The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  The Peales, themselves partisans in the portrait game, might be expected to snipe at the new competition in town. But Stuart, too, remained discontented with this portrait of a preoccupied president whose mind looked to be elsewhere, and he was far from finished with taking Washington’s likeness.

  III.

  Winter 1796 . . . Philadelphia

  GEORGE WASHINGTON WELCOMED anything that reminded him of retirement. Eight years before, he had agreed to become president because he felt obliged to bow to the common wisdom that he wasn’t merely the best man for the job but the only one. Several years later, having promised himself he would serve but one term, he had asked his trusted colleague, Congressman James Madison, to draft a valedictory address. He hadn’t banked on the pressures that soon arose and that seemed to come from all directions. His old friend, Eliza Willing Powel, a favorite dinner partner and the wife of a prominent Philadelphia merchant and former mayor, put it persuasively when she spoke truth to power. If he were to retire after one term, she advised him, he would be “quitting a trust, upon the proper execution of which the repose of millions might be eventually depending.” She described him as “the only man in America that dares to do right on all public occasions.”

  She didn’t stop there. “You have shown that you are not intoxicated by power or misled by flattery,” she continued. “You have a feeling heart and the long necessity of behaving with circumspection must have tempered that native benevolence which otherwise might make you too compliant . . . the soundness of your judgment has been enriched on many and trying occasions, and you have frequently demonstrated that you possess an empire over yourself. For God’s sake, do not yield that empire to a love of ease.”22Thus chastised, Washington felt bound to remain in office, and he accepted the unanimous vote of the 132 members of the electoral college for a second term.

  Now, however, as he contemplated a new notion of Martha’s to commission pendant portraits of the two of them, the idea seemed a way of commemorating his much anticipated “return to the walks of private life.” There would be no third term—on that matter he was utterly firm—and in a year’s time, his successor chosen, he would climb into his carriage and leave Market Street, bound once and for all to his acres overlooking the Potomac. So why shouldn’t they depart with a remembrance of the presidency, just as Martha wanted?

  They had been married thirty-seven years, and reminders of their early time together awaited them in Mount Vernon’s Parlor. Since then the narrow-waisted girl in the portrait John Wollaston had painted in 1757 had matured into a plump and widely admired matron. The open-faced country colonel pictured in Charles Willson Peale’s first portrait of Washington had subsequently endured eight years of war, the birthing of the Constitution, and another eight years playing the demanding role of president. The young horse man’s athleticism had given way to the pallor and softness of late middle-age.

  Yes, he agreed, new portraits of the white-haired president and his lady should decorate the walls at Mount Vernon, despite the fact that his previous experience sitting for Mr. Stuart hadn’t been entirely plea-sur able. But all of Philadelphia seemed to agree that Stuart made the best likenesses. Most important of all, Martha was among them.

  LIKE GEORGE, MARTHA had taken many turns in the Painter’s Chair. She had sat before he did, posing in 1757 as the wife of Daniel Parke Custis. As Mrs. George Washington, she had looked back at many of the same artists who rendered likenesses of her husband. Just the previous year, she had posed for both Mr. Trumbull and Mr. Peale, and not for the first time.

  The marriage of George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis had been characterized by warmth and civility. Certainly they had grown fond of each other during their nine-month courtship back in 1758, but complementary circumstances rather than passion had disposed them to take the vows of marriage. Both bride and groom had been bruised by love, Martha having watched death take her husband and two young children. George’s heart still ached for Sally, the unattainable wife of his friend and neighbor, George William Fairfax. It had been their compatible worldly needs that made the match of George and Martha seem logical. The Widow Custis’s large inherited estate required knowledgeable and careful management; though he was an eligible bachelor and a dashing soldier, George possessed only a small fortune, and his finances were tight. If their courtship was conceived of convenience—she brought him wealth and status, he would manage her estate with skill and good faith—their union had proved a partnership of abiding affection, respect, and cooperation. Many years later Washington himself would describe his marriage in a letter to his old friend Lafayette’s wife Adrienne as “the dearest of all . . . resources of happiness.”23

  To sit for Mr. Stuart required no special preparation of Mrs. Washington. She would bring no airs to the chair, any more than she did to her role as First Lady. She dressed simply, spoke plainly, and affected no superiority. She avoided display and ostentation. As Abigail Adams wrote to her sister after her first meeting with Martha, “She is plain in her dress, but that plainness is the best of every article . . . Her manners are modest and unassuming, dignified and feminine, not the Tincture of ha’ture about her.”24

  Martha had been brought up to be a Virginia hostess and household manager, roles she had fulfilled at Mount Vernon for the first fifteen years of their marriage. She had invested herself in caring for her two surviving children, and George had proved a devoted stepfather. They both had watched in horror when Patsy collapsed and died of a violent seizure in 1773; she indulged her surviving son, Jacky, only to see him die prematurely, too, in 1781. Although the union of George and Martha produced no children, Martha’s mothering had been extended in 1779 when the baby Nelly had come into her grandmother’s care, since the child’s own mother, Jacky’s wife, Eleanor Calvert Custis, was too ill to care for her. Two years later, Nelly’s six-month-old brother Wash had come to Mount Vernon, too. With the death of Jacky, a new family was formed, as Nelly and Wash became the children of Mount Vernon.

  Now, in Philadelphia, Martha was the nation’s hostess. As the first to perform the role of First Lady, she followed her instincts, conducting herself and her household much as she had done as the wife of a planter and a general. Like so many jobs of apparent power and influence, her role came with surprising limitations. She was expected to entertain all visitors, but in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism the First Family accepted no invitations to the homes of others. “I live a very dull life here and know nothing that passes in the town,” she confided to a niece. “Indeed I think I am more like a prisoner than anything else.”25But the Martha that Gilbert Stuart was to paint was nothing if not a practical woman, one who had learned to weather life’s surprises. As she explained to one correspondent, “[T]he greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.”26A mother and grandmother, she was also a devoted aunt and adviser to many young women. She ran her kitchens with care, at Mount Vernon and on the road, often relying on a cookbook, a gift from her first mother-in-law, that she herself revised and updated.

  She was happy in her fashion in a durable marriage that was a mix of public and private. She and George rarely dined together as a couple. When away from Mount Vernon, the Washingtons had either a military or a presidential “family” around them, complete with officers, advisers, clerks, lieutenants, foreign and political visitors, and others who joined them at the table. At home, it was much the same, as they inhabited what Washington described as a “well resorted tavern” with a constant flow of daily visitors. Yet Martha was central to the private life that her husband cherished, and her devotion to him sustained him. She came to him in winter camp for each of the winters of the war—in Cambridge during the siege of Boston, at Valley Forge, to Morristown in 1779–80 during the most brutal winter of the eighteenth century. These “winterings” were, for Washington, the closest thing to normal life between the spring of 1775 and the turn of 1784.

  Martha wa
s a fixture and a constant in the eyes of the painters. Unlike her husband who always seemed to look somehow different from one portrait to the next, Martha remained remarkably the same, whether the portraitist was Mr. Trumbull, Mr. Peale, Mr. Savage, or, as in this case, Mr. Stuart.

  TO STUART, THE commission negotiated with Mrs. Washington amounted to more than a piece of business. Many of his previous portraits featured ambitious merchants, idle aristocrats, or their wives (when one husband complained of Stuart’s rendering of his spouse, the painter had angrily retorted, “What a——business is this of a portrait painter— you bring him a potatoe and expect he will paint you a peach!”).27If many of his sitters failed to spark his genius, certainly some of the men and women who had come to his Painting Room had charmed and engaged him.

  Yet none had posed the ineffable challenge that Washington did. The world believed that this man possessed an inner sublimity of nature that, perhaps beyond any other of Stuart’s subjects, demanded recording for posterity. Stuart knew he needed to look at this man anew and capture his moral power and authority.

  He wasn’t quite certain how to go about accomplishing his goal, but the commission called for half-lengths that approximated, at least in size, the existing pair back at Mount Vernon. But as he considered Martha Washington’s commission, Stuart’s basis for comparison was less the two earlier portraits, which he had never seen, than his own recent likeness of Washington. As the painter-physiognomist contemplated rendering his subjects, his intent was to do as Mr. West had said: This time he would truly nail the president (and his lady) to the canvas.

  He chose to employ one of the conventions of pendant portraits, arranging his sitters so that when the finished paintings were hung together, the husband and wife would face each other. George’s pose upon assuming the Painter’s Chair was the reverse of his previous portrait, and he sat with his head and shoulders turned slightly to the painter’s left, thereby revealing the left side of his face. Martha would do the opposite. Unlike Stuart’s earlier and smaller head-and-shoulders bust portrait of Washington, in these Martha and George were to be seen from the waist up.

  When Washington entered Stuart’s house for the sitting, the painter’s wife was just stepping into her parlor. She caught a glimpse of the president as he passed through the hall door, bound for the Painting Room. To Mrs. Stuart, the man in the black velvet suit and lace ruffles— she had never laid eyes on him before—was “the most superb looking person [I] had ever seen.”28

  With Washington in the Chair, Stuart tended to the task at hand. He noticed some differences in his sitter from his small portrait. His sideburns had grown longer. As if Stuart needed another challenge in painting the president, he observed that Washington, even more than usual, had a “constrained expression . . . about the mouth and lower part of the face.”29His face seemed somehow more square, and his mouth appeared to bulge. It was no wonder: He had acquired new dentures.

  When young, Washington had cracked walnuts with his teeth; as he aged, his once firm and healthy bite had deteriorated. He suffered painful abscesses, and he began losing teeth at just twenty-two. By 1781 he had begun wearing a partial dental plate, and over the decade that followed, his dental condition continued to worsen. In 1789 a dentist named John Greenwood had fabricated him a lower plate out of hippopotamus ivory and human teeth, but this very year the president had lost the last of his own teeth, which had anchored his dentures. A new set of false teeth, these from a Philadelphia dentist, incorporated animal and human teeth mounted on lead upper and lower plates that were connected by a spring. These dentures, Washington reported, were “uneasy in the mouth and bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.”30They were uncomfortable, inefficient, and difficult to keep in position.

  During the several sittings required, Stuart found that one way to keep Washington both relaxed and awake was to have guests in the Painting Room to amuse and distract him. In addition to the sometime presence of Mrs. Washington, other Painting Room visitors included her granddaughter, grandson, and Washington’s old military colleagues, General Henry Lee and Secretary of War Henry Knox. The pretty and pert Harriet Chew, of the powerful Chew clan, was welcomed, too; Washington himself admitted “her presence always gave him his most agreeable expression.”31

  With friends present he relaxed a bit—even if he refused to acknowledge it. When the Scots wife of the British minister, Henrietta Liston, remarked upon the happiness that was to be seen in his expression when he talked of his retirement, he was quick to disagree (“You are wrong! My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!”). Despite the uncharacteristic abruptness of his retort, Mrs. Liston still thought the world of him: “He possesses so much natural unaffected dignity, and is so noble a figure as to give always a pleasing impression.”32

  Having company at hand while he worked benefited Mr. Stuart in another way. Virtually all of these personages would go on to commission portraits of themselves. His Washington association was proving every bit as valuable to him as he had anticipated.

  Stuart painted Martha and George separately, but their two canvases resembled each other. At the start both were blank, the weave of the fabric covered by a “fog-color” ground.33Stuart strove in his first session with each sitter to lay in the major forms of the head, to rough in the nose, the features, the shape of the face. “The first idea,” Stuart believed, was to create “an indistinct mass of light & shadows, or the character of the person as seen in the heel of the evening[,] in the grey of the morning, or at a distance too great to discriminate features with exactness.”34 Only after he had created a strong facial likeness did Stuart paint in the eyes.

  With the face coming to life, he added the hair and encircled each head with dark paint, a drab green that contrasted with the light flesh tones and helped give the viewer the illusion that the heads were three-dimensional. As he worked to make Mr. and Mrs. Washington’s portraits more lifelike, he added pink-complexioned skin tones with light brushstrokes. To do it, Stuart barely touched the canvas, applying touches of pure, unblended color.

  As he went about painting Washington, once again Stuart attempted to engage his sitter. He had some success, thanks to a fortunate accident. During a sitting, Stuart noticed that Washington’s usually somnolent features suddenly seemed to awaken, and the painter realized the cause was a horse passing by outside. Though he had tried talking of farming to Washington—to no avail—Stuart now turned the talk to horses. For a time, at least, the sitter seemed more animated.

  The more Stuart looked at this man—and, by now, Washington had sat for him a number of times—the more confident he felt of his insights into his character. The painter was now certain, though he had not witnessed it personally, that the president’s temper was prodigious. He confided as much to General Henry Lee.

  Lee, who served with distinction in the Continental Army and earned himself the sobriquet “Light Horse Harry” for his deft horsemanship, breakfasted with his old commander a few days later. “I saw your portrait the other day—a capital likeness,” he told George and Martha. Then he added, “Stuart says you have a tremendous temper.”

  Mrs. Washington, offended on her husband’s behalf, replied, “Upon my word, Mr. Stuart takes a great deal upon himself, to make such a remark.”

  Lee, concerned that his words had offended, added, “But, stay, my dear lady, he added that the president had it under wonderful control.”

  Smiling slightly, the man himself remarked, “He is right.”35

  Lee knew of Washington’s temper. He had heard tell of Washington’s tirade when he discovered Continental troops retreating at the Battle of Monmouth Court house. An officer on the scene, General Charles Scott, remembered that Washington swore “till the leaves shook on the trees . . . Never have I enjoyed such swearing before, or since . . . he swore like an angel from heaven.”36Washington then had turned his ire on the enemy and personally rallied the troops. The man rarely lost control—since
childhood he had disciplined himself to contain his anger when it rose—but Mr. Stuart was quite right that it sometimes simmered dangerously.

  A brilliant likeness of Washington could be seen on canvas; Martha’s, though less developed, was emerging, too. Before Stuart could finish them, another commission came to him.

  I V.

  Spring 1796 . . . The Painter’s Studio . . . Philadelphia

  ON APRIL 11, 1796, a hand-delivered letter from the President’s House confirmed an agreed-upon appointment. “Sir, I am under promise to Mrs. Bingham, to set for you tomorrow at nine oclock . . . I am Sir Your Obedient Servt, G. Washington.”37

  The president had long before demonstrated his appreciative eye for the ladies, and Anne Willing Bingham—sensual, confident, always dressed to advantage—was perhaps Philadelphia’s most beautiful woman. She was proud of her beauty and wore au courant French fashions with short sleeves and plunging necklines; her exposed elbows and cleavage earned her both admiring looks and, in some quarters, words of disapproval. Yet no one dared speak too harshly of Nancy, as she was known. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and, in the way of the city’s elite, virtually all of Philadelphia’s rich and powerful families were either her blood relations or linked with her by marriage.

  She had married well at sixteen. Her husband, William Bingham, twelve years older and her father’s business partner, had become one of America’s richest men, profiting in the war trade and thereafter succeeding mightily in shipping, land speculation, and international banking. As Abigail Adams observed, “Money, Money is his sole object, and he feels the weight of it.”38