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Artist Turned Scientist

Samuel F.B. Morse, the artist and inventor, was born on this day in 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

He attended Yale College and studied painting under Benjamin West in London. Morse was a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design in New York.

The Goldfish Bowl, painted around 1835, depicts the artist's sister-in-law, Mrs. Richard Carey Morse and her daughters Elizabeth and Charlotte set in a fashionable neoclassical interior. Morse's serene family portrait embodies a nineteenth-century belief in the virtue of domesticity and maternal devotion. This painting was his last group portrait.

After 1833 Morse, disappointed with his artistic career, became increasingly involved in science and technology. His development of the electromagnetic telegraph and signaling code, which bears his name today, earned him recognition as one of the most important inventors of the nineteenth century.

Pictured: Samuel F.B. Morse, 1791–1872, The Goldfish Bowl (Mrs. Richard Cary Morse and Family), about 1835, oil on wood, 29 5/8 x 24 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. J. Wright Rumbough in loving memory of her father Gilbert Colgate.