Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [27]
Probably inspired by his mentor’s presence, Finley painted an All-stonesque full-length of a girl wandering in the ruins of a Gothic abbey, emblematic of her failing health: “I always thought he had a great deal in him,” Allston commented. Allston himself began a mammoth painting of Belshazzar’s Feast, the canvas stretching across nearly the entire back wall of his studio. He expected to finish the picture in six or eight months, then put it profitably on exhibition. A perfectionist, however, he would do and undo Belshazzar’s Feast the rest of his life.
In September, Lucrece gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter they christened Susan Walker Morse. Finley was able to enjoy his infant barely two months, however, his here-and-there commissions making for a back-and-forth existence. He had to leave for Washington to do his portrait of President Monroe, and head from there to Charleston for the social season. His brother Sidney, now a ministerial student at the Andover Seminary, accompanied Lucrece, baby Susan, and nurse Nancy to the home of Lucrece’s parents in New Hampshire, where they stayed until Finley returned from Charleston some six months later.
The addition of Susan made this parting from Lucrece more than usually wrenching—“and I don’t care to try it again,” Finley said. Washington did not much lift his spirits. The nation’s capital had a “very mean aspect”—badly built houses scattered over a windy space of uneven ground without connecting streets, the landscape blotched with swamps and vacant lots. And the work was frustrating. The President treated him without formality, inviting him to dinner three times, and to tea. But the subject was often called away during the sittings, too busy to pose longer than ten or twenty minutes at a time.
Finley managed to do no more than take the President’s face, leaving his body to be filled in. He made a bust-length copy of the face for one of Monroe’s daughters, vividly rendering the President’s ruddy complexion and deeply cleft chin. She said that her father thought it the only portrait that really looked like him—although he had also been painted by Gilbert Stuart, many of whose portraits Finley ranked with Vandyke’s. When later completed, the full-length portrait won admirers too, despite its fuzzy unfinished-looking torso. The New York Academy of Arts asked to exhibit it, “presenting you to the New York public in the most graceful way.”
Samuel F. B. Morse, James Monroe (White House Collection)
From Washington, Finley set out for South Carolina through a violent December snowstorm that nearly upset his creaking coach, the horses toppling under their crust of ice and icicles. The tough going made an apt prelude to his season in Charleston. The city he returned to early in 1820 was in economic decline. Since the war with England, Americans had turned much of their attention from foreign affairs to internal improvement and domestic manufactures, with seemingly unlimited opportunities for average but energetic people to make money. The country was growing, too, at a rate that stirred hopes for national greatness—its territorial claims extending to the Pacific Ocean, more and more new states seeking admission to the Union. In 1819, however, the intense economic development withered into a financial depression that would last almost a decade. Businesses failed, some half-million workers were left without means of support, philanthropic groups doled out soup.
Finley discovered that the depression had reached Charleston, where cotton