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By Root 1399 0

back. He lowered the price of his portraits and boosted his efforts to please. But most people who had once paid much attention to him now ignored him. His few patrons were harder than before to please, too, and slower to pay. “Cotton and rice are so dull,” he told Lucrece. “I know not how much I shall bring home.” He reminded himself to view his frustration from a religious perspective: should he receive good from God and not also evil? Still, he heard out advice from his parents and brothers that he think about spending the winters not in Charleston but in New Orleans, Savannah, or Washington. He reassured Lucrece that he favored New York: “if I can get established there I think it will be much better for me than to be so far from home.”

Finley considered another way out. At the moment, aspiring artists in America taught themselves or worked in the studios of established artists. He might open a school for painting and sculpture in New Haven, based on what he knew of the Royal Academy. He already owned nearly enough casts, prints, and books to equip such a school himself. Together with portrait commissions, ten or fifteen pupils at $100 a year would provide a livable income, especially if he also gave a course of public lectures on the fine arts. In the evenings he began devising a format for the talks, certain he could make them “highly popular.”

Finley realized that the whole scheme might seem another of his impractical flights. But teaching and lecturing in New Haven would keep him together with his family. And it would, after four years of distraction, return him to his vocation, “the higher branches of poetical and Historical Painting which it is high time I should begin to think of again if ever I mean to pursue them with success.”

Perhaps simply to test his idea, Finley tried to lay the groundwork in Charleston for a South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts. Collaborating with the Comptroller General of the state, an amateur painter-sculptor named John Cogdell, he drew up rules for the Academy and submitted a resolution asking the city council for a building site in the public square. He felt no great certainty that the Academy would win public support. “It looks prosperous now,” he wrote to Lucrece, “but I am not sanguine as to its success.” With good reason. Many of the subscribers he enlisted failed to pay up, a lottery to purchase plaster study-casts yielded little money, and the completed building ultimately cost three times the estimate. The Academy languished for a decade before vanishing in 1830, its property sold to pay debts.

Finley had planned to return home at the end of March, earlier than usual. Business was slack, and Lucrece was pregnant, expecting the birth of their second child. Some new commissions kept him in Charleston until April, however. Meanwhile Lucrece caught a severe cold that lamed her arm. “I dread the trial,” she said, “still I trust I can wait with humble submission to my heavenly Father.” Finley soon received news that he had another daughter, named Elizabeth Ann. “God did help you,” he wrote to Lucrece, “he made your trial short.” They asked God for grace to bring up their children in the admiration of the Lord. But fourteen days out of the womb the infant became critically ill and died, medicine having failed to cure her “canker of the bowels.”

Still without a home or an income, Finley returned briefly to New Haven then went off seeking portrait business in Massachusetts, Vermont, and upstate New York. Another rootless six months on the road, with the lonely wait for letters reporting that little Susan looked for him when she awoke, saying, “Papa all gone he don’t been in Mama’s bed now.”

During his tour, Finley conceived a bold new painting, the most novel and complex he had ever attempted. Its subject would be the monumental interior of the House of Representatives, newly rebuilt since the British torched the Capitol in 1814. The great canvas, eleven feet wide by over seven feet high, would include portraits of all the House members. The ambitious idea grew out of his experience