Read The Painter's Chair Online
Authors: Hugh Howard
The Painter's Chair (31 page)
The task was not a new one. Since returning from his first French visit, he had tried no fewer than sixteen times to make
a composite likeness. While all of those “trial portraits” had been sold, none satisfied their creator. This time he surrounded
himself with “every document representing in any degree the man who still lived in my memory.”
22
When his wife found him studying the materials arrayed around his Painting Room, she asked, her tone anxious, what he had
in mind. In the past she had seen him lose himself repeatedly in attempts to paint Washington; she found his distance, his
frustration, and his failure upsetting. “When I told her,” Peale recounted, “she burst into a flood of tears, & exclaimed
with great emotion that Washington was my evil genius, & she wished he had never been born!”
23
Peale promised her that this attempt, canvas number seventeen, would be his “
last effort.”
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In the years since returning from his first trip abroad, Rembrandt had gone once more to Paris (in 1809–10) with his wife
and children. On his return to Philadelphia, he had opened a gallery, the Apollodorian, and, inspired by what he had seen
in Paris, he began painting grand history paintings. In 1813, he had moved his museum to Baltimore. To house the usual mix
of art and natural history, he constructed the first purpose-built museum in the United States. During his nine years in Baltimore,
he also painted portraits. Like his father, he was intrigued by advancing technology, and he founded the Baltimore Gas Light
Company to light his adopted city. He went on tour with a new history painting,
The Court of Death
(the canvas was enormous, twenty-three feet wide and nearly twelve feet high). The principal figures in the allegorical painting
included War, Conflagration, Famine, Pestilence, and Remorse, along with Consumption, Despair, Hypochondria, and, of course,
Death himself. Only Faith and Old Age relieved the scene. Then, in 1822, determined to return to painting full time, Rembrandt
had handed the keys of his Baltimore museum to his brother Rubens. He spent some months in New York and Boston, but finally,
his homing instinct still strong, he returned to Philadelphia. Here he would perfect his National Likeness.
To make his new Washington he worked, Peale later recollected, in a “Poetic frenzy.” He thought of nothing else; he painted
nothing else. His father, whose encouragement had often sustained him, worried about his son. Days passed; weeks became months.
Rembrandt dreamed of the painting at night and worked at it all day. His father’s concerns turned to “grief,” and he concluded
that Rembrandt’s Washington was “a hopeless effort.”
25
When Rembrandt was not happy with his progress, he turned his father away at the Painting Room door. Finally, three months
into the process, his elderly and bespectacled father was permitted to enter the Painting Room. Although several of his children
painted very well, Charles Willson had come to regard his second surviving son as his greatest hope. As a boy Rembrandt had
had the run of his Museum and while there had learned much from his father. During his later travels to England and especially
France Rembrandt gained painting knowledge beyond his father’s, and their roles were reversed, with the son becoming the father’s
artistic tutor. Charles Willson admired his son’s dedication to painting; as a scientist himself he was intrigued with Rembrandt’s
study of the chemistry of paint. Most of all, perhaps, he was moved by the younger man’s firm belief in the ability of art
to celebrate such virtues as patriotism and filial piety.
Charles Willson studied the portrayal on the easel. Soon, he clapped his son on the shoulder and uttered the words Rembrandt
wished most to hear from the man who had himself painted Washington from life and had known him for more than twenty-five
years.
“You have it now—this is indeed Washington.”
26
THE ARTIST GAVE his new Washington the permanence of stone. In composing what he hoped would be the definitive bust portrait,
he painted what appears to be a massive marble frame, decorated with a wreath-like oval of carved oak leaves, topped with
a keystone bearing the face of Jupiter. Although the words
Patriae Pater
(“father of his country”) appeared to be carved into the windowsill, the canvas was soon given a simpler name. It became the
“Porthole Portrait.”
Peale had fashioned a new—and, in his opinion, authoritative— likeness of George Washington. He had not painted it from life,
yet the Washington pictured appeared to have more vivacity than the life portraits. The likeness only distantly resembled
Peale’s own 1795 study; in the new portrait, the man is clearly younger, the flesh on his face firmer. This Washington owed
more to the marmoreal vision of Houdon’s 1785 bust than to any Peale portrait.
Peale’s
Patriae Pater
was also an invention, a romantic portrayal that echoed the notion of Rembrandt’s contemporary, the English poet William Wordsworth,
who defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity.” A quarter
century of contemplating the principal Founding Father had indeed led to Peale’s period of composition, which he described
as “an instance of Artistic excitement.”
27
Word of the portrait traveled quickly around the city, and Peale’s fellow Philadelphians crowded his Painting Room for weeks,
keen to see the painting that glorified the great man. He set about collecting testimonials to his canvas. Many of the men
he solicited had known Washington and proclaimed the portrait excellent. Major Lawrence Lewis, the General’s nephew and husband
of Nelly Custis, wrote to Peale, “It is the only portrait of my uncle I ever wish to look at a second time; but on this I
could gaze continually.” Upon seeing the portrait, Lafayette exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this is the Washington I knew!”
Washington is seen through the stone oculus as if, walking down the street, the viewer has chanced to glance into a window.
There our alert eye fixes him. His black cloak is near at hand, resting where he has thrown it, across the windowsill.
His face is illuminated from above, his chin casting a shadow on his neck. This man does not suffer from the somnolence that
so often overtook Washington in the Painter’s Chair. This is a man of action, of evident force and strength. He is not held
hostage by the painter. He might be gone in a moment, in pursuit of the mission from which he was distracted. We’re privileged
to see him—looking, listening, about to launch himself again toward his objective. The surface of the canvas has a gleam;
Washington seems almost polished, the sitter’s skin waxed. Rembrandt had lost the painful candor of his 1795 portrait of an
old man, that is clear. In its place, he has made an icon that is fresh and forceful, if theatrical.
The painting was exhibited in the U.S. Capitol in late February 1824. Rembrandt then took the portrait on tour, showing it
to crowds in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In Boston, he arranged for a lithograph to be made from it. In 1828, the
year after his father’s death, Rembrandt traveled to Eu rope and exhibited the
Patriae Pater
to acclaim in Florence, Rome, Naples, Paris, and London. In celebration of the centennial of Washington’s birth in 1832, a
special committee recommended that the U.S. Congress acquire the portrait. For $2,000, Rembrandt sold
Patriae Pater
to the nation to hang in the Senate chamber.
THE “PORTHOLE PORTRAIT” became a mixed blessing to the aging Rembrandt Peale. From his travels to Italy with his son, Michael
Angelo, he returned with copies of Old Master paintings. He experimented with the new vogue of sublime landscapes, painting
at least five views of Niagara Falls. He devised a drawing manual, a modest pamphlet titled
Graphics: a Manual of Drawing and Writing, for the Use of Schools and Families,
published in 1835. The book, revised and expanded in four editions, saw continuing sales and regular reprinting over the next
several decades.
Despite his other activities, by the 1850s Rembrandt Peale’s principal mission had become to acquaint younger generations
with George Washington. Traveling widely to deliver a long lecture titled “Washington and His Portraits,” he talked not only
about his own Washington canvases but also displayed copies he had made of other artists’ works, among them two of Stuart’s
portraits, Trumbull’s 1792 full-length, several of his father’s images of Washington, and a profile copied from Houdon’s bust.
The older he got, the more tightly entwined Rembrandt’s reputation became with Washington.
His travels and talks inspired commissions for more “Portholes.” The very name by which they came to be known suggests how
routinized the work had become (the labels often read “George Washington Copy”). They varied slightly in content; in some,
Washington looks right, in others he looks left; the subject’s attire varies from the civilian (as in the original) to the
military. Most were not true replicas but smaller adaptations, typically painted on twenty-five-by-thirty-inch canvases.
At age seventy-seven, Rembrandt confided to his brother Rubens, “I have not many years to live, and feel that my Vocation
is to multiply the Countenance of Washington.”
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That he continued to do, painting the last (seventy-ninth) version of his
Patriae Pater
when he was eighty-two, in the last year of his life.
The past is never dead, it’s not even past.
—William Faulkner,
Requiem for a Nun,
Act I, Scene 3
I.
Friday, October 15, 1824 . . . Arlington House . . . Virginia
I
N 1778 A German-language almanac from the printing press of Francis Bailey of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, referred to George
Washington as
“Des Landes Vater.”
Translated into English as “the father of his country,” the designation began to follow the man around like his shadow on
a sunny day. In time, the conceit of
Founding Father
would become the principal metaphor of the revolutionary era.
While Washington’s political paternity survived him, no biological children did. Martha bore no more babies after marrying
Colonel Washington in 1759 (she had given birth four times in seven years of marriage to Daniel Parke Custis). Despite his
lack of gene tic descendants, however, Washington most certainly did not lack familial ties. His affection for Martha’s children
and, later, her grandchildren ran deep. In his correspondence he was generous in offering life guidance to many young and
inexperienced men and women within his purview.
Over the decades he had more than a few stand-in sons, young men he sought to mold into great men. Among them were Martha’s
unlucky and undisciplined son, Jacky; Alexander Hamilton, the aide-de-camp who later served as the nation’s first secretary
of the treasury; and Tobias Lear, the devoted secretary and confidant who was with Washington at the end. There were Washington
nephews and other men in the extended Custis clan, many of whom came to regard Mount Vernon as the bosom of their family.
They, too, were subject to the fatherly ministrations of the General.
Two men in particular stand forth from the crowd of surrogate sons. Both of them—one a near relation, the other a passionate
partisan from abroad—would help to shape the general’s legacy after his death.
IF HE HAD had his way, George Washington Parke Custis would have become master of Mount Vernon. He had grown up there after
the premature death of his father, Jacky Custis, of “Camp Fever” (most likely typhoid) at age twenty-six. Though there was
no provision in English or Virginia law for formal adoption, Wash and his sister Nelly shared Martha and George’s domicile
even when President Washington’s public life took him to New York and Philadelphia. Before, after, and periodically during
Washington’s presidency, they regarded Mount Vernon as home.
The General set high expectations for his ward and step-grandson, and more than once despaired of the young Wash Custis. “From
his infancy,” Washington wrote to the president of the College of New Jersey when the sixteen-year-old encountered academic
difficulties, “I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in everything that [does] not tend to his
amusements.”
1
After the boy failed in a second and a third attempt at college, Washington resigned himself to Wash’s seeming inability to
mature into the public role he had foreseen. The General confided to another member of the extended family, “I believe Washington
means well, but has not the resolution to act well.”
2
Even so, the aging Washington chose to believe that the boy’s better instincts would eventually emerge. As his adoptive father,
Washington entrusted the eighteen-year-old Wash with the role of co-executor of his estate in the will he wrote in June 1799.
With Washington’s death a few months later, Wash would begin to demonstrate that this trust had not been misplaced. The lad
dutifully remained with his grandmother until she died in her garret bedroom in 1802 at Mount Vernon. Only then did things
change.
Believing that inheritance should follow the “laws of nature,” the General did not leave Mount Vernon to Wash Custis. With
the death of Martha, the estate went to one of his blood relations, Bushrod Washington, the eldest son of the General’s younger
brother John Augustine.
3
Custis wanted to purchase the property, but Bushrod refused to sell. Young Custis then moved eight miles north to an eleven-hundred-acre
property that was part of the legacy left him by his own father. He named it “Mount Washington.”
Wash adopted as his bachelor quarters a four-room cottage standing near the bank of the Potomac. There he stowed the many
Custis heirlooms his grandmother left him, along with a growing collection of Washington memorabilia. While everyone in Washington’s
extended family seemed to cherish his memory, Wash was the first to recognize that even quotidian items associated with Washington
were important. After Martha’s bequests had been distributed, most of the remaining contents of Mount Vernon were dispersed
at auction. Custis bought so many items that his purchases left him with a debt that would require years to pay off (the total
cost, $4,545, was the equivalent of roughly $150,000 in twenty-first-century currency).
After some of his cherished mementoes were damaged by vermin and dampness due to inadequate storage, he resolved to build
a proper repository in which to preserve and display his Washingtoniana. He dubbed his new home “Arlington House” after an
earlier Custis plantation. In 1804, he brought home a wife, Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Wash and “Molly” resided in the completed north
wing, and the rest of the structure, which included a tall main block and a second symmetrical wing, was completed over the
next dozen years.
Although separated from his childhood home, Custis found other ways to honor his connection to George Washington. He regaled
guests with stories of Mount Vernon, offering item-by-item explications of the Washington-related objects that filled Arlington.
There was the “War Tent,” stored in two leather portmanteaus, and other military equipment, including a camp chest. Custis
owned the iron lantern from Mount Vernon’s passage, which family lore held to have been the property of Lawrence Washington
(1659–1698), the first American-born Washington. Custis’s cupboards displayed many Washington porcelains and silver, and a
reinforced document chest held papers. In an upstairs chamber he would point out the most moving object of all. Stripped of
its dimity canopy was the bed on which the Chief had died.
Downstairs hung an array of Custis portraits that, taken together, constituted an informal history of English portraiture
as America was being settled. A portrait of his great-great-grandfather, G. W. P. Custis told his visitors, was the work of
Anthony van Dyck; another, this one of his great-grandfather, he believed to have been executed by the London portraitist
Sir Godfrey Kneller.
4
Nearby hung the three John Wollaston portraits of Martha, her first husband (and G.W.P.’s grandfather), and Martha’s two children,
Patsy and Jacky. Advancing through time, canvas by canvas, elaborate baroque clothing and painting styles grew simpler as
the generations passed, offering the viewer a short course on how art had changed since John Smibert’s time. The climax of
the sequence was the original of Washington originals, the Colonel Washington portrait that Charles Willson Peale painted
in 1772, which heralded the arrival of American-born, Eu rope an-trained painters.
As the historic repository for Custis’s “Washington Treasury,” Arlington House became an essential stopping place for those
wishing to pay their respects to the memory of George Washington. One such visitor was Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert
du Motier, an intimate friend of the family. The Frenchman’s portrait—this was, of course, Washington’s old comrade in arms
Lafayette—already hung at Arlington House, another canvas from the hand of Charles Willson Peale. It was a likeness commissioned
by George Washington himself during the Revolution.
WHEN LAFAYETTE CAME to visit, much had changed in the quarter century since the death of Washington. Thomas Jefferson defeated
John Adams in the Bostonian’s bid for a second term as president in 1800. After Jefferson’s eight years in the President’s
House, two other Virginians won two terms each. First was “Little Jim” Madison (Washington’s constitutional confidant stood
just five-foot-four); he was succeeded by James Monroe (who, as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant in 1776, had crossed the Delaware
with General Washington). But the year 1824 would truly see a changing of the political guard.
A new generation of candidates—for the first time, none was a Founding Father—sought the presidency. Voters considered such
regional favorites as John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Crawford of Georgia, and Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee. But few Americans that autumn would pay close attention to the mud-slinging of electoral politics, in
which Jackson was cast as an adulterer, Clay a drunkard, and Adams as slovenly (by then Crawford had suffered a debilitating
stroke). In those months, the more edifying story line that newspaper readers simply could not get enough of was the national
tour of the man President Monroe called “the Nation’s Guest.”
Monroe had issued the invitation the previous February. “The whole nation,” Monroe wrote, “. . . ardently desire[s] to see
you again.”
5
An act of Congress, passed unanimously by both houses, had authorized the communication, and from his home in France, The
Grange, the invitee responded in the affirmative. He let it be known that he would be honored to return to America after an
absence of forty years, although he no longer used the title that was his birthright. Instead, he favored the rank he had
earned in the Continental Army. The former marquis wished to be known as
General Lafayette
.
BY THE TIME Lafayette readied to cross the Potomac on the mile-long wooden bridge, he was running late yet again. The plan
had been for a midday visit, but the commandant at the Navy Yard had given him a most thorough tour. The hours spent reviewing
ships and dry docks meant the Nation’s Guest had been forced to go directly to the President’s House. He had taken his dinner
with James Monroe, an old friend from soldiering days, and had postponed his trip to Arlington House until the evening.
Lafayette had been back in America barely two months, but each day the American public embraced him anew. On first stepping
ashore in New York, he had been greeted by a crowd of fifty thousand lining the parade route to City Hall. The unexpected
welcome overwhelmed him: Standing in the Portrait Hall, with a tall
George Washington
by Trumbull nearby, Lafayette felt tears running down his cheeks. At one point he was so moved he had difficulty speaking
and stepped into an anteroom to compose himself.
6
He had gone to Boston, where he was greeted by a crowd of seventy thousand, and been fêted in Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and at villages and crossroads in between with banquets, receptions, speeches, toasts, and applause from the crowds that lined
every mile of his route. On his journey south, he also revisited the scene of the 1777 Battle of Brandywine, where, though
struck in the leg by a musket ball, he had fought until his boot filled with blood. Back in the day, upon learning Lafayette
had been wounded, Washington ordered the battle-field surgeon to “treat him as my son, for I love him the same.”
