The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  These men liked and respected each other. After 1779, Washington would take more turns in Peale’s Painter’s Chair for portraits taken at the time of his resignation as commander in chief (1783), as the Constitution began to take shape (1787), and as president (1795). Peale painted a great many other men, women, and children of his time; in his most prolific period, the two decades after his return from England in 1769, he made some seven hundred portraits during war, peace, and political upheaval. Many were more revealing of the characters he painted, perhaps, than his Washingtons; his family pictures, in particular, and those of his friends are character studies in which human emotions can be read clearly. Yet his sequence of canvases portraying Washington offers a collective sense of their enigmatic and distant subject. More than any of his portraitists, Peale had the chance to observe the evolution of the planter-colonel who became a general and president.

  CHAPTER 4

  John Trumbull Takes His Turn

  [H]aving a natural taste for drawing, in which he had already made some progress, Colonel Trumbull resolved to cultivate that talent, with the hope of thus binding his name to the great events of the time, by becoming the graphic historiographer of them and of his early comrades. With this view he devoted himself to the study of the art of painting, first in America, and afterwards in Europe.

  —John Trumbull, 1832 1

  I.

  1780–1781 . . . Tothill Fields Bridewell . . . London

  AS ONE OF his fellow prisoners might have advised him, the twenty-four-year-old Mr. Trumbull would have done well to learn how to keep his gob shut. For the proud colonel, however, that was not his way, and his intemperate outburst had assured him his place in prison.

  One didn’t have to be a Connecticut governor’s son to appreciate that the jail was well below John Trumbull’s station. Almost fifty years earlier William Hogarth had memorialized Tothill Fields Bridewell in his “Harlot’s Progress,” a popular series of engravings. Hogarth had illustrated the prostitute Moll, a fallen woman in a crowded cell, making hangman’s nooses of hemp at her jailer’s command. In the years since, little had changed at Bridewell, although the prison’s unsavory population had ballooned, and the walled edifice had become home to an even larger array of prostitutes, runaway apprentices, and petty criminals.

  John Trumbull’s crime loomed very much larger. No common felon, he stood accused of nothing less than high treason, a crime punishable by death. As Trumbull saw it, the charge had arrived on November 19, 1780, like “a thunderbolt falling at my feet.” A man unknown to him, name of Mr. Bond, had knocked at the door of his London lodgings on George Street, asking for Trumbull by name. Adjudging him a respectable man, Trumbull invited him into his parlor.2

  Once there, Bond announced, “I have a warrant . . . to secure your person and papers, Mr. Trumbull, for examination.” The American, rarely at a loss for words, was dumbstruck.

  At his arraignment the following morning, he was ready to defend himself. Despite having spent a night in a room with the door bolted and an armed officer for company, he made an impressive appearance, standing five feet, nine inches tall with a recognizably military bearing from his days in the Continental Army. His treatment as little more than a common criminal offended his sense of propriety—he was, after all, an officer and gentleman—jolting him back to his usual manner. He confronted the three police magistrates who looked down at him at the eleven o’clock court proceeding.

  From the dock, he addressed them heatedly. “You appear to have been much more habituated to the society of highwaymen and pickpockets, than to that of gentlemen,” he told them. “I will put an end to all this insolent folly, by telling you frankly who and what I am. I am an American—my name is Trumbull; I am a son of him whom you call the rebel governor of Connecticut; I have served in the rebel American army; I have had the honor of being an aid-du-camp to him whom you call the rebel General Washington.

  “These two,” he continued, his anger still carrying him, “have always in their power a greater number of your friends, prisoners, than you of theirs . . . I am entirely in your power; and after the hint which I have given you, treat me as you please, always remembering that as I may be treated, so will your friends in America be treated by mine.”

  Whatever temporary effect his rebuke had (to Trumbull, his treatment thereafter seemed more respectful) it was insufficient to secure his release, and the bench issued a warrant of commitment. Months after the arrest, here at Bridewell, he remained a prisoner, his fate uncertain, despite the fact that his crime consisted of nothing more than having been a partisan of the American cause.

  When Trumbull arrived at Tothill Fields, his manner and his ready cash had served him well. Mr. Smith, the keeper of the prison, recognized a gentleman when he saw one, having himself once been butler to the Duke of Northumberland. Eager to extend a genteel civility to a paying prisoner, whatever his crimes, Mr. Smith agreed to rent the American a room in his own house, which stood within the walls of the prison. It was a spacious parlor room some twenty feet square. As Trumbull noted, “The room was neatly furnished, and had a handsome bureau [folding] bed.” For a guinea a week, he lived comfortably, with the freedom to take daylight walks in a “pretty little garden.”

  Despite the creature comforts, there was no denying he remained a prisoner. The two windows in his cell looked out upon the prison yard and, at night, Mr. Smith locked and bolted the door, leaving the American to muse on his unfortunate timing. Just days before his arrest and his incriminating outburst, word had reached London of the execution in New York of the British officer Major John André as a spy in connection with Benedict Arnold’s treachery; for some loyal British subjects, the execution of Trumbull would have seemed a perfect symmetry. Trum-bull knew full well he had been less than circumspect in his conversations, and in his captured correspondence his words betrayed a warmth “to the cause of America” that his captors regarded as evidence of treasonous intent.3

  There was also the matter of his military service back in the colonies. As a man supremely confident of his own rectitude, he would hardly have denied his association with General George Washington five years earlier, in the months before the big victory at Boston.

  II.

  Summer 1775 . . . Roxbury, Massachusetts

  THE GENERAL DESPERATELY needed to learn the topography. A trained surveyor, he trusted maps, having grown accustomed to taking the measure of a place. In his new posting in coastal Massachusetts, with British-occupied Boston frustratingly near at hand, Washington could only peer through his spyglass at the unfamiliar city on its peninsula in Boston harbor. Most of the surrounding mainland was under his control, but the British warships in the tidal waters of the harbor and the River Charles meant he could get no closer to the city itself than the headlands across the bay.

  On his arrival earlier in the month to take charge of the army, Washington inherited a stalemate. After losing more than a thousand men in the battle at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill in June, British commanders demonstrated little appetite for assaulting an entrenched colonial force. For his part, Washington was wary of confronting the British military—he had been one of them, not so many years earlier—and he knew almost nothing of his own enthusiastic band of irregulars. Most of them were New England country boys with little training. For the moment, then, he would seek to understand the lay of the land.

  He wished to know in particular all he could about the fortifications that protected Boston Neck, the narrow spit that linked the city to the mainland like the handle of a serving spoon. John Trumbull, just nineteen but already a graduate of Harvard, learned of the commander in chief ’s desire from the commissary general (who happened also to be his brother, Joseph). The ambitious adjutant recognized his chance to ingratiate himself with George Washington, hoping that producing a chart would prove “a mean[s] of introducing myself (probably) to the favorable notice of the general.”

  From the Roxbury line, where his Connecticut regime
nt was encamped, Trumbull made his way to the shoreline, creeping like a cat “under the concealment of high grass” to a lookout within firing range of the British. Unseen, he got close enough to study the disposition of the British defense and to count the guns mounted on the bastion facing his position. He returned to camp and prepared a drawing of what he had seen.

  Trumbull delivered his map into Washington’s hands only to find it had already become redundant. The General nevertheless went to the trouble of looking with care at young Trumbull’s sketch. He compared it with the crude plan of the entire installation that a British deserter had just provided. Washington recognized the accuracy of Trumbull’s work, and the handsome, soft-spoken governor’s son standing before him made a good impression. The General Orders for July 27, 1775, reflected his approval, recording the appointment of “John Trumbull Esqr” as “aid de Camp to his Excellency the Commander in Chief.”

  With a young man’s fervor, Trumbull had desired just such an appointment. He found it surprising when, as the newest member of Washington’s military family, he was intimidated by life at Vassall House. Even with rough-and-tumble infantrymen bivouacked all over the neighborhood, the royalist residence that had been commandeered by the Colonial Army after the battles at Lexington and Concord bespoke wealth and style unfamiliar to Trumbull. His father was indeed governor of Connecticut (Jonathan Trumbull was the only colonial governor to remain in office and support the Patriot cause after independence), but the family fortunes had plummeted a decade earlier when four ships in which the Trumbulls had invested were lost at sea, taking their crews and cargoes to the bottom. In Washington’s Cambridge house, John Trumbull encountered many “of the first people of the country,” officers, merchants, and politicians who came to dine with the General. A vain man, the youthful Trumbull felt self-conscious in such august company, not least because he plainly lacked the resources to dress as others did. He soon decided he was “unequal to the elegant duties of [his] situation,” and, when promoted to major that August, he departed headquarters with few regrets to assume command of a brigade at Roxbury.4

  A few months later, Trumbull and his men helped occupy Dorchester Heights and watched the outmaneuvered British from their perch overlooking the harbor. “Within a few days the enemy abandoned Boston,” he wrote, “and we entered it on St. Patrick’s day, the 17th of March.”5 Later that year, he was made a colonel at just twenty years of age and served with distinction in a military campaign that took him to Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga. Then a fit of temper overcame him when the formal commission from Congress confirming his appointment as a colonel arrived. It bore a date three months after he had been granted a field commission, and the angry Trumbull promptly resigned.

  “Thus ended my regular military service,” Trumbull would write.6 That left him free to resume his pursuit of another goal—to become an artist—and chase it he would. But his encounter with his commander in chief during the siege of Boston would remain with him, a proud memory—and a lingering danger.

  III.

  Winter 1781 . . . Tothill Fields Bridewell . . . London.

  THE TALL MAN, his reddish brown hair unkempt, strode across the prison yard. His broad frame and angular features gave him the appearance of purpose and power. Yet when he spied Trumbull peering out at him through the bars on his window, his intensity gave way, as it often did, to his fondness for a bon mot. It was irresistible, really. How could he not address his friend by the nickname he had just conceived? In the visitor’s mind, John Trumbull had become Bridewell Jack.

  At first Trumbull couldn’t quite bring himself to think the name “Bridewell Jack” remarkably funny. On the other hand, he knew full well that one had to take his friend Gibby as he was, foibles and all. The man drank too much, was profligate with his money, habitually used snuff, and wore his irreverence like an officer wore his uniform sash. Who else would dare to refer to the big, dramatic historical paintings of their mutual benefactor, Benjamin West, as “ten-acre pictures”?7To amuse himself and those around him was his way, and, infuriating as he could be, Gilbert Stuart had become Trumbull’s stalwart friend. He was impossible to dislike.

  As usual, Gibby brought news and gossip, but this day, he brought an idea as well. Stuart was determined to take Trumbull’s portrait. It would amuse both of them, the expatriate Rhode Islander decided, for him to record the imprisoned Connecticut Yankee on canvas.

  They had known each other a few months, just since Trumbull had knocked on the door of the Newman Street studio the previous summer. Like Charles Willson Peale, Stuart, and other aspiring American painters before them, Trumbull had inevitably made his way to the large house of Benjamin West on coming to England. As the most accomplished American painter of the era—he had been appointed history painter to the court and completed a portrait of King George III only the previous year—West welcomed other Americans, giving them the run of his two towering Painting Rooms as well as the sculpture garden and the gallery at the rear of the house. The older painter made himself available in the morning to his protégés, advising them on their work. Either he or one of his students would instruct newcomers in the proper procedures for preparing a canvas, grinding and mixing pigments, and laying out a palette. The pupils who sought him out stayed for periods ranging from a few days to several years, but West consistently encouraged them not to imitate him but rather to follow the tilts of their own talents. Unlike Joshua Reynolds, West was open with his students, who found him accessible. “He had no secrets or mysteries,” remembered one, “he told all he knew.”8

  West had assigned Stuart to show Trumbull where “to find the necessary colors, Tools, &c,” and the two younger men painted together in the same Painting Room.9Stuart had arrived in the city more than four years earlier and his familiarity with London helped Trumbull’s adjustment to what seemed to his colonial eye a vast metropolis. His easy manner counterbalanced Trumbull’s nervous stiffness.

  The two friends had been inconvenienced by Trumbull’s legal difficulties. They were no longer the lighthearted jokesters in West’s studios, and to perform the flute duets they so enjoyed, Stuart was required to visit his incarcerated friend. But Trumbull’s life was hardly one of deprivation. He purchased his breakfast and dinner from a nearby public house, drawing upon his own funds. He gave his two-penny-a-day allowance from his jailers to the turnkey, who brushed his hat, cleaned his shoes, and tended his clothes.

  His jailer permitted Trumbull to practice his art in his cell. That meant materials were at hand for a portrait. A prepared canvas, roughly two feet wide, two and a half feet high, was duly set upon the easel. Trumbull assumed the unaccustomed role of sitter for the more experienced man. Stuart, who was already winning Londoners’ admiration as a maker of fashionable portraits, picked up his brush and went to work.

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS new to the great city of London, John Trum-bull’s artistic desires were of long standing. At age fifteen, he had begged to be apprenticed to John Singleton Copley in Boston, but his father had summarily rejected the idea. The lad was told that, as his brothers and father had done, he would enroll at Harvard. The day before the admission test at Cambridge, temptation was dangled before him when one of his brothers arranged an audience with Copley at the artist’s fine house overlooking Boston Common.

  The visit was brief, but the youngest of the Trumbull brood left Beacon Street deeply impressed. He long cherished the dual memory of “[Mr. Copley’s] dress and appearance—an elegant looking man, dressed in a fine maroon cloth, with gilt buttons—this was dazzling to my unpracticed eye! [and] his paintings, the first I had ever seen deserving the name, [which] riveted, absorbed my attention, and renewed all my desire to enter upon such a pursuit.”10

  Across the river in Cambridge, Trumbull was admitted the following day as a junior. As a Harvard student, he studied moral philosophy as well as natural philosophy (as mathematics and the sciences were then identified). He had arrived so proficient in Latin and Greek that he
sought out a French-speaking family in the neighborhood and obtained instruction in that language, too. He continued to find time, as one of his tutors reported to his father, to exercise his “natural genius and disposition for limning . . . an art I have frequently told him will be of no use to him.”11From Harvard’s library, he charged out volumes on perspective, painting technique, and aesthetics. He found engravings to copy and even showed one such imitation to Copley, who admired it. As if to return the compliment, Trumbull studied works of Copley’s that were in the “philosophical chamber” at Harvard.

  After earning his degree, he worked for a time as a schoolmaster back in Connecticut, but with revolution in the air, the young man soon joined his state’s First Regiment, which took him to Boston and his term of service in the army.