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By Root 1631 0

Marpessa’s choice to abandon the god of artistic inspiration and return to her mortal husband, he perhaps had in mind a question that his return to Charlestown raised about himself. Did he belong to domestic life, or to his artistic career? To art, he believed. Either way, he felt it necessary to tell his parents that he did not want to endure in person the scoldings they had administered by mail. “I have not, that I recollect since I have been in England, had a turn of low spirits, except when I have received letters from home.” The letters came with affection and solicitude, he knew. But they also contained so much nagging, distrust, and doubt that after reading them he felt miserable for a week, “as though I had been guilty of every crime.”

Finley set down for Jedediah and Elizabeth the terms on which he was returning. He would linger only a year, earning enough money by painting portraits to go abroad again to continue his studies. He would not pursue a permanent career as a portrait painter. He would never abandon his long-range aim of becoming a successful history painter: “My ambition is to be among those who shall revive the splendour of the 15th century, to rival the genius of a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, or a Titian; my ambition is to be enlisted in the constellation of genius which is now rising in this country.”

Finley’s manifesto struck Elizabeth no more agreeably than had his teenaged pleas from New Haven to have brandy in his room or go gunning. He addressed his parents from on high, she said, as “poor shortsighted worms.” She sent back pages of reproof, with what she called “a word of kind advice”:

we may and ought to tell you, and that with the greatest plainness, of anything that we deem improper in any part of your conduct, either in a civil, social, or religious view…. and it will ever be your duty to receive from us the advice, counsel, and reproof, which we may, from time to time, favor you with, with the most perfect respect and dutiful observance.

Whether in England or America, that is, Finley remained his parents’ child and would have to listen and obey—even, she added with a sting, “when you are head of a family, and even of a profession, if you ever should be either.”

Jedediah returned a softer answer. He accepted without argument Finley’s decision to remain in America for only a year. But he added his hope that “artists in your profession, and of the first class”—as he respectfully referred to Finley’s situation—might soon be so well supported in the country that they would not have to study and paint abroad. “In this case you can come and live with us,” he said, “which would give us much satisfaction.”

Although Finley considered his return a pause before a fresh start, he brought with him a mission as well. He would do what he could to establish the arts in the United States so that, as his father hoped, the nation’s painters would not have to become exiles and expatriates. What Americans needed was Taste, he believed, the ability to appreciate different kinds of excellence and to separate the real from the meretricious. Such Taste, after all, was acquired; it could be had by anyone of common sense who took a serious interest. Creating it meant introducing first-rate pictures into the country and forming institutions such as the Royal Academy. Sometime before leaving England, he entered a resolution in his journal: “On returning to America, let my endeavor be to rouse the feeling for works of art.”

The speed of sailing ships in 1815 was about the same as it had been for the last century. Finley’s trip to England from New York had taken twenty-six days, and what with the piano playing, flying fish, and buffoonery of the British dramatist Minshull, had been a delight. “I am sometimes at a loss to understand,” he had written, “why so much is made of a voyage across the ocean.”

Now he found out.

Finley sailed from Liverpool in the Ceres, bound for Boston. The ship crashed through one howling storm after another. Its foremast almost toppled under winds so fierce they could not be faced.