The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  What Nancy desired, Nancy usually got—even from President Washington. As the wife of the newly elected Senator Bingham, she was charged with managing the social side of their world. She had a gift for conversation (her cleverness with English was remarked upon and she spoke French fluently), and her manners were highly polished. Having traveled abroad and resided in Paris and London, on returning home she worked to raise the elegance of the society in her city (during the Constitutional Convention almost ten years earlier, Washington noted in his diary, “Dined, and drank Tea at Mr. Binghams in great Splender”39). She was not bashful about expressing her opinions—even political ones—and the Binghams’ in-town home, Mansion House, was the site of lavish entertainments. At her balls and receptions the city’s and the nation’s powerful men and their wives gathered. George Washington was a frequent guest, known to walk arm-in-arm with Mrs. Bingham, deep in conversation.

  Nancy and William Bingham had known Gilbert Stuart in London during their six years abroad. They knew how great were his gifts and how unpredictable his personality (the family portrait the Binghams had commissioned of themselves and their two daughters had come back to America unfinished). Now they wished to commission a truly regal portrait of George Washington, a gift worthy of a powerful English ally, the Marquis of Lansdowne.

  From the first, the new portrait was understood to be both new and not: The unfinished head Stuart was painting for Martha would be the basis of the Washington head in the proposed portrait, which meant inconveniencing Washington for perhaps as little as one additional sitting. But this new picture would be very much more, too, as befitted the intended recipient.

  Born William Petty, Lord Lansdowne inherited large estates in Ireland and became the Earl of Shelburne upon his father’s death. During his career in British politics he had won the admiration of Americans as an opponent of the war, and, as prime minister in 1782–83, he shaped policies that led to the Treaty of Paris, which had officially brought the American Revolution to an end.

  In 1784 he had been created the Marquis of Lansdowne. During the Binghams’ London years, they had been introduced to Lansdowne by Joseph Vaughan, and a friendship was born. Nancy and her husband had been made welcome at Lansdowne’s London town house on Berkeley Square, where they talked trade, politics, and art. Lord Lansdowne’s art collection included paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, Reynolds, and Gains-borough. Stuart, too, was known to Lansdowne, as the American had painted his portrait during his London years, and the Englishman had also been one of the thirty-two men who desired a copy of Stuart’s first Washington portrait.

  The Binghams, Nancy in particular, were determined with this commission to make a grand statement about America, its most important hero, and even the status of its artistic culture. Their English friend’s house merited something greater than a mere bust portrait, and Nancy was just the person to make it happen.

  STUART UNDERSTOOD THAT expectations for his Washington portraits had been elevated once again. Mrs. Bingham always did things in grand style, and this new portrait of her friend Mr. Washington would be no exception. She wanted a life-size standing portrait.

  The commission provided the artist with another fine chance to profit from the worldwide admiration of Washington, as Stuart recognized that copies of a big portrait could be an ongoing and lucrative source of income. Further, the very nature of the image would make it suitable for engraving—from the moment of conception, everyone expected Stuart to paint Washington in a grand setting, surrounded by a richly detailed collection of objects that represented his accomplishments and his legacy. The sale of prints from such a painting, Stuart knew, would provide welcome revenue.

  Although he gladly contemplated the potential returns from such a portrait, the actual execution of the canvas for the Binghams and Lord Lansdowne intimidated him in a way that commissions rarely did. Painting torsos and, in particular, the legs of his subjects for full-length portraits did not come so easily to him. His lack of confidence in his ability to reproduce a full-length human form was, in fact, one reason that, at age nineteen, he had refused the prestigious commission to paint the Newport worthy Abraham Redwood. True, in London and Dublin in later years, he had had some successes in painting subjects head to toe, but his gift was for painting heads and faces, and he knew it.

  To help assure he would succeed with this very public assignment, he rifled through his collection of engravings, looking for a model on which to base his composition. The new canvas would be an official portrait, not a family portrait like the new conversation piece, Savage’s The Washington Family, of which his fellow Philadelphians now gossiped. Nor would he look to portray the General as his friend Trumbull had done a few years before, posed in military regalia as if for battle. His plan was to capture George Washington as statesman, as president, with certain of the trappings of that office. When he came across a portrait by the French artist Hyacinthe Rigaud of a noted seventeenth-century preacher, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, that seemed to fit the bill nicely.

  The 1723 engraving of the Rigaud portrait had just the right mix of elements, including a luxurious setting with columns, drapery, and ostentatious furniture, all of which added grandeur to the imposing figure in the center. Adopting Rigaud’s composition, Stuart concluded, would save him a great deal of time and trouble in resolving how the pieces would fit together.

  Yet the large opportunity at hand remained freighted with other pressures, some of the sort that Stuart habitually sidestepped. He was a master at ignoring deadlines, but this time there would be the persistent and powerful Mr. Bingham hurrying him to complete the painting. Uncharacteristically, Stuart worried about what people would say. He wanted his old friends in the London painting world, many of whom would surely see the finished canvas, to think highly of it. He remembered, as well, the “extreme fastidiousness of the English nobility,” and it made him apprehensive to think that not only Lansdowne but others in London society might find his tall Washington a disappointment. The pressure was on, and Stuart set to work to make a masterpiece—and to do it quickly.40

  BY AUTUMN, HE had done it. He had fallen seriously ill in the process, recovered, and completed the canvas.41Martha had given him lace for the neck ruffles, and he borrowed Washington’s sword to copy it precisely, complete with its gold tassel and ribbon. He purchased an expensive Turkish-made rug for the foreground. He carefully planned the pictorial elements to send the right messages: Such pieces should, he believed, “illustrate the character of the person. The eye should see the application of the parts as to illustrate the whole, but without separating or attracting the attention from the main point . . . [T]he person should be so portrayed as to be read like the bible without notes.”42

  On October 29, 1796, William Bingham composed a note to accompany the large crate ready to begin its journey across the sea; inside, a bold and elegant Philadelphia-made frame had been fitted to enclose the five-foot-by-eight-foot canvas. “I have sent by the present opportunity a full-length portrait of the President,” Bingham wrote to Rufus King, the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, who was charged with seeing the gift through customs. “It is intended as a present on the part of Mrs. Bingham to Lord Lansdowne. As a warm friend to the United States and a great admirer of the President it cannot have a better destination.”43

  Once it reached Berkeley Square, the picture very much pleased its recipient. “[T]he picture . . . is in every way worthy of the original,” Lansdowne wrote, comparing the canvas to Washington himself.44

  When he examined Mr. Stuart’s creation, Lord Lansdowne could not help but feel as if he were looking upward. Stuart had recorded the presidential figure—it wasn’t Washington who posed for the body but a stand-in—from a low angle. Thus the president towers over the onlooker. Behind him, adding monumental scale, are the bases of two pair of Doric columns and tasseled drapery (an architect friend had helped Stuart sketch the arrangement). In the distance, a beclouded but clearing sky can be see
n, and Stuart painted in a pale rainbow. The storm has passed, and the figure at center, his gaze distant, looks into the future.

  The setting is a fiction, more nearly resembling the earlier French canvas than any scene in Philadelphia. Beneath Washington’s outstretched hand stands a table, draped with a rich red cloth, its leg shaped like a human knee and well-turned calf. At the crest of the state chair behind the standing figure is a shield, an element derived from the Great Seal of the United States. An inkstand on the table bears the Washington family coat of arms; beneath the table are three books, with titles that allude to the General’s service (General Orders and American Revolution) and his political leadership (Constitution & Laws of the United States). The sitter hadn’t planned the painting, but the retiring president took symbols very seriously indeed. He, perhaps better than anyone, understood that he was one.

  The painted president is frozen in midgesture, his right arm extended, palm up (his left hand rests on the sword at his hip). To Lansdowne, schooled in the classics, this was recognizable as the ad locutio gesture, a proper pose since the time of Augustus Caesar for statesmen and heroes. Here was Washington as orator; and in educated London as in ancient Rome, the gesture conveyed the rhetorical power of the man’s speech and his authority. (In fact, he wasn’t remarkable as an orator—Mrs. Liston: “Washington Writes better than He reads, there is even a little hesitation in his common speaking.”)45As Stuart’s brushstrokes revealed him for his admirer Lord Lansdowne, he very much looked the part.

  When Stuart painted his president, the man himself was preparing for his departure from public life. The man in the portrait is clearly giving a speech; in life, Washington was working on one, namely, his farewell address to the nation, in which he sought to explain his decision to decline a third presidential term.46 He would never read the speech to an audience (it was published in Philadelphia on September 19, 1796, in the American Daily Advertiser and widely reprinted across the country thereafter), but that only made the pairing of the portrait and the speech inevitable. The combination offers a window into Washington’s state of mind as he contemplated retirement.

  His speech had been carefully crafted over a period of years. In May of 1792 he had asked James Madison to provide a retirement address, a time when he hoped to return to Mount Vernon after just one term. His old friend Eliza Willing Powel and others had then persuaded him of the necessity that he serve four more years, but some of his thoughts, as articulated by Madison back in 1792, still applied. Washington himself had worked at the prose and in May of 1796, he asked Alexander Hamilton, a political ally and old hand at speechifying, to review a new draft that was a blend of Madison’s words and Washington’s. Hamilton added some rhetorical flourishes, but the finished speech was pure Washington.

  The man in the picture is aging; the man who wrote of retirement was conscious of his own mortality. Washington did not wish to die in office. He wanted to avoid mimicking the monarchical precedent of the head of state who served until the moment of death. An orderly transition of power was preferable, he thought, and it would deflect the oft-published accusations by the anti-Federalists that he was a king in all but name. Till his last days in office, Washington concerned himself with appearances and precedents.

  In his speech he reminded his readers “that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in [time], the happiness of the people of these States, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing as will acquire to them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and adoption of every nation which is yet a stranger to it.”

  Don’t take this for granted, he seemed to be saying. Washington wanted his fellow Americans to understand that the man was less important than the document that had made possible his election to the office of president. It was vintage Washington. With the simple regard for continuity of a farmer born to the cycles of the land, he pled for the restraint, respect, and patience to allow the new country “to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”47

  Lord Lansdowne gave his new painting a place of honor. He hung it in his library, a grand room with domes at each end, where the Washington likeness was in excellent company. Among other works of art, the room also contained ancient marble statues of Hercules and, appropriately, Cincinnatus, the latter bending to tie his sandal. There were also paintings by Rubens, Claude, Murillo, and Poussin.

  The London press offered encomiums. Typical was the Oracle and Public Advertiser, which proclaimed on May 15, 1797:

  The portrait presented . . . to the Marquis of Landowne is one of the finest pictures we have seen since the death of Reynolds . . . To many a description of the person of General Washington will be new: the picture enables us from its fidelity to describe it very correctly. The figure is above the middle height, well proportioned, and exceedingly graceful. The countenance is mild and yet forcible. The eye, of a light gray, is rendered marking by a brow to which physiognomy attaches the sign of power. The forehead is ample, the nose aquiline, the mouth regular and persuasive. The face is distinguishable for muscle rather than flesh, and this may be said of the whole person . . .

  The liberality of his Lordship [the Marquis of Lansdowne] has consigned it to the [en]graver, but we cannot resist the plea sure of describing the effect which the picture produced upon us.48 Just as Washington readied to depart once more for private life— this time for good, he hoped—Stuart’s regal likeness of the man established him abroad as the republic’s most important public figure.

  V.

  1796–1797 . . . The Painter’s Studio . . . Germantown

  MR. STUART, HAVING risen to a great challenge, rode the crest of the wave. To judge from the flow of the curious through his Philadelphia Painting Room, Stuart’s American fame was assured. In fact, he was so “inundated with visitors” that he “found it impossible to attend to his profession.”49 The hoped-for significance of the Lansdowne commission had come to pass, both for his reputation and his pocketbook. The original Lansdowne alone had enriched him by $1,000.

  He had been engaged to make a replica for Mrs. Bingham. That one he signed G. Stuart, 1796. The signature was unusual (when asked why he so rarely marked his canvases with his name or initials, he replied it was because “I mark them all over”).50Perhaps he made an exception for the Binghams as a way of expressing his appreciation to his patrons. Other people wanted replicas of the full-length portrait, and, given the practice of charging by canvas size, that meant more money for Stuart.

  He now had important work to do, and desiring fewer distractions, he found himself a new place to work in the countryside. Located in Germantown, across the Schuylkill River and a half-dozen miles northwest of the busy downtown streets of Philadelphia, the village was a pleasant two-hour carriage ride from the capital. His house was far from grand, given that “most of the town’s houses were of dark, moss-grown stone, and of somber and prison-like aspect, with little old-fashioned windows.” But the two-story barn behind suited Stuart’s needs perfectly.51 He adapted the structure, bringing in lathers to plaster the walls of the second floor, which he converted into his Painting Room. He opened new windows in the walls to provide “top light,” and ordered the outside painted red.52

  Gratifying as it was that people desired copies of the big portrait, Stuart still had some old customers knocking at his door desiring earlier commissions he had yet to complete. One of them was Mrs. Washington: She still wanted her smaller canvas of her husband and its pendant.

  Nearly a year had passed since she and her husband had sat for Mr. Stuart. In that time he had completed the big paintings for Mrs. Bingham but not the two for Mount Vernon. Martha was growing impatient.
Together with her imposing husband she visited Mr. Stuart at his new address. Washington noted in his diary that day, “Road to German Town with Mrs. Washington to see Mr. Stuarts’ paintings.”53 It was January 7, 1797.

  This wasn’t their first follow-up visit to Stuart—they had called often. On this visit Martha was again disappointed. The couple saw their likenesses, but each remained little more than a head afloat on an expanse of bare canvas, like a boat becalmed on an empty sea. Even so, the likenesses each had a surprising humanity. In a way, the very incompleteness of the paintings seemed to imply the presence of the artist, ready to add the highlights to the eyes that were his trademark (Washington’s eyes in life were light blue; in this likeness, they were dark). These were, of course, unfinished portraits, but the visible brushwork seemed to suggest the painter was near at hand, palette and brush ready. Stuart hadn’t blended his colors as Copley would have done; to do so he felt was to risk giving “the flesh the consistency of buckskin.”54The paradox was how lifelike two disembodied heads could be.

  In no sense was Martha’s painting done; they could see that. Her mobcap remained little more than sketchy zigzags of white paint that framed her face. Though closer to completion—enough of Washington’s shoulders were painted that the image resembled a Roman bust—the president’s portrait was also far from ready. Mr. Stuart made a plea for his maintaining possession, and not only because they were unfinished. He needed the originals, he told his clients, in order to make copies from them. Everyone present understood that in the absence of a willing sitter—and Washington was quite uninterested in another session in the Chair—then the next best source would be to copy the canvas that had been made from life.