American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Gilbert Stuart still holds his place among the greatest of American portrait painters. His heads, painted simply and without artifice, and yet with high imagination, are unsurpassed; they possess insight, they accomplish that greatest of all tasks, the delineation of character. Stuart's portraits—as every portrait must, to be truly great—show not only how his sitters looked but what they were. Art can accomplish no more than that.

The anecdotes which are told of him are innumerable, and most of them have to do with his hot temper, which grew hotter and hotter as his years increased and he became more and more a public character. One day, a loving husband, whose wife Stuart had put on canvas in an unusually uncompromising way, complained that the portrait did not do her justice.

"What an infernal business is this of a portrait painter," Stuart cried, at last, his patience giving way. "You bring him a potato and expect him to paint you a peach!"

But look at his portrait at the beginning of this chapter, and you will see a witty and kindly old gentleman, as well as an irascible one.

John Trumbull was a student of West's at the same time that Stuart was. He was a year younger, and was a son of that Jonathan Trumbull, afterwards governor of Connecticut, whose title of Brother Jonathan, given him by Washington, became afterwards a sort of national nickname. He was an infant prodigy, graduating from Harvard at an age when most boys were entering, and afterwards going to Boston to take lessons from Copley. The outbreak of the Revolution stopped his studies; he enlisted in the army, won rapid promotion, and finally resigned in a huff because he thought his commission as colonel incorrectly dated.

In 1780, he sailed for France, on his way to London, met Benjamin Franklin in Paris and from him secured a letter of introduction to Benjamin West, who welcomed him with his unfailing cordiality; but he had scarcely commenced his studies when he was arrested and thrown into prison. The reason was the arrest and execution at New York of Major André, who was captured with Benedict Arnold's treasonable correspondence hidden in his boot, and who was hanged as a spy. Knowing that Trumbull had been an officer in the American army, and anxious to avenge André's death, the King ordered his arrest, but West interceded for him and secured his release several weeks later.

Warned that England was unsafe for him, Trumbull returned to America and remained there until after the close of the Revolution. The beginning of 1784 saw him again in London, at work on his two famous paintings, "The Battle of Bunker Hill" and "The Death of General Montgomery," and from that time until his death he was occupied almost exclusively with the painting of pictures illustrating events in American history—"The Surrender of Cornwallis," "The Battle of Princeton," "The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton," to mention only three. In 1816 he received a commission to paint four of the eight commemorative pictures in the Capitol at Washington, and completed the last one eight years later, this being his last important work.

Trumbull is in no respect to be compared with Gilbert Stuart, but his work was done with a painstaking accuracy which makes it valuable as a historical document. For the personages of his pictures he painted a great number of miniatures from life, which, in many cases, are the only surviving presentments of some of the most prominent men of the time.

After Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully was by far the greatest of the men who studied in West's studio. Stuart aside, there was no American painter of the day to equal him. He was born in England in 1783, but was brought to this country by his parents at the age of nine. The Sullys were actors of some talent and secured an engagement at Charleston, South Carolina, and there the boy was placed first in school, and then in the office of an insurance broker. He spent so much time making sketches that his employer decided he was destined for art and not for business, and secured another clerk.

Young Sully thoroughly agreed with this and started out to be an artist. He had no money, nor means of earning any, but he managed to secure some desultory instruction, and this, added to his native talent, enabled him to begin to paint portraits for which uncritical persons were willing to pay. But it was a hard road, and none was more conscious of his deficiencies than himself. He knew that he needed training, and finally started for England with a purse of four hundred dollars in his pocket, which had been subscribed by friends, who were each to be repaid by a copy of an old master.