The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  “The churches are all hung in black,” wrote Nathaniel Willis, reporting for his readers in New York. “There is a constant succession of funerals, and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city.”

  A young French woman, Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin, who had just published her first novel under the pen-name George Sand, lived directly across the Seine from the morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité and could see from her window the wagonloads of dead bodies being delivered. She and her friends had made a pact to meet at the Luxembourg Gardens every day at a certain time to be sure they were all still alive.

  Strangely, though, much of life in Paris went on as usual. People strolled the parks and boulevards and dined at the cafés, as though they had not a worry. Willis attended a masquerade ball at the Théâtre des Variétés, where two thousand people carried on with their revels through the night, until seven in the morning. It was all unbearably macabre.

  There was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera-galopade, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence.

  Week after week the weather remained incongruously delightful. Picture the most perfect day in June, but without the full heat of an American summer, wrote James Jackson, trying to fathom how this could be.

  I walk by the riverside and the waters are flowing mildly and calmly, undisturbed, while the glorious sun in its fullest splendor is glowing above and the sky is of the finest blue without a cloud and the air of the clearest and purest. All seems beauty.

  Believing, like others, that the cholera was in decline, and exhausted from his efforts at the hospitals, Jackson decided after a month it was time he left for London. He had done all he could to help, he felt, and had seen more and learned more firsthand than he could ever have anticipated.

  Meanwhile, at the Louvre, Samuel Morse toiled on. He was there each morning from the moment the great bronze doors opened. Friends knew always where to find him. There is no evidence that he missed a day, or that Cooper was not on hand to lend support. As would be said of Cooper’s novels, his hero, his “model man,” whether woodsman, sailor, or gentleman, was always “bent on bringing some especial thing to pass.” Here now in the Louvre was his friend Morse, under pressures of a kind none could have foreseen, trying with all that was in him to bring some exceedingly special thing to pass.

  Morse was terrified. In his youth he had taken the dying Hercules as a subject. Now, bending to this Herculean task, with death all about, he could only wonder if it was to mean his demise. Five weeks into the epidemic, on May 6, he wrote to his brothers, “My anxiety to finish my picture and return drives me, I fear, to too great application. …”

  All the usual securities of life seem to be gone. Apprehension and anxiety make the stoutest hearts quail. Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night, that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak.

  He had to be finished by August 10, the day the Louvre closed for the summer. By September, he prayed, he would be homeward bound.

  Most days he could be found maneuvering his scaffold from one part of the museum to another, to work on copies of the different paintings in his composition. Possibly, in painting his copies, he made use of a camera obscura, a large dark box in which the image of an object may be projected through a small convex lens onto a facing surface. It was a device artists had employed for a long time, and the sort of thing Morse found fascinating.

  The thirty-eight pictures in his painting-of-paintings included works by twenty-two masters. Five—Veronese, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and Guido Reni—were represented twice; two, Murillo and Van Dyck, three times. Titian appeared four times. The single work by Leonardo da Vinci was the Mona Lisa.

  Each had to be so rendered as to catch the very character of the original. Each had to have the look of that particular painter. It was as if a single actor were required to play twenty-two different parts in a performance, and all so well that there could be no mistaking who was who.

  That there be no question which paintings and painters he considered most important, Morse clustered several immediately beside and above the open door to the Grand Gallery, the focal point of his composition. He positioned Titian’s portrait of Francis I, the king of France, at almost the exact center of the canvas, against the upper right-hand corner of the door, and painted it somewhat larger than it really was relative to the others. To Morse, Titian was a veritable god among painters, and Francis I was the French monarch who, in the sixteenth century, first began collecting paintings for the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa. Morse placed another Titian, Supper at Emmaus, directly over the door, and to the left he put Murillo’s Holy Family.

  By far the largest painting in the arrangement was the largest painting in the Louvre, the monumental work depicting Christ’s first miracle, The Marriage at Cana, by the sixteenth-century Venetian Paolo Veronese. To have effectively created a foreshortened version of so complicated a painting was a tour de force in itself. Its position on the side wall at far left made it number one if the arrangement was “read” from left to right.

  Significantly, a total of sixteen, or nearly half of the thirty-eight paintings chosen by the devout Morse, including the giant Veronese, were of religious subjects.

  Some days, when copying a picture hung at the highest level—up at “the skyline,” as artists said—he could be seen perched ten or twelve feet above the floor. There was, also, a certain irony to the fact that in this biggest undertaking of his career he had to spend the greatest part of his time painting small, not large, working with small brushes on his miniature renditions on the canvas.

  So concerned was he about finishing in time, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the copies—work that could only be done at the Louvre—and paint the frames for each later, back in New York.

  The bond of friendship between Cooper and Morse held fast through the long ordeal of the cholera epidemic. If anything, it grew stronger. Acutely sensitive to the extreme stress under which Morse worked, Cooper continued to praise and encourage him, even implying he might purchase the painting once it was completed. Or at least that was Morse’s impression. And as terrified for his own life as Morse may have been, he readily understood the weight of worry and responsibility for an entire family that Cooper had to bear.

  But there was more. For some time Cooper had been subjected to criticism of a kind that cut deeply and that Morse thought unjust. The trouble had begun with the publication of a book of Cooper’s titled Notions of the Americans, one of those he had written while in Paris. It was a novel in the form of a series of letters supposedly written by an Englishman traveling in America at the time of Lafayette’s visit. Cooper had done it partly to please Lafayette, but mainly as a way to correct what he saw as egregious misconceptions about his country held by many in Britain and Europe. The book was not Cooper at his best. The writing was stiff, didactic, and so laudatory of his country and the “American Dream” that it raised outcries on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when real English authors were traveling the United States and offering a decidedly different view.

  The most scathing and engaging of these had appeared that same calamitous spring of 1832 and became a huge success in England. Domestic Manners of the Americans was a rollicking satirical tour of the New World in which the author, Frances Trollope, had a grand time finding almost nothing to like about America and Americans. She made great sport of the way Americans ate, for example, describing the “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured.” She did not like Americans, she wrote in her concluding chapter. “I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.” Her book, as well as the frequent anti-American snobbery to be found in publications like the Edinburgh Review, in addition to critical commen
tary of a like kind in print in his own country, riled Cooper as nothing ever had, and in defense he became still more boastful, even bombastic about being an American, and spoke more disparagingly of Europeans and their failings.

  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 be
comes 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.”