Rhapsodies

Now that I have my museum membership back I’ve been putting in a half hour or so when I’m down town. When I was there on Thursday I was lucky enough to catch the opening of a new exhibit, Samuel F.B Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre.
As you can guess from the name, I’d always had a degree of pride in Professor Morse, at least over the “he invented the Telegraph bit, and at the very least he was useful when you had to tell thick people how to spell a five letter last name. (since Morse Code hasn’t been used officially for over a generation that’s not as useful as it used to be.) Needless to say this is where having relatives who are into genealogy are a bad thing when I inevitably discovered I wasn’t actually descended from him.

Anyway this was a piece done when he was teaching art in Paris. It does a nice job showing the students in period dress copying the great works which Morse catalogues in the painting (somehow I doubt they were ever all in the same gallery like this) I stuck to drawing just the figures.