| In antebellum America, critics and audiences frequently claimed to hear, smell, feel, and even taste paintings, imagining themselves transported to distant, wild places. This dissertation argues that such sensory rhetoric was an important signifier of imaginative work, and by taking it seriously, charts an alternative history of vision and nineteenth-century American culture. Against the common use of the panorama as the dominant social, political, and visual model of the American nineteenth century, this project posits the diorama, an under-investigated entertainment popular in the second third of the nineteenth century, as a model for "imaginative vision," placing it in dialectical relation to the precise, masterful, and proprietary gaze that is often associated with the panorama. The second chapter examines the reception of two new genres of painting in American art---the theatrically-staged, traveling, single-picture exhibition and "poetic landscape"---that both seemed to deny their two-dimensionality and instead called attention instead to the viewer's own multisensory experience, explaining how the mobilization of new multisensory medical techniques like mediate auscultation and phrenology, along with cultural anxieties about the invisibility of the body's interior, helped shape this reception. The third chapter examines the phenomenon of the diorama, and other, more common objects such as the translucent window shade, showing how they became identified with a sensual, yet automaton-like female body that became the dominant model of imaginative engagement in the 1830s. It also extends that analysis of material culture to a group of paintings of young women asleep that proliferated during the same period. While the discursive construction of the "sleeping beauty" made claims for originality, uniqueness, and sensuality, it actually harnessed technology to achieve a kind of standardized, enchanted machine. Chapter 4 closely examines three specific paintings of young women asleep or in reverie by Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, and Samuel F. B. Morse, showing how those works signified their makers' high artistic ambitions and manifested a troubling anxiety about imagination and the invisible. Chapter 5 shows how anxieties about the imagination, luxury, masculinity, and the changing art market finally came to the fore in a group of self-reflexive works depicting male artists dreaming by Charles Bird King, Durand, and Thomas Cole. The final chapter shows how this trajectory of the artistic imagination---oneiric, inward, agentic, at times abject, and always deeply identified with the body---persisted into the latter half of the nineteenth century, taking Frederic Church's magnificent Persian residence along the Hudson River, Olana, as a case study.;Against common characterizations of the imaginative, Romantic genius toiling in anonymity, this project suggests that imagination in antebellum America was a social, though vexed, activity, one that paradoxically united transatlantic networks of diversely constituted viewing publics in a common discourse of dreams, nightmares, translucency, and the body. It challenges the dominance of the conceptual connection between nineteenth-century American painting and politics---including ideologies like Manifest Destiny---reexamining the rich and strange ways in which the imagination can transform once-familiar territory. |
