The Painter's Chair (21 page)

I V.
February 22, 1796 . . . The Columbian Gallery . . . Philadelphia

WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY? TO Savage, it seemed the perfect symmetry. While Savage was abroad, the President had been reelected
for a second term, and, despite growing political disagreements between his Federalist Party and the opposition Democratic-Republicans,
Washington’s status had hardly diminished. It was Savage’s profound hope that the birthday timing would benefit a project
that had required six years to mature. Now, with its paint still drying, the canvas was going on display.

Savage had returned to America with big plans for promoting his art. In May 1794, Savage opened an exhibit in Boston that
he called the Columbian Exhibition of Pictures and Prints. Later that year, with his fortunes on the rise, he married a Boston
girl, Sarah Seaver. By 1795, when he opened the doors to his Columbian Gallery in Philadelphia, he and Sarah were the proud
parents of a namesake son, Edward. His brother was already established as a successful merchant in Philadelphia, and Savage
had decided to try the American capital, too, welcoming the public to a display that featured “a large collection of ancient
and modern Paintings and Prints.”
⁹

There being no equivalent of the Royal Academy in the United States, public art exhibitions were virtually unheard of in America.
Charles Willson Peale had hung the upper walls of his Museum with his portraits, but his painted worthies were often overlooked
by patrons absorbed by the natural history specimens and other curiosities in the cases beneath. Mr. Savage’s exhibition also
featured something quite new and different. As his countryman Copley had done in London, Savage would display a large canvas
that offered viewers an almost life-size experience. The centerpiece of Savage’s Columbian Gallery was to be his magnum opus:
On its patriarch’s birthday,
The Washington Family
would have its debut.

He had completed
The Washington Family
in a new incarnation. Years earlier he had begun small, but during his two years abroad, his ambition—and a second version
of the painting—had grown larger. He now hoped to make a splash in America as great as Copley had done in London. The Washingtons
on his new canvas were as big as life, and the canvas itself stood seven feet tall and nine and a half feet wide.

Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1795, he found much had changed in America, including two of the players in his big conversation
piece. Wash and Nelly, the Washington grandchildren, were no longer the youngsters they had been in 1790. Nelly had become
a young woman, widely admired for her beauty and intelligence, and Wash, just entering his teens, had grown perhaps a foot
taller. In order to make his painting current for the public, Savage had scheduled new sittings at which he overpainted the
earlier likenesses, making the girlish Nelly taller and giving her a more womanly figure (her seventeenth birthday was just
a month away). Savage modified her younger brother’s countenance. He also changed the portrayal of the servant, making him
taller and older so that he would resemble more closely Washington’s trusted wartime servant William Lee.

The painting’s long gestation had allowed Savage to incorporate an array of symbolic elements into the picture, which he hoped
would add to its allure. He had conceived it in the tradition of
The Bermuda Group
and other group portraits he had seen in his travels, but he wanted his conversation piece to have the appeal of a grand history
painting, too. Washington had become one of the world’s most admired personages, and nowhere was he more esteemed than in
America, where, in that brief historic moment before political parties evolved, he had been unanimously elected the nation’s
president. So Savage larded his canvas with reverential clues to Washington’s world. In a later description he offered his
own gloss on the painting’s iconography.

“The General is seated by a table,” explained Savage, “drest in his uniform, which represents his Military Character; his
left arm rests on papers which are suitable to represent his Presidentship; Mrs. Washington, sets at the other end of the
table, holding the Plan of the Federal City, pointing with her fan to the grand avenue; Miss Custis stands by her side assisting
in showing the plan; George Washington [Custis] stands by the Gen. his right hand resting on a globe.”
¹⁰

Savage dared hope that picture-viewing could become a popular diversion in America, just as it had in England. He announced
that his gallery show would open on “Chestnut-street, third door West of Tenth-Street.” He sought to up the ante for his show
by opening on Washington’s birthday, a date that was already emerging as a suitable day of recognition for the aging General.
Washington neared retirement— despite uncountable entreaties, he had refused to be a candidate for president a third time—so
barely a year remained before another man would take the oath of office, assuming the role that no one else had held and that
Washington had defined.

Those who attended on February 22, 1796, were asked to pay an admission fee of “one quarter of dollar.” They came to look
and to celebrate the President’s sixty-fourth birthday, but they got something they did not expect. The experience of the
Washington group portrait was unprecedented; there were few such conversation pieces in America, and no other of public figures.
Its creator had advertised the event two days before the opening as “the President and Family, the full size of Life.”
¹¹

As Smibert had done with Dean Berkeley, Savage had placed Washington off center. The old General sits back in his red, brocade-upholstered
chair, his legs crossed at the knees, with his left hand resting on the tabletop before him. His body appears relaxed but
his face does not; Washington’s jaw is set and he stares determinedly away from the viewer (remember, he never lost his dislike
of having his picture taken). Sitting opposite her husband, Martha is her gracious self, wrapped in the voluminous folds of
a fine silk dress and a black lace shoulder scarf. Her upright posture and beribboned mobcap make her seem taller than she
appears in her other portraits. Like her husband, she looks distracted, but her composed features nevertheless convey the
kindness for which she was renowned. Nelly stands at her grandmother’s side, a pretty young woman with thick red hair and
a fair complexion. Still a boy, the standing Wash barely reaches the shoulder of his seated grandfather. This casual arrangement
of the family gives the vignette a relaxed air. So does the fifth and final figure, the liveried slave half hidden in the
shadows behind Martha.

For those who came to see it, the effect of Savage’s
Family
was unique and fresh, and not just because of its size and the presence of the assembled Washingtons. The audience found a
larger American vision. Here was Washington as general, president, planter, world figure, and, perhaps freshest of all, as
paterfamilias, all rolled into one. This was Washington, a childless man yet a father to these children and a Founding Father
too. The attentive viewer perceived that the subject of the painting was twofold. Behind the people, the country is represented;
it’s not George Washington at the center of the piece, but a vista of America’s natural beauty that is the focal element.
The grander theme of America and its possibilities adds depth to an image that, initially, appears to be a portrait of a family
unit, one with which almost any father and husband could identify.

The painting was widely admired. It was an immediate hit in Philadelphia, and in later exhibitions when Savage took it on
the road, New Yorkers and Bostonians found it admirable and even moving. Savage saw to it that his work was soon on view even
for those unable or unwilling to travel. In the spring of 1798, he announced publication of the copperplate engraving of
The Washington Family
. “The print, representing General Washington and Family, all whole lengths in one groupe, will be ready for delivery by the
15th of March.” The plate that went to press bore not only the image but also an identifying label, in English, that was repeated
in French. Savage hoped his work would gain international distribution, and he employed a skilled engraver, David Edwin, a
young English émigré who had trained in London and Amsterdam. Finished prints would cost one and a half guineas for those
who subscribed in advance; latecomers would pay two guineas.
¹²

Announcements appeared in March in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
and the
Time-Piece
(published in New York). In August 1798 Bostonians who read the
Columbian Centinel
learned that “A number of plates of the elegant picture of the
Washington
family, are expected to arrive from
Philadelphia
in all
September . . .
The execution is wholly American; and . . . this plate is worthy to adorn the parlours of every house in the U. States.—It
represents our late beloved PRESIDENT, his amiable Lady, and her two Grand-children . . . The likenesses are correct, and
impressive— the drapery exact—and the engraving throughout masterly.”
¹³

Washington himself ordered four freshly printed copies of the copperplate engraving. They came to him at Mount Vernon directly
from Edward Savage. Per the general’s orders, the images had been mounted in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with
glasses.”
¹⁴
In the letter that accompanied the prints, Savage explained, “I Delivered four of the best impressions of your Family Print.
They are Chose out of the first that was printed. Perhaps you may think that [they] are two Dark, but they will Change light
after hanging two or three months. The frames are good Sound work. I have Varnished all the Gilded parts which will Stand
the weather and bare washing with a wet Cloth without injury.”

His explanation delivered, the artist could not help but confide in the man responsible how good business was. “[A]s soon
as I got one of the prints Ready to be seen I advertised . . . that a Subscription would be open for about twenty Days. Within
that time there was three hundred and thirty one Subscribers to the print and about one hundred had subscribed previously,
all of them the most respectable people in the city. In consequence of its Success and being generally approved of I have
continued the Subscription. There is every probability at present of its producing me at least ten thousand Dollars in one
twelve month. As soon as I have one printed in Colours I shall take the Liberty to sent it to Mrs. Washington for her acceptance.
I think she will like it better than a plain print.”
¹⁵

Just a few years earlier, John Trumbull had encountered a great deal of trouble earning what he regarded as an acceptable
living at the painting game, but Edward Savage demonstrated that it could be done. His artistic aspirations were less than
those of some of his contemporaries. Compared to the likes of Peale and even Trumbull, he sought out less instruction and
devoted less energy to mastering the art of painting. His likenesses seem competent, at best, when compared to the expressive
paintings of his New England contemporary Gilbert Stuart. Even in his own era, his work was disparaged by America’s first
art historian, William Dunlap. “Savage published prints from his own
wretched
pictures,” wrote Dunlap in his compendious two-volume
History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States
(1834).
¹⁶

Edward Savage may fall short of greatness as a painter—neither
The Washington Family
nor, for that matter, its antecedent,
The Berkeley Group,
is an inspiring painting. On the other hand, both grand paintings exist and have endured because of inspiring men. Following
a path established by Smibert, Savage was able to do something his pre de ces sors could not do: He found an immense audience
for his work. He became an art impresario, as much an entrepreneur as artist. His personality may have helped. In the miniature
watercolor on ivory that he painted of himself, his complexion is ruddy, and he appears possessed of a sanguine disposition,
with a smile at the ready. But his memory is ensured not by his character but for the popular appeal of his domestic view
of Washington and the wide currency it achieved after the general’s death.

IN THE BIG painting of
The Washington Family
, Wash and Nelly looked like their current teenage selves, but in the Savage engraving begun years earlier, they reverted
to childhood. The fifth member of
The Washington Family
, Washington’s valet and war-time companion, William Lee, hovers at the edge of the image, an almost spectral presence. In
the caption printed at the foot of the engraving he isn’t even mentioned. His figure, set deeply into the picture space behind
Martha’s chair, seems a worthy metaphor for the less-than-human status of a slave.

In October 1767 a Virginia widow sent some of her property to the auction block. Washington attended the sale and purchased
“Mulatto Will” for sixty-one pounds, fifteen shillings, along with the boy’s brother, Frank, for fifty pounds. At the same
auction, he also bought the “Negro boy Adam” for just nineteen pounds.
¹⁷
The disparity in prices was probably a function of skin color, since the destiny of dark-skinned slaves was usually to work
in the fields, while those of mixed race were often favored for greater responsibilities as craftsmen or house servants.