Early American Painting

Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33
Object - Samuel Morse, Gallery of the Louvre
Besides being the inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse had a distinguished career as a painter and art educator in New York in the early and mid-nineteenth century. While serving as the first president of the National Academy of Design, then America’s foremost art school and exhibition venue, Morse traveled to Europe to study masterpieces. In Paris, he began his most ambitious painting, Gallery of the Louvre, a visual guide to the highlights of Europe’s premier art collection, and a painted treatise on artistic training. He intended the painting to inform Americans about Europe’s artistic heritage and to inspire them to build on its legacy as they developed the young nation’s cultural identity. Morse completed the painting in New York in 1833, but its public reception was discouraging. Today, however, Gallery of the Louvre is recognized as a key work in the development of American art.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Early American Painting

Blind Man's Buff, 1814

Portrait of Mrs. John Stevens (Judith Sargent, later Mrs. John Murray), 1770–72

George Washington, Porthole Portrait, after 1824

A Peaceable Kingdom with Quakers Bearing Banners, c. 1829–1830

Girl in a Red Dress, c. 1835

Portrait of a Woman said to be Clarissa Gallond Cook, in front of a Cityscape, c. 1838

Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33

Lorenzo and Jessica, 1832

Portrait of Harriet, c. 1840

Portrait of Blanch Sully, 1839