Works by Samuel Finley Breese Morse

Before Morse code, Samuel Morse was a portrait painter trained in England who also tried grander things: classical gods, a night view of Congress, a Louvre gallery with its pictures copied in miniature.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse sailed for England in 1811 with the painter Washington Allston, who meant to introduce him to Benjamin West, and that year he entered the Royal Academy. Life drawing there shows in the Dying Hercules of 1812, a hero thrown back on a rock with every muscle of chest and belly modelled, one arm flinging a white cloth up against a stormy sky; he first made the figure as a sculpture. In The Judgment of Jupiter, also painted in England, Jupiter stretches out a hand from a cloud beside his eagle while Marpessa flees to her husband Idas, who catches her, and Apollo, his head ringed with rays, looks on.

Back in America from 1815 he lived on commissions, and most of the works below are portraits, several setting black clothes and white linen against a red wall or shawl. The House of Representatives was meant to earn admission fees the way a touring picture by François Marius Granet had; Morse set it at night, with a man on a ladder tending the great chandelier, but it drew no crowds in New York in 1823. In Paris he began Gallery of the Louvre, 38 of the museum's paintings copied small on one canvas, with copyists at work in front. On the voyage home in 1832, experiments with a fellow passenger's electromagnet gave him the idea of a single-wire telegraph, and he put the painting aside.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Terra Foundation for American Art.