by Hugh Howard
Announcements appeared in March in the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Time-Piece (published in New York). In August 1798 Bostonians who read the Columbian Centinel learned that “A number of plates of the elegant picture of the Washington family, are expected to arrive from Philadelphia in all September . . . The execution is wholly American; and . . . this plate is worthy to adorn the parlours of every house in the U. States.—It represents our late beloved PRESIDENT, his amiable Lady, and her two Grand-children . . . The likenesses are correct, and impressive— the drapery exact—and the engraving throughout masterly.”13
Washington himself ordered four freshly printed copies of the copperplate engraving. They came to him at Mount Vernon directly from Edward Savage. Per the general’s orders, the images had been mounted in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with glasses.”14In the letter that accompanied the prints, Savage explained, “I Delivered four of the best impressions of your Family Print. They are Chose out of the first that was printed. Perhaps you may think that [they] are two Dark, but they will Change light after hanging two or three months. The frames are good Sound work. I have Varnished all the Gilded parts which will Stand the weather and bare washing with a wet Cloth without injury.”
His explanation delivered, the artist could not help but confide in the man responsible how good business was. “[A]s soon as I got one of the prints Ready to be seen I advertised . . . that a Subscription would be open for about twenty Days. Within that time there was three hundred and thirty one Subscribers to the print and about one hundred had subscribed previously, all of them the most respectable people in the city. In consequence of its Success and being generally approved of I have continued the Subscription. There is every probability at present of its producing me at least ten thousand Dollars in one twelve month. As soon as I have one printed in Colours I shall take the Liberty to sent it to Mrs. Washington for her acceptance. I think she will like it better than a plain print.”15
Just a few years earlier, John Trumbull had encountered a great deal of trouble earning what he regarded as an acceptable living at the painting game, but Edward Savage demonstrated that it could be done. His artistic aspirations were less than those of some of his contemporaries. Compared to the likes of Peale and even Trumbull, he sought out less instruction and devoted less energy to mastering the art of painting. His likenesses seem competent, at best, when compared to the expressive paintings of his New England contemporary Gilbert Stuart. Even in his own era, his work was disparaged by America’s first art historian, William Dunlap. “Savage published prints from his own wretched pictures,” wrote Dunlap in his compendious two-volume History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834).16
Edward Savage may fall short of greatness as a painter—neither The Washington Family nor, for that matter, its antecedent, The Berkeley Group, is an inspiring painting. On the other hand, both grand paintings exist and have endured because of inspiring men. Following a path established by Smibert, Savage was able to do something his pre de ces sors could not do: He found an immense audience for his work. He became an art impresario, as much an entrepreneur as artist. His personality may have helped. In the miniature watercolor on ivory that he painted of himself, his complexion is ruddy, and he appears possessed of a sanguine disposition, with a smile at the ready. But his memory is ensured not by his character but for the popular appeal of his domestic view of Washington and the wide currency it achieved after the general’s death.
IN THE BIG painting of The Washington Family, Wash and Nelly looked like their current teenage selves, but in the Savage engraving begun years earlier, they reverted to childhood. The fifth member of The Washington Family, Washington’s valet and war-time companion, William Lee, hovers at the edge of the image, an almost spectral presence. In the caption printed at the foot of the engraving he isn’t even mentioned. His figure, set deeply into the picture space behind Martha’s chair, seems a worthy metaphor for the less-than-human status of a slave.
In October 1767 a Virginia widow sent some of her property to the auction block. Washington attended the sale and purchased “Mulatto Will” for sixty-one pounds, fifteen shillings, along with the boy’s brother, Frank, for fifty pounds. At the same auction, he also bought the “Negro boy Adam” for just nineteen pounds.17The disparity in prices was probably a function of skin color, since the destiny of dark-skinned slaves was usually to work in the fields, while those of mixed race were often favored for greater responsibilities as craftsmen or house servants.
Will’s precise birth date is uncertain, but he was about sixteen when Washington acquired him. Known as “Billy,” the young man soon won a position of trust. By 1770 he was traveling to Williamsburg at “publick time,” attending his master as his personal body servant during sessions of the House of Burgesses. He went to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress in 1774, and gradually acquired a degree of freedom few slaves were granted. A superb horse man like his master, he traveled with the General throughout the war, accompanying him on horseback and on foot, well armed and mounted, entrusted with carrying Washington’s telescope in its leather case. For twenty years he remained almost constantly at Washington’s side. He brushed his master’s long hair in the morning and tied it back firmly with a ribbon in the military manner. Depending upon Washington’s circumstances and needs, Will was his valet, huntsman, waiter, and butler. Respecting the man’s wishes, Washington took to referring to him as William and indulged the addition of the surname “Lee.” After the slave’s marriage during the war, Washington even attempted to arrange for Lee’s wife, Margaret Thomas, a free woman from Philadelphia, to come to Mount Vernon.
William Lee was helping Washington to survey his Four Mile Run tract in 1785 when the slave fell carrying the hundred-foot surveyor’s chain. According to Washington, Will “broke the pan of his knee.” He was able to accompany Washington to Philadelphia in 1787 for the Confederation Congress, but the following year he injured the other knee in a fall at the Alexandria Post Office. When Washington became president in 1789, Will set out for the new capital in New York. He got as far as Philadelphia, but his damaged knees forced him to quit the presidential caravan. After seeking medical treatment, he reached New York, but eventually he returned to Mount Vernon where, immobilized by his injuries, he practiced the cobbler’s craft. His singular status earned him a house near the Mansion. Probably an alcoholic, certainly crippled by his injuries, Lee in the coming years welcomed veterans of the late war who came to visit Washington but also stopped to converse with Will, reminiscing about battles or winter hardships.
The presence of an African-American servant in Savage’s picture bespoke artistic convention and an attempt to demonstrate the means and comfort of the Washingtons’ lives. Even so, it is impossible for us to look at this image without thinking of the General’s struggle to countenance human bondage in an era of new freedoms. The sitter certainly never discussed such matters with his recorders, but he felt the weight of the devoted service of “Mulatto Will” and of the bravery of black soldiers in the Continental Army. He had considered the passionate arguments of Lafayette and Lear, both of whom made cogent arguments for manumission. By the time Savage went public with his family portrait, Washington regarded Will Lee and all his slaves differently from the way he had been taught as a boy.
Few in the world into which George Washington was born had any scruples about slavery. It was legal in all thirteen colonies, but in the course of his life Washington wrestled with conflicting and evolving thoughts. As an adult he resolved never to break up a slave family, a practice that was all too widespread. He treated his slaves well (Lear: “The negroes [at Mount Vernon] are not treated as blacks in general are in this Country, they are clothed and fed as well as any labouring people whatever and they are not subject to the laws of a domineering Overseer—but still they are slaves”).18Washington worried about intermarriages between his slaves, over whom he had absolute control, and Martha’s
. He was moving toward the stunning resolution to free all his slaves, but he had no legal right to free Martha’s dower slaves unless he could persuade the Custis heirs (to whom they would revert at her death) to manumit them. That he was unable to do, and he knew it would divide families.
In Washington’s last will and testament the second person mentioned by name—after Martha—was a slave. “And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom.”19 Washington’s unambiguous words hang in the air when the viewer examines the slave in Savage’s image, dressed in livery, a little-noticed dark face.
I V.
1802 . . . The Columbian Gallery . . . The Pantheon . . . New York
THE PRESENCE OF someone else’s museum in Philadelphia—our old friend Charles Willson Peale operated his natural history and portrait museum in the Pennsylvania State House—helped persuade Edward Savage to try his luck in New York in 1802. He entered his name in the New York Directory that year as a “historical painter, at the Pantheon.” His new gallery, in a circular building formerly used as a circus on Greenwich Street, one block north of the Battery, soon outclassed the competition. Not only did he have his Washington Family on view, but his curiosities included a stuffed polar bear and an electric battery. The latter he used to deliver deliciously surprising shocks to his visitors.20
The Washington Family was among the two-hundred-plus paintings and prints he displayed; some were his own work, some not. They included a double portrait of John Hancock and his wife, one of the Philadelphia astronomer and mathematician David Rittenhouse, and another of Benjamin Franklin. A self-portrait of Benjamin West and a John Trumbull full-length of John Adams were also in the show, along with a rich mix of other images, including two Savage engravings of eruptions of Mounts Vesuvius and “Aetna.”21
Savage claimed the show offered “the richest collection of valuable paintings ever exhibited on the shores of Columbia.”22A writer in the newly established Morning Chronicle took issue with the installation. “The Proprietor of the Gallery[’s] . . . best pictures are placed so low as to render it impossible to have a good view of them, without lying flat on the floor.” That said, however, the pseudonymous Jonathan Oldstyle concluded, “The present collection is . . . in a good state of preservation and sufficiently interesting.”23
For admirers of George Washington, two items in addition to The Washington Family held especial interest. Architectural images were a rarity, but Savage displayed two oils of Mount Vernon. The renderings were primitive, their perspective askew and the scale distorted. But they offered a curious northern public the chance to view the General’s much admired Virginia property.
Washington had traveled to South Carolina in 1791 on a trip to the southern states (in 1789 he had ventured north) in which he sought to measure public opinion on the new government. At the same time Savage had been in Georgetown, outside Charleston, completing a portrait commission. Having resumed his acquaintance with Washington early that summer, Savage was undoubtedly among the stream of visitors who sought Washington’s hospitality at what the Virginian called his “well-resorted tavern” on his return north. During that visit, it seems, he drew the imposing house the president called home.
In composing one of the paintings, the artist placed the house almost in the background. The structure is central to the image but not large, seen from afar on its elevated site overlooking the Potomac. A sunrise sky, pastoral landscape, and multiple outbuildings suggest the manorial character of the general’s plantation. In turn, the fence and stone wall of the ha-ha help explain Washington’s marriage of the wild and civilized.
The second painting offered a reverse angle on the house. It reveals the west front overlooking the green expanse of Washington’s “bolling green.” The squire of Mount Vernon was consciously working in the tradition of such great English landscape gardeners as Lancelot “Capability” Brown (who got his name because he told clients that their grounds had unrealized “capabilities”). Washington, too, used plantings, the lawn, fences, outbuildings, and other elements as part of his composition.
The house is rendered with such care that it appears Savage’s original intention was to make a pure landscape; the two sets of figures on the green seem to be an added flourish and are crudely painted. Approximations of George and Martha stand with Nelly. A short distance away, Wash, two dogs, and a uniformed figure walk toward them. The composition is such that one’s eye is strangely drawn to the fuzzy oil splotches that are George and Martha. The grand house is framed by trees, but all has become a backdrop for the family.
For the New York audience the two-hundred-plus pictures must have seemed almost overwhelming, an unprecedented tide of images, wave upon wave of places and people. With the pictures hung floor-to-ceiling, with adjacent frames so close as almost to touch one another, a close examination of any one of them would have been difficult.
Taken together, however, Mr. Savage’s unique images of Mount Vernon and the Washingtons make them of inestimable value. The later addition of the figures to The West Front of Mount Vernon casts the painting in a distinctive historic light. Paintings appear to be permanent and static; but Savage peopled this landscape over time. He recorded the Mansion House first in 1791 on his Virginia visit, but he must have added (or at least amended) the figures that walk toward the viewer much later, many miles from Mount Vernon (Nelly and Wash are quite evidently older than ages ten and twelve, as they would have been in 1791). Savage didn’t merely illustrate what he saw; the image has been staged in the way a scenic director imagines his design.
The genius of the piece for which he is best remembered, The Washington Family, offers Savage’s most essential insight: He understood that his public—which was merely a slice of Washington’s much larger constituency—wanted to see Washington in his context. The Washington Family and The West Front of Mount Vernon are very different paintings. One is a modified architectural, the other a conversation piece, but together they provide a sense of Washington at home, and a picture of his home at a distance. The same figures are seen, but they are distributed and portrayed differently. The artist has provided two dumb shows, different yet complementary, which offer an original and dynamic interplay.
Those who saw Mr. Savage’s images came away with the sense that they knew the General a great deal better: This was no monarch; no formal audience was required to see this man. He was a family man, not so different from the million other men in households in America at the turn of the nineteenth century. To understand the General, who revealed so little about his private feelings, it was a useful, if imperfect, portal.
CHAPTER 8
Stuart Slouches Toward Philadelphia
I heard West say that “he nails the face to the canvas.”
—William Temple Franklin
I.
1793 . . . A Sunday in the Country . . . Stillorgan Farm
WHEN HE LOOKED at his pigs, the ruminative Gilbert Stuart could not help but recognize how well his time in Ireland had served him. The fields and animals on his modest farm were reminiscent of the life he had known as a boy in Rhode Island. Within the confines of his own gates, he tended his gardens and flowerpots. Here he was a farmer, more concerned with feeding his pigs (he gave them apples from his own fruit trees) than with the Dublin bailiffs who might come knocking to collect some overdue debt.
For Stuart, this cottage in a nobleman’s deer park was the perfect escape from Ireland’s capital. As other droll companions had in London in previous years, Dublin’s poets, musicians, actors, and authors had proved irresistible to Stuart, and he had the bills to show for it. He owed the butcher, the baker, and the wine merchant. But his new life here in the country, though hardly solitary, suited him and his wife, Charlotte, and their growing brood of children. Another man might have been happy to remain on the farm on this headland at Black Rock, but as he looked out at the Irish Sea toward Holyhead, Stuart knew that circumstances were conspiring to send him back to America.
Arriving from England six years before, he had been utterly charmed by Ireland. Like the artist himself, Dublin was on the threshold of world-class status. The rationalized grid of wide streets that he walked was dotted with construction sites. Almost everywhere he saw grand neoclassical buildings. Trinity College had an elegant new face, almost one hundred yards long, with a tall portico at its center. Nearby stood the columned arcades of Parliament House. The Rotunda Hospital had been the first purpose-built lying-in hospital in the British Isles, and the costs of its operation were defrayed by the sumptuous Assembly Rooms, where the landed gentry met to eat, dance, and amuse one another in the elegant Round and Supper Rooms. On the banks of the River Liffey stood the grandest building, the Custom House, with its tall dome. New buildings all, they redefined the port city and its growing prosperity.
Stuart had journeyed to Ireland at the behest of no less a personage than Sir Joshua Reynolds, still one of the leading portraitists in England and president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The aging Sir Joshua, already deaf and with his eyesight fading, was reluctant to embark on the long trip over land and sea, so he asked Stuart to go in his stead to execute a commission for one of his patrons. The thirty-one-year-old Stuart agreed and, though the portrait of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Rutland, never came to pass (no sooner had Stuart appeared in Dublin in the fall of 1787 than the duke died suddenly of a “putrid fever”), Stuart’s prospects hadn’t been diminished. The painter’s fortuitous arrival had proved to be just what the city’s nabobs desired, and within weeks the Dublin Evening Herald proclaimed, “Mr. Stewart, an English gentleman lately arrived in the metropolis, excels in his delicacy of coloring and graceful attitudes . . . and has a happy method of disposing his figures and at the same time preserving a strong resemblance.”1The writer spelled his name incorrectly and confused his country of origin (Stuart had arrived from a twelve-year residence in London), but had no difficulty finding the words to praise the painter’s talents.
