Getty Museum

Professor Samuel Morse

Maull & Polyblank

Date

1855–1860

Medium

Albumen silver print

Culture

British

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

0212de59-020c-4dfb-9516-c21e571e7932

Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the American inventor who pioneered the development of the telegraph, was also trained as a painter and earned his living through portraiture while a young man. In the winter of 1838-1839, he traveled to Paris to present his electric telegraph to the Academy of Sciences. While there, he took the opportunity to meet with his fellow inventor Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre. Morse promptly dispatched an account of the meeting, with an enthusiastic description of the French inventor's revolutionary new photographic process, to the editor of the *New York Observer* in a letter of March 9, 1839. Morse himself became one of the earliest exponents of the daguerreotype in America, opening a portrait studio with J.W. Draper in New York in 1840. In this portrait, he demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of the camera through his steady composure and fixed gaze.

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