The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  Pigments became paints when the fine powders were mixed with oil or another material to help bind the pigment to the canvas. When small quantities were required, the mixing was done on the palette itself with a thin-bladed palette knife. Larger quantities could be mixed on a stone or muller. The blended oil and pigment looked uniform, though the tiny grains of pigment were merely suspended in the liquid, like currants in cake batter. After the paint was applied, it would thicken from a paste to a solid in a chemical reaction as the oil set (oxidized). A tough film remained, dry to the touch in a matter of hours. Most paints on the palette needed to be mixed each day, as one day’s batch would dry by the next day.

  The painting process itself required several sittings and a gradual buildup of layers of paint in a prescribed order. Sometimes the painter began with a chalk or graphite sketch, but when the time came to begin a painting, Smibert worked in so-called dead colors. For this under-painting, he would rough out his first vision of the painting, indicating in dull tones the largest areas of form and color, perhaps the gentleman’s coat or background drapery. He applied the paint with a “fitch,” a rough, square-ended brush often made from the hair of the skunklike polecat (or “fitchew”). Once he established the relationship of the biggest elements, Smibert could refine his pictorial idea, since the neutral tones of the paint enabled him to correct what he did not like, to exchange darks for lights, to rethink what he had done. By the time he completed the underpainting, the monochromatic canvas before him was usually a fair representation of the composition as it would appear in the finished painting.

  When he moved on to more detailed work, he employed a good-quality pointed brush called a “street pencil.” Using paints thinned with turpentine, he could render the hair and other details. He began working with brighter colors and used glazes (tinted and transparent oily mixes) and thin washes for backgrounds and detail. The tendency was to paint the sitter’s clothing and surroundings more freely. A thicker, paste-like paint was used for flesh tones. Layers of paint, varying from thin and translucent to thick and opaque, were built up for visual effect, adding shading or enhancing and deepening the colors beneath. After the painting was finished, a varnish (a gum resin dissolved in spirits) was usually applied both to protect the painted surface and to give the finished product a sheen that intensified the contrasting colors. A minimum of several days was required to allow the layers of paint, glaze, and varnish to dry.

  As he neared the end of his life, the infirm and nearly blind Smibert continued to sell casks of paint, pails, jars, and a wide variety of other supplies. Among the wares he imported from London, in addition to canvases and pigments, were papers, silver and gold leaf, and the makings for “Fanns” (the painting of fans was a popular ladies’ pastime). For all the goods that he sold, however, it was his knowledge of painting, as well as the paintings he had made, that proved of inestimable value. Even in death, Smibert would continue to influence the artistic climate of his adopted city.

  III.

  1751–1795 . . . Smibert’s Painting Room . . . Queen Street

  THE LEGACY SMIBERT left to his wife included “The easterly half of the House and Land in Queen Street,” which was valued at 446 pounds, 13 shillings, 4 pence. As prepared in February 1752, his probate inventory also listed a fourteen-acre farm on the city’s outskirts (£186.13.4), silver plate (£36.6.4), linens (£34.4.5), feather Beds and Bedsteads (£29.6.8), as well as Chests, five Looking Glasses, a slave named Phillis, and other goods. He had become a man of considerable means.

  After the house, the second most valuable item was the inventory of Smibert’s shop, principally the “Colours & Oyls,” with an estimated value of 307 pounds, 16 shillings, and 5 pence. Further down the list appeared entries for objects that, despite lesser monetary worth, would prove of surprising importance. They included the following:

  Some of these were the same works of art with which Smibert had begun Boston’s aesthetic education back in 1730. He had also held a sale in 1734 at which, on Monday, March 27, he offered for purchase “A Collection of Valuable PRINTS [and] . . . a Collection of Pictures in Oil Colours.”11 Some prints and frames had been sold but the majority of his collection remained in his studio, and it had become a regular stop for visitors to Boston. One out-of-towner who came to look at the “fine pictures” was Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a fellow Scotsman then residing in Annapolis. He was so taken by what he saw during his summer call in 1744 that he visited Mr. Smibert’s again a few days later. After the second survey he recorded in his Itinerarium, “I . . . entertained myself an hour or two with his paintings.”12

  After Smibert’s will had been filed and probated, surprisingly little changed. His widow, Mary, and a nephew, John Moffatt, continued to operate the color shop. One flight up, the dead painter’s art collection remained unsold and available for study. The Painting Room, its walls lined with green baize, provided a suitable backdrop for the works themselves, which amounted to something of a summary of the painter’s life. It was a mingling of Smibert portraits and landscapes, together with the Old Master copies dating from his Italian sojourn. It would prove to be another of Mr. Smibert’s firsts, as this well-lit room was soon to become a place of pilgrimage. Smibert’s Painting Room was, in effect, America’s only art museum in the days before the Revolution.

  PETER PELHAM, ANOTHER aging English émigré, also died in Boston in 1751. Though he and Mary Copley had been married barely three years, in that time Pelham had introduced her son, John, to a world the boy had not previously known.

  John Singleton Copley had spent his first ten years living over the family tobacco shop on Long Wharf before moving to his stepfather’s home on Lindal’s Row near the upper end of King Street. Though less than a half a mile away, Boston’s commercial center seemed very different from the maritime bustle of the old neighborhood, with its transient population of sailors and the ceaseless coming-and-going of ships. On King Street, the nearby Town House was a commanding presence, the center of government in Boston. John Smibert resided in this new neighborhood, too, which was dominated by merchants, shop keepers, and craftsmen.

  Mary Copley advertised her wares in the Boston Gazette, proclaiming hers “the best Virginia Tobacco, Cut, Pigtail and spun, of all Sorts, by Wholesale or Retail, at the cheapest Rates.”13To supplement his income, her new husband drew upon his English education, offering his colonial neighbors the chance to improve themselves. Peter Pelham taught reading, writing, and arithmetic and gave instruction in etiquette, needlework, and dancing. The adolescent John Singleton Copley absorbed everything he could from Pelham, a former Londoner who had arrived in Boston with the urban savvy of a man who had spent his first thirty-two years negotiating the teeming streets of Eu rope’s largest city.

  Among the lessons the boy learned from his stepfather was the wizardry of the mezzotint. As the first to engrave a mezzotint in the colonies, Pelham had great skill with the essential tool of his trade, the burin, which was used to scrape a pitted copper plate to allow areas, rather than just lines, to be inked. The technique produced prints with subtle tones that conveyed the illusion of human skin and delicate fabrics, making the medium well suited to portraiture. Although he was a competent painter in oils upon his arrival in America in 1727, Pelham set aside his brushes after John Smibert brought his superior skills to Boston. The two men had become collaborators, and Pelham’s prints of ministers and other worthies of the day, many of them copied from Smibert’s original oils, helped establish a local market for prints.

  Not long after Pelham’s death, his young stepson—Copley was going on sixteen—tried his hand at the mezzotint. After the death of a prominent Boston minister in 1753, Copley chose a plate his stepfather had made ten years before after a Smibert portrait. Using the burnisher, he obliterated part of the Smibert–Pelham likeness of another minister, leaving the clerical collar, coat, and cape in place. He substituted a new head, reworking the copper so that it bore the bewigged visage of the just-decease
d reverend. Pleased with his work, the young artisan also changed the inscription, replacing the names of the original painter and engraver with “J.S. Copley pinxt et fecit.”

  Copley soon moved to another medium—applying oil to canvas. His apprentice works included a portrait of his stepbrother Charles Pel-ham, but three other early paintings were what he called “Classick subjects.” Copley found engravings to copy, images of the mythological Venus, Neptune, and Galatea, each one posed with an assemblage of other figures. He chose to imitate not only the subject matter but the composition as well.

  Once he had completed the underpainting, the monochrome prints he mimed offered no further clues as to how to proceed. In the absence of the two Englishmen who might have tutored him, it was Mr. Smibert’s painted legacy that guided him. He had been acquainted, of course, with Smibert, although the old man Copley knew was more shopkeep er than artist, since by then Smibert’s vision had become too blurred and dim to pursue portraiture. But the precocious boy had visited Smibert’s color shop and gone upstairs to view the art in his Painting Room, and entered in his sketchbook a drawing of Smibert’s plaster cast of the Medici Venus. Now, in need of help with his “Classicks,” he found inspiration in the palette Smibert had employed in copying Old Masters. On his Italian tour thirty years before, Smibert had mimicked the hues of the original canvases, among them works by Poussin and Titian. When Copley painted his Classick subjects, he made reference to Smibert’s copies and imitated the brilliant colors.

  Copley knew Smibert’s portraits, too, among them his works in miniature. By 1755 Copley was also working “in Littell,” painting as Smibert had done with oils on copper (which were then fired to affix the paints permanently to the metal surface). Copley’s instincts led him away from Smibert’s style as he developed his own manner of portraiture. Rather than giving his subjects the solemnity of Smibert’s, he incorporated the worldly accouterments of his wealthy clients, such as imported silks, pearls, gold braid, lace, highly polished furniture, and elegant carpets. Copley still found the older man’s footsteps unavoidable; as he emerged as Boston’s new preeminent painter, Copley produced portraits for families that had patronized Smibert, recording some of the same men and women later in life. When he painted Gloucesterman Epes Sargent in 1760, his painting became a pendant to a portrait Smibert had painted of Sargent’s wife, Katherine Winthrop Browne Sargent, twenty-six years before.

  The differences between Smibert’s and Copley’s work reflected their very different personalities. Smibert arrived in America with a sense of religious mission, a commitment to moral rectitude. In his obituary he was a man remembered for his “constant Resignation to the Will of God.”14Copley, as a child of the streets who had witnessed his mother’s struggles, worked toward more worldly goals. In his richly detailed paintings, he satisfied his sitters’ wish to display their wealth, and, in doing so, he elevated himself. He affected a powdered wig, dressed in the latest English fashion, and married the daughter of a Loyalist family. He was savvy as well as ambitious, and he worked hard to remain apolitical in a time when dissatisfactions with the English Crown began to be heard in some quarters. He brought to his canvases the ability to see into the characters and even into the dreams of his clients. As his confidence grew, he became irritated when the merchants and power brokers in Boston treated him as if he were a mere craftsman; he came to regard himself as an “Eleustrious Artist.”15

  From Smibert and Pelham he had heard stories of the artistic life in London, and he dreamed of life abroad. He entrusted paintings to a ship’s captain of his acquaintance, who delivered them to London for submission to the Royal Academy. In examining one of Copley’s paintings, academy president Sir Joshua Reynolds immediately recognized the influence of Anthony van Dyck. Even at third hand—from van Dyck’s portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, transmitted through Smibert’s copy to young Copley—the color and technique remained unmistakable to an expert eye. Later, when Copley himself crossed the Atlantic, he wrote from Italy in 1774 to his half brother, Henry Pelham. In examining a canvas by Raphael, Copley recognized the influence of Smibert’s collection—in the presence of the original, his reference point still remained “the Coppy at Smibert’s.”16He was quick to point out that Smibert’s was “very different from . . . the Original,” but Copley’s memory was inhabited by individual Smibert paintings, including the van Dyck, the Raphael, and a Titian. He even remembered where some of them were hung back in Boston, belying the assertion he would later make to his namesake son, when he claimed he “was entirely self-taught, and never saw a decent picture, with the exception of his own, until [he] was thirty years of age.”17The tobacconist’s son had gained more than confidence; he looked at the world with a distinct vanity.

  John Singleton Copley had sought to make himself the best painter in America, and by the time of his departure for Eu rope in 1774, his opulent portraits—they were unreserved and prideful displays of the wealth and worldly accomplishment of Loyalists and Patriots alike—he had earned for himself the reputation he desired. But he owed a debt to Peter Pelham and to Smibert’s cache of canvases.

  OVER THE YEARS, other painters found their way to Queen Street. In 1765, Charles Willson Peale was on the run. A slim man of short stature, the twenty-four-year-old Mary lander could count among his burdens a wife and infant child back home in Annapolis. His outspokenness as a member of the newly formed Sons of Liberty—rumors of a Parliamentary plan to impose a tax on the American colonists led to its founding—had earned Peale powerful enemies. They had called in debts, forcing him to flee the threat of debtors’ prison. Yet on his arrival in Boston Peale had an air of optimism about him.

  In part, it was his nature, but circumstances contributed, too. Barely two years earlier, Peale had found his calling. Painting had not been his first choice; he had apprenticed as a saddler and demonstrated surprising skills in metalworking, silversmithing, and watch and clock repairs. Still, he decided that painting was his destiny. Now, as his debts threatened to swamp him, he looked for commissions as a means of rebuilding his fortunes.

  He also needed supplies since, during his travels north, his “Paint Box [had] proven very Troublesome.” The box had chafed the hips of his horse, and slowed his progress northward. “Rather than be Detain’d I put all my Paints in the Bags and through away the Box and Pall[ette].”18

  The morning after his arrival in Boston, Peale reported, “in the commencement of my painting and hunting for colours [I] found a colour-shop which had some figures with ornamental signs about it . . . Becoming a little acquainted with the owner of the shop”—that would be John Moffatt, Smibert’s heir and nephew—“he told me that a relation of his had been a painter, and he said he would give me a feast. Leading me upstairs he introduced me into a painter’s room.”19

  The shade of Mr. Smibert once again rose to guide a young painter. The naïve colonial came face-to-face with Smibert’s versions of van Dyck, Raphael, and Poussin, as well as some of Smibert’s own canvases. Peale soon departed from Boston, but not before purchasing, despite his straitened circumstances, several prints. Smibert’s works were, as Peale remembered, “in a stile vastly superior to any [I] had seen before.”20

  Mr. Peale, a man of boundless curiosity and a generous spirit, would have a long and productive painting career in the decades to come.

  WHEN JOHN TRUMBULL arrived, in 1778, he was in an ill humor. He felt his country and family had failed him.

  The Revolutionary War had begun, and as a spirited patriot Trum-bull had joined the cause led by General Washington. Trumbull’s honorable service in the Continental Army was to have been rewarded by elevation to the rank of colonel. He observed lesser officers raised to this rank while he waited with growing impatience. When his commission finally did appear, it was misdated, further insulting Trumbull. His pride was offended by the army’s “neglect,” and he promptly resigned. “Thus ended my military service,” he wrote, “to my deep regret, for my mind was . . . fu
ll of lofty military aspirations.” His next plan met with a different problem: His family—including his father, Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut—dismissed his notion of becoming a painter as foolhardy. Still, Trumbull was undeterred. “I . . . resumed my pencil,” said Trumbull, “and . . . went to Boston, where I thought I could pursue my studies to more advantage.”21

  This worked out better than even he might have hoped because he, too, made his way to Queen Street. Not content merely to visit Smibert’s Painting Room, reported Trumbull, “I hired the room which had been built by Mr. Smibert, the patriarch of painting in America.” With John Moffatt recently dead, Trumbull’s timing proved impeccable. In the rented space he found the collections largely intact.

  Trumbull could hardly have been more different from the unassuming Mr. Peale. His carriage and posture had an aristocratic hauteur. He was darkly handsome and confident of his educated pedigree, but also conscious that he was in the novitiate stage of becoming a painter. As he summarized the experience, “Mr. Copley was gone to Eu rope, and there remained in Boston no artist from whom I could gain oral instructions, but these copies supplied the place and I made some progress.”22 As the Revolutionary War continued, its theater the mid-Atlantic states, he made landscapes based on engravings, copied some of Smibert’s females, and did studies of his brother.