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350               Samuel F.B Morse, the Painter
The plaster cast was presented to the Yale School by the Rev. E.G Smith and the gold medal was given by Morse to the same school.
    Morse did not wish to remain a mere portrait painter. He had a curious contempt for that branch of art, which is yet considered by many competent critics to be one calculated than another to give in pictures the spirit of the difficult times from 1830 to 1860.
    "He was a man sound in mind and body, well born, well educated, and both by birth and education in sympathy with his time. He had been abroad, had seen good work and received sound training.
[*There is a picture beneath of Morse's sculpture with a label saying, "Cast of the Dying Hercules. By Samuel F.B Morse, 1812. The original model received the Adelphi gold medal in 1813. Presented to the School of the Fine Arts, Yale.]
of the most difficult of all, and real success in which raises a painter to the highest rank. Had he never received fame as an inventor, he would still have been known to posterity as one of the very good artists of his age, and it would have been his portraits which rescued his name from oblivion.
    Samuel Isham, in his excellent "History of American Painting," after giving a short but interesting sketch of Morse's career as an artist, and saying that from the date of the first conception of the telegraph (1832) "painting ceased to be foremost in his thoughts," thus sums up:
    "It was a serious loss, for Morse, without being a genius, was yet, perhaps, better
His ideals were not too far ahead of his public. Working as he did under widely varying conditions, his paintings are dissimilar, not only in merit, but in method of execution; even his portraits vary from thin, free handling to solid impasto. Yet in the best of them there is a real painter's feeling for his material; the heads have a soundness of construction and a freshness in the carnations that recall Raeburn rather than West; the poses graceful or interesting, the costumes are skillfully arranged, and in addition, he understands perfectly the character of his sitters, the men and women of the transition period, shrewd, capable, but rather commonplace, without 
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[There is a painting with the caption, "The Death of Hercules-1813. From a painting by Samuel F.B Morse
Property of the family-loaned to the School of the Fine Arts, Yale."]
the ponderous dignity of Copley's subjects or the cosmopolitan graces of a later day."
    And yet Morse speaks slightingly of portrait-painting in a letter to his parents dated May 2, 1914:
    "If I find that I cannot support myself, that I am contracting debts which I have no prospect of paying, I shall then return home and settle down into a mere portrait-painter for some time, till I can return to Europe again; for I cannot be happy unless I am pursuing the intellectual branch of the art. Portraits have none of it, landscape has some of it, but history has it wholly.
    "I am certain you would not be satisfied to see me sit down quietly spending my time in painting portraits, throwing away the talents which Heaven has given me for the higher branches of art, and devoting my time only to the inferior.
    "The Americans at present stand unrivalled, and it is my great ambition (and it is certainly a commendable one) to stand among the first. My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name, how can I be of service in refuting the calumny, so industriously spread against her, that she has produced no men of genius?"
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