Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [30]
Finley began the work in November 1821, in Washington. Well known in the city through his father and on his own, he was cordially received, given a painting room in the Capitol, so close to the House chamber that he could hear the sound of debate through the wall. President Monroe advised him to paint the House members first, then the room: “he seems pleased with the idea of all the pictures,” Finley wrote home, “and thought they would be popular.” But Finley chose to do both at once, taking the congressmen when they could sit for him in his studio, painting the chamber when they could not. He intended to depict the scene in the legislature as it appeared by lamplight, “when the room already very splendid will appear 10 times more so.” The venerable doorkeeper of the House agreed to light the chamber’s great chandelier for him two hours each evening, so that he could make sketches.
Up at dawn, Finley worked sixteen hours a day on the painting, he said, so intently that he confused one day with another. The subject required him to make small portraits of sixty-seven congressmen, and of another nineteen figures as well—Supreme Court justices, newspapermen, doorkeepers, servants. He was able to get in six sittings a day, of two hours each; one day he held eleven sittings, equivalent to painting five ivory miniatures. The sessions went well, the House members being not just willing to pose but deeming it an honor.
Yet the painting progressed far more slowly than Finley anticipated. The semicircular House chamber presented “Herculean difficulties” in perspective—an art, he realized, in which he had little skill. He tried using a camera obscura to puzzle out the technical problems, sometimes spending a whole day erasing and re-erasing. Three weeks passed before he drew a line of the chamber on his canvas. But he solved the problems, “by the assistance of God’s grace,” and in the process gained a satisfying new ease in drawing backgrounds. “I am certain, that with diligence & perseverance,” he wrote to Lucrece, “I can make a popular & profitable picture.”
Lucrece had expected Finley to return to New Haven late in December. But his labors stretched on through January, then beyond. He asked her whether he should finish the portraits and come back briefly in February, or complete the entire painting and return permanently in April: “Can you spare me till April dearest? … You shall decide for me, my dear wife, and dear little daughter.” Lucrece had never written her husband a letter even remotely critical of him, but the question for once angered her. During his absence her mother had died, an event not unexpected yet devastating. She was pregnant again, too, and felt drooping and dizzy. “I cannot feel at all reconciled to the thoughts of your absence for several months longer,” she replied. “Shall I tell you husband, that your letter made me feel dull and unhappy?”
Finley returned to New Haven in February, bringing some eighty heads he had painted on small panels, and the giant canvas on which he would copy and arrange them. In April Lucrece gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Lucretia Ann. Born one year after the death of their second child, the infant survived only twenty-five days. How the couple dealt with their new loss is unknown. Little information about such intimate crises appears in the extant letters and journals of Finley and his family; if more at some time existed,