Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (22 page)
Will’s precise birth date is uncertain, but he was about sixteen when Washington acquired him. Known as “Billy,” the young
man soon won a position of trust. By 1770 he was traveling to Williamsburg at “publick time,” attending his master as his
personal body servant during sessions of the House of Burgesses. He went to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress
in 1774, and gradually acquired a degree of freedom few slaves were granted. A superb horse man like his master, he traveled
with the General throughout the war, accompanying him on horseback and on foot, well armed and mounted, entrusted with carrying
Washington’s telescope in its leather case. For twenty years he remained almost constantly at Washington’s side. He brushed
his master’s long hair in the morning and tied it back firmly with a ribbon in the military manner. Depending upon Washington’s
circumstances and needs, Will was his valet, huntsman, waiter, and butler. Respecting the man’s wishes, Washington took to
referring to him as William and indulged the addition of the surname “Lee.” After the slave’s marriage during the war, Washington
even attempted to arrange for Lee’s wife, Margaret Thomas, a free woman from Philadelphia, to come to Mount Vernon.
William Lee was helping Washington to survey his Four Mile Run tract in 1785 when the slave fell carrying the hundred-foot
surveyor’s chain. According to Washington, Will “broke the pan of his knee.” He was able to accompany Washington to Philadelphia
in 1787 for the Confederation Congress, but the following year he injured the other knee in a fall at the Alexandria Post
Office. When Washington became president in 1789, Will set out for the new capital in New York. He got as far as Philadelphia,
but his damaged knees forced him to quit the presidential caravan. After seeking medical treatment, he reached New York, but
eventually he returned to Mount Vernon where, immobilized by his injuries, he practiced the cobbler’s craft. His singular
status earned him a house near the Mansion. Probably an alcoholic, certainly crippled by his injuries, Lee in the coming years
welcomed veterans of the late war who came to visit Washington but also stopped to converse with Will, reminiscing about battles
or winter hardships.
The presence of an African-American servant in Savage’s picture bespoke artistic convention and an attempt to demonstrate
the means and comfort of the Washingtons’ lives. Even so, it is impossible for us to look at this image without thinking of
the General’s struggle to countenance human bondage in an era of new freedoms. The sitter certainly never discussed such matters
with his recorders, but he felt the weight of the devoted service of “Mulatto Will” and of the bravery of black soldiers in
the Continental Army. He had considered the passionate arguments of Lafayette and Lear, both of whom made cogent arguments
for manumission. By the time Savage went public with his family portrait
,
Washington regarded Will Lee and all his slaves differently from the way he had been taught as a boy.
Few in the world into which George Washington was born had any scruples about slavery. It was legal in all thirteen colonies,
but in the course of his life Washington wrestled with conflicting and evolving thoughts. As an adult he resolved never to
break up a slave family, a practice that was all too widespread. He treated his slaves well (Lear: “The negroes [at Mount
Vernon] are not treated as blacks in general are in this Country, they are clothed and fed as well as any labouring people
whatever and they are not subject to the laws of a domineering Overseer—
but still they are slaves
”).
18
Washington worried about intermarriages between his slaves, over whom he had absolute control, and Martha’s. He was moving
toward the stunning resolution to free all his slaves, but he had no legal right to free Martha’s dower slaves unless he could
persuade the Custis heirs (to whom they would revert at her death) to manumit them. That he was unable to do, and he knew
it would divide families.
In Washington’s last will and testament the second person mentioned by name—after Martha—was a slave. “And to my Mulatto man
William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom.”
19
Washington’s unambiguous words hang in the air when the viewer examines the slave in Savage’s image, dressed in livery, a
little-noticed dark face.
I V.
1802 . . . The Columbian Gallery . . . The Pantheon . . . New York
THE PRESENCE OF someone else’s museum in Philadelphia—our old friend Charles Willson Peale operated his natural history and
portrait museum in the Pennsylvania State House—helped persuade Edward Savage to try his luck in New York in 1802. He entered
his name in the
New York Directory
that year as a “historical painter, at the Pantheon.” His new gallery, in a circular building formerly used as a circus on
Greenwich Street, one block north of the Battery, soon outclassed the competition. Not only did he have his
Washington Family
on view, but his curiosities included a stuffed polar bear and an electric battery. The latter he used to deliver deliciously
surprising shocks to his visitors.
20
The Washington Family
was among the two-hundred-plus paintings and prints he displayed; some were his own work, some not. They included a double
portrait of John Hancock and his wife, one of the Philadelphia astronomer and mathematician David Rittenhouse, and another
of Benjamin Franklin. A self-portrait of Benjamin West and a John Trumbull full-length of John Adams were also in the show,
along with a rich mix of other images, including two Savage engravings of eruptions of Mounts Vesuvius and “Aetna.”
21
Savage claimed the show offered “the richest collection of valuable paintings ever exhibited on the shores of Columbia.”
22
A writer in the newly established
Morning Chronicle
took issue with the installation. “The Proprietor of the Gallery[’s] . . . best pictures are placed so
low
as to render it impossible to have a good view of them,
without lying flat on the floor.”
That said, however, the pseudonymous Jonathan Oldstyle concluded, “The present collection is . . . in a good state of preservation
and sufficiently interesting.”
23
For admirers of George Washington, two items in addition to
The Washington Family
held especial interest. Architectural images were a rarity, but Savage displayed two oils of Mount Vernon. The renderings
were primitive, their perspective askew and the scale distorted. But they offered a curious northern public the chance to
view the General’s much admired Virginia property.
Washington had traveled to South Carolina in 1791 on a trip to the southern states (in 1789 he had ventured north) in which
he sought to measure public opinion on the new government. At the same time Savage had been in Georgetown, outside Charleston,
completing a portrait commission. Having resumed his acquaintance with Washington early that summer, Savage was undoubtedly
among the stream of visitors who sought Washington’s hospitality at what the Virginian called his “well-resorted tavern” on
his return north. During that visit, it seems, he drew the imposing house the president called home.
In composing one of the paintings, the artist placed the house almost in the background. The structure is central to the image
but not large, seen from afar on its elevated site overlooking the Potomac. A sunrise sky, pastoral landscape, and multiple
outbuildings suggest the manorial character of the general’s plantation. In turn, the fence and stone wall of the ha-ha help
explain Washington’s marriage of the wild and civilized.
The second painting offered a reverse angle on the house. It reveals the west front overlooking the green expanse of Washington’s
“bolling green.” The squire of Mount Vernon was consciously working in the tradition of such great English landscape gardeners
as Lancelot “Capability” Brown (who got his name because he told clients that their grounds had unrealized “capabilities”).
Washington, too, used plantings, the lawn, fences, outbuildings, and other elements as part of his composition.
The house is rendered with such care that it appears Savage’s original intention was to make a pure landscape; the two sets
of figures on the green seem to be an added flourish and are crudely painted. Approximations of George and Martha stand with
Nelly. A short distance away, Wash, two dogs, and a uniformed figure walk toward them. The composition is such that one’s
eye is strangely drawn to the fuzzy oil splotches that are George and Martha. The grand house is framed by trees, but all
has become a backdrop for the family.
For the New York audience the two-hundred-plus pictures must have seemed almost overwhelming, an unprecedented tide of images,
wave upon wave of places and people. With the pictures hung floor-to-ceiling, with adjacent frames so close as almost to touch
one another, a close examination of any one of them would have been difficult.
Taken together, however, Mr. Savage’s unique images of Mount Vernon and the Washingtons make them of inestimable value. The
later addition of the figures to
The West Front of Mount Vernon
casts the painting in a distinctive historic light. Paintings appear to be permanent and static; but Savage peopled this landscape
over time. He recorded the Mansion House first in 1791 on his Virginia visit, but he must have added (or at least amended)
the figures that walk toward the viewer much later, many miles from Mount Vernon (Nelly and Wash are quite evidently older
than ages ten and twelve, as they would have been in 1791). Savage didn’t merely illustrate what he saw; the image has been
staged in the way a scenic director imagines his design.
The genius of the piece for which he is best remembered,
The Washington Family
, offers Savage’s most essential insight: He understood that his public—which was merely a slice of Washington’s much larger
constituency—wanted to see Washington in his context.
The Washington Family
and
The West Front of Mount Vernon
are very different paintings. One is a modified architectural, the other a conversation piece, but together they provide a
sense of Washington at home, and a picture of his home at a distance. The same figures are seen, but they are distributed
and portrayed differently. The artist has provided two dumb shows, different yet complementary, which offer an original and
dynamic interplay.
Those who saw Mr. Savage’s images came away with the sense that they knew the General a great deal better: This was no monarch;
no formal audience was required to see this man. He was a family man, not so different from the million other men in households
in America at the turn of the nineteenth century. To understand the General, who revealed so little about his private feelings,
it was a useful, if imperfect, portal.
I heard West say that “he nails the face to the canvas.”
—William Temple Franklin
I.
1793 . . . A Sunday in the Country . . . Stillorgan Farm
WHEN HE LOOKED at his pigs, the ruminative Gilbert Stuart could not help but recognize how well his time in Ireland had served
him. The fields and animals on his modest farm were reminiscent of the life he had known as a boy in Rhode Island. Within
the confines of his own gates, he tended his gardens and flowerpots. Here he was a farmer, more concerned with feeding his
pigs (he gave them apples from his own fruit trees) than with the Dublin bailiffs who might come knocking to collect some
overdue debt.
For Stuart, this cottage in a nobleman’s deer park was the perfect escape from Ireland’s capital. As other droll companions
had in London in previous years, Dublin’s poets, musicians, actors, and authors had proved irresistible to Stuart, and he
had the bills to show for it. He owed the butcher, the baker, and the wine merchant. But his new life here in the country,
though hardly solitary, suited him and his wife, Charlotte, and their growing brood of children. Another man might have been
happy to remain on the farm on this headland at Black Rock, but as he looked out at the Irish Sea toward Holyhead, Stuart
knew that circumstances were conspiring to send him back to America.
Arriving from England six years before, he had been utterly charmed by Ireland. Like the artist himself, Dublin was on the
threshold of world-class status. The rationalized grid of wide streets that he walked was dotted with construction sites.
Almost everywhere he saw grand neoclassical buildings. Trinity College had an elegant new face, almost one hundred yards long,
with a tall portico at its center. Nearby stood the columned arcades of Parliament House. The Rotunda Hospital had been the
first purpose-built lying-in hospital in the British Isles, and the costs of its operation were defrayed by the sumptuous
Assembly Rooms, where the landed gentry met to eat, dance, and amuse one another in the elegant Round and Supper Rooms. On
the banks of the River Liffey stood the grandest building, the Custom House, with its tall dome. New buildings all, they redefined
the port city and its growing prosperity.
Stuart had journeyed to Ireland at the behest of no less a personage than Sir Joshua Reynolds, still one of the leading portraitists
in England and president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The aging Sir Joshua, already deaf and with his eyesight fading,
was reluctant to embark on the long trip over land and sea, so he asked Stuart to go in his stead to execute a commission
for one of his patrons. The thirty-one-year-old Stuart agreed and, though the portrait of the lord lieutenant of Ireland,
the Duke of Rutland, never came to pass (no sooner had Stuart appeared in Dublin in the fall of 1787 than the duke died suddenly
of a “putrid fever”), Stuart’s prospects hadn’t been diminished. The painter’s fortuitous arrival had proved to be just what
the city’s nabobs desired, and within weeks the Dublin
Evening Herald
proclaimed, “Mr. Stewart, an English gentleman lately arrived in the metropolis, excels in his delicacy of coloring and graceful
attitudes . . . and has a happy method of disposing his figures and at the same time preserving a strong resemblance.”
1
The writer spelled his name incorrectly and confused his country of origin (Stuart had arrived from a twelve-year residence
in London), but had no difficulty finding the words to praise the painter’s talents.
At first Stuart established his Painting Room in a rented house on Pill Lane. The neighborhood was respectable, near the Liffey
and not so far from another of the city’s impressive new buildings, the immense legal edifice known as the Four Courts. He
shared the house with his family, but he threw himself into his work and a gregarious social life that his temperament and
his profession seemed to demand. They lived, it was said, in a very good style. Stuart was a voracious consumer of good food,
drink, and conversation. He liked nothing more than to entertain guests with his wife’s lovely contralto singing voice, and
he often accompanied her on his flute. The daughter of a Berkshire apothecary, Charlotte Coates Stuart was pretty and intelligent
and a fervent believer in her husband’s talents.
His patrons included the new lord chancellor of Ireland, for whom he executed a life-size canvas, portraying the regal ruler
in the style of royal portraiture, with his mace, luxuriant robes, and other symbols of power.
In Stuart’s newfound home, the commissions had come from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, the ruling class dominated by the British
and a mix of old Protestant Irish families (under the Penal Laws, no Catholic was permitted to vote, hold office, or own land).
The city’s elite inhabited the spacious downtown squares, living in new row houses fronted by doorways with sweeping fanlights.
Visitors climbed to the second floor, the
piano nobile
, to find spaces decorated with fine stucco work applied by Italian artisans. At some of the better addresses, original Stuart
portraits soon hung. More than a few of his old London clients had large land holdings in Ireland, so Stuart’s renown preceded
him. The very year he left England’s capital, one of that city’s newspapers had labeled him “The Vandyke of the Time.”
2
According to a painter friend, everyone who was anyone in Dublin wanted a Stuart, as “a rage to possess some specimen of his
pencil took place.”
3
He had no peer in Ireland’s capital; aspiring younger painters sought his guidance, and older lesser artists moved elsewhere.
His commissions were numerous, and at first the half-fees he collected from his sitters (monies were paid in advance) made
possible his gracious lifestyle. Within two years of his arrival, however, he was cast into Marshalsea Prison in the summer
of 1789. Unlike his friend John Trumbull, incarcerated for treason a few years earlier, Stuart found himself in a debtors’
prison, his obligations having far exceeded his income. Even so, the spirited Stuart remained undaunted, turning his time
in jail to advantage. Just as Trumbull had done, he set up his easel. He welcomed “men of wealth and fashion . . . who wanted
portraits from his hand,” and, after he had collected enough half-fees to clear his outstanding debt, he regained his freedom,
at least for a time. He liked to tell the story of another episode in another prison when, having painted both the jailer
and his wife, he was set free by the grateful sitter.
Stuart’s spirits could change like the tides of the Irish Sea; when “in the humor,” he painted with great verve, but at other
times his temperament varied from the manic to the depressed.
4
Given the chance to try living in a village on Dublin’s outskirts, Stuart had packed up his family and started afresh. At
Stillorgan Park the Stuart family’s cottage was located on an estate owned by the Earl of Carysfort, an English nobleman and
a friend of Sir Joshua. Stuart was away from the everyday temptations of Dublin but close enough that, by taking the short
walk down a narrow lane to the inn at Black Rock, he could travel the several miles to Dublin in a public coach. There he
maintained a Painting Room for the convenience of the Dublin customers on whom his livelihood depended.
From the high ground of his acres in Stillorgan, Stuart could take in the waterscape around him. This rural interlude was
among the happiest times in his life, but Mr. Stuart could hardly deny that it would soon be necessary to move on once more.
His ever-growing debts were one consideration; so was his emerging dream of creating a great painting that would make his
penurious past merely a memory.
THE SMELL OF salt air was well known to Gilbert Stuart. By birth he was a Rhode Islander, a child of the tiny colony of islands
with a mile of coastline for every three of land area. The sound of freshwater rushing by had accompanied Stuart’s early years,
along with the creaks and groans of an undershot waterwheel. That wheel drove the milling machine in the family’s downstairs
kitchen, its wooden teeth and gears grinding tobacco into snuff.
He was the namesake of his father, Gilbert Stuart of Perth, who had come from Scotland in 1751 to establish the first snuff
manufactory in America. Gilbert the younger was born in the mill house in 1755 and lived in the wood-framed homestead on the
banks of the Mattatuxet Brook until Gilbert, age five, his older sister, Ann, and their parents moved to nearby Newport.
The business of making snuff proved disappointing once the growth of transatlantic trade made snuff cheaper to import than
to produce. A small inheritance from a maternal relative enabled the Stuarts to move to Newport, and their means were sufficient
that they owned two slaves (a mother and child) and enough land to maintain a garden and livestock. Gilbert the elder set
up shop on Banister’s Wharf, where his wares included mustard flour, earthenware cups, writing paper, hats, shoe buckles,
linen, silk, and sewing supplies.
5
The parents rented a pew at Trinity Church, and the boy learned his reading, writing, and sums under the tutelage of the clergy
at Trinity’s grammar school. His scholarship was unremarkable (he was, said a childhood friend, “a very capable, self-willed
boy . . . habituated at home to have his own way in everything with little or no control from the easy, good-natured father”).
6
The young Gilbert excelled as a musician. As a pupil of the church’s organist, a disciplined German named Johann Ernst Knotchell,
he mastered the pipe organ.
Gilbert began drawing at an early age, too, thanks in part to rudimentary instructions provided by an African slave named
Neptune Thurston. When Stuart was barely into his teens, he painted a likeness of two spaniels for a local physician, who,
recognizing the boy’s ability to draw, provided him with painting materials. The animals were posed beneath another of Dr.
Hunter’s proud possessions, a fine locally made side table in the house’s handsomely appointed parlor. The doctor engaged
a second artist at the same time to paint portraits of people, and Stuart made the acquaintance of the itinerant Scots artist
Cosmo Alexander. He hired on as his apprentice. From his master he learned to grind and mix pigments, lay out a palette, prepare
canvases, and wash brushes. This training provided Stuart’s first “lessons in the grammar of the art . . . [of] drawing—and
the groundwork of the palette.”
7
The son of an artist (his first name honored one of his father’s patrons, the Tuscan Grand Duke Cosimo III), Cosmo Alexander
had trained in Italy and was well connected in London. With Stuart in tow, the worldly artist soon embarked on travels to
Philadelphia; Norfolk and Williamsburg, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and thence overseas to Edinburgh. The apprenticeship
ended prematurely after less than three years with Alexander’s sudden death in Scotland. For a time Stuart continued his training
in Glasgow with another painter, Alexander’s brother-in-law, Sir George Chalmers, and he briefly attended university there.
By the fall of 1773 he made his way back to America and began producing portraits on his own.
Not yet eighteen, Stuart wrestled with his talent, learning from every exposure to other artists. His father’s onetime partner
in the snuff business, Thomas Moffatt, was John Smibert’s nephew. It seems that the connection enabled Stuart to visit the
deceased Smibert’s color shop (and the Painting Room above), then being operated by Smibert’s widow and John Moffatt. Along
the way, Stuart studied engravings based on the work of Eu rope an masters. As others before him had done, he recognized that
such images were models from which to borrow poses, pictorial composition, and miscellaneous details.
During these years Stuart’s eye also fell upon the work of John Singleton Copley, then
the
artist of Boston. Copley’s portraiture incorporated lovingly painted clothing, furniture, and other objects, but all very
much in the service of inner dramas that seemed to be unfolding on the canvas. Stuart, too, began incorporating props—not
merely costumes but books and quill pens and furniture as well—and he labored to capture his subjects in midgesture. Instead
of depicting them as if frozen in place before his easel, he sought to create the illusion that these people were going about
their business. His sitters’ faces glowed. Far from being imprisoned by their pictures, their eyes looked beyond, their expressions
vital, curious, and thoughtful. The crude and wooden people of his early paintings were transformed into alive and engaging
characters.
When the nineteen-year-old painter felt ready to record the ruling class, he witnessed first hand the strength of the revolutionary
winds swirling through the colonies. Stuart was in Boston in April 1775 when word reached the city of the opening battles
of the war in nearby Lexington and Concord. A few days later, when the same news reached Philadelphia, the Continental Congress
began the debate on who should lead the volunteer army that was assembling near Boston. The friction between Loyalists and
Patriots in New England threatened every transaction conducted by merchants and artisans, and potential patrons had already
begun to scatter. John Singleton Copley had left the growing divisions behind when he sailed for London almost a year earlier,
and by the summer of 1775, Stuart’s Tory father, mother, and sister were gone, too, settling on property they owned in the
safety of the royal province of Nova Scotia. Left alone in Newport, Stuart recognized that the call for portraits, never an
essential, could only diminish in the war that had now begun. The youthful artist made a pragmatic decision.