Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [38]
Samuel F. B. Morse, William Cullen Bryant (National Academy of Design)
The Academy’s current president was the distinguished history painter and Revolutionary War veteran, Colonel John Trumbull. One of very few American artists with an international reputation, he alone held together whatever art community existed in New York at the time. He had studied with Benjamin West in London and had personally known many of the Founding Fathers, many of whose faces he had taken from life in depicting such events as the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He got along easily with the directors of the Academy—bankers, merchants, physicians, and other New York gentlemen of taste and fortune.
Samuel F. B. Morse, DeWitt Clinton (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Trumbull had liabilities as well, including a scandalously hard-drinking wife and an illegitimate son who had joined the British army. Nearing seventy, his energy waning, he was quick to sense and resent disrespect. And unlike Reynolds and West at the Royal Academy, he had no interest in developing art theory or nurturing young artists. “I would sooner,” he remarked, “make a Son of mine a Butcher or a shoemaker.”
In October, about six months after his election as an Associate, Finley was given a petition to the Academy drafted by some disgruntled students. The Academy offered no art classes, but during certain morning hours it allowed students to draw from its collection of antique casts, which included models of the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön purchased from the Louvre. The students who composed the petition had gone to the Academy one morning to draw, but found the door locked. The doorkeeper reportedly said he would open up when it suited him. Trumbull reportedly approved and commented, haughtily: “These young men should remember that the gentlemen have gone to a great expense in importing casts, and that they [the students] have no property in them…. beggars are not to be choosers.” The students’ petition asked the Academy to honor the privileges it had extended.
The document seems to have come to Finley with the request that he present it to the Academy. Stress “seems”: the several surviving accounts of the events that followed over the next three months are fragmentary, biased, and contradictory. But Finley’s increasing prominence and his standing as an Associate did make him a likely choice to present the petition. And after his abortive attempts to found an academy in Charleston and New Haven, it did occur to him when settling in New York that he might replace the aging Trumbull as head of the American Academy. Nor had he forgotten the resolution he entered in his journal when he left England ten years before: “On returning to America, let my endeavor be to rouse the feeling for works of art.”
Finley seems to have invited some Academy students to his Canal Street house to discuss the situation, with two results. The petition was dropped, and a Drawing Association was formed, headed by Finley. The members proposed to meet three evenings a week to draw together from casts, for mutual improvement. Enrolling such well-known New York painters as Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole, the club presented itself not as a competitor to the American Academy but an extension of it. Trumbull said he was “delighted.” He lent the artists some of the Academy’s casts, and arranged for them to use rooms at the New-York Historical Society, of which he was vice president.
Finley was pleased by the drawing club’s atmosphere of cooperation, especially as the members attributed it to him. “There is a spirit of harmony among the artists,”