Tell me a story: narrative and orality in nineteeth-century American visual culture

Abstract

This dissertation explores issues of narrative and storytelling as they apply to nineteenth-century art and visual culture, focusing particularly on objects produced between 1830 and 1870. During the decades following the establishment of the National Academy of Design in 1825, artists and patrons struggled to broaden the American art world through the creation of institutions for the display and criticism of art. Genre painting in particular rose to new prominence for American art audiences, with some of its major practitioners like William Sidney Mount and Richard Caton Woodville skyrocketing to fame. Viewers encountered these works in a culture where orality and the spoken word served as a primary medium through which citizens would engage with public and private life. Facility with orality and storytelling was an important skill for Americans in multiple arenas of endeavor, and viewers brought their experiences and expectations to encounters with the visual arts, along with a range of specifically taught viewing behaviors that conditioned how to see and interpret images. Genre paintings, popular illustrations, sculptures, and even ephemera like games and advertisements produced during this time period often relied heavily on narratives to enchant viewers and communicate specific messages. People were accustomed to a paradigm wherein education, politics, private family entertainments, and public displays of art and lectures all revolved around the spoken word and narrative. This dissertation asserts that paintings produced during this period that expressly address the topic of storytelling and speech should be viewed in this context. Chapter One introduces the subject of the dissertation. Chapter Two addresses why genre paintings in general and images about storytelling in particular rose to such prominence during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. American lives were richly interwoven with orality, and the oral and aural nature of art is approached through two kinds of evidence: 1) speeches made in front of paintings, like the lectures of George Catlin and John Banvard that directly combined spontaneous verbal exposition with display of images, and 2) speech about, in front of, and in criticism of artwork, considering ways in which Americans encountered art in public and private and how dialogue and verbal response played a role in the viewing process. Chapter Three focuses on a single painting, The Tough Story, of 1837, by William Sidney Mount, reinserting it into its original historical context of “tough” stories and tall talk. There follows an analysis of the chain of presentations and representations the painting underwent in text and print. Chapter Four argues that the experience of viewing images was a learned practice, and it examines pictures intended for children, which informed youthful viewers’ later roles as citizens and viewers of art. The Rollo books by Jacob Abbott offer evidence of how children learned to identify characters, stories, motivations, and morals in visual productions through the use of visual codes of representation. An in-depth analysis of two paintings by Lilly Martin Spencer and Seymour Joseph Guy—both of whom represented the telling of nursery rhymes—demonstrates how artists attempted to render the process of mental imagining visible for the viewer.