ABSTRACT
The 1830s and 1840s saw a veritable platoon of fancy pieces modeled after Old Master paintings depicting young women in a state of reverie. Alone and seemingly unaware of the viewer’s presence, these maidens slept, sang, and sketched, their virtue apparently secured by their apparent ignorance of the viewer. For a country supposedly awash in dubious forgeries of Old Masters, American artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had a surprising degree of access to paintings by Bartolome Esteban Murillo. The older, classical tradition of the ekphrastic paragone had long viewed interarts comparisons as competitions, a tradition that was familiar enough in earlynineteenth-century aesthetic criticism. Far more popular, however, was the gentler, Horatian tradition of “Ut pictura poesis” that saw poetry, sculpture, and the other arts as sisters, not adversaries. Whiteness was fetishized by devotees of classical sculpture, the German theorist and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, while color was associated with women, exotic “others,” filth, and the body.
