Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. 240 pp.
Review by Rachael Z. DeLue
17 February 2016
Jennifer Raab’s excellent Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail considers a selection of major works by the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church against a backdrop of what she terms an “epistemological transition from knowledge to information” (2) in the nineteenth century. In her formulation of this sea change, knowledge connotes understanding of a whole, as in the whole of the natural world, as well as the belief in the essential wholeness, or systematic unity, of the thing known. Information, in turn, lines up with data, discontinuous seeing, and the detail—an approach to apprehending existence that sidelines the forest in favor of individual trees. Other, analogous oppositions obtain for Raab, including Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, allegory and science, art and commerce, and meaning and materiality.
Church’s paintings, from well-known works such as The Heart of the Andes (1859) and Icebergs (1861) to lesser-known canvases like Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica (1867), thus emerge in her persuasive account as pictorial fields of struggle on the part of a painter desirous of seeing and knowing system and cause but faced with a historical moment bent on denying all but the partial and piecemeal, a drama that winds up reenacted by the viewer (period and present-day) working to gauge meaning whose discomfit in front of these anxious yet dazzling pictures recapitulates Church’s own distress. The book hinges on the matter of detail in Church—his detailed manner of painting but also the status and effect of detail in the operation of his pictures as shaped by both pictorial and historical concerns.
Detail looms large for Church, this Raab makes absolutely and convincingly clear, and she does so by way of meticulous and thick, often revelatory accounts of the formal characteristics of Church’s paintings. Her careful, unhurried descriptions drive her analysis, as they should, rather than merely illustrating her argument, and well-placed, precise turns of phrase—for example, the perfectly calibrated locution “paint as ice” (p. 90)—exemplify the essential and compelling admixing throughout the book of Raab’s visual, historical, and conceptual arguments. Raab’s analysis of the absence of detail in certain of Church’s pictures and the distinct effects produced in each case—illegibility, blankness, forgetting, haunting, loss—unseats conventional scholarly wisdom to offer a wholly and forcefully reimagined Church and, by extension, a newly conceived interpretive ground for the study of American landscape art.
So, yes, detail. But what of the culture of detail (pp. 2, 13) Raab invokes as the “specific cultural context” (p. 8) that gave rise to Church’s paintings and instigated their skirmishes with form and content? Marking this culture as part of an epistemological shift conjures the big picture of this context, and one would be hard pressed to argue that the nineteenth century did not witness such a transformation. Raab offers provocative glimpses of those ideas and events she believes reveal this culture to be so attuned to and worried over detail, including the writing of Mark Twain, Darwin, and Herman Melville as well as the picturesque, the sublime, the department store, stereoscopy, slavery and its aftermath in the United States and South America, new modes of historical discourse that placed emphasis on the local and the anecdotal, nascent environmentalism, and theories of the ice age. The opportunity to think about Church in relation to these things is just one of many reasons to read this excellent, absorbing book, and one leaves Raab’s study understanding Church’s pictures as modes of seeing and knowing in their own right, entangled with rather than passively reflecting their historical and discursive spaces.
Yet given that certain terms run through and undergird her analysis—realism, objectivity, science, and mimesis among them—one wonders if more might be said about how “detail” as a thing and a concept was articulated and understood in the spaces that were heavily invested in these terms in the period, and whether or not the investment was so fraught across the board, or if such worry can in fact be made over as culture, if not episteme, or, even, if one can ascertain and measure a chief quality of a culture, be it detail, realism, allegory, romanticism, or any other such notion or condition. What of nineteenth-century science (sustained discussion of which occupies a relatively small share of the book) and its approach to the part, that is, to the specimen or its anatomy? And the strategies of extraction and isolation native to scientific illustration, a genre of picturing that offered, along with period writing about scientific method and the philosophy of knowledge, various theorizations of the relationship of part to whole, organism to habitat, specimen to species, data to law? Might period writing about rhetoric and language also offer a particularly specific and revealing context for thinking about the relationship of a unit to its larger network, and about description as such, in this case in the context of verbal expression? The same query could be made about period discourses on ornament and the decorative, or in relation to literary realism. And were other artists and writers impinged by this culture and its anxieties? The suggestion here is not that Raab considered the wrong cultural context, but rather that the particular context she builds for Church does not fully bear the weight of the trauma and the working through she ascribes to Church’s practice and to detail, for much of that weight winds up shifted throughout her analysis onto the personal and biographical, which runs counter to her intended focus on culture and epistemology. This is not to take away from the ambition and accomplishment of her study, which should be essential reading for any student and scholar of American history and art, but to suggest that the study’s brilliance lies perhaps less in what it reveals about culture than what it has to say, exquisitely, about Church.
