The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  Two paintings Martha had commissioned were not there: Gilbert Stuart had begun portraits of both General and Mrs. Washington but had yet to complete them. Though the paired portraits would never be delivered, the images were far from forgotten.

  As the family gathered at Mount Vernon the next day, Mrs. Washington employed Tobias Lear’s pen to notify other family members, friends, and neighbors. Topping the list were President Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, the man who would eventually be Washington’s principal heir and owner of Mount Vernon. Notes went by express to some—one in par tic-u lar was dispatched to Wash Custis, carried by Tobias Lear’s personal servant, Charles, on Lear’s own horse. Another of those on Martha’s list was Charles Willson Peale, the artist who had painted her husband, served in the army with him, and had for years been a neighbor (in Philadelphia) and a frequent correspondent who shared Washington’s curiosity about the world. Peale’s likenesses of her children, both long dead, helped keep them alive for Martha.

  On Wednesday, a great deal of ceremony accompanied the installation of Washington’s remains in the family vault. Uniformed troops, both on horseback and on foot, led the parade, followed by the clergy. Next came the General’s horse, riderless but saddled, followed by the lead-lined mahogany coffin swathed in black cloth. Much of the family followed, though Martha remained within the walls of the Mansion. In fact, she would never leave the estate again. Abandoning the bedchamber she had shared with her husband, she slept thereafter in a garret on the third floor, where, as was the way, older and less fashionable furniture had been retired, no doubt reminding her of younger, happier days in the era when she and George were newly married. She would die there on May 22, 1802.

  The nation was stunned by Washington’s death; he had seemed indestructible as well as essential. In the days after his unexpected end, Congress approved a resolution, composed by his old comrade Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, “To the memory of the Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow-citizens.” Within a matter of weeks, the print market was awash in engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and etchings of Washington based upon images by painters Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Edward Savage, and others. The widespread sale of such prints helped transform the memory of a man into a symbol of his nation.

  When he and, later, Martha died, Mount Vernon was a suitable receptacle for what was a rare and important array of original art and prints, most of them devoted to American subjects, many of Washington himself. Certainly, the portraits were historically important as a record of the general, but in a larger sense they also spoke for Washington’s patient encouragement of artists, especially those native to his country. He himself was not a particularly artistic man; architecture undoubtedly was his favorite of the arts, and the only one that he himself practiced. Yet as a patron he had fostered nothing less than the birth of American painting. In his house he left a museum’s worth of visual testimony to his own history and what was new in American art.

  We can see Washington in these pictures, but in death, as in life, he remained a man who was easier to see and admire than to understand.

  CHAPTER 1

  John Smibert’s Shade

  We were a long time blundering about the ocean.

  —Dean George Berkeley, 1729

  I.

  1729 . . . Boston Harbor . . . The Province of Massachusetts Bay

  WHEN HE STEPPED ashore at Long Wharf, the Scots-born John Smibert expected his stay would be brief. America was new to him after a harsh Atlantic crossing and brief visits in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. He imagined Boston would be just another stopover on his way to his final destination, the island of Bermuda. There he and his benefactor, George Berkeley, planned to launch what both men hoped would be a beneficent adventure.

  The Anglo-Irish philosopher and churchman—Berkeley was the dean of Derry—had hatched a plan for a college in America. Back in London, he had offered Smibert the professorship of drawing, painting, and architecture at the proposed school, where they planned “to Instruct the Europe an and Indian children in the Christian faith, & necessary educations.”1For Smibert, a man of fragile health and deep religious faith, the life of a don on the idyllic isle of Bermuda promised to be a happy escape from the intense competition back in Britain’s capital. But the great experiment could not begin until the arrival of the promised £20,000 from the Crown’s treasury. While awaiting the money, Smibert had left Berkeley’s household in Newport and made the short sail north to Boston. Here he planned to paint portraits, just as he had done before traveling across the Atlantic.

  The practical men of Boston tended to regard the painting of pictures as an indulgence, and some puritanical citizens even considered the making of such images utterly godless. Even so, the city held a few likenesses of ministers, royal governors, and well-to-do merchants, though the tradesmen who made them usually worked as painter-stainers, men more likely to paint houses or signs than canvases. The making of such images, often called “effigies,” had been no more than an occasional pastime to their makers, and the paintings were crude. Smibert set out to change all that.

  In the New World, his abilities were remarkable. He had been an up-and-coming painter of some repute back in London, and his Boston neighbors were quick to recognize in the new arrival skills superior to any they had ever seen. In a matter of weeks, dozens of the city’s richest inhabitants would commission Smibert to paint them.

  The forty-one-year-old Scotsman welcomed his newfound success— it followed almost thirty years of hard work. Born in the Grassmarket neighborhood of Edinburgh in 1688, he learned his colors from his artisan father, a wool dyer. At fourteen he apprenticed as a house painter and plasterer. Wallpaper was rare and expensive, so he painted decorations on walls and applied plaster elements to ceilings. After completing a seven-year apprenticeship, he made his way to London and found work as a carriage-painter, producing pastoral scenes and heraldic coats of arms on gentlemen’s coaches and sedan chairs. His skill with oils and brushes impressed art dealers in the city, and Smibert moved on to the more lucrative work of copying other people’s pictures. In 1713 he enrolled in a new school for painting and drawing. His evening studies in the clublike environs of the old mansion known as the Great Queen Street Academy readied him to make another artistic leap, and in 1716 he returned to Scotland and launched himself as a portraitist.

  The canny Smibert next embarked on an extended journey to Italy, spending months in Florence, Rome, and Naples. He purchased paintings, prints, and casts on behalf of sponsors back home, but the ultimate purpose of his three years in the cultural and artistic heart of Eu rope was to polish his skills. He gained access to private art collections, enabling him to paint copies of Old Master works and make drawings of statuary. This was the way every artist learned—by studying the great painters of the past; the premium was not on originality but on copying. Learning any craft in his time involved an apprenticeship, whether contractual or informal; for all that Smibert already knew, he still had much to learn of drawing, perspective, anatomy, the use of color, and a dozen other skills that the great artists of the past did so much better than he ever had. So Smibert painted Old Master copies, and portraits, too, often on commission to fellow Scotsmen on their Grand Tours. One of his subjects had been the Irish prelate George Berkeley.

  On returning to London, Smibert soon earned a reputation as “a good ingenious man [who] paints and draws handsomely.”2A few years later his friend Dean Berkeley sought him out at his quarters in Covent Garden, the epicenter of London’s artistic community. Berkeley invited Smibert to join his Bermuda-bound band of scholars. Smibert sailed for America in 1728 together with Berkeley and his entourage.

  Smibert’s weeks in Boston became months. Two years passed before Berkeley finally despaired of ever seeing the funds he needed to launch his college and decided to return to England. By then, Dr. Nathaniel Williams,
a physician and master of Boston’s finest school (later, Boston Latin), had commissioned Smibert to paint five Williams portraits—and Smibert had married one of his sitters, Dr. Williams’s daughter Mary. When the marriage took place, on July 30, 1730, she was twenty years his junior and brought a modest dowry of £400 to their life together.

  In the autumn of 1731, John Smibert waved farewell to his benefactor, Dean Berkeley, from Boston’s Long Wharf. He was the father of one daughter, Allison, and a second child was on the way. As the dream of the professorship at the island college vanished once and for all, John Smibert, for better or for worse, became a Bostonian.

  THE INITIAL FLURRY of portrait business in Boston was gratifying, but no preordained path for artistic success existed in the New World. Smibert realized he needed to proselytize. More of his puritanical neighbors had to be persuaded that commissioning images of themselves was not prideful and that owning a painting was no mere luxury.

  Known as “a silent and modest man,” Smibert chose to let art speak for him.3In early 1730 he opened his lodgings on Green Lane to the public. Local citizens who walked through his door that March encountered men they knew, rendered by Smibert onto canvas in a starkly realistic fashion. He brought back from the dead Samuel Sewall, the recently deceased chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court and father of the Reverend Joseph Sewall, who had presided at Smibert’s wedding. Nearby hung a well-known military man, Jean Paul Mascarene. Smibert’s three-quarter portrait of the Huguenot showed him dressed in his British ceremonial armor, posed before a detailed landscape of the harbor earthworks he helped design. Another Boston worthy, the bewigged and toothless Judge Nathaniel Byfield, looked at viewers from his canvas, his countenance possessed of all the certainty and sternness his neighbors knew to be in his nature.

  More than familiar faces were on display. The professor-to-be had brought with him to North America a study collection he had planned to use at the proposed Bermuda college. He put on view copies of Old Master paintings made during his years in Italy. Among them were works after Raphael (Madonna della Sedia), Titian (Venus Blinding Cupid), and Rubens, and a copy of van Dyck’s portrait Cardinal Bentivoglio. The discipline of copying was a routine part of any artist’s training, and for Smibert the copies also represented models he kept for his own reference or as a source of income. While in Italy he had sold some as souvenirs to other British and Scots visitors, who regarded a good copy of a great painting as more valuable than the original of a lesser work.

  Smibert owned lay figures too, doll-sized, jointed models of the human form that were especially useful in studying the draping of clothing, essential to portraying men and women in their flowing clothes of rich fabrics. His collections of books, engravings, and drawings were also at hand. Visitors to Smibert’s improvised museum encountered an art form then unknown in the colonies. His plaster casts, purchased in Italy and London over the span of a decade, were the first western sculptures to reach America. At Mr. Smibert’s the gentry of Boston admired a bust of the artist’s friend and fellow Scotsman, poet Allan Ramsay; a head of the greatest of storytellers, Homer; and a plaster of a standing sculpture from antiquity, the Venus de’ Medici. The sculptures seemed so real that one Boston versifier described the Venus and Homer as “the breathing Statue and the living Bust.”4

  The eighty-line ode, titled “To Mr. Smibert. on the sight of his Pictures,” soon appeared in the London Daily Courant and a Philadelphia newspaper. Composed by the impressionable Mather Byles, a twenty-two-year-old Bostonian, the poem announced the artist’s presence in his adopted town. Doggerel though it was, the poem enthusiastically endorsed Smibert as he sought to establish, single-handedly, an important outpost of the London art world in the colonies. “Still, wondrous Artist,” exhorted the poet, “let thy Pencil flow / Still warm with Life, thy blended Colours glow.”5

  The open house had been an opportunity to attract more business, but the event was more momentous than it seemed. In another of the extraordinary firsts that seemed to accumulate around Smibert, his show that late winter day constituted nothing less than the first art exhibition in America.

  II.

  April 4, 1751 . . . Queen Street . . . Boston

  TO A PASSERBY on the pebbled street out front, the store looked the same. The shelves and counters inside remained stocked with the colors, brushes, papers, palette knives, oils, and other art goods that John Smibert had sold for some twenty years. Yet one important change occurred this particular week. According to the Boston News-Letter, “On Tuesday last died here, much lamented, Mr. John Smibert, well known for many fine Pictures he has done here.”6At age sixty-three, the man who fostered a taste for paintings in Boston was gone.

  Failing eyesight had forced Smibert to retire from painting five years earlier, but not before he had made several hundred American portraits (in his first five years in Massachusetts, his one-hundred-plus portraits exceeded the total painted there in the previous three decades). Most of Smibert’s clients wanted bust-length or slightly larger canvases called Kit-kats,* but a few ordered three-quarter or even full-sized portraits (the cost increased with the size). The price of a three-quarter portrait was equivalent to that of a fine bookcase or a silver teapot.

  Smibert’s painting provided him with an income roughly equal to that of a middling merchant, but his father-in-law, Dr. Williams, made possible a move to a fine house on Queen Street. Mary Williams Smibert’s grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied the spacious building near Boston’s commercial center, barely a thousand feet from the Long Wharf. In 1733, as Smibert reported to an old Scots patron, “[I] have now got into a house of my father in laws, who has built me a large & handsome Painting Room & showroom in al respects to my satisfaction.”7

  In Smibert’s two decades in the colonies, he had watched Boston become a city of tradesmen. The narrow and winding streets in the neighborhood surrounding Queen Street were home to dozens of skilled joiners, printers, upholsterers, tailors, and other artisans. Members of the city’s gentry and even people of the middling sort had developed a taste for the china, fabrics, dry goods, tobacco, and house hold items sold in nearby shops. Smibert himself prospered: At the time of his death, he was a man of property. Among his other worldly goods were a sword with a silver hilt, several looking glasses, and forty-six chairs. He was indebted to his wife and her father for the access they had provided to prosperous Bostonians who wanted their pictures taken, but his retail business had succeeded, too. On the ground floor at the Queen Street house, his “colour shop” had been the first in Boston, offering a full range of painter’s goods, from the most basic to the exotic, along with engravings, mezzotints, and other prints. An advertisement for the venture had claimed, “JOHN SMIBERT, PAINTER, sells all sorts of colours, dry or ground . . . with Oils, and Brushes, Fans of Several Sorts, the Best Mezotints, Italian, French, Dutch, and English Prints, in Frames and Glasses, or without, by Wholesale or Retail at Reasonable Rates.”8

  Even after its proprietor’s death, his shop and studio remained. It would soon prove to be much more than a mere reminder of the man who had worked there.

  IN SMIBERT’S TIME, the preparation of materia pictoria could be as time-consuming as the act of painting itself.

  The canvases were made of woven flax. John Smibert, Merchant, ordered these linen “cloaths” (he also rendered the word “Cloats”) from his lifelong friend, Arthur Pond, a sometime painter, etcher, and art dealer. Pond shipped them to America from London, where back-street artisans produced the canvases in quantity. Smibert ordered the larger ones to be “rolled up & put in a case” (so as to take up less shipping space), whereas the smaller ones arrived already “strained” (stretched).

  Like his London peers, John Smibert, Painter, worked on canvases that had already been sized. In preparing a canvas, a London colourman would have warmed (but not boiled) granules of hide glue (typically rabbit-or pigskin) to a thick liquid the consistency of honey. The sizing was then spread on a
canvas in broad strokes using a palette knife. Once the glue dried, the surface was sanded smooth with a pumice stone.

  The grounding came next. Its composition varied, with common ingredients including plaster, the sediment from a jar of brush-cleaning oil, or carbon black, as well as the essential linseed oil and white-lead pigment. Smibert preferred a grayish-green or reddish ground, but whatever the ingredients, the application of the grounding produced a smooth surface, less absorbent than raw linen but still able to retain some of the fabric’s tooth and flexibility.

  As a purveyor of colors, Smibert sold few ready-to-use paints; his trade was in the ingredients used to make them. These included such vehicles as oils, dryers, turpentine, shellacs and other varnishes, and the all-important pigments.

  Most of the pigments Smibert sold were made from earths and minerals that had been processed (usually by firing or cooking), dried on long boards or stones, and then levigated, meaning they were finely ground into powders by a hand mill or with a mortar and pestle. For larger quantities, the tool of choice was a muller, a stone with one flat side that was held in the palm and worked in circles on a stone slab. Depending upon their source, iron-rich soils called ochers produced pigments ranging in color from pale yellow to orange and red. Thus terra di Sienna, when burned (calcined), produced an orange-red hue called burnt Sienna; a scarlet red was termed Venetian red; the brown-red was Spanish brown. The mineral copper was used to produce greens (“Distilled Verdigres,” specified one bill of lading from London). Mercury ore (quicksilver) made cinnabar, a bright red vermilion pigment. Other colors that Smibert ordered from Pond in London included “French Sap Green” (made from buckthorn berries), “English Saffron” (a tincture of the spice saffron), and “Prussn. Blew . . . of a fine deep sort.”9Prussian blue was the first chemical color of the age, made not from an earth or other natural pigment but from a salt compound of iron and potassium. The carmine that Smibert ordered (“very fine,” he specified), was highly prized, having actually traveled across the ocean twice, coming as it did from Mexico or South America via London (it was derived from the eggs and body of the cochineal insect). The primary white pigment was flake white, made of white lead, favored because it was durable and tough yet flexible.