4 Sermons on Canvas

Art goes hand in hand with commerce.

—John Wanamaker

On a bitterly cold night in 1907, flames curled outside the windows of Lindenhurst, John Wanamaker’s country home near Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.1 A watchman discovered the fire and acted quickly, warning the slumbering servants inside. At a Walnut Street townhome in Philadelphia, the phone rang, and Wanamaker received the terrible news: Lindenhurst, the home of his massive art collection, was on fire. Only six years earlier, the country home and art collection of his eldest son, Thomas, burned to the ground after an alleged lightning strike.2 Soon, firefighters, a class of men Wanamaker had worked hard to reform from their nefarious ways during the Businessmen’s Revival, arrived on the scene only to be thwarted by the frigid temperatures—all nearby water sources were frozen, including the lake Wanamaker had created to help if a fire should ever break out.3

The house contained over eight hundred treasures: art, books, antique furniture, pianos, a pipe organ, glass, rugs, tapestries, and statuary from around the world. Wanamaker “directed by phone the work of the rescue,” giving instructions on what art pieces to save first.4 Fortunately, many of the paintings and statuary resided in an adjacent gallery wing, one of two additions built to house Wanamaker’s growing appetite for art. The gallery’s location allowed firefighters, servants, and neighbors to save hundreds of paintings before the aggressive flames reached them.5 Larger paintings, too heavy to carry, were brusquely cut from their frames, rolled, and pulled out of the building. But not all the art could be saved. Smaller and lighter pieces of art exited first, and, in the rush to save as much as possible, rescuers unceremoniously dropped Wanamaker’s valuables onto the snowy lawn. The art “lay in heaps, and crowds of persons . . . tramped among them unhindered.”6

The fire drew spectators from a wide area to watch the “remarkable” sight of the great house with its turrets and porches in flames.7 “A score of persons seated themselves in beautifully carved and upholstered chairs and divans saved from the house and comfortably watched the splendid spectacle.”8 The chill of the night did not interfere with their voyeurism. “They were so near to the fire where they sat that the flames kept them warm.”9 As the night wore on, the scene grew more bizarre; the New York Times reported, “A piano lay on the ground in the rear of the art gallery, and some boys drew discordant sounds from it by striking the keys with their feet. A superb bronze figure ‘Le Bucheron,’ (‘The Wood Chopper,’ by Chambard) lay prone on its back in the snow near heaps of books, rugs, cut glass, pictures.”10

Significant pieces disappeared that night—but not in the flames. Some witnesses helped themselves to the art. “Many persons openly carried off books, cut glass, and various other objects” to decorate their homes or to sell.11 In different circumstances—had the spectators paid for the art treasures or viewed the pieces in his department store art galleries—the dissemination of the items would have pleased Wanamaker. But the onlookers—especially the ones who carried off his treasures—were not the kind who likely shopped at Wanamaker’s emporium or spent time browsing his art displays. They probably missed the significance of the pieces carefully collected by Wanamaker not only for his pleasure but for the education of his store guests.

When hearing the extent of the losses that February night, the sixty-nine-year-old Wanamaker lamented to the New York Times, “It is a terrible thing to think a collection of a lifetime swept away.”12 Later, he wrote privately in his diary, “It will be a blessed thing for us if all our fires are in this world and not in the next.”13 He reminded himself that the material was transitory, and yet he regularly relied on its power for his religious work. The surviving artwork would eventually be displayed again in the private sanctuary of a rebuilt Lindenhurst and again for the public in his department store art galleries that were under construction.

Wanamaker had enthusiastically embraced a notion growing in esteem among Protestants that proposed a connection between the visual and the moral. He believed that art was a tool to shape the morality and taste of his customers.14 He asserted that “art in its highest sense is the expression of ideal beauty.”15 Wanamaker believed, as English art critic and tastemaker John Ruskin did, that art and beauty stirred religious faith, and he quoted Ruskin often in store publications.16 For Wanamaker, promoting aesthetic beauty and art served a religious purpose as a moral influence that had the power to change people. To collect art, and then share it, was another motor in his moral evangelizing machine.

The Art of Taste

The Wanamakers—John and his two sons Thomas and Rodman—obsessively collected art, although the father’s motives were sometimes different from those of his sons. John’s sensibilities were influenced by an emerging Protestant aesthetic, one rooted in architecture and fine art and one that, he believed, held didactic potency. He bought the paintings not only for his pleasure but for pedagogical purposes. As a collector, he enjoyed a variety of forms of art, and, by curating it, he hoped to engage people in a discourse of good taste that was, in his mind, cultivated and that reinforced moral living. Although he thought of taste, beauty, and morality as universal qualities and standards, they were socially constructed categories rooted firmly in white, emerging middle-class Protestantism and shaped by people like him.

John Wanamaker’s foray into serious art collecting launched the same year he opened his Grand Depot. He had traveled to Paris that year to glean merchandising ideas from the French department stores like Le Bon Marché. During his research trip Wanamaker attended his first art Salon in a city and a country that he grew to love.

During the nineteenth century, Paris lured Americans with its wide boulevards, beautiful buildings, and an electric art scene. In its recovery from the Franco-Prussian War and the devastation of the Paris Commune, France’s capital reasserted itself as an authority on good taste in fashion, art, and culture.17 Visitors thronged the Louvre and other museum spaces scattered across the city and visited the many expositions and commercial art galleries. American artists flocked to Paris, entering its art academies, opening studios, and exhibiting their work to an extent that many Americans considered Paris the capital of American art.18 Wanamaker and his sons joined other wealthy Americans who attended the Salons and purchased mass quantities of art for their collections. Not only did art collecting raise the Wanamakers’ status among their peers, but it also helped to establish them as American art connoisseurs in a league with even more affluent Americans: John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, and J. P. Morgan.

Although the Wanamakers viewed art in a variety of venues, John Wanamaker’s favorite was the official Paris Salon sponsored by the French government and later one of its prestigious art academies. A juried event, the Salon supported international “academic” artists who had gained admission into the selective constellation of academie artists by offering them an opportunity to exhibit their work where thousands of visitors would experience it. The Salon galleries hosted art of a wide variety of subjects, which were displayed from floor to ceiling and side by side. Artists jockeyed for jury medals and prominent display locations.19 Illustrated catalogs further disseminated the artwork by offering facsimiles of featured pieces.

Wanamaker started purchasing paintings from the Paris Salon and other exhibitions in 1893. The official Salon served as the primary source for his contemporary painting purchases. Over the years, he expanded his consumption of art and fashion to London. Except for the years of the Great War, his trips to Paris and various Salons became an annual affair where he would spend hours studying the art, speaking with the artists, and deciding on his purchases.

Occasionally, the Wanamakers served as patrons to Salon artists like Mihály Munkácsy, Frederick Carl Frieseke, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Support came in the form of purchasing artwork, commissioning special pieces, and paying expenses.20 Paintings and sculptures by the Old Masters also appealed to Wanamaker, but most were not available for purchase. Pieces that were available were gobbled up by an increasingly competitive group of American millionaires. To feed his longing for classic art canonized by European museums, he commissioned copies and reproductions—sometimes of entire collections.21 If a statue in the Louvre appealed to him, Wanamaker, like other wealthy American art patrons, had it copied, sometimes in plaster, sometimes in bronze, and added to his collection.22 Copies gave Wanamaker and other American collectors access to “the aura associated with original works of art.”23 He was particularly attracted to Old Masters’ depictions of Bible stories. When the opportunity arose, he purchased what he believed to be original classic paintings, only for his heirs to discover after his death that many of these paintings were forgeries or misattributed to the wrong artist.24

***

France, especially Paris, had seduced the Wanamakers in the 1870s. Family members made frequent trips for personal pleasure and store business. Les grands magasins of Paris had served as one of the muses for the Wanamaker store. In general, Americans had fallen under France and Europe’s spell of art, architecture, and fashion. For John Wanamaker, France possessed “artistic inspiration that belongs to no other nation.” Starting at the Grand Depot and expanding over the years, Wanamaker curated French goods and art as the major source for the refinement and good taste that he sold at his stores and that decorated his homes.25

Rodman Wanamaker shared his father’s passion for France. Without the duty to take over the business as the second son, he moved to France in 1889 with his new wife of French descent, Fernanda, and spent the next decade living in the capital running the Wanamaker Paris office and living a European aristocratic lifestyle. Rodman and his wife participated in the dinner parties, art scene, and social whirlwind of the American colony in Paris. They summered in Biarritz, mingled with aristocracy, and at some point, befriended Great Britain’s Prince of Wales.26 As the head of the Wanamaker Paris office, Rodman sought out merchandise, furniture, antiques, and art to funnel back to the family stores. His activity did not go unnoticed. The French government honored him with the Legion of Honor medal for his support of French trade with the United States, his commitment to French art, and his role as the president of the American Art Association in France. Later, France would recognize the senior Wanamaker by making him an officer in the Legion of Honor in 1911 to honor his hefty investment in French art and the aid he sent after the Great 1910 Flood, when the Seine River inundated much of Paris.27

The Wanamakers had an insatiable appetite for art. Every year, they sent to the United States crates packed full of hundreds of paintings, art objects, sculptures, and originals and copies of masterpieces to join their personal collections, to go on display at the store art galleries, or to be sold at the store. In 1902 alone, Wanamaker purchased the entire collection of well-known Czech artist Václav Brožík’s 300 paintings in Paris and an additional 118 watercolor paintings on a trip to London.28 Evidently, he was troubled by the opulent nature of his purchases, describing the acquisitions as an occasion when he “fell from grace.”29 His 1903 trip turned out to be only slightly more moderate: he returned from Paris with 250 paintings. Sheepishly, in a diary entry, Wanamaker worried that the Salon invoices would arrive in Philadelphia before he could personally explain the purchases to his sons.30 In addition to their own shopping sprees, the Wanamakers hired art agents to search for and obtain paintings, rare books, and sculptures for their collections.31

To house the regular inflow of new art, the Wanamakers built massive art galleries at their country and city homes and created viewing galleries in their Philadelphia and New York City department stores. Paintings and sculptures also appeared in window displays, store model homes, and special fashion and history exhibits. John Wanamaker’s church, Bethany, hosted his art on its walls for what he felt would be the betterment of church members. When Wanamaker joined the Masons late in life, he stocked the Philadelphia Masonic Lodge with artwork and rare books. These multiple exhibit spaces not only enabled Wanamaker to collect more art but also allowed him to deploy art as a “civilizing force” for moral character formation in multiple locations.

Moral Art

The idea of artwork as a moral instructor was a rather astonishing development in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, Protestantism was often at odds with art. A change took place in the early decades of the century when Protestants discovered that pictures were powerful helpmates in missionary efforts and in religious education, so they adopted images as a standard pedagogical tool.32 Historian David Morgan has traced how, from the 1820s through the 1890s, the use of images rapidly expanded, in part because of advances in technology that made the reproduction of quality images affordable.33 Wood-engraved illustrations first appeared in Bible tracts, almanacs, and school primers, followed by picture cards and books. Not only did church leaders quickly adopt images in their religious work, but they also sought cheaper and more efficient reproduction methods.34 The adoption of religious fine art reproductions in Protestant circles took longer.

Fine art was initially seen as a corrupting influence, with seductive qualities much like theater, sporting events, gambling, and other forms of entertainment. Religious art repulsed some Protestants with its depiction of Catholic iconography and practices. Gazing at a painting of Jesus was thought of as dangerous ground—it smacked of Catholicism. They feared that viewing Catholic art would cause them, inadvertently, to commit “idolatry,” one of the popular charges against Catholics.35 Anti-Catholic and nativist movements further sowed negative views.

Art began to gain reverence in Protestant circles in the 1840s when American clergy and their wealthy parishioners, especially Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians, flowed into Europe in larger numbers and experienced its famed museums, great cathedrals and their catacombs, roadside shrines, and ancient abbeys to take in the sumptuous Catholic images and spaces.36 Many of the churches and buildings were ruins, crumbling from the ravages of time and war. This gave the old buildings an alluring quality that drew American visitors, prompting European cities and towns to preserve and restore the edifices for the booming tourist trade.37 American Protestant tourists wrote about their experiences and produced a large corpus of travel journals that often relied on religious language to describe encounters with Catholic art and edifices, demonstrating a simultaneous romantic magnetism and fearful repulsion. To commemorate their tours, they brought home with them reproductions and engravings of art pieces.38

A curious tension appeared as Catholic immigrants poured into the country and Protestants vilified Catholic practices while at the same time being drawn to historic Catholic art and architecture.39 Many saw within medieval Christianity’s art and architecture a unity, simplicity, and cultural authority that they perceived to be slipping away.40 Helping to usher in this transformation were the writings of English art and culture critic John Ruskin; his American disciples James Jackson Jarves and Charles Eliot Norton; Elbert Hubbard, the founder of the Roycroft Arts and Crafts enclave in New York; and Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell.41

Ruskin’s first book, Modern Painters, which deeply influenced British and American thinkers, reached American audiences in the summer of 1847 and was widely circulated by the 1850s. His book taught American Protestants to see art not as an enemy but as an ally by “shifting the criteria of artistic judgment from the sensuous, which was suspect and unfamiliar in America, to the moral.”42 Art was not a dangerous foreign “other”; rather, it was deeply rooted in religion, morality, and nature. His work, extended by Jarves and Norton, helped drain European religious art of its negative Catholic associations by aligning Catholic art with Protestant moral values and a romantic, premodern, and simpler form of Christianity. Contemporary Catholics crowding into American cities were not associated with this form of Christianity by Protestants; rather, they were a people who had lost touch with their “purer” medieval past.43

Ruskin and other cultural critics made it possible for Protestants to find meaning in Catholic church interiors, crucifixes, and Madonnas without fear of contamination because they signified something else.44 “Beauty” usurped cleanliness as an ideal; although the two would remain intertwined, beauty had the power to evoke morality.45 For others, the opportunity to immerse themselves in beauty helped salve nerves rattled by the pressures of the industrialized world. Protestant collectors by this time had moved past their earlier rejections of Catholic art, and many, especially the wealthier collectors, now sought Catholic pieces for their collections.46 Images of Madonna and Child were particularly attractive.47 Leading art critics and magazines of the period fueled the desire by associating the experience of aesthetic beauty with the cultivation of morality. Beauty transformed into a socializing and sanctifying force.

Horace Bushnell’s book Christian Nurture arrived the same year as Ruskin’s Modern Painters. A favorite among Protestants, the book was revised by Bushnell in 1861 for a new generation of readers. Character formation had slowly developed into a focus of religious educators as views of children and domestic life changed.48 Bushnell, among a growing body of Protestant leaders, instructed that the formation of character occurred both through explicit teaching and through a subtler, unconscious form of nurture. This marked a move away from a focus on sudden conversion experiences to a more organic, slower process that happened over time in the family home and at church. This shift aligned with a developing class consciousness and the belief that the people one associated with, how one dressed, and how one looked had the power to shape one’s character.

For followers of Bushnell, the goal of religious education changed from saving souls from damnation to fostering the “self realization” of human society.49 Henry Frederick Cope served as a spokesperson for this new trajectory in education: “Hence the aim of every religious institution should be the development of character to fullness and efficiency under the best social conditions.”50 Thus for Cope and others, human society would improve through education. This idea was taken further by art lover and writer Augustine Duganne. He promoted art as a force for “moral refinement” and urged readers of his 1853 pamphlet Art’s True Mission in America to see art as a way to lift up American society by experiencing beauty.51 Art had a moralizing power, whether it was a landscape or a religious painting.

The practice of collecting and displaying art among private collectors, which had developed before the Civil War, became a marker of good taste by the end of the war.52 Art and artists were seen as respectable and as tools for reform.53 Inspired by Ruskian ideas on art and later his ideas on architecture, and shaped by Bushnell’s call for nurture, clergy and tastemakers began promoting art as a complementary path to moral improvement.54 With advances in technology and a new perspective on religious fine art, reproductions of paintings provided a focus for devotion and religious education in late nineteenth-century Protestantism.55

Rising naturally out of his work with the YMCA and Sunday school, Wanamaker’s Ruskian turn to “Christian nurture” in his department store was not a big leap. Wanamaker looked for aesthetic models that drew out religious and moral sentiments from viewers. He too believed in the moral influence of art and pictures. It is likely that he first encountered didactic images in the Landreth Sunday school he attended as a boy. Later, as the founder of a mission Sunday school, he found images a useful tool for leading his growing school. An early adopter of didactic imagery, he regularly used illustrations at his Sunday school, such as the printed “blackboard illustration” method in which an image and words embellished the Sunday lesson by providing a visual element.56 He had purchased the Sunday School Times, to make illustrated content more readily available for Bethany and other congregations.57 Following Bushnell’s emphasis on character formation and developments in religious education, Wanamaker actively participated in the groups made up of leading religious educators.

The Golden Book reflected Wanamaker’s philosophy of art and subtly raised the tension between beauty and fashion. It declared, “The truth is, that the quality of art comes out in everything we do. Whatever is well done, with sincerity and love of the work and of feeling for beauty, is art.” Beauty needed sincerity and intentionality. “Whatever is badly done, with pretense and half-heartedness and clumsiness, is far from being art. It is not only the person whose soul sings through his lips, or who puts his thoughts on canvas with a brush, who is an artist. The vehicle of expression does not matter. It is the spirit that counts.”58 It was a sentiment Wanamaker applied to his store’s educational efforts, from his historical displays to thoughtful home décor; for him, the “right” material was indeed an expression of the spirit. He believed that “art in its highest sense is the expression of ideal beauty.”59 He agreed with other followers of Ruskin that beauty possessed the power to stir religious faith: “The greatest art originated in and reinforced religious faith.”60

Just as illustrations in Sunday school lessons instilled religious teaching, Wanamaker believed that fine paintings, sculptures, and artifacts held power in their beauty, simplicity, and message. But Wanamaker held a more liberal interpretation of what constituted religious art. Carefully curated pieces that illustrated landscapes, village scenes, or a young girl sitting under a tree all displayed the values Wanamaker hoped to foster in his store guests. He argued for the importance of a painting to “preach a sermon.” Nonetheless, his measure of a painting remained whether he liked it.61 He preferred art that he deemed beautiful and that he thought could teach a lesson.62 Sometimes the message was overtly religious—images of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus or of Christ’s crucifixion. Seeing no problem or conflict with this criterion, he held himself up as the arbiter of the taste he hoped to cultivate. All the same, Wanamaker straddled two worlds in his art collection. A leader in a growing trend in Protestant aestheticism, he embraced aesthetic beauty in his public religious expressions at his store and at Bethany.

The Conquerors

One of Wanamaker’s early significant purchases from the Paris Salon was the controversial painting Les conquérants by Pierre Fritel. He first saw the painting on his visit to the Salon in 1892. It was exhibited prominently where another grand-scale award-winning painting, Georges Antoine Rochegrosse’s Le mort de Babylone (The fall of Babylon), had hung the year before, adding to its prestige.63

Les conquérants startled Salon goers. A monumentally sized canvas of sixteen by twenty feet, Fritel’s painting depicted a tightly clustered group of horsemen—two of them riding chariots—galloping down a wide, endless valley lined with scores of naked, white, presumably dead bodies, some of them children, in a devastating uniformity. The figures riding the horses were some of the most well-known conquerors from history. The central figure was a toga-draped Julius Caesar, with Rameses II and Alexander the Great alongside him in their chariots. Riding next to them, but slightly behind, were Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Napoleon in his famous bicorn hat. They were the historic conquerors of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Marching on their heels, an immense army carried the conquerors’ standards and sharp spears with red shafts reminding viewers of their killing power. A large crimson cloth standard fluttered in a breeze at the center of the painting, high above the conquerors’ heads. The faces of the accompanying army were obscured by murky shadows of dust and darkness, while an ethereal and mysterious light illuminated the bodies along the road.

The art magazine the Collector described the astonishing nature of the painting as “something more than forcible—it is horrible.” And yet, despite its horrific topic, the author argued that it somehow “exerts an indescribable spell over the morbid or cynical side of our nature.” Viewers were mesmerized by the painting, which was simultaneously repellent and magnetic. The magazine proclaimed that it was “neither conventional nor commonplace” and surmised that it “will be awarded a medal.”64 It was.

Wanamaker purchased Les conquérants a few years later, in 1899, at the recommendation of the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy, an artist who created two of the most beloved paintings in Wanamaker’s collection.65 Les conquérants, now called The Conquerors for an American audience, appeared to be a curious purchase for a man whose passion for the military went as far as dressing his youngest employees in military uniform and calling them “cadets.” He did not see a conflict.

When Wanamaker began featuring The Conquerors at his department store, viewers of the painting had assistance with interpretation, as they did with many of the store’s art and holiday displays through the years. Booklets, formal presentations, and speeches attempted to guide shoppers’ experiences of the disturbing painting. In 1905 the store newspaper, the Wanamaker Herald, included a special booklet grandly titled A Message to Mankind. The booklet argued that the importance of the painting rested not in in its horrific display of the conquerors marching through the bodies. Rather, the painting’s most distinguishing characteristic was its “meaning and message.” It claimed that the painting “images an idea” and that it was “an embodiment of history—the splendors of human ambition, and side-by-side with these their appalling cost in human blood.”66 Not shying away from religious overtones, the Herald explained, “It is the most powerful sermon ever preached on canvas against the lust of conquest . . . and the sermon is as pointed in the new century as in the old.”67 Human ambition was splendid and dangerous at the same time. The painting served as a warning to viewers about greed.

Sharing a similar point of view on the value of work and the dangers of ambition, Elbert Hubbard delivered a speech on The Conquerors at the store. He shared with the audience the first time he saw the painting at the top of one of the great staircases at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. Describing each of the emperors and their achievements, his speech turned somber and he asked the audience the question, “What have they conquered?” Then he explained, “The irony of it, men, male men have endeavored to conquer the world since the days of old, but every man who endeavored to conquer is riding to his own funeral.” Addressing the ills of individual ambition, Hubbard told those gathered, “The world will not be conquered by man or woman; it will be conquered by the Blessed Trinity of Man, Woman, and Child.” The painting, for Hubbard, spoke for the need of “the spirit of co-operation” over and against the individual. The wrong kind of ambition was dangerous.

Ministers found The Conquerors a provocative example and referred to it in their sermons—frequently enough that Wanamaker collected the sermons. Henry Fosdick, the prominent liberal minister of Riverside Church in New York City, reflected on The Conquerors in his famous essay series originally printed in the Ladies’ Home Journal and later turned into the popular book, Twelve Tests of Character.68

The painting was also used to address the tragedy of war. During the decade of the Mexican Revolution, the New York Times reproduced Wanamaker’s painting in the November 3, 1912, edition with the following headline: “A Picture That Pleads the Cause of Peace in These Days of War,” using it as a commentary for “The Price of Glory.” The Times’s description of the painting lifted parts of Fosdick’s essays without crediting him, explaining that the painting warned against “ambition” and describing it as “the desire to overtop our fellows, to have more than other people have, to be more than other people are.” Ambition, the article noted, “has left a bloodstained trail across history.” Fosdick and now the Times declared that everyone possessed ambition; it was a “primitive instinct ingrained by immemorial necessity passed from the jungle into history.” However, as The Conquerors depicted, “the consequences were terrific” for pursuing the wrong kind of ambition.69

Throughout the decades that it was on display at the store in Philadelphia, The Conquerors was often hung in common spaces and was moved to one of the store’s two concert halls for special viewings. It remained a staple display piece until the devastation of World War I, when it went into storage on the upper floors of the store and was largely forgotten, only to make a brief reappearance in 1938 to honor the women who led the Transcontinental Peace Caravan that crossed the country in a two-month period.70

Store officials considered putting the painting back on display in 1948 in the Grand Court to support peace, although they determined that it was too gruesome for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions meeting in Philadelphia. At that point, the painting had not been on permanent display in twenty years. In its heyday, it drew large numbers of visitors, and, many years later, customers who remembered the picture still asked to see it.71 A letter written to the store in 1965 inquiring about the painting received the reply that the store took it down because it was deemed “too controversial.”72 Years later, the painting was discovered hanging from the rafters on the top floor of the store.

The Conquerors was but one of the paintings that drew crowds to Wanamaker’s. At the beginning of the twentieth century, art collections at department stores successfully competed with budding American art museums, drawing thousands of visitors to view art during shopping excursions.

The Rise of Museums

Cities in the early half of the nineteenth century focused on creating cultural institutions ranging from historical societies, libraries, and theaters to art unions, art academies, and lyceums.73 Art museums were late arrivals, not fully emerging until the last half of the century. To the majority of nineteenth-century Americans, fine “art remained something suspicious and European” and suffered from a lack of popularity, slowing the creation of public art museums.74 European art faced enduring associations with decadence and a lack of morality. Scholar Lawrence Levine describes the development of American museums as moving from the “general and eclectic to the exclusive and specific.”75

Early American museums originally focused on entertainment and education for the lower classes. Dime museums offered lessons on natural history and scientific curiosities, along with the entertainment of the bizarre or grotesque, “where one could usually find, along with the bones of the woolly mammoth and the miniature steam engine carved from a cherry pit, the most lifelike waxwork tableau of some celebrated criminal in the act of committing his most celebrated crime, with the very hatchet or the very knife.”76 Museums were primarily collections of the strange and curious of scientific interest, often alongside examples of art. This was true of Charles Peale’s famous museum of natural objects and paintings, which opened in 1786, and of the Columbian Museum of Boston, which opened in 1795.77

These incipient museums inspired the provocative innovator P. T. Barnum to open his famous American Museum in 1841 in New York City. Barnum’s menagerie featured “the natural science collections of several other earlier museums” sitting next to relics from the Holy Land, among other things.78 Barnum’s museum was wildly successful, so much so that he struggled to control the crowds of visitors. When his museum accidentally burned down in the summer of 1865, he quickly rebuilt a grander version to maintain his lucrative enterprise.

Two types of museums acted as models for American efforts. European fine art museums, with their core art treasures derived from nationalized royal, ecclesiastic, and aristocratic collections, resided in converted mansions and palaces.79 The other type of museum concentrated on education, with collections more broadly defined than fine art; they centered on manufacturing and craftsmanship. These museums arose out of the great exhibitions and continued the tradition of displaying a variety of textiles and ceramics while positioning themselves as arbiters of good taste for visitors as well as retailers.80 The South Kensington Museum in London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) exemplified this model.81 Following in the footsteps of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, it opened in 1857; the museum developed displays on “good taste,” and, in an adjacent area, showcased a curated room of “bad design.”82 Following this example, the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts was founded in 1824 by William Keating, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Samuel Merrick, a clerk. They created the institute to teach people about the advances and developments in mechanical sciences through exhibits, classes, and a comprehensive library.83

Several fine art museums opened in 1870 in Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and attempted to emulate European collections.84 However, without the historical advantages of European museums’ royal or aristocratic collections and buildings, fledgling American art museums gravitated toward education and the display of contemporary art.85 The United States’ first international exhibition in Philadelphia, the Centennial, ushered in an early attempt at establishing an art museum. In addition to erecting temporary structures, fair planners included a provision for constructing a permanent building, Memorial Hall, to house the fair’s art collection. Items were purchased from fair exhibitors to populate the new museum’s collection, but the space mainly showed European and Japanese examples of industrial, home, and decorative art objects, much like the collections in the South Kensington Museum. Another museum opened in the city in 1897. Called the Philadelphia Museum, most people knew it as the Commercial Museum. It was started by William Wilson, a botanist, after he visited the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Thrilled by what he witnessed in Chicago, Wilson wanted a place to house the exhibits from the 1893 fair and from future world’s fairs to educate Americans about other countries and the possibilities for business. To stock the new museum, he had twenty-five boxcars transport items from Chicago’s exposition. Each year, he added more to the collection from fairs held around the world.86 But the Franklin Institute and the Commercial Museum were not fine art museums, and it would be some years before Memorial Hall took on this role. When Philadelphia’s first art museum finally emerged, it concentrated less on fine art in its earliest days and would not augment its fine art collections until the 1920s.87 While Wanamaker supported, financed, and provided leadership to the fledging Philadelphia art institutions, he also felt he could be more successful with offering fine art to the community.

At the outset, American department stores did a better job than smaller museums. While museums emphasized the education of the masses, they had trouble reaching them. Stores promoted themselves, like the exhibitions, as a place of culture and learning as well as fantasy. Displaying art furthered this goal.88 Department stores successfully democratized art by appealing to diverse audiences. Stores combined the attractive characteristics of world’s fairs and early museums. For visitors, a department store furnished a broad range of curated decorative household goods, textiles, and the latest fashion—all available for purchase and with no admission charge.

Many of the department store founders collected art and deemed their stores a perfect place to display their personal treasure troves, while some presented rich historical and scientific displays.89 Le Bon Marché and Selfridge’s attracted visitors with their inventive displays of art and technology—Harry Selfridge famously suspended the plane that Louis Blériot used to fly across the English Channel.90 Marshall Field’s collections earned his store the moniker of Chicago’s “Third Museum.”91 Morton May of May Company displayed over twelve hundred sculptures from his Greek and Roman collection in a Washington, D.C., store. Yet the dominant and earliest American department store maestro of art display was John Wanamaker. Most department store art galleries did not take off until after the turn of the century.92

Buying and displaying art in his store more extensively and earlier than his counterparts, Wanamaker introduced a wide range of people to the fine arts with eye-catching and well-designed displays.93 By creating his own public art galleries, Wanamaker presented himself as having the authority to curate artwork that was morally uplifting and in good taste. It also communicated what he valued in art.

Wanamaker hung his first painting in the men’s tailoring department in his first store, Oak Hall. The Chestnut Street branch of John Wanamaker & Co. featured a collection of paintings on the walls. In 1881 Wanamaker carved out a devoted space in the Grand Depot for a store art gallery. He added the feature to his New York branch when he purchased it in 1896. With the construction of the new flagship store in Philadelphia, Wanamaker committed a huge amount of floor space to form a series of art galleries large enough to hold a significant portion of his collection, including his most treasured pieces. By 1914, he added additional gallery space in his New York City store.

Wanamaker continued to scatter art pieces throughout the store, as in the case of The Conquerors and large statues. For example, he placed two bronze lions from Paris at the entrance of his millinery department in 1904 in the partially finished building. A sculpture of Joan of Arc graced the Market Street entryway to the store. For the celebration of Joan of Arc day, the statue moved to anchor various displays. In 1924 the statue appeared in one of the Wanamaker store windows surrounded by French flags.94 Copies of statutes from the Louvre were found throughout the store.

Wanamaker bragged that his art galleries outstripped American art museums. While his claim could appear to be mere braggadocio, he was addressing the real differences between early art museums and the capabilities of his art galleries. For a time, his claim was true. The display of his art collection on the higher floors of his store was meant to do the work that Wanamaker felt museums were failing to do: to bring in a large variety of people to experience the edifying power of beautiful and inspiring curated art.

Wanamaker regularly advertised his store’s connections with the Paris Salons, telling his customers, “Probably no other store in the world . . . has gone to the Paris Salons and purchased the pictures best worth having to decorate its walls.”95 Not only did he acquire a fine collection of paintings and art objects, but he also rotated the artwork to alleviate the potential for boredom and added educational exhibits to the rotation. Special exhibits enabled him to entice visitors with a menu of new visual experiences. Those wanting to see the famous paintings of Europe only needed a trip to the store, where he arranged “reproductions of all the beautiful Nattier portraits in the galleries of Versailles.”96 Invitation-only dinners served as another way to present the art treasures. The store also printed yearly catalogs of its art shopping sprees, with black-and-white reproductions and descriptions of the pieces on high-quality paper.

Wanamaker boldly called his store a “sight teacher of history, industry and the arts.”97 To accomplish this goal, he rebuilt historic structures in the store, antique homes, old-fashioned sweet shops, and a reproduction of a Philadelphia shop and cottage.98 Wanamaker also curated special collections of fine art, objects, and reproductions for the public’s education. One of the first themed events occurred in 1895 when Wanamaker celebrated “Monarchs and Beauties of the World” by exhibiting more than six hundred photographs of France, hundreds of miniatures, dozens of paintings of rulers, and a reproduction of the world’s largest diamond in what Wanamaker claimed to be “educative exhibits of art and life and history.”99 Another display featured the life and military career of Napoleon. This instructive presentation traced Napoleon’s early life in poverty, placed on view how his signature had changed over time, and illustrated his experiences on the military battlefield.100 Napoleon’s rags-to-emperor story mirrored Wanamaker’s own rag-to-riches biography.

The Philadelphia art museum’s location and admissions charges also contributed to Wanamaker’s feelings of superiority. Situated in Fairmount Park, far from the city center, the museum was inconvenient to visit. Wanamaker’s art galleries did not charge admission, arguably offered better art in this period, and were located near several convenient transportation options. Wanamaker actively competed with local art museums by advertising that his store was “open to all for the coming” and that he had converted his stores into “vast public museums.”101 Indeed, he bragged that his store art galleries welcomed more visitors than most state or local museums. They even, he argued, beat New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in 1910 claimed nearly a million visitors while “the attendance at Wanamaker’s reaches many millions of visitors!”102

The Art of Display

Long a leader in department store merchandise display, Wanamaker pioneered a new attitude in art display with the help of his son Rodman, his close associate Robert Ogden, and his store art directors. While other department stores developed picture galleries as a place to display art for sale or as a sampling of the store owners’ private collections, Wanamaker did both. Lithographs, paintings, and art objects for sale were found in other parts of the store scattered throughout model home galleries, situated in display windows, leaned against walls and cabinets, or displayed in the model rooms of the furniture store.103 Reproductions of paintings from his collection appeared on Crystal Tea Room menus, Bethany church programs, store publications, and souvenirs.104

Wanamaker’s display techniques for his fine art differed from the those of the great exhibitions and art museums, in which curators crammed multiple paintings into the available wall space and clustered sculptures in the center of packed rooms. While he employed a similar approach in his home galleries, like the one at Lindenhurst, where the size of his collection necessitated using every available inch of wall space, he took a different tack for his department store. In the store, there was ample room to give his curated collection of artwork dedicated space. Wanamaker and his team avoided visual cacophony by hanging paintings individually or, in the case of smaller pieces, in groups of no more than two, one above the other.105 Nearly all the paintings were hung at eye level, inviting an intimacy with the paintings. Tracts of blank wall between frames and individual lamps isolated the paintings in a pool of light to define and focus visitors’ viewing.106 This display technique also heightened a sense that the paintings in the gallery were important for the viewer to see without distraction.107 Small brass plaques identified the title and artist of each artwork. Overall, gallery visitors encountered less visual clutter than they would find at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same period.108

Set apart from the hubbub of the busy sales floors, the store art galleries provided a quiet oasis on the upper floors of the thirteen-story building, granting shoppers a quiet place of contemplation inside a commercial and urban world.109 The Philadelphia galleries occupied parts of the seventh and eighth floors, and over the years moved to make room for special exhibits and additions. On the eighth floor a gallery was placed near the entrance of the store’s elegant Crystal Tea Room and was dubbed the Rendezvous. Elegant chairs and cushioned benches scattered throughout the area invited visitors to linger among paintings and served as a comfortable spot to wait for friends before entering the Tea Room. A reserve gallery operated on the ninth floor. Large oriental rugs softened footfalls and added a touch of elegance to the gallery.

The main galleries consisted of six rooms where hundreds of paintings hung on the walls, and elegantly draped islands were set up in the middle of larger rooms to accommodate more art. Wanamaker had the artwork mostly organized by country of origin, following the pattern of his personal galleries, with sections labeled Italian, English, French, Flemish, or Dutch. Special areas mixed artwork for drama. The reserve gallery served as a home for his largest paintings, among them Munkácsy’s, and as an overflow space for the treasures picked up during Parisian shopping sprees. Bronzes and statuary had their own gallery. By 1926, the reserve gallery housed ninety-five paintings.110 Other paintings in the room focused on Christian themes: Benjamin West’s Christ Blessing Little Children, a fifteenth-century Flemish painting titled Portrait of a Lady, H. O. Tanner’s Behold the Bridegroom Cometh, Virgin and Child and St. John, and a painting called Italian Interior of a Cathedral.111

Ornate metalwork gates marked the entrance to the main galleries. The gates framed the galleries as liminal space set apart from store business and demonstrated the paintings as objects of high value, needing to be locked up in the interior of the store.112 Moving past the iron gates, visitors first encountered a succession of religious paintings and objects that positioned the gallery experience as a reverent and religious one. The first visible painting, The Holy Family by the School of Pietro Perugino, showed Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. Next to the painting stood a magnificent six-foot-tall reproduction of the great Strasbourg Cathedral Clock.113 The clock depicted the four “ages” of humankind—childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age—four times an hour. As the clock tolled the quarter hour, the clock sprang to life when a small door above the clock face opened and figures representing Jesus’s twelve disciples emerged. Each disciple turned to Jesus as a cock crowed three times—a reference to Peter’s denial of Jesus in the Gospels.114 Two angels at the front of the clock represented Judgment Day. Wanamaker had created a place where everyday time was suspended—it was the time of the ages, and it was holy time. The gallery featured a mixture of paintings from the Salons and Old Masters (sometimes copies). Landscapes and portraits were displayed next to Madonna and Child paintings and depictions of New Testament stories. One area of the gallery displayed Lely’s Lady with Curls, Bylert’s Lady with White Collar and Woman in Orange Dress with Parrot next to Carlos Dolci’s Madonna and Child and Gainsborough’s Landscape with Cattle. Another wall placed together Revez’s Husking Corn, Fortuny’s Religious Procession, and Weenix’s Sheep and Shepherd.115 Religious paintings were sprinkled among depictions of everyday life and beautiful landscapes. Statuary punctuated open floor space in the gallery.

Although the Wanamaker store galleries moved from time to time as departments were added or rearranged, the pictures cycled regularly between his homes and church. For many years the main gallery resided on the eighth floor just outside Wanamaker’s office. If store guests harbored any doubt of the importance of the galleries to Wanamaker, their location offered a firm answer. In the middle of the art gallery was a door marked “Founder’s Office” with Wanamaker’s portrait hanging beside it.116 On one side of his office door was a work purportedly by Titian and on the other side were three religious paintings—two depicting the Virgin and Child and the other depicting Mary and Joseph’s flight into Egypt from the Gospel of Matthew.117

Wanamaker did more than display paintings and art; he also wanted to instruct the viewer and did so by providing educational booklets that explained prominent pieces of art. One booklet counseled visitors to the galleries, “The Wanamaker Picture Galleries bid you welcome at all times. They are in close relation with the Paris Salons, and with all art centers, and always have something new to show you.” In case a visitor was uncertain of the importance of what they were viewing, they were told, “Art students and collectors might seek the country over in vain for a better exemplification of all that is authoritative or representative in art than is yearly gleaned from the two Paris Salons by the Wanamaker Store; and its gleanings, of course, take in other fields as well.”118 The paintings were important, and, by proxy, the store guest was important by viewing the paintings. The art displays were then advertised, with large exhibits accompanied by interpretative booklets “explaining the significance of the art.”119 Featuring quality reproductions of the art on high-quality paper, the booklets allowed shoppers to continue their relationship with the paintings at home for further study and contemplation.

Department Store Christ

When the fire broke out at Lindenhurst, Wanamaker’s summer home, on that frigid night in 1907, the first art pieces saved by his butler were the two gigantic paintings Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha. To save them, the butler cut the canvases out of their frames, rolled them, and carried them outside to safety (likely with help). They were Wanamaker’s most precious possessions and, at the time, two of the most well-known paintings in the world created by the prominent Hungarian and Catholic artist Mihály Munkácsy. Brought to the United States with great acclaim, Munkácsy’s work would become some of the best-known art to American audiences in the nineteenth century.120

The two paintings that Wanamaker purchased depicting Jesus’s Passion, Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha, proved to be some of the most dramatic additions to his art collection. Wanamaker acquired Munkácsy’s Christ before Pilate in 1877 and Christ on Golgotha in 1888.121 He paid the highest price ever paid for a painting in America at the time, explaining that he found the paintings particularly moving.122

Munkácsy’s improbable rise to stardom in the art world started in 1870, when his painting Last Day of a Condemned Prisoner won a prestigious gold medal at the Paris Salon that year. Orphaned at an early age, Munkácsy first apprenticed under an itinerant painter before studying at the Vienna Academy in 1865. Following his time at the academy, he traveled to Dusseldorf to study with Ludwig Knaus, a well-known genre painter.123

A visit to Paris in 1867 introduced Munkácsy to realism—an approach to painting that emphasized painting everyday life instead of romantic and idealized pictures. He used the new style for his medal-winning painting. Two years after his successful debut at the Salon, he moved to Paris and married the widow of the Baron de Marches. The marriage opened aristocratic circles to him, where he excelled in charming the Parisian elite. Casting himself as a mysterious figure and artist, he continued painting and produced Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters in 1877 and sold it for the hefty sum of thirty thousand francs to the art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who would later sign him to an exclusive contract. For the next twenty years, Munkácsy painted across several genres including landscapes, historical subjects, scenes of wealthy domestic life, and portraits. His works were cherished among well-heeled collectors in the United States and Europe. Bouts of ill health and mental instability that had plagued him all his life finally took their toll, and in 1896 he was committed to a mental institution, where he died four years later.

Despite his success in France, Munkácsy did not achieve celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic until the 1880s, when he painted two enormous canvases that depicted scenes from Christ’s Passion. The art dealer Sedelmeyer helped secure a studio space substantial enough to hang a painting of nearly three hundred square feet.124 The first painting, Christ before Pilate, went on display in 1881 at Sedelmeyer’s home in Paris after the Salons rejected it as a late entry. The painting immediately garnered high acclaim.125

In Christ before Pilate, Munkácsy captured the story told in all four Gospels of Jesus’s trial and sentencing before the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate. While the Gospel accounts conflict on the details of the story, Munkácsy created a large-canvas depiction of the story. His version portrays Jesus standing in a gleaming white robe before an enthroned Pilate in Herod’s palace. Pilate, also in white, is the other central figure in the painting. Playing to a desire for historical paintings of Jesus, and of a Jesus who was not effeminate, Munkácsy found a middle way with a historical narrative painting that featured a strong yet tender Jesus—a popular combination in the late nineteenth century.126 Depicted as European, Jesus stands against the backdrop of a Middle Eastern crowd representing the Sanhedrin. The painting features an animated crowd scene of men and a lone woman holding a child. The facial expressions and body language of the crowd are clearly visible and tell the story of a variety of reactions to Jesus’s trial and death. The actions performed by the people in the crowd invite viewers to identify or reject the emotions on display.127 The men in the painting appear angry, agitated, thoughtful, and worried, while the woman holding the child shows sympathy. Striking in its use of shadow, the otherwise dark painting gifts a glimpse of blue sky and Jerusalem beyond the immediate scene. Though Munkácsy was Catholic, both scenes fit well into the Protestant repertoire of Jesus images by illustrating a Bible story and not focusing too much on the body. Sedelmeyer took the painting on a tour of the European capitals, which reaped more praise and acclaim for the painting and its artist.

Munkácsy finished his second work, Christ on Golgotha, in 1884. A powerful painting in its size, scale, and storytelling, it depicts Jesus’s last moments on the cross before his death. Using more vibrant colors in this painting, Munkácsy employs bright blues and reds to direct viewers to take in different parts of the painting’s story. Jesus, illuminated from a heavenly light above and draped in white, hangs on the cross while three grief-stricken women (Jesus’s mother, Mary, as well as Mary Magdalene and Salome) gather at his feet and a disciple stands nearby, aloof. One woman motions to a young man with a ladder, desperate to take Jesus off the cross, while two Roman guards watch the scene unfold from different vantage points. The two thieves hanging on crosses frame Jesus’s broken body and provide contrast with their slack bodies and bowed heads. Jesus’s face looks skyward toward a heavenly light; his body, despite its abuse, glows. Some members of the crowd cry out, others look on in awe, while others turn their backs or appear indifferent, and one man runs away.

Christ on Golgotha debuted on Good Friday, again at Sedelmeyer’s home, but now in an addition built for the sole purpose of displaying the two mammoth canvases together.128 Unbelievably, Christ on Golgotha eclipsed the first painting in praise and renown. Once again, Sedelmeyer arranged a major tour, making the painting and its author one of the most famous pairs in Europe. With the European capitals conquered, Sedelmeyer turned his attention to the United States and began planning what would prove to be by far the most successful presentation of the paintings to an enthusiastic and broad audience.

Sedelmeyer decided to launch an American tour in New York City. Finding the right venue to display the paintings posed a challenge. Eventually, he secured the Twenty-Third Street Tabernacle, a space in the city with a conflicted past. Originally an armory, the building was rented by the Reverend Albert Benjamin Simpson in 1881 to open what he called the Gospel Tabernacle, an outreach church to immigrants and the working class. The congregation left when it outgrew the armory.

Following this, a controversial businessman and showman, Salmi Morse, had secured the Tabernacle to perform a ten-act play he wrote on the end of Jesus’s life, titled A Passion Play: A Miracle Story.129 After being run out of San Francisco, in part for the play’s content, Morse decided to try New York. Investing a large sum of money to renovate the Tabernacle for his production, he suggested that it would become a “shrine” once he presented the play in the space.130 City authorities refused to issue a theatre license, and shortly afterward, Morse mysteriously turned up dead. The space became available for rent again.131 When Sedelmeyer secured the Tabernacle to display Munkácsy’s paintings, art historian Laura Morowitz explains, it was essentially an exchange of Morse’s Passion play for another—in this case, Munkácsy version.132 It was also the replacement of one business proposition mixed up with religion for another.

Munkácsy and his paintings arrived in New York City on November 14, 1886. The New York press greeted them at the dock. Crowds clamored to see the paintings and paid an admission fee for access. The reviews were mixed. While some visitors reported religious experiences while viewing the mural-sized paintings, a New York Times reporter warned that the paintings showed evidence of business taking over religion. Charging an admission fee struck the reporter as incongruous with the subject of the painting. The association with commerce hung over the popular and profitable religious paintings from the beginning. But the crowds came anyway to spend time studying the stunning paintings, and religious leaders who viewed the paintings went on to write about them. Many attendees traveled from afar to see Munkácsy’s masterpieces. Wanamaker was one of them.

When Wanamaker visited the paintings, he arranged to meet Munkácsy. From their meeting, they forged a friendship that lasted the rest of Munkácsy’s life. Wanamaker commissioned the artist to paint a portrait of one of Wanamaker’s daughters. Later, the store hosted Jan Munkácsy, the painter’s nephew, a violin virtuoso.133

In 1888 Harper’s Weekly featured a full-page advertisement selling copies of Christ before Pilate. The advertisement boasted that to buy a copy of the famous painting was to own a reproduction of a $120,000 painting—a startling sum in 1888 and arguably the most ever paid for a painting in the United States—and to have a reproduction that “dense crowds” in Europe and the Americas lined up to view.

Clergy testimonials bolstered the importance of the artwork and were published in an accompanying booklet to demonstrate the paintings’ religious merit and authenticity. The Reverend Charles P. Deems claimed, “The face of Christ is a stroke of genius,” and the eminent Presbyterian New York City minister Reverend Henry J. Van Dyke said, “The picture of ‘Christ Before Pilate’ . . . is potent, intense, throbbing with life.” Readers were told that the sales of the image had been high and that it would make “a beautiful holiday present.”134 Ferdinand French, an associate superintendent for Bethany’s Sunday school, wrote a multipage essay on the paintings, possibly as a teaching tool for Sunday school students who went to the store to see the paintings. French presented a brief history of the paintings and the painter, claiming that Munkácsy’s artwork emerged from his brush after careful study of the “word of God.” “No one has any knowledge of the face of our Lord Jesus Christ,” even painters.135

Wanamaker purchased Munkácsy’s paintings in 1887 and 1888, for what was claimed to be the highest sum paid for a painting at the time. The claim would become a part of the advertising. Wanamaker extended the public tour of the paintings; he sent them on a tour of sixty-two churches in the United States.136 Again, admission was charged to view the paintings. Wanamaker said that the admission covered the cost of the tour and was split with the hosting congregations.137

After the tour, Wanamaker installed the paintings at Lindenhurst for his personal viewing. They became his favorites, and when the house burned down in 1907, he was most concerned that those two paintings be rescued. Following the fire, Wanamaker had them restored to their original size and, perhaps in a move to protect them, installed them in the art galleries of his Philadelphia store. At times, he had to defend or at least explain his display of the paintings in his store to friends who worried about mixing sacred art with the commercial world.138

The elder Wanamaker preferred a devotional setting for the paintings and refused to display them in the Grand Court. Instead, customers would be directed to the quiet of the art galleries for viewing during the Lenten and Easter seasons. They were hung in a large room, the Munkácsy Gallery, on the ninth floor. The paintings were placed at eye level, from floor to ceiling giving viewers the impression they could walk into the painting and be among the spectators surrounding Jesus before Pilate or at the foot of the cross where Jesus was crucified. It was a room Wanamaker was known to visit alone at the beginning of the business day to spend some time contemplating the last days of Jesus’s life.139

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Munkácsy was only one of several artists that the Wanamakers befriended and supported. Henry Ossawa Tanner had moved to Philadelphia when he was twenty-one to train with Thomas Eakins and was one of the first African Americans to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He left Philadelphia for Paris in 1891 and began submitting his work to the Paris Salon. Rodman Wanamaker likely met Tanner in 1895, when Rodman served as the president of the American Art Association of Paris and the artist joined the organization.140 John Wanamaker had also sponsored Tanner’s teacher Thomas Hovenden.141

In the summer of 1896, after six months of painting, Tanner completed his dramatic painting The Resurrection of Lazarus and was later awarded a medal at the Salon. The painting attracted Rodman Wanamaker’s attention when he saw it at the artist’s studio. Rodman noticed what he called an accidental “Orientalism” in the composition.142 Rodman’s use of “Orientalism,” according to art historian Anna Marley, “was most likely referring to the work of nineteenth-century French painters . . . who used architectural elements and ethnic details derived from their travels in North Africa and the Near East to depict aspects of native cultures in their paintings.”143 The success of The Resurrection of Lazarus led Rodman to sponsor a trip to the Holy Land in 1897, where Tanner was to research the landscape, architecture, and atmosphere of the Holy Land to incorporate into future biblical paintings.

Only the year before, in 1896, Rodman had convinced his father to make a six-month pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The trip had a profound effect on John Wanamaker. It kindled within him deep emotion, so much so that on his visit to the Holy Sepulcher he bribed the tomb’s attendant to leave, and, he recalled, “Yielding to an irresistible temptation, I stretched myself out on [Jesus’s] tomb.”144 Perhaps Rodman believed that a similar trip for Tanner would put the artist in touch with the deep emotion his father experienced. Tanner’s trip followed the route most American tourists took by traveling to Cairo, Jerusalem, Port Said, Jaffa, Jericho, the Dead Sea, and Alexandria.145

Rodman financed a second trip for Tanner in 1898 and 1899, allowing the artist to draw inspiration for what would be a series of religious paintings that elevated his career. Tanner returned to Paris, purchased “oriental” objects and costumes from the estate of Mihály Munkácsy, who had recently died, and began to paint a series of religious paintings that secured his reputation as an in-demand religious artist. The Wanamakers purchased many of the paintings inspired by Tanner’s Holy Land trips and displayed them at both of their department stores. Among the works of art displayed were Tanner’s Christ and His Mother Studying the Scriptures, Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet, Mary Magdalene Returning from the Tomb, and The Holy Family. Other pieces by Tanner hung in several of the Wanamakers’ homes.146 The largest canvas Tanner painted, Behold the Bridegroom Cometh (also called The Wise and Foolish Virgins), had been commissioned by Rodman and was displayed in both stores.147

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While the Philadelphia store had Munkácsy and Tanner, New York had the paintings of James Tissot, at least in reproductions. A French artist famous for his paintings of everyday life, Tissot changed his artistic direction when he experienced a moving vision of Jesus at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris during Mass. After the experience, he decided to create an illustrated New Testament. Like Tanner and other artists before him, he traveled to the Holy Land in an attempt to make his paintings historically authentic; the trip resulted in a collection of 350 watercolor paintings picturing key moments in the biblical text. The watercolors went on tour in Europe, premiering in Paris in 1894, and in the United States as other epic pieces of religious art did throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing eager crowds. The Wanamakers were not able to purchase Tissot’s collection. The Brooklyn Museum acquired the complete collection of Tissot’s paintings in 1900 after a community fundraising effort through subscription.148 The Wanamaker store instead exhibited high-quality reproductions of the paintings in the art gallery.

Tissot’s project resonated with the Wanamakers the way Tanner’s work had. They named their New York store art gallery the Tissot Art Gallery and made a deal to publish the artist’s epic series in a deluxe four-volume set: Tissot’s Life of Christ. While not the first to publish the series, Wanamaker made it accessible by offering financing. To make the extravagant purchase possible—volumes ranged in price from thirty to fifty dollars—Wanamaker invited shoppers to join the “Wanamaker-Tissot Club” and to buy the volumes in monthly installments. It was a popular item. Purchase of a Tissot set was newsworthy in small towns, with local papers reporting the arrival of each volume, usually obtained by the local minister.

Advertisements stressed the authenticity of the pictures as a central selling point, emphasizing that it had taken Tissot ten years to complete the paintings and noting his status as “a devoted believer,” ignoring the fact that Tissot was a committed Catholic. His travels to Syria and Palestine, to places where Jesus had “walked and talked,” lent weight to the authenticity of his paintings, depicting the “Holy Land” as a place suspended in time. Tissot’s artwork, the advertisement claimed, recorded “the men, women, and children” and “the rocks and hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, stream, villages and roadways that Jesus knew,” making them accessible to viewers of his paintings.149 The concept of authenticity invited the viewer to make an emotional connection with the story of Jesus.

Jesus in the Grand Court

After his father’s death, Rodman initiated a new Lenten-Easter tradition at the store. An Episcopalian who had heartily embraced the Gothic Revival movement’s penchant for opulent interior decorations to communicate spiritual emotion, Rodman moved Munkácsy’s two famous paintings into the Grand Court during the four weeks of Lent leading up to Easter. To make the paintings stand out in the visually busy Grand Court, store designers hung dark navy velvet curtains along the walls just above the court’s arches, suspended above the first floor on opposite sides, forming an informal trinity with the Great Organ. Given the history of the paintings’ public consumption, they continued to have a profound effect on visitors wherever they were located. At the ground level, large standing markers gave a brief history of each painting and of Munkácsy’s life. Two allegorical shields ringed in lights, symbolizing the Bible, hung on either side of the paintings, and a line of silk pennants adorned the sides of the court. The placement of the paintings in the court invited shoppers to enter the story of Jesus’s last days and last breath.150

A store advertisement for the “pre-Easter season” displays of Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha in the final days of World War II utilized gothic typeface. A backdrop of the Great Organ’s pipes reminded readers of the popularity of the paintings and how “thousands” came to the store to see them every year. The advertisement noted that it was “an impressive sight to watch those gathered in the Grand Court” to see the paintings with “respectful mien” and an “attitude of reverence.” The writer of the ad interpreted this outlook as being generated by the universality of the paintings. Who were these visitors? “Some come to study the technique of the artist,” but the majority “come because these paintings arouse some inner emotion, thought or feeling,” and “offer inspiration.” As a result, viewers “gained spiritual enrichment.” The advertisement promised visitors to the store and its famous painting that those who came to visit and took a moment to look at the painting would participate in sending a communal “silent prayer” that had the power to break through the “shadows” and bring forth peace.151

Although there appear to be no extant letters to the Wanamaker store from the early days expounding on the power of the paintings, letters from the 1940s and 1950s demonstrate how customers who viewed them in the Grand Court were moved by the painting. One visitor from Ohio wrote to the store after his visit to see whether he could acquire reproductions of the paintings and a biography of the artist.152 Another visitor, Walter Galbraith Dunlap, conveyed how popular the paintings were. Dunlap’s letter, which was written in the 1940s, demonstrated how the paintings in a public commercial space still managed to operate as religious devotional objects: “Each year thousands of people pause, as they pass through the Grand Court of Wanamaker’s Store in Philadelphia, at Easter Time, and stand in wonder as they view the two great paintings of Munkácsy—Christ Before Pilot [sic] and the Crucifixion.” Dunlap observed that the shoppers who stopped to view “the magnificence of the artistry” did not do so by happenstance. Instead, they made a pilgrimage:

They are people who annually make a special trip to the store to see again the paintings and draw anew some message, some inspiration from their grandeur and solemnity. . . . Perhaps here too we can make a grand venture in Faith—that somehow out of all the turmoil of the age, out of all the depths of degradation to which man seems to have sunk, we can look out from the Court of Pilot [sic], across the ghastly hill of Calvary to the hope and sunlight of a distant Easter. To an Easter where the best that we can be will triumph over the worst that we often are.153

Surrounded by the latest in fashion, Dunlap had described a religious experience—one he felt confident those around him who gazed in the same direction shared. Wanamaker may have disapproved of the paintings hanging in the Grand Court, but Dunlap’s meditations validated much of the religious work Wanamaker did inside his store.

William F. Hamill Jr. reached out to the president of the store in April 1950 to share his Lenten experience of the Munkácsy paintings, calling them “beautiful murals.” Hamill visited the paintings regularly each Lenten season. Standing in the busy Grand Court, he would steal “a few moments in Silent Meditation and prayer.” He wrote, “I have overheard many awed comments on these pictures, many of them indicating a new appreciation and inspiration to faith and understanding in Christ.” He asked that the pictures remain in the Grand Court for “inspirational effect,” noting that it was a time when all needed inspiration, whether “Catholic, Protestant and Jew.” If the store allowed the paintings to remain for a bit longer, Hamill believed the store would reap “the gratitude of hundreds of thousands of Christians and Americans.”154

Writing a reply, the next day, John E. Raasch, president of the store from 1947 to 1966, agreed with Hamill that the paintings were powerful, and, in a statement that echoed John Wanamaker, he said, “More and more do we realize that the salvation of the world rests in the spiritual and not the material.” However, Raasch worried that the power of the paintings of Christ’s final days would be lessened if the store displayed them all the time. He explained, “The impact that these pictures make during the Lenten Season, when the minds of many people are most receptive to spiritual suggestion,” was a phenomenon he was “loathe to interfere with.” Because of that, he felt it was important to remove the paintings “immediately after Easter,” as had been the store’s long custom.155

A retired Presbyterian minister from Ohio sent a note to the store in March 1958 after a visit to Philadelphia for the funeral of his youngest brother. The Reverend William Waide went to the store to view the Munkácsy paintings he recalled having seen twenty years earlier. He described the experience as “a great privilege and a great blessing” and asked whether the artist had created a “statement” on “the various characters” in the paintings and who they “were supposed to represent and the feelings and attitudes he sought to depict.”156

Word spread about the annual display of the paintings. A letter dated March 28, 1965, from the Reverend M. L. Heerbotha, a Lutheran minister from St. Louis, asked whether the paintings were still displayed during Lent. He hoped the store could send a brochure about them; if they were still displayed every year, he expressed a desire “to come see it sometime.” The minister had heard about the paintings or perhaps had seen a reproduction of them in a Sunday school newspaper or magazine article. “From all I have heard and read about this masterpiece,” he wrote, “it must touch the viewer deeply. Your firm is to be commended very highly for giving such a positive witness for salvation through Christ.”157

An employee, a woman named Evelyn B. Conner, drafted an introduction for the paintings that she delivered on a routine basis.158 Once she shared the history of the paintings, she asked customers to “pause for an extra minute” on their next visit to the Grand Court and “offer these three short prayers”:

FIRST—A prayer of thanksgiving for such an artist as Munkácsy who gave us these magnificent paintings.

SECOND—A prayer of thanks to the John Wanamaker Store for their great generosity in sharing them with us every Eastertide.

THIRD—(and most important), A prayer of thanksgiving to our HEAVENLY FATHER for having HIS SON to die upon the cross, that we might have the light of CHRISTIANITY throughout the world.159

For Conner and many customers over the years, the paintings were more than holiday store decorations. They gave a focus for prayer and meditations on Jesus’s life, death, and the possibilities of his resurrection during the Lenten season.

Although some visitors felt uncomfortable with the lavishly decorated court surrounding the paintings. Jean Shyrock of Philadelphia sent a letter in May 1965 to Wanamaker’s great-grandson, who served as the chair of the store’s board, to give advice on how the Munkácsy paintings should be displayed. Shyrock had visited the store for the explicit purpose of viewing the paintings and had heard Evelyn Conner’s presentation on the “details of these superb works.” Yet she found the decorations distracting and recommended that the store “let the paintings alone dominate the Court during Holy Week, but without any decorations in the Court.” Such a presentation would be more appropriate for the “most solemn week of the Christian calendar.” As she explained, “there should be nothing to divert the spectators’ attention from the tragic event that gave us the enduring meaning of Easter.”160 The store did not heed Shyrock’s advice. Nearly every year, the Easter decorations in the Grand Court grew more extravagant. The Munkácsy paintings reconstituted a retail space into a sacred one.

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As the ashes smoldered at John Wanamaker’s summer home, exhausted servants, firefighters, and neighbors gathered the scattered artwork that escaped the fire and spectators and gently placed the pieces in the home’s carriage house and other outlying buildings to protect them from the elements and looting. Watchmen were posted to guard the art from further theft.161 Most of the paintings were moved out over the next few months, while china, crystal, and art objects remained in storage. But the Lindenhurst fire would not be the last conflagration. Six months later, the carriage house mysteriously burned to the ground, consuming the part of the collection that still awaited removal to more secure quarters.162

John Wanamaker’s department store art galleries were his own art Salons, which he and his sons juried through purchase and presented to the public as examples of good Protestant taste, gentility, and inspiration.163 As generations had traveled to European art galleries especially in England, France, and Italy to acquire taste and culture, the Wanamakers brought a European art experience to Americans to give them taste and culture in the confines of his store. After the death of his father, Rodman maintained the practice of buying pictures from the Salons every year and putting them on exhibit complete with an accompanying catalogue.

The art critic John Ruskin and minister Horace Bushnell had promoted a way to view beauty that gave religious meaning to his art collecting. Wanamaker put these ideas into action as ministers and other leaders had in their institutions. The religious art in his collection could act as a portal for devotion. He felt that the right kind of art stimulated morality, instilled civic responsibility, and cultivated virtue in its viewers.164 Wanamaker took seriously the power of beauty conveyed through art to edify people. He gave himself large doses while sharing his work with the people he cared for the most. He displayed the same art that he surrounded himself with, edifying those at his Philadelphia and New York City department stores and in the halls and meeting rooms of Bethany Church. His two most famous purchases had an even broader audience as they were paraded across the country in a multicity tour. Believing he had moral authority, Wanamaker used his taste, which was tied to the popular taste of America’s wealthy elite, to elevate the taste of others and was a part of a larger movement that sought to curate and “sacralize” particular musical and cultural forms.165 By displaying art in the space of his stores where goods were for sale, he also made consumerism, by association, a cultural act.

Shoppers and employees responded to the art in multiple ways—some with deep religious devotion. Others were oblivious to the images of Jesus in the court or in the galleries in a rush to complete their shopping errands. Just as the lines between department store and sacred space slipped during the holidays, the art galleries invited a multitude of responses and prepared shoppers for the possibility that the experience could be a religious one.

Wanamaker acquired art to uplift himself, and he displayed and sold reproductions of art in his store to sell refinement to the American upper and middle classes. Fashion and taste were for sale and could be purchased. Wanamaker served as a curator of that taste, which was defined in his advertisements and displays. They encapsulated the respectability proffered by his involvement in Protestant Christianity, whether by closing stores on Sunday or being known as a leading Presbyterian and temperance movement figure in Philadelphia. Wanamaker sought to use art and beauty to influence the moral character of his shoppers and staff. Wanamaker’s massive art collection and its use and display in his home, church, and the department store during his lifetime and after his death were key elements in his religious work.