Christmas Carols, Part II: Twas Night Before Christmas (A Visit From St. Nicholas), by Clement C. Moore

Though certainly not a carol in the traditional sense, Clement C. Moore’s wonderful Twas Night Before Christmas (originally entitled A Visit From St. Nicholas) has often been set to music.  There are several delightful musical renditions of the poem, and perhaps our favorite here at the Jade Sphinx is that of Christmas Cowboy Deluxe, Gene Autry (1907-1998), recorded with Rosemary Clooney (1928-2002).  If you don’t believe us – listen and see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TaQPg10OmA.

(Before moving on to Mr. Moore and Mr. Claus, a quick word on Gene Autry.  The very best Christmas present one could get is the classic cowboy’s Christmas album.  Autry introduced Frosty the Snowman, as well as Here Comes Santa Claus and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, and his recordings of these numbers are definitive.  In addition, the other songs on the album – including Santa, Santa, Santa and the lovely and evocative Merry Christmas Waltz – are seldom-heard gems, and they have become a tradition in our household.  They should become a tradition in yours, as well.)

Clement Moore (1779-1863) lived with his beloved wife, Elizabeth, and their nine children in a large, comfortable Georgian manor house in what is now the Chelsea section of New York.  The estate, called Chelsea, rested on 96 acres of farmland, which hopefully illustrates that, if nothing else, Manhattan is constantly changing.

Early one Christmas Eve, in his carriage en route to Washington Market to buy a holiday turkey, he began composing a Christmas poem for his six-year-old daughter, Charity.  Back home in his study, he consulted Henry Irving’s History, and finished the poem in three hours.  That night, at supper, he read it aloud to his family – it was the first time Twas Night Before Christmas was heard by an audience.  It was an instant hit.  Charity brought it to her Sunday School class, and then friends had the poem published in the Troy, New York Sentinel the following Christmas in 1823.  Moore, a scholar and serious educator, was initially reluctant to admit authorship.

It was more than 40 years later that the political cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) created the modern Santa Claus when illustrating a republication of Moore’s poem.  As cartoonist for the influential illustrated Harper’s Weekly, for each Christmas issue he drew a Santa, which he claimed was a welcome relief from his usual round of political cartooning.  One wonders how he would feel now.

One of the many interesting things in Santa’s evolution is that Moore originally conceived of Santa as elf-sized.  This somehow got lost in the details, as Nast’s Santa was republished everywhere: calendars, cards, posters and wrapping paper.  Between Moore and Nast, the modern Santa Claus was born.

Here’s the original poem:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds;

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,

Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,

When what to my wondering eyes did appear,

But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,

With a little old driver so lively and quick,

I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!

On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up to the housetop the coursers they flew

With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof

The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;

A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad face and a little round belly

That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;

A wink of his eye and a twist of his head

Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan

Perhaps one of the most compelling of individual dreams is to have a place of one’s own.  Whether that be a study, studio, off-limits bedroom, basement hideaway or personal garage, many of us yearn for a secluded place situated to our own personalities, where our will was law.

Author Michael Pollan (born 1955) found himself in much the same place shortly before the birth of his first son, Isaac.  A writer and editor for Harper’s Magazine and a columnist for House & Garden, Pollan moved to a few acres in rural Connecticut in the late 1990s.  But while there, he began to dream of a little shack, a ‘writer’s hut’ where he could work, look at nature and collect his thoughts.

This dream took Pollan on a personal odyssey.  Though more at home with words and concepts than tools and building materials, Pollan decided to build his own little writer’s hut behind his home.  He hired an architect to design it up-to-code, but, other than that, he strove to build it himself with just the help of a local handyman.

The project, which should’ve taken just two months, took more than a year and taught Pollan a great deal about both the natural and theoretical worlds.  Though buildings first exist as constructs and drawings on pieces of paper, they must be translated into solid, three-dimensional entities.  And, more importantly, the materials must first be converted from raw materials – trees, stones, etc. – before they can be turned into building components.

While building, Pollan developed a new understanding of wood, of the complications that come with the execution of plans, and of landscape.  He investigated the mysteries of architecture, as well as such philosophies as feng shui and postmodernism.  He also had something of an imaginary dialogue with Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who faced many of the same challenges while building his shack at Walden Pond, and much of Pollen’s book detailing his experience, A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, is a prolonged discussion with the now-dead philosopher.

A Place of My Own benefits from Pollan’s jaunty writing style, as well as from his self-deprecating honesty.  He admits upfront that he is not handy, that he has no grasp of math, and that the idea of building something is entirely alien to his experience.  However, he also felt that dealing in a purely theoretical world of words and ideas kept him separate from some vital part of the human experience.  Moreover, he also believed that our technological advances had somehow separated us from some component of our basic humanity, and that building something that would last – like his writer’s hut – was a way of reconnecting with that missing link.

Here is Pollan on why he did it: For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for the literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do.  Work is how we situation ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand.  Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other people’s words, rewriting, revising, rewording.  Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn’t always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address.  (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.)  Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do.  Whenever I heard myself described as an “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.

A Place of My Own is a fascinating meditation on our relationship to man-made spaces, as well as how we incorporate ourselves into nature.  The main flaw of the book, however, is that it seems as if Pollan has never had an unrecorded thought, and many of his ruminations pad a fascinating story with irrelevancies.  Think of A Place of My Own is much like the world’s longest New Yorker article – filled with great stuff, sometimes numbingly repetitious or padded, but ultimately rewarding.  Recommended for anyone who is feeling penned in by our modern world.

We Struck Some Boggy Ground, by Frederic Remington

Here is a stunning black and white piece by artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909), depicting an actual event some 40 years after the fact for an article he wrote about it in Harper’s Weekly.  (He did rely upon the testimony of eyewitnesses.)

Remington’s story, How the Law Got Into the Chaparral, was published in December, 1896.  In the story, Remington relates the tale as told by Texas Ranger Colonel “Rip” Ford.  John Salmon “Rip” Ford intermittently led Ranger companies against Indians throughout the 1850s and dealt with Mexican rebellion on the Rio Grande in 1859-60.  His most notable exploit was the Battle of Antelope Hills, May 12, 1858, in which Texas Rangers surprised and destroyed the Comanche village of Iron Jacket.

For a full description of the engagement, here is a passage from Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, a magisterial history by Robert M. Utley that comes highly recommended: By March 1858, Ford was advancing toward the northwestern frontier, combing a broad swatch of country in four columns.  He felt himself too weak, however, to mount an offensive into the Comanche homeland.  The Rangers called up under the Pease administration had reached the end of their terms and were being replaced.  That left Ford with only a few more than a hundred men, including his seventy-three-year-old father.  At the Brazos Agency, however, Agent Shapley Ross solved Ford’s problem: more than a hundred Caddos, Anadarkos, Tawakonis, and Tonkawas placed themselves under Ross’s command to take the warpath with Ford’s Rangers.

Striking northwest from is base near Fort Belknap, Ford crossed Red River and bore north into the Comanche ranges west of the Wichita Mountains.  The Indian auxiliaries not only doubled Ford’s firepower but proved their worth as guides and trackers.  The Rangers were superior fighters, well drilled by Ford.  All they needed was to find the elusive Comanches, which they achieved by falling on a broad trail that led to the Canadian River opposite the landmark Antelope Hills.

Early on May 12, 1858, the Rangers and their allies splashed across the Canadian and raced headlong toward the village of the Comanche chief Iron Jacket.  The Brazos Indians took the lead, bore to the left, between the village and the river, and poured a deadly fire into surprised warriors bolting from their lodges.  Iron Jacket, brightly painted and armored in a coat of Spanish mail, mounted and charged the Brazos line.  “The sharp crack of five or six rifles brought his horse to the ground,” recalled Ford, “and in a few moments the Chief fell riddled with balls.”  The auxiliaries shot down all the Comanches attacking toward the river.  Meanwhile, in two wings the Rangers stormed into the village itself.  The fight then became a free-for-all, with knots of Rangers and their allies chasing fleeing Comanches.  Here and there warriors paused to make a stand and give their families time to escape.  But the Rangers, their six-shooters pooping, broke up every such attempt.  Shortly after noon, the winded pursuers returned to the village.  Warriors from another camp a few miles up the Canadian attempted a counterattack, but were driven off.

(Watch these pages for a review of Lone Star Justice, along with other books by master historian Robert M. Utley.)

This stunning gouache picture in grisaille measures 29.4x20, and also shows an interesting insight into Remington’s views on Indians.  In his story, Remington writes about the “screaming of the women and the children,” and in his illustration also shows how viciously outnumbered, out-gunned and out maneuvered the Indians were in this encounter.

The Rangers ride magnificent horses and brandish guns – by focusing on the rear of the animals and moving them uphill, Remington underscores their size and power.  The sheer size of the Rangers in the picture is impressive: they dwarf the Indian encampment in the background, which seems to have no martial contingent ready at-hand.

Telling, too, is the dead Indian in the foreground.  His proximity to the horses show the Indians ridden over by the tide of history.  A fascinating bit of Remingtonana.

More Remington tomorrow!

 

Pretty Mother of the Night, by Frederic Remington

We continue our look at Western artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) with a picture very different from the frenetic and violent A Dash for the Timber: Pretty Mother of the Night.

Following his first commercial sales to Harper’s Weekly, Remington went to rural Peabody, Kansas, to become a sheep rancher.  He quickly found out the life in Kansas was boring, isolated and rougher than he anticipated.  An Easterner at heart, he was never really completely at home in the wilderness. His inheritance dissipated from the failed venture, Remington returned home.

His mother loaned him enough money to go to Kansas City and start a hardware business.  However, some kind of swindle (the details have never really been clear), made the business fail.  He took what money he had left and invested as half-owner in a saloon.  He also married his New York sweetheart Eva Caten and brought her to Kansas City.

Eva was as unhappy in the saloon business as Remington was in the sheep business.  In addition, she showed little interest or appreciation in his art, and left him to return to New York.  This desertion may have served as something of a wakeup call to Remington, who started to sketch and paint in earnest.

His painting created greater success for him than any of his business ventures, and he soon identified as an artist.  He returned to New York and reunited with Eva in Brooklyn.  He studied at the Art Students League in New York and improved his technique.

At this time, there was a fear in the East that the great open spaces of the West were closing down, and that the pageant of the American West was drawing to a close.  Remington was able to capitalize on that by submitting work to Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s, documenting his recent (and largely exaggerated) Western experiences.  Eastern editors took him for the genuine article, and started sending him back to the West to chronicle its final days.

Between 1885 and 1888 Remington made a number of trips to the American Southwest, principally to cover the U.S. Cavalry and its pursuit of the Apaches. He also followed the Cavalry in pursuit of the renegade Indian Geronimo.  The stark landscape and dramatic human events he encountered there greatly influenced his artistic development. Remington filled his diaries with observations, made countless field sketches, took many photographs with the latest equipment, and collected numerous artifacts to use in his paintings.

In the eternal comparisons between Remington and Charles Russell (1864-1926), one of the most interesting points is their respective feelings toward the American Indian.  Russell genuinely liked Indians – to him, they were just as much a symbol of freedom and living-in-nature as the American cowboy.  He learned the exacting sign language (he and his wife used it as both a private code and a party trick), and even camped with them for extended periods.  Though he never shied from depicting the occasional savagery of the Indian, he also reveled in his beauty, capability and stoicism.

It was an entirely different story with Remington.  Most of his interactions with the Indians were while he was covering the Indian Wars in the company of the U.S. Cavalry.  They were never anything less than the enemy – wily, unscrupulous, untrustworthy and … alien.  There are few positive depictions of the Indians in Remington’s work.  That is why Pretty Mother of the Night (oil on board) is such a remarkable picture.  Seldom has he portrayed the Indian with such a sympathetic eye.

Pretty Mother of the Night is best labeled a nocturne – its explores the technical and aesthetic difficulties of painting nighttime pictures.  (It is a feat at which Remington would excel.)  Painted around 1900, this picture was meant to serve as an illustration for a novel he had recently written called The Way of the Indian.  In the novel the hero, White Otter, addresses the moon (Pretty Mother of the Night) after successfully completing a test of manhood. 

Aside from the lack of the frenetic energy in a painting like A Dash for the Timber, look at the other things that Remington does differently.  A Dash for the Timber details man, horse and landscape with an almost photographic attention to detail.  Here, Remington uses a significant change in compositional technique.  Though beautifully rendered, the horses, Indians and landscape are all done with an almost Impressionist lack of detail. 

Also … Just look at how he poses the subjects and what he’s doing with them.  If the landscape is barren and empty, Remington underscores the hardness of the landscape by the lean, almost skeletal sparseness of the Indians.  These are not well-fed warrior princes, but, rather, people of the land barely squeezing a living from it.

Also, too, look at how he compares the barren immensity of the landscape and its two dots of life with the immensity of the heavens with its corresponding dots of light.  Remington here underscores the quiet miracle of life, both here on earth, and in the heavens.

More Remington tomorrow!

 

 

A Dash for the Timber by Frederic Remington

An email crossed our desk wondering why we at The Jade Sphinx have devoted so much time to so many great painters of the American West, yet have paid scant attention to one who is arguably one of the greatest: Frederic Remington.

There are several reasons for the seeming oversight on our part.  First off, Remington’s works are so well cataloged throughout the Web that it seemed a redundancy on our part.  Secondly, I didn’t know if there was anything I could say that was either fresh or interesting.  And finally, in my researches into the man himself … I have to say that no matter how much I admire his work, I don’t like him very much.

Though Remington had several youthful adventures out West, his conception of the time and place were radically different from that of his contemporary, Charles Russell (1864-1926).  Where Russell saw the West as a glorious pageant, a time of freedom and fun and opportunity, Remington saw only the hardship, the brutality and the privation.  Both outlooks are perfectly viable and have more than an element of truth – indeed, either outlook is possible for today’s world – but I could never fully embrace the negativist. 

Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was, if I may slip into the vernacular of the West, born a dude.  He was born in Canton, New York.  His father, Seth Pierre Remington, was a colonel in the Civil War and a businessman who was often absent from the family.  The family moved from Bloomington, Illinois for a brief time, and later resettled in Ogdensburg, New York.

Young Frederic was something of a challenge to his father.  The boy had no great ambition to work too hard, no interest really in the military, and thought he would spend his life as a journalist-illustrator.  While in military school, Remington spent most of his time drawing pictures – he was clearly not soldier material and the older Remington’s dreams of his son going to West Point were squashed.  Instead, young Remington went to art school at Yale, where he was the only male in attendance.  (He also was something of football star.)  After graduating, he used a small inheritance to go West.

Remington spent time in Montana and New Mexico, watching cattlemen, cavalry and foot soldiers, and Indians.  From this trip, he sold a story and illustration to Harper’s Weekly, and in a very roundabout way, his career as an artist began.

Remington’s first great painting was A Dash for the Timber, and it is easy to see how his reputation as a serious artist started here.  It is his first masterpiece.  The picture was commissioned by E. C. Converse, a wealthy New York industrialist who wanted a painting that portrayed “a life-threatening situation.”  Converse knew of Remington from his work with Harper’s Weekly (by this time, Remington had followed General Cook on the trail of Geronimo, the rebel Apache, to get the story for Harper’s.)  As a journalist out West, Remington, knew it to be a place where hard men managed to live off of a harder, more unforgiving land. 

The painting first appeared publicly at The National Academy of Design in 1889; years later, it was bought by a private individual and donated to Washington University.  In 1945, the university sold it to collector David Findlay Sr. for $23,000 so that they university cold then buy a Picasso and a Matisse.  (They should’ve kept the Remington.)  The picture now resides at the Amon Carter Museum.

Let’s look at this remarkable picture.  The first thing of course that draws our eye are the horses.  Remington’s portrayal of airborne horses was revolutionary in 1889.  He was aided in this not just through personal observation, but through the fast-action sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, who invented a technique for taking such fast photos that he was able to capture the horse while it was actually airborne.

These are horses running hard: each muscle is straining, nostrils are flared, eyes are bulging.  Lariats and canteens are suspended in mid-air under the thundering hoof beats, and a cloud of dust follows in their wake.  Look, too, at the contrast of the purplish shadow thrown by the horses and the stark, sandy-colored earth. 

Each and every one of the participants is a distinct personality: except, of course, for the empty-saddled horse, which has obviously lost its rider.  Look, too, at the rigidity of the vaquero on the left obviously hit by a bullet – one of his comrades leans over the keep in him the saddle.  The hats of the riders fold at the brim in the wind, and some of the hardier souls turn round to return gunfire.

The timber, to the left, looks a little thin, and one wonders how much protection it will provide.  Indeed, these look like doomed men.

Aside from the virtuosity of the composition and execution, what Remington really captures is a sense of action.  Painters from the Renaissance onward have been able to create a sense of movement, but not so much of action.  A Dash for the Timber is the kind of painting that leaves the viewer in a sweat of exhaustion.

More than 100 years of Western films have perhaps removed some of the novelty of this composition, but have not diminished at all its power.  This is a remarkable painting.

More Remington tomorrow!