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[[image: black and white photograph of a painted portrait of a woman holding an infant and a toddler]]
Portrait of his first wife and two children. From a painting by Samuel F.B Morse.

large picture of the House of Representatives (now Statuary Hall) which, at present, hangs in the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington.

It was more in line with the monumental work which it was ambition to produce; it contains over eighty portraits of the legislators of that day, but the key has, unfortunately, been lost. Although it is excellent as a work of art and is much admired by the painters of the present day, it attracted but little attention at the time and proved a pecuniary loss to the painter. The times were not yet ripe for works of that character. It was not until about ten years later, after Morse had again visited Europe and had perfected himself further in his art, that his great opportunity came.

The selection of artists to paint the great historical pictures for the panels in the rotunda of the Capitol, at Washington, was referred to the committee in Congress of which John Quincy Adams, ex-President and member of Congress, was a member, and Morse, strongly endorsed by Washington Allston and the National Academy of Design, confidently expected to be chosen to paint at least one or two of these pictures.

Mr. Adams wished to throw the competition open to the artists of all countries, 

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[[image: black and white photograph of a painted portrait of a woman with a large book in her lap]]
Susan Walker Morse.
From a painting by Samuel F.B Morse.

saying that there were no American artists of sufficient ability to paint such great pictures. A caustic reply to Mr. Adams's assertions appeared anonymously in the New York Evening Post, and was attributed by him to the facile pen by Morse. The real author proved to be James Fenimore Cooper, but this became known too late, for Morse's name was rejected by the committee.

He never really recovered from this terrible blow to his artistic ambition; he could never speak of it in later years unmoved; it practically ended his career as an artist.

Thus do the fates weave our destinies; what seem to be calamities are often blessings in disguise. Morse, the artist, dropped his discouraged brush and threw himself will all the ardor of his sanguine nature into the perfection of what then looked upon as the idle dream of a madman; he struggled on through years of hardship and privation, and gave to the world the electric telegraph.