A couple of days ago I happily left the early 21st century to return to the early 19th. I’d been away too long.
I’m writing—or trying to write—a novel set in Baltimore in 1807. Some of my characters are fictional, while some are based on real, though minor, historical figures. My story has led me to an early American landscape painter named Francis Guy, who these days is best known for a Breughel-esque painting of a Brooklyn streetscape dating from about 1820.
Before moving to Brooklyn, Guy spent about twenty years in Baltimore, mostly painting the houses of wealthy landowners. During the year 1807 he came in for some criticism from another one of my characters, Eliza Anderson, who was the editor of a weekly magazine called The Observer (and who was, as far as I’ve been able to discover, the first woman to edit a magazine in the United States). Anderson made some condescending remarks about Guy, who had no formal training as an artist and had previously made his living as a tailor and dyer.
Anderson mocked Guy after he and another artist, William Groombridge, mounted a joint exhibit in June of 1807. While Guy might have some natural talent, Anderson said, he had been “reduced to the necessity of making coats and pantaloons,” and therefore had “not had it in his power to cultivate his talent, nor has he made a single striking step in the art.” By contrast she praised Groombridge, who had received academic training and was a member of the artistic establishment, having exhibited at the National Academy in London and been a founding member of the first artistic academy in the United States, the Columbianum in Philadelphia.
I knew that this criticism had led to a war of words between Eliza Anderson and Guy’s defenders, but I’d only read Anderson’s side of the story. All I knew about Guy came from a scholarly article published in 1950 that cited a few other secondary sources I hadn’t bothered to track down. I learned some interesting things from the article—for example, that the verdict of history has been quite the opposite of Anderson’s. Groombridge is pretty much forgotten, whereas Guy—while not exactly a household name—has been heralded as an American original, with his Brooklyn streetscape prominently on display at the Brooklyn Museum.
But once I started to introduce Guy as a character in the novel, I realized that there were things missing from the article. I couldn’t figure out exactly where and when certain things had happened, and these details were now becoming important to me. I also wondered if there were any contemporary accounts that might give me a better idea of who Guy really was: what he looked like, what his personality was.
So I was delighted to discover that there were a couple of books about Guy in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, a place where I’ve already spent many happy hours plowing through rare volumes, handwritten manuscripts, and cloudy microfilm while researching this novel. I hadn’t realized, back then, that I would be writing about Guy, so I hadn’t bothered to check for books about him. But I’ve learned that you can never do all the research for a historical novel in advance. Inevitably, you’ll find the story taking you to places you didn’t anticipate, and you’ll have to pause to do research. Given how difficult the writing can be, you may actually welcome those pauses.
So it was this past Wednesday, when I found myself speeding up I-95 to Baltimore on a gorgeous fall day. A few things had changed about the MdHS library: there was a new person behind the desk, and their security procedures have been tightened since a dramatic theft of documents there a few months ago. But for the most part, it was reassuringly familiar: the stacks of books framed by stately white columns, the honey-colored wood library tables, and the voice of the revered Francis O’Neill, a librarian who seems to hold all historical information about Baltimore comfortably within his balding head, ringing across the room.
I requested four books, but chose to start with the one that had been quoted the most in the article I’d read. Although it wasn’t that old—the publication date was 1943—it was classified as a rare book, which meant I had to read it at the first library table, under the watchful eye of the librarian, and prop it up on protective foam pads.
I never got to the other three books. This one gave me a wealth of information about Guy: the fact that he had a sallow complexion and black eyes, the fact that he was combative but almost pathologically generous (there was a story about how he had borrowed $5 from one friend and then a few minutes later impulsively spent it on a canary in a cage, which he then impulsively gave away to the next friend he met). I learned that he’d been an inventor as well as a tailor, dyer, and artist, and I got the details of the ingenious device he’d used to trace the outlines of a landscape before painting it. I discovered he’d also invented a cure for toothaches, which he advertised at $1.50 a dose.
I learned that, in his later years at least, he’d taken to drink. He’d sobered up long enough to paint what is now considered his masterpiece, the streetscape of Brooklyn. But as soon as he finished he went back to drinking—his pious wife for some reason having procured him the brandy he demanded—and, perhaps as a result, almost immediately died.
Best of all, I found out that I could, in a sense, hear his voice—almost as clearly as I was hearing that contemporary Francis, the librarian Mr. O’Neill. Francis Guy had actually responded to Eliza Anderson’s comments in the pages of a Baltimore newspaper, and I was able to locate the article because the MdHS library had the microfilm in its filing cabinets (it also now has a functioning microfilm printer, which for quite some time it didn’t).
There, in the Baltimore Federal Gazette for November 17, 1807, Guy had begun his counter-attack thusly: “What do you think the Observer means by playing shuttlecock with my poor name at every full and change of the moon?” Reading that, I could see Guy standing before me, his hands on his hips, his black eyes bright with indignation.
In my fictional account, I’d already started imagining Mr. Guy. I’d given him reddish hair that sprang from his head in tufts, and a ruddy complexion. But now my fictional Guy has acquired a sallow complexion and black eyes, just like the real one. And I’m looking forward to incorporating some of the other details I’ve gleaned about him, and trying to recreate that indignant voice.
I don’t know that the character will turn out “better,” in some sense, because I did this research—although I doubt I would have been able to come up with a line as good as that “shuttlecock” one just using my imagination. But when I’m writing about people who actually lived, and inserting their real names into my story, I feel some responsibility to find out as much as I can about them and then use what I’ve learned. And when I come across someone as interesting as Francis Guy, it seems almost criminal not to.