Matthew Ehret: 29-12-2025,
This essay examines an important battle nearly wiped memory that saw the emergence of a republican vanguard of artists and statesmen set the stage for a new renaissance in America. The contents featured below are an extract from the newly published first 228 page full color RTF Anthology “The Art of Liberty”
In order to understand the relevance of Samuel Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre which came to the USA in 1833, we must observe that America didn’t have many museums during this time. There wasn’t a lot of access to Renaissance paintings.
You couldn’t go and just see copies of paintings by Raphael like you can today at a click of a button on the internet and it took weeks to sail across the Atlantic to see a real painting. So what did he do in 1831?
He spent several months doing something that had never been done before.
Samuel Morse spent months a the Louvre in Paris, because wanted to bring something back to the United States that would give people an entire museum in one painting.
And this is a giant tableau he generated in the end which toured to great acclaim across the USA.
And in it, what we have featured are 37 reproductions of paintings by the greatest artists of human history.
These were paintings which Morse deemed the most sublime and influential within the Louvre,