Anders Zorn told me two stories about Grover Cleveland, showing the extraordinary penetration and understanding of this statesman. While he was doing a portrait of the President, at one time he took the canvas and turned it upside down to look at it. To Cleveland’s questioning he replied that he was doing it to see if he had painted the book too high in value, adding:
“What do you think?”
“I suppose you painters use the word ‘value’ to mean the importance a thing holds in its effect upon the eye of the beholder. Yes, I think it is too high but why do you turn it upside down?”
Zorn was interested. “Why do you think we do?”
“It must be to see it from a new point of view. To get a new conception of it all.”
It was, but how keen of him to have thought it out!
Zorn asked Mrs. Cleveland what her husband’s friends thought of the portrait. She replied that she did not know anyone who fitted that description, that he had many acquaintances, but no one that she could call his friend. It seems that the higher a man climbs, the farther behind he leaves his associates. Shakespeare must have been very lonely away up there on the mountain top.
There were two humps in the Monument Land near the Old Manse which were supposed to be the graves of British soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War. Hawthorne tells the legend of a boy who chopping wood there at the time of the battle of Concord, saw one soldier fall, and went over and finished him with his ax. When my dog Cuff used to start digging at this place, I always wanted to let him go on, just to see if one of the skulls was split. During this period of my life, no doubt aided by the usual school history, I formed a definite idea of the battle of Concord, and it was not until I tried to paint it for the Boston State House that I found out the real truth of the matter. And my enlightenment came from a Britisher!
I naturally started out with a composition of men in red coats, but, thinking it over, decided to be sure, so I wrote to Trevelyan, author of that wonderful history of the Revolutionary period, asking him where I could get information. A very courteous reply told me that he was in the country and that he did not have his books of reference with him, but added, “Why do you not go to that excellent library of yours, the Boston Athenæum, and consult the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1775? You’ll find what you want there.”
I did find what I wanted, and a lot more. For instance, only one out of ten British soldiers at Concord were redcoats. Those who fought at the Bridge were the ones who afterward formed the “King’s Own”—a flying wedge of two hundred men in dark-blue-and-black uniforms. Another little error of the poet Longfellow’s is that Paul Revere may have been a very good silversmith, but he never got to Concord. He was only one of a group of men sent out to warn the countryside, and he, with many others, was caught by the British and sent back to Boston. And then the flag! Despite Betsy Ross, I shall have to confess that the Stars and Stripes turned up the first time at the siege of Boston and were carried by a body of Connecticut militia.