ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contradictions between control and chaos in Luman Reed’s gallery, and, by extension, in a period that would come to be regarded as the infancy of American art, locating that chaos in an embodied imagination that was considered dangerous and unpredictable. It suggests that the divergent meanings of the imagination—as civilization and its ruin—wended their way through the margins of Reed’s gallery, creating fault lines within apparent solidity, order, and stability, the dominant aesthetic concerns of the antebellum era. In the 1830s, the bodily anxieties would have been closely linked to an embodied imagination identified not only with taste, but with digestion. Thomas Reid, whose works “dominated college curricula in America for nearly a century” wrote that there was “a constant ebullition of thought [from the mind], a constant intestine motion.”
