The Painter's Chair (6 page)

Copley soon moved to another medium—applying oil to canvas. His apprentice works included a portrait of his stepbrother Charles
Pel-ham, but three other early paintings were what he called “Classick subjects.” Copley found engravings to copy, images
of the mythological Venus, Neptune, and Galatea, each one posed with an assemblage of other figures. He chose to imitate not
only the subject matter but the composition as well.

Once he had completed the underpainting, the monochrome prints he mimed offered no further clues as to how to proceed. In
the absence of the two Englishmen who might have tutored him, it was Mr. Smibert’s painted legacy that guided him. He had
been acquainted, of course, with Smibert, although the old man Copley knew was more shopkeep er than artist, since by then
Smibert’s vision had become too blurred and dim to pursue portraiture. But the precocious boy had visited Smibert’s color
shop and gone upstairs to view the art in his Painting Room, and entered in his sketchbook a drawing of Smibert’s plaster
cast of the Medici Venus. Now, in need of help with his “Classicks,” he found inspiration in the palette Smibert had employed
in copying Old Masters. On his Italian tour thirty years before, Smibert had mimicked the hues of the original canvases, among
them works by Poussin and Titian. When Copley painted his Classick subjects, he made reference to Smibert’s copies and imitated
the brilliant colors.

Copley knew Smibert’s portraits, too, among them his works in miniature. By 1755 Copley was also working “in Littell,” painting
as Smibert had done with oils on copper (which were then fired to affix the paints permanently to the metal surface). Copley’s
instincts led him away from Smibert’s style as he developed his own manner of portraiture. Rather than giving his subjects
the solemnity of Smibert’s, he incorporated the worldly accouterments of his wealthy clients, such as imported silks, pearls,
gold braid, lace, highly polished furniture, and elegant carpets. Copley still found the older man’s footsteps unavoidable;
as he emerged as Boston’s new preeminent painter, Copley produced portraits for families that had patronized Smibert, recording
some of the same men and women later in life. When he painted Gloucesterman Epes Sargent in 1760, his painting became a pendant
to a portrait Smibert had painted of Sargent’s wife, Katherine Winthrop Browne Sargent, twenty-six years before.

The differences between Smibert’s and Copley’s work reflected their very different personalities. Smibert arrived in America
with a sense of religious mission, a commitment to moral rectitude. In his obituary he was a man remembered for his “constant
Resignation to the Will of God.”
¹⁴
Copley, as a child of the streets who had witnessed his mother’s struggles, worked toward more worldly goals. In his richly
detailed paintings, he satisfied his sitters’ wish to display their wealth, and, in doing so, he elevated himself. He affected
a powdered wig, dressed in the latest English fashion, and married the daughter of a Loyalist family. He was savvy as well
as ambitious, and he worked hard to remain apolitical in a time when dissatisfactions with the English Crown began to be heard
in some quarters. He brought to his canvases the ability to see into the characters and even into the dreams of his clients.
As his confidence grew, he became irritated when the merchants and power brokers in Boston treated him as if he were a mere
craftsman; he came to regard himself as an “Eleustrious Artist.”
¹⁵

From Smibert and Pelham he had heard stories of the artistic life in London, and he dreamed of life abroad. He entrusted paintings
to a ship’s captain of his acquaintance, who delivered them to London for submission to the Royal Academy. In examining one
of Copley’s paintings, academy president Sir Joshua Reynolds immediately recognized the influence of Anthony van Dyck. Even
at third hand—from van Dyck’s portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, transmitted through Smibert’s copy to young Copley—the
color and technique remained unmistakable to an expert eye. Later, when Copley himself crossed the Atlantic, he wrote from
Italy in 1774 to his half brother, Henry Pelham. In examining a canvas by Raphael, Copley recognized the influence of Smibert’s
collection—in the presence of the original, his reference point still remained “the Coppy at Smibert’s.”
¹⁶
He was quick to point out that Smibert’s was “very different from . . . the Original,” but Copley’s memory was inhabited by
individual Smibert paintings, including the van Dyck, the Raphael, and a Titian. He even remembered where some of them were
hung back in Boston, belying the assertion he would later make to his namesake son, when he claimed he “was entirely self-taught,
and never saw a decent picture, with the exception of his own, until [he] was thirty years of age.”
¹⁷
The tobacconist’s son had gained more than confidence; he looked at the world with a distinct vanity.

John Singleton Copley had sought to make himself the best painter in America, and by the time of his departure for Eu rope
in 1774, his opulent portraits—they were unreserved and prideful displays of the wealth and worldly accomplishment of Loyalists
and Patriots alike—he had earned for himself the reputation he desired. But he owed a debt to Peter Pelham and to Smibert’s
cache of canvases.

O
VER THE YEARS, other painters found their way to Queen Street. In 1765, Charles Willson Peale was on the run. A slim man of
short stature, the twenty-four-year-old Mary lander could count among his burdens a wife and infant child back home in Annapolis.
His outspokenness as a member of the newly formed Sons of Liberty—rumors of a Parliamentary plan to impose a tax on the American
colonists led to its founding—had earned Peale powerful enemies. They had called in debts, forcing him to flee the threat
of debtors’ prison. Yet on his arrival in Boston Peale had an air of optimism about him.

In part, it was his nature, but circumstances contributed, too. Barely two years earlier, Peale had found his calling. Painting
had not been his first choice; he had apprenticed as a saddler and demonstrated surprising skills in metalworking, silversmithing,
and watch and clock repairs. Still, he decided that painting was his destiny. Now, as his debts threatened to swamp him, he
looked for commissions as a means of rebuilding his fortunes.

He also needed supplies since, during his travels north, his “Paint Box [had] proven very Troublesome.” The box had chafed
the hips of his horse, and slowed his progress northward. “Rather than be Detain’d I put all my Paints in the Bags and through
away the Box and Pall[ette].”
¹⁸

The morning after his arrival in Boston, Peale reported, “in the commencement of my painting and hunting for colours [I] found
a colour-shop which had some figures with ornamental signs about it . . . Becoming a little acquainted with the owner of the
shop”—that would be John Moffatt, Smibert’s heir and nephew—“he told me that a relation of his had been a painter, and he
said he would give me a feast. Leading me upstairs he introduced me into a painter’s room.”
¹⁹

The shade of Mr. Smibert once again rose to guide a young painter. The naïve colonial came face-to-face with Smibert’s versions
of van Dyck, Raphael, and Poussin, as well as some of Smibert’s own canvases. Peale soon departed from Boston, but not before
purchasing, despite his straitened circumstances, several prints. Smibert’s works were, as Peale remembered, “in a stile vastly
superior to any [I] had seen before.”
²⁰

Mr. Peale, a man of boundless curiosity and a generous spirit, would have a long and productive painting career in the decades
to come.

WHEN JOHN TRUMBULL arrived, in 1778, he was in an ill humor. He felt his country and family had failed him.

The Revolutionary War had begun, and as a spirited patriot Trum-bull had joined the cause led by General Washington. Trumbull’s
honorable service in the Continental Army was to have been rewarded by elevation to the rank of colonel. He observed lesser
officers raised to this rank while he waited with growing impatience. When his commission finally did appear, it was misdated,
further insulting Trumbull. His pride was offended by the army’s “neglect,” and he promptly resigned. “Thus ended my military
service,” he wrote, “to my deep regret, for my mind was . . . full of lofty military aspirations.” His next plan met with
a different problem: His family—including his father, Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut—dismissed his notion of becoming
a painter as foolhardy. Still, Trumbull was undeterred. “I . . . resumed my pencil,” said Trumbull, “and . . . went to Boston,
where I thought I could pursue my studies to more advantage.”
²¹

This worked out better than even he might have hoped because he, too, made his way to Queen Street. Not content merely to
visit Smibert’s Painting Room, reported Trumbull, “I hired the room which had been built by Mr. Smibert, the patriarch of
painting in America.” With John Moffatt recently dead, Trumbull’s timing proved impeccable. In the rented space he found the
collections largely intact.

Trumbull could hardly have been more different from the unassuming Mr. Peale. His carriage and posture had an aristocratic
hauteur. He was darkly handsome and confident of his educated pedigree, but also conscious that he was in the novitiate stage
of becoming a painter. As he summarized the experience, “Mr. Copley was gone to Eu rope, and there remained in Boston no artist
from whom I could gain oral instructions, but these copies supplied the place and I made some progress.”
²²
As the Revolutionary War continued, its theater the mid-Atlantic states, he made landscapes based on engravings, copied some
of Smibert’s females, and did studies of his brother.

Trumbull, like Copley and Peale before him, would soon depart for Europe. But even after Trumbull had come and gone, taking
with him some of the paintings, Smibert’s ghost continued to inhabit his old Painting Room. The room remained a magnet for
young painters. Mather Brown rented “the upper chamber” in the winter of 1780.
²³
Samuel King and John Mason Furnass followed; the latter advertised in the
Chronicle
of April 28, 1785, inviting his “Friends and the Public” to call at his “Painting-Chamber” where he was “execut[ing] Portrait-Painting
in Oil and Water Colours . . . As a native of Boston he hopes for as much encouragement as foreigners and invites them to
call at his Painting-Chamber.”
²⁴
After having copied it himself, Trumbull donated Smibert’s version of van Dyck’s
Cardinal Bentivoglio
to Harvard in 1791, where another young artist, Washington Allston, would soon copy it at the college library.

Perhaps the best-remembered painter of the revolutionary era made a cameo appearance on this little stage, as well. Some years
earlier, another of Smibert’s nephews, Thomas Moffatt, had ordered from London an “Engine for cutting tobacco . . . and two
sieves for Scotch snuff.” The equipment was to be installed at a snuff mill, one designed and operated in Newport, Rhode Island.
The Scotsman whom Moffatt brought to America for that purpose, Gilbert Stuart, lived over the mill, and there his namesake
son was born. Through the family’s contacts, the younger Stuart later came to know some, perhaps many, of Smibert’s canvases.
²⁵