SOURCE: Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy. “Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Study of Artistic Influence.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 1-21.

[In the following essay, Valenti highlights the importance of Hawthorne's painting and appreciation of art and the influence these had on others around her, including her husband.]

“Sophia, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne” is the simple inscription which marks the grave of a woman remembered for her marriage to one of the foremost men in American letters. However, she deserves to be remembered among the earliest women in American painting. The flawlessness of her copies could have provided her with a comfortable living, but she aspired with the intensity and seriousness of a professional to surpass the status of an amateur or copyist to become a painter of original canvases. Her aspirations were affirmed by the leading painters of the day who became her mentors. Influenced as she was by Chester Harding, Washington Allston, and Thomas Doughty, she then exerted an influence upon her husband as his mentor in understanding the visual arts and the place they held in his fiction, a fact perhaps recognized by their son, Julian who, entitling the biography of his father Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, wrote that “in drawing, painting, and sculpture she showed a loving talent not far removed from genius. Thus she was able to meet at all points her husband's meditative and theoretic needs with substantial and practical gratification.”¹

Born on 21 September 1809, Sophia Amelia Peabody was the third daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Peabody.² Her older sisters were Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Tyler Peabody, who married Horace Mann; the Peabodys had three sons after Sophia's birth. Her early education, subjected to Elizabeth's enormous intellectual curiosity, was atypical of the education of females in Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century and included the study of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and French.³

In 1824 drawing was added to Sophia's studies, an event which coincided almost exactly with the onslaught of debilitating headaches; but it was not until the Peabody family moved to Boston that Sophia's artistic apprenticeship began in earnest.⁴ The intellectual and artistic environment in Boston stimulated Sophia's mind and talents tremendously. Her notebooks for the years 1829 and 1830 reveal almost daily commentaries on her reading of classical writers and her reflections on theological matters. One of the contemporary writers whom she enjoyed was Coleridge, and his work tempted Sophia to “poetize.”⁵

Soon, however, the practice of visual arts rather than the writing of poetry dominated her attention. This concentration was fostered by several male mentors whose presence cannot be overestimated for, as Linda Nochlin in her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” asserts, the absence of mentors had been one of the social and cultural factors which kept women from artistic achievement. The world's “great” painters, Nochlin points out, participated in the life of the academies, where, for example, the painting of nudes (an exercise forbidden to women although women were allowed to pose nude) was part of the acquisition of artistic skills. Male artists thus had an environment in which to exchange ideas; they obtained mentors, patrons, power, and self-confidence. In contrast, Nochlin remarks,

to [this] single-mindedness and commitment … we might set the image of the “lady painter” established by nineteenth-century etiquette books and reinforced by the literature of the times. It is precisely the insistence upon a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism, the looking upon art, like needlework or crocheting, as a suitable “accomplishment” for the well-brought-up young woman, who naturally would want to direct her major attention toward the welfare of others—family and husband—that militated against any real accomplishment on the part of women.⁶

Nochlin further points out that those women artists who did not conform to this image were “all almost without exception … the daughters of artist fathers, or generally later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a close personal connection with a stronger and more dominant male artistic personality.”⁷

Sophia had been led to believe that her chronic, severe headaches would render her an invalid, unable to marry.⁸ Therefore, she never considered painting a genteel, temporary accomplishment, but rather a potential, hopefully remunerative, profession. However, more than her presumed invalidism would have prompted Sophia to see herself as a professional painter rather than as an amateur. The attention of the most important painters of her day afforded her mentorial support and the aforementioned “close personal relationship with a stronger and more dominant male artistic personality” which could confirm her desire to become a painter of stature. Aware of Sophia's talent, these mentors appear to have sought her out and granted her special privileges not accorded all aspiring artists. This represents especially compelling evidence that Sophia should be considered among the earliest serious female painters in America because the only other recognized contemporary women painters acquired their mentors, initially at least, because they were related to them.

Anna Claypoole Peale (1791-1878) and Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-85), for example, were the daughters of James Peale and the nieces of the portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, whose encouragement and criticism particularly influenced Sarah, a noted portrait painter in Baltimore between 1825 and 1829. Jane Stuart (1812-86) was the youngest child of Gilbert Stuart. Although he refused to instruct his own children, Jane furtively observed him and when Stuart died in poverty in 1828, Jane opened her own studio in Boston to support her family. Although she began by copying her father's work, a review of the 1833 exhibit at the Academy of Fine Arts praised her in her own right as “among the best portrait painters in our city, so far as color and keeping go.”⁹

While Jane Stuart and Sarah and Anna Peale were able to cultivate their talent within the domestic sphere and could initially obtain recognition because of their relatives who were established artists, Sophia's talent was recognized and fostered by those outside her family, thus suggesting the high degree of its merit in a culture where women were rarely recognized outside the domestic sphere. Indeed, the nature of Sophia's relationship towards her mentors was somewhat ambivalent. She seems to have enjoyed a comfortable, personal (at times almost flirtatious) relationship with these mentors while holding them and their work in awe. Although they cultivated her taste and technique, she had the confidence in her own opinions to differ with them on occasion. Although she was their devout pupil, they repeatedly urged her beyond copying and encouraged her to create her own canvases.

Sophia's first mentor was Francis Graeter, a German illustrator of early American children's books who was then working at Elizabeth Peabody's school. Sophia learned from him the techniques of copying.¹⁰ Graeter also instructed Sophia in German and accompanied her to the Boston Athen❙vum where they would view and evaluate paintings. They admired Salvatore Rosa's “Landscape with Cattle” and Claude Lorraine's “Seaport” while they disapproved of Allston's picture, “Mother and Child,” because they thought the attitude of the child unnatural. However, their opinion differed on another of Allston's paintings. Sophia liked a painting she referred to as “The Doomed Bride,” but Graeter “denounced it utterly” saying that the expression of the bride was solely for effect, and that a spectator “always ought to be able to imagine how the countenance would look afterwards.” Sophia and Graeter seem to have shared many enjoyable outings at the Athen❙vum, and when Graeter failed to arrive to escort her to the Athen❙vum on one occasion, Sophia noted coyly in her diary that “the perfide came not.”¹¹

However, Sophia's more significant mentors were Chester Harding, Thomas Doughty, and Washington Allston. They formed a triumverate of influence upon her style, technique, and ability. Chester Harding, a self-taught portrait artist, was as surprised as he was gratified by the “Harding Fever” which flourished in the artistic market place in the 1830s. Thomas Doughty, like Harding, had had little formal training in painting, but his sojourn in Paris had exposed him to the French landscape painters. The early 1830s were the most prosperous of his career, and his relatively small, delicately toned landscapes, which inevitably contained woodlands and simple river scenes, were, for that brief period of time, very popular. Washington Allston was, however, the most important painter to emerge from this period in American art, for his talent was acclaimed internationally as well as at home. Coleridge called Allston “a man of … high and rare genius … whether I contemplate him in the character of a Poet, a Painter, or a Philosophical analyst”; and Coleridge's theory of the fine arts in the area of “the Graphic” was developed by “continual reference to Allston.”¹² Allston's typical landscape, depicting the grandeur of nature contrasted against a dwarfed figure in the foreground, brought the English Romantic influence to the Hudson River School of painters. Furthermore, he was one of the few painters of his time who drew heavily upon literary texts for his subjects and themes.¹³

Sophia was directly influenced by each of these painters. She went to the studio of portrait-painter Chester Harding to watch him work. Harding, who painted Sophia's portrait in 1830, asked to see her paintings. She recorded his reactions thus: “Mr. Harding wanted to see my picture and politely praised it—and offered to teach me to paint heads—said I should copy his portrait of Allston which he would not suffer any body else in Boston to do. … He is a noble souled man—I like him exceedingly.” Sophia was very impressed with Harding's rendition of Allston on canvas, with “The head erect—in the attitude of a receiver of supernatural communion with something up and beyond—the eye looking through things temporal with the piercing fire (Promethean) of inspiration.”¹⁴

Sophia's relationship with Harding, like her relationship with Graeter, was comfortable, friendly and unintimidated. It was Sophia who suggested that Harding name his newly born son Allston, a suggestion which her mentor accepted with greater enthusiasm than did his wife. Harding visited Sophia frequently, once prompting her to call to him through her window asking “when he wanted a vision of my sweet face over his throne,” and Sophia followed Harding to his studio and painted even when the July heat seemed to be “purgatory” to her; but Harding was “as agreeable as he could possibly be all the time I was doing penance.”¹⁵

Because Sophia was sometimes confined to bed on account of her severe headaches, she could not avail herself of Thomas Doughty's advertised offers, such as the following one in the Boston Evening Transcript, to give classes in his studio: “The following branches will be taught, viz Landscape in Oils and Water Colors, Pencil Drawing, Drawing on stone, Flowers, Fruits, etc., etc.”¹⁶ Rather, through the maneuvering of Elizabeth, Doughty paid Sophia the enormous compliment of coming to her home to instruct, and Elizabeth recorded her sister's lessons with Doughty thus: “She would lie on the bed, and he had his easel close by. Every day, in the interval of his lessons, she would imitate on another canvas what he had done. And her copy of his landscape was even better than the original, so that when they were displayed side by side, everybody guessed her copy to be the one that Doughty painted.”¹⁷

Sophia's brother, Wellington, had originally introduced the painter as “Mr. Dowdy,” a misnomer which coincided with Sophia's initial impression, for she felt that he did not look like a genius, yet presumed that he might have “times of illumination when he is in the act.” Indeed, Doughty more than fulfilled Sophia's hopes. When he brought Sophia a picture of his to sketch, she recorded that her “whole internal organization underwent an agitation at the sight of him—it seemed as if he had the power of my life and death.” Watching Doughty paint and copying his paintings caused Sophia to experience intense emotional and physiological reactions: “Ye Powers! how my heart beat. It seemed as if he embodied the art in some way so that I was in its immediate presence and I felt consequently awe struck. He looked very smiling and pleasant however, not in the least fearful, and painted an hour and then left me to copy. … The instant he departed I began my own operations and found that the portion of his art which he had left on the board possessed the same aweful power as he brought with him, and before I put my brush to the picture, I trembled from head to foot. Certainly I never felt so much about any such thing before—I did not know what to make of it. … I was afraid to be alone with the—what? I am sure I cannot tell.”¹⁸

So important was copying Doughty's work and receiving his praise that Sophia was able to overcome her physical complaints when she knew that Doughty would be arriving for a lesson. Furthermore, with Doughty as her mentor, Sophia felt probably for the first time the overwhelming desire to create her own compositions. She recorded this burgeoning desire in the following journal excerpt: “the violent commotions of my heart were a little quieted by his pronouncing my work very well done, better than he expected. It was extremely interesting to see him create. It filled me with a sensation quite suffocating. What an intense feeling of delight it gives me to think that I may ever create too.”¹⁹ Yet notwithstanding the awe with which she regarded Doughty, she was able to maintain a critical view towards some of his techniques. Doughty is “rather too purple in his heavenly taste,” she recorded, and when he failed to arrive at the appointed time for one of their lessons, she chastized the “scamp” who had gone for a ride with his wife instead.²⁰

Sophia's relationship with Washington Allston, with whom she was acquainted through the family of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, had the most significant impact on her artistic career for a number of reasons. Allston showed great interest in Sophia's talent and lent her a copy of Flaxman's Herod and Aeschylus so that she could trace the engravings. More important must have been his statement that one could make a living through landscape painting in the United States,²¹ a fact which certainly bolstered Sophia's confidence that she would be able to make a living as a professional painter. He further suggested that she go to Europe where she could devote herself to art, and he exhorted her to “copy only masterpieces,—nothing second rate,” as Elizabeth put it.²²

Copying Allston's own work was an emotionally charged experience for Sophia because it occasioned “an intense enjoyment almost intoxicating. It was an emotion altogether too intense for my physicals. A most refined torture did it work and has it worked … upon my head—accompanied with a deathly sickness. … Every faculty of my mind and every thing of which I thought was tinged with a burning splendor which was almost terrible and I did not let my imagination excurse.”²³ However, the turmoil produced by copying Allston's paintings was productive even if painful for Sophia. In Dedham, Sophia copied prodigiously, and Elizabeth was able to obtain fifty dollars per canvas for her sister.²⁴ Her health eventually improved, her confidence flourished, and in January 1832 Sophia wrote to Elizabeth:

What do you think I have actually begun to do? Nothing less than create and do you wonder that I lay awake all last night after sketching my first picture. I actually thought my head would have made its final explosion. When once I began to excurse, I could not stop. Three distinct landscapes came forth in full array besides that which I had arranged before I went to bed and it seemed that I should fly to be up and doing. I have always determined not to force the creative power but wait til it had mastered me and now I feel as if the time has come and such freedom and revelry does it bring!²⁵

In May 1832 Sophia reported that she had finished her own landscape which she brought to Boston where Allston, who then had several paintings on exhibit at the Athen❙vum, came to see it. “It does you great credit,” he said, “I have found no fault with it.” His reaction to a copy of a French landscape was not so positive; Sophia recorded that “He thought I might find pictures enough to copy but he wished that I might copy nature.” Thus Sophia continued in the most creative period of her life, and by September 1832 she recorded that she had completed in just seventy-two hours her fourth original painting.²⁶ Sophia's landscapes, housed at the Essex Institute, may possibly be two of these originals. These landscapes demonstrate a high degree of technical competency and are similar to the compositional elements of Doughty's work. In both of Sophia's landscapes, a figure in the foreground treads a winding path and is dwarfed by overhanging trees. The background in these landscapes is of mountains fading into the distance against a sky of muted tones.²⁷

Sophia's artistic successes were mixed blessings for they coincided with severe emotional turmoil. Whether Sophia's emotional upheaval was the cause of her creativity or the result of it, painting sometimes left her with “the unalloyed agony of overstretched nerves.” She recorded somewhat elliptically: “then I understood the majesty—the beauty—the sublimity with startling clearness. Visions of landscapes and scenes such as never rose upon other than mental eyes—ideal beauty—marble starting into curved lines of grace.” Elsewhere she questioned, “Why am I so privileged to exercise this divinest art?” and again she recorded that she made a “desperate effort … to be myself in my occupation. I wonder if there are many people who live life thus as it were by drawing up buckets of life with hard labor from the well of the mind.”²⁸

This intensity of her artistic experiences and sensitivity regarding questions about her art may have been, in some measure, drug induced. Cantwell characterizes her responses as “the feverish intensity of a convalescent or habitual user of drugs”; she was given narcotics, first opium and then hyosycamus, which produced a twilight sleep. Undoubtedly the drugs and the head pains for which they were prescribed intensified her emotional responses to situations, both artistic and personal. However, the degree of emotion in these responses may have been attributable in part to the fact that painting was such an intensely important activity for Sophia. She wanted to be a painter of the caliber of her mentors, an aspiration which, while motivating her, caused tremendous anxiety and might have contributed a pyschogenic basis for the debilitating headaches.²⁹

In 1833 Elizabeth Peabody was attempting to publish a volume of “Grecian Theology and Mythology” and had decided that Sophia should illustrate it with lithographs. Sophia had no training in this method, and her efforts to comply with commitments Elizabeth had made for her led to work which was far below Sophia's standards. The blinding headaches were accompanied again by dreadful nightmares—one was of Elizabeth dead in a coffin in the Peabodys' parlor—and culminated in Sophia's complete physical and emotional collapse. The Peabodys truly feared for Sophia's life, and decided that, accompanied by her sister Mary, she should take a trip to Cuba to restore her health. On 6 December 1833, the sisters sailed for Cuba where they spent the next two years. Dr. Channing's only advice to her upon her departure was: “Don't think!”³⁰

Sophia's Cuban sojourn was just what the doctor ordered. She was removed from the pressures of Boston, her family, and the highly stressful influence of her artistic mentors. While Mary acted as governess to wealthy Cuban planters, Sophia enjoyed the leisure to ride horseback, socialize with young men at parties and balls, observe tropical flora and fauna, read, and pursue various aspects of her art in a relaxed manner. Lacking mentors or classes, Sophia developed her skill in portraiture, sculpted, reflected upon her art work, and experimented in some new forms including restoration and decorative art. Her headaches abated, and the sisters returned to Massachusetts in 1836. The entire experience was recorded and preserved through the letters Sophia and Mary sent to their family in what they called The Cuba Journal.

However, Sophia's return to Salem brought a return to the headaches and the copying notwithstanding the fact that Elizabeth was now able to fetch one hundred dollars per canvas for her sister. This represented a significant sum for Sophia's art, as indicated by its relative market value when compared with the prices Doughty received for his paintings. In 1837 Doughty obtained his highest prices ever for his paintings—＄250.00 to ＄350.00. However, during his most productive and lucrative period, 1832-37, his canvases sold for as little as thirty dollars.³¹

On 16 November 1837, perhaps the most decisive event in Sophia's life occured, even though it took place while she was bedridden with a severe headache. The Peabodys had moved to Boston, and Elizabeth arranged for her sisters to meet their new neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In lieu of meeting Nathaniel in person on this occasion, Sophia sent him two artistic emissaries: a copy of Flaxman's Greek poets from which she had been copying drawings and her “Cuba Journal.”³²

Nathaniel probably recognized a kindred spirit through certain aspects of Sophia's depiction of her Cuban experiences. In one of her accounts she described an attempted portrait of a host, Don Fernando, which she recorded in her journal thus: “It was the most beautiful, soul-beaming face I have ever produced, but a touch of the pencil is omnipotent and a false one banished the living soul from the features and changed a high noble look into an expression of utter stupidity and ordinariness.”³³ These comments, like those cited earlier about Harding's portrait of Allston, indicate Sophia's belief that a painting, specifically a portrait, had almost magical properties and could convey something beyond that which was strictly pictorial. Perhaps in Sophia's sketch of Don Fernando “her mistake was the reality,” demonstrating the artist's uncanny ability to depict “truth” even unwittingly.³⁴ Whatever the relationship between Don Fernando's “real” character and Sophia's depiction of him, Hawthorne undoubtedly realized that this incident bore an uncanny similarity to the experience of the painter in “The Prophetic Pictures” which he composed some time before meeting her and had published in 1837.

Hawthorne also read Sophia's record of her attempts to restore a painting which had been obscured by age. Sophia had dipped her fingers in some aromatic oils and “touched the corners of the picture. A gorgeous crimson tint was revealed, [as was] the golden glory of the floating hair, the majesty of contrition in the upraised brow and lustrous eye.”³⁵ This incident gave Hawthorne his inspiration for “Edward Randolph's Portrait,” which he published in 1838.³⁶ Perhaps Hawthorne was describing Sophia when he wrote of Alice Vane, the heroine of “Edward Randolph's Portrait,” that she was “a pale, ethereal creature, who, though a native of New England, had been educated abroad, and seemed not merely a stranger from another clime, but almost a being from another world. … It was said that the early productions of her own pencil exhibited no inferior genius, though, perhaps, the rude atmosphere of New England had cramped her hand, and dimmed the glowing colors of her fancy.”³⁷

While “Edward Randolph's Portrait” was the first of Hawthorne's fictional works directly influenced by Sophia, her influence upon Hawthorne's understanding of the visual arts was far more profound and pervasive than the obvious supplying of prototypes for plot and character. Sophia was for Hawthorne a congenial spirit with whom he could discuss literature, painting, and the relationship between the two. Indeed, Sophia functioned as Hawthorne's mentor, helping him to verbalize his inchoate ideas about pictorial expression, for nothing recorded about Hawthorne's life prior to his relationship with Sophia indicates that he had any exposure to the visual arts. His course of study at Bowdoin had neglected history, modern languages, and literature, as well as anything related to the pictorial arts such as art history or painting, emphasizing instead the classics, philosophy, and mathematics.³⁸ Hawthorne does not seem to have compensated for this omission in his education by attending the annual art exhibits at the Boston Athen❙vum since no mention of these exhibits is made in his early journals. Sophia, however, seems to have whetted Nathaniel's interest in attending the exhibits for on 23 June 1839, Elizabeth wrote to Sophia that Hawthorne went to Allston's exhibit at the Athen❙vum “and was eager to know what [Sophia was] going to paint.”³⁹

Sophia and Nathaniel came to regard each other as predestined soul-mates. Although her letters to him during their courtship were destroyed, Nathaniel's letters to Sophia record an intense relationship which grew on physical, spiritual, intellectual, and artistic levels. Because Sophia's recovery from illness was the prerequisite for their marriage, Hawthorne responded in distress when Sophia wrote that the price of her art was sometimes her good health; but notwithstanding the fact that Sophia continued to paint, her health did improve during their courtship. Envisioning their future as one in which they each would pursue their respective arts, Hawthorne wrote her: “Oh, beloved, if we but had a cottage, somewhere … and have a place to Be in. … And you should draw and paint, and sculpture, and make music, and poetry too, and your husband would admire and criticize; and I, being pervaded with your spirit, would write beautifully, and make myself famous for your sake.”⁴⁰

Hawthorne sought out Sophia's opinion of his work, and their discussion of those stories which contain specifically pictorial elements illuminates the visual nature of Hawthorne's imagination. For example, he wrote to Sophia commenting on her evaluation of two of his stories, “Monsieur du Mirroir” and “The Man of Adamant,” and lamenting that he had “failed in giving shape and substance to the vision which I saw.”⁴¹ “The Man of Adamant” foreshadows the particular use of sculpture which Hawthorne developed more extensively in The Marble Faun, his last completed work of fiction. There, the works of the sculptor Kenyon are used to reflect Hawthorne's notion that statues appear to possess an ability to preserve a person from the ravages of time and decay. However, this is an idea Hawthorne had discussed explicitly with Sophia many years before he wrote The Marble Faun. In writing about a clay bas-relief of Charles Chauncey Emerson which she had completed, he said, “thou hast achieved mighty things. Thou hast called up a face which was hidden in the grave—hast re-created it, after it was resolved to dust—and so hast snatched from Death his victory.”⁴²

Nathaniel also felt that he and Sophia would create joint productions which would blend her visual and his verbal talents: “I never owned a picture in my life,” he wrote to her, “yet pictures have always been among the earthly possessions (and they are spiritual possessions too) which I have most coveted. … When we live together in our own home, belovedest, we will paint pictures together—that is our minds and hearts shall unite to form the conception, to which your hand shall give the material existence. I have often felt that I could be a painter, only I am sure that I could never handle a brush;—now my Dove will show me the images of my inward eye, beautified and etherealized by the mixture of her own spirit.”⁴³

Their first collaboration occured within a year after Nathaniel and Sophia met. A wealthy Salem resident and friend of Sophia's, Miss Susan Burley, financed a special, limited printing of “The Gentle Boy,” Nathaniel's short story which had originally been published anonymously in The Token in 1832. Miss Burley evidently wished to provide a vehicle for publishing Sophia's drawings, but the illustration did not please Sophia entirely for the engraver “changed the position of the eyes of Ilbrahim, darkened the brows, [and] turned the corners of the mouth downward instead of the original curve.” This must have been a disappointment for Sophia, who wrote enigmatically to Elizabeth: “So much for the Word uttering itself through my fingers in the face of Ilbrahim.”⁴⁴ Sophia was apt almost to deify Nathaniel in her letters, referring to him as Apollo, for example. Thus the “Word” may have been her synonym for Nathaniel. However, the sentence also suggests her real attempts to render the verbal in a visual medium, a notion which is echoed by Nathaniel's dedication of this special edition of “The Gentle Boy” to “Miss Sophia Amelia Peabody, This Little Tale, To which Her Kindred Art has Given Value, is respectfully inscribed.” Hawthorne continues along this vein in the preface:

No testimony in regard to the effect of this story, has afforded the Author so much pleasure as that which brings out this present edition. However feeble the creative power which produced Ilbrahim, it has wrought an influence upon another mind, and thus given to imaginative life a creation of deep and pure beauty. The original sketch of the Puritan and the Gentle Boy, an engraving from which now accompanied the Tale, has received what the artist may well deem her most attainable recompense—a warm recommendation of the first painter in America. If, after so high a meed, the Author might add his own humbler praise, he would say that whatever of beauty and pathos he had conceived but could not follow forth in language, has been caught and embodied in the few simple lines of this sketch.⁴⁵

Undoubtedly the “first painter in America” refers to Washington Allston, whose enthusiastic review in 19 January 1839 Christian Register and Boston Observer encouraged “the young artist … to go on in the beautiful work and put into ‘simple severe lines’ more of Mr. Hawthorne's exquisite fancies.”⁴⁶

Another example of Sophia's illustration of Nathaniel's work is housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library and is identified by a note in Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's hand: “Said by Aunt Lizzie P[almer] P[eabody] to be drawn by Mamma as illustration for Papa's story.” This pencil-sketch portrait of Judge Pyncheon, bearing the inscription “The Portrait, House of Seven Gables, page 39,” renders perfectly the verbal description of Judge Pyncheon found on that page of the first edition of the novel.

Not only did Nathaniel have Sophia illustrate specific works, but he also composed verbal descriptions of himself and his surroundings which he hoped she would translate into pictures:

I wish you would make a sketch of me, here in our own parlor; and it might be done without trusting entirely to imagination, as you have seen the room and the furniture—and (though it would be the least important item of the picture) you have seen myself. I am writing now at my new bureau, which stands between the windows; there are two lamps before me, which show the polished shadings of the mahogony panels to great advantage. A coal fire is burning in the grate—not a very fervid one, but flickering up fitfully, once in a while, so as to remind me that I am at my own fireside. I am sitting in the cane bottomed rocking chair … and another hair cloth arm-chair stands in front of the fire.⁴⁷

In this passage Nathaniel displayed a particular sensitivity to the pictorial elements of balance and light. Seated betweeen two windows with two lamps in front of him, he thus implied that he was the focus of the picture though he protested that he would be its least important element. He was also explicit about the type of light in the room, produced by the flickering of two lamps and the firelight.

In another letter, Nathaniel discussed the effects, both physical and psychological, of the play of lights upon a painting. Citing Sophia's paintings entitled “The Menaggio” and “The Isola,” Hawthorne said: “I gaze at them in all sorts of light—daylight, twilight, and candle-light; and when the lamps are extinguished, and before getting into bed, I sit and look at the pictures in the flickering of the fire-light. They are truly an infinite enjoyment.”⁴⁸

This pair of paintings was especially important to Sophia and Nathaniel. They are landscapes of Lake Como done after the manner of Doughty and similar in compositional elements to those landscapes cited earlier in this essay. Nathaniel wrote to Sophia that he “actually trembled as [he] undid” the wrappings when he received the pictures, and he identified the figures which are depicted as Sophia and himself. “The Isola” contains a lone female figure in the foreground whose back is to the viewer; “The Menaggio” depicts two figures standing on a bridge.⁴⁹ “Yes,” wrote Nathaniel, “it must be my very self; and from henceforth it must be held for an absolute and indisputable truth. It is not my picture but the very I; and as my inner self belongs to you, there is no doubt that you have caused my soul to pervade the figure. Thus we are, unchangeable. Years cannot alter us, nor our relation to each other.”⁵⁰

Like Sophia's trembling reaction to Doughty's art, “The Menaggio” and “Isola” produced a physical effect upon Nathaniel and for much the same reason. Both Sophia and Nathaniel evinced a belief in the almost magical ability of a painting to capture a person's essential character and transmit it immutably through time. This is a theme which Nathaniel sounded at various points in his literary career, most obviously in “The Prophetic Pictures,” “Edward Randolph's Portrait,” The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun, but nowhere had he stated these ideas more explicitly than in his correspondence with Sophia. In a letter to Sophia dated 11 December 1839, he reflected upon daguerreotype, an invention which had only that year been announced in America.⁵¹ “I wish there were something in the intellectual world analogous to Daguerreotype (is that the name of it?) in the visible—something which should print off our deepest, and subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings as minutely and accurately as the above mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature.”⁵²

Perhaps the painting that Sophia produced which “printed off” the young couple's “deepest” and “delicatest” thoughts most significantly was completed early in their marriage, just two months before the birth of their first child.⁵³ Sophia began copying a painting of a bas-relief of Endymion with the intention of selling it, hopefully to someone she knew so that one day she might buy it back. The price would be one hundred dollars; “if it be worth one cent, it is worth that,” Sophia wrote her mother. But as Sophia worked, she felt that the painting had “come out of my soul. What a record it is of these happy, hopeful days! The divine dream shining in Endymion's face, his body enhanced in sleep, his soul bathed in light, every curve flowing in consummate beauty—in some way it is my life.”⁵⁴ The painting represented Sophia as the moon goddess and the sleeping Endymion as Nathaniel himself. When the picture was finished, neither Nathaniel nor Sophia could part with it. “I always go through the valley of the shadow of death in painting every picture,” Sophia wrote, “and the more worth the picture has, the more dismal my journey. But at last I stand on the delectable mountains and now I seem to be there with Endymion.”⁵⁵

Unfortunately this picture cannot be found, for Rose Hawthorne has described it as “a picture in pale brown monochromes, of the most remarkable finish and beauty of draughtmanship.”⁵⁶ However, the subject that Sophia chose and the identifications that she made of its figures shed enormous light upon both Nathaniel and Sophia's life and art. The theme of Keats' lengthy poem, the spiritualization of Endymion through his immersion in the physical, sexual nature of experience, suggests obvious parallels to Nathaniel's life. Indeed, this affirmation of the union of the spiritual and physical is a recognition to which he had come through his relationship to Sophia. “My breast is full of thee; thou art throbbing throughout all my veins,” he wrote her; “Never, it seems to me, did I know what love was, before. … But our hearts are new created for one another daily, and they enter upon existence with such up-springing rapture as if nothing ever existed before—as if, at this very now, the physical and spiritual world were but first discovered, and by ourselves only.”⁵⁷

Indeed, Sophia's influence upon Nathaniel's understanding and use of the visual arts is a rich, subtle, and pervasive one. At the most obvious level she seemed to have provided him with prototypes for plot and character in his fiction. Yet even this facet of her artistic influence is subtle and complex. In The Marble Faun, for example, the reader will observe, as was noted above, Nathaniel's use of sculpture in a manner similar to that which he had discussed with Sophia years earlier. Critics of The Marble Faun have consistently remarked that Hilda, the gentle, virginal copyist of that work, resembles Sophia. The assumption has then been made that Miriam, the mysterious, sensuous, original artist, represents a kind of woman that Hawthorne would not affirm, notwithstanding the fact readers generally find her the more attractive of the two women. Knowing, however, that Nathaniel encouraged all aspects of Sophia's art, not just her copying, and that their relationship had a clearly sensual element, as is evinced through many of his letters and her treatment of Endymion, one can see aspects of Sophia in Miriam as well as in Hilda.

Sophia also provided for her husband a sympathetic critic of his works, one with whom he shared formerly inchoate notions of pictorial representation and its function in fiction. Nathaniel responded to Sophia's art as she did to the art of Doughty and Allston, with awe and reverence which produced physical agitation. Both Sophia and Nathaniel regarded pictures as an almost magical, definitely spiritual, artistic medium which could capture ineluctable qualities of a subject's psyche that eluded verbalization. Similarly, sculpture was for both Sophia and Nathaniel a means of defying time.

Although Nathaniel's literary career, specifically in his use of the visual arts, flourished in his relationship with Sophia, her marriage to Nathaniel coincided with a shift in her artistic career. She virtually abandoned oil painting after Una's birth, but she demonstrated her flexibility as an artist by making inlaid hand fire-screens and painted lampshades for five dollars each. Her family benefited from Sophia's industry, for the Hawthornes were never financially secure, and this was never truer than upon Nathaniel's loss of his position at the Custom House. The ＄150.00 that Sophia had saved from the sale of her decorative arts kept the family afloat while Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps Nathaniel had some foreknowledge of his wife's economy when he wrote about his dismissal to Hillard: “The intelligence has just reached me; and Sophia has not yet heard it. She will bear it like a woman—that is to say better than a man.”⁵⁸

In the final analysis, the mentorial relationships threaded through Sophia's life reflect a network of influence among the leading figures in American arts and letters in the first half of the nineteenth century. Sophia's mentors were the foremost artists of her day, and from them, at the most obvious level, she learned to copy. Her skill in portraiture, landscape painting, and the use of literary texts as subjects for her art can be traced directly to the influence of Harding, Doughty, and Allston. She learned from their direction and incorporated their methods while she enjoyed comfortable, personal relationships with them, relationships which, perhaps, tempered the awe in which she held them and their work. While she could assert opinions different from theirs in matters of taste and technique, she nonetheless reacted with extreme emotional intensity to their influence. Her Cuban sojourn seemed to have provided her with the respite necessary to coalesce her artistic strength. Unbeknownst to her, the Cuban sojourn provided a buffer between her experience with great artists as mentors and her experience as the mentor to a great artist. Heretofore she has been remembered only as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne; clearly she deserves to be remembered as one of the earliest female painters in America and as one who influenced, as well as was influenced by, the great artists of her era.

Notes

1. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 1:41-44. Josephine Withers includes Sophia Hawthorne in her study of nineteenth-century American women artists, “Artistic Women and Women Artists,” Art Journal, 35 (Summer 1976): 331-34. Although Withers believes that Sophia's “ambitions and accomplishments lay somewhere between the amateur and the professional,” Withers acknowledges that Sophia's marriage to Nathaniel and “her interest in art had a profound, if indirect, effect on their lives” (331).

2. Julian Hawthorne, in Hawthorne and His Wife (1:46), gives his mother's date of birth as 21 September 1811; Louisa Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), pp. 17, 342, cites the Salem records of the date of Sophia's birth, given two years earlier.

3. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, pp. 37-38. Joan Maloney's essay, “Mary Toppan Pickman: The Education of A Salem Gentlewoman, 1820-1850,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 123 (January 1987): 1-28, demonstrates that while the education of most women during that period emphasized the acquisition of “ornamental accomplishments,” a classical education was possible for Salem's young ladies in “at least one segment of society” (28).

4. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, pp. 37-38.

5. Unpublished manuscript journal, 16 and 20 July 1830, NN-B. All citations to Sophia Peabody's unpublished manuscript journals or diaries are from NN-B and will be documented as fully as possible. Some documentation is partial where entries are not fully dated or lack page numbers. The fruits of the desire to “poetize” are very probably Sophia's Continuation to “Christabel” published in an essay by Patricia Valenti in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 13, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 14-15.

6. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker (New York: Collier, 1973), p. 27. Withers in “Artistic Women” also discusses the conventional nineteenth-century expectation that artistic “accomplishments were intended to be distracting, not engrossing; a diversion, not a preoccupation”; however, she cites Sophia as one of the women artists “who move around this stereotype” (331).

7. Nochlin, “No Great Women Artists,” p. 30.

8. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 46.

9. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950 (New York: Alfred A Khopf, 1976), pp. 220-21; Elsa Honig Fine, Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld & Schram LVPrior, 1976), pp. 100-104. Fine cites another exception to the rule of the mentorial relative in the case of Sarah Gooderidge (1788-1853). Known as “Goode,” she painted Gilbert Stuart who sat for her to have “his effigy made” although he allowed no one else that honor (pp. 99-100).

10. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 46.

11. Unpublished manuscript journal, 11 [n.m.] 1832 and 9 [n.m.] 1830, NN-B. Robert F. Perkins, Jr., and William J. Gavin III, in their edition of The Boston Athen❙vum Art Exhibition Index: 1827-1874 (Boston: The Library of the Boston Athen❙vum, 1980), confirm that Allston's “Mother and Child,” Rosa's “Landscape with Cattle,” and Lorraine's “Seaport” were exhibited at the Athen❙vum in 1830 (pp. 11, 35, 119). It is more difficult to identify the painting Sophia called “The Doomed Bride” because no such painting by Allston was exhibited at the Athen❙vum that year, nor—more puzzling still—do William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., in A Man of Genius: The Art of Washington Allston, 1779-1843 (Boston: The Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), cite any of Allston's paintings by that title.

12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1:304.

13. Gerdts and Stebbins, in A Man of Genius, provide the most useful reference on Washington Allston. Similar references for Harding and Doughty, respectively, are Leah Lipton, A Truthful Likeness: Chester Harding and His Portraits (Washington: The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1985), and Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., Thomas Doughty 1793-1856, An American Pioneer in Landscape Painting: A Selection and Catalogue (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1973). Also very helpful is Howard N. Doughty's unpublished manuscript, “A Biographical Sketch of Thomas Doughty” (New-York Historical Society, 1941).

14. Unpublished manuscript journal, 12 July 1830 and 14 July 1830, pp. 188, 191-92, NN-B. Lipton points out that Sophia's copy of Harding's 1830 portrait of Allston is housed at MHi. This portrait is reproduced by Lipton in A Truthful Likeness (p. 98), as is Harding's portrait of Sophia herself (p. 95).

15. Unpublished manuscript journal, 22 July 1830, pp. 202-203; 18 July 1830, p. 195; 14 July 1830, pp. 191-92, NN-B.

16. Quoted in Goodyear, An American Pioneer, p. 17.

17. Quoted in Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, 1:64-65.

18. Unpublished manuscript journal, [n.d.] [n.m.] 1830; [n.d.] [n.m.] 1830, pp. 123-24, NN-B.

19. Unpublished manuscript journal, 15 [n.m.] [n.y.], p. 134; 12 [n.m.] 1830, NN-B.

20. Unpublished manuscript journal, 5 and 6 June 1830, pp. 157, 161, NN-B.

21. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Sophia Peabody, 1835 and 1838, NN-B.

22. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, 1:65-66.

23. Unpublished manuscript journal, 10 January 1832, NN-B.

24. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 54.

25. Quoted in Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 55.

26. Quoted in Tharp, Peabody Sisters, pp. 57, 59.

27. Tharp has pointed out that Sophia was careful to give credit to the original if one of her paintings was a copy, and thus concludes that paintings without such citations are probably originals. Tharp says because these paintings are not identical to those of Doughty or Rosa, whose manner they appear to imitate, they are probably original canvases (Peabody Sisters, p. 346). However, because much of Doughty's work has been lost, it is impossible to accept Tharp's reasoning that one of Sophia's paintings is an original simply because Doughty's extant work does not contain an exact duplicate. Perkins points out that Sophia's Landscape was exhibited at Boston Athen❙vum in 1834 (Exhibition Index, p. 108).

28. Unpublished manuscript journal, 10 January 1832, 20 January 1830, 15 February 1832, NN-B.

29. Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years (New York: Rinehart, 1948), p. 244. Sophia's maladies initially suggest those of nineteenth-century American gentlewomen which B. Ehrenreich and D. English discuss in Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973). These authors surmise that fainting, headaches, and the need for bed-rest were probably the only acceptable way such women could escape the stresses of socially imposed domestic roles. However, the pattern of Sophia's condition defies facile identification with this historical generalization. First of all, her symptoms exceeded the socially acceptable limits of genteel invalidism. Furthermore, her illness did not provide her with escape from a circumscribed domestic role, for that role had never been presumed for her, nor did she assume that role for herself. Her family believed that her art must be her means of self-support because her illness would render her unfit for marriage and childbearing; nonetheless, Sophia's illness sometimes interferred with her pursuit of what she wanted most—to be a painter of original canvases.

30. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 70; quoted in Cantwell, Hawthorne, p. 240.

31. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 107; Howard N. Doughty, A Biographical Sketch, pp. 32, 56, 62.

32. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, pp. 115-16.

33. Quoted in Cantwell, Hawthorne, p. 253.

34. In Hawthorne, Cantwell develops this notion at some length through a discussion of the corruption of the Cuban social system in which Sophia was participating though without, perhaps, understanding on a conscious level its ramifications (pp. 253-54).

35. Quoted in Tharp, Peabody Sisters, pp. 97-98.

36. Sophia Peabody to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, 1:185.

37. “Edward Randolph's Portrait,” The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William L. Charvat et al., 20 vols. to date (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962-), vol. 9, Twice-Told Tales (1974), p. 259.

38. Randall Stewart, Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 16-17.

39. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), p. 28. Norman Holmes Pearson, introduction to Hawthorne's French and Italian notebooks (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1941), 1:xii, is one of the few critics who has recognized Sophia's influence, concluding that were it possible to trace with precision the source of Hawthorne's artistic development “the field would doubtless lie in the particular interest in art on the part of his wife.”

40. Centenary Edition, vol. 15 The Letters, 1813-1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (1984), p. 339.

41. Letters, pp. 572-73.

42. Letters, p. 442.

43. Letters, pp. 397-98.

44. Quoted in Lathrop, Memories, p. 24; Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 119. In Hawthorne, Cantwell describes this illustration, which was apparently drawn after the manner of Flaxman, as “a frail, haunting, shadowy drawing, characteristic of her work. Her art was distinctive, personal, … a century later it would have been fashionable” (p. 289).

45. Preface to The Gentle Boy: A Thrice Told Tale (Boston: Weeks, Jordan; New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1839).

46. Washington Allston, “The Gentle Boy,” Christian Register and Boston Observer, 19 January 1839, p. 4, col. 6.

47. Letters, p. 362.

48. Letters, p. 404.

49. John Idol, “Hawthorne on Sophia's Paintings of Lake Como,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Newsletter, 10, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 11.

50. Letters, p. 402.

51. Benjamin Lease, “Diorama and Dream: Hawthorne's Cinematic Vision,” Journal of Popular Culture, 5 (Fall 1971): 316.

52. Letters, p. 384.

53. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 161.

54. Quoted in Lathrop, Memories, pp. 72-73.

55. Quoted in Tharp, Peabody Sisters, p. 181.

56. Lathrop, Memories, p. 72.

57. Letters, p. 620.

58. Centenary Edition, vol. 16 The Letters, 1843-1853 (1985), p. 620.