Albumen carte de visite photograph depicting Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872), American artist, inventor, and pioneer of telegraphic communication. Morse is shown in later life with a long white beard, wearing formal attire and a group of medals pinned to his coat. The photograph likely dates to the late 1860s or early 1870s and appears to be from a known portrait sitting of the period. The reverse is inscribed in pencil identifying the sitter as “Samuel F. B. Morse.” Morse was a central figure in both early American art and the history of communication technology. Trained as a painter, he first achieved prominence as a portrait artist and historical painter before turning his attention to electrical telegraphy. He is best known as the co-developer of the practical electric telegraph and for the creation of Morse code, innovations that transformed long-distance communication worldwide. Morse was also directly connected with the earliest years of photography in the United States. After learning of the new process in Paris in 1839, he became one of the first Americans to practice and promote daguerreotype photography, opening one of the earliest daguerreian studios in New York and teaching many of the country’s first professional daguerreotypists, including Mathew Brady. Portrait photographs of Morse were widely distributed during the final decades of his life and shortly after his death, reflecting his international reputation as one of the most important scientific figures of the nineteenth century as well as a significant early American artist and photographic pioneer. This example preserves a clear late-life likeness of a figure closely associated with both the invention of the telegraph and the introduction of daguerreotype photography in the United States.