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An American Grail: An Iconographic Study of Thomas Cole's Titan's Goblet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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The presence of the large, the massive, the majestic, the panoramic in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American painting can be well documented. Aesthetic theories of the sublime, scenes of Niagara Falls and mountains, large canvases, vast views—all of these attest to the longing of the small American nation on a sprawling continent to project its vision of a great destiny, the possible future, the promised future, in its art. An early work in oil on canvas (1833) encompassing the large in a small (193⅜ by 16⅛ inches) canvas is The Titan's Goblet by Thomas Cole, who is called the father of American landscape painting and who, in fact, in his transitional role between Washington Allston and Frederic Church, transferred a symbolic way of seeing, especially in terms of American nationhood, to the enterprise of American landscape painting. The Titan's Goblet, “one of Cole's smallest and most finished works,” according to an early biographer, is a mysterious and fantastic painting that begs for interpretation: It seems peculiarly central to the process of making the American landscape function in a metaphorical way. Clearly symbolic itself, the goblet in the painting may be more than that and can be seen as emblematic of what it represents; that is, it can be seen as a singular object that stands for something else by suggesting the other thing's nature or history.
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References
NOTES
1. Tuckerman, Henry T., Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867), p. 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is relevant to my concerns that Tuckerman, an eminent commentator on the art of his time, should have perceived The Titan's Goblet as one of Cole's most finished works, because a close look at the painting in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, where it hangs in New York, will reveal that it has some characteristics of a sketch or a fragment. When it is compared to the large Cole canvases especially, it seems remarkably unpolished; its color is subdued; its brush strokes are unstudied. It is, in fact, this appearance of a work done rapidly, in a moment perhaps of special insight, that gives it its immediate appeal and, for me, makes it appear to be a gesture of self rather than a deliberate effort to accomplish a significant, memorable, finished painting.
2. Parry, E. C. III, “Thomas Cole's The Titan's Goblet: A Reinterpretation,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, No. 4 (1971), 123–40Google Scholar. In his discussion of European and English pictorial sources for The Titan's Goblet, Parry mentions John Flaxman's work, which Cole may have seen in England; but he curiously fails to mention Flaxman's 1793 engraving Odysseus Gives Wine to Polyphemus specifically. This engraving seems particularly important to Parry's argument. I mention it here to indicate that I have no quarrel with Parry's general thesis, but I have another idea to present.
3. Noble, Louis L., The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Vessell, Elliott S. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. Harris, Neil, The Artist in American Society (New York: George Braziller, 1966), p. 239.Google Scholar
5. McCoubrey, John W., ed., American Art, 1700–1960: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 96.Google Scholar
6. Louis L. Noble, quoted in Theophilius Stringfellow's booklet. See note 12, below.
7. Thomas Cole's papers, Box No. 7, at the New-York Historical Society. Photostats of Cole's papers are at the New-York Historical Society in New York City. The original papers are in the New York State Library in Albany.
8. Ibid., Box No. 6.
9. Ibid., Box No. 1.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., Box No. 7.
12. Theophilius Stringfellow's discussion of the goblet as a world-tree, or cosmic tree of life, from Norse legend appears in a booklet printed in New York City in 1886 by J. M. Falconer. The booklet, which accompanied an exhibition of the painting, also included Louis L. Noble's remarks about the painting. A fee was apparently charged for viewing The Titan's Goblet, for Stringfellow's essay starts, “At the exposition this year may be seen an oil painting by the late Mr. Cole, a distinguished American artist, which is well worth many entrance fees to see.” Acknowledging the special attraction of the work to be its insistence on meaning, Stringfellow continues, “It is a work requiring some study to understand, and may be described as a poetical conception, in which nature and man are symbolically represented and their mutual relations subtly suggested.” Both the entrance fee and Stringfellow's comments attest to the continuing interest nineteenthcentury American audiences took in this particular painting. The booklet may be found among Cole's papers at the New-York Historical Society.
13. See the garden fountain at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the courtyard of the Pazzi Palace in Florence. Of marble, it is attributed to the workshop of Donatello from the period 1453–78. It came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1941. See also the twelfth-century French garden fountain from the Cuxa Cloister, originally in the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, now in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
14. Parry, , pp. 123–40.Google Scholar
15. Grogan, L. S., The Ardagh Chalice (London: Brown & Nolan, 1932), p. 9.Google Scholar
16. The various real chalices and cups that have been proposed as the authentic Holy Grail are discussed in Eisen, G. A., Glass: Its Origin, History, Chronology, Technic and Classification to the Sixteenth Century (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1927)Google Scholar. On page 716 of that book is described one contender, a glass vessel with foliate decoration that includes a wreath that contains “a central Latin Cross with floreate arms standing on a pyramidal platform of four steps.… The cross is surrounded by red drops of blood and below it we see a three-branched Tree of Life.” It is the cross, another Christian symbol, and more particularly, the Tree of Life, that are most interesting in this description. The Tree of Life is reminiscent of Cole's goblet. If Cole's goblet is seen as a chalice, or as the Grail, it may be feasible to include the world-tree (as a Tree of Life) connotations from Stringfellow within a wider interpretation. In the context of an enlarged symbolism, it may be worthwhile to note here also that the word “grail” comes from the Latin word for “crater,” which suggests an association Cole may have made while in Italy with volcanic craters.
17. L. L. Noble, quoted in Theophilius Stringfellow's booklet. See note 12, above.
18. Noble, , Life and Works of Cole, p. 7.Google Scholar
19. Huntington, David C., “Church and Luminism: Light for America's Elect,” in Wilmerding, John, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1980), p. 162.Google Scholar
20. Ibid., p. 172.
21. Stein, Roger B., John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 160–61.Google Scholar
23. In this connection, it may be useful to cite a poem by Wallace Stevens, a modern American poet who looked at paintings. The poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” dwells on the same kind of juxtaposition that Cole's painting exemplifies. The first two of its three stanzas are:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
24. Thomas Cole's papers, Box No. 6.
25. Ibid., Box No. 1.
26. Novak, Barbara, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 68.Google Scholar
27. Bercovitch, , p. 146.Google Scholar