Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [8]
Washington Allston, Self Portrait (1805) (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
It was Allston himself who had changed Jedediah’s mind. He had been painting in a Boston studio, a pale, brooding, cultivated young man with large blue eyes and silken black hair. Seven years of training in London, Paris, and Rome had made him the most accomplished and promising American painter in the generation after Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Having seen and approved some of Finley’s works, he persuaded Jedediah and Elizabeth to allow Finley to join him when he returned to England.
Samuel F. B. Morse, Morse Family Portrait Group (ca. 1809) (National Museum of American History)
While waiting out the six months before his departure, Finley informally began his studies. He attended lectures on anatomy given in Boston by the eminent physician Dr. John Warren. With Allston’s guidance he also kept painting. Several works from the period of his late teens survive. They include an unfinished liny watercolor of his family, himself leaning in over his mother’s shoulder as Jedediah discourses on geography. Daring to paint a historical subject in the grand style, he at first considered depicting the defeated Roman general Marius viewing the ruins of Carthage—an image of the mutability of empires and of human fortune. Instead he chose a subject that might induce not only moral elevation but also patriotic pride—the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, heroic windswept figures on a canvas some four feet by five, ambitious though crudely jumbled.
Having consented to Finley’s plans, Jedediah felt uneasy about them. Providing the boy’s expenses for a three-year stay in London would be a hardship. American-British relations were tense, too. President James Madison and Congress had reinstated a policy of non-intercourse that forbade American trade with England. And the boy was only nineteen years old: “what must be our solicitude for a son, at his critical age,” Jedediah confided, “removed at such a distance from us, with little experience or knowledge of mankind, in a land of strangers, & exposed to the various evils & snares of the world.”
Samuel F. B. Morse, The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (Boston Public Library)
Probably toward the end of June, Finley left Charlestown for New York City, there to depart for England in mid-July. Traveling first to New Haven in a stagecoach stiflingly hot under the summer sun, he stopped off at Yale to say good-bye to his brothers. His coastal packet boat to New York was becalmed for two days. And when he at last reached the city, it roasted him with its worst heat in fourteen years—116 degrees, he claimed.
Finley spent two weeks in New York before his departure. He bought the bedding he would need aboard ship—mattress, pillows, sheets. He enjoyed passing an afternoon with Allston’s Knickerbocker friend Washington Irving, just twenty-eight years old but already America’s first literary celebrity. He got to meet some of his thirteen fellow passengers, an exotic group that included a Prussian, a Russian, a Scotsman, and a minor comic dramatist, John Minshull, author of He Stoops to Conquer, or, The Virgin Wife Triumphant.
With two piano-playing passengers and a pianoforte aboard, the voyage promised to be agreeable and Finley felt in good spirits, although once the ship got under sail with a fair wind off Sandy Hook, he admitted to feeling also a bit strange, “rather singularly,” he said, “to see my native shores disappearing so fast and for so long a time.”
TWO
No One Uninspired by the Muses May Enter
(1811–1815)
LONDON