Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection

O but (quoth she) great griefe will not be tould,

And can more easily be thought, then said.

Right so; (quoth he) but he, that neuer would,

Could neuer: will to might giues greatest aid.

But griefe (quoth she) does greater grow displaid,

If then it find not helpe, and breedes despaire.

Despaire breedes not (quoth he) where faith is staid.

No faith so fast (quoth she) but flesh does paire.

Flesh may empaire (quoth he) but reason can repaire.

His goodly reason, and well guided speech

So deepe did settle in her gratious thought

That her perswaded to disclose the breach,

Which loue and fortune in her heart had wrought

And said: faire Sir, I hope good hap hath brought

You to inquire the secrets of my griefe

Or that your wisdome will direct my thought,

Or that your prowesse can me yield relief:

Then heare the stone sad, which I shall tell you briefe. (1.7.41-42)

As Spenser's wonderfully evocative parentheses make graphically manifest, Morse chose to illustrate a scene that was all talk: he said; she said. Not an event, but the persons. Or rather, the most glorious but also most interior of all events, the moment of saving grace in which a sinner is turned from despair to faith. As Morse seems to have recognized--given his own religious heritage, he could hardly have missed it--this scene epitomizes Spenser's critique of Catholicism by representing the life-changing moment of saving grace as a conversation. The Protestant God of Spenser and Morse does not simply command obedience, he is a rational deity who accommodates himself to the highest gifts of his creatures and saves them by enlightening their understanding. [56]

A high theme indeed--but also an exceptionally appropriate one for a painting intended for the main cabin of a Hudson River steamboat. As Prince Arthur enlightens Una by engaging her in conversation, so Morse's painting is designed to engage the viewer. Which painting do you like best? Why do you like that one? Why is this one so much more loosely painted? Who are Una and the Dwarf? Why do you think the painter chose that story? What does it mean? Like the Albany collection as a whole, Morse's painting is designed to promote republican values by furthering the aesthetic and moral education of the traveling public.

The evidence I have collected suggests that the Albany gallery was intended to express a patriotic as well as an aesthetic program. Lawrence's View from Bordentown Hill provides an important clue to these meanings (Fig. 21). In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte's elder brother Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844) immigrated to the United States. The former king of Naples (1806-8) and of Spain (1808-13), Joseph Bonaparte purchased an estate at Bordentown in 1816 and made his home there until his first return to Europe in 1832 and again from September 1838 until November 1839. Bonaparte's original purchase consisted of 211 acres, including a white mansion sitting on a high bluff known as Point Breeze overlooking the confluence of Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware River. Within a few years, Bonaparte had purchased several adjacent farms to create an eighteen-hundred-acre estate extending a mile up Crosswicks Creek. As James Alexander Stevens's granddaughter Katherine Stevens Vroom pointed out in a letter of 1913 to the magazine American Art News, the painting Morse described as a View from Bordentown Hill was a distant view of "Joseph Bonaparte's place at Bordentown, N.J." [57]