The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (16 page)

Morse lived modestly in a few small rooms on a side street, the rue de Surène, on the Right Bank, which, to meet expenses, he shared with
another American artist named Richard Habersham. Except for his evenings with the Coopers, he appears to have had no other life in Paris apart from his work at the Louvre—no theater, no opera, no convivial evenings at restaurants, no social life of any kind. Still, he and Cooper saw each other, as he recorded, “daily … almost hourly” in these “eventful years” of 1831, 1832.

They had much in common. Both were the sons of prominent fathers. Both had attended Yale and were of roughly the same age. Both were talented, ambitious, and bright. Each considered himself a historian in his way. Each was devout in his Protestant faith, Morse more so than Cooper, and fittingly for the son of a preacher, he would have preferred that Cooper were more religious. Morse gave time to prayer every day and saw the unfolding of his life, his burdens and struggles, the decisions he made, in religious terms. That Cooper said grace at meals and read family prayers every evening apparently did not suffice.

Both loved music—Cooper played the flute, Morse the piano—and both took with utmost seriousness their roles as gentlemen, “gentlemen in all republican simplicity,” in Cooper’s phrase. It was how they had been raised and educated. If asked, they would have said that, as Americans abroad, gentlemanly deportment was of even greater importance, since they were a reflection on their country.

(The question of what constituted a gentleman was given serious consideration by other Americans who came to Paris. Wendell Holmes decided, after looking at Titian’s painting at the Louvre of the young man with a glove in his hand, that Titian “understood the look of a gentleman as well as anyone that ever lived.”)

Cooper’s father, William, remembered as a kind of “genius in land speculation,” had served as the first judge of Otsego County and was twice elected to Congress. He had known George Washington. Gilbert Stuart had painted his portrait. His famous son would recall with affection “my noble-looking, warm-hearted father” who could “lighten the way with his anecdote and fun.”

Morse’s father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, was of an entirely different
variety, a Congregational clergyman and scholar known across the country and abroad as “the father of American geography.” He was the author of
Geography Made Easy
and
The American Geography
. His
Elements of Geography
, for children, was a standard in nearly every school. When young Samuel entered Yale as a freshman, he was at once, inevitably, nicknamed “Geography” Morse.

Cooper had been expelled from Yale by the time Morse arrived at age fourteen, and while Morse graduated with the class of 1810, he was only a fair student. His younger brothers, who followed him to Yale, were, as he acknowledged, “very steady and good scholars” and “much esteemed.” He was always short of money, and continuously begging his parents for more, which, it happened, was exactly as it had been for his father when he was at Yale.

That Samuel had a lively mind was obvious. But with the exception of some courses in science, he had shown little serious interest in his studies. In one way only had he distinguished himself as an undergraduate, and that was in drawing and painting. Already he was doing miniature portraits for a dollar a piece.

But much differed between Cooper and Morse. Cooper was famous; Morse was not. Cooper had made himself fluent in French, Morse continued to struggle with the language. Morse had no family with him, nothing remotely like the financial security Cooper enjoyed. For Morse there had been no late awakening to what he wanted to make of his life. He had not just shown a knack for painting at Yale; he had known then that he must be an artist. “I was made for a painter,” he told his parents at age nineteen, and pleaded for money enough to study under one of the most accomplished young artists of the time, Washington Allston of Boston.

For years his parents had worried that he was “unsteady.” “
Attend to one thing at a time
,” the Reverend Morse preached repeatedly. The “steady and undissipated attention to one object” was the “sure mark of a superior genius.” But when the boy declared he wanted to “attend” to painting as his “one object,” his parents found that unacceptable. Best that he form no plans, his father wrote. “Your mama and I have been thinking and planning for you.”

From the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown,
Jedidiah Morse espoused an unyielding, orthodox Calvinism and sent his sons to his alma mater, in large part because Yale remained free from the corruptions of the new liberal Unitarianism espoused at Harvard. With his long, pale, Puritan face he seemed severe and humorless as the grave, as well as exceptionally learned. At home “Papa” preached hard work and frugality, dutiful obedience to parents and gratitude for the blessings of heaven. Samuel’s mother, Elizabeth Morse, was of the same mind, but more plainspoken. The daughter of a New Jersey judge, granddaughter of the president of Princeton College, she had “no use of Segars or Brandy or Wine or anything of the kind,” as she had reminded Samuel during his college years. “The main business of life is to prepare for death,” she told him.

As he well knew, she had had more than her share of experience with death’s reality. Of the eleven children she had given birth to, only three, Samuel and his two brothers, Sidney and Richard, had survived.

That Jedidiah and Elizabeth Morse were also attentive, warmhearted parents who cared deeply for their three sons and their welfare, the three sons would have been the first to confirm. And so it was that in a matter of months after Samuel’s return home from Yale, having seen at first hand how intent was his desire to make the most of what God-given talent he had, they acquiesced. Not only could he study under Washington Allston, he could, as Allston strongly urged, go to London with him and his wife to study there.

To an acquaintance in London, the Reverend Morse wrote as follows, by way of an introduction for his son. The letter also said much about the father:

His parents had designed him for a different profession, but his inclination for the one he has chosen was so strong, and his talents for it, in the opinion of some good judges, so promising, that we thought it not proper to attempt to control his choice.

In this country, young in the arts, there are few means of improvement. These are to be found in their perfection only in older countries, and in none, perhaps, greater than yours.
In compliance, therefore, with his earnest wishes and those of his friend and patron, Mr. Allston (with whom he goes to London), we have consented to make the sacrifice of feeling (not a small one), and a pecuniary exertion to the utmost of our ability, for the purpose of placing him under the best advantage of becoming eminent in his profession, in the hope that he will consecrate his acquisitions to the glory of God and the best good of his fellow men.

In contrast to James Cooper, who had taken up the pen at age thirty and burst virtually full-blown as a successful writer, having had no training or served any sort of apprenticeship, Morse spent four years in London, working as he never had, driven, as he said, by a desire to “shine.”

His progress under Allston’s tutelage was astonishing. Allston, who was in his early thirties, was himself hard at it and painting better than he ever had, and this Morse found thrilling to behold. As a teacher, Allston was exceedingly demanding. His critiques could be “mortifying,” Morse wrote, “when I have been painting all day very hard and begin to be pleased with what I have done … to hear him after a long silence say, ‘
Very bad, sir. That is not flesh, it is mud, sir. It is painted with brick dust and clay!
’ ” At such moments Morse felt like slashing the canvas with his palette knife. He felt angry and hurt, but with reflection came to see that Allston was no flatterer, but a friend, “and that really to improve I must see my faults.”

Allston could also take the palette and brushes from Morse and with a few deft strokes show him just how it should be done. “Oh, he is an angel on earth.”

Allston introduced him to the legendary Benjamin West, under whom Allston had studied. West, who had grown up near Philadelphia, was by then in his seventies, yet youthful in spirit and revered as no other living historical painter. He had arrived in London in 1763, during what was to have been temporary study abroad, and never left. In the half century since, he had become the favorite of King George III and one of the greatest of all teachers. Among the many Americans who had studied under West over the years were John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson
Peale, and Thomas Sully. His interest in young artists was as great as ever.

Morse was amazed to learn West had painted more than six hundred pictures, and was then at work on nine or ten different pieces at once. West questioned him closely on the state of the arts in America, and “appeared very zealous that they should flourish there.”

Morse met West just as the War of 1812 broke out between Britain and the United States, and thus found himself living among the enemy, which was exactly what had happened to West during the American War for Independence.

“Paint
large!
” West told him.

When Morse finished a historical canvas,
The Dying Hercules
, measuring six by eight feet, West came at once to see it and had only compliments. “Mr. West … told me that were I to live to his age, I should never make a better composition,” Morse noted proudly. The painting was selected to hang in an exhibition at the Royal Academy, and for the first time Morse saw his work praised in print.

It was Allston, however, who had brought him to where he was in his work, Morse stressed. He could hardly say enough for Allston. Through him he met other painters, as well as an acclaimed young American actor, John Howard Payne, and the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Morse was reading Chaucer and Dante. (“These are necessary to a painter,” he explained to his parents.) He took up the harpsichord and, contrary to the old home preachments, began smoking cigars and drinking wine. He attended the theater, saw the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons in one of her last performances, even tried his hand at writing a farce.

“You mention being acquainted with young Payne, the play actor,” his mother wrote, plainly worried. “I would guard you against any acquaintance with that description of people, as it will, sooner or later, have a most corrupting effect on the morals.”

Morse was busy, sociable, letting go of old enforced constrictions as much as he ever had or ever would, and he was as happy as he had ever been. According to a letter written years later, he even came close to falling in love, though with whom, he never said, adding only that after a time he had found love and painting to be “quarrelsome companions.”

At Yale he had been constantly short of money. In London the problem became even more acute. He could afford “no nice dinners,” he plaintively informed his parents. “I have had no new clothes for nearly a year; my best are threadbare, and my shoes are out at the toes.”

He had to be more than a “mere portrait painter,” he announced in another long letter dated May 2, 1814. He could not be happy unless pursuing the “intellectual branch” of art, namely history painting.

I need not tell you what a difficult profession I have undertaken. It has difficulties in itself which are sufficient to deter any man who has not firmness enough to go through with it at all hazards, without meeting any obstacles aside from it. The more I study it, the more I am enchanted with it; and the greater my progress, the more I am struck with its beauties. …

He was thinking of his country. “My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?”

He longed to go to France to study, but again it was a matter of money. Paris, he reminded his parents, was a mere two-day journey. “I long to bury myself in the Louvre,” Morse wrote fully seventeen years before finding himself perched atop his movable scaffold there.

His ambition, he had written in London at age twenty-three, was to be one of those who would revive the splendor of the Renaissance and rival the genius of a Raphael or Titian. Now in Paris in 1832, at age forty, painting large indeed, he was filling his enormous canvas with a virtual tour of the Renaissance that included Raphael and Titian and more.