The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  By 1830 Trumbull was once again in need of money, when he negotiated a sale of his personal art collection to Yale University for an annuity of $1,000 a year. He helped design the museum that opened in 1832. His paintings filled the North Gallery, while the works of others in the Yale collection, notably John Smibert’s The Bermuda Group, hung in the South Gallery. In 1837, Trumbull began work on what would be the first published autobiography by an American artist. Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters of John Trumbull from 1756 to 1841 appeared just two years before his death in 1843. His remains were interred at Yale’s Trum-bull Gallery, beneath one of his own full-length portraits of George Washington.

  GILBERT STUART did not endear himself to Martha Washington, who had Tobias Lear write to him a few weeks after George’s death asking him to send her the unfinished portrait of her husband. Stuart still had it years later when G. W. P. Custis once more asserted the family’s claim, and even offered $4,000 as payment. Again, Stuart refused to hand it over. The architect William Thornton, familiar with all the principals, probably expressed the popular consensus when he commented to another artist, “The original of the General I think ought to be Mrs. Washington’s—and I think Mr. Stewart has not acted honorably in disposing of it.”19A client once said of Stuart, “Like many other men of preeminent genius, he is his own worst foe.”20As if to demonstrate the truth of the observation, Stuart thumbed his nose at the world, hanging the portrait on the door of his Boston Painting Room.

  All of which is not to say that Stuart failed to put the unfinished portrait to good use. In his Painting Rooms in Philadelphia, Washington (1803–1805), and thereafter in Boston, he painted some seventy-five head-and-shoulder replicas, depicting the sitter in his black velvet suit and a white shirt with a lacy ruffle at the neck. As the years went by, Stuart grew increasingly reluctant to paint them, and his execution became mechanical and more loosely painted. Despite their variability, the copies represented in times of need a source of income to the alcoholic and snuff-addicted Stuart. He disparagingly called the copies his “hundred-dollar bills” and was said to be able to knock one out in two hours. He painted the last of them in 1825, after which he gradually lost the use of his left arm due to paralysis. At his death in July 1828 the un-finished portraits of Martha and George were all he had to leave his widow and four daughters. Daughter Jane, herself a painter of considerable skill, negotiated a sale of the incomplete likenesses of George and Martha to the Boston Athenaeum for $1,500. Since 1918, the Athenaeum likeness of Washington has been engraved on the one-dollar bill, making it almost certainly the most reproduced painted image in history.

  EDWARD SAVAGE operated his New York museum, the Columbian Gallery, until 1810. Thereafter he installed his collection in Boylston Hall, Boston, which he called the New York Museum, before retiring to his farm in Princeton, Massachusetts. He died there in July 1817. His survivors inherited The Washington Family, which was valued at $550 in his probate inventory. After a century of ownership changes (it was often exhibited but remained privately held), it finally moved to its permanent home at the National Gallery.

  Whatever its merits as a painting, engravings of The Washington Family became the iconic image of Washington and his family for two generations of Americans; its fame and popularity far exceeded the hopes of its creator in uncounted versions of Mr. Savage’s 1798 print, an ever-evolving series of mezzotints, paintings, magazine engravings, and lithographs. The clothing changed, the columns in the background came and went, and, in the Civil War era, slave William Lee disappeared; but throughout the nineteenth century, Americans came to know the domestic Washington largely as Savage had pictured the president and his family.21

  The image became a cultural fixture, and schoolgirls replicated Savage’s family portrait in needlework samplers. By 1850 the average American hadn’t a clue what the current president looked like (it was Millard Fillmore). The chief executives who served between Washington and Fillmore were similarly unrecognizable. Thanks in part to Savage’s The Washington Family and, to a lesser degree, Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait, the first president remained a familiar figure.22

  Two of the principal characters in these pages never painted Washington. Still, this is unmistakably a book about the stepchildren of BENJAMIN WEST and JOHN SMIBERT. The latter died early (in 1751) but left behind him the entombed Painting Room that so many painters came to see. West lived two decades into the nineteenth century. He had tutored Charles Willson Peale, made Stuart something of a partner, and employed Trumbull in his studio while encouraging the younger man’s “National Work.” Later, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Rembrandt Peale, Henry Sargent, Samuel F. B. Morse, and a dozen other painters came to him and found approval, encouragement, and guidance. Trum-bull described West’s friendship as “inexhaustible.”23Indeed it was, and when West died, in 1820, his manservant gave voice to the question many were asking themselves: “Where will they go now?”24

  Yet it is Washington himself who stands at the fulcrum. When he was born, the New World had virtually no artists, and few colonials had ever seen a painting. For centuries, Eu ro pe an princes, philosophers, and statesmen had exercised a lively interest in the arts, but in the early eighteenth century, the life of the American settler remained a struggle for survival and, on behalf of Eu rope an investors, for profits.

  Within Washington’s lifetime (1732–1799), a cultural transformation occurred. He helped engineer the introduction of neoclassical architecture as the nation’s de facto style, as evidenced by both its new capital city and the homes of its merchant, landowner, and middle classes. In Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and even Boston where a puritan ban survived into the 1790s, theaters had opened their doors to eager audiences. Painting and sculpture assumed a broad new presence in a country whose citizens, possessed of both independence and a growing prosperity, explored the life of the mind by pursuing new intellectual and artistic tastes.

  The artists West trained sought to establish the art of painting in America and to do it in a distinctly American way. To his core, Charles Willson Peale was an egalitarian, convinced that everyone should be exposed to art and science. Trumbull saw America’s quest for independence as immensely noble, a cause worthy of paintings as great as those of the Euro pe an masters. Stuart, as his daughter reported, stood in awe of Washington, the man they all painted, the central figure in the story.

  These artists all struggled to survive on their artistic output. They had no royal patronage as Benjamin West had had although, where they could, they aped aspects of West’s economic models (he pioneered the sale of prints from his paintings, and each of these painters produced their fair share of mezzotints and other prints). If they each achieved a certain fame, none made his fortune. Only Gilbert Stuart influenced the practice of painting beyond the boundaries of the United States.

  By the time Rembrandt Peale and Wash Custis died, in the years immediately before the Civil War, artists faced a fresh challenge. Portraiture was becoming the province of the photograph. At the same time, a broader public taste for art had made America’s natural wonders the new favorite subject for painting (think John James Audubon and the landscapes of the Hudson River School). Rembrandt Peale had personal experience of the generational shift that was occurring. He sought a major commission to paint Lafayette during the “Farewell Tour,” but he lost out to the younger Samuel F. B. Morse; Morse, in turn, would soon retire from portraiture (he had inventions to pursue), and he watched as his friends Asher Durand and Thomas Cole changed the focus of painting in America. The great era of American portraiture had ended as the new artists begin to paint pictures of America, not Americans.

  IV.

  Seeing Washington

  AS VARIED AS the portraits are, certain Washington attributes are notably absent. For his time, Washington was very tall and large-limbed. As some big men do, he exuded a quiet strength with no apparent attempt to display his physical prowess. He had the air of a great natural athlete, who
understands intuitively that it must be left to his public to describe his capabilities. To see him was to understand.

  That quality of Washington is lost to us. In thinking of Washington we must imagine a man of unusual size, evident strength, and surprising grace. Many of his contemporaries described his person and movements as majestic and splendid, words not often associated with physicality. He took great pains with his clothing, military and civilian. Appearances, Washington believed, set the tone for the meetings of men. He could never enter a room unnoticed. Since he cannot enter ours, we must take his physical presence on faith.

  Another characteristic that a painted likeness can only suggest is the man’s quietude. After being derided as a young soldier for a foolish remark about the sound of a bullet whizzing by, he made it a rule to keep his own counsel. By temperament, he was a private man, and his sense of educational inferiority (his schooling ended as he entered his teen years) reinforced his reserve. As a soldier he learned early that an officer cannot be a friend to his men. As president (both of the Confederation Convention and of the nation) he occupied a lonely seat at the top of the pyramid, apart from everyone else in the government.

  Even in casual society he felt no obligation to fill silences. Mount Vernon guests reported that when an awkward quiet fell at the dinner table, Washington seemed quite content to eat in silence. He liked the company of women very much, and perhaps he relaxed with them in a way he did not with men. Unfortunately, aside from some warm and confiding correspondence, we have little evidence of these relationships. If George Washington had a reserve that was close to impenetrable, undoubtedly Martha had her means of getting through to him (Wash remembered his tiny grandmother grabbing her husband’s waistcoat button to get his attention), but she left virtually no written evidence of their connection, having burned her correspondence with the man she referred to as “the General.”

  Washington’s contemporaries recorded the pleasure he took in easy conversation and in the witticisms of others. The painstaking process of portrait-painting leaves us with no smiling images of the man (he is said to have laughed rarely but to have smiled often); undoubtedly his loss of teeth and primitive dentures account for the frozen and distorted grimace characteristic of his later portraits. If we had a sense that his features sometimes relaxed and softened, we might feel as if we knew Washington better. But few smiling images of anyone survive from that time.

  His gaze was attentive, even penetrating. He listened with great care to what was said to him. Some observers thought his intellect slow, but those who knew him best understood his intelligence was not of the rapid and clever sort. His thinking was deliberate, balanced, and considered. In his voluminous letters he constructs arguments with great care. Only rarely does he resort to metaphor.

  Washington wasn’t an idea man in the way that Jefferson and Hamilton were. He was, in an antediluvian sense, a manager. In an era before the business of America was business (then it was farming), he was learning the new art of managing men who were no one’s subjects. He was mastering the governance of a country by consensus, collaboration, and, perhaps above all, his own good sense. He understood intuitively that every move he made as president set some sort of precedent, whether it was his conduct at afternoon levees or his creation of the body of advisers now called the Cabinet. He took a slow and thoughtful approach to everything as a systematic, deeply methodical man. As James Madison said of him, his tendency was to take things as he found them. He also had the self-confidence to recruit better-trained and faster-firing minds to work for him.

  These latter facets of his character can be fairly seen in the portraits. In the inscrutable expressions on Stuart’s canvas, for example, a man of great self-control wrestling with himself can be distinguished. His temper was rarely unchecked (those who did witness its detonation attested to its white heat); his black moods were less uncommon. He was a melancholy man. His first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, once described him as “inclined to gloomy apprehensions.” Washington wished with all his heart for the great American experiment to work; but he had many lingering doubts. In his farewell address, he observed, “At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation; and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own.” In his likenesses we read both doubt and duty.

  Washington was a man of unquestioned bravery, but, as a general, he lost more battles than he won. He was not motivated by power, fame, or money (for most of his life, he had all three, though the land-rich farmer at times had significant cash-flow concerns). Washington embodied leadership. Here was a man who won people’s trust and confidence in an instant. He was serious and somber. For a public man, he was remarkably private.

  He never officially ran for office. There were no campaigns in his time, as the cacophony of electoral debate grew louder only after he left the stage. His electability was innate. His imposing presence was crucial, of course, but so was his desire to listen to others rather than himself. He had the invaluable gift of being able to remember people’s names on brief acquaintance. He never had a great deal of cash at hand but he rarely extended an empty palm to those who asked; Washington’s account books over the years recorded hundreds and hundreds of acts of charity, gifts to poor men, soldiers, widows, the wounded, schools, people who lost their homes in fires, orphans, and the aged. His manner simply suited the game.

  OUR VIEW OF Washington is linked to the Athenaeum portrait, an image that has grown so familiar it has been called “the household Washington.” The unfinished Stuart canvas is enigmatic, but with close study, the viewer begins to realize that the Washington in the portrait isn’t simply iconic. The General, nearing the end of his life, has begun to relax. His duty is nearly done. We are looking at a man on his way home after a very long journey. Doesn’t he seem to have his eye on posterity? The effort to intuit his character is important: To understand the America he contemplated, shaped, and helped to invent, we must seek to understand him.

  He was the midwife at the birth of his country, and he was the unavoidable presence as American painting emerged. When Smibert came to America, most puritanical Bostonians regarded portraits as ungodly; in effect, there was no artistic culture in the colonies. In Washington’s time art emerged from the drawing room and went on display in galleries and public buildings. Charles Willson Peale helped make admiring likenesses popular, as the obliging man painted likable pictures of the well-to-do to display in their homes and to assure they would be remembered after they were gone. The colonial Mr. Copley, before his premature departure for England (he never returned to America after independence), did the same. Trumbull’s aspirations were loftier, and he prided himself on nothing less than painting history. Savage, whose flair as a showman was undoubtedly greater than his artistic gifts, reached a larger public. His audience was the emerging middle class, men and women who could identify with his big painting of America’s great hero. They admired not just the man but Martha, too, together with their wards, in a resplendent setting that represented a collective American future.

  Thanks to his own deeds, to the remembrances published by Wash Custis, and to the explosion of interest produced by the visit of Lafayette, “the Friend of Washington,” new generations too young to recall the Revolution were introduced to the General. The stolid, determined, rugged, dogged man the painters recorded has endured because of what he accomplished, and also because of what he didn’t do. Unlike the others he rarely stooped to political bickering. A man of stature in more ways than one, he always tried to look over other people’s heads at the horizon, to a time down the road when the distractions of the moment blurred and a larger vision emerged.

  Washington became the paradigm of the Founding Father, more than Jefferson or Adams or Hamilton or any of the rest. None of the others had the unimpeachable mix of gravitas, selflessness, and implied power. In the age before photography he left no negative legacy; he was, as his friend Eliza Wi
lling Powel told him, “the only man in America that dares to do right on all public occasions.”25

  The Washington we know today, through his words, the testimony of others, and in the pictures the painters made of him, offers proof positive of his instinctive, pragmatic, and quintessentially American character. He was also a man who always agreed, admittedly with an air of resignation, to sit for yet another portrait.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE TASK OF looking at historic portraiture involves trying to insinuate oneself into a series of two-dimensional likenesses. Mime-like, I have tried to enter the picture spaces created by Messrs. Trumbull, Stuart, Peale, and the rest, and to push the boundaries in such a way that I could better glimpse the other man in the frame, George Washington.

  This book is the result of those efforts. My research has taken me to the artists’ Painting Rooms, as best I could reconstruct them in my mind. My own two feet, together with Amtrak and an automobile, have delivered me to many museum galleries to see the art these artists made as they measured and mused upon their common sitter. An understanding of the past is just that: One view, one appreciation, one set of perceptions. We cannot truly know a historic personage. But writing a book like this is about glimpses, about assemblages, about assuming other people’s points of view long enough to triangulate a new understanding—and many conversations, directives, and advice along the way helped me in my pursuit. Among those to whom I owe debts are James C. Rees, Jennifer Kittlaus, Dawn Bonner, and Christine Messing at the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association; Jennifer Tonkovich and Sylvia Merian at the Morgan Library; Carrie Rebora Barratt and Catherine Scandalis at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Charles Greifenstein at the American Philosophical Society; Peggy Baker at the Pilgrim Hall Museum; Robert Harmon at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Wendy Kail at Tudor Place Historic House and Garden; and the staffs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Boston Athenaeum, the Sawyer Library at Williams College, the Chatham Public Library, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Mid-Hudson Library System, and C/W MARS, the central and western Massachusetts library system.