• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1505 0

received the agonizing news too late to return for Lucrece’s funeral, which was held without him. But on the long slow stagecoach trip back to New Haven he paused in Baltimore to observe the Sabbath, and sent a letter to his parents: “Oh, is it possible—is it possible? shall I never see my dear wife again? … I fear I shall sink under it.” Every day made evident to him another bond to Lucrece he had taken for granted, which now was all too plainly ruptured. “Oh, what a blow! I dare not give myself up to the full survey of its desolating effects.” His attachment had been strengthened, too, by her ardent affection for him, and by her piety. In her trunk he discovered a personal journal recording her arduous self-examination for grace and her delight in at last feeling qualified to take communion. He had guided her through the conversion process, their souls wrapped together. No wonder he now felt heartsick, empty, “as if my very heart itself had been torn from me.”

And what would become of his children, “one of the darkest points in my future”? He left young Charles and his infant son in New Haven with his parents and Nancy Shepherd. He took Susan to live with him in New York, where the family with whom he boarded looked after her. Perhaps with some thought of also moving the boys to New York, he rented a three-story house on Canal Street, planning to let part of it to a couple rent-free in exchange for cleaning, washing, and some cooking. But Susan felt homesick, cried, wanted to see her little brothers. After two months he brought her back to New Haven. Much as he wanted the children with him, it seemed impossible to manage. He sent money for their upkeep and often thought of paying them a short visit, “but dare not think of it,” he said.

As he tried to get back to his painting, Finley felt tired and preoccupied, “ready almost to give up.” Once he got going, however, he threw himself into the work relentlessly. Sitting before his easel all week from seven in the morning until past midnight, by the Sabbath he felt “exceedingly nervous,” he said, “so that my whole body and limbs would shake.” Lafayette had sent him a sympathizing note on Lucrece’s death, promising to finish the large portrait they had begun in Washington. The general came to New York in July, after laying the cornerstone of a fiftieth-anniversary Bunker’s Hill monument in Boston, before a throng of forty thousand. The many demands on his time, however, allowed Finley no more than a “few casual glimpses” of him before his return to France.

Although still uncompleted, the prestigious commission brought Finley other important orders for portraits. During the winter and spring of 1825–26—“pumping hard,” he said—he created several memorable images of distinguished contemporaries, including the Knickerbocker poet-journalist William Cullen Bryant and the popular governor DeWitt Clinton, chief sponsor of the just completed 350-mile-long Erie Canal. The carefully painted pictures have not only historical value but also a fascinating presence—of vulnerable sensitivity in Bryant, in Clinton of bullnecked combativeness.

Finley’s commission also brought him election as an Associate in the American Academy of the Fine Arts. The rank entitled him to participate in the Academy’s annual exhibitions and to enter its gallery free of charge. This relatively minor bit of recognition may not have provided much relief from his sorrow. “There are times,” he wrote, “when I realize her loss with as much intensity as ever.” But his election to the Academy now figured in earning him a unique place in the history of American art.

Like Finley’s ill-fated Charleston Academy, the American Academy had mostly languished since its founding in 1802, installed for the last decade behind City Hall in a converted almshouse. The idea of an academy devoted to the discussion and teaching of art had been alive in Europe since at least the sixteenth century. But the wealthy New Yorkers who founded the American Academy and owned its property had little interest in training practicing painters and