American Hamlet

Sometimes an exhibit catalog, or a companion book, constitutes a whole other exhibit. Such is the case of the elegant coffee-table book that accompanies the Katonah Museum of Art's "Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era" (The Dixon Gallery and Gardens.)

It's not just that curator Kevin Sharp's book — which considers the parallel trajectories of the Hudson River School and the poet who wrote "Leaves of Grass" — takes a different approach from his Katonah show. It's that a book can explore works not in the exhibit.

Like Sanford Gifford's "A Coming Storm" (1863), owned by Edwin Booth, 19th-century America's greatest actor and a brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes.

E. Booth lent the demonically swirling landscape to an April 1865 exhibit at the National Academy in Manhattan, where a customs inspector named Herman Melville saw it and more important, saw in it a metaphor for the tragedy of the Civil War and the Booth family.

Melville would ponder that metaphor in his ekphrastic poem "The Coming Storm," in which he cast E. Booth — "Shakespeare's pensive child" — as Hamlet offstage as well as on.

Edwin Booth (1833-93) — a friend to and collector of Hudson River School artists like Gifford, whose "Baltimore 1862 — Twilight" (seen here) is part of the Katonah show — remains a resonant figure in American culture. Even without his brother John's assassination of Abraham Lincoln — an act that would haunt Edwin to the end of his days — his life was filled with suffering. His beloved first wife, actress Mary "Molly" Devlin, died young. His second wife, actress Mary McVicker, went mad. The only child of his second union, Edgar, died soon after his birth.

E. Booth himself was the subject of an assassination attempt and a carriage accident that rendered his left arm useless. He gained and lost several enterprises, including Broadway's Booth Theatre. Alcoholism, unsurprisingly, was a continual struggle. And yet, through it all, he continued to perform, refining his greatest role, Hamlet.

He didn't merely play the hero. He was one, saving the life of Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's oldest son, when the Harvard student fell through the gap between a moving train and the Jersey City station platform around 1864.

The storyteller in me can't resist that tale or Edwin Booth's life. What makes one brother a savior of men and the other a destroyer? I think the crux was that John Wilkes Booth saw himself as the star in the grand, romantic drama that was his own life, not unlike another assassin with a trio of names, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Whereas Edwin Booth, for all his identification with Shakespeare's greatest role, never confused playing Hamlet with being him. He, too, was bold, cautious, true.

The image of Sanford Gifford's "Baltimore 1862-Twilight" appears courtesy of the Katonah Museum of Art.