Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (29 page)
V.
1796–1797 . . . The Painter’s Studio . . . Germantown
MR. STUART, HAVING risen to a great challenge, rode the crest of the wave. To judge from the flow of the curious through his
Philadelphia Painting Room, Stuart’s American fame was assured. In fact, he was so “inundated with visitors” that he “found
it impossible to attend to his profession.”
49
The hoped-for significance of the Lansdowne commission had come to pass, both for his reputation and his pocketbook. The
original Lansdowne alone had enriched him by $1,000.
He had been engaged to make a replica for Mrs. Bingham. That one he signed
G. Stuart, 1796.
The signature was unusual (when asked why he so rarely marked his canvases with his name or initials, he replied it was because
“I mark them all over”).
50
Perhaps he made an exception for the Binghams as a way of expressing his appreciation to his patrons. Other people wanted
replicas of the full-length portrait, and, given the practice of charging by canvas size, that meant more money for Stuart.
He now had important work to do, and desiring fewer distractions, he found himself a new place to work in the countryside.
Located in Germantown, across the Schuylkill River and a half-dozen miles northwest of the busy downtown streets of Philadelphia,
the village was a pleasant two-hour carriage ride from the capital. His house was far from grand, given that “most of the
town’s houses were of dark, moss-grown stone, and of somber and prison-like aspect, with little old-fashioned windows.” But
the two-story barn behind suited Stuart’s needs perfectly.
51
He adapted the structure, bringing in lathers to plaster the walls of the second floor, which he converted into his Painting
Room. He opened new windows in the walls to provide “top light,” and ordered the outside painted red.
52
Gratifying as it was that people desired copies of the big portrait, Stuart still had some old customers knocking at his door
desiring earlier commissions he had yet to complete. One of them was Mrs. Washington: She still wanted her smaller canvas
of her husband and its pendant.
Nearly a year had passed since she and her husband had sat for Mr. Stuart. In that time he had completed the big paintings
for Mrs. Bingham but not the two for Mount Vernon. Martha was growing impatient. Together with her imposing husband she visited
Mr. Stuart at his new address. Washington noted in his diary that day, “Road to German Town with Mrs. Washington to see Mr.
Stuarts’ paintings.”
53
It was January 7, 1797.
This wasn’t their first follow-up visit to Stuart—they had called often. On this visit Martha was again disappointed. The
couple saw their likenesses, but each remained little more than a head afloat on an expanse of bare canvas, like a boat becalmed
on an empty sea. Even so, the likenesses each had a surprising humanity. In a way, the very incompleteness of the paintings
seemed to imply the presence of the artist, ready to add the highlights to the eyes that were his trademark (Washington’s
eyes in life were light blue; in this likeness, they were dark). These were, of course, unfinished portraits, but the visible
brushwork seemed to suggest the painter was near at hand, palette and brush ready. Stuart hadn’t blended his colors as Copley
would have done; to do so he felt was to risk giving “the flesh the consistency of buckskin.”
54
The paradox was how lifelike two disembodied heads could be.
In no sense was Martha’s painting done; they could see that. Her mobcap remained little more than sketchy zigzags of white
paint that framed her face. Though closer to completion—enough of Washington’s shoulders were painted that the image resembled
a Roman bust—the president’s portrait was also far from ready. Mr. Stuart made a plea for his maintaining possession, and
not only because they were unfinished. He needed the originals, he told his clients, in order to make copies from them. Everyone
present understood that in the absence of a willing sitter—and Washington was quite uninterested in another session in the
Chair—then the next best source would be to copy the canvas that had been made from life.
The portraits were so good that Martha was eager to have them, but the president accepted Stuart’s explanation. As they prepared
to leave, with Martha out of earshot, Washington told the artist, “Certainly, Mr. Stuart, if they are of any consequence to
you; I shall be perfectly satisfied with copies from your hand, as it will be impossible for me to sit again at present.”
55
Neither he nor Martha (or even their descendants) would ever take delivery of copies, not to mention the originals. However,
a great many other people would.
NOT SO MANY months would pass before Stuart’s run of good fortune ebbed. Lansdowne responded to the public admiration in London
for his painting by consigning the work to an engraver for reproduction. James Heath, who was among the artisans Stuart had
painted for Alderman Boydell a decade earlier, produced a large engraving, but Stuart received no financial benefit from it.
Stuart thought Heath’s engraving not only unauthorized but a poor job. As if to underscore the insult, the artist was listed
as “Gabriel” Stuart.
56
The artist blamed Bingham for not protecting his interests and asked him to compensate him for his losses. The confrontation
ended their relationship, and Stuart lost an important patron and, undoubtedly, access to Bingham’s social network. Too often,
that was Stuart’s way: As another Philadelphia merchant confided in his diary, “Like many other men of preeminent genius .
. . his passions are impetuous, nor does he appear very regardful to control them.”
57
Still, the Washington paintings remained a franchise, and Stuart made many replicas. Using a common copying method, he would
lay a porous fabric over an existing painting. The image beneath could be read through this “tracing cloth,” enabling Stuart
to make a chalk copy for transfer to a new canvas.
58
One visitor to his studio, a young Baltimore merchant named Robert Gilmor, admired the copy he was completing for Mrs. Bingham.
Stuart told him that “he had engaged to finish copies to amount of 70 or 80,000 Drs at the rate of 600 Drs a copy.”
59
Perhaps remembering good days in Stillorgan, Stuart invested the proceeds from “five whole lengths of Washington, and twenty
others of different sizes” in a farm further into the Pennsylvania countryside. He planned to import Durham cows and breed
them on the estate. He hoped it would be “a home for his declining years and provision for his family.”
For a time business was good, though probably not as good as he told Gilmor. Even with assistants, Stuart could not have painted
so many replicas—and he did not. His finances, like his personality, continued to fluctuate—he couldn’t any more moderate
his manner of living than he could control his moods, which ranged from light and high spirits to dark and gloomy lows. As
a young man, he had amused himself by outwitting bill collectors and charming his jailers in debtors’ prison. Even when, as
now, the tide of his income rose, the money trickled though his fingers. His dream of a retiring to a farm in the country
got away, too, since he failed to secure proper title to the property. He lost his entire investment of $3,442 when the seller
died and his heir refused to honor Stuart’s claim.
60
It wasn’t in his nature to repeat himself like some kind of machine. He admitted that in making copies “he worked mechanically
and with little interest.”
61
He varied the big canvases, producing versions in which Washington rests his hand on the table, atop a document. He elongated
the president’s physique, restoring Washington’s own stature, producing a more elegant pose. Over time he tired of making
copies of his
Washington
s, and his financial fortunes took a steep downturn. On May 6, 1801, the Germantown sheriff, in pursuit of payment for an
old debt, attached the Stuarts’ worldly goods for auction. Fortunately for Stuart, the writ did not extend to the contents
of the Painting Room. He reopened a studio in Philadelphia for a time, before following the federal government to Washington,
and for several years he worked in the new Federal City.
THE ARTIST AND the president seem to have been predestined to play paramount roles in each other’s legacy. Not so many years
after Washington’s death, the unfinished head had
become
George Washington; in 1823, the English art critic John Neal observed, “[If] a better likeness of him were shown to us, we
should reject it; for, the only idea that we have now of George Washington, is associated with Stuart’s Washington.”
62
As for Stuart, remove Washington from his oeuvre, and, despite his status as the first world-class American painter, his
standing would be greatly diminished.
Theirs was a pairing of opposites: Washington, the man who kept himself under tight control, and Stuart, a man of mood swings,
his nose swollen from his addiction to snuff and reddened by his fondness for drink, whose impulses were rarely contained.
Stuart’s daughter remembered him as frequently profane (“my father did swear at times: he was very faulty in this respect”)
and often “out of temper.”
63
Yet there are the three portraits. The first was the small portrait that disappointed the artist, which we now know as the
“Vaughan Portrait,” for the English owner of the copy from which an engraving was made. (Of the original Stuart himself said
he “rubbed it out.”)
The next was the floating head left unfinished but, it seems, resolved to his satisfaction. Stuart would retain possession
of the original until his own death three decades later, after which it went into the collection of the Boston Athenaeum (thus
attaching to the canvas the name “Athenaeum Portrait”). The big painting, known as the “Lansdowne Portrait,” added ceremony
and symbolism.
For Stuart, however, the face of his sitter was the truth; by employing the “science of physiognomy,” he believed his likenesses
enabled the viewer to read temperament and character in the facial features and expression he limned. Of that one cannot be
sure, but he was indisputably the best American painter of his age. For Stuart, the face
was
the painting; the rest of it was just wrapping paper.
I am now the only painter living who ever
saw
Washington.
—Rembrandt Peale, “Lecture on Washington and His Portraits,” 1858
I.
September 1795 . . . Philosophical Hall . . . Philadelphia
I
N ONE HOUR, opportunity would knock at the Painting Room door. His father had arranged the appointment for seven o’clock in
the morning, and a further understanding had been reached for the customary second and third sessions in the days to come.
Though the arrangements had been agreed upon, the painter found little consolation in his routine as the light of day began
filtering through the high windows.
The young man—this Mr. Peale was seventeen—had risen before daylight. Now, as the minutes marched toward the appointed hour
and he set about mixing his colors, his concentration wavered and his hands felt unsteady. Before he could prepare his palette,
his agitation grew to unease. He began to fear that he would fail, that he would be unable to render a likeness onto his canvas
of the august presence about to appear in the doorway.
The portrait he was to paint, he knew, could elevate his artistic fortunes. A likeness of Washington in his hand would draw
people’s attention, gain him income from replicas, and, once and for all, set him on the path that since birth his father
had hoped he would take. His very name—in 1778 he had been christened Rembrandt
—
implied how high were the expectations.
He had shown a precocious talent for drawing at just eight years of age, and a few years later he constructed his own easel,
paint box, and chair in order to pursue his vocation.
1
He apprenticed in his father’s Painting Room, making copies of portraits, historical prints, and landscapes, and demonstrated
such promise that the senior Peale had announced that he himself had “bid adieu to portrait painting.”
2
Future commissions, Charles Willson Peale announced in a paid notice in the pages of Philadelphia’s
Daily Advertiser,
should be referred to his sons, Rembrandt and his older brother, Raphaelle, “whose likenesses, and the excellency of their
coloring . . . will give general satisfaction.” The elder Peale, having painted many of the Founding Fathers as well as Washington
in the preceding quarter century, was devoting himself to his Museum of natural history (and, not coincidentally, of American
history, too, as many pictures of Patriots were suspended over cases filled with nature’s curiosities).
The sitter that morning was well known to young Rembrandt. They seemed to be linked as if by some sort of historical umbilical.
Although he came along forty-five years later, Rembrandt had been born, as he himself put it, on “the 22d of February, the
Birth-day of Washington.”
3
This accident of chronology had long excited in the boy a particular fascination with the General. On the occasions during
his boyhood when he had seen “the Man, distinguished above all Men,” his eyes had locked on the tall figure, even when Washington
marched amid a multitude of other soldiers at celebrations enacted at Philadelphia’s Centre Square. The young painter held
in his mind the vivid recollection of one such morning when, despite the cover of clouds and fog, he observed “the peculiar
effect of the misty light on the visage of Washington. His cocked Hat threw but a narrow shadow on his forehead, but his projecting
brows cast a broad
filmy shade
over the whole orbit of his eyes.”
4
Yet the president was not an unapproachable presence. For years he had known the identity of this serious boy. As a lad, young
Peale had had the run of the city, often doing errands about town for his father. Some of them were messages to deliver to
Washington, who recognized the boy on the street. Young Peale recalled a day years earlier when Washington had rested his
massive hand on his head and kindly inquired, “How is your
good
father?”
5
As he waited apprehensively, Rembrandt had the comfort of knowing that what he was about to attempt was very much in the Peale
tradition. His father had painted the great man many times and knew him well. Only days after Rembrandt’s birth, Charles Willson
had packed his palette and shouldered his rifle to return to the Philadelphia militia, rejoining Washington’s army at its
encampment, a small city of rough-hewn huts at Valley Forge.
Having returned to full-time artistry in peacetime, Charles Will-son had again painted his commander, this time as a delegate
to the Confederation Congress, during the summer of 1787, when Washington had presided over meetings convened to modify the
Articles of Confederation. Peale, his entrepreneurial instinct piqued, had asked his old commander to sit in order that he
might make a painting that, in turn, he could scrape onto a copper plate to produce a fresh Washington mezzotint. The Virginian
had agreed, and one July morning, before the day’s sessions at the Pennsylvania State House, he duly came to Peale’s Painting
Room to be recorded.
The memory of that day remained vivid in Rembrandt’s mind, since he himself, though only nine, had been in attendance. “My
post,” Rembrandt remembered, “had been behind my father’s chair when he painted him.”
6
Now, as Rembrandt contemplated standing alone at his canvas with the General before him, the clock ticked toward seven. But
there it was, Rembrandt realized, the balm he required to ease his rising panic. His father’s manner with the man had been
easy as they talked of common friends and enthusiasms. The notoriously restrained Washington had relaxed. Rembrandt knew his
father to be much liked, and his capacity for making friends quite evidently extended to Washington. As the son saw it, the
explanation lay in his father’s “traits of character, his amiable temper, and his talents as a painter, that engaged for him
the enduring friendship of Washington.”
7
In the midst of his hour of nervous anticipation, Rembrandt found his solution. He immediately summoned his father and asked
him to join him in the Painting Room. If he were to work at a second easel, suggested the son, the sitter would get the benefit
of his familiar conversation, and both painters could record the sitter at his ease. The presence of the veteran painter would
not only relax the sitter and boost the confidence of his protégé; it would also offer “assurance that the sittings would
not be unprofitable, by affording a double chance for a likeness.”
8
Shortly the State House clock struck seven, and Mr. Washington arrived. As he entered the Painting Room, Rembrandt noticed,
his subject was “in the act of putting his Watch into his fob.” His pocket watch synchronized, the ever-punctual president
was ready to have his picture taken once more.
THE MAN HAD aged in the six years he had served as president. To see him passing by in his yellow carriage was one thing.
To observe him near at hand, in the intimate setting of the Painting Room, was another. This was a careworn face.
Rembrandt had set his easel before the Painter’s Chair, providing him a frontal view slightly to Washington’s left. His father’s
sightline took in the left side of the face as well, but from a three-quarter angle, since he stood to Rembrandt’s right and
slightly behind his son. Knowing himself to be a slow and meticulous worker, the seventeen-year-old had chosen a small canvas.
Just fifteen inches high and eleven wide, it was barely a quarter the size of his father’s. He had sufficient space to paint
a life-size head, but little more.
As the painters set to work, it was obvious that Washington had shaved himself before coming that morning but that he had
not had his morning session with the barber. His hair, its daily dose of powder yet to come, was revealed as graying but still
dark brown. Rembrandt found that he could study Washington without distraction. The fear that had unnerved him the previous
hour faded, and he observed not an icon but an aging family acquaintance, one engaged in a casual conversation. In his usual
way, Charles Willson painted and talked; Rembrandt remained largely silent, “enjoy[ing] the rare advantage of studying the
desired countenance whilst in familiar conversation.”
9
The paintings had progressed well enough when the first session ended, three hours after it began. When Washington returned,
two days later, his approach was observed from the Painting Room window. He was pacing, walking back and forth along the allée
of linden trees in the State House yard. Only when the clock struck seven did he enter the Painting Room.
There he found that the number of painters before him had doubled. Rembrandt’s uncle, James Peale, was permitted to take a
miniature, and he painted his ivory from a position to Rembrandt’s left. Raphaelle worked at a profile sketch. A visitor who
happened by the Painting Room that day, Gilbert Stuart, described the scene to Mrs. Washington, whom he encountered as he
departed. “Madam,” said Stuart in his wryest manner, “the general’s in a perilous situation. He is beset, madam,—no less than
five upon him at once; one aims at his eye—another his nose—another is busy with his hair—his mouth is attacked by a fourth—and
the fifth has him by the button; in short, madam, there are five painters at him, and you who know how much he has suffered
when only attended by one, can judge of the horrors of his situation.”
10
The father-and-son oils continued to take shape, but by the third sitting, following another off-day, Rembrandt began to worry
once more. He noticed his father was working down, repainting the forehead first. With time running out, Rembrandt determined
to work upward from the chin. Between them, he decided, they would be able to assemble a complete likeness even if the third
and final session found their canvases incomplete.
Rembrandt’s final result has the candor of youth. He had no time to devise a flattering way to record a likeness, producing
instead an honest picture of a man weighed down by his years. Rembrandt knew his painting lacked sophistication; what it most
certainly didn’t lack was a willingness to paint according to what his eyes saw. This was no gloss; nor did Rembrandt have
the time to labor over a final polish of this painting. Even before the slow-drying oils had fully set, he rolled and packed
the canvas for shipment to Charleston. A deep-seated urge to see the world led Rembrandt to look farther afield, and he had
already booked passage, along with his brother Raphaelle, to the wealthy southern city. Along with some sixty copies he and
his brother had made of their father’s portraits of other great men, Rembrandt would display his freshly painted
George Washington
.
He hoped the picture “would invite attention from its novelty and interest” among the rice and cotton planters who flocked
to the port city during the winter.
11
The Peale brothers rented rooms in which to paint. They wanted to stimulate a taste for their own work; back in Philadelphia,
the recent arrival of Gilbert Stuart had drawn off many potential Philadelphia commissions, making a journey to another market
seem sensible. They found a venue to display all their pictures (admission price: twenty-five cents). They announced the exhibition
at the South Carolina statehouse in a verse newspaper advertisement.
Rembrandt did indeed find commissions in the new city. There was a strong demand for copies of his Washington portrait, and
he painted ten of them. “In executing these,” Peale noted, “I became familiar with whatever good it possessed, but also became
still more sensitive to its deficiencies.”
12
Only much later, almost a quarter century after the death of his subject, would he return to the task of producing a Washington
likeness that would both supersede this one and become a major preoccupation of the last thirty years of Rembrandt Peale’s
life.
REMBRANDT PEALE’S TIME in Charleston was followed by a brief visit to Savannah, then a much longer stay in Baltimore. In Maryland,
the two brothers established a museum of their own, featuring a range of curiosities including taxidermy (some two hundred
specimens of birds, animals, and fish, duplicates borrowed from their father) and likenesses (advertised as “distinguished
Philosophers and scientists [and] Miscellaneous Portraits”).
13
Neither their willingness to paint pictures nor the twenty-five-cent admission fees to their museum proved sufficient to sustain
them in Mary land. Less than two years later, they returned to Philadelphia.