Samuel Morse, the co-inventor of the code that bears his name, was also an accomplished what?

Samuel Morse, in full Samuel Finley Breese Morse, (born April 27, 1791, Charlestown, Massachusetts, U.S.—died April 2, 1872, New York, New York), was an American painter and inventor who developed the electric telegraph (1832–35). In 1838 he and his friend Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code.

After graduating from Yale in 1810, Morse became a clerk for a Boston book publisher. But painting continued to be his main interest, and in 1811 he went to England in order to study with American painter Washington Allston. On his return, he worked as an itinerant painter. After 1825, he settled in New York City and painted some of the finest portraits ever done by an American artist. He combined technical competence and a bold rendering of his subjects’ character with a touch of the Romanticism he had imbibed in England.

He probably made his first working model by 1835. The powerful electromagnets that his friend Henry had devised allowed Morse to send messages over 16 km (10 miles) of wire, a much longer distance than the 12 meters (40 feet) over which his first model could transmit. By 1838 the system of dots and dashes thought of by Vail that became known throughout the world as the Morse Code, was completed.

At one time he did not wish to be remembered as a portrait painter, but his powerful and sensitive portraits, among them those of Lafayette, the American writer William Cullen Bryant, and other prominent men, have been exhibited throughout the United States.