The Painter's Chair (7 page)

THE LEGACY OF John Smibert, painter, shopkeeper, and collector, spanned a time of immense change in America. In the decade
after his death in 1751, the memory of Smibert inspired John Singleton Copley. In the 1760s, it was Charles Willson Peale
who gained from exposure to Smibert’s upstairs gallery. Trumbull arrived to work there in 1778, and still other artists followed
in the 1780s, including a Massachusetts goldsmith-turned-painter and engraver named Edward Savage. In the same time span,
America went from a contented colony to a rebel state and finally emerged as an independent nation.

Smibert was a British painter, but those who followed him were American; he was the medium through which they gained exposure
to landscapes, portraits, Old Master copies, plaster casts, and a fine arts library. Despite its location in an increasingly
unfashionable part of town, Smibert’s Boston studio became an artistic crossroads—no one went to the trouble of clearing it
out for more than half a century—enabling many artists to experience his lingering influence. In secondhand forms, he brought
high-art Europe an artistic culture to the colonies. If John Smibert was not the first great American painter—he was not American
nor, in the opinions of most art historians, were his artistic gifts remarkable—he nevertheless left his imprint.
*

Smibert’s Painting Room provided younger artists with the venue; the art he left on display offered essential, if indirect,
instruction to a series of aspiring painters. The dead Scotsman even found a way to remain on the premises, his watchful gaze
ready to catch the eye of anyone, student, patron, or tourist, who troubled to look up at the only known image of the man
himself.

He looked down from a painting that was—is this a surprise?— another American first. At the time, no one else in America had
attempted a “conversation piece,” as large group portraits were known. Smibert’s
The Bermuda Group
pictured Dean Berkeley and those who accompanied him on the ill-fated venture to establish the school in Bermuda. The size
of the painting was grand but inconvenient (it stands nearly six feet tall, and eight feet wide). Undoubtedly its large scale
was a major reason the canvas failed to attract a buyer over more than three-quarters of a century in Boston. As a result
it stayed where it was, impressing more than a few viewers. Despite being locked away in the upstairs room, it became by far
the most influential of all Smibert’s works.
²⁶

As first conceived, the painting featured six figures, but Smibert would add two others to
The Bermuda Group
. One was Henry, an infant child and New World arrival, born to the dean and his wife, Anne, in 1729. The eighth and final
figure to join the tableau on the big canvas was a thin and sober-looking man. He seems to have just stepped into the frame,
unbeknownst to the others (they were there first, settled in their places for who knows how long). The stranger stands apart
from the main group, deeper into the picture space. No one acknowledges his presence.

Unlike the main figure of Dean Berkeley, the new arrival wears no wig. A man in early middle age, he has long dark brown hair
that reaches his shoulders, though his forehead has grown tall where his hairline has receded. His dark-eyed gaze is intense
as he looks straight out of the painting. He seems to be studying us, the onlookers. Or perhaps he is impatient for another
painter to arrive, another to carry on what he started. Certainly his is an appraising look. Maybe he is wondering how best
to render the viewer with his pencil and paint.

More likely, it is a mirror into which he is looking, because this is John Smibert, a man who usually kept to his easel or
remained behind his counter. Had he stayed back home in either Edinburgh or London, however, American painting would have
evolved very differently indeed. It was Smibert’s spirit, refusing to go quietly into oblivion, that remained a presence whose
influence was felt two full generations after his death.

* The name comes from the thirty-six-by-twenty-eight-inch portraits of members of the fashionable eighteenth-century London
Kit-Cat Club, showing the head and shoulders to waist level.

* Even Boston’s architecture reflects Smibert’s time in town. Another service he provided to his adoptive city was the design
of Faneuil Hall, the first purpose-built market in colonial Boston. Completed in 1742, the grand two-story building consisted
of an open-air market on the ground level, enclosed by an arcade of brick arches, with a second floor meeting room for public
gatherings. Named for the benefactor who underwrote its construction, the building housed a full-length portrait—painted by
Smibert—of Peter Faneuil.

The fifteen-year-old painting portrayed a handsome young matron dressed in a white and blue silk gown trimmed with lace. Martha
knew she had aged since the painting had been done, but it was another canvas in the West Parlor that reminded her how much
time truly had passed. Her motherly spirits rose on glimpsing her wee children, Jacky and Patsy, posed as a miniature Virginia
gentleman and his lady, together with a vermilion pet parrot. In life, those children now neared adulthood. John Parke Custis,
eighteen, had grown into his distinguished name, and Martha Parke Custis was just two years behind him.

This was the time, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington had decided, to add a portrait of her second husband to the family collection.
Although the notion had no particular appeal for him, George had given in to her entreaties. Here he stood, a man of forty
years, posing for the painter for the second consecutive day—and feeling ridiculous, all dressed up as if he were going to
war.

He could hardly blame the boy, but Jacky had been the instrument of his present discomfort. The lad’s studies in Annapolis
with the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican priest and schoolmaster, meant that word of the possible commission reached
Charles Willson Peale. A twenty-nine-year-old Marylander, Peale was acquainted with Boucher, both in his role as rector of
St. Anne’s Church and, in Boucher’s off hours, at the Homony Club (Boucher was its president). There the members met to find
boon companions with whom to dine. Jacky Custis had returned home to Mount Vernon for a visit several days earlier with Peale
in tow, and the artist was now staring intently at Washington from his easel a few feet away.

The Washington who looked back at him wore the outdated uniform of his old Virginia regiment. Although he and his fellow colonists
felt a growing discontent with Parliament’s tin ear when it came to American matters, few men Washington knew had any desire
to don uniforms, new or old. Besides, he himself had a large farm to run.

If not occupied by posing, he might have ridden out to inspect his fields. Or he might have gone to visit his great friends,
the Fairfaxes, at their nearby seat, Belvoir. He might still be conducting business at the county courthouse, where he had
been the very Monday when Peale arrived. As a member of the House of Burgesses, he could have traveled to the colony’s capital,
Williamsburg, as he had done in March and early April, to do committee work, as just another Virginia gentleman of property.
Instead, he was spending a cool and clear spring Thursday as a captive in his own house.

He had been a bachelor planter with substantial debts at the time of their 1759 marriage, but the Widow Custis’s arrival in
his life had made him solvent and had brought social connections, too. As he stood erect before Peale, his head turned slightly,
the contours of his face were revealed to the painter. With the arm bent at the elbow, Washington held his right hand over
his heart, his fingers resting inside his partly unbuttoned waistcoat. The other hand was swung around to the small of his
back. His standing pose was that of a gentleman planter, a status that his marriage to Martha had made possible.

On this, his second day of work on the painting, Peale’s task was the “Drapery.” Washington wore his old company’s dark blue
coat, together with red breeches and waistcoat. Peale’s task involved more than reproducing planes of flat color, since the
coat was trimmed with silver braid and buttons. Washington’s sash was a splash of lavender draped over his left shoulder and
tied at the right hip. His black hat was adorned with a silver medallion, and the hilt of his fine, English-made sword was
visible hanging at his waist. Washington knew better than anyone that the assemblage he wore for Mr. Peale was a painterly
charade. Despite the uniform, his military days fighting Frenchmen and Indians on the western frontier were long behind him,
his colonel’s commission resigned thirteen years earlier. Yet if the personage emerging on Peale’s canvas resembled his younger
self, that was hardly a bad thing. Indeed, a much younger man had wooed the woman pictured in the portrait with which this
one would be paired.

Yet the two men had much in common. Both were children of the gentry, with all that membership in the upper class implied
about manners, social position, and expectations. Each man had also attended the funeral of his father in early adolescence,
events that had changed the anticipated course of both their lives. For Washington, the death of Augustine Washington meant
an end to plans for the boy to follow his half brothers to England for schooling. In the same way, the passing of Peale’s
father, a schoolmaster with vague hopes of inheriting an English manor house, left a widow to fend for herself and her five
children as best she could. Friends helped Mrs. Peale relocate her family to Annapolis, where she found work as a seamstress
and dressmaker, but her eldest son’s formal education had ended with writing and arithmetic. Ironically, despite the abrupt
and early end of their schooling, both Peale and Washington were already proving to be vigorous and imaginative correspondents.

Of the two, Washington had more experience with horse flesh, but Peale knew the equipment of the equestrian as only a maker
could. Charles Willson had been apprenticed to a saddlemaker when he was twelve. A naturally curious man with a gift for craftsmanship,
he easily mastered the diverse skills required of making harnesses and traveling equipment. He carved beechwood and worked
leather. He cast and polished iron, brass, and silver. His Annapolis master, Nathan Waters, exposed the boy to other businesses,
too, as a merchant and planter buying and selling goods and lands.

He found himself a teacher who was willing to barter. Mr. Peale offered one of his best saddles, and a deal was struck. John
Hesselius, the son of a Swedish emigrant painter and himself an itinerant portraitist, agreed that Peale might watch him as
he executed two portraits. They also agreed Hesselius would paint half a face, which Peale would then complete under the older
man’s watchful eye.