Half a century had carried nearly all of his contemporary actors of the Revolution into the abyss of time, and he now stood like an imposing column that had been raised to commemorate deeds and principles that a whole people had been taught to reverence.
THUS wrote James Fenimore Cooper of the Marquis de Lafayette, shortly after the portrait opposite was painted. Cooper's words give some idea of the size of the task that faced Samuel Finley Breese Morse when he came to paint the portrait in 1826. Morse painted the picture just after...
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