Category: Thomas Jefferson

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It takes all kinds of thinkers

Whatever happened to the educated, literate generalist in our public life?

Apple orchard in spring, Carol L. Douglas

If you followed my recent trip to Argentina, you know we returned home with a virulent intestinal bug. It’s lasted for more than two months and resisted diagnosis, even with extensive testing. My husband was looking like a starving Biafran so Brien Davis, our nurse-practitioner, ordered a new round of tests. Mirabile dictu, it’s giardiasis! We start treatment as soon as we round up the proper drugs. Kudos to Brien for exceptional persistence.

When we left Rochester, my biggest concern was leaving the practice of our doctor, Bernard Plansky. His specialty is family medicine, which we used to call ‘general medicine’. I credit him with saving my life, since he figured out that I had cancer after two other specialists missed it. He’s also knowledgeable on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare, etymology, bagpipes, publicans and surfing. He’s that 18th century ideal, a polymath.

Apple tree with swing, Carol L. Douglas

Being a two-time cancer survivor, I had been under a high level of specialized care. Moving to Maine, I wasn’t at all sure about switching to a nurse-practitioner. But it’s worked very well. Under Brien’s care, I’ve lost 60 lbs., resolved most of my back problems, and am no longer hypertensive. In his spare time, Brien runs Hope Orchards. As with all farming, orchard husbandry takes intelligence and optimism. Both of these medical men have served my interests well, although they’ve approached the questions very differently.

I’ve been thinking about thinking because of a something I chanced across while reading about Alexander von Humboldt. He had a warm friendship with president Thomas Jefferson, whom he visited several times at the White House.

Dame’s Rocket in an old orchard, Carol L. Douglas

Jefferson was—like von Humboldt—a true son of the Enlightenment. He was a farmer, interested in scientific agriculture. He taught himself the principles of architecture and designed Virginia’s statehouse as well as his own home, Monticello. He was an inventor who gave us both the moldboard plow and the swivel chair. He could speak, read, and write in many languages.

Jefferson was a keen naturalist and anthropologist. Not only did he commission the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he tutored Meriwether Lewis in the skills he needed to lead the trip, including mapping, botany, natural history, mineralogy, astronomy and navigation. He was interested in Native American cultures and languages. And, somehow, he found time to be a very successful politician and lawyer.

Farm country, Carol L. Douglas

My sad thought for yesterday was that the last president with a background like that was Teddy Roosevelt. It’s hard to imagine what von Humboldt would have in common with modern politicians, whatever their affiliation.

Of course, we’ve done this to ourselves. We moderns assume that the best person for any job is the most specialized. But how well has that served us, exactly?

Postscript: The Bangor Arts Society’s 2020 Open Juried Show runs from June 1-15. There’s still time to sneak in a last-minute submission. The juror is art writer Carl Little. In a time when there are almost no live art shows, it’s refreshing to see America’s oldest continuous art society sticking with tradition, come hell or high water.

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Towering genius disdains the beaten path

Today, art and science run in very separate tracks. That wasn’t always true.

Cotopaxi, 1862, Frederic Edwin Church, courtesy Detroit Institute of Arts 

Because of lockdown, museums and galleries are closed. That means I won’t seeing Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Luckily, I can tour the show virtually or buy the book.

Not only was Alexander von Humboldt the towering genius of early 19th century science, he had a profound influence on American art and culture. There’s a Humboldt Street in Portland, a Humboldt Parkway in my home town of Buffalo, and various fixtures named Humboldt across our country.  He was a famous explorer, but he was also the fellow whose work inspired Frederic Church’s The Heart of the Andes.

Self-portrait, 1815, Alexander von Humboldt. Gentlemen-scientists once knew how to draw.

Humboldt was the last of that breed of brilliant scientific generalists, largely self-taught, who contributed so much to the world’s knowledge of botany and geography. Between 1799 and 1804, he traveled throughout South America, exploring and describing it in scientific terms.

Humboldt is the first person to have realized that the coasts of South America and Africa dovetail, and he proposed the idea that they might have once been joined. He noted that volcanoes fall in linear chains and demonstrated the fallacy of the idea that rocks were formed from the world’s oceans. He laid the foundations of modern geography and meteorology. In his spare time, he surveyed Cuba and stopped to visit President Thomas Jefferson at the White House.

Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1805, Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland.

Humboldt saw the physical world as a unified system and the physical sciences as interlinked. He understood that botany was dependent on biology, meteorology, and geology. To prove that took 21 years and resulted in his opus magnum, Cosmos. It changed the way scientists see the world.

Humboldt mentored many young scientists. He was equally generous with visual artists. He expected them to play a part in the collection of natural data, by accurately portraying the landscape. Humboldt recognized landscape painting—then in its infancy—as among the highest expressions of love of nature.

Alexander von Humboldt and AimĂ© Bonpland at the foot of the Chimborazo, 1810, Friedrich Georg Weitsch

Church was not the only artist to follow in Humboldt’s footsteps, but he was by far the cleverest. In 1853 and 1859, he traveled to South America to replicate Humboldt’s journeys. While Humboldt had used family money to finance his explorations, Church enlisted an American financier, Cyrus West Field, who wanted to encourage investment in his South American ventures.

The Heart of the Andes is a composite of South American topography and botany. Its monumental scale and detail can’t be appreciated through photographs; you really need to go to New York and stand in front of it.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in 1859, Americans weren’t flocking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it didn’t yet exist. Our nation didn’t even have a decent rail system. Church took his painting on tour, visiting seven American cities and London. At its opening in New York (April 29 to May 23, 1859) 12,000 people paid a quarter apiece to see it.

At the end of its tour, Church sold the painting for $10,000—at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Church had hoped to ship the painting to Berlin to show it to his mentor, but Humboldt, alas, died before that was possible.

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A feminist painter and her feminist royal patron

It’s very trendy right now to ‘discover’ women artists. But how lost were they, really?
Mary Moser, c. 1770-71, George Romney, courtesy National Gallery
I’m in Edinburgh finishing a portrait this week. My subject bought me a copy of The Lady. This is one of Britain’s longest-running magazines. Founded in 1885, it was where the gentry advertised for domestic servants. Between the nanny ads and the horoscopes, there are some pieces of surprising interest, including a biography of 18th century painter Mary Moser.
Moser is best remembered for her decorative painting at Frogmore House, an English country house within the Home Park at Windsor. Started in 1680, it was largely renovated by Queen Charlotte, whom Americans know as the wife of King George III.
A Vase of Flowers, 1792-97, Mary Moser, Frogmore House, courtesy Royal Collection Trust
But the Queen was much more than that. Among other things, she was a champion of women artists and a keen amateur botanist who helped expand Kew Gardens. It was this interest in botany that led to her hiring Moser to decorate the South Pavilion at Frogmore House.
The house was more than a century old when Queen Charlotte purchased it in 1792. She used it as a retreat from nearby Windsor Castle, where she and her daughters could practice their hobbies of “painting, drawing, needlework, japanning, reading and ‘botanising’.” The Queen had borne 15 children (13 of whom lived to adulthood) and had a mentally-ill husband, so it’s perhaps understandable that she then built another retreat within the gardens of this retreat. That’s Frogmore Cottage, where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now live with their new baby.
Queen Charlotte, 1761, studio of Allan Ramsay
Moser was already well-regarded as a floral painter when she took up the commission at Frogmore House. She had been trained by her father, an enamellist and himself a drawing tutor to George III. She was one of 36 artists who joined together to form the Royal Academy of Arts. At the age of 24, she was the youngest Academician and one of just two women among the founders. The other was Angelica Kauffman.
Moser did not marry until later in life. By convention, a woman’s professional life ended upon marriage. “[P]erhaps there was no man worth giving it all up for,” suggested The Lady.
Moser carried on an affair with miniaturist Richard Cosway. He was well-known as a libertine, and “commonly described as resembling a monkey.” (His wife was, in turn, getting it on with Thomas Jefferson.) In his notebooks, Conway made lascivious comments and “invidious comparisons between her and Mrs Cosway,” implying that Moser was more sexually responsive than his wife. He died insane, just in case you’re wondering if there’s cosmic justice.
A Bunch of Flowers, 1792-97, Mary Moser, Frogmore House, courtesy Royal Collection Trust
Moser married at age 49. Bowing to social pressure, she retired and began exhibiting as an amateur under her married name. She’d made a pile of money as a painter; the Frogmore commission alone earned her ÂŁ900, which is equivalent to ÂŁ100,000 today. She left most of her wealth to women: relatives, friends, and the wives of other artists.
It’s very trendy right now to ‘discover’ women artists. But how lost were they in the first place? Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, may not have been a household name twenty years ago, but was well-known to students of the Baroque.
The problem wasn’t so much with their own times, but with the peculiar blinders of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moser’s membership in the Royal Academy was circumscribed to some degree by her gender; she could not attend nude sketch sessions, for example, and some meetings were closed to her. But all in all, she had a happy and complete life as a painter.