ON VIEW

William Rimmer stands with Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919), Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), and Elihu Vedder (q.v.) as an American artist of powerfully idiosyncratic vision. Born in Liverpool, England, Rimmer went with his family first to Nova Scotia and then to Maine. By 1825, they were settled in Boston, where he spent the remainder of his youth and much of the rest of his life. Rimmer's father, who believed he was the lost heir to the throne of France, made a strong impact on the artist, coloring his later work with themes of conflict, struggle, and thwarted ambition.

As a young man, Rimmer worked at a variety of professions to support himself and his family. He was at times a lithographer, sign painter, and itinerant portraitist before studying medicine during the 1840s. Between 1848 and 1858 much of Rimmer's time was devoted to treating the sick. He returned to art, however, in 1858, when he began to carve sculptures in granite. These attracted the attention of Boston connoisseur Stephen Higginson Perkins, who encouraged Rimmer and commissioned an important early work, The Falling Gladiator (original plaster 1861, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC). From the 1860s onward Rimmer established himself as a fixture in the Boston art world, particularly as a teacher. His lectures on anatomy were widely popular, as were his illustrated treatises, Elements of Design (1864) and Art Anatomy (1877). In 1878, toward the end of his life, Rimmer assisted William Morris Hunt (q.v.) on his pathbreaking mural designs for the new state house in Albany, New York. Rimmer died in South Milford, Massachusetts, in 1879.

Sleeping embodies the enigmatic content and sublimated emotion that typify Rimmer's most memorable paintings and sculpture. The subject is a nude young girl, asleep on a richly draped bed. The child's body is illuminated by an unknown light source to the left; in the lower right, an ornate vase of flowers rests atop a small round table. Pronounced chiaroscuro effects and swirling patterns of line formed by the draperies lend the composition a dreamlike, almost feverish air. Like other paintings by Rimmer, Sleeping possesses an emblematic quality, suggesting that it is more symbolic than narrative in meaning.

Almost certainly a private work painted for the artist's own ends, the exact significance of Sleeping is elusive. Rimmer scholar Jeffrey Weidman felt that the sleeping child may be a "memory image" of one of the artist's grown daughters, perhaps his youngest, Caroline, with whom he was particularly close. Yet Weidman also noted the erotic quality of the subject, pointing out the sinuous curves of the child's body and its overt display atop the lush bedcoverings. Finally, he saw in the painting a kind of memorial quality, suggested in part by the vase of flowers and the cool color scheme. Concluding that Sleeping "hints at the relationships between sleep, unfulfilled desire, and death," Weidman characterized the work as a deeply personal image whose exact meaning is ultimately impossible to pin down.(1)

The sources for Sleeping are somewhat less obscure. Although Rimmer's subject is a child, the proportions and pose belong to an adult. Viewed as an adult, Rimmer's figure is not unusual and parallels those seen in paintings of reclining nudes by artists of the Renaissance and, more recently, by neoclassical and romantic painters of the nineteenth century. While such paintings were difficult to find in the prudish Boston art world of the 1870s, there were nevertheless a few examples that might have served as models for Rimmer. Reproduced as a large engraving by Asher B. Durand in 1835, John Vanderlyn's Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (1812, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) is perhaps the best known American work in this genre. In addition, there were any number of French nudes that Rimmer may have seen either through reproductions or possibly through his friendship with William Morris Hunt, an early and assiduous promoter of French art in the United States. Another likely point of contact between the artist and modern French painting was the school of the new Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where Rimmer taught anatomy from 1877 to 1879. Notably international in scope, the school looked unswervingly to Europe for its curriculum and standards.

Rimmer certainly admired French work, as evinced by quotations in his own paintings of such leading Salon artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904).(2) In Sleeping, the dramatic lighting and agitated line are especially reminiscent of paintings by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), whose dramatic historical pieces and animal studies are close to Rimmer's both in subject and in spirit. Like Rimmer, Delacroix was a kind of artistic iconoclast who nevertheless managed to keep his hand in the official art circles of his time.

Sleeping remained in the possession of the artist and was passed to his daughter, Caroline, after his death. On the verso of the work, she wrote, "One of my Dear Father's last [or "best"] and it is a perfect shame the varnish is not good and I suppose will be sticky always." Caroline Rimmer's observation may have staved off later attempts at retouching, for the painting was in near pristine condition when it was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art in 1985.

VSD

NOTES

1. Jeffrey Weidman in Jeffrey Weidman, Neil Harris, and Philip Cash, William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo, ex. cat. Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA, 1985, p. 78.

2. Ibid., p. 71.

REFERENCES

Walker Montgomery, ed. American Art and American Art Collections. 2 vols. Boston: E. W. Walker and Company, 1889.

Jeffrey Weidman, Neil Harris and Philip Cash. William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo. Ex. cat. Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA, 1985.