ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, the imagination was regarded as a tool of despots and tyrants, capable of encouraging “the vitious gratification of grosser appetites,” as the refined statesman Gulian Verplanck warned in an address to the American Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824. Alvan Fisher’s vivid metaphors describing his imagination in his letter to Durand compels us to acknowledge, however, that the imagination, the pivot around which this aesthetic discourse turned, was built upon shaky ground. For many, the combination of “imagination” and “antebellum American art” will seem like a contradiction in terms. “Little has been written about the rise of the imagination in American art,” the esteemed Americanist Wayne Craven wrote in a footnote to an essay published in 2001. Pleasure in eating led to other, potentially non-normative modes of pleasure, both sexual and more broadly sensual, a damning accusation that indicted the imagination, as well.
