Art: HEROIC PORTRAIT

Half a century had carried nearly all of his contemporary actors of the Revolution into the abyss of time, and he now stood like an imposing column that had been raised to commemorate deeds and principles that a whole people had been taught to reverence.

THUS wrote James Fenimore Cooper of the Marquis de Lafayette, shortly after the portrait opposite was painted. Cooper’s words give some idea of the size of the task that faced Samuel Finley Breese Morse when he came to paint the portrait in 1826. Morse painted the picture just after his wife died, and he apologized later: “A picture painted under such circumstances can scarcely be expected to do the artist justice, and, as a work of art, I cannot praise it.”

Morse was wrong. His lifesize Lafayette, is monumental and poignant painting. The craggy old marquis, looking not unlike a pork-fed Fernandel, towers against a symbolic sunset sky, his fist clenched beside the busts of his dead friends Franklin and Washington.

Portraitist Morse had once hoped to “be among those who shall revive the splendor of the 15th century.” The son of a stiff-necked Yankee pastor, he conceived the notion that art can be purely “intellectual.” While Morse was at Yale, President Timothy Dwight regularly admonished his students against all kinds of fun. “Recollect,” Dwight would cry out, “that you are to give an account of your conduct at the last day.” Samuel Morse felt quite at home in this stringent atmosphere. Along with painting, he dabbled in electricity, which alarmed his father. “Your natural disposition,” warned the elder Morse, “renders it proper for me earnestly to recommend to you to attend to one thing at a time.”

Abandoned Principle. On graduation, Morse decided that the one thing he really wanted to do was to paint. He was apprenticed to the great expatriate, Benjamin West, in London, and four years later came home an accomplished academician with an art that was as cool as its reception. For many years Artist Morse had a hard time making ends meet. So at 41 he abandoned his father’s principle of attending to one thing at a time to resume tinkering with electricity. The principle of the telegraph was in his head. After a decade of tinkering Morse achieved what he was after. Sitting in the gallery of the House of Representatives, he saw the bill passed authorizing him to string some experimental wire between Washington and Baltimore, and 15 months later —on May 24, 1844—he flashed the first message over those 41 miles: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.

The last years of Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor, were filled with riches and honors; he lived to see a statue of himself erected in Central Park. But the “failure” of his painting hopes never ceased to rankle. “Alas,” the artist-inventor wrote to his friend Cooper, “the very name of pictures produces a sadness of heart I cannot describe. Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me. I did not abandon her; she abandoned me. I have no wish to be remembered as a painter, for I never was a painter; my idea of that profession was perhaps too exalted; I may say, is too exalted. I leave it to others more worthy to fill the niches of art.”