Samuel Morse and the Muse

Last year the Metropolitan Museum received a portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse of his daughter Susan, the bequest of Herbert Lee Pratt. This important addition to the collection of American paintings provides an opportunity to review a group of pictures by Morse and other objects associated in one way or another with this most interesting man. Morse the inventor is so firmly embedded in the popular imagination that in 1932, during the centennial celebration of his invention, the rediscovery of Morse the painter came as a pleasant surprise to many who read and wrote of that occasion. The man seemed suddenly to emerge as a many-sided genius. The common attitude toward his paintings that had prevailed since the middle of the nineteenth cen-