Terra Collection Initiative: Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention

Samuel F. B. Morse’s monumental painting Gallery of the Louvre went on a multi-year national tour beginning in January 2015. 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.  In addition to highlighting renowned works by the Old Masters, Gallery of the Louvre serves as a painted treatise on artistic practice, positioning Morse, depicted as the centrally placed instructor in the work, as a link between European art of the past and America’s cultural future.

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.

The painting’s conservation in 2010 yielded insight into Morse’s working methods and confirmed that Morse was as fearless an experimenter with painting media as he was with the daguerreotype and the electromagnetic telegraph later in his career.  The 30-minute video A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre,” documents the conservation conducted by Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, specialists in American painting.

The exhibition, Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention, was the culmination of the painting’s extensive conservation treatment and two years of scholarly investigation. It was accompanied by an anthology of the same title, published by the Terra Foundation and distributed by Yale University Press.