Matt Morgan on Broadway

1872 revival of Black Crook
poster by Matt Morgan

Image credit: Marin Theatre Company on Pinterest

Update: For another version by Walt McDougall of his social encounter with Melville at Matt Morgan's studio, see Walt McDougall in the American Mercury.

Reading Richard Scully on Matthew Somerville Morgan gives me a different idea of why artists and poets including Herman Melville might have visited Morgan's New York studio in the 1870's. Walt McDougall placed his encounter there with Melville in the context of Morgan's fame as cartoonist and co-founder of the London Tomahawk, and McDougall's own youthful semi-employment with American comic weeklies like Puck and Judge. But as Scully makes clear, Morgan just then was already turning, or rather returning, from caricature to theater and scene painting. Update: And duh! I see now that the book version of McDougall's reminiscence names "actors" among the daily crowd at Morgan's studio, along with illustrators and poets. The earlier magazine version had not specified actors or poets, describing the regular visitors as "nearly all of the illustrators and writers of the day."

Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library
"Matt Morgan" The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Various of Morgan's theatrical productions in this period were regarded as scandalous in the usual moralizing quarters--which complaints of course must have been very good for business. The NY Spirit of the Times delighted to entice readers with provocative descriptions of shows at Niblo's. The following notice, printed when Black Crook had just segued into a new revue called The Naiad Queen, mentions all three ladies pictured above in the Black Crook poster by Matt Morgan:

... Mlle. Sassi's performance with the anaconda excites wonder of many kinds and degrees. Miss Kate Santley looks as pretty as she can, and Miss Jennie Lee is pretty, piquant, and a general favorite. Consequences—crowded houses and overflowing tills.
(Spirit of the Times, March 2, 1872; found at Old Fulton NY Post Cards)

I'm guessing Morgan's allegorical paintings and controversial "living art pictures" or tableaux vivant would probably have interested Melville more at that point in his life (in his mid fifties) than Morgan's political cartoons.

In the early 1870's, Morgan worked on revivals of the musical "Black Crook," contributing allegorical paintings of 

five temptations and a moving tableau called “Immortality." They show how a young Venetian student, who has just graduated at college, is tempted by a character, in Mephistophelian guise, with wine, wealth, woman, power, and fortune in war. He resists all these temptations, and the moving tableau shows how he is borne aloft to heaven by twenty angels as a reward for his adherence to virtue. The paintings are masterly in effect and beautiful in detail. (New York Times, July 14, 1873)

Then, as Scully reports, in 1875 Morgan

inaugurated one of the most controversial entertainments of the day -- "Mr Matt Morgan's Magnificent Classical Tableaux" -- comprising a series of tableaux vivant of well-known works of art, and "enacted" by "A Corps of Ladies of Unrivalled Beauty...especially engaged to carry out the Artist's ideas" (Theatre Comique Program, 1875, Nov. 15). For propriety's sake, the ladies were clad in flesh-colored body stockings whenever they were called upon to model Classical nudes, in a style reminiscent of the Pantomime fairies of Morgan's London days. Including reconstructions of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," Rubens's "Diana and Her Nymphs, Surprised," Emile Jean Horace Vernet's "The Slave Merchant," and Jean-Léon Gérôme's "Phryne Before the Tribunal," the show was advertised and critiqued on the basis of its artistic merits. --Sex, Art, and the Victorian Cartoonist p314

The controversy over Morgan's shows recycled the old debate about Hiram Powers and The Greek Slave. In New York, Morgan publicly defended his work in court against charges of immorality. The case, as freely and lightly summarized in the Sacramento Daily Union, would investigate the tension between "Art and Public Morals":

Mr. Matt. Morgan is an artist, and was at one time employed on Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated Paper. Then he undertook to manage the Theatre Comique, and his artistic disposition led him to present the public with a new kind of entertainment, called for the nonce " living classic pictures." The idea is to represent classic pictures, fables, etc., by living persons properly (or improperly) costumed; and Mr. Morgan's conception of the public taste has led him to select those "pictures" in which the beauties of the female form are exhibited under the most free and untrammeled conditions. For example, he displayed "Cleopatra before Caesar;" and as everybody knows that Cleopatra, when unrolled from her tapestry on that occasion was, as Tennyson says of Lady Godiva, "clothed on[ly] in loveliness," and in very little else, the representative of the Egyptian Queen was necessarily restricted to a complete suit of tight-fitting pink silk induements. Another picture was "The Shower of Gold," in which a Circassian Danae reposed upon a divan, modestly shaded by a blue silk parasol in the hands of an attendant — "only this and nothing more." Now the Young Men's Christian Association have declared that the "classic pictures "at the Theatre Comique are indecent, and have, through the valiant Anthony Comstock, haled Mr. Morgan before the magistrates. The manager on his part is indignant. He says that he has aimed to instruct the New York people in the beauties of Art; that he has been furnishing them with purely classic representations; that it would be absurd to put Cleopatra in crinoline and corsets; that Danae never could have worn a pin-back; and that, as Bulwer would undoubtedly have remarked under similar circumstances, the True is the Beautiful, and the Beautiful is the Good. Meantime the public watch the contest with bated breath, possibly reflecting that after the class of dramatic spectacles which has held the boards during the past decade without active interference on the part of Young Men's Christian Associations, and while Art in the form of such pictures as the "Andromeda" is welcomed to the most public exhibitions, it is a rather delicate operation to draw the line sharply upon Mr. Morgan's "classic" pictures" or, as they would be called in Paris, his poses plastiques. --Sacramento Daily Union, 18 December 1875 

This (1872-1877) was prime time to see Matt Morgan at work. He successfully defended the charge of indecency in New York, although the next year in Louisville, police would shut down the show.

Richard Scully, again:

Having pushed the boundaries of acceptable entertainment, Morgan did not return his attention to the semi-scandalous after 1877, instead turning his not inconsiderable skill to more mundane, commercial forms of art. --Sex, Art, and the Victorian Cartoonist p320

Well we already knew Melville liked to visit artists in their studios. Douglas Robillard points out that when traveling abroad,

"Melville made a point of visiting, or attempting to visit, American artists who were living and working in Italy." --Melville and the Visual Arts, p27

In March 1857 Melville had visited the studio of sculptor Hiram Powers, a "plain man" and "Fine specimen of an American" as Melville described him in his journal.

"... to spend an hour or two with Hiram Powers in Florence was to have a tutorial in aesthetics."  --Hershel Parker, Herman Melville V2, p492

Upon his return from Europe and the Holy Land, the first professional thing Melville did was lecture on classical art. Statues in Rome! At Matt Morgan's New York studio, Melville (though legendarily shy and taciturn until warmed up) might have found congenial company, and glimpses perhaps of classically themed art in progress. And for properly warming up, that washtub of claret punch.

Related posts at melvilliana:

• Walt McDougall remembers Melville (and Whitman) 
• Walt McDougall in the American Mercury
• Trying to date Walt McDougall's encounter
• Artist Matt Morgan, works in progress during 1874
• NUDE ART IN NEW YORK

Melville at a New York cafe, after bumping into John Godfrey Saxe (July 27, 1846)

Halleck in Central Park

Update2: Uh, if this is from the Charleston Evening News, then hey! maybe it's by Thomas Low Nichols writing as "Observer."  Parker in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (149-52) credits Kendall Spillman and Patricia Cline Cohen with finding regular letters from Nichols, "two or three letters a week" in 1846, to the Charleston Evening News. Nichols is the cat who advised Gansevoort to take the manuscript of Typee to London for publication there.

Hershel Parker likes to talk about special correspondents of nineteenth-century newspapers, how important they were as news gatherers and reporters, and yet how frequently they get overlooked, still, as sources of biography and cultural history.  The premier example in Parker's biography is the story of Melville and Hawthorne together at the hotel in Lenox, nobly retold from facts and hints in a letter by "Maherbal" to a Vermont newspaper. That's at the close of Volume 1. You can read more about the hunt for Maherbal in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. There also Parker reveals that before he got sidetracked, he

"longed at some indefinite time to write a book about special correspondents of American newspapers before the Civil War." (Parker, Inside Narrative)

Here's something else for that unwritten work, from the New York correspondent of a Virginia newspaper (if I have this right), the Richmond Evening News. Update: or is the source a South Carolina newspaper, the Charleston Evening News? The writer's identity is a current mystery, the re-printing below from the August 5, 1846 Alexandria [Virginia] Gazette lacks even a pseudonym. It remains to be determined, if this NY correspondent was "special" enough ever to have a pen name, and regular appearances in the Richmond newspaper. Well, we did figure out finally who Maherbal was, and Proteus, so maybe we can chase down this guy too.

Wow, look! Herman Melville with the author of Progress: a Satirical Poem at a Manhattan cafe on Monday, July 27, 1846. Among the New York literati, briefly at least in the company of poets and one yet-to-be-named journalist with a weakness for French dancers and phrases. Not a Virginian?

LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

Correspondence of the Evening News.

NEW YORK, JULY 28, 1846.

Just as I had concluded my too hasty letter, yesterday, for the brevity of which I beg to apologise, there was handed me a letter of introduction, which commended, to my courtesies, the bearer, and one paragraph of which I take leave to transcribe. "He is a lawyer by profession: a wit and poet by force of genius; and a good fellow by nature. His most conspicuous faults are, that he is a strong locofoco and an incorrigible punster. If you can tolerate such serious vices I have no doubt that you will find his acquaintance an agreeable one." The gentleman thus introduced to me, was a six foot tall, and otherwise conspicuous Vermonter, dressed a la green mountains; or, as we sometimes say, in a mountainous fashion. He came from and belongs to the very north-west corner of that verdant State, where Lake Champlain joins the Canada line. But I found him all that my letter described him, and something more. He is a literary protege of Oliver Wendell Holmes, our first comic poet, and John Saxe will be, if he is not now, the second. In fact, his business in New York at this moment is to publish, what I think the critics will pronounce the best satire that has appeared in--say twenty years. 

With the advent of my humorous and poetical Vermonter commenced one of those days which a man cannot avoid noticing as remarkable. Certainly, in a month before, I had not run against and almost stumbled over so many literary celebrities. The first man we met was Clark the Editor of the Knickerbocker, happy in having just finished the last revise of his August num­ber, and ready to burst with all the good jokes he had bottled up, like Champaigne, in his Editor's Table. He was quite overflowing with the good humor which sparkles in the pages of his particular department. Contracting to meet at Niblo's in the evening, we parted, and turning a corner with my Vermont poet, we ran against the author of Typee, Mr. Herman Melville. 

He had just returned from Buffalo, where he had been to see his ci devant companion in the Marquesas. There, alive and well, and not eaten up by the savages, was the veritable Toby, the companion of his sufferings, and for whose fate he had entertained so many apprehensions.

Toby saw the first notice of "Typee," in the New York Evangelist. He went directly to a bookseller in Buffalo, and asked, "Have you got Typee?" "No! we have had it, but they are all sold."

"Have you read it?"

"Oh! yes, it is a charming book."

"Does it say anything of the author having a companion in Typee?"

"Toby, yes; to be sure. Here was Toby, who disappeared mysteriously, and was eaten up by the amiable cannibals."

"Not a bit of it,"--said the querist, "I am Toby!"

"You?  Well, I declare, you do answer the description. Are you really? How did you get away, then?"

I don't know all the conversation, but it became noised round that the lost Toby was found. The ladies flocked to see him. They begged locks of his glossy ringlets--the daguerreotypers took portraits of him; in short he was a lion.

Richard Tobias Greene

Melville, as I said, went to see him, and has given his adventures in escaping from Typee, as a sequel of the second edition.

While sitting with my two lions in the Cafe, who should come in but a brace of poets, beside, of whom we had been talking an instant before. They were Fitz Green Halleck and William Wallace. Of the former, as a literary man, I need not speak; the latter is still young, under thirty, but for two years past has made long strides towards the highest rank in literature, and has written verses which seem as likely to live as any which are produced at the present day. 

Melville, who I am sure never wrote a stanza or a couplet in his life, is a modest, and personally not a very remarkable man, but our three poets have strong peculiarities, the younger ones especially.

Mr. Halleck, born in the State of Connecticut, has the quiet tone and dignified bearing of an English Lord. Brought up in a democratic and puritan community, the friend of Drake, the companion of Bryant, the author of Marco Bozzaris, he is a monarchist and high tory in his politics, and a Roman Catholic in religion. These, at all events, are the opinions he maintains in conversation, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity.

But my young friends, my other pair or poets, are quite the reverse of all this. They talk loudly, and extravagantly--they repeat their own verses--they make no pretense of a modest opinion of their merits--they are both Democrats, of the most radical kind, and though one is all humor, and the other all sublimity, it was wonder­ful to see how much they resembled each other.

We were fated to meet celebrities--in passing out we encountered Tuckerman, powerfully moustached, and evidently thinking of his "Thoughts on the Poets." Then McG-----, an Irish literateur, with English predilections so strong, that the highest compliment he was known to pay an American book, was, that it read as if written by an Englishman!

Before getting a block up Broadway towards Niblo's, we met Haas, the most skillful of Daguerreotype artists, formerly lithographer to the Government, walking arm in arm with Professor Mapes, who is distinguished as a sculptor, musician, poet, engineer, chemist, agriculturist, and I know not what beside--the only successful man of universal genius I ever met; quite an oracle, and an admirable Critchton!

At Niblo's was a full and brilliant House, with the Mayor sitting in the centre of the pit, and Mademoiselle Blangy, the prettiest dancer we have had, if not the greatest, danced La Sylphide, so as put the whole audience into a state of mild extacy. It was quite ravishing, and if this danseuse makes the Southern tour next winter, you are to be congratulated.

 (Alexandria Gazette, Wednesday, August 5, 1846; found at genealogybank.com)

Apparently Melville stayed back at the cafe. Tuckerman his eventual friend was on his way in, was this their first meeting? Perhaps they merely happened to be in the same place at the same time. From the sound of it, the Author of Typee and new sequel did not walk up Broadway with Saxe and company to catch Mlle. Hermine Blangy at Niblo's. Or did he?