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Thomas Kinkade

Duke University Press

Contents

Illustrations...........................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................................1Introduction ALEXIS L. BOYLAN..........................................................................................................29Thomas Kinkade and the History of Protestant Visual Culture in America DAVID MORGAN....................................................54Painter of the Right: Thomas Kinkade's Political Art MICKI MCELYA......................................................................81God in the Retails: Thomas Kinkade and Market Piety SETH FEMAN.........................................................................107Brand-Name Living from the Painter of Light KARAL ANN MARLING..........................................................................124Purchasing Paradise: Nostalgic Longing and the Painter of Light ANDREA WOLK RAGER......................................................143Repetition, Exclusion, and the Urbanism of Nostalgia: The Architecture of Thomas Kinkade CHRISTOPHER E. M. PEARSON.....................165"A Temple Next Door": The Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center JULIA ALDERSON.....................................................191Thomas Kinkade's Heaven on Earth JEFFREY VALLANCE......................................................................................206Manufacturing "Masterpieces" for the Market: Thomas Kinkade and the Rhetoric of High Art MONICA KJELLMAN-CHAPIN........................238Art Ethics: Thomas Kinkade and Contemporary Art ANNA BRZYSKI...........................................................................259Bibliography............................................................................................................................275Contributors............................................................................................................................277

Chapter One

Geography is an unavoidable element in any definition of nationhood. While the actual borders of a nation may be unstable, offering occasions for cultural and even military conflict, citizens commonly imagine their collective identity by seeing its material expression in the features of a terrain. Landscape is more than physical dimensions—it is the boundary of a larger self. If king, language, or a religious polity such as "Christendom" served as the pivot around which peoples orbited in eras before modernity, the modern nation-state relies on forms of collective imagination, among which landscape—in painting, song, and story, as well as national parks and roadside scenery—serves as the enduring deposit of national destiny. Landscape roots imagination in time and place and provides the meeting point of past and present, divine and mortal. It is among the most pervasive and most powerful forms of national mythology and imagined community, since landscape combines the mundane and the dramatic in a single range of common experience. For many Americans mountains, oceans, and forests bear the imprint and intent of divinity, while farms and landownership secure the material base for individuality, citizenship, and liberty. To be sure, the same may be said of other peoples for whom land and geography define national, ethnic, or religious identity. Americans exercise no monopoly on the cultural magic of a naturalized ethos. It is a common human myth, all the more so when its enchantment tailors a landscape to the peculiar lineaments of a people. This is the power of a national imaginary.

The popular regard for the art of Thomas Kinkade is not difficult to understand when considered in the context of the devotion of Americans to their national landscape. Kinkade offers American consumers pictures that intermingle piety with national pride by envisioning landscapes that are both glorious and inviting, magnificent and intimate, evidence of blessing from above and a history of goodness here below that vouch for the possibility of reclaiming what remains a divinely insured national trust. Although the appeal of Kinkade's work among his admirers depends on his keen insight into popular taste and his ambitious marketing, there is a long history of mass-produced and mass-marketed lithography in the United States that constitutes a historical framework for understanding the production, distribution, and reception of his work. Here I will survey that history by examining the religious subjects of lithography from Currier and Ives to Warner Sallman, including the marketing and reception of their images and focusing on the enduring importance of landscape as a subject matter that continues to inspire a special fondness in Americans generally and devout Americans in particular.

Nineteenth-Century Lithography: Piety and the American Home

Other than photography, the visual industry in the nineteenth century most closely associated with the home was the print trade—engravings and lithographs. These inexpensive forms of image making were available to almost all Americans, across racial, economic, and regional lines. Certainly the most well known, but by no means the only, firm responsible for providing affordable prints for parlor and workplace was Currier and Ives. Nathaniel Currier set up shop in New York in 1834. Around 1840 he began including religious imagery in his stock, especially geared to Catholic immigrants, whose use for devotional imagery of saints was answered by hundreds of editions of lithographs with captions in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Currier issued many versions of the stations of the cross, as well as other biblical subjects.

In the mid-1840s Currier began to offer images aimed at Protestant consumers, including many different scenes of families reading the scriptures in the parlor and memorial imagery set at graveside in country cemeteries, with looming neo-Gothic churches in the background. It is a common misconception that Protestants historically have been averse to imagery. Although Protestants have often avoided placing images in church sanctuaries, they have, in fact, long made avid use of illustrations in instructional manuals and illustrated tracts and Bibles, as well as in print imagery designed for display in the home. Decorative imagery imbued with religious or moralizing features, including landscape, was displayed in the parlor, which was the most formal space within the American home. Both subjects of reading the scriptures and mourning at graveside offered Protestants pious imagery suitable for domestic display. Scripture reading was a common practice in the parlor, and the funerary imagery answered to the national movement to replace city graveyards with pastoral cemeteries conceived as idyllic rural gardens. Currier left blank spaces on the urns or gravestones in the prints in which customers wrote the personal details of their deceased loved ones. This personalization of the mass-produced artifact was enhanced by the hand-tinting of prints that Currier and Ives used. Even when the mechanical process of chromolithography allowed prints to be uniformly tinted, Currier and Ives continued to prefer coloration by hand. One reason may be that no two prints were ever exactly alike,...