The grotesque visions of a genteel rogue: Frederick E. Cohen's Detroit paintings, 1845-1853
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Following a stint in the British army during the Upper Canada Rebellion and a failed elopement, English-born painter Frederick E. Cohen set up studio in 1840s Detroit. There, he painted allegorical fantasies, landscapes, genre scenes, and dozens of lapidary-hued portraits of the region’s wealthy denizens while the region witnessed dizzying levels of transformation. Accounts about the artist written after his death remember him as a “handsome, genial, witty, and kindly man,” as well as a dandy. Looking at paintings and drawings created by the artist in the late 1840s and early 1850s, this thesis examines the ways in which these early characterizations belie the grotesque, violent, and darkly subversive undercurrents in Cohen’s work. ☐ Cohen’s work captures Detroit’s street life and the events that shaped its history as a growing, diverse population center, a vital stop on the Underground Railroad, and a porous border town between Canada and the United States. Focusing on paintings such as Near Old Post Office, Detroit (1852), The Mayflower (1851), and The Reading of the Premiums at the Michigan State Fair (1853), as well as a newly donated book of drawings and poetry at the Newbery Library, Chicago, this thesis situates the artist’s work within the tumultuous cultural, political, and social atmosphere in which it was produced. An idiosyncratic contribution to American art history, Cohen’s paintings are an important, if deeply biased, record of the fluid culture and aesthetics of the nineteenth century Great Lakes.
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Keywords
American painting, Antebellum Detroit visual culture, Firefighting, Frederick E. Cohen, Great Lakes visual culture, Steamships