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This is the definitive study of one of America's major artists and inventors, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872). It covers his prodigious achievements in painting and technology, his passionate cultural ambitions, and his key role in the historical development of American art. The book imaginatively combines intellectual biography with interpretation of more than one hundred pictures. Three chapters consider Morse's most extraordinary artistic achievements: The House of Representatives, The Gallery of the Louvre and The National Academy of Design. In a final chapter on the electromagnetic telegraph, an invention that imprinted his name on our language, there is a special discussion of the conceptual relationship between artistic and mechanical inventions.