Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (11 page)
On Monday evening, January 18, 1779, the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania approved a resolution calling for a Washington
portrait. It was to hang in the council’s chamber, an expression of confidence in the new nation’s military prospects and
a celebration of the country’s central figure. Mr. Peale was just the man to make the portrait of the General, and the painter
chose the Battle of Princeton as the pivotal moment to portray. It had been won at the expense of veteran British regulars,
on their terms in an open field, unlike the midnight maneuver at Boston and the surprise attack at Trenton. Peale decided
to portray the events in a big picture, one of monumental size to suit the subject.
The canvas, fully eight feet tall and five feet wide, would be the first full-length portrait of the man.
This time Peale painted a determined Washington. The vague look of the Virginia gentleman was gone, as was the distracted
character of the 1776 Philadelphia portrait for John Hancock. The man in the new image was large-bodied, his head small, but
the impression conveyed was of a man very much in possession of himself. His pose wasn’t aggressive but full of confident
authority. In part, Peale was merely doing what was asked of him, since the resolution that led him to make the painting specified
that its purpose was to “perpetuate the memory . . . [of] how much the liberty, safety and happiness of America in general
and Pennsylvania in particular is owing to His Excellency General Washington.”
29
The work would also be the making, once and for all, of Charles Willson Peale, Painter. He had gotten the important public
commission, of course, but another reason the painting proved to be a show-off moment was that the artist himself had witnessed
the battle. Copies of the painting would enable denizens of the Old World to see not only what Washington had done but also
what Peale could do. In 1776, the artist had sold a few replicas of the Washington Portrait he painted for Hancock, but in
1779 orders poured in for canvases of Washington at Princeton. French ambassador Gérard purchased one for presentation to
Louis XVI, and five copies were ordered to go to the Spanish court. The American envoy bound for Holland took a copy with
him. Peale painted at least eighteen replicas, along with a number of three-quarter-length variations.
30
This was Washington, icon of America, suitable for diplomatic use, and to the eighteenth-century Eu rope an, Peale’s image
of “His Excellency” portrayed not an upstart revolutionary but the undisputed leader of the new American republic.
The multiple commissions could hardly have come along at a better moment. Peale continued to need money to feed his growing
family (Angelica and Raphaelle had been joined by another son, Rembrandt, barely a year old). Charles Willson sent one copy
of the big painting on consignment to Spain, entrusting it to William Carmichael, the new chargé d’affaires for the American
legation. Carmichael sailed across the Atlantic on the frigate
Aurore
in October 1779, carrying a letter from Peale. “I have directed a long packing case for you which contains a whole length
of Gen. Washington,” Peale had written, “begging your favor in putting it into the hands of some person who will sell it on
commission.”
31
The artist had hoped it would sell quickly “as I am in want of necessaries for painting, and clothing my family.”
32
Even when business seemed to be booming, Peale collected no windfall profits; his living was still a portrait-by-portrait
affair.
One reason for the international appeal of the painting was Peale’s use of what he had learned in London. In his influential
Discourses
, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, had declared there was no need “to be confined to mere matter[s]
of fact”; rather, a painter ought to aim for the classical ideal of perfecting nature. When working in what Reynolds liked
to call the “Grand Manner,” the artist aimed to represent the nobility and seriousness of human action, as Raphael had done
in the sixteenth century and Poussin in the seventeenth. Although the faces of the figures might seem strangely impassive,
the artist looked to express in his composition what Johann Joachim Winck-elmann, a contemporary who busied himself inventing
the discipline of archaeology, termed “noble simplicity” and “calm grandeur.”
33
Peale employed some of the conventions of history painting, which his old master Benjamin West had only recently reinvented
when he painted a scene from the French and Indian War in contemporary dress. The tradition held that classical costume—such
as the toga in which Peale had dressed his William Pitt—brought order and logic to the conception. As a result, the London
painting establishment had been shocked at the unveiling in April 1771 of West’s
The Death of General Wolfe
, in which General Wolfe was portrayed in his own British uniform, a brilliant crimson in color, at the Battle of Quebec.
Wolfe’s prone figure was surrounded by officers at the center of the canvas, all of whom also wore their regimentals. To Peale,
the notion of a realistic portrayal of a contemporary figure seemed like received wisdom, an obvious means of serving a hardscrabble
new nation that aspired to dignity, honor, and virtue but saw no need for the pretense of dressing up in the costume of an
ancient era.
Reynolds had promptly dismissed West’s approach as unworthy of an artist’s imagination and invention. Ever the pragmatic American,
however, West had patiently explained the logic of his painting: “[T]he event . . . commemorated took place on the 18th of
September 1758 in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and at a period of time no such nation and heroes in their costume
any longer existed.”
34
Even if West had difficulty with the chronology (he was a year off in dating the battle, which took place in 1759), his
The Death of General Wolfe
had been a great sensation, and prints of it became bestsellers.
Following West’s lead, Peale decided his George Washington at Princeton was to be more than a portrait. To be certain he got
the context just right, in February 1779 Peale “set out on a journey to take perspective Views of Trent[on] & Prince Town.”
He made sketches of the battlefield terrain and of cannons.
35
Returning to his studio, he added in Nassau Hall, the principal building in Princeton. To one side of the canvas he painted
Washington’s horse to remind the viewer of Washington’s skills as a rider (Thomas Jefferson called him “the best horse man
of his age and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horse back”).
36
Holding the horse’s bridle is William Lee, the General’s body servant, who served as both valet and wartime companion. Peale
left the canvas untitled, but it was easily distinguished by the mise-en-scène around the tall figure as the Battle of Princeton
(it became the prototype for the “Princeton Portrait,” thereby distinguishing it from the “Continental Type,” like Hancock’s,
and the 1772 “Virginia Militia Type,” like Martha’s). Given the events memorialized by the big 1779 canvases, the name was
inevitable.
At front and center stands Washington, his hand on a cannon; a second cannon behind the first refers to the victory a week
earlier at Trenton. As he painted Washington from life for this commission—in the days between January 20 and February 2,
1779, the General sat for Peale—he brought to bear years of on-again, off-again exposure to his subject. Peale had been to
Washington’s home, painted him from life at least three times, and had had intermittent exposure to the General as a soldier
and officer in his army, including service during the long winter of 1778 spent at Valley Forge. He had made copies of his
own Washington paintings numerous times, producing life-size canvases and miniatures on ivory. Even if Washington never learned
to relax for those charged with taking his picture, Peale knew how to give Washington’s painted likeness a sense of relaxed
power. No doubt it stemmed, in part, from the military confidence that flowed from the big victory at Princeton, an event
that even in its own time was a recognizable turning point in the colonials’ fortunes on the field of battle. But Peale’s
knowledge of the man informed his brushwork, too.
The martial figure at center had seen a whirlwind of change in the seven years since Peale first painted Martha’s husband
at Mount Vernon. His citizenship had changed: He was an American now, no longer a subject of the English king. He had been
promoted by the unanimous vote of his peers in the Continental Congress from the rank of a Virginia militia colonel to general
and commander in chief. Although his battle-field successes had been outnumbered by the failures, his fellow citizens trusted
him as they did no other. On numerous occasions, he had led his men into battle, ignoring the bullets whistling by, winning
his soldiers’ trust and admiration.
Almost in spite of his elevated status, he had become a man the men of the middling and lower sorts trusted. After the Battle
of Trenton, many of his troops were just days from the expiration of their enlistments. The imminent departure of these soldiers
to return to their farms and families threatened to thin the already dangerously reduced ranks of his army, and Washington
saw that he had to take a direct approach. Only hours before the New England regiments were free to go home, he assembled
the troops and spoke to them from horse back. An offer was already before them for a bonus of ten dollars for added weeks
of service, but almost no one had been persuaded by the money. Without rhetorical exaggeration—he would never be a man given
to passionate speechifying—Washington spoke to his men:
My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at
stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships,
but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause
of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.
37
Washington had found his voice on the banks of the Delaware and nearly all the soldiers fit for duty stepped forward, making
the victory at Princeton possible.
As for Peale, his 1779
The Battle of Princeton
was a high point in his painting career. In the years after the Revolution, he never quite recaptured his preeminence as an
artist. Mr. Peale would try out various other roles. He devised patriotic displays to celebrate founding anniversaries. He
invented gadgets. He excavated the prehistoric skeletons of two mastodons, which he took on an exhibition tour. In various
ways he proved himself one of the first and greatest of American showmen, not least by establishing a museum of natural history
and art, which he opened in July 1788. Though originally conceived as a means of displaying his portraits (Washington’s among
them), Peale’s Museum housed collections of natural history specimens (birds outnumbered the fish and quadrupeds), as well
as mechanical objects, books, and his paintings. Unlike Euro pe an museums of the time that aimed to attract the educated
and privileged few, Peale’s Museum welcomed any member of the general public willing to part with two bits.
38
Distracted by his many interests, Peale would cease public painting for a time, although he later returned to it. Perhaps
the picture that best conjures up the Peale-and-Washington connection isn’t a painting at all but an imagined tableau of the
painter and the poser. Washington is in the Painter’s Chair. Although seated, he somehow overshadows Peale, who, by his own
account, was “a thin, spare, pale faced man.” But the sanguine Mr. Peale is doing the talking, his subjects ranging from seeds
to saddles (Peale sticks to nonpolitical and nonmilitary subjects, knowing that horses and agricultural innovation are among
Washington’s delights). He smiles often, and his intelligent banter keeps Washington’s attention from drifting. Washington
listens and absorbs. He will engage Peale, questioning and probing; but he does so only, as he himself once wrote, after “balancing
in my mind and giving the subject the fairest consideration.”
39
These men liked and respected each other. After 1779, Washington would take more turns in Peale’s Painter’s Chair for portraits
taken at the time of his resignation as commander in chief (1783), as the Constitution began to take shape (1787), and as
president (1795). Peale painted a great many other men, women, and children of his time; in his most prolific period, the
two decades after his return from England in 1769, he made some seven hundred portraits during war, peace, and political upheaval.
Many were more revealing of the characters he painted, perhaps, than his Washingtons; his family pictures, in particular,
and those of his friends are character studies in which human emotions can be read clearly. Yet his sequence of canvases portraying
Washington offers a collective sense of their enigmatic and distant subject. More than any of his portraitists, Peale had
the chance to observe the evolution of the planter-colonel who became a general and president.
[H]aving a natural taste for drawing, in which he had already made some progress, Colonel Trumbull resolved to cultivate that
talent, with the hope of thus binding his name to the great events of the time, by becoming the graphic historiographer of
them and of his early comrades. With this view he devoted himself to the study of the art of painting, first in America, and
afterwards in Europe.
—John Trumbull, 1832
1
I.
1780–1781 . . . Tothill Fields Bridewell . . . London
A
S ONE OF his fellow prisoners might have advised him, the twenty-four-year-old Mr. Trumbull would have done well to learn
how to keep his gob shut. For the proud colonel, however, that was not his way, and his intemperate outburst had assured him
his place in prison.
One didn’t have to be a Connecticut governor’s son to appreciate that the jail was well below John Trumbull’s station. Almost
fifty years earlier William Hogarth had memorialized Tothill Fields Bridewell in his “Harlot’s Progress,” a popular series
of engravings. Hogarth had illustrated the prostitute Moll, a fallen woman in a crowded cell, making hangman’s nooses of hemp
at her jailer’s command. In the years since, little had changed at Bridewell, although the prison’s unsavory population had
ballooned, and the walled edifice had become home to an even larger array of prostitutes, runaway apprentices, and petty criminals.
John Trumbull’s crime loomed very much larger. No common felon, he stood accused of nothing less than high treason, a crime
punishable by death. As Trumbull saw it, the charge had arrived on November 19, 1780, like “a thunderbolt falling at my feet.”
A man unknown to him, name of Mr. Bond, had knocked at the door of his London lodgings on George Street, asking for Trumbull
by name. Adjudging him a respectable man, Trumbull invited him into his parlor.
2
Once there, Bond announced, “I have a warrant . . . to secure your person and papers, Mr. Trumbull, for examination.” The
American, rarely at a loss for words, was dumbstruck.
At his arraignment the following morning, he was ready to defend himself. Despite having spent a night in a room with the
door bolted and an armed officer for company, he made an impressive appearance, standing five feet, nine inches tall with
a recognizably military bearing from his days in the Continental Army. His treatment as little more than a common criminal
offended his sense of propriety—he was, after all, an officer and gentleman—jolting him back to his usual manner. He confronted
the three police magistrates who looked down at him at the eleven o’clock court proceeding.
From the dock, he addressed them heatedly. “You appear to have been much more habituated to the society of highwaymen and
pickpockets, than to that of gentlemen,” he told them. “I will put an end to all this insolent folly, by telling you frankly
who and what I am. I am an American—my name is Trumbull; I am a son of him whom you call the rebel governor of Connecticut;
I have served in the rebel American army; I have had the honor of being an aid-du-camp to him whom you call the rebel General
Washington.
“These two,” he continued, his anger still carrying him, “have always in their power a greater number of your friends, prisoners,
than you of theirs . . . I am entirely in your power; and after the hint which I have given you, treat me as you please, always
remembering that as I may be treated, so will your friends in America be treated by mine.”
Whatever temporary effect his rebuke had (to Trumbull, his treatment thereafter seemed more respectful) it was insufficient
to secure his release, and the bench issued a warrant of commitment. Months after the arrest, here at Bridewell, he remained
a prisoner, his fate uncertain, despite the fact that his crime consisted of nothing more than having been a partisan of the
American cause.
When Trumbull arrived at Tothill Fields, his manner and his ready cash had served him well. Mr. Smith, the keeper of the prison,
recognized a gentleman when he saw one, having himself once been butler to the Duke of Northumberland. Eager to extend a genteel
civility to a paying prisoner, whatever his crimes, Mr. Smith agreed to rent the American a room in his own house, which stood
within the walls of the prison. It was a spacious parlor room some twenty feet square. As Trumbull noted, “The room was neatly
furnished, and had a handsome bureau [folding] bed.” For a guinea a week, he lived comfortably, with the freedom to take daylight
walks in a “pretty little garden.”
Despite the creature comforts, there was no denying he remained a prisoner. The two windows in his cell looked out upon the
prison yard and, at night, Mr. Smith locked and bolted the door, leaving the American to muse on his unfortunate timing. Just
days before his arrest and his incriminating outburst, word had reached London of the execution in New York of the British
officer Major John André as a spy in connection with Benedict Arnold’s treachery; for some loyal British subjects, the execution
of Trumbull would have seemed a perfect symmetry. Trum-bull knew full well he had been less than circumspect in his conversations,
and in his captured correspondence his words betrayed a warmth “to the cause of America” that his captors regarded as evidence
of treasonous intent.
3
There was also the matter of his military service back in the colonies. As a man supremely confident of his own rectitude,
he would hardly have denied his association with General George Washington five years earlier, in the months before the big
victory at Boston.
II.
Summer 1775 . . . Roxbury, Massachusetts
T
HE GENERAL DESPERATELY needed to learn the topography. A trained surveyor, he trusted maps, having grown accustomed to taking
the measure of a place. In his new posting in coastal Massachusetts, with British-occupied Boston frustratingly near at hand,
Washington could only peer through his spyglass at the unfamiliar city on its peninsula in Boston harbor. Most of the surrounding
mainland was under his control, but the British warships in the tidal waters of the harbor and the River Charles meant he
could get no closer to the city itself than the headlands across the bay.
On his arrival earlier in the month to take charge of the army, Washington inherited a stalemate. After losing more than a
thousand men in the battle at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill in June, British commanders demonstrated little appetite for assaulting
an entrenched colonial force. For his part, Washington was wary of confronting the British military—he had been one of them,
not so many years earlier—and he knew almost nothing of his own enthusiastic band of irregulars. Most of them were New England
country boys with little training. For the moment, then, he would seek to understand the lay of the land.
He wished to know in particular all he could about the fortifications that protected Boston Neck, the narrow spit that linked
the city to the mainland like the handle of a serving spoon. John Trumbull, just nineteen but already a graduate of Harvard,
learned of the commander in chief ’s desire from the commissary general (who happened also to be his brother, Joseph). The
ambitious adjutant recognized his chance to ingratiate himself with George Washington, hoping that producing a chart would
prove “a mean[s] of introducing myself (probably) to the favorable notice of the general.”
From the Roxbury line, where his Connecticut regiment was encamped, Trumbull made his way to the shoreline, creeping like
a cat “under the concealment of high grass” to a lookout within firing range of the British. Unseen, he got close enough to
study the disposition of the British defense and to count the guns mounted on the bastion facing his position. He returned
to camp and prepared a drawing of what he had seen.
Trumbull delivered his map into Washington’s hands only to find it had already become redundant. The General nevertheless
went to the trouble of looking with care at young Trumbull’s sketch. He compared it with the crude plan of the entire installation
that a British deserter had just provided. Washington recognized the accuracy of Trumbull’s work, and the handsome, soft-spoken
governor’s son standing before him made a good impression. The General Orders for July 27, 1775, reflected his approval, recording
the appointment of “John Trumbull Esqr” as “aid de Camp to his Excellency the Commander in Chief.”
With a young man’s fervor, Trumbull had desired just such an appointment. He found it surprising when, as the newest member
of Washington’s military family, he was intimidated by life at Vassall House. Even with rough-and-tumble infantrymen bivouacked
all over the neighborhood, the royalist residence that had been commandeered by the Colonial Army after the battles at Lexington
and Concord bespoke wealth and style unfamiliar to Trumbull. His father was indeed governor of Connecticut (Jonathan Trumbull
was the only colonial governor to remain in office and support the Patriot cause after independence), but the family fortunes
had plummeted a decade earlier when four ships in which the Trumbulls had invested were lost at sea, taking their crews and
cargoes to the bottom. In Washington’s Cambridge house, John Trumbull encountered many “of the first people of the country,”
officers, merchants, and politicians who came to dine with the General. A vain man, the youthful Trumbull felt self-conscious
in such august company, not least because he plainly lacked the resources to dress as others did. He soon decided he was “unequal
to the
elegant
duties of [his] situation,” and, when promoted to major that August, he departed headquarters with few regrets to assume command
of a brigade at Roxbury.
4
A few months later, Trumbull and his men helped occupy Dorchester Heights and watched the outmaneuvered British from their
perch overlooking the harbor. “Within a few days the enemy abandoned Boston,” he wrote, “and we entered it on St. Patrick’s
day, the 17th of March.”
5
Later that year, he was made a colonel at just twenty years of age and served with distinction in a military campaign that
took him to Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga. Then a fit of temper overcame him when the formal commission from Congress
confirming his appointment as a colonel arrived. It bore a date three months after he had been granted a field commission,
and the angry Trumbull promptly resigned.
“Thus ended my regular military service,” Trumbull would write.
6
That left him free to resume his pursuit of another goal—to become an artist—and chase it he would. But his encounter with
his commander in chief during the siege of Boston would remain with him, a proud memory—and a lingering danger.
III.
Winter 1781 . . . Tothill Fields Bridewell . . . London.
THE TALL MAN, his reddish brown hair unkempt, strode across the prison yard. His broad frame and angular features gave him
the appearance of purpose and power. Yet when he spied Trumbull peering out at him through the bars on his window, his intensity
gave way, as it often did, to his fondness for a bon mot. It was irresistible, really. How could he not address his friend
by the nickname he had just conceived? In the visitor’s mind, John Trumbull had become
Bridewell Jack.
At first Trumbull couldn’t quite bring himself to think the name “Bridewell Jack” remarkably funny. On the other hand, he
knew full well that one had to take his friend Gibby as he was, foibles and all. The man drank too much, was profligate with
his money, habitually used snuff, and wore his irreverence like an officer wore his uniform sash. Who else would dare to refer
to the big, dramatic historical paintings of their mutual benefactor, Benjamin West, as “
ten-acre
pictures”?
7
To amuse himself and those around him was his way, and, infuriating as he could be, Gilbert Stuart had become Trumbull’s stalwart
friend. He was impossible to dislike.
As usual, Gibby brought news and gossip, but this day, he brought an idea as well. Stuart was determined to take Trumbull’s
portrait. It would amuse both of them, the expatriate Rhode Islander decided, for him to record the imprisoned Connecticut
Yankee on canvas.
They had known each other a few months, just since Trumbull had knocked on the door of the Newman Street studio the previous
summer. Like Charles Willson Peale, Stuart, and other aspiring American painters before them, Trumbull had inevitably made
his way to the large house of Benjamin West on coming to England. As the most accomplished American painter of the era—he
had been appointed history painter to the court and completed a portrait of King George III only the previous year—West welcomed
other Americans, giving them the run of his two towering Painting Rooms as well as the sculpture garden and the gallery at
the rear of the house. The older painter made himself available in the morning to his protégés, advising them on their work.
Either he or one of his students would instruct newcomers in the proper procedures for preparing a canvas, grinding and mixing
pigments, and laying out a palette. The pupils who sought him out stayed for periods ranging from a few days to several years,
but West consistently encouraged them not to imitate him but rather to follow the tilts of their own talents. Unlike Joshua
Reynolds, West was open with his students, who found him accessible. “He had no secrets or mysteries,” remembered one, “he
told all he knew.”
8
West had assigned Stuart to show Trumbull where “to find the necessary colors, Tools, &c,” and the two younger men painted
together in the same Painting Room.
9
Stuart had arrived in the city more than four years earlier and his familiarity with London helped Trumbull’s adjustment to
what seemed to his colonial eye a vast metropolis. His easy manner counterbalanced Trumbull’s nervous stiffness.