Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (15 page)
BEFORE HOUDON AND his apprentices could begin their journey home, several additional tasks remained to be completed.
The mold of Washington’s face was invaluable, but it was precisely the reverse of what Houdon actually needed, since it was
a negative of the General’s features. After curing for some hours, the mold would be lubricated, and freshly mixed plaster
poured into it. Once the plaster had set, the negative mold could then be chipped away with the light, slanting blows of a
chisel driven by a wooden mallet. In this way, the negative mold would be destroyed, but the plaster cast that emerged from
beneath would be an exact reproduction of the General’s face, which Houdon could have at hand to measure and refresh his memory
when he returned to his Paris studio.
The clay bust also needed further attention. It was slowly air-drying, but in order to be made more durable, it needed to
be fired into terra cotta (literally “baked earth”). Houdon and his men also wished to make a piece mold of the bust. Fashioned
in several sections, the piece mold would leave the original bust intact while making it possible for the sculptor to produce
multiple copies.
In the next several days, Houdon and his men completed their work. They toted the bust to Mount Vernon’s kitchen to fire.
The lower temperatures of the bake oven drove off the remaining moisture more slowly than Houdon’s much hotter Paris kiln
would have done, thus avoiding the buildup of steam inside and the risk of cracking. After its firing, the surface remained
somewhat soft and fragile but intact.
Houdon departed on Monday, October 17. Washington bade him farewell, noting in his diary, “Having finished the business which
bro’t him hither, [he] went up . . . with his People, work and implements in my Barge, to Alexandria, to take a Passage in
the Stage for Philadelphia.”
17
On arriving in Philadelphia three days later, the sculptor presented a copy of the bust to Benjamin Franklin. Impatient to
return to Paris, Houdon soon traveled to New York and sailed for Eu rope, carrying the life mask in his baggage, leaving his
workmen to bring the mold of the bust and another positive cast when they followed. He reached his home on Christmas Day 1785.
The original terra cotta bust remained in America, a gift from Houdon to the General. In making the piece molds, his assistants
marred the bust slightly, leaving trace adhesions around the eyes. Houdon himself had intentionally left his mark on the bust’s
right rear shoulder, incising his signature,
Houdon F. 1785.
The terra cotta soon found a place of honor in Washington’s study and a reputation in the family as “the best representation
of Gen. Washington’s face.”
18
III.
1786 and After . . . Houdon’s Atelier . . . Palais des Beaux-Arts . . . Paris
IN JANUARY 1786, Jefferson reported Houdon’s safe return from America and that he came armed “with the necessary mold and
measures” to make the full-length statue of Washington.
19
But Houdon still required a bit of help. For one thing, he needed a decision: What would be the appropriate apparel for the
Washington marble?
“Permit me,” Jefferson wrote to Washington, “to ask you whether there is any particular dress or any particular attitude which
you would rather wish to be adopted?”
20
As usual, Washington sought other people’s counsel before expressing his own opinion. The standard approach in Paris, Washington
learned, was the classical. In sculpture, as in buildings and paintings, the dress of antiquity was in vogue, meaning his
marble representation might be wrapped in a Roman tunic or toga. The prevailing assumption among artists was that truth and
beauty were best served by the idealized dress of the ancients and that, in contrast, contemporary clothes would be vulgar
and distracting.
Washington wasn’t so sure. From an old aide-de-camp turned diplomat, David Humphreys, he learned of
The Death of General Wolfe
, the Benjamin West portrayal of General Wolfe in his own British uniform. That painting had persuaded a new generation of
painters—among them Charles Willson Peale—of the rightness of contemporary dress. George Washington tended to see the argument
in the same way. “A servile adherence to the garb of antiquity might not be altogether so expedient as some little deviation
in favor of the modern costume,” Washington wrote back to Jefferson, employing his usual epistolary manner of writing in quiet
understatement rather than making overbearing demands. “This taste which has been introduced in the painting by Mr. West I
understand is received with applause and prevails extensively.”
21
Houdon considered both options, executing two scale models, each perhaps eighteen inches high. In one Washington was in modern
military costume, carrying a walking stick, his sword hung from a column beside him. In the other, he wore a cape, his lower
legs uncovered, his feet clad in sandals. Jefferson favored the notion of modern dress and replied to Washington that not
only West but such other Americans abroad as John Singleton Copley and John Trumbull shared his view. It was decided.
Deciding
and
doing
, though, were different things. Washington’s bust and life mask had been at hand to measure and contemplate for the head,
but Houdon wished a life model to stand in as he shaped the statue’s legs, arms, and torso. After his fortnight at Mount Vernon,
Houdon knew that not just anyone would do. Few men of their time stood as tall as the General, but his stature alone did not
account for his powerful presence. He was made of large parts yet he moved with a lightness and grace that belied his size.
In June 1789, Jefferson arrived for one of his periodic progress visits to Houdon’s studio, this time with New Yorker Gouverneur
Morris at his side. Despite his peg leg (years earlier, Morris had endured an amputation after a carriage accident), he carried
himself with an easy grace, and he was a strikingly handsome six-foot-four. He was renowned for his charming way with the
ladies and his gift for business. He and Washington were friends (at Washington’s behest, he had drafted much of the Constitution),
but the gregarious Morris did not share his friend’s diffident personality. He did share Washington’s gift for turning heads—even
dressed in his dark, unornamented American suit, Morris had an élan that stood out on the streets of Paris—and Houdon immediately
recognized him as a suitable double for the General.
Morris stood for two lengthy modeling sessions. After the first, on Friday, June 5, 1789, he noted in his diary, “I stand
for [Houdon’s] Statue of Genl. Washington, being in the humble employment of a Manakin.” Four days later he reported, “This
morning [I went] to Mr. Hudon’s . . . to stand for the Statue of the General until I am heartily tired.”
22
Still another three years would pass before Houdon completed the statue. Because of construction delays at the Virginia State
Capitol, an additional four years elapsed before the statue and its tall plinth, together weighing thirty-six thousand pounds,
were loaded into three cases and shipped to America on the ship
Planter.
And it wouldn’t be until 1803 that James Monroe, minister to France, paid Houdon his full fee. But Houdon had captured George
Washington at Mount Vernon. Pensive and inward-looking, the man seemed to nurture no dreams of executive power. In Washington’s
own memorable turn of phrase, the tall American whom Houdon visited had retired into himself.
23
The greatest motive I had or have for engaging in, or for continuing my pursuit of painting, has been the wish of commemorating
the great events of our country’s revolution.
—John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, June 11, 1789
I.
1784–1785 . . . At Mr. Benjamin West’s . . . London
W
ITH AN UNEAS confidence in own destiny, John Trum-bull remained true to his promise not to set foot on British soil until
peace was restored. After his return to America, he lived for a time with his family in Lebanon, Connecticut. Next he worked
for his brother David in New York, helping provision the Continental Army, but he continued to struggle to find his proper
place.
His father still wished him to engage in commerce or perhaps the law. “With proper study,” the old governor told him, “[you]
should make a respectable lawyer.” But Trumbull felt a passionate urge to pursue the arts. As he tried to justify his leanings,
he once more debated the matter with his father. “I . . . entered into an elaborated defense of my predilection,” he later
wrote, “and dwelt upon the honors paid to artists in the glorious days of Greece and Athens.” His father dismissed the argument
simply. “You forget, sir,” he told his son, “that
Connecticut is not Athens.
”
1
In the face of his father’s insistent urgings, Trumbull determined to resume his artistic apprenticeship as soon as possible,
and in December 1783 that moment arrived. The end of the war permitted him to resume his pursuit of instruction in England.
The speed of his journey back across the Atlantic seemed a good omen. No great wind blew the traveler off course, and the
winter passage required an unremarkable forty-one days. The trip had a certain symmetry, too, as the good ship
Mary
sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and made landfall at Portsmouth, England, on January 16, 1784. Even as he made his
way from the port city on England’s south coast to the British capital, the Continental Congress back home prepared to ratify
the Treaty of Paris in Philadelphia. With the war at an end, Trum-bull’s military rank could once more safely precede his
name, and he vowed never again to relinquish the title of
colonel
Trumbull.
The momentum from his journey carried over into his new life in England. The returning student devoted himself to his training,
rising each day at five o’clock to study anatomy and to tend to his correspondence before his eight o’clock breakfast. As
Trumbull had hoped, Benjamin West welcomed him back to his studio at 14 Newman Street, and, after making the twenty-minute
walk into the city each morning from his quarters near outlying Paddington Square, he worked all day at his easel at West’s,
pausing only for an afternoon dinner about two o’clock. His friend Gilbert Stuart, though no longer at Mr. West’s, was nearby,
having established his own Painting Room at No. 7 Newman Street. Stuart’s reputation as a portraitist brought him much custom.
Trumbull began spending evenings at the Royal Academy in drawing classes. Most of his fellow students there were mere boys,
lads very much younger than the twenty-nine-year-old Trumbull. He discovered to his dismay that many of them drew better than
he, but his disciplined approach paid off. Trumbull was soon able to write home to his brother Jonathan, “Judges of the Art
declare that I have made a more rapid progress in the few months I have been here than they have before known.”
2
His daytime labors in West’s studio produced portraits. The first of them was a likeness of Sir John Temple, an aristocratic
Englishman whom Trumbull knew from his time in Boston (Temple was married to the daughter of the Bay State’s governor, James
Bowdoin). When Trum-bull asked West to appraise the work, his mentor expressed admiration for
Sir John Temple
, and the canvas was submitted to the Royal Academy, where it was exhibited later that year. A picture he finished in June
1784, a father-and-son portrait of an old Connecticut merchant friend,
Jeremiah Wadsworth and His Son, Daniel
, won fewer plaudits. No less a personage than Joshua Reynolds offered Trumbull his critique. “The moment he saw it,” the
colonel reported, “he said in a quick sharp tone, ‘that coat is bad, sir, very bad; it is not cloth—it is tin, bent tin.’
” Though he accepted the correctness of the observation, Trumbull made a point thereafter of not “expos[ing] my imperfect
works to the criticism of Sir Joshua.”
3
Even so, Trumbull’s overall progress pleased him. Just eight months into his second English sojourn, he felt confident enough
to confide in his brother, “If I chose to give myself entirely to portraits I could more than support myself, as I receive
ten guineas for what I can easily finish in a week.”
4
But he felt a rising dissatisfaction, too, sensing that his strong puritan streak could never be satisfied with painting mere
likenesses of men wealthy enough to pay his fees. Even as he began to fulfill his long-held desire to succeed as an artist,
he felt a need to perform a public service for his country across the sea. He would soon explain to a newfound patron, Thomas
Jefferson, that portrait painting is “little useful to Society, and unworthy of a man who has talents for more serious pursuits.”
5
Fortunately for Trumbull, Benjamin West was at hand to show him another path.
FOR TWENTY YEARS, West had been making history paintings. Some of his early canvases portrayed mythological scenes drawn from
classical sources, while others featured more recent English battles. When the Pennsylvanian had first arrived in London,
he painted as other contemporary history painters did, in the Grand Style, before he shocked the London art world with
The Death of General Wolfe
.
Even before the public unveiling of that painting in 1771, word had reached his patron, George III, of the radical five-by-seven-foot
canvas on West’s easel. The king let it be known that he had no interest in acquiring a painting in which the heroes were
dressed in coats, breeches, and cocked hats. In an equally dismissive mood, Reynolds had come to call at West’s studio. On
seeing at first hand the work in progress, Reynolds urged West to abandon “the modern garb of war” for “the classic costume
of antiquity, as much more becoming the inherent greatness of [the] subject.”
6
West disregarded the advice and completed his painting without regard to one of the essential tenets of neoclassicism; instead,
he dressed the officers and soldiers at the 1759 Battle of Quebec in their actual costume.
When Trumbull heard the story in the next decade, he also learned that from the first day the completed canvas was exhibited,
on April 29, 1771,
The Death of General Wolfe
was almost universally admired. The public had queued up along Pall Mall to file through the Royal Academy gallery in which
the painting hung. Politician William Pitt, actor David Garrick, and even Sir Joshua himself expressed their admiration. Reynolds’s
response, in particular, was gratifying. “I retract my objections,” Reynolds said “. . . and I foresee that this picture will
not only become one of the most popular, but occasion a revolution in the art.”
7
Though the picture had already been sold privately for £400, King George reversed his earlier judgment and requested a copy
for his personal collection. Trum-bull also learned that sales of the engraving of
The Death of General Wolfe
had proven even more profitable.
In the years since, other history paintings found a ready market, too, among them new works by West and others by his fellow
American John Singleton Copley. The independent-minded Bostonian had himself broken a long-established precedent when he chose
not to exhibit his
Death of the Earl of Chatham
at the Royal Academy, instead installing the painting, which portrayed the collapse of William Pitt on the floor of the House
of Lords, in a private pavilion. More than twenty thousand people paid admission to view the ten-foot-wide canvas for which
fifty-five noblemen had sat during Copley’s two years of work. He netted some five thousand pounds. Copley also refused an
offer (fifteen hundred guineas) to purchase the picture outright, opting instead to commission a run of twenty-five hundred
impressions of a large-scale engraving, which quickly sold out.
The son and brother of merchants, Trumbull knew the ring of commerce when he heard it. Since boyhood, he had also recognized
in himself a deep desire to paint, and now, as he neared his thirtieth birthday, he was finally producing paintings that people
of taste and training esteemed. He was also acutely aware that his means of making a living was at best tenuous. Further,
he felt burdened by the need, as a patriot and a member of a family with a long history of public service, to make some larger
contribution.
In late 1784, Benjamin West approached his pupil with a most flattering request. The older man desired a copy of one of his
own history paintings,
The Battle of La Hogue
, which commemorated a British victory over France in a naval battle fought in 1692.
Would Mr. Trumbull be interested in executing it for him?
It was an immense compliment as, quite explicitly, the student was being invited to pick up his master’s brush. Trumbull agreed,
explaining to his father in a letter, “West’s pictures are almost the only example in Art of that particular style which is
necessary to me—pictures of modern times and manners.”
8
He expected a year would be required to copy the big picture, but he managed to complete it in just three months. “The work,”
Trumbull acknowledged, “was of inestimable importance to me.”
9
THE GRAND IDEA came to Benjamin West first. News had arrived from Paris of the signing of the preliminary articles of peace,
so he had already been musing on the new notion when a letter from his old student Charles Willson Peale arrived in mid-1783.
Peale wrote to ask whether his old friend and teacher might help him sell one of his portraits of Washington. West wrote back
saying he would be delighted to see “a whole-length portrait of that greatest of all characters,
General Washington . . .
that phinominy among men.” Washington was indeed a phenomenon, and was well on his way to becoming the best-known man in the
world.
In his reply West also asked a favor of Peale. “[W]ould you procure for me the drawings or small paintings of the dresses
of the American army,” he wrote, “from the officers down to the common soldier . . . and any characteristic of their armies
or camps.” He confided in Peale his plan to paint “pictures of the great events of the American contest.” He proposed to call
the series “The American Revolution.”
10
By the time Trumbull returned to West’s studio six months later, West had already abandoned the plan (to pursue it might have
jeopardized his standing with his most important patron, King George III). Before jettisoning the idea, however, he had begun
one painting, and the unfinished canvas rested near where Trumbull worked, attesting to what, at least at first, seemed to
West like a wonderful notion. The oil sketch had been almost forgotten, set aside in the clutter of the busy studio. When
Trumbull saw
The American Peace Commissioners
, he realized what it represented.
Five men were pictured, Americans all, three seated at a table, the others standing. Trumbull took in the unmistakable tomahawk
nose of John Jay, the plump figure of John Adams, the aging Ben Franklin, Franklin’s secretary (and grandson), William Temple
Franklin, and South Carolinian Henry Laurens. As a man who made a point of keeping current with American politics, Trumbull
knew these men had been the American commissioners sent by the Continental Congress to negotiate the peace with England. The
other side of the negotiation—in life, British commissioner Richard Oswald and his secretary, Caleb White-foord, had represented
the Crown—was nowhere to be seen.