by Hugh Howard
In late 1784, Benjamin West approached his pupil with a most flattering request. The older man desired a copy of one of his own history paintings, The Battle of La Hogue, which commemorated a British victory over France in a naval battle fought in 1692. Would Mr. Trumbull be interested in executing it for him? It was an immense compliment as, quite explicitly, the student was being invited to pick up his master’s brush. Trumbull agreed, explaining to his father in a letter, “West’s pictures are almost the only example in Art of that particular style which is necessary to me—pictures of modern times and manners.”8He expected a year would be required to copy the big picture, but he managed to complete it in just three months. “The work,” Trumbull acknowledged, “was of inestimable importance to me.”9
THE GRAND IDEA came to Benjamin West first. News had arrived from Paris of the signing of the preliminary articles of peace, so he had already been musing on the new notion when a letter from his old student Charles Willson Peale arrived in mid-1783. Peale wrote to ask whether his old friend and teacher might help him sell one of his portraits of Washington. West wrote back saying he would be delighted to see “a whole-length portrait of that greatest of all characters, General Washington . . . that phinominy among men.” Washington was indeed a phenomenon, and was well on his way to becoming the best-known man in the world.
In his reply West also asked a favor of Peale. “[W]ould you procure for me the drawings or small paintings of the dresses of the American army,” he wrote, “from the officers down to the common soldier . . . and any characteristic of their armies or camps.” He confided in Peale his plan to paint “pictures of the great events of the American contest.” He proposed to call the series “The American Revolution.”10
By the time Trumbull returned to West’s studio six months later, West had already abandoned the plan (to pursue it might have jeopardized his standing with his most important patron, King George III). Before jettisoning the idea, however, he had begun one painting, and the unfinished canvas rested near where Trumbull worked, attesting to what, at least at first, seemed to West like a wonderful notion. The oil sketch had been almost forgotten, set aside in the clutter of the busy studio. When Trumbull saw The American Peace Commissioners, he realized what it represented.
Five men were pictured, Americans all, three seated at a table, the others standing. Trumbull took in the unmistakable tomahawk nose of John Jay, the plump figure of John Adams, the aging Ben Franklin, Franklin’s secretary (and grandson), William Temple Franklin, and South Carolinian Henry Laurens. As a man who made a point of keeping current with American politics, Trumbull knew these men had been the American commissioners sent by the Continental Congress to negotiate the peace with England. The other side of the negotiation—in life, British commissioner Richard Oswald and his secretary, Caleb White-foord, had represented the Crown—was nowhere to be seen.
Though he had told Peale that he regarded the Patriots as having earned a place “among the greatest characters of antiquity,” West’s American Revolution series had ended abruptly with this half-finished study for a much larger painting. But during 1784 he came to recognize that he had an apprentice whose emerging skills and commitment to the American cause might enable him to make the series his own. He broached the idea, and Trumbull wrote to his brother late that year, “Mr. West has mentioned my doing . . . the great events of the revolution.”11
Trumbull began to veer away from portraiture. After completing his copy work for West, Trumbull put his hand to a historical composition based on Homer’s Iliad. The picture, Priam Returning with the Body of Hector, cost Trumbull another three months and an investment of ten guineas to pay for its frame and the models he employed.12It proved a valuable practice piece in the historical vein and was well received by the London critics (one of them termed it “a considerable advance” on his earlier work).13West hired him to help with a large royal commission for a set of paintings at Windsor Castle. His apprenticeship advanced, as he continued learning the language of high art under the guidance of West.
The opportunity “to take up the History of Our Country,” as Trum-bull put it, seemed a noble venture, an opportunity for both honor and, he hoped, profit. He foresaw a chance to do good for his country and the opportunity to do well for himself.
TRUMBULL BEGAN WITH what he knew. While stationed with his Connecticut regiment years earlier he had witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill from afar. Even on the other side of Boston harbor, the cannonades had echoed like peals of thunder. He had seen the flames in Charlestown and the smoke from the battle that smudged the sky. The memory inspired him a decade later to paint The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775, a canvas that also paid homage to his mentor’s The Death of General Wolfe.
Trumbull worked in West’s studio under the eye of the veteran painter. His painting would not be a precise record of the events at Bunker and Breed’s Hills, but Trumbull had talked to participants and, at other times, seen his fellow Colonials in combat. In a series of careful sketches, he created a staged composition that represented an imagined moment in time that, though it never quite happened, was still historically accurate in many of its particulars. In short, he grasped that the essence of history painting is to mix the real and the idealized. The scale of his new painting was small compared to West’s mural-sized histories. Trumbull’s canvas was a mere thirty-four inches wide, twenty-five high. It was no accident that the canvas size would also suit future engravers, who would be able to make a same-size rendering of the painting on their plates.
As Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker’s Hill neared completion, in early 1786, West made an occasion of asking Trumbull to a dinner party. “I have invited some of our brother artists,” West explained, “and I wish you to be of the party.” When the appointed hour came, the host welcomed his guests to the Painting Room, where, as Trumbull recalled years later, the battle painting had been carefully situated at West’s instruction to catch the best light. Upon seeing it, reported Trumbull, Reynolds “ran up to my picture,—‘Why, West, what have you got here?—this is better colored than your works are generally.’
“ ‘Sir Joshua,’ (was the reply,) ‘you mistake—that is not mine—it is the work of this young gentleman, Mr. Trumbull.’ ”14
Another who saw the painting was moved by its portrayal. Abigail Adams, whose husband, John, had become the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, saw the painting in London in early 1786. “Looking at it my whole frame contracted, my blood shivered, and I felt a faintness at my heart.” She, too, had witnessed the battle at a distance, in her case from a Braintree hilltop some nine miles away, where she stood holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, John Quincy. The painting had added meaning for her since General Warren, the young Boston physician who lay dying in Trumbull’s canvas, had been a dear friend for years. In writing to her sister back in America, Abigail described Trum-bull as “the first painter who has undertaken to immortalize by his pencil those great actions, that gave birth to our nation.”15
By February, Trumbull was at work on the second of the revolutionary paintings, The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, using some of the reference material that Peale had provided West. This canvas would portray the bravery of Richard Montgomery in his attempt “to attack the enemy at the heart,” according to Trumbull, on December 31, 1775. The plan for that night called for Colonel Benedict Arnold to advance on the city of Quebec from one direction, while Montgomery approached from another. Although Arnold’s men captured their objective, Montgomery and several of his officers were felled by grapeshot from a naval cannon. The assault on Quebec ended almost before it had begun, but Trumbull wanted to memorialize the moment for its “brilliancy of conception and hardihood of attempt.” As the painting began to emerge, Trumbull’s debt to West’s great canvas, The Death of General Wolfe, became evident.
With two paintings in the proposed series well under way, West suggested that Antonio di
Poggi, an artist-turned-publisher, might help Trumbull find an engraver on the continent (for obvious reasons, English engravers were reluctant to celebrate the recent war). Di Poggi and Trumbull reached an understanding, and the Italian soon crossed the Channel to look for a suitable artisan.
The city of London in 1786 was a diverse place, but to Americans abroad their social world was small. American painters, diplomats, and merchants dined together often. One afternoon that spring Trumbull was invited to dine with John and Abigail Adams. At their table that day he made the acquaintance of another Patriot, a red-headed Virginian whose learning and manner charmed the shy Yankee. Thomas Jefferson, who had traveled to England from his post in Paris to consult with John Adams on diplomatic matters, seemed to be interested in everything.
The promising young American painter, his character vouched for by his old friend Adams, intrigued Jefferson. The minister to France issued an invitation: Trumbull ought to come to Paris, “to see and study the fine works there, and to make [Jefferson’s] house my home, during my stay.”16
Colonel Trumbull’s luck, it seemed, had truly turned.
II.
August 1786 . . . With Mr. Jefferson . . . Paris
MONSIEUR CHEFERSONE,” AS he was known to one Left Bank merchant, had recovered himself. The painful recollection of his wife’s death, in 1782, was still fresh when his friend James Madison had arranged Jefferson’s appointment as minister to France. For the master of Monticello, the diplomatic posting possessed a double appeal: He hoped he could quiet the persistent sense of loss and fulfill his long-held desire to visit what he called “the vaunted scene of Eu rope.”
Jefferson found all the distractions he wished for. He immersed himself in the art and culture of Paris, its food, and its society. He examined the architecture, sculpture, and painting, gloried in the music, and delighted in the wines. He reveled in the city’s bookstores, often indulging his tendency to “Bibliomanie,” as he termed his book-buying passion. He made the acquaintance of artists and architects. He hired Houdon to make a Washington sculpture for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and, in collaboration with the French antiquarian and architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau, he designed a monumental Capitol for Richmond in which Houdon’s pedestrian statue was to be installed.
When John Trumbull arrived in France, late in July 1786, after more than two years of intensive study and work at Mr. West’s, he, like Jefferson, envisioned Paris as a holiday. He brought with him the first two in his projected series of American history paintings, in order that he, with the assistance of Signor di Poggi, might contract with an engraver for their reproduction.
Jefferson liked nothing better than offering tutelage to young men who entered his circle. This had become a pattern with nephews, secretaries, and bright young Americans of all sorts (in the years to follow, this inclination would further blossom with his mentoring of a generation of young architects and in his dream of a state university for Virginia). The arrival of Trumbull that summer provided an opportunity to expose a promising young American to French artists and Europe an art. The lack of great art in his homeland worried Jefferson. As he had written to James Madison the previous year, to fail to improve the “national good taste” would be to risk “barbarism.”17He recognized in Mr. Trumbull and in his national work a chance to elevate American tastes.
After some months in central Paris, which he found too busy for his liking, Jefferson had moved to a large house on the outskirts of the city. The Hôtel de Langeac—it wasn’t a hotel at all, but a mansion—had become the American Legation, serving as the minister’s place of business. There he tended to concerns of trade, the passports of American travelers, and a multitude of other official matters. The house was also Jefferson’s home away from home, the site of “family dinners” (when his daughter, Patsy, was home from her convent boarding school) and “great dinners,” at which Jefferson entertained an ever-widening circle of friends at his table.18
When Trumbull stepped through the gate at the corner of the Champs-Elysées and the rue de Berri, he entered a large courtyard. Before him stood the grand entrance to the stately three-story house, its height emphasized by the floor-to-ceiling windows on the ground floor. Originally designed to accommodate a duke’s mistress, the stylish hôtel included within its walled perimeter a range of buildings, including stables, servants’ quarters, and a coach house. As Jefferson had written to Abigail Adams a year earlier, “it has a clever garden to it.”19A bit wistful for flavors of home, he was attempting to propagate “Indian corn for the use at my own table, to eat green, in our manner.”20
Jefferson welcomed Trumbull warmly to his spacious house. Within its walls were three separate suites, one of which would be his guest’s home for the weeks to come. In Trumbull’s time at the Hôtel de Langeac, both Jefferson and Trumbull gained more from their new acquaintanceship than they could possibly have expected.
TRUE TOJEFFERS ON’ S promise, doors all over Paris opened for Trumbull as he sought to examine the city’s art. Early on in his tour he visited the Louvre (“fine, very fine indeed, the very best thing which I have as yet seen,” he noted in his journal). He thought the Palais-Royal “magnificent.” He visited palaces, cathedrals, churches, the Sorbonne, and Versailles.
On some days Jefferson accompanied him, but Monsieur Houdon and his pretty bride Marie (they had married only the previous month) also took a turn as Trumbull’s guides. The Houdons took him to see some of Jean-Antoine’s sculpture and to a waxworks to view a surgeon’s collection of anatomical models of the human body. At the Louvre they looked at statues, casts, and bas-reliefs. In the gallery of the French Academy, Trumbull admired Charles Le Brun’s History of Alexander the Great, a series of history paintings he thought “among the finest things which have ever been produced—perhaps the finest.” He was unimpressed by the academy’s drawing room, which he thought less convenient than those he knew at the Royal Academy in London.21
In his zigzag five-week tour of Paris he saw paintings by Correggio, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, Fragonard, Tintoretto, Vero-nese, Poussin, and “Michael Angelo.” But it was The Death of Henry IV, by Peter Paul Rubens, at the Luxembourg Palace that he thought “the most perfect of all . . . splendor and harmony are here wonderfully united—the truth of nature, and the glow of a nature superior to ours.”22 He saw works by Jacques-Louis David, then emerging as the most admired painter in Paris. When he met the man himself in his studio in the Louvre, David became his “warm and efficient friend” and provided access to still other artists, collectors, and collections. Trumbull tended to business, too, meeting engravers, among them the auspiciously named Heinrich Güttenberg (“a plain honest German, industrious, and ambitious of fame, and one of the best engravers at present in France”).
A few days into his Paris visit, Trumbull was joined at Mr. Jefferson’s home by another guest, a boyish-looking young Harvard graduate named Charles Bulfinch. A Grand Tourist nearing the end of an eighteen-month tour that had already taken him to England and Italy, the young Bostonian had architectural aspirations and was intent upon seeing the sights of Paris. Soon the three Americans became acquainted with two other visitors to the city. Trumbull first met Mr. and Mrs. Cos-way at the studio of his new friend, Monsieur David. Richard Cosway was an English miniature painter who had come to paint portraits of the children of the influential Duc d’Orléans. His wife, Maria, was younger, possessed of both artistic and musical gifts—and as beautiful as her husband was homely. For much of August and into September, these companions and a varying cast of French aristocrats, artists, and friends went on daily excursions.
On his return to the Hôtel de Langeac in the evenings, Trumbull made entries in “a journal of each day’s occupation.” He listed places visited, artworks seen, and those with whom he had traveled that day. More than half a century later, he employed this diary in compiling his Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters of John Trumbull from 1756 to 1841. Even then, despite having been edi
ted by the elder ly sensibilities of the eighty-something Trumbull, the retrospective text still managed to convey a youthful hunger for beauty in his wide-eyed reactions to the art, architecture, and gardens. The Autobiography also proved to be an invaluable text for historians attempting to understand Trumbull, the Paris of the day, and his host, Mr. Jefferson. Yet what the painter left unsaid in his day-to-day accounting of events leaves the attentive reader curious, even querulous.
Trumbull himself interrupts his exacting account with an apology. He explains that, beginning with August 19, 1786, “[M]y manuscript fails me; I presume that one if not two sheets, have perished entirely.” For a man who left an immense trove of documents at his death, as well as his thorough Autobiography, the loss is perplexing—particularly since the lacuna coincides with the days of Mr. Jefferson’s now famous flirtation with Maria Cosway. Trumbull acknowledges the couple’s friendship: “Mr. Jefferson joined our party almost daily [during these twenty days]; and here commenced his acquaintance with Mrs. Cosway.” Then he moves on, dispassionately, to describe other people and places.
The dalliance between Jefferson and the radiant Mrs. Cosway—in her portraits, one sees a tousle of blonde hair, porcelain skin, perfect features, and dark, intelligent eyes into whose depths a lonely man might well fall—is today mysterious only as to the extent of the couple’s physical intimacies. From their letters, most of them published long after Trumbull’s death, the passion on both sides is apparent to any reader. As Jefferson himself wrote to Cosway in the most famous of those letters, he felt acutely the emotional heat, having learned “how imprudent it is to place our affections, without reserve, on objects you must so soon lose.”23 The philosopher-politician composed the letter as a debate between his head and heart, with reason prevailing in the end.
