The Painter's Chair (33 page)

WASH CUSTIS DECIDED to write an account of the visit. His multipart “Conversations with Lafayette” ran in the
Alexandria Gazette
and attracted national attention when it was republished widely. Among those who read the pieces with particular interest
was a popular historian named John F. Watson. He immediately wrote to Custis, suggesting they might collaborate on a Washington
memoir. Watson thought he might ask the questions and, working with Custis’s answers, “develop, as by moral painting, the
individual character of General and Mrs. Washington, as they appeared in domestic and everyday life.”
¹⁷

The project seemed tailor-made for Custis, who abbreviated his Lafayette series in order to set to work collecting his thoughts
on the Chief. His first “Recollection of Washington” was published in May 1826, and, for many years thereafter, usually on
the occasion of Washington’s birthday or Independence Day, new memory pieces would appear in the pages of the
National Intelligencer
and many other papers.

Titled
The Indian Prophecy
, the story featured the young Virginia colonel and climaxed with the prophecy of the title. A Kanawha Indian chief predicts
that the brave soldier will not die in battle but will live to found and lead a mighty empire. When the play was first produced,
in July 1827, at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theater, the prediction had long since come to pass.

Custis also tried his hand at painting, though with largely unremarkable results (according to his own daughter, the value
of his paintings lay in “their truthfulness to history in the delineation of events, incidents and costumes”).
¹⁸
He painted the battle scenes at Princeton, Germantown, and Yorktown. One painting stands out from the rest. It quite evidently
owes its inspiration to John Trumbull’s portrait
General Washington at Verplanck’s Point
, the canvas the artist had given to Martha and that had hung in the New Room at Mount Vernon. Custis coveted the original,
but it had gone by Martha’s bequest to another Custis relation, so he had made his own version (it can’t truly be called a
copy). His is primitive. The horse has a mythic quality, anatomically odd, rendered by an unschooled hand. Yet as painted
by his step-grandson, the General has real dash. Custis’s portrayal somehow manages to convey, as Trumbull had done, a sense
of the man’s physical power in repose. It hung in the entry hall at Arlington House, together with Peale’s Virginia colonel.

GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE Custis was a poet, playwright, antiquarian, painter, and most of all, family historian whose favorite
subject was always the man he called the Chief. He was a curator, too, whose care for a range of Washington objects helped
assure their survival (many later migrated back to Mount Vernon).

When he, in turn, went to his grave in 1857, he was the last of the General’s immediate family (Nelly had died five years
earlier). Custis left copious writings about Washington, and his daughter oversaw their publication in
Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son George Washington Parke Custis
three years later. It would prove to be the most enduring personal memoir of the Chief. Despite the differences in their ages,
G.W.P. knew the man intimately, at least in the paradoxical and sometimes subliminal way that a child understands adult affairs.
He was family; he knew the inner dynamics of Washington’s personal world very well. He was a writer and researcher, and he
used his agreeable manner and family connections to gain unique access to the memories of others who knew his grandfather,
among them Lafayette, Dr. James Craik (Washington’s oldest friend from military service in the 1750s, as well as his personal
physician); the freed slave, William Lee; and others. The man managed to be both the child of Mount Vernon and the sage of
Arlington. He was a self-appointed memory keeper; his assemblage of miscellaneous memories remains an essential, if eccentric,
source for historians.

T
O HIS PORTAITISTS, Washington was a protean figure. The relaxed country squire whom Peale painted in 1772 became the tired
and haggard man that Rembrandt Peale limned a quarter century later. The Virginian spent most of the intervening years in
public service, initially at war, often in the line of fire. He experienced another kind of crossfire as president, which,
though strictly speaking political, was no less heated, as Jefferson and Hamilton were forever sniping at each other within
Washington’s own cabinet.

The personalities of Washington and his recorders can be identified by looking at the canvases. Peale’s paintings are always
unmistakable from across a gallery or down a hall, and in Peale’s round faces we can almost sense his own cherubic personality.
In his first
Washington
we note the man’s girth, because Peale liked to portray people in their stout, full-bodied prosperity. Trumbull shows us a
more patrician view. For him, Washington is a figurehead. Trumbull’s desire was to capture the heroic Washington, to precipitate
with oil paints a semblance of the man’s historical importance. Savage aspired to less, and as artisan and showman he shaped
workmanlike portraits. Stuart’s genius for suggesting rather than reproducing what he saw seems to have suited the vagaries
of a habitual drinker and snuff-user.

After his father’s death, the best-remembered son, REMBRANDT PEALE, remained in pursuit of portraiture. Despite having made
only one likeness of Washington from life (and that when he was seventeen), Rembrandt lived to paint almost eighty copies
of his composite
Patriae Pater.
Even in his last days (he died in the autumn of 1860), he was working to complete two more Washington portraits and had achieved
wide fame for his lectures on Washington.

Despite having determined to pursue other career paths in the 1790s, JOHN TRUMBULL periodically resumed painting in what proved
to be a long life. When he returned to America after another Eu rope an sojourn in 1815, his arrival coincided with the rebuilding
of the Capitol after the British had burned the unfinished structure during the War of 1812. Trumbull took the opportunity
to resurrect his Revolutionary War project, persuading Congress to commission four large-scale versions of his history paintings.
He was paid generously, collecting a fee of $32,000 for
The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga
,
The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown
,
The Declaration of In dependence
, and
The Resignation of General Washington
. They went on public view in November 28, 1826, in the Capitol Rotunda, where they remain today.

By 1830 Trumbull was once again in need of money, when he negotiated a sale of his personal art collection to Yale University
for an annuity of $1,000 a year. He helped design the museum that opened in 1832. His paintings filled the North Gallery,
while the works of others in the Yale collection, notably John Smibert’s
The Bermuda Group
, hung in the South Gallery. In 1837, Trumbull began work on what would be the first published autobiography by an American
artist.
Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters of John Trumbull from 1756 to 1841
appeared just two years before his death in 1843. His remains were interred at Yale’s Trum-bull Gallery, beneath one of his
own full-length portraits of George Washington.

GILBERT STUART did not endear himself to Martha Washington, who had Tobias Lear write to him a few weeks after George’s death
asking him to send her the unfinished portrait of her husband. Stuart still had it years later when G. W. P. Custis once more
asserted the family’s claim, and even offered $4,000 as payment. Again, Stuart refused to hand it over. The architect William
Thornton, familiar with all the principals, probably expressed the popular consensus when he commented to another artist,
“The original of the General I think ought to be Mrs. Washington’s—and I think Mr. Stewart has not acted honorably in disposing
of it.”
¹⁹
A client once said of Stuart, “Like many other men of preeminent genius, he is his own worst foe.”
²⁰
As if to demonstrate the truth of the observation, Stuart thumbed his nose at the world, hanging the portrait on the door
of his Boston Painting Room.