William Cullen Bryant

The poet and editor William Cullen Bryant was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794. In 1810 he entered Williams College, but in the following year he decided to pursue his studies at Yale. His family's finances precluded his further education and he consequently turned his talents to the study of law, and was admitted to the bar in 1815. However, the publication in the North American Review in 1817 of his poem, Thanatopsis, brought him immediate recognition. Bryant abandoned the legal profession in favor of writing verse. He published his first collection of poems in 1825, and in the same year he moved to New York, where he became the co-editor of New York Review and Atheneum Magazine, and in the following year, editor of New York's Evening Post. Bryant's poetry won world-wide recognition. This standing as an author, together with his role as an active editor, made him one of New York's most prominent citizens. Bryant was a leading champion of the Academy, and his assumption of the editorship of the Post in the year of the Academy's founding provided him the means to give the fledgling organization real and valuable support. He served as the Academy's professor of mythology and history from 1828 to 1837, and remained an especially close friend of the Academy throughout his long life., The first documentation of this portrait's presence in the collection is its inclusion in the listing published in 1839, however it is likely it had been executed and acquired about a decade earlier. Bryant described the commissioning of the portrait in a letter to William A. Croffot of August 12, 1872, in response to what apparently was a request for reminiscences of Morse: "The members of the Academy took a fancy to ask for my portrait painted by Morse, and I sat to him for the purpose. Thirty dollars was at that time his price for a portrait without the hands. The money was handed to me by Mr. John Morton one of the members, and I passed it over to Morse. 'You will want a frame of course' said Morse. I assented and contributed a frame, and the picture enclosed in it was sent to the Academy in whose possession I suppose it now is."