The Painter's Chair (4 page)

Two paintings Martha had commissioned were not there: Gilbert Stuart had begun portraits of both General and Mrs. Washington
but had yet to complete them. Though the paired portraits would never be delivered, the images were far from forgotten.

As the family gathered at Mount Vernon the next day, Mrs. Washington employed Tobias Lear’s pen to notify other family members,
friends, and neighbors. Topping the list were President Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod
Washington, the man who would eventually be Washington’s principal heir and owner of Mount Vernon. Notes went by express to
some—one in par tic-u lar was dispatched to Wash Custis, carried by Tobias Lear’s personal servant, Charles, on Lear’s own
horse. Another of those on Martha’s list was Charles Willson Peale, the artist who had painted her husband, served in the
army with him, and had for years been a neighbor (in Philadelphia) and a frequent correspondent who shared Washington’s curiosity
about the world. Peale’s likenesses of her children, both long dead, helped keep them alive for Martha.

On Wednesday, a great deal of ceremony accompanied the installation of Washington’s remains in the family vault. Uniformed
troops, both on horseback and on foot, led the parade, followed by the clergy. Next came the General’s horse, riderless but
saddled, followed by the lead-lined mahogany coffin swathed in black cloth. Much of the family followed, though Martha remained
within the walls of the Mansion. In fact, she would never leave the estate again. Abandoning the bedchamber she had shared
with her husband, she slept thereafter in a garret on the third floor, where, as was the way, older and less fashionable furniture
had been retired, no doubt reminding her of younger, happier days in the era when she and George were newly married. She would
die there on May 22, 1802.

The nation was stunned by Washington’s death; he had seemed indestructible as well as essential. In the days after his unexpected
end, Congress approved a resolution, composed by his old comrade Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, “To the memory of the Man,
first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow-citizens.” Within a matter of weeks, the print market
was awash in engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and etchings of Washington based upon images by painters Charles Willson Peale,
Gilbert Stuart, Edward Savage, and others. The widespread sale of such prints helped transform the memory of a man into a
symbol of his nation.

When he and, later, Martha died, Mount Vernon was a suitable receptacle for what was a rare and important array of original
art and prints, most of them devoted to American subjects, many of Washington himself. Certainly, the portraits were historically
important as a record of the general, but in a larger sense they also spoke for Washington’s patient encouragement of artists,
especially those native to his country. He himself was not a particularly artistic man; architecture undoubtedly was his favorite
of the arts, and the only one that he himself practiced. Yet as a patron he had fostered nothing less than the birth of American
painting. In his house he left a museum’s worth of visual testimony to his own history and what was new in American art.

We can see Washington in these pictures, but in death, as in life, he remained a man who was easier to see and admire than
to understand.

CHAPTER 1

John Smibert’s Shade

We were a long time blundering about the ocean.
—Dean George Berkeley, 1729

I.
1729 . . . Boston Harbor . . . The Province of Massachusetts Bay

W
HEN HE STEPPED ashore at Long Wharf, the Scots-born John Smibert expected his stay would be brief. America was new to him
after a harsh Atlantic crossing and brief visits in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. He imagined Boston
would be just another stopover on his way to his final destination, the island of Bermuda. There he and his benefactor, George
Berkeley, planned to launch what both men hoped would be a beneficent adventure.

The Anglo-Irish philosopher and churchman—Berkeley was the dean of Derry—had hatched a plan for a college in America. Back
in London, he had offered Smibert the professorship of drawing, painting, and architecture at the proposed school, where they
planned “to Instruct the Europe an and Indian children in the Christian faith, & necessary educations.”
¹
For Smibert, a man of fragile health and deep religious faith, the life of a don on the idyllic isle of Bermuda promised to
be a happy escape from the intense competition back in Britain’s capital. But the great experiment could not begin until the
arrival of the promised £20,000 from the Crown’s treasury. While awaiting the money, Smibert had left Berkeley’s household
in Newport and made the short sail north to Boston. Here he planned to paint portraits, just as he had done before traveling
across the Atlantic.

The practical men of Boston tended to regard the painting of pictures as an indulgence, and some puritanical citizens even
considered the making of such images utterly godless. Even so, the city held a few likenesses of ministers, royal governors,
and well-to-do merchants, though the tradesmen who made them usually worked as painter-stainers, men more likely to paint
houses or signs than canvases. The making of such images, often called “effigies,” had been no more than an occasional pastime
to their makers, and the paintings were crude. Smibert set out to change all that.

In the New World, his abilities were remarkable. He had been an up-and-coming painter of some repute back in London, and his
Boston neighbors were quick to recognize in the new arrival skills superior to any they had ever seen. In a matter of weeks,
dozens of the city’s richest inhabitants would commission Smibert to paint them.

The forty-one-year-old Scotsman welcomed his newfound success— it followed almost thirty years of hard work. Born in the Grassmarket
neighborhood of Edinburgh in 1688, he learned his colors from his artisan father, a wool dyer. At fourteen he apprenticed
as a house painter and plasterer. Wallpaper was rare and expensive, so he painted decorations on walls and applied plaster
elements to ceilings. After completing a seven-year apprenticeship, he made his way to London and found work as a carriage-painter,
producing pastoral scenes and heraldic coats of arms on gentlemen’s coaches and sedan chairs. His skill with oils and brushes
impressed art dealers in the city, and Smibert moved on to the more lucrative work of copying other people’s pictures. In
1713 he enrolled in a new school for painting and drawing. His evening studies in the clublike environs of the old mansion
known as the Great Queen Street Academy readied him to make another artistic leap, and in 1716 he returned to Scotland and
launched himself as a portraitist.

The canny Smibert next embarked on an extended journey to Italy, spending months in Florence, Rome, and Naples. He purchased
paintings, prints, and casts on behalf of sponsors back home, but the ultimate purpose of his three years in the cultural
and artistic heart of Eu rope was to polish his skills. He gained access to private art collections, enabling him to paint
copies of Old Master works and make drawings of statuary. This was the way every artist learned—by studying the great painters
of the past; the premium was not on originality but on copying. Learning any craft in his time involved an apprenticeship,
whether contractual or informal; for all that Smibert already knew, he still had much to learn of drawing, perspective, anatomy,
the use of color, and a dozen other skills that the great artists of the past did so much better than he ever had. So Smibert
painted Old Master copies, and portraits, too, often on commission to fellow Scotsmen on their Grand Tours. One of his subjects
had been the Irish prelate George Berkeley.

On returning to London, Smibert soon earned a reputation as “a good ingenious man [who] paints and draws handsomely.”
²
A few years later his friend Dean Berkeley sought him out at his quarters in Covent Garden, the epicenter of London’s artistic
community. Berkeley invited Smibert to join his Bermuda-bound band of scholars. Smibert sailed for America in 1728 together
with Berkeley and his entourage.

Smibert’s weeks in Boston became months. Two years passed before Berkeley finally despaired of ever seeing the funds he needed
to launch his college and decided to return to England. By then, Dr. Nathaniel Williams, a physician and master of Boston’s
finest school (later, Boston Latin), had commissioned Smibert to paint five Williams portraits—and Smibert had married one
of his sitters, Dr. Williams’s daughter Mary. When the marriage took place, on July 30, 1730, she was twenty years his junior
and brought a modest dowry of £400 to their life together.

In the autumn of 1731, John Smibert waved farewell to his benefactor, Dean Berkeley, from Boston’s Long Wharf. He was the
father of one daughter, Allison, and a second child was on the way. As the dream of the professorship at the island college
vanished once and for all, John Smibert, for better or for worse, became a Bostonian.

THE INITIAL FLURRY of portrait business in Boston was gratifying, but no preordained path for artistic success existed in
the New World. Smibert realized he needed to proselytize. More of his puritanical neighbors had to be persuaded that commissioning
images of themselves was not prideful and that owning a painting was no mere luxury.

Known as “a silent and modest man,” Smibert chose to let art speak for him.
³
In early 1730 he opened his lodgings on Green Lane to the public. Local citizens who walked through his door that March encountered
men they knew, rendered by Smibert onto canvas in a starkly realistic fashion. He brought back from the dead Samuel Sewall,
the recently deceased chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court and father of the Reverend Joseph Sewall, who had
presided at Smibert’s wedding. Nearby hung a well-known military man, Jean Paul Mascarene. Smibert’s three-quarter portrait
of the Huguenot showed him dressed in his British ceremonial armor, posed before a detailed landscape of the harbor earthworks
he helped design. Another Boston worthy, the bewigged and toothless Judge Nathaniel Byfield, looked at viewers from his canvas,
his countenance possessed of all the certainty and sternness his neighbors knew to be in his nature.

More than familiar faces were on display. The professor-to-be had brought with him to North America a study collection he
had planned to use at the proposed Bermuda college. He put on view copies of Old Master paintings made during his years in
Italy. Among them were works after Raphael (
Madonna della Sedia
), Titian (
Venus Blinding Cupid
), and Rubens, and a copy of van Dyck’s portrait
Cardinal Bentivoglio
. The discipline of copying was a routine part of any artist’s training, and for Smibert the copies also represented models
he kept for his own reference or as a source of income. While in Italy he had sold some as souvenirs to other British and
Scots visitors, who regarded a good copy of a great painting as more valuable than the original of a lesser work.

Smibert owned lay figures too, doll-sized, jointed models of the human form that were especially useful in studying the draping
of clothing, essential to portraying men and women in their flowing clothes of rich fabrics. His collections of books, engravings,
and drawings were also at hand. Visitors to Smibert’s improvised museum encountered an art form then unknown in the colonies.
His plaster casts, purchased in Italy and London over the span of a decade, were the first western sculptures to reach America.
At Mr. Smibert’s the gentry of Boston admired a bust of the artist’s friend and fellow Scotsman, poet Allan Ramsay; a head
of the greatest of storytellers, Homer; and a plaster of a standing sculpture from antiquity, the
Venus de’ Medici
. The sculptures seemed so real that one Boston versifier described the Venus and Homer as “the breathing Statue and the living
Bust.”
⁴

The eighty-line ode, titled “To Mr. Smibert. on the sight of his Pictures,” soon appeared in the
London Daily Courant
and a Philadelphia newspaper. Composed by the impressionable Mather Byles, a twenty-two-year-old Bostonian, the poem announced
the artist’s presence in his adopted town. Doggerel though it was, the poem enthusiastically endorsed Smibert as he sought
to establish, single-handedly, an important outpost of the London art world in the colonies. “Still, wondrous Artist,” exhorted
the poet, “let thy Pencil flow / Still warm with Life, thy blended Colours glow.”
⁵

The open house had been an opportunity to attract more business, but the event was more momentous than it seemed. In another
of the extraordinary firsts that seemed to accumulate around Smibert, his show that late winter day constituted nothing less
than the first art exhibition in America.

II.
April 4, 1751 . . . Queen Street . . . Boston

T
O A PASSERBY on the pebbled street out front, the store looked the same. The shelves and counters inside remained stocked
with the colors, brushes, papers, palette knives, oils, and other art goods that John Smibert had sold for some twenty years.
Yet one important change occurred this particular week. According to the
Boston News-Letter
, “On Tuesday last died here, much lamented, Mr. John Smibert, well known for many fine Pictures he has done here.”
⁶
At age sixty-three, the man who fostered a taste for paintings in Boston was gone.

Failing eyesight had forced Smibert to retire from painting five years earlier, but not before he had made several hundred
American portraits (in his first five years in Massachusetts, his one-hundred-plus portraits exceeded the total painted there
in the previous three decades). Most of Smibert’s clients wanted bust-length or slightly larger canvases called Kit-kats,
*
but a few ordered three-quarter or even full-sized portraits (the cost increased with the size). The price of a three-quarter
portrait was equivalent to that of a fine bookcase or a silver teapot.

Smibert’s painting provided him with an income roughly equal to that of a middling merchant, but his father-in-law, Dr. Williams,
made possible a move to a fine house on Queen Street. Mary Williams Smibert’s grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied
the spacious building near Boston’s commercial center, barely a thousand feet from the Long Wharf. In 1733, as Smibert reported
to an old Scots patron, “[I] have now got into a house of my father in laws, who has built me a large & handsome Painting
Room & showroom in al respects to my satisfaction.”
⁷

In Smibert’s two decades in the colonies, he had watched Boston become a city of tradesmen. The narrow and winding streets
in the neighborhood surrounding Queen Street were home to dozens of skilled joiners, printers, upholsterers, tailors, and
other artisans. Members of the city’s gentry and even people of the middling sort had developed a taste for the china, fabrics,
dry goods, tobacco, and house hold items sold in nearby shops. Smibert himself prospered: At the time of his death, he was
a man of property. Among his other worldly goods were a sword with a silver hilt, several looking glasses, and forty-six chairs.
He was indebted to his wife and her father for the access they had provided to prosperous Bostonians who wanted their pictures
taken, but his retail business had succeeded, too. On the ground floor at the Queen Street house, his “colour shop” had been
the first in Boston, offering a full range of painter’s goods, from the most basic to the exotic, along with engravings, mezzotints,
and other prints. An advertisement for the venture had claimed, “JOHN SMIBERT, PAINTER, sells all sorts of colours, dry or
ground . . . with Oils, and Brushes, Fans of Several Sorts, the Best Mezotints, Italian, French, Dutch, and English Prints,
in Frames and Glasses, or without, by Wholesale or Retail at Reasonable Rates.”
⁸

Even after its proprietor’s death, his shop and studio remained. It would soon prove to be much more than a mere reminder
of the man who had worked there.