William Rimmer

Dorinda Evans

Description

William Rimmer (1816–1879) is arguably the first modernist American sculptor, although his inventive originality has not been fully acknowledged. Rimmer cultivated an art of ideas and personal expression whilst supporting himself as a physician and, later, as a teacher of art anatomy at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York.


Unlike his contemporaries, he advocated the creation of sculpture drawn entirely from the artist’s imagination, as opposed to antique archetypes or live models. In this way, he sought to reframe excellence in American art as something that must be found within, rather than derived from Europe.


In this new monograph, the meaning of Rimmer’s works is for the first time considered from a combination of perspectives, such as close visual analysis (including X-ray and infrared), historical documentation, and social context. These are enriched with discussion of the artist’s own bipolar disorder, deeply-held spiritualism, and views on gender equality—considering women just as talented as men, he used naked male models in all-female classes long before his contemporaries, and produced an allegorical sculpture of fighting lions that criticized the tyranny of men over women.


This book will be of great interest to academics, students, art museums, collectors, dealers, art historians, and members of the public with an affinity for Rimmer’s work. It will also appeal to those with a broader interest in American culture.
 

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• Art
• American
• Sculpture

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 05 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800647596
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 18 Mo

Extrait

William Rimmer

William Rimmer
Champion of Imagination in American Art
Dorinda Evans





https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2022 Dorinda Evans




This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Dorinda Evans, William Rimmer: Champion of Imagination in American Art . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0304
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
Further details about CC BY-NC licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0304#resources
ISBN Paperback: 9781800647565
ISBN Hardback: 9781800647572
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800647589
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800647596
ISBN Digital ebook (azw3): 9781800647602
ISBN XML: 9781800647619
ISBN HTML: 9781800647626
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0304
Cover image: William Rimmer, The Dying Centaur (1869; cast 1905), bronze, Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11915 , public domain.
Cover design by Katy Saunders

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. A Secret Inheritance 1
2. The Two-Dimensional Portraits in Context 23
3. Self-Expression in Flight and Pursuit 51
4. Swedenborg and Enigmatic Pictures 81
5. A Challenge to International Neoclassicism 117
6. Visionary Depictions 165
7. The Death and Legacy of a Maverick Artist 197
Selected Bibliography 209
List of Illustrations 225
Index 231

In honor of William Rimmer
He had art knowledge and genius enough … to establish an era of art in this country. But he accepted circumstances, and followed the bent of his own nature and feelings…. If the results were disastrous, he made no complaint. In certain matters one’s own way is heroism.
T.H. Bartlett, Art Life of William Rimmer , 1882
And in memory of my mother, Priscilla White Evans
who was a student of Frank W. Benson
who was a student of William Rimmer

Acknowledgments
This book began with Flight and Pursuit which was in the 1985–1986 traveling exhibition of William Rimmer’s work. At the time, and in subsequent articles, interpretations of the picture did not jibe with the visual evidence. The challenge (albeit long delayed) to try to figure it out led to research on the artist, a re-identification of a related drawing and a documented, and visually-based, reinterpretation of much of Rimmer’s work. As it turned out, this one painting conforms to patterns that can be found generally in the artist’s output.
I benefited immeasurably from my precursors, Lincoln Kirstein and Jeffrey Weidman, who compiled information on Rimmer, his pictures, and his sculpture. Kirstein’s surviving research, mostly from the 1940s, for a biography of Rimmer was left to Richard Sherman Nutt who intended to expand it. What remains now belongs to the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. Weidman built on Kirstein’s initial research and completed a Ph.D. dissertation in 1982 that was published the following year as a seven-volume, catalogue raisonné of Rimmer’s oeuvre. It is invaluable as an extensively detailed record of what could be discovered about Rimmer and his attributed work at the time. One of Weidman and Kirstein’s greatest contributions is their recording of information received from Rimmer’s descendants. I would like to acknowledge Jeffrey’s kind assistance in allowing me to see some of the questionable-attribution images sent to him since his book’s publication (none convincing as by Rimmer) as well as copies of Rimmer’s surviving musical compositions (unfortunately mostly illegible) in his possession.
For an addition to primary sources, I owe a special debt to Robert and James Korndorffer who are great-great grandsons of Rimmer, through his first daughter, Mary. Robert owns Caroline Rimmer’s annotated copy of Truman Bartlett’s 1882 biography of Rimmer and Alice Caroline (Haskell) Lapthorn’s unpublished manuscript, “Stories and Memoirs,” which includes memories of her grandfather Rimmer.
I am grateful also to the following who assisted this research in important ways. Some are mentioned in the notes: Anne E. Bentley, Mindy N. Besaw, Katie Blumenkrantz, Jud Crawford, C.D. Dickerson III, Deborah Diemente, Stuart Feld, Paul Godin, Richard Hacken, Elizabeth Haff, Ellen Hanspach-Bernal, Martha J. Hoppin, Catherine N. Howe, Kara M. Jackman, Kelly J. Keegan, Kirstin Kennedy, Elizabeth Korndorffer, Joshua W. Lane, James F. Lawrence, Corrine Lemberg, Bronwyn E. Loring, Meredith Marcinkewicz, John F. McGuigan Jr., David Miller, Carolle Morini, Kenneth J. Myers, Scout Noffke, Devi Noor, Lisa Norberg, Richard Salisbury Nutt, Richard Ormond, Michael W. Otto, Karen Papineau, Amelia Peck, Pamela Post-Ferrante, John T. Quinn, Laurel Rhame, Aileen Ribeiro, Miriam Stewart, Nina Sweeney, Thayer Tolles, Patience H. White, Gordon D. Wilkins, Justine Wimsatt, and Tiffany N. Wixon.
Jessica B. Murphy, at the Countway Medical Library, went to unusual lengths to contribute by scanning items for me when the library was closed because of the pandemic. I am indebted to her effort. Sadly, the Boston Medical Library and the Countway Library are parting ways so that, in future, their currently-combined Rimmer collections will be divided. At this writing, the Boston Medical Library is in the process of moving its Rimmer collection into deep storage.
Concerning the text, I am deeply grateful to Linda Merrill for her close reading and thoughtful suggestions. Her comments proved extremely helpful. My debt, in the final phase, also extends to Brian E. Hack, Anne Bolen, and Carol Troyen. Brian and Anne read the manuscript, or parts of it, and made welcome recommendations. Carol contributed by reviewing an early version of the chapter on Flight and Pursuit and calling attention to the use of light as significant. As work progressed, email discussions with Brian about Rimmer’s rightful place in a reconsideration of American sculpture served as inspiration, for which he has my gratitude.
Finally, I want to thank Emory University, where I taught, for generously subsidizing the illustrations, as well as the entire staff involved in the book’s production at Open Book Publishers. Alessandra Tosi, Alex Priestley, and Luca Baffa deserve special recognition at OBP for the roles they played in guiding the book to its completion. This has been a difficult but thoroughly rewarding journey. William Rimmer deserves renewed attention that I hope he will now receive.

1. A Secret Inheritance

© 2022 Dorinda Evans, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0304.01
William Rimmer (1816–1879) was a major and highly influential American artist, who, fairly consistently, managed to be misunderstood. Since his death, assessments of him have varied widely. He has been labeled both a neoclassicist and a precursor of the rebellious French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. 1 Yet the content of Rimmer’s sculpture is very different from both. Just as concerning, many of his paintings and drawings have been misinterpreted, and his unsigned work confused with that of others. This book is an attempt to reconstruct his artistic identity and to provide a long-overdue reconsideration of his place in history.
To begin with, Rimmer had a much more creative mind than has been assumed. At his death in 1879, he was typically praised as a man of “original genius.” 2 In the context of flattering obituaries, this might not seem so unusual. But posthumously he gave new life to this estimation when he won a contest that acknowledged his fertile imagination. In 1880, a national journal of arts and literature, out of Buffalo, asked its readers to name which two American artists, alive or dead, were “pre-eminent in imaginative power.” 3 Given Rimmer’s relative obscurity as a man of “reserved habits,” the result must have been a surprise. 4 He shared the honor with Elihu Vedder — a still living, European-trained artist who was primarily a painter and book illustrator. They both were innovative in subject matter, but Rimmer differed in also being unusually original in sculptural form.
With an uncommon breadth of talent, Rimmer split his creative energy as an artist. He worked in both two and three dimensions as well as taught art. During his career, he had to overcome the drawbacks of being not only self- taught — except for some lessons from his father — but also hindered by a late start so that he was not even recognized as a professional until the age of forty-five. It was then that he became a sculptor and necessarily only part-time. 5 He produced few saleable works over a twenty-year career and supported himself by teaching. When he did exhibit — which was rare — his contributions tended to sacrifice public appeal by being inaccessible in meaning. Not only was his iconography esoteric, but he also earn