The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  Rembrandt tested the artistic waters of New York in 1798, mounting an exhibition he titled “American Pantheon or Peale’s Collection of Portraits of American Patriots” (brother Raphaelle remained in Philadelphia, where he advertised himself as a miniature painter). Rembrandt spent the following winter painting in Annapolis, but he returned to Philadelphia in the fall of 1799, advertising his portrait skills using just one name. To differentiate himself from his family, he called himself Rembrandt.

  He was commissioned to paint the newly inaugurated president, Thomas Jefferson, among others, but in 1801 and 1802, he invested much time working at his father’s side to recover and reassemble the fossilized bones of two giant mammoths, which they promptly put on display in his father’s Philadelphia Museum. Along with younger brother Rubens, he traveled to London with a “Behemoth” skeleton. In England’s great capital he, too, became acquainted with the venerable Benjamin West, just as his father had done so many years earlier. But Rembrandt’s stay in West’s Painting Room proved much briefer. Though his first trip across the Atlantic exposed him to the fashionable mode of English portraiture—he exhibited two new works at the Royal Academy, Self-Portrait with Mammoth Tooth and George Washington as a Master Mason— he returned to America with a sense of incompleteness, and a yearning to see Paris.

  For several years he devoted himself to portraiture (in Philadelphia, New York, the Federal City, and the South), but by the summer of 1808 he determined to take his much-mused-upon trip to France. It was the place, he believed, where he could “exert himself to get to the head of the Art.”14

  II.

  Summer 1808 . . . An American in Paris

  REMBRANDT PEALE ARRIVED in the French capital carrying letters of introduction from his father, the diplomat Joel Barlow, and others with French connections. With the deed to his house as collateral, he had borrowed $1,300 to help underwrite his trip to France. Another $500 came from Charles Willson, who expected in return that his son would paint a dozen portraits of eminent persons for his Museum. Jefferson contributed a special passport bearing his own presidential signature, as well as a list of celebrated Frenchmen whom Rembrandt might record.

  A month-long sea journey was followed by a five-day ride through the French countryside. Rembrandt thought Versailles “Majic . . . worthy of the Heathen Mythology.”15Rembrandt did not seek a place in anyone’s studio. John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and his own father had settled into Benjamin West’s studio in London, but in Paris Rembrandt sought a different sort of tutelage. Rather than setting up his easel in the Painting Room of a mentor, he chose to study at the Louvre. There the artists with whom he apprenticed were dead.

  They included Raphael, Correggio, Titian, van Dyck, and Veronese. The works he examined were not copies, but original oils, and Peale studied the masterpieces daily. At the Luxembourg Palace he spent hours with a series of paintings by his favorite artist, Peter Paul Rubens, admiring the flamboyant colors. He visited the tapestry factory, the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins, and the Palais Bourbon, with its array of classical statues. The dutiful son also asked around for fossils and arranged an exchange of birds to add to his father’s natural history collections.

  The younger Mr. Peale had painting to do, too, in order to fulfill his obligations to his father. One of those portraits would acknowledge the great favor that France’s most admired sculptor had done for the United States. In America, Jean-Antoine Houdon was esteemed, linked as he was to the early patrons of early American art, Jefferson and Washington.

  In a sense, this was a family affair. Despite having rejected the idea of working from Charles Willson Peale’s canvas for his statue, Houdon had sculpted his Washington much as Peale had painted him in his 1784 Portrait of Washington at the Surrender of Yorktown. In the finished standing sculpture that now stood in Richmond, Washington’s pose, waistcoat, jacket, and even his paunch closely resembled Peale’s portrayal. A handful of artists had worked to establish a taste for sophisticated art in America, and the youthful Peale represented a maturing of the artistic passions his father and the others had sought to stir up. Here he was, closing the circle, a member of the next generation, painting a likeness of the first world-renowned artist to take America’s taste for the fine arts seriously.

  III.

  1808 . . . Houdon’s Atelier . . . Palais des Beaux-Arts . . . Paris

  JEAN-ANTOINE HOUDON LIKED nothing better than an audience. Even at the most intimate moments of creation, with his eyes fixed intently upon his subject and his fingers caressing the clay, he sought not privacy but the energy and attention of others.

  He kept his élèves nearby. Often one or more of the students would sketch as the master worked. Another might be at the ready to provide a fresh cloth or refill the bowl he used to moisten the clay at hand. Behind the sculptor might be several bystanders, artists who had come to observe, perhaps collectors or curious onlookers. He opened his studio to the public, advertising in the Paris newspapers that his premises were available for inspection. For a small tip paid to the Swiss guard on hand, visitors could view full-figured nudes and portrait busts. Male and female visitors, French and foreign alike, visited his studio, as they did that of painter Jacques-Louis David, since both had become essential stops on the itineraries of Grand Tourists in town to see the cultural high points of Paris. Houdon’s work space was a gallery, atelier, and small manufactory, too, since Houdon pioneered the production of multiple copies of his works, delegating those labors to his assistants, who produced terra-cotta and plaster casts. Each bore a red wax seal bearing Houdon’s name to demonstrate their authenticity.

  Another and different sort of audience looked over Houdon’s shoulder as he worked at his rotating sculptor’s table. A distinguished gallery of great men lined two sturdy shelves mounted on the walls of his high-ceilinged studio. These were likenesses of many renowned personages of the age, part of Houdon’s personal collection of plaster busts (“I always keep an exemplar for myself”).16Diderot, Rousseau, Molière, Voltaire, Lafayette, and dozens of others offered mute testament to his skill and importance. For Houdon, his accomplishment could be plainly stated: “I believed I would be allowed to take pride in these works, whose sole merit is likeness.”17But the critics extolled his larger virtues. As one had written of his work in the Salon exhibit of 1783, “M. Houdon lacks only the means to make his portraits speak.”18As Stuart did, he attempted in his art to penetrate his sitter’s personality; though his mode was coolly classical, his subjects were acutely alive.

  When Rembrandt Peale arrived to present himself to Houdon, he soon spotted the bust of Washington resting on the studio shelves. He also spied another, more peculiar object on a shelf in that same workroom in the Palais des Beaux-Arts. It was three-dimensional and, though truncated at the hairline and ears, it was unmistakably a foot-high face complete with chin. Though of thick and heavy plaster, it looked very much indeed as if it could be used as a mask; but it also looked remarkably like George Washington. It was the life mask that Houdon had made at Mount Vernon in 1785.

  Rembrandt had come to take Houdon’s likeness, the Frenchman having agreed to the flattering request. After the American had found himself quarters in which to paint, Monsieur Houdon came to take a turn in the Painter’s Chair.

  I V.

  1808 . . . Peale’s Painting Room . . . Paris

  WHEN REMBRANDT PEALE studied his sitter, he found himself regarding another aging man. The wear and tear of arthritis had begun to make sculpting painful. Despite surrounding himself with assistants who did much of the preliminary carving and who cast the replicas, Houdon faced the prospect of creating fewer original works and devoting more time to teaching. His life did have other pleasures, as he and his wife of twenty-three years, Marie-Ange-Cécile Langlois Houdon, had three grown daughters.

  Houdon’s reputation was great, both in Eu rope and America. His American oeuvre included busts of Washington, Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, naval hero John Paul Jones, Joel Ba
rlow, and Robert Fulton, the Pennsylvanian who had gone to Eu rope to study painting and returned as a steamboat inventor and entrepreneur. Houdon’s gallery of great Americans did not, however, include a second Washington commission; its absence was among the few disappointments of his great career. He had undertaken the arduous six-month journey to Mount Vernon more than twenty years earlier with the hope of being given a second Washington commission, namely the equestrian monument of Washington that the American Congress had resolved in 1783 to raise in honor of the General. Houdon had regarded a bronze of the great soldier on his horse to be an even more prestigious task than la statue Pédestre he made for Virginia. In attempting to win that job Houdon himself had taken the cast of the George Washington bust to Congress on his way back to France in 1785, and Jefferson had lobbied on his behalf with many in the government.

  But the congressional commission had never come, and Houdon had made his peace with the disappointment, even cherishing his recollections of his Mount Vernon fortnight. He confided in a son-in-law that “his memory [of Mount Vernon] always shone with peculiar radiance, for, though not knowing English and having to speak through an interpreter, the pleasure of having been close to Washington left memories which he was fond of referring to when many others of various kinds had long been forgotten.”19

  As Peale put paint to canvas, he recorded Houdon in a head-and-shoulder view. His format was predetermined in order that his canvas would be of a piece with the others in his father’s gallery. The painter rendered his new friend’s face seemingly at the very plane of the canvas, but his subject’s shoulders were turned away from Mr. Peale, his right arm raised. The hand was out-of-frame, since the conceit Rembrandt devised was to portray his sitter as if Houdon were at work on a bust.

  In a role reversal, Houdon had become the model watching the artist at work, and Peale recorded a man whose lively countenance watched him intently. Houdon’s regard of the viewer was confident but curious; his frank gaze never seemed to falter. As the likeness took on a life of its own from one sitting to the next, the face assumed a healthy, reddish hue, enhanced by the red velvet backdrop. The image was reflective, with one artist portraying another; the men’s lives were reflections, too, Peale himself having made his likeness of Washington in 1795, and Houdon his bust and statue a decade earlier.

  Mr. Peale completed his Houdon portrait and seven others on that visit to Paris, but he became deeply homesick before completing the full dozen his father had commissioned. Rembrandt’s wife and daughters had remained in America, and after only three months in Paris, the young family man departed in such a hurry that the paint on the last of his Paris portraits was not yet dry. The canvas, depicting the chemist Antoine-François de Fourcroy, was in ruinous condition when Rembrandt opened the crate after returning to America. The others he had made while abroad, including the painting of Houdon, would prove more enduring.

  Another by-product of his French sojourn was the genesis of a new idea. Peale had visited the atelier of Jacques-Louis David and seen his grand paintings of Napoleon, who had proclaimed himself emperor. David had become official painter to the court, and his canvases of the ruler, while true to details of the man’s appearance and attire, depicted an icon that seemed to transcend the merely human. David’s role was to glorify Emperor Napoleon, to make him a demigod.

  Rembrandt looked at the work of David, and he considered the sculptural likeness of Houdon’s Washington. The thought began to take shape in his mind that he, Rembrandt Peale, might one day fashion a definitive, even eternal, likeness of the General. The idea was not born in an instant, but over time it would become a preoccupation. If he could produce what he would come to call the Standard National Likeness, mightn’t he establish himself as America’s reigning Old Master?

  V.

  1823–1824 . . . Painting the Patriae Pater . . . Philadelphia

  THE TIME TO do it had finally come. Rembrandt Peale went into his Painting Room and shut the door behind him.

  His motivation was clear. “No human being could have felt more devoted admiration of the character of Washington,” he explained, “and no Artist ever found his pride more strongly excited by the magnitude and interest of his purpose than mine to rescue from oblivion the aspect of a Man who would forever be venerated as the ‘Father of his Country.’ ”20

  Inside the Painting Room, no one faced the artist from the Painter’s Chair. His subject had been interred for almost a quarter century. Still, Rembrandt Peale believed he could create a likeness that would inspire his countrymen. Stuart’s portraits of Washington had become the standard, but Rembrandt intended to do better. He had studied Trumbull’s Washington paintings and found those insufficient. His sources would be Houdon’s 1785 bust—everyone agreed that was the best likeness—along with his own life study and his father’s portrait, both dating from 1795.

  The new canvas would be larger than life, of a “size and style . . . expressly calculated for public Halls, to produce a grand and pleasing effect.”21Pure and simple, this was to be public art, and the artist’s goal was to create a patriotic likeness to elevate and excite the feelings of his countrymen. That said, Rembrandt Peale knew that if he succeeded with this painting of the patriot father, it would enhance his own reputation, and create an appetite for replicas.

  The task was not a new one. Since returning from his first French visit, he had tried no fewer than sixteen times to make a composite likeness. While all of those “trial portraits” had been sold, none satisfied their creator. This time he surrounded himself with “every document representing in any degree the man who still lived in my memory.”22

  When his wife found him studying the materials arrayed around his Painting Room, she asked, her tone anxious, what he had in mind. In the past she had seen him lose himself repeatedly in attempts to paint Washington; she found his distance, his frustration, and his failure upsetting. “When I told her,” Peale recounted, “she burst into a flood of tears, & exclaimed with great emotion that Washington was my evil genius, & she wished he had never been born!”23Peale promised her that this attempt, canvas number seventeen, would be his “last effort.”24

  In the years since returning from his first trip abroad, Rembrandt had gone once more to Paris (in 1809–10) with his wife and children. On his return to Philadelphia, he had opened a gallery, the Apollodorian, and, inspired by what he had seen in Paris, he began painting grand history paintings. In 1813, he had moved his museum to Baltimore. To house the usual mix of art and natural history, he constructed the first purpose-built museum in the United States. During his nine years in Baltimore, he also painted portraits. Like his father, he was intrigued by advancing technology, and he founded the Baltimore Gas Light Company to light his adopted city. He went on tour with a new history painting, The Court of Death (the canvas was enormous, twenty-three feet wide and nearly twelve feet high). The principal figures in the allegorical painting included War, Conflagration, Famine, Pestilence, and Remorse, along with Consumption, Despair, Hypochondria, and, of course, Death himself. Only Faith and Old Age relieved the scene. Then, in 1822, determined to return to painting full time, Rembrandt had handed the keys of his Baltimore museum to his brother Rubens. He spent some months in New York and Boston, but finally, his homing instinct still strong, he returned to Philadelphia. Here he would perfect his National Likeness.

  To make his new Washington he worked, Peale later recollected, in a “Poetic frenzy.” He thought of nothing else; he painted nothing else. His father, whose encouragement had often sustained him, worried about his son. Days passed; weeks became months. Rembrandt dreamed of the painting at night and worked at it all day. His father’s concerns turned to “grief,” and he concluded that Rembrandt’s Washington was “a hopeless effort.”25

  When Rembrandt was not happy with his progress, he turned his father away at the Painting Room door. Finally, three months into the process, his elderly and bespectacled father was permitted to enter the Painting Room. Althoug
h several of his children painted very well, Charles Willson had come to regard his second surviving son as his greatest hope. As a boy Rembrandt had had the run of his Museum and while there had learned much from his father. During his later travels to England and especially France Rembrandt gained painting knowledge beyond his father’s, and their roles were reversed, with the son becoming the father’s artistic tutor. Charles Willson admired his son’s dedication to painting; as a scientist himself he was intrigued with Rembrandt’s study of the chemistry of paint. Most of all, perhaps, he was moved by the younger man’s firm belief in the ability of art to celebrate such virtues as patriotism and filial piety.

  Charles Willson studied the portrayal on the easel. Soon, he clapped his son on the shoulder and uttered the words Rembrandt wished most to hear from the man who had himself painted Washington from life and had known him for more than twenty-five years.

  “You have it now—this is indeed Washington.”26

  THE ARTIST GAVE his new Washington the permanence of stone. In composing what he hoped would be the definitive bust portrait, he painted what appears to be a massive marble frame, decorated with a wreath-like oval of carved oak leaves, topped with a keystone bearing the face of Jupiter. Although the words Patriae Pater (“father of his country”) appeared to be carved into the windowsill, the canvas was soon given a simpler name. It became the “Porthole Portrait.”

  Peale had fashioned a new—and, in his opinion, authoritative— likeness of George Washington. He had not painted it from life, yet the Washington pictured appeared to have more vivacity than the life portraits. The likeness only distantly resembled Peale’s own 1795 study; in the new portrait, the man is clearly younger, the flesh on his face firmer. This Washington owed more to the marmoreal vision of Houdon’s 1785 bust than to any Peale portrait.