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By Root 1467 0

near the tall white steeple of St. Michael’s Church. This time his search for a living to support himself and Lucrece was repaid. He soon became a sought-after painter in Charleston, earning $60 and $70 apiece for his portraits—four or five times what he got for the same painting in New England. Over time, one rice and indigo planter hired him to do nineteen family portraits; in appreciation, Finley presented to him as a gift the still-unsold Judgment of Jupiter. By mid-March Finley had completed twenty-seven portraits and had commissions for forty more: “with application,” he wrote to Lucrece, “I can make a fortune in a few years.” He planned to return to Charleston for the next social season, this time bringing Lucrece as his wife.

With his first commercial success as a painter, Finley could afford to act on his pious belief in charitable giving, especially to religious causes. He sent $20 to the theological seminary at Princeton, another $20 to the Board of Missions—“little enough considering how abundantly the Lord is pouring wealth into my lap.” He forwarded several hundred dollars to his parents, as a loan to help them pay off their many debts.

Capable now of earning a thousand dollars a month, he wildly believed, Finley stopped peddling his and Sidney’s inventions. Although he had taken along a model of their fire engine to display in Charleston, he had become “heartily sick” of the whole business: “it yields much vexation, labor, and expense, and no profit.” Inquiries about foreign patents for the flexible leather piston revealed that a French patent would be costly, and that someone in England had already patented what appeared to be the same device. Moreover, a New Hampshire demonstration of the fire engine had failed, he learned, prompting a spectator to comment, “Mr Morse better stick to his brush, he will do well enough then but as to Engines he’d better let them alone.”

Finley’s plentiful commissions came with a price. His customers were demanding, in the way that made artists in the “higher branches” of painting look down on portraitists as mere servants, hired flatterers. One patron gave him an engraving of Chief Justice John Marshall and specified that he wanted his son depicted in the same attitude. And dressed in a black coat and white waistcoat. And seated in a beautiful chair at a handsome table—against a backdrop of magnificent scenery. Another patron required that the subject’s right hand must nestle in a partly buttoned coat, “his left arm being entirely exposed and the left hand with glove on, resting on the hilt of the sword.” Not all his employers were satisfied with the results, either. Some thought his pictures good likenesses but painted hastily.

Finley did tend to leave his portraits unpolished. Yet his popularity was the deserved reward of matured skill and insight. Despite his loving admiration for Allston, in depicting his sitters he departed from his arch-Romantic mentor. Where Allston suffused his paintings with an aura of moonlit fantasy, Finley clung to some advice by Gilbert Stuart: “Be rather pointed than fuzzy…. you cannot be too particular in what you do to see what sort of an animal you are putting down.”

Samuel F. B. Morse, Rev. and Mrs. Hiram Bingham (Yale University Art Gallery)

Accordingly, he emphasized candid observation and concrete detail, conveying his sharp sense of character through careful representation of posture, hair, facial contours. He acknowledged his patrons’ wealth, elaborately rendering their clothing and jewelry. But he usually granted their faces no flattery. He bluntly depicted his sitters as lackluster, gawky, porcine, or whatever else his eye recorded, as in his portrait of the New England missionaries the Reverend and Mrs. Hiram Bingham.

During Finley’s six-month absence in the South, Lucrece remained with her family in New Hampshire. She missed him badly and wrote often: “dearest love,” one letter began, “how painful this separation is to me who love you with so much tenderness and affection.” But Finley’s return to Charlestown in the early