We have forgotten how to grieve, how to sing, as Whitman did when mourning the death of Lincoln, a song “low and wailing . . . and yet again bursting with joy.” We are far indeed from the consolations available to a nineteenth-century artist such as Frederic Edwin Church, whose Hudson valley home, Olana, was, and is, filled with memorials to children, siblings, friends, and children of friends without so much as a whiff of melancholia—to borrow a term from Freud. As I toured the small exhibition currently in the Sharp Gallery at Olana, Afterglow: Frederic Church and the Landscape of Memory, I considered the vast gulf between then and now. Vast and yet somehow bridged by its ebullient young curator Allegra Davis, who, improbably enough for someone her age, understands that what we have lost in our journey from Church’s time to ours cannot be regained, though it can to some extent be explained and appreciated.
The paintings here are mostly familiar; some like To the Memory of Cole, completed by Church when he was only twenty-two, and The Evening Star, a memorial for the young son of his friend Erastus Dow Palmer, have been borrowed. Others like The After Glow, a tribute to the artist’s younger sister, Charlotte, who died that year, are integral to Olana, as are such mementoes as a lock of Charlotte’s hair and the quilt Church’s daughter “Downie” Church made incorporating fabric from her late mother Isabel’s dresses. There is more, much more, in the two rooms of the show, but I am not surprised that, in giving the exhibition its title, the words death and mourning were avoided, for how many among the public currently flocking to Olana would have come here had they been included? We back away from the inevitable. Church, a man very much of his time, did not. Davis tells me that several people are deeply disconcerted by the lock of a deceased’s hair and similar mementos while appreciative of the comforting distance a memorial quilt can provide. We have forgotten that keeping all these things close is not morbid but salutary.
In the nineteenth century things were otherwise. Yes, death was omnipresent due to diseases like diphtheria (two of the Church children died of it) along with the wholesale slaughter of the Civil War, but we must try to understand that someone like Frederic Church had instinctual habits of mind very different from our own. We cannot adopt those habits, we cannot see life and death as he did, but, like Allegra Davis, we need to get as close as possible.
Those habits of mind go back a long way, perhaps even to John Milton’s Lycidas if that poem is properly understood. Church did not engage in the pathetic fallacy of seeing nature as an echo of man’s thoughts and feelings. Nature does not mourn our losses but it is consoling. How it consoles is there in the paintings, where sense and cognition are inseparable. This is no simple layered allegory, nor is it allegorical at all. The artist did not see things in layers; he saw them at once. At its best, a Church landscape like The Evening Star is simply an opening into acceptance and the possibility, even the certainty, of renewal. Beauty consoles, something we have forgotten, something wholly antithetical to the mission of contemporary art, where the abuse of beauty is often an artist’s starting point.
In her catalogue essay Davis acknowledges that in their imposition of Christian imagery on the “untouched” landscape, “these works overwrite Indigenous presence and history, underpinning them with a different grief that comes from separating land and culture.” For an Indigenous perspective on the matter of land-scape and art, something not within the purview of this exhibition, you need only cross the river to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, where the show Native Prospects brings together works by Kay WalkingStick, Alan Michelson, and others.
In the meantime, there are these rooms, these paintings, these mementoes, and, setting aside the imperial gaze, a worldview not wholly at odds with an Indigenous one. Nature heals. Renewal and consolation abide in the best landscapes of Church as they make death a compatible and inseparable part of life. These are lessons I wish I’d encountered when I visited Olana in the 1990s as many young friends were dying of AIDS. I went there for distraction not consolation. I walked the paths, looked out across the river toward Cole’s house, walked more, but seldom went inside. Had I paused in its rooms would I have learned that a memory palace imbued with death, can also be a place of solace, even joy? Not likely. For that I would have needed this exhibition and Allegra Davis.
