by Hugh Howard
The portraits were so good that Martha was eager to have them, but the president accepted Stuart’s explanation. As they prepared to leave, with Martha out of earshot, Washington told the artist, “Certainly, Mr. Stuart, if they are of any consequence to you; I shall be perfectly satisfied with copies from your hand, as it will be impossible for me to sit again at present.”55
Neither he nor Martha (or even their descendants) would ever take delivery of copies, not to mention the originals. However, a great many other people would.
NOT SO MANY months would pass before Stuart’s run of good fortune ebbed. Lansdowne responded to the public admiration in London for his painting by consigning the work to an engraver for reproduction. James Heath, who was among the artisans Stuart had painted for Alderman Boydell a decade earlier, produced a large engraving, but Stuart received no financial benefit from it. Stuart thought Heath’s engraving not only unauthorized but a poor job. As if to underscore the insult, the artist was listed as “Gabriel” Stuart.56
The artist blamed Bingham for not protecting his interests and asked him to compensate him for his losses. The confrontation ended their relationship, and Stuart lost an important patron and, undoubtedly, access to Bingham’s social network. Too often, that was Stuart’s way: As another Philadelphia merchant confided in his diary, “Like many other men of preeminent genius . . . his passions are impetuous, nor does he appear very regardful to control them.”57
Still, the Washington paintings remained a franchise, and Stuart made many replicas. Using a common copying method, he would lay a porous fabric over an existing painting. The image beneath could be read through this “tracing cloth,” enabling Stuart to make a chalk copy for transfer to a new canvas.58One visitor to his studio, a young Baltimore merchant named Robert Gilmor, admired the copy he was completing for Mrs. Bingham. Stuart told him that “he had engaged to finish copies to amount of 70 or 80,000 Drs at the rate of 600 Drs a copy.”59
Perhaps remembering good days in Stillorgan, Stuart invested the proceeds from “five whole lengths of Washington, and twenty others of different sizes” in a farm further into the Pennsylvania countryside. He planned to import Durham cows and breed them on the estate. He hoped it would be “a home for his declining years and provision for his family.”
For a time business was good, though probably not as good as he told Gilmor. Even with assistants, Stuart could not have painted so many replicas—and he did not. His finances, like his personality, continued to fluctuate—he couldn’t any more moderate his manner of living than he could control his moods, which ranged from light and high spirits to dark and gloomy lows. As a young man, he had amused himself by outwitting bill collectors and charming his jailers in debtors’ prison. Even when, as now, the tide of his income rose, the money trickled though his fingers. His dream of a retiring to a farm in the country got away, too, since he failed to secure proper title to the property. He lost his entire investment of $3,442 when the seller died and his heir refused to honor Stuart’s claim.60
It wasn’t in his nature to repeat himself like some kind of machine. He admitted that in making copies “he worked mechanically and with little interest.”61He varied the big canvases, producing versions in which Washington rests his hand on the table, atop a document. He elongated the president’s physique, restoring Washington’s own stature, producing a more elegant pose. Over time he tired of making copies of his Washingtons, and his financial fortunes took a steep downturn. On May 6, 1801, the Germantown sheriff, in pursuit of payment for an old debt, attached the Stuarts’ worldly goods for auction. Fortunately for Stuart, the writ did not extend to the contents of the Painting Room. He reopened a studio in Philadelphia for a time, before following the federal government to Washington, and for several years he worked in the new Federal City.
THE ARTIST AND the president seem to have been predestined to play paramount roles in each other’s legacy. Not so many years after Washington’s death, the unfinished head had become George Washington; in 1823, the English art critic John Neal observed, “[If] a better likeness of him were shown to us, we should reject it; for, the only idea that we have now of George Washington, is associated with Stuart’s Washington.”62 As for Stuart, remove Washington from his oeuvre, and, despite his status as the first world-class American painter, his standing would be greatly diminished.
Theirs was a pairing of opposites: Washington, the man who kept himself under tight control, and Stuart, a man of mood swings, his nose swollen from his addiction to snuff and reddened by his fondness for drink, whose impulses were rarely contained. Stuart’s daughter remembered him as frequently profane (“my father did swear at times: he was very faulty in this respect”) and often “out of temper.”63
Yet there are the three portraits. The first was the small portrait that disappointed the artist, which we now know as the “Vaughan Portrait,” for the English owner of the copy from which an engraving was made. (Of the original Stuart himself said he “rubbed it out.”)
The next was the floating head left unfinished but, it seems, resolved to his satisfaction. Stuart would retain possession of the original until his own death three decades later, after which it went into the collection of the Boston Athenaeum (thus attaching to the canvas the name “Athenaeum Portrait”). The big painting, known as the “Lansdowne Portrait,” added ceremony and symbolism.
For Stuart, however, the face of his sitter was the truth; by employing the “science of physiognomy,” he believed his likenesses enabled the viewer to read temperament and character in the facial features and expression he limned. Of that one cannot be sure, but he was indisputably the best American painter of his age. For Stuart, the face was the painting; the rest of it was just wrapping paper.
CHAPTER 10
Rembrandt’s Washington
I am now the only painter living who ever saw Washington.
—Rembrandt Peale, “Lecture on Washington and His Portraits,” 1858
I.
September 1795 . . . Philosophical Hall . . . Philadelphia
IN ONE HOUR, opportunity would knock at the Painting Room door. His father had arranged the appointment for seven o’clock in the morning, and a further understanding had been reached for the customary second and third sessions in the days to come. Though the arrangements had been agreed upon, the painter found little consolation in his routine as the light of day began filtering through the high windows.
The young man—this Mr. Peale was seventeen—had risen before daylight. Now, as the minutes marched toward the appointed hour and he set about mixing his colors, his concentration wavered and his hands felt unsteady. Before he could prepare his palette, his agitation grew to unease. He began to fear that he would fail, that he would be unable to render a likeness onto his canvas of the august presence about to appear in the doorway.
The portrait he was to paint, he knew, could elevate his artistic fortunes. A likeness of Washington in his hand would draw people’s attention, gain him income from replicas, and, once and for all, set him on the path that since birth his father had hoped he would take. His very name—in 1778 he had been christened Rembrandt—implied how high were the expectations.
He had shown a precocious talent for drawing at just eight years of age, and a few years later he constructed his own easel, paint box, and chair in order to pursue his vocation.1He apprenticed in his father’s Painting Room, making copies of portraits, historical prints, and landscapes, and demonstrated such promise that the senior Peale had announced that he himself had “bid adieu to portrait painting.”2Future commissions, Charles Willson Peale announced in a paid notice in the pages of Philadelphia’s Daily Advertiser, should be referred to his sons, Rembrandt and his older brother, Raphaelle, “whose likenesses, and the excellency of their coloring . . . will give general satisfaction.” The elder Peale, having painted many of the Founding Fathers as well as Washington in the preceding quarter century, was devoting himself to his Museum of natural history (and, not coi
ncidentally, of American history, too, as many pictures of Patriots were suspended over cases filled with nature’s curiosities).
The sitter that morning was well known to young Rembrandt. They seemed to be linked as if by some sort of historical umbilical. Although he came along forty-five years later, Rembrandt had been born, as he himself put it, on “the 22d of February, the Birth-day of Washington.”3 This accident of chronology had long excited in the boy a particular fascination with the General. On the occasions during his boyhood when he had seen “the Man, distinguished above all Men,” his eyes had locked on the tall figure, even when Washington marched amid a multitude of other soldiers at celebrations enacted at Philadelphia’s Centre Square. The young painter held in his mind the vivid recollection of one such morning when, despite the cover of clouds and fog, he observed “the peculiar effect of the misty light on the visage of Washington. His cocked Hat threw but a narrow shadow on his forehead, but his projecting brows cast a broad filmy shade over the whole orbit of his eyes.”4
Yet the president was not an unapproachable presence. For years he had known the identity of this serious boy. As a lad, young Peale had had the run of the city, often doing errands about town for his father. Some of them were messages to deliver to Washington, who recognized the boy on the street. Young Peale recalled a day years earlier when Washington had rested his massive hand on his head and kindly inquired, “How is your good father?”5
As he waited apprehensively, Rembrandt had the comfort of knowing that what he was about to attempt was very much in the Peale tradition. His father had painted the great man many times and knew him well. Only days after Rembrandt’s birth, Charles Willson had packed his palette and shouldered his rifle to return to the Philadelphia militia, rejoining Washington’s army at its encampment, a small city of rough-hewn huts at Valley Forge.
Having returned to full-time artistry in peacetime, Charles Will-son had again painted his commander, this time as a delegate to the Confederation Congress, during the summer of 1787, when Washington had presided over meetings convened to modify the Articles of Confederation. Peale, his entrepreneurial instinct piqued, had asked his old commander to sit in order that he might make a painting that, in turn, he could scrape onto a copper plate to produce a fresh Washington mezzotint. The Virginian had agreed, and one July morning, before the day’s sessions at the Pennsylvania State House, he duly came to Peale’s Painting Room to be recorded.
The memory of that day remained vivid in Rembrandt’s mind, since he himself, though only nine, had been in attendance. “My post,” Rembrandt remembered, “had been behind my father’s chair when he painted him.”6Now, as Rembrandt contemplated standing alone at his canvas with the General before him, the clock ticked toward seven. But there it was, Rembrandt realized, the balm he required to ease his rising panic. His father’s manner with the man had been easy as they talked of common friends and enthusiasms. The notoriously restrained Washington had relaxed. Rembrandt knew his father to be much liked, and his capacity for making friends quite evidently extended to Washington. As the son saw it, the explanation lay in his father’s “traits of character, his amiable temper, and his talents as a painter, that engaged for him the enduring friendship of Washington.”7
In the midst of his hour of nervous anticipation, Rembrandt found his solution. He immediately summoned his father and asked him to join him in the Painting Room. If he were to work at a second easel, suggested the son, the sitter would get the benefit of his familiar conversation, and both painters could record the sitter at his ease. The presence of the veteran painter would not only relax the sitter and boost the confidence of his protégé; it would also offer “assurance that the sittings would not be unprofitable, by affording a double chance for a likeness.”8
Shortly the State House clock struck seven, and Mr. Washington arrived. As he entered the Painting Room, Rembrandt noticed, his subject was “in the act of putting his Watch into his fob.” His pocket watch synchronized, the ever-punctual president was ready to have his picture taken once more.
THE MAN HAD aged in the six years he had served as president. To see him passing by in his yellow carriage was one thing. To observe him near at hand, in the intimate setting of the Painting Room, was another. This was a careworn face.
Rembrandt had set his easel before the Painter’s Chair, providing him a frontal view slightly to Washington’s left. His father’s sightline took in the left side of the face as well, but from a three-quarter angle, since he stood to Rembrandt’s right and slightly behind his son. Knowing himself to be a slow and meticulous worker, the seventeen-year-old had chosen a small canvas. Just fifteen inches high and eleven wide, it was barely a quarter the size of his father’s. He had sufficient space to paint a life-size head, but little more.
As the painters set to work, it was obvious that Washington had shaved himself before coming that morning but that he had not had his morning session with the barber. His hair, its daily dose of powder yet to come, was revealed as graying but still dark brown. Rembrandt found that he could study Washington without distraction. The fear that had unnerved him the previous hour faded, and he observed not an icon but an aging family acquaintance, one engaged in a casual conversation. In his usual way, Charles Willson painted and talked; Rembrandt remained largely silent, “enjoy[ing] the rare advantage of studying the desired countenance whilst in familiar conversation.”9
The paintings had progressed well enough when the first session ended, three hours after it began. When Washington returned, two days later, his approach was observed from the Painting Room window. He was pacing, walking back and forth along the allée of linden trees in the State House yard. Only when the clock struck seven did he enter the Painting Room.
There he found that the number of painters before him had doubled. Rembrandt’s uncle, James Peale, was permitted to take a miniature, and he painted his ivory from a position to Rembrandt’s left. Raphaelle worked at a profile sketch. A visitor who happened by the Painting Room that day, Gilbert Stuart, described the scene to Mrs. Washington, whom he encountered as he departed. “Madam,” said Stuart in his wryest manner, “the general’s in a perilous situation. He is beset, madam,—no less than five upon him at once; one aims at his eye—another his nose—another is busy with his hair—his mouth is attacked by a fourth—and the fifth has him by the button; in short, madam, there are five painters at him, and you who know how much he has suffered when only attended by one, can judge of the horrors of his situation.”10
The father-and-son oils continued to take shape, but by the third sitting, following another off-day, Rembrandt began to worry once more. He noticed his father was working down, repainting the forehead first. With time running out, Rembrandt determined to work upward from the chin. Between them, he decided, they would be able to assemble a complete likeness even if the third and final session found their canvases incomplete.
Rembrandt’s final result has the candor of youth. He had no time to devise a flattering way to record a likeness, producing instead an honest picture of a man weighed down by his years. Rembrandt knew his painting lacked sophistication; what it most certainly didn’t lack was a willingness to paint according to what his eyes saw. This was no gloss; nor did Rembrandt have the time to labor over a final polish of this painting. Even before the slow-drying oils had fully set, he rolled and packed the canvas for shipment to Charleston. A deep-seated urge to see the world led Rembrandt to look farther afield, and he had already booked passage, along with his brother Raphaelle, to the wealthy southern city. Along with some sixty copies he and his brother had made of their father’s portraits of other great men, Rembrandt would display his freshly painted George Washington.
He hoped the picture “would invite attention from its novelty and interest” among the rice and cotton planters who flocked to the port city during the winter.11The Peale brothers rented rooms in which to paint. They wanted to stimulate a taste for their own work; back in Philadelphia, the recen
t arrival of Gilbert Stuart had drawn off many potential Philadelphia commissions, making a journey to another market seem sensible. They found a venue to display all their pictures (admission price: twenty-five cents). They announced the exhibition at the South Carolina statehouse in a verse newspaper advertisement.
Rembrandt did indeed find commissions in the new city. There was a strong demand for copies of his Washington portrait, and he painted ten of them. “In executing these,” Peale noted, “I became familiar with whatever good it possessed, but also became still more sensitive to its deficiencies.”12Only much later, almost a quarter century after the death of his subject, would he return to the task of producing a Washington likeness that would both supersede this one and become a major preoccupation of the last thirty years of Rembrandt Peale’s life.
REMBRANDT PEALE’S TIME in Charleston was followed by a brief visit to Savannah, then a much longer stay in Baltimore. In Maryland, the two brothers established a museum of their own, featuring a range of curiosities including taxidermy (some two hundred specimens of birds, animals, and fish, duplicates borrowed from their father) and likenesses (advertised as “distinguished Philosophers and scientists [and] Miscellaneous Portraits”).13Neither their willingness to paint pictures nor the twenty-five-cent admission fees to their museum proved sufficient to sustain them in Mary land. Less than two years later, they returned to Philadelphia.
