Big Idea

The somewhat-more-than-mighty vision of a 19th-Century American patriot was put on display last week at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The vision was a Historical Monument of the American Republic as beheld in fantasy and painted about 1876 by Erastus Salisbury Field (see cut).

The artist was a New Englander who painted portraits for 75 years and died in 1900 at the age of 95. His huge tribute to his country (9 ft. 3 in. by 13 ft. 1 in.) showed in realistic detail an edifice far beyond even Hollywood's most incredible fabrics. He also did a Garden of Eden Without Eve, filled with fauna, flora and far perspectives, which the Springfield (Mass.) Republican called "on a par with the extraordinary work of the French 19th-Century genius Rousseau. There can, of course, be no influence one from the other, but there is a strong . . . spiritual affinity between these two 'primitive' painters."

Erastus Salisbury Field wrote a twelve-page description of his vast architectural dream. In it he declared: "I am not a professed architect, and some things about it may be faulty. Be that as it may, my aim has been to get up a brief history of our country or epitome, in a monumental form. . . . The towers are connected with suspension bridges, and the cars are going to and from the centennial exhibition, which is on the top of the central tower."

Field also noted that in one sculpturesque panel of the central tower "President Johnson is operating on the Government machinery with all his might, and the members of Congress ... are pulling the opposite way."

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