Gallery of the Louvre

Morse Code inventor brought the Louvre to the United States

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) is known best for his invention of the electromagnetic telegraph—and for "Morse" code—but he began his career as a painter and rose to the Presidency of the National Academy of Design in New York.

No Photography of great art in 1833.

In 1833 there were no opportunities for Americans to know the great art of Europe—no art books, no photograph of the paintings.

The monumental Gallery of the Louvre is Morse’ masterwork, a canvas he created for the edification of his countrymen. ¹

The Gallery of the Louvre was Morse's ambitious effort to capture images of the Louvre's great paintings and transport them across the ocean and throughout the country, to the republic's young cities and villages, so that art and culture could grow there. The paintings he included were works by Veronese, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Titian, Jouvenet, Murillo, Poussin, Vernet, and Reni. For this canvas, Morse imaginatively ’reinstalled’ them in one of the museum’s grandest spaces, the Salon Carré.²

Morse, family and friends in the painting.

Morse included himself in the center looking over his daughter Susan’s shoulder as she paints. The woman painting alone at the easel is his late wife Lucretia Pickering. James Fennimore Cooper stands in the corner gesturing to his daughter. Richard Habersham, a portraitist and former roommate of Morse is painting a seascape in the forefront, and emerging from the long hall is Horatio Greenough, a sculptor whom Morse met in Paris and who went on to create a colossal marble monument to George Washington. We also see a woman and child with their backs to us who appear to be from Brittany, this serves as a reminder that the Louvre was open to people from all walks of life.³

1. Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33, Samuel F. B. Morse, American, 1791–1872, oil on canvas, 73 ¾ x 108 in. (187.3 x 274.3 cm).

2. Olmsted, Jennifer W. “Samuel F. B. Morse’s ‘Gallery of the Louvre’ and the Art of Invention.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (2018). Review of John Brownlee, ed., Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art in conjunction with Yale University Press, 2014. 224 pp.; 135 color illus.

3. Stanska, Zuzanna. (2017). Samuel F. B. Morse was an American painter who graduated from Yale University and went on to the Royal Academy in England where he studied painting. Daily Art Magazine.