The Painter's Chair

by Hugh Howard

  38. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull, December 27, 1786.

  39. The thirteen he announced were the six already listed along with The Surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga and The Resignation of General Washington. In time he would complete these eight, but in his initial offering he also listed five he would not execute: The Treaty with France, The Signing of the Treaty of Peace, The Evacuation of New York by the British, The President Received by the Ladies of Trenton and The Arch, and The Inauguration of the President. Later he would add still another, The Battle of Eutaw Springs, though that, too, would never be finished.

  40. John Trumbull to Harriet Wadsworth, April 4, 1790.

  41. John Trumbull to Lloyd Nicholas Rogers, November 10, 1825.

  42. Gazette of the U.S., July 8, 1789.

  43. John Trumbull to Lloyd Nicholas Rogers (Eliza Custis’s son-in-law), quoted in Edgar P. Richardson, “A Penetrating Characterization of Washington by John Trumbull” (1967), p. 22.

  44. Trumbull, Autobiography (1841, 1953), p. 170.

  45. John Trumbull to Daniel Wadsworth, September 7, 1803.

  CHAPTER 7: “The Washington Family”

  1. Joseph Willard to George Washington, November 7, 1789.

  2. George Washington to Joseph Willard, December 3, 1789.

  3. Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy (1874), p. 51.

  4. Louisa Dresser, “Edward Savage, 1761–1817” (1952), p. 195.

  5. Smibert, Notebook (1969), p. 85.

  6. Richard H. Saunders, author of this generation’s authoritative book on the painter, John Smibert: Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 173), notes the “pronounced influence” of The Bermuda Group on Robert Feke’s Isaac Royall and His Family and John Greenwood’s The Greenwood-Lee Family, painted in 1741 and 1747, respectively.

  7. Foote, John Smibert (1950), p. 120.

  8. Harold E. Dickson, “Artists as Showmen” (1973), pp. 4–6.

  9. Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), February 20, 1796.

  10. Columbian Gallery (1802), pp. 3–4, cited in Ellen G. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (1995), pp. 156–57, fns. 11 and 48.

  11. Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), February 20, 1796.

  12. Charles Henry Hart, “Edward Savage, Painter and Engraver” (1905), p. 11.

  13. Columbia Centinel, August 8, 1798, p. 3.

  14. George Washington to Clemont Biddle, March 19, 1798.

  15. Wick, George Washington (1982), pp. 122–23.

  16. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 321.

  17. Cash accounts in George Washington, Papers, Colonial Series, vol. VIII, p. 261.

  18. Decatur, Private Affairs of George Washington (1933), p. 315.

  19. George Washington, Last Will and Testament, reprinted in The Papers of George Washington, Dorothy Twohig, ed., Retirement Series, vol. 4, p. 480. See Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003) for a thorough and thoroughly engaging examination of Washington’s relationship to his slaves and slavery.

  20. Harold E. Dickson, John Wesley Jarvis, American Painter, 1780–1840 (1949), p. 54.

  21. Rita Susswein Gottesman, “New York’s First Major Art Show” (1959), pp. 293–305.

  22. Mercantile Advertiser (New York), August 11, 1802.

  23. Gottesman, “Art Show” (1959), pp. 291–92.

  CHAPTER 8: Stuart Slouches Toward Philadelphia

  1. Rebora and Miles, Gilbert Stuart (2004), p. 76.

  2. The World (London), April 18, 1787, p. 3.

  3. J. D. Herbert, Irish Varieties, for the last Fifty Years: Written from Recollections (1836), p. 246.

  4. Stuart may have been bipolar; Dorinda Evans makes an intriguing case in “Gilbert Stuart and Manic Depression,” American Art, vol. 18, no 1 (spring 2004), pp. 10–31.

  5. Advertisement of Gilbert Stuart, Senior, in the Newport Mercury, November 16–24, 1766.

  6. The manuscript memoir of Benjamin Waterhouse, quoted at length in Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, pp. 165 ff.

  7. Waterhouse, quoted in Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 166.

  8. Jane Stuart, “The Youth of Gilbert Stuart” (1877), p. 642. Jane, Stuart’s youngest daughter, born in 1812, proved to be both his artistic heir (she painted copies of his works after his death) and his biographer, as she collected in three articles various stories her father had recounted for the family. In addition to “Youth,” the other pieces in Scribner’s Monthly were “Anecdotes of Gilbert Stuart” (1877) and “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876).

  9. Stuart confided in H. M. Jouett, whose 1816 Notebook is reprinted in Gilbert Stuart and His Pupils by John Hill Morgan (1939), p. 87.

  10. Waterhouse, quoted in Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 167.

  11. Gilbert Stuart to Benjamin West, undated (December 1777?), Miscellaneous Manuscripts, New-York Historical Society.

  12. Quoted in William T. Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), pp. 27–28.

  13. Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 85.

  14. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, pp. 178–79.

  15. “Postscript Account of the Exhibition of Paintings, &c. at the Royal Academy,” St. James’s Chronicle, May 2, 1782, p. 4.

  16. Quoted in Mason, Gilbert Stuart (1879), p. 277.

  17. Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 39.

  18. As quoted by his daughter, Martha Babcock Amory, in her Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley (1882), p. 195.

  19. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. 1, p. 193.

  20. Ibid., p. 191.

  21. The full stories of the children of Gilbert and Charlotte Coates Stuart— she gave birth to twelve—remain muddled. A number of useful clues are to be found in the brief biography of their daughter Jane by Berit M. Hattendorf, “Newport’s First Woman Portraitist” (1996), pp. 145–69.

  22. Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 81.

  23. Herbert, Irish Varieties (1836), p. 232.

  24. Ibid., p. 248.

  25. Stuart to Henry Pickering, in “Conversation with Mr. Stuart the Painter,” Pickering Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., 1817.

  26. Stuart family legend, in Rebora and Miles, Gilbert Stuart (2004), p. 101, fn 2.

  27. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 195.

  28. Mason, Gilbert Stuart (1879), p. 183.

  29. “American Painters,” American Quarterly Review, vol. XVII, no. 33 (March 1835), p. 177.

  CHAPTER 9: A Plurality of Portraits

  1. Sarah Livingston Jay, August 2, 1794, quoted in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 92.

  2. Sarah Livingston Jay to John Jay, November 15, 1794, quoted in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 92.

  3. Gilbert Stuart to Joseph Anthony, November 2, 1794, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  4. Henry Wansey, An Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794 (1798), p. 57.

  5. Here and after, the primary source for information concerning the President’s House is Edward Lawler Jr., “The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark” (2005).

  6. Jane Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 369.

  7. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. 1, p. 197.

  8. William Sullivan, Familiar Letters on Public Characters, and Public Events, from the Peace of 1783, to the Peace of 1815 (1834), pp. 75–76.

  9. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 372.

  10. Ibid., p. 374.

  11. Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 522.

  12. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. 1, pp. 197–98.

  13. Gilbert Stuart, as quoted in Isaac Weld Jr., Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1807), vol. 1, pp. 1054–56.

  14. Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 521.

  15. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876),
p. 371.

  16. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 373.

  17. William T. Oedel, “John Vanderlyn: French Neoclassicism and the Search for An American Style,” cited in Rebora and Miles, Gilbert Stuart (2004), p. 147.

  18. Abigail Adams to John Adams, December 30, 1804.

  19. John Caspar Lavater as quoted in Mary Lynn Johnson, “Lavater Contemplating a Bust of Chatham,” in Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture, Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler, eds. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 60.

  20. John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, designed to promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind, vol. III (1798), p. 435.

  21. Rembrandt Peale, letter of 1834, quoted in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 95.

  22. Eliza Willing Powel to George Washington, November 17, 1792.

  23. George Washington to the marquise de Lafayette, March 16, 1793.

  24. Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, May 28, 1789.

  25. Martha Washington to Fanny Bassett Washington, October 23, 1789.

  26. Martha Washington to Mercy Otis Warren, December 26, 1789.

  27. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, pp. 220–21.

  28. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 372.

  29. Ibid., p. 370.

  30. George Washington to John Greenwood, January 20, 1797.

  31. As reported by Tobias Lear, in Stephen Decatur, Private Affairs of George Washington: From the Records and Accounts of Tobias Lear, Esquire, his Secretary (1933), p. 178.

  32. Henrietta Liston, “A Diplomat’s Wife in Philadelphia” (1954), p. 606.

  33. Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 83.

  34. Gilbert Stuart, as recorded in Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 81.

  35. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 371.

  36. Custis, Recollections (1860), pp. 413–14.

  37. George Washington to Gilbert Stuart, April 11, 1796.

  38. Abigail Adams to Abigail Adams Smith, April 11, 1798.

  39. George Washington, Diaries, May 21, 1787.

  40. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 369.

  41. Ibid., p. 369.

  42. Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 84.

  43. Quoted in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 99.

  44. Lord Lansdowne to Anne Willing Bingham, March 5, 1797, in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 99.

  45. Liston, “Diplomat’s Wife” (1954), p. 606.

  46. American Daily Advertiser, September 19, 1796.

  47. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 1796.

  48. Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), pp. 99–100.

  49. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 370.

  50. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 218.

  51. From Annals of Philadelphia (1830) by John Watson, quoted in Whitley, Gilbert Stuart (1932), p. 112.

  52. Jenkins, Washington in Germantown, p. 302.

  53. Washington, Diaries, January 7, 1797.

  54. Jouett, Notebook (1816), p. 83.

  55. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 370; and Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, pp. 198–99.

  56. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I., pp. 204–5.

  57. Thomas Pym Cope, Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851 (1978), p. 124.

  58. Dorinda Evans, The Genius of Gilbert Stuart (1999), p. 85.

  59. Jenkins, Washington in Germantown, p. 304.

  60. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 373.

  61. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 199.

  62. John Neal, Observations on American Art (1823), p. 2.

  63. Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington” (1876), p. 369, and “Anecdotes of Stuart” (1877), p. 377.

  CHAPTER 10: Rembrandt’s Washington

  1. Rembrandt Peale, “Reminiscences. The Painter’s Eyes” (1856), pp. 163–64.

  2. Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, April 24, 1794.

  3. “Rembrandt Peale’s Lecture on Washington and His Portraits” (1858), reprinted in Gustavus A. Eisen, Portraits of Washington (1932), vol. I, p. 300.

  4. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), p. 300.

  5. C. Edwards Lester, The Artists of America (1846), p. 204.

  6. Lester, The Artists (1846), p. 204.

  7. Rembrandt Peale, “Reminiscences. Charles Willson Peale. A Sketch by His Son” (1855), p. 82.

  8. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), p. 308.

  9. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), variant ms. at Haverford College, p. 16.

  10. Dunlap, History (1834), vol. I, p. 206. Stuart was never afraid to amplify an anecdote; the identity of a fifth Peale, if any, is unknown.

  11. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), Mount Vernon variant.

  12. Rembrandt Peale, “Lecture” (1858), p. 311.

  13. Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, October 25, 1796.

  14. Charles Willson Peale to John Isaac Hawkins, July 3, 1808.

  15. Rembrandt Peale to Charles Willson Peale, September 8, 1808.

  16. Poulet, Houdon (2003), p 341.

  17. Ibid., p.20, fn. 29.

  18. Ibid., p 20, fn. 28.

  19. Raoul Rochette, quoted in Hart and Biddle, Memoirs (1911), p. 218.

  20. Rembrandt Peale writing to the Committee on the Portrait of Washington, March 16, 1824. Library Company of Philadelphia.

  21. Rembrandt Peale in his pamphlet Portrait of Washington, quoted in Hevner, Rembrandt Peale (1985), p. 66.

  22. Rembrandt Peale, “Lecture,” Mount Vernon variant.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), p. 313.

  25. Ibid., p. 313.

  26. Lester, The Artists (1846), p. 211.

  27. Peale, “Lecture” (1858), Mount Vernon variant.

  28. Rembrandt Peale to Rubens Peale, July 12, 1855; in Hevner, “Rembrandt Peale’s Life in Art” (1986), p. 88.

  EPILOGUE: Remembering the Founding Father

  1. George Washington to Samuel Stanhope Smith, May 24, 1797.

  2. George Washington to David Stuart, January 27, 1799.

  3. “Jack” Washington had also been Mount Vernon’s farm manager during some of Washington’s military absences, so an understanding may have been reached earlier about the eventual bequest of the plantation.

  4. Art historians have long since rejected his attributions.

  5. James Monroe to Lafayette, February 24, 1824.

  6. Jane Bacon MacIntire, Lafayette, The Guest of the Nation. Privately published, 1967, pp. 11–12.

  7. Ibid., p. 45.

  8. Peale, Autobiography, p. 482.

  9. MacIntire, p. 92.

  10. Some of the details in this retelling of Lafayette’s visit to Arlington House on October 15, 1824, have been drawn from La Fayette’s visit to Arlington House, an account of the evening by an unknown writer. The original manuscript is in the archives at Tudor Place Historic House and Garden, Washington, D.C. Although the narrative reads very much as if it were composed at the time, the manuscript is undated.

  11. Eleanor Parke Custis, George Washington’s Beautiful Nelly: The Letters of Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis to Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, 1794–1851 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 39.

  12. George Washington to Lafayette, February 7, 1788.

  13. Robert D. Ward, An Account of General La Fayette’s visit to Virginia, in the years 1824–’25 (1881), pp. 26–27.

  14. Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, vol. 1 (1829), p. 181.

  15. Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 592.

  16. Lafayette to George Washington, March 17, 1790.

  17. Benson J. Lossing, “Preface” to Custis, Recollections (1860), p. 120.

  18. Mrs. R. E. Lee, quoted in William Buckner McGroarty, “A Letter and a Portrait from Arlington House,” The William and Mary Quarterly, second series, vol. 22, no. 1 (Janu
ary 1942), p. 51.

  19. William Thornton to William Winstanley, January 4, 1800.

  20. Thomas Pym Cope, Diary, June 10, 1802.

  21. For a more detailed discussion, see Scott E. Casper, “First First Family: Seventy Years with Edward Savage’s The Washington Family,” Imprint, vol. XXIV, no. 2 (autumn 1999), pp. 2–15.

  22. I owe this observation to Scott Casper’s perceptive “First First Family” (1999).

  23. John Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull, May 24, 1786.

  24. Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections (1860), p. 38.

  25. Eliza Willing Powel to George Washington, November 17, 1792.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I HAVE SOUGHT whenever possible to rely on primary sources. Thus, the papers of Washington, Charles Willson Peale, John Trum-bull, and others shaped this book’s narrative and give it much of its texture. In the same way, without John Smibert’s Notebook, Jane Stuart’s recollections of her father, G. W. P. Custis’s memoir of the Chief, and William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, this book might not have been possible.