Samuel Morse, Lafayette and the Immortal Power of Ideas: The Gallery of the Louvre

PART 3 OF A SERIES

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, including, obviously, Leonardo Davinci’s Mona Lisa. We can see paintings by Titian, by Velázquez, by Raphael, the Madonna, I mean there’s just so many amazing pieces infused into this scene.

You also have several students featured in the painting. Students who are themselves learning how to paint, and more will be said about them shortly.

So you have this entire bonanza of 37 paintings! Nobody had EVER done anything like this. And as you can imagine, this is a massive and incredibly immersive painting (see image below)

To this very day, this painting is renowned for being so adherent to the styles, the essence of each of the paintings that he’s copying.

They’re not perfect, but he’s able to adeptly change gears and really express the dignity and the style of each of the great masters. I’m going to just focus in on a few elements of this, because I just think it’s kind of like what Raphael Sanzio does with the School of Athens in so many ways. Because this room does exist, and it is named the Paris Room of the Louvre.

However, none of the paintings that Morse portrays inside this room have ever been located in that room.

These are all paintings that Morse chose to place in the painting in order to get the desired effect.

Thinking vs Feeling: How Morse and Raphael Broke a False Dichotomy

So is this painting something that can be categorizable as ‘A Realist’ painting? Nowadays, it has become customary to denigrate realism because we are told that classical realism deadens your creativity by binding the artist to the shackles of sensory experience. Modern artists are told, that if they wish to express their creativity they must leap to the opposite extreme of realism… which is what? Abstract Surrealism in order to express their creative freedom. There’s no other way… or so we are told.

But as you can see from the example of Morse, or Cole, or Bierstadt and Church above, that is not true at all. You don’t have to just go into abstract, the anti-realist extreme, to express creativity or thoughts that are transcendental to your senses.

You don’t have to do that.

So here Morse is exhibiting one of many approaches to resolving that paradox.

And just like in Raphael’s great School of Athens of 1509, none of the people, none of those philosophers really lived in the time that Rafael was painting them together in one mural in the Stanza Della Signatura of the Vatican.

“The School of Athens,” depicting some of the Ancient Greek philosophers, by Raphael. Vatican Museums. Credit: Public domain

By and large, those philosophers in Raphael’s Academy did not live at the same time or same are of the world, and yet Raphael was able to put in various clusters of dialogues that were occurring in the school of Athens into his mural. This included various thinkers stretching from Plato and Aristotle who are featured the center to Socrates, who died before Aristotle was born, to Pythagoras who lived in the early 6^th century BC, and Anaxagoras (500-428 BC). We even have Raphael Sanzio himself who placed himself in the painting.

It is my contention that Samuel Morse was inspired by Raphael’s masterpiece in his construction of his painting ‘The Louvre’.

An Exploration of Morse’s Gallery at the Louvre

Let us review the people featured in the painting. We have James Fenimore Cooper, who was one of the leading members of the American artistic movement and intelligentsia. Cooper innovated an entire new literary school of the written word, not just the Last of the Mohicans and Leatherstocking Tales, but he also infused insights into psychological warfare techniques and occult intelligence operations threatening the USA into his stories. This is especially clear in his story of The Bravo which explores the nature of Venice and the structure of the of the political systems of Venice, and contrasted that to the Republican cultures and political systems of the West.

There’s an entire body of rich work and insights that he was able to create.

Cooper also happened to be a sponsor of Samuel F. B. Morris, the painter. And he was one of the catalyzers who brought him to France at this very strategic point in world history.

What we have there is Cooper and his wife standing next to him with their daughter, Susan Cooper.

She was a renowned painter in her own right.

Just as Raphael Sanzio couldn’t help but insert himself into the School of Athens, next to the figure of Ptolemy, so too did Samuel Morse insert an image of himself delivering an art lesson to his daughter featured right in the center.

We have in the background, one of Samuel Morse’s friends and sculptors who was part of this artistic network in Europe walking into the La Salle Carrée.

We have there Richard Habershan- an American painter and sculptor who was residing with Samuel B. Morse during the two years he spent in France.

And there we have Lucretia Morse, Samuel’s wife.

Just as in The School of Athens, not everybody featured lived at the same time. Well, the same thing applies to this painting as well.

Lucretia Morse had herself died at the age of 26 in 1825, four or five years before this painting was begun.

In his 2011 masterpiece Samuel F.B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre, Pierre Beaudry writes:

“Morse’s design was the passion of communicating to mankind the universal actions of discovery that the Italian Renaissance had made, especially the aspects of artistic composition that related to the power of immortality that he had discovered in Italy around the theme of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Morse understood that unless those mental qualities that made humans different from animals were replicated across the globe on a large scale, humanity would lose its power of immortality and die as a species. Thus, the theme of the death of Christ and of His Resurrection became the central reference point of his Gallery of the Louvre and his grateful contribution to the immortality of his species. There are no less than six large paintings on this subject. Although Morse did not identify which paintings he started to replicate first, and the numerical choice he made from left to right was not an indicator of priority, it is possible to determine a certain conceptual ordering that he might have had in his mind. This is pure speculation, but it is coherent with the way Morse would have been thinking.”

So this is an homage to his late wife and the mother of his three children. It is also an homage to James Fenmore Cooper’s daughter, Susan Cooper, who had died two years earlier.

Just as in Raphael’s School of Athens of 1509, we are again confronted with a beautiful expression of the idea of the simultaneity of eternity.

The ancient Greeks understood this notion far better than today’s society, but following the example of Raphael and Morse, when people are participating in immortal ideas together, and most specifically, in their LOVE of immortal ideas, they find themselves, in a certain sense participating in a higher level of time (Kairos) which transcends the ephemeral time that changes moment to moment (Chronos).

I’m not going to go through a dissection of each of the individual paintings which Cooper chose to include in this study, but it is a fun exercise for everyone to try this out as an exercise. Simply track down the titles of each painting, and see what stories and lessons the artists intend to convey using color, shadow, using light, using the stories from the Bible or ancient Greek classics or stories from their own times to convey certain ideas that are always more than the sum of the parts that make up the physical paintings.

That’s always the case with these classical paintings.

Now there are two questions that arise.

1) Why is Cooper in France? and

2) Why does he pick this subject?

I think I’ve said partially pretty well why he picked the subject.

Up until that moment, people in America who hadn’t been to the Louvre only had a chance to really know of the Louvre by this superstar painting that had toured the USA.

Thousands upon thousands of American citizens had paid money to see this painting in 1831.

It is interesting to note that right before Morse started to paint his masterpiece, another painting was finished and revealed to the public. I am referring to the following painting by a French artist named Nicolas-Sebastien Maillot (1781-1857).

Most of the paintings featured by Maillot in his ‘Painting of the Louvre’ are pretty unintelligible.

It also features the same room as the one selected by Cooper. The room itself was officially called ‘The French room’ because it was devoted entirely to French paintings.

The only painting which can be said to be intelligible here is the 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by the French artist Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) featured in the center.

The Raft of the Medusa was a painting of despair. There’s not really any hope. Contrast this sentiment to the case we reviewed in part two with Frederick Church’s 1862 Cotopaxi landscape, where you have a certain sense of hope that after the despair of the destructiveness of the volcano, a day will rise again, the sun will continue on.

In The Raft of the Medusa, you have pretty much dead bodies being eaten by rats on a raft. The painting was ‘inspired’ by the true story of the sinking of a ship carrying 150 people called ‘The Medusa’ off the coast of Mauritania on July 5, 1816. After thirteen days adrift at sea punctuated by immense death, suffering and cannibalism, all but thirteen were dead.

Yet it was considered an absolutely avant-guard painting which won awards, acclaim and financial success as it toured the salons and exhibition halls of France. The general style was really a nouveau style that was being innovated by a new movement of painters in France. And Morse just found this to be emblematic of some major tragedies and moral rot which was happening at his time in France, which also is part of the master key to unlock the secret of why he was there in France at that specific time of 1839-1832 in the first place.

What was the problem of France’s failure, the culture’s failure, of the masses’ failure, as well as the failure of the elites to do something that needed to happen?

Morse’s Insight into the Tragic Contradictions of Marquis de Lafayette

This takes us into a second component of Morse’s identity as a universal figure and somebody who participated directly in world history. This part of the story will take us to a figure who is featured before you:

The man featured in this painting is none other than the Marquis de Lafayette.

This was a painting that Samuel Morse was commissioned to do when Lafayette was in the United States in 1826.

What is Lafayette famous for?

He was famous for bringing the French army to help the American revolution.

Lafayette, was an instrumental figure in the equation of the success of the American Revolution that was orchestrated by Benjamin Franklin, who had been the ambassador to France during the revolution and had huge networks in the intelligentsia and was able to orchestrate an alliance where France was able to intervene in 1777 and tip the balance in favor of the Americans against the British Empire. It was really a deciding factor in the outcome of the war.

Now Lafayette was an extremely young man at this time- only 18 years old, who came in and offered his services even before the alliance between France and the USA was formalized. He was that gung-ho and believed in the cause to that extent.

Washington Hamilton Statue. Het Alliance-beeldhouwwerk van Algemeen George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Marquis de Lafayette tijdens Amerikaanse Revolutie 1777 in Morristown Groen New Jersey

However, it is a bit of a paradox that he was also part of the nobility, and he wasn’t unique at this period of time, as many younger members of the nobility at this period had come to express a certain disdain for the decadence and immorality of the oligarchical culture that existed through the parasitical exploitation of the majority of the people.

Due to the powerful promethean cultural movement within the arts and science of the 18^th century, he had also developed a love for republican principles of self-government and the ideal that all people were made in the living image of God. This put him in a very interesting position as a man caught between two worlds.

After the success of the American Revolution, Lafayette returned to France, in order to continue the movement that was supposed to go on beyond the American colonies, by ending the stranglehold of hereditary institutions from Europe. This had to occur with France in 1789.

He did as well as could be expected during the early stages of the revolution… but as much as he hated these elitist aristocratic cultural controls, a strange part of him had a strange loyalty to them none the less.

It was something he could never fully break with, and that caused him to make some very bad decisions which he unfortunately became famous for.

A second chance to undo the Tragedy of the French Revolution

By virtue of being among the youngest soldiers of the war of independence, he also became the last living American Revolutionary leader by 1826 as he toured the USA for two years in preparation for something explosive, and global that was to culminate in 1830-32.

It should be noted by Lafayette also happened to be a leading figure within the International Society of Cincinnati and the Philosophical Society founded by Benjamin Franklin as an international republican agency with members across Russia, Europe and the new USA. Together the Philosophical Society would work closely with Alexander Hamilton’s Society of Cincinnati as a coordinating body globally that stretched all the way throughout Europe, Germany, Spain to the United States.

Even leading figures within Russia, Prussia, Poland, Ireland and England were part of it.

Marquis de Lafayette was the President of the European branch of the Society of the Cincinnatus, and if there was going to be a second chance at an American revolution in France, then it was clear that Lafayette was going to be the leader. Undoing the non-revolution that happened in 1789 which quickly became a Jacobin bloodbath and a color revolution run by British intelligence was not going to be easy.[7] The wasting wars of Napoleon Bonaparte who saw himself as an imperial God-King launching total war on Europe, followed by the restoration of oppressive monarchies in 1815 demoralized many French citizens, and it was going to take a miracle to revive their optimism.

Marquis Lafayette had a very big role to play, and the United States was a key part of his plans to have another attempt at creating a republic in France by 1830.

So he was in America between July 1824 to September 1825 where he traveled, and organized for the presidency of John Quincy Adams- who did actually end up winning by a matter of one vote. So, he really did tip the balance in favor of the nationalists in opposition to the Wall Street/ Tammany Hall crowd.

But he was also organizing the leaders of the republican movements of Canada such as William Lyon Mackenzie, who met with Marquis de Lafayette for several days during this period. William Lyon Mackenzie would become famous as the leader of the short lived ‘Rebellion of the Patriots of Upper Canada’ in 1837-38. James Fenimore Cooper was also a Society of Cincinnatus member as was Edgar Allan Poe.

As a young man, Poe had met with the Marquis de Lafayette during his American tour, and in 1832, according to letters written to the head of Westpoint (General Thayer), and according to letters written by Alexander Dumas in 1832, it is clear that Poe was himself also in France alongside a vast network of fellow Cincinnatus members who followed Lafayette back to France[8].

When James Fenimore Cooper acquires the contract for Morse to paint Lafayette, he embeds several major ideas in the form of visual ironies into it.

So let us review the Samuel Morse’s portrait of Lafayette… Do you see anything anomalous being communicated?

Is there anything weird that you see about this that you wouldn’t normally see in another portrait or any anomalies that you see popping out at you?

Among many things, our eyes are drawn to the ominous dark clouds behind the Marquis

Those dark clouds appear to be slowly overwhelming the blue skies light and the sun on his right side.

Is there anything else? We could hypothesize that he is looking towards the light as a symbol that he supports the American Revolution republican principles, but there’s a certain kernel of his aristocratic tendencies that he just can’t shake off.

What about the busts? Whom do they portray?

One looks like Benjamin Franklin, and the other is George Washington… and both appear to be looking at the Marquis!

They are certainly on the side of where the sunlight is coming from and sort of looking at him almost in judgment or maybe asking the question: What are you going to do now?

Look at Benjamin Franklin’s eyes, his facial expression. As far as I know, there is no bust in existence of Ben Franklin in that facial expression anywhere on Earth.

That’s something that Morse invented for the specific message he wanted conveyed in this irony-rich painting. There’s almost like the typical sort of Roman, you know, Greco-Roman bust we see in George Washington’s disposition, you know, this austere dignity. You don’t really have that with Ben Franklin’s bust. His facial expression is much more uncertain. His eyebrows are up.

There’s a certain smirk on his face.. what appears to be perhaps a look of bewilderment. And possibly an allusion to a certain irony in his thinking.

It is a little bit reminiscent of Aristotle (or is it Virgil?) contemplating the bust of Homer painted by Rembrandt 180 years earlier.

In that painting Homer has just got this look, even though he’s blind- he’s got this look of bewilderment, and surprise or dismay. The way Rembrandt paints the two figures, it appears that the marble bust of blind Homer can “see” something more clearly than the bewildered expression of Aristotle/Virgil[9].

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer/Virgil, 1653

Something that struck me is his body’s posture. Is he walking forward or is he in a stationary position? The fact that he his leaning on the column with his right hand does imply that he is stationary, doesn’t it?

So there seems to be an ambiguity between motion and no motion that’s being communicated also. The feet are aligned, so they’re prepared for motion. But that hand is definitely fixed implying stasis.

This contrast of motion/non-motion, was a technique used to great effect by the great Raphael Sanzio, who was also the greatest inspiration for Morse’s teacher Benjamin West of whom we will be introduced shortly.

This motion vs stasis schism was featured prominently in Raphael’s School of Athens and centers around the dispute between Plato and Aristotle, where one figure is obviously stationary (Aristotle) indicating the static framework of Aristotle’s noun-driven cosmology and ethics. In contrast to this, Plato is featured in motion and pointing above to the realm of transcendental principles expressive of his opposing cosmology as outlined in his dialogues and most explicitly in The Timeaus, which is being carried by Plato in the painting.

Now again, with Morse’s portrait of Lafayette, you again have this brilliant juxtaposition of two opposing principles (change and no change), except this time, it is featured in a more advanced way, because these concepts are combined into one figure instead of two.

I don’t think this is an accident as it was general knowledge of the republican intelligentsia of the day that the Marquis de Lafayette’s inability to resolve the tension caused by his dual devotion to aristocratic principles and his love for republicanism was at the heart of his failure to make the right decisions in 1789, and which once again threatened to “turn a great moment” into tragedy once more in 1830-32.

The republican movement of the Society of Cincinnatus and its international membership hoped that he could resolve this paradox in his old age, but by the time of this painting, it was becoming apparent that he did not have it in him.

Let’s take one last look at Lafayette’s facial expression. I think there is a certain uncertainty which is not a typical thing found in portraits.

By 1829, when Lafayette travels with James Fenimore Cooper and we have other American literary figures coordinating a republican movement including Washington Irving, who was also strategically positioned to serve as the US ambassador of Spain at the time.

We also had Edgar Allan Poe, a third generation member of the Society of Cincinnatus, there in France alongside Cooper in 1832, and we had Samuel Greeley Howe, who was the one of the leading doctors of America who founded the schools of Braille that gave rise later on to Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, who were all part of this amazing network. Additionally, Cooper, Morse and Lafayette all lived several doors down from each other during the entire period that something was happening and which I am going to say something more about. They would spend evenings together, working together, playing music together, and planning together.

Morse played the flute and Cooper played the piano. Lafayette was a patron and participant of these solons. But they were doing more than just simply socializing. So what was happening?

The events leading up to Lafayette’s 2^nd chance

There were three days of riots called the Three Glorious Days of 1829, where the repercussions of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the 1815 Congress of Vienna were really coming home to roost.

The 1815 Congress of Vienna was essentially a dark moment in history which has been called ‘The Restoration of the Oligarchies’ at the end of the brutal years of Napoleonic Wars. This entire hellish period of total war across Europe unleashed by Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, can largely be seen as the direct downstream consequences of Lafayette’s earlier failure to accept becoming the president when he had the chance after the tennis court oath in 1789.

Lafayette had a chance to just say “okay the time is right and the people are ready to move”. He could have decided to say “I will accept the popular demands of the masses to become the president and establish a genuine republic”. Instead, as we all know, he chose not to do this, and he instead chose to attempt an impossible fusion between the ideals of republicanism and Monarchism alongside King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

He tried to keep his loyalties to both worlds intact when the objective circumstances shaping the new world he was living in no longer allowed such a reconciliation.

He couldn’t do it. And through his failure to act accordingly, not only was the monarchy wiped out in France there in favor of an anarchist mob uprising dubbed ‘The Terror’, but his leading allies, including Antoine Lavoisier, the allies of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, the artists, Jean-Sylvain Bailley were all killed by the new Jacobin ‘democratic’ tyrants.

Their heads were cut off.

And after this bloody civil war wasted away the best of the French leadership (Lafayette himself kept his head only by escaping France and rotting in an Austrian Habsburg dungeon for 4 years), the two decades of Napoleonic Wars unfolded.

And when finally Napoleon’s reign had ended and you had what was called the Congress of Vienna or the Holy Alliance, of several imperial powers of Europe under the direction of grand strategists such as Lord Metternich, Lord Castlereagh of the British Foreign Office, and several others like the Spanish Habsburg who united together and said, OK, we cannot let this happen again.

They decided on a new policy of banning all ideas that were deemed dangerous to the stability of the state, or inclined towards revolutionary ideals. So you had a total dictatorship in the arts. Books were banned. You couldn’t read Schiller, or Lessing or Mendelsohn.

You couldn’t read Thomas Paine, or the political essays of Shelley. You had dictators stationed in every single school, censors in every publishing house that ensured that no dangerous ideas would be permitted to enflame dangerous thoughts in the minds of the youth.

Professors who chose to not obey were promptly expelled and forbidden to work in something we saw again repeat during the higher of the ‘red scare’ witch hunts and blacklists of the 20^th Century Cold War. This is also why you had a lot of leading Republican thinkers and scientists emerge in America from Germany during this period.

But the stifling situation across Europe, and especially in France, resulted in sort of a backlash. And in July of 1829, you had three days of riots. And Lafayette was again positioning himself to emerge as the president of a new republican France. All he would have to do was eliminate the the Bourbon kingship under Charles X and correct the problem of 1789.

So what happens?

As the story has been passed down, and recorded by the French historian (and Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux), Lafayette has a discussion on the balcony the day that he’s about to speak in front of crowds of tens and tens of thousands of French subjects, which included among the crown James Fenimore Cooper, and Sauel Morse—all of whom were shouting for President Lafayette to come to the balcony, declare himself the leader of a new republic. That morning, Lafayette had a discussion with the Duke of Orleans, the son of Philippe de Egalité (who had been one of the key players in the first color revolution decades earlier and aspired to become the ‘Jacobin King’ in 1792). The Duke and Lafayette came to a very tragic arrangement.

According to Hanotaux, Lafayette says,

“You know that I am a republican and that I consider the Constitution of the United States as the most perfect that ever existed.” “I think as you do,” replied the Duke of Orleans, “ It is impossible to have lived two years in the United States and not be of that opinion; but, do you believe that, in the situation that France is in, and following public opinion, it would be right to adopt it?” “No,” replied Lafayette, “what the French people need today, is a popular monarchy, surrounded by republican institutions, completely republican .” “That is precisely what I intend to do,” said the prince.”[10]

What followed next, involved Lafayette arriving to the balcony and instead of declaring himself President of a republic, he endorses the new king, the new Duke of Orleans as the king of France.

And they did sort of a horse trade. for one king for another. And Lafayette was told that would be the head of the National Guard, which he was for about five minutes before being fired.

And at that moment, the French King immediately set up an alliance with the British Empire, and did everything all over again. So pretty much went back to business as usual, and the new Anglo-French alliance ran roughshod over the world for the next two centuries.

Lafayette had also written earlier to his wife in 1792 saying, “you know that my heart would have been Republican if my reason had not given me a nuance of royalism.”

What kind of loser thing is that to say?

And that’s a picture of him in 1789 kissing the hand of Marie Antoinette when he really should have been declaring himself president, which he couldn’t bring himself to do.

Now let’s go back to Samuel B. Morse. This is right after he sets up his American Academy of Design, which stood in opposition to the British-directed American Academy has been annihilated around 1828.

He writes a manifesto describing what will principles that will animate the new movement of the arts in America. And he says:

“The plan for Exhibitions, as it exists in the English Royal Academy, is that which we have adopted, as better suited to our state of society than those of the Continental Academies.[…] We have taken the English Royal Academy for our model, as far as the different circumstances of form of government and state of taste will admit.”[11]

Okay… wait. What is he talking about? How would this anti-monarchist, anti-royalist, fervent Republican humanist model his new academy for the arts on the English Royal Academy of Fine Arts?

This is an incredible paradox and the resolution to this problem is shocking.

Now, I may have forgotten to mention that Samuel Morse’s training as to become a great republican painter actually took place in England.

But he wasn’t alone, as Morse was merely one of many students who trained in England before returning to the USA. In Morse’s case, his English training took place for several years during the War of 1812, and he was specifically taken under the wing of the President of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Now this is where our story becomes really interesting.

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Footnotes

[7] The Jacobin Terror 1789-1794: Just Another Color Revolution? By Matthew Ehret, Canadian Patriot Review, 2019

[8] In 1929, a rare book dealer named David Wells discovered a letter from the hand of french author Alexandre Dumas, dated 1832 documenting his relationship with a man named ‘Edgar Poe’:“It was about the year 1832. One day, an American presented himself at my house, with an introduction from… James Fenimore Cooper. Needless to say, I welcomed him with open arms. His name was Edgar Poe. From the outset, I realized that I had to deal with a remarkable man. Two or three remarks which he made upon my furniture, the things I had about me, the way my articles of everyday use were strewn about the room, and on my moral and intellectual characteristics, impressed me with their accuracy and truth”

[9] Although popularly labelled ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’, it is worth holding in mind that Rembrandt himself never gave it this title and to this day, the evidence of Aristotle’s identity rests on mere hearsay and gossip. A superior hypothesis was presented by Gerald Therrien in ‘Virgil or Aristotle… Who is Contemplating the Bust of Homer?’ (first published on The Rising Tide Foundation in 2022 and featured as an appendix of this book)

[10] Gabrielle Hanotaux recounting the dialogue between Marquis Lafayette and the Duke of Orleans

[11] Samuel F. B. Morse, 1827 Discours before the Academy of Design, p. 20

For more work on Classical painting and the fight for republican principles across the ages, pick up a copy of ‘The Art of Liberty’ which I just released with Cynthia Chung in time for Christmas

Additionally, many of the insights showcased in this essay series were made possible through the pioneering work of Pierre Beaudry whose American painting book is freely available for all to download here

Matt is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media where this article was first posted and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).