Samuel Finley Breese Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse
1791 - 1872
American painter and inventor. The son of a Calvinist minister, he began amateur sketching while a student at Yale College, New Haven, CT. After graduating in 1810, he returned to Charlestown, MA, to paint family portraits. In Boston in the same year he met Washington Allston, recently returned from Italy, under whose tutelage he executed his first history painting, the Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (c. 1810–11; Boston, MA, Pub. Lib.). He joined Allston on his trip to London in 1811, enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools and also studied privately with Allston and Benjamin West. Morse’s Dying Hercules (1812–13; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), based on the pose and musculature of the Laokoon (Rome, Vatican, Mus. Pio-Clementino) and the theory evident in Allston’s Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1811–14; Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.), was critically acclaimed when exhibited at the Royal Academy and is indicative of Morse’s academic interests. After two trips in 1813 and 1814 to Bristol, where he painted a number of portraits and small subject pieces, Morse ended his period in England with another mythological history painting, the Judgement of Jupiter (1814–15; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.)
Morse received critical praise but little financial reward from the exhibition of his London pictures on his return to Boston in 1815, and as a result he turned to portraiture to earn a living. After two difficult years travelling through New England, he made the first of four annual trips early in 1818 to Charleston, SC, where he painted dozens of portraits. That of his wife, Lucretia Pickering Walker Morse (c. 1818–19; Amherst Coll., MA, Mead A. Mus.), shows the influence of Gilbert Stuart in its painterly technique and bold colour. Morse’s later portraits in Charleston are closer in style to the fluid elegance of Thomas Sully.
Having profited both artistically and financially from his time in Charleston, Morse painted his first mature American history picture, the House of Representatives (2.20×3.33 m, 1822–3; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). His largest work, it depicts Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s newly renovated Hall of Congress and over 80 portraits of congressmen, Supreme Court justices, journalists, a Pawnee Indian, and the artist’s father. Morse hoped to demonstrate to a mass audience the rationality, morality, and gentility of the American system of government; but because of its emblematic nature and the narrative expectations of the viewing public, the exhibition of the House in New Haven, Boston, and New York was a popular and financial disaster, forcing Morse to return to portraiture.
In New Haven during the early 1820s Morse painted figures in and around the Yale University community, such as Eli Whitney, Benjamin Silliman (both New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), and Noah Webster (Amherst Coll., MA, Mead A. Mus.). Moving late in 1824 to New York, which became his permanent home, Morse reached the apex of his career. He painted many of the city’s literary and political leaders, including romantic portraits of William Cullen Bryant (c. 1826; New York, N. Acad. Des.) and DeWitt Clinton (1826; New York, Met.). His most important portrait commission of this period, for the City of New York, was of the Marquis de Lafayette (1825–6; New York, City Hall), who was on a triumphant tour of the USA on the occasion of the semi-centennial of the American Revolution. Full-length and life-size, the portrait represents a departure in the grand-style American portrait. Unlike the static classical pose that had dominated American portraiture (e.g. Gilbert Stuart’s ‘Lansdowne’ Washington, 1796; Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.), Morse’s Lafayette shows the figure in action, a style influenced by the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence. During this period Morse also worked for literary publications, painted a few landscapes and founded the National Academy of Design, New York, of which he was the first president.
Morse travelled to Europe in 1829, spending a year in Italy, where he studied thousands of Old Master pictures, astutely copied some, including Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (1548; Venice, Accad.; copy, 1831; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), and sketched and painted landscapes such as his beautiful Chapel of the Virgin at Subiaco (1831; Worcester, MA, A. Mus.). In mid-1831 he was in Paris, where he began the Gallery of the Louvre (1832–3; Chicago, IL, Terra Mus. Amer. A.). A pantheon of the Louvre’s masterpieces assembled in Morse’s imagination in the Salon Carré, the work, exemplifying his artistic skill, is Morse’s attempt to provide Americans with an awareness of their artistic patrimony. However, like the House of Representatives before it, the Louvre was not a popular success when exhibited in New York in 1833.
The failure of the Louvre, coupled with the decision of the US Congress not to commission Morse to paint a mural in the Capitol Rotunda, signalled the waning of his artistic career. He continued as President of the National Academy until 1845, was appointed Professor of the Literature of the Arts of Design at New York University in 1834 and painted a few spectacular pictures in the 1830s, such as the chromatically brilliant portrait of his daughter Susan, The Muse (1836–7; New York, Met.). Morse’s time was increasingly absorbed by politics, science, and technology. In 1839, after meeting Daguerre in Paris, Morse publicized the daguerreotype process in the USA and became one of its earliest practitioners, opening a portrait studio with John William Draper (1811–82) in New York in 1840. In the late 1830s he developed the first practical electromagnetic telegraph and signalling code. After successfully demonstrating the revolutionary instrument before Congress in 1844 and building a telegraphic empire, Morse became the most honoured inventor in 19th-century America. [Paul J. Staiti. "Morse, Samuel F B." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T059745.]
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