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Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Jonas Platt, 1828. Oil on canvas, 35 15/16 x 29 7/16 in. (91.3 x 74.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 85.23.

By the mid-1820s, Samuel F. B. Morse finally had achieved in his portraits a more fluid technique and mastery of high color rivaling the accomplishments of the then-elderly Gilbert Stuart. His portrait of Jonas Platt may be counted, along with his Benjamin Silliman, 1825 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), among his most sensitive and finely painted likenesses dating from this brief high point in his artistic career. Particularly in these works, Morse displayed a fluid realism and expressive immediacy that neither Stuart nor Thomas Sully achieved in their own highly fluid but more stylized manners.

Morse received commissions for two portraits of Judge Jonas Platt late in 1827, the year in which the exhibition of his The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York) at the National Academy of Design established him, for a brief time, as New York’s preeminent artist. Platt was by this time a highly successful New York attorney and politician. Son of one of the founders of Plattsburgh, New York, he had studied law and entered the New York offices of Richard Varick by 1790, when he also was admitted to the bar and married Helen Livingston (d. 1859) of Fishkill. Platt left New York City in 1791 to establish a country residence in Whitesboro, near Utica, and open a law office. He represented both Oneida and Onondaga Counties in the state legislature, and was a member of Congress from 1799 to 1800. Platt continued to pursue a political career as a state senator and, in 1810 (the year of his unsuccessful run against the incumbent governor Daniel Tompkins), he joined DeWitt Clinton (1769-1828) in promoting the passage of a bill proposing the construction of the Erie Canal. His motives no doubt included enhancing the value of their substantial landholdings and investments in the Oriskany Woolen Mills. He assumed a seat on the State Supreme Court in 1814, the year of a triumphant battle against the British in Plattsburgh. About 1826, Platt reestablished his New York residence and law practice, and remained in the city until 1829, when he retired to a large farm in Valcour, near Plattsburgh, where he died there in 1834.

One of numerous commissions that Morse garnered in the wake of his triumph with the Lafayette portrait, this likeness was commissioned by Moss Kent (1766-1838), a former member of Congress and Platt’s relation by marriage. During Morse’s discouraging 1823 visit to Albany in search of patronage, Moss Kent had been his only sitter; and later that year in New York City, Morse had painted a portrait of Chancellor James Kent (The New-York Historical Society), a powerful conservative in New York State politics, with which he had vainly hoped to establish his reputation in the city. While this prior contact alone made him a likely candidate to execute the Platt portrait, Kent’s choice must have been influenced as well by Morse’s own very active role in conservative New York politics. His ties were manifest not only in several recent commissions, including his 1826 portrait of Governor DeWitt Clinton, Platt’s old ally (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), but in Morse’s own writings. By 1827 he had begun to contribute articles to The New York Observer, a religious newspaper run by his brother Sidney; and that year he founded his own publication, The Journal of Commerce, in which he offered his views on morality and acceptable entertainments. Morse’s receipt of the Platt commission may also have been a legacy of his recently deceased father’s rigid Federalism, which earlier had won him the good graces of John Adams.

Platt, whose stature had risen with the lavishly celebrated opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, was another artistic and political feather in the artist’s cap. Morse depicted Platt as a decorous, calm, and cerebral man with attributes signifying his reliance on the written word. He finished the portrait by February 4, 1828, and exhibited it at the National Academy of Design annual that spring, when the heated controversy with the National Academy’s rival institution, the American Academy of Fine Arts, was at its height. It apparently was well received, judging from another letter from Morse to his mother in which he wrote, “[M]y portrait has obtained me, by exhibiting it, six portraits at least.”

The portrait of Jonas Platt is currently on view in the American Identities Galleries on the 5th floor. It can be found in the section entitled ‘From Colony to Nation.’ The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872). Portrait of John Adams, 1816. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 24 15/16 in. (75.5 x 63.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 32.144.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s unrelentingly factual portrait of the former president John Adams was both the result of an important commission from the leading Philadelphia publisher Joseph Delaplaine (1777-1824) and the cause of one of the artist’s earliest professional disappointments. When Morse returned to Boston from London in the fall of 1815, he was hopeful that his student success at the Royal Academy predicted his future success in America. In advance of his arrival, he had explained in a letter to his parents that he planned to begin painting portraits immediately, at a charge forty dollars below Stuart’s, earning enough within a year to return to England with more important commissions in hand. Circumstances were to prove harder than expected, however, and by the time the young artist received the offer of several commissions from Delaplaine, his well-connected father had already communicated with one of the prospective sitters, John Adams, on his son’s behalf.

As early as the summer of 1814, Joseph Delaplaine had begun to circulate an extravagant prospectus advertising a series of illustrated volumes entitled Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished American Characters. He had initiated the project with a substantial profit in mind, and therefore intended to pay very little for the original portraits on which his engraving illustrations would be based. Morse must have relished the opportunity to contribute to Delaplaine’s grandly conceived effort despite the offer of a mere twenty-five dollars per portrait (Morse was probably aware that Gilbert Stuart had received $100 for a portrait of the aging ex-president earlier that year). In part as a favor to the elder Morse, John Adams grudgingly obliged to sit for the portrait, commenting, “It seems not worth while to take a bald head, on which fourscore Winters have snowed.” He delayed their encounter, however, continuing, “[I]t would be too much to ask [Morse] to come to me and it would be disturbing for me, in the dead of winter, to go to Boston. . . .. But who knows what may happen before spring.”

Morse apparently completed the portrait in relative haste while staying at the Adams home, for by February 10, 1816, Abigail Adams had declared it “a stern unpleasing likeness.” Admittedly shocking in its directness and honesty, it was nevertheless an improvement over other of Morse’s early portraits, which conveyed neither the physical substance nor vitality of his sitters. The determination with which Morse documented the deep creases and sagging flesh, the graceless stare, and pinched, involuntary grimace of the elderly Adams was surely unexpected. Adams’s own reaction to Morse’s portrait is more difficult to gauge. Delaplaine’s was quick and negative; he immediately sought to convince Adams of its shortcomings, and unsuccessfully requested access to the portrait of Adams that had been executed by Gilbert Stuart.In his rejection of the portrait, Delaplaine quoted to Morse the harsh critiques of the artist’s peers and stated his intention to withhold payment. Humiliated by the rebuff and frustrated by Stuart’s confirmed hold on the portrait market, Morse abandoned his artistic practice temporarily that summer.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Update 1/28/09: The portrait of John Adams is currently on view in the Luce Visible Storage/Study Center, hanging in painting bay 24.

An Xiao’s concept for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed employs the language of Morse code—one of many instances in which science and art have crossed paths. Relatively few people know that the great American inventor—and the inventor of Morse code—Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) initially set out to become a great American artist. Throughout the early decades of the 19th century, Morse shared with his contemporary Rembrandt Peale a near missionary zeal for the promotion of grand, moralizing art in America—big, serious paintings whose ideal forms and lofty messages could improve the individual and society as a whole. A distinct lack of demand for such art in the young Republic forced both artists to rely for their livings on more mundane portrait work (for which there was a healthy market), and on scientific and business pursuits.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Unidentified photographer. Daguerreotype. Image ID: aaa_macbgall_4798. Smithsonian Institution via The Commons on Flickr.

Morse was born into a rigorously intellectual and religious family in Charlestown, Massachusetts; his father was a renowned Congregationalist minister and author. Morse was educated at Phillips Academy (in Andover, Massachusetts) and at Yale University. He began his formal artistic training in 1810 under the prominent Boston artist Washington Allston, who fostered Morse’s interest in ambitious subjects drawn from history or the bible. When Morse accompanied Allston to London the following year to begin his training at the Royal Academy School, he was motivated by an intense nationalism to excel for the cause of American art. Four years later, when his parents recalled him to Boston, he began work as a fledgling portraitist only to find himself in direct competition with the aging but highly sought Gilbert Stuart (best-know for his portraits of George Washington). Morse resourcefully tutored himself in Stuart’s well-documented techniques and gradually achieved some success. When his too-factual portrait of John Adams was poorly received, however, he temporarily set painting aside in order to work on his invention of a flexible piston fire pump, and to contemplate a career in the ministry.

Morse thus established a thirty-year pattern of alternating work as an artist with his scientific pursuits, often switching gears in reaction to the cool reception of his art. Both efforts were aided by his 1821 move to New Haven, where he maintained close ties with the Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864). The grand artistic success for which Morse hoped, however, remained elusive. When his remarkable scene of history in the making, The House of Representatives, 1822-23 (The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was poorly received during a costly exhibition tour the following year, he turned his attention to the design of a marble-carving machine. Morse enjoyed the high point of his painting career in 1824, after a move to New York, when he won the highly contested commission to paint a grand portrait of General Lafayette for the City of New York, 1825-26 (Art Commission, City of New York). He won further notice in 1826 for his role in the formation of the National Academy of Design, and his appointment as its first president.

Disappointment was in the offing again, however, when in 1829 he launched a nearly-twenty-year lobbying effort to win one of the remaining monumental painting commissions for the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. During a year of preparatory work in Europe, he began the large painting Gallery of the Louvre, 1832-33 (Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), whose subsequent failure to boost Morse’s reputation led him to abandon all but portraiture, and to focus on his new duties as the first professor of art at New York University. The indefatigable Morse also undertook his first unsuccessful bid for the office of mayor of New York, campaigning on a platform of rabid nativism. It was the ultimate awarding of the Capitol Rotunda commission to his colleague Henry Inman in 1837 that proved the last straw for Morse the artist. He threatened to resign his National Academy presidency, gave up his ongoing portrait work, and turned his energies concertedly to his invention of the telegraph with which he had begun to experiment in 1832.

After a successful demonstration of the telegraph in 1838, Morse returned to Europe and there met the pioneer photographer Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), from whom he learned the daguerreotype technique and derived the inspiration to open a photographic studio on his return to New York. He made a second unsuccessful run for mayor in 1841; and after Inman’s death in 1846 made the unwise decision to bid for the Capitol Rotunda commission a second time, only to be rebuffed again. With this final insult, Morse ended his career as an artist absolutely, resigning his post at the National Academy in 1847. He subsequently occupied himself with such scientific pursuits as the placing of an Atlantic telegraph cable, in partnership with Cyrus Field. Morse died in New York, and was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

In the next post, about young Morse’s ill-fated portrait of the former president John Adams, you’ll get a clearer idea of the frustration he first encountered as a struggling painter.

(For a more extensive discussion with reference notes, see American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, available in the Museum shop and library.)

For more information on Morse and his artistic career, see Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

In planning our spots for Channel 13, we faced the challenge of choosing two particularly engaging paintings from among the many works on view objects in our American Art galleries. We often select groups of works for inclusion in the tours we give to students and adult visitors, but there is usually some sort of thread—historical, thematic, or artistic—that links them together. In choosing single works, we think more about which objects have come to represent the entire collection. And in the case of the Museum’s pre-1945 American paintings, two works instantly come to mind. Each has come to represent the American art collection, even though one was acquired in 1846, and the other entered the collection more than one hundred years later . . . .

Francis Guy’s “Winter Scene” was painted about 1819, and made its exhibition debut in Manhattan in 1820. Viewers were bowled over to see such a remarkably accurate “portrait” of a locale that was familiar to many of them. Guy had painted this townscape of Brooklyn’s one-time center from the vantage point of his rented rooms on Front Street, and he included actual physical features of the place as well as the likenesses of many of the area’s most prominent inhabitants. In shaping the scene, he probably intended to contrast the old-fashioned barnyard that occupies the center of the image, with more the stylish residences of the more affluent residents at the far left of the scene—the latter component sadly was lost when the painting was damaged in a fire in 1881, and the left-hand edge was cut away.

The Brooklyn Museum’s predecessor, the Brooklyn Institute, held a series of important art exhibitions, featuring hundreds of works, in the 1840s, and Guy’s “Winter Scene” was prominently exhibited in two of them. Among the visitors who marveled at the picture was the young Walt Whitman, then the vocal editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and an active advocate for the arts in Brooklyn. In his review of the 1846 exhibition, Whitman called attention to the work’s power to suggest to present and future viewers how rapidly and completely this once rural village had changed: “. . . few things will be able to bring before the next race the fact how rapidly Brooklyn has ‘went’ in the progress of improvement, more fully than this well-delineated picture.” Whitman’s comments and a number of popular prints based on the painting guaranteed its public profile. Interestingly enough, when the new Brooklyn Museum building was opened to the public in 1897, “Winter Scene” once again occupied a prominent position, although not in the primary galleries of American and European paintings on the fifth floor; the early American portraits, and what were described as American “landscapes of great historical value,” were installed near the entryway on the third floor. The segregation of what was considered at the time to be “antiquarian” material from “contemporary” turn-of-the-century art was typical of many young American art institutions. Even after Brooklyn dedicated separate American art galleries in 1907, the “historical” works were exhibited separately from the modern American paintings.

Today, a wide array of the Museum’s American paintings is on view in the American galleries, grouped in a sequence of themes rather than by strict chronology. Guy’s “Winter Scene” is the focal object in our introductory gallery, which is entirely Brooklyn-centric. In reorganizing these galleries in 2001, our goal was to use this space to introduce viewers to the art-life that has existed in Brooklyn for centuries. Every object in this space has something to do with Brooklyn—Brooklyn as a longtime center of manufacturing, of creative expression, and of collecting, and Brooklyn as subject. A broad spectrum of New Yorkers, and visitors from much farther afield, still marvel at Guy’s townscape, as they consider how vastly different the Brooklyn environment is today.

Over the course of the 20^th century, American collectors and museums became increasingly more interested in collecting 18^th and 19^th-century American art. Brooklyn was among the leaders in this direction in the teens, when the Museum actively purchased and exhibited colonial and Federal era portraits. American landscape painting surprisingly lagged in the revival of interest in pre-Modern American art. It was not until the 1930s that a germ of interest began to develop—in part out of a renewed Nativism in the Depression era, and a concerted effort to establish the independence of American art from European influence. Interest in Hudson River School landscapes grew steadily during the mid-20^th century; most of the museum’s best Hudson River pictures were purchased during this period, beginning in the 1950s. The collecting market was most dramatically boosted, however, by the build-up toward and the celebration of the American Bicentennial of 1976. It was in 1976 that the Brooklyn Museum purchased its monumental Bierstadt painting, “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie”. Since entering the Museum’s collection, this painting has captured the interest and imaginations of thousands of visitors to the museum, owing to the impact of its size, and the dramatic nature of the artist’s portrayal of the American West. Bierstadt based it on his own expedition to the Colorado Rockies in 1863, and conceived the final canvas as a blockbuster that would introduce the remote western landscape that few individuals had experienced into the consciousness of largely urban audiences in America and Europe.That a painting as large and well-publicized as this one fell off the radar screen by the early 20^th century had to do in part with the fact that it was purchased immediately by the Englishman Thomas William Kennard, a civil engineer who had presided over the building of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway in the United States. At the outset of the revival of interest in 19^th -century American landscape art, preference was given to artists who were considered to have been less reliant on European landscape models. Since Bierstadt was associated so closely with the German Dusseldorf school, his work initially lagged in popularity. By the 1970s, however, when art historians began to revalue work by foreign-trained Americans, Bierstadt’s reputation was gradually revived.”Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” remained officially “unlocated” for almost ninety years—even reported by some sources to have been destroyed by fire. After Kennard’s death in 1896, it entered the inventory of a London dealer and resurfaced only in 1974. Today, Bierstadt’s grand canvas speaks to innumerable viewers who are captivated the artist’s vision of the West despite their own broader familiarity with the region it recorded. Most people gravitate toward this painting even while understanding the hyperbole of Bierstadt’s composition—a composite of various landscape elements in a super-sized view, animated by theatrical atmospheric and light effects. The painting still conveys the natural force and resources that were directly associated throughout the late-nineteenth century with the might and rising potential that the United States would bring to bear on the world stage. For contemporary viewers, it also presents a nostalgic vision of an unspoiled place, just as Guy’s “Winter Scene” allows us to time travel nearly two hundred years into the past.

It is the power of both of these pictures to make us pause and look that has made them among the popular favorites on view in “American Identities: A New Look“.

One of the great challenges of working with the Brooklyn Museum’s large and important collection of American watercolors is determining how best to share it with our audience. Like most works of art on paper, the watercolors are vulnerable to light exposure—they can fade easily—and require careful limits on the amount of time they can be displayed in a gallery. Our conservators keep a detailed record of light exposure for each of these paintings.

It is all the more exciting, then, when we have the opportunity to put them on view, both through loans to other museums and in the larger exhibitions, like Brushed with Light, that we organize here at Brooklyn once or twice a decade. Since our last large American watercolor exhibition (in 1998) was a survey selected from the entire collection, we decided to focus our efforts this time on American landscape subjects. Ranging in date from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the selected watercolors offer a fairly comprehensive survey of the evolution of American landscape art from its inception. At the same time, one can trace through these works the major shifts in watercolor practice. While it was an art practiced primarily by amateurs and illustrators well into the nineteenth century, watercolor gained tremendously in prestige in the latter half of the century, when it was embraced by many leading artists of the day.

In making our selections, we also tried to balance the inclusion of major works by famous artists (there are eight important works by Winslow Homer) with watercolors by some less familiar names. We also wanted to offer groups of works that are particularly indicative of strengths of the collection and highpoints in watercolor practice in the field of landscape. One of these areas is our modernist watercolors. A number of the leading American early modernists—John Marin and Charles Demuth to name two—did their most compelling work in the medium. The modernist works also offer the chance to consider how the unique aspects of the medium responded to the new modes of composition employed by these artists. Often favoring the use of partial or fragmented forms, they allowed large areas of unpainted paper to play a part in their compositions.

A slightly different version of Brushed with Light was exhibited at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in Nashville, last spring. Another, slightly different version of the exhibition will go on view at the Taft Museum, in Cincinnati, in 2008.

Brushed with Light opens September 14, 2007. I look forward to hearing your responses to the exhibition.