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Jonas Platt

Terry Carbone on January 29, 2009

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Jonas Platt, 1828. Oil on canvas, 35 15/16 x 29 7/16 in. (91.3 x 74.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 85.23.

By the mid-1820s, Samuel F. B. Morse finally had achieved in his portraits a more fluid technique and mastery of high color rivaling the accomplishments of the then-elderly Gilbert Stuart. His portrait of Jonas Platt may be counted, along with his Benjamin Silliman, 1825 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), among his most sensitive and finely painted likenesses dating from this brief high point in his artistic career. Particularly in these works, Morse displayed a fluid realism and expressive immediacy that neither Stuart nor Thomas Sully achieved in their own highly fluid but more stylized manners.

Morse received commissions for two portraits of Judge Jonas Platt late in 1827, the year in which the exhibition of his The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York) at the National Academy of Design established him, for a brief time, as New York’s preeminent artist. Platt was by this time a highly successful New York attorney and politician. Son of one of the founders of Plattsburgh, New York, he had studied law and entered the New York offices of Richard Varick by 1790, when he also was admitted to the bar and married Helen Livingston (d. 1859) of Fishkill. Platt left New York City in 1791 to establish a country residence in Whitesboro, near Utica, and open a law office. He represented both Oneida and Onondaga Counties in the state legislature, and was a member of Congress from 1799 to 1800. Platt continued to pursue a political career as a state senator and, in 1810 (the year of his unsuccessful run against the incumbent governor Daniel Tompkins), he joined DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) in promoting the passage of a bill proposing the construction of the Erie Canal. His motives no doubt included enhancing the value of their substantial landholdings and investments in the Oriskany Woolen Mills. He assumed a seat on the State Supreme Court in 1814, the year of a triumphant battle against the British in Plattsburgh. About 1826, Platt reestablished his New York residence and law practice, and remained in the city until 1829, when he retired to a large farm in Valcour, near Plattsburgh, where he died there in 1834.

One of numerous commissions that Morse garnered in the wake of his triumph with the Lafayette portrait, this likeness was commissioned by Moss Kent (1766-1838), a former member of Congress and Platt’s relation by marriage. During Morse’s discouraging 1823 visit to Albany in search of patronage, Moss Kent had been his only sitter; and later that year in New York City, Morse had painted a portrait of Chancellor James Kent (The New-York Historical Society), a powerful conservative in New York State politics, with which he had vainly hoped to establish his reputation in the city. While this prior contact alone made him a likely candidate to execute the Platt portrait, Kent’s choice must have been influenced as well by Morse’s own very active role in conservative New York politics. His ties were manifest not only in several recent commissions, including his 1826 portrait of Governor DeWitt Clinton, Platt’s old ally (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), but in Morse’s own writings. By 1827 he had begun to contribute articles to The New York Observer, a religious newspaper run by his brother Sidney; and that year he founded his own publication, The Journal of Commerce, in which he offered his views on morality and acceptable entertainments. Morse’s receipt of the Platt commission may also have been a legacy of his recently deceased father’s rigid Federalism, which earlier had won him the good graces of John Adams.

Platt, whose stature had risen with the lavishly celebrated opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, was another artistic and political feather in the artist’s cap. Morse depicted Platt as a decorous, calm, and cerebral man with attributes signifying his reliance on the written word. He finished the portrait by February 4, 1828, and exhibited it at the National Academy of Design annual that spring, when the heated controversy with the National Academy’s rival institution, the American Academy of Fine Arts, was at its height. It apparently was well received, judging from another letter from Morse to his mother in which he wrote, “[M]y portrait has obtained me, by exhibiting it, six portraits at least.”

The portrait of Jonas Platt is currently on view in the American Identities Galleries on the 5th floor. It can be found in the section entitled 'From Colony to Nation.' The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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John Adams

Terry Carbone on January 21, 2009

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Portrait of John Adams, 1816. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 24 15/16 in. (75.5 x 63.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 32.144.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s unrelentingly factual portrait of the former president John Adams was both the result of an important commission from the leading Philadelphia publisher Joseph Delaplaine (1777-1824) and the cause of one of the artist’s earliest professional disappointments. When Morse returned to Boston from London in the fall of 1815, he was hopeful that his student success at the Royal Academy predicted his future success in America. In advance of his arrival, he had explained in a letter to his parents that he planned to begin painting portraits immediately, at a charge forty dollars below Stuart’s, earning enough within a year to return to England with more important commissions in hand. Circumstances were to prove harder than expected, however, and by the time the young artist received the offer of several commissions from Delaplaine, his well-connected father had already communicated with one of the prospective sitters, John Adams, on his son’s behalf.

As early as the summer of 1814, Joseph Delaplaine had begun to circulate an extravagant prospectus advertising a series of illustrated volumes entitled Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished American Characters. He had initiated the project with a substantial profit in mind, and therefore intended to pay very little for the original portraits on which his engraving illustrations would be based. Morse must have relished the opportunity to contribute to Delaplaine’s grandly conceived effort despite the offer of a mere twenty-five dollars per portrait (Morse was probably aware that Gilbert Stuart had received $100 for a portrait of the aging ex-president earlier that year). In part as a favor to the elder Morse, John Adams grudgingly obliged to sit for the portrait, commenting, “It seems not worth while to take a bald head, on which fourscore Winters have snowed.” He delayed their encounter, however, continuing, “[I]t would be too much to ask [Morse] to come to me and it would be disturbing for me, in the dead of winter, to go to Boston. . . .. But who knows what may happen before spring.”

Morse apparently completed the portrait in relative haste while staying at the Adams home, for by February 10, 1816, Abigail Adams had declared it “a stern unpleasing likeness.” Admittedly shocking in its directness and honesty, it was nevertheless an improvement over other of Morse’s early portraits, which conveyed neither the physical substance nor vitality of his sitters. The determination with which Morse documented the deep creases and sagging flesh, the graceless stare, and pinched, involuntary grimace of the elderly Adams was surely unexpected. Adams’s own reaction to Morse’s portrait is more difficult to gauge. Delaplaine’s was quick and negative; he immediately sought to convince Adams of its shortcomings, and unsuccessfully requested access to the portrait of Adams that had been executed by Gilbert Stuart.In his rejection of the portrait, Delaplaine quoted to Morse the harsh critiques of the artist’s peers and stated his intention to withhold payment. Humiliated by the rebuff and frustrated by Stuart’s confirmed hold on the portrait market, Morse abandoned his artistic practice temporarily that summer.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Update 1/28/09: The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

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He Could Have Been a Contender . . .

Terry Carbone on January 15, 2009

An Xiao's concept for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed employs the language of Morse code—one of many instances in which science and art have crossed paths. Relatively few people know that the great American inventor—and the inventor of Morse code—Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) initially set out to become a great American artist. Throughout the early decades of the 19th century, Morse shared with his contemporary Rembrandt Peale a near missionary zeal for the promotion of grand, moralizing art in America—big, serious paintings whose ideal forms and lofty messages could improve the individual and society as a whole. A distinct lack of demand for such art in the young Republic forced both artists to rely for their livings on more mundane portrait work (for which there was a healthy market), and on scientific and business pursuits.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Unidentified photographer. Daguerreotype. Image ID: aaa_macbgall_4798. Smithsonian Institution via The Commons on Flickr.

Morse was born into a rigorously intellectual and religious family in Charlestown, Massachusetts; his father was a renowned Congregationalist minister and author. Morse was educated at Phillips Academy (in Andover, Massachusetts) and at Yale University. He began his formal artistic training in 1810 under the prominent Boston artist Washington Allston, who fostered Morse’s interest in ambitious subjects drawn from history or the bible. When Morse accompanied Allston to London the following year to begin his training at the Royal Academy School, he was motivated by an intense nationalism to excel for the cause of American art. Four years later, when his parents recalled him to Boston, he began work as a fledgling portraitist only to find himself in direct competition with the aging but highly sought Gilbert Stuart (best-know for his portraits of George Washington). Morse resourcefully tutored himself in Stuart’s well-documented techniques and gradually achieved some success. When his too-factual portrait of John Adams was poorly received, however, he temporarily set painting aside in order to work on his invention of a flexible piston fire pump, and to contemplate a career in the ministry.

Morse thus established a thirty-year pattern of alternating work as an artist with his scientific pursuits, often switching gears in reaction to the cool reception of his art. Both efforts were aided by his 1821 move to New Haven, where he maintained close ties with the Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864). The grand artistic success for which Morse hoped, however, remained elusive. When his remarkable scene of history in the making, The House of Representatives, 1822-23 (The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was poorly received during a costly exhibition tour the following year, he turned his attention to the design of a marble-carving machine. Morse enjoyed the high point of his painting career in 1824, after a move to New York, when he won the highly contested commission to paint a grand portrait of General Lafayette for the City of New York, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York). He won further notice in 1826 for his role in the formation of the National Academy of Design, and his appointment as its first president.

Disappointment was in the offing again, however, when in 1829 he launched a nearly-twenty-year lobbying effort to win one of the remaining monumental painting commissions for the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. During a year of preparatory work in Europe, he began the large painting Gallery of the Louvre, 1832-33 (Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), whose subsequent failure to boost Morse’s reputation led him to abandon all but portraiture, and to focus on his new duties as the first professor of art at New York University. The indefatigable Morse also undertook his first unsuccessful bid for the office of mayor of New York, campaigning on a platform of rabid nativism. It was the ultimate awarding of the Capitol Rotunda commission to his colleague Henry Inman in 1837 that proved the last straw for Morse the artist. He threatened to resign his National Academy presidency, gave up his ongoing portrait work, and turned his energies concertedly to his invention of the telegraph with which he had begun to experiment in 1832.

After a successful demonstration of the telegraph in 1838, Morse returned to Europe and there met the pioneer photographer Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), from whom he learned the daguerreotype technique and derived the inspiration to open a photographic studio on his return to New York. He made a second unsuccessful run for mayor in 1841; and after Inman’s death in 1846 made the unwise decision to bid for the Capitol Rotunda commission a second time, only to be rebuffed again. With this final insult, Morse ended his career as an artist absolutely, resigning his post at the National Academy in 1847. He subsequently occupied himself with such scientific pursuits as the placing of an Atlantic telegraph cable, in partnership with Cyrus Field. Morse died in New York, and was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

In the next post, about young Morse's ill-fated portrait of the former president John Adams, you'll get a clearer idea of the frustration he first encountered as a struggling painter.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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