A Knickerbocker Tea Party
Artist
John Quidor
(American, 1801 - 1881)
Date1866
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions27 x 34 in. (29 1/4 x 35 7/8 x 5 in.)
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Terms
Object number1953.06
Description"A Knickerbocker Tea Party", derived from Washington Irving's "A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker" (1809), was never publicly exhibited during Quidor's lifetime and its early history passed without comment. Nevertheless, the artist has presented us with a vision that is witty and complex and throws light on the artist's practice. Quidor exhibited an appetite for Irving's stories, including his immensely popular "History of New York" often before, and from fairly early in his career--as in "A Battle Scene from Knickerbocker's History" (1838; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and "Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant"(1839; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica). In "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" he returned to Irving's satirical memoir and to another trademark that stamped his early pictures--the inclination to working in sets and series. Indeed, despite the absence of personal testimony or documentation, there are important suggestions that "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" was conceived as part of a shrewd and thoughtful undertaking that included "The Knickerbocker Kitchen" (1865; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.).
The pictures are similar in size: "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" measures 27 by 34 inches, "The Knickerbocker Kitchen", the first painting in the narrative sequence and the earlier of the two works, measures 27 by 33 1/2 inches. In both, Quidor presents rooms with fireplaces "of a truly patriarchal magnitude" at the left and small latticed windows at the far right--a pictorial recapitulation that not only links the two paintings but corresponds to Irving's text. (1) Both works include the same mixed lot of characters, enlarged in "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" by the subsequent addition of guests. And when the two pictures are placed alongside one another in their narrative order, the seated figures of the father and mother of the household--located at the right in "A Knickerbocker Kitchen" and at the left in "A Knickerbocker Tea Party"--are not only situated near the center of the linked compositions but posed so as to suggest mirror images.
The two paintings are, moreover, compatible in subject. Both refer specifically to book 3, chapter 3 of "A History of New York", and both were derived from consecutive passages in which Irving provides "a Picture of the Manners of Our Great-Great-Grandfathers." (2) While it is apparent that Quidor was inspired by the topic of Dutch manners as described by Irving, it is also clear that he chose to take liberties with the author's material. In "The Knickerbocker Kitchen", for example, the center of the composition is given over to a young boy who, with malicious glee, is muzzling the family dog. The paterfamilias, rather than "looking in the fire with half-shut eyes, and thinking of nothing," (3) as Irving had it, appears to observe this spectacle of abuse with chilling indifference, if not silent approval. The text furnishes no account or justification for this small drama; on the contrary, according to Irving's story, "the very cat and dog, enjoyed a community of privilege, and had each a right to a corner." (4) The tone of Quidor's two paintings deviates a good deal from the cheerily satirical level at which Irving's tale stands and in this instance would seem to be little short of cruel.
Not the least of Quidor's humor lies in the fact that "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" is dominated by the unbridled appetites of its human cast. Although Irving describes the banqueters' "dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces in this mighty dish--in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes," (5) we are hardly prepared for the agility and manic energy of Quidor's diners. The animation of this scene owes a great deal to Quidor's flamboyant sense of visual hyperbole, which effectively calls into question the table manners of nearly everyone. Quidor's tea party is a wild and frenzied affair in which eyes are bulging, figures lunging, forks rattling, and a plate and chair overturning. Yet this is more than simply reducing human behavior to an animalistic level. For if their undomesticated eating habits strongly affirm the need for some form of constraint, one is invited to notice the irony of a situation in which the role of untamed animal in "A Knickerbocker Kitchen" has plainly been miscast. In "A Knickerbocker Tea Party", the dog is made to undergo the calamity of a having a chair fall on its back, overturned by the boy who is too preoccupied with "launching" at a morsel of fat pork to notice, let alone care. Indeed, the savage treatment of the dog in the pendant, and the perplexing silence of the old burgher in the face of both the boy's malicious pleasure in the one picture and his careless disregard of the pet in the other, can be seen as a witty reversal of an unequivocal scriptural allusion from the same chapter of Irving's "History of New York".
By way of describing the standards of behavior at these tea parties, and in sharp contrast to Quidor's treatment, Irving observed that the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. . . . As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire. (6)
The young boy's brutal treatment of the dog, which is the more awful in that it is performed with the apparent sanction of the youngster's father, is absolutely contrary to the tableau invoked by Irving: a touching openhearted scene from the book of Tobit, which, the author informs us, "figured to great advantage" (7) in the Knickerbocker kitchen. As envisaged in the Vulgate version of Tobit 11:9, Tobit's reunion with his son Tobias is preceded by the boy's faithful dog, which greets the elderly Tobit, his tail wagging happily, for he has come to expect the whole family to behave lovingly. But that reference is by no means the only index of the normal atmosphere of the Dutch household that Quidor seized upon and lampooned in this pendant.
In addition to Tobit and the dog we have Irving's cunning reference to Haman on the gallows (Esther 7:10), which echoes in his description of the large lump of sugar, used to sweeten tea, that was suspended "by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth." It is worth noting in this context that King Ahasuerus's order to string up Haman (Esther 7:7-10), came during a banquet.
At the same time, the vengeance with which the banqueters attack the food in the New Britain picture may be construed as a comic play on Irving's allusion to Jonah's escape from the belly of a whale, "like Harlequin through a barrel of fire" (8): "And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" (Jonah 2:10). We might expect that sooner or later the voracious appetites of the diners in A Knickerbocker Tea Party will lead to analogous, though less exalted, consequences.
Irving's subtle allusions to gluttony in this chapter, as indicated by the superabundance of food that is served and, presumably, consumed, were surely noted by Quidor. Yet, while owing something to Irving's evocation of the excesses of the Knickerbocker tea party, Quidor altered, exaggerated, and even desanitized the author's gently satirical account. As such, aspects of the two paintings stand in conspicuous contrast to both the temper and the decor of Irving's story. We can see Quidor's imagination at work not only in his diversion of attention to the mistreatment of the dog, which he marshaled into a coherent discourse involving both paintings, but also in his comic allusion to basic human functions that go unremarked in Irving's text. When Quidor's pictures are viewed together, the basket of apples displayed in the right foreground of "A Knickerbocker Kitchen" is balanced with and contrasted to the open chamber pot in the left foreground of "A Knickerbocker Tea Party". To be sure, above and to the right of the chamber pot is a figure, viewed from behind, who is busily cramming food as he sits on a stool, indelicately suggesting that one stool is leading to another.
In this spirit of earthy levity we have the sense that while Quidor was a highly sensitive reader of his literary sources, his fertile imagination could not keep him from embellishing them. Such an impulse was indeed recognized early in his career. Writing in 1828 about Quidor's Ichabod Crane Pursued by the Headless Horseman (1828; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)--a painting based on Irving's "Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." (1819-20)--a New York reviewer stated, "Old Ichabod, has somewhat of Geoffrey Cragon's [sic] Ichabod, and yet it is not his Ichabod, the Ichabod of No. 9, being really and truly Quidor's Ichabod." (9) And while Quidor's "A Knickerbocker Tea Party" suggests a careful reading of Irving, as a low, sometimes dark, farce, it is, in keeping with the reviewer's contention, really and truly Quidor's Knickerbocker tea party.
CM
Bibliography:
John I. H. Baur, "John Quidor", exhib. cat. (Utica: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1965); David M. Sokol, "John Quidor, Literary Painter," "American Art Journal 2" (spring 1970): 60-73; David M. Sokol, "John Quidor: Painter of American Legend", exhib. cat. (Wichita: Wichita Museum of Art, 1973); Chad Mandeles, "A New Look at John Quidor's Leatherstocking Paintings," "American Art Journal 12" (summer 1980): 65-74; Christopher Kent Wilson, "The Life and Work of John Quidor," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1982.
Notes:
1. Washington Irving, "A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty"---by Diedrich Knickerbocker (New York: G. P. Putnam; Hurd and Houghton, 1865), p. 196.
2. Ibid., p. 191.
3. Ibid., p. 196.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 197.
6. Ibid., pp. 198-199.
7. Ibid., p. 199.
8. Ibid.
9. "On the Works of Living Artists, at the National Academy of Design. No. 3," "Morning Courier", June 13, 1828, p. 2.
On View
Not on view
