THE PAINTER'S CHAIR
George Washington and the Making of American Art
By HUGH HOWARD
BLOOMSBURY PRESS
Copyright © 2009
Hugh Howard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-244-1
Contents
The Players........................................................xiii
A Washington Timeline..............................................xvii
PROLOGUE AN ACCIDENTAL GALLERY....................................1
CHAPTER 1. JOHN SMIBERT'S SHADE....................................16
CHAPTER 2. THE FIRST LIKENESS......................................37
CHAPTER 3. THE GENERAL.............................................47
CHAPTER 4. JOHN TRUMBULL TAKES HIS TURN............................73
CHAPTER 5. "THE FINEST STATUARY OF THE WORLD"......................90
CHAPTER 6. THREE FRIENDS OF MR. TRUMBULL...........................207
CHAPTER 7. "THE WASHINGTON FAMILY".................................138
CHAPTER 8. STUART SLOUCHES TOWARD PHILADELPHIA.....................157
CHAPTER 9. A PLURALITY OF PORTRAITS................................178
CHAPTER 10. REMBRANDT'S WASHINGTON.................................210
EPILOGUE REMEMBERING THE FOUNDING FATHER..........................229
Acknowledgments....................................................255
Notes..............................................................257
Bibliography.......................................................273
Index..............................................................287
Chapter One
John Smibert's Shade
We were a long time blundering about the ocean.
-Dean George Berkeley, 1729
I.
1729 ... Boston Harbor ... The Province of Massachusetts Bay
When he stepped ashore at Long Wharf, the Scots-born
John Smibert expected his stay would be brief. America was new
to him after a harsh Atlantic crossing and brief visits in Williamsburg,
Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. He imagined Boston would be
just another stopover on his way to his final destination, the island of
Bermuda. There he and his benefactor, George Berkeley, planned to
launch what both men hoped would be a beneficent adventure.
The Anglo-Irish philosopher and churchman-Berkeley was the
dean of Derry-had hatched a plan for a college in America. Back in
London, he had offered Smibert the professorship of drawing, painting,
and architecture at the proposed school, where they planned "to Instruct
the European and Indian children in the Christian faith, & necessary
educations." For Smibert, a man of fragile health and deep religious
faith, the life of a don on the idyllic isle of Bermuda promised to be a
happy escape from the intense competition back in Britain's capital. But
the great experiment could not begin until the arrival of the promised
£20,000 from the Crown's treasury. While awaiting the money, Smibert
had left Berkeley's household in Newport and made the short sail north to
Boston. Here he planned to paint portraits, just as he had done before
traveling across the Atlantic.
The practical men of Boston tended to regard the painting of pictures
as an indulgence, and some puritanical citizens even considered the
making of such images utterly godless. Even so, the city held a few likenesses
of ministers, royal governors, and well-to-do merchants, though
the tradesmen who made them usually worked as painter-stainers, men
more likely to paint houses or signs than canvases. The making of such
images, often called "effigies," had been no more than an occasional pastime
to their makers, and the paintings were crude. Smibert set out to
change all that.
In the New World, his abilities were remarkable. He had been an
up-and-coming painter of some repute back in London, and his Boston
neighbors were quick to recognize in the new arrival skills superior to
any they had ever seen. In a matter of weeks, dozens of the city's richest
inhabitants would commission Smibert to paint them.
The forty-one-year-old Scotsman welcomed his newfound success-it
followed almost thirty years of hard work. Born in the Grassmarket
neighborhood of Edinburgh in 1688, he learned his colors from his artisan
father, a wool dyer. At fourteen he apprenticed as a house painter and
plasterer. Wallpaper was rare and expensive, so he painted decorations on
walls and applied plaster elements to ceilings. After completing a seven-year
apprenticeship, he made his way to London and found work as a
carriage-painter, producing pastoral scenes and heraldic coats of arms on
gentlemen's coaches and sedan chairs. His skill with oils and brushes
impressed art dealers in the city, and Smibert moved on to the more lucrative
work of copying other people's pictures. In 1713 he enrolled in a
new school for painting and drawing. His evening studies in the clublike
environs of the old mansion known as the Great Queen Street Academy
readied him to make another artistic leap, and in 1716 he returned to
Scotland and launched himself as a portraitist.
The canny Smibert next embarked on an extended journey to Italy,
spending months in Florence, Rome, and Naples. He purchased paintings,
prints, and casts on behalf of sponsors back home, but the ultimate
purpose of his three years in the cultural and artistic heart of Europe was
to polish his skills. He gained access to private art collections, enabling
him to paint copies of Old Master works and make drawings of statuary.
This was the way every artist learned-by studying the great painters of
the past; the premium was not on originality but on copying. Learning
any craft in his time involved an apprenticeship, whether contractual or
informal; for all that Smibert already knew, he still had much to learn of
drawing, perspective, anatomy, the use of color, and a dozen other skills
that the great artists of the past did so much better than he ever had. So
Smibert painted Old Master copies, and portraits, too, often on commission
to fellow Scotsmen on their Grand Tours. One of his subjects had
been the Irish prelate George Berkeley.
On returning to London, Smibert soon earned a reputation as "a
good ingenious man [who] paints and draws handsomely." A few years
later his friend Dean Berkeley sought him out at his quarters in Covent
Garden, the epicenter of London's artistic community. Berkeley invited
Smibert to join his Bermuda-bound band of scholars. Smibert sailed
for America in 1728 together with Berkeley and his entourage.
Smibert's weeks in Boston became months. Two years passed before
Berkeley finally despaired of ever seeing the funds he needed to launch
his college and decided to return to England. By then, Dr. Nathaniel
Williams, a physician and master of Boston's finest school (later, Boston
Latin), had commissioned Smibert to paint five Williams portraits-and
Smibert had married one of his sitters, Dr. Williams's daughter Mary.
When the marriage took place, on July 30, 1730, she was twenty years his
junior and brought a modest dowry of £400 to their life together.
In the autumn of 1731, John Smibert waved farewell to his benefactor,
Dean Berkeley, from Boston's Long Wharf. He was the father of one
daughter, Allison, and a second child was on the way. As the dream of
the professorship at the island college vanished once and for all, John
Smibert, for better or for worse, became a Bostonian.
* * *
THE INITIAL FLURRY of portrait business in Boston was gratifying,
but no preordained path for artistic success existed in the New
World. Smibert realized he needed to proselytize. More of his puritanical
neighbors had to be persuaded that commissioning images of themselves
was not prideful and that owning a painting was no mere luxury.
Known as "a silent and modest man," Smibert chose to let art speak
for him. In early 1730 he opened his lodgings on Green Lane to the public.
Local citizens who walked through his door that March encountered
men they knew, rendered by Smibert onto canvas in a starkly realistic
fashion. He brought back from the dead Samuel Sewall, the recently
deceased chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court and father of
the Reverend Joseph Sewall, who had presided at Smibert's wedding.
Nearby hung a well-known military man, Jean Paul Mascarene. Smibert's
three-quarter portrait of the Huguenot showed him dressed in his
British ceremonial armor, posed before a detailed landscape of the harbor
earthworks he helped design. Another Boston worthy, the bewigged
and toothless Judge Nathaniel Byfield, looked at viewers from his canvas,
his countenance possessed of all the certainty and sternness his
neighbors knew to be in his nature.
More than familiar faces were on display. The professor-to-be had
brought with him to North America a study collection he had planned to
use at the proposed Bermuda college. He put on view copies of Old
Master paintings made during his years in Italy. Among them were
works after Raphael (
Madonna della Sedia), Titian (
Venus Blinding Cupid),
and Rubens, and a copy of van Dyck's portrait
Cardinal Bentivoglio.
The discipline of copying was a routine part of any artist's training, and
for Smibert the copies also represented models he kept for his own reference
or as a source of income. While in Italy he had sold some as souvenirs
to other British and Scots visitors, who regarded a good copy of a
great painting as more valuable than the original of a lesser work.
Smibert owned lay figures too, doll-sized, jointed models of the human
form that were especially useful in studying the draping of clothing,
essential to portraying men and women in their flowing clothes of rich
fabrics. His collections of books, engravings, and drawings were also at
hand. Visitors to Smibert's improvised museum encountered an art form
then unknown in the colonies. His plaster casts, purchased in Italy and
London over the span of a decade, were the first western sculptures to
reach America. At Mr. Smibert's the gentry of Boston admired a bust of
the artist's friend and fellow Scotsman, poet Allan Ramsay; a head of the
greatest of storytellers, Homer; and a plaster of a standing sculpture
from antiquity, the
Venus de' Medici. The sculptures seemed so real that
one Boston versifier described the Venus and Homer as "the breathing
Statue and the living Bust."
The eighty-line ode, titled "To Mr. Smibert, on the sight of his Pictures,"
soon appeared in the
London Daily Courant and a Philadelphia
newspaper. Composed by the impressionable Mother Byles, a twenty-two-year-old
Bostonian, the poem announced the artist's presence in his
adopted town. Doggerel though it was, the poem enthusiastically endorsed
Smibert as he sought to establish, single-handedly, an important outpost
of the London art world in the colonies. "Still, wondrous Artist," exhorted
the poet, "let thy Pencil flow/Still warm with Life, thy blended
Colours glow."
The open house had been an opportunity to attract more business,
but the event was more momentous than it seemed. In another of the
extraordinary firsts that seemed to accumulate around Smibert, his show
that late winter day constituted nothing less than the first art exhibition
in America.
II.
April 4, 1751 ... Queen Street ... Boston
To a passerby on the pebbled street out front, the store looked
the same. The shelves and counters inside remained stocked with
the colors, brushes, papers, palette knives, oils, and other art goods that
John Smibert had sold for some twenty years. Yet one important change
occurred this particular week. According to the
Boston News-Letter, "On
Tuesday last died here, much lamented, Mr. John Smibert, well known
for many fine Pictures he has done here." At age sixty-three, the man
who fostered a taste for paintings in Boston was gone.
Failing eyesight had forced Smibert to retire from painting five years
earlier, but not before he had made several hundred American portraits
(in his first five years in Massachusetts, his one-hundred-plus portraits
exceeded the total painted there in the previous three decades).
Most of Smibert's clients wanted bust-length or slightly larger canvases
called Kit-kats, but a few ordered three-quarter or even full-sized portraits
(the cost increased with the size). The price of a three-quarter
portrait was equivalent to that of a fine bookcase or a silver teapot.
Smibert's painting provided him with an income roughly equal to
that of a middling merchant, but his father-in-law, Dr. Williams, made
possible a move to a fine house on Queen Street. Mary Williams Smibert's
grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied the spacious
building near Boston's commercial center, barely a thousand feet from
the Long Wharf. In 1733, as Smibert reported to an old Scots patron,
"[I] have now got into a house of my father in laws, who has built me a
large & handsome Painting Room & showroom in al respects to my
satisfaction."
In Smibert's two decades in the colonies, he had watched Boston
become a city of tradesmen. The narrow and winding streets in the
neighborhood surrounding Queen Street were home to dozens of skilled
joiners, printers, upholsterers, tailors, and other artisans. Members of the
city's gentry and even people of the middling sort had developed a taste
for the china, fabrics, dry goods, tobacco, and household items sold in
nearby shops. Smibert himself prospered: At the time of his death, he
was a man of property. Among his other worldly goods were a sword
with a silver hilt, several looking glasses, and forty-six chairs. He was
indebted to his wife and her father for the access they had provided to
prosperous Bostonians who wanted their pictures taken, but his retail
business had succeeded, too. On the ground floor at the Queen Street
house, his "colour shop" had been the first in Boston, offering a full
range of painter's goods, from the most basic to the exotic, along with
engravings, mezzotints, and other prints. An advertisement for the venture
had claimed, "John Smibert, Painter, sells all sorts of colours, dry
or ground ... with Oils, and Brushes, Fans of Several Sorts, the Best
Mezotints, Italian, French, Dutch, and English Prints, in Frames and
Glasses, or without, by Wholesale or Retail at Reasonable Rates."
Even after its proprietor's death, his shop and studio remained. It
would soon prove to be much more than a mere reminder of the man
who had worked there.
* * *
IN SMIBERT'S TIME, the preparation of
material pictoria could be
as time-consuming as the act of painting itself.
The canvases were made of woven flax. John Smibert, Merchant,
ordered these linen "cloaths" (he also rendered the word "Cloats") from
his lifelong friend, Arthur Pond, a sometime painter, etcher, and art
dealer. Pond shipped them to America from London, where back-street
artisans produced the canvases in quantity. Smibert ordered the larger
ones to be "rolled up & put in a case" (so as to take up less shipping
space), whereas the smaller ones arrived already "strained" (stretched).
Like his London peers, John Smibert, Painter, worked on canvases
that had already been sized. In preparing a canvas, a London colourman
would have warmed (but not boiled) granules of hide glue (typically
rabbit- or pigskin) to a thick liquid the consistency of honey. The sizing
was then spread on a canvas in broad strokes using a palette knife. Once
the glue dried, the surface was sanded smooth with a pumice stone.
The grounding came next. Its composition varied, with common
ingredients including plaster, the sediment from a jar of brush-cleaning
oil, or carbon black, as well as the essential linseed oil and white-lead
pigment. Smibert preferred a grayish-green or reddish ground, but whatever
the ingredients, the application of the grounding produced a smooth
surface, less absorbent than raw linen but still able to retain some of the
fabric's tooth and flexibility.
As a purveyor of colors, Smibert sold few ready-to-use paints; his
trade was in the ingredients used to make them. These included such
vehicles as oils, dryers, turpentine, shellacs and other varnishes, and the
all-important pigments.
Most of the pigments Smibert sold were made from earths and
minerals that had been processed (usually by firing or cooking), dried
on long boards or stones, and then
levigated, meaning they were finely
ground into powders by a hand mill or with a mortar and pestle. For
larger quantities, the tool of choice was a muller, a stone with one flat
side that was held in the palm and worked in circles on a stone slab.
Depending upon their source, iron-rich soils called ochers produced
pigments ranging in color from pale yellow to orange and red. Thus
terra di Sienna, when burned (calcined), produced an orange-red hue
called burnt Sienna; a scarlet red was termed Venetian red; the brown-red
was Spanish brown. The mineral copper was used to produce greens
("Distilled Verdigres," specified one bill of lading from London). Mercury
ore (quicksilver) made cinnabar, a bright red vermilion pigment.
Other colors that Smibert ordered from Pond in London included
"French Sap Green" (made from buckthorn berries), "English Saffron"
(a tincture of the spice saffron), and "Prussn. Blew ... of a fine deep
sort." Prussian blue was the first chemical color of the age, made not
from an earth or other natural pigment but from a salt compound of
iron and potassium. The carmine that Smibert ordered ("very fine," he
specified), was highly prized, having actually traveled across the ocean
twice, coming as it did from Mexico or South America via London (it
was derived from the eggs and body of the cochineal insect). The primary
white pigment was flake white, made of white lead, favored because
it was durable and tough yet flexible.
Pigments became paints when the fine powders were mixed with
oil or another material to help bind the pigment to the canvas. When
small quantities were required, the mixing was done on the palette itself
with a thin-bladed palette knife. Larger quantities could be mixed on a
stone or muller. The blended oil and pigment looked uniform, though
the tiny grains of pigment were merely suspended in the liquid, like currants
in cake batter. After the paint was applied, it would thicken from a
paste to a solid in a chemical reaction as the oil set (oxidized). A tough
film remained, dry to the touch in a matter of hours. Most paints on the
palette needed to be mixed each day, as one day's batch would dry by
the next day.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE PAINTER'S CHAIR
by HUGH HOWARD
Copyright © 2009 by Hugh Howard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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