The Cracks in Being: On Edwin Elmer’s Mourning Picture (1890)
by Jon Repetti
(The following is not so much an interpretation of Elmer’s painting as it is an attempt to narrate an experience of looking, to track and reconstruct the moods one passes through while living with some particular work for a long time.)
Credit: Edwin Romanzo Elmer, American, 1850–1923. “Mourning Picture,” 1890. Painting, oil on canvas. Smith College Museum of Art. https://scma.smith.edu/mourning-picture
I
Edwin Romanzo Elmer was born in 1850 in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the youngest in a family of poor, devout farmers with deep New England roots. We know almost nothing about his early life besides what can be gleaned from a few anecdotes reported by a niece, Maud Velona Elmer.
She describes an idyllic childhood: days spent exploring the woods and eating wild berries, nights gathered around the hearth with the family, perhaps listening to their mother read from Scripture. As Maud tells it, the idyll ended once Edwin and his brother Samuel grew “old enough to swing an axe,” at which point they went to work chopping wood to sell to the family’s more prosperous neighbors.
Elmer moved to Cleveland in 1867 to join another brother, Ansel, in the silk-spool business. A biographer speculates that this is where the precocious teenager first encountered serious contemporary art and artists. Rapidly developing Cleveland—John D. Rockefeller would found Standard Oil in the city in 1870—was certainly a more cosmopolitan milieu than rural Ashfield. Perhaps at the city’s newly opened public library he read the Victorian critic John Ruskin on the role of nature in painting. Perhaps he frequented local galleries and studied the landscape work of John Henry Hill, Charles Herbert Moore, and other now-forgotten three-named painters of the era.
We at least know for sure that Edwin found early business success in Ohio.
We know this because, around 1875, he returned to Ashfield in style, and immediately set to work constructing a tasteful Italianate house in nearby Buckland. Once installed in this country seat, he quickly invested his money in a series of failed business ventures, including a billiard hall and an oyster bar. His patented inventions proved moderately more successful, at least for a time; they included a double-action butter churn and a machine for braiding horsewhips. He specialized in clever mechanical improvements that made the lives of small-town folk a bit easier.
Elmer would live to see the butter churning process taken out of the home and industrialized, and the horse-drawn carriage replaced by the automobile. He had a striking portrait taken in 1876 and married Mary Jane Ware, a local beauty, in 1879. A year later, she gave birth to Effie, the couple’s first and only child.
As Maud recalls, Elmer taught himself drawing techniques in his spare time throughout the 1880s, filling notebooks with careful studies in form and perspective, most of which have been lost. He seems to have pursued art as a kind of gentleman’s hobby, not entirely distinct from his machine tinkering, billiard playing, and amateur study of mathematics. The rest of his time was spent minding various investments and doting on his wife and daughter. The family seems to have spent a happy, prosperous decade in the Buckland house—a life of provincial middle-class bonheur and domestic harmony reminiscent of Louisa May Alcott’s more saccharine fictions.
In January 1890, Effie died of appendicitis. She was nine years old.
Edwin fell into a period of intense depression that he would combat with work, and Mary into a cycle of neurotic grief that would last the rest of her life. Mary was unable to even look at children, and she convinced her husband to leave the house, which he sold to his brother Samuel. They gave Effie’s pets (a lamb, a kitten, and a hen named “Dody”) to Maud, and kept a box of her clothing and dolls.
II
Before the move, Edwin completed Mourning Picture, a masterpiece in oil paint that represents the culmination of his studies over the previous decade. It was displayed briefly at a local post-office, and then disappeared from view until Maud Elmer sold it to the Smith College Museum in 1953, where it has been on continuous display for decades.
The painting has attracted little scholarly comment (besides a brief flash of interest in the 1980s, the product of a retrospective), but it has undoubtedly caught the eye of countless Smith undergraduates. It exerts a strange magnetic force from a back corner of the museum’s third floor, pulling the viewer away from the more familiar 19th-century landscapes and portraits around it. It certainly had this effect on Adrienne Rich, whose poem of the same title ventriloquizes little Effie from beyond the grave:
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers,
draw out the map of each lilac leaf
or the net of the veins on my father’s
grief-tranced hand.
Elmer’s Mourning Picture depicts Effie, Edwin, and Mary on the lawn in front of their house. Effie stands in the left-center foreground with her lamb, cat, and doll, while her parents sit in the shade of a tree, behind her and off to the right.
The Elmer homestead looms behind them in the middle ground. It appears at first somewhat small in relation to the human figures in front of it; one wonders how even this family of three could all fit behind that narrow façade. But, as we look longer, it seems to grow more massive (though no wider), to become heavier than any other object in the frame; the thick horizontal planks and finely wrought columns lend a sense of enduring groundedness to this house that Edwin built with his own hands.
Behind Effie, the green tree-line fades into the gently rolling hills of Western Massachusetts where she played like her father before her. At the peak of the furthest hill, over Effie’s shoulder, one can just barely discern a tiny white fort, the American flag flying above it rendered in two minuscule splotches of red and blue. This military structure, reduced to a tiny white square against a vast horizon, gestures backward to the days of violent frontier-settlement. It reminds us that these hills were the site of bloodshed before they witnessed children’s idylls. It also points forward to the nation’s continued westward expansion.
Politics, History, and Empire are all inscribed here, but they are almost comically distant, an afterthought from the viewpoint of a prosperous New England family—the pater familia with his (notably local) newspaper and thick, sausage-like mustache; the saintly mother with her ball of yarn and knitting needles. At the same time, the fort is dwarfed by the calm, gentle beauty of the unpeopled hills, their history erased under the hand of the artist. A fantasy of pastoral harmony.
III
But, of course, we’re burying the lead. The above constitutes a kind of intellectual retreat from properly aesthetic experience—a looking-at and thinking-about rather than a being-with. The former are necessary, but they don’t get us any closer to the enigmatic draw of Elmer’s work; the sense that it (perhaps moreso than Elmer himself) has something to say directly to us, though it speaks obliquely; the radical distinction it achieves from the more traditional paintings around it.
Long before that fort on the horizon becomes visible (let alone legible and comical in a historical symbolic network), before the house can appeal to the eye as a refuge of relative permanence and bonheur, our primary experience of the painting, however hard we may try to rationalize or disavow it, is one of unease, anxiety, even dread—the counterparts of our fascination. But why?
Consider first the intense stillness of the scene. There is hardly any trace of movement anywhere, hardly any relation between persons or objects. We cannot infer the direction or presence of a breeze from the trees and grass, though each leaf and blade has been rendered with the painstaking detail one might expect from Van Eyck. The hard-edged clouds share nothing with the airy billows of Hudson River School landscape paintings, resembling instead islands on a map of the South Pacific. None of the three members of the family look at the others, and even the animals seem to avoid each other’s gaze. The short stretch of ground between Edwin and his daughter seems somehow vast, like the unbridgeable distance between Achilles and the Tortoise in Zeno’s paradox.
The family portrait, whose key function (Jean Baudrillard teaches us) is to represent the various family members in their proper relations to one another and thereby remind them how to act like a proper family, instead produces here a sense of mutual alienation reminiscent more of Edvard Munch than Norman Rockwell.
To my eye, the only three figures that suggest any movement or relation at all seem specifically chosen and arranged to further intensify the work’s primary sense of radical separation: the cat turning away from the scene and stepping towards the tree line, which grows more ominous in light of the above; the doll’s stroller precariously perched on the sloping grass, its delicate wheels in danger of rolling forward and out of frame; the single tear at the corner of the lamb’s eye about to fall.
IV
Sigmund Freud tells us that the uncanny—the unheimlich—emerges when we perceive a lack of distinction between living and non-living forms, when persons behave like objects or objects behave like persons. In Mourning Picture, this effect is heightened when we notice the similarity between the eyes of Effie’s doll and the eyes of the human figures, the artist’s own most of all.
Piece by piece, each figure in the painting comes to disturb us in its own way. Effie seems to be missing a leg, though we assume it to be hidden behind the body of the lamb. The world behind the windows of the house is a dark void in a work otherwise intensely illuminated. The shadows of human and non-human figures all fall at slightly different angles. In her wonderful essay on Elmer, Elizabeth Young writes that the whole “visual field” of the work is “dismembered” by such discrepancies; in keeping with the theme of dismemberment, she goes on to compare the façade of the house to the Bates Motel in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1958) (549-51).
Effie, of course, had already passed away at the time Elmer made this painting, and he reportedly used her photograph as a model, reproducing it as accurately as possible on the canvas. Working from photographs to depict the deceased was not unusual, and in fact Elmer would eventually turn a profit producing large crayon portraits of the dearly departed in the same manner. But it was unusual at the time to include living and dead persons in the same frame. Rather than paint Effie from a photograph and himself and his wife from life, Elmer also modeled himself and Mary from photographs, conferring on all three of them the same otherworldly quality. He effectively painted all three of them as if they were already dead.
To again quote Young, we’ve found ourselves, without quite knowing when we arrived, in the “landscape of American gothic, an unheimlich space in which loss and wonder commingle, and an unbounded time in which it is always the day of the living dead” (551).
V
If the above description exhausted our experience and explained away our anxiety, Mourning Picture would be one of many technically impressive but unremarkable works produced by nineteenth-century New England amateurs. In its uncanniness, it might be said to vaguely and accidentally anticipate the work of René Magritte, or of the American photorealists. It may even speak to us, over the 130 years that separate us from the tragedy of Effie’s death, as an idiosyncratic and profoundly moving act of personal mourning, by a man who seems to have been otherwise silent on such intensely private subjects. But there is more to it than that.
Elmer, in the throes of his immense suffering and from the wellspring of his considerable though untrained talent, has composed what I want to call a work of ontological grief.
A network of cracks traverse the painting in all directions. They are most noticeable in the white clouds but, upon closer inspection, actually touch almost every inch of the canvas except the main wall of the house (a fact which, in hindsight, adds to its sense of massiveness and stability discussed earlier). These cracks resulted from an amateur painter’s mistake: Elmer worked too quickly, adding a top layer of paint to much of the canvas before the bottom layer dried. The lower layer shifted slightly over time and split the paint about it.
The inclusion of error and chance within the composition reminds us of the famous cracks in Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, which the artist worked on for eight years before it was broken during transport after its first public exhibition. Such a gesture, even if accidental, seems utterly appropriate in a work responding to an absurd death.
In these cracks, what first appeared as a naive image of domestic bonheur, which then became legible as a representation of the radical alienation brought on by grief, transforms once more.
We’ve already mentioned the uncanny, Freud’s unheimlich, literally translated as the “unhomely.” In his 1919 essay on the phenomenon, Freud traces the term’s etymology. He finds that, though German-speakers tend to use heimlich and unheimlich as opposites—heimlich to refer to the (comforting) familiar and unheimlich to the (unsettlingly) unfamiliar—in one use case the terms can in fact refer to an identical object: the hidden, the private, the personal secret that has “come to light.”
It is in this sense that Gothic fictions are properly unheimlich: the Gothic hero spends his life trying to conceal some crime (perhaps his own, perhaps his ancestors’), which inevitably comes comes home to roost in the form of a ghost or curse.
The secret in Mourning Picture—the most radical secret of all, the secret kept from respectable children as long as they can be shielded from it—is Death, which came for Effie before she could even properly begin to conceptualize it as a fact relevant to her own life. But the Death in this painting is not only Effie’s but her parents’ as well (painted as if post-mortem). And it does not stop there; this Death, which is somehow more than the simple stoppage of breath and heartbeat and brain function, seems to touch each lovingly rendered object in their little world. How?
Because the work lacks a stable vanishing point—itself quite odd, considering the utter mastery of perspective Elmer would display a year later in an ornate still-life titled Magic Realism—the scene depicted grows flatter the longer one looks. The distance between Effie and her parents, between Elmer and the house, between the Effie and the house and the tree line, and so on, expands or contracts startlingly depending on how viewers focus their eyes. This, probably, was the cause of our initial impression that the house was too small for the bodies within it.
The world itself, ultimately flattened to a single plane of non-relating parts, is now literally splitting apart, as the near-colorless layer below the surface of the paint—its shade, as far as I can tell, occupies a no-man’s land between blue and grey, absorbing the tints of the paint around it— through the wider cracks. Depth is no longer located within the representational illusion of the image but in the material of the work itself, in its layers and their struggle with one another.
VI
Elmer’s grief is, of course, personal. He mourns both the loss of his beloved daughter and the loss of meaning in his own life. Effie’s death left a void he would try desperately to fill over the coming years with his painting and other work. It is also, in an indirect and symptomatic sense, historical. He mourns, perhaps unconsciously, the loss not only of a life but of a way of life.
Effie’s death in 1890 coincides neatly with the accelerated decline of the traditional society into which Elmer was born. Small tradesmen and inventors like Elmer—intelligent and hardworking individuals who could, with some luck, rise out of poverty by their brains, energy, and a marketable idea—were already being wiped away by the rise of massive industrial corporations and financial capital, along with the increasingly frequent financial crises that accompanied this rise. The life of provincial gentility symbolized in the sturdy country house was fading as Americans flocked into cities.
His grief is, finally, ecological and ontological. Nature no longer comforts. Elmer is cut off forever from childhood games in the wood; their memory can no longer bring comfort just as the very sight of children could only worsen Mary’s pain for years after Effie’s death.
Elmer’s Nature dwarfs Man and his projects (in the form of that tiny fort on the horizon), but its vastness offers no romantic compensation, no edifying perspective. It is not permeated with divinity as the Massachusetts Transcendentalists saw it, nor is it a continuous cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth whose eternity comfortingly typifies that of our eternal souls. Nature here is a blind mechanical process, an overwhelming Thing.
This Thing finds representation not in any particular tree or cloud or hill, but in the cracks themselves, and the colorless, textureless underworld that threatens to pry apart the painting’s surface and deform its figures. Surrounding everything, underlying everything, devoid of meaning—or at devoid least of any meaning that might make human life bearable. The artist turns away from the tree-line as his cat turns toward it.
Perhaps the best description of this well-nigh apocalyptic grief can be found in Emerson’s essay on “Experience,” composed after the death of his own son a generation before Effie’s passing. “Souls,” he writes, “never touch their objects. An unnavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with… I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature… Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.”
Emerson’s world of absolute alienation, of thwarted aims and constant miscommunication, where time and space themselves seem specifically devised to frustrate the pathetic aspirations of the living—this world was imagined and inhabited (for a time) by the same man who, a few years prior, wrote that “Nature is the symbol of Spirit,” a gigantic book through which Man might know intimately the mind of God.
We should, at last, be absolutely clear: Elmer is not identifying Nature with Death. This would constitute a regression to the worst form of primitive Calvinism, for which matter as such is inherently evil and the transcendent world is All. Instead, Elmer brings into representation, perhaps for the first time in American painting, Death as the ground of all life—human and otherwise. Everything in this world seen through the tears of grief carries its own death within it, like a seed or a child. If there is any connection between the inhabitants of such a world, our world, it emerges precisely through the invisible network of cracks in being that traverse us all.
Sources
Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Objects.” Translated by James Benedict, New York: Verso, 2020.
Elmer, Edwin Romanzo. Mourning Picture. 1890, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton.
Elmer, Maud Velona. “Edwin Romanzo Elmer as I Knew Him.” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1964-5, pp. 121-44.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, Translated by James Strachey et al., London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Jones, Betsy B. Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850-1923. Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, Distributed by the University Press of New England, 1983.
Péladeau, Marius B. “Review: Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850-1923 by Betsy B. Jones.” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1, 1985, pp. 148-52.
Rich, Adrienne. The Necessities of Life. New York: Norton, 1966.
Young, Elizabeth. “Mourning Pictures and Magic Glasses [The first of two parts].” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2013, 539-555.
Jon Repetti is a writer and PhD candidate at Princeton University. He is currently completing a dissertation on American literary naturalism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and precarity. He lives in Western Massachusetts and loves/hates The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club. Find him on Twitter: @pourfairelevide.