Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822
washington, dc.
Samuel Morse is remembered as the inventor of the telegraph and the code that bears his name. That he was a professional artist is less well known, yet it was while sailing back from Paris where he been working on Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-34, that Morse had the idea that a message might be transmitted by an electric current along a wire.
According to Claire Perry, the guest curator of “The Great American Hall of Wonders” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Morse epitomised the 19th-century American aptitude for invention.
“I was amazed by the sense of confidence about American ingenuity”, said Perry, “and the shared belief that each citizen had a duty to educate himself”.
Morse’s role model was another artist-scientist, Charles Willson Peale, whose passion to spread the gospel of self-improvement and useful knowledge led him to open America’s first great museum, the Philadelphia Museum in 1801.
Peale, who painted the portraits of many of the founding fathers, including George Washington, pioneered, among other things, late night openings of his museum, so that workers, as well as the leisured classes, could visit.
Peale’s self-portrait, The Artist in His Museum, 1822, is a key work in this show that explores the convergence of art and science in the first century of the new republic.
The US Patent office, where the Smithsonian American Art Museum is now housed, became another popular place for education, said Perry.
Each would-be inventor had to submit a 12-inch-high working model of their device. “So this huge building was filled with models made by everyone from Samuel Colt and Morse to ordinary people,” she adds. “It was very egalitarian.”
Perry has organised the exhibition around the subjects that fascinated and inspired America’s scientists and artists, ranging from its natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls, the vast herds of buffalos and mechanical breakthroughs, such as the telegraph and repeating firearms.
A work by Winslow Homer depicts a combination of new technologies: a sharpshooter using a telescopic sight.
The exhibition is not all celebratory, however. “We look at things that went terribly awry,” says Perry.
“Americans were proud of the buffalo because it symbolised the nation’s natural bounty, but at the same time they developed ever more efficient ways to wipe it out.”
The show, which also includes art by John James Audubon, George Catlin and Thomas Eakins, has been organised by the Smithsonian in collaboration with the US Patent and Trademark Office, with support from Battelle.
The background to the show is the fear that America is losing its innovative edge, says Perry. US artists are more productive than ever, but “our inventive juices are blocked”, she says.
While not in this exhibition, Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre is nearby at the National Gallery of Art (until 8 July 2012). n
Javier Pes
Categories: Thematic
1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)