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Had it ended there, the well-mannered exchange between Finley and Dexter might be remembered as the country’s first substantial public debate on art, touching many issues of long-range importance to the arts in America. The Academy question having been opened for discussion however, others took it up. Under such pseudonyms as “A Patron,” “Middle Tint,” and “Joe Strickland” of “Memphremagog,” they turned out a score of pamphlets and newspaper articles that dragged into public view conflicting and often bitter accounts of how the National Academy of Design came to be.

One side attacked the breakaway artists as “seceders,” the other defended them as patriots, acting “as much from principle as our Republican Government.” Both sides grumbled about backstabbing and snakes in the grass, and spoke out for or against Finley or Trumbull personally. One side said Trumbull turned artists into sycophants, fawning on the rich in hopes of patronage; his exhibitions at the American Academy, showing the same pictures year after year, were a joke (“Have you seen the exhibition this year?” “No, I saw it last year”). Finley, the other side said, inflated himself “with the pompous title of President”; proceeds from exhibitions of the National Academy went to line his own pockets.

Becoming a storm center, Finley held still until the appearance of an article in the New York American by “A Lay Member.” The writer charged him with having published a series of inflammatory articles under the names “Boydell” and “Denon.” This duo had denounced Trumbull’s American Academy for among other things holding fraudulent elections, faltering under a load of debt, and being useless to the city’s artists. Insulted to be accused of hiding behind pseudonyms, Finley replied in the Evening Post, dismissing the charge as “entirely mistaken” and for the first time publicly laying out his own version of the founding of the N.A.D.

This “Exposé,” as Finley called it, enraged Trumbull. Answering back in the same newspaper he blasted Finley as a “wretched pettifogger,” damning his “gross perversion and suppression of truth.” It was Finley, he said, who had excited students at the American Academy to revolt, who had masterminded a plan to deprive the Academy of its charter of incorporation, rob it of its property. In any circumstances Trumbull was quick to take offense. But the violence of his response suggests that he may have been the “Lay Member” who sniffed out Finley behind “Boydell” and “Denon.” Invoking his advanced age and long service to the country, he told his readers that he felt duty-bound to speak plainly: “in the spirit of the olden time, I have called a Cat a Cat, and not a pretty pussy.”

Finley remained calm, at least before the public. Addressing Trumbull through the Evening Post, he said that he had “too much self-respect to spend many words in answering.” He would rest content with drawing a comparison: “The National Academy, sir, is a real Academy for the promotion of the Arts of Design…. The American Academy of Fine Arts, sir, is not an Academy.”

The controversy died down in the summer of 1828. But Finley did not forget the harsh words written against him. Later in the year an upstate newspaper editor asked him to review an exhibition at Trumbull’s Academy. He declined, explaining that he could give no lengthier appraisal than to comment that most of the pictures were junk—“execrable trash, the vile daubings of old-picture manufacturers, or the crude copies of students … But don’t say I gave it to you.”

Amid the public exhibitions and quarreling, Finley lived the drifting life of a homeless widower. He changed residences several times, moving from Canal Street to Cedar Street, Murray Street, Grand Street. With New York City becoming the country’s publishing center, he befriended Bryant, the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and other writers no less eager to establish a professional class of American authors than he to win respect for American artists. He