The Painter's Chair
Page 28
My particular thanks go to Peter Ginna, publisher, and Katie Henderson, editor, at Bloomsbury Press for lending their unerring ears and insightful eyes to the manuscript; Gillian Blake, who, at the outset, asked the key question (“What do the painters have in common?”); my friend and agent Gail Hochman, always ready with her good spirit and critical acumen; Kathleen Moloney for her humor, kindness, and patience with my grammatical lapses; Jean Atcheson for her close and literate scrutiny of the manuscript; Greg Villepique for readying the book for the press; Sara Stemen for a design that feels of a piece with the General’s era; and Peter Miller and Jason Bennett for their work in alerting the world to the presence of this book. Special thanks, as well, go to Mary V. Thompson at Mount Vernon, for sharing her deep and affectionate knowledge of the Washingtons and their home.
Finally, I must thank the women with whom I share my daily life: my wife Betsy, whose engagement with the past has helped shape my thinking; our daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth, for their patience with my dinner-table tales; and to the living spirit of my late mother, Ann D. Howard, who first gave me entrée to the world of the American past.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: An Accidental Gallery
1. John Neal, Randolph, A Novel (1823), reprinted in Observations on American Art, Harold Edward Dickson (State College: Pennsylvania State College, 1943).
2. George Washington, Diaries, February 22, 1799.
3. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son George Washington Parke Custis (1860), pp. 527–28.
4. Quoted in William S. Baker, Character Portraits of Washington (1887), p. 320.
5. George Washington to Wakelin Welch and son, August 16, 1789.
6. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree: Travels through America in 1797–1799, 1805 with some further account of life in New Jersey (1965), p. 96.
7. Tobias Lear, “The last illness and Death of General Washington,” reprinted in The Papers of George Washington, Dorothy Twohig, ed., Retirement Series, vol. 4, p. 547.
8. Lear, “last illness,” p. 550.
9. George Washington, Last Will and Testament, reprinted in The Papers of George Washington, Dorothy Twohig, ed., Retirement Series, vol. 4, pp. 479–92.
10. Lear, “last illness,” pp. 550–51.
CHAPTER1: John Smibert’s Shade
1. Stuart P. Feld, “In the Latest London Manner” (1963), p. 297.
2. George Vertue, quoted in Feld, “London Manner” (1963), p. 296.
3. Horace Walpole, quoted in John Marshall Phillips, “The Smibert Tradition” (1949), p.ii.
4. Henry Wilder Foote, John Smibert, Painter (1950), pp. 53–58.
5. Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 55.
6. Boston News-Letter, April 2, 1751.
7. Saunders, John Smibert (1995), p. 255.
8. Ibid., p. 100.
9. The source for much of this is also the source that proved to be essential to many early American painters, Robert Dossie’s The Handmaid to the Arts (1758), a reference for artisans that was updated and republished often in the late eighteenth century.
10. Saunders, John Smibert (1995), p. 263.
11. Ibid., p. 102.
12. Foote, John Smibert (1950), pp. 90ff.
13. Boston Gazette, July 12, 1748.
14. Boston News-Letter, April 4, 1751.
15. John Singleton Copley to John Greenwood, January 25, 1771.
16. John Singleton Copley to Henry Pelham, March 14, 1774.
17. William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), vol. I, p. 104.
18. Charles Willson Peale, Diary in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family (1983), vol. I, p. 39.
19. Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 123.
20. Charles Willson Peale, The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale, in Selected Papers, vol. V, (2000), p. 23.
21. John Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 44.
22. Ibid., p. 45.
23. Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 256.
24. Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 126.
25. John Smibert, The Notebook of John Smibert (1969), p. 10; and Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 41, fns. 17 and 47.
26. Smibert’s The Bermuda Group will reappear later as the source for Edward Savage’s The Washington Family. See Chapter 7, page 140.
CHAPTER2: The First Likeness
1. George Washington to the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, May 21, 1772.
2. George Washington, Diaries, May 20, 1772.
3. Maryland Gazette, January 21, 1762.
4. Peale, Autobiography, p. 14.
5. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
6. George Washington to Jonathan Boucher, May 21, 1772.
7. John Laurens, The Army Correspondence of Col. John Laurens (1867), p. 138.
8. Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 484.
9. Peale, Papers, vol. I, pp. 141–43.
10. Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 519. There is some difference of opinion as to whether this transpired, as reported by Washington’s step-grandson Wash Custis, in 1772 or in early 1774.
11. George Washington to Jonathan Boucher, May 21, 1772.
12. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (1970), p. 89.
13. Charles Willson Peale to Edmond Jenings, August 29, 1775.
14. George Washington to Burwell Bassett, June 20, 1773.
CHAPTER3: The General
1. Charles Willson Peale to Edmond Jenings, August 29, 1775.
2. Peale, Diary, November 11, 1775, p. 155.
3. Flexner, George Washington (1970), p. 335.
4. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, vol. III, p. 426.
5. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 29, 1775.
6. Washington, Papers, Revolutionary War Series, vol. I, pp. 3–4.
7. John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. II, p. 417.
8. Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. II, p. 91.
9. Washington, Papers, Revolutionary War Series, vol. I, p. 1.
10. George Washington to Martha Washington, June 18, 1775.
11. Charles Coleman Sellers, Portraits and Miniatures (1952), p. 230.
12. Wendy C. Wick, George Washington, An American Icon (1982), pp. 9–13.
13. Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley (1966), vol. I, fig. 95.
14. The word “limner,” from “illuminate” meaning to embellish manuscripts, was synonymous at the time with “portraitist”; only later did it come to be applied to self-taught and, by then, old-fashioned itinerant artists. Peale, Papers, vol. I, pp. 45–46.
15. Robert C. Alberts, Benjamin West: A Biography (1978), p. 77.
16. Peale, Papers, vol. V, p. 32.
17. William Dunlap, Diary, 1766–1823 (1930), pp. 542–43.
18. John Galt, Life of Benjamin West (1816–1820), vol. 2, p. 17.
19. Peale, Autobiography, Papers, vol. V, page 34.
20. Ibid.
21. Sellers, Peale (1969), p. 74; and Sellers, Peale (1947), vol. I, p. 88.
22. Peale, Papers vol. I, p. 189. The document known as the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted two days later and signed on August 2.
23. Peale, Diary. Papers, vol. I, p. 209.
24. Peale, Autobiography, p. 50.
25. For a richly detailed and learned study of the crossing and the subsequent battles at Trenton and Princeton, see David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
26. Washington, Papers, Revolutionary War Series, vol. VII, pp. 449–50.
27. Peale, Diary, January 2–3, 1776.
28. Peale, Autobiography, p. 53.
29. Resolution of Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, January 18, 1779.
30. John Hill Morgan and Mantle Fielding, The Life Portraits of Washington and Their Replicas (1931), p. 15.
31. Charles Willson Peale to
William Carmichael, October 1779.
32. Charles Willson Peale to Edmond Jenings, October 15, 1779.
33. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Writings on Art (1972), pp. 72, 113.
34. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (1991), pp. 26–27.
35. Peale, Diary, pp. 304–305.
36. Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington (1896), p. 195.
37. Sergeant R_____, “The Battle of Princeton.” Wellsborough, Pa., Phenix (24 March 1832); as reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. XXIX (1896), pp. 515–19.
38. For a more detailed discussion of Peale’s Museum, see Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles in American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1979), pp. 40–71; and Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), pp. 219–35.
39. Peale, Autobiography. Papers, vol V., p. 53.
CHAPTER 4: John Trumbull Takes His Turn
1. Quoted in Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 351.
2. Much of the story of Trumbull’s incarceration comes from his own account in his Autobiography (1841, 1953), pp. 63–72.
3. The Remembrancer, vol. I, pt. 2 (1780), pp. 277–79.
4. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), pp. 22–23.
5. Ibid., p. 24.
6. Ibid., p. 44.
7. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. II, p. 178.
8. William Dunlap, Diary, 1766–1823 (1930), p. 543.
9. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 61.
10. Ibid., p. 11.
11. Ibid., p. 11, fn. 30.
12. Ibid., pp. 52, 53.
13. Ibid., p. 62.
14. John Trumbull to James Thatcher, quoted in Carrie Rebora and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (2004), p. 307.
15. Quoted in Lewis Einstein, Divided Loyalties (1933, 1970), p. 373.
16. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 73, fn. 47; and Charles Allen Munn, Three Types of Washington Portraits (1908), p. 5.
17. Oswaldo Rodriguez Rocque in “Trumbull’s Portraits,” in John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (1975), Helen A. Cooper, ed., p. 96.
18. Wick, George Washington (1982), pp. 26–28.
19. Alberts, Benjamin West (1978), page 136.
20. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 81.
CHAPTER 5: “The Finest Statuary of the World”
1. Anne L. Poulet, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment (2003), p. 24, fn. 80.
2. Resolution of the General Assembly of Virginia, June 22, 1784.
3. Thomas Jefferson to Governor Benjamin Harrison, January 20, 1785.
4. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, December 10, 1784.
5. Charles Henry Hart and Edward Biddle, Memoirs of the Life and Works of Jean-Antoine Houdon (1911), pp. 184–85.
6. Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Harrison, January 12, 1785.
7. Hart and Biddle, Memoirs (1911), pp. 187–88.
8. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (1965), p. 386.
9. Hart and Biddle, Memoirs (1911), p. 75.
10. Aldridge, Benjamin Franklin (1965), p. 374; and Jeanne L. Wasserman, ed. Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (1975), p. 61.
11. George Washington to Jean-Antoine Houdon, September 26, 1785.
12. Washington, Diaries, October 2, 1785.
13. Washington to Lafayette, February 1, 1784.
14. Washington, Diaries, October 6, 1785.
15. Ibid., October 10, 1785.
16. Letter of Eleanor Parke Lewis (Nelly Custis) to George Washington Parke Custis, quoted in “Genesis of a Portrait,” in The Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, Annual Report, (1967), pp. 11–12.
17. Washington, Diaries, October 19, 1785.
18. John A. Washington to W. J. Hubard, October 8, 1859, quoted in Morgan and Fielding, The Life Portraits of Washington and Their Replicas (1931), p. 112.
19. Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Harrison, January 24, 1786.
20. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, January 4, 1786.
21. George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, August 1, 1786.
22. Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution (1939), pp. 107, 109.
23. Washington to Lafayette, February 1, 1784.
CHAPTER 6: Three Friends of Mr. Trumbull
1. Trumbull, Autobiography, pp. 82–83.
2. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull Jr., September 23, 1784.
3. Trumbull, Autobiography, pp. 86–87. What ever the imperfections of the portrait, the boy portrayed would later marry Trumbull’s favorite niece, Faith Trumbull, and become an important art patron (of Thomas Cole, among others), amateur artist, and founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.
4. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull Jr., August 15, 1784.
5. John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, June 11, 1789.
6. Alberts, Benjamin West (1978), pp. 106–7.
7. Ibid., pp. 107–108.
8. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull Sr., November 3, 1784.
9. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 87.
10. Benjamin West to Charles Willson Peale, June 15, 1783. Quoted in Dorinda Evans, Benjamin West and His American Students (1980), p. 86.
11. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull Jr., November 15, 1784. Yale University Library, Trumbull papers.
12. Jaffe, Trumbull (1975), p. 324.
13. “Miscellanies,” in The Artist’s Repository and Drawing Magazine 4 (1796), p. 25, cited in Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 87, fn 11.
14. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 89.
15. Abigail Adams, Letters, vol. I, pp. 126–27.
16. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), pp. 92–93.
17. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 20, 1785.
18. Howard C. Rice Jr. Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (1976), pp. 51–53.
19. Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, September 4, 1785.
20. Thomas Jefferson to Col. Nicholas Lewis, July 11, 1788.
21. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), pp. 102–103.
22. Ibid., p. 103.
23. Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786.
24. Much of the Jefferson-Cosway correspondence was published for the first time in My Head and My Heart by Helen Duprey Bullock, in 1945; Marie Kimball’s Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789 (1950) offers a particularly measured and detailed account.
25. Susan R. Stein’s The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (1993) is an invaluable resource in understanding Jefferson’s acquisitive instincts, both at home and abroad. For material regarding the Hôtel de Langeac, see especially pages 22–34. Again, Mrs. Kimball’s volume, Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789 (1950) offers a supplementary view (pp. 108ff.).
26. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 93.
27. Thomas Jefferson to Ezra Stiles, September 1, 1786.
28. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 146.
29. Ibid., p. 163.
30. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency, George Washington (2004), p. 193.
31. David Humphreys, The Life of General Washington, quoted in Flexner, George Washington (1972), p. 89.
32. George Washington to Patrick Henry, September 24, 1787.
33. George Washington to Lafayette, April 28, 1788.
34. George Washington to Henry Lee, September 22, 1788.
35. George Washington to Lafayette, January 29, 1789.
36. George Washington to George Steptoe Washington, March 23, 1789.
37. George Washington to Henry Knox, April 1, 1789.