The Painter's Chair (18 page)

THOUGH CONCEIVED IN a moment, the painting took very much longer to complete. Trumbull returned to London in November by way
of Frankfurt, Cologne, Liège, and Brussels, as he continued his search for an engraver. Once ensconced back at Mr. West’s
studio in London, he set to work in earnest.

“I resumed my labors . . . on the history of the Revolution,” he wrote, “arrang[ing] carefully the composition for the Declaration
of Independence, and prepared it for receiving the portraits.”
²⁸
He wanted his new history painting to be admired both as art and as a historically accurate record of the event commemorated.
It wouldn’t be easy: The canvas, designed to be engraving-ready, was small, only twenty-one inches high and thirty-one inches
wide, and it had to accommodate a crowd of Continental Congressmen. In the end, Trumbull would portray forty-six figures;
fifty-six men signed the document, but Trumbull chose to incorporate the faces of four notable patriots who did not, omitting
fourteen others.

Most of these men were entirely unknown to Trumbull, and almost none was on the same side of the Atlantic as he. The following
summer he painted John Adams directly onto the canvas, just prior to Adams’s return to America. The next winter Trumbull returned
to Paris and painted in Jefferson. Only upon returning to the United States, a journey he was not yet ready to take, could
he finish the painting; in fact, the work of completing
The Declaration of In dependence, 4 July 1776
would be central to the next several years, the most productive of Trumbull’s artistic life.

In helping Trumbull plan the painting, Jefferson had played the dramaturge; in the painting itself, his was the lead role.
The combined intelligence and experience of the two Americans in Paris, reveling in a rich artistic culture new to them, produced
a unique work of art. Coming from a pragmatic land where drawing skills were more likely to be employed in surveying land
than seeking beauty, a nation where painters were regarded as limners because almost no one saw the merits of any art beyond
portraiture, Trumbull and Jefferson recognized that art could perform an important public function. Although it records a
legislative moment rather than a military confrontation,
The Declaration of Independence
would ring out over the centuries louder than a cannon shot.

I
ARRIVED IN New York on the 26th of November, 1789,” Trumbull wrote in his
Autobiography
many years later. He returned to America a more sophisticated artist, his six years of tutoring in the studio of Benjamin
West at an end. As the
Montgomery
sailed into harbor, Trumbull’s confidence was at high ebb, buoyed by the enthusiasm of Jefferson. In the voluminous baggage
stowed below decks were the several canvases of his planned “great work.” He had come home to complete them and to lay claim
to the title of Artist of the Revolution.

Once ashore, he called at No. 3 Cherry Street, the house Congress had rented as the presidential residence. Trumbull arrived
with the perfect entrée, since, on a brief trip to Paris immediately before his return to America, he had met with the Marquis
de Lafayette. Washington’s old comrade-in-arms and surrogate son had asked Trumbull to seek out Washington on his return.
When he sat down with the man who had become the nation’s first president less than eight months earlier, Trum-bull “lost
no time in communicating to him the state of political affairs, and the prospects of France, as explained to me by M. La Fayette.”
²⁹
Just as Trumbull had been, Washington was curious about the storming of the Bastille, Lafayette’s new role as commander of
the National Guard, and other particulars of the unfolding revolution in France.

When they met that late November day in the three-story square house overlooking the mouth of the East River, Trumbull’s professional
preoccupation was with the past. His desire was to obtain portraits to fill the “pockets” in the unfinished canvas of his
Declaration of Independence
. He had painted in the torsos of the players, arranging them as Jefferson recollected them, and now anticipated a series
of journeys up and down the United States coast to Philadelphia, Charleston, Boston, and Newport, to Virginia and New Jersey.
He wanted to paint the surviving participants from life, fitting their faces to the figures on canvas.

Washington’s concern was the present. As they met that day on St. George’s Square, George, like his wife, Martha, was still
adapting to large changes. She continued to refer to him in her letters as “the General,” a designation she preferred to others
that had been bandied about of late (among those were two notions of John Adams’s, “His Elective Majesty” and “His Mightiness”).
³⁰
Washington understood the title chosen for the office really would mean something. Symbolic though it might be, it had to
describe the role that Washington inhabited, in deliberate contrast to King George III. It was also a part no one had ever
before played.

While Trumbull had been working at his
Declaration
in Georgian London, the second of his nation’s momentous documents, the United States Constitution, had been drafted at Philadelphia.
Since then it had become the supreme law of their homeland, and Trumbull’s old commander in chief had assumed an unwanted
and ill-defined set of responsibilities.

ON HIS RETIREMENT to Mount Vernon at the war’s end in 1783, Washington had happily accepted the role of a latter-day Cincinnatus.
Having led his army to victory, just as the Roman consul Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus had done in the fifth century B.C.E.,
Washington returned to farming, content to let others rule. He kept his distance from the political life of the country, although
visitors to Mount Vernon in the mid-1780s met a man quick to cross-examine them on such subjects as Congress, commerce, and
foreign relations. Washington, a habitual reader of newspapers, also maintained a copious correspondence with those still
in the political fray, both at home and abroad. One of them, a former aide and sometime secretary, Colonel David Humphreys,
recognized both the joy with which Washington welcomed his withdrawal to the “shades of private life” and the General’s near
compulsion to be “
the focus of political intelligence
for the new world.”
³¹
While Washington had relinquished all claims on power, the progress of the political experiment he made possible continued
to preoccupy him.

Thirty-nine of the fifty-five constitutional delegates, including George Washington, eventually signed the draft document
(three in attendance refused to endorse it, while another thirteen had departed prior to the ceremony). The deed done, an
impassive Washington climbed into his carriage and returned to Virginia. He did his best to stay out of the political crossfire,
leaving the infighting to Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, who penned
The Federalist Papers
, writing collectively under the pseudonym Publius. Even without Washington’s intervention, month by month and state by state,
the powers-that-be convened to consider ratification. Before the year ended four states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
and Georgia) had voted to ratify the document.

The final adoption of the Constitution was by no means a foregone conclusion; intense opposition had to be overcome in some
states. Yet as 1788 passed, the process seemed to be gaining momentum—January and February brought word of acceptance in Connecticut
and Massachusetts— but Washington had very mixed feelings. Certainly he believed the approval of the Constitution was essential
(he had earlier written to Patrick Henry, a potential opponent of the measure, “I wish the constitution, which is offered,
had been more perfect; but . . . if nothing had been agreed on by [the federal convention], anarchy would soon have ensued,
the seeds being deeply sown in every soil”).
³²
As state conventions approved the draft document (Mary land joined the list in April), Washington recognized the looming,
if indistinct, shape of a potential obligation. He wondered whether he could avoid being drafted as chief executive of the
revised union.

He was hardly alone in worrying about the matter; his implied candidacy was apparent even to an observer three thousand miles
away, the Marquis de Lafayette. Replying to the man whom he regarded almost as a son, Washington wrote in April 1788, “In
answer to the observation you make [in your last letter] on the probability of my election to the presidency, knowing me as
you do, I need only say, that it has no enticing charms and no fascinating allurements for me. However, it might not be decent
for me to say I would refuse to accept, or even to speak much about an appointment, which may never take place . . . [but]
at my time of life and under my circumstances, the increasing infirmities of nature and the growing love of retirement do
not permit me to entertain a wish beyond that of living and dying an honest man on my own farm.”
³³
Five months later the Constitution had become law, and Washington wrote to another old friend, General Henry Lee: “[M]y inclinations
will dispose and decide me to remain as I am, unless a clear and insurmountable conviction should be impressed on my mind,
that some very disagreeable consequences must, in all human probability, result from the indulgence of my wishes.”
³⁴
As the elective mechanisms of the new document swung into motion, Washington’s thinking evolved;
I’d really rather not
became
Must I?

He continued to wait at Mount Vernon as if the outcome was in doubt, assuming the guise of a typical farmer occupied by concerns
about atypical weather conditions and the estate’s disappointing harvests. Yet in answering the many inquiries from old friends
about the presidency, he gradually assumed a tone of resigned acceptance. In a January 1789 letter to Lafayette he wrote,
“Should circumstances render it in a manner inevitably necessary, . . . I shall assume the task with the most unfeigned reluctance.”
³⁵
He repeated the same sentiment in other letters, but by March he wrote to a nephew, “[I]t is probable I shall be under the
necessity of quitting this place, and entering once more into the bustle of pub-lick life, in conformity to the voice of my
Country and the earnest entreaties of my friends, however contrary it is to my own desire or inclinations.”
³⁶
If
had become
When.