The Painter's Chair (12 page)
Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The two friends had been inconvenienced by Trumbull’s legal difficulties. They were no longer the lighthearted jokesters in
West’s studios, and to perform the flute duets they so enjoyed, Stuart was required to visit his incarcerated friend. But
Trumbull’s life was hardly one of deprivation. He purchased his breakfast and dinner from a nearby public house, drawing upon
his own funds. He gave his two-penny-a-day allowance from his jailers to the turnkey, who brushed his hat, cleaned his shoes,
and tended his clothes.
His jailer permitted Trumbull to practice his art in his cell. That meant materials were at hand for a portrait. A prepared
canvas, roughly two feet wide, two and a half feet high, was duly set upon the easel. Trumbull assumed the unaccustomed role
of sitter for the more experienced man. Stuart, who was already winning Londoners’ admiration as a maker of fashionable portraits,
picked up his brush and went to work.
ALTHOUGH HE WAS new to the great city of London, John Trum-bull’s artistic desires were of long standing. At age fifteen,
he had begged to be apprenticed to John Singleton Copley in Boston, but his father had summarily rejected the idea. The lad
was told that, as his brothers and father had done, he would enroll at Harvard. The day before the admission test at Cambridge,
temptation was dangled before him when one of his brothers arranged an audience with Copley at the artist’s fine house overlooking
Boston Common.
The visit was brief, but the youngest of the Trumbull brood left Beacon Street deeply impressed. He long cherished the dual
memory of “[Mr. Copley’s] dress and appearance—an elegant looking man, dressed in a fine maroon cloth, with gilt buttons—this
was dazzling to my unpracticed eye! [and] his paintings, the first I had ever seen deserving the name, [which] riveted, absorbed
my attention, and renewed all my desire to enter upon such a pursuit.”
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Across the river in Cambridge, Trumbull was admitted the following day as a junior. As a Harvard student, he studied moral
philosophy as well as natural philosophy (as mathematics and the sciences were then identified). He had arrived so proficient
in Latin and Greek that he sought out a French-speaking family in the neighborhood and obtained instruction in that language,
too. He continued to find time, as one of his tutors reported to his father, to exercise his “natural genius and disposition
for limning . . . an art I have frequently told him will be of no use to him.”
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From Harvard’s library, he charged out volumes on perspective, painting technique, and aesthetics. He found engravings to
copy and even showed one such imitation to Copley, who admired it. As if to return the compliment, Trumbull studied works
of Copley’s that were in the “philosophical chamber” at Harvard.
After earning his degree, he worked for a time as a schoolmaster back in Connecticut, but with revolution in the air, the
young man soon joined his state’s First Regiment, which took him to Boston and his term of service in the army.
Upon his resignation from the military in 1777, he returned for a time to the family home in Lebanon, Connecticut, where he
resumed painting. His family continued to exert pressure on him to pursue something more important than art. Undeterred, he
produced portraits of relatives, friends, and even himself. He tried his hand at history painting, too, on canvases portraying
biblical, mythological, and classical personages such as Elisha and Brutus. These varied experiments helped him realize how
much he had yet to learn. His figures were ill-proportioned, their eyes too big. His canvases lacked a sense of depth, sharing
more with the dry, flattened character of the engravings he was copying than with Copley’s richly detailed paintings. That
man, from whom he might have learned the most, was now gone (Copley had sailed for England in 1774), but Trumbull moved to
Boston, hoping to find instruction and perhaps a few painting commissions. Once there, he took his turn at Mr. Smibert’s.
He found the Painting Room on Queen Street a ready-made artist’s milieu (he paid as rent for Smibert’s “Chamber” the sum of
£61.6. “in Old Emission Currency”). He made copies of the Old Master paintings, including van Dyck’s
Cardinal Bentivoglio
, Raphael’s
Madonna della Sedia
, and Poussin’s
Continence of Scipio.
He made drawings from life. Given access to the art collection of the wealthy merchant John Hancock, he even painted a “Half
length portrait of Washington,” a copy of the portrait Charles Willson Peale had painted for Hancock, then president of the
Continental Congress, in the summer of 1776.
His time in Boston produced other dividends. He dabbled in the family merchant business during those months, buying and selling
commodities and investing in three shipping vessels. His investments proved profitable, and he used some of the proceeds to
purchase a number of Smibert canvases. Whatever social inferiority he had felt at Washington’s Vassall House headquarters
was gradually forgotten as he gained membership in an informal circle of Harvard alumni. Trumbull, now aged twenty-three,
had attained a new maturity; he felt at ease with these up-and-coming gentlemen, men possessed of aspirations to power and
influence in politics, law, diplomacy, or other professions. Trumbull’s rooms became their meeting place, and there he painted
their portraits and engaged the young aristocrats in conversation.
By the fall of 1779, he reached a new resolve: He would travel abroad. The combination of his modest success in trade and
the pressure exerted by his friends and family finally persuaded Trumbull, as he put it, “to undertake the management of a
considerable speculation, which required a voyage to Eu rope, and promised (upon paper) great results.” Another Boston friend
had obtained assurances from the British foreign secretary that, despite the state of war, Trumbull might study art in England,
as long as he avoided the taint of politics. So the artist-merchant sailed across the Atlantic, bound first for France, with
two goals in mind. First would be his “mercantile project”; should that prove a failure, he acknowledged, it would leave “the
road . . . open for pursuing my study of the arts.”
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TRY AS HE might, Gilbert Stuart was having little success in capturing his imprisoned friend Trumbull on the canvas. He prided
himself on his gift for entertaining his sitters with his anecdotes, but the spirits of the man sitting opposite him seemed
quite earthbound, entirely unavailable to his most imaginative flights of conversational fancy. That meant the face emerging
ever so slowly lacked expression, and the eyes had a dim and faraway look. Gone were the bracing enthusiasm and seriousness
Trumbull had brought to West’s studio on his arrival the previous summer.
Stuart was unaccustomed to finding it so difficult to spark a sitter’s interest. After all, he had no trouble in casting Trumbull’s
circumstances in a warm and optimistic light. His friend still hadn’t been formally charged, and, although he was confined,
his quarters were comfortable and spacious enough to enable him to work. When not posing, Trumbull worked at the easel, and
he was progressing nicely on his copy of Benjamin West’s own copy of Correggio’s
Saint Jerome at Parma.
His life was hardly solitary, as he had numerous guests. Things really could be a great deal worse.
Stuart also knew very well that there is no substitute for having friends in high places, and even Trumbull had to admit he
had his share here in Eu rope. To start with, there was Benjamin Franklin. Trumbull had made his war time crossing of the
Atlantic on a French ship,
La Né-gresse
. Almost as soon as he stepped ashore in France, he had discovered that his commercial venture was doomed, since news of the
British capture of Charleston, South Carolina, had led to a precipitous decline in the valuation of his American securities.
So Trumbull had resorted to his backup plan of finding proper instruction in painting. He sought out Benjamin Franklin, minister
plenipotentiary to France, who provided him with a letter of reference to another highly placed American, namely, Benjamin
West.
Stuart had been at hand when Trumbull arrived at West’s studio and witnessed the great painter’s open-armed hospitality, the
same welcome with which Stuart had been greeted two years earlier. His Eu rope an mission being mercantile in nature, Trumbull
had arrived without portfolio. West set him to work to make a “specimen” painting. Trumbull chose a small roundel of a mother
and two children to copy. Unbeknownst to him, it was a copy of a work by Raphael, and West was immediately impressed with
his new pupil’s taste. Stuart had helped settle the stranger into the well-equipped studio, and he watched Trumbull’s progress.
When the copy was finished, West examined it with care and declared, “Mr. Trumbull, I have no hesitation to say that nature
intended you for a painter.”
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By then, the two younger men were friends, and Trumbull was settling into his new place, preparing to learn both from his
new master and from Stuart, who worked at the next easel. Just weeks later, his arrest abruptly interrupted his tutelage.
Upon learning of his student’s imprisonment, West had sought an audience with King George III. He hurried to Buckingham House,
concerned for his own status as the king’s history painter and for the life of his young countryman. He soon received assurances
on both counts, though the king would not agree to intervene and order Trumbull’s release. Someone else would have to be found
to plead his case, but as he worked on his portrait of Trumbull, Stuart knew that a powerful Parliamentarian named Charles
James Fox was sympathetic and had already been to visit Trumbull. Though Fox’s Whig party was out of power, as part of the
loyal opposition to Prime Minister Lord North the man still carried wide influence. Yet, for all John Trumbull knew, he might
remain “Bridewell Jack” indefinitely, and his hours of solitude in his prison room allowed him to contemplate the paradoxes
of his own character. He was a man who seemed forever in conflict with himself, always looking to balance the competing impulses
of his sense of duty and his artistic sensibility, even as he wrestled with the rectitude of his patrician upbringing and
his native curiosity.
The dull-eyed, long-nosed, and expressionless sitter before Gilbert Stuart displayed such sullenness that, after a week of
on-again, off-again attempts to capture the character of his Connecticut friend, Stuart decided to give it up. As Trumbull
explained, he “could make nothing of my damn’d sallow face.”
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I V.
July 1781 . . . The Manse De Neufville . . . Amsterdam
TRUMBULL'S SENSE OF relief at his release must have been palpable. In the comfortable confines of his new accommodations,
he could peacefully contemplate his first twenty-five years. In a life already full of incident, he had tried on the roles
of
scholar, teacher, soldier, merchant, painter
, and
prisoner
. At this moment, however, the description he cherished above all was his most recent. Once again, he had become a
free man
.
His release had come about after Trumbull wrote to Charles Fox’s fellow Whig, Edmund Burke, saying, “I am ignominiously imprisoned
as a felon.”
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Burke was already sympathetic to the American cause (from the floor of Parliament he had repeatedly gone on record as a harsh
critic of the war), and he turned up at Bridewell a few days later. After agreeing to take Trumbull’s side, he negotiated
a deal for the American’s release. The king would order Trumbull freed if, in return, the painter promised to leave England
within thirty days and not to return until the war was over. Trumbull accepted the offer and promptly paid the £400 surety
(£100 came from West, £100 from the coffers of John Singleton Copley, and Trumbull was able to raise the rest). Soon after
he settled his bill for room and board at Bridewell, Trumbull traveled to Kent and there boarded a ship in the port town of
Deal to cross the Strait of Dover, heading for Amsterdam.