Edward Waldo Emerson
1844 - 1930
During his regular winter sojourns to escape the harsh Massachusetts winters, the son of essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of Tryon’s most respected figures. His presence lent prestige to the North Carolina village and attracted a number of friends to visit — such as John Burroughs, famous nature author and friend of Walt Whitman.
Edward Waldo Emerson lived most of his life in Concord, the town that can be considered America’s first “country colony” of intellectuals. There a number of writers, and later visual artists, were able to work in an atmosphere of peace and quiet, away from the noise and bustle of Boston. His childhood in the country atmosphere he found idyllic, and his famous father’s interests in words and ideas were balanced with the pleasures of the eye. “A very little child always had the entrance and the run of his study, where it was first carried around the room and shown the Flaxman statuette of Psyche with the butterfly wings, the little bronze Goethe, the copy of Michael Angelo’s Fates, which because of the shears and thread, were always interesting,” Edward Emerson later reminisced. “The pictures in the old Penny Magazine were the next treat, and then, if the child wanted to stay, pencil and letter-back were furnished him to draw with.” We learn that the intelligent philosopher encouraged his son’s interest in visual art.
When a railway was built, Concord became a virtual suburb of the metropolis, allowing fast access to Boston as well as quick trips out by visitors from the city. We do not know exactly why Emerson chose Tryon for his winter home, but probably good access by rail had to do with it. The Emersons loved mountains, and Edward quotes his father expressing in 1843: “I long some times to have mountains, ravines, and flumes, like that in Lincoln, New Hampshire, within reach of my eyes and feet. . .” Also from its earliest days the little North Carolina community had a literary spirit. By the time Emerson came on the Tryon scene it had the Lanier Club — its own little athenaeum — with regular lyceum lectures on topics of substance, art exhibits, and a library, replicating the venerable Boston Athenaeum where Emerson was a member.
Edward was a mild-mannered and cheerful fellow, and in the spirit of doing good he took his degree from Harvard Medical School. But he was more inclined toward anatomical drawing than practicing medicine. More than anything else he yearned to be an artist. As the scion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, he spent much of his life editing the papers of his famous father, for publishers eager to satisfy the demand from the adulatory public. Edward dutifully attended many events around the nation representing the legacy of his father, such as literary symposia and the unveiling of monuments. But home in Tryon — as in Concord — he could relax and could withdraw, more or less, from the public eye. His family included his wife Annie Shepard Keyes, two daughters, and four sons.
Thanks to his medical training, Emerson taught anatomy for art classes at the academy of the Boston Museum. He lectured in Tryon for the Lanier Club, and amazed his audience by drawing on a chalkboard with both hands simultaneously. So far we have not yet located any of his artworks in Tryon collections. In any case his oeuvre is mostly hidden from public view, or lost. In the Inventory of American Art, a database compiled by the Smithsonian to help historians locate paintings by artists prior to 1914, only two by Emerson are included. One of these, a large 1900 oil of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, is owned by his descendents in New England. The other is the only known Emerson accessible to the public — U.S. Cavalryman (undated) belonging to the Museum of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
US Cavalryman
oil on canvas 20 x 24 in.
[reproduction from a black & white photo]
West Point Museum Collection,
United States Military Academy
Emerson did quite a bit of writing himself. He authored The Early Years of the Saturday Club, an inscribed copy of which he gave to the Lanier Club in April, 1919. This thick book, based on his intimate personal knowledge, describes the famous people of Boston in his father’s circle — Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell — their sentiments and accomplishments, and their intellectual interrelationships. Henry Thoreau, As Remembered by a Young Friend is his personal testament to that remarkable naturalist and philosopher. Edward also wrote Emerson in Concord, a memoir about the “social circle” of Concord. It is a fascinating picture of how 19th century people in the arts and letters exchanged ideas and influenced others. It is unfortunate Edward never wrote a more personal book called "Emerson in Tryon", for it could have doubtless given us rich information about his contemporaries in the Tryon colony that now we will never be able to retrieve.
Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell: Captain Sixth United States Cavalry; Colonel Second Massachusetts Cavalry, Brigadier-General United States Volunteers (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1907) is about the Union leader he knew well. Can it be that Lowell, hero of battles at Williamsburg and Chickahominy and Antietam, is the mounted man depicted by Emerson in his painting at West Point?
His biography Charles Eliot Norton: Life and Letters is about his friend the Harvard professor who from 1874 through 1898 lectured on the history of art. As much as any other figure in academia, Norton was responsible for elevating visual arts to the same level of scholarship and prestige as belles lettres. Through Emerson, the ideas of Norton about the role of visual arts in culture and philosophy were carried directly to Tryon. At the Lanier Club, talks were frequent on topics of art — when speakers talked on the subject, they might have Norton’s proxy listening.
Hemlock Shoals, one of several waterfalls in the Tryon vicinity. Reminiscent of New Hampshire mountains where Emerson vacationed in his youth. tinted photograph, circa 1925
Essays, Addresses and Poems of Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Riverside Press, 1930) is Emerson’s personal philosophy, posthumously compiled by his son Raymond who presented one of the first copies to the Lanier Library in Tryon. It has five of Edward Waldo Emerson’s own poems, including The Busy Wheel in the Brain. Seven essays show the breadth of his mind, and his sympathetic nature. Among them are "American Life" and "The Man As Doctor". Perhaps the most significant is Relation of Art to Life, completed in 1896. From a man steeped in the anti-hedonistic traditions of old New England, it begins thus: “The Relation of Art to Life is first for beauty — pleasure — then for teaching — help — whence again comes pleasure.” But it is not long before Emerson loosens up, and we hear the voice of Thoreau: “. . .I have learned with joy, and, like a new convert am anxious to proselyte and share the good things Art daily gives.” After describing practical esthetic concepts, he cites artists who he thinks have good things to say about Art. Among these, most surprisingly, is Oscar Wilde. But Emerson cannot bring himself to consider Photography in the realm of true art: “Speaking of excessive claims of science and the influence of the photograph on Art in our day. . . after the novelty has passed away, these will not occupy so important a place. . .the tendency may be to seek deliverance from facts in the fairyland of the imagination.” Even before he wrote, the Impressionists had taken the Boston art world by storm, and Emerson’s opinion presages trends in painting of the dawning 20th century.
Emerson’s prestige and ongoing presence in Tryon made him influential in the country colony. His views on art must have been consistent, as "The Relation of Art to Life" was delivered as the Lanier lecture much later, on December 14, 1911. (If his views had changed from the time of his 1895 essay, he surely would have titled his later lecture something different.) Emerson was a willing speaker, and was appreciated by the audiences of the little athenaeum. Sometimes his program is not heavy, just selections from his favorite poets. One lecture by Emerson, however, sounds like Longfellow on the lecture circuit at his peak, that of February 4, 1915: “Selections from William Morris translation of the Icelandic story of The Volsungs and the Niblungs, and his ‘Sigurd the Volsung'.” Indeed just the ticket for a winter day in the Southern Highlands, articulated by the English philosopher icon of the Arts & Crafts movement!
Emerson teamed with Anna Cabot Putnam to deliver a joint talk of February 27, 1919 on James Russell Lowell. One might be inclined to jump to the conclusion that these two Boston Brahmins — lecturing about the Harvard patrician — down in North Carolina must have been the ultimate tale of fish out of their waters. Yet in Tryon Putnam preferred to go by “Annie” and elsewhere Emerson quoted his famous father’s attitude, “Both men and women engaged in hard work are more picturesque than any which art and study could contrive, for the Heart is in these first. I say picturesque, because when I pass these groups I instantly know whence all the fine pictures I have seen had their origin: I feel the painter in me . . .He liked to talk with horsemen and stage-drivers, and enjoyed their racy vernacular and picturesque brag as much as the cautious understatement of the farmer. On his walks he fell in with pot-hunters and fishermen, wood-choppers and drivers of cattle, and liked to exchange a few words with them, and he always observed the old-time courtesy of the road, the salutation to the passer-by, even if a stranger.”
