The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  Even at the remove of a half a century, Trumbull must have known more about the Jefferson-Cosway relationship than he admitted. He had joined them in their coach, walked the same garden paths, and been privy to their conversations on many occasions in those days and weeks. Jefferson shared his home with Trumbull during this time, too, and upon returning there each evening, one might reasonably conjecture, the smitten Virginian might have shared confidences or, at the very least, been unable to mask all his feelings.24Jefferson later trusted Trumbull as his go-between, to deliver letters he was reluctant to send by less secure means, some of them to Mrs. Cosway. Yet when he came to describe the relationship he closely observed, the elderly Trumbull chose silence over indiscretion. A man of his time, he left the provocative interlude in Mr.

  WHEN JEFFERSON LEASED the Hôtel de Langeac, its rooms were empty, from the large bedchambers to the grand oval salon with the trompe-l’oeil rising sun on its ceiling. He refused to rent what he needed, since the fee for furnishings and other house hold equipment would have amounted to 40 percent per year. Instead, he went shopping in an urban landscape dense with artisans, shops, and merchants.

  As was his punctilious habit, he recorded his purchases in his Memorandum Books. These included bed linens and blankets, along with an armoire in which to store them. He bought mattresses, carpets, stoves, andirons, and wood. For his kitchen and dining room, he purchased a coffee mill, teapots, silver flatware, and china. He acquired furniture, too, including two lits de repos (daybeds), easy chairs in which to relax, and both arm-and side chairs for dining. Mirrors, biscuit figurines, gaming tables, chandeliers, white porcelain vases, girandoles, silk damask draperies, and other goods came later. Not satisfied with the choices in Paris, he wrote to his friend Abigail Adams, asking her to purchase napkins and a tablecloth for him in London. Acquisitive by nature, he relished the entire process, feeding his appetite for and appreciation of craftsmanship, elegance, and the neoclassical taste of the day.25

  Within months of his arrival, he began acquiring objets d’art, too, both at auction and from dealers. Although his friendship with Houdon led him to purchase a number of the sculptor’s terra-cotta patinated busts, he tended not to buy original works by living artists but chose instead to seek copies of great works from the past by the likes of Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Rubens, and others. He favored portraits of the great and estimable, and a good many pictures still remained on his desiderata by the time his guest arrived. He sought Trumbull’s guidance for images of Shakespeare, Columbus, and others.

  A bond developed between the two men, growing by the day. They found they shared a reverence for the thinkers Isaac Newton and John Locke (Trumbull had copied their portraits years earlier, and Jefferson wanted to include them in his pantheon). After long days shared seeing the sights of Paris together, they would return to the Hôtel de Langeac with impressions of the art and architecture they had seen. A man famed for both his curiosity and his courtly manners, Jefferson was more interested in learning from others than in hearing the sound of his own voice. Here he had Trumbull to himself, in effect an artist-in-residence. Many of their enthusiasms beyond the world of art overlapped, too, as they saw in the signs of political unrest in France a welcome echo of the revolution in individual freedom that American independence represented.

  When the colonel arrived in Paris, his baggage included the two completed canvases that portrayed the battle scenes at Bunker Hill and Quebec. Primed by their earlier exchange in London, Jefferson was eager to see what Trumbull had wrought, and, as the painter reported, his host very much approved of “the first fruits of my national enterprise” and offered his “warm approbation.”26Jefferson went further, insisting the artworks be displayed to others in Paris, too. He spread the word across the Atlantic, writing some days later to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College. “A countryman of yours,” he advised Stiles, “has paid us a visit here, and brought with him two pictures which are the admiration of the Connoisseurs. His natural talents for this art seem almost unparalleled.”27

  Trumbull laid out his plans in detail for Jefferson. His hope was that he and the publisher di Poggi would be able to find a skilled artisan to engrave the images, in order that affordable prints could be offered for sale in America. His aspiration went beyond these two early battles, at both of which the British had prevailed. Trumbull planned to paint other revolutionary military scenes, specifically those at Princeton and Trenton, along with the surrenders at Saratoga and Yorktown, all confrontations from which the Continental Army emerged victorious. Jefferson became a partisan, believing whole-heartedly in Trumbull’s national work. He recognized that the paintings could open the eyes of countless Americans to the merit of history painting and enable them to contemplate the late, great days of the fight for independence.

  IN THE COMMODIOUS house near the city’s wall, a fresh idea came to them.

  They were seated in Mr. Jefferson’s library. Even when the sun had set, the room remained surprisingly bright, with candlelight reflecting off the decorative gilding, the lightly painted walls, and the mirrors in the room. Books were everywhere, since Jefferson was acquiring them at a rate approaching a book a day.

  As they talked of Trumbull’s series, a question made its way to the surface. It was a bit provocative in that it was contrary to the tradition of history painting. The general notion they floated was whether or not the subject matter of all of Trumbull’s history paintings had to be military.

  Both men knew the history of the war very well; in truth, General Washington’s genius had been to play the fox more often than the lion, choosing to disappear on numerous occasions rather than confront the superior force of his enemy. The Revolution certainly had had its essential military moments, but didn’t politics and even philosophy loom as large as the scenes filled with cannon and encampments? The war wasn’t an end in itself, after all, but a means of advancing the larger cause of individual freedom. Yet history paintings had traditionally relied upon well-known stories from classical antiquity, the Bible, or the pathos of a death scene or battle to provide emotional content.

  Perhaps the particular idea was Jefferson’s brainchild; undoubtedly it arrived with the power of an epiphany. But here it was: Why not record the events of July 4, 1776?

  The formulation suited both men nicely. For Jefferson, it was a memory, a defining moment for him and his country. He had fought in no battles, yet here he was the central figure in a truly heroic scene. For Trumbull, it became a great pictorial possibility. They talked of the circumstances. Jefferson volunteered as a witness and a participant to help Trumbull bring the scene to life on canvas. The challenge was, as Trum-bull saw it, “to convey an Idea of the Room in which congress sat.”

  Jefferson, no artist but eager to help, put pen to paper. On a small sheet, he drew a crude floor plan of the assembly room on the ground floor of the old State House in Philadelphia where the Continental Congress gathered. He indicated the position of the doors and the dais. Having examined what Jefferson sketched, Trumbull took up the pencil. Working on the facing half of the same sheet, he added to Jefferson’s rudimentary plan, and a more sophisticated rendering of the room emerged. Jefferson told Trumbull who had been in attendance, who played what role, and the artist began to people the sketch with the players. There were Adams and Franklin; and Jefferson; and John Hancock, too, the president of the Congress. When he needed a model for the president’s chair, Trumbull looked around him, and chose an oval-back fauteuil at hand in Jefferson’s salon at the Hôtel de Langeac. The two men, enraptured by the moment, planned the painting.

  The impromptu exchange that August day in 1786 was unprecedented. The chief image of the republic’s founding moment was conceived by a principal player and the man who would be the era’s most celebrated “graphic historiographer.” The work would prove to be Trum-bull’s best remembered (today it is reprinted on the back of the two-dollar bill) and the keystone of his reputation. It helped elevate the presenta
tion of the founding document to the status of a heroic battle. Trumbull’s carefully modulated history picture, with its array of Signers, imparts a sense of history being made.

  THOUGH CONCEIVED IN a moment, the painting took very much longer to complete. Trumbull returned to London in November by way of Frankfurt, Cologne, Liège, and Brussels, as he continued his search for an engraver. Once ensconced back at Mr. West’s studio in London, he set to work in earnest.

  “I resumed my labors . . . on the history of the Revolution,” he wrote, “arrang[ing] carefully the composition for the Declaration of Independence, and prepared it for receiving the portraits.”28He wanted his new history painting to be admired both as art and as a historically accurate record of the event commemorated. It wouldn’t be easy: The canvas, designed to be engraving-ready, was small, only twenty-one inches high and thirty-one inches wide, and it had to accommodate a crowd of Continental Congressmen. In the end, Trumbull would portray forty-six figures; fifty-six men signed the document, but Trumbull chose to incorporate the faces of four notable patriots who did not, omitting fourteen others.

  Most of these men were entirely unknown to Trumbull, and almost none was on the same side of the Atlantic as he. The following summer he painted John Adams directly onto the canvas, just prior to Adams’s return to America. The next winter Trumbull returned to Paris and painted in Jefferson. Only upon returning to the United States, a journey he was not yet ready to take, could he finish the painting; in fact, the work of completing The Declaration of In dependence, 4 July 1776 would be central to the next several years, the most productive of Trumbull’s artistic life.

  As for the man who helped Trumbull conceive the painting, Jefferson benefited, too. He had had little fame when he journeyed across the Atlantic in 1784. No portrait had been painted of him, and, if his ship had sunk, no likeness from life would have existed to remind us of his physiognomy. At the time his name was not well known to Eu rope ans, unlike those of George Washington or the widely popular Benjamin Franklin.

  In helping Trumbull plan the painting, Jefferson had played the dramaturge; in the painting itself, his was the lead role. The combined intelligence and experience of the two Americans in Paris, reveling in a rich artistic culture new to them, produced a unique work of art. Coming from a pragmatic land where drawing skills were more likely to be employed in surveying land than seeking beauty, a nation where painters were regarded as limners because almost no one saw the merits of any art beyond portraiture, Trumbull and Jefferson recognized that art could perform an important public function. Although it records a legislative moment rather than a military confrontation, The Declaration of Independence would ring out over the centuries louder than a cannon shot.

  III.

  1789–1792 . . . With General Washington . . . New York

  I ARRIVED IN New York on the 26th of November, 1789,” Trumbull wrote in his Autobiography many years later. He returned to America a more sophisticated artist, his six years of tutoring in the studio of Benjamin West at an end. As the Montgomery sailed into harbor, Trumbull’s confidence was at high ebb, buoyed by the enthusiasm of Jefferson. In the voluminous baggage stowed below decks were the several canvases of his planned “great work.” He had come home to complete them and to lay claim to the title of Artist of the Revolution.

  Once ashore, he called at No. 3 Cherry Street, the house Congress had rented as the presidential residence. Trumbull arrived with the perfect entrée, since, on a brief trip to Paris immediately before his return to America, he had met with the Marquis de Lafayette. Washington’s old comrade-in-arms and surrogate son had asked Trumbull to seek out Washington on his return. When he sat down with the man who had become the nation’s first president less than eight months earlier, Trum-bull “lost no time in communicating to him the state of political affairs, and the prospects of France, as explained to me by M. La Fayette.”29Just as Trumbull had been, Washington was curious about the storming of the Bastille, Lafayette’s new role as commander of the National Guard, and other particulars of the unfolding revolution in France.

  When they met that late November day in the three-story square house overlooking the mouth of the East River, Trumbull’s professional preoccupation was with the past. His desire was to obtain portraits to fill the “pockets” in the unfinished canvas of his Declaration of Independence. He had painted in the torsos of the players, arranging them as Jefferson recollected them, and now anticipated a series of journeys up and down the United States coast to Philadelphia, Charleston, Boston, and Newport, to Virginia and New Jersey. He wanted to paint the surviving participants from life, fitting their faces to the figures on canvas.

  Washington’s concern was the present. As they met that day on St. George’s Square, George, like his wife, Martha, was still adapting to large changes. She continued to refer to him in her letters as “the General,” a designation she preferred to others that had been bandied about of late (among those were two notions of John Adams’s, “His Elective Majesty” and “His Mightiness”).30Washington understood the title chosen for the office really would mean something. Symbolic though it might be, it had to describe the role that Washington inhabited, in deliberate contrast to King George III. It was also a part no one had ever before played.

  While Trumbull had been working at his Declaration in Georgian London, the second of his nation’s momentous documents, the United States Constitution, had been drafted at Philadelphia. Since then it had become the supreme law of their homeland, and Trumbull’s old commander in chief had assumed an unwanted and ill-defined set of responsibilities.

  ON HIS RETIREMENT to Mount Vernon at the war’s end in 1783, Washington had happily accepted the role of a latter-day Cincinnatus. Having led his army to victory, just as the Roman consul Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus had done in the fifth century B.C.E., Washington returned to farming, content to let others rule. He kept his distance from the political life of the country, although visitors to Mount Vernon in the mid-1780s met a man quick to cross-examine them on such subjects as Congress, commerce, and foreign relations. Washington, a habitual reader of newspapers, also maintained a copious correspondence with those still in the political fray, both at home and abroad. One of them, a former aide and sometime secretary, Colonel David Humphreys, recognized both the joy with which Washington welcomed his withdrawal to the “shades of private life” and the General’s near compulsion to be “the focus of political intelligence for the new world.”31While Washington had relinquished all claims on power, the progress of the political experiment he made possible continued to preoccupy him.

  The perspicacity of General Washington was hardly required to recognize how ineffectual the American government was. Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government had little money and less power. Though Washington dismissed the Confederation Congress as “a nugatory body,” when a convention was finally called to consider changing it, he spent months deciding whether or not to accept nomination as a Virginia delegate. At last he did, and, after traveling to Philadelphia, he was met with the inevitable (and unanimous) draft as its president on the convention’s first official day.

  From May to September 1787, he officiated at Pennsylvania’s State House in the same room where he had been appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army. This time he occupied the president’s chair on a low dais. Though he could have done, he did not dominate the proceedings; as presiding officer he took no liberties and made only one minor speech during the deliberations. He set the tone in subtle ways, always arriving punctually and missing no sessions. Behind the scenes he exerted influence (he maintained a close rapport with, among others, James Madison, one of the Constitution’s masterminds). Even so, as America’s peculiar experiment with democracy took shape, George Washington maintained a stoical public silence.

  Thirty-nine of the fifty-five constitutional delegates, including George Washington, eventually signed the draft document (three in attendance refused to endorse it, whil
e another thirteen had departed prior to the ceremony). The deed done, an impassive Washington climbed into his carriage and returned to Virginia. He did his best to stay out of the political crossfire, leaving the infighting to Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, who penned The Federalist Papers, writing collectively under the pseudonym Publius. Even without Washington’s intervention, month by month and state by state, the powers-that-be convened to consider ratification. Before the year ended four states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Georgia) had voted to ratify the document.

  The final adoption of the Constitution was by no means a foregone conclusion; intense opposition had to be overcome in some states. Yet as 1788 passed, the process seemed to be gaining momentum—January and February brought word of acceptance in Connecticut and Massachusetts— but Washington had very mixed feelings. Certainly he believed the approval of the Constitution was essential (he had earlier written to Patrick Henry, a potential opponent of the measure, “I wish the constitution, which is offered, had been more perfect; but . . . if nothing had been agreed on by [the federal convention], anarchy would soon have ensued, the seeds being deeply sown in every soil”).32As state conventions approved the draft document (Mary land joined the list in April), Washington recognized the looming, if indistinct, shape of a potential obligation. He wondered whether he could avoid being drafted as chief executive of the revised union.