PRESIDING DIVINITIES: IDEAL SCULPTURE IN ... - Indiana University

Eliot Norton—championed the latter settings. In an 1874 article titled “Chromo-
Civilization,” Norton attacked sentimental, household art as the root of such “mental and
moral chaos” as the struggle for women’s suffrage. 7 In an 1870 essay titled “Museums of
Art,” Jarves advocated,
…a training which shall teach the public how to discriminate between the
permanent and ephemeral, profound and shallow, true and counterfeit, in
everything affecting their aesthetic enjoyment and moral well-being. Now, with all
due gratitude to those popular artists who have made art a household object to the
million, who otherwise might have gone to their graves unknowing and indifferent
to it in any shape, it is no wrong to them to hail with satisfaction any means by
which the nation may become at once a better judge and patron… Public galleries
and museums… by providing adequate sources of comparison and instruction, will
enable the people better to decide on the relative merits of artists and schools of art,
and thus do fuller justice to their teachers and themselves. 8
Jarves also stressed in this essay that museums and galleries should be run by “competent
experts,” by which he meant male professionals trained in the study of art. 9
According to the mid-nineteenth-century "cult of domesticity," virtue was a
personal matter, to be taught by sentimental men and women in the home. Ideal sculpture
was intimately intertwined with this process of private moral education, and with
Americans’ construction of themselves as sentimental, domestic subjects. The Civil War
and its aftermath disrupted this view. As Lawrence Levine has shown, distinctions
between popular and elite culture grew wider after the war. 10 Furthermore, as Michael
7 [Charles Eliot Norton], “Chromo-Civilization,” The Nation 5 (24 September 1874):
200-01.
8 J. Jackson Jarves, “Museums of Art,” The Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 52.
9 Ibid., 57.
10 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
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