Sunday morning

Thinking about things: 1. imagining and re-imagining 2. borrowing 3. order and beauty

Samuel F. B. Morse Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–1833, oil on canvas.

[click for larger image of the painting]

Beginning on Sunday, June 3, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will exhibit Samuel Morse's painting Gallery of the Louvre. The American better known for inventing the telegraph and the communication code that bears his name, painted the large work — it's 6 feet tall and 9 feet wide — starting in 1831, while living in Paris.

David McCullough writes about Morse and his painting in his new book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. McCullough says Morse created the painting in order to show Europe's great works of art to Americans:

There were no museums here, as yet, in the 1830s, and no color representations of paintings. So he was going to bring the culture of Europe — mainly the Renaissance Italian masterpieces in the Louvre collection — back to the United States for the benefit of his countrymen.

He had to go through the entire collection of the Louvre, which was enormous, but well over a thousand paintings, and pick out those masterpieces which he thought merited the attention of his countrymen back home. So it's his pick of the Louvre masterpieces, and it includes most of the major Italian Renaissance painters. Titian and Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt to be sure, and others. He had to not only reduce them down to miniature size in the painting, but he had to capture the essence of their style and their genius.

It was an extremely ambitious undertaking because many of the paintings that he was copying were hung very high up. And so he had to build a movable platform, or scaffold, that he wheeled about the galleries of the Louvre to reach his subjects.

In Gallery of the Louvre, Morse shows a large red-colored room, its walls hung with more than three dozen works of art. McCullough says the works themselves were all on view at the Louvre, but not in the same room.

[Excerpt from NPR: The Best Of The Louvre, On A Single Canvas]

This story is about imagining. And re-imagining. And doing something about it: Mr. Morse with his devotion and hard work to make this painting. Mr. McCullough with his learned and thoughtful interpretation of history and the discrete deeds of people who made their marks on their times. And NPR with its honoring of all of this.

This story is about borrowing: from The Louvre, from historical records, from the National Gallery of Art, from McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, and from NPR, among others.

And this story is about order and beauty: paintings and rooms and historical documents and newly imagined words.

[Visit The Best Of The Louvre, On A Single Canvas at NPR.org for more.]