by Hugh Howard
In obeying the congressional summons, Washington spent fifteen busy days away from his army. Only with difficulty did he fit Mr. Peale into his schedule with the other social, political, and military demands on his time. For much of the General’s first week, Peale had to content himself with working on the matching portrait of Mrs. Washington, who had traveled to Philadelphia to obtain an inoculation for smallpox (George himself was immune from further bouts, having survived his infection with the deadly disease at age nineteen). Peale could manage only two sessions with the General, on Wednesday and Friday, May 29 and 31, probably at Peale’s new Arch Street studio.
In the finished painting, Washington’s features may be read as expressing disgruntlement. If that is so, the emotion probably stemmed both from his impatience to rejoin his troops and from the fact that the portrait was destined for Hancock’s home. Hancock was one politician for whom Washington had no particular affection.
AT AGE FORTY-FOUR, Washington had begun to go gray, and Peale painted him with his hair powdered white. The face Peale rendered on canvas is oval, its forehead high. The General wears no hat. His nose is long and straight, the mouth closed (Washington had long since begun to lose his teeth). The expression is nervous or, perhaps, impatient. This man is certainly not relaxed, but, gazing distractedly back at the viewer, the uniformed man with the pale blue sash looks the part of the commander in chief.
Washington wears a military uniform, but the bright Redcoat red has been banished to a trunk at Mount Vernon. In place of the Virginia regimentals is a dark blue coat, a buff-colored waistcoat, and breeches that extend just beyond the knee. There is no insignia, though the General has the air of a man in charge. His buttons are brass (not silver), and his costume no longer identifies an obedient subject of the English king. He has become a revolutionary, proud to wear the uniform of the Continental Army.
Peale was unable to complete the painting in May and June, but found some hours in July, August, and September to devote to both General and Mrs. Washington’s canvases. During the summer of 1776, both portraits were on display in his Painting Room, where John Adams admired them. Others who saw the paintings liked them, too, and the artist fielded orders for full-size copies, as well as miniature versions for Mrs. Washington. By December 3, he completed the original transaction with Hancock, receiving from him payment “in full for General Washington and Lady, 28 guineas.”11
Hancock took his paintings to Boston, where the following year the Washington portrait became the source of the first published images of the General. Line cuts, mezzotints, and other engravings would appear during the next decade, many of which drew upon the 1776 portrait. Beyond the few who had seen the man in person, most of those who had begun proudly to call themselves Americans became acquainted with George Washington through Mr. Peale’s eyes.12
II.
1767–1769 . . . Castle Street . . . London
ALMOST TEN YEARS earlier, Charles Willson Peale had painted another icon. This one he did not dress in a uniform; rather, he wrapped “the Great Commoner” in a toga. English statesman William Pitt was a hero in the colonies. In January 1766 he got to his feet in the House of Commons to oppose the Stamp Act, the first direct tax on the colonists, enacted by Parliament the year before. “I rejoice that America has resisted,” the former prime minister proclaimed. His speech anticipated the repeal of the act a few months later and, for revolutionary-minded Americans, earned Pitt a place in the pantheon.
Peale’s route to England—and the commission to paint a life-size Pitt for several Virginia gentlemen—was a circuitous one. In the mid-1760s, his newfound enthusiasm for art and his financial difficulties had combined to make him something of a pilgrim. Already a married man when he took up painting at the advanced age of twenty-one, he found his debts threatened to overwhelm him. In order to escape the unanswerable demands of his Mary land creditors, he left Annapolis, sailing north in 1765.
His peregrinations took him not only to John Smibert’s Painting Room but to the studio of John Singleton Copley, where he received a few painting lessons. Among other assignments, the Bostonian instructed Peale to copy a “head painted by candlelight.”13After a subsequent stay in prosperous Newburyport, some miles north of the Massachusetts capital, Peale painted his way home. A twelve-dollar fee earned for a Boston portrait paid his passage as far as Virginia, where he paused in the town of Accomac, awaiting the conclusion of negotiations to permit him to return home while staying out of debtors’ prison.
England could hardly have been further from his mind at that moment. After months of separation, he was about to be re united with his wife, Rachel, and their infant son, but the prolific Mr. Peale worked at two presentation pieces based on English prints during his stay on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When he finally returned to Annapolis, he gave them to potential patrons, and the recipients quickly recognized the young man’s talent. The notion dawned on them that it would be desirable to have a fine painter at hand to record portraits of the ladies and gentlemen of their self-consciously genteel town. Eleven Annapolitans of means contributed a total of £85.12. to Mr. Peale’s coffers, a sum sufficient to underwrite a year’s journey to England. There, it was decided, Peale could best advance his art.
Barrister Charles Carroll made the most generous contribution (the sum of twenty-five guineas), and added his influence to the venture, too, writing to his London agent, “The Bearer hereof Charles Wilson Peale [is] a young man . . . who has a Turn for Limning.”14Barely two months after returning to his family from his New England venture, Peale boarded the Brandon, a merchant ship bound for London. Fittingly, the ship’s hold held a consignment of the stamped paper rendered obsolete by the repeal of the hated Stamp Act.15
Peale carried a second letter of introduction that would make the Pitt portrait possible. This missive was addressed to Benjamin West, an American-born painter recently settled in London. West got the opportunity to size up his pupil-to-be when Peale turned up at his studio unannounced, outfitted in a new blue suit, beaver hat, gloves, and black stockings, a fine London outfit that had diminished the Mary lander’s capital by more than seven pounds.16The door on which Peale knocked was, in effect, the portal to an art school for aspiring American artists.
In the coming twenty-five months, Peale repeatedly benefited from his new mentor’s artistic generosity. As another of West’s protégés would write, “[West] had no secrets or mysteries. He told all he knew . . . every American was as a brother to him, and his open doors and open heart ever received them as such.”17
Although the Pennsylvania-born West was only three years Peale’s senior, he was already an acclaimed painter in London. He had begun to take himself seriously as an artist as a young boy and, by age seventeen, was getting paid to paint portraits. In 1760, the twenty-one-year-old West became the first American-born artist to travel to Italy. He spent three years in Rome, Florence, and Venice, where he studied and, in the habit of the day, made careful copies of paintings by such masters as Raphael and Poussin. West’s work impressed his European contemporaries (he was elected a member of academies in Florence and Bologna), but he resolved to return to America, hoping (as he put it) “to cultivate in his native country that profession in which [I] had already acquired so much celebrity.”18A stopover in London led to a sudden change in plans. Finding his skills very much in demand in Europe’s wealthiest and most populous city, West settled into a studio on Castle Street near Leicester Square. Though born to humble Quaker farmers in Pennsylvania, West rapidly won the admiration of the London art world and even the attention of the king. By the time Peale arrived in 1767, West was a London fixture known as “the American Raphael.”
Benjamin West painted portraits and an occasional landscape, but his chosen milieu was history painting. Drawing upon events from the classical past, the Bible, and even mythology, the history painter portrayed complex scenes featuring multiple figures set in panoramic landscapes. To West and his contemporaries, a history p
ainting had to be more than a well-executed canvas; it also had to be an enlightening and dramatic visual experience for those who saw it. The viewer who contemplated a history painting encountered a story at its climax. From the actions of those in the painting, a moral or intellectual message was to be gleaned. History painting was regarded as the highest art to which a painter might aspire, requiring wide knowledge of anatomy, classical sculpture, Renaissance painting, and a broad familiarity with literature and history.
The cachet of West’s Italian training and the novelty of his American birth set him apart from other London artists. He was well on his way to becoming a conspicuous success when Peale arrived. Perhaps intimidated by West, Peale began painting miniatures, which supplemented the monies his Mary land benefactors had given him. He posed occasionally, too, standing in for the Roman consul Marcus Atilius Regulus in a canvas that West was painting for no less a patron than George III, commissioned to decorate the king’s personal apartment at the royal palace, Buckingham House. Summoned by the king to Buckingham House, West had agreed to paint the departure from Rome of the brave general. With a beard added by the artist, Peale impersonated the Roman consul, who was returning to Carthage as he had promised his former captors he would do, despite the fact it meant almost certain torture and death. For a time, Peale visited West’s studio daily to pose as Regulus.
Peale, ever adaptable, copied paintings for West, repaired locks (nothing mechanical seemed beyond him), and once even mended a favorite wooden palette that West had cast aside. Peale enjoyed his subservient role as a studio assistant and tended to London errands for various Maryland friends and benefactors. He sought out Benjamin Franklin, who welcomed him and explained to the curious young man the electrical experiments with which he was engaged. Peale was a man difficult not to like, his easy disposition endearing him to both plain people and the famous. Despite the many diversions of the great city, however, Peale was homesick for his wife, Rachel, and “always felt . . . alone, even amidst the crowds that are found at all public places.”19
Peale’s chance to put his own hand to a history painting did not come from the monarch, but from another American. Edmond Jenings, an English-educated attorney working in London, hired Peale to paint William Pitt (Benjamin West could hardly have accepted such a commission, given Pitt’s championing of American resistance to the Crown). Peale had no royal connections to protect (in fact, Peale prided himself on his refusal to doff his hat when the king’s carriage rolled by). The opportunity to make a life-size likeness of the popular William Pitt for an American audience seemed tailor-made.
Peale could get no sitting with the great man and contented himself with basing his portrait on a plaster cast. Made from a statue by Joseph Wilton, the plaster portrayed a standing Pitt with the Magna Carta in hand. Peale added a variety of other allegorical elements, among them the figure of British liberty and, in the background, the rising walls of the Banqueting House, Whitehall, the London landmark where King Charles I had been beheaded a century earlier. To Peale and his intended American audience, a warning to a tyrannical king was clearly implied.
This busy painting became Peale’s first major work. He portrayed the English lord (by 1768 Pitt had entered the House of Lords as the Earl of Chatham) in what he called a “Consular Habit.” Despite being very much a man of the Enlightenment, the declaiming and gesturing Pitt appears without his wig, bare at the knees and neck, his attire a red Roman toga, pale yellow tunic, and sandals. Such raiment was a convention of history painting, serving to associate contemporary figures with the heroes of antiquity. During his time in London, Peale also worked at mastering a variety of other artistic skills, including the making of prints, and he produced a mezzotint based on his Pitt portrait (he sent one impression to Copley, who admired it and thanked Peale copiously). When back in America, Peale would sell them for years afterward, making a modest profit.
Despite his studies with West, their growing friendship, and the opportunity to explore the great city of London, Peale still thought of himself “as an exile from his friends.”20Longing for his wife, he departed for home after two years and one month in England. An added stipend of £30 from his Mary land benefactors helped underwrite the purchase of art supplies in London. Among them were “Picture frames,” fine brushes called “pencils,” a palette and palette knives, “canvis,” a miniature paint box and palette, prints, books, and “Fraim and Glass.” He bought pigments, too, including carmine (“vivid red Lake”), “ullemarine” (ultramarine), “Prussian Blue,” and “Peach Black.” Even if he couldn’t spell, he had come to recognize what painting materials he needed and desired.
He had acquired advanced technical knowledge, too, of grinding pigments and the use of a thin layer of transparent paint (glaze) to add shadows to flesh tints. He learned how to add luminosity to reds by painting them over whites, and how to use a heavy layering of paint (impasto), often applied with a palette knife, to add emphasis and richness to his linear style, which tended to rely upon draftsmanship. He returned to America with training beyond that of anyone in the colonies.
When he sailed for home in March, Peale’s baggage included two important gifts from Benjamin West. One was a canvas West had painted of his student. His second gift was an unusual armchair, large and square in form. Beneath the seat was a pivot that fastened to a platform, which elevated the whole some eighteen inches above the floor. The mechanism allowed the occupant to rotate in place without shifting position. It was purpose-made for use in a portraitist’s studio, enabling the painter to adjust his subject’s relationship to daylight without shifting drapery or costume.21
This was, of course, a Painter’s Chair. After returning from England in 1769, Peale worked to clear his Mary land debts, painting more than 150 portraits in the next six years of Virginians, Mary landers, and other gentlemen and ladies. He established his reputation as the foremost portraitist in the mid-Atlantic region, and after Copley embarked for England in 1774, Peale was left with no serious rival anywhere in America. By then, more than a few members of the emerging revolutionary generation had already taken a seat in his Painter’s Chair.
III.
Winter 1776–1777 . . . Crossing the Delaware . . . Pennsylvania and New Jersey
THE POPULAR PORTRAITIST is fated to be forever in search of new customers. By 1776, Charles Willson Peale had long since fulfilled the needs of his original Annapolis patrons. His ongoing search for clients had already taken him on several occasions to Philadelphia, where he found many new sitters; as a result he had resolved in early 1776 to relocate to America’s most prosperous metropolis to service them. The Hancock commission to paint General and Mrs. Washington that spring served to affirm the wisdom of his decision, so work on their portraits had been regularly postponed by his journeys back and forth to Maryland to orga nize the move of his family and business to Philadelphia.
On June 19, 1776, the Peale entourage finally arrived in Pennsylvania’s capital. The painter counted among his ten dependents his wife, Rachel; a baby daughter (Angelica); a two-year-old son (Raphaelle; their first son had died while Peale was in England); a motherless nephew and niece; and other extended family, including Charles Willson’s mother. The move brought them to the city in time for him to record a momentous event in his diary on July 2. “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.”22
The news was supposed to have been subject to a “bar of secrecy,” but within hours the vote had become the talk of Philadelphia’s coffeehouses. A strong supporter of the Patriot cause, Peale joined the ranks of the military early the following month over the strenuous objections of his mother. Brother James was already a member of a Mary land battalion, but now, as a Pennsylvanian, Peale chose to join the Philadelphia Associators. The city militia was run democratically, and Peale, though a relative stranger, proved a popular and resourceful leader. By November he was elected a first lieutenant.
The fortunes of the Cont
inental Army had plummeted following the British evacuation of Boston. After posing for Peale, Washington rejoined his troops in New York in June 1776, and his ragtag band of volunteers had proved no match for the most sophisticated military force in the world. The Americans had been outflanked on Long Island in August, outgunned in Manhattan in September, and overmatched in almost every way since. As winter approached, the Continental Army was in full retreat across New Jersey, and Washington sought to save what remained of a force reduced by casualties, desertion, sickness, and the expiration of enlistments. The Associators received their marching orders in early December 1776 to join the retreating army in New Jersey, but within hours of arriving in “Trent-Town” (as Peale labeled Trenton in his diary), the Philadelphians were retreating, too, heading back across the Delaware River. Peale described a “hellish scene,” with bonfires on both shores illuminating a nighttime crossing, as boats returned again and again to New Jersey, ferrying men, horses, and artillery to the hoped-for safety of Pennsylvania.23
The Associators could only watch as their battle-weary brethren shuffled past. The Philadelphians were simply dressed (established decades earlier by Benjamin Franklin, the Associators had agreed that their uniforms, in order to minimize class distinctions, would cost no more than ten shillings). But their plain brown and gray woolens seemed like luxury itself in comparison to what the retreating soldiers wore. Peale noticed in particular one man who “had lost all his cloaths. He was in an Old dirty Blanket Jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of Sores, that he could not clean it.”24The man, who had once been dressed in the finery of a silk-stocking Annapolis regiment, was in rags. Charles Will-son did a double-take: He recognized the haunted and hungry face of his brother James.