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By Root 1509 0

Painting on a high stand from nine each morning until four, with “the closest application” and without interruption, he wore himself down and felt he had damaged his health. Yet he could hardly bear to be away from the canvas. “I have become so interested in it that I believe I should risk my life in finishing it.” He did not let up even when, in March, the cholera epidemic that had been raging through eastern Europe reached Paris, ultimately killing 18,000 people. Carts piled with corpses moved through the city; the deaths from cholera of two Liberal leaders touched off two days of renewed political street fighting. “I have remained at my post through the whole scene,” Morse wrote, “not without danger, not without great apprehension, but … with confidence that all was safe in the hands of Him to whom I have confided all for time and for eternity.”

Morse considered his Grand Gallery of the Louvre worth all the danger and effort, “a great labor but it will be a splendid and valuable work…. I am sure it is the most correct of its kind ever painted, for every one says I have caught the style of each of the masters.” His incessant toil over the complex canvas attracted crowds of onlookers. “He really has created a sensation in the Louvre,” Cooper wrote, “having a little school of his own, who endeavor to catch his manner.” One French nobleman was so impressed that he presented Morse an expensive folio of the monuments of France containing hundreds of engravings.

Morse planned to complete the miniature copies in Paris, adding the frames and the ten foreground figures when he returned to America in the fall. What to do after that was unclear. Despite the failure of his House of Representatives he thought he might send the Gallery on a traveling exhibition, beginning in New York City. Cooper advised him against this. Harshly criticized by some New York newspapers for meddling in European politics, he urged Morse to display the painting in Philadelphia, then in Baltimore and Washington: “Your intimacy with me has become known, and such is the virulence of my enemies in New-York, that I have no sort of doubt, of their attacking your picture in consequence.” As an alternative to either plan, Morse thought he might sell the painting to someone else for exhibition—or that Cooper himself might buy it.

Morse spent fully fourteen months on The Grand Gallery of the Louvre. The completed canvas reproduces in miniature the Mona Lisa, Raphael’s Belle Jardinière, Murillo’s Beggar Boy, and Veronese’s tremendous Wedding Feast at Cana, as well as pictures by Leonardo, Poussin, Rubens, and other masters, whose manner he convincingly rendered. To the left appears Cooper’s daughter Sue, copying a painting, with her parents behind her; beside her easel hangs Rembrandt’s Angel Leaving Tobias. Morse stands in the center, legs crossed, instructing a young female artist. Although this painting-about-painting belongs to an established genre of works that depict galleries, its inner subject is Morse’s experience of Europe and his hopes for the future—his productive encounter with the richness-beyond-measure of Western art, and preparation to paint a major historical work of his own.

As he got ready to return home, Morse assessed what he had learned during nearly three years abroad, and how it had changed him. His thinking about politics had been kept “at boiling heat,” he said, making more apparent than ever before the contrast between America and Europe. Europe was, above all else, sinister. Everywhere he had felt the oppression of Church and State, with their attendant ignorance and squalor. The Continent was but a larger version of the Roman soldier cursing him as il diavolo—one great garrison, preserving peace at the point of a gun. “The sword and bayonet are every where…. the habit of dread operates very powerfully to preserve order, but such order is purchased at the expense of the dearest rights of man.”

Morse also appreciated more keenly than ever how America’s precious political liberty depended on its foundation in Protestantism—“a religion