It would probably surprise Samuel F. B. Morse, and not pleasantly, that future generations know him for his invention of Morse code and his services to telegraphy, rather than for those paintings, produced over six decades, that were the serious business of his life. Despite a strict Protestant upbringing, Morse (1791-1872) spent three years in Europe under the tutelage of the painter and general intellectual Washington Allston, where he deepened his understanding of the art of painting. He returned to Europe nearly 20 years later and while there, he conceived one of his largest works, Gallery of the Louvre (1831-33), which will soon go on view at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens before continuing on to eight other American venues in a tour that will last into early 2018.
Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872), Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33), oil on canvas, 73 1/2 x 108 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.
Six feet by nine feet, this delightful painting was produced at a pivotal moment of Western art, when painters had emerged from the tradition of the Old Masters, but had not yet fully realized that fact. In his portrait of a gallery filled with famous paintings by the greatest European masters, Morse was actually following, and he knew he was following, in an inveterate tradition, a genre even, in which painters depicted entire galleries, usually those of imperial or papal collections, and seemed to challenge the viewer to identify each work. Doubtless Morse had seen examples of this genre by David Teniers the Younger and Pompeo Batoni, among others. We must not forget that one of the functions of such paintings—before the invention of photography—was to serve as an aid to the memories of travelers, or as an index of a collection for the benefit of those viewers who had not had the chance to see these works in the flesh.
In Morse’s painting, the Louvre is depicted as a smaller, less exalted place than what it would become as a result of Visconti and Lefuel’s additions during the July Monarchy, to say nothing of the additions under the Second Empire. The paintings are arrayed salon style—one atop another—with no respect for style, genre, period or nationality. One sees paintings by Claude, Raphael, Rubens, Correggio, Titian, Poussin and Murillo. It is interesting that Morse was painting at a time when the Mona Lisa, though revered, had not yet attained the mythic stature that it enjoys today. As such it appears almost as an inconspicuous afterthought behind the back of the dapper painting instructor who is giving pointers to one of several young women who inhabit the sparsely occupied room.
Morse could be a skillful painter, mostly in those portraits that were his bread and butter. Otherwise, it must be said, his depictions of landscapes or, as here, an interior, often seem a little feeble in conception and execution. His achievement lies elsewhere, in a sense of patriotic duty to lay bare the treasures of the old world to the citizens of the new, most of whom could reasonably expect that they would never live to see Europe. Today that has changed, of course, but still The Gallery of the Louvre is eminently worth seeing, for what it tells us about how the Louvre and its treasures appeared nearly two centuries ago, and how they were seen through the eyes of Americans.
