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Samuel F. B. Morse, Allegorical Landscape Showing New York University (New-York Historical Society)

Shortly after resuming his presidency, Morse was approached by a director of John Trumbull’s American Academy, David Hosack, about the possibility of uniting the two associations. Unknown to Morse, Hosack came at the behest of Trumbull, who understood well enough that the breakaway N.A.D. had cost his Academy interest and support. Although Morse had feuded publicly with Trumbull at the time he founded the N.A.D., he approved the union if it could be made without compromise. Every academy he had seen in Europe was managed by artists, strengthening his conviction that any other plan of governance was “perfectly absurd.”

In January 1833, Morse, A. B. Durand, and William Dunlap met several times with a committee from Trumbull’s American Academy. On the crucial issue of governance, they agreed to unite by creating different classes of membership, one of academicians, another of lay members, with authority over separate matters. Morse and a representative of Trumbull’s committee drafted a description of the new, united academy. But when it reached Trumbull he rejected it. The plan, he said, denigrated and disempowered the propertied benefactors who had founded the Academy, and contributed its building and collections. Without the patronage of such men as John Jacob Astor, who recently donated two marble busts by Canova, the arts could not flourish in America: “never, while I live and have my reason,” Trum-bull said, “will I … consent to such a violation of their rights.”

Morse spent two weeks writing a reply, an exercise in cultural politics published as Examination of Col. Trumbull’s Address, in Opposition to the Projected Union. He denounced the American Academy as “anti-republican,” subjugating artists to a monied aristocracy: “The Artist, poor, helpless thing, must learn to boo and boo in the halls and antechambers of my lord, implore his lordship’s protection, advertise himself painter to his majesty.” Privately he wrote off Trumbull as the dead hand of the past—“an old man,” he told a friend, “in an institution formed for the promotion of the arts, but which has been an incubus on them.” Three years later the American Academy again tried to interest the N.A.D. in a union; its communication was read and filed.

Returning to his easel, Morse put finishing touches on some commissioned paintings he had brought back from Europe. Local awareness of his studies abroad created much curiosity about what his new work would be like. William Cullen Bryant promised readers of his Evening Post that their “talented countryman” would prove that America had artists the equal of any in Europe, and “earth and skies as fitted to inspire the poet or the painter as Italy can boast.” Morse’s many striking portraits in this period retain a precisely observed visual realism but reach beyond it for what he called “Intellectual Imitation”—not likeness but analysis, inner revelation. The sitters’ unconventional poses and unusual facial expressions seem emblematic of their being, as in his strongly composed portrait of the Reverend Thomas Harvey Skinner of Andover Theological Seminary. Not everyone agreed with Bryant, however. To New York’s former mayor Philip Hone, attending an N.A.D. exhibition, some of Morse’s new work looked frigid: “the warmth of the sunny skies of Italy does not appear to have had any effect upon the worthy president. He is … well acquainted with the principles of his art; but he has no imagination.”

However Morse’s European study affected his painting, it made the art scene in America dreary by comparison. Feeling for the arts in New York was low—or rather, he said, there was “no feeling.” In explaining to the public the failure of the N.A.D.’s proposed union with Trumbull’s Academy, he had had to rehash elementary matters he had made clear years before: “It is mortifying to find on my return home, that the very first principles