The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is more than a school. The Historic Landmark Building has a vast collection of painting and sculpture treasures. Having attend CE classes at PAFA I had free access to the museum. When I heard about the Samuel Morse Louvre painting I was thinking, "Is viewing one painting worth the visit?" ...Yes it was! Sitting in the bench in the center of the exhibit room I was drawn into the paintings in the Louvre Painting. My eye viewed each little painting Morse copied from the masters in detail. The gallery room is hung salon style. So it's like you are sitting in the painting within the painting. The sad and interesting story about this artist is that Morse's painting was not accepted by the critics when it was exhibited so he abandoned painting however he went on to invent the telegraph.
From the PAFA website... http://www.pafa.org/About/Press-Room/Press-Room/1003/month--201208/search--morse/vobid--9433/
The exhibition is a collaboration between PAFA’s Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art, Robert Cozzolino, and PAFA’s Curator of Historical American Art, Anna Marley.
Morse meticulously copied 38 paintings spanning five national schools and three centuries, including works by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens and Poussin. The artist himself is shown in front, leaning over his daughter in a space where visitors study, sketch and copy from the masters.
A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre tells a fascinating tale about art education, mentorship and practice, and learning from historical art. PAFA’s Morse installation will set the painting into an environment that will mirror what is shown in the picture. While the Morse painting will be on one side of the gallery with objects that help provide a broader context for the themes of artistic practice and identity, the other half of the gallery will be hung salon-style with paintings from PAFA’s collection that highlight the four academic genres taught and exhibited at PAFA in the first half of the 19th century.
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