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not being God, however, it cannot create out of nothing. The artist can only combine into new forms the existent God-given “principles” of nature, such as Motion, Order, Unity, and Mystery. Lecture Three demonstrated how painting’s sister arts use these principles to stir the Imagination. To reproduce natural effects of Motion, for instance, poets divide their language into metrical feet, musicians vary their tempi, landscape gardeners build brooks. In his final lecture Finley showed how painters too reproduce these familiar principles. Much as poets render natural forces through words, painters use lines, chiaroscuro, and color. The painter imitates Motion, for instance, by arrangements of color that move the viewer’s eye from point to point, or imitates Mystery by contrasts of light and dark. To illustrate, Finley held up and analyzed engravings of works by Titian, Rubens, Poussin, and other masters.

While speaking of general principles and old masters, Finley obviously had his own situation in mind. By refining American taste he hoped at the same time to create American buyers for the sort of pictures he wanted to paint, to overcome the indifference that had doomed his House of Representatives: “what use is it for the Artist to cultivate his own taste,” he asked his audience, “if those around him are incapable of feeling and appreciating the beauties which are spread before them.” He generally excluded the lower classes from the future ranks of the tasteful, confining his instruction to persons such as he considered his listeners to represent, “the intelligent and well educated in all countries and ages.” In their disdain for the emergent democratic masses, at least, his lectures offered nothing to offend the patrician founders of Trumbull’s American Academy.

According to Finley, each lecture drew a larger audience than the one before, his final lecture attracting the largest audience ever assembled in the Columbia chapel. He found not much time to enjoy his success, being obliged to prepare for another important event—the first exhibition by his National Academy of Design. A private opening was held on May 13, attended by Governor Clinton, the mayor of New York City, the Columbia College faculty, and other dignitaries. Next day the Academy members welcomed in the public—the artists identifying themselves by wearing white ribbons in their buttonholes, shaped into roses. Housed on the second floor of an ordinary dwelling on lower Broadway, the exhibit stayed open through June from nine in the morning to ten at night (lit by six gas lamps). Finley contributed three portraits; Trumbull himself sent a painting, as did Allston. All of the 180 oils, watercolors, engravings, and architectural drawings were new works by living artists, not previously displayed in public—an important innovation that led Thomas Cummings to call the N.A.D. show “the first solely artistic effort at Exhibition in the country.”

Probably only a day or two before or after the opening, Finley received a letter from his mother saying she had never seen Jedediah so feeble. He would be glad to see his sons, “if they can break away from their numerous cares.” Although often tempted to drop everything for a “short look” at his children, Finley had not visited New Haven for three months. A few days after receiving his mother’s letter, he received another from her, with the news that Jedediah was now unable to get out of bed without help: “He will be much gratified to see his dear children when they can conveniently come.” Finley replied that he was tied down, “painting away with all my might,” the city Corporation pressing him to finish his full-length portrait of Lafayette: “Nothing but the most imperious necessity prevents my coming immediately…. like our good father, all his sons seem destined for most busy stations in society … not for themselves alone, but for the public benefit.”

With the news early in June that his father had only a few days to live, Finley tore himself from business. He seems to have arrived in New Haven on June 9, only hours before