The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  He was hardly alone in worrying about the matter; his implied candidacy was apparent even to an observer three thousand miles away, the Marquis de Lafayette. Replying to the man whom he regarded almost as a son, Washington wrote in April 1788, “In answer to the observation you make [in your last letter] on the probability of my election to the presidency, knowing me as you do, I need only say, that it has no enticing charms and no fascinating allurements for me. However, it might not be decent for me to say I would refuse to accept, or even to speak much about an appointment, which may never take place . . . [but] at my time of life and under my circumstances, the increasing infirmities of nature and the growing love of retirement do not permit me to entertain a wish beyond that of living and dying an honest man on my own farm.”33Five months later the Constitution had become law, and Washington wrote to another old friend, General Henry Lee: “[M]y inclinations will dispose and decide me to remain as I am, unless a clear and insurmountable conviction should be impressed on my mind, that some very disagreeable consequences must, in all human probability, result from the indulgence of my wishes.”34As the elective mechanisms of the new document swung into motion, Washington’s thinking evolved; I’d really rather not became Must I?

  He continued to wait at Mount Vernon as if the outcome was in doubt, assuming the guise of a typical farmer occupied by concerns about atypical weather conditions and the estate’s disappointing harvests. Yet in answering the many inquiries from old friends about the presidency, he gradually assumed a tone of resigned acceptance. In a January 1789 letter to Lafayette he wrote, “Should circumstances render it in a manner inevitably necessary, . . . I shall assume the task with the most unfeigned reluctance.”35He repeated the same sentiment in other letters, but by March he wrote to a nephew, “[I]t is probable I shall be under the necessity of quitting this place, and entering once more into the bustle of pub-lick life, in conformity to the voice of my Country and the earnest entreaties of my friends, however contrary it is to my own desire or inclinations.”36If had become When.

  The Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, arrived on April 14, 1789, to read him the Senate president’s letter informing him of his official election. Ever conscious of propriety, Washington had drafted an acceptance speech. He read it to Thomson as they stood, face to face, in the New Room, the grandest space at Mount Vernon.

  Two days later Washington embarked on a week-long journey to the nation’s capital in New York. Along the way he was met at almost every hamlet and crossroad by speeches, parades, toasts, banquets, and huzzahs. In Philadelphia alone twenty thousand people turned out to cheer the new president, who, mounted on a white charger, passed beneath a celebratory arch of triumph designed by Charles Willson Peale.

  Washington was sworn in as the nation’s first president on April 30, 1789, though even in the days before, he confided his reluctance to a friend. He wrote to his old artillery commander, General Henry Knox (soon to become his secretary of war), “My movement to the Chair of Government, will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”37

  As the year 1789 ended, Washington was peopling his cabinet, delegating responsibilities to able men (Hamilton had accepted treasury with alacrity, though Jefferson remained coy about the office of secretary of state). He worried over his advancing age. Though not yet fifty-eight, the previous summer he had been forced to consider his mortality when a persistent fever and a growth on his thigh had meant surgery. The procedure to remove the large tumor required a deep incision, without anesthesia. At the time, Washington told Dr. Samuel Bard, “I am not afraid to die and therefore can bear the worst.” Almost as soon as he returned to work (he spent forty days reclining painfully on a settee, unable to sit at his desk) word reached him of his mother’s death of cancer of the breast.

  TRUMBULL WAS A man on a mission, and he seemed to be progressing nicely toward his objective.

  His completed canvases for the two battles early in the war were at hand, together with his Declaration, a work in progress. Three other American history paintings were under way too, each commemorating a well-remembered victory. The first, The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, would portray the victorious General Washington at Trenton on the morning after the nighttime crossing of the Delaware on December 26, 1776. In the second, The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, Mercer’s horse has been shot from beneath him, and, his sword raised, he attempts to defend himself against a British grenadier poised to deliver the mortal wound with his bayonet. Washington is at center, in the middle distance, where the battle rages. Mercer will die, but Washington, with a fearless disregard for his own safety, will lead his men to a crucial victory. The third canvas, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, depicts the British forces marching between two lines of the victorious American troops under Washington’s watchful gaze.

  While still in Eu rope, Trumbull had sought out Rochambeau, Lafayette, and other French officers and recorded them for Yorktown, just as he had done with Jefferson and Adams for his Declaration. Now, back in America, he desired a variety of other American likenesses, too. After a visit to his family in Connecticut (during which he worked in India ink at a sketch for Trenton) he returned to New York in the company of his brother Jonathan, a member of their state’s delegation to Congress.

  With the House of Representatives in session, Trumbull was able to begin recording elder statesmen and some of the military personages who had fought at the battles he was putting on canvas. With the graying of the Founding Fathers (fourteen Signers were already dead), Trum-bull had grown “fully sensible of the precariousness as well as the value of many other lives,” so he worked as quickly as he could.38But the figure he needed most of all—for Princeton, Trenton, and Yorktown—was General Washington on horse back.

  On January 14 a dinner invitation brought Trumbull back to Cherry Street, where he was the president’s guest along with two senators and nine members of the House of Representatives (including his brother). Although he was the only guest not in the government, he managed to advance the cause of his historic work by returning the kind invitation of his host and hostess, asking them to do him the honor of inspecting his paintings. The following week, on January 23, Washington recorded in his diary, “Went with Mrs. Washington in the forenoon to see the Paintings of Mr. Jno. Trumbull.” Washington liked what he saw, and that very day Trumbull went public with his project.

  In a New York newspaper, Gazette of the United States, the artist announced his plan to print thirteen engravings.39Having agreed to lend his likeness, Washington assumed the Painter’s Chair for Trum-bull for the first time on Wednesday, February 20, noting in his diary, “Sat from 9 until 11 o’clock for Mr. Trumbull to draw my picture in his historical pieces.” They resumed that Friday, then had three more sessions the following week. Work slowed slightly as the Washingtons moved housekeeping to 39 Broadway. With its two drawing rooms, the much larger Macomb House better suited the family’s entertaining needs. Washington received diplomats, politicians, and other visitors at the weekly Presidential Levees on Tuesday afternoons, while Martha greeted ladies and gentlemen for more casual conversation at Drawing Room Receptions Friday evenings. There was even space for a Painting Room for Trumbull when he came to work.

  For the March 1 session, they varied the process. “Exercised on horseback this forenoon,” noted Washington in his diary, “attended by Mr. John Trumbull, who wanted to see me mounted.” Trumbull was closing in on what he needed, and on April 2 he published a broadside that described in full his big project and solicited buyers. He needed subscribers to underwrite the production costs of the engraving. The artist and di Poggi had commissioned Johann Gotthard von Müller of Stuttgart, Germany, to commence work on the plate for Bunker’s Hill, a deal that had been reached before Trumbull returned the previous fall. The cost would be more than a thousand guineas, and Trumbull hoped that people would order in advance, putting money down and en
abling him to commission more engravings as he completed the paintings.

  Trumbull waited. When, after three days, he had received no subscriptions, he experienced what he himself described as “a fit of the Dumps.”40His spirits rebounded when the first orders did arrive and, in the days thereafter, his subscription list came to include the names of the president, vice president, New York’s Governor George Clinton, and various senators and representatives. Emboldened by the sales and his ten painting sessions with Washington, Trumbull went off to Philadelphia for two months, looking to collect both missing likenesses for his Declaration and to solicit additional subscribers.

  WHEN TRUMBULL RETURNED, he prevailed upon Washington again, and on July 6, Washington wrote in his diary entry, “I sat for Mr. Trumbull to finish my pictures in some of his historical pieces.” After a fashion—both men were reserved—they had become friends. As a student of the world, Washington found the well-traveled artist an informative and thoughtful companion. Trumbull appreciated that, during the time spent with Washington, he had been the recipient of “many civilities which added the endearment and affection of personal feelings to the reverential respect which his public character always commanded from all men.”41Trumbull also recognized that the best way to thank Washington for his time and trouble was to gratify Mrs. Washington.

  With her husband’s cooperation Trumbull began work on a canvas that, though small, portrayed a full-length image of Washington. In a sense, it was to be a painted-from-life version of his London portrait a decade earlier, only this time he didn’t have to work from memory or imagination. He now knew the look of this man intimately, after having watched him at his own table managing a roomful of politicians. He had studied his maneuvers on horseback, seeing for himself the grace and ease with which Washington rode. While remaining somewhat in awe of him, Trumbull had come to know Washington as a social peer. Trumbull had seen Washington at war and in government; he had observed him charming the ladies and listening in stony silence to the words of his advisers.

  For his gift to Martha, Trumbull chose to paint Washington not on horseback but standing beside a tall white steed. He selected as his backdrop Verplanck’s Point on the Hudson River, some thirty miles above New York, where King’s Ferry linked New England and the colonies to the south. It had been a strategic site during the Revolution when the British held New York, but Trumbull rendered it as a quiet waterscape on a low horizon. In Trumbull’s Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown scenes, Washington was one officer among many. In this portrait nothing would distract from Mrs. Washington’s husband.

  As he had with his histories, Trumbull took great pains with the minutiae of Washington’s military dress. He always accumulated research, working from detailed sketches and notes regarding the landscape, the soldiers, and their equipment. This time, with Washington front and center, he could concentrate on such details as the uniform buttons, the spurs, and the straps and buckles on the horse furniture. He was able to paint from one of Washington’s actual uniforms. (Once a soldier, always a soldier: In his first public appearance after recovering from his surgery he had come to the door of his Cherry Street house on July 4, 1789, dressed “in a suit of regimentals.”)42

  Still, it was the man, not his uniform or other accouterments, that made this painting an instant heirloom, one that Martha would leave as a specific bequest to a granddaughter and that would later pass from one family hand to another. The artist signed his named simply—“J. Trumbull | 1790”—before presenting the canvas, as he said, “con amore . . . as an offering of grateful respect . . . to Mrs. Washington.”43He had succeeded in rendering on canvas better than anyone the latent physical power of Washington.

  EVEN BEFORE TRUMBULL completed the gift for Martha, the painting won the plaudits of others. Mayor Richard Varick was among its admirers, and he decided New York needed its own George Washington. Only his desire was less modest in scale: The big city needed a life-size version, he told Trumbull. The painting he commissioned would stand nine feet tall and six feet wide.

  Although the New York version portrayed the General and his handsome mount much as Trumbull had painted them for Mrs. Washington (Washington did not sit for this public portrait, so Trumbull copied Mrs. Washington’s smaller version), the painter did vary the mise en scène. He portrayed lower Broadway in ruins and British ships leaving the shore. He was commemorating the evacuation of New York in 1783 by the invading forces that had occupied the city since 1776. It was Washington the victorious, towering over the retreating vanquished.

  Trumbull received commissions for other Washington portraits in the next several years, among them one for the city of Charleston, South Carolina. He painted the battle at Trenton into the immediate background, blending his portraiture and history painting styles. He was pleased with the result, calling the painting “the best certainly of [the Washington portraits] I painted, and the best, in my estimation, which exists in his heroic military character.”44The town fathers disagreed and rejected the painting. They wanted a more placid Washington. Trumbull obliged.

  His history paintings progressed slowly (The Declaration of In de pen-dence wasn’t completed until 1820). Although his labors as a painter were widely admired, the results still proved disappointing to the sensitive artist. Had he been able to find just five hundred subscribers willing to pay a guinea and a half for each of the prints as his engravings became available, he might have been able to live comfortably, though not opulently, in the manner of the social class he had been brought up in. When he did not, after investing some twenty years in becoming a painter, he abruptly abandoned painting in 1794. He accepted an invitation from John Jay to become his secretary on the Jay Treaty Commission in London and sailed back across the Atlantic. He would remain abroad for ten years.

  His long-promised engravings of Bunker’s Hill and Quebec appeared in 1797, and, though he resumed painting in 1800, he would never regain his artistic passion. As he confided in a letter to a Connecticut friend, “I feel at times not a little anxiety on the Subject of picture making.” It would never provide him a sufficient income (“I have by no means money eno: to live comfortably without business of some sort”), and he hated the fact that art remained unappreciated in America. As he summed it up, “my Countrymen care very little for the only thing which I pretend to understand.”45

  CHAPTER 7

  “The Washington Family”

  The Likenesses of the young people are not much like what they are at present . . . [but] the portrait of your Self and Mrs. Washington are generally thought to be likenesses.

  —Edward Savage, writing to George Washington, June 3, 1798

  I.

  Winter 1789–1790 . . . 3 Cherry Street . . . Manhattan Island

  LIKE MANYAN OTHER New England country boy, Edward Savage set off to make his fortune in New York. Born on a farm in central Massachusetts, he had spent several years in Boston learning to paint, and his facility was such that he found patrons willing to pay him to copy other people’s canvases, including the sophisticated work of John Singleton Copley. He had begun to receive local portrait commissions, too, but as he walked along Cherry Street in early December 1789, his twenty-eighth birthday a recent memory, he had a bigger plan in mind.

  Savage had adopted the fashion of powdering his hair. When the goldsmith-turned-artist arrived at the doorstep of the President’s Mansion, the whiteness of his hair set off his dark brown eyes. He felt confident of his reception since he carried a letter of introduction from Joseph Willard, president of Harvard College. The addressee was George Washington.

  “When you were in the Philosophy Chamber of the University in this place,” Washington soon read, “you may perhaps remember, that I expressed my wishes, that your Portrait might, some time or other, adorn that Room. Since [then], Mr. Savage, the Bearer of this, who is a painter and is going to New York, has called on me and of his own accord has politely and generously offered to take your portrait for the University, if you will be
so kind as to sit.”1

  Washington, by now all too familiar with such requests, sent Wil-lard a courteous letter. “I am induced, Sir, to comply with this request from a wish that I have to gratify, so far as with propriety may be done, every reasonable desire of the Patrons and promotors of Science.”2

  To accommodate Willard, Washington took a seat in the Painter’s Chair several times during that holiday season for the unknown Mr. Savage. The third and last of the sessions before the easel occurred on the morning of Twelfth Night, January 6, 1790, George and Martha’s wedding anniversary. By then a recognizable likeness had emerged on the canvas, with the deep-set dark blue eyes, long nose, and the fleshy jowls of a man married thirty-one years.

  The thirty-inch-by-twenty-five-inch oil would be delivered to Harvard later that year. Many who saw it expressed their admiration. Josiah Quincy thought the portrait “the best likeness” he had ever seen of Washington, even though he went on to observe that “its merits as a work of art are but small.”3But well before the bust portrait made its way to Cambridge, Savage had conceived a plan whereby that first picture, executed gratis, might be the means of launching a more profitable enterprise. A man of entrepreneurial instincts, he recognized that a market existed for images of this admirable man, about whom so many were curious.