The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Besides the time he had spent with Cooper and his family in Rome, including a moonlight tour of the Colosseum, Morse struck up a friendship in Florence with a young American sculptor, Horatio Greenough, a friend of Cooper’s, whom Morse saw as a fellow spirit “wholly bent” on “excellence in his art.” Greenough had paid Morse the compliment of doing a bust of him. To Greenough, who was still in his twenties, Morse seemed well on in years. He enjoyed teasing Morse for his straitlaced Puritan ways, calling him “wicked Morse,” and kept telling him it was time he married again. A man “without a true love,” insisted Greenough (who was happily single), “is a ship without ballast, a one-tined fork, half a pair of scissors.”

  When Morse returned to Paris in the fall of 1831, Cooper thought his work “amazingly improved.” Morse had no sooner unpacked than Cooper commissioned him to paint a copy of a Rembrandt, Tobit and the Angel, that Cooper judged to be as difficult an assignment as any painting in the Louvre.

  Cooper considered himself an artist as a writer, and reviewers of his novels often likened his eye for description to that of a painter. In France, Balzac wrote of Cooper that in his hands the art of the pen had never come closer to the art of the brush. Cooper took serious interest in painting and favored the company of artists. In the New York lunch club he had started—the Bread and Cheese—the artists outnumbered the literary men.

  To Cooper, the art of portraiture, when it went beyond a skillful likeness to a delineation of character, had an especially strong appeal. Seeing a portrait of Jefferson by Thomas Sully, Cooper had experienced a complete change of mind. His staunch Federalist family background had given way, he said, and he saw “a dignity, a repose” in Jefferson he had never seen in other portraits. “I saw nothing but Jefferson standing before me, a gentleman … in all republican simplicity, with a grace and ease on the canvas. …”

  From the time Morse took up his ambitious project at the Louvre, Cooper could not keep away. He came every day, climbing the long flight of marble stairs to the second floor to sit and watch.

  It was to be a giant interior view of the Louvre. The canvas Morse had prepared measured six by nine feet, making it greater in size than his House of Representatives of a decade earlier. And it was to be an infinitely greater test of his skill. Instead of a crowd of congressmen’s faces to contend with, he had set himself to render a generous sampling of the world’s greatest works of art, altogether thirty-eight paintings—landscapes, religious subjects, and portraits, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—and convey in miniature the singular beauty and power of each.

  Interior views displaying the treasures of great European art collectors had been an established convention since the seventeenth century. One stunning example of the genre was The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, painted in 1749 by Giovanni Paolo Panini, which presented the collection Morse had seen at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, though in a setting only somewhat like that of the Palazzo. In 1831, just a year ahead of Morse, a British artist, John Scarlett Davis, had done one of the Louvre, a painting Morse probably knew about and may have been inspired by. But very few Americans had ever seen such paintings, and no American artist had yet undertaken the interior of the Louvre. Morse’s view was to be nearly twice the size of the Davis canvas, which in conception, compared to what Morse had in mind, was prosaic, even banal.

  American painters had been coming to Paris for a long time—notably Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull in the late eighteenth century—and they had registered great delight in the city. Trumbull had come as the guest of Jefferson, and in the library of Jefferson’s home on the Champs-Élysées he and Jefferson had first discussed the idea of a painting to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On a small piece of paper, Jefferson had drawn a rough floor plan of the room at Independence Hall as he remembered it, and Trumbull, on the same piece of paper, had made a quick thumbnail sketch of how he envisioned the scene that was to become the best-known work painted by an American.

  Rembrandt Peale and John Vanderlyn were among the other American painters who came later to Paris, Vanderlyn spending seven years in all. Robert Fulton, artist and inventor, spent time there at intervals from 1797 to 1804, during which he both painted and worked on ideas for steamboats and submarines.

  No American prior to Morse, however, had set himself to so great and difficult a Paris subject, a task that could require a year’s work, as Morse appreciated.

  He had decided, in effect, to rehang the walls of the elegant Salon Carré, or Square Room, the heart of the Louvre’s picture galleries. He would select his own chefs d’œuvre from the museum’s collection and arrange them on canvas to his liking. This in itself was an enormously ambitious undertaking, in that it meant walking the length and breadth of the Louvre for days, taking time to look seriously at some 1,250 paintings, then, as his own jury of one, decide which to include and how to arrange them.

  As it was, the paintings hanging in the Salon Carré were contemporary French works, most in the Romantic style, including Théodore Géricault’s highly dramatic Raft of the Medusa. Romantic art, with its emphasis on drama, color, and vigorous brushwork, was at its height. Just the year before, in 1831, at the French Academy’s Salon, the annual exhibition of contemporary art held at the Louvre, Eugène Delacroix had presented his Liberty Leading the People, a huge heroic tribute to the Revolution of 1830, in which its commanding figure, the resolute Liberty, her breast bared, leads the charge to victory, the tricolor held high. The brilliant young Delacroix, who had become the commanding figure in the Romantic revolt against academic art, also included himself in the painting as a handsome, resolute citizen at Liberty’s side, armed with a musket.

  But Morse, whose work was fundamentally academic, failed to appreciate or take much interest in the Romantics and their revolt. He would choose instead those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European masterworks—mainly from the Italian Renaissance—that he loved especially, and by the artists he most admired, but also, importantly, works he felt his fellow Americans ought to know and learn to appreciate. He was a man on a mission, a kind of cultural evangelical, as would be said. He would bring the good news of time-honored European art home to his own people, for their benefit and for the betterment of his country.

  It was not a new idea. In the same spirit, Jefferson had purchased some sixty-three paintings while in Paris, mostly copies, in the belief that they, like the hundreds of books he selected from bookstalls by the Seine, could help increase American appreciation of the fine arts and the world of ideas.

  The great virtue of Morse’s project was that so many acknowledged masterworks could be seen all together. It would be his own musée imaginaire, which he would take on tour at home, though unlike the Louvre, he would charge admission. He had had the same idea with his House of Representatives and with no success. But this, he felt, was such a vastly different subject that the public would respond differently. He was intensely enthusiastic, but then he was by nature intensely enthusiastic.

  Cooper loved what he saw emerging and the “sensation” it was causing. He had a regular routine—work at his desk in the morning, then proceed to the Louvre (a walk of a mile and a half or more from his home across the Seine) to spend the afternoon with Morse.

  I get up at eight, read the papers, breakfast at ten, sit down to the quill at 1/2 past ten, work till one, throw off my morning gown, draw on my boots and gloves, take a cane … go to the Louvre, where I find Morse stuck up on a high working stand. …

  Morse worked from a tall, movable scaffold of his own contrivance, which he shifted about from point to point in the galleries to copy his chosen subjects, some of which were hung quite high.

  His painting was of a wall full of pictures in the Salon Carré hung floor-to-ceiling and cheek-by-jowl—the standard mode for French exhibitions. Just left of center in the composition, through a large open doorway, could be seen the long, high-vaulted Grande Galerie with
its skylights stretching away as if forever, like a glowing vista in a landscape. To the left and right of the main wall of paintings were portions of the sidewalls, these, too, solid with pictures though much foreshortened like the side-walls of a stage set. In fact, the net effect of the whole arrangement was very like that of a stage set, and it was Morse’s plan to place a half dozen or more figures on stage, as it were, for added interest and to give human scale to the room.

  He worked all day “uninterruptedly,” Sundays included, from nine o’clock until just before four, when the guards came through to call out that the museum was closing. Visitors flowed through the galleries the whole time, and other artists and students worked at their easels doing copies. But Morse up on his scaffold remained the undisputed center of curiosity and topic of conversation. Sitting astride a chair close at hand, Cooper enjoyed the show more than anyone, occasionally, for comic relief, offering his friend a little unsolicited advice: “Lay it on here, Samuel— more yellow—the nose is too short—the eye too small—damn it, if I had been a painter what a picture I should have painted.”

  Nathaniel Willis, who was fascinated by faces, tried to fathom why, in a crowd, he could always recognize an American. There was something distinctive about the American face, something he had never noticed until coming to Paris. The distinguishing feature, he decided, was “the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to anyone as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the index to our national character.”

  To Willis, Cooper and Morse were the essence of the “national character,” and on a gentle, sunny afternoon in the Garden of the Tuileries that March, seeing them approaching along one of the wide gravel walks, Willis took note. A fashion plate himself, he had been observing the passing parade of French dandies, their heads “fresh from the hairdresser” and sporting the whitest of white gloves. Then Cooper and Morse came into view, and what contrast there was between these two good American faces!

  Morse with his kind, open, gentle countenance, the very picture of goodness and sincerity; and Cooper, dark and corsair-looking, with his brows down over his eyes, and his strongly lined mouth fixed in an expression of moodiness and reserve.

  The two faces were not equally just to their owners, Willis thought. Morse was all that his face bespoke, but Cooper was by no means as dark and moody as he appeared, as anyone who knew him could attest. Cooper himself called it his “chameleon face.”

  In a portrait painted at home ten years before by John Wesley Jarvis, it is an intensely serious James Fenimore Cooper who fixes his bright black eyes on the viewer. A ruddy face from the brow down, it is dominated by a nose burned red by the sun, while the unusually broad forehead is pale white, the mark of a man who spent much time out of doors, his hat pulled low over the eyes.

  On a marble bust carved in Paris by a leading French sculptor, Pierre-Jean David, Cooper’s face is leaner and handsomer, the brow, if anything, broader still, and there is a tenacious set to the jaw. Cooper’s family thought it an excellent likeness, which was not the case of another bust by Horatio Greenough, where the “corsair-look” was too much in evidence.

  Cooper and Morse were about the same height, and from Morse’s passport we know he stood five feet nine. The rest of the passport description reads as follows:

  Forehead: High

  Eyes: Black

  Nose: Straight

  Mouth: Large

  Chin: Regular

  Hair: Black & Grey

  Face: Long

  In several portraits Morse did of himself, starting in his college years, his countenance is quite as kind, open, and gentle as Nathaniel Willis said, and boyish verging on pretty. Greenough also rendered Morse and gave due emphasis to the high forehead, straight nose, and large mouth. The boyish look, however, is no longer in evidence. The face Greenough modeled is leaner, the hair tousled, and there are creases at the corners of the wide mouth. It might be the bust of a handsome actor or poet. It is a gentle, romantic, somewhat soulful face, yet with an unmistakable look of purpose about it.

  II

  Cooper’s afternoons at the Louvre with Morse were a welcome diversion from much on his mind. They were part of that “little pleasure concealed in the bottom of the cup” he had hoped to find living abroad. In the eyes of many, Cooper, with his established reputation and attractive family, was the center of the small American circle in Paris. But for Cooper, Morse and Morse’s work at the Louvre had become a redeeming center of interest and enjoyment.

  Six months earlier, in September, Cooper’s nephew William, who had become very like an adopted son, was taken ill. In October, William died of consumption at age twenty-two. With the onset of winter, Cooper’s wife, Susan, came down with a fever of some lingering indeterminate variety that had the whole family worried. Paris was notoriously unhealthy in the chill gloom of winter, the season of colds and deadly fevers.

  “Ma femme est malade et … j’attends le médecin,” Cooper notified a French friend. The family’s Parisian doctor was doing too little for her, Cooper thought. He was too content to let nature take its course. “They [the French] are capital in all surgical or all anatomical applications, but when it comes to fevers and latent diseases, they are too timid by half.”

  His own health, though uneven, was better than it had been in New York, as he liked to tell others. He was less troubled by fevers and gastric attacks. At age forty-two, he was often told he looked thirty-five. “Of course, I believe them,” he would respond. Susan, reporting in confidence to her sister, wrote that “Mr. Cooper” was quite well but for one problem. “When he goes into crowded rooms, then he is sure to suffer for the next twenty-four hours with an attack of nerves more or less violent.” But of this nothing was to be said beyond the family.

  For several months there had been warnings of a possible onset of the dreaded cholera morbus. Reports had appeared in the Paris and London newspapers starting in August, and concern kept growing. From Boston in November, Dr. James Jackson, Sr., wrote to his son in Paris asking, “What are you to do if the cholera reaches you?” His advice was to “fly”— to leave France as fast as possible.

  Cooper dismissed the talk of cholera, suspecting “a good deal of exaggeration on the subject.”

  As usual, Cooper had a novel under way, his fourteenth. Beyond that he talked of doing a volume on his travels in Europe. He had been writing now for twelve years, and while the quality of his efforts was uneven, he took pride in the books and enjoyed the acclaim they brought. And he loved the money. It was for money that he had started writing in the first place, when the collapse of a family empire left him nearly destitute. According to the story told later by his daughter Sue, a story widely repeated, Cooper had been reading aloud to her mother from an English novel one evening when, after a chapter or two, he threw it aside saying he could write a better book. She had laughed at the idea, whereupon he set to work.

  At no prior time had he shown the least interest in writing or entertained any thought of a literary life. At Yale, where he was the youngest student in the college, he had proven such a poor scholar and such a hellion that he was expelled at age sixteen. (Among other things, he had locked a donkey in a recitation room and exploded a homemade bomb under a dormitory door.) After a year under his father’s supervision at home in Cooperstown, the village founded by his father beside Otsego Lake in upstate New York, it was arranged for him to go to sea on a merchant ship. Finding he liked the sailor’s life, he had joined the U.S. Navy—it was then that he met his Paris walking companion, Captain Woolsey—and saw no reason not to make the navy a career, until he met Susan Augusta De Lancey, who thought it time he settled down.

  Married in New York in 1811, they lived first with her parents at Mamaroneck, then moved to a farm by Otsego Lake. Cooper began building a stone manor house, and with a generous cash bequest from his father, who had died in 1809, he anticipated a serene future as an upstate country ge
ntleman. Children were born. Debts accumulated. When his father’s unsettled estate was found to be riven with debt, and the family land holdings worth little because of a poor economy, Cooper faced bankruptcy.

  His first book, Precaution, was a romance set in England, somewhat in the manner of a Jane Austen novel. It was not very good and only moderately successful. In England it was taken to be an English novel. But Cooper had discovered he liked the work and liked the prospect of the influence he might attain as an author. Books mattered. Without delay he tried again.

  “By persuasion of Mrs. Cooper I have commenced another tale,” he wrote. (He called her his “tribunal of appeals,” “an excellent judge in everything.” He read all he wrote aloud to her and she went over every page of manuscript.) The result this time proved entirely different. The Spy was an all-out adventure tale set in America during the Revolutionary War. Its theme, as Cooper said, was patriotism, and it was an immediate hit.

  From that point on, his success was phenomenal. The next tale, The Pioneers, sold 3,500 copies by noon of publication day. Less than a year later, a French translation appeared.

  The Pioneers was published in 1823, the most difficult year of Cooper’s life. The house he had built burned. His two-year-old son, Fenimore, died. He himself suffered from sunstroke as well as severe bilious attacks, as he called them, and a fever that may have been malaria.

  In The Pioneers he had been writing about a world much like that of his boyhood, and largely to please himself. The setting was Cooperstown (called Templeton in the book), the year, 1793. It was in The Pioneers, too, that he introduced Natty Bumppo, a lean old frontiersman, known also as Leatherstocking for the long deerskin leggings he wore, a character very like Daniel Boone, who had died only a few years earlier.