The Painter's Chair (28 page)
Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Binghams, Nancy in particular, were determined with this commission to make a grand statement about America, its most
important hero, and even the status of its artistic culture. Their English friend’s house merited something greater than a
mere bust portrait, and Nancy was just the person to make it happen.
STUART UNDERSTOOD THAT expectations for his Washington portraits had been elevated once again. Mrs. Bingham always did things
in grand style, and this new portrait of her friend Mr. Washington would be no exception. She wanted a life-size standing
portrait.
The commission provided the artist with another fine chance to profit from the worldwide admiration of Washington, as Stuart
recognized that copies of a big portrait could be an ongoing and lucrative source of income. Further, the very nature of the
image would make it suitable for engraving—from the moment of conception, everyone expected Stuart to paint Washington in
a grand setting, surrounded by a richly detailed collection of objects that represented his accomplishments and his legacy.
The sale of prints from such a painting, Stuart knew, would provide welcome revenue.
Although he gladly contemplated the potential returns from such a portrait, the actual execution of the canvas for the Binghams
and Lord Lansdowne intimidated him in a way that commissions rarely did. Painting torsos and, in particular, the legs of his
subjects for full-length portraits did not come so easily to him. His lack of confidence in his ability to reproduce a full-length
human form was, in fact, one reason that, at age nineteen, he had refused the prestigious commission to paint the Newport
worthy Abraham Redwood. True, in London and Dublin in later years, he had had some successes in painting subjects head to
toe, but his gift was for painting heads and faces, and he knew it.
To help assure he would succeed with this very public assignment, he rifled through his collection of engravings, looking
for a model on which to base his composition. The new canvas would be an official portrait, not a family portrait like the
new conversation piece, Savage’s
The Washington Family
, of which his fellow Philadelphians now gossiped. Nor would he look to portray the General as his friend Trumbull had done
a few years before, posed in military regalia as if for battle. His plan was to capture George Washington as statesman, as
president, with certain of the trappings of that office. When he came across a portrait by the French artist Hyacinthe Rigaud
of a noted seventeenth-century preacher, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, that seemed to fit the bill nicely.
The 1723 engraving of the Rigaud portrait had just the right mix of elements, including a luxurious setting with columns,
drapery, and ostentatious furniture, all of which added grandeur to the imposing figure in the center. Adopting Rigaud’s composition,
Stuart concluded, would save him a great deal of time and trouble in resolving how the pieces would fit together.
Yet the large opportunity at hand remained freighted with other pressures, some of the sort that Stuart habitually sidestepped.
He was a master at ignoring deadlines, but this time there would be the persistent and powerful Mr. Bingham hurrying him to
complete the painting. Uncharacteristically, Stuart worried about what people would say. He wanted his old friends in the
London painting world, many of whom would surely see the finished canvas, to think highly of it. He remembered, as well, the
“extreme fastidiousness of the English nobility,” and it made him apprehensive to think that not only Lansdowne but others
in London society might find his tall Washington a disappointment. The pressure was on, and Stuart set to work to make a masterpiece—and
to do it quickly.
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BY AUTUMN, HE had done it. He had fallen seriously ill in the process, recovered, and completed the canvas.
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Martha had given him lace for the neck ruffles, and he borrowed Washington’s sword to copy it precisely, complete with its
gold tassel and ribbon. He purchased an expensive Turkish-made rug for the foreground. He carefully planned the pictorial
elements to send the right messages: Such pieces should, he believed, “illustrate the character of the person. The eye should
see the application of the parts as to illustrate the whole, but without separating or attracting the attention from the main
point . . . [T]he person should be so portrayed as to be read like the bible without notes.”
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On October 29, 1796, William Bingham composed a note to accompany the large crate ready to begin its journey across the sea;
inside, a bold and elegant Philadelphia-made frame had been fitted to enclose the five-foot-by-eight-foot canvas. “I have
sent by the present opportunity a full-length portrait of the President,” Bingham wrote to Rufus King, the American minister
to the Court of St. James’s, who was charged with seeing the gift through customs. “It is intended as a present on the part
of Mrs. Bingham to Lord Lansdowne. As a warm friend to the United States and a great admirer of the President it cannot have
a better destination.”
43
Once it reached Berkeley Square, the picture very much pleased its recipient. “[T]he picture . . . is in every way worthy
of the original,” Lansdowne wrote, comparing the canvas to Washington himself.
44
When he examined Mr. Stuart’s creation, Lord Lansdowne could not help but feel as if he were looking upward. Stuart had recorded
the presidential figure—it wasn’t Washington who posed for the body but a stand-in—from a low angle. Thus the president towers
over the onlooker. Behind him, adding monumental scale, are the bases of two pair of Doric columns and tasseled drapery (an
architect friend had helped Stuart sketch the arrangement). In the distance, a beclouded but clearing sky can be seen, and
Stuart painted in a pale rainbow. The storm has passed, and the figure at center, his gaze distant, looks into the future.
The setting is a fiction, more nearly resembling the earlier French canvas than any scene in Philadelphia. Beneath Washington’s
outstretched hand stands a table, draped with a rich red cloth, its leg shaped like a human knee and well-turned calf. At
the crest of the state chair behind the standing figure is a shield, an element derived from the Great Seal of the United
States. An inkstand on the table bears the Washington family coat of arms; beneath the table are three books, with titles
that allude to the General’s service (
General Orders
and
American Revolution)
and his political leadership (
Constitution & Laws of the United States
). The sitter hadn’t planned the painting, but the retiring president took symbols very seriously indeed. He, perhaps better
than anyone, understood that he was one.
The painted president is frozen in midgesture, his right arm extended, palm up (his left hand rests on the sword at his hip).
To Lansdowne, schooled in the classics, this was recognizable as the
ad locutio
gesture, a proper pose since the time of Augustus Caesar for statesmen and heroes. Here was Washington as orator; and in educated
London as in ancient Rome, the gesture conveyed the rhetorical power of the man’s speech and his authority. (In fact, he wasn’t
remarkable as an orator—Mrs. Liston: “Washington Writes better than He reads, there is even a little hesitation in his common
speaking.”)
45
As Stuart’s brushstrokes revealed him for his admirer Lord Lansdowne, he very much looked the part.
When Stuart painted his president, the man himself was preparing for his departure from public life. The man in the portrait
is clearly giving a speech; in life, Washington was working on one, namely, his farewell address to the nation, in which he
sought to explain his decision to decline a third presidential term.
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He would never read the speech to an audience (it was published in Philadelphia on September 19, 1796, in the
American Daily Advertiser
and widely reprinted across the country thereafter), but that only made the pairing of the portrait and the speech inevitable.
The combination offers a window into Washington’s state of mind as he contemplated retirement.
His speech had been carefully crafted over a period of years. In May of 1792 he had asked James Madison to provide a retirement
address, a time when he hoped to return to Mount Vernon after just one term. His old friend Eliza Willing Powel and others
had then persuaded him of the necessity that he serve four more years, but some of his thoughts, as articulated by Madison
back in 1792, still applied. Washington himself had worked at the prose and in May of 1796, he asked Alexander Hamilton, a
political ally and old hand at speechifying, to review a new draft that was a blend of Madison’s words and Washington’s. Hamilton
added some rhetorical flourishes, but the finished speech was pure Washington.
The man in the picture is aging; the man who wrote of retirement was conscious of his own mortality. Washington did not wish
to die in office. He wanted to avoid mimicking the monarchical precedent of the head of state who served until the moment
of death. An orderly transition of power was preferable, he thought, and it would deflect the oft-published accusations by
the anti-Federalists that he was a king in all but name. Till his last days in office, Washington concerned himself with appearances
and precedents.
In his speech he reminded his readers “that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained;
that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in [time], the happiness of the people
of these States, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of
this blessing as will acquire to them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and adoption of every nation
which is yet a stranger to it.”
Don’t take this for granted,
he seemed to be saying. Washington wanted his fellow Americans to understand that the man was less important than the document
that had made possible his election to the office of president. It was vintage Washington. With the simple regard for continuity
of a farmer born to the cycles of the land, he pled for the restraint, respect, and patience to allow the new country “to
settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency
which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”
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Lord Lansdowne gave his new painting a place of honor. He hung it in his library, a grand room with domes at each end, where
the Washington likeness was in excellent company. Among other works of art, the room also contained ancient marble statues
of Hercules and, appropriately, Cincinnatus, the latter bending to tie his sandal. There were also paintings by Rubens, Claude,
Murillo, and Poussin.
The London press offered encomiums. Typical was the
Oracle and Public Advertiser
, which proclaimed on May 15, 1797:
The portrait presented . . . to the Marquis of Landowne is one of the finest pictures we have seen since the death of Reynolds
. . . To many a description of the person of General Washington will be new: the picture enables us from its fidelity to describe
it very correctly. The figure is above the middle height, well proportioned, and exceedingly graceful. The countenance is
mild and yet forcible. The eye, of a light gray, is rendered marking by a brow to which physiognomy attaches the sign of power.
The forehead is ample, the nose aquiline, the mouth regular and persuasive. The face is distinguishable for muscle rather
than flesh, and this may be said of the whole person . . .
The liberality of his Lordship [the Marquis of Lansdowne] has consigned it to the [en]graver, but we cannot resist the plea
sure of describing the effect which the picture produced upon us.
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Just as Washington readied to depart once more for private life— this time for good, he hoped—Stuart’s regal likeness of
the man established him abroad as the republic’s most important public figure.