Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [42]
At one moment Jedediah shuddered, laboring for breath. Finley assured him that the Savior would not desert him in his hour of trial. “O no, he gives me already a foretaste of heaven,” Jedediah replied earnestly; “I have not strength to express the joy I feel.” In what Finley believed was an allusion to Lucrece, his father added: “I feel no gloom about the grave knowing … in whose company I am to rise.” A few minutes later, with Richard and Sidney still en route from New York, Finley closed his father’s eyes. Next day he recalled Psalms 37: 37, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace.”
But Jedediah’s end had not been so peaceful. He died convinced that his labors had gone unappreciated. He had prepared a 500-page report on his tour of Indian villages, but the government refused to publish it—“to mortify & wound your feelings,” Elizabeth said. Lamenting the loss of his ministry, his geographies no longer selling as well as before, he had had to mortgage his house and borrow to keep up appearances.
Jedediah’s will testified to the deepening financial failures of his last few years. To his three sons he left only $50 each. Noting that Finley had received his portion through his training in England, he gave the copyrights of his books to Richard and Sidney, requiring them to pay a third of the income to Elizabeth. The remainder of the estate went to her, but this amounted to less than nothing. At the time of his death Jedediah had $7000 but owed $14,000. As Elizabeth summed up her situation soon afterward, “At age 61 years I have three little motherless children to take care of besides three young men all without wives who have never yet been from under my care at home or abroad.”
Throughout Finley’s life, “Morse” had meant Jedediah, the “Father of American Geography.” But by his lectures and his activities as president of the National Academy, “Morse” was beginning to mean himself— New York City’s, perhaps the nation’s, chief spokesman for American art. Artists elsewhere noticed and sent congratulations. “The progress of your Academy has produced a sensation,” Thomas Sully wrote. The Philadelphia painter John Neagle hurrahed: American artists had at last shown themselves to be self-sufficient, “qualified to preside over and govern ‘An Academy of Arts’ without the adventitious & aristocratic influence of the MD’S, LLD’S or ASSES!” The news reached even London: “Morse,” said his old friend Charles Leslie, “seems to be a great man among them at New York.”
Finley’s completed Lafayette brought further notice and praise. The eight-by-five-foot canvas was displayed at the N.A.D.’s second show, held this time in the city’s best exhibition room, the skylighted upper floor of the handsome Arcade Bath building. The portrait depicts the thick-waisted sixty-eight-year-old general standing at the top of a flight of stairs. In his black coat and yellow pantaloons he looks baggy-eyed, a bit mournful, quintessentially Gallic. Several newspapers hailed the painting for accurate likeness, but it aims, rather, at symbolic representation. Finley explained some of the many symbolic touches: a glowing sunset sky, marking the glorious evening of Lafayette’s life; a heliotrope facing the sun, alluding to his unswerving consistency; an empty pedestal beside busts of Washington and Franklin, waiting to complete the national trinity by receiving a bust of the Marquis himself. Concerned more with the thought than the thing, Finley painted not so much Lafayette as the Idea of Lafayette—an authentic American