Samuel F. B. Morse

This 1990 volume represented the first fully developed study of the eminent American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872). It reveals his prodigious achievements in painting and technology, his passionate ambitions, and his key role in the development of American art. While covering the artist’s entire career, Professor Staiti gives particular attention to three of his most extraordinary artistic achievements: the House of Representatives, the Gallery of the Louvre and the National Academy of Design. In a final chapter, on the electromagnetic telegraph, an invention that imprinted Morse’s name on our language, there is a discussion of the conceptual relationship between artistic and mechanical invention. Also contained in the book is the first comprehensive listing of the three hundred works of art, both extant and lost, that Morse is known to have produced. This landmark book offers an arresting profile of an enormously complex figure.