Exhibition

Mr. Morse, from Boston

We remember Samuel F. B. Morse as the creator of the telegraph, an invention that would revolutionize communication. Using a series of machines connected to one another by a single wire, Morse essentially shrunk both time and distance. Messages that had once been physically carried by a person—taking hours, days, or even weeks to deliver—now took mere seconds to convey through the telegraph, with operators tapping out letters in a series of dots and dashes known today as Morse Code. When Morse publicly demonstrated how the telegraph worked to the U.S. Senate on May 24, 1844, the message he transmitted was prophetic: “What hath God wrought?” The world would never be quite the same again.

Being an inventor was not Morse’s first career, though. He was in his forties when he developed the telegraph and already well respected as an American artist. He earned his living primarily as a portrait painter, traveling throughout the eastern United States to capture the likenesses of those who could afford to hire him, including the Marquis de Lafayette and Presidents John Adams and James Monroe.

Morse visited New Hampshire three times—in 1816, 1817, and 1818—to paint portraits, working mostly in Concord where he met his future wife, Lucretia Pickering Walker. The couple were married for less than a decade before Lucretia died in childbirth, but what they shared was, by all accounts, a great love story.

The exhibition, featuring eight portraits by Morse from the New Hampshire Historical Society's collection, including one of his wife, Lucretia, will be on view through March 31, 2027.