Notes

1. Henry James to Thomas S. Perry, September 20, 1867, in Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84), I, 77.
2. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1869), 511.
3. Everett P. Wheeler, “Russell Sturgis,” The City College Quarterly 5, no. 1 (March 1909): 10. Sturgis began acquiring the photographs on a trip to Europe from 1858 to 1861. After studying architecture in Munich, he toured the major European capitals and purchased albumen prints and albums from various commercial studios. He returned to Paris in 1878 to attend the Universal Exposition. Dated prints in the collection indicate that Sturgis may have taken several other foreign trips including a voyage to the Holy Land and Constantinople in the early 1890s and a visit to Paris in 1900. For more on Sturgis’s collection and teaching with photographs, see David R. Hanlon, Facades of Time: Photographs of Architecture from the Collection of Russell Sturgis (St. Louis: self-pub., 2002); and Maura Lucking, “‘Seeing Clearly What Is Good’: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image,” Thresholds 46 (2008): 68–87.
4. Russell Sturgis, A Short History of Architecture: Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1896), vi. Quoted in Lucking, “‘Seeing Clearly What Is Good,’” 68.
5. For example, Sturgis encouraged the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a trustee, to purchase photographs covering its encyclopedic range of global fine and decorative arts. The museum held fourteen thousand photographic prints in its study collection by 1907. Lucking, “‘Seeing Clearly What Is Good,’” 77–78.
6. See Margaretta Lovell, Venice: The American View, 1860–1920 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1984); and Lovell, A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860–1915 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
7. Lovell, A Visitable Past, 54.
8. Gifford became so overwhelmed with requests for pictures of Venice that by 1875 he had declined to paint them. “One can’t stay in Venice forever anymore than one can eat partridge every day.” Letter from Sanford Robinson Gifford to John Ferguson Weir, May 6, 1875. John F. Weir Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven. Quoted in Kevin J. Avery, “Venetian Sails, a Study, 1873,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, ed. Avery and Franklin Kelly (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 210.
9. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (New York: John W. Lovell, 1885), 15.
10. Henry James, “The Grand Canal,” in Italian Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 61.
11. See Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 179.
12. “The Palazzo Ferro,” The Guernsey Magazine 16, no. 7 (July 1888): unpaged. On the identification of business enterprise with religion in the Gilded Age, see Sigmund Diamond, The Reputation of the American Businessman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 77.
13. In his introduction to the 1898 edition of Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Sturgis regretted that photography had not been available to Ruskin as he studied Venetian architecture: “The photograph had only begun to say its word as an artistic teacher, and the earliest photographs of Venetian monuments made by Ponti, of Venice, appear to date from the very year in which the first edition of the ‘Seven Lamps’ was published.” Interestingly, Brusa printed this photograph from an original negative by Ponti. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin had admired the Palazzo Contarini-Fasan as “the most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice.” Russell Sturgis, “Ruskin on Architecture,” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin (New York: D. Appleton, 1898), v; and Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 195.
14. See William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990).
15. Peyton Sanders to Charles Parsons, October 8, 1877. Charles Parsons Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. See also Graham W. J. Beal, Charles Parsons Collection of Paintings (St. Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1977), 10–11. For more on Parsons’s collection of Japanese art, see John Launius, The Life and Times of Missouri’s Charles Parsons: Between Art and War (Charleston: The History Press, 2020), chapters 9 (“Fragrant Curios”) and 12 (“Notes of Travel in 1894 and 1895”).
16. Charles Parsons, Notes of a Trip Around the World in 1894 and 1895 (St. Louis: George D. Barnard, 1896), 11, 18–19.
17. Ibid., 173, 27.
18. See The Exhibition of the Empire of Japan: Official Catalogue (St. Louis: International Exposition, 1904), 138; and Frederick Baekeland, Imperial Japan: The Art of the Meiji Era (1868–1912) (Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1980), 201.
19. Hosley, The Japan Idea, 63.
20. Dean T. Lahikainen, “Redefining Elegance: Benson’s Studio Props,” in The Art of Frank Weston Benson: American Impressionist (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2000), 80–81. See also Frederic A. Sharf, ed., A Pleasing Novelty: Bunkio Matsuki and the Japan Craze in Victorian Salem (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 1993).
21. See Bonnell D. Robinson, “Transition and the Quest for Performance: Photographers and Photographic Technology in Japan, 1854–1880s,” in A Timely Encounter: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Japan, ed. Melissa Banta and Susan Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 1988), 48.
22. Quoted in David Odo, Unknown Japan: Reconsidering 19th-Century Photographs (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008), 23. According to W. K. Burton, a British photographer in Meiji Japan, “there was a superstition among the Japanese of the time that the taking of their photograph meant the loss of some of their vital energy.” W. K. Burton, “A Japanese Photographer,” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin 21 (March 11, 1890), unpaged. Quoted in Terry Bennett, Early Japanese Images (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1996), 55. See also Mio Wakita, “Selling Japan: Kusakabe Kimbei’s Image of Japanese Women,” History of Photography 33, no. 2 (2009): 218.
23. Andrew L. Maske, “Performance and Play: The Art and Accomplishments of Geisha,” in Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2004), 116–17.
24. Wakita, “Selling Japan,” 214.
25. On Kusakabe’s use of the term “costume” in advertising material and its application more broadly, see Luke Gartlan, “Types or Costumes? Reframing Early Yokohama Photography,” Visual Resources 22, no. 3 (September 2006): 239–63.
26. Wakita, “Selling Japan,” 217–18; see also Lesley Downer, “A World behind Closed Doors,” in Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile, 34.
27. David Odo, The Journey of “A Good Type”: From Artistry to Ethnography in Early Japanese Photographs (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 2015), 34.
28. Meiji men wore top hats and carried bourgeois accoutrements like umbrellas in order to project a “civilized” appearance to Western powers and thereby demonstrate their fitness to self-govern. See David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 158.
29. Printmakers also depicted photography as an aspect of the modernization of Japan. See Allen Hockley, “Cameras, Photographs and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Prints,” Impressions 23 (2001): 42–63.
30. In many photographs of the bridge, its span acts as a barrier across the picture plane rather than a formal device directing the viewer’s gaze into depth. This composition is much more typical of Japanese art than Western landscape photography. See Ellen Handy, “Tradition, Novelty, and Invention: Portrait and Landscape Photography in Japan, 1860s–1880s,” in A Timely Encounter, 66.
31. Editor J. R. Black reproduced another five photographs of Nikko by Uchida and praised them as “very excellent” in “Notes of a Trip to Nikko,” The Far East 3, no. 23 (May 1, 1873): 272. Cited in Terry Bennett, Photography in Japan 1853–1912 (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2006), 80. The introduction of the dry plate process to Japan in the early 1880s simplified photographing in the field. For more on the use of field cameras, portable darkrooms, and other routine equipment, see Karen Fraser, “Studio Practices in Early Japanese Photography: The Tomishige Archive,” History of Photography 33, no. 2 (2009): 132–44.
32. Russell Sturgis, “The Fine Arts of Japan,” The Nation 7, no. 157 (July 2, 1868): 16.
33. See Charles R. Toothaker, Commercial Raw Materials: Their Origin, Preparation and Uses (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Museums, 1905); and W. Colgrove Betts, “The Philadelphia Commercial Museum,” Journal of Political Economy 8, no. 2 (March 1900): 232.
34. See Steven Conn, “The Philadelphia Commercial Museum: A Museum to Conquer the World,” in Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 115–50.
35. See S. Takashima and K. Ogawa, Illustrations of Japanese Life (Tokyo: K. Ogawa; Yokohama: Kelly and Walsh, 1896), plate 37 (“Loom”); and Rob Oechsle, “Drawing Silk from Cocoons,” www.t-enami.org and https://www.flickr.com/photos/okinawa-soba/2347140546/in/set-72157605714378115.
36. See Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
37. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9, 49.
38. Obenzinger, American Palestine, 5.
39. See Milette Shamir, “‘Our Jerusalem’: Americans in the Holy Land and Protestant Narratives of National Entitlement,” American Quarterly 55, no. 1 (March 2003): 29–60.
40. Obenzinger, American Palestine, xvii.
41. The photographs from this journey were also reproduced in other texts, including The New Testament, Illustrated and Explained (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson, 1895); and The Self-Interpreting New Testament, ed. James W. Lee (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson, 1896).
42. Rachel McBride Lindsey, A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 181.
43. James W. Lee, Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson, 1894).
44. Whether spirituality and science were complementary or contradictory remained a topic of intense debate throughout the period. For the changing relationship between science and knowledge of God, see James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
45. Jennifer Axsom Adler, “The Other Witness: Nineteenth-Century American Protestantism and the Material Gospel Theology” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2015), 120.
46. Lee, Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee.
47. Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 53.
48. Davis, The Landscape of Belief, 74.
49. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859): 746.
50. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, Traveling in the Holy Land through the Stereoscope (New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1900), 12.
51. Ibid., 12.
52. Ibid., 139.
53. Shamir, “‘Our Jerusalem,’” 51–52.
54. C. Stuart Johnson, “Schreyer and His Horses,” Munsey’s Magazine 11, no. 3 (June 1894): 271.
55. Curatorial files, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The painting was titled Retreating Arabs in the inventory of Charles Parsons’s painting collection published in Edward Strahan (Earl Shinn), Art Treasures of America, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1882), 59.
56. Parsons, Notes of a Trip, 146.
57. Groups of local men would wait for tourists at the base of the pyramids and offer their services for a gratuity. Photographers would also wait for tourists at the pyramids and offer to record the ascension. Micheline Nilsen, Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 168–70.
58. See Felix Thürlemann, Das Haremsfenster: Zur fotografischen Eroberung Ägyptens im 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink, 2016); and Thürlemann “Staging the Egyptian Harem for Western Eyes,” The Iris (blog), J. Paul Getty Museum, January 25, 2017, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/staging-the-egyptian-harem-for-western-eyes/.
59. In his story “Photographic Experiences in the East,” published serially in The Philadelphia Photographer, Rau recalled grappling with the monotonous visual effects of the desert. “Wady Soboah, although nearly covered with sand, was still quite picturesque, but vast expanses of gray sand made bad foregrounds, so figures must be introduced to relieve and make a picture.” William H. Rau, “Photographic Experience in the East,” The Philadelphia Photographer 20, no. 229 (January 1883): 27.
60. Quoted in William Brey, “William H. Rau’s Photographic Experiences in the East,” Stereo World 11, no. 2 (May/June 1984): 7.
61. Edward L. Wilson, Wilson’s Lantern Journeys, vol. 3 (New York: Edward L. Wilson, 1886), 190. Wilson had been encouraged to create a photographic record of the people and places of the Holy Land by a clergyman writing a book on his own travels and by professors seeking lantern slides for use in art and archaeology courses. See Brey, “Rau’s Photographic Experiences,” 4–5.
62. Danièle Méaux, “Monuments et Paysages de John B. Greene,” History of Photography 33, no. 3 (2009): 275.
63. Wendy Martin and Cecilia Tichi, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2016), 20–23. See also T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
64. Cope & Stewardson, New Buildings for Washington University St. Louis: Explanation of Drawings (1899), 3, 10. Washington University Architectural Plans, 1900–2001, University Archives, Washington University Libraries.
65. See Nancy Fowler, “If These Halls Could Talk,” The Source, March 3, 2014, https://source.wustl.edu/2014/03/if-these-halls-could-talk/.
66. “At Washington in 90’s: Major Stafford Calls,” The Washingtonian 5, no. 2 (November 1927): 24. See also Alexander S. Langsdorf, History of Washington University, 1853–1953, 280. Alexander Langsdorf Papers, 1893–1974, University Archives, Washington University Libraries; and Candace O’Connor, Beginning a Great Work: Washington University in St. Louis, 1853–2003 (St. Louis: Washington University in St. Louis, 2003), 77.
67. See Lears, No Place of Grace, 100–101, 134–35; and Jeanne Fox-Friedman, “Howard Pyle and the Chivalric Order in America: King Arthur for Children,” Arthuriana 6, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 87–88.
68. Joseph Pennell, “Joseph Pennell’s Lithographs of the Panama Canal,” in The Print-Collector’s Quarterly, ed. Fitzroy Carrington (New York: Frederick Keppel, 1912), 295; and Joseph Pennell, Joseph Pennell’s Pictures of the Panama Canal (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912), 7.
69. Pennell, “Lithographs of the Panama Canal,” 308.
70. Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 380.
71. Pennell, “Lithographs of the Panama Canal,” 315.
72. Pennell also downplayed the plight of the canal workers in his writings, alleging, “Most people do not get hurt, and I never met anyone who wanted to leave; and I believe the threat to send the men home broke the only strike on the Canal.” Pennell, Pictures of the Panama Canal, 13. In his 1916 publication Wonder of Work, Pennell noted further, “I am simply an artist searching for the Wonder of Work—not for morals—political economy—stories of sweating—the crime of ugliness. I am trying to record the Wonder of Work as I see it, that is all.” Joseph Pennell, Pictures of the Wonder of Work (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916), unpaged.
73. Pennell’s work accords with historian Matthew Frye Jacobson’s observation that Gilded Age Americans “were set on becoming more and more engaged with the world’s peoples” in their economic affairs, although “in their social outlook they were not necessarily becoming any less parochial than they had ever been.” Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 56.

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