The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (326 page)

(1791–1872)
, American painter and inventor. He had ambitions as a history painter and studied with
West
in London 1811–15, but had, to his discontent, to work mainly at portraiture for financial reasons. After his return to the USA he worked in Boston and then in New York, where he was a founder member of the
National Academy of Design
and its first President from 1826 to 1845. Disenchanted by his failure to achieve major commissions as a history painter, however, he turned to invention, and in the 1830s conceived the idea of the telegraph and developed the Morse Code, which eventually made him a fortune. His first telegraph line was established between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, by which time Morse had abandoned painting as a profession.

 
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(1740–79).
English painter, a pupil of
Hudson
at the same time as his friend Joseph
Wright
. Like Wright, he worked both at portraiture and at subject pieces of a pioneering
Romantic
nature. His
conversation pieces
bear comparison with those of
Zoffany
, but he found his true bent in the 1770s with pictures representing the exploits of soldiers and
banditti
in the ‘savage’ style of Salvator
Rosa
(
Bandit Taking up his Post
, Detroit Institute of Arts). Many of his paintings have disappeared and are now known only through engravings. Mortimer led an eccentric and irregular life, but he became more settled after marrying in 1775 and his early death cut short the career of one of the most individual British painters of his generation.

 
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mosaic
.

The art of making patterns and pictures by arranging coloured fragments of glass, marble, and other suitable materials and fixing them into a bed of cement or plaster. It was first developed extensively by the Romans in pavements. But it is also well suited to the adornment of walls and vaults, and great use was made of wall mosaic by the Christian churches of Italy and the
Byzantine
Empire throughout the Middle Ages. As an exterior decoration it has sometimes appeared on the façades of medieval churches and in modern architecture (see
O'GORMAN
). More rarely it has been made into portable pictures, or inlaid in furniture and small objects, as in the Aztec art of Mexico.

 
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Mosan School
.

School of manuscript illumination, metalwork, and enamelwork flourishing from the late 11th to the early 13th cents. in the valley of the Meuse (or Maas). The river rises in France and empties into the Rhine estuary in the Netherlands, but in the context of medieval art the term Mosan refers to the stretch of river and its tributaries in present-day Belgium, particularly the area around Liège and the Benedictine monastery of Stavelot. The most important artists of the school are
Godefroid de Claire
,
Nicolas
of Verdun, and
Renier of Huy
. The Mosan style is part of
Romanesque
art, but is distinctive because of its more naturalistic, if idealized, attitude towards the human figure. In Renier of Huy's font at Liège, for example, the figures are three-dimensional and well proportioned and their draperies are notably
antique
-like. Mosan art is also noteworthy for its sheer sumptuousness, and Mosan metal-workers in particular were famed throughout Europe; Abbot
Suger
employed a number at Saint-Denis.

 
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(active 1432).
German painter, known only from one work, the
Magdalen
Altarpiece in the church at Tiefenbronn (signed and dated 1432—not 1431, as had previously been read). The altarpiece is remarkably advanced stylistically, showing a detailed naturalism in the treatment of figures and landscape and an interest in light that have much in common with the paintings of
Witz
, who worked in nearby Switzerland. Also remarkable is the enigmatic inscription the altarpiece bears (perhaps no more than the lament of an underpaid artist): ‘Schri kunst schri vnd klag dich ser din begert iecz niemen mer’ (‘Cry out, art, cry out and wail! No one wants you now’).

 
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