The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land

In Curzio Malaparte’s perverse and irksome caller “The Skin,” an American Army serviceman stationed successful a devastated confederate Italy successful 1943 exclaims, “Ah Europe! What an bonzer spot it is. I request Europe, to marque maine conscious of being an American.” The officer—“an American successful the noblest consciousness of the word,” a antheral with a “delicacy of feeling” prone to blushing astatine the show of the degradation each astir him—seems to beryllium talking astir European culture, of which helium is successful awe. But helium is besides utilizing Europe’s infinitesimal of deepest ignominy arsenic an excuse to judge successful American innocence.

Europe served a akin relation successful nineteenth-century America. The Continent had generations of infamy to gully on. It had artists similar Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. It had cities similar Rome, astir which James Salter erstwhile wrote, “Nothing truthful often betrayed could clasp a shred of illusion.” The French Revolution, coming truthful soon aft America’s palmy War of Independence, had produced archetypal the Terror and past a warfare of conquest that culminated successful humiliating defeat. France lurched from republic to dictatorship to empire earlier cycling backmost done implicit monarchy, law monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire. The United States, searching for self-definition but loath to suffer its illusions—its innocence—needed each of this arsenic a counterpoint.

Gifted, worldly, and wide loved, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was the emblematic creator of the mediate decades of America’s nineteenth century. A starring fig of the alleged Hudson River School, helium painted panoramic landscapes of astonishing detail, grandeur, and motivation ambition. Combining melodramatic mountains, lush tropical forests, and awe-inspiring geological formations nether relentlessly epic skies, helium portrayed these environments arsenic richly interconnected, stirring successful themselves but besides portion of thing larger: a bigger feeling, a greater idea.

Mark Twain, a repetition visitant to Church’s astir celebrated painting, “The Heart of the Andes” (1859), arsenic it toured the U.S., wrote to his member that a “third sojourn volition find your encephalon gasping and straining with futile efforts to instrumentality each the wonderment in.” You volition conflict to understand, helium continued, “how specified a occurrence could person been conceived and executed by quality encephalon and quality hands.” Landscape painters summation taste centrality by showing a nation’s territory to itself. Church did for America what John Constable and J. M. W. Turner had done for Britain. Like Turner, Church besides travelled acold beyond the shores of his homeland. But immoderate helium painted, whether Andean volcanoes, Arctic icebergs, oregon the Athenian Parthenon, helium was ever progressive successful the hard task of American self-definition.

Constable and Turner stay cardinal to British individuality today, their paintings reproduced connected java mugs and fridge magnets; Church’s presumption successful American civilization is much precarious. Did helium amusement america the United States oregon thing we conflict to recognize—either due to the fact that it inactive relied excessively heavy connected Europe oregon due to the fact that the United States helium depicted was excessively wrapped up successful a vulgar show of its ain innocence? The two-hundredth day of Church’s commencement is being marked this twelvemonth by a scope of publications and exhibitions. “Frederic Church: Global Artist” (Yale), the rubric of an illustrated postulation of essays edited by Tim Barringer, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Jennifer Raab, feels apt erstwhile you recognize Church arsenic an American looking to the satellite for definition. The essays sermon his relationships with the Ottoman Empire, Colombia, and Rome, and see his bequest successful the discourse of Indigenous and settler histories, slavery, science, ecology, and religion. Perhaps adjacent much apt, however, is the rubric of a lively caller biography of the creator by Victoria Johnson, “Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World” (Scribner), the “glorious country” successful question being America.

Church’s credentials arsenic America’s nationalist creator were impeccable. Born 50 years aft the commencement of his nation, helium was the nonstop descendant of an aboriginal Puritan pioneer. His begetter ran a palmy metallic and jewelry business, and aboriginal served arsenic a manager of an security institution successful Hartford, Connecticut. To spell with his ancestral claims, Church, who had been drafting obsessively since aboriginal childhood, besides inherited an creator mantle. At eighteen, helium became the lone pupil of Thomas Cole. Though calved successful Lancashire, England, Cole moved to the United States portion inactive a teen-ager and became his adopted nation’s preëminent painter-interpreter. The precocious Church was embraced by the Cole household astatine a farm, known arsenic Cedar Grove, successful Catskill. While different artists of ambition sailed for Europe, Cole’s protégé was perfectly satisfied sketching on the Hudson.

Cole’s canvases were synthetic constructions teeming with homilies. He saw America arsenic an Arcadia destined for corruption by populist forces, personified by Andrew Jackson. “We are inactive successful Eden,” helium told a New York assemblage successful 1835. “The partition that shuts america retired of the plot is our ain ignorance and folly.” The changes helium witnessed successful America, including railway expansion, the adoption of steam power, and worsening pollution, convinced Cole that life’s earthy rhythms were accelerating retired of control. “The Course of Empire,” a bid of allegorical paintings helium began successful 1833, depicted American destiny successful presumption laid retired by Edward Gibbon successful “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

“It took a 100 years, but I yet grew retired my bangs.”

Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

Cole’s works were arsenic notable for what they omitted arsenic for what they showed. To overgarment an 1827 presumption of the Hudson River Valley from the Catskills, helium moved speech a upland blocking the vista, and edited retired a edifice and a guardrail astatine a scenic lookout. (As Diana Seave Greenwald writes successful “Frederic Church: Global Artist,” erstwhile Church visited the Holy Land forty years later, helium besides chose to edit retired oregon marginalize the obvious—that the territory was Muslim and portion of the Ottoman Empire—preferring to absorption connected the landscape’s links with its Greco-Roman and Crusader past.) But Cole’s authorization extended beyond his canvases; helium was besides doing his portion to make the creator satellite from which the young Frederic Church would truthful auspiciously emerge. He helped recovered the National Academy of Design, successful New York, the twelvemonth earlier Church was born. He arranged for 2 tiny landscapes by Church, past conscionable shy of nineteen years old, to beryllium exhibited astatine the academy’s prestigious outpouring show; they were good received, and Church was disconnected and running. He was, according to a friend, “fortune’s favourite from the beginning.”

Church’s archetypal important painting, completed successful 1846, was “Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, successful 1636,” which depicts aboriginal Pilgrims (among them his ancestor Richard Church) seeking asylum from the Bay Colony authorities successful Boston. The wooded, well-irrigated landscape, gilded by the airy of the gloaming, is presented arsenic a promised land. The coating whitethorn beryllium the archetypal quality successful creation of the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a word coined the twelvemonth earlier by the newspaperman and diplomat John O’Sullivan. Manifest Destiny entailed not conscionable westward enlargement but the dispersed of liberty and democracy, which O’Sullivan believed was thing little than “Christianity successful its earthly aspect.” Abraham Lincoln was wary of the doctrine, perceiving that immoderate specified conception of divine inevitability could beryllium utilized to warrant onshore grabs and war.

Church was not inclined to Cole’s pessimism. Where his teacher favored generalized nature, Church moved gradually toward greater specificity and empiricism, adjacent arsenic helium continued to usage scenery to research ideas of liberty and American identity. When Church moved to New York, successful 1847, helium aroused involvement arsenic the lone pupil of the celebrated Thomas Cole. Most of his aboriginal income were to the committee of the National Academy’s rival organization, the Art-Union. Established successful 1839, the Art-Union sought to link New York’s creation satellite with a nationalist assemblage done a subscription strategy and an yearly lottery. Church did not, however, neglect the National Academy, and successful 1849—in the midst of bloody riots pitting nativists against immigrants and New York’s moving people against the wealthy—he was promoted to afloat academician status. Three years later, his “New England Scenery,” which transposes the pastoral picturesque of the French artists Claude and Poussin to New England, was sold for thirteen 100 dollars, the highest terms past paid for an American painting.

Church’s operation of talent, affability, and good manners eased his mode into New York’s élite, sometimes inspiring envy among his creator friends. (He “never knew what poorness was,” his person Worthington Whittredge noted.) At the Century Association, a men’s nine for artists and affluent patrons (Twain called it “the astir unspeakably respectable nine successful the United States”), helium met with Cyrus Field, a merchant astir to go celebrated for laying a telegraph cablegram crossed the Atlantic Ocean. In 1851, Church was travelling with Field and his wife, Mary, successful Virginia erstwhile helium archetypal encountered the slave-owning American South.

Tensions implicit slavery were past ratcheting up everywhere. “There is infamy successful the air,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote aft a fugitive from slavery was brutally captured successful Boston; the shame of complicity, helium added, “robs the scenery of beauty, and takes the sunshine retired of each hour.” Church and the Fields stayed astatine Shirley, a plantation conscionable southeast of Richmond. Their host, Hill Carter, “considered himself an enlightened and benevolent man,” Victoria Johnson writes; helium “occasionally sold children distant from their parents, but nary much often, helium insisted, than helium felt perfectly necessary.” During their visit, the archetypal installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared successful a Washington, D.C., newspaper. At Field’s urging, Church painted a presumption of Virginia’s Natural Bridge, the renowned geological enactment alluded to successful “Moby-Dick.”

As a nationalist icon, the Natural Bridge served arsenic a quiet, Emersonian rebuke to Europe’s militaristic triumphal arches, reinforcing the naturalness of American democracy. Church depicted the precocious arch, which sits connected onshore erstwhile owned by Thomas Jefferson, with technological precision yet successful a romantic, aureate light. He signalled his enactment for radical equality by coating a Black man, picked retired by airy successful the foreground shadows, lasting portion speaking to a seated achromatic woman, his gestures suggesting pedagogical intent.

Church’s landscapes themselves had pedagogical intent, and the lessons were not conscionable technological but ethical, spiritual, patriotic. This intent aligned with the nation’s urgent accent connected acquisition arsenic a defence against mob rule. It aligned, too, with the proposal acceptable retired successful Emerson’s rhapsodic 1836 effort “Nature,” which posited the earthy satellite arsenic an arena for motivation instruction. Channelling Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile, oregon On Education,” Emerson stressed not conscionable self-reliance but an innocent, childlike mode of living, escaped from the “corruptions” of tradition. The power connected American civilization of Emerson’s rallying cry—“Why should not we besides bask an archetypal narration to the universe?”—is hard to overestimate.

When Church travelled to the Andes, archetypal successful 1853 and again successful 1857 (Field accompanied him connected the archetypal travel and financed both), helium was seeking conscionable specified an “original relation.” But his epic travel wasn’t itself original—it was successful nonstop emulation of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, who, betwixt 1799 and 1804, had traversed thousands of miles successful South and Central America. In his treatise “Cosmos” and successful different writings, Humboldt presented the satellite arsenic a elephantine “interlaced and interwoven” organism successful ways that spoke powerfully to Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and inactive resonate today. He besides extolled scenery coating arsenic 1 of the highest expressions of a emotion of nature. Church acceptable retired to present connected Humboldt’s insight. Johnson’s descriptions of his journeys are among the astir breathtaking parts of her biography:

As they climbed ever higher, the stone began to alternate with slabs of glacier. The hail turned to snow. The fume surging from the crater rolled downward, and adjacent successful his discomfort Church admired the “vaporous undulations &c. melting into a smoky light.” When the unreality drifted isolated briefly, helium caught a thrilling glimpse of the summit, swathed successful snow. At this altitude, helium could hardly instrumentality 10 steps without losing his breath. The horses trudged forward, often coming to a standstill arsenic they snorted and gasped successful the bladed air.

The astir important coating to look from that archetypal trip, “The Andes of Ecuador,” has a low, centered prima irradiating a immense scenery framed astatine near by a thenar histrion and astatine close by a waterfall. In the distance, stretching the vista astir to its breaking point, are 2 snowcapped volcanoes. The coating was seen by Thoreau erstwhile it went connected show astatine the Boston Athenaeum and was purchased by William Henry Osborn, a young railroad enforcement with whose household Church would go lastingly close.

Church felt it captious to the occurrence of his pictures—and perhaps, by extension, to American democracy—that radical trusted successful the accuracy of what helium showed them. The thousands who came to spot his 1857 coating of Niagara Falls, archetypal successful the United States and past successful Britain, were astounded by its immense standard and unsocial perspective. As a show of attentive observation, it seemed unprecedented. Artists earlier Church recovered it each but intolerable to “freeze” the movements of water, but successful Church’s hands, arsenic the creation professional Robert Hughes wrote, “not a wavelet oregon an eddy fails to play its portion successful a communicative of factual origin and effect.”

Church’s second, shorter travel to the Andes led to the instauration of his masterpiece. The profusion of precisely rendered item successful “The Heart of the Andes” is mesmerizing, and a reminder of the promiscuous relations, successful those years, betwixt subject and Romanticism. Just arsenic Emerson had written that “every quality successful quality corresponds to immoderate authorities of the mind,” Church made sure, arsenic the creation historiographer Rebecca Bedell has said of the painting, that “almost each pictorial item has its counterpart successful Humboldt’s words.”

And yet “The Heart of the Andes” is not a faithful rendering of a peculiar view. It’s a composite, contrived successful the studio, informed by the scores of sketches and colour notations Church had made portion travelling. Like a teacher guiding a child, the enactment leads the oculus step-by-step from the little close to the precocious left. In the foreground is simply a lushly forested vale with a stream and a waterfall and 2 pilgrims earlier a wayside cross. In the mediate region is simply a quality settlement, past a set of aureate grasslands, past the arid little slopes of the Cordilleras, and yet the snowy peaks, including the expansive dome of Chimborazo.

Seven decades oregon truthful earlier, the Scottish naturalist James Hutton had argued that geological processes played retired gradually implicit antecedently unimagined periods of time. His find of what John McPhee aboriginal termed “deep time” seemed to pulverize immoderate claims to quality significance. But Church, undeterred, was drawn to the thought that those processes offered lessons successful demolition and renewal which could beryllium applied to a federation teetering connected civilian war. In a forty-three-page usher to “The Heart of the Andes,” Church’s person Theodore Winthrop recovered “proofs everyplace of change, building, razing, upheaval, sinking, and deliberate crumbling away.” But helium besides saw grounds of however “new ruin restores the beardown lines that aged ruin weakened.”

Church wanted to assistance reconstruct America’s “strong lines,” which helium thought of arsenic republican, abolitionist, Christian, and scientific. Like Humboldt, helium believed that subject could beryllium reconciled with religion. But erstwhile Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” successful 1859, a caller presumption of beingness threatened to snuff retired Humboldt’s thought of a benevolent “harmony, blending unneurotic each created things,” and regenerate it with a Hobbesian imaginativeness of randomness, conflict, and opportunism. Darwin’s mentation did not preclude societal coöperation oregon progress, but it undermined the thought that determination was immoderate deeper intent to beingness than survival. Church, for each his technological curiosity, was not moved to person Darwinism into pictorial rhetoric. “I privation subject would instrumentality a vacation for 10 years truthful I could drawback up,” helium wrote adjacent the extremity of his life.

That Church combined his acquisition ngo with a acquisition for showmanship led immoderate to comparison him to P. T. Barnum. The circus promoter who gave america bearded infants, giantesses from Maine, and Jumbo the elephant had earlier established the American Museum, successful little Manhattan. Along with exhibits of skeletons, mummies, and Revolutionary War mementos, the depository included an full level of dioramas and panoramic paintings. In phalanxes of varying typeface which mirrored the precise babble of democracy, the posters advertizing the depository promised “hours and hours of entertainment, instruction, and motivation uplift.”

Barnum’s depository wasn’t acold southbound of the Tenth Street Studio, where, implicit 3 weeks successful May, 1859, Church archetypal displayed “The Heart of the Andes” to 12 1000 ticket-holding patrons. The painting’s gigantic walnut framework resembled a model acceptable into a niche. Heavy draperies connected a curtain rod were drawn backmost to uncover the work, which viewers often had to enactment up for hours to see. “The taxable is new, the scenes are strange, the facts are amazing,” Winthrop wrote, sounding (as Bedell notes) precise overmuch similar 1 of Barnum’s publicity leaflets. But Church was not a snob. If helium had a spot of amusement biz successful him, it was conscionable 1 much happening that made him emblematically American.

Among the crowds who came to spot the coating was Isabel Carnes, the beauteous girl of a luxury-imports merchant from Dayton, Ohio. By the opening of 1860, she and Church were engaged. After marrying, they settled connected his spot successful the Hudson Valley.

By then, Church had a set of followers. More than immoderate creator earlier him, helium had made the lawsuit for American art—and, by extension, American identity—as distinct, vigorous, and independent. Yet, with the United States connected the cusp of civilian war, the question of what counted arsenic “American art” became recently charged. Art historians—among them Angela Miller and Tyler Green—have argued that “The Heart of the Andes” was possibly little astir South America than it was astir the United States. At a clip of intensifying divisions astatine home, a depiction of Ecuador could connection an Edenic, new-world scenery escaped from the partisanship tainting Church’s New England landscapes. The Andes’ earthy features could symbolically integrate some the North (snowcapped peaks) and the South (hot lowlands). Church was utilizing a overseas landscape, successful different words, to entreaty for American unity.

When warfare broke out, Church’s person Winthrop died connected the battlefield; helium is often cited arsenic the archetypal Union serviceman to dice successful combat. Church’s landscapes from those traumatic years functioned arsenic commentaries connected the conflict’s course. Warnings, laments, and odes to renewal were expressed pictorially arsenic dying days nether bleeding heavens, belching volcanoes, arrogant icebergs, lavish rainbows amid spangling, mist-suffusing sunlight and dawns of bid and hope.

Church was the archetypal large American creator to marque a constituent of snubbing Europe; helium neither grew up nor trained there, and did not acceptable ft successful the Continent until his estimation was agelong established. Yet helium continued to beryllium heavy connected European pictorial conventions, supra each that of the Romantic sublime. The sublime—a conception introduced by the first-century philosopher Longinus and aboriginal refined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—rests connected an brushwood with thing excessively immense oregon excessively almighty for the quality caput to comprehend fully. With it comes an anticipation that, arsenic the caput cracks isolated nether the strain of trying, we mightiness glimpse the transcendent. In scenery painting, the sublime had its origins successful the high-angled, panoramic vistas (or “world landscapes”) of Joachim Patinir, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It was developed into a rhetoric by Salvator Rosa successful the seventeenth period and by Caspar David Friedrich and Turner successful the aboriginal nineteenth century.

In Church’s hands, the sublime served arsenic an scale to the vastness and complexity of nature, the greatness of God, and the “naturalness” of the caller nation. But determination was thing belated astir his adoption of this fundamentally European tradition. Compare Church’s landscapes with paintings by the French realists and Impressionists who were his contemporaries, and you go conscious of an assumed narration betwixt landscape, nationalist identity, and spiritual revelation that had already begun to consciousness strained. The landscapes of Church and his adjacent Albert Bierstadt (who painted the American West) tin consciousness similar histrionic versions of Friedrich’s simpler, much concentrated aesthetic.

When Church did yet sojourn Europe, successful the precocious eighteen-sixties, helium was unimpressed. (“The Tiber is not the Hudson,” helium wrote.) He was drawn alternatively to the Levant, and his travels to the Middle East, successful 1868, inspired what galore see his past masterpiece—not a coating but Olana, a lovingly designed scenery and his location connected a elevation successful the Hudson Valley. With its winding paths, extended planting, and choreographed vistas offering views of 4 states, Olana is simply a benignant of Gesamtkunstwerk to which Church devoted the last decades of his career. “I tin marque much and amended landscapes successful this way,” helium wrote, “than by tampering with canvas and overgarment successful the studio.”

The eccentric plan of Olana was inspired by fortresses successful Persia (where, curiously, Church hadn’t travelled), arsenic good arsenic Italian, East Indian, Gothic Revival, and French Second Empire architecture. Its Wunderkammer-like interior, preserved and unfastened to the nationalist since 1967, is hectically eclectic—filled with paintings and sketches by Church and his friends alongside Indian and Chinese furniture, Central Asian textiles, Persian tiles, Mexican sombreros, Japanese paintings, European Old Master copies, and an extended library.

Church’s fondness for pumping motivation rhetoric into his pictures whitethorn reassure america that, connected questions astir slavery, democracy, and the environment, helium was connected the close broadside of past (to invoke different guiltless illusion). But it’s besides what caused his enactment to autumn from favor. His occupation was not truthful overmuch that radical stopped buying the rhetoric—it was that radical wanted little rhetoric. Winslow Homer, a decennary younger than Church, started his vocation by making illustrations for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. He populated his landscapes—closely cropped and adjacent astatine hand—with existent people, not ciphers, and his robust, adhesive benignant was much successful measurement with vernacular traditions. If, today, Homer feels much emblematically American to america than Church does, it’s due to the fact that his paintings made his assemblage attraction a small much astir the communicative and a small little astir its cosmic implications.

In America, the lessons of Impressionism—which coincided successful France with the extremity of an empire and the opening of the enduring Third Republic—fell connected receptive ground. The caller movement, arsenic it gathered momentum, unravelled France’s academy-based, state-sponsored Salon system. (The yearly juried outpouring exhibitions astatine New York’s National Academy of Design were patterned aft the Salon.) A thriving republic, artists started to realize, mightiness necessitate less visions of the sublime and much images of mundane scenes. People wanted beauty, yes. But, alternatively of God-bothering sunsets and overseas vistas, they yearned to admit themselves and the radical they loved.

Like the enactment task itself, the creator movements of some Europe and America were a mashup of communal influences. And yet Europe’s sheer taste value intensified America’s thirst for separation. In Church’s day, that separation depended connected promoting a robust thought of American innocence implicit Europe’s enfeebling corruption.

The rhetoric of innocence, adjacent if it’s illusory, tin beryllium energizing, but, erstwhile it fails to lucifer reality, it tin besides go exhausting. The region betwixt the perfect successful your caput and the facts connected the crushed tin unfastened retired astatine your feet similar a canyon. The lone mode to subdue the dizziness whitethorn beryllium to fto spell of the large ideas—nation, nature, arcs of past bending toward justice, and truthful on. That whitethorn beryllium wherefore the ascendant strains successful American modernism (at slightest until the mid-twentieth century, erstwhile the sublime reappeared successful the enactment of the Abstract Expressionists) cleaved to the factual, the intimate, the proximate. The writer William Carlos Williams’s rallying outcry “No ideas but successful things” recovered echoes each done American culture, including successful the writings of Ernest Hemingway, the photography of Walker Evans (“If the happening is there, wherefore determination it is”), and the poesy of Frank O’Hara (“I bash this, I bash that”).

But, adjacent if Church’s propensity to enlistee quality for heavy-handed symbolism tin look excessively overmuch today, thing astir his work—some operation of thrilling ambition, tact tethered to empiricism, and loving tenderness—continues to magnetize our spectacle-jaded eyes. Sadly, his beingness rhymed not lone with American occurrence but besides with American grief. His and Isabel’s archetypal 2 children some died of diphtheria successful March, 1865, conscionable weeks earlier President Lincoln’s death. Church threw himself into nationalist life, serving arsenic a parks commissioner successful New York and helping to recovered the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His decades-long improvement of Olana, however, coincided with worsening rheumatoid arthritis. Beginning successful his wrist, it yet affected his full body. Warm upwind helped, truthful helium spent much than a twelve winters successful Mexico portion Isabel, suffering from her ain chronic wellness troubles, turned progressively to religion. Fred, their oldest surviving child, was suspended from Princeton for cheating, past caught embezzling from his Seattle leader to feed, Church suspected, a gambling habit. He ended up managing a edifice successful Honolulu, acold from his dismayed parents.

Shortly earlier Lincoln’s assassination, successful 1865, with the North’s triumph successful the Civil War successful sight, the President had told his wife, Mary, that helium wanted to sojourn Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Around 3 years later, Church and his household acceptable distant to bash what was denied to the Lincolns. Their travels successful the Middle East astir coincided with Mark Twain’s. Church went to the Holy Land successful hunt of sublimity; Twain fastened connected the absurdities of those determined to find it. In the publication that resulted, “The Innocents Abroad,” Twain’s mockery often settled connected his stand-in for the pious guidebook writer William C. Prime, who, helium wrote, “went done this peaceful onshore with 1 manus everlastingly connected his revolver, and the different connected his pocket-handkerchief. Always, erstwhile helium was not connected the constituent of crying implicit a beatified place, helium was connected the brink of sidesplitting an Arab.” Twain was by turns amused and appalled by the histrionics that taint our tellings of history, and by the yawning gaps betwixt story and reality.

Still, erstwhile Twain visited Church astatine Olana, successful 1887, helium had a fantastic time. It was, helium wrote successful a thank-you note, “an perfect holiday, successful a Garden of Eden.” ♦