John Trumbull (1756–1843) saw the birth of the nation. His father was the patriot governor of Connecticut. He himself served as an aide to George Washington and Horatio Gates, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, and spent time in an enemy prison as a spy.
He also saw the birth of American painting, one of a cohort of brilliant provincials that included Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley.
Trumbull vowed to tell the story of his time in a series of paintings that would “give to the present and future sons of misfortune, such glorious lessons of their rights and of the spirit with which they should assert and support them.”
This excerpt follows him from post-war London, where he had gone to learn his art, to Paris, where the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence persuades him to include it in his series.
The whole story can be read here:
Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution, by Richard Brookhiser (Yale, 276 pp., $30)
J ohn Trumbull arrived in Paris with a letter of introduction, and a residence already awaiting him.
The letter, from a London art dealer, was to Jean-Baptiste Pierre LeBrun, a portraitist, a restorer of old paintings, and a fellow dealer, who knew everyone in the Paris art world, beginning with his wife, Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, a better painter than he was (he acted as her agent). Through LeBrun and his contacts, Trumbull would meet Jean-Antoine Houdon, a sculptor who had traveled to the United States to take a life mask of George Washington; Jacques-Louis David, an upcoming painter still in his twenties; and Richard Cosway, an English miniaturist who was in Paris to depict the family of the duc d’Orléans, a cousin of the king.
Trumbull’s host was Thomas Jefferson. The Virginian, who had been serving as minister to France since 1785, had met Trumbull on a visit to London. Always on the lookout for talented younger men, he had invited Trumbull to stay with him at the nobleman’s house he rented in the western suburb of Chaillot.
Jefferson, then 43 years old, had served as a congressman and governor of his state before going abroad. Tall and sandy-haired, he was graceful on horseback, shy and almost physically awkward in person. “He sits in a lounging manner on one hip,” wrote one observer, “. . . and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other.” But his manners were impeccable, and his conversation, when he was among intimates, sparkled.
Intellectually, Jefferson was both a visionary and a magpie. He could conceive ideas with the force and clarity of eternal truths, without neglecting a learner’s roving curiosity about how things in the world around him looked and worked. Among his many interests were the arts, especially architecture; back home he had already begun designing a plantation house on a small summit (monticello in Italian) that would be the project of his life. It was natural that he would be drawn to a patriot, and a painter, like Trumbull.
And natural for Trumbull to be drawn to his host. He would call George Washington his “master and friend,” but here was a man who could truly be the latter — a dozen years older, not a quarter century; amiable, once one got to know him, not remote through very nobility; interested in Trumbull’s lifework. Jefferson, finally, was a fellow American abroad.
Paris was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with two-thirds of a million inhabitants. French kings, distrusting Parisians as insufficiently docile, had lived for over a century safely distant at the palace of Versailles, where ceremony and intrigue consumed the attention of those engaged in them. But liveliness was to be found in the city: plays, concerts, coffeehouses, and salons — gatherings in the homes of the wealthy where everything from gossip to philosophy might be discussed, under the direction of aristocratic hostesses. The poor worked or begged; when harvests failed, they starved.
The Paris art scene was on the cusp of a change. The prevailing style of the last half century, which still echoed in the work of Vigée-LeBrun, was rococo, a softening and sweetening of the baroque. One of her more ambitious efforts was Peace, Bringing Back Abundance, in which one allegorical woman, dark-haired, casts an arm and a sheltering cloak over another, a ripe blonde showing a bare breast and pouring the harvest out of a cornucopia. Trumbull called the coloring “very brilliant and pleasing.”
For young David, the way ahead was a leap back into the classical past — and into manly conflict. His Oath of the Horatii showed three noble Romans swearing before their father to fight the enemies of the city. Their womenfolk — mother, sister, and wife — mourn, because they are related by marriage to the enemies in question. Whoever wins, they will lose. The figures — warriors, father, women — form three parallel units, rigid as planks. But this arrangement, rather than draining the painting of life, as in Trumbull’s youthful classical exercises, acts as a launching pad for flinging lines of force across the canvas — outthrust legs, saluting arms, swords. The Oath was a blockbuster, bursting with energy. All it lacked was humanity. When Trumbull saw it in David’s studio, he called it a “story well told, drawing pretty good, coloring cold.”
The main object of Trumbull’s gaze was the art of generations past. Paris offered royal and noble collections, made available to him by his new acquaintances, into which he plunged with the enthusiasm of a tourist, and the eye of a practitioner. A journal of his sightseeing during the month of August records his judgments. Not all were favorable. Although he admired the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides, a hospital and old-age home for veterans, he found the paintings hung there “intolerably bad.” The cathedral of Notre Dame struck him as “not grand” (Trumbull’s century did not appreciate the gothic). The figures of the Venetian master Veronese seemed “cut out in pasteboard, and stuck upon the canvass.” But when he liked what he saw, which was often, his delight was unbounded. The Palais Royal, owned by the duc d’Orléans, offered the “best works of every great man”; the Paris home of the comte d’Orsay had the “most beautiful collection of perfect little things.” He esteemed works by Correggio, Carracci, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin. But the painter he praised over and over was Rubens. He marveled at his “grandeur in composition” and “splendor of coloring”; “the richness, the glow, . . . the truth of color and effect is wonderful.” “For color, composition, and expression, nothing can excel a Rubens.” He was hailing traits — bravura hues, and the dramatic placement of light, shadow, and people — he hoped to impart to his own historical paintings.
He spent one August day at Versailles, in an ecstasy of observation, marveling at the buildings, the collections within them, and the layout of the grounds. “Magnificent in the highest degree . . . the view from the windows, magnificently beautiful . . . a collection of the most precious things I have yet seen . . . I had no imagination of ever seeing such works in existence.” The visit ended with a late afternoon walk through the gardens. “I had expected to see immense monuments of labor and bad taste, where nature was overwhelmed in art; but I was disappointed.” Delightfully disappointed; nature and art — trees and gardens, statues and fountains — collaborated to bewitch. “The evening was advancing, and the growing obscurity of twilight left the imagination at liberty to vary and veil the forms of objects.” Trumbull lingered until half past eight; it was ten o’clock when, exhilarated and exhausted, he finally got back to Paris. “I had indeed seen too much.”
Trumbull did not make such expeditions alone. His companions might include Houdon the sculptor; Antonio di Poggi, the man who was supposed to be finding him an engraver; Richard Cosway and his wife, Maria; or Jefferson. One day Jefferson and the Cosways accompanied him together (Trumbull introduced them). Jefferson wanted to visit a pair of architects, from whom he sought tips on how to design a public market for Virginia’s new capital, Richmond. But his attention was drawn far from architecture.
Maria Cosway was 26 years old. She had been born and raised in Florence, daughter of an English innkeeper who hosted gentlemen making the grand tour of the continent and artists come to learn from Italian masters. After he died, she and her Italian mother moved to London, where she married Richard Cosway. She was herself a talented painter and musician, and spoke half a dozen languages with ease, and with little errors that only enhanced her charm. She had a slender figure and a sweet face under a mass of golden curls. Her husband was 19 years older than she was, foppish, and described by everyone as looking like a monkey. Jefferson fell hard.
The consultation with the architects concluded, the two Americans and the Cosways spent the rest of the day sightseeing along the Seine west of Paris, dining in the village of Saint-Cloud, stopping in the hilltop suburb of Montmartre to see a show of fireworks, calling finally on Jean-Baptiste Krumpholz, a composer for the harp, one of the instruments Maria played. “The wheels of time,” Jefferson wrote, recalling the day later, “moved on with a rapidity of which those of our carriage gave but a faint idea, and yet in the evening, when one took a retrospect, . . . what a mass of happiness had we travelled over!”
Jefferson and Mrs. Cosway met again and again, sometimes with Trumbull, sometimes tête-à-tête. Jefferson’s beloved wife, Martha, had died in 1782; his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings had not yet begun. Maria was filling an emotional void in his life, and Trumbull served as a friendly go-between. When he and the Cosways returned to London in the fall, Trumbull was the conduit for Jefferson’s communications with his newfound love. (Jefferson explained the necessity of an intermediary thus: His own letters, as those of a diplomat, “are read both in the post offices of London and Paris.”)
Jefferson’s correspondence with and via Trumbull continued for the three years the Virginian remained at his post in Paris. The two friends wrote about many things — harpsichords, musical glasses, and carriages, all to be ordered by Trumbull for Jefferson in London — but always there was Maria. She was angry with her admirer, Trumbull reported in one letter, “yet teases me every day for a copy of your little portrait” — a painting he had done of Jefferson in Paris — “that she may scold it, no doubt.” Maria herself wrote to Jefferson asking if he would “give Mr. Trumbull leave to make a coppy of a certain portrait he painted at Paris? It is a person who hates you that requests this favor.” A month later, Maria was still waiting for her copy. “Trumbull puts me out of all patience. I always thought painting slow work, ’tis dreadful now.” Finally, the copy was done. “Wish me joy,” Maria wrote to its subject, “for I possess your picture. Trumbull has procured me this happiness for which I shall ever be grateful for.” Jefferson, for his part, told Trumbull to “kneel to Mrs. Cosway for me, and lay my soul in her lap.” So the billets-doux went back and forth, slackening only after Jefferson returned finally to the United States. “If you ever see Mr. Trumbull,” Maria wrote to him there wistfully, “I hope you will speak of me together.”
Trumbull was enmeshed in Jefferson’s erotic life. What of his own? He turned 30 in the summer of 1786. Over the years he had recalled the “demoiselles” of Lebanon and learned French from the Robichaud family, which included daughters. In the journal that he kept of this, his first trip to Paris, and of a cruise down the Rhine he added on before heading back to London, he regularly noted the presence of pretty women: One in Brussels had “the precise style of beauty which Van Dyck so loved to paint.” He left sketches of some of the women he admired. Did he do more than sketch? His letters written at the time, and his autobiography written years later, keep the secret, if there was any.
More important to Trumbull than Jefferson’s flirting was his advice, political and artistic. Jefferson encouraged Trumbull to include the Declaration of Independence in his revolutionary project.
Fifteen months of combat (and most of Trumbull’s military career) had preceded America’s formal exit from the British empire. The deed was finally done on July 2, 1776, when Congress resolved that the 13 united colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” But in a country so verbal, with an unusually high number of preachers, lawyers, and newspaper readers, it was thought necessary to present a longer justification to the public, and to the world. Congress assigned the task to a five-man committee, including John Adams, Congress’s most eloquent orator, and Benjamin Franklin, thanks to his almanacs and journalism the most widely read American then living. But the committee gave the job to young Jefferson, already famous for his revolutionary polemics. Adams and Franklin made a few small changes to his draft, which Congress then cut and rewrote more heavily. Jefferson, like any sensitive author, resented the alterations to his handiwork. Like a proud author, he believed in its importance for the country, and for his own reputation.
Trumbull’s father had promulgated a declaration of Connecticut’s independence a month before Congress debuted Jefferson’s. The governor’s declaration looked to “preserve our precious rights and liberties.” But it wove the political struggle into a Calvinist account of the Fall of man into sin, the consequent need for just governments, and the hope that Americans might be “blessed of the Lord, as long as the Sun and Moon shall endure.” Jefferson’s declaration pared theology to a minimum, but what remained was compelling nonetheless: Men were endowed with rights “by their Creator”; America was entitled to nationhood by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Many men had already fought and died for the cause, and more struggle and bloodshed were to come. When you ask men to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, you must tell them why, and say so as clearly and stirringly as possible.
Jefferson gave Trumbull a sketch of the room in the State House in Philadelphia where Congress had met. (He misremembered the number of doors.) The oval-backed Louis XVI chairs of his Paris house provided the model for the chair in which Trumbull would place the president of Congress. Trumbull’s thoughts for his revolutionary series had so far run to battles, the most vivid experiences he had had. Now, inspired by his new friend, he would add a painting of a political event.
He returned to London in the fall, via the Rhine and the Low Countries. He was back at his easel and his efforts to make a mark in the British art market by November 1786.
Editor’s note: This article is excerpted and adapted from Richard Brookhiser’s book Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution.