The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  As the men reached Pennsylvania, Washington redeployed his troops along the west bank of the Delaware. He placed them at strategic points where the British might attempt to cross, but in the days before Christmas Washington also found himself pondering the where and when of the forthcoming winter encampment. War was a warm-weather affair, he knew, but he wrestled with black thoughts of a long winter spent contemplating the disastrous results of the preceding months. While Lieutenant Peale, his portable paint box on his lap, painted a miniature of his commanding officer, Captain Lawrence Birnie, Washington and his generals conceived the bold stroke that would carry them back across the Delaware after darkness fell on Christmas night 1776. Very much later, a German immigrant named Emanuel Leutze would make an enormous painting, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which captured something of the spirit of that long night. Despite its inaccuracies, it would become a part of American mythology. But that’s another story entirely.25

  The surprise attack on Trenton on the morning of December 26 succeeded brilliantly. In the face of a violent nor’easter that dumped rain, hail, and snow upon them, Washington and some twenty-four hundred Continentals accomplished the heroic nighttime crossing of a river nearly choked with ice. Having then marched more than ten miles to Trenton, the Americans routed the Hessian mercenaries holding the town, taking some nine hundred of them prisoner. But the victory was far from complete. Only half of Washington’s forces had been able to cross the river, because an ice jam downstream had prevented eight hundred members of the Pennsylvania militia from crossing to Trenton, while violent currents kept Peale and twelve hundred of his fellow Associators along with six hundred New England Continentals on the Pennsylvania shore still farther south. Recognizing how exposed his position was, Washington ordered the troops accompanying him to retreat once more across the Delaware, along with the Hessian prisoners.

  Safely back in Pennsylvania, he convened a council of war to decide “what future operations may be necessary.”26As his military advisers assembled, a messenger arrived. The letter from General John Cadwalader, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Associators, advised Washington that Cadwalader and his men had successfully crossed the river—but had done so a day late. Peale and his fellows were, in short, marching around New Jersey, virtually surrounded by a vastly larger enemy force.

  Washington and his counselors decided to seize the opportunity to make one last military strike before retiring for the winter. Yet again, the Continentals would cross the river, this time to Princeton, and attempt to retake south Jersey. For one of the few times in the war, Washington committed his entire army to the effort, and Peale was there to witness the events, leading his men into battle since Captain Birnie’s various injuries had led to Peale’s taking charge of his platoon.

  Peale—in a literary voice as colloquial and unpretentious as the man himself—recorded the events in plain language in his diary:

  At One oclock this morning [January 2, 1777] began a march for Trent Town. The Roads are very muddy, almost over our Shoe Tops . . . a very tedious march. The Sun had Risen more than an hour before we Reached the Town [but] . . . at last we were provided and had made a fire. I took a short nap on a plank with my feet to the fire. I was suddenly awakened by a Call to Arms, that the Enemy was advancing, and at small distance from the Town . . .

  We now was ordered to take our arms. The Sun appeared to be hardly 1.2 hour high. We then marched in Platoons back towards the Town [and] . . . Platoon firing was now perty frequent. When we had almost got out of the Woods . . . word was brought that the Enemy gave way, which at different times was the case. However, they had no[w] got possession of the greatest part of the Town. A very [heavy] firing was kept up on the Bridge, and great numbers of the Enemy fell there. Some of our Artilery stood their ground till the Enemy advanced within 40 Yds. And they was very near loosing the Field Piece . . . I really expected a retreat.

  At one oclock [the next] morning we began to move . . . By this I expected we were going to surround the Enemy, but after marching some miles . . . the Sun had just risen just before we See Prinstown. We proceeded as fast as possible and was within a mile of the Town when we were informed that all was quiet. A short time after, the Battn. just ahead of us began a Exceeding quick Platoon firing and some Cannon . . . I carried my Platoon to the Top of the Hill & fired, tho’ very unwillingly, for I thought the Enemy rather too far off, and then retreated, Loading . . . The 3rd time up, the Enemy began to Retreat. I must here give the New England Troops their due. They were the first who regularly formed . . . and stood the fire without regarding [the] Balls which whistled their thousand different notes around our heads, and what is very astonishing did little or no harm . . .

  We now advanced towards the Town, & halted at about 1.4 of a mile distance till the Artilery came up and our men were collected in better order. Amediately on the Artilery firing, a Number [of the enemy] that had formed near the College began to disperse, and amediately a Flag was sent, and we huzared Victory.27

  Peale claimed no great glory for himself, then or later, as he recollected his war experiences in his Autobiography. In retrospect, he described himself as “totally unfit to endure the fatigues of long marches,” before offering an aside that aptly sketched his character, humbly referring to himself, as he did throughout his Autobiography, in the third person. “Yet by temperament and by a forethought of providing for the worst that might happen, he endured this campaign better than many others whose appearance was more robust. He always carried a piece of dryed Beef and Bisquits in his Pocket, and Water in his Canteen, which, he found, was much better than Rum.”28

  Temperate and sensible, a man of modest expectations, Peale survived the Battle of Princeton. His memories would later serve him well on canvas as well as on the printed page.

  I V.

  January and February 1779 . . . Mr. Peale’s Painting Room . . . Philadelphia

  THE TIME FOR another painting had come. Washington’s success at Princeton had been galvanizing, but it had been followed by two years of military ups and downs. The Americans had lost the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, allowing the British to occupy Philadelphia; balancing that disappointment, the Continental Army had defeated the enemy at the Battle of Saratoga in October. A brutal winter followed for Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, but spirits lifted when later in 1778 the news arrived that the French had joined the war against Britain. Philadelphia was once more in American hands—that summer the British had shifted their base of operations to New York City—and optimism was rising on the American side.

  On Monday evening, January 18, 1779, the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania approved a resolution calling for a Washington portrait. It was to hang in the council’s chamber, an expression of confidence in the new nation’s military prospects and a celebration of the country’s central figure. Mr. Peale was just the man to make the portrait of the General, and the painter chose the Battle of Princeton as the pivotal moment to portray. It had been won at the expense of veteran British regulars, on their terms in an open field, unlike the midnight maneuver at Boston and the surprise attack at Trenton. Peale decided to portray the events in a big picture, one of monumental size to suit the subject.

  The canvas, fully eight feet tall and five feet wide, would be the first full-length portrait of the man.

  This time Peale painted a determined Washington. The vague look of the Virginia gentleman was gone, as was the distracted character of the 1776 Philadelphia portrait for John Hancock. The man in the new image was large-bodied, his head small, but the impression conveyed was of a man very much in possession of himself. His pose wasn’t aggressive but full of confident authority. In part, Peale was merely doing what was asked of him, since the resolution that led him to make the painting specified that its purpose was to “perpetuate the memory . . . [of] how much the liberty, safety and happiness of America in general and Pennsylvania in particular is owing to His Excellency General Washingt
on.”29

  The work would also be the making, once and for all, of Charles Willson Peale, Painter. He had gotten the important public commission, of course, but another reason the painting proved to be a show-off moment was that the artist himself had witnessed the battle. Copies of the painting would enable denizens of the Old World to see not only what Washington had done but also what Peale could do. In 1776, the artist had sold a few replicas of the Washington Portrait he painted for Hancock, but in 1779 orders poured in for canvases of Washington at Princeton. French ambassador Gérard purchased one for presentation to Louis XVI, and five copies were ordered to go to the Spanish court. The American envoy bound for Holland took a copy with him. Peale painted at least eighteen replicas, along with a number of three-quarter-length variations.30This was Washington, icon of America, suitable for diplomatic use, and to the eighteenth-century Eu rope an, Peale’s image of “His Excellency” portrayed not an upstart revolutionary but the undisputed leader of the new American republic.

  The multiple commissions could hardly have come along at a better moment. Peale continued to need money to feed his growing family (Angelica and Raphaelle had been joined by another son, Rembrandt, barely a year old). Charles Willson sent one copy of the big painting on consignment to Spain, entrusting it to William Carmichael, the new chargé d’affaires for the American legation. Carmichael sailed across the Atlantic on the frigate Aurore in October 1779, carrying a letter from Peale. “I have directed a long packing case for you which contains a whole length of Gen. Washington,” Peale had written, “begging your favor in putting it into the hands of some person who will sell it on commission.”31 The artist had hoped it would sell quickly “as I am in want of necessaries for painting, and clothing my family.”32Even when business seemed to be booming, Peale collected no windfall profits; his living was still a portrait-by-portrait affair.

  One reason for the international appeal of the painting was Peale’s use of what he had learned in London. In his influential Discourses, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, had declared there was no need “to be confined to mere matter[s] of fact”; rather, a painter ought to aim for the classical ideal of perfecting nature. When working in what Reynolds liked to call the “Grand Manner,” the artist aimed to represent the nobility and seriousness of human action, as Raphael had done in the sixteenth century and Poussin in the seventeenth. Although the faces of the figures might seem strangely impassive, the artist looked to express in his composition what Johann Joachim Winck-elmann, a contemporary who busied himself inventing the discipline of archaeology, termed “noble simplicity” and “calm grandeur.”33

  Peale employed some of the conventions of history painting, which his old master Benjamin West had only recently reinvented when he painted a scene from the French and Indian War in contemporary dress. The tradition held that classical costume—such as the toga in which Peale had dressed his William Pitt—brought order and logic to the conception. As a result, the London painting establishment had been shocked at the unveiling in April 1771 of West’s The Death of General Wolfe, in which General Wolfe was portrayed in his own British uniform, a brilliant crimson in color, at the Battle of Quebec. Wolfe’s prone figure was surrounded by officers at the center of the canvas, all of whom also wore their regimentals. To Peale, the notion of a realistic portrayal of a contemporary figure seemed like received wisdom, an obvious means of serving a hardscrabble new nation that aspired to dignity, honor, and virtue but saw no need for the pretense of dressing up in the costume of an ancient era.

  Reynolds had promptly dismissed West’s approach as unworthy of an artist’s imagination and invention. Ever the pragmatic American, however, West had patiently explained the logic of his painting: “[T]he event . . . commemorated took place on the 18th of September 1758 in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and at a period of time no such nation and heroes in their costume any longer existed.”34Even if West had difficulty with the chronology (he was a year off in dating the battle, which took place in 1759), his The Death of General Wolfe had been a great sensation, and prints of it became bestsellers.

  Following West’s lead, Peale decided his George Washington at Princeton was to be more than a portrait. To be certain he got the context just right, in February 1779 Peale “set out on a journey to take perspective Views of Trent[on] & Prince Town.” He made sketches of the battlefield terrain and of cannons.35Returning to his studio, he added in Nassau Hall, the principal building in Princeton. To one side of the canvas he painted Washington’s horse to remind the viewer of Washington’s skills as a rider (Thomas Jefferson called him “the best horse man of his age and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horse back”).36 Holding the horse’s bridle is William Lee, the General’s body servant, who served as both valet and wartime companion. Peale left the canvas untitled, but it was easily distinguished by the mise-en-scène around the tall figure as the Battle of Princeton (it became the prototype for the “Princeton Portrait,” thereby distinguishing it from the “Continental Type,” like Hancock’s, and the 1772 “Virginia Militia Type,” like Martha’s). Given the events memorialized by the big 1779 canvases, the name was inevitable.

  At front and center stands Washington, his hand on a cannon; a second cannon behind the first refers to the victory a week earlier at Trenton. As he painted Washington from life for this commission—in the days between January 20 and February 2, 1779, the General sat for Peale—he brought to bear years of on-again, off-again exposure to his subject. Peale had been to Washington’s home, painted him from life at least three times, and had had intermittent exposure to the General as a soldier and officer in his army, including service during the long winter of 1778 spent at Valley Forge. He had made copies of his own Washington paintings numerous times, producing life-size canvases and miniatures on ivory. Even if Washington never learned to relax for those charged with taking his picture, Peale knew how to give Washington’s painted likeness a sense of relaxed power. No doubt it stemmed, in part, from the military confidence that flowed from the big victory at Princeton, an event that even in its own time was a recognizable turning point in the colonials’ fortunes on the field of battle. But Peale’s knowledge of the man informed his brushwork, too.

  The martial figure at center had seen a whirlwind of change in the seven years since Peale first painted Martha’s husband at Mount Vernon. His citizenship had changed: He was an American now, no longer a subject of the English king. He had been promoted by the unanimous vote of his peers in the Continental Congress from the rank of a Virginia militia colonel to general and commander in chief. Although his battle-field successes had been outnumbered by the failures, his fellow citizens trusted him as they did no other. On numerous occasions, he had led his men into battle, ignoring the bullets whistling by, winning his soldiers’ trust and admiration.

  Almost in spite of his elevated status, he had become a man the men of the middling and lower sorts trusted. After the Battle of Trenton, many of his troops were just days from the expiration of their enlistments. The imminent departure of these soldiers to return to their farms and families threatened to thin the already dangerously reduced ranks of his army, and Washington saw that he had to take a direct approach. Only hours before the New England regiments were free to go home, he assembled the troops and spoke to them from horse back. An offer was already before them for a bonus of ten dollars for added weeks of service, but almost no one had been persuaded by the money. Without rhetorical exaggeration—he would never be a man given to passionate speechifying—Washington spoke to his men:

  My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do und
er any other circumstances.37

  Washington had found his voice on the banks of the Delaware and nearly all the soldiers fit for duty stepped forward, making the victory at Princeton possible.

  As for Peale, his 1779 The Battle of Princeton was a high point in his painting career. In the years after the Revolution, he never quite recaptured his preeminence as an artist. Mr. Peale would try out various other roles. He devised patriotic displays to celebrate founding anniversaries. He invented gadgets. He excavated the prehistoric skeletons of two mastodons, which he took on an exhibition tour. In various ways he proved himself one of the first and greatest of American showmen, not least by establishing a museum of natural history and art, which he opened in July 1788. Though originally conceived as a means of displaying his portraits (Washington’s among them), Peale’s Museum housed collections of natural history specimens (birds outnumbered the fish and quadrupeds), as well as mechanical objects, books, and his paintings. Unlike Euro pe an museums of the time that aimed to attract the educated and privileged few, Peale’s Museum welcomed any member of the general public willing to part with two bits.38

  Distracted by his many interests, Peale would cease public painting for a time, although he later returned to it. Perhaps the picture that best conjures up the Peale-and-Washington connection isn’t a painting at all but an imagined tableau of the painter and the poser. Washington is in the Painter’s Chair. Although seated, he somehow overshadows Peale, who, by his own account, was “a thin, spare, pale faced man.” But the sanguine Mr. Peale is doing the talking, his subjects ranging from seeds to saddles (Peale sticks to nonpolitical and nonmilitary subjects, knowing that horses and agricultural innovation are among Washington’s delights). He smiles often, and his intelligent banter keeps Washington’s attention from drifting. Washington listens and absorbs. He will engage Peale, questioning and probing; but he does so only, as he himself once wrote, after “balancing in my mind and giving the subject the fairest consideration.”39