The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (19 page)

Nathaniel Willis had observed that Cooper’s stern countenance ought not to be taken as representative of the man. So Morse felt Cooper and his opinions needed some explaining for those at home no less than in Europe. He knew the man, he knew the respect he commanded in Paris. “He has a bold, original, independent mind, thoroughly American,” Morse
wrote to his brothers in New York, who had established a religious newspaper, the
New York Observer
.

He loves his country and her principles ardently. … I admire exceedingly his proud assertion of the rank of an American … for I know no reason why an American should not take rank, and assert it, too, above any artificial distinctions that Europe has made. We have no aristocratic grades … and crosses, and other gewgaws that please the great babies of Europe. …

Morse was exhausted and angry.

There can be no
condescension
to an American. An American gentleman is equal to any title or rank in Europe, kings and emperors not excepted. …

Cooper sees and feels the absurdity of these distinctions, and he asserts his American rank and maintains it too, I believe, from a pure patriotism. Such a man deserves the support and respect of his countrymen. …

Willis, who felt he had very much “arrived” by being included in Cooper’s circle, said no American could live “without feeling every day what we owe to the patriotism as well as the genius of this gifted man.” Reluctantly, Willis had decided the time had come for him to move on and continue his travels, to Italy next. “Paris is a home to me, and I leave it with a heavy heart,” he wrote.

Morse kept working, the epidemic notwithstanding, and the crowds kept coming to see the American painter and his picture. Even Alexander von Humboldt, the world-famous naturalist and explorer, came to watch and to chat with Morse. In all Europe there was no more revered embodiment of the life of the mind.

He “took pains to find me out,” Morse wrote, his spirits lifted.

By the start of summer, cholera had struck New York, and in Paris had abated somewhat. But by no means was the danger past, as some contended. Probably 12,000 people had already died in Paris. By summer’s end at least 18,000 would be dead in six months’ time, considerably more lives taken than during the entire Reign of Terror. According to surviving records, no Americans died in Paris of cholera. In New York the epidemic left 3,515 dead.

For several years now, it had become the custom among a number of Americans in Paris to celebrate the Fourth of July with a grand patriotic banquet, and to include General Lafayette as guest of honor. If, because of the cholera epidemic, there was any reluctance to hold the event that summer of 1832, or any thought of canceling it, no evidence is to be found. For Morse and Cooper, it was to be a particularly affecting occasion, their last Fourth of July in Paris and a last opportunity to honor Lafayette.

The dinner was held at Lointier on the rue de Richelieu, a favorite restaurant among Americans. Morse presided as President of the Day, with Cooper as Vice President. Eighty guests, including Lafayette and the American minister to France, William C. Rives, pulled up their chairs to the table and, before the evening was out, joined in toasts to George Washington and the new president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, King Louis-Philippe, and the City of Paris, some twenty toasts in all.

But Morse’s toast to Lafayette brought the greatest response, with spirited applause following nearly every line. The imagery he chose for his windup, in tribute to the general’s strength as a leader, suggests his own homeward voyage, and the ways of winds and storm-tossed seas, were also much on his mind. In any event, he brought the whole crowd cheering to its feet.

Some men were “like the buoys upon tide-water,” Morse said. “They float up and down as the current sets this way or that.”

If you ask at an emergency where they are, we cannot tell you. We must first consult the almanac. We must know the quarter of the moon, the way of the wind, the time of the tide. …

But gentlemen, our guest … is a tower amid the waters. … He stands there now. The winds have swept by him, the waves dashed around him, the snows of winter have lighted upon him, but still he is there.

I ask you, therefore, gentlemen, to drink with me in honor of General Lafayette.

In the weeks remaining, before the Louvre closed for the summer, Morse pressed on. Concentrating on the immense canvas overall, he found himself well pleased, even to the point of bragging a bit to his brothers, calling it “a splendid and valuable” work. “I am sure it is the most
correct
one of
its kind
ever painted, for everyone says I have caught the style of each of the masters.”

Whether he began work on the figures in the scene during these last days at the Louvre, or saved them for later, is not entirely clear, but most likely they were added in New York. Either way they were part of his plan and who they were—those he included and those he did not—was of no small importance.

In the completed painting which Morse titled
The Gallery of the Louvre
, there would be ten figures. And though he was to provide viewers a key to all the paintings in the scene, he would identify none of the people. Still, four were quite obvious to anyone who knew them.

Most conspicuous was Morse himself standing front and center, leaning over the right shoulder of an attractive young art student, giving her instructions. The subject she is sketching—and that Morse is helping her understand—is the colossal Veronese,
The Marriage at Cana
, on the left-hand wall. The identity of the student is not known. Nor is that of another young woman working on a miniature at a table to the right. The seated artist wearing a red turban on the left is believed to be Morse’s American friend and roommate, Richard Habersham.

Upstage, by the doorway, a figure wearing the traditional peaked white cap of the women of Brittany, and the child she holds by the hand, are the only ones in the scene with their faces toward the glow and splendors of the Grand Gallery beyond. As an accent, her cap serves as an instructor’s
pointer calling attention to the painting above,
The Holy Family
, by Murillo. But she and the child serve, too, as reminders that the museum and its riches are there not for artists and connoisseurs only, but for people of all kinds and ages.

The well-dressed man entering the Salon Carré through the doorway, his high-crowned black hat in hand, has the appearance of Horatio Greenough, and fittingly, his eye is fixed on the single work of sculpture on display,
Diane Chasseresse—Diana of the Hunt
—at the far right.

But after the figure of Morse, it is the threesome in the left-hand corner who are of greatest interest, and they are, unmistakably, Cooper and his wife watching their daughter Sue at her easel working on a copy. Possibly, as later speculated, Morse included them because he expected Cooper to buy the painting. Morse himself never said. Most likely, he included the Coopers for the same reason he had added his father, the Reverend Morse, and his Yale professor Benjamin Silliman to the faces in the gallery in his
House of Representatives
, because it gave him great pleasure to do so.

With the presence of Cooper, his wife, and daughter, Greenough and young Habersham, the scene becomes something distinctly more than a tour de force showcase of Old World masterpieces. It may be taken as well as a kind of family portrait—Morse and his Paris family.

But seldom in family portraits does one member so upstage the others as Morse does here. By placing himself as he has, so conspicuously, so immodestly front and center and larger than anyone, he has rendered a self-portrait intended to present much that he wished to be known and remembered about himself, beyond the fact that the whole huge panorama is the result of his own efforts and ability. In the tableau with the student, most obviously, he is presenting himself not as an artist only, but as a teacher—a teacher in the spirit of Benjamin West and Washington Allston—and a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design. The Salon Carré becomes thereby a sumptuous, treasure-laden classroom for the master.

And if a man be known by the company he keeps, there in the corner is his friend Cooper, with his upraised finger pointing, like the white Brittany
hat, to Murillo’s
Holy Family
, as he, the cultivated gentleman, talks of what he sees and appreciates in a great work of art. Further, as a readily recognizable American somebody, Cooper provides a distinct note of national pride.

By rendering Sue Cooper as he did, with her head turned to listen to her father, Morse seems to suggest his interest in her may indeed have been romantic, and if not, here was visible reason why it could have been.

Of the ten figures in Morse’s tableau, six, or more than half, are Americans—Americans in Paris making the most of their time. And six, counting the child, are females, which would appear Morse’s way of encouraging women in their aspirations in art.

As may be said of nearly all paintings, nothing is included by chance. Every element is the result of conscious choice, and what an artist chooses to leave out is also of importance in understanding a finished work. That there is a complete absence in Morse’s Salon Carré of French aristocrats, French soldiers and priests, could only have been intentional. Aristocrats, soldiers, priests, were ubiquitous, and as commonly present at the Louvre as they were in almost any public place or gathering in Paris.

Like Cooper, Morse had no use for the “mere butterflies” of Paris society, and no more liking for the sight of soldiers everywhere than would Charles Sumner. Such disdain for almost anything connected with the Catholic Church, for priests, and the dictates of the Vatican that had permeated Morse’s Calvinist upbringing, had only hardened as a consequence of his experiences in Europe. In Rome he had written in his notebooks of priests “dissipating their time in gambling” and “disfiguring the landscape with their uncouth dress,” of the “numberless bowings and genuflections and puffings of incense” at the Catholic services he attended. He had been willing to remove his hat when entering a Catholic church, but not in the street when religious processions passed. “If it were a mere civility I should not object,” he wrote, “but it involves acquiescence in what I see to be idolatry and of course in the street I cannot do it. … No man has a right to interfere with my rights of conscience.”

Once, on a street in Rome, when a religious procession passed and
Morse failed to remove his hat, a soldier, one of the cardinal’s guards, had knocked it off with his gun, cursing him as
il diavolo.
Thinking about it later, Morse decided he could not blame the soldier, only a religion that would resort to such force.