3. Anthropomorphism: In Defense of Sentiment

Braddock, Alan C.

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3. Anthropomorphism: In Defense of Sentiment

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

This chapter builds on the previous one by exploring a specific kind of thinking about animacy, namely anthropomorphism...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.4

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23301

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismAnthropomorphismThaxter, Celia, 1835-1894Hassam, Childe, 1859-1935Environmentalism in artEcology in artLandscape painting, American--19th centuryBirds--Collection and preservation

3. Anthropomorphism: In Defense of Sentiment

anthropomorphism, n.
1. a. The attribution of human form, character, or attributes to God or a god.
1. b. The attribution of human personality or characteristics to something non-human, as an animal, object, etc.

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This chapter builds on the previous one by exploring a specific kind of thinking about animacy, namely anthropomorphism—the human tendency to see human characteristics in nonhuman beings. The term is not so familiar to art historians, but scholars in other fields have had much to say about it. For example, in the introduction to their book Thinking with Animals, editors Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman outline the changing cultural and scientific fortunes of anthropomorphism over time, from ancient zoomorphic fables to modern nature documentaries and scientific discourse. They note that anthropomorphism has long been an “irresistible taboo,” a habit of the imagination that has generated countless creative expressions while also being widely condemned by cultural and scientific authorities for alleged distortions of truth, moral or otherwise. As the editors also observe, “The reflexive assumption that animals are like us, despite obvious differences of form, food, and habitat, is not confined to popular culture.” Accordingly, the present chapter examines a case study in nineteenth-century New England painting and literature, using an ecocritical approach to suggest that anthropomorphism has an important historical relation to art and ecology. Daston and Mitman point out that “anthropomorphism . . . is usually applied as a term of reproach,” especially in modern Western science, which has tended to regard the habit as “sloppy thinking,” “a mark of childishness,” or a sign of so-called primitive mentality. Yet they also explain that modern evolutionary theory has complicated received wisdom about a “hard-and-fast line between humans and animals, since common descent and the gradual process of natural selection on random variation make it plausible to assume some continuity of traits, including psychological traits, among closely related species.” Therefore, even some modern scientists have come to recognize anthropomorphism as no longer wholly bad but instead as a double-edged sword, for it can produce both distortions and understanding, not to mention much-needed empathy in a world witnessing gross exploitation and mass extinction of nonhuman beings. We encountered some of these ideas already in the previous chapter, notably in connection with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s discussion of Indigenous thought and practice, but anthropomorphism deserves a closer look as a special case of animacy; hence the present chapter.1 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1, 2, 3.

HOME OF THE HUMMINGBIRD

No works of American impressionism are more recognizable than Childe Hassam’s vibrant depictions of poet Celia Laighton Thaxter’s garden on the resort island of Appledore, the largest of the Isles of Shoals, located ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. Produced primarily between 1890 and 1894 in various media—oil, watercolor, pastel, and published illustrations—Hassam’s Appledore garden series encompasses dozens of pictures executed en plein air using a vivid palette. The series punctuates the artist’s decisive shift to impressionism in his early thirties, after a brief stint of academic training in Paris during the late 1880s. Hassam would generate some four hundred pictures at the Isles of Shoals over nearly three decades, but the images of Thaxter’s garden remain his signature achievement there and include some of the most widely known works of his career. The series masterpiece, an oil painting from 1892 titled In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden), shows the poet standing in midday sunlight amid a chromatic explosion of poppies, hollyhocks, and other flowers (fig. 1).2 David Park Curry, Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited (New York: Denver Art Museum in association with W. W. Norton, 1990); H. Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2004), 120–44.

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Description: In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden) by Hassam, Childe

Fig. 1. Childe Hassam, In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden), 1892. Oil on canvas, 22 1/4 × 18 in. (56.5 × 45.7 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum

Celia Laighton, Hassam’s senior by a quarter century, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1835, but grew up on the Isles of Shoals from the age of four, when her father, Thomas, became lighthouse keeper there. At sixteen, she married and moved to Boston with her Harvard-educated tutor, Levi Thaxter, who was also her father’s business associate in building Appledore House, a large tourist hotel on the island. On the mainland, Celia raised three children, wrote poetry, and, through her husband, met some of Boston’s leading intellectuals and publishers, but she was unhappy in marriage and urban life. After the publication of her first poem, “Land-Locked,” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861, she returned to the Shoals with her children to become the innkeeper at Appledore House. When her parents died, she moved to their nearby cottage and cultivated an “old-fashioned” garden of heirloom flowers.3 For biographical details about Thaxter, see Norma H. Mandel, Beyond the Garden Gate: The Life of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004). According to Thaxter, “Mine is just a little old-fashioned garden where the flowers come together to praise the Lord and teach all who look upon them to do likewise.” Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 71.

Though relatively small (about fifteen by fifty feet), Thaxter’s garden became a focal point of cultural life at Appledore, providing a rich source of floral decoration and artistic inspiration. Merging impulses of naturalism and aestheticism, the garden was an enduring labor of love from which Thaxter made cuttings and arrangements for both the hotel and her cottage. In the cottage parlor, called “the room of flowers,” Thaxter produced other creative work with naturalistic themes—poetry, prose, painted china, decorative tiles, and watercolors—sometimes combining media, as when she illuminated her poems for friends (fig. 2). At once a studio and salesroom that helped support Thaxter financially, the parlor also served as an informal salon where she hosted gatherings of friends, including the eminent poets John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) and James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), musicians William Mason (1829–1908) and John Paine (1839–1906), artists William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), J. Appleton Brown (1844–1902), and, of course, Hassam (1859–1935). An important prototype for later American art colonies, Thaxter’s salon and garden functioned as a hub for New England cultural figures from the middle of the 1870s until her death in 1894.4 For a reproduction of Hassam’s Room of Flowers (1894, oil on canvas, private collection), depicting Thaxter’s parlor, see Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 123. On Thaxter’s various creative activities and guests at Appledore, see Sharon Paiva Stephan, One Woman’s Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Portsmouth, N.H.: Portsmouth Athenaeum in association with Isles of Shoals Historical and Research Association, 2001).

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Description: The Sandpiper by Thaxter, Celia

Fig. 2. Celia Thaxter, “The Sandpiper,” n.d. Watercolor over set type (from Celia Thaxter, Poems, New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872, p. 32)

That year, at the height of Thaxter’s literary acclaim, Houghton Mifflin posthumously published An Island Garden, her lush prose account of flower cultivation techniques and broader ideas about nature, illustrated by Hassam, with In the Garden as frontispiece (fig. 3). When that publication appeared, the painter had been a close friend of Thaxter and a regular guest at her salon and garden for about a decade. Sometime around 1890 he built his own studio on the island, not far from her cottage. Partial to Appledore’s picturesque scenery and salubrious environment, Hassam was a frequent summer visitor from 1886 until 1914, when a large fire suddenly swept everything away—hotel, cottage, studio, and garden—bringing an abrupt end to what the art historian David Park Curry has called an “American Cythera.”5 Thaxter, Island Garden, frontispiece; Curry, Childe Hassam, 25.

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Description: An Island Garden by Thaxter, Celia

Fig. 3. Celia Thaxter, frontispiece and title page from An Island Garden (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1894)

As Curry’s term suggests, scholars in art history today tend to regard the work of Hassam and Thaxter at Appledore as elite expressions of hegemonic New England regional identity and retreat from the complexities of modern metropolitan life. According to this prevailing view, both painter and poet embody little more than Gilded Age, Anglo-American nativist nostalgia for a timeless vision of flowers, coastal leisure, and social exclusivity in an era of dramatic social change associated with immigration, industrialization, and the growth of cities. As Curry observes, “The Shoals were especially congenial during a period when rapid urbanization caused a general, somewhat uneasy turning towards rural subject matter and a longing for the supposedly more innocent past.” Here, says Curry, Hassam constructed a “fortress of aestheticism” with a “seductive element of escapism,” an artistic corollary to the garden as “a place detached from the new urban life and reassuringly identified—like Thaxter herself and her poetry—with the very bedrock of old New England and earlier America.” Affirming Curry’s assessment, William Truettner and Thomas Denenberg describe Thaxter’s home and garden on Appledore Island as a privileged “retreat” into an “exclusive past.” For these and other scholars, Thaxter and Hassam epitomized an essentially conservative, White, colonial revivalism. This well-established line of art historical interpretation, combined with a general understanding of American impressionism’s belatedness vis-à-vis French originators, has eclipsed other ways of seeing the work of Hassam, Thaxter, and their contemporaries, leaving them effectively marooned as cultural throwbacks on an island garden of reactionary antimodernism.6 Curry, Childe Hassam, 19, 57; William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in association with Yale University Press, 1999), 82. On Hassam, see also H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Realism and Impressionism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 92, 285, 288–89, 295–97, 310–11. The classic and still influential study of Gilded Age antimodernism is T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

The present chapter offers a different interpretation, one that is more expansive and generous to the historical figures in question. Specifically, I wish to recover Thaxter’s and Hassam’s largely forgotten contributions to period aesthetics of environmental conservation through their collaborative production of An Island Garden. Anthropomorphism constituted an important element of these aesthetics, especially in Thaxter’s case. Various images and texts come into play, but special attention will be paid here to her book and one of Hassam’s illustrations for it: Home of the Hummingbird, showing a profusion of red and pink poppies, blue larkspurs, white lilies, sweet peas, and green leaves near the west gate of Thaxter’s garden, above which we see an opaque gray sky and the distant mainland shoreline (fig. 4). As I explain in greater detail below, the picture alludes to the final pages of An Island Garden, in which Thaxter animatedly describes her flowers as providing an annual summer “home” for a favorite hummingbird, along with other birds, until their inevitable autumn migration leaves the poet and her garden bereft of these “adored” winged fauna.7 On Home of the Hummingbird, see Curry, Childe Hassam, 71, 76; and Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 129, 133. For references to the “home” of the “adored” hummingbird, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 111, 114, 115, 116; the picture is reproduced facing page 112.

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Description: Home of the Hummingbird by Hassam, Childe

Fig. 4. Childe Hassam, Home of the Hummingbird, 1893. Watercolor on paper, 13 3/4 × 10 1/8 in. (34.9 × 25.7 cm). Private collection

A few pages before that elegiac conclusion, Thaxter’s text offers a remarkable description of her resuscitation and reanimation of the favorite hummingbird after a storm injures “him” and damages the garden. Hassam’s Home of the Hummingbird does not represent this particular narrative episode—he was not an artist prone to narrative literalism—but the picture’s title and specific setting nonetheless register Thaxter’s ornithological concerns in a timely manner. Indeed, far from being simply an illustration of elite nativist leisure and antimodernist reverie, Hassam’s work quietly affirmed the poet’s very public views about bird protection during a highly charged period of international debate over conservation and commerce, specifically women’s fashion, which was then decimating avian populations through its reliance on destructive market hunting for decorative hat feathers and other ornaments. Here and throughout the text, Thaxter and Hassam asserted the value of her island garden (indeed, any garden) as a vital refuge of cultivated natural beauty and wildlife—a retreat not only for New England’s White (human) intelligentsia but also for birds, flowers, and other “wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God.” As Thaxter declared, “How devoutly thankful I am that there is not a creature with a gun on this blessed island!” In asserting such values, An Island Garden eschewed overt political critique in favor of an affirmative, biocentric mode of persuasion marked by the aesthetic celebration of life in various forms. Recognizing this expanded field of interpretation does not cancel out the aforementioned social art historical readings by other scholars, such as Curry, who correctly noted a general undercurrent of nostalgic antimodernism and Anglocentric New England regionalism in the late nineteenth-century cultural community at the Isles of Shoals. Yet the complexity of historical evidence in my view demands that we inflect our understanding of Thaxter and Hassam, whose collaborative achievement at Appledore simply cannot be conflated with the worst forms of nativist xenophobia seen elsewhere during the period (and after), as other scholars have insinuated.8 On resuscitating the hummingbird, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 109–11. For the gun reference, see Thaxter, 49. For discussion of alleged xenophobia and nativism, see Erin Leary, “‘A Tendency to Outstrip Native Blossoms in Life’s Race’: Nativism in Impressionist Gardens,” in The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, ed. Anna O. Marley (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in association with University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 61–74. Regarding late nineteenth-century fashion, market hunting, and the feather trade, see Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 102–53; and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 57–109.

More recent scholarship in other disciplines outside art history has explored the importance of Thaxter and the garden movement in early American conservation. For example, Shana Miriam Cohen situates Thaxter within “the advent of naturalistic, wild, native, and old-fashioned gardening [that] helped to propel women’s flower-painting and garden-making into the public eye.” According to Cohen, “Thaxter’s self-consciously old-fashioned garden on Appledore Island . . . inspired authors such as Sarah Orne Jewett and painters such as Childe Hassam to celebrate the homespun beauty and simplicity of ‘grandmother’s garden’ in their works.” Such activities, says Cohen, reclaimed “the lost intimacy of the farm house” and “some of the connections that colonial housewives had developed,” thereby cultivating “a deeper rapport with the plants, animals, and people of the rocky coast.”9 Shana Miriam Cohen, “American Garden Clubs and the Fight for Preservation, 1890–1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 50–51.

In another scholarly assessment of Thaxter’s literary achievement, Leah Glasser has described her as “one of the earliest environmentalists, a regionalist whose life and language was shaped by her responses to the island” and who forged her identity as a writer “through the portrayal of her relationship to the plants, birds, flowers, animals, and sea life that surrounded her.” Lawrence Buell has noted Thaxter’s “intensity of microvision,” locating her writing in the “solid middle ground of environmental reportage” exemplified by figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin (1868–1934), and Aldo Leopold (1887–1948). Like their texts, says Buell, Thaxter’s are “constantly dissolving into free-floating aphorisms, philosophical and religious quotations, and bits of natural history gleaned from experts.”10 Leah Blatt Glasser, “‘The Sandpiper and I’: Landscape and Identity in Celia Thaxter’s Isles of Shoals,” American Literary Realism 36, no. 1 (2003): 2. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 233, 237.

Similarly, Angela Sorby finds in Thaxter’s work a complex hybrid of romantic sentiment and realist description that fostered understanding of nature on multiple levels. In the case of “The Sandpiper” (see fig. 2), elements of careful observation and representation (both verbal and visual) helped readers young and old to identify this variety of shorebird by its long beak, quick “flit” along the beach, and “sweet and mournful cry.” At the same time, the poet invited those readers to identify with the bird emotionally and ethically by insistently referring to the creature as a companion (“One little sandpiper and I”) deserving of care and respect, as in the concluding stanza:

Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night

When the loosed storm breaks furiously?

. . . I do not fear for thee, though wroth

The tempest rushes through the sky:

For are we not God’s children both,

Thou, little sandpiper, and I?

In Thaxter’s hybrid approach, says Sorby, “the natural world and the poetic artifact are mutually dependent, like the human ‘I’ and the avian ‘thou’ in ‘The Sandpiper.’” As Sorby observes, “This relationship is very different from the commodity fetishism of birds attached to hats because it recognizes the living, coevolving nature of both the bird and the poem; if one is dead, the other cannot live.” Indeed, Thaxter’s work participated in a rich nineteenth-century “poetics of bird defense” that included William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” (1815), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Forbearance” (1847), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Birds of Killingworth” (1863), and many others. Modernism often taught twentieth-century readers to disparage such poetics in favor of aesthetic formalism and emotional detachment, but an emerging generation of scholars in environmental studies and feminist literary history seeks to reclaim the importance of sentiment in early conservation’s cultural work while acknowledging its political complexities. A number of these scholars now recognize Thaxter as an important figure, despite her New England Anglocentrism.11 Angela Sorby, “The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918,” in Poetry after Cultural Studies, ed. Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 173–97, 190. Celia Thaxter, “The Sandpiper,” in Poems (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872), 32–33. See also Marcia B. Littenberg, “From Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Island Views Revisited,” in Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 137–52. On new materialism, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

SENTIENT BEINGS—THAXTER’S ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Thaxter’s writing is her frequent anthropomorphic identification with nonhuman life forms and her ascription of vital agency, subjectivity, and even intelligence to them. For Thaxter, human and nonhuman life were implicated with one another. For example, in one passage of An Island Garden, Thaxter observes: “I feel the personality of each flower, and I find myself greeting them as if they were human. ‘Good-morning, beloved friends!’ . . . They seem like sentient beings, as if they knew me and loved me, not indeed as I love them, but with almost a reliance on my sympathy and care.” In another passage, she perceived “a vital spark, almost a mind, so remarkable is the intelligent action often manifested in many plants and trees.” Thaxter also regarded each bird in her garden as a “tiny spark of brilliant life” and particularly marveled at the power of hummingbirds, whose “tiny wings” could “bear them over the miles of restless and perilous brine, to find this rock with its nest of flowers! Do they surmise the hospitality that awaits them at the end of their long journey as they steer their dangerous way across the wastes of the sea salt on those small, weak, quivering pinions? Have they some subtle inkling of the tender welcome that awaits them here?”12 Thaxter, Island Garden, 88, 113, 116.

Although long dismissed as fatal to serious science and literature, as noted by Daston and Mitman, anthropomorphism has found new defenders lately among scholars interested in recovering an alternative philosophical tradition seen as more environmentally sensitive than the dominant, mechanistic, classical Western epistemology established centuries ago and already discussed in the previous chapter. For example, the political philosopher Jane Bennett notes that Charles Darwin’s anthropomorphic view of worms as willful, intelligent beings enabled him “to pay close attention.” Moreover, says Bennett, “in a vital materialism” of the sort espoused by Darwin, “an anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances” undetected by conventional observers operating in the classical mode of scientific objectivity and empiricism.13 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 99. See also Claire Parkinson, Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Broadly speaking, Thaxter’s vitalist literary sensibility resembled Darwin’s in her close attention to nonhuman phenomena, energies, and behaviors. Unlike Darwin, though, Thaxter privileged the aesthetic beauty of flowers and certain favorite birds over species she regarded as garden pests, including weeds, worms, and slugs. Waging “battle” against these “enemies,” Thaxter used lime as a pesticide, but she also relied on the help of birds and toads in a manner anticipating techniques that gardeners today describe as integrated pest management. In one passage of An Island Garden she touted her conquest of pests as exemplifying “the survival of the fittest,” invoking the social evolutionary catchphrase popularized by Herbert Spencer’s book Principles of Biology (1864), which misinterpreted the meaning of Darwinian natural selection in teleological terms. Tempting though it might be to draw far-reaching conclusions from Thaxter’s casual remark, it reveals no serious or sustained theoretical engagement with Spencerian social-evolutionism, nor does it clearly foreshadow later ideas about eugenic racism. No matter how allegorically we read Thaxter, the logic of her horticultural references fails to line up neatly or systematically with the stridently nativist, white supremacist discourse of her time, much less that of Madison Grant (1865–1937) and Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950), whose visceral writings about race and eugenics postdated her death by more than two decades. Even in Thaxter’s most vociferous complaints about certain parasitical weeds, such as chickweed and dodder, we encounter no derogatory stigmatizing metaphors alluding to immigration, exoticism, or racial difference. A more plausible source for her belligerent language of conquest in describing garden pests is the pervasive period discourse of militarism, but again, simply to conflate these different categories of experience without attending to the fictive nature of literary figuration would be misguided.14 For numerous references to pestilential “enemies” and “battle,” see Thaxter, Island Garden, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67; “survival of the fittest” appears on page 61. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864), 444. For a discussion of Thaxter in relation to eugenics, see Leary, “‘Tendency to Outstrip Native Blossoms.’” Regarding the history of integrated pest management since the nineteenth century, see Marcos Kogan, “Integrated Pest Management: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments,” Annual Review of Entomology 43 (January 1998): 243–70; and Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology, and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885–1985 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996). On the intersecting discourses of aesthetics and militarism during the late nineteenth century, see Alan C. Braddock, “Armory Shows: The Spectacular Life of a Building Type to 1913,” American Art 27, no. 3 (2013): 34–63.

When it came to writing about bird protection, Thaxter could be quite confrontational and explicit in stating her beliefs. For example, “The Great Blue Heron (A Warning)” (1885), one of many poems she published in the prominent children’s periodical St. Nicholas, expresses concern about a beautiful bird that “stood all alone / By the edge of the solemn sea, / On a broken bowlder [sic] of gray trap-stone . . . lost in reverie,” apparently oblivious to danger:

I paused to watch him. Below my breath

“O beautiful creature!” I cried,

“Do you know you are standing here close to your death,

By the brink of the quiet tide?

“You can not have heard of the being called Man —

The lord of creation is he;

And he slays earth’s creatures wherever he can,

In the air or the land or the sea.

“He’s not a true friend of your race! If he sees

Some beautiful, wonderful thing

That runs in the woodland, or floats in the breeze

On the banner-like breadth of its wind,

“Straight he goes for his gun, its sweet life to destroy,

For mere pleasure of killing alone.

He will ruin its beauty and quench all its joy,

Though ’t is useless to him as a stone.”

Then I cried aloud: “Fly! before over the sand

This lord of creation arrives

With his powder and shot, and his gun in his hand

For the spoiling of innocent lives!”

At last, the bird flies away, leading the narrator to conclude exultantly, “‘Now perhaps you may live and be happy,’ I said: / ‘Fly, Heron, as fast as you can! / Put the width of the earth and the breadth of the sea / Betwixt you and the being called Man!’” As I explain below, the poet’s identification of the killer as emphatically male related closely to her personal experience, but it also exemplified a broader, emerging alliance between feminism and environmental protection.15 Celia Thaxter, “The Great Blue Heron (A Warning),” St. Nicholas 12, no. 10 (1885): 776.

Thaxter’s choice of bird species here was timely and apposite. As the historian Robin Doughty has demonstrated in a study of public debate over feather fashions and bird preservation during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the heron family constituted “the cause célèbre of the plumage dispute.” While haute couture magazines such as Harper’s Bazar and Godey’s annually touted millinery designs with heron feathers as the most stylish of all, articles and editorials in other popular magazines, newspapers, and scientific journals voiced concern, even outrage, about destruction of the species in the name of fashion. In 1876, for example, the eminent scientist Joel Asaph Allen (1838–1921), cofounder of the American Ornithologists’ Union (1883) and the first national Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds (1886), wrote about the decline of heron and other bird populations in the Penn Monthly, a magazine with national circulation. Regarding heron, Allen observed, “Many have of late been destroyed for their feathers where, in Florida especially, the havoc made with these poor defenseless birds is subject of painful contemplation and a disgrace to the age. . . . The effect of the wholesale destruction that for the last few years has prevailed in Florida and other portions of the Gulf States, is already apparent in the rapid decrease there of these beautiful birds.” By the 1890s, a growing chorus of scientific and popular publications across the United States registered alarm at the “slaughter” of heron and “vanishing” of birds generally as a result of the feather trade.16 Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 60. Joel Asaph Allen, “On the Decrease of Birds in the United States,” Penn Monthly 7 (December 1876): 931–44, 936. “Words for the Birds,” Boston Journal, June 13, 1891; “The Slaughter of Birds in Florida,” Kansas City Star, December 29, 1893; “Florida Losing Its Birds of Plumage,” New Haven Register, March 15, 1894; “Our Vanishing Birds,” Daily Inter-Ocean (Chicago), April 6, 1896.

It might be tempting to dismiss Thaxter’s “poetics of bird defense” as merely a subjective projection of her predicament as an estranged spouse and widow (after Levi’s death in 1884) on Appledore, “all alone / By the edge of the solemn sea, / On a broken bowlder of gray trap-stone.” After all, the issues raised in “The Great Blue Heron (A Warning)” had distinct and enduring personal relevance. For Thaxter, a recurring source of disagreement with her husband concerned his activities as an amateur ornithologist, especially his frequent bird-hunting excursions with their sons. In a letter of 1865 to her friend Elizabeth Hoxie, Thaxter complained: “The boys and Levi have guns and go murdering round the country in the name of science till my heart is broken into shreds. They are horribly learned, but that doesn’t compensate for one little life destroyed, in my woman’s way of viewing it.” A few years later, she again expressed frustration to her friend: “Levi, Lony, and John are gone down to Jacksonville, or rather to the state of Florida generally and promiscuously, with powder and shot by the ton. . . . They are to steam down to Enterprise and then take their boat on to the lakes at the end of the St. John’s River, and then row back in their boat, shooting all the crocodiles, parakeets, mockingbirds, herons, flamingoes, white ibises and every other creature, feathered or otherwise, that chances to fall in their way.” Thaxter obviously had struggled with such concerns for many years.17 Celia Thaxter to Elizabeth C. Hoxie, [1865] and March 7, 1869, in Letters of Celia Thaxter, ed. Annie Fields and Rose Lamb (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 28–29, 39–40.

However, her published writings entailed more than just personal projection, as she forcefully demonstrated in an essay titled “Woman’s Heartlessness” (1887) openly criticizing the wasteful, destructive effects of contemporary millinery fashions. Featured in the inaugural issue of the Audubon Magazine (published by the Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds), Thaxter’s essay railed against what she called the baffling “indifference and hardness” of women who were “educated and enlightened” but still willing to wear a fashionable hat composed of birds—“a charnel house of beaks and claws and bones and feathers and glass eyes upon her fatuous head.” Compared to such a “cruel sin against nature,” said Thaxter, “how refreshing is the sight of the birdless bonnet!” Intriguingly, Thaxter wears no bonnet whatsoever in Hassam’s In the Garden or other portraits.18 Celia Thaxter, “Woman’s Heartlessness,” Audubon Magazine 1, no. 1 (1887): 13.

Adapting some of her own poetic themes and techniques to this prose manifesto, Thaxter addressed birds directly and anthropomorphically, exclaiming,

Your beauty makes you but a target for the accursed gun that shatters your lovely life, quenches your delicious voice, destroys your love, your bliss, your dutiful cares, your whole beautiful being, that your dead body may disfigure some woman’s head and call all eyes to gaze at her! . . . Does any woman imagine these withered corpses (cured with arsenic) which she loves to carry about, are beautiful? Not so; the birds lost their beauty with their lives. To-day I saw a mat woven of warblers’ heads, spiked all over its surface with sharp beaks, set up on a bonnet and borne aloft by its possessor in pride! Twenty murders in one! and the face beneath bland and satisfied, for are not ‘Birds to be worn more than ever?’”

Deploying a motif from one of her most famous poems, Thaxter used her sandpiper to render the supposed nobility of human beings with a striking note of irony: “Flit, sandpiper, from the sea’s margin to some loneliness remote and safe from the noble race of man!” Thaxter also lamented how

you [birds] shall not live your humble, blissful, dutiful life, you shall not guard your treasured home. . . . No, some woman wants your corpse to carry on her head. You shall die [so] that vanity, that ‘Fashion,’ may live. I fear we no longer deserve these golden gifts of God. I would the birds could all emigrate to some friendlier planet, peopled by a nobler race than ours, where they might live their sweet lives unmolested, and be treated with respect, the consideration and the grateful love which are their due. For we have almost forfeited our right to the blessing of their presence. But still we venture to hope for a better future, still the Audubon and other societies work with heart and soul to protect and save them.

Thaxter’s essay closes with a brief excerpt from Longfellow’s poem “The Birds of Killingworth” (1863): “’Tis always morning somewhere, and above / The awakening continents, from shore to shore, / Somewhere the birds are singing evermore.” As Sorby explains, Longfellow’s poem, about a poet-professor defending birds against his townsfolk’s misguided plans to exterminate them to protect their crops, had become famous as a touchstone and rallying cry for the international bird protection movement.19 Thaxter, 13–14, 14; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet’s Tale (The Birds of Killingworth),” in Tales of a Wayside Inn (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 189–204; Sorby, “Poetics of Bird Defense,” 173–76, 179–85, 192, 194.

Thaxter’s “Woman’s Heartlessness,” now considered a classic of early environmental activism, strategically deploys anthropomorphism and sentimentalism to offer a strikingly modern, even realist, critique of commercial exploitation. It was not alone in this regard. As Doughty has demonstrated, scientists, trade representatives, artists, and laypeople on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean wrote countless articles, essays, cartoons, and editorials during the late nineteenth century debating bird protection and the destructiveness of feather fashions before national laws restricting traffic in plumage began to appear in the United States and Europe after 1900. Thaxter’s essay provided a more vivid statement than many of these publications, including muckraking images such as the full-page exposé in 1883 about the “cruelties of fashion” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, showing complacent women with bird-decorated hats along with scenes of market hunting and taxidermy (fig. 5). Such women routinely appeared wearing the latest feather-millinery styles in turn-of-the-century fine art paintings, as in Frank W. Benson’s Lady Trying on a Hat (The Black Hat), which does not critique plumage fashion but rather integrates it approvingly into a larger aesthetic ensemble (fig. 6). (Benson [1862–1951] also frequently depicted birds in the wild; he was an avid bird hunter and early member of Ducks Unlimited, an organization committed to preserving game habitat.) Closer in tone to Thaxter’s essay is a picture produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the British artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) titled A Dedication (To all those who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty) (fig. 7). In this impassioned work, we see an angel mourning over an altar littered with the bodies of birds sacrificed for fashion and vanity. Watts, a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, famously refused to portray the actress Lily Langtry until she removed the feather trim from her bonnet.20 “The Cruelties of Fashion—‘Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds,’” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (November 10, 1883), 184. For more popular imagery about the bird fashion issue, see Doughty, Feather Fashions, 82–83; and Price, Flight Maps, 60, 66, 83, 96. On Benson’s painting, see Faith Andrews Bedford, Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 98–99; also see Bedford on his sport hunting of birds and frequent use of ornithological subject matter. I thank Emily Casey at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for alerting me to Benson’s interest in birds. On the Watts painting, see Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 48–49.

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Description: The Cruelties of Fashion—Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds

Fig. 5. “The Cruelties of Fashion—'Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds,’” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (November 10, 1883), p. 184

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Description: Lady Trying on a Hat (The Black Hat) by Benson, Frank Weston

Fig. 6. Frank W. Benson, Lady Trying on a Hat (The Black Hat), 1904. Oil on canvas, 40 × 32 in. (101.6 × 81.3 cm). Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence

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Description: A Dedication (To all those who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and...

Fig. 7. George F. Watts, A Dedication (To all those who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty), 1898–99. Oil on canvas, 40 3/16 × 28 in. (102 × 71 cm). Watts Gallery, Compton, Guildford, United Kingdom

Both verbally and visually, An Island Garden struck a very different tone. Its often anthropomorphic celebration of Thaxter’s garden as a beautiful refuge of cultivated natural vitality resembles neither the cartoonish critique of bird fashion seen in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper nor the aesthetic commodity fetishism of Benson’s Lady Trying on a Hat. Although Watts’s Dedication indirectly recalls the outrage expressed in “Woman’s Heartlessness,” it could not be more remote from Thaxter’s and Hassam’s discreet sense of artistic affirmation in An Island Garden. Reviewing Hassam’s oeuvre, in fact, we search in vain for anything quite like the aforementioned images. As an illustrator, he was not known for political critique, but neither was he a bird hunter-painter like his friend Benson, a fellow member of the American impressionist group known as the Ten. Hassam’s depictions of women’s hats are relatively rare, and most seem to be adorned with ribbons and flowers. Those that plausibly might be said to have bird feathers generally appear at a distance, their details dissolving into vague patches of color and light.21 Hassam’s Lady in Furs (Portrait of Mrs. Charles A. Searles) (1912, private collection), showing an attractive young woman wearing a mink scarf and wide-brimmed hat adorned with unidentifiable bird feathers (possibly parakeet), may be the closest comparison to Benson’s Black Hat.

In light of these comparisons, a striking characteristic of Hassam’s Home of the Hummingbird is its uncanny vision of absence (see fig. 4). The titular hummingbird does not appear in the picture, except by implication. We see the hummingbird’s garden “home,” but the protagonist is not at home. A simplistic explanation for this would be to say that Hassam, whom Curry describes as “not always successful” as a figure painter, here avoided ornithological portraiture for fear of embarrassment. Indeed, birds and other nonhuman animals rarely populate Hassam’s work; he was not familiar with the challenges of representing them and may well have been uneasy about attempting to depict their forms. Such a technical explanation, however, fails to acknowledge the interesting complexities of Home of the Hummingbird as an interpretation of Thaxter’s text or its timely mode of address concerning the contemporary bird protection debate. In order to appreciate the nuances of Hassam’s work, let us turn finally to the relevant passages in An Island Garden, near the end of Thaxter’s narrative recounting events over a single summer season.22 Curry, Island Garden Revisited, 145.

The final chapter opens by saying, “The garden suffers from the long drought in this last week of July,” when “all things begin again to pine and suffer for the healing touch of the rain.” Then, “Toward noon on this last day of the month the air darkens” as a thunderstorm approaches. “The whole sky is dark with threatening purple,” such that “death and destruction seem ready to emerge” and “Earth seems to hold her breath before the expected fury.” Such anthropomorphism—here casting Earth as a breathing person—oversimplifies nature to be sure, but it also fosters empathy and affect through identification. Soon come lightning and thunder, then “a few drops like bullets strike us.” Before long, “the tempest is shot through with the leaping lightning and crashing thunder, like steady cannonading.” Although “every leaf rejoices in the life-giving drops,” “the gale fills me with dread for my flowers defenseless.” In the midst of this rejuvenating war of weather, Thaxter declares, “Everything is drenched: where are the humming-birds?”23 Thaxter, Island Garden, 105–7.

Eventually, the storm subsides, leaving “the flowers flat all over” and “prostrate everywhere.” Approaching the garden’s western gate, “I was stopped still as a statue before a most pathetic sight. There, straight across the way, a tall Poppy plant lay prone upon the ground, and clinging to the stem of one of its green seed-pods sat my precious pet humming-bird, the dearest of the flock that haunt the garden, the tamest of them all. His eyes were tightly closed, his tiny claws clasped the stem automatically, he had no feeling, he was rigid with cold. . . . [He] is dead, I thought with a pang, as I shifted my flowers in a glowing heap to my left arm, and clasped the frozen little body in the palm of my right hand.”24 Thaxter, 109.

Refusing to accept this death sentence, the narrator endeavors to revive the bird:

I held him most tenderly in my closed hand, very careful not to crush or even press his tiny perishing body, and breathed into the shut hollow of my palm upon him with a warm and loving breath. . . . Alas, I thought, he is truly dead; when all at once I felt the least little thrill pass through the still, cold form, an answering thrill of joy ran through me in response, and more softly, closely, tenderly yet I sent my warm breath to the tiny creature. . . . In a few minutes more I began to feel the smallest fluttering pulse of life throbbing faintly within him; in yet a few moments more he stirred and stretched his wings.

She then carries him in a “small shallow basket of yellow straw . . . out into the corner where the heavenly blue Larkspurs stood behind the snow-whiteness of the full blossoming Lilies.” There, “The ardent sunbeams sent fresh life through him; suddenly he rose, an emerald spark, into the air, and quivered among the blue flowers.”25 Thaxter, 110, 111.

In the book’s final pages, Thaxter revels in the late summer vitality of the garden and its inhabitants, especially “the tamest, dearest hummingbird, whose home is in the Larkspurs”—the very place depicted by Hassam in Home of the Hummingbird. Exemplifying what Buell called “intensity of microvision,” Thaxter describes the hummingbird bathing itself in remarkable detail and ponders the endurance of “these most minute of feathered creatures,” who fly across the ocean with a “subtle inkling of the tender welcome that awaits them here” on Appledore. Eventually, they leave the island again as the season begins to change. After one last review of the many late-summer flowers blooming in her garden, Thaxter says, “The hummingbirds are gone, I know not whither, not to return this year.” She ends the book by saying, “And so the ripe year wanes.” Soon “it will be time to tuck up safely my Roses and Lilies and the rest for their long winter sleep beneath the snow, where I never forget them, but ever dream of their wakening in happy summers yet to be.”26 Thaxter, 115, 116, 124, 126.

ELEGIAC AESTHETICS

Hassam’s Home of the Hummingbird appears as the penultimate illustration in the final chapter of An Island Garden, amid Thaxter’s joyous description of vitality in the garden following the storm and after her resuscitation of the bird (the last illustration, Sunset and the Pinafore, shows the ferry on which tourists return to the mainland at the end of the day or season). Although it depicts the larkspurs, poppies, lilies, and other flowers standing erect in vivid, lively colors, as if never damaged by the storm, Home of the Hummingbird nevertheless seems ambiguous in tone, with its gray sky and absence of birds. As such, the painting captures the end of the summer season, when Thaxter observes that “the hummingbirds are gone.” The picture thus contains an elegiac note consistent with this seasonal shift and departure. Hassam generally avoided heavy-handed allegory or moralizing in his art, but scholars have detected similarly wistful, elegiac tones in other works by him. For example, in The Little Pond, Appledore, Curry observes a “chilly palette,” “flat, almost unmodulated sky,” and a “delicate, detailed handling of paint” that make it “unusual in Hassam’s Shoals works” (fig. 8). Noting that this “austere and reserved” work depicts the site where Thaxter found William Morris Hunt’s drowned corpse in 1879—an apparent suicide—Curry says, “The sense of elegy in this picture is present, but Hassam states it gently.”27 Curry, Island Garden Revisited, 154. Regarding Hunt’s suicide, see “Obituary; William Morris Hunt, Artist,” New York Times, September 9, 1879. On Hassam’s Tanagra (1914, Smithsonian American Art Museum) as “elegiac,” see Julie Springer, “Review of Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914,” Woman’s Art Journal 21, no. 1 (2000): 45. This theme has also been addressed by Patricia Junker in a lecture titled, “Wartime Elegies: Childe Hassam and Marsden Hartley in 1916,” Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kans., September 24, 2007.

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Description: The Little Pond, Appledore by Hassam, Childe

Fig. 8. Childe Hassam, The Little Pond, Appledore, 1890. Oil on canvas, 16 × 22 in. (40.6 × 55.8 cm). Art Institute of Chicago

An analogous sense of gentle elegy informs Home of the Hummingbird, but here the artist has placed thematic emphasis on an absent nonhuman creature instead of a human being. In light of contemporary fears about “disappearing” and “vanishing” birds—including hummingbirds—expressed regularly in newspapers across the country by the early 1890s, Hassam’s picture not only illustrates a passage in Thaxter’s book, but also subtly broaches a broader environmental concern. In 1888, in just one of many reports of its kind, The Auk (official journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union) told of a single public sale by a London firm involving tens of thousands of dead birds, including 12,000 hummingbirds. Referring specifically to the ruby-throated hummingbird, North America’s only native variety of the species east of the Mississippi River, an editorial writer in Forest and Stream observed in 1892, “It seems to me they are becoming scarcer every year, and I can only attribute this to their slaughter for ladies’ hats; but the dealers will not stop buying them, nor the ladies wearing them; and until they do, the slaughter of the innocents will continue.”28 The Auk (1888), cited in Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 30; “Humming-Birds as Pets (from Forest and Stream),” Springfield Republican, April 27, 1892, 9.

Home of the Hummingbird invites comparison with another elegiac work treating the theme of “home” at virtually the same moment: George Inness’s Home of the Heron (fig. 9). Produced by the aging Inness (1825–1894) in the last year of his life during a therapeutic visit to Tarpon Springs, Florida, this painting rendered a solitary heron silhouetted against a melancholy sunset. Located on the Gulf Coast, Tarpon Springs at that time was the site of one of Florida’s last surviving heron rookeries. In an entry on the snowy heron in an article for the Auk (1889), field scientist W. E. D. Scott observed: “It is particularly difficult to give accurate data as to the natural breeding time of this and others of the smaller Herons, for they are hunted just during the period of the full perfection of the plumes with such unremitting perseverance by the cruel plume hunters that scarcely a ‘rookery,’ no matter how small, escapes. So that the poor survivors of these massacres are constantly seeking new nesting grounds, and I have found Herons about Tarpon Springs and other points.” Inness apparently left no verbal statement commenting on such realities or interpreting The Home of the Heron, but his picture might as well have been called The Vanishing Race, for its elegiac tone of spiritual evanescence in nature brings to mind period discourse and imagery about Native Americans—a group similarly dispossessed and dematerialized by forces of modernity, as in a famous photograph by Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) titled The Vanishing Race—Navaho (fig. 10). Like Hassam, Inness could hardly be called a conservation activist, but both artists pondered the meaning of “home” for threatened birds at a particularly charged moment in the history of the feather trade—a moment already fraught with national concerns about the imminent extinction of the American bison and the closing of the frontier.29 W. E. D. Scott, “A Summary of Observations on the Birds of the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Auk 6, no. 1 (1889): 18. On the bison and frontier, see Alan C. Braddock, “Poaching Pictures: Yellowstone, Buffalo, and the Art of Wildlife Conservation,” American Art 23, no. 3 (2009): 36–59. For discussion Curtis and the “vanishing race” discourse, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). On Indigenous responses to such discourse, see Thomas Constantine Maroukis, We Are Not a Vanishing People: The Society of American Indians, 1911–1923 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021).

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Description: The Home of the Heron by Inness, George, Sr.

Fig. 9. George Inness, The Home of the Heron, 1893. Oil on canvas, 30 × 45 in. (76.2 × 115.2 cm). Art Institute of Chicago

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Description: The Vanishing Race—Navaho by Curtis, Edward S.

Fig. 10. Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race—Navaho, 1904. Photogravure, 18 1/8 × 12 3/16 in. (46 × 31 cm). From The North American Indian (Boston: John Andrew and Son, 1907, vol. 1, plate 1)

Compared with Inness’s Home of the Heron or Curtis’s Vanishing Race, though, Hassam’s Home of the Hummingbird seems firmly grounded on earth in the here and now. Moreover, while Thaxter’s garden denizen may be away from “home” for the season, we at least may entertain the hope of its return next spring, despite the real threats faced by hummingbirds and other feathered species at the time. Thanks to the garden’s vitality, which Thaxter and Hassam cultivated and celebrated with their respective artistic imaginations, this refuge—and others like it—helped ensure the bird’s survival. Although “just a little old-fashioned garden where the flowers come together to praise the Lord,” Thaxter believed it could “teach all who look upon them to do likewise” and appreciate all the “wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God,” thereby fostering bird protection through broad dissemination of empathic, anthropomorphic sentiment. Hassam may well have shared that sentiment, since his art—like Thaxter’s writing—depended so heavily on environmental phenomena. Admittedly, there were limitations and contradictions in their work, including New England regional bias and selectivity in their nature sympathies. We know that Hassam cared little for human foreigners and Thaxter waged war on pests that ate her flowers. She also obviously privileged hummingbirds and other favored species as beautiful pets that appealed to her aesthetic taste. But these particular historical facts do not invalidate the important power of creative anthropomorphism—whether by Thaxter, Hassam, or other environmentally sensitive artists—to facilitate recognition of human implication with other forms of life.30 On Hassam’s xenophobia, see Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 18, 25n64, 244. For more about Thaxter’s war on pests, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 6–12.

Epigraph: “anthropomorphism, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/8449.

1 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1, 2, 3. »

2 David Park Curry, Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited (New York: Denver Art Museum in association with W. W. Norton, 1990); H. Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2004), 120–44. »

3 For biographical details about Thaxter, see Norma H. Mandel, Beyond the Garden Gate: The Life of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004). According to Thaxter, “Mine is just a little old-fashioned garden where the flowers come together to praise the Lord and teach all who look upon them to do likewise.” Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 71. »

4 For a reproduction of Hassam’s Room of Flowers (1894, oil on canvas, private collection), depicting Thaxter’s parlor, see Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 123. On Thaxter’s various creative activities and guests at Appledore, see Sharon Paiva Stephan, One Woman’s Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Portsmouth, N.H.: Portsmouth Athenaeum in association with Isles of Shoals Historical and Research Association, 2001). »

5 Thaxter, Island Garden, frontispiece; Curry, Childe Hassam, 25. »

6 Curry, Childe Hassam, 19, 57; William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in association with Yale University Press, 1999), 82. On Hassam, see also H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Realism and Impressionism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 92, 285, 288–89, 295–97, 310–11. The classic and still influential study of Gilded Age antimodernism is T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). »

7 On Home of the Hummingbird, see Curry, Childe Hassam, 71, 76; and Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 129, 133. For references to the “home” of the “adored” hummingbird, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 111, 114, 115, 116; the picture is reproduced facing page 112. »

8 On resuscitating the hummingbird, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 109–11. For the gun reference, see Thaxter, 49. For discussion of alleged xenophobia and nativism, see Erin Leary, “‘A Tendency to Outstrip Native Blossoms in Life’s Race’: Nativism in Impressionist Gardens,” in The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, ed. Anna O. Marley (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in association with University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 61–74. Regarding late nineteenth-century fashion, market hunting, and the feather trade, see Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 102–53; and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 57–109. »

9 Shana Miriam Cohen, “American Garden Clubs and the Fight for Preservation, 1890–1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 50–51. »

10 Leah Blatt Glasser, “‘The Sandpiper and I’: Landscape and Identity in Celia Thaxter’s Isles of Shoals,” American Literary Realism 36, no. 1 (2003): 2. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 233, 237. »

11 Angela Sorby, “The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918,” in Poetry after Cultural Studies, ed. Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 173–97, 190. Celia Thaxter, “The Sandpiper,” in Poems (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872), 32–33. See also Marcia B. Littenberg, “From Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Island Views Revisited,” in Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 137–52. On new materialism, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). »

12 Thaxter, Island Garden, 88, 113, 116. »

13 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 99. See also Claire Parkinson, Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (New York: Routledge, 2019). »

14 For numerous references to pestilential “enemies” and “battle,” see Thaxter, Island Garden, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67; “survival of the fittest” appears on page 61. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864), 444. For a discussion of Thaxter in relation to eugenics, see Leary, “‘Tendency to Outstrip Native Blossoms.’” Regarding the history of integrated pest management since the nineteenth century, see Marcos Kogan, “Integrated Pest Management: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments,” Annual Review of Entomology 43 (January 1998): 243–70; and Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology, and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885–1985 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996). On the intersecting discourses of aesthetics and militarism during the late nineteenth century, see Alan C. Braddock, “Armory Shows: The Spectacular Life of a Building Type to 1913,” American Art 27, no. 3 (2013): 34–63. »

15 Celia Thaxter, “The Great Blue Heron (A Warning),” St. Nicholas 12, no. 10 (1885): 776. »

16 Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 60. Joel Asaph Allen, “On the Decrease of Birds in the United States,” Penn Monthly 7 (December 1876): 931–44, 936. “Words for the Birds,” Boston Journal, June 13, 1891; “The Slaughter of Birds in Florida,” Kansas City Star, December 29, 1893; “Florida Losing Its Birds of Plumage,” New Haven Register, March 15, 1894; “Our Vanishing Birds,” Daily Inter-Ocean (Chicago), April 6, 1896. »

17 Celia Thaxter to Elizabeth C. Hoxie, [1865] and March 7, 1869, in Letters of Celia Thaxter, ed. Annie Fields and Rose Lamb (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 28–29, 39–40. »

18 Celia Thaxter, “Woman’s Heartlessness,” Audubon Magazine 1, no. 1 (1887): 13. »

19 Thaxter, 13–14, 14; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet’s Tale (The Birds of Killingworth),” in Tales of a Wayside Inn (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 189–204; Sorby, “Poetics of Bird Defense,” 173–76, 179–85, 192, 194. »

20 “The Cruelties of Fashion—‘Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds,’” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (November 10, 1883), 184. For more popular imagery about the bird fashion issue, see Doughty, Feather Fashions, 82–83; and Price, Flight Maps, 60, 66, 83, 96. On Benson’s painting, see Faith Andrews Bedford, Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 98–99; also see Bedford on his sport hunting of birds and frequent use of ornithological subject matter. I thank Emily Casey at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for alerting me to Benson’s interest in birds. On the Watts painting, see Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 48–49. »

21 Hassam’s Lady in Furs (Portrait of Mrs. Charles A. Searles) (1912, private collection), showing an attractive young woman wearing a mink scarf and wide-brimmed hat adorned with unidentifiable bird feathers (possibly parakeet), may be the closest comparison to Benson’s Black Hat. »

22 Curry, Island Garden Revisited, 145. »

23 Thaxter, Island Garden, 105–7. »

24 Thaxter, 109. »

25 Thaxter, 110, 111. »

26 Thaxter, 115, 116, 124, 126. »

27 Curry, Island Garden Revisited, 154. Regarding Hunt’s suicide, see “Obituary; William Morris Hunt, Artist,” New York Times, September 9, 1879. On Hassam’s Tanagra (1914, Smithsonian American Art Museum) as “elegiac,” see Julie Springer, “Review of Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914,” Woman’s Art Journal 21, no. 1 (2000): 45. This theme has also been addressed by Patricia Junker in a lecture titled, “Wartime Elegies: Childe Hassam and Marsden Hartley in 1916,” Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kans., September 24, 2007. »

28 The Auk (1888), cited in Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 30; “Humming-Birds as Pets (from Forest and Stream),” Springfield Republican, April 27, 1892, 9. »

29 W. E. D. Scott, “A Summary of Observations on the Birds of the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Auk 6, no. 1 (1889): 18. On the bison and frontier, see Alan C. Braddock, “Poaching Pictures: Yellowstone, Buffalo, and the Art of Wildlife Conservation,” American Art 23, no. 3 (2009): 36–59. For discussion Curtis and the “vanishing race” discourse, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). On Indigenous responses to such discourse, see Thomas Constantine Maroukis, We Are Not a Vanishing People: The Society of American Indians, 1911–1923 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021). »

30 On Hassam’s xenophobia, see Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 18, 25n64, 244. For more about Thaxter’s war on pests, see Thaxter, Island Garden, 6–12. »

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