by Hugh Howard
Trumbull, like Copley and Peale before him, would soon depart for Europe. But even after Trumbull had come and gone, taking with him some of the paintings, Smibert’s ghost continued to inhabit his old Painting Room. The room remained a magnet for young painters. Mather Brown rented “the upper chamber” in the winter of 1780.23 Samuel King and John Mason Furnass followed; the latter advertised in the Chronicle of April 28, 1785, inviting his “Friends and the Public” to call at his “Painting-Chamber” where he was “execut[ing] Portrait-Painting in Oil and Water Colours . . . As a native of Boston he hopes for as much encouragement as foreigners and invites them to call at his Painting-Chamber.”24After having copied it himself, Trumbull donated Smibert’s version of van Dyck’s Cardinal Bentivoglio to Harvard in 1791, where another young artist, Washington Allston, would soon copy it at the college library.
Perhaps the best-remembered painter of the revolutionary era made a cameo appearance on this little stage, as well. Some years earlier, another of Smibert’s nephews, Thomas Moffatt, had ordered from London an “Engine for cutting tobacco . . . and two sieves for Scotch snuff.” The equipment was to be installed at a snuff mill, one designed and operated in Newport, Rhode Island. The Scotsman whom Moffatt brought to America for that purpose, Gilbert Stuart, lived over the mill, and there his namesake son was born. Through the family’s contacts, the younger Stuart later came to know some, perhaps many, of Smibert’s canvases.25
THE LEGACY OF John Smibert, painter, shopkeeper, and collector, spanned a time of immense change in America. In the decade after his death in 1751, the memory of Smibert inspired John Singleton Copley. In the 1760s, it was Charles Willson Peale who gained from exposure to Smibert’s upstairs gallery. Trumbull arrived to work there in 1778, and still other artists followed in the 1780s, including a Massachusetts goldsmith-turned-painter and engraver named Edward Savage. In the same time span, America went from a contented colony to a rebel state and finally emerged as an independent nation.
Smibert was a British painter, but those who followed him were American; he was the medium through which they gained exposure to landscapes, portraits, Old Master copies, plaster casts, and a fine arts library. Despite its location in an increasingly unfashionable part of town, Smibert’s Boston studio became an artistic crossroads—no one went to the trouble of clearing it out for more than half a century—enabling many artists to experience his lingering influence. In secondhand forms, he brought high-art Europe an artistic culture to the colonies. If John Smibert was not the first great American painter—he was not American nor, in the opinions of most art historians, were his artistic gifts remarkable—he nevertheless left his imprint.*
Smibert’s Painting Room provided younger artists with the venue; the art he left on display offered essential, if indirect, instruction to a series of aspiring painters. The dead Scotsman even found a way to remain on the premises, his watchful gaze ready to catch the eye of anyone, student, patron, or tourist, who troubled to look up at the only known image of the man himself.
He looked down from a painting that was—is this a surprise?— another American first. At the time, no one else in America had attempted a “conversation piece,” as large group portraits were known. Smibert’s The Bermuda Group pictured Dean Berkeley and those who accompanied him on the ill-fated venture to establish the school in Bermuda. The size of the painting was grand but inconvenient (it stands nearly six feet tall, and eight feet wide). Undoubtedly its large scale was a major reason the canvas failed to attract a buyer over more than three-quarters of a century in Boston. As a result it stayed where it was, impressing more than a few viewers. Despite being locked away in the upstairs room, it became by far the most influential of all Smibert’s works.26
As first conceived, the painting featured six figures, but Smibert would add two others to The Bermuda Group. One was Henry, an infant child and New World arrival, born to the dean and his wife, Anne, in 1729. The eighth and final figure to join the tableau on the big canvas was a thin and sober-looking man. He seems to have just stepped into the frame, unbeknownst to the others (they were there first, settled in their places for who knows how long). The stranger stands apart from the main group, deeper into the picture space. No one acknowledges his presence.
Unlike the main figure of Dean Berkeley, the new arrival wears no wig. A man in early middle age, he has long dark brown hair that reaches his shoulders, though his forehead has grown tall where his hairline has receded. His dark-eyed gaze is intense as he looks straight out of the painting. He seems to be studying us, the onlookers. Or perhaps he is impatient for another painter to arrive, another to carry on what he started. Certainly his is an appraising look. Maybe he is wondering how best to render the viewer with his pencil and paint.
More likely, it is a mirror into which he is looking, because this is John Smibert, a man who usually kept to his easel or remained behind his counter. Had he stayed back home in either Edinburgh or London, however, American painting would have evolved very differently indeed. It was Smibert’s spirit, refusing to go quietly into oblivion, that remained a presence whose influence was felt two full generations after his death.
* The name comes from the thirty-six-by-twenty-eight-inch portraits of members of the fashionable eighteenth-century London Kit-Cat Club, showing the head and shoulders to waist level.
* Even Boston’s architecture reflects Smibert’s time in town. Another service he provided to his adoptive city was the design of Faneuil Hall, the first purpose-built market in colonial Boston. Completed in 1742, the grand two-story building consisted of an open-air market on the ground level, enclosed by an arcade of brick arches, with a second floor meeting room for public gatherings. Named for the benefactor who underwrote its construction, the building housed a full-length portrait—painted by Smibert—of Peter Faneuil.
CHAPTER 2
The First Likeness
Inclination having yielded to Importunity, I am now, contrary to all expectation under the hands of Mr Peale.
—George Washington, May 21, 1772 1
May 1772 . . . Mount Vernon . . . The Colony of Virginia
THE NEW PORTRAIT was Martha’s idea. The lady of the house had walked past her own image countless times, but lately the canvas had begun to seem a little forlorn.
The fifteen-year-old painting portrayed a handsome young matron dressed in a white and blue silk gown trimmed with lace. Martha knew she had aged since the painting had been done, but it was another canvas in the West Parlor that reminded her how much time truly had passed. Her motherly spirits rose on glimpsing her wee children, Jacky and Patsy, posed as a miniature Virginia gentleman and his lady, together with a vermilion pet parrot. In life, those children now neared adulthood. John Parke Custis, eighteen, had grown into his distinguished name, and Martha Parke Custis was just two years behind him.
This was the time, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington had decided, to add a portrait of her second husband to the family collection. Although the notion had no particular appeal for him, George had given in to her entreaties. Here he stood, a man of forty years, posing for the painter for the second consecutive day—and feeling ridiculous, all dressed up as if he were going to war.
He could hardly blame the boy, but Jacky had been the instrument of his present discomfort. The lad’s studies in Annapolis with the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican priest and schoolmaster, meant that word of the possible commission reached Charles Willson Peale. A twenty-nine-year-old Marylander, Peale was acquainted with Boucher, both in his role as rector of St. Anne’s Church and, in Boucher’s off hours, at the Homony Club (Boucher was its president). There the members met to find boon companions with whom to dine. Jacky Custis had returned home to Mount Vernon for a visit several days earlier with Peale in tow, and the artist was now staring intently at Washington from his easel a few feet away.
The Washington who looked back at him wore the outdated uniform of his old Virginia regiment. Although he and his fellow colon
ists felt a growing discontent with Parliament’s tin ear when it came to American matters, few men Washington knew had any desire to don uniforms, new or old. Besides, he himself had a large farm to run.
If not occupied by posing, he might have ridden out to inspect his fields. Or he might have gone to visit his great friends, the Fairfaxes, at their nearby seat, Belvoir. He might still be conducting business at the county courthouse, where he had been the very Monday when Peale arrived. As a member of the House of Burgesses, he could have traveled to the colony’s capital, Williamsburg, as he had done in March and early April, to do committee work, as just another Virginia gentleman of property. Instead, he was spending a cool and clear spring Thursday as a captive in his own house.
The previous day had been the first sitting. Mr. Peale had chalked in a rough likeness on the canvas, and last night Washington had made a perfunctory note in his diary, “I sat to have my Picture drawn.”2Certain aspects of the picture were predetermined, since it would be hung along with Martha’s, a life-size, three-quarter portrait that captured her person from mid-thigh upward on a fifty-inch-tall canvas. Peale’s day of sketching had produced a much larger Washington—at more than six feet, two inches, he towered over Martha, who was fully a foot shorter. As a result, the master of the house filled proportionately more of his matching canvas than did his wife.
He had been a bachelor planter with substantial debts at the time of their 1759 marriage, but the Widow Custis’s arrival in his life had made him solvent and had brought social connections, too. As he stood erect before Peale, his head turned slightly, the contours of his face were revealed to the painter. With the arm bent at the elbow, Washington held his right hand over his heart, his fingers resting inside his partly unbuttoned waistcoat. The other hand was swung around to the small of his back. His standing pose was that of a gentleman planter, a status that his marriage to Martha had made possible.
On this, his second day of work on the painting, Peale’s task was the “Drapery.” Washington wore his old company’s dark blue coat, together with red breeches and waistcoat. Peale’s task involved more than reproducing planes of flat color, since the coat was trimmed with silver braid and buttons. Washington’s sash was a splash of lavender draped over his left shoulder and tied at the right hip. His black hat was adorned with a silver medallion, and the hilt of his fine, English-made sword was visible hanging at his waist. Washington knew better than anyone that the assemblage he wore for Mr. Peale was a painterly charade. Despite the uniform, his military days fighting Frenchmen and Indians on the western frontier were long behind him, his colonel’s commission resigned thirteen years earlier. Yet if the personage emerging on Peale’s canvas resembled his younger self, that was hardly a bad thing. Indeed, a much younger man had wooed the woman pictured in the portrait with which this one would be paired.
SURVEYING MOUNT VERNON between painting sessions, they made an odd couple. Washington was a consummate horseman accustomed to riding fine steeds in pursuit of the fox; Peale was more familiar with such nags as his old Gimblet, a small mare that represented not recreation but basic transport. Riding out to inspect the outlying farms on his Mount Vernon plantation, which soon would total more than 8,000 acres, was one of Washington’s great pleasures. Looking both slight and short in the shadow of the Virginian, Peale was less familiar with open plantation acres than with the bustling streets of the port towns of Annapolis and Chestertown, Maryland. Washington wore bespoke clothing that his London agents purchased for him; Peale, still working to clear debts of many years’ duration, was dressed in the well-worn clothes of a man with more mouths to feed than ready money. (Charles Willson had become head of the Peale family, and he maintained a household that included his wife, his widowed mother and her companion, two brothers, a sister, and various nieces, nephews, and cousins.)
Yet the two men had much in common. Both were children of the gentry, with all that membership in the upper class implied about manners, social position, and expectations. Each man had also attended the funeral of his father in early adolescence, events that had changed the anticipated course of both their lives. For Washington, the death of Augustine Washington meant an end to plans for the boy to follow his half brothers to England for schooling. In the same way, the passing of Peale’s father, a schoolmaster with vague hopes of inheriting an English manor house, left a widow to fend for herself and her five children as best she could. Friends helped Mrs. Peale relocate her family to Annapolis, where she found work as a seamstress and dressmaker, but her eldest son’s formal education had ended with writing and arithmetic. Ironically, despite the abrupt and early end of their schooling, both Peale and Washington were already proving to be vigorous and imaginative correspondents.
Of the two, Washington had more experience with horse flesh, but Peale knew the equipment of the equestrian as only a maker could. Charles Willson had been apprenticed to a saddlemaker when he was twelve. A naturally curious man with a gift for craftsmanship, he easily mastered the diverse skills required of making harnesses and traveling equipment. He carved beechwood and worked leather. He cast and polished iron, brass, and silver. His Annapolis master, Nathan Waters, exposed the boy to other businesses, too, as a merchant and planter buying and selling goods and lands.
When the apprentice’s lack of money had made repairing his own timepiece a necessity, he taught himself clock-and watchmaking. Upon completing his term of service making saddles for Waters, he branched out into upholstering carriages, and, in his first advertisement in the Maryland Gazette in January 1762, announced his presence in Annapolis. “CHARLES WILLSON PEALE, SADDLER, at his shop in CHURCH-STREET . . . HERE gives Notice, That he has now set up in his Business of Saddle-making, Harness-Making, Postering and Repairing Carriages, &c. . . . [and] he hopes to have the Employ of his Friends, who may depend upon being well and faithfully served.”3
None of that explained his presence at Washington’s side, although his first step toward Mount Vernon could also be traced back to 1762. Reveling in his newfound freedom, Peale had traveled to Virginia, “with a view to purchasing that necessary article of [my] Saddlery business.” In Norfolk, he found more than the leather supplies he needed when, in the home of a new acquaintance, he gazed upon several landscapes and a portrait. Their execution was unremarkable. “They were miserably done,” remembered Peale,“[and] had they been better, perhaps they would have smothered . . . [the] faint spark of Genius.” Instead, Peale found “the idea of making Pictures” took possession of him.4
Back in Annapolis, he tried his hand at painting. His friends and family admired his first effort, a landscape. Next he painted a self-portrait in his clockmaker guise, surrounding his likeness with the pieces of a dismantled clock. His experiments at recording the countenances of his wife, siblings, and friends proved presentable enough that they led to a paying commission, a pair of portraits of a local ship’s captain and his wife. By December 1762, hoping that painting might become his livelihood, he ventured to Philadelphia, returning with paints bought at a color shop and a book, Handmaid to the Arts, to guide his paint mixing.
He found himself a teacher who was willing to barter. Mr. Peale offered one of his best saddles, and a deal was struck. John Hesselius, the son of a Swedish emigrant painter and himself an itinerant portraitist, agreed that Peale might watch him as he executed two portraits. They also agreed Hesselius would paint half a face, which Peale would then complete under the older man’s watchful eye.
For the pupil, these lessons “infinitely lightened the difficulties of the new art.” It was decided: Charles Willson Peale would be a painter.5
PEALE’S PORTRAIT WAS a first for Washington. Despite the novelty of the experience, he found no joy in having his picture taken. The process, he said, put him in a mood that was both “grave” and “sullen.”6
Even so, Washington was coming rather to like Mr. Peale. He couldn’t help but wonder whether, given his own inability to concentrate, the painter would be able t
o capture much of his character. “I fancy the skills of this Gentleman’s Pencil, will be put to it, in describing to the World what manner of Man I am.” Washington’s concern was well placed, as his lethargy was revealing itself on the canvas in his bland, expressionless look. He was a man whose eyes flashed with intelligence when he became engaged in a conversation, but whose gaze went dormant when his mind wandered. (As a trusted adjutant later observed, “[H]is countenance when affected either by joy or anger, is full of expression, yet when the muscles are in a state of repose, his eye certainly wants animation.”)7It was indeed the detached Washington that Peale recorded.
Washington’s laconic pose for Peale betrayed little of the physical presence that impressed those who met the Virginia colonel. When he entered a room, he filled the doorway. He stood taller than most of his contemporaries, but his stature only partly explained the sense of quiet power he exuded. He had the shoulders of a woodsman. Though he was thin through the chest, having suffered from a “pulmonary affection in early life,” his long, box-like trunk was wide and unmistakably solid.8He had very large hands and feet, thickly muscled limbs, and bulky thighs strengthened by countless hours straddling a horse. Yet the man in the picture seemed unfocused, his body slack. He was not in peak physical condition (Peale faithfully recorded a missing button on Washington’s waistcoat, the fabric strained by the soldier’s growing midlife girth). But his sitter’s pear shape was also the result of Peale’s penchant for sweeping curves. Anatomical accuracy was less interesting to the artist than an appealing picture with overall grace and appeal.
