Art: Patriot Painter

Of the leading American artists of Revolutionary days, only Charles Willson Peale stayed to witness the stirring events that led to victory. Benjamin West, already an established London painter by 1775, preferred to remain in England. John Trumbull at 19 was an aide-de-camp to Washington and had viewed the battle on Bunker’s Hill through field glasses from his post in Roxbury, but he resigned his commission in a huff and later departed for London. Gilbert Stuart, then 19, got away in the spring of 1775 aboard the last ship to escape the embargo in Boston Harbor. John Singleton Copley, best portraitist in the colonies, was a Tory sympathizer who left Boston in 1774, never returned.

As a result, the best firsthand views of history in the making are the work of self-taught engravers and limners, who turned out such rough-and-ready works as The Battle of Lexington (above}, a joint work by Painter Ralph Earl and Engraver Amos Doolittle. both believed to have been members of the New Haven Cadets under Captain Benedict Arnold.* Between Copley’s departure and Stuart’s return in 1793, the best contemporary portraits of the men who led the Revolution were all done by Soldier-Painter Peale.

Hats on for the King. A saddlemaker, upholsterer, clockmaker and silversmith before he took up painting, Peale as a young man sailed up and down the seaboard, painting pictures for his fare. When his fellow townsmen at Annapolis offered to underwrite a trip to study at Benjamin West’s London studio, young Peale seized the opportunity. Once there, Peale made no attempt to hide his Revolutionary sympathies, ostentatiously refused to lift his hat when the royal carriage passed. But he worked hard. Back home again after two years in London, Peale quickly made a reputation with wealthy Philadelphians and prosperous Southern planters, including Colonel George Washington of Mount Vernon, whom Peale first painted in 1772.

When the Philadelphia militia was called out in 1776, Peale, dressed in a brown uniform and black tricornered hat, and equipped with a sword, a musket with telescopic sights of his own invention, new fur gloves, a quarter cask of rum and his painting kit. rode off at the head of his company of 81 men. Peale, a green militiaman, found his first view of the face of the war “a hellish sight.” Standing up to his first volley (discharged from British muskets outside Princeton), Peale noted with surprise the “balls which whistled their thousand different notes around our heads, and what is very astonishing did little or no harm.” After returning the fire three times, Peale’s men saw the enemy formed near the college take to their heels. Wrote Peale jubilantly in his diary: “We huzared Victory.”

Jeers for Arnold. At Valley Forge, Peale got a chance to lay aside his powder horn for his paintbox. Using bedticking for canvas, he painted Lafayette, Washington, General Nathanael Greene and a host of other officers, turned out miniatures on ivory on the side. Once, when painting General Washington in 1777, Peale found himself eyewitnessing a high moment in history. An aide handed Washington a dispatch. After one glance, Washington for a moment lost his iron control, jubilantly shouted, “Burgoyne is taken,” then quickly resumed his solemn pose.

Though Peale worked himself to the point of exhaustion, served on countless political committees, worried about his growing family, he rose enthusiastically to important occasions. When news of Benedict Arnold’s treachery arrived, Peale created a two-faced effigy of the traitor, a letter from Beelzebub in one hand, a mask in the other, with the devil behind him (see cut). A small boy hidden in the wagon’s false bottom pulled strings to keep the puppet dancing, to the delight of jeering Philadelphians. In 1781, when Colonel Tench Tilghman galloped into Philadelphia with the news that Cornwallis had surrendered, Peale promptly turned the windows of his house into an illuminated display. He filled the windows with colored cartoons of Washington and Rochambeau, titled SHINE VALIANT CHIEFS, and took the third story to spell out: FOR OUR ALLIES, HUZZA! HUZZA! HUZZA!

Fit & Painted. At war’s end, Peale’s gallery of more than 30 portraits of Revolutionary heroes brought him as many commissions as he could handle. One of them, a painting of Washington at Yorktown, which still hangs in the Maryland House of Delegates (see color page), is one of the best of Washington at his prime. Peale added the Marylanders’ hero, hard-riding Colonel Tilghman, holding the articles of surrender, and Peale’s great friend Lafayette. In the middle ground, “to tell the story at first sight,” Peale introduced the French and U.S. battle flags on either side of two downcast Britons carrying their colors cased.

The final victory brought a flush of belated pride to Peale’s expatriate fellow artists. Benjamin West wrote asking for sketches of Continental uniforms. Stuart came home in 1793, to begin making portraits of the aging Washington. Peale himself went on to found the first scientifically arranged natural-history museum in America, was the prime mover in founding the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1805, the oldest U.S. art school still in existence (TIME, Feb. 7). When Peale died in 1827, one of his finest tributes was the memory of an old Continental who said: “He fit and painted, painted and fit.” On both accounts the U.S. has reason to be grateful.

* Their engraving made one point historians long lost sight of: the Lexington Minutemen were dispersing without offering concerted resistance when shot down.