Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [546]
In 1845 Duyckinck became literary editor of the Democratic Review, a broad-circulation political magazine edited by John Louis O’Sullivan, a fiery and charming Irishman. O’Sullivan was a vigorous supporter of western expansion and European revolution. In both cases, he said, it was America’s “manifest destiny” to extend the domain of democracy (though as a staunch Democrat, O’Sullivan exempted black slaves from this destiny). The swashbuckling O’Sullivan reached out to the scholarly Duyckinck because the latter’s literary vision dovetailed perfectly with the former’s political project. Both believed New York to be the ideal seedbed for a new American culture because it was home to writers from the West, South, and North, thus a more representative American city than provincial Boston. And New York, Duyckinck pointed out, was the country’s “true publishing center,” the only place technologically and financially capable of underwriting a people’s art.
George Palmer Putnam, the aggressively entrepreneurial publisher, was Young America’s perfect ally. Putnam was eager to promote America’s cultural independence, especially if it could help him contest Harpers’ domination of the literary marketplace, and he was prepared to pay authors fair dividends while distributing inexpensive editions of their books to ordinary American audiences. Duyckinck became general editor of Wiley and Putnam’s watershed project, the Library of American Books, and enlisted some of the city’s (and country’s) outstanding younger writers in forming a new literary canon. In 1847, moreover, Wiley and Putnam joined Appleton and Company in launching the Literary World, with Duyckinck at the editorial helm. The new magazine would survey and publicize the nation’s burgeoning literary output. It would assess, as well, the accomplishments of America’s visual artists, who, like the writers, had been profoundly affected by technological and social developments in New York City.
ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
The Panic of 1837 had disrupted Manhattan’s patronage system. Cole, Sully, and Asher Durand found that merchants laughed wanly at the notion of buying paintings with their businesses facing bankruptcy. Spurred by hard times, artists fashioned new and more collective ways of supporting their work.
In 1838 portraitist and engraver James Herring established the Apollo Gallery, where painters could exhibit and share in the proceeds of a twenty-five-cent admission fee. When this foundered, Herring decided to reach out to a far broader audience. In 1839, drawing on a model developed in several European cities, he created the Apollo Association, a noncommercial joint stock company. Subscribers contributed five dollars each to a fund, which then purchased works from artists. These were exhibited to the public free of charge and, at year’s end, distributed by lottery to subscribers. Association members also received engraved reproductions of some of the artworks, as well as the group’s Bulletin, the first magazine devoted exclusively to American art. In 1844 the enterprise, now going strong, was renamed the American Art-Union (AAU).
The AAU was run by managers whom Herring drew at first from the pool of gentleman art enthusiasts—among them Philip Hone, rentier James W. Beekman, and editors Henry Raymond and William Cullen Bryant. Some were attracted by old republican ideals of stewardship and civic patronage; others hoped art might exert what the Rev. Henry Bellows called “exalting, purifying, calming influences” on the increasingly agitated masses. Young America rallied to the AAU, seeing in it a democratizing project akin to their own. Duyckinck, Mathews, Putnam, and O’Sullivan, delighted to make art available to the many, also hoped that artists freed from dependence on Eurofixated patrons might create an American art.
By the late 1840s the American Art-Union was the nation’s primary market for U.S. paintings other than portraits. Each year roughly nineteen thousand subscribers purchased an average of four hundred artworks, benefiting