A Louvre With a View
Saturday November 4, 2006
High Museum of Art Is Lent Famous Work
by Stan Parchin
Atlanta, Georgia's freshly expanded High Museum of Art announced on October 9, 2006 that it will exhibit the famous Gallery of the Louvre (1831-32) by American portrait miniaturist, painter, inventor and politician Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) as part of its three-year collaboration with Paris' Musée du Louvre. Morse's work, owned by the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, will play a prominent role in the High's presentation of Kings as Collectors (October 14, 2006-September 7, 2007), an installation of breathtaking antiquities, paintings and sculptures acquired by absolutist monarchs Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) and Louis XVI (r. 1774-1793) during France's bold and brash age of Baroque and Rococo cultural splendor associated with the political exigencies of the Ancien Régime.
Morse's painting aptly describes the Musée du Louvre's Salon Carré in the early 1830s. His canvas accurately illustrates the customarily close arrangement of paintings typical of French salons at the time, providing a visual record was what was collected and displayed there. Some scholars suggest that Morse, whose experiments helped to develop the telegraph, painted himself into the composition of his Gallery of the Louvre. Here an artist, presumably Morse, is seen instructing a female student, facing left, in a room of the museum overwhelmingly devoted to numerous pictorial accomplishments of the Old Masters.
A student of Washington Allston (1779-1843), an American portraitist and history painter, Morse accompanied his teacher to London in 1811. There he was exposed to works of classical antiquity at England's Royal Academy of Arts. Morse returned to America in 1815, where only his portraits were favorably received by his clients in New England and Charleston, North Carolina. The artist subsequently traveled to France and Italy in 1829. Having studied European masterpieces astutely, he incorporated many of them in his Gallery of the Louvre. Morse's remarkable painting, amply documented and exhibited numerous times since its creation, was most recently displayed in the Musée du Louvre's American Artists and the Louvre exhibition from June 14 to September 18, 2006, its appearance attesting to the painting's enduring significance in the history of the visual arts.
Image credit:
Samuel F.B. Morse (American, 1791-1872)
Gallery of the Louvre (1831-32)
Oil on canvas
73 3/4 x 108 in. (187.3 x 274.3 cm)
Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.51
© Terra Foundation for American Art
by Stan Parchin
Atlanta, Georgia's freshly expanded High Museum of Art announced on October 9, 2006 that it will exhibit the famous Gallery of the Louvre (1831-32) by American portrait miniaturist, painter, inventor and politician Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) as part of its three-year collaboration with Paris' Musée du Louvre. Morse's work, owned by the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, will play a prominent role in the High's presentation of Kings as Collectors (October 14, 2006-September 7, 2007), an installation of breathtaking antiquities, paintings and sculptures acquired by absolutist monarchs Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) and Louis XVI (r. 1774-1793) during France's bold and brash age of Baroque and Rococo cultural splendor associated with the political exigencies of the Ancien Régime.
Morse's painting aptly describes the Musée du Louvre's Salon Carré in the early 1830s. His canvas accurately illustrates the customarily close arrangement of paintings typical of French salons at the time, providing a visual record was what was collected and displayed there. Some scholars suggest that Morse, whose experiments helped to develop the telegraph, painted himself into the composition of his Gallery of the Louvre. Here an artist, presumably Morse, is seen instructing a female student, facing left, in a room of the museum overwhelmingly devoted to numerous pictorial accomplishments of the Old Masters.
A student of Washington Allston (1779-1843), an American portraitist and history painter, Morse accompanied his teacher to London in 1811. There he was exposed to works of classical antiquity at England's Royal Academy of Arts. Morse returned to America in 1815, where only his portraits were favorably received by his clients in New England and Charleston, North Carolina. The artist subsequently traveled to France and Italy in 1829. Having studied European masterpieces astutely, he incorporated many of them in his Gallery of the Louvre. Morse's remarkable painting, amply documented and exhibited numerous times since its creation, was most recently displayed in the Musée du Louvre's American Artists and the Louvre exhibition from June 14 to September 18, 2006, its appearance attesting to the painting's enduring significance in the history of the visual arts.
Image credit:
Samuel F.B. Morse (American, 1791-1872)
Gallery of the Louvre (1831-32)
Oil on canvas
73 3/4 x 108 in. (187.3 x 274.3 cm)
Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.51
© Terra Foundation for American Art
Comments
How nice to read about The Louvre without having to hear about that movie.
I could spend the day just looking at the paintings in Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre, an art history lesson in itself.