Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919)

In his scenes of bygone days and ways, Henry often included elderly figures to suggest the antiquity of their surroundings. In his interiors from 1860s through the 1880s, Henry frequently depicted his friend William Kulp’s elderly Quaker aunt, Hannah Tyson, and it is probably she who appears in Totally Absorbed, in the interior of a Colonial or Federal house in Philadelphia or nearby Germantown. She reads a newspaper by an open window, which lets sunlight into an otherwise dim room. Many of the objects that decorate the room seem to be nearly as old as she is, and some could be even older: the pier mirror, pier table, and the sinumbra lamp, date from the 1810s or 1820s, while the Chippendale desk at the left edge of the image is a product of the Colonial period. 

In a flight of fancy, Henry introduced a note of liveliness and humor to this venerable scene, in the form of a standoff between two cats. The one on the right, which has knocked the lady’s knitting basket onto the floor, gazes from its perch on an upholstered chair at the other cat’s reflection in the mirrored back of the pier table; the other cat crouches defensively behind the lady’s dress and looks warily back through the mirror. The cat on the right seems poised to pounce at the mirror, fall with a clatter to the ground, and spook the other cat, thereby disrupting the calm of this well-preserved interior.

Totally Absorbed belongs to a series of small works that Henry executed in the early 1870s, which often depict Hannah Tyson in interiors that appear to be different, yet which include many of the same objects. Henry presumably observed some of these objects, like fireplaces, blinds, and wall moldings, at the Philadelphia and Germantown houses that he visited, while others likely came from Henry’s collection of antiques. Although his interiors do depict actual places and objects, the series makes clear that, at this early stage in America’s historical preservation movement, they were not meant to be factual historical documents, and were not subject to the strict periodization that today’s connoisseurs of antiques have come to expect in re-creations of historical interiors. Instead, Henry creatively combined different styles to create eclectic, visually stimulating scenes that were meant to evoke the genteel atmosphere of an old home and the moods associated with lifestyles of the past

Seen from today’s perspective, paintings of Henry’s such as this one are fascinating expressions of America’s complex relationship to its past and present during the Gilded Age. Faced with the social dislocations caused by the Civil War, rapid industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, Henry was clearly nostalgic for a more harmonious time filled with elegant, hand-crafted objects. Yet his materialistic emphasis on interiors and the cultural caché of historical objects was a product of his own time. Beginning in the 1870s, newly wealthy Americans spent unprecedented sums on lavishly decorated interiors, often filled with art and antiques—a trend which Henry vividly illustrated in one of his best-known works, Parlor in Brooklyn Heights of Mr. and Mrs. John Bullard, 1872 (Manoogian Collection, Grosse Point, Michigan). American artists also increasingly adopted an international orientation at this time, and artists such as Henry and Eastman Johnson were some of the first Americans to pick up on the European fashion for interior scenes influenced by 17th-century Dutch painters such as Johannes Vermeer. Finally, Henry’s active participation in the period’s historical preservation movement and promotion of historical styles indirectly resulted in the Colonial Revival style that emerged in the 1890s, which integrated Henry’s nostalgia for the past with industrial construction and production techniques and a building and consumption boom that were wholly of the present.