by Hugh Howard
John Adams soon offered encouragement. His was a double request, as the vice president wanted portraits of both Martha and George. The chief executive duly obliged both the painter and Adams, sitting again on April 6, 1790. Savage made quick work of the assignment, and, just eleven days later, he delivered the pair of canvases. Along with the finished paintings came a bill to “The Vice President of the United States [for] forty Six Dollars & 2/3rds for a portrait of The President of the United States & His Lady.”4
During that winter Savage also took images of George and Martha’s wards, Nelly and Wash, then ages eleven and nine. He also made a third version of the General’s portrait, which he kept for his own reference. But it was another canvas, one that drew upon all of Savage’s Washington family images, which would distinguish the work of the enterprising artist in the years to come.
Like most of the other painters in his generation, Savage had felt the influence of the late John Smibert. His indebtedness was more direct and, in a literal sense, even larger than that owed by some of the other painters. The picture that gained Savage enduring fame (and substantial profit) can be traced directly back to the grandest of Smibert’s canvases.
Savage’s great notion was inspired by The Bermuda Group. He would echo the painting’s composition (framing his foreground figures with columns, together with a landscape view at the back of the picture space) and even its palette (the muted reds, browns, greens, and blues).
Savage knew the big oil that remained longer than all the others in Smibert’s Painting Room on Queen Street. To that address, then, we must return.
II.
1729–1731 . . . Group Portrait . . . Dean Berkeley and His Entourage
GEORGE BERKELEY LOOKS distracted. Only a moment ago, it appears, he waxed philosophical while his admiring friend, John Wainwright, scratched the older man’s thoughts into a manuscript book. Now, still leaning forward in his chair with quill in hand, the scribe waits for Berkeley to resume his discourse. But the churchman—a tall, heavy-set man in black cassock and long clerical collar—stares into the distance.
The two men are not alone. Anne Foster, Berkeley’s wife, sits next to her standing husband, attired in an elegant yellow dress. Their young son, Henry, plays on his mother’s lap, a peach in his hand. Anne’s companion, Miss Handcock, sits on her other side, looking at mother and child, and two gentlemen stand behind the seated figures. One leans on the back of Miss Handcock’s chair; the other looks over Mr. Wainwright’s shoulder at his jottings.
Believable as it may appear, this scene never could have taken place. The “Large picture,” commissioned by “Mr. Wainwright, Esq.,” was begun by John Smibert in England in “Juley” of 1728.5 After making some preliminary portraits (including Wainwright’s), Smibert packed up his sketches and departed with Dean Berkeley’s entourage when they embarked on their transatlantic voyage on September 4. Wainwright, an admirer of Berkeley and a patron of Smibert, gave Smibert ten guineas as a first payment for the painting, but he did not accompany the group on their journey to the Americas on their educational mission.
After the party reached America, the painting remained unfinished for several years. In that time young Henry Berkeley joined the party—the small boy had not even been conceived in the summer of 1728, since Anne Foster gave birth to him late the following spring in Newport, Rhode Island. Smibert probably added the toddler to the composition when he visited Berkeley and company in January 1731. That would have been shortly before the other members of the Bermuda group made their journey back across the Atlantic. Smibert’s picture thus became a record of an imaginary moment, fixing in time the life and death of a dream. Wainwright had commissioned the group portrait to commemorate Berkeley’s great adventure, but by the time he forwarded to Boston the balance due Smibert for its completion (thirty guineas), Berkeley’s grand plan for a North American university had been abandoned.
Still, Smibert’s conversation piece had its own closely reasoned plan. The artist located his friends in front of the shafts of three classical columns. Seen in the distance is a rocky seascape with tall pine trees. Quite simply, the cultured Eu rope ans standing before us, shaded by a classical building, have arrived in an untamed landscape. The painter’s friends are actors in a play that was halted halfway through its composition.
While Berkeley’s grand scheme faded like a sailor’s red sky, the big painting—it was the largest American canvas of its time—remained on view in Smibert’s studio. The canvas was much more than just big. Writ large in its pigments were Berkeley’s ambitions, conveyed in a work that, for its day, was highly sophisticated. Smibert himself must have recognized its greatness, as it is the one of his hundreds of American works that he chose to sign.
For decades, the life-size figures on the canvas witnessed a parade of visitors strolling past, although the never-to-be college in Bermuda faded into obscurity. If sheer size was part of the picture’s power, it was singular in other ways, too. Before The Bermuda Group, no artist in America had succeeded in painting a group portrait. Almost no one else had even tried to paint more than two people on a single canvas. The usual preference was for single figures painted actual size. It made more sense to paint paired or “pendant” portraits, rather than to memorialize a couple together, given the average life expectancy and, in particular, the frequency with which women died in childbirth. Smibert’s big picture was an exception, a sophisticated illusion, an entirely plausible rendition of a scene with life-size figures. His portrayal of his brave English band was so persuasive that at least two young American artists in Smibert’s lifetime were inspired to paint large family portraits that were unmistakably derived from The Bermuda Group.6
When Copley began to paint in earnest after Smibert’s death, the small range of artistic references available to him included the works in Smibert’s studio. From The Bermuda Group, he unashamedly borrowed the pose of the two women for an early painting. Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull also painted conversation pieces of their families after seeing Smibert’s canvas. Though they didn’t copy Smibert’s work, his vision of his Bermuda-bound colleagues was certainly their first introduction to a group painting.7For each of them the experience of Mr. Smibert’s group painting made such a painting seem a natural conceit.
Not so many years later, along came another painter, the young Massachusetts-born Edward Savage. He would turn out his own conversation piece, but his subject would be a grander family—not his but the nation’s—and his painting and the uncounted prints and other copies made of it would help define America’s indispensable man for his countrymen.
III.
1791-1793 . . . London
EDWARD SAVAGE MOVED to London to advance his new craft. Like other aspiring American artists, he sought out Benjamin West, who had just been elevated to the presidency of the Royal Academy. In that foreign capital, Savage thought he could master the profitable art of engraving. When he arrived, his skills were no more than rudimentary, but by early 1792 he was able to publish a good-quality stipple engraving based upon the George Washington he had painted for Harvard College. The General looked his age (Washington turned sixty just as the print was issued), with a somber dignity.
Savage continued his painting, making a variant portrait of Washington, this one portraying the Virginian as a statesman rather than a soldier. The uniform has vanished; instead, Washington wears a black velvet coat, with wrist ruffles and a lace jabot at the neck. In this three-quarter view, he is seated at a table and holds in his hands a document distinguishable as the plan for the new Federal City (though the man himself would always have difficulty bringing himself to call it “Washington,” the new capital had recently been given that name). Savage published this portrait, too, as a print, extending his artistic reach once more by engraving the image as a mezzotint. But its significance would prove to be as a stage in the development of a much bigger painting.
Prior to leaving New York two years earlier, Savage had begun work o
n an easily portable oil study—it was eighteen and a half inches high by twenty-four inches wide—of a very different picture. This was the Washington family group, which, he later told Washington, he had also begun transferring to a copper plate. The image was still taking shape in his mind, and, during his London days, Savage kept the canvas and the copper plate near at hand. At odd moments he returned to them, altering the figure of Washington to coincide with the three-quarters portrait. He incorporated the map of the Federal City, and the mezzotint of Washington and the canvas also came to share the same backdrop. He added the base of a Doric column and a bulky swagged curtain to the work in progress. During his stay in London, Savage added a fifth figure, too, a slave in livery standing at the periphery of the family group. For a model he used the black manservant of the American minister to the Court of St. James’s.
This project—Savage called it The Washington Family—became the one on which he placed his greatest expectations. His hopes for The Washington Family grew as he observed the newest currents in the London art world. He was learning about more than engraving, taking careful note of the fashion for mounting an exhibition that consisted of a single large work, usually a history painting, which portrayed a contemporary hero. One of the most successful practitioners of the painting show was Savage’s émigré countryman, John Singleton Copley, who had taken to installing his newest large-scale painting in a grand frame that resembled the proscenium arch of a theater. Savage had arrived in London in time to join the queue to see Copley’s Siege of Gibraltar. Some sixty thousand customers that spring had paid to see the immense canvas (it was eighteen by twenty-three feet) that commemorated a 1781 naval battle, in which the English garrison holding the strategic Rock of Gibraltar had held off the combined forces of forty-eight French and Spanish ships. George III and his queen had been among those who viewed the heroic painting in its eighty-five-foot-long “magnificent Oriental tent” in Green Park. To Savage, the notion of audiences numbering in the thousands paying a shilling each to view such a spectacle seemed an appealing business model, particularly when compared with his recollections of his father’s struggle to extract a thin living from the rocky soils of Princeton, Massachusetts.8
I V.
February 22, 1796 . . . The Columbian Gallery . . . Philadelphia
WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY? TO Savage, it seemed the perfect symmetry. While Savage was abroad, the President had been reelected for a second term, and, despite growing political disagreements between his Federalist Party and the opposition Democratic-Republicans, Washington’s status had hardly diminished. It was Savage’s profound hope that the birthday timing would benefit a project that had required six years to mature. Now, with its paint still drying, the canvas was going on display.
Savage had returned to America with big plans for promoting his art. In May 1794, Savage opened an exhibit in Boston that he called the Columbian Exhibition of Pictures and Prints. Later that year, with his fortunes on the rise, he married a Boston girl, Sarah Seaver. By 1795, when he opened the doors to his Columbian Gallery in Philadelphia, he and Sarah were the proud parents of a namesake son, Edward. His brother was already established as a successful merchant in Philadelphia, and Savage had decided to try the American capital, too, welcoming the public to a display that featured “a large collection of ancient and modern Paintings and Prints.”9
There being no equivalent of the Royal Academy in the United States, public art exhibitions were virtually unheard of in America. Charles Willson Peale had hung the upper walls of his Museum with his portraits, but his painted worthies were often overlooked by patrons absorbed by the natural history specimens and other curiosities in the cases beneath. Mr. Savage’s exhibition also featured something quite new and different. As his countryman Copley had done in London, Savage would display a large canvas that offered viewers an almost life-size experience. The centerpiece of Savage’s Columbian Gallery was to be his magnum opus: On its patriarch’s birthday, The Washington Family would have its debut.
He had completed The Washington Family in a new incarnation. Years earlier he had begun small, but during his two years abroad, his ambition—and a second version of the painting—had grown larger. He now hoped to make a splash in America as great as Copley had done in London. The Washingtons on his new canvas were as big as life, and the canvas itself stood seven feet tall and nine and a half feet wide.
Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1795, he found much had changed in America, including two of the players in his big conversation piece. Wash and Nelly, the Washington grandchildren, were no longer the youngsters they had been in 1790. Nelly had become a young woman, widely admired for her beauty and intelligence, and Wash, just entering his teens, had grown perhaps a foot taller. In order to make his painting current for the public, Savage had scheduled new sittings at which he overpainted the earlier likenesses, making the girlish Nelly taller and giving her a more womanly figure (her seventeenth birthday was just a month away). Savage modified her younger brother’s countenance. He also changed the portrayal of the servant, making him taller and older so that he would resemble more closely Washington’s trusted wartime servant William Lee.
The painting’s long gestation had allowed Savage to incorporate an array of symbolic elements into the picture, which he hoped would add to its allure. He had conceived it in the tradition of The Bermuda Group and other group portraits he had seen in his travels, but he wanted his conversation piece to have the appeal of a grand history painting, too. Washington had become one of the world’s most admired personages, and nowhere was he more esteemed than in America, where, in that brief historic moment before political parties evolved, he had been unanimously elected the nation’s president. So Savage larded his canvas with reverential clues to Washington’s world. In a later description he offered his own gloss on the painting’s iconography.
“The General is seated by a table,” explained Savage, “drest in his uniform, which represents his Military Character; his left arm rests on papers which are suitable to represent his Presidentship; Mrs. Washington, sets at the other end of the table, holding the Plan of the Federal City, pointing with her fan to the grand avenue; Miss Custis stands by her side assisting in showing the plan; George Washington [Custis] stands by the Gen. his right hand resting on a globe.”10
Savage dared hope that picture-viewing could become a popular diversion in America, just as it had in England. He announced that his gallery show would open on “Chestnut-street, third door West of Tenth-Street.” He sought to up the ante for his show by opening on Washington’s birthday, a date that was already emerging as a suitable day of recognition for the aging General. Washington neared retirement— despite uncountable entreaties, he had refused to be a candidate for president a third time—so barely a year remained before another man would take the oath of office, assuming the role that no one else had held and that Washington had defined.
Those who attended on February 22, 1796, were asked to pay an admission fee of “one quarter of dollar.” They came to look and to celebrate the President’s sixty-fourth birthday, but they got something they did not expect. The experience of the Washington group portrait was unprecedented; there were few such conversation pieces in America, and no other of public figures. Its creator had advertised the event two days before the opening as “the President and Family, the full size of Life.”11
As Smibert had done with Dean Berkeley, Savage had placed Washington off center. The old General sits back in his red, brocade-upholstered chair, his legs crossed at the knees, with his left hand resting on the tabletop before him. His body appears relaxed but his face does not; Washington’s jaw is set and he stares determinedly away from the viewer (remember, he never lost his dislike of having his picture taken). Sitting opposite her husband, Martha is her gracious self, wrapped in the voluminous folds of a fine silk dress and a black lace shoulder scarf. Her upright posture and beribboned mobcap make her seem taller than she appears in her other portraits. Like h
er husband, she looks distracted, but her composed features nevertheless convey the kindness for which she was renowned. Nelly stands at her grandmother’s side, a pretty young woman with thick red hair and a fair complexion. Still a boy, the standing Wash barely reaches the shoulder of his seated grandfather. This casual arrangement of the family gives the vignette a relaxed air. So does the fifth and final figure, the liveried slave half hidden in the shadows behind Martha.
For those who came to see it, the effect of Savage’s Family was unique and fresh, and not just because of its size and the presence of the assembled Washingtons. The audience found a larger American vision. Here was Washington as general, president, planter, world figure, and, perhaps freshest of all, as paterfamilias, all rolled into one. This was Washington, a childless man yet a father to these children and a Founding Father too. The attentive viewer perceived that the subject of the painting was twofold. Behind the people, the country is represented; it’s not George Washington at the center of the piece, but a vista of America’s natural beauty that is the focal element. The grander theme of America and its possibilities adds depth to an image that, initially, appears to be a portrait of a family unit, one with which almost any father and husband could identify.
The painting was widely admired. It was an immediate hit in Philadelphia, and in later exhibitions when Savage took it on the road, New Yorkers and Bostonians found it admirable and even moving. Savage saw to it that his work was soon on view even for those unable or unwilling to travel. In the spring of 1798, he announced publication of the copperplate engraving of The Washington Family. “The print, representing General Washington and Family, all whole lengths in one groupe, will be ready for delivery by the 15th of March.” The plate that went to press bore not only the image but also an identifying label, in English, that was repeated in French. Savage hoped his work would gain international distribution, and he employed a skilled engraver, David Edwin, a young English émigré who had trained in London and Amsterdam. Finished prints would cost one and a half guineas for those who subscribed in advance; latecomers would pay two guineas.12
