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Finley’s Lafayette did not please everyone. One reviewer wrote that he “might have made a much better picture of any thing or any body.” As Finley’s prominence more and more exposed him to public scrutiny, he won detractors as well as admirers. The New York Mirror put down a portrait he displayed in the third annual N.A.D. exhibition, for “the unskillful manner in which the colours have been laid on.” Another viewer derided Finley’s portrait of William Cullen Bryant as vapid, “too much like a common man—Mr. Morse never could have understood and felt his genius.” Still another critic sensed in Finley—correctly—pretensions to having attained rank in an aristocracy of talent. Much as Jedediah had styled himself “D.D.F.A.A.S.H.S.,” Finley now signed himself “P.N.A.,” President of the National Academy—as if, it was said, he wanted to make artists princes or knights.

Barely two years old, Finley’s Academy also came under attack, some of it intense. He had advised the members not to lash out at Trumbull’s American Academy, indignant though many felt over its past treatment of them. Further controversy, he said, would be expensive, and a distraction from their studies: “silence is undoubtedly the best defence.”

Samuel F. B. Morse, The Marquis de Lafayette (City of New York, Office of the Mayor)

Without intending to, however, Finley himself touched off a mean-spirited public battle between his organization and Trumbull’s. It began with a lengthy commencement address he delivered at the conclusion of the N.AD.’s first academic year, published with notes as a sixty-page pamphlet entitled Academies of Arts (1827). His arguments are too many and complex to be summarized briefly. But in essence he contended that from late-medieval Venice to the present, art academies had two features in common: instruction for students and governance by the artists themselves. Throughout their history, academies served especially to teach students to draw, accurate representation being the foundation for all the arts of design. But American students would face public insensitivity and ignorance, the country being as yet unable to appreciate genuine merit: “Bold pretension will be successful, while more retiring merit will be neglected, for it will not be understood.” And American patrons preferred buying supposed European masterworks—most of them fakes—to works by living American artists, a practice certain to “retard the progress of modern art.”

Finley’s pamphlet provoked a seventeen-page reply in the North American Review, New England’s most prestigious intellectual journal. The anonymous author was a Boston lawyer and amateur painter named Franklin Dexter. More sympathetic than the classicist Finley to new currents of Romantic thinking, he argued that when artists govern an academy they tend to establish a school, systematizing what should arise from the student’s observation of nature. By emphasizing accurate drawing, too, academies teach students to make dull copies of what happens to be before them, ignoring poetical conception. Dexter also countered Finley’s pessimistic picture of American taste. The enemy to national progress in the arts is not a snobbish preference for European works, but the utilitarian spirit of the present age: “Eloquence, poetry, painting, and sculpture—do not belong to such an age; they are already declining, and they must give way before the progress of popular education, science, and the useful arts.”

Finley published a thoughtful rebuttal to Dexter’s article. Writing for a New York newspaper, he argued among other things that the very progress of practical arts in America reflected a national energy that would at some future date also elevate painting and its sister arts: “Their place in the march of civilization is in the train of the useful arts, and these, their avant couriers, have long and eminently occupied a distinguished place in our country.” The elegant arts would someday thrive in practical America, he prophesied, because they need the atmosphere of a free government