One of our well-known illustrators has made a drawing of Washington reviewing his troops under the famous elm at Cambridge (again the flag floating proudly in the breeze), the soldiers being carefully clothed in Colonial uniforms. According to the statement of the Rev. William Emerson, we find a blacksmith of Concord, during the siege of Boston, which was after the battle at the Bridge, carrying his own gun and wearing his leather apron. Also, Washington made a pathetic appeal to Congress for some form of shirt that should distinguish his soldiers from the citizens, saying that the only way he had to mark his officers was a red, white, or blue ribbon which they wore in their coats.
About this point in my reading I stopped and changed my entire composition, taking my cue from the letter which remains for us, from the American commander at the Bridge. He says:
“I then sprang to my feet, crying, ‘Fire, fellow citizens! Fire!’”
Sprang to his feet? Where must he have been? Lying behind something. I had shot, fished, and traveled over this land all my life—it was only just across the river from our house—and there was nothing there in my boyhood behind which a man could have hidden. I looked this up and found there had formerly been a wall so that the market women during the spring freshet could walk dry shod in the days of the Concord River’s overflow.
Considering the fact that I had never seen green grass anywhere near Boston on the 19th of April, it may seem strange that I put it into my decoration. Of course, I preferred it for my color scheme, but I actually found a letter from a woman of the period and of that date, saying, “I saw green grass waving out of my window this morning.” It appears that that year they had an unusually early spring.
“THE RETURN OF THE FLAGS”
Panel by Edward Simmons, Boston State House
Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print
Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston
When I painted my second panel, I thought of the order that the Pope gave to Raphael to paint him putting out a fire by the power of God. The Pope naturally saw himself the principal figure and was disgusted when he found that Raphael had made him a little figure on a balcony in the distance, the artist preferring a group of maidens rushing around in the foreground with jugs of water as being more interesting to paint. Now my subject was War, and when I chose as my other panel “The Return of the Battle Flags into the Custody of the State after the Civil War,” many people naturally expected that the governor and officials would occupy the prominent place on the canvas. The governor was an admirable man and did a great deal toward winning the war, but in actual fact he was about five feet high, “pot-gutted,” bald headed, and not an attractive object from a painter’s point of view. I did not wish to do a group of portraits, but a decoration, so I imagined myself in the park, looking up at the State House, with a line of color sergeants marching up the steps to present the flags to the governor and officials waiting above. As they were two or three hundred feet away from the gate, I had to reduce them to twelve or fifteen inches in height, thereby making lifelong enemies of several who were still alive. When the G. A. R. found I was not to do the officers, but the color sergeants, my trouble was by no means over, for the wives and relatives of more than a dozen sent me photographs of their beloved ones, some of whom were dead, some of whom had lost an arm in the war. Many of the likenesses were of the individual thirty years later than the day he carried the flag! All, of course, expected to be represented in the decoration by a life-sized portrait. I obviated this difficulty by making them march up the stairs away from one, as they naturally would have done, and a back view is not a good portrait.
The ceremony had taken place on a day in December, and it had snowed the night before; so the next question that arose was that of the army overcoat. I had seen many of them in my boyhood; all of the farmers wore them in the fields. I took it for granted that it would be easy to get one. I appealed to the G. A. R. of Boston, the G. A. R. of New York, and the G. A. R. of Washington, D. C. There were none to be had. Finally, I wrote to Sanger, a classmate of mine, who was the Assistant Secretary of War, and found that there were some in the army archives and that all I had to do was to go to Washington and look at them. They would even have them taken out for me to examine thoroughly. This, of course, would do me no good whatever. I must have one in my studio so that a model could pose in it. My home and studio were at East Hampton, Georgica Pond, at the time, and I was walking around my garden one day, feeling very low in my mind, when my man of all work asked me what the matter was. I was blue enough to tell anyone my troubles, and explained to him, with no idea that he could help me.
“Why, old Jackson wears a coat like that,” he said.