Americans have long been enamored with the romantic and artsy scene of Paris, the city of lights. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, David McCullough, delves into that topic during a speech about his most recent book, “The Greater Journey — Americans in Paris,” at the National Gallery of Art Sept. 26. The book is about how French culture in the late 19th century contributed to the development of American art.
But the focus of McCullough’s lecture was “The Greater Journey,” a collection of stories about great American artists who studied in Paris between 1830-1880. These weren’t all conventional artists; the group included writers, painters, doctors and inventors. Choosing whose lives to chronicle, McCullough said, was the most interesting part of the process.
“I got to cast my own characters,” McCullough said. “In my other books, you follow the course of history and there are people you have to write about. This time, I could do it for these people I wanted to write about.”
Because so many important Americans lived in Paris during this time, he developed a set of criteria to help narrow down the list of people he wanted to include in his work.
The first item on the list was crucial:
“They had to go to Paris and be changed by it,” McCullough said. “Also, their work had to be changed by it. Then, they had to take what changed them, bring it home, and use it to change us.”
The second item was more logistical. In order to come to understand the artists, they had to have written about their experiences in France. These writings, said McCullough could come in the forms of diary entries, letters, notes — anything that would give McCullough insight and allow him to conduct formal research.
Although the people discussed in the book are important, McCullough said the time and location were also essential. “Paris in the late 19th century was not ‘a moveable feast’ every month, every spring,” he said, referencing Hemingway’s chronicle of Paris in the 1920s. “This was a time of political upheaval and epidemic disease. Cholera was killing thousands of people literally in the streets. Those who stayed in Paris were truly dedicated to their work.”
Of those dedicated people, McCullough told the audience the stories of Samuel Morse and James Fenimore Cooper.
Though many know Morse as the inventor of the telegraph, he had worked as a painter from childhood and went to France in the early 1830s to paint a picture of the grand gallery of Paris’s iconic art museum, The Louvre.
Morse and Cooper quickly became friends in Paris and shared an apartment in the city. Though thousands fled once people began dying from cholera, Morse wanted to finish his painting, and Cooper stayed with him. More than that, after writing in the mornings, Cooper visited Morse at the Louvre and kept him company for several hours a day.
After leaving France, Morse developed the single-wire telegraph, and Cooper went on to write the great American novel, “The Last of the Mohicans.”
The point in telling this story, McCullough said, was to demonstrate what it took to make it in Paris and in the United States.
“Every one of them really worked [while in France],” he said. “It had nothing to do with how much talent they had … You have to have that drive. Making it look easy is the hardest part of all.”
McCullough also emphasized how much of a nation’s culture comes from the contributions of other countries. Without the rich and inspirational culture of Paris during this period, American art and culture would have sorely suffered, he said.
“[Americans] must never ever take for granted the part played in identifying who we are and why we are the way we are,” McCullough said.
thescene@theeagleonline.com
