Author's note: Parts of this essay are adapted from my “Verbally Roughing It: The West of Words,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (June 1989): 67–92.

1. Conventional wisdom has sided with this latter, sociological view: that is, that artistic excellence bears no relation to a work's popular appeal. Northrop Frye opens his magisterial study with the claim: “It is clearly the simple truth that there is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet.” Yet Frye then goes on to celebrate the role of criticism in educating a popular audience, reopening the question pursued in this essay of whether critical standards structure the reception given an artist. See Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 4Google Scholar.

For an investigation of problems involved in understanding popular response, see Radway, Janice A., Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar. An analysis that attempts to circumvent those problems is contained in my “‘When You Call Me That …’: Tall Talk and Male Hegemony in The Virginian,” PMLA 102 (01 1987): 66–77.Google Scholar

2. The school was known for its strong colors and precise draftsmanship, its genre scenes of eye-catching poses and gestures that even then seemed sentimental. Among other notable American painters who studied in Düsseldorf in the late 1850s were Emanuel Leutze, George Caleb Bingham, and T. Worthington Whittredge. For an assessment of this movement, see Marzio, Peter C., The Democratic Art: Pictures for a 19th-century America: Chromolithography 1840–1900 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1979)Google Scholar; and the essays collected in The D¨sseldorf Academy and the Americans, ed. Hoopes, Donelson F. (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1972)Google Scholar, especially von Kalnein, Wend, “The Düsseldorf Academy,” pp. 13–18Google Scholar; and Hoopes, Donelson F., “The Diisseldorf Academy and the Americans,” pp. 19–34Google Scholar.

Hoopes asserts that “Bierstadt early demonstrated his feeling for dramatic contrasts and effective placement of masses. He seems intuitively to have reached for that peculiarly Düsseldorf habit of composing landscapes as if they existed as a succession of planes parallel with the picture surface.… [He] raised the panorama idiom to the level of Wagnerian opera” (p. 31).

3. Cited by Henricks, Gordon, in the fullest study to date of the artist, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harry Abrams, 1972), p. 140.Google Scholar

4. Roughing It, vol. 2 of The Works of Mark Twain, Introduction by Rogers, Franklin R. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 3Google Scholar. Subsequent references appear in the text.

5. Peter Rindisbacher, George Back, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Wimar, William J. Hays, John Mix Stanley, John Howland, and Frederic Remington were also among more prominent painters who depicted the buffalo in the 19th Century. Washington Irving recounted his experiences in A Tour of the Prairies (1835)Google Scholar, as did Parkman, Francis in The Oregon Trail (1849)Google Scholar. For a full analysis of the pictorial history, see Barsness, Larry, The Bison in Art: A Graphic Chronicle of the American Bison (Fort Worth: The Amon Carter Museum, 1977)Google Scholar. Bareness also notes that the 1912 design for the Buffalo Nickel was the result of an explicit commission for a “truly American coin” that could not be confused with the currency of any other nation (p. 132).

6. Brown, Milton, American Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Decorative Arts, Photography (New York: Harry Abrams, 1979), p. 226.Google Scholar

7. In 1492, it is estimated that sixty million animals roamed the continent, while twenty million still existed as late as 1850. In thirty-odd more years, however, that number had diminished to barely five hundred at the same time that sentimental regret for a vanishing wilderness had begun to peak (see Hendricks, , Bierstadt, p. 291)Google Scholar. For an account of documentary anxiety about the buffalo, see my Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

8. If his tones here sound like a latter-day Catlin, it is worth noting that the painting was actually the impetus for the first official census of America's remaining buffalo. The statement was quoted in The New York World (undated, March 1889), cited by Hendricks, , Albert Bierstadt, p. 291.Google Scholar

9. One of the jurors, asked to explain the decision of the selection committee, said that the painting “did not represent Bierstadt at his best.” The rejection came as a shock to Bierstadt, who as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor was entitled to a place in the Paris Salon of that year. He expressed his dismay in terms that suggest he did not consider the painting at all idiosyncratic: “I consider my picture one of my very best” (cited by Hendricks, Gordon, Albert Bierstadt, pp. 284, 291).Google Scholar

10. Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1870), pp. 75–76.Google Scholar

11. Cox, James M., The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 102–3Google Scholar. For a reading that disagrees with Cox, see Wadlington, Warwick, The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 204–6.Google Scholar

12. Hendricks, , Albert Bierstadt, p. 144Google Scholar. It is notable that what Jarves assumes is a liability for Bierstadt and Church – their impulse to make “two pictures in one, from different points of view” – may well be another way of describing the plight of the American artist, as Barbara Novak has described it. Her definition of “luminism” seems to fit Jarves's critique: an inability to sacrifice the clarity of realistic detail to the demands of impressionist light, yet nonetheless a fascination with light itself as a vehicle for the transcendence of a merely local perspective. See Novak, Barbara, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), esp. ch. 5, pp. 92–109.Google Scholar

13. Martin, a British landscapist, enjoyed extraordinary popularity in the early part of the century. Friderich, the German Romantic, had (like Martin) educated viewers to the stylistics of mountain formations. Interestingly, Friedrich's brilliance is today understood as the result of his willingness to turn against contemporary expectations. It was “by turning his back on the European tradition that Friedrich evolved his art, by cultivating a symbolic technique that seemed awkward to his contemporaries.” See Rosen, Charles and Zerner, Henri, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 63.Google Scholar

14. For two views of competing discourses in Twain, see Smith, Henry Nash, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), esp. ch. 3, pp. 52–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sewell, David, Mark Twain's Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Variety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. ch. 5, pp. 85–109.Google Scholar

15. Quoted from House, Edward H.'s 1867 review, cited in Critical Essays on Mark Twain, 1867–1910, ed. Budd, Louis J. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 19Google Scholar. See also, most importantly, Howells, William Dean's 1882 essay (pp. 54–60)Google Scholar; and the collection of reviews collected in Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage, ed. Anderson, Frederick (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)Google Scholar. Budd, Louis J. has analyzed Twain's “status as a culture-hero” in Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).Google Scholar

16. Nichol, John's 1882 review, collected in Critics on Mark Twain, ed. Kesterson, David B. (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), p. 15.Google Scholar

17. For fuller discussion of this point, see my “‘Nobody But Our Gang Warn't Around’: The Authority of Language in Huckleberry Finn,” in New Essays on “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” ed. Budd, Louis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 83–106.Google Scholar

18. Cited by Hendricks, , Albert Bierstadt, p. 147.Google Scholar

19. Bold, Christine, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 169Google Scholar. Bold in turn has drawn on Warshow, Robert's earlier observation about the “double vision” maintained by readers of comic books, in “Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham,” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962). pp. 83–104.Google Scholar

20. Novak, Barbara has examined this strain of American painting in Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. For the standard (and still illuminating) treatment of the larger subject, see Tuveson, Ernest, “Space, Deity, and the ‘Natural Sublime’,” Modern Language Quarterly (1951): 20–38Google Scholar. According to Tuveson, the “sublime of nature [was] an aesthetic which set up as supreme criteria the qualities of immensity, unlimitedness, and awe” (p. 32).

21. Hendricks, , AIbert Bierstadt, p. 160.Google Scholar

22. Stephen Fender has remarked that “to Clemens, the geographical West meant pre-eminently a place without history, with no integral culture, no roots, an absurd place. That is what made his febrile humour possible, and what caused his problem with style in all its senses.” See “‘The Prodigal in a Far Country Chawing of Husks’: Mark Twain's Search for a Style in the West,” Modern Language Review 71 (10 1976): 753.Google Scholar

23. O'Gorman, Edmundo first investigated this possibility in The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 42–47, 138–45Google Scholar. More recently, scholars have extended our understanding of the rhetorical and aesthetic strategies adopted by American travel writers, although they still tend to emphasize the priority of the Western landscape being described. For excellent studies, see Fender, Stephen, Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Franklin, Wayne, Discovers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Spengemann, William C., The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Stafford, Barbara Maria has made a magisterial survey of European efforts and a sophisticated assessment of “the prison of perceptual conventionality,” in Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 348.Google Scholar

24. Cox, , The Fate of Humor, pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

25. The standard assessment is Milton Brown's, who has stated that Bierstadt had “a predilection for the epic vision, the panoramic view, and the outsized canvas. However, Bierstadt had no pretensions to profundity. He was a popular picture maker who had discovered that he could package the sublime for common consumption” (American Art, p. 217).Google Scholar