The Painter's Chair (20 page)

Although the New York version portrayed the General and his handsome mount much as Trumbull had painted them for Mrs. Washington
(Washington did not sit for this public portrait, so Trumbull copied Mrs. Washington’s smaller version), the painter did vary
the mise en scène. He portrayed lower Broadway in ruins and British ships leaving the shore. He was commemorating the evacuation
of New York in 1783 by the invading forces that had occupied the city since 1776. It was Washington the victorious, towering
over the retreating vanquished.

CHAPTER 7

“
The Washington Family
”

The Likenesses of the young people are not much like what they are at present . . . [but] the portrait of your Self and Mrs.
Washington are generally thought to be likenesses.
—Edward Savage, writing to George Washington, June 3, 1798

I.
Winter 1789–1790 . . . 3 Cherry Street . . . Manhattan Island

LIKE MANYAN OTHER New England country boy, Edward Savage set off to make his fortune in New York. Born on a farm in central
Massachusetts, he had spent several years in Boston learning to paint, and his facility was such that he found patrons willing
to pay him to copy other people’s canvases, including the sophisticated work of John Singleton Copley. He had begun to receive
local portrait commissions, too, but as he walked along Cherry Street in early December 1789, his twenty-eighth birthday a
recent memory, he had a bigger plan in mind.

Savage had adopted the fashion of powdering his hair. When the goldsmith-turned-artist arrived at the doorstep of the President’s
Mansion, the whiteness of his hair set off his dark brown eyes. He felt confident of his reception since he carried a letter
of introduction from Joseph Willard, president of Harvard College. The addressee was George Washington.

“When you were in the Philosophy Chamber of the University in this place,” Washington soon read, “you may perhaps remember,
that I expressed my wishes, that your Portrait might, some time or other, adorn that Room. Since [then], Mr. Savage, the Bearer
of this, who is a painter and is going to New York, has called on me and of his own accord has politely and generously offered
to take your portrait for the University, if you will be so kind as to sit.”
¹

Washington, by now all too familiar with such requests, sent Wil-lard a courteous letter. “I am induced, Sir, to comply with
this request from a wish that I have to gratify, so far as with propriety may be done, every reasonable desire of the Patrons
and promotors of Science.”
²

To accommodate Willard, Washington took a seat in the Painter’s Chair several times during that holiday season for the unknown
Mr. Savage. The third and last of the sessions before the easel occurred on the morning of Twelfth Night, January 6, 1790,
George and Martha’s wedding anniversary. By then a recognizable likeness had emerged on the canvas, with the deep-set dark
blue eyes, long nose, and the fleshy jowls of a man married thirty-one years.

The thirty-inch-by-twenty-five-inch oil would be delivered to Harvard later that year. Many who saw it expressed their admiration.
Josiah Quincy thought the portrait “the best likeness” he had ever seen of Washington, even though he went on to observe that
“its merits as a work of art are but small.”
³
But well before the bust portrait made its way to Cambridge, Savage had conceived a plan whereby that first picture, executed
gratis, might be the means of launching a more profitable enterprise. A man of entrepreneurial instincts, he recognized that
a market existed for images of this admirable man, about whom so many were curious.

John Adams soon offered encouragement. His was a double request, as the vice president wanted portraits of both Martha and
George. The chief executive duly obliged both the painter and Adams, sitting again on April 6, 1790. Savage made quick work
of the assignment, and, just eleven days later, he delivered the pair of canvases. Along with the finished paintings came
a bill to “The Vice President of the United States [for] forty Six Dollars & 2/3rds for a portrait of The President of the
United States & His Lady.”
⁴

During that winter Savage also took images of George and Martha’s wards, Nelly and Wash, then ages eleven and nine. He also
made a third version of the General’s portrait, which he kept for his own reference. But it was another canvas, one that drew
upon all of Savage’s Washington family images, which would distinguish the work of the enterprising artist in the years to
come.

Like most of the other painters in his generation, Savage had felt the influence of the late John Smibert. His indebtedness
was more direct and, in a literal sense, even larger than that owed by some of the other painters. The picture that gained
Savage enduring fame (and substantial profit) can be traced directly back to the grandest of Smibert’s canvases.

Savage’s great notion was inspired by
The Bermuda Group
. He would echo the painting’s composition (framing his foreground figures with columns, together with a landscape view at
the back of the picture space) and even its palette (the muted reds, browns, greens, and blues).

Savage knew the big oil that remained longer than all the others in Smibert’s Painting Room on Queen Street. To that address,
then, we must return.

II.
1729–1731 . . . Group Portrait . . . Dean Berkeley and His Entourage

GEORGE BERKELEY LOOKS distracted. Only a moment ago, it appears, he waxed philosophical while his admiring friend, John Wainwright,
scratched the older man’s thoughts into a manuscript book. Now, still leaning forward in his chair with quill in hand, the
scribe waits for Berkeley to resume his discourse. But the churchman—a tall, heavy-set man in black cassock and long clerical
collar—stares into the distance.

The two men are not alone. Anne Foster, Berkeley’s wife, sits next to her standing husband, attired in an elegant yellow dress.
Their young son, Henry, plays on his mother’s lap, a peach in his hand. Anne’s companion, Miss Handcock, sits on her other
side, looking at mother and child, and two gentlemen stand behind the seated figures. One leans on the back of Miss Handcock’s
chair; the other looks over Mr. Wainwright’s shoulder at his jottings.

Believable as it may appear, this scene never could have taken place. The “Large picture,” commissioned by “Mr. Wainwright,
Esq.,” was begun by John Smibert in England in “Juley” of 1728.
⁵
After making some preliminary portraits (including Wainwright’s), Smibert packed up his sketches and departed with Dean Berkeley’s
entourage when they embarked on their transatlantic voyage on September 4. Wainwright, an admirer of Berkeley and a patron
of Smibert, gave Smibert ten guineas as a first payment for the painting, but he did not accompany the group on their journey
to the Americas on their educational mission.

After the party reached America, the painting remained unfinished for several years. In that time young Henry Berkeley joined
the party—the small boy had not even been conceived in the summer of 1728, since Anne Foster gave birth to him late the following
spring in Newport, Rhode Island. Smibert probably added the toddler to the composition when he visited Berkeley and company
in January 1731. That would have been shortly before the other members of the Bermuda group made their journey back across
the Atlantic. Smibert’s picture thus became a record of an imaginary moment, fixing in time the life and death of a dream.
Wainwright had commissioned the group portrait to commemorate Berkeley’s great adventure, but by the time he forwarded to
Boston the balance due Smibert for its completion (thirty guineas), Berkeley’s grand plan for a North American university
had been abandoned.

Still, Smibert’s conversation piece had its own closely reasoned plan. The artist located his friends in front of the shafts
of three classical columns. Seen in the distance is a rocky seascape with tall pine trees. Quite simply, the cultured Eu rope
ans standing before us, shaded by a classical building, have arrived in an untamed landscape. The painter’s friends are actors
in a play that was halted halfway through its composition.

While Berkeley’s grand scheme faded like a sailor’s red sky, the big painting—it was the largest American canvas of its time—remained
on view in Smibert’s studio. The canvas was much more than just big. Writ large in its pigments were Berkeley’s ambitions,
conveyed in a work that, for its day, was highly sophisticated. Smibert himself must have recognized its greatness, as it
is the one of his hundreds of American works that he chose to sign.

For decades, the life-size figures on the canvas witnessed a parade of visitors strolling past, although the never-to-be college
in Bermuda faded into obscurity. If sheer size was part of the picture’s power, it was singular in other ways, too. Before
The Bermuda Group
, no artist in America had succeeded in painting a group portrait. Almost no one else had even tried to paint more than two
people on a single canvas. The usual preference was for single figures painted actual size. It made more sense to paint paired
or “pendant” portraits, rather than to memorialize a couple together, given the average life expectancy and, in particular,
the frequency with which women died in childbirth. Smibert’s big picture was an exception, a sophisticated illusion, an entirely
plausible rendition of a scene with life-size figures. His portrayal of his brave English band was so persuasive that at least
two young American artists in Smibert’s lifetime were inspired to paint large family portraits that were unmistakably derived
from
The Bermuda Group
.
⁶

When Copley began to paint in earnest after Smibert’s death, the small range of artistic references available to him included
the works in Smibert’s studio. From
The Bermuda Group,
he unashamedly borrowed the pose of the two women for an early painting. Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull also painted
conversation pieces of their families after seeing Smibert’s canvas. Though they didn’t copy Smibert’s work, his vision of
his Bermuda-bound colleagues was certainly their first introduction to a group painting.
⁷
For each of them the experience of Mr. Smibert’s group painting made such a painting seem a natural conceit.

Not so many years later, along came another painter, the young Massachusetts-born Edward Savage. He would turn out his own
conversation piece, but his subject would be a grander family—not his but the nation’s—and his painting and the uncounted
prints and other copies made of it would help define America’s indispensable man for his countrymen.

III.
1791-1793 . . . London

EDWARD SAVAGE MOVED to London to advance his new craft. Like other aspiring American artists, he sought out Benjamin West,
who had just been elevated to the presidency of the Royal Academy. In that foreign capital, Savage thought he could master
the profitable art of engraving. When he arrived, his skills were no more than rudimentary, but by early 1792 he was able
to publish a good-quality stipple engraving based upon the
George Washington
he had painted for Harvard College. The General looked his age (Washington turned sixty just as the print was issued), with
a somber dignity.

Savage continued his painting, making a variant portrait of Washington, this one portraying the Virginian as a statesman rather
than a soldier. The uniform has vanished; instead, Washington wears a black velvet coat, with wrist ruffles and a lace jabot
at the neck. In this three-quarter view, he is seated at a table and holds in his hands a document distinguishable as the
plan for the new Federal City (though the man himself would always have difficulty bringing himself to call it “Washington,”
the new capital had recently been given that name). Savage published this portrait, too, as a print, extending his artistic
reach once more by engraving the image as a mezzotint. But its significance would prove to be as a stage in the development
of a much bigger painting.

Prior to leaving New York two years earlier, Savage had begun work on an easily portable oil study—it was eighteen and a half
inches high by twenty-four inches wide—of a very different picture. This was the Washington family group, which, he later
told Washington, he had also begun transferring to a copper plate. The image was still taking shape in his mind, and, during
his London days, Savage kept the canvas and the copper plate near at hand. At odd moments he returned to them, altering the
figure of Washington to coincide with the three-quarters portrait. He incorporated the map of the Federal City, and the mezzotint
of Washington and the canvas also came to share the same backdrop. He added the base of a Doric column and a bulky swagged
curtain to the work in progress. During his stay in London, Savage added a fifth figure, too, a slave in livery standing at
the periphery of the family group. For a model he used the black manservant of the American minister to the Court of St. James’s.

This project—Savage called it
The Washington Family
—became the one on which he placed his greatest expectations. His hopes for
The Washington Family
grew as he observed the newest currents in the London art world. He was learning about more than engraving, taking careful
note of the fashion for mounting an exhibition that consisted of a single large work, usually a history painting, which portrayed
a contemporary hero. One of the most successful practitioners of the painting show was Savage’s émigré countryman, John Singleton
Copley, who had taken to installing his newest large-scale painting in a grand frame that resembled the proscenium arch of
a theater. Savage had arrived in London in time to join the queue to see Copley’s
Siege of Gibraltar
. Some sixty thousand customers that spring had paid to see the immense canvas (it was eighteen by twenty-three feet) that
commemorated a 1781 naval battle, in which the English garrison holding the strategic Rock of Gibraltar had held off the combined
forces of forty-eight French and Spanish ships. George III and his queen had been among those who viewed the heroic painting
in its eighty-five-foot-long “magnificent Oriental tent” in Green Park. To Savage, the notion of audiences numbering in the
thousands paying a shilling each to view such a spectacle seemed an appealing business model, particularly when compared with
his recollections of his father’s struggle to extract a thin living from the rocky soils of Princeton, Massachusetts.
⁸