Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (27 page)
Martha was a fixture and a constant in the eyes of the painters. Unlike her husband who always seemed to look somehow different
from one portrait to the next, Martha remained remarkably the same, whether the portraitist was Mr. Trumbull, Mr. Peale, Mr.
Savage, or, as in this case, Mr. Stuart.
TO STUART, THE commission negotiated with Mrs. Washington amounted to more than a piece of business. Many of his previous
portraits featured ambitious merchants, idle aristocrats, or their wives (when one husband complained of Stuart’s rendering
of his spouse, the painter had angrily retorted, “What a——business is this of a portrait painter— you bring him a
potatoe
and expect he will paint you a peach!”).
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If many of his sitters failed to spark his genius, certainly some of the men and women who had come to his Painting Room had
charmed and engaged him.
Yet none had posed the ineffable challenge that Washington did. The world believed that this man possessed an inner sublimity
of nature that, perhaps beyond any other of Stuart’s subjects, demanded recording for posterity. Stuart knew he needed to
look at this man anew and capture his moral power and authority.
He wasn’t quite certain how to go about accomplishing his goal, but the commission called for half-lengths that approximated,
at least in size, the existing pair back at Mount Vernon. But as he considered Martha Washington’s commission, Stuart’s basis
for comparison was less the two earlier portraits, which he had never seen, than his own recent likeness of Washington. As
the painter-physiognomist contemplated rendering his subjects, his intent was to do as Mr. West had said:
This
time he would truly nail the president (and his lady) to the canvas.
He chose to employ one of the conventions of pendant portraits, arranging his sitters so that when the finished paintings
were hung together, the husband and wife would face each other. George’s pose upon assuming the Painter’s Chair was the reverse
of his previous portrait, and he sat with his head and shoulders turned slightly to the painter’s left, thereby revealing
the left side of his face. Martha would do the opposite. Unlike Stuart’s earlier and smaller head-and-shoulders bust portrait
of Washington, in these Martha and George were to be seen from the waist up.
When Washington entered Stuart’s house for the sitting, the painter’s wife was just stepping into her parlor. She caught a
glimpse of the president as he passed through the hall door, bound for the Painting Room. To Mrs. Stuart, the man in the black
velvet suit and lace ruffles— she had never laid eyes on him before—was “the most superb looking person [I] had ever seen.”
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With Washington in the Chair, Stuart tended to the task at hand. He noticed some differences in his sitter from his small
portrait. His sideburns had grown longer. As if Stuart needed another challenge in painting the president, he observed that
Washington, even more than usual, had a “constrained expression . . . about the mouth and lower part of the face.”
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His face seemed somehow more square, and his mouth appeared to bulge. It was no wonder: He had acquired new dentures.
When young, Washington had cracked walnuts with his teeth; as he aged, his once firm and healthy bite had deteriorated. He
suffered painful abscesses, and he began losing teeth at just twenty-two. By 1781 he had begun wearing a partial dental plate,
and over the decade that followed, his dental condition continued to worsen. In 1789 a dentist named John Greenwood had fabricated
him a lower plate out of hippopotamus ivory and human teeth, but this very year the president had lost the last of his own
teeth, which had anchored his dentures. A new set of false teeth, these from a Philadelphia dentist, incorporated animal and
human teeth mounted on lead upper and lower plates that were connected by a spring. These dentures, Washington reported, were
“uneasy in the mouth and bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.”
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They were uncomfortable, inefficient, and difficult to keep in position.
During the several sittings required, Stuart found that one way to keep Washington both relaxed and awake was to have guests
in the Painting Room to amuse and distract him. In addition to the sometime presence of Mrs. Washington, other Painting Room
visitors included her granddaughter, grandson, and Washington’s old military colleagues, General Henry Lee and Secretary of
War Henry Knox. The pretty and pert Harriet Chew, of the powerful Chew clan, was welcomed, too; Washington himself admitted
“her presence always gave him his most agreeable expression.”
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With friends present he relaxed a bit—even if he refused to acknowledge it. When the Scots wife of the British minister, Henrietta
Liston, remarked upon the happiness that was to be seen in his expression when he talked of his retirement, he was quick to
disagree (“You are wrong! My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!”). Despite the uncharacteristic abruptness of his
retort, Mrs. Liston still thought the world of him: “He possesses so much natural unaffected dignity, and is so noble a figure
as to give always a pleasing impression.”
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Having company at hand while he worked benefited Mr. Stuart in another way. Virtually all of these personages would go on
to commission portraits of themselves. His Washington association was proving every bit as valuable to him as he had anticipated.
Stuart painted Martha and George separately, but their two canvases resembled each other. At the start both were blank, the
weave of the fabric covered by a “fog-color” ground.
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Stuart strove in his first session with each sitter to lay in the major forms of the head, to rough in the nose, the features,
the shape of the face. “The first idea,” Stuart believed, was to create “an indistinct mass of light & shadows, or the character
of the person as seen in the heel of the evening[,] in the grey of the morning, or at a distance too great to discriminate
features with exactness.”
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Only after he had created a strong facial likeness did Stuart paint in the eyes.
With the face coming to life, he added the hair and encircled each head with dark paint, a drab green that contrasted with
the light flesh tones and helped give the viewer the illusion that the heads were three-dimensional. As he worked to make
Mr. and Mrs. Washington’s portraits more lifelike, he added pink-complexioned skin tones with light brushstrokes. To do it,
Stuart barely touched the canvas, applying touches of pure, unblended color.
As he went about painting Washington, once again Stuart attempted to engage his sitter. He had some success, thanks to a fortunate
accident. During a sitting, Stuart noticed that Washington’s usually somnolent features suddenly seemed to awaken, and the
painter realized the cause was a horse passing by outside. Though he had tried talking of farming to Washington—to no avail—Stuart
now turned the talk to horses. For a time, at least, the sitter seemed more animated.
The more Stuart looked at this man—and, by now, Washington had sat for him a number of times—the more confident he felt of
his insights into his character. The painter was now certain, though he had not witnessed it personally, that the president’s
temper was prodigious. He confided as much to General Henry Lee.
Lee, who served with distinction in the Continental Army and earned himself the sobriquet “Light Horse Harry” for his deft
horsemanship, breakfasted with his old commander a few days later. “I saw your portrait the other day—a capital likeness,”
he told George and Martha. Then he added, “Stuart says you have a tremendous temper.”
Mrs. Washington, offended on her husband’s behalf, replied, “Upon my word, Mr. Stuart takes a great deal upon himself, to
make such a remark.”
Lee, concerned that his words had offended, added, “But, stay, my dear lady, he added that the president had it under wonderful
control.”
Smiling slightly, the man himself remarked, “He is right.”
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Lee knew of Washington’s temper. He had heard tell of Washington’s tirade when he discovered Continental troops retreating
at the Battle of Monmouth Court house. An officer on the scene, General Charles Scott, remembered that Washington swore “till
the leaves shook on the trees . . . Never have I enjoyed such swearing before, or since . . . he swore like an angel from
heaven.”
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Washington then had turned his ire on the enemy and personally rallied the troops. The man rarely lost control—since childhood
he had disciplined himself to contain his anger when it rose—but Mr. Stuart was quite right that it sometimes simmered dangerously.
A brilliant likeness of Washington could be seen on canvas; Martha’s, though less developed, was emerging, too. Before Stuart
could finish them, another commission came to him.
I V.
Spring 1796 . . . The Painter’s Studio . . . Philadelphia
ON APRIL 11, 1796, a hand-delivered letter from the President’s House confirmed an agreed-upon appointment. “Sir, I am under
promise to Mrs. Bingham, to set for you tomorrow at nine oclock . . . I am Sir Your Obedient Servt, G. Washington.”
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The president had long before demonstrated his appreciative eye for the ladies, and Anne Willing Bingham—sensual, confident,
always dressed to advantage—was perhaps Philadelphia’s most beautiful woman. She was proud of her beauty and wore au courant
French fashions with short sleeves and plunging necklines; her exposed elbows and cleavage earned her both admiring looks
and, in some quarters, words of disapproval. Yet no one dared speak too harshly of Nancy, as she was known. She was the daughter
of a wealthy merchant and, in the way of the city’s elite, virtually all of Philadelphia’s rich and powerful families were
either her blood relations or linked with her by marriage.
She had married well at sixteen. Her husband, William Bingham, twelve years older and her father’s business partner, had become
one of America’s richest men, profiting in the war trade and thereafter succeeding mightily in shipping, land speculation,
and international banking. As Abigail Adams observed, “Money, Money is his sole object, and he feels the weight of it.”
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What Nancy desired, Nancy usually got—even from President Washington. As the wife of the newly elected Senator Bingham, she
was charged with managing the social side of their world. She had a gift for conversation (her cleverness with English was
remarked upon and she spoke French fluently), and her manners were highly polished. Having traveled abroad and resided in
Paris and London, on returning home she worked to raise the elegance of the society in her city (during the Constitutional
Convention almost ten years earlier, Washington noted in his diary, “Dined, and drank Tea at Mr. Binghams in great Splender”
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). She was not bashful about expressing her opinions—even political ones—and the Binghams’ in-town home, Mansion House, was
the site of lavish entertainments. At her balls and receptions the city’s and the nation’s powerful men and their wives gathered.
George Washington was a frequent guest, known to walk arm-in-arm with Mrs. Bingham, deep in conversation.
Nancy and William Bingham had known Gilbert Stuart in London during their six years abroad. They knew how great were his gifts
and how unpredictable his personality (the family portrait the Binghams had commissioned of themselves and their two daughters
had come back to America unfinished). Now they wished to commission a truly regal portrait of George Washington, a gift worthy
of a powerful English ally, the Marquis of Lansdowne.
From the first, the new portrait was understood to be both new and not: The unfinished head Stuart was painting for Martha
would be the basis of the Washington head in the proposed portrait, which meant inconveniencing Washington for perhaps as
little as one additional sitting. But this new picture would be very much more, too, as befitted the intended recipient.
Born William Petty, Lord Lansdowne inherited large estates in Ireland and became the Earl of Shelburne upon his father’s death.
During his career in British politics he had won the admiration of Americans as an opponent of the war, and, as prime minister
in 1782–83, he shaped policies that led to the Treaty of Paris, which had officially brought the American Revolution to an
end.
In 1784 he had been created the Marquis of Lansdowne. During the Binghams’ London years, they had been introduced to Lansdowne
by Joseph Vaughan, and a friendship was born. Nancy and her husband had been made welcome at Lansdowne’s London town house
on Berkeley Square, where they talked trade, politics, and art. Lord Lansdowne’s art collection included paintings by Titian,
Tintoretto, Reynolds, and Gains-borough. Stuart, too, was known to Lansdowne, as the American had painted his portrait during
his London years, and the Englishman had also been one of the thirty-two men who desired a copy of Stuart’s first Washington
portrait.