Morse's Brush Strokes, Merging Art and Science

At the Corcoran: Big Government's Big Oil

Detail from Samuel F.B. Morse's 1822 painting "The House of Representatives," on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. (Corcoran Gallery of Art)

You say you're too busy to make the trip from Friendship Heights or Fairfax, much less Baltimore or New York, to spend a little time with a single work of art in downtown Washington? That's a poor excuse: Jean-Philippe Antoine, a busy professor of aesthetics and art criticism at the University of Lyons in France -- with a parallel career as an esoteric sound artist -- flew all the way from France to do just that. He spent two months.

In September and October, Antoine took up a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts -- a kind of think tank for aesthetes run by the National Gallery of Art -- to study the works and thoughts of Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse became famous in the 1840s as the inventor of the telegraph, but before that he was best known as a leading American painter.

Antoine came to Washington to study the Morse papers held by the Library of Congress. But he also came to analyze "The House of Representatives," the big painting of the Hall of the House -- now National Statuary Hall -- that Morse labored on through 1821 and 1822. The canvas is on prominent display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the rest of the holiday season before it goes on tour across the nation.

Antoine spent an hour with us looking at the work in Washington. Once he was back in France, he gave us another two over the phone, further breaking down the things we'd seen in front of it.

Inside are some of the results of our thorough dissection of that single picture.