Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [59]
Morse also wrote up for the American press an eyewitness account of the melancholy celebration held in Paris on November 29 to mark the first anniversary of the Polish revolution. The event brought the American Polish Committee together with a similar group from Poland itself and a French-Polish Committee organized by Lafayette, who attended in the uniform of the Polish National Guard. Pained by what he saw, Morse described for American readers the woe on the faces of the more than sixty exiles present—“the close pressed mouth, the frowning brow, and the downcast fixed eye.” The prominence of some of the exiles emphasized the pervasive sense of defeat. Among those in the flag-draped hall were the last president of the Polish government at Warsaw, the former principal of the University of Warsaw, “nobles, men of science, literature and art, and officers and soldiers,” Morse reported, “outcasts in a foreign country, housed by strangers, and living on their charity.”
Most of his time and energy in Paris, Morse devoted to painting at the Louvre. In easy walking distance of his house, the museum stretched more than a quarter of a mile along the Seine. Napoleon had swollen its holdings with the spoils of his military campaigns, masterpieces pillaged from churches and palaces throughout Europe. Much of the fabulous booty had been returned, but perhaps a fifth was left, in addition to the treasures of the French royal collections.
The museum’s mammoth Grand Gallery, lit by glass skylights, ran on for perhaps five city blocks. From one end to the other artists sat silently copying at their easels, soldiers motionlessly on guard. “It is a long walk simply to pass up and down the long hall,” Morse wrote, “the end of which, from the opposite end is scarcely visible, but is lost in the mist of distance. On the walls are 1250 of some of the chefs d’oeuvres of painting.” He saw works by Piero della Francesca and Murillo, staggering historical epics such as Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, the dusky golden atmosphere of Caravaggio. Here was yet a further aesthetic standard, in one respect surpassing even that of Rome and Florence—gems not only from Italy but also from France, Germany, and Holland, “the most splendid, as well as the most numerous single collection of works of art, in the world.”
Morse painted at the Louvre throughout the winter cold, hindered by the short days but filling his many commissions. Cooper ordered a copy of Rembrandt’s Angel Leaving Tobias and often stopped by to banter: “Lay it on here, Samuel—more yellow—the nose is too short—the eye too small—damn it if I had been a painter what a picture I should have painted.” Others also paused at Morse’s easel, including Baron Alexander von Humboldt, author of Kosmos, a “physics of the world” fifty years in the making. Sometimes called the last universal genius, he had corresponded with Jedediah and praised his geographies, and now “took pains,” Morse said, “to find me out.” Morse toured the gallery with him at his request, awed by Humboldt’s ability to speak not only German, French, and English, but also Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, Danish, and Russian.
Sometime around the new year, Morse decided to refuse further commissions and apply himself to a single ambitious work. It would depict the Louvre’s Salon Carré, as if the room had on display many of the museum’s chief treasures. A tour de force, six feet by nine feet, it required him to copy in miniature thirty-seven masterpieces.