American, 1791 - 1872
Of the Founders of the National Academy of Design, none was more influential in its creation, and in shaping its successful survival than Samuel F.B. Morse.
Morse was the eldest child of the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, a prominent preacher, and minister of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, a near suburb of Boston, from 1789 to 1819. As befitted the intellectual aristocracy of his background, Morse was educated was at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut. He aspired to a life of distinction, one in which he would at once serve God and society, and win honor and at least some wealth. While still in college he began painting miniatures, and determined upon art as the calling in which he might best attain his ambition. Back in Boston in 1810, he met and became a student of Washington Allston, who was twelve years his senior, and already greatly respected in Boston for the moral idealism of his landscapes and figure subjects. Allston, who would become America's most revered artist of the first half of the nineteenth century, was the ideal mentor for Morse. He was a model of the kind of artist he intended to become, a painter of imaginative, complex compositions expressive of the great moral lessons of humanism and Christianity: a History Painter. Morse accompanied Allston to England in July 1811. He immediately began to prepare to enter the Royal Academy's school, and was admitted on his first try in October that year. Like many of his contemporaries, Morse also benefited from the advice and encouragement of its president, the expatriate American, Benjamin West. Morse advanced rapidly; within a year he was at work on an eight by six foot canvas, Dying Hercules (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), which was highly praised by West and the London critics when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition of 1813.
Morse was back in Boston by the close of the year 1815, very well trained, with demonstrated accomplishements in his profession, and convinced of his calling to elevate American art and the artistic perceptions of the American public. However opportunities to pursue his career as an historical painter were rare in America; he turned to portraiture to make his living. Gilbert Stuart dominated Boston in this speciality, and in the circumstances Morse saw little hope of prompt success. He began to travel in search of commissions: Concord, Hanover, and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, in 1816; Charleston, South Carolina in the winters of 1817-18, 1818-19, 1819-20, and 1820-21. He was an active participant in the founding of the South Carolina Academy of the Fine Arts, but eventually became disillusioned with its administration by businessmen, and slowly withdrew his support.
Late in 1821, Morse was in Washington, D. C. at work on a large painting of the interior of the Congressional chamber in the Capitol. This was to be part of a tripartite composition that would show the president and cabinet flanked by the two houses of Congress. The other two canvases were not begun. Instead, in 1823 Morse toured The House of Representatives (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.) to New Haven, Boston, and finally New York. Its exhibition gained Morse considerable praise from important sources, but nearly nothing in the way of reward from the admission charge. After a short return to New Haven, where his family now lived, Morse again took up the life of an itinerant portraitist.
In the autumn of 1824 he settled in New York, and established connection with the leading literary and intellectual figures of the day, including James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck. The ease with which Morse's intellectual and social background allowed him to move in such circles, as well as the demonstrated excellence of several portraits done after his arrival in New York, contributed to his receiving the coveted commission from the city's Common Council to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, then making a tour of the country whose independence he had helped secure. The commission, and the resulting monumental painting, completed in 1826 (City Hall, New York), established Morse among America's foremost artists.
Morse's status in New York's artistic, political, and social world made him the ideal rallying point for the growing dissatisfaction of a rising young generation of artist with the failure of the American Academy of the Fine Arts to provide the kind of opportunity for sophisticated training it had promised.
The members of the American Academy, founded in 1802, were the city's most prominent business and social leaders; a few artists were included, and its president was the formidable John Trumbull. In November 1825, the younger artists along with the established professionals Henry Inman, Asher B. Durand, William Dunlap, Charles Ingham, and a number of gentlemen amateurs formed the New-York Drawing Association. They met three evenings a week to draw from a cast of a classical sculpture. Morse was elected president of this essentially self-help group. Several attempts to consolidate the two groups were misunderstood on both sides, and tempers grew short. Instead of effecting an amicable liaison, in January 1826, at Morse's suggestion, and with his guidance as to the specific form the organization should take, the Association confirmed its independence by reconstituting itself into the National Academy of Design.
The keystone of Morse's concept of the Academy was that its membership be limited to professional artists, and consequently, that the arbiters of all its actions on behalf of American art and artists would be those best qualified for the authority, the artists themselves. He was explicit in identifying London's Royal Academy as his model for the stucture of the American organization.
As president of the National Academy, Morse was its eloquent spokesman and defender, and wise guide through the first critical decades of its existence. He was not always present in person to oversee Academy practice, for he continued his active role as a painter, and in 1829 brought to fruition a long-planned return to Europe. With the support of a fund of $3,000 subscribed by friends and patrons, he passed three years of travel and study abroad, visiting London, Paris, Northern Italy, Rome, and Switzerland; he often enjoyed the company of American fellow-artists who were abroad for varying lengths of time. In addition to executing his own compositions, he made some copies of Old Masters as ordered by his sponsors. The last year of the trip Morse spent in Paris, developing the very large Gallery of the Louvre (Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), to which he put the finishing touches after his return to New York late in 1832. Late the following year Morse put the painting on public display. His experience with the House of Representatives was repeated: the Louvre was admired by the knowledgable, but shunned by the paying public. Morse continued to paint portraits, and in 1835 New York University named him its first Professor in the Literature of the Arts of Design.
The single greatest hope of aspiring American history painters in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were the eight huge places for paintings around the interior of the United States Capital rotunda. John Trumbull had filled four of them by 1824, but had been denied the commission for the remaining four, which remained blank for more than a decade. Much lobbying was done on behalf of various artists, including Morse, who had applied for a commission himself. It was the concensus of cultured New York that he would be among the chosen artists; indeed, he considered his second period of European study a specific preparation for undertaking a composition for the Capitol. However, when the commissions were announced in 1836, Morse was not among the honored four. The reason for his rejection was likely his conspicuous and unpopular political activity; in 1836 he had made an unsuccessful run for the New York mayoralty on the xenophobic Native American ticket.
Morse's disappointment and humiliation were overwhelming. His career as a painter had not truly gone beyond portraiture, and now all hope of attaining his artistic ambition was at an end. As an educated man, Morse had long had a practical knowledge and curiosity in the sciences. He had begun to experiment with the concept of telegraphy at about the time of his return from Europe. With the closure of his future in art, Morse turned to science as a route to attain the distinction he sought. He sent the first successful telegraphic communication early in 1838.
Morse's withdrawal from the art world occurred gradually over the next several years, as his involvement with development of the telegraph increased. He continued to attend as diligently as possible to Academy affairs, although frequently absent from New York on matters related to his invention. The first public demonstration of the telegraph occurred in 1844 and the following year Morse declined reelection to the presidency of the Academy.
Asher B. Durand became the Academy's second president, but in 1861, when he refused to continue in the post, and devisive fighting for the controlling position seemed imminent, the now-venerable Morse was asked to return to it. He agreed, but on condition that his service be limited to one year. In expressing his reluctance, he wrote the Academy: "There are many reasons, of mainly a personal nature, which make me unfeignedly reluctant to accede to your request. I have been so long out of the traces of Art, that I am conscious of inability to fulfill the duties of the position either to my own or your satisfaction."
Although Morse turned away from the practice of art, he never lost his interest in the Academy, nor failed to support it--substantively, as well as in spirit. When the Fellowship Fund was created in 1863 to raise the money to build the Academy headquarters, Morse led off the subscriptions with a contribution of $1,000, and two years later, just before the opening of that building, he made a gift to the Academy of a portrait of Washington Allston, by his old friend and fellow Allston proteg‚, Charles Robert Leslie. Later he gave his art books to the Academy library.
Morse's death was solomnly noted around the world. On April 3, 1872, a special meeting of the Academy's Council was called in order to enter into record its memorial:
In common with the rest of the World, it becomes our painful duty to recognize the passage away from among us of Prof. Saml F. B. Morse our first president, we may almost say the very founder, of our institution, a man endeared to many of us by still closer ties. The last of a trio of painters from whom have proceeded during the past century, perhaps the three most remarkable inventions of the age, in their wide spread and still spreading influence upon mankind; for Fulton, Daguerre and Morse are names which hereafter associate themselves in the mind of men, to a very remote stretch of time. . . . We cannot but feel some pride in the share which the study of our common profession must have had in developing those faculties with which he wrought the great telegraphic plan that makes his name forever famous and though he has secured such a lastng name by other than the pursuit of that Art with which he set out in his life, had he confined himself thereto, there is little doubt among the best judges in Art matters, but that he would even then, have left his among the role of the names not born to die.
Morse was the eldest child of the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, a prominent preacher, and minister of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, a near suburb of Boston, from 1789 to 1819. As befitted the intellectual aristocracy of his background, Morse was educated was at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut. He aspired to a life of distinction, one in which he would at once serve God and society, and win honor and at least some wealth. While still in college he began painting miniatures, and determined upon art as the calling in which he might best attain his ambition. Back in Boston in 1810, he met and became a student of Washington Allston, who was twelve years his senior, and already greatly respected in Boston for the moral idealism of his landscapes and figure subjects. Allston, who would become America's most revered artist of the first half of the nineteenth century, was the ideal mentor for Morse. He was a model of the kind of artist he intended to become, a painter of imaginative, complex compositions expressive of the great moral lessons of humanism and Christianity: a History Painter. Morse accompanied Allston to England in July 1811. He immediately began to prepare to enter the Royal Academy's school, and was admitted on his first try in October that year. Like many of his contemporaries, Morse also benefited from the advice and encouragement of its president, the expatriate American, Benjamin West. Morse advanced rapidly; within a year he was at work on an eight by six foot canvas, Dying Hercules (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), which was highly praised by West and the London critics when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition of 1813.
Morse was back in Boston by the close of the year 1815, very well trained, with demonstrated accomplishements in his profession, and convinced of his calling to elevate American art and the artistic perceptions of the American public. However opportunities to pursue his career as an historical painter were rare in America; he turned to portraiture to make his living. Gilbert Stuart dominated Boston in this speciality, and in the circumstances Morse saw little hope of prompt success. He began to travel in search of commissions: Concord, Hanover, and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, in 1816; Charleston, South Carolina in the winters of 1817-18, 1818-19, 1819-20, and 1820-21. He was an active participant in the founding of the South Carolina Academy of the Fine Arts, but eventually became disillusioned with its administration by businessmen, and slowly withdrew his support.
Late in 1821, Morse was in Washington, D. C. at work on a large painting of the interior of the Congressional chamber in the Capitol. This was to be part of a tripartite composition that would show the president and cabinet flanked by the two houses of Congress. The other two canvases were not begun. Instead, in 1823 Morse toured The House of Representatives (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.) to New Haven, Boston, and finally New York. Its exhibition gained Morse considerable praise from important sources, but nearly nothing in the way of reward from the admission charge. After a short return to New Haven, where his family now lived, Morse again took up the life of an itinerant portraitist.
In the autumn of 1824 he settled in New York, and established connection with the leading literary and intellectual figures of the day, including James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck. The ease with which Morse's intellectual and social background allowed him to move in such circles, as well as the demonstrated excellence of several portraits done after his arrival in New York, contributed to his receiving the coveted commission from the city's Common Council to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, then making a tour of the country whose independence he had helped secure. The commission, and the resulting monumental painting, completed in 1826 (City Hall, New York), established Morse among America's foremost artists.
Morse's status in New York's artistic, political, and social world made him the ideal rallying point for the growing dissatisfaction of a rising young generation of artist with the failure of the American Academy of the Fine Arts to provide the kind of opportunity for sophisticated training it had promised.
The members of the American Academy, founded in 1802, were the city's most prominent business and social leaders; a few artists were included, and its president was the formidable John Trumbull. In November 1825, the younger artists along with the established professionals Henry Inman, Asher B. Durand, William Dunlap, Charles Ingham, and a number of gentlemen amateurs formed the New-York Drawing Association. They met three evenings a week to draw from a cast of a classical sculpture. Morse was elected president of this essentially self-help group. Several attempts to consolidate the two groups were misunderstood on both sides, and tempers grew short. Instead of effecting an amicable liaison, in January 1826, at Morse's suggestion, and with his guidance as to the specific form the organization should take, the Association confirmed its independence by reconstituting itself into the National Academy of Design.
The keystone of Morse's concept of the Academy was that its membership be limited to professional artists, and consequently, that the arbiters of all its actions on behalf of American art and artists would be those best qualified for the authority, the artists themselves. He was explicit in identifying London's Royal Academy as his model for the stucture of the American organization.
As president of the National Academy, Morse was its eloquent spokesman and defender, and wise guide through the first critical decades of its existence. He was not always present in person to oversee Academy practice, for he continued his active role as a painter, and in 1829 brought to fruition a long-planned return to Europe. With the support of a fund of $3,000 subscribed by friends and patrons, he passed three years of travel and study abroad, visiting London, Paris, Northern Italy, Rome, and Switzerland; he often enjoyed the company of American fellow-artists who were abroad for varying lengths of time. In addition to executing his own compositions, he made some copies of Old Masters as ordered by his sponsors. The last year of the trip Morse spent in Paris, developing the very large Gallery of the Louvre (Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), to which he put the finishing touches after his return to New York late in 1832. Late the following year Morse put the painting on public display. His experience with the House of Representatives was repeated: the Louvre was admired by the knowledgable, but shunned by the paying public. Morse continued to paint portraits, and in 1835 New York University named him its first Professor in the Literature of the Arts of Design.
The single greatest hope of aspiring American history painters in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were the eight huge places for paintings around the interior of the United States Capital rotunda. John Trumbull had filled four of them by 1824, but had been denied the commission for the remaining four, which remained blank for more than a decade. Much lobbying was done on behalf of various artists, including Morse, who had applied for a commission himself. It was the concensus of cultured New York that he would be among the chosen artists; indeed, he considered his second period of European study a specific preparation for undertaking a composition for the Capitol. However, when the commissions were announced in 1836, Morse was not among the honored four. The reason for his rejection was likely his conspicuous and unpopular political activity; in 1836 he had made an unsuccessful run for the New York mayoralty on the xenophobic Native American ticket.
Morse's disappointment and humiliation were overwhelming. His career as a painter had not truly gone beyond portraiture, and now all hope of attaining his artistic ambition was at an end. As an educated man, Morse had long had a practical knowledge and curiosity in the sciences. He had begun to experiment with the concept of telegraphy at about the time of his return from Europe. With the closure of his future in art, Morse turned to science as a route to attain the distinction he sought. He sent the first successful telegraphic communication early in 1838.
Morse's withdrawal from the art world occurred gradually over the next several years, as his involvement with development of the telegraph increased. He continued to attend as diligently as possible to Academy affairs, although frequently absent from New York on matters related to his invention. The first public demonstration of the telegraph occurred in 1844 and the following year Morse declined reelection to the presidency of the Academy.
Asher B. Durand became the Academy's second president, but in 1861, when he refused to continue in the post, and devisive fighting for the controlling position seemed imminent, the now-venerable Morse was asked to return to it. He agreed, but on condition that his service be limited to one year. In expressing his reluctance, he wrote the Academy: "There are many reasons, of mainly a personal nature, which make me unfeignedly reluctant to accede to your request. I have been so long out of the traces of Art, that I am conscious of inability to fulfill the duties of the position either to my own or your satisfaction."
Although Morse turned away from the practice of art, he never lost his interest in the Academy, nor failed to support it--substantively, as well as in spirit. When the Fellowship Fund was created in 1863 to raise the money to build the Academy headquarters, Morse led off the subscriptions with a contribution of $1,000, and two years later, just before the opening of that building, he made a gift to the Academy of a portrait of Washington Allston, by his old friend and fellow Allston proteg‚, Charles Robert Leslie. Later he gave his art books to the Academy library.
Morse's death was solomnly noted around the world. On April 3, 1872, a special meeting of the Academy's Council was called in order to enter into record its memorial:
In common with the rest of the World, it becomes our painful duty to recognize the passage away from among us of Prof. Saml F. B. Morse our first president, we may almost say the very founder, of our institution, a man endeared to many of us by still closer ties. The last of a trio of painters from whom have proceeded during the past century, perhaps the three most remarkable inventions of the age, in their wide spread and still spreading influence upon mankind; for Fulton, Daguerre and Morse are names which hereafter associate themselves in the mind of men, to a very remote stretch of time. . . . We cannot but feel some pride in the share which the study of our common profession must have had in developing those faculties with which he wrought the great telegraphic plan that makes his name forever famous and though he has secured such a lastng name by other than the pursuit of that Art with which he set out in his life, had he confined himself thereto, there is little doubt among the best judges in Art matters, but that he would even then, have left his among the role of the names not born to die.
