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Art Theory and Psychological Thought in Mid-19th-Century America: The Case of The Crayon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
Associationism as a school of 19th-century psychological thought has been mentioned as an important influence on American landscape painters of that period by several authors, yet little systematic investigation of the influence of contemporaneous psychological theories on 19th-century artistic thought has been attempted. This essay explores these psychological dimensions in the writings of Henry James Sr., Justin Winsor, and John B. Brown, regular contributors to the Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts and the Literature Related to Them. Published in New York from 1855 to 1861, the Crayon was unique among art publications in its theoretical emphasis. Among the philosophical problems the Crayon took up were questions that today would have been identified as psychological. The ideas of these three authors concerning perception, creativity, and reception are among the clearest and most articulate of the essays in the Crayon in terms of displaying a coherent psychology. Their psychological thought will be extracted from the texts and reconstituted within the contending psychological debates of the time. It will be shown that although associationism was an important influence on artists and critics, other psychological theories stemming from different premises were of equal or even greater importance.
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References
Notes
1. The periodical had almost no illustrations, unlike the art union bulletins and the majority of popular monthly magazines. As Janice Simon points out in her unpublished dissertation, this was at least partly a function of the costliness of engravings. Nonetheless, the lack of pictures served to separate it from the more popular journals and underlined the serious theoretical nature of the writings (Simon, , “The Crayon 1855–1861: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts” [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990], 40Google Scholar).
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4. Thomas Kuhn is probably the most widely used model of historical development today in the sciences (Kuhn, , The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962]Google Scholar).
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10. Ibid. Also see Craig Eliason, “Beauty, Nature and Art in the Crayon: The Aesthetics of a Nineteenth-Century American Art Journal,” unpublished essay (1993). Eliason treats at length Stillman, James's series of articles collectively titled The Nature and Uses of Beauty, which ran through most of volume 3 (1856)Google Scholar of the Crayon.
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17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
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