www.common-place.org · vol. 11 · no. 2 · January 2011
Wendy Bellion is associate professor of
art history at the University of Delaware.
Her book, Citizen Spectator: Art,
Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early
National America (2011), explores the
changing forms and functions of trompe
l’oeil illusion during the early republic.
Wendy Bellion
Slow Art
The Pleasures of Trompe l’Oeil
I have a confession to make.
In the course of writing my book on art and illusion in the early
republic, I was taken in by a trompe l’oeil object.
It was October 2002. I had completed my doctoral dissertation the
previous year and was just beginning the work of revising it for
publication. In the meantime, I had contributed a number of entries
to an exhibition catalogue for a large show about trompe l’oeil that
was being organized by the National Gallery of Art, Deceptions and
Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting. At the
exhibition’s opening, I was thrilled to see many of the pictures I had
studied, pondered, and written about. Cleverly positioned near a
museum staircase was Charles Willson Peale’s trompe l’oeil
Staircase Group (1795), a double portrait of Peale’s sons Raphaelle
and Titian Ramsay that reportedly fooled no less a figure than
George Washington back in the day. In another room I encountered
the marine artist Thomas Birch, leaning out from the space of his
portrait to rest his arm on the picture frame. Elsewhere was
Raphaelle Peale’s masterful Venus Rising from the Sea—A
Deception (c. 1822), which appeared to conceal a picture of a
female nude behind a cloth. According to family lore, Raphaelle’s
wife—presumably peeved by her husband’s naughty imagination—
took a swipe at the painting in an attempt to remove the cloth.
I knew all the tricks of trompe l’oeil walking into this exhibition. I
knew the stories of spectators deceived by wily pictures, of birds
that pecked at painted grapes and dogs that climbed the step of the
Staircase Group. I knew better than to get taken in by an illusion.
And then my vanity got the better of me.
I rounded the corner of a gallery and spied the exhibition catalogue
resting on a bench. Another reader had carelessly left it upside
down and open, so that its cover was clearly visible and its spine
within easy reach. I hadn’t yet laid my hands on a copy of the
catalogue, and I was eager to see own my own entries in print. I
made a beeline for the bench. I grasped the book.
It didn’t budge.
It was a fake. An
expertly crafted
simulacrum of the real
catalogue, affixed to
the bench and
perfectly positioned to
ensnare the gullible. I
had been deceived.
In the space of an
instant, I realized my
mistake. Gasping with
surprise, I beat a quick
path out of the gallery,
hoping that no one had
witnessed my gaffe. I
think I may have
actually hidden behind
my husband when I
finally located him in
another room. In a
Photograph by George Freeman
gushing whisper, I
relayed the
rompe l’oeil invites us to undeceive ourselves
embarrassment of
of the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits
what had occurred. He
that the senses can detect and explain deception.
took a long, steady
look at me and burst
into laughter. And
then I began to laugh, too. Once we’d collected ourselves, we crept
back into the gallery to inspect the trompe l’oeil catalogue, to
marvel at its predatory conceit and its capacity to trump and
surprise. For several long minutes, we enjoyed a good chuckle at
ourselves. Well, at me.
T
I’ve thought often of this incident over the past few years as I
researched the ways in which spectators reacted to trompe l’oeil
objects during the post-revolutionary decades. Between the 1790s
and 1820s, in cities large and small, early national Americans
created, displayed, experienced, and wrote about a tantalizing array
of pictorial and optical deceptions, including trompe l’oeil portraits
and still life paintings, like those made by the Peales and their
Philadelphia cohort; "philosophical" instruments, such as solar
microscopes, zograscopes, and phantasmagorias, that magnified
tiny things to magnificent proportions, threw flat pictures into three
dimensions, or generated illusions of ghosts; even mechanical
devices—such as the "Invisible Lady," a popular visual and aural
illusion—that vexed and delighted Americans up and down the East
Coast for years. Spectators encountered these deceptions in an
equally varied range of places, from Charles Willson Peale’s
Philadelphia Museum to taverns, houses, and assembly halls
temporarily transformed into public exhibition rooms.
Into these spaces, spectators carried a host of assumptions about
their abilities to detect a deception—and the cultural stakes of being
able to do so. Common Sense philosophy taught early Americans to
trust the evidence of their senses, to believe that perspicacious
vision would see through illusion and discern the truth of a
situation. Political writers turned this sensory faith to partisan
advantage: Republicans advised the people to sharpen their eyes
against Federalist deceit, while Federalists cautioned against
Republican myopia. How, I wanted to know, was this politicization
of the senses relevant to the concurrent culture of visual illusions?
How did art and politics inform one another during the early
republic?
I found some answers to these questions in the accounts of
deceptions that early national Americans confided to letters and
journals or published in newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Not
unlike my own experience at the National Gallery, spectators
exhibited a mixture of embarrassment and wonder in response to
trompe l’oeil illusions. Such emotions may seem trivial (they did to
Sir Joshua Reynolds, the period’s leading British aesthetician, who
never failed to remind his audiences that trompe l’oeil was cheap
and vulgar in comparison to the civic-minded, edifying genre of
history painting). But, like trompe l’oeil itself, there is more to these
responses than initially meets the eye. Trompe l’oeil exacts several
things of its spectators, and in the reactions it yields, we can
understand something of its broader cultural and political
significance.
First, trompe l’oeil is fun. There is good reason why so many early
modern optical illusions were commonly known as "pleasing
deceptions." Trompe l’oeil produces surprise, giggles, chatter,
appreciation. It can make dupes of unwitting observers, serving
them up for mockery to the bemusement of onlookers already in the
know. Yet it also invites us to laugh at ourselves. It’s safe to say
that there are few genres of art capable of generating an adrenaline
rush. But my own encounter with the trompe l’oeil catalogue proves
that this can occur, and my research suggests that early national
spectators experienced something similar.
Consider the case of the Invisible Lady. This enticing mechanical
illusion took the form of a glass ball suspended by wires from a
ceiling. A square railing surrounded the center, with trumpets
positioned atop vertical posts at each corner. Entering the rooms in
which this unusual contraption was installed, visitors encountered
the sounds of the invisible woman who purportedly inhabited the
space. Voices, breathing, and even singing seemed to emerge from
the trumpets. And while it was clear that an unseen speaker could
see the audience, she herself was nowhere to be seen. Spectators
professed confusion—how did the deception work?—but mostly
they expressed enjoyment. The illusion elicited admiration (its
mechanics were so "ingeniously veiled as hitherto to elude all
discovery," effused one witness) and gave rise to flights of fancy
(one wit claimed the lady "kissed some single gentlemen" but
"blows upon married men and old bachelors").
Accounts of the Invisible Lady reveal another crucial aspect about
trompe l’oeil: it takes awhile to experience its ruses and pleasures.
Critics like Reynolds often dismissed trompe l’oeil out of hand,
presuming that its artistic purpose was ephemeral and its
significance therefore negligible. But reports of the Invisible Lady
suggest otherwise. Writers from Poulson’s American Daily
Advertiser took their time at a Philadelphia exhibition of the illusion
in 1804. Their narrative presents a careful inspection of the device
and its environment, retracing the cautious movements they made
around the gallery ("there are closets, but they are well closed, and
in whatever part of the room you stand, the voice is heard from the
trumpets only"). Such comments reveal trompe l’oeil to be an art of
duration. It catches the eye (or ear or hand) in a second with its
exacting simulations and imitations, but it also invites us to linger,
marveling at its execution. To put it in twenty-first century terms,
trompe l’oeil is slow art.
What’s more, these unhurried pleasures amount to a phenomenon
that is less about being deceived than it is about undeceiving.
Trompe l’oeil beckons the viewer close to inspect its surfaces and
manufacture; it challenges us to look, touch, and listen, as the
Invisible Lady’s admirers did, in order to understand the artistry by
which it effects its illusions. In invites us to undeceive ourselves of
the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits that the senses can
detect and explain deception.
It’s in this space of possibility that trompe l’oeil engaged early
national concerns about dissimulation —about demagogues,
counterfeiting, forgers, and charlatans—and tested the visual acuity
of American citizens. Throughout the Revolutionary and early
national periods, the capacity to discern differences between truth
and falsehood, or to see through artifice and design, was prized as a
sign of able citizenship. What did it mean, then, to encounter
illusionistic objects at public exhibitions that staged this very
challenge? The frequent display of trompe l’oeil pictures and
optical devices invites us to understand early American exhibition
rooms as spaces of citizen formation, as places where sensory
perception was tested, honed, and performed. At Peale’s Museum,
in art galleries, and in the vernacular sites where the Invisible Lady
was shown, the cultures of trompe l’oeil and politics coalesced
around the prospect of undeceiving.
What of the early national spectators, then, who encountered trompe
l’oeil catalogues at these exhibitions, as I did at the National
Gallery? Well, that’s a subject I explore in my book. A real book.
You can even pick it up.
1
Comments Community
Recommend
⤤ Share
Login
Sort by Best
Start the discussion…
Be the first to comment.
✉
Subscribe
d Add Disqus to your site Add Disqus Add %
Privacy
Copyright © 2000-2011 Common-place The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, Inc., all rights
reserved
Why a Common Place? | Previous Issues | Editorial Board | Terms of Use