As the subject of a monograph, the American genre painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855) presents some clear challenges. His life was regrettably short (he died of a morphine overdose at age thirty), his few years of work were not overly prolific (we know of perhaps seven major paintings), his decision to live in Europe for his entire career placed him culturally and physically outside the ranks of his fellow antebellum artists, and, as if to frustrate the historian’s attempt to compensate for these limitations, he left behind almost no personal papers. Moreover, Woodville’s art does not fit into the accustomed furrows of interpretation that have marked the field of American genre painting for the last decade. Those who have written about his work note that Woodville’s vision was darker, subtler, and less easy to categorize than the broader, sunnier productions of some of his colleagues, with their penchant for winking puns, overdetermined political allegory, and pratfall-laden comedy.

Justin Wolff recognizes that this set of conditions demands a different treatment. His book is no iconographic roman-à-clef, nor is it a tour de force of close reading. It is not even necessarily a deep contextual excavation, despite the fact that antebellum culture and politics play a crucial role in shaping his understanding of Woodville. Instead, Wolff appears to have felt liberated by the lack of data points on his graph. His book reads more like an extended essay on the ultimate “unknowability” of his subject. This is, at its core, a literary reading of Woodville, but the “Artful Dodger” of the book’s title refers less to the boyish charm and inner moral compass of the familiar Charles Dickens character and more to the shady, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous “Confidence Men” whom Herman Melville elevated to a national type in the 1850s.

The facts of Woodville’s life are easily stated. Born in Baltimore in 1825 into a reasonably prominent family, he received a general education at St. Mary’s College and also passed a year at the University of Maryland College of Medicine before abandoning the study of science. After spending some time sketching the denizens of the Baltimore almshouse, marrying rashly, and seeing his modest Two Figures at a Stove (1845) exhibited at the National Academy of Design, he left for Europe in 1845, returning to the United States only infrequently for short visits to Baltimore. His first twenty years in that city provided Woodville with much of the pictorial inspiration he would develop in his last ten years in Europe, and Wolff also draws on the Baltimore milieu to flesh out his discussions of paintings.

A lively, polyglot city in a border state, Woodville’s birthplace nurtured continual debate on the question of slavery and saw more than its share of anti-Catholic and temperance-related controversy. Nevertheless, the primary venue for his work was New York City, where he quickly became a star artist within the popular American Art-Union. Because of his residency in Europe, Woodville, more than most painters, was almost completely dependent on the Art-Union to “make” his reputation, write about him in its journal, and disseminate his images in engraved form. This situation of imposed authorial distance, with the cultural producer necessarily yielding interpretive agency to the marketplace, is characteristic of the “new economy” of the 1840s that has been notably examined by Sean Wilentz. Following Wilentz, Wolff emphasizes this dynamic of geographic and distributive displacement, concluding that it effectively masks Woodville’s intentions from our view. The point is a good one, but one might also go further to examine that controlling marketplace in much greater detail, perhaps through the circulation of prints. This type of particularized scholarship is not seen here, nor indeed is it widespread in the American field.

Once in Europe, Woodville spent a year as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy, remaining in that city until 1851. Two years earlier, he had separated from his wife, Mary Theresa, and had begun a relationship with a German artist, Antoinette Schnitzler, finally marrying her in 1854; Woodville had two children with each of his wives. His final place of residence was London, where he moved for the last two years of his life. From what we can tell, Woodville was unusually private, at least in the way he concealed the potentially scandalous events of his European homelife from his family back in Baltimore. Yet in his ten years abroad—exhibiting, forming artistic friendships, renting or buying property, raising children, and (almost certainly) selling works that never made it to the United States—the artist must have left a documentary trail that has yet to be unearthed. Wolff uses the existing literature on the Düsseldorf Academy to posit Woodville’s influences and friendships and to set his residency there within the context and controversies of pedagogic battles and Prussian nationalism. Beyond that, however, he seems not to have plumbed the European archives that might shed light on the decade his artist spent in Germany, France, and England.

The bulk of Wolff’s work is dedicated to examining the five or six major Woodville canvases in light of what he terms “the economic disruption and social distress accompanying the maturation of capitalism” (8). The artist’s vision is singular, as Wolff writes: “Woodville set his paintings in remarkably cramped spaces that often look more like mazes than rooms. Rarely did he set his figures within the ordinary confines of four corners; he was a geometrician, rather, who compulsively repeated and layered simple, hard-edged shapes into complicated, slanted amalgams of social meaning” (9). A dual formal/social mode of analysis works well with Woodville, especially for his mature paintings such as Waiting for the Stage (1851): the slow, dim light that banks on surfaces as in a smoky still life by Jean-Siméon Chardin; the silent pause of suspended card playing broken only by the rustle of a newspaper; the partial, faceted views; and the vague corner recesses and faint chalk marks on the slate board all contribute to a charged environment of tension and uncertainty. Wolff scores points when he compares such nuanced paintings to similar subjects painted by William Sidney Mount, Francis William Edmonds, James Goodwyn Clonney, and Christian Mayr. With their predilection for sarcasm, obvious humor, and lampooned characters, these artists—or rather their works—seem less “human” to Wolff, and he rightly insists that “Woodville breathed more life into his protagonists than did his fellow genre painters. They look less like convenient symbols than like people with many ideas in mind at once” (83).

These ideas correspond to the “messy” state of antebellum American society, which is, in large part, this book’s primary topic. War, expansion, cheating, racism, and alienation are just a few of the issues hinted at or addressed outright in Woodville’s imagery, yet Wolff cautions that the artist’s paintings will never be neatly inscribed into the debates of his era. He suggests that twentieth-century interpreters have followed their nineteenth-century predecessors too closely in assuming that genre painting resolves its period’s anxieties with transparent and efficient narratives, always with a proffered lesson or visual adage. Woodville’s art, at least, seems less sure of itself, more prone to irony; he “summoned fringe characters and directed them in dramas that speak more to his era’s disorder” (44–45). Wolff’s Woodville is always an outsider, but his “fluid, illusory” characters usually frustrate any attempt to connect them to their author. Since Woodville left such a paltry written record, Wolff elects Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and especially Melville as his spokesmen—“experts” on the subject of cultural dissent and discontentment with the bourgeois marketplace of values. Melville, who appears so frequently in this volume as to be a fellow protagonist, might seem an odd comparative figure for Woodville. The novelist tends to sit uneasily within his American skin; his sometimes tortured, lumbering work proved difficult to digest for his antebellum audience. Woodville’s images, in contrast, were universally successful, polished productions valued for their seductive craft and seeming legibility. Though the reception of the paintings remains difficult to gauge, Wolff endeavors to convince us that they speak as deeply to the insecurities of the epoch as Melville’s prose.

This is most apparent in Woodville’s scenes of card games in waiting rooms, where themes of deception and conniving are situated within a general climate of suspicion that is historically specific to the late 1840s and early 1850s. Wolff makes the interesting suggestion that the paintings could be seen as a visual equivalent of the many behind-the-scenes “tours” of card dens and drinking establishments published in the popular press; readers presumably used them as a means of securing a vicarious taste of forbidden low life, along with useful knowledge that would ensure against becoming a victim of the confidence games practiced in such venues. He makes a similar connection between Woodville’s Politics in an Oyster House (1848) and the short-lived phenomenon of the “oyster-house critic,” a type of blustery, direct newspaper reporter who came by his insights through “loafing” in the right establishments.

In examining Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848), Wolff contributes to a more layered understanding of this celebrated image. The mix of reactions to news from the front has always been understood as the primary driver of narrative in the work, but Wolff’s convincing excavation of a vein of anti-imperialistic sentiment among certain sectors of the American public adds depth to the more reserved expressions of several of Woodville’s figures. Anguished letters from soldiers published in the penny press, worries about violence and the horrors of field hospitals, and fears that the United States had become a selfish bully on the international stage were widespread. Wolff reads the elderly figure straining to hear news of the Mexican War as taking a dim view of the conflict, and this generational divide, with the aged veteran bemoaning the unprincipled barbarity of the younger warrior, becomes the lens through which he views Old ’76 and Young ’48 (1849), a composition that plays out the recounting of war stories in a more domestic context. However, Wolff overemphasizes the supposed familial tensions between grandfather and grandson, and though his description of Old ’76 and Young ’48 as Woodville’s most political canvas is uncharacteristically insistent, it remains his least persuasive proposition; the author’s readings of body language and expression just don’t seem to correspond to the painted image.

The dance between object and context takes a variety of forms in this volume. Sometimes the two are pressed together in close embrace; at other times, they separate and spin off in independent gyrations. In such instances, the links become tenuous. This problem affects the book’s conclusion, in which Wolff considers Woodville’s last painting, The Sailor’s Wedding (1853), exhibited in New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of the same year. Wolff has a difficult time accounting for the appearance of the painting in the small and unprepossessing collection of American art in the Crystal Palace, and the work did not, evidently, inspire a single review. Still, this “hook” prompts quite a few pages on the history, organization, and, ultimately, the failure of the exhibition—an interesting tangent that, in actuality, has very little to do with the painting.

By ending with this melancholy episode, Wolff seems to be suggesting a similar failure on the part of the artist, or at least of his art. It is a rather abrupt and pessimistic ending to a book that otherwise makes a winning case for its fascinating subject. Yet a lengthy and sweeping conclusion would also have undercut Wolff’s main point: that Woodville’s art is one of deception and deflection, resistant to any kind of neat packaging. Such unresolved complexity can be a virtue, and Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger opens some new doors in American art history. Its ruminative and novel presentation of Woodville as a kind of semiotic “shill” (to use a term favored by Wolff) should hopefully prompt others to test themselves against his painted games of chance.