AT THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT Gallery in Washington D.C., the permanent “American Origins” exhibit features room after room of paintings of figures from America’s past. Given their uniformity in style, it is more a history lesson than an aesthetic experience. Yet even a good painter today can marvel at some of the techniques—skin tones, drawing, and glazing—that were considered first class in the nineteenth century.
In one such room, amid the throng, is a self-portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), once a very prolific American painter, eventually turned inventor and politician.
On occasion it has been asked, "Who is America's greatest painter." Given the stretches of time, and variety of period styles, it is impossible to answer. However, if we ask, "Who is America's most consequential painter?" we have narrowed the query. I would propose that it was Morse.
For most of his life, he was a hands-on painter, matching in focus and work hours anyone past or present. He studied in England and Rome, painted presidents, had countless portraits to his name, and was president of the country's first important art organization, the National Academy of Design, founded in 1852.
Still, Morse is most widely known as inventor of the telegraph and the Morse Code. Like other early Americans—Ben Franklin comes to mind—he could be a polymath. Much in art, science and politics was rapidly shifting in the post-revolutionary and antebellum periods, and a single individual could aspire to some kind of notable breakthrough.
While Morse was probably most consequential as an inventor—helping to shepherd in the communications revolution that changed America—he was also emblematic of the contradictions, the dark and light, of his era.
Born into a strict Calvinist, New England family (his father was a minister), he had not only the discipline and noblesse oblige of his privileged class, but its biases as well. His single-minded painting career, and his matriculation at Yale, led him into circles, scientific and political, that made him a classic type of the elite American. Once loyal to the Federalist Party, he turned anti-Federalist (i.e. anti-Britain) during the War of 1812, advocated universal education (a Federalist policy), and yet supported slavery as God ordained.
Morse equated Protestant Christianity with modern liberty. That made him anti-Catholic and thus anti-immigrant, warning of the perils of "popery." When in Rome he refused to doff his hat to the pope. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York on those anti platforms.
He also became a shrewd businessman. Through his contacts with other inventors, he co-invented the electrical mechanism for the tap-tap “repeater” telegraph, which he dramatically demonstrated in 1844 on wires strung between Washington and Baltimore. Once its value was realized, he engaged in a pitched copyright battle with other entrepreneurs over rights to the invention. The Supreme Court took the case, giving Morse half of his claim. This set an important copyright precedent, now applied to copyright disputes over computer devices and programs.
Few painters, if any, since Morse have played such a public role or influenced social developments. Arguably, the communications revolution begun by the telegraph allowed society-wide reforms, such as abolition, women’s suffrage, and the immigrant “melting pot,” to finally prevail.
By his industry, Morse was able to make a good living at painting. His giant painting of the gathered House of Representatives, known for its architectural detail but weak composition, continues to have great documentary import from an age without photography.
Seeing Morse's self-portrait at the National Portrait Gallery will at first convey the monotony of just another antiquated artwork, all of them rather dark and fusty in the age before luminism, Impressionism, and modern art. Nevertheless, he was a skilled, all-in painter who happened to live at a time of extraordinary ferment. He was in the right place at the right time, bringing his curious mind and ambition to bear.
Few painters since have found themselves in such an environment, with very little artistic competition. We could say the times made Morse. We might give Morse less credit, since he was not the rebellious painter defying his times, a common definition today of the heroic artist. Early Americans, so long under the traditions of Europe, had little motive for artistic innovation. Practical invention was the America impulse. Morse kept the old European norms, Calvinist in color, but rebelled in another way: advancing can-do knowledge over passivity.
Most people only know about the Morse Code. Still, he is my candidate for the "most consequential" painter in U.S. history, for good and ill.