The Painter's Chair (30 page)

Rembrandt tested the artistic waters of New York in 1798, mounting an exhibition he titled “American Pantheon or Peale’s Collection
of Portraits of American Patriots” (brother Raphaelle remained in Philadelphia, where he advertised himself as a miniature
painter). Rembrandt spent the following winter painting in Annapolis, but he returned to Philadelphia in the fall of 1799,
advertising his portrait skills using just one name. To differentiate himself from his family, he called himself
Rembrandt
.

He was commissioned to paint the newly inaugurated president, Thomas Jefferson, among others, but in 1801 and 1802, he invested
much time working at his father’s side to recover and reassemble the fossilized bones of two giant mammoths, which they promptly
put on display in his father’s Philadelphia Museum. Along with younger brother Rubens, he traveled to London with a “Behemoth”
skeleton. In England’s great capital he, too, became acquainted with the venerable Benjamin West, just as his father had done
so many years earlier. But Rembrandt’s stay in West’s Painting Room proved much briefer. Though his first trip across the
Atlantic exposed him to the fashionable mode of English portraiture—he exhibited two new works at the Royal Academy,
Self-Portrait with Mammoth Tooth
and
George Washington as a Master Mason—
he returned to America with a sense of incompleteness, and a yearning to see Paris.

For several years he devoted himself to portraiture (in Philadelphia, New York, the Federal City, and the South), but by the
summer of 1808 he determined to take his much-mused-upon trip to France. It was the place, he believed, where he could “exert
himself to get to the head of the Art.”
¹⁴

II.
Summer 1808 . . . An American in Paris

R
EMBRANDT PEALE ARRIVED in the French capital carrying letters of introduction from his father, the diplomat Joel Barlow, and
others with French connections. With the deed to his house as collateral, he had borrowed $1,300 to help underwrite his trip
to France. Another $500 came from Charles Willson, who expected in return that his son would paint a dozen portraits of eminent
persons for his Museum. Jefferson contributed a special passport bearing his own presidential signature, as well as a list
of celebrated Frenchmen whom Rembrandt might record.

A month-long sea journey was followed by a five-day ride through the French countryside. Rembrandt thought Versailles “Majic
. . . worthy of the Heathen Mythology.”
¹⁵
Rembrandt did not seek a place in anyone’s studio. John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and his own father had settled into Benjamin
West’s studio in London, but in Paris Rembrandt sought a different sort of tutelage. Rather than setting up his easel in the
Painting Room of a mentor, he chose to study at the Louvre. There the artists with whom he apprenticed were dead.

They included Raphael, Correggio, Titian, van Dyck, and Veronese. The works he examined were not copies, but original oils,
and Peale studied the masterpieces daily. At the Luxembourg Palace he spent hours with a series of paintings by his favorite
artist, Peter Paul Rubens, admiring the flamboyant colors. He visited the tapestry factory, the Manufacture Nationale des
Gobelins, and the Palais Bourbon, with its array of classical statues. The dutiful son also asked around for fossils and arranged
an exchange of birds to add to his father’s natural history collections.

The younger Mr. Peale had painting to do, too, in order to fulfill his obligations to his father. One of those portraits would
acknowledge the great favor that France’s most admired sculptor had done for the United States. In America, Jean-Antoine Houdon
was esteemed, linked as he was to the early patrons of early American art, Jefferson and Washington.

In a sense, this was a family affair. Despite having rejected the idea of working from Charles Willson Peale’s canvas for
his statue, Houdon had sculpted his Washington much as Peale had painted him in his 1784
Portrait of Washington at the Surrender of Yorktown.
In the finished standing sculpture that now stood in Richmond, Washington’s pose, waistcoat, jacket, and even his paunch closely
resembled Peale’s portrayal. A handful of artists had worked to establish a taste for sophisticated art in America, and the
youthful Peale represented a maturing of the artistic passions his father and the others had sought to stir up. Here he was,
closing the circle, a member of the next generation, painting a likeness of the first world-renowned artist to take America’s
taste for the fine arts seriously.

III.
1808 . . . Houdon’s Atelier . . . Palais des Beaux-Arts . . . Paris

J
EAN-ANTOINE HOUDON LIKED nothing better than an audience. Even at the most intimate moments of creation, with his eyes fixed
intently upon his subject and his fingers caressing the clay, he sought not privacy but the energy and attention of others.

He kept his
élèves
nearby. Often one or more of the students would sketch as the master worked. Another might be at the ready to provide a fresh
cloth or refill the bowl he used to moisten the clay at hand. Behind the sculptor might be several bystanders, artists who
had come to observe, perhaps collectors or curious onlookers. He opened his studio to the public, advertising in the Paris
newspapers that his premises were available for inspection. For a small tip paid to the Swiss guard on hand, visitors could
view full-figured nudes and portrait busts. Male and female visitors, French and foreign alike, visited his studio, as they
did that of painter Jacques-Louis David, since both had become essential stops on the itineraries of Grand Tourists in town
to see the cultural high points of Paris. Houdon’s work space was a gallery, atelier, and small manufactory, too, since Houdon
pioneered the production of multiple copies of his works, delegating those labors to his assistants, who produced terra-cotta
and plaster casts. Each bore a red wax seal bearing Houdon’s name to demonstrate their authenticity.

Another and different sort of audience looked over Houdon’s shoulder as he worked at his rotating sculptor’s table. A distinguished
gallery of great men lined two sturdy shelves mounted on the walls of his high-ceilinged studio. These were likenesses of
many renowned personages of the age, part of Houdon’s personal collection of plaster busts (“I always keep an exemplar for
myself”).
¹⁶
Diderot, Rousseau, Molière, Voltaire, Lafayette, and dozens of others offered mute testament to his skill and importance.
For Houdon, his accomplishment could be plainly stated: “I believed I would be allowed to take pride in these works, whose
sole merit is likeness.”
¹⁷
But the critics extolled his larger virtues. As one had written of his work in the Salon exhibit of 1783, “M. Houdon lacks
only the means to make his portraits speak.”
¹⁸
As Stuart did, he attempted in his art to penetrate his sitter’s personality; though his mode was coolly classical, his subjects
were acutely alive.

When Rembrandt Peale arrived to present himself to Houdon, he soon spotted the bust of Washington resting on the studio shelves.
He also spied another, more peculiar object on a shelf in that same workroom in the Palais des Beaux-Arts. It was three-dimensional
and, though truncated at the hairline and ears, it was unmistakably a foot-high face complete with chin. Though of thick and
heavy plaster, it looked very much indeed as if it could be used as a mask; but it also looked remarkably like George Washington.
It was the life mask that Houdon had made at Mount Vernon in 1785.

Rembrandt had come to take Houdon’s likeness, the Frenchman having agreed to the flattering request. After the American had
found himself quarters in which to paint, Monsieur Houdon came to take a turn in the Painter’s Chair.

I V.
1808 . . . Peale’s Painting Room . . . Paris

W
HEN REMBRANDT PEALE studied his sitter, he found himself regarding another aging man. The wear and tear of arthritis had begun
to make sculpting painful. Despite surrounding himself with assistants who did much of the preliminary carving and who cast
the replicas, Houdon faced the prospect of creating fewer original works and devoting more time to teaching. His life did
have other pleasures, as he and his wife of twenty-three years, Marie-Ange-Cécile Langlois Houdon, had three grown daughters.

Houdon’s reputation was great, both in Eu rope and America. His American oeuvre included busts of Washington, Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, naval hero John Paul Jones, Joel Barlow, and Robert Fulton, the Pennsylvanian who had gone to Eu rope to study
painting and returned as a steamboat inventor and entrepreneur. Houdon’s gallery of great Americans did not, however, include
a second Washington commission; its absence was among the few disappointments of his great career. He had undertaken the arduous
six-month journey to Mount Vernon more than twenty years earlier with the hope of being given a second Washington commission,
namely the equestrian monument of Washington that the American Congress had resolved in 1783 to raise in honor of the General.
Houdon had regarded a bronze of the great soldier on his horse to be an even more prestigious task than
la statue Pédestre
he made for Virginia. In attempting to win that job Houdon himself had taken the cast of the George Washington bust to Congress
on his way back to France in 1785, and Jefferson had lobbied on his behalf with many in the government.

But the congressional commission had never come, and Houdon had made his peace with the disappointment, even cherishing his
recollections of his Mount Vernon fortnight. He confided in a son-in-law that “his memory [of Mount Vernon] always shone with
peculiar radiance, for, though not knowing English and having to speak through an interpreter, the pleasure of having been
close to Washington left memories which he was fond of referring to when many others of various kinds had long been forgotten.”
¹⁹

As Peale put paint to canvas, he recorded Houdon in a head-and-shoulder view. His format was predetermined in order that his
canvas would be of a piece with the others in his father’s gallery. The painter rendered his new friend’s face seemingly at
the very plane of the canvas, but his subject’s shoulders were turned away from Mr. Peale, his right arm raised. The hand
was out-of-frame, since the conceit Rembrandt devised was to portray his sitter as if Houdon were at work on a bust.

In a role reversal, Houdon had become the model watching the artist at work, and Peale recorded a man whose lively countenance
watched him intently. Houdon’s regard of the viewer was confident but curious; his frank gaze never seemed to falter. As the
likeness took on a life of its own from one sitting to the next, the face assumed a healthy, reddish hue, enhanced by the
red velvet backdrop. The image was reflective, with one artist portraying another; the men’s lives were reflections, too,
Peale himself having made his likeness of Washington in 1795, and Houdon his bust and statue a decade earlier.

Mr. Peale completed his Houdon portrait and seven others on that visit to Paris, but he became deeply homesick before completing
the full dozen his father had commissioned. Rembrandt’s wife and daughters had remained in America, and after only three months
in Paris, the young family man departed in such a hurry that the paint on the last of his Paris portraits was not yet dry.
The canvas, depicting the chemist Antoine-François de Fourcroy, was in ruinous condition when Rembrandt opened the crate after
returning to America. The others he had made while abroad, including the painting of Houdon, would prove more enduring.

Another by-product of his French sojourn was the genesis of a new idea. Peale had visited the atelier of Jacques-Louis David
and seen his grand paintings of Napoleon, who had proclaimed himself emperor. David had become official painter to the court,
and his canvases of the ruler, while true to details of the man’s appearance and attire, depicted an icon that seemed to transcend
the merely human. David’s role was to glorify Emperor Napoleon, to make him a demigod.

Rembrandt looked at the work of David, and he considered the sculptural likeness of Houdon’s
Washington.
The thought began to take shape in his mind that he, Rembrandt Peale, might one day fashion a definitive, even eternal, likeness
of the General. The idea was not born in an instant, but over time it would become a preoccupation. If he could produce what
he would come to call the
Standard National Likeness,
mightn’t he establish himself as America’s reigning
Old Master
?

V.
1823–1824 . . . Painting the Patriae Pater . . . Philadelphia

T
HE TIME TO do it had finally come. Rembrandt Peale went into his Painting Room and shut the door behind him.

His motivation was clear. “No human being could have felt more devoted admiration of the character of Washington,” he explained,
“and no Artist ever found his pride more strongly excited by the magnitude and interest of his purpose than mine to rescue
from oblivion the aspect of a Man who would forever be venerated as the ‘Father of his Country.’ ”
²⁰

Inside the Painting Room, no one faced the artist from the Painter’s Chair. His subject had been interred for almost a quarter
century. Still, Rembrandt Peale believed he could create a likeness that would inspire his countrymen. Stuart’s portraits
of Washington had become the standard, but Rembrandt intended to do better. He had studied Trumbull’s Washington paintings
and found those insufficient. His sources would be Houdon’s 1785 bust—everyone agreed
that
was the best likeness—along with his own life study and his father’s portrait, both dating from 1795.

The new canvas would be larger than life, of a “size and style . . . expressly calculated for public Halls, to produce a grand
and pleasing effect.”
²¹
Pure and simple, this was to be public art, and the artist’s goal was to create a patriotic likeness to elevate and excite
the feelings of his countrymen. That said, Rembrandt Peale knew that if he succeeded with this painting of the patriot father,
it would enhance his own reputation, and create an appetite for replicas.