Known today primarily for his role in the development of the electromagnetic telegraph and his namesake code, Samuel Morse began his career as a painter. Created between 1831 and 1833 in Paris and New York, Gallery of the Louvre was Morse’s masterwork and the culmination of his studies in Europe. Morse’s “gallery picture,” a form first popularized in the seventeenth century, is the only major example of such in the history of American art. For this canvas, Morse selected masterpieces from the Louvre’s collection and imaginatively “reinstalled” them in one of the museum’s grandest spaces, the Salon Carré.

The exhibition Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention, a Terra Collection Initiative, is accompanied by an anthology of the same title, published by the Terra Foundation and distributed by Yale University Press.

The exhibition is on view at:

• Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (January 24–May 4, 2015)
• Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, (May 23–August 23, 2015)
• Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, (September 16, 2015–January 10, 2016)
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, (January 23–April 18, 2016)
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, (June 18–September 18, 2016)
• Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, (October 8, 2016–January 8, 2017)
• Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, (February 17–June 4, 2017)
• New Britain Museum of American Art New Britain, Connecticut, (June 17–October 15, 2017)

For more information, please visit:
http://www.cartermuseum.org/exhibitions/samuel-f-b-morses-gallery-of-the-louvre-and-the-art-of-invention