Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (9 page)
Yet now Washington was in Philadelphia, a three-day ride distant from his troops, who, accustomed to his everyday presence,
watched nervously for the arrival of British ships in New York harbor; they knew very well indeed that they were betwixt battles.
Continental Congress President John Hancock had summoned the General, desiring a report on the big victory at Boston. Washington’s
visit had also seemed to Hancock an auspicious moment to record him on canvas for his personal collection, so he had summoned
Mr. Peale, too.
John Hancock was far from being a fond relation (recall that Martha commissioned the previous portrait in 1772). His order
to Peale to make a three-quarter-length portrait of the General and another of his wife was a conspicuous public gesture.
Hancock’s motives were uncertain (some wondered,
Does he still desire a military commission for himself?
), but at the very least, Hancock wished to compliment the man in whom the entire nation had placed its trust.
In obeying the congressional summons, Washington spent fifteen busy days away from his army. Only with difficulty did he fit
Mr. Peale into his schedule with the other social, political, and military demands on his time. For much of the General’s
first week, Peale had to content himself with working on the matching portrait of Mrs. Washington, who had traveled to Philadelphia
to obtain an inoculation for smallpox (George himself was immune from further bouts, having survived his infection with the
deadly disease at age nineteen). Peale could manage only two sessions with the General, on Wednesday and Friday, May 29 and
31, probably at Peale’s new Arch Street studio.
In the finished painting, Washington’s features may be read as expressing disgruntlement. If that is so, the emotion probably
stemmed both from his impatience to rejoin his troops and from the fact that the portrait was destined for Hancock’s home.
Hancock was one politician for whom Washington had no particular affection.
AT AGE FORTY-FOUR, Washington had begun to go gray, and Peale painted him with his hair powdered white. The face Peale rendered
on canvas is oval, its forehead high. The General wears no hat. His nose is long and straight, the mouth closed (Washington
had long since begun to lose his teeth). The expression is nervous or, perhaps, impatient. This man is certainly not relaxed,
but, gazing distractedly back at the viewer, the uniformed man with the pale blue sash looks the part of the commander in
chief.
Washington wears a military uniform, but the bright Redcoat red has been banished to a trunk at Mount Vernon. In place of
the Virginia regimentals is a dark blue coat, a buff-colored waistcoat, and breeches that extend just beyond the knee. There
is no insignia, though the General has the air of a man in charge. His buttons are brass (not silver), and his costume no
longer identifies an obedient subject of the English king. He has become a revolutionary, proud to wear the uniform of the
Continental Army.
Peale was unable to complete the painting in May and June, but found some hours in July, August, and September to devote to
both General and Mrs. Washington’s canvases. During the summer of 1776, both portraits were on display in his Painting Room,
where John Adams admired them. Others who saw the paintings liked them, too, and the artist fielded orders for full-size copies,
as well as miniature versions for Mrs. Washington. By December 3, he completed the original transaction with Hancock, receiving
from him payment “in full for General Washington and Lady, 28 guineas.”
11
Hancock took his paintings to Boston, where the following year the Washington portrait became the source of the first published
images of the General. Line cuts, mezzotints, and other engravings would appear during the next decade, many of which drew
upon the 1776 portrait. Beyond the few who had seen the man in person, most of those who had begun proudly to call themselves
Americans became acquainted with George Washington through Mr. Peale’s eyes.
12
II.
1767–1769 . . . Castle Street . . . London
ALMOST TEN YEARS earlier, Charles Willson Peale had painted another icon. This one he did not dress in a uniform; rather,
he wrapped “the Great Commoner” in a toga. English statesman William Pitt was a hero in the colonies. In January 1766 he got
to his feet in the House of Commons to oppose the Stamp Act, the first direct tax on the colonists, enacted by Parliament
the year before. “I rejoice that America has resisted,” the former prime minister proclaimed. His speech anticipated the repeal
of the act a few months later and, for revolutionary-minded Americans, earned Pitt a place in the pantheon.
Peale’s route to England—and the commission to paint a life-size Pitt for several Virginia gentlemen—was a circuitous one.
In the mid-1760s, his newfound enthusiasm for art and his financial difficulties had combined to make him something of a pilgrim.
Already a married man when he took up painting at the advanced age of twenty-one, he found his debts threatened to overwhelm
him. In order to escape the unanswerable demands of his Mary land creditors, he left Annapolis, sailing north in 1765.
His peregrinations took him not only to John Smibert’s Painting Room but to the studio of John Singleton Copley, where he
received a few painting lessons. Among other assignments, the Bostonian instructed Peale to copy a “head painted by candlelight.”
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After a subsequent stay in prosperous Newburyport, some miles north of the Massachusetts capital, Peale painted his way home.
A twelve-dollar fee earned for a Boston portrait paid his passage as far as Virginia, where he paused in the town of Accomac,
awaiting the conclusion of negotiations to permit him to return home while staying out of debtors’ prison.
England could hardly have been further from his mind at that moment. After months of separation, he was about to be re united
with his wife, Rachel, and their infant son, but the prolific Mr. Peale worked at two presentation pieces based on English
prints during his stay on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When he finally returned to Annapolis, he gave them to potential patrons,
and the recipients quickly recognized the young man’s talent. The notion dawned on them that it would be desirable to have
a fine painter at hand to record portraits of the ladies and gentlemen of their self-consciously genteel town. Eleven Annapolitans
of means contributed a total of £85.12. to Mr. Peale’s coffers, a sum sufficient to underwrite a year’s journey to England.
There, it was decided, Peale could best advance his art.
Barrister Charles Carroll made the most generous contribution (the sum of twenty-five guineas), and added his influence to
the venture, too, writing to his London agent, “The Bearer hereof Charles Wilson Peale [is] a young man . . . who has a Turn
for Limning.”
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Barely two months after returning to his family from his New England venture, Peale boarded the
Brandon
, a merchant ship bound for London. Fittingly, the ship’s hold held a consignment of the stamped paper rendered obsolete by
the repeal of the hated Stamp Act.
15
Peale carried a second letter of introduction that would make the Pitt portrait possible. This missive was addressed to Benjamin
West, an American-born painter recently settled in London. West got the opportunity to size up his pupil-to-be when Peale
turned up at his studio unannounced, outfitted in a new blue suit, beaver hat, gloves, and black stockings, a fine London
outfit that had diminished the Mary lander’s capital by more than seven pounds.
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The door on which Peale knocked was, in effect, the portal to an art school for aspiring American artists.
In the coming twenty-five months, Peale repeatedly benefited from his new mentor’s artistic generosity. As another of West’s
protégés would write, “[West] had no secrets or mysteries. He told all he knew . . . every American was as a brother to him,
and his open doors and open heart ever received them as such.”
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Although the Pennsylvania-born West was only three years Peale’s senior, he was already an acclaimed painter in London. He
had begun to take himself seriously as an artist as a young boy and, by age seventeen, was getting paid to paint portraits.
In 1760, the twenty-one-year-old West became the first American-born artist to travel to Italy. He spent three years in Rome,
Florence, and Venice, where he studied and, in the habit of the day, made careful copies of paintings by such masters as Raphael
and Poussin. West’s work impressed his European contemporaries (he was elected a member of academies in Florence and Bologna),
but he resolved to return to America, hoping (as he put it) “to cultivate in his native country that profession in which [I]
had already acquired so much celebrity.”
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A stopover in London led to a sudden change in plans. Finding his skills very much in demand in Europe’s wealthiest and most
populous city, West settled into a studio on Castle Street near Leicester Square. Though born to humble Quaker farmers in
Pennsylvania, West rapidly won the admiration of the London art world and even the attention of the king. By the time Peale
arrived in 1767, West was a London fixture known as “the American Raphael.”
Benjamin West painted portraits and an occasional landscape, but his chosen milieu was history painting. Drawing upon events
from the classical past, the Bible, and even mythology, the history painter portrayed complex scenes featuring multiple figures
set in panoramic landscapes. To West and his contemporaries, a history painting had to be more than a well-executed canvas;
it also had to be an enlightening and dramatic visual experience for those who saw it. The viewer who contemplated a history
painting encountered a story at its climax. From the actions of those in the painting, a moral or intellectual message was
to be gleaned. History painting was regarded as the highest art to which a painter might aspire, requiring wide knowledge
of anatomy, classical sculpture, Renaissance painting, and a broad familiarity with literature and history.
The cachet of West’s Italian training and the novelty of his American birth set him apart from other London artists. He was
well on his way to becoming a conspicuous success when Peale arrived. Perhaps intimidated by West, Peale began painting miniatures,
which supplemented the monies his Mary land benefactors had given him. He posed occasionally, too, standing in for the Roman
consul Marcus Atilius Regulus in a canvas that West was painting for no less a patron than George III, commissioned to decorate
the king’s personal apartment at the royal palace, Buckingham House. Summoned by the king to Buckingham House, West had agreed
to paint the departure from Rome of the brave general. With a beard added by the artist, Peale impersonated the Roman consul,
who was returning to Carthage as he had promised his former captors he would do, despite the fact it meant almost certain
torture and death. For a time, Peale visited West’s studio daily to pose as Regulus.
Peale, ever adaptable, copied paintings for West, repaired locks (nothing mechanical seemed beyond him), and once even mended
a favorite wooden palette that West had cast aside. Peale enjoyed his subservient role as a studio assistant and tended to
London errands for various Maryland friends and benefactors. He sought out Benjamin Franklin, who welcomed him and explained
to the curious young man the electrical experiments with which he was engaged. Peale was a man difficult not to like, his
easy disposition endearing him to both plain people and the famous. Despite the many diversions of the great city, however,
Peale was homesick for his wife, Rachel, and “always felt . . . alone, even amidst the crowds that are found at all public
places.”
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Peale’s chance to put his own hand to a history painting did not come from the monarch, but from another American. Edmond
Jenings, an English-educated attorney working in London, hired Peale to paint William Pitt (Benjamin West could hardly have
accepted such a commission, given Pitt’s championing of American resistance to the Crown). Peale had no royal connections
to protect (in fact, Peale prided himself on his refusal to doff his hat when the king’s carriage rolled by). The opportunity
to make a life-size likeness of the popular William Pitt for an American audience seemed tailor-made.
Peale could get no sitting with the great man and contented himself with basing his portrait on a plaster cast. Made from
a statue by Joseph Wilton, the plaster portrayed a standing Pitt with the Magna Carta in hand. Peale added a variety of other
allegorical elements, among them the figure of British liberty and, in the background, the rising walls of the Banqueting
House, Whitehall, the London landmark where King Charles I had been beheaded a century earlier. To Peale and his intended
American audience, a warning to a tyrannical king was clearly implied.