• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1666 0

University saw a few crayon drawings pinned around, but otherwise everything seemed neglected and unused. Dust covered the plaster models, canvases faced the wall, stumps of brushes littered the floor. Finished with his career or not, Morse still brooded over having been denied a commission for the Capitol paintings. The never-to-be-won prize had preoccupied the best part of his life, “animated me to sacrifice all that most men consider precious, prospects of wealth, domestic enjoyments, and not least the enjoyment of country.” The disregard of Congress, he said, had killed his enthusiasm for painting.

Morse apparently had done no work on The Gem of the Republic, the history painting commissioned by some well-wishers to console him for what Congress had done. To his horror, a subscriber to the painting placed an anonymous notice about it in the New York Mirror: “Not having heard any thing of this picture for upwards of a year, it has just occurred to us to inquire what has become of it? Is Mr. Morse engaged upon it? and when is the picture to be done?” Morse drafted a seven-page reply, rehearsing the long history of his connection with the rotunda project, including his studies in France and Italy, followed by a brief history of his misfortunes with the telegraph, including its rejection by the Czar.

Wisely, Morse did nothing with this anguished moan. Instead, he printed up a circular addressed to the subscribers, announcing that he now planned to return all the money they had given him—“not that I abandon my enterprise,” he insisted. On the contrary, he intended to free his imaginative powers from the sense of financial obligation that had inhibited it, “the first necessary step to the final accomplishment of my design.” This can have been nothing more than a hope-against-hope or attempt to save face, for privately he despaired of ever being able to paint again.

Fellow artists still treated Morse as a respected member of the guild. In 1841 the National Academy of Design ordered a bust to be sculpted of him and placed in the Council Chamber. While abroad he had sent back books on art for the N.A.D. library, and he took at least some part in its activities. John Trumbull’s long-failing American Academy had ceased to exist, its property sold off, including about twenty casts of antique statues and sixty-three busts bought by the National Academy.

A serious rival to the N.A.D., however, arose in 1839 with the formation in New York of the American Art-Union. Morse and a committee of the N.A.D. met with representatives of the new group to discuss the possibility of cooperating to advance the fine arts in America. But the committees clashed over the issue of exhibitions. The Art-Union maintained a free public exhibition of works by living American artists. Morse feared that this show would deprive the N.A.D. of some good pictures and reduce public interest in its annual exhibition—the Academy’s main source of support. “We have no stockholders,” he pointed out, “no subscribers to create a fund for our use; our sole Revenue is the Exhibition.” His committee therefore asked the Art-Union to confine its exhibitions to copies of famous paintings, works by deceased artists, and works previously shown at the National Academy. Here the negotiations broke off.

Morse remained proud of having founded the N.A.D. The Academy had a new room devoted to sculpture, and now owned the country’s largest collection of studio models, affording rich means of study. When asked to supply information on the history of the arts in New York, for an official state survey, Morse observed that when the Academy began, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore led New York City in taste and enthusiasm. But currently about seventy professional artists connected with the N.A.D. lived in the city. The Academy was on its way to realizing part of the mission of its founders, “that of making New York the great centre of the Fine Arts as it has long been of the Commerce of the country.”

During his two-year engagement with daguerreotyping and politics, Morse had held