In today’s 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen’s visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only through artistic rendering?
Paul Staiti tackles this interesting question in a new collective biography of the five most prominent portrait painters of the revolution and early republic: Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart. What Staiti illuminates best is how each artist understood the historical importance involved in depicting the new nation’s Founders, but also how a painter would stamp his portrayals with artistic individuality. Each artist’s perception of George Washington was decisively identifiable as Washington, but one artist may have emphasized the broad brow while another focused on the strength of Washington’s jaw. Whatever the artistic differences, the intention was to portray a heroic revolutionary figure as an iconic symbol of the new republic.
When George Washington was born, colonial America lacked any artists of note. But the onset of revolution provoked artistic growth. Staiti writes that “war and art were unlikely but welcome companions.” Young Charles Willson Peale began painting small portraits as a soldier, rendering miniatures for military comrades as “mementoes of service and sacrifice” and, sometimes, as memento mori for soldiers’ families. For Peale, Staiti writes, the war “stimulated the urge to record and commemorate.”
The artistic mentor for Peale, and most other leading American portrait painters, was Benjamin West, a native Pennsylvanian who had long supported the Patriot cause but who spent more than a decade “in the eminent post of court painter to George III, who was both his friend and benefactor.” West “deftly navigated” his political inclinations in what Staiti calls “a political high-wire act of the first order.” When the Provisional Treaty of Peace was signed in 1782, West assumed he could declare his own independence. He wrote Peale that he intended to compose “a set of pictures containing the great events which have affected the revolution of America” and asked his former student to send him detailed drawings that illustrated costumes and “the conspicuous characters” he would depict in his history paintings.
However well-intentioned, West never followed through and stopped work on the project in 1784. When John Trumbull had come to London to study with West, news of his military service in the Continental Army preceded him. He was arrested for treason in 1780 and only rescued from the gallows when West defended him in an audience with George III. Trumbull was imprisoned until 1781, when his bail was covered jointly by West and John Singleton Copley, another young American artist who had come to London to study with West.
West turned his revolutionary history project over to Trumbull, and over the next several decades, Trumbull created a dramatic narrative that would be showcased in the United States Capitol. In 1818, he completed Declaration of Independence and took the 216-square-foot painting on a triumphal tour across the Northeast before delivering the “GREAT NATIONAL PAINTING” to the Capitol. Trumbull’s other enormous works were delivered in 1820 (Surrender of Lord Cornwallis), 1821 (Surrender of General Burgoyne), and 1824 (General Washington Resigning His Commission). All were “majestically installed with gilt-trimmed frames in the newly completed Capitol Rotunda in 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This was now the symbolic center of the United States.”
Another prominent portrait painter, John Singleton Copley, first left Boston for London in 1774, where he studied with West, kept quiet about politics, and “vigorously pursued his artistic career.” Copley often painted American Loyalists, but is best known for his spectacular Watson and the Shark, which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1778. One of the most delicious stories recounted here is about the portrait John Adams commissioned from Copley in 1783. Along with Benjamin Franklin, Adams had just signed the Treaty of Paris, but Parisians ignored Adams and, instead, trumpeted Franklin’s genius in a barrage of adoring portraits, medals, miniatures, and sculpture. It even became fashionable for Parisian men to wear Quaker-style hats.
Staiti writes that to remind people of his role in the history-making treaty, Adams hired Copley to paint “a colossal eight-foot-tall, full-length portrait.” He viewed art as a visual statement about America’s greatness, and he wanted posterity to recognize his contribution in a big, unmistakable way. The result was “a mammoth portrait spectacularly broadcasting Adams’s significance. No one could overlook a picture so grand, nor now ignore the man who had valiantly waged peace abroad.” Alas, once the portrait was unveiled, Adams was embarrassed by its hugeness: Copley’s image was aggrandizing rather than virtuous. Ultimately, it spent years languishing in a London print shop before being hung in the Boston home of Ward Boylston. (It was too big to fit into the Adams house in Quincy.) In 1837, Boylston bequeathed it to Harvard College.
Perhaps the most interesting character was Charles Willson Peale, a brilliant and multitalented artist whose fame was launched with his 1779 portrait George Washington at Princeton. As Staiti writes, “This was a new day in the history of America, and Peale had condensed the new order of rule into a single image of Washington,” capturing him as “the living embodiment of republican virtue.”
Peale applied his view of heroic portraiture to a new gallery he was developing in Philadelphia: a hall of fame that would celebrate Revolutionary War heroes. In addition to “Portraits of Illustrious Personages,” his museum would include everything that made the New World exceptional, including “a Collection of preserved Beasts, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, Insects, Fossils, Minerals, Petrifications.” But the most notable Founding Father portraits were Gilbert Stuart’s of George Washington. Washington was president when he first posed for Stuart in 1794-95. He had already posed countless times for Peale, Trumbull, and others, and once quipped that “I am now so hackneyed to the touches of the Painters pencil, that I am now altogether at their beck.” Stuart’s first portrait of Washington “set in motion an avalanche of commissions for more portraits,” and over the next 30 years, he would paint more than a hundred portraits of Washington. Most were copies of his own originals, allowing the artist to mass-produce them.
Each of these individual portrait painters has been the subject of innumerable scholarly studies, and there have been occasional works with a more inclusive view, such as Hugh Howard’s The Painter’s Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art (2009). But Paul Staiti has produced an overview that reveals surprising interconnections among artists in the early republic and perceptively explains the impact of “republican virtue” on revolutionary portraiture.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
