John Vanderlyn’s Jane McCrea: Love, Death, and America.
Paul Staiti
Alumnae Foundation Professor of the Fine Arts
Mount Holyoke College
Forthcoming book: The Killing of Jane McCrea: Love, Death, and the American Revolution
John Vanderlyn, The Murder of Jane McCrea, 1804, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford (Wikimedia Commons)
We are looking at John Vanderlyn’s startling 1804 painting The Murder of Jane McCrea, part of the American collection of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. If, for a moment, we were to accept the picture as a magic portal to the American Revolution, and take what we are seeing as authentic and true, free from any political passion or personal bias, then the story of Jane McCrea’s violent death, according to Vanderlyn, would go something like this:
Dateline: Fort Edward, New York, July 26, 1777. At the beginning of the third year of the American Revolution, the British are rapidly advancing into the Champlain and Hudson corridor from Canada in an audacious effort to divide the rebellious colonies and smash the fledgling United States. With an impressive force of British soldiers, augmented by German troops, Loyalist units, and about 400 Native Americans, the army of Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne is nearing Fort Edward, 50 miles north of Albany, where a few of his Indian auxiliaries encounter a young woman who has stayed in town. Rather than flee the British advance like everyone else, twenty-five-year-old Jane McCrea, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, remained in Fort Edward in anticipation of her imminent marriage to a Loyalist fighting for Burgoyne, Lieutenant David Jones.
detail of the above
In Vanderlyn’s reckoning of what happened next, two Native warriors in Burgoyne’s employ have taken her out of Fort Edward to the edge of a dense forest where they push her to one knee. Lieutenant Jones, a tiny figure at the back of a clearing in Vanderlyn’s painting, runs toward her screams, but is too far away to affect a rescue.
detail of the above
Pleading for her life as if she were a heroine in a tragic poem by Ovid, she turns her terrified blue eyes toward the crazed face of a barefoot assailant who, indifferent to her plight, grips her pale wrist, raises a tomahawk, and targets her forehead. A tear falls from her eye. She is dressed that day for her marriage, in a powder-blue wedding gown, now hopelessly misshapen from the struggle, leaving her exposed and debased. A second warrior charges from the right in homicidal frenzy. With teeth clenched, he takes hold of her blond hair and yanks it back before slicing off the scalp. Muscled male bodies overpower soft female forms. Dark skinned hands squeeze ghost-white flesh. Death and dismemberment are imminent.
To be sure, there is a kernel of historical truth to the picture. Burgoyne had recruited Native Americans from the Great Lakes as British auxiliaries, tasked with applying injudicious terror in advance of his main force. At least two, but maybe as many as six of the warriors had been sent to retrieve McCrea from behind the American lines at Fort Edward so that she might rendezvous with her fiancé, waiting for her in the British camp. The plan went terribly wrong, and McCrea ended up scalped and dead.
Vanderlyn’s searing image possesses so much power that it lingers in the mind like no written account—such as mine—possibly can. If we take a presentist view of the picture, that is, if we assess it according to the values–moral, political, aesthetic, etc.--of 2023, then it tells a familiar, indeed predictable, American tale, in which a white damsel in distress is mauled by Indians who are cast as irredeemable savages incapable of civil decency. It does not take much effort to see the stereotypes in Vanderlyn’s picture. We might ask, where, exactly, are the equivalent images of the crimes committed by American raiding parties, such as the Sullivan expedition of 1779, which swept through New York, burning Iroquois villages, destroying crops, summarily killing men, and pointedly abusing women?
We could leave it at that. On the other hand, we could be historicist, and try to see what the picture meant to Vanderlyn and to its viewers two centuries ago. To do that, we need to understand that Jane McCrea was not just another case of collateral damage during the Revolution. True, she was like every other civilian victim, an unexceptional person merely caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, and when looked at objectively, neither her life, love, nor her death was especially important in the early history of the United States.
But what folks made of it was. Widespread press coverage and a public relations campaign hatched by the American General Horatio Gates turned her into the great female cause célèbre of the Revolution. Stories of her reputed beauty, youthful promise, and brutal murder became a rallying cry for the Americans, who went on to defeat Burgoyne at Saratoga in October of that year. For the British, however, her killing was a deep humiliation. Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and William Pitt would deliver stinging speeches about her in Parliament in order to stop the war and bring down the Tory government.
Instead of fading away after the Revolution, she evolved into an American martyr—dare I say an American saint—whose death inspired historians to tirelessly recount her story, tourists to pilgrimage to the site of the crime and shed tears by her grave, and poets, novelists, and painters, such as Vanderlyn, to reanimate her story and make it into a spectacle of violence. Her story would then find new life in the 1820s as the poster-girl justifying Indian Removal, which was the Jacksonian effort to evict Native peoples to west of the Mississippi. Protecting white women from perceived Indian predations, as Vanderlyn’s painting and hundreds of other pictures about her seem to be suggesting, was a central tenet of an expansionary United States.
Vanderlyn painted Jane McCrea in Paris. He had grown up on the Hudson, in Kingston, New York. When he was two-years-old in 1777 (at the same time Burgoyne was facing defeat at the Battle of Saratoga), the British invaded Kingston and burned it to the ground, all 326 houses, including that of his family, leading to Vanderlyn’s lifelong hatred of the British and a deep affection for France, America’s great ally. At age 21, thanks to the patronage of Aaron Burr, a fellow Francophile, Vanderlyn began art studies in Paris, where he also plunged into contemporary politics, heartily approving of Napoleon’s war against “Haughty Britannia,” as he liked to phrase it. While working in the studio of François-André Vincent, the American poet Joel Barlow hired him on the advice of Robert Fulton to illustrate The Columbiad, the epic poem Barlow thought would be nothing less than the new republic’s equivalent to the Iliad and the Aeneid.
In Napoleonic Paris, militaristic subjects were all the rage among artists. A moderately-sized picture illustrating McCrea’s death, based on the sixth book of Barlow’s Columbiad, allowed Vanderlyn to join the ranks of distinguished French masters, such as Louis-François Lejeune and Antoine-Jean Gros, who were producing blockbuster paintings on martial themes. Moreover, in depicting Jane’s gruesome death at the hands of Burgoyne’s auxiliaries, Vanderlyn was announcing his political alignment with the French in their all-out war against the British at that time. At the prestigious Salon, he titled the picture A Young Woman Slaughtered by Two Savages in the Service of the English During the American War, the key word being “English.” It was as if he were saying, “The British, as you can see, will stop at nothing in their despicable pursuit of victory.”
Amazonomachy, frieze panel form the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, c. 350 BCE, British Museum (Wikimedia Commons)
Young Vanderlyn was also under pressure to demonstrate his artistic bona fides in Neoclassical Paris, which he accomplished by presenting Jane’s death as a modern reprise of Antiquity. The composition closely resembles the fight scenes on the ancient Tomb of Mausolus. The Indians derive from the famous Borghese Gladiator, while Jane’s pinwheel pose comes from a Greek statue of a dying Niobid. For him, and all major French artists, ancient stories were in close communication with modern events. Except that Vanderlyn gave that concept an American twist in Paris by applying classical mythology to a New World subject.
Left: Borghese Warrior, c. 100 BCE, Louvre, Paris (Wikimedia Commons)
Middle: Dying Niobid, c. 440 BCE, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome (Wikimedia Commons)
Vanderlyn even dressed Jane classically, in a directoire gown. The thin blue material that clings to her body, as well as the low-cut bodice and lack of structured undergarments, echo the dress of Antiquity, turning an American country girl of 1777 into a stylish Neoclassical woman of 1804. Expose was in. Eighteenth-century corsets, stays, padding, stiff stomachers, long sleeves, and poufy coiffeurs were out. Jane’s bust and thighs were not to be hidden beneath a wall of impenetrable fabrics.
Vanderlyn cast Jane’s attackers as the opposite: swarthy beasts from the deep forest, like what the Goths were to the ancient Romans. Napoleonic artists obsessively contrasted Western civilization against the “barbaric” Ottomans, Egyptians, Africans, and Haitians. Like his French colleagues, Vanderlyn was trafficking in racial stereotypes. He made no effort to understand that Native Americans had been plunged into an existential situation, fighting for their lives, their families, and their civilization, all of which was being destroyed by white people fighting each other to the death across their ancestral homelands.
Overall, Vanderlyn wanted to cast Jane McCrea as a saintly martyr to The Cause, ready for enshrinement in the American temple of fame. Saint Catherine and Saint Cecilia, both Christian virgins and both beheaded, were often depicted in old master paintings like Jane, moments before death, on their knees, centered in the foreground, and at the mercy of their executioners.
Guercino, The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, 1653, Hermitage, St. Petersburg (Wikimedia Commons)
Artemesia Gentileschi, Lucretia and Tarquinius, c. 1645-1650, Neues Palais, Potsdam (Google Arts and Culture)
The story of McCrea’s revolutionary sacrifice also parallels another legendary martyr much older than the Christian saints. Lucretia, a married Roman woman of the sixth century BCE, was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of a tyrannical Etruscan king. Out of wounded honor and in an effort to prove she had tried to remain virtuous, Lucretia stabbed herself to death. Her appalled Roman brethren, galvanized by her death and the unspeakable violence committed by the Tarquins, banded together against the Etruscans—much as Patriots did against the British--“in defense of their liberty,” determined never “to suffer such outrages to be committed by the tyrants."[1]
One of the central imperatives of the revolutionary Cause in America was the protection of all Jane McCreas from such harm, whether from British overseers or Native American warriors. As Tom Paine phrased the situation in Common Sense, “There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; . . .. As well, can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.”[2] Jane McCrea was starkly alone when assaulted in 1777, but her torment ultimately became a shared public ordeal, one that worked to forge white citizenship in the new American republic. Vigilance against perceived outsiders was not just an ongoing security obligation; it was the essential quest that helped define the new United States.
[1] Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (London: Booksellers of London, 1758), 269.
[2] Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Dedham, MA: Mann and Bryant, 1844), 29.