938
delivered his “The Relation of Photography to the Fine
Arts” paper to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia
for which he later served as the vice-president from 1870
to 1873. In 1870, he sold an album of views of early
Philadelphia architecture to the Library Company of
Philadelphia. Soon thereafter, Moran acted as offi cial
photographer for both T.O. Selfridge’s expedition to
the Darien Isthmus in Panama (1870–1871) and the
United States’ observation of the Transit of Venus in
Tasmania and South Africa (1874). By the late 1870s,
following his display of landscape views at the Centen-
nial Exhibition of 1876, Moran abandoned photography
for landscape painting. On February 19, 1903, Moran
died of Bright’s Disease at the New York City home of
his son, Thomas.
Erika Piola
MORAVIA, CHARLES BARCLAY
WOODHAM (c. 1821–1859)
Employed as an executive engineer with the Public
Works Department in India in the 1850s, Moravia was
given responsibility for the demolition of buildings in
Delhi after the Mutiny. All his known photographic work
appears to date from around this period, during which
he produced an outstanding range of views of Indian
architecture around Delhi, which survive in the form
of albumen prints from his paper negatives, generally
signed ‘Ch. Moravia’ and dated in the negative. In 1859
Moravia was appointed Principal of the Engineering
School at Lahore, but his career was cut short by his
death from smallpox at Sialkot, where he was buried
on 30 April 1859.
John Falconer
MORSE, SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE
(1791–1871)
American daguerreotypist, artist, and inventor
Morse, the eldest son of Calvinist Congregationalist
minister and geographer Jedidah Morse and Elizabeth
Anne Breese, was born 27 April 1791 in Charlestown,
Massachusetts. Best remembered as the father of the
telegraph, Morse was also known by his contemporaries
as the father of American photography, an association
often overshadowed by his revolutionary invention. A
man blessed with a mechanical mind and cursed with
fi nancial instability, Morse pursued photography in the
1840s following a thirty-year career as an artist, inven-
tor, author, and publisher. A recipient of a privileged
education at the Phillips Academy (Andover, Mas-
sachusetts) and Yale College (Class of 1810), Morse
trained for a career as an artist at the Royal Academy
in London between 1811 and 1815. Through his foreign
study, he developed a nativist ideology that infl uenced
his professional decisions for the rest of his life. Morse
would return to America and attempt to create a unifi ed
national culture through art and technology.
After Morse returned to the United States, he pursued
his artistic career, fi rst through a failed Boston studio
and then through itinerant portrait painting. Despite a
few prominent commissions in the 1820s, Morse never
achieved fi nancial stability. His two colossal paintings,
House of Representatives (1823) and the Gallery of the
Louvre (1833), created and exhibited as part of his nativ-
ist mission, failed as well. Consequently, Morse sought
other outlets to fulfi ll his intellectual, fi nancial, and
professional goals. In 1826, Morse helped to establish
and was elected the president of the National Academy
of Design in New York. In 1827 he established the peri-
odicals Journal of Commerce and Academics of Art. In
1832 and 1835, respectively, he was appointed professor
of Painting and Sculpture and professor of Literature
of the Arts and Design at the University of the City of
New York, later New York University. Between 1832
and 1838, with fi nancial and intellectual partners Alfred
Vail and Leonard Gail, Morse invented and perfected
the telegraph for which he received a patent in 1840. In
May 1838, as a Congressional bill to appropriate funds
for his invention sat in a political quagmire, Morse trav-
eled to Europe to seek foreign investment.
Following its inception in early 1839, the daguerreo-
type became the one invention that rivaled the telegraph
in prestige. On 5 March 1839, during his time in Paris,
Morse met with Louis Daguerre and witnessed “one of
the most beautiful discoveries of the age.” As a trained
artist and inventor who had experimented unsuccessfully
with photography in the early 1800s, Morse immedi-
ately envisioned the cultural impact of this new type of
“drawing.” In April 1839, Morse authored one of the
fi rst American eyewitness accounts of the daguerreo-
type. Soon thereafter, he became synonymous with the
burgeoning fi eld of American photography when his
narrative, fi rst published in his brothers’ periodical the
New York Observer, was republished across the country.
A month later, he had Daguerre elected as an honorary
member of the National Academy of Design and within
days of the arrival of the description of the process to
the United States in September 1839, Morse became
one of the fi rst Americans to announce success in the
creation of a daguerreotype.
His daguerreotype view of the new Unitarian Church
in New York City was disclosed in the 28 September
1839 edition of the Journal of Commerce and in the
ensuing months he continued to experiment with the
new process aiming to decrease the exposure time of
daguerreotypes by several minutes in order to produce
portraits. After engaging Daguerre agent Francois
Gouraud as an instructor, Morse began keeping detailed