English Painters, with a Chapter on American Painters

by H. J. Wilmot-Buxton; S. R. Koehler

Still more national importance attaches to JOHN TRUMBULL (1756—1843), since he was an historic as well as a portrait-painter, took part in person as an officer in the American army in many of the events of the Revolution, and was intimately acquainted with most of the heroes of his battle scenes. America enjoys in this respect an advantage of which no other country can boast—that of having possessed an artist contemporaneous with the most important epoch in its history, and capable and willing to depict the scenes enacted around him. Colonel Trumbull, the son of Jonathan Trumbull, the Colonial Governor of Connecticut, studied at Harvard, and gave early evidences of a taste for art. At the age of nineteen he joined the American army, but in 1780, aggrieved at a fancied slight, he threw up his commission and went to France, and thence to London, where he studied under West. Trumbull must not be judged as an artist by his large paintings in the Capitol at Washington, the commission for which he did not receive until 1817. To know him one must study him in his smaller works and sketches, now gathered in the gallery of Yale College, where may be seen his Death of Montgomery, Battle of Bunker Hill, Declaration of Independence, and other revolutionary scenes, together with a series of admirable miniature portraits in oil, painted from life, as materials for his historic works, and a number of larger portraits, including a full-length of Washington. As a portrait-painter, Trumbull is also represented at his best by the full-length of Alexander Hamilton, at the rooms of the New York Chamber of Commerce. The most successful of his large historic pieces, The Sortie from Gibraltar, painted in London, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Goethe, who saw the small painting of The Battle of Bunker Hill while it was in the hands of Müller, the engraver, commended it, but criticized its colour and the smallness of the heads. It is true that Trumbull's drawing is somewhat conventional, and that he had a liking for long figures. But his colour, as seen to-day in his good earlier pictures, is quite brilliant and harmonious, although thoroughly realistic. In his later work, however, as shown by the Scripture pieces likewise preserved in the Yale Gallery, there is a marked decadence in vigour of drawing as well as of colour. Owing to an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, Trumbull has not received the full appreciation which is his due, even from his own countrymen. Thackeray readily recognised his merit, and cautioned the Americans never to despise or neglect Trumbull—a piece of advice which is only now beginning to attract the attention it deserves.

Among the portrait-painters of this period, CHARLES WILSON PEALE (1741—1827) takes the lead by reason of quantity rather than quality. Peale was typical of a certain phase of American character, representing the restlessness and superficiality which prevail upon men to turn lightly from one occupation to another. He was a dentist, a worker in materials of all sorts, an ornithologist and taxidermist, rose to the rank of colonel in the American army, and started a museum of natural history and art in Philadelphia. But his strongest love seems, after all, to have been for the fine arts. Among the fourteen portraits of Washington which Peale painted, according to Tuckerman, is the only full-length ever done of the father of his country: it shows him before the Revolution, attired as an officer in the colonial force of Great Britain. A large number of Peale's portraits may be seen in the Pennsylvania Academy and in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. The New York Historical Society owns, among other works by his hand, a Washington portrait and a group of the Peale family comprising ten figures. Much of Peale's work is crude, but all of his heads have the appearance of being good likenesses.

Among a number of other painters of this period we can select only a few, whose names receive an additional lustre from their connection with Washington.

JOSEPH WRIGHT (1756—1793) was the son of Patience Wright, who modelled heads in wax at Bordentown, N.J., before the Revolution. While in England he painted a portrait of the Prince of Wales. In the year 1783 Washington sat to him, after having submitted to the preliminary ordeal of a plaster mask. Tuckerman speaks of this portrait as inelegant and unflattering, and characterizes the artist as unideal, but conscientious. Wright's portrait of John Jay, at the rooms of the New York Historical Society, authorizes a more favourable judgment. It is, indeed, somewhat austere, but lifelike, well posed, and cool in colour.

E. Savage (1761—1817) seems to have been nearly as versatile as Peale, emulating him also in the establishment of a museum, at first in New York, then in Boston. His portrait of General Washington, in the Memorial Hall of Harvard University, is carefully painted and bright in colour, but rather lifeless. His Washington Family, in the Boston Museum (a place of amusement not to be confounded with the Museum of Fine Arts), which he engraved himself, has similar qualities. A little picture by him, also in the Boston Museum, representing The Signers of the Declaration of Independence in Carpenters' Hall, is interesting on account of its subject, but does not possess much artistic merit. The portrait of Dr. Handy, on the contrary, which is assigned to him, at the New York Historical Society, is a very creditable work, good in colour, luminous in the flesh, and simple in the modelling.

WILLIAM DUNLAP (1766—1839), finally, may also be mentioned here on account of his portrait of Washington—painted when the artist was only seventeen years old—although he belongs more properly to the next period, and is of more importance as a writer than a painter. He published, in 1834, a "History of the Arts of Design in the United States," a book now quite scarce and much sought after. A group of himself and his parents, painted in 1788, is in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

THIRD PERIOD, OR PERIOD OF INNER DEVELOPMENT.

The example of Trumbull found no followers. The only other American painter who made a specialty of his country's history seems to have been JOHN BLAKE WHITE (1782—1859), a native of Charleston, S.C., who painted such subjects as Mrs. Motte presenting the Arrows, Marion inviting the British Officer to Dinner, and the Battles of New Orleans and Eutaw, placed in the State House of South Carolina. White's fame is quite local, however, and it is impossible, therefore, to judge of his qualities accurately. Had there been more painters of similar subjects, a national school might have resulted; but neither the people nor the Government took any interest in Colonel Trumbull's plans. It was necessary to employ all sorts of manœuvring to induce Congress to give a commission to the artist, and the result was disappointment to all concerned; and when, later, the further decoration of the Capitol at Washington, the seat of government, was resolved upon, the artist selected for the work was CARLO BRUMIDI (1811—1880), an Italian artist of the old school. The healthy impetus towards realistic historic painting given by Trumbull thus died out, and what there is of historic and figure painting in the period now under consideration is mainly dominated by a false idealism, of which Washington Allston is the leading representative. To rival the old masters, to do what had been done before, to flee from the actual and the near to the unreal and the distant, to look upon monks and knights and robbers and Venetian senators as the embodiment of the poetic, in spite of the poet's warning to the contrary, was now the order of the day; and hence it was but natural that quite a number of the artists who then went to Europe turned to Italy. It was in this period, also, that the first attempts were made to establish Academies of Art in Philadelphia and New York—attempts which, while they were laudable enough in themselves, inasmuch as these institutions were intended to provide instruction at home for the rising generation, still pointed in the same direction of simple imitation of the expiring phases of European Art.