Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [9]
The honored place of artists in London society also came as a shock. Americans regarded painters as members of the “lower class of people”; Londoners ranked painters with lords or barons, “… a person cannot be better recommended than by avowing himself a painter.” Indeed, in London art exhibitions were resorts of the fashionable, art was a constant subject of conversation, and no one was considered well educated who lacked an enthusiastic love of painting.
Finley took rooms on Great Titchfield Street, in the Marylebone district, sharing his quarters with another young American artist, Charles Leslie (1794–1859). Only sixteen years old, Leslie had come to London from Philadelphia to study painting for two years. “Every thing we do has a reference to the art,” Finley said, “and all our plans are for our mutual advancement in it.” Finley expected good things of his roommate, predicting that Leslie would become an ornament to the new nation’s culture, as he hoped to become himself.
Many other artists lived in Marylebone, including Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, and Allston. Finley visited Allston every evening and soon learned that London connoisseurs considered him the painter to watch, destined to “carry the art to greater perfection than it ever has been carried, either in ancient or in modern times.” Allston was beginning work on his large Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, a characteristic dramatization of Divine power, with elements of gothic horror, that would establish his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Finley cherished Allston’s practical and theoretical instruction, and the example he set of high-mindedness. Allston refused to leave off a painting until it satisfied him, and scorned mere moneymaking. “Oh! he is an angel on earth,” Finley wrote, “I cannot love him too much.”
Through Allston, Finley got to meet the legendary founder of American art, Benjamin West. Now an amiable, white-haired sophisticate of seventy-three, West had left Philadelphia fifty years earlier as a barely literate Quaker youth, to study and paint in Rome. His progress over the next decade had been astonishing. Moving to London, he helped to create the Royal Academy of Arts, at the request of King George III. His Death of General Wolfe excited more interest than any other American picture that had ever been exhibited. Its use of modern dress and contemporary events constituted a revolution in the painting of history. West had never returned to America, but Finley found him eager to know the state of the arts there. Having painted some six hundred pictures in his lifetime—“more than any artist ever did, with the exception of Rubens,” Finley said—West was still active, presiding over the Royal Academy and working on eight or nine different paintings at a time.
Only a few days after Finley’s arrival in London, West took him to see his celebrated life-size sermon on canvas, Christ Healing the Sick. It was probably the first important original painting Finley had ever seen, dazzling: “A sight of it is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” He may have been less impressed by West’s comment that during six weeks of exhibition the picture took in some £9000 ($50,000). Finley came to feel that he could not respect West, despite the grandeur of his thought and perfect understanding of artistic theory. He continued to seek his advice, but believed that Allston would almost as much surpass West as West had surpassed earlier American painters.
With an introduction from West, Finley was admitted as a student at the British Institution. Founded six years earlier to stimulate interest in British art, the Institution was governed mainly by connoisseurs, not artists. Probably for this reason, Finley tried to gain admission instead to