WILLIAM MATTHEW PRIOR “That’s how the light gets in”
By Monroe Denton, New York
Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed
American Folk Art Museum
January 24-May 26, 2013
A special exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum introduced the wide-ranging career of a New England painter, born in Bath, Maine in 1806. It opened almost exactly 140 years after his death in Boston. The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, which is the primary repository for Prior’s works, had organized the show of almost forty Prior portraits (and two other works) plus a handful of works by his relatives, housepainters who turned their hands to images under his influence. The lessons of history and contemporary art which the exhibition offered left at least this viewer excited beyond anticipation.
“There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen sings over and over in my imagination. I wonder: is art the way that the light gets in? It isn’t the quality of light in Prior’s work, which is pretty hard, even, New England crisp, but the spark of an idea that illuminates the map of my artistic prejudices and ignorance.
Prior’s works, which will be returned to various museums throughout New England this summer, raise questions about art in general, the idea of progress in art, the folk/high art distinction. When one looks at the museums holding the material, it is obvious that they are usually seen in isolation, as evidence of material culture (folk and historical societies), rather than esthetic achievement.
The Artist as a Young Man: Self Portrait, William Matthew Prior (1806–1873), Portland, Maine, 1825, Oil on canvas, 31 1/8 x 26 15/16 in., Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, N0008.2010
Looking at Prior
Attending the exhibition with an artist friend, I was excited to note that the right eyes of Prior’s sitters throughout the artist’s career were distinctive in characteristic ways—whether the modeling was naturalistic or linear, conceptual. My companion blithely chipped in, “No faces are symmetrical. Every right eye is different from the left. You learn that right at the beginning when you take studio courses.” Such quick answers are often the mark of the “educated” spectator, and may block rumination or accommodating the shock of a specific artwork. I realized that, for me, the shock—the crack in my sureties, my knowingness— is that which lets the light in. The “crack” may be the moment of esthetic perception, and the esthetic perception is not bound by the fashions or exigencies of the market place, which is the chief determinant of the high/folk distinction. What I had noticed in the treatment of the right eyes was not from a comparison to nature, but through a forensic approach, along the lines of the principles outlined by 19th-century connoisseur Giovanni Morelli and essential to the tracing of “hands” in works of his highest estimation (Morelli’s principles were widely utilized by Bernard Berenson, whose impact on New England cultural history and international art history cannot be over-estimated).
Prior’s Marketing
Prior’s work forces consideration of many points related to the fine/folk distinction. There is the matter of his variant styles, which emerges as heavily conditioned by commercialism. With the introduction of the daguerreotype and consequent competition for likenesses, Prior had to resort to a much faster production schedule (he is credited with over 1500 portraits—an enormous output). The tag attached to the back of Nat Todd’s portrait reads:
Portraits
Painted in This Style
Done in about an hour’s sitting
$2.92, including Frame, Glass, &c.
Please call at Trenton Street
Wm M. Prior
East Boston
Prior’s enterprise parallels that of Rembrandt, “discovered” by Svetlana Alpers in her controversial studies of the 1980s, which re-conceived the spiritual ecstasy of pure painting of the Dutch master into a series of commercial transactions and manipulations. In fact, Alpers’s point, which by-passed the traditional concept of “progress” in an artist’s career in favor of a synoptic macro-economic consideration of specific images, is a suggestive way of viewing Prior’s output. As with the Dutch master, a frank commercialism opened the way to a democratizing of the image. Prior is especially credited with his rather expansive African American customer base, although at fewer than a dozen works, it constitutes less than 1% of the oeuvre.
Style and Technique
A style of high romanticism (an early self-portrait summons comparison to either Ingres or the German echt romantic, Philip Otto Runge) modifies the academic background à la Ingres that Prior lacked. A pair of portraits from Old Sturbridge Village, portraits of Lucy and Jesse Hartshorn (1836) have an icy smooth finish that results from the non-porous cardboard support to the oil paint. The surface refinement parallels the images. True contemporaries of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Queen Victoria, they are equally worthy heirs to the tradition of the wildly popular English painter Thomas Lawrence. These early female sitters, with their elongated necks and impossibly sloping shoulders posses, heads wrenched in turns and at angles unparalleled in nature, find their matches in 21st-century John Currin. This 19th-century artist from Bath Maine, whose primary goal seems to have been to secure a living from his art, becomes a fascinating conduit under the entire history of modernism.
Style as signifier
Prior possessed an uncanny ability to harness the implications of style as a signifier. Even after the adoption of his “flat “ style, as in the Todd portrait, in 1843, he produced two of the more surprising works in the current exhibition. These are a pair of portraits from 1843 held by the Shelburne Museum, of William and Nancy Lawson. The husband, an independent clothing merchant in Boston, and his wife, are images of mid-19th century prosperity, surprising to a 21st-century viewer because of their race.
Nancy Lawson, William Matthew Prior (1806–1873), Probably East Boston, 1843, Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in., Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont
Here is the amazement of Prior’s African American sitters. With the exception of occasional servant images, the huge absence in historical American portraiture is of persons of color. The warm, reddened brown of the husband is slightly different from his wife’s skin. Obviously, Prior looked carefully at the individuals before him, and here he has presented them with the full volumetric presence of his earlier romantic images rather than the linear style of his “flat works.” In other images of blacks, for example the grouping of the three daughters of the Copeland family (1854, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), the more “folk” style reigns. The three sisters’ racial blend is characterized by rather sharply different complexions, but what charms is the sweetly unmoored central sister, in yellow. Her uncorrected perspective and modeling give her the weightlessness of Chagall, here wedded to an ornamental embroidery in the tree outside the window and the girls’ dresses that recurs seventy years later in Mirò.
Past and present cracks in the art world
In folk art, traditionally, we are accustomed to search for traces of the artist’s inner life; in high art, we believe we read the personalities of the sitters. The reversal of these priorities might be one reason folk painting suggests itself so well to modernism and post-modernism—the idea of the artist’s glyphic authority to express himself or herself as of greater interest than reading the substrata of the image.
While the exhibition was on view in New York City, the cracks within the art world were letting in different lights. On the one hand, there was the announcement of the Museum of Modern Art that, having acquired the Museum of Folk Art’s home, which opened shortly after 9/11, would raze the building, despite its initial recognition as a symbol of national pride and honor of the folk tradition (the market collapses of 2008 and the recent resurgence of real estate prices in New York conspired to make it cheaper as a “tear down”); simultaneously, the Philadelphia Museum announced the first major acquisition of a collection of “outsider” (untrained) art to be folded into its encyclopedic collection. The re-evaluation and significance of the example of Prior may go on, or these works, created beyond criticism or theory, may return to status as illustrations of social events rather than artistic treasures. Was the light let in by this an assembling fool’s gold? What secures the belief system that makes art . . . art?
Emily Dickinson wrote:
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all.
Perhaps as the works return to their holding institutions, one will experience the spark of Ignis fatuus, that phosphorescent light that hovers or flits over swampy ground at night, possibly caused by spontaneous combustion of gases emitted by rotting organic matter. One hopes it gets through. Prior’s death came from typhoid fever; he is buried next to his first wife in Woodlawn Cemetery, Elliott Ma, with a palette and brushes carved into his headstone.
Child in Blue with Dog, William Matthew Prior (1806–1873), Probably East Boston, 1848, Oil on canvas, 35 5/8 x 29 in., Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, gift of Stephen C. Clark, N0254.1961
Addendum
Where works by and/or attributed to Prior can be seen
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fall River Historical Society
Fruitlands, Harvard University
Maine Historical Society
Massachusetts Historical Society
National Gallery of Art (Washington DC)
New Bedford Whaling Museum
Old Sturbridge Village
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Shelburne Museum, Vermont
William Miller Home and Farm (Whitehall, NY)
and elsewhere, in numerous private collections, and on eBay
Monroe Denton is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.