6. Visionary Depictions

Whenever William Rimmer drew landscapes, they were typically pencil sketches of places he had visited, such as the Flume Gorge in New Hampshire or the Wellfleet shoreline on Cape Cod (Fogg Museum). With the exception of small landscapes in oil (lost) that were commissioned for a couple of dollars when he was young, these pieces were little more than easily portable mementos.¹ Thus, from what is known, English Hunting Scene (fig. 117) deserves attention — just on the basis of size — as a potentially unique undertaking.² Not only signed but also dated, it was completed in Boston in 1871, where Rimmer had opened an art-anatomy school after his return from New York the year before.³ Although it is by far the largest of Rimmer’s known pictures, there is no indication that it was ever intended for public exhibition or for sale. Instead, it seems to have been meant for private viewing in Rimmer’s home. Some thirty years later or sometime before 1910, his descendants sold the painting — which had still not been exhibited — outside of the family.⁴ The new owners called it a “medieval hunting scene,” but, by the time it appeared in the 1946 Rimmer exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it had acquired the title, English Hunting Landscape, which is a misidentification.⁵ The real subject is definitely not a hunt scene.

Fig. 117 English Hunting Scene, 1871. Oil on canvas mounted on wallboard, 47 7/8 x 72 1/4 in. (121.6 x 183.51 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of David M. Davis. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

When completed, the painting had the potential to attract interest as a colorful, springtime landscape with budding foreground plants, centuries-old ruins, medieval-appearing characters like those in historical novels, and the unifying tonality of a warm sunset. The foreground is richly dark — recalling Rembrandt’s biblical scenes — which adds an air of mystery to an otherwise happy mood. To create this effect of a lustrous, deep brown-black, Rimmer added bitumen to his oil paint in the darker sections.⁶ Also contributing to the original beauty of the piece, the softened color throughout conveys a sense of atmosphere, and the pigments are harmonized by a repetition of shades of green and orange. The one accent is the stronger reddish hue on the pointing man’s cape at lower right.

Nonetheless, this is not an ordinary scene. By including two women at the right in present-day costume, a sixteenth-century or Tudor interaction in the center, and a distant modern, railroad-truss bridge, the picture is quite inconsistent temporally, which calls attention to the point being made. Beyond the shadowy foreground, it reveals the eternal presence of the past. It reflects Rimmer’s belief, reinforced by séance experiences, in an afterlife — where one retains one’s identity — and in the related, omnipresent reality of a spirit world.⁷ The occasion shown is a learning opportunity for the young women — evidently his daughters, Adeline and Caroline — who are accompanied by an imaginatively dressed spirit guide from the world of the past.⁸

As a landscape, the picture is remarkably original. Unlike possible precedents, it is not a scene of visitors to purgatory or heaven or even to a specific location, such as a ruined European abbey or the Roman Forum in Italy.⁹ It is perhaps visually closest to Thomas Cole’s 1838 paired paintings, The Past (fig. 118) and The Present (fig. 119), in which the first shows a medieval castle in its heyday, at the time of a grand tournament with jousting knights on horseback. The second picture provides the same view, but centuries later, so that the castle is now an abandoned ruin, overgrown by nature and contemplated by a lowly goat herder. As in this pendant, Rimmer amalgamates past and present in one scene, but as a temporal impossibility. His past is still current through the inclusion of spirits of the dead.

Fig. 118 Thomas Cole, The Past, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 ½ x 60 ½ in. (102.9 x 153.7 cm). Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. © Mead Art Museum / Bridgeman Images

Fig. 119 Thomas Cole, The Present, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 ¾ x 61 5/8 in. (103.5 x 156.5 cm). Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. © Mead Art Museum / Bridgeman Images

There is also a resemblance to the joining of past and present in American artist Thomas Moran’s 1858 Haunted House (fig. 120). But the connection would be closer if the indistinct figure in blue at right center, approaching the multi-tiered ruin, were unquestionably a ghost. In Moran’s case, the status of this person is unclear, but usually presumed to be living.¹⁰

Fig. 120 Thomas Moran, Haunted House, 1858. Oil on canvas, 34 x 28 in. (86.4 x 71.1 cm). Image Courtesy of Sotheby’s, New York (2020)

Moran’s scene has been considered a loose interpretation of the eerie, haunted house in a well-known literary source, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 The Fall of the House of Usher.¹¹ Although pictures by professional artists of ghosts and haunted places were almost non-existent, the exception was book illustration. Several American authors during Rimmer’s lifetime — such as Poe, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne — produced popular ghost stories that offered opportunities for illustration. But what these tales have in common is a frightening or terrifying situation which is unlike Rimmer’s display of apparent contentedness.

Another American artist, George Inness, resembled Rimmer in being a Swedenborg follower whose work was affected by his belief. But he confined himself to landscape and worked from nature with a quite different result. He preferred to paint a “civilized landscape” (such as cultivated fields rather than the pristine wilderness) because the effect he sought included a reference to man.¹² From the mid-1860s on, his blurry landscapes with a lone figure and mysterious lighting can be more evocative than earlier of an unseen, spiritual presence. Indeed, his deliberate mystification brings Rimmer to mind, but there is never a haunted building or inclusion of an actual spirit. Inness was like a number of other American artists of the period in revealing religion through nature, but, unlike all of them, Rimmer elaborated on an afterlife experience that was personal.

Rimmer was not only a Swedenborgian but also — in defiance of Swedenborg — a Spiritualist who (inspired by Swedenborg) had his own visions and his own communications with the dead. These seem to have included manic hallucinations.¹³ He wrote in his narrative, “Stephen and Phillip,” of the sensation of his spirit “wandering through infinity, time, space, and matter, scarce anchored to the world by the weight of fleshly sense.”¹⁴ As is plain from this manuscript, it was not unusual for him to speak to angels or to see demons. He even reported feeling a passing sensation of God inhabiting his body. More relevant to the picture, he spoke, in visions, to those he loved who had died.¹⁵ According to Spiritualist belief, he could see these beings through an inner sight, the vision of his spirit.¹⁶

Taking an unorthodox path that was fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century, he joined others in trying to connect with deceased friends and relatives through a spirit medium who claimed to be able to contact the dead. In arranged séances with participants in a darkened room, usually seated around a table or in a circle, the medium took questions to be relayed to a specific dead person either directly or through an intermediary spirit guide from the world beyond. Answers were typically funneled back to the questioner through the medium who held special status as someone chosen and empowered by spirits.¹⁷ The medium might even, in a trance state, be possessed by the particular spirit called upon (such as a deceased relative) and speak for that spirit.¹⁸ Eventually the whole Rimmer family became Spiritualists and habitually used slate chalkboards that a spirit medium would bind together and then untied to reveal a spirit’s written response on one of the boards.¹⁹

Rimmer’s involvement with séances is understandable. He had lost his mother before his marriage and his father when he was thirty-six, but, more unusually, five out of eight of his children died as babies, despite his probable ministrations as a physician. Without doubt, he would have wanted to learn about their welfare. An additional incentive to attend séances would have been to ask the question of spirits who might know, such as Napoleon’s generals, whether Louis XVI’s son survived. It is a famous question that other interested parties were known to pose in these sessions.²⁰ But, to Rimmer, as the eldest son of the supposed heir, it would have had unique consequence.

After participating in séances, Rimmer acted as a medium himself on at least one occasion when he labored to obtain a message from Abel Kingman, the dead father of his friend, Dr. Kingman, who had been his mentor in studying medicine. Rimmer took a pencil, held it high in the air, and let it descend to the table to write. Apparently he intended to engage in psychography where he would totally relax his hand (as if in a trance) and the pencil he held would write by itself under the control of the spirit of the dead man. But the resultant writing made no sense. Kingman told Rimmer so and realized, from Rimmer’s reaction, that he had hurt his pride by seeming ridicule.²¹

Not just Rimmer’s family but also others thought of the artist as psychic, which might have been a reason to ask him to sculpt or paint pictures of the dead.²² One known case is his commission to create a bust of a daughter who had recently died. Rimmer confessed in his missing diary that, although he had been paid well, he did not consider the portrait (lost) entirely successful. Surprisingly, he added that, if it had been better, it would have been entirely due to the participation of the deceased sitter.²³ This suggests that the result could have been spirit art, based on a vision of her that she provided. Whether this was a supernatural visitation or a mania-induced hallucination is not something that can be determined.²⁴ Whatever the circumstance, Rimmer thought he was acting as an intermediary between worlds.

Exactly when Rimmer became a Spiritualist is not known. He experienced a paranormal event when he was visited by his sister’s spirit just before she died, but that was not the beginning of his involvement.²⁵ Jane Rimmer’s death occurred in 1866, and Rimmer had been associated with Spiritualism from at least as early as 1855 when he made his living as a physician. Fortunately, a census record for that year provides some insight by showing that the Spiritualist Louisa P. Hunt lived with him then as either a boarder or guest. After she died a year later, her gravestone in Quincy employed a peculiarly Spiritualist phrase in referring to her death as the moment when she “left the form,” or left her materialized existence.²⁶ At least this early, Rimmer very likely shared her belief in communication with the dead.

Apparently, the Rimmer family sold English Hunting Scene without any valid explanation of the people shown. Despite the somewhat fanciful costuming, the picture has enough Tudor touches — such as the feathered hats — to pass as an English sixteenth-century genre scene.²⁷ It opens to a relatively flat, grassy expanse, with a hill to the left and the beginning of a sunset in the sky. At the left of center, two female equestrians, riding side saddle, are engaged in conversation while their male companion, riding next to them, gestures toward a towering, overgrown ruin that was once part of a grand estate. If he is hailing the man on the caparisoned horse (which is wrong for a hunt) that person would be expected to react, but he stares straight ahead as if unaware of the presence of anyone else. Perhaps he envisions a tournament. Dogs are present as would be appropriate in a fox hunt — but only two — and no hunting horn. To add to the puzzle of this presentation, two helmeted soldiers advance on the supposed hunter as if he were not there.

Despite the spindly, semi-transparent figures to the left and right in the background, there is not much indication that this painting could contain ghosts. From the emphasis on the full-bodied figures, it is no wonder that the subject was misidentified. Most people thought that ghosts — if they were not totally invisible — were at least transparent, just as the English author Charles Dickens described them in his widely read 1843 tale, A Christmas Carol.²⁸ Their defining transparency was the reason the Boston photographer, William Mumler, could fool customers in the 1860s — some of whom were Spiritualists — into thinking his multiple-exposure photographs caught the image of spirits hovering near his sitters (fig. 121).²⁹

Fig. 121 William H. Mumler, Unidentified Man with a Long Beard Seated with Three “Spirits,” 1861–78. Albumen silver print, 3 7/8 x 2 3/16 in. (9.8 x 5.6 cm). Getty Museum Collection. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/107N9D

Despite such assumptions, according to Spiritualists, spirits can take various forms. Thus, the abbreviated ghosts in the background could be disembodied spirits, free of material encumbrance as they haunt the ruins on either side. But the life-like ghosts closer to the foreground are visible three-dimensionally because they wish to be.³⁰ According to the Boston Spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, when a spirit was asked how his kind could materialize themselves, he replied that they “hitch on” to a place and then “will” themselves into a full-bodied existence.³¹

After much study, the English Spiritualist, Catherine Crowe, became perhaps the most well-known authority on the phenomenon of visible ghosts. She wrote in 1853 that the spirit of a deceased person, if returned to Earth, tended to repeat the acts of that person’s life or at least “simulate a repetition of them.”³² This might be what is happening with the figures on horseback or walking near the so-called hunter who is probably a local lord near the remains of his manor. These people undoubtedly rode or walked through that area before.

The supposed hunting scene is not only the result of séances. Rimmer also had a fondness for the Middle Ages and the subsequent Tudor period. This is revealed in earlier pictures, such as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and in his narrative, “Stephen and Phillip,” which includes a tragic story of medieval lovers who are star-crossed because of their class difference.³³ In his story, a young woman, who is a poverty-stricken serf, has fallen in love with a wealthy boy who courted her since their childhood but has grown up to become a knight, leaving her far behind. The tale is an empathetic portrayal, in Rimmer’s words, of “serfdom” during a time of “feudal tyranny.”³⁴ His sensitivity to the issue of class is a reason to identify the more active, distant and vapory spirits (fig. 122) as serfs who choose to remain separate and stay among themselves.³⁵

Fig. 122 English Hunting Scene (detail), 1871

Any spirit, as Crowe confirmed, appears as she or he prefers (including clothed or unclothed) and can be visibly distinct according to the receptivity of the viewer. This explains the physical difference in spirits. Furthermore, the spirits might not see viewers, just as the onlookers might not see them.³⁶ In the painting, the spirits do not seem to be aware of the red-caped spirit guide or Rimmer’s daughters who are symbolically separated from the mundane world by a low wall. As the two women are on the inside, their eyes are figuratively unveiled.

Rather than observing the past, Rimmer’s daughters are witnessing the spirit world that is eternally present. Its representatives are traversing a common piece of turf, so they are related spatially but not necessarily temporally. That is, they are locked into the time when they were alive in that space, and they might interact within a group that was present then but not see the other spirits who are present now. This certainly comes out of séances where spirits from different periods in time can be called into the present.

Relatedly, Rimmer was attuned to the possibility of suggesting time differences within one space. Dr. Kingman said he and Rimmer would talk about “powers of observation, perception,” and “the internal recognition of things,” that might not be seen.³⁷ As already noted, a clairvoyant might see a ghost repeating actions. But Rimmer’s co-Spiritualists also believed that a person could leave a psychic residue in an occupied place as if part of that person was left behind, and a clairvoyant could see the person as still there.³⁸ This is similar to the situation in Rimmer’s Interior / Before the Picture where the pale furniture, as if containing residue, is a symbol of an invisible presence. It is also the basis for the curious inclusion of Cupid twice in Morning: Venus and Cupid (fig. 123). The penciled rendition of Cupid asleep is slightly paler (as if in the past) than his duplicate, standing nearby as he greets his mother. As unusual as it is, this double imagery within one scene conveys a time lapse.³⁹

Fig. 123 Morning: Venus and Cupid, 1869. Red crayon over graphite within a printed oval mount, 18 1/16 x 12 7/8 in. (45.8 x 32.7 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum. Gift of Mrs. Henry Simonds. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Akin to this is Rimmer’s drawing, after an Aesop fable, Lion and Mouse (fig. 124). The story begins with a confused mouse that infuriated a sleeping lion by accidentally running across his nose. When the lion captured her, she begged to be let free, claiming that someday she would definitely repay him. As it happened, he did release her and she did repay him by freeing him from a hunter’s net. Rimmer shows the mouse twice: dangling from the lion’s mouth (legs and tail visible) and then speaking in front of him. This richness of invention might be expected of Rimmer, but he has gone further in suggesting not just a time lapse but movement as well. He went over the drawing of the lion with increased pressure on his pencil as he repeatedly sketched the lion’s right leg, chest, and tail, implying shifts in position by leaving disparate outlines. The disheveled mane, sprouting in different directions, seems to move as well. Surely, this illusion of movement to the point of vibration is a means of expressing the intensity of the lion’s irritation — his perfect fury. Rimmer’s interest in ways of portraying sequential timing, as in the repeated mouse, reappears a year later — but in the subtle overlay of unrelated or unseeing spirits — in English Hunting Scene.

Fig. 124 Lion and Mouse, 1871. Graphite on pink paper, 14 5/8 x 11 7/8 in. (37.1 x 30.2 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Apart from the ghosts, the scene is about Rimmer’s daughters experiencing a vision or an epiphany that is not available to everyone. The fact of a vision is actually a theme in Rimmer’s artwork, exemplified even in his sculpture of St. Stephen. The artist seemed to be fascinated by break-through views to a spirit world that he knew to exist because, as he believed, he had seen and visited it himself. Indeed, the supernatural world he depicted went beyond the Spiritualist preoccupation with the dead to include angels, devils, and fairy-like beings from another realm.

Several visionary scenes by Rimmer, concerning the presence of spirits on Earth, survive. The earliest are drawings, The Midnight Ride (fig. 125) and The Demon Feast (fig. 126), from probably the late 1840s.⁴⁰ They illustrate an original poem — “The Midnight Ride, A Tale” — by Rimmer from likely the same time and now bound with them in a commonplace book. His daughter, Caroline, mistakenly gave both drawings and the poem a date of 1830, when Rimmer would have been fourteen.⁴¹ But this date is not believable, primarily because the poem is written about the anguish of a father who is certainly metaphorically himself.

Fig. 125 The Midnight Ride, late 1840s. Graphite on paper, 6 x 7 ½ in. (15.27 x 19.08 cm). Rimmer Commonplace Book. Boston Medical Library, William Rimmer Collection

Fig. 126 The Demon Feast, late 1840s. Graphite on paper, 6 x 7 ½ in. (15.27 x 19.08 cm). Rimmer Commonplace Book. Boston Medical Library, William Rimmer Collection

As the first drawing shows, the father (in medieval dress) hugs his young son protectively as he races on horseback through an onslaught of devils toward a Christian haven but — early on — passes a cross and burial ground on the way. It seems to be a symbolic portrayal of Rimmer’s need to protect his infant sons, three of whom died between 1841 and 1847 before any daughters were born.⁴²

The second drawing illustrates part of the last half of the poem when hideous, hybrid creatures — “alive — rotten — and dead” — dance and threaten the riders. Among them are an “infant blazing” (naked and strapped to a tall, burning pole), an ape, a “blue imp,” a “monster child,” and a bat of “horrid size” with “demon eyes” (at right). Through it all, the child’s constant praying — at the father’s urging — and the father’s determination are what saves them both. The poem ends with praise of the saints and the “Blessed Virgin,” of whom there is also a drawing, which might suggest a date before the anti-Catholic influence of Swedenborg.⁴³

Given his interests, Rimmer must have created other, now-missing images that were inspired by similar imaginings. As a grandniece reported about artwork by Rimmer and his daughter Caroline, the family had a “mania… to always destroy any thing that was criticized or not satisfactory” to themselves.⁴⁴ From this reaction, it is quite likely that any ecstatic creation or odd-seeming work that Rimmer produced under the influence of a powerful vision would have been destroyed. Either he would have done the censoring or a family member would after his death. That is, the otherworldly fantasies and horrifying monster descriptions in “Stephen and Phillip” are almost without a visual counterpart, but that counterpart once existed.⁴⁵

Proof of this assertion can be found in a conservator’s photograph of Sleeping (fig. 127) that documents the presence of a predatory monster at the far right, beneath a layer of over-paint.⁴⁶ This snouted creature, seeming to exude evil, stares fixedly at the naked child, with gleaming eyes, an open mouth, and implied sexual interest. In her sleep, the girl’s face is not expressive of anything unpleasant which means that the intruder is not a projection of her thoughts — not a nightmare. Rather, this dark figure calls to mind a threatening demonic spirit and resembles the bear, dancing with a young girl, at mid-lower left in The Demon Feast (fig. 126). In the context of Rimmer’s work, the added demon implies that the picture is a meditative juxtaposition of inborn innocence and its violation or corruption.

Fig. 127 Sleeping (under conservation), ca. 1878. William Suhr Papers, Getty Research Institute. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute

Other exceptions to the relatively mild work that survives are two disturbing female heads on academy board that Rimmer created from his imagination and possibly remembrance of nightmares: Head of a Young Woman (fig. 128) and Young Woman (fig. 129). Their faces express their reaction to unseen spirits or, in the second case, perhaps the “eyes of demons watching.” This is how Rimmer described the cause of a terror he felt in “Stephen and Phillip.”⁴⁷ Another relevant passage in the same text is his questioning of what is hidden by night but might be present: “What opposite reality is there in the sphere of darkness that puts the soul in its gloom to such wild imaginings, quickening its fears; confusing its thoughts, and setting it to groping with its sensibility for unseen powers, angels and demons, and warnings […] and all the unfathomable beings and circumstances of another world?”⁴⁸ This opposite reality is what these women appear to experience.

Fig. 128 Head of a Young Woman, 1866 and 1867. Oil on academy board, 17 x 14 in. (43.20 x 35.55 cm). Unlocated. Courtesy of Richard Salisbury Nutt

The Head of a Young Woman (fig. 128) either evolved over a span of two years or was once incorrectly dated. It is reportedly dated twice: “1867” on the front and “1866” on the reverse, where it is also inscribed as having been painted in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Although the picture has not been publicly seen or located since 1947, two black and white photographs of it and a limited description survive. As recorded, she is shown against a “greenish brown” background with brunette hair, brown eyes, and golden, impastoed ornamentation at the neck of her garment.⁴⁹ Most notably, her eyes are extraordinarily large with a wild, haunted look — suggesting that she is possessed.⁵⁰ Fortunately, the earlier photograph preserves the painting’s original state which included a thickly impastoed, white streak at the upper left corner.⁵¹ Its insertion, which was removed in the twentieth century, gives the picture singular meaning. In his manuscript, Rimmer described a spirit more than once as being able to assume the form of a “vapor mist or small cloud.”⁵² Strange as it may seem, this indicates that the woman is accompanied by a spirit, and it is potentially in control.

The second painting, Young Woman (fig. 129) — dated a year later in 1868 — is similar but more expressive of anxiety, as the woman looks over her shoulder as if conscious of being followed. She has the same enlarged, soulful eyes as her predecessor and wears a dreamlike, black cap with a long feather.⁵³ As in the earlier depiction, this woman reacts to the presence of invisible spirits who perhaps threaten ensnarement. She can see them, beyond what is natural, with, in Rimmer’s words, her inner “soul’s eyes” which recall the bulging eyes of the Dying Centaur.⁵⁴

Fig. 129 Young Woman, 1868. Oil on millboard, 15 1/16 x 11 ¾ in. (38.73 x 29.85 cm). Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University 91.286

From devils, Rimmer sometimes switched to angels as in the drawing, Home Sweet Home (fig. 130), which depicts them in various positions on and in front of a house and barn as if sanctifying the homestead.⁵⁵ The inscribed title is taken from an American song written by John Howard Payne, which gained popularity during and after the Civil War. But the only wording that the picture reflects, other than the title, is: “A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there.” Even the foreground fence is adorned with angels who “hallow” the area. Yet no angels are mentioned in the lyrics, and the image does not otherwise closely follow illustrations of the song.

Fig. 130 Home Sweet Home, probably the 1860s. Graphite on dark buff-colored Bristol board, 11 7/8 x 13 3/4 in. (30.2 x 34.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1965

Parts of this drawing are so loosely drawn as to be indecipherable, but certain details are featured. A child opens the fence gate for the spectator; a group of people huddle near a cross in the sky; a person waves from a bench; and an angel reclines in a tree.⁵⁶ The cypresses, an emblem of mourning, stand out because of their height and their backing by a rayed sun.⁵⁷ Combined with the action in the clouds, they probably stand for mourned but immortal family members. While the song conveys longing, the open-gate interpretation is more expressive of a joyful welcoming. The charm that hallows in this case is certainly visible, divine support.

In another imaginative introduction of angels, Rimmer added one in his 1878 gillotage (print) of an impoverished worker’s family. His illustration, The Poor Man Has Nothing to Lose (fig. 131), was used to show the impact of a textile mill strike in Fall River, Massachusetts. In an unusual — if not unique — occurrence for him, he provided an image for a short-lived periodical, The Porcupine, which fell partly under the supervision of his son-in-law, William O. Haskill, as co-editor. Unfortunately, although a proof from Rimmer’s print exists, no edition of the publication is known to survive.

Fig. 131 The Poor Man Has Nothing to Lose, 1878. Gillotage, Plate image: 8 x 7 1/8 in. (20.3 x 18.1 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Nutt. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI

The catalyst for this incident in Fall River was a glutted market and depression in business that led to reduction of the wages of textile weavers and spinners. A cutback of fifteen percent took place on April 1, 1878, although the workers adamantly protested. Then the price of cloth fell so that the benefit of trimming wages did not go to the manufacturers, and the bosses responded by closing the mills for weeks. When trade revived, they hired the workers back at the lower wage.⁵⁸

Truman Bartlett assumed that Rimmer’s title (inscribed outside the border of the illustration) came from a newspaper discussion of the strike, but he did not cite a specific source, and there might well not have been one.⁵⁹ The expression, “the poor man has nothing to lose,” was not rare at the time and refers to the risks a capitalist assumes, as opposed to the laborer, in backing an enterprise that might fail and bring financial ruin. Apparently Rimmer used the expression satirically in the “humoristic weekly,” because, as his history shows, he strongly supported the position of labor.⁶⁰

“Before God,” Rimmer once demanded in a complaint against unjust pay, “what right has any man to any thing that impoverishes another?”⁶¹ Rephrasing and tempering this on another occasion, he asked: “Why should one man have more of the good of this world, save as he merits it in all righteousness, than another?”⁶² As Bartlett noted from what he had heard, “Against the wrongs of unjust laws, the sufferings of the poor, and the inequalities of justice,” Rimmer would not be silent.⁶³ Indeed his artwork embraced current social issues such as income disparity, increasing materialism, religious hypocrisy and a loss of spiritual certainties. Despite his supposed royal heritage, Rimmer’s opinions reflected the viewpoint of a Christian with strongly socialist sympathies. His confidant, Stephen Perkins, held similar views with perhaps more pronounced socialist leanings.⁶⁴

In keeping with the publication in which Nothing to Lose appeared, Rimmer’s scene reveals that the poor man, in crowded quarters, has vibrant health (even a hero’s physique), a loving wife and four healthy children. In an unseen vision behind him, a supportive angel implies that he has riches of a spiritual sort as well. Yet, with the whole family dependent on his earnings, the man’s troubled face expresses anxiety.⁶⁵ Rather than nothing, he could lose all that makes life valuable. Perhaps the capitalist does not have as much.

The gillotage proof has been perplexing because Rimmer’s signature, within the plate, is “Zeros.” However, this term has special Spiritualist meaning. As explained by a Spiritualist in 1854, all people are born at zero on a moral scale. With free will at maturity, they either rise or fall according to their moral life relative to that of their parents. Even after death, they can continue to change their position on the scale and ascend or descend by numbered degrees or spheres in a positive or negative direction. For example, the seventh degree above zero is deemed very high but attainable.⁶⁶ In a characteristic act of self-criticism, Rimmer signed a number of his works — especially poetry — with his status as “Zero” or, considering both parents, “Zeros,” meaning he judged himself as neither better nor worse than his parents.⁶⁷

Rimmer’s visionary depictions were not always earthbound with visiting supernatural creatures. In an extension of his daughters’ role in English Hunting Scene, they included witnesses to heaven’s events as well. Three examples of this, in roughly chronological order, are different enough to be biblical, Swedenborgian, and historical.

Rimmer’s drawing, Woman’s Head and Soldiers (fig. 132), from his only known sketchbook, has not previously been identified precisely, but it is of the Archangel Gabriel, as a phantom head, giving an order to celestial soldiers.⁶⁸ Evidently it was meant to complete the same subject begun by his Boston-area precursor, Washington Allston, and left unfinished. Rimmer owned a book of engravings after Allston’s drawings — a present from Stephen Perkins — that included this uncommon subject (fig. 133) so he would have been especially aware of it.⁶⁹ Allston’s drawing, despite the identification in the plate title, lacked the figure of Gabriel and therefore appears unfinished. The scene, taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book 4: 865–73) is the moment when Gabriel sets the watch for a group of soldiers to guard Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in order to protect them from Satan.

Fig. 132 Woman’s Head and Soldiers (re-identified as Gabriel Setting the Watch), ca. 1866-69. Graphite on paper, 10 ¼ x 8 ¼ in. (26.05 x 20.95 cm). Rimmer Sketchbook, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University

Fig. 133 After Washington Allston, Gabriel Setting the Watch, 1850. From Outlines & Sketches by Washington Allston Engraved by J. & S.W. Cheney, Boston: [Stephen H. Perkins], 1850, pl. 2. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Rimmer’s soldiers are generally like Allston’s, with the same helmet, but in completely different positions and totally naked — a concept conveying their innocence.⁷⁰ The most innovative part of Rimmer’s version is the visionary portion: the looming, ethereal head of Gabriel, shown disembodied and with androgynous features. Rimmer, in the late 1860s, was using the vapory touch of sfumato to suggest a dematerialized form, a transient appearance, or an otherworldly agent of God which is the cumulative effect of Gabriel’s visage.⁷¹ Essentially, Rimmer has added an overwhelmingly spiritual element which gives point to Allston’s congregation of armed, celestial guards. They look toward a void that has now been filled with the sublime. Ultimately the sfumato effect comes from Leonardo da Vinci, who popularized it. He could have influenced Rimmer directly, from about 1850 on, or through a number of different intermediaries, including some of Allston’s paintings.⁷²

When Bartlett began his biography of Rimmer, he went through family-owned artworks that were shown to him and was struck by the number of “varied and beautiful” treatments of the earliest part of the day. They were not only “among the most poetical” of Rimmer’s creations, but also characteristically visionary.⁷³ His drawing, Morning (fig. 134), is one such example. These images and family commentary suggested to him that Rimmer was not just an individual, “but rather the medium through which the ideal world took form on paper or canvas.”⁷⁴

Fig. 134 Morning, late 1860s or 1870s. Graphite on paper, 10 1/8 x 14 in. (25.7 x 35.56 cm). Wichita Art Museum. Gift of Berry-Hill Galleries in honor of Virginia and Howard Wooden

As if to confirm this, Rimmer wrote in his “Stephen and Phillip” of an instance of his own dreaming of sunlit fields and “morning beauty” as he fancied he was near the “gate of paradise.” In his thoughts, he combined “tender romance with the bright reality” as he “sped along” in a wingless flight near the awesome gate.⁷⁵

In Rimmer’s drawing, a middle-aged man reclines on a hill to the right as he beholds a vision of spirits and angels — or naked, ecstatic couples floating and reveling in an atmosphere of contagious love. Swedenborg described angels — who were formerly human beings — as retaining their human appearance and becoming more beautiful as they approached God (different ranking in three spheres), but Rimmer adds the traditional wings.⁷⁶ According to Swedenborg — which this partly follows — all those in heaven (not just angels) are restored to their youth and paired with their former mate (their spouses, when the spouse dies, if they were happy together) or someone else, if they wish, who brings pleasure (including sexual) as a perfect soul mate. That is — as diminishing as this was to the Christian church — marital switches could be performed in heaven, and no one is alone unless by preference.⁷⁷ Furthermore, angels are particularly in a state of love in the morning; their vitality lasts forever, and they live “the life of joy itself.”⁷⁸ Spiritual angels, such as guardian angels, are clothed, whereas celestial ones (more exalted in a higher sphere) are naked in a sign of their innocence.⁷⁹ In Rimmer’s simplified version, both the angels and the wingless spirits (newly departed) are naked and mingling in a state of euphoria over their growing love as couples become one after death. Observing them, the reclining man (possibly wearing a wreath) is probably meant to represent Rimmer himself or at least someone with whom he could identify.

In his signed, but unfinished, oil painting, Soldiers by a Stream (fig. 135), Rimmer turned to a celestial vision that had a world-wide impact on Christianity. The scene has not been recognized before because it is ambiguous, but this is no ordinary soldier’s camp. The muscled soldier in the center points to the sky to indicate the presence of a midday vision.⁸⁰ What he sees is a cross of light at the Emperor Constantine’s campsite before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. As he turns to his relaxing comrades, he faces a weapon, in the unusually perfect shape of a cross (not as long as a sword), on the hip of a soldier in front. This is an instance of Rimmer suggesting, but not being explicit about, his meaning. Reinforcing the religious significance of the moment, there is a pagan temple behind a dead tree. There is also a starving dog of war in the foreground.⁸¹ According to reports, Constantine witnessed the vision with his army and, that night in his tent, Constantine had a dream in which Christ told him to carry the Chi-Rho monogram (a sign of Christ) to be victorious in his battle the next day. After he did so, his stupendous victory led to his conversion to Christianity and eventually the acceptance of the Christian religion by the Roman Empire.⁸²

Fig. 135 Soldiers by a Stream, probably 1872. Oil and graphite on academy board, 18 ½ x 14 15/16 in. (47 x 37.94 cm). Unlocated. Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library

Fortunately, Rimmer made a preliminary drawing for the scene (fig. 136) on the reverse of a periodical cover (Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly) that is dated 1872. This helps to establish the date of the final version and, through design differences, its meaning.⁸³ For example, the large, background tent in the drawing alludes to the site of Constantine’s famous dream.

Fig. 136 Soldiers, probably 1872. Graphite pencil on paper, 11 5/8 x 8 ¾ in. (29.6 x 22.2 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As a visionary artist, Rimmer produced amusing work too that transcended the physical world and portrayed an expanded reality based on his ingenuity. Even as a child, he had fashioned “fanciful forms” out of shoemaker’s wax such as “dragons and other frightful beasts.”⁸⁴ As an adult and teacher, he let loose sometimes at the backboard with fantastical creatures at the end of a session. One student wrote: “he would give us some delightful cupids floating upon clouds,” personifications of “‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’ or some strange warlike figure; something to appeal to the imagination; and he would say, ‘There, put that into your [copy] books: make ideal drawings […] but try to acquire the power of expressing yourselves.’”⁸⁵ One critic called them “weird fancies.”⁸⁶

Examples of this kind of drawing include one inscribed “On the Wings of the Creator / Out of Eternity into time” (fig. 50), Rimmer’s own poetic lines which accompany an image of a newborn soul. Other “weird fancies” include Young Child Standing on a Flower (fig. 137), Nudes and a Forest Pool (fig. 138) and Shooting Stars (fig. 140).

In the first instance (fig. 137), on one side of a sheet of paper, a tiny girl is balanced on an imaginary, drooping bell-shaped flower in a round archway and, on the reverse, three young maidens are admiring a less distinctly drawn flower — reminiscent of a meadow anemone — near a forest pool.⁸⁷ The human beings are so much smaller than the flowers that they are convincing as flower spirits, a concept that comes out of John Milton’s Paradise Lost where they are part of the celestial Garden of Eden. Milton describes them as the culmination of plants which evolve from coarse roots to stems and the refinement of perfumed spirits exhaled by their flowers, in a development analogous to man’s progress from a crude animal to a higher, intellectual and finally spiritual being (Book 5, Lines 469–85). Not only did this analogy agree with Rimmer’s view of man’s divergent path from the ape, but also Milton’s passage concerning flower spirits was known well enough to be recognized.⁸⁸ It was repeated during the nineteenth century and developed by other poets, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.⁸⁹

Fig. 137 Young Child Standing on a Flower (recto), possibly ca. 1870. Graphite on paper, 9 ¼ x 5 7/8 in. (23.5 x 15 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Fig. 138 Nudes and a Forest Pool (verso), possibly ca. 1870. Graphite on paper, 9 ¼ x 5 7/8 in. (23.5 x 15 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Rimmer’s Young Child Standing on a Flower is perhaps the closest his imagery ever came to that of the English artist William Blake, as in his 1789 Infant Joy (fig. 139), which has the same curvilinear plant tendrils, but, revealingly, Rimmer’s figure — with a greater consciousness of the real world — tries to balance her weight. This kind of consideration was not one of Blake’s concerns as he drew figures gathered on one side of an unaffected, large blossom. Rimmer’s flower spirits also recall those by Elihu Vedder, such as his drawing, Soul of the Sunflower (Metropolitan Museum of Art), which is of a young woman’s face, looking upward and surrounded by luxurious, flame-like hair. But Vedder’s flower spirit has an earthy sensuality and dependence on reality that is unlike the fragile, poetic and visionary quality of the other two examples.

Fig. 139 William Blake, Infant Joy, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, pl. 23, 1789-1794. Hand-colored relief etching, book spine: 7 3/8 in. (18.7 cm). Collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:57619

The drawing, Shooting Stars (fig. 140), is probably typical of whimsical blackboard illustrations that Rimmer would have used in class. It is partly line drawing to suggest two dimensions (the lower part) and partly shaded and highlighted to create an effect of three dimensions (upper part). In an image so fanciful that the subject could not be recognized if not supplied by the Rimmer family, he has combined winged cherub heads with long, wavy tresses that provide the flaming tail on a cluster of shooting stars.⁹⁰ In real life, the sight of this phenomenon has long been understood to be a sign of good luck.⁹¹ Because of the mood of the drawing, it could still have that meaning.

Fig. 140 Shooting Stars, 1860s or 1870s. Pen and white chalk on paper? Unlocated. Truman H. Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890, no. 6

To return to English Hunting Scene, similar symbolic signs appear there as well, beginning with the odd pairing of two white birds circling at the top of the picture. The one on the left resembles a long-necked crane, and the smaller one on the right is probably a dove. If this is the case, the coming together of the birds — both of which Rimmer used symbolically elsewhere — unites the concepts of divine wisdom through the crane (Jeremiah 8:7) and divine spirit through the dove (Matthew 3:16).⁹² Such a combination is appropriate in that the daughters are granted special wisdom through this revelation of the existence of a spirit world.

An unidentified friend of Rimmer’s might have been remembering English Hunting Scene when he sent Bartlett the following story. He described subsidizing Rimmer, at about age twenty, in his effort to create an eight-foot square painting of Adam and Eve mourning the death of their son Abel. When the scene was complete, they put it on exhibition with an admission charge, but their venture ended in failure. Rimmer apparently felt embarrassed over his friend’s investment, and the friend sold the picture (since destroyed) at a loss. About thirty-five years later — which would fit with the year being 1871 — the friend happened to be near Rimmer’s studio in Bromfield Street, so he decided, after their long separation, to pay a call. Finding an unlocked door, he walked in on Rimmer who was painting an unusual subject, with his back to him: “a large landscape with figures.”⁹³ When the friend made a joke about his color not having changed, Rimmer spun around with anger on his face before recognizing his friend. They spent two hours talking about old times but the friend evidently never learned anything worth relaying about the picture.⁹⁴

Whether this was the right painting or not, Rimmer had cause to be defensive about English Hunting Scene and the family had good reason never to exhibit it publicly.⁹⁵ Contacting or conjuring the dead, as in this picture, was not only prohibited by the Bible (Deuteronomy 18:10–12) but also denounced as the work of the devil by those caught up in a backlash against Spiritualism.⁹⁶ There had long been opposition, but it began to culminate in the United States during the 1870s. Inevitably the stories of the sensational success of well-known mediums elicited suspicion, and then self-appointed detectives started to attend séance sessions in order to expose them as fraud. As their findings were published, the Spiritualist movement became increasingly discredited.⁹⁷ Even without this, the circumstances of Rimmer’s life had led him to expect to be misunderstood.⁹⁸ In apparent fear of criticism, Rimmer’s wife and daughters avoided telling Bartlett not only about the dauphin connection but also about any family interest in Swedenborg or Spiritualism.⁹⁹ If one of Bartlett’s interviewees had not reminisced briefly on the artist’s attempt to contact the deceased Abel Kingman, there would have been little hint of either viewpoint in the biography.

But, as it happens, the location of Rimmer’s studio widens the Spiritualist connection beyond the confines of the family. According to city directories, the studio was situated at 18 Bromfield Street which was only a couple of doors away from Marsh’s Bookstore at number 14.¹⁰⁰ Most remarkably, Spiritualists held séances, conferences, and Sunday meetings in the same building as this bookstore.¹⁰¹ Attendees could easily visit Rimmer’s studio, and their presence might offer inspiration and emotional support. In fact, a major point of the painting — that dead people could look just as real and alive as the living — exemplified something that they strongly believed.¹⁰²

Like Swedenborg, Rimmer was not a churchgoer.¹⁰³ Moreover, he lacked patience for anyone who could be considered religiously judgmental, intolerant or narrow-minded. This comes across in the hateful countenance of a clergyman (fig. 141) in his 1877 Art Anatomy. Used as his prime example of a facial type that is readable as “Brutal and Monstrous,” the illustration shows the head of a man dressed as a seventeenth-century Puritan. Rimmer’s Spiritualist daughter, Caroline, had a similar response to potential public disapproval toward her family, as evinced by the supercilious man in her 1908 drypoint etching, The Self Righteous (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). With his nose in the air and his body nearly encased by imagined wings, he seems to float as if he were a veritable angel. But his appearance and Caroline’s inscription below him belie this impression: “With feet scorning the earth and eyes closed to heaven stands the self righteous.”

Fig. 141 Expression Brutal and Monstrous, 1877. From William Rimmer, Art Anatomy, (Boston: Little Brown, 1877), Section: Expression, p. 30, no. [196]

Perhaps Rimmer’s friend interrupted him just as he was drawing his picture’s hidden but most revealing component: the profile of an outdoor staircase (fig. 142), cloaked in darkness at bottom left. It has a meaning that is shared by the staircase in a second picture, The Sentry (fig. 143), which concerns an armed, nineteenth-century Middle Easterner, guarding an ancient tomb. Wearing prayer beads over one hip and a generally invented costume, the guard looks away from the symbolic staircase. That is, he is oblivious to the potential for another presence that it suggests.

Fig. 142 English Hunting Scene (detail), 1871

Fig. 143 The Sentry, ca. 1872, Oil on academy board, sight: 11 5/8 x 8 3/8 in. (29.53 x 21.28 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. (M2002.70)

This interpretation stems from Swedenborg who spoke of a staircase connecting the worlds of the living and the so-called dead. In a passage that can be misread to advocate séances, he wrote that we have lost our connection with those in the afterworld through “want of spiritual sympathy.” But a “likeness of mind” can lure the deceased back, so that they may be “led down, when the Lord pleases, by the stairs of the unforgettable past, and visit our abodes.” The dead person has “only to open his mind worldwards, and straight he can commune with an earthly seer — if he can find one.”¹⁰⁴ Through these means, he assures the reader, we can learn Virgil’s biography, for instance, from Virgil himself.¹⁰⁵

Accordingly, the stairway is for the convenience of visiting spirits who might wish to return to their former life. As the one thriving patch of greenery — and its repetition near the man’s foot — clearly symbolizes in The Sentry, there is no death, only transformation as in the transition of plants from winter dormancy to rebirth in the spring. However, the guard is no “earthly seer,” open to the possibilities that Swedenborg mentioned.

In addition to the stairs in English Hunting Scene — which are made more visible by tiny streaks of light on each step — there is another peculiar element in the dark, lower left corner. Directly above the signature is an unexplained incandescent spark, which is associated with the stairs by its location just beneath. This is likely a surrogate for the artist. Rimmer wrote of the soul that “freed from the presence of the sun and of the world doth then the soul begin to glow, burn of its own fire and shine of its own light,” which is the situation in this darkness.¹⁰⁶ On another occasion, he wrote of his wife’s soul as an “Image bright / A guiding star a beacon light.”¹⁰⁷ Because of mood swings that could be animating or draining, he would have been particularly sensitive to the presence or absence of energy, but this effect is more than that. A spark or candle flicker would be a suitable metaphor for his soul as a divinely formed essence as he believed it to be.¹⁰⁸ It is like him to leave this nearly invisible mark as something to be discovered. Its inclusion also makes English Hunting Scene the only known work by Rimmer that has a symbol as a kind of stamp of his presence or as part of his signature.

On the whole, English Hunting Scene is a testament to Rimmer’s fondness for teaching. Indeed, following his advice, the “most prominent” color is the red on both the spirit-guide (teacher) and a member of his audience as “the central point[s] of interest.”¹⁰⁹ This use of color is not only as Rimmer recommended, but it also signals the importance of experiential learning to the entire picture.

In the real world, Rimmer did instruct his daughters, including on such matters as the number of bones in the human body which they recited as a catechism.¹¹⁰ But, outside his home, he fulfilled a broader teaching role that had a major impact. Numerous responses of his art students to Bartlett’s request for information make plain his effectiveness and ability to inspire as a teacher.¹¹¹ He even successfully conducted an art class for children and admired their drawings — no matter how crude — if, instead of perfect copying, they had “something to say.”¹¹² Daniel French spoke for others when he confessed to a journalist that he owed more to Rimmer, as his teacher, than to anyone else.¹¹³

But Rimmer was too original and distant to encourage a close following in the manner of some other Americans who excelled in the teaching profession, such as Benjamin West, Thomas Eakins, or Robert Henri. Like Eakins, but earlier and fleetingly, he was progressive enough to use nude models of the opposite sex, and his reputation for this helped make it possible for female students to be accepted as designers of monuments to male forebears.¹¹⁴ Yet he had little in common with these teachers, and the differences are telling. Unlike West, Eakins, and Henri, he never studied abroad. Unlike them, he was an advocate for major change in the criterion for artistic excellence. Also unlike them, he welcomed idiosyncratic self-expression such as in children’s art. Perhaps even more divergently, he used images in class from another dimension of reality — as personal and cryptic as Shooting Stars. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne, he did not, in myopic fashion, limit himself or see “too clearly what is within his range to be aware of any mystery beyond.”¹¹⁵ It is this beyond and the human soul that were often his subject.