Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [10]
Finley first decided to submit a drawing of a classical statue of The Gladiator. Displeased with it, he made another—from a plaster cast of the Laocoön, “the most difficult of all the statues.” Allston praised this drawing as superior to most such works made by third-year students. It at least succeeded in getting Finley admitted to the Royal Academy for a year as a “probationer.”
Finley entered an exclusive artistic domain, sumptuous beyond anything in the raw United States. The Academy was located in Somerset House, a monumental palace fronting the Thames, all colonnades and classical pilasters. Within the Academy were an Antique school, where students drew from casts of classical statues; a meeting room and library, adorned with paintings by West and Sir Joshua Reynolds; and a nearly fifty-foot-square Great Room for exhibitions, inscribed above the doorway, in Greek, “No one uninspired by the Muses may enter.” The Academy did not teach painting, offering instruction only in drawing the human figure. Students painted at home. Older artists sometimes dropped in to draw from a model, so at the next easel a student might find, say, J. M. W. Turner.
Between study at the prestigious Academy and work at his lodgings, Finley painted and drew all day and into the evening. As practice he and Charles Leslie posed for each other in fancy costume—Finley in Scotch tartan plaid with plumed bonnet—and did portraits of acquaintances, who paid for the canvas and colors. Sometimes they painted together in the fields in the open air before breakfast, to study the effect of morning light on the landscape. On his own Finley often walked the mile and a half from his lodgings to Burlington House, residence of Lord Elgin, to draw from the celebrated Elgin marbles, fifth-century B.C. sculptured friezes that, in his view, made all later sculpture seem inferior. Although most of Finley’s London works have unfortunately become lost, a profile self-portrait painted around 1812 survives—himself as a handsome romantic figure of vivid eye and curling dark hair.*
Allston oversaw Finley’s progress. His blunt criticism was not easy to take, as Finley admitted:
It is a mortifying thing sometimes to me, when I have been painting all day very hard, and begin to be pleased with what I have done, and on showing it to Mr. Allston with the expectation of praise, and not only of praise, but a score of “excellents,” “well dones,” and “admirables,” I say it is mortifying to hear him after a long silence say, “very bad Sir, that is not flesh, it is ‘mud’ Sir, it is painted with ‘brick dust and clay.’ ”
At such moments Finley sometimes felt ready to gash the canvas. But on reflection he realized that to improve he must see his own faults. And Allston invariably cheered him up by offering practical advice: “put a few flesh tints here, a few grey ones there … clear up such & such a part, by such and such colors.” Sometimes Allston took the palette and brushes and showed him how.
With Finley’s growing competence came enlarged interest in painting, deeper understanding of its demands, and greater clarity about his own aims. He undertook a program of reading—“the old poets, Spencer [sic], Chaucer, Dante, Tasso &c &c. these are necessary to a painter.” He understood that the painter must study everything in nature with minute attention, under varying conditions. Every species of tree, for instance, then its different parts, then
the color of those different parts in light