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By Root 1501 0

—an American school for training American artists. And New York City was the ideal home for it, “the capital of the country, and here the artists should have their rallying point.” But with nothing less than “professional freedom” at stake, the president would bear heavy responsibilities, “more than a balance for the honor.” Seeking advice from above, as always, he prayerfully decided that he had a calling to the office: “the cause of the Artists seems under Providence to be in some degree confided to me, and I cannot shrink from the cares and troubles.” He agreed to serve as president—as he would every year for the next fifteen years.

By his essential part in creating the National Academy of Design, Finley did much to give American artists a sense of identity and lay a foundation for the modern New York art world. Over the next decade, some four hundred students received instruction at the Academy, which over the next half century remained the most influential art institution in America. Thomas Cole, Rembrandt Peale, William Dunlap, the architect Ithiel Town, and the other original members were succeeded by such distinguished National Academicians and Associates as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The idea of lecturing on art had been with Finley since the time of his seasons in Charleston. Amid the wrangling that brought the N.A.D. into being he tried putting together four lectures. Reading widely and taking copious notes, he found the writing difficult and often thought of postponing the talks, or giving only two. But a desire to enlarge his growing reputation kept him at it: “if well done, they place me alone among the artists; I being the only one who has yet written a course of lectures in our country.”

Finley delivered his lectures over four nights in March and April 1826, in the chapel of Columbia College. They were sponsored by the New York Athenaeum—one offering in a series of talks by writers, philosophers, and scientists meant to enrich the city’s intellectual life. As literature Finley’s lectures are undistinguished. He borrowed freely from the many books he consulted, especially Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, and strained to achieve a highfalutin tone. His first lecture, for instance, opens with a convoluted by-your-leave:

If those of your Lecturers who have been in the habit of addressing a popular assembly have felt a diffidence in appearing before so refined and intelligent an audience as I now have the honor to address and have claimed your indulgence, well may I feel a diffidence in submitting to you the composition of one more accustomed to address the public through the eye than through the ear, and consequently inexperienced in the facilities of arranging a written discourse.

Despite the wearisome formality, in the history of American art Finley’s lectures have the primacy of Edgar Allan Poe’s attempts, a few years later, to educate the American public in sophisticated standards for judging literary works.

Finley took as his main subject the affinity of painting to poetry, music, and landscape gardening, and their mutual dependence on the eternal principles active in Nature. He began, that is, with the ancient doctrine of the sister arts, but gave it an important twist: “the other Arts of the Imagination have hitherto been more cultivated in our country than Painting, and I presumed that the latter would be better understood by showing it in its connexion with the former.” His lectures were a simile, comparing the unknown to the known. Unlike a European audience, his listeners in New York had had little experience of serious painting. So to suggest its features he described congruent features of carefully wrought poetry, music, and landscape gardening, kindred arts more familiar to them.

In his first lecture, Finley distinguished the Practical Arts from the Fine Arts, the aim of the latter being to please the Imagination. His second lecture set out a theology of the Fine Arts. Created in the likeness of God, humanity desires to create;