Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [64]
Samuel F. B. Morse, Rev. Thomas Harvey Skinner (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Despite his professorship, his presidency, his vision of the rising glory of American culture, after a year back in New York, Morse again felt seriously depressed: “I have more mental suffering, more hopeless despondence in regard to the future, than I have ever before suffered.” He often fell ill, and once was confined for three weeks, under a physician’s care for boils on his legs. His brother Richard was also liable to such “fits” of “the blues”—and their father before them. Morse wondered whether something in his physical system might be awry, capable of producing in him “such settled conviction of hopelessness.”
He decided not. The real and the apparent causes were the same: his inability—for twenty years now—to survive as the sort of painter he wanted to be: “my profession is that of a beggar, it exists on charity.” His resettlement in America had only confirmed what he gloomily sensed in Paris: “My life of poetry and romance is gone. I must descend from the clouds and look more at the earth.”
Perhaps to begin his descent, Morse decided to sell the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. He gave it up reluctantly: “As a record of studies made in Paris, it was particularly calculated to be a treasure to me.” He considered asking $2500. But being again broke and in debt he offered the picture at half that amount to an upstate New Yorker, George Hyde Clarke, whose portrait he had painted five years earlier. He got more than he bargained for. When he told Clarke that after reducing the price to $1300 he had been offered $2000 by someone else, Clarke offered to release him from their deal. On the edge of losing a badly needed sale, Morse squirmed out: “I prefer your note for 1300 to his for 2000.” He even offered to paint Lafayette into an unfinished space in the foreground of the Gallery. This, too, was a mistake, for Clarke wrote back cursing the General as a Jacobin—“a Philosopher that only comprehended one half of Liberty merely personal freedom, & neglected the other more essential half the protection of Property.” Morse offered instead to fill the space—there beneath miniatures of Raphael and Murillo and Rubens—with hundred-dollar-apiece portraits of Clarke’s family, full-length.
Morse’s domestic situation offered little to lift his fits of the blues. On returning to America he seems to have placed his children under the guardianship of Sidney Morse, perhaps only as a legal convenience so that his brother could administer the bequests to them from Lucrece’s now-deceased father. But physically and emotionally he remained distant from the children, as his parents had been from him. His constant separation from them disturbed his brother Richard, who thought it “unnatural.”
Morse visited Susan at least once at her school in New England. At least once she also visited him in New York, when he likely painted The Muse, a monumental five-by-six-foot portrait of her at about the age of seventeen. She had been taking drawing lessons, and he depicted her holding a pencil poised over a large sketchbook on her lap, awaiting inspiration, clad in a lace cape and richly painted butterscotch-colored dress. Susan was also taking music lessons, learning to play “The Caliph of Bagdad”—an interest he encouraged by sending her sheet music for a waltz. Meeting his daughter now in her teens, after a three-year separation,