The Painter's Chair (13 page)
Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
“Immediately on my arrival here Mr. De Neufville invited me to his house,” Trumbull wrote to his father, “where I am at present
very hospitably and elegantly entertained.” The De Neufvilles, proprietors of the banking house John De Neufville & Son, had
presented him on arrival with letters from Governor Trumbull, who hoped his son would be able to secure a loan in Amsterdam
on behalf of the state of Connecticut. Though politically disposed to the American side, the Dutch bankers refused the request
out of concerns over war time uncertainties. On a more modest scale, they did agree to provide the young American with the
sum of £100, enabling him to contemplate his homeward journey, as he reported to his father, “without the necessity of being
under obligations to any person in England.”
16
THOUGHT HE DEN EUF VILLES gave him money, of far greater import than a mere £100 was the presence of what was undoubtedly
the most important painting of Trumbull’s young career. Trumbull had arranged to get this, his first portrait of Washington,
out of England and into the hands of his Dutch friends. Executed in London the previous autumn, this canvas would be the basis
for the first prints made from his work. The meticulously executed mezzotint version of the painting would both establish
Trumbull’s reputation and, for the first time, make the face of America’s most essential man recognizable to many Eu rope
ans.
Despite the absence of a sitter, Trumbull had painted the likeness of the General soon after his arrival in England the previous
year. He worked from memory, but as Washington’s former aide-de-camp, Trum-bull had clear recollections of his subject. He
had observed him on horseback, at his spyglass, and dictating letters to his clerks. Trumbull had dined at his table and joined
the General and his officers in conference. Not only were the man’s visage, carriage, and demeanor well known to him, he had
earlier made a practice copy of Peale’s 1776 portrait of Washington, the one painted at Hancock’s behest. In the De Neufville
George Washington
, one could see a bit of Peale as well as signs of the emerging Trumbull.
The canvas was of medium size—three feet high, twenty-eight inches in width—with the full-length figure of the statuesque
General George Washington at its center. Once more his body servant, William Lee, stands behind him, his hand on the mane
of the General’s large chestnut horse. Even if the formula was new to Trumbull, he was coming to know something of the conventions
of British portraiture. The arrangement of the elements—the hero, his turbaned groom, the horse, all set in a deeper landscape—was
popular in London at the time.
17
Despite the contrived pose, Washington’s posture and his direct gaze give him a look of serene confidence. The meticulous
details of the uniform— its buff and deep blue fabrics are highlighted by gold braid—add to the sense that the man portrayed
is cool despite the battle raging below.
Even as Trumbull had waited in prison, the painting had been in the London shop of Valentine Green. The mezzotint engraving
Green produced was inscribed, “Painted by J. Trumbull, Esq. of Connecticut 1780. Engraved by V. Green, Mezzotinto, Capital
Engraver to His Majesty.” The Green engraving proved popular, as many Eu rope ans were curious about the man who led the Americans.
Another mezzotint of Trumbull’s painting was produced in Brussels later that year, followed by other editions published in
Dublin, London, and Paris.
18
Trumbull profited little from the exploitation of his work, which soon included frontispieces in books and even the appearance
of his Washington likeness on cotton fabric used for bed-curtains.
The De Neufville
George Washington
would prove to be the sort of painting Trumbull did best. It wasn’t too big: Benjamin West, in fact, had imposed an “injunction”
on the size of canvas Trumbull was to attempt based on the younger painter’s physical limitations. Stuart had once remarked
of a Trumbull painting, “Why, Trumbull, this looks as though it was drawn by a man with one eye”—and, indeed, it had been.
19
Trumbull had lost virtually all the vision in one eye in a childhood accident, a tumble down a flight of stairs at age five.
His monocular vision meant that this one-eyed Jack would be better off painting small pictures than big ones.
JOHN TRUMBULL'S RETURN trip to America proved nightmarishly long. The crossing took more than double the usual time. Gale
winds blew the frigate on which he sailed into the North Sea, and Trum-bull sketched seascapes at such unexpected destinations
as the Shetland Islands and, later, Bilbao, Spain. A full six months passed before Trum-bull once again set foot on American
soil in January 1782, and during his extended sea journey, the deciding battle of the war had been fought at Yorktown. Even
as treaty negotiations got under way across the Atlantic, Trumbull arrived in New York with little to show for his first Eu
rope an journey, his business ventures having come to nothing. As for his painting, he had been dragged off to Bridewell almost
as soon as he had settled into West’s studio.
Though greeted by a nor’easter that blocked the roads with snow, Trumbull remembered, “I returned to Lebanon, as soon as possible,
and occupied myself with closing all accounts respecting my unfortunate mercantile experiments. My recollections were painful—I
had thrown away two of the most precious years of life—had encountered many dangers, and suffered many inconveniences, to
no purpose. I was seized with a serious illness, which confined me to my bed, and endangered my life; and it was autumn before
I had recovered strength sufficient to attempt any occupation.”
20
The man’s sense of divided allegiance, as it so often would, had left him with a sense of frustration. He had fallen short
of accomplishing his goals as both merchant and painter. That said, he did return with one public painting to his credit that
would prove a key source of propaganda, a secret weapon of an oddly public sort. Trumbull had left his Washington portrait
in the hands of Valentine Green, and the original canvas had made its way to Trumbull’s first patron, the banker De Neufville.
Admittedly, Mr. Trumbull was but one unarmed man who assaulted his enemy with nothing more than a graven image. But pictures,
especially those of inspiring men such as General Washington, can have surprising power.
Mr. Houdon . . . comes now for the purpose of lending the aid of his art to transmit you to posterity.
—Thomas Jefferson, writing to George Washington, July 10, 1785
I.
September 14, 1785 . . . Aboard Ship . . . The Delaware River
E
VEN AS HE emerged from a deep sleep, Jean-Antoine Houdon knew in an instant where he was. Far from his Paris atelier in the
Bibliothèque du Roi, the Frenchman floated toward consciousness in a world of constant motion. In the blink of an eye, he
recognized the familiar but cramped quarters below decks on the
London Packet.
Just two days before, sailors and passengers alike had welcomed the sight of land at the horizon. Although the weather had
favored the travelers for most of the transatlantic crossing, one violent wind had torn the foresail from its stays, sending
it to the deck with a violent crash. Now, with Philadelphia close by, Monsieur Houdon anticipated tying up at the quay, bringing
to a close the longest leg of his trip, a seven-week crossing from Southampton. A shorter, overland journey by stage would
follow, one that would take him to Virginia, where his new challenge awaited him.
Once on deck, Houdon made an amusing sight. Aged forty-four years and short of stature, he looked more like a scamp in a Molière
comedy than a man accustomed to the company of the nobility. His eyes were set deep beneath a tall, protruding brow, and he
wore neither wig nor powder. His motley clothes were not of his choosing, consisting of a shirt, breeches, and stockings loaned
to him by fellow passengers. He had come aboard carrying only his
sacs de nuit
(overnight needs), though his journey had begun with vastly more baggage.
In July he and three assistants assembled 128 cases, bales, boxes, hampers, casks, and baskets on the Paris riverside. With
his clothes, tools, and other goods readied to float down the Seine on a barge loaded with freight, Houdon had mounted a
diligence
(stagecoach) bound for the port of Le Havre. From there the four men sailed to Southampton, making a disagreeable two-day
crossing of the English Channel during which winds and rain buffeted the ship, producing an epidemic of seasickness among
the passengers. The baggage failed to catch up with his party by July 28, when the
London Packet
sailed for America at 5:00 A.M.
Forty-eight days later, Houdon surveyed the calm waters of the Delaware River. He expected no difficulty in finding a tailor,
hatter, and shoemaker upon reaching shore, but if dressing himself and his attendants seemed a simple matter, he could not
help but wonder whether other missing items might be more difficult to replace in America. He needed the tools of his art,
the calipers, brushes, chisels, spatulas, hawks, scrapers, clay cutters, gouges, knives, molds, bowls, and other modeling
and mixing tools, as well as sculptor’s clay and casting plaster. He could only hope that the shops of Philadelphia, in a
land where the art of sculpture was little known, would have all that he wanted. But America’s largest metropolis, the city
on the bluff ahead, looked to the worldly Parisian like a provincial place.
A modest, plain-spoken man, Houdon had risen far above his origins to reach the pinnacle of his profession. Born the son of
a
domestique
in 1741, Houdon had benefitted from an unexpected turn of fate when his father had become concierge at the École Royale des
élèves protégés, the Paris preparatory school linked with the French Academy in Rome. Scraps of sculptor sticks and modeling
clay became eight-year-old Jean-Antoine’s toys; making recognizable shapes out of them became his preoccupation. Engaged by
what he saw at the school and encouraged by the artists who peopled this world, he earned himself an official place at the
school by the time he turned fifteen. Thereafter his student work regularly won prizes, culminating in the Prix de Rome fellowship
to the French Academy in Rome in 1764.
In early manhood, he produced sculptures on grand historical and mythological themes, but at age thirty he had begun the work
that brought him wide renown. The first of his many busts of great men was a portrait of encyclopedist Denis Diderot, exhibited
at the Paris Salon of 1771. A full member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture by 1777, Houdon counted among his
patrons members of the French and German nobility, as well as Catherine the Great of Russia.
Houdon arrived as a head-hunter, a
bustier
, having made the Atlantic journey to take a bust of a new and different kind of aristocrat. For nearly a year he anticipated
arriving at the plantation home of the mysterious man—a farmer, really, and a retired soldier—and that rare personage who
engaged the curiosity of Eu rope beyond other men. Described by a contemporary as being “above all modern artists,” Houdon
hoped to capture in his sculpture the essential genius of the enigmatic man who had helped reshape the world.
1
GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON had led his country to victory at the last major military conflict of the war, the Battle of Yorktown.
Virginia’s favorite son had marched his combined American and French troops to Virginia from his base in New York. Together
with troops already in Virginia and the French fleet that arrived to control the Chesapeake, they surrounded British commander
Lord Cornwallis and his men. After a three-week siege, the British had surrendered on October 19, 1781. At the time almost
no one recognized the significance of the events at Yorktown, but in the months that followed the British evacuated Charleston,
South Carolina, and on September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed, formally acknowledging the in dependence of the
United States of America.
One of the signatories to that document, Benjamin Franklin, joined Jean-Antoine Houdon on the voyage to America in 1785. The
previous year Virginia’s General Assembly had resolved “to take measures for procuring a statue of General Washington, to
be of the finest marble and the best workmanship.”
2
Since no American sculptor possessed the skills to fulfill such a commission, Governor Benjamin Harrison deputized his predecessor,
Thomas Jefferson, to select the right man for the assignment.
The task of finding a sculptor and acting as Virginia’s commissioning agent suited Jefferson. He consulted Franklin, the man
he was succeeding as the American Minister to the Court of Louis XVI, and soon wrote to tell Harrison of their choice. “There
could be no question raised as to the Sculptor who should be employed, the reputation of Mons. Houdon of this city, being
unrivalled in Europe.”
3
Jefferson wrote to Washington, too, at Mount Vernon, to assure the General that Houdon was “the finest statuary of the world.”
4
While awaiting Jefferson’s reply—an exchange of letters between Europe and America typically required several months to cross
and re-cross the Atlantic—Governor Harrison had asked Charles Willson Peale “to draw a full-length picture of [Washington]
immediately, and, as soon as it is sufficiently dry, to have it packed up in the most secure manner and shipped in the first
ship bound for France to the address of the hon[ora]ble Thomas Jefferson.” Peale’s previous experience in painting the General
from life enabled him to dispatch the requested canvas in short order, along with his bill for thirty guineas. Of his own
initiative, the ever-expansive Peale added a scene in the foreground from the decisive Battle of Yorktown. It featured, explained
Peale, “French and American officers with their colors
displayed
, and between them the British with their colors
cased.
” He thought the battle view might be useful “if any pieces of history are to be made in bas-relief on the pedestal of the
Statue.”
5
In France, neither the likeness of the man nor the battle scene proved to be what the sculptor needed. Houdon condescended
to tell Jefferson that a sculpture “cannot be perfectly done from a picture.” Previously ignorant of the art of sculpture,
Jefferson came to understand Houdon’s refusal to work from Peale’s portrait. As he explained to his Virginia colleagues, “On
conversing with [Houdon], Dr. Franklin and myself became satisfied that no statue could be executed so as to obtain the approbation
of those to whom the figure of the original is known . . . Statues are made every day from portraits; but if the person be
living they are always condemned by those who know him for want of resemblance.”
6
Though he dismissed the painting, Houdon expressed his eagerness to make the sculpture. The men negotiated a fee of 25,000
livres (equivalent to a thousand English guineas or five thousand dollars), plus expenses and a life insurance policy of 10,000
livres. Houdon would travel to Mount Vernon, where, as Jefferson put it, he would “take the true figure by actual inspection
and mensuration.” After visiting Mount Vernon, Houdon was to return to his Paris studio, where, it was agreed, three years
would be required to execute a full-size, standing figure in marble for the Virginia State Capitol.
7
On that brisk, clear October morning, Franklin made one final entry in his travel diary before emerging from below decks to
see his “dear Philadelphia” for the first time in almost a decade. As the
London Packet
approached the busy city, Franklin knew this would be his last homecoming. At seventy-nine, he had passed much of the voyage
in his cabin. His party, which included two grandsons, Benny and Temple, and a grandnephew, Jonathan Williams Jr., had occupied
all of the ship’s “elegant and convenient accommodations.”
8
During the trip, the old man reveled in his newfound leisure—the weight of his diplomatic duties had been lifted with the
responsibilities left in Mr. Jefferson’s capable hands—and he happily returned to the practice of science. One of America’s
foremost natural philosophers, he picked up where he left off nine years earlier on his last transatlantic voyage, his passage
to France in 1776. With his grandnephew taking daily readings of the wind, air and water temperature, latitude, and longitude,
Franklin incorporated the findings into a learned paper titled
Maritime Observations
. He also completed two other treatises during the voyage,
On the Causes and Cure of Smoky Chimneys
and
Description of a New Stove for Burning of Pitcoal
.
Though his aging body grew infirm, Franklin remained curious, his mind sharp.
Despite seeing little of him during the voyage, Houdon knew Franklin’s physiognomy well. The American had stood out from what
he called “the powdered heads of Paris.”
9
With his plain Quaker clothes, thinning gray hair, omnipresent spectacles, and fur cap, Franklin had been a popular figure
in the city’s salons, an admired eccentric often seen in drawings, paintings, and pastels. His likeness had been widely published
in engravings and mezzotints, his miniature portraits reproduced in rings, snuffboxes, and clocks. Monsieur Houdon himself
had joined the parade of artists who recorded Franklin, producing a bust that had gone on view in his studio in 1778. Though
both were members of the same Masonic lodge, the men had not formally met at the time (Houdon worked from published prints
and sightings of the famous Dr. Franklin).
10
Even so, Houdon’s terra-cotta bust of the memorable American had been much admired at the Paris Salon of 1779.
Word of Franklin’s return preceded him, and as the ship entered the harbor, a gathering crowd on the Market Street wharf came
into view.
Packet
drew closer, cannons were fired and bells rung. The people’s
huzzahs
soon became audible.
In the tumult surrounding the grand welcome extended to Dr. Franklin, Monsieur Houdon, a fellow of unremarkable appearance
dressed in other people’s clothing, became the forgotten man. While Franklin’s friends and family welcomed him home with tears
and cheers, the most celebrated sculptor in the world, the first artist of international note to cross the Atlantic, stepped
onto American soil almost entirely unnoticed.
II.
October 1785 . . . The Mansion House . . . Mount Vernon
A SEPTEMBER LETTER from Franklin had advised Washington that Houdon planned to travel south after reequipping himself. Thus
prompted, the General wrote by return mail to the sculptor: “I wish the object of your mission had been more worthy of the
masterly genius of the first statuary in Eu rope: for thus you are represented to me. It will give me pleasure, Sir, to welcome
you to the seat of my retirement, and what ever I have and can procure that is necessary for purposes or convenient to your
wishes, you must freely command.”
11