently moved: “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance.” Sophia’s response, as always, was disappointing. She looked at the portrait with an expression of blank politeness that slowly changed to irritation; and turning to Moorash “with an odd little smile,” asked whether her hair was really so much in need of combing as that.

ELIZABETH MOORASH

1845–46

Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 28 1/2 in.

The final portrait of Elizabeth was begun in October 1845. Moorash worked at it continuously for about a month and then fitfully until the following May, when he set aside all his paintings for the ill-fated self-portrait.

Over the dark lake, Elizabeth lies sleeping. So deeply sunk in sleep is she that she appears to be under an enchantment. And indeed there is an air of enchanted stillness in the dark repose of the painting, as of a wildness calmed. It is as if the tension and disturbing energy of the portraits of William and Sophia have been transposed into peace — the same long, flowing lines here resolve into restfulness. The portrait has about it a storybook air: Elizabeth is a princess closed in a tower of sleep, to which no prince will come. Deeply, deeply, Elizabeth lies sleeping, in a spell from which she can never awake. But the world too lies sleeping: the hills, the night sky, the lake, all have fallen asleep beside and beneath and within her. The effect is different from that of Elizabeth in Dream [5], for there the world was dissolved by the dreamer, but here there is no dreamer and no dream; rather, there is the vision of an animate universe stilled in sleep. It is, if you like, a childlike vision, but one deepened with adult knowledge — it is such a vision as is possible only after a searing spiritual struggle. For in this portrait Moorash has done nothing less than imagine Elizabeth’s death; and by lifting it into a realm beyond grief, he has come out on the other side of anguish.

By the summer of 1845 Elizabeth’s headaches and other ailments were causing her to spend more and more time indoors, where she became increasingly dependent on the soothing effects of laudanum, prescribed by a Dr. Long of Strawson and easily obtainable in the two druggist shops of Saccanaw Falls. Only in the remissions of her illness was she able to leave Stone Hill Cottage to take long walks in her beloved woods, along her stream, or in the direction of Black Lake. After a particularly bad attack in late summer William persuaded Moorash to let him hire a housekeeper, a Mrs. Duff from Strawson, who came three times a week and soon became deeply devoted to both Elizabeth and Edmund. Elizabeth at first protested, but she quickly succumbed; there were certain chores she could no longer do.

The absence of Dr. Long’s medical records, and the predominance of nonspecific symptoms such as headaches and dizziness, make it impossible to determine the nature of Elizabeth’s illness, which may or may not have been psychosomatic. Although a depressive disorder cannot be ruled out, neither the Journal nor the scanty medical records provide conclusive evidence (see Havemeyer, p. 210 ff., for a complete summary). The “vertigo” and headaches suggest the strong possibility of high blood pressure; but since a practical blood-pressure gauge was not invented until the end of the century, all such suggestions must remain entirely speculative. Although hypertension or some related cardiovascular pathology would explain most, if not all, of Elizabeth’s symptoms, they can also have resulted from other causes, such as extreme anxiety or excitement. Finally, in any consideration of illness before the mid-nineteenth century — that is, before the discovery of drug-induced poisoning — it must always be kept in mind that the manifestation of new, unexplained symptoms may have been caused by the doctors themselves.

Although the Journal records an increased irritability to certain stimuli, such as the sharp sound of a knife on a plate, the smell of urine, and the sudden dimming and flaring up of a candleflame because of imperfections in the wick, one of the odder manifestations of Elizabeth’s illness was heightened sensitivity to literature, music, and art. Certain slow, languorous rhythms in the 1842 Poems of Alfred Tennyson, specific hushed, dreamy, drowsily drawn-out effects in Keats, produced by long vowels interwoven with droning m’s and n’s and softened with sibilants (she records “The maiden’s chamber, silken, hushed, and chaste” from The Eve of St. Agnes), stray lines suggesting a mysterious vastness (“Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness”) or ringing with a call to some high action (“Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?”) would bring a quickening of heartbeat and flushed cheeks, so that Elizabeth would be forced to put aside a volume and lie with her hands folded on her collarbone, as if to press down her excitement. Listening to Sophia play Schumann’s In der Nacht from the Fantasiestücke, op. 12, or Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, op. 9, no. 2, or the andante doloroso of Sonnenstein’s Brocken Sonata, op. 16, with its long chains of unresolved harmonic suspensions and its plunging five-note motif, she would be brought to a state of dangerous exaltation, during which a pulse throbbed “visibly” in her neck (did she observe herself in the mirror?) and she felt alternately fiery hot and icy cold. But it was the art of painting that evoked in her the strongest and most disturbing responses. Once when William brought her a book of engravings of medieval German paintings, Elizabeth was gripped by a feverish excitement that kept her from sleep all that night and led the next morning to a fit of such violent coughing that Edmund in alarm had to summon Dr. Long from Strawson. She seemed to take in a picture all at once, like a sudden blow, and to experience it not simply in her nerve endings but in the deepest fibers of her being. It was as though some protective film had been dissolved by her illness, leaving her wide open. But if she was acutely susceptible to painting in general, she was fervently and perhaps unwholesomely sensitive to Edmund’s painting in particular, the effect of which she describes in language of increasing intensity: “I turned to look, and lo! it entered me like fire” (2 May 1845); “a blow to the temple was that night sky to me, and I staggered back, gasping for breath” (14 August 1845); “the sweet poison flowed in me, chilling as it warmed” (8 November 1845).

That summer William and Sophia prolonged their stay at Black Lake to mid-September. It was during the second week of September, on a bright and unseasonably warm day, that Elizabeth held an interview with William which she recorded briefly in her Journal, but which Sophia reported at greater length in a letter to Eunice Hamilton (12 September 1845). Lying on her sickbed, her long hair strewn about her, her eyes “glowing with unnatural brightness,” Elizabeth asked William to watch over her brother “if he should ever be left alone,” for Edmund was “like a child, in some things.” William gave his solemn pledge. When he stepped from the room, Sophia noted that his face was wet with tears.

SELF PORTRAIT

1845?–46

Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 × 30 3/8 in.

In October 1845 Moorash spoke to Elizabeth of a self-portrait, but it is not clear from the Journal whether he had actually begun it. A self-portrait is mentioned again in December, although in a way that suggests he may still have been only dreaming his way toward it (8 December 1845: “E hard at work on The Devil’s Dream [a lost painting]. Spoke of paradox of self-portrait: what is a self?”) He was clearly at work on a self-portrait by May 1846, and he appears to have worked on it steadily from that time, setting aside all other work, until his death on 27 July.

Elizabeth rallied in the fall of 1845. Despite a small setback in November she had recovered sufficiently by mid-December to enjoy a ten-day Christmas visit from Sophia and William, during which all four took long walks in the wintry woods and fields, went skating on Black Lake, and hired a sleigh with “handsome carvings and cushioned seats, drawn by two horses, a black and a white,” in which they took long rides through wild country. She was still well in April, when Sophia and William returned from Boston to their cottage on Black Lake, but in mid-May she took a turn for the worse, staying in bed for three days with headaches and violent vomiting. By June she had returned to her semi-invalid life, receiving visitors in her bedroom or on the sagging sofa in the kitchen-parlor. The Journal entries for June and July are extremely irregular: long, detailed entries on days of relative good health alternate with abrupt, fragmentary notes or utter silence. Despite the gaps, we are able to follow the progress of the Self-Portrait in some detail, for Moorash spoke about it to Elizabeth more than he was accustomed to speak of his work in progress; and we can trace the evolution of a strange scheme that quickly became an obsession.

The first mention of the scheme occurs on 6 June, a month after he had begun the Self-Portrait: Moorash intends to show the picture to Sophia in order to “open her eyes.” The painting is not for Sophia; but he intends that she shall “be wakened by it from her slumber.” Is he here perhaps thinking of himself as the triumphant prince, climbing to Dornröschen’s tower? Elizabeth is skeptical of the plan: apart from Sophia’s lack of understanding of Edmund’s work, there is the question of the proper aim of a work of art. Moorash argues that a painting is intended to “excite feelings”—why then should he not wish to excite the feelings of Sophia? Elizabeth asks if that is all he intends. Moorash laughs harshly and replies that the devil works in mysterious ways — perhaps he’ll possess her soul by means of his portrait. Elizabeth, disturbed by his answer, remains silent. On 18 June Moorash is discouraged and thinks of destroying the painting, but on 20 June he is hard at work. On 26 June Elizabeth is attended by Dr. Long after a bad night. The next day Moorash, who has been painting in the barn, moves to his cramped upstairs studio in order to be near Elizabeth. There is a gap of eight days, but on 5 July Elizabeth reports that she has taken a walk with Sophia and William. On 7 July Moorash tells Elizabeth that it’s enough for him if Sophia is simply “presented with the evidence.” His intention appears to have shifted: he now wishes to address her moral sense. Within a week he is filled with doubts and is on the verge of destroying the picture, but he recovers his enthusiasm and returns to work “with a vengeance.” On 17 July Moorash states that “a painting is a dagger aimed at a heart.” His intention appears to have changed again: he now wants to wound Sophia with his art. On 18 July Elizabeth asks whether he plans to woo Sophia with his portrait. Moorash grows thoughtful and replies: “No, I want her to look at me. She has never seen me.” The continual assertion of contradictory intentions during the painting of Self-Portrait is perhaps indicative of an overwrought state of mind, but it should be noted that the shifting esthetic positions of June and July are connected by a consistent theme: Moorash is insisting on the power of painting to affect a beholder, to enter another mind. On 22 July he is “almost done with” the portrait. On 23 July he asks Elizabeth if she is willing to look at it and decide its fate. He shuts himself up for three days of feverish work and on the evening of 26 July brings down the canvas, covered with a white cloth, and sets it up on an easel at the foot of her bed. Facing Elizabeth, he watches her closely as he lifts the cloth.

Later that night Elizabeth recorded the events of 26 July in a rapid, excited hand. The painting “thrills and frightens me — pierces me to the very core.” It is “dark and terrible — the image of Satan — dark.” In the terrible eyes she sees “suffering — and sorrow — and evil unspeakable.” She “cannot bear” to look at it “and yet — and yet.” She begged Edmund to leave the painting with her for the night, so that she might speak with him about it in the morning.

The events of 27 July are occasionally hazy in detail, although clear enough in outline; there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mrs. Duff’s Report. Edmund rose early and went down to breakfast, which he ate alone in the kitchen-parlor. Elizabeth sometimes slept to mid-morning or later, and he was careful not to disturb her. He returned upstairs to his room, perhaps to work on a painting laid aside months earlier, and was interrupted by Mrs. Duff’s cry. He hurried downstairs. Elizabeth was unconscious and breathing erratically. Edmund hesitated for only a moment before leaving Mrs. Duff with Elizabeth and running the half mile into Saccanaw Falls, where he found that the local doctor was out on his rounds. He promptly hired a trap to take him to Strawson, only to discover that Dr. Long was attending a patient six miles away. In Strawson he was able to find a second doctor, a Dr. Parrish, who returned with him to Stone Hill; Dr. Parrish strode into the sickroom, bent over Elizabeth, and pronounced her dead. About fifteen minutes after the doctor left — it is not clear how long he remained — Sophia and William arrived. At the door Mrs. Duff informed them of Elizabeth’s death. Sophia rushed wildly into the room, followed by Mrs. Duff, and threw herself to her knees beside Elizabeth. Sobbing hysterically, she seized Elizabeth’s hand and began kissing it over and over again and pressing it to her tearstained cheek. William stood for a moment in the doorway, stunned and trembling, before walking into the room and sitting abruptly on the edge of the bed, where he bent his face into his hands. Moorash sat expressionless in a chair on the other side of the bed. Suddenly Sophia stood up, looked wildly about, and stepped over to a small sewing table, where she pulled open a drawer and removed a pair of sharp scissors. Uttering a cry, she ran to the portrait, which still stood on the easel at the foot of the bed, and began slashing at the face with the scissors. During this outburst Moorash stared at her from his chair but did not move. After striking repeated blows, Sophia dropped to her knees, raised her eyes to the ceiling, and with both hands thrust the scissors into her throat. Even as she raised her arms to strike the blow, Moorash leaped from the chair, but he was too late to prevent the scissors from entering with full force. It appears that he next attempted to wrench the weapon from her grasp, but Sophia, though bleeding profusely, struggled violently, as if she were being attacked. It was only now that William, as though startled out of a dream, tore himself from Elizabeth’s side and with a “wild look” and “strangled cry” rushed over to the struggling pair. Moorash had succeeded in pulling the bloody scissors from Sophia’s throat, and there now took place a fierce struggle between Moorash and William for possession of the scissors, in the course of which Moorash was wounded in the neck — it is not clear how. It is impossible to tell from the Report whether William was attempting to prevent a second suicide, or whether, in his half-mad state, he attacked his friend. William suddenly seemed to come to his senses and, holding Edmund gently, laid him on the floor. He became brisk and efficient, tearing strips of cloth to staunch the wounds of Edmund and Sophia, and ordering Mrs. Duff to fetch a doctor. When she returned some twenty minutes later with Dr. Parrish, whom she had overtaken on the road to Strawson, she found William lying on his back on the bed beside Elizabeth, one arm outstretched. She did not know at first that he was dead. On the floor lay one of Moorash’s hunting pistols, which William had removed from the small deal table in the upstairs bedroom. Moorash was dead (later it was determined that he had died from a stab wound in the throat). Sophia was alive but unconscious; she died early the next morning.

A tableau of bloody corpses presided over by a mangled painting is an effect that Moorash would have deplored; he detested banal visions of the knife-and-cadaver kind. That his life should have ended as an imitation of a mediocre academic painting would nevertheless, one imagines, have elicited from him a wry smile, for it was his conviction that the contrivances of art were always superior to the accidents of life.

The Self-Portrait is badly damaged; despite painstaking restorative efforts, much of the face, including both eyes, is so torn and scratched as to be virtually unseeable. Nevertheless, the design or plan remains clear. Moorash retained the motif of lake, hills, and sky that he used in his three late portraits, as well as the method of mythic representation: the shadows of wings are visible, as if he had intended to portray himself as a great dark angel, a fierce and fallen Lucifer. Although even in its mutilated form the portrait retains a certain power, the damage condemns it to an uneasy place in Moorash’s oeuvre, for it seems to hover in a limbo between art and biography, between the realm of imperishable beauty and the world of decay.

Elizabeth and Edmund were buried in the small graveyard in Saccanaw Falls, within sight of Stone Hill. The parents of Sophia and William insisted that they be returned for proper burial in the family plot in Philadelphia.

In October 1846 Charlotte Vail died, after a lingering illness.