"'Keen Spiritual Intuitions': Thomas Le Clear and the Problem of Medium"

Thomas Le Clear’s Interior with Portraits (1865)—a portrait of long-dead siblings, painted from a daguerreotype—is perhaps his most enigmatic work. It breaks decidedly with his paintings of newsboys and with the large-scale, single-figure portraits for which he became best known. Angela Miller maintains that the canvas stages a contest between mediums—between the natural process of the photograph and the imaginative, intellectual endeavor of the painter. I argue, however, that it is an attempt to indict both: they may capture material appearances or the artist’s intellect, but never truth, which could only emerge from the spiritual realm. Like many Americans of his era, Le Clear was deeply invested in Spiritualism. In the 1850s he was a member of the growing Spiritualist movement in Buffalo—serving on the editorial committee for the journal Age of Progress—and attested in print to his experiences of various spiritual phenomena. Most relevant here is his assessment of an 1877 portrait “precipitated” by Madame Blavatsky, which he and a colleague found to have “individuality of the profoundest kind.” The portrait’s ability to capture the sitter’s essence, “in a medium not easy to distinguish” (according to another writer), highlighted the impossibility that an artist’s lens or hand alone could ever convey the world truthfully. Le Clear’s investment in Spiritualism suggests that Interior with Portraits is not a statement on the inadequacy of one medium over another, but rather the inadequacy of all mediums, save a spiritual one.