Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [101]
How long Morse and Draper operated their University gallery is unclear. Draper withdrew to concentrate on scientific research, and in the fall of 1840 Morse moved into new quarters at the Observer. Despite the economic depression, Sidney was prospering, his newspaper now printing 16,000 copies—“beyond our most sanguine expectations,” he said. He had purchased the six-story building that housed the paper, on the corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets. At a cost of $500 he built his brother a rooftop studio, “entirely of glass,” Morse said, “so that I have nearly the effect of outdoor light.” The light especially pleased Morse, for he had been experimenting with reduced exposure times, and believed he could ultimately take a portrait in two seconds, if not in one. The rapidity also depended on the shortness of focus in the lenses, and he put together a series of lenses that provided a focus of four and a half inches.
Morse worked hard to make his photographs pay. “I am tied hand and foot through the day,” he said, “endeavoring to realize something from the Daguerreotype portrait.” The “something” amounted to enough to get him out of debt, but not enough to repay Sidney for the cost of the studio, as he promised to do. He increased his income by taking on pupils, charging $50 for one quarter’s instruction. They learned from him not only Daguerre’s process, but also ideas about lighting, posing, and facial expression he retained from years of training and practice as a painter. His pupils soon formed a corps of American photographers. It included the famous Mathew Brady, who later praised his teacher as “the first successful introducer of this rare art in America.”
Like all of Morse’s endeavors, the latest one drew him into debate and controversy. Exhibitions of daguerreotypes provoked much public discussion of how photography might redefine art. Most believed that its eerie exactitude would diminish the value of painting and painters. The New-Yorker, reviewing François Gouraud’s exhibition of French daguerreotypes, commented that by comparison the most beautifully painted miniature seemed “a miserable daub.” “You would be led to suppose that the poor craft of painting was knocked in the head,” Thomas Cole wrote, “and we [artists] nothing to do but give up the ghost.”
Morse disputed such beliefs in a speech to the National Academy of Design. The daguerreotype was bound “to produce a great revolution in art,” he said. But its influence would be “in the highest degree favorable.” The artist would no longer have to paint from imperfect sketches that had taken him days or weeks to execute. Now he could furnish his studio with exquisite models, facsimiles of scenes and figures—not copies of nature, “but portions of nature herself.” Such images would offer unsurpassed lessons in perspective, light and shade, and other problems of optics. For the public they would form a new school of taste, teaching how to discriminate between true artists and the merely chic: “Will not the artist, who has been educated in Nature’s school of truth, now stand forth pre-eminent, while he, who has sought his models of style among fleeting fashions and corrupted tastes, will be left to merited neglect?” He saluted Daguerre as a discoverer comparable to Columbus and Galileo: “Honor to Daguerre, who has first introduced Nature to us, in the character of Painter.”
No honor, however, to Daguerre’s pupil and associate François Gouraud. The lessons Morse took from him occasioned a bitter war of words between them. It began when the New York press praised some of Morse’s daguerreotypes. Gouraud wrote to the city’s Evening Star, implying that much of the success of the pictures was owing to himself, since he had “given Mr. Morse all the instruction in my power.” Morse already