The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  Peale’s Patriae Pater was also an invention, a romantic portrayal that echoed the notion of Rembrandt’s contemporary, the English poet William Wordsworth, who defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity.” A quarter century of contemplating the principal Founding Father had indeed led to Peale’s period of composition, which he described as “an instance of Artistic excitement.”27

  Word of the portrait traveled quickly around the city, and Peale’s fellow Philadelphians crowded his Painting Room for weeks, keen to see the painting that glorified the great man. He set about collecting testimonials to his canvas. Many of the men he solicited had known Washington and proclaimed the portrait excellent. Major Lawrence Lewis, the General’s nephew and husband of Nelly Custis, wrote to Peale, “It is the only portrait of my uncle I ever wish to look at a second time; but on this I could gaze continually.” Upon seeing the portrait, Lafayette exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this is the Washington I knew!”

  Washington is seen through the stone oculus as if, walking down the street, the viewer has chanced to glance into a window. There our alert eye fixes him. His black cloak is near at hand, resting where he has thrown it, across the windowsill.

  His face is illuminated from above, his chin casting a shadow on his neck. This man does not suffer from the somnolence that so often overtook Washington in the Painter’s Chair. This is a man of action, of evident force and strength. He is not held hostage by the painter. He might be gone in a moment, in pursuit of the mission from which he was distracted. We’re privileged to see him—looking, listening, about to launch himself again toward his objective. The surface of the canvas has a gleam; Washington seems almost polished, the sitter’s skin waxed. Rembrandt had lost the painful candor of his 1795 portrait of an old man, that is clear. In its place, he has made an icon that is fresh and forceful, if theatrical.

  The painting was exhibited in the U.S. Capitol in late February 1824. Rembrandt then took the portrait on tour, showing it to crowds in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In Boston, he arranged for a lithograph to be made from it. In 1828, the year after his father’s death, Rembrandt traveled to Eu rope and exhibited the Patriae Pater to acclaim in Florence, Rome, Naples, Paris, and London. In celebration of the centennial of Washington’s birth in 1832, a special committee recommended that the U.S. Congress acquire the portrait. For $2,000, Rembrandt sold Patriae Pater to the nation to hang in the Senate chamber.

  THE “PORTHOLE PORTRAIT” became a mixed blessing to the aging Rembrandt Peale. From his travels to Italy with his son, Michael Angelo, he returned with copies of Old Master paintings. He experimented with the new vogue of sublime landscapes, painting at least five views of Niagara Falls. He devised a drawing manual, a modest pamphlet titled Graphics: a Manual of Drawing and Writing, for the Use of Schools and Families, published in 1835. The book, revised and expanded in four editions, saw continuing sales and regular reprinting over the next several decades.

  Despite his other activities, by the 1850s Rembrandt Peale’s principal mission had become to acquaint younger generations with George Washington. Traveling widely to deliver a long lecture titled “Washington and His Portraits,” he talked not only about his own Washington canvases but also displayed copies he had made of other artists’ works, among them two of Stuart’s portraits, Trumbull’s 1792 full-length, several of his father’s images of Washington, and a profile copied from Houdon’s bust. The older he got, the more tightly entwined Rembrandt’s reputation became with Washington.

  His travels and talks inspired commissions for more “Portholes.” The very name by which they came to be known suggests how routinized the work had become (the labels often read “George Washington Copy”). They varied slightly in content; in some, Washington looks right, in others he looks left; the subject’s attire varies from the civilian (as in the original) to the military. Most were not true replicas but smaller adaptations, typically painted on twenty-five-by-thirty-inch canvases.

  At age seventy-seven, Rembrandt confided to his brother Rubens, “I have not many years to live, and feel that my Vocation is to multiply the Countenance of Washington.”28That he continued to do, painting the last (seventy-ninth) version of his Patriae Pater when he was eighty-two, in the last year of his life.

  EPILOGUE

  Remembering the

  Founding Father

  The past is never dead, it’s not even past.

  —William Faulkner,

  Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene 3

  I.

  Friday, October 15, 1824 . . . Arlington House . . . Virginia

  IN 1778 A German-language almanac from the printing press of Francis Bailey of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, referred to George Washington as “Des Landes Vater.” Translated into English as “the father of his country,” the designation began to follow the man around like his shadow on a sunny day. In time, the conceit of Founding Father would become the principal metaphor of the revolutionary era.

  While Washington’s political paternity survived him, no biological children did. Martha bore no more babies after marrying Colonel Washington in 1759 (she had given birth four times in seven years of marriage to Daniel Parke Custis). Despite his lack of gene tic descendants, however, Washington most certainly did not lack familial ties. His affection for Martha’s children and, later, her grandchildren ran deep. In his correspondence he was generous in offering life guidance to many young and inexperienced men and women within his purview.

  Over the decades he had more than a few stand-in sons, young men he sought to mold into great men. Among them were Martha’s unlucky and undisciplined son, Jacky; Alexander Hamilton, the aide-de-camp who later served as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury; and Tobias Lear, the devoted secretary and confidant who was with Washington at the end. There were Washington nephews and other men in the extended Custis clan, many of whom came to regard Mount Vernon as the bosom of their family. They, too, were subject to the fatherly ministrations of the General.

  Two men in particular stand forth from the crowd of surrogate sons. Both of them—one a near relation, the other a passionate partisan from abroad—would help to shape the general’s legacy after his death.

  IF HE HAD had his way, George Washington Parke Custis would have become master of Mount Vernon. He had grown up there after the premature death of his father, Jacky Custis, of “Camp Fever” (most likely typhoid) at age twenty-six. Though there was no provision in English or Virginia law for formal adoption, Wash and his sister Nelly shared Martha and George’s domicile even when President Washington’s public life took him to New York and Philadelphia. Before, after, and periodically during Washington’s presidency, they regarded Mount Vernon as home.

  The General set high expectations for his ward and step-grandson, and more than once despaired of the young Wash Custis. “From his infancy,” Washington wrote to the president of the College of New Jersey when the sixteen-year-old encountered academic difficulties, “I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in everything that [does] not tend to his amusements.”1After the boy failed in a second and a third attempt at college, Washington resigned himself to Wash’s seeming inability to mature into the public role he had foreseen. The General confided to another member of the extended family, “I believe Washington means well, but has not the resolution to act well.”2

  Even so, the aging Washington chose to believe that the boy’s better instincts would eventually emerge. As his adoptive father, Washington entrusted the eighteen-year-old Wash with the role of co-executor of his estate in the will he wrote in June 1799. With Washington’s death a few months later, Wash would begin to demonstrate that this trust had not been misplaced. The lad dutifully remained with his grandmother until she died in her garret bedroom in 1802 at Mount Vernon. Only then did things change.

  Believing that inheritance should follow the “laws of nature,” the General did not leave Mount Vernon to Wash Cus
tis. With the death of Martha, the estate went to one of his blood relations, Bushrod Washington, the eldest son of the General’s younger brother John Augustine.3 Custis wanted to purchase the property, but Bushrod refused to sell. Young Custis then moved eight miles north to an eleven-hundred-acre property that was part of the legacy left him by his own father. He named it “Mount Washington.”

  Wash adopted as his bachelor quarters a four-room cottage standing near the bank of the Potomac. There he stowed the many Custis heirlooms his grandmother left him, along with a growing collection of Washington memorabilia. While everyone in Washington’s extended family seemed to cherish his memory, Wash was the first to recognize that even quotidian items associated with Washington were important. After Martha’s bequests had been distributed, most of the remaining contents of Mount Vernon were dispersed at auction. Custis bought so many items that his purchases left him with a debt that would require years to pay off (the total cost, $4,545, was the equivalent of roughly $150,000 in twenty-first-century currency).

  After some of his cherished mementoes were damaged by vermin and dampness due to inadequate storage, he resolved to build a proper repository in which to preserve and display his Washingtoniana. He dubbed his new home “Arlington House” after an earlier Custis plantation. In 1804, he brought home a wife, Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Wash and “Molly” resided in the completed north wing, and the rest of the structure, which included a tall main block and a second symmetrical wing, was completed over the next dozen years.

  Although separated from his childhood home, Custis found other ways to honor his connection to George Washington. He regaled guests with stories of Mount Vernon, offering item-by-item explications of the Washington-related objects that filled Arlington. There was the “War Tent,” stored in two leather portmanteaus, and other military equipment, including a camp chest. Custis owned the iron lantern from Mount Vernon’s passage, which family lore held to have been the property of Lawrence Washington (1659–1698), the first American-born Washington. Custis’s cupboards displayed many Washington porcelains and silver, and a reinforced document chest held papers. In an upstairs chamber he would point out the most moving object of all. Stripped of its dimity canopy was the bed on which the Chief had died.

  Downstairs hung an array of Custis portraits that, taken together, constituted an informal history of English portraiture as America was being settled. A portrait of his great-great-grandfather, G. W. P. Custis told his visitors, was the work of Anthony van Dyck; another, this one of his great-grandfather, he believed to have been executed by the London portraitist Sir Godfrey Kneller.4Nearby hung the three John Wollaston portraits of Martha, her first husband (and G.W.P.’s grandfather), and Martha’s two children, Patsy and Jacky. Advancing through time, canvas by canvas, elaborate baroque clothing and painting styles grew simpler as the generations passed, offering the viewer a short course on how art had changed since John Smibert’s time. The climax of the sequence was the original of Washington originals, the Colonel Washington portrait that Charles Willson Peale painted in 1772, which heralded the arrival of American-born, Eu rope an-trained painters.

  As the historic repository for Custis’s “Washington Treasury,” Arlington House became an essential stopping place for those wishing to pay their respects to the memory of George Washington. One such visitor was Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, an intimate friend of the family. The Frenchman’s portrait—this was, of course, Washington’s old comrade in arms Lafayette—already hung at Arlington House, another canvas from the hand of Charles Willson Peale. It was a likeness commissioned by George Washington himself during the Revolution.

  WHEN LAFAYETTE CAME to visit, much had changed in the quarter century since the death of Washington. Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the Bostonian’s bid for a second term as president in 1800. After Jefferson’s eight years in the President’s House, two other Virginians won two terms each. First was “Little Jim” Madison (Washington’s constitutional confidant stood just five-foot-four); he was succeeded by James Monroe (who, as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant in 1776, had crossed the Delaware with General Washington). But the year 1824 would truly see a changing of the political guard.

  A new generation of candidates—for the first time, none was a Founding Father—sought the presidency. Voters considered such regional favorites as John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Crawford of Georgia, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. But few Americans that autumn would pay close attention to the mud-slinging of electoral politics, in which Jackson was cast as an adulterer, Clay a drunkard, and Adams as slovenly (by then Crawford had suffered a debilitating stroke). In those months, the more edifying story line that newspaper readers simply could not get enough of was the national tour of the man President Monroe called “the Nation’s Guest.”

  Monroe had issued the invitation the previous February. “The whole nation,” Monroe wrote, “. . . ardently desire[s] to see you again.”5An act of Congress, passed unanimously by both houses, had authorized the communication, and from his home in France, The Grange, the invitee responded in the affirmative. He let it be known that he would be honored to return to America after an absence of forty years, although he no longer used the title that was his birthright. Instead, he favored the rank he had earned in the Continental Army. The former marquis wished to be known as General Lafayette.

  BY THE TIME Lafayette readied to cross the Potomac on the mile-long wooden bridge, he was running late yet again. The plan had been for a midday visit, but the commandant at the Navy Yard had given him a most thorough tour. The hours spent reviewing ships and dry docks meant the Nation’s Guest had been forced to go directly to the President’s House. He had taken his dinner with James Monroe, an old friend from soldiering days, and had postponed his trip to Arlington House until the evening.

  Lafayette had been back in America barely two months, but each day the American public embraced him anew. On first stepping ashore in New York, he had been greeted by a crowd of fifty thousand lining the parade route to City Hall. The unexpected welcome overwhelmed him: Standing in the Portrait Hall, with a tall George Washington by Trumbull nearby, Lafayette felt tears running down his cheeks. At one point he was so moved he had difficulty speaking and stepped into an anteroom to compose himself.6He had gone to Boston, where he was greeted by a crowd of seventy thousand, and been fêted in Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and at villages and crossroads in between with banquets, receptions, speeches, toasts, and applause from the crowds that lined every mile of his route. On his journey south, he also revisited the scene of the 1777 Battle of Brandywine, where, though struck in the leg by a musket ball, he had fought until his boot filled with blood. Back in the day, upon learning Lafayette had been wounded, Washington ordered the battle-field surgeon to “treat him as my son, for I love him the same.”

  Despite having expired a quarter century before, George Washington seemed to be watching his old friend at almost every stop of his “Farewell Tour.” In Boston, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of President Washington had been installed at Lafayette’s accommodation on Park Street.7 In Quincy, where he visited the eighty-eight-year-old John Adams, the 1790 portrait of Washington that Adams had ordered from the artist Edward Savage hung in a place of honor, as did a Savage likeness of Martha. In Philadelphia, Lafayette had embraced his war time comrade Charles Willson Peale at the Pennsylvania State House, then insisted upon going upstairs for a guided tour of Peale’s gallery of revolutionary worthies (more than one canvas portrayed Washington). Later, Lafayette visited the artist’s Walnut Street Painting Room, where Peale sketched him once more.8In Princeton, as the Frenchman received a doctor of laws degree inside a circular pavilion constructed for the reception, General Washington looked on, this time the size of life, from one of Peale’s replicas of his Battle of Princeton.9After arriving in Washington, Lafayette had toured the Capitol, where four giant versions of John Trumbull’s history pictures, including The Declara
tion of Independence, had been contracted for but not yet installed in the unfinished Rotunda. At the President’s House, grandly outfitted in the French style by President Monroe, Lafayette saw the Gilbert Stuart Washington that Dolley Madison had saved from the fire that gutted the mansion during the War of 1812.

  With dusk falling that Friday evening, Lafayette heard the rumbling of the wooden roadbed as his carriage crossed the Potomac. Along with his son, George Washington Lafayette, he anticipated a very different evening from the recent days of grand public occasions with thousands of hands to shake. The bridge beneath them connected the Federal City with Alexandria, Virginia, and upon reaching the river’s western shore, the horses soon began the climb to the heights of Arlington, through a parkland of tall oaks and elms. At the top of a bluff overlooking the city, Wash Custis and other surviving members of George and Martha’s family awaited the Lafayettes.10

  Decades earlier, the Marquis de Lafayette had delighted in calling the plump little boy, then just three years old, “Squire Tub,” but the family connection had been renewed in the interim. After the American War of Independence had concluded, Lafayette had returned to France and played an important role in his own nation’s revolution (in 1789, as commander of the citizen militia, he had ordered the demolition of the Bastille, a state prison and symbol of tyranny). When more radical factions came to power, Lafayette had been imprisoned during the anarchic days of the Reign of Terror. His son George, then fourteen, escaped to America, where he and his tutor found refuge with the Washingtons. The General had treated the boy more as his son than as a guest, so to George Lafayette, now a man of forty-four, this journey was also a fond return to familiar places and faces. Thirty years earlier he and Wash Custis, two years younger, had been playmates and friends; Nelly Custis called him “my young adopted Brother.”11