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of the commission from Congress: “I see year after year of the very vigor of my life wasted in this vain expectation.” And time was running out for him. He was forty-one; Raphael had painted all his wonders by the age of thirty-seven, “I ought to use the remaining few years of life in that department of art which will leave bread to my children.” When he returned to America it would be best to confine himself to portraits and copies. Europe had taught him much, not least by raising a question that could not be ignored. Why, after all, go on acquiring skills and knowledge he could never use?

SIX

Anomalous, Nondescript, Hermaphrodite

(1832–1837)

MORSE’S RETURN to New York began hopefully. A month after arriving, he accepted an appointment as Professor of Painting and Sculpture at the just-opened University of the City of New York. Founded by a small group of patricians, the school aimed at educating sons of the rising middle class. Morse was appointed without salary, expected to receive his pay in the form of fees from his art students for their instruction.

On reaching New York, Morse stayed several weeks with his brother Richard. But eventually he lodged, handsomely, at the university itself. Outgrowing its rented quarters in congested lower New York, the school joined a larger exodus of city residents northward to what would become Greenwich Village. In 1835 it erected a permanent building on parklike Washington Square, an impressive Gothic structure of white marble that inspired a fashion for “college Gothic” on other campuses. Morse rented five rooms in the northwest tower, and was given a sixth gratis—plenty of space to live, paint, and teach. Some of the rooms he rented to his five private students.

With the building still under construction, Morse’s quarters at first proved troublesome. The ceiling of the tower leaked and the walls dribbled, “perfect shower baths” that drove two students from their apartment. Forced to suspend his painting and teaching, Morse lost the fifty-three cents per day he charged each pupil for instruction. Three months after moving in he presented a bill for $50 in damages, including harm to his and his students’ health.

New York University (New York University Archives)

Despite the fuss Morse valued his professorship. He praised New York University—as the school quickly became known—for creating a separate department of the Arts of Design, the first in America. He recorded his high regard in an unusual architectural fantasy, Allegorical Landscape Showing New York University. It depicts the new Gothic edifice standing across a lagoon from Mount Helicon, the abode of the Muses. The key to the allegory is perhaps the powerfully rising morning sun that begins to illuminate the scene. The rising sun image had often been used during and after the American Revolution to symbolize the inevitable movement of the arts and sciences westward from the classical world to Europe and, inevitably, to America. Read in this way the painting presents the university as one locus of a cultural progress in America that is as certain as sunrise.

Morse also took charge again as president of the National Academy of Design, energetically. His absence had been felt: the number of lectures had dropped, instructors had missed classes. He threw himself into readying the annual exhibitions, advising Philadelphia artists on their conflict with the Pennsylvania Academy, delivering a reworked version of his talks on the affinity between painting and the other fine arts. He tried to raise money for the widow and daughter of Gilbert Stuart, living destitute in Newport. In touch again with Allston, he arranged a $500 loan to his mentor—by now considered the greatest living American artist, but debt-ridden and still struggling with his unpaintable Belshazzar’s Feast. All his efforts treated art as an exalted cause. They were noticed, too, bringing him election to such select groups as the Académie des Beaux Arts of Anvers, the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and New York’s St. Nicholas Society, whose