THE boundaries of a State are difficult limits to observe in any account of creative activity in the arts. That problem is especially acute in the State that includes New York City, which, by virtue of its great wealth, its concentration of population, its huge publishing industry, and the pre-eminence of its art critics and institutions, has long been the arbiter of the arts in the United States. The role played by the city has been adequately described in New York Panorama (1938) and New York City Guide (1939) of the American Guide Series. The short accounts that follow will therefore deal primarily with the upstate area.
In respect to the arts, upstate New York is but part of the hinterland that extends 3,000 miles west of the metropolis. Most of the writers, actors, artists, and musicians who were born within its boundaries were attracted to the center of activities in New York City and to the more mature and self-conscious environments of Europe; some of them lived long enough in the upstate area to carry its influence into their work; some returned to make its natural or its human scene the subject matter of their creative activity, in which they were joined by outsiders.
Because of its proximity to the metropolis, the upstate area was drained of its creative artists probably more rapidly and more thoroughly than other sections of the country. But in recent years it has been compensated by the widespread tendency of artists and writers to retreat from the crowded city and make their homes on its farms, among its mountains, and along its lake shores. Some of them settled in ‘colonies’; others consulted their individual tastes and desires. A complete list of these would occupy too much space; it would include Max Eastman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Stuart Chase, Waldo Frank, Maxwell Anderson, Herbert Asbury, Robert Benchley, Whit Burnett, Margaret Foley, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Corey, Ruth Lechlitner, Will Durant, John T. Flynn, Horace Gregory, Ben Hecht, Granville Hicks, John Howard Lawson, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Charles MacArthur, Burton Rascoe, William Seabrook, Vincent Sheean, Louis Untermeyer, Rockwell Kent, Margaret Widdemer, Brooks Atkinson.
Early literature in New York consisted principally of sermons, historical writings, and letters and promotional pamphlets to attract settlers and investors; the verse, such as it is, is interesting only to specialists. An important source of information are the contemporary accounts of travelers and visitors. Cadwallader Colden wrote his History of the Five Nations to correct the false impressions of the Iroquois created by the French. William Smith was the first historian of New York, his History of the Province of New York appearing in London in 1757. In his Letters from an American Farmer St. John de Crèvecœur, who farmed for a number of years in Orange County, presents a sympathetic and eloquent picture of life on the frontier and its democratic processes. Mrs. Anne Grant, in her Memoirs of an American Lady, describes the tranquil, democratic society of Colonial Albany as she knew it in her childhood.
Between the passage of the Stamp Act and the adoption of the Constitution the quill was devoted primarily to protest, propaganda, and politics. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Crisis made him the most effective of the Revolutionary pamphleteers; after his English and French experiences, he spent his last years on his farm at New Rochelle. Philip Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, described with fervent patriotism, but in verse imitative of the English neoclassical poets, the ‘atrocities’ he suffered on British prison ships in New York harbor, and wrote delicate lyrics showing a keen, sensitive awareness of natural beauty. The Federalist, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in defense of the Constitution and a strong central government, remains one of the outstanding works of American political thought.
Literary history proper may be said to begin in New York State with Washington Irving (1783–1859), its first outstanding man of letters. Salmagundi and Dietrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York are satirical treatments of life in the city in his own day and during the Dutch period. But the determining factor in his literary career, taken as a whole, was his long absence abroad. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, the two stories localized in the Hudson Valley upon which his continuing popular reputation rests, appeared in The Sketch Book, which was published in England and had English life and manners as its main theme. Thereafter Irving’s chief interest was Spanish history, though he also wrote a life of Washington and an account of the fur trade for his patron, John Jacob Astor. At home near Tarrytown on the Hudson soon after his return from Europe in 1832, Irving brought the influence of a larger cultural world to the New York literary scene; but, like his famous character, old Rip, he was not altogether at ease in the bustling surge of a growing democracy.
James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), Irving’s Salmagundi collaborator, was the lesser artist but was more responsive to the native scene, pioneering in realistic fiction, welcoming the passing of the landed aristocracy, and satirizing the Whig party. Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820) co-operated in writing the humorous, satirical ‘Croaker’ verses; Halleck ‘lamented the wane of romance’; Drake was one of the first to turn Hudson Valley scenery into accountable verse. John Howard Payne (1791–1852) collaborated with Irving in the writing of plays and achieved some reputation as a playwright, but is remembered only for his sentimental lyric, Home, Sweet Home. During his long editorship of the New York Evening Post William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) supported every liberal cause, including the right of labor to organize, and risked the life of his paper by attacking the financial oligarchy of his day. Although considered essentially a New England poet, Bryant found inspiration for lyrics in the countryside about his Roslyn home, in the Catskills, and in the Hudson Valley.
The fame of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) rests chiefly on the five Leatherstocking Tales, which comprise a biography of the scout, Natty Bumppo, one of the outstanding figures of American fiction. Vivid characters, sustained action, and a strong romantic atmosphere won for these novels a wide popular audience in both America and Europe. For his descriptions of the frontier wilderness Cooper drew upon his memories of New York State. If in these tales Cooper idealized the Indian as the ‘unspoiled child of nature,’ he can be forgiven in view of the prevailing characterization of the native as ignorant, bloodthirsty, and treacherous.
But the popularity of these romances and his sea stories has obscured the importance of Cooper’s novels of manners and social purpose. Most significant are Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1846), and The Redskins (1846), in which he deals with the antirent wars and the decline of the aristocracy in New York State. Tied to the landed gentry by birth and marriage, Cooper fought against the equalitarian tendencies of the time. ‘The notion,’ he wrote in The Redskins, ‘that every husbandman is to be a freeholder is as utopian in practice as it would be to expect that all men were to be on the same level in fortune, condition, education, and habits.’ In his view, stability in democracy depends upon the recognition of a landed aristocracy as a reservoir of culture.
In the mid-nineteenth century, New York State, unlike New England, had no ‘schools,’ no groups of writers clustered around and receiving coloration from a man or an idea. Writers here were rather isolated figures, sharing, it is true, in the common romanticism, but achieving a sharply personalized expression of that impulse. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were both born in 1819, one in New York City, the other on Long Island; but their paths lay far apart and their readings of life are antithetical.
After a contented childhood in the city, Melville spent his teens in the Albany-Troy district as a poor relation at the table of his mother’s family, the Gansevoorts. From 1841 to 1844 he sailed the seven seas on a whaler and on an American man-of-war; and then he returned home to set down his disillusions in Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. None of his books after the first won immediate popular approval; and, though he lived until 1891, his significantly creative life ended at the age of 33. Not until the post-World War years was the significance of his bitter renunciation of transcendental optimism adequately appreciated.
Whitman, on the contrary, was the last, most vociferous, and most uncritical poet of transcendentalism, affirming in discursive physical imagery his egotism and his utter faith in democracy based on an all-embracing comradeship. Whitman lived his early years on Long Island, listening to the surf, teaching school, carpentering, editing newspapers, crossing the ferry to mingle with the crowds on the streets of Manhattan. The first edition of Leaves of Grass drew the scorn of the genteel men of letters of the time; and his later verse, most of it reflecting his sobering Civil War experiences, was little better received. But appreciation of his significance in literature has steadily grown. Aroused by Emerson’s call to the youth of America, he brought America’s literary dependence on England to an end. As an old man he settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he received homage as the ‘good gray poet’ and where he died in 1892.
For the rest, the pre-Civil War literary production of the State is more notable for quantity than quality. Susan B. Warner (1819–85) and Anna B. Warner (1827–1915), sister spinsters who lived on Constitution Island near West Point, under the pseudonyms ‘Elizabeth Wetherell’ and ‘Amy Lothrop’ wrote novels heavy with moral teaching and sugared with romance. The former’s The Wide, Wide World was, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perhaps the most widely read book in nineteenth-century America. Mary Jane Holmes (1825–1907), who lived in Brockport for many years, won countrywide attention with Tempest and Sunshine and other novels. The Reverend Joel Tyler Headley, born in 1813 in Walton, wrote more than 30 volumes of biography, history, and travel, which by 1853 had reached a total of 200,000 copies; the total up to his death in Newburgh in 1897 has not been computed. The letters of Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–67), poet and journalist, and resident of Cornwall-on-Hudson, were widely popular in book form. As wife of a clergyman in Elmira, Mrs. Frances Miriam Whitcher, born in Whitesboro in 1814, wrote a number of mild satires for Godey’s Lady’s Book and other publications that almost caused her ostracism by her neighbors.
In the post-Civil War years one figure stands out, as much a product and part of upstate New York as Cooper and, though destined by his genre to a more restricted audience, of comparative stature. John Burroughs, poet-naturalist, was born near Roxbury in the Catskills in 1837, and as a boy ranged the mountains, observing birds, trees, and flowers while he steeped himself in the transcendental philosophy of Emerson. In his mid-twenties he worked in the Treasury Department in Washington, where he met Whitman. Thereafter, except for several long trips, his years were spent in his beloved Catskill Mountains, to which he belongs in much the same way as Wordsworth belongs to the Lake Country. On his farm on the west bank of the Hudson 80 miles above New York, and at his birthplace in the mountains, he wrote a book almost every two years. His development moved from a recording of the world about him, as in Wake Robin and Birds and Poets, through an interest in philosophical views of the world, to a wholehearted acceptance of the scientific approach that remained paramount until his death in 1921. Henry James said that Burroughs was ‘a sort of reduced—more available, Thoreau.’ Certain it is that he made the natural world of more interest to the American reading public than ever before. Raymond T. Fuller, in Sullivan County, and Alan Devoe, in Columbia County, carry on the Burroughs tradition today.
Upstate New York bulks large in two other fields of nineteenth-century American literature: in books for boys and girls—those read openly and those read surreptitiously; and in indigenous humor.
John T. Trowbridge (1827–1916), born in Ogden Township, Monroe County, published a number of adventure stories and Civil War novels. Frank G. Patchin (1861–1925), born in Wayland, produced more than 200 adventure books for boys and girls, including the Circus Boy series and the Grace Harlowe Overland Rider series. Charles Austin Fosdick, under the pen name ‘Harry Castlemon,’ rivaled the popularity of Horatio Alger, Jr., with his Frank, the Young Naturalist and his Gunboat, Rocky Mountain, and Boy Trapper series; Fosdick was born in Randolph in 1842, lived for many years in Westfield, and died almost forgotten in Hamburg in 1915. Edward Zane Carroll Judson (1823–86), under the name ‘Ned Buntline,’ popularized the American ‘dime novel,’ with William F. Cody, to whom he gave the name ‘Buffalo Bill,’ as his hero. Judson’s life was almost as melodramatic as one of his plots. Born in Stamford in 1823, he ran away to sea as a boy, beginning a career, notorious in his day, as infamous adventurer and political demagogue with the Know-Nothing Party, plus a very brief and ignoble period as a soldier in the Civil War. But the last 15 years of his life he spent as a respectable citizen in his native town.
In contrast to these were the books of Edward Payson Roe (1838–88) and Isabelle McDonald Alden (1841–1930); in a day when novels were considered instruments of Satan, the works of these two authors were not only permitted reading for the children of pious families on the Sabbath, but even had their place in Sunday School libraries. Roe, who lived in Cornwall-on-Hudson, was a country preacher turned author, and his elevating moral tales like Barriers Burned Away and Near to Nature’s Heart sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Mrs. Alden, native of Rochester and wife of a Presbyterian minister, wrote more than 120 volumes, most of them books for girls—Chautauqua Girls at Home, Six Little Girls, etc. Dillon Wallace (1863–1939) wrote a number of popular boys’ books based on his expeditions into Labrador. Finally, Lyman Frank Baum, one of the foremost writers for the young in the English-speaking world, who was born in Chittenango in 1856, achieved acclaim, long after he had left the State, for Father Goose: His Book and the Wizard of Oz series. Baum died in Hollywood, California, in 1919.
Best known of the humorists associated with New York State is Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings). Born in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, in 1818, Shaw attended Hamilton College, from which he was expelled in his second year. After 20 years in the West, he returned to New York, settling finally in Poughkeepsie as auctioneer, real estate agent, and politician. He began his career as a humorist in 1860 with his Essa on the Muel bi Josh Billings, and the success of his laconic essays, homely philosophy, and popular almanacs lasted beyond his death in 1885. In a similar vein was the humor of Melville De Lancey Landon (1839–1910), born in Eaton, Madison County; his ‘Eli Perkins,’ as Saratoga correspondent for the New York Commercial Advertiser, won him a Nation-wide reputation. Marietta Holley (1836–1926), living most of her life as a semi-recluse near her birthplace in Ellisburgh, New York, was popular both at home and abroad with her Samantha books—a simple, humorous portrayal of her own North Country people as observed by and reflected in ‘Josiah Allen’s wife.’ Of more limited association with the State were: David Ross Locke (1833–88), born in Vestal near Binghamton, who left the State at the age of 17 and whose ‘Petroleum V. Nasby’ letters were an important contribution to Northern propaganda in the Civil War; Bret Harte (1836–1902), author of The Luck of Roaring Camp, who was taken west shortly after his birth in Albany; and Mark Twain, once editor of the Buffalo Express and frequent summer visitor in Elmira, where he worked on several of his well-known books.
Of the upstate poets of the nineteenth century, few are worthy of note. The appeal of the sisters Davidson of Plattsburg—Lucretia Maria, born in 1808, and Margaret Miller, born in 1823—to the religious and sentimental readers of their time was enhanced by their untimely death from tuberculosis at the ages of 16 and 15. Two poems by Alfred Billings Street (1811–81) of Poughkeepsie, The Gray Forest Eagle and Lost Hunter, have given him a place among our minor poets.
Like native humor a transitional phase between romanticism and realism, the local color movement, stressing local scenes and local characters, first found expression, rather belatedly, in upstate New York in the last years of the century. Seth’s Brother’s Wife by Harold Frederic (1856–98), native of Utica, Albany editor, and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, depicts the drabness of upstate farm life. His Damnation of Theron Ware is a study of the lay and clerical leaders of the Methodist Church. David Harum by Edward Noyes Westcott, born in Syracuse in 1846, is an indulgent character study of a village banker; several publishers rejected the manuscript on the ground that it was ‘unpleasant,’ so the book was published only after Westcott’s death in 1898, but it soon won a countrywide success. Irving Bacheller’s novels, Eben Holden and D’ri and I, and his autobiography, Coming up the Road, portray the life of the North Country, where he was born in 1859. Grace Miller White’s Tess of the Storm Country is a melodramatic account of the struggles of the despised squatters on the Ithaca lake shore with the respectable folk in the hill section of town. Samuel Hopkins Adams, born in Dunkirk in 1871, has written a number of successful books, often with a social theme as background; his Siege is a sympathetic study of an upstate strike, and Revelry, national in theme, is an exposé of the ruling clique during the Harding administration. Carl Carmer, native of Cortland, describes varied aspects of upstate life and folklore in Listen for a Lonesome Drum, and in The Hudson gives a vivid account of the State’s most important river valley. Bellamy Partridge’s Country Lawyer portrays life in the late Victorian period in Phelps, New York.
Partly overlapping this local color theme are the many historical novels that have mined the rich vein of history in upstate New York. Frederic’s In the Valley is a chronicle of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution, climaxed by a graphic account of the stand at Oriskany. Cardigan by Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933), of Broadalbin, is a spirited romance with the same background. In Jerusalem the Golden Robert P. St. John tells the story of Jemima Wilkinson, the Universal Friend. In Arundel and Rabble at Arms Kenneth Roberts describes the Saratoga campaign. Roger Burlingame’s Three Bags Full chronicles the development of central New York. Walter D. Edmonds, native of Boonville, has made the Erie Canal his subject in Rome Haul, Erie Water, and Mostly Canallers. His popular Drums along the Mohawk goes back to the Revolutionary struggle. Don Cameron Shafer, a resident of Schoharie, recasts the epic of the Schoharie Valley during the frontier period in Smokefires in Schoharie. The scene of Artillery of Time, Civil War novel by Chard Powers Smith, native of Watertown, is laid in the upstate area.
During the first quarter of the twentieth century New York State was the home of several successful writers of popular novels, including Grace S. Richmond of Fredonia, Mary Shipman Andrews of Onondaga, and Faith Baldwin of New Rochelle. Marjorie Rawlings, author of The Yearling, worked on newspapers in New York City and Rochester. Paul Horgan, born in Buffalo and associated with the Rochester Opera Company for several years, won the Harper prize in 1933 with his novel Fault of Angels, which satirized the pursuit of the arts in a provincial city.
Upstate New York’s participation in the recent literary movements—realism, social revolt, muckraking, the new poetry, and the new criticism—has been the result of geographical location rather than of any indigenous stimulus. Hamlin Garland wrote much of his Middle Border series at his home in the mountains above Catskill. Theodore Dreiser came east and picked an upstate tragic figure for the principal character in An American Tragedy. Stephen Crane studied at Syracuse University but went to New York City to discover the slums and its ‘creatures that were once men.’ In poetry the renaissance championed in Boston by Amy Lowell and in Chicago by Harriet Monroe found a versatile promoter in Louis Untermeyer, who picked a mountain farm in the Adirondacks for a home. Edna St. Vincent Millay moved into Greenwich Village from Maine, but soon fled to the quiet of Columbia County hills. Max Eastman, who grew up in the Southern Tier, moved to New York to take part in the literature of revolt. Among the critics, Lewis Gannett grew up in Rochester, Lewis Mumford found a quiet spot in Dutchess County in which to write his books, and Granville Hicks selected the Grafton Mountains for his home.
The early theater suffered the brunt of moral opposition to the arts. In 1750 a company in New York City was able to run continuously for four months. Lewis Hallam’s troupe of London actors opened in a theater on Nassau Street in 1753, offering plays by Shakespeare, Congreve, and Addison. From 1758 to 1774 David Douglass operated with some security despite antagonism from the defenders of the public morals. The Dutch clergy denounced a performance of The Beaux’ Stratagem by a group of British soldiers stationed in Albany in 1757, the first dramatic production north of New York City. In 1769 Douglass brought his company to Albany for a month. As late as 1785 the Albany Gazette mentioned a petition demanding that the Common Council refuse permission to play The Taming of the Shrew in that city, on the ground that the theater ‘will drain us of our money, if not instill into the minds of the imprudent, principles incompatible with that virtue which is the true basis of republican liberty and happiness.’
During the Revolution the theater was kept alive only by the British officers stationed in New York, who, with the co-operation of women acquaintances, presented plays for six seasons. Political independence won, the call for cultural independence from England was answered by Royall Tyler (1757–1826) with his comedy, The Contrast, presented in New York on April 16, 1787. In it Jonathan, the first of the humorous Yankee characters, is a provincial boor with a Connecticut dialect; but his democratic principles, his patriotism, and his simple morality are extolled. William Dunlap (1766–1839), historian of the early stage, followed with The Father; or, American Shandyism, a comedy, and André, a tragedy.
The War of 1812 found the theater well established in New York and Albany. In 1813 John Bernard, actor-manager, opened the first theater built as such in the latter city. Moral opposition declined; a prologue promised
No vile obscenity—in this blest age,
Where mild Religion takes her heavenly reign . . .
and advised that
. . . though ’mong players some there may be found
Whose conduct is not altogether sound . . .
Your remedy is good with such a teacher,
Imbibe the precept, but condemn the preacher.
In Syracuse the top floor of a tavern was converted into a makeshift theater in 1823; the following year a theater was built in Rochester despite pleas that such wickedness be prohibited. In 1825 a modest playhouse was opened in Buffalo, its resident troupe traveling to near-by towns; the Troy Theater, in the Rensselaer House, opened with a resident company in 1828. Theaters were drab and meagerly equipped; Dunlap wrote of crude makeshift properties and of one set of costumes doing duty for the plays of an entire season.
By 1830 New York City had superseded Philadelphia as the country’s theatrical center. But the stage in the upstate towns from Albany to Buffalo retained its independent vitality, presenting plays of the same quality as in New York and attracting the same stars. The repertory was principally Shakespeare and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English drama, and many of the stars—Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, William Macready, Charles and Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree—were imported from England. The showboat Temple of the Muses opened on the Hudson in 1845, playing The Rent Day, a popular London melodrama acidly portraying the grievous condition of English tenantry, which was warmly applauded by the Hudson Valley tenant farmers then in the midst of their antirent struggle. American plays, however, were well received, the two perennials being Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Rip Van Winkle, in the latter of which Joseph Jefferson, third, starred from 1865 until 1904; and American stars like Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Booth shared the spotlight with their English colleagues. The first performance of George L. Aiken’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was given in Troy in 1852.
In the second half of the nineteenth century James W. Wallack and Augustin Daly subordinated the individual star to the well-rounded company. The eighties and nineties were the golden age of stock for both resident and road companies. Audiences were drawn by such melodramas as The Black Crook with its ‘unprecedentedly generous display of the female figure,’ Under the Gas Light, and The Drunkard interspersed with Shakespeare and other classical importations. It was in Albany’s Green Street Theater in 1861 that Adah Isaacs Menken created a sensation when, clad in tights, she allowed herself to be bound to a horse for Mazeppa’s wild ride; the incident has been called a forerunner of burlesque. The importance of Albany as a theatrical center is illustrated by the fact that the first performance in the United States of a play by George Bernard Shaw—The Devil’s Disciple, starring Richard Mansfield—was presented in that city in 1897.
The modern commercialized theater began in the nineties and 1900’s when Charles Frohman and the three Shubert brothers from Syracuse organized countrywide chains of theaters with headquarters in New York City. The new system overstressed the star at the expense of the supporting cast and produced plays with a sure-fire popular appeal. As a result a number of stage luminaries were developed—John Drew, Julia Marlowe, Otis Skinner, Ethel Barrymore; New York City was invested with monopolistic control of the American theater; the independent stock companies in Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo disappeared, and these cities became one-night stands for road companies repeating Broadway hits. This breakdown of the commercial theater upstate was made complete by the competition of the motion picture. A few resident stock companies and occasional traveling troupes, some of them acting in rural communities under tents, continued a fitful existence, performing three-year-old Broadway hits and old stand-bys like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ten Nights in a Barroom, and other melodramatic thrillers. But in the thirties these disappeared, so that, except for an occasional visit of a New York City company, the stage in the upstate area lives today only in the widespread activities of amateur civic and college play groups and in the summer theaters, including the Mohawk Drama Festival directed by Charles Coburn at Union College, Schenectady.
From the earliest days the State has contributed its share of actors and playwrights. Frances Denny, born in Schenectady, became in 1820 ‘one of America’s foremost actresses of tragic parts.’ William James Florence, born in Albany, was one of the first great Irish comedians, and his wife, Melvina Pray, was the first American comic actress to play in London. Frances Starr, native of Oneonta, made her debut in Albany in 1901. Buffalo was the proving ground for several important figures of the stage—May Irwin, Chauncey Olcott, Katharine Cornell, and others. Clyde Fitch, one of the first playwrights to give drama a native vitality, was born in Elmira.
Ben Hecht lives at Nyack; his Front Page, Crime without Passion, and The Scoundrel achieved large success. Maxwell Anderson, author of Winterset, High Tor, and Star Wagon, the latter two dealing with the upstate scene, lives in New City. Rochester produced three successful contemporary playwrights: Philip Barry, who wrote the successful plays You and I, Paris Bound, and Animal Kingdom; George F. Abbott, who collaborated in the writing of Broadway and The Fall Guy; and George S. Brooks, whose No Cause for Complaint won first prize in a national social work play contest. Robert E. Sherwood, author of The Petrified Forest, Idiot’s Delight, and other successful plays, was born in New Rochelle.
In New York City recent years have seen the rise of a number of experimental groups: the Provincetown Playhouse; the Theater Guild, outstanding in its success; the Workers’ Laboratory Theater, the Theater Union, and the Group Theater—all of which have encouraged young American playwrights and brought the social-purpose play to the fore. The Federal Theater, part of the national relief program from 1935 to 1939, introduced the stage in a variety of popular and experimental forms to a new audience of thousands in the city and in the upstate area.
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
Because settlers in Colonial New York thought of themselves as citizens of the Mother Country, early art was dominated by European influences. Even the folk art drew, though often remotely, from recollected European examples. In spring and summer itinerant portrait painters, or ‘limners,’ circulated from the cities among the rural settlements along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, carrying a stock of stiff, formal portraits, which they had painted during the winter months, with the faces left blank. For a small sum, often for food and lodging, a farmer could have his likeness introduced into a selected canvas.
The first stoneware kiln in America is said to have been that of Corselius on ‘Potter’s Hill,’ New York City. The earliest recorded maker of the softer ‘earthenware’ was ‘Dirick Benson, Pott Baker, 1698.’ Johannes Smedes blew glass—probably crude bottles and ‘bulls-eye’ window panes—on Glass Maker’s Street, now William Street, in 1654. Almost 100 years later Loedwyck Bamper started a more elaborate glassworks. The recent revival of interest in folk art has recovered many examples of early ships’ figureheads, weather vanes, gravestones, and cast or hammered iron decorations.
New York craftsmanship reached its highest achievement in the rich yet classic skill of the dour Duncan Phyfe, whose furniture is almost unsurpassed for perfection of form and beauty of ornament. He came to Albany in 1783, where he was probably apprenticed to a coachmaker, and began his career in New York City in 1792 as Duncan Fife, joiner; but a year later he was Duncan Phyfe, cabinetmaker, and such he continued to be until he closed his workshop in 1848. The characteristic cosmopolitanism of New York is reflected in Phyfe’s style, which was primarily English with French touches and American simplification.
Among the limners and painters of Dutch New York were Henri Couturier, a Frenchman, and four Duyckincks of three generations. Evert Duyckinck, who settled on Long Island in 1638, made the first stained glass in America and painted portraits of Stephanus Van Cortlandt and other notables. Jacobus Gerritsen Strycker, a prosperous farmer, trader, and official of New Amsterdam, painted a number of portraits, including one of Adrian Van der Donck, Patroon of Haarlem, which is said to be the second portrait painted in America. Pieter Vanderlyn (1687–1778) worked in the neighborhood of Kingston, painting inn signs and portraits of Dutch worthies. Among the native-born professional painters of the eighteenth century, who were associated with the English school but showed a leaning toward realism that reflected the rigorous, practical Colonial life, the outstanding New Yorker was Robert Feke, born on Long Island about 1705, who employed his unschooled talents on vigorous, statuesque, brilliantly colored paintings of Colonial families.
The painters of the young Republic were taught by Benjamin West (1728–1820), American expatriate in London, to depict historical scenes with an elevating patriotic appeal. John Trumbull (1756–1843) executed portraits of Revolutionary leaders and painted, among other historical canvases, the well-known The Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Other members of the school of West were Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), historical painter; Robert Fulton—better known for perfecting steam navigation with the Clermont; Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872), inventor of the telegraph, whose portraits and landscapes are today arousing an increasing interest; and William Dunlap (1766–1839), whose History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States records the lives and ideas of the artists of America to his own day.
Ezra Ames (1768–1836), who settled in Albany, achieved a considerable reputation for his portraits ‘characterized by a homely soundness of approach.’ John Vanderlyn (1775–1852), grandson of Pieter and born in Kingston, studied with Stuart in Philadelphia and then went abroad, where he came under the influence of David and French historical painting. His nude Ariadne was widely exhibited in America, and despite objections to its subject achieved wide popularity through the engravings of Asher B. Durand. John Wesley Jarvis (1781–1839) and Thomas Sully (1783–1872), both English born, worked in New York on portraiture and miniature painting. During this period John Ramage, Archibald and Alexander Robertson, Edward G. Malbone, and Benjamin Trott achieved remarkable success in exacting and delicate miniatures. Trott made copies of oil paintings; the Robertsons broadened their scope to include city views and landscapes for engravers; Malbone, the greatest of the group, achieved a highly refined technique.
Expansion and prosperity after the War of 1812, stimulated, especially in New York State, by the Erie Canal, produced a strong national self-consciousness. Although portraiture in the English style continued to be fashionable, the artists of the first half of the nineteenth century began to turn their attention to scenes from everyday life. Henry Inman (1801–46), who was born near Utica, important also for his portraiture, was one of the earliest to win popularity with his genre subjects, which include Picnic in the Catskills, Rip Van Winkle’s Awakening, An October Afternoon, and Mumble the Peg. William S. Mount (1807–68), born in Setauket, Long Island, the son of a farmer, traveled through Long Island in a studio built on wheels, painting his neighbor farmers, field hands, tavern keepers, and Negro workers at their everyday tasks. His work reflects American provincial life, which was at the time perhaps in its most picturesque stage.
The American landscape was made the subject of art on a large scale by the Hudson River School. Under the same romantic impulse that stimulated Irving, Halleck, Drake, and Bryant in literature and Andrew Jackson Downing in landscape architecture, artists painted Hudson Valley scenes, especially the blue Catskills, with a detailed realism that was expected to arouse awe and humility. The technical deficiency of the members of the school in color and composition does not detract from their contribution in expanding and naturalizing the field of American art. Founder of the school was Thomas Doughty (1793–1856), a self-taught artist who was driven to extreme bitterness by public neglect of his work; its leading spirit was Thomas Cole (1801–48), who began with detailed landscapes but later introduced human figures to tell his story. Chief followers of Cole were Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), who had made a reputation as an engraver; John Kensett (1818–72), who achieved tremendous popularity with his meticulous landscapes of the Hudson Valley and the Adirondacks; and Frederick E. Church (1826–1900), who left the Hudson for the more grandiose and melodramatic aspects of nature that he found at Niagara Falls and in South America and Labrador. In the footsteps of these leaders a host of ‘earnest, bearded young men’ toured the Hudson Valley on foot and set up their easels to reproduce with the natural scene the romantic sentiments that it aroused in them. This same impulse toward a detailed recording of nature inspired John James Audubon’s Birds of America.
Sculpture developed slowly in New York State. The first marble portrait carved by a native American—that of John Wells in old St. Paul’s Church, New York City—is credited to John Frazee (1790–1852); the first equestrian statue to Clark Mills (1810–83), who introduced the industry of bronze-casting into this country. Thomas Crawford (1813–57), like Mills, executed several important commissions in the National Capital. Henry Kirke Brown (1814–86), sculptor of the equestrian statue of Washington in Union Square, New York City, strove for a robust native realism, which was more adequately achieved by his gifted pupil, John Q.A. Ward (1830–1910), whose works include the Indian Hunter in Central Park, New York, Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and Sheridan in Capitol Park, Albany. The sculptured groups of John Rogers (1829–1904), tremendously popular in their day, are homely and pictorial illustrations of scenes from everyday life.
Improvements in lithography and increased newspaper and magazine publishing did much to popularize art. In 1850 Nathaniel Currier, operator of a lithograph print shop in New York City, and James Merritt Ives, artist, formed their famous partnership. Ives supervised a staff of artists, who produced prints on almost every subject of popular interest. Homes that no art had previously entered were decorated with these inexpensive prints characterized by detail, color, and action.
In the post-Civil War period a new spirit was infused into American art by the realists Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), and the mystic Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). Homer was ‘the trustworthy reporter’ of the ‘peoples, occupations and natural phenomena’ of this country; Eakins, with a deeper insight into human character, unsparingly portrayed the money-grubbing society of the Gilded Age. Ryder, on the other hand, set aside the strident world and strove to convey the inner images that nature and legend aroused in him. A versatile figure concerned with the American scene as subject matter was Frederic Remington (1861–1909), native of Canton, well known as illustrator, painter, etcher, and sculptor of small bronzes. Most popular were his melodramatic western subjects—bucking bronchos, stagecoach holdups, fights with the Indians—celebrating the ‘westward moving tide of empire.’
But these native forces were not to prevail until after American art had rounded out its education. In the second half of the nineteenth century, to a much greater extent than in the earlier period, American artists went to Munich, Dusseldorf, Paris, Rome, and other centers to submit themselves to training in the various European styles. The most prominent figure in this tradition was James A.M. Whistler (1834–1903), who went to Europe in 1856 and remained there throughout most of his life. John La Farge (1835–1910), a New Yorker of an old Jefferson County family, studied abroad and became an eclectic of remarkable range. As father of American mural painting he made it possible for the painter to co-operate with the sculptor and the architect to create harmonious interiors. La Farge was the pupil of William Morris Hunt (1824–79), who decorated the old Capitol in Albany and whose influence on American art was exerted largely through the painters who came under his guidance. Augustus St. Gaudens (1848–1907), who studied with La Farge before going abroad, brought the French influence into American sculpture in a personal style full of verve and feeling. His first important work was the Farragut monument in Madison Square, New York; his Hiawatha is in Saratoga Springs; his Captain Randall is in Sailors’ Snug Harbor, Staten Island.
The predominant foreign influence came from French art. Taking their initial impulse from the Hudson River School, George Inness (1825–94), native of Newburgh, Alexander H. Wyant (1836–92), and Homer D. Martin (1836–97), born in Albany, moved on, under the influence of the French landscapists, to a more subjective treatment of views of the Catskills, the Mohawk Valley, and the Adirondacks. French Impressionism was introduced into American art by John Henry Twachtman, whose landscapes have a remarkable luminosity, often catching in a few delicate lines the whole substance of a subject. J. Alden Weir, with some of the poetic sensitivity of Ryder, was a vigorous painter of landscapes and figures.
In 1908 a group of artists under the leadership of Robert Henri (1865–1929) exhibited their work in New York City. Although their techniques were varied, in their work ‘once again the influences of the past both native and foreign had been absorbed into an idiom of American experience.’ Because of the subjects of their canvases—downtown streets, dock scenes, prizefights, beauty parlors, pool rooms—they were called the Ashcan School; now they are referred to as the New York Realists. The group included John Sloan, George Luks, Arthur B. Davies, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, and Maurice B. Prendergast. To these may be added Edward Hopper, born and brought up in Nyack, and Charles E. Burchfield, who lived in Buffalo for a number of years. This new realism encouraged a revival of lithography and wood-engraving, represented, among others, by George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, and John Taylor Arms.
This re-emphasis of the American scene was partly the stimulus behind the founding of the Woodstock colony, the most important center of creative art in the upstate area. In 1906 L. Birge Harrison moved the summer school of the New York Art Students League to this Catskill village and brought to the place such artists as John Carlson, Walter Goetz, Henry Leith-Ross, and Frank Swift Chase. Henri came to Woodstock to teach and attracted George Bellows, Eugene Speicher, Henry Lee McFee, and John Carroll. Other early leaders were Ralph Radcliffe Whiteside and Bolton Brown. The Woodstock colony has been credited with reflecting French modernism; but its product has been more varied than such a statement implies. From it has come the vivid and melodramatic work of Bellows; the solid figures of Speicher; the quiet dignity of Leon Kroll; the analytical realism of Kenneth Hayes Miller; the keen, humorous work of Peggy Bacon; the sensitive paintings of Alexander Brook.
The Tiffany colony in Oyster Bay and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs provide invited artists with the opportunity to work free from financial worries. The activities of the Art Program of the WPA have introduced indigenous art to a vast new public in the State. A group of artists in Buffalo have in recent years revealed a strong regional interest, painting local subjects such as canal and harbor scenes; their work, exhibited in New York City, has won much favorable comment.
MUSIC
Early music in New York was part of church services; secular music was frowned upon, though settlers in the central and western parts of the State had their fiddlers who managed to make their dancing tunes heard above the stomping of heavy-soled boots on barn floors. The Shakers at Colonie and New Lebanon made singing an integral part of religious rituals and harvest celebrations, accompanying song with simple dance movements.
In New York City musical societies were organized in the 1770’s; in the upstate area they began much later, largely by the efforts of German immigrants, who brought a tradition of choral singing and a taste for instrumental music. Rochester had a brass band as early as 1817; the Maennerchor was organized in 1854, the Rochester Philharmonic Society in 1865. A local German choral group of 150 voices gave a concert of sacred music in Albany in 1830. In 1840 Professor Ferdinand Ilsely was engaged to teach music in Albany’s public schools. Ilsely presented the oratorio The Creation, in 1839 and David in 1841; in 1850, the year before Jenny Lind sang in Albany, he organized the Harmonia Society and presented Haydn’s The Seasons. Choral groups were organized in other upstate cities in the sixties and seventies, and local societies arranged for concerts by the great artists that visited New York.
With the establishment of the Philharmonic Society in 1842 and the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883, New York City laid the foundation for its pre-eminence in the musical world. But to a much larger extent than in the fine arts and the stage, music remained an activity in which large numbers of upstate people participated. The later Italian and Polish immigrant groups strengthened public interest and participation in music. Most large towns had choral groups, and even the villages sported local bands; the music teacher was an institution, instructing on the piano, the violin, and the wind instruments.
The silent motion picture increased professional opportunity for the musician, since even the smallest theater employed at least a pianist to accompany the movie and many had orchestras of several pieces. But the talking picture soon eliminated that field and the depression of the thirties added its blow by reducing the number of private pupils. The old marching bands were superseded by the modern jazz orchestras, but here a relatively few ‘name’ bands out of New York City, popularized by the radio, dominated the market. The Music Program of the WPA organized orchestras in the population centers of the State to give public concerts, thereby providing employment for musicians and creating a new impetus to musical activity and appreciation. The Buffalo Philharmonic Society, after sponsoring the WPA orchestra for several seasons, took over 54 of the project musicians and organized its own orchestra.
The musical pre-eminence of Rochester in the upstate area is supported by a long history of music activities. As a nucleus for the Eastman School of Music, opened in 1922, there was at hand, for George Eastman to purchase, the Institute of Musical Arts, established in 1913 by Herman Dossenbach, Alf Klingenberg, and Oscar Gareissen. The school’s director, Howard Hanson, has composed, among other works, the opera Merry Mount; and the faculty includes a number of other outstanding composers and musicians. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Jose Iturbi, director, has created a national reputation through its radio broadcasts.
The other cities of the State also provide opportunities for the enjoyment of classical music. Each, with few exceptions, has a civic symphony orchestra supported by its citizens and a music association that sells subscriptions for an annual concert series featuring well-known vocalists, instrumentalists, and ensembles. Concerts given by local choral societies, usually with visiting artists, are events of community-wide interest. Chautauqua has for many years made music a major part of its summer activities, bringing to the western section of the State outstanding musicians from New York and other cities. In recent years musical education for the young has been taken over by the public schools, and music activities in colleges have expanded.
As in the other arts, New York has contributed a number of nationally known figures to the roster of American musicians. Antoinette Sterling, born in Jefferson County, was famous in the nineteenth century as a ballad singer. Madam Albani, nineteenth-century opera star, although born in Canada, lived in Albany until she went to Europe to study. Among the Metropolitan Opera stars, Carmela Ponselle was born in Schenectady and Richard Bonelli in Port Byron.
