Painting Dissent by Lynford Sophie;

Author:Lynford, Sophie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

FIG. 57. “Fountain under the Main Entrance of The National Academy,” Harper’s Weekly, June 3, 1865, 348. Widener Library, Harvard University.

Wight’s academy was a successor to the Oxford Museum. He perceived the two buildings as participating in a transatlantic project that literally set in stone the doctrine Ruskin had crystallized in prose. In a pamphlet illustrated with photographs of the academy, published shortly after the building was completed, Wight himself noted the lineage between his work and Oxford: “Deane & Woodward, architects of the new museum at Oxford, said that the carved capitals on that building, designed by the workmen from nature, cost less than ordinary carving; and I can add my testimony to theirs, that the capitals of the Academy of Design cost no more than Corinthian capitals of the same size and delicacy of finish.… And this has been the result with men to whom the work has been totally new—who had not even seen such work as they were asked to do.”54

Wight’s design, construction, and adornment reflected the “Naturalism” that Ruskin had invoked in “The Nature of Gothic,” to describe how Gothic ornamentation both “resembled” nature and channeled the spiritual commitment of the carver.55 Naturalism for Wight elicited multiple expressive strengths from the craftsman, including idiosyncrasies of personal style and a pleasing variation that was the inevitable result of imperfect execution. But Wight’s and his colleagues’ vision of the egalitarian role of architecture was far more radical in its implications than Ruskin would have endorsed. Ruskin did believe in the social value of ornament and asserted that if executed according to what he viewed as the sanguine principles of medieval guilds, such ornament would serve worthy didactic purposes. But despite the radical implications of some of Ruskin’s arguments, his political and social views were far from democratic; he held that unequal labor relations do not fundamentally disadvantage one class over another or lead to political suppression, authoritarianism, or slavery. In fact, in Ruskin’s view, any dilution of the social stratifications conferred by birth would result in a further undermining of Britain’s national culture and polity.56 Such a retrograde political philosophy could not be sustained by the American Pre-Raphaelites in a nation riven by slavery and civil war. Wight understood the design and construction of the National Academy as a transformative aesthetic and political statement that would redeem not only the nation’s future architecture, but the status, dignity, and freedom that must be universally granted if the United States was to fulfill its social compact.

Wight’s emulation of the Oxford Museum extended to the manner in which he documented and publicized the National Academy. The pamphlet he published on the building resembled in its general appearance, tone, and illustrations the Oxford Museum monograph by Acland and Ruskin. Wight included photographs and descriptions of the academy, detailing its process of construction and ornamentation, and the architect’s rationale for ultimately selecting the Italian Gothic style. As he had in 1859 with the Oxford Museum monograph, Norton reviewed Wight’s pamphlet in the North American Review.

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