Art: Gentleman John Trumbull

It was his sisters’ needlework that first attracted John Trumbull to art. His father found the attraction inappropriate on two counts: first, young John had lost the use of one eye in a childhood accident, and second, he was a gentleman. Picturemaking, for the handsome son of the governor of Connecticut, was unthinkable. Accordingly, odd John was packed off to Harvard for polishing. There, however, he called on the greatest of American portraitists, John Singleton Copley, and painted and copied all the pictures he could. He was one of the first male American aristocrats to take brush in hand (Copley came from Boston’s waterfront).

He was also one of the first important American painters.

John Trumbull’s great talent for mirroring the sunrise of the U.S. was made apparent last week by a big retrospective exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. More than 100 of his works were assembled for the show, marking the bicentennial of Trumbull’s birth in Lebanon, Conn. Together they testified that Trumbull’s reputation deserves to grow, for it does not yet match his just deserts.

A Soldier’s Pet. Trumbull came into his own on the outbreak of the Revolution, with his valuable ability to make military maps. This talent, plus his father’s connections, helped him rise. He served in the Continental Army for a year and a half (including a few weeks as Washington’s aide-de-camp). Then, disappointed that the commission making him a full colonel at the age of 20 was postdated by three months, he resigned. “A soldier’s honor,” Trumbull haughtily informed Congress, “forbids the idea of giving up the least pretension of rank.”

Though he thus barred himself from the fighting, Trumbull dreamed of recording it for posterity. In London he made a pilgrimage to the studio of compatriot Painter Benjamin West, who urged that Trumbull stick to small pictures that his one eye could compass. This led Trumbull to compress heroic compositions into canvases more concentrated and powerful than West’s own. Returning after the Revolution, he traveled from New Hampshire to South Carolina to portray the VIPs of a Very Important Period, and to sketch the quieted battlefields.

A Painter’s Part. Best of the lot. perhaps, was Trumbull’s small Declaration of Independence (see cut). (The Atheneum was unable to borrow the actual painting from the Yale University Art Gallery, but it did exhibit a later version.) In only 30 inches of width, Yale’s picture contains 48 portrait figures, all grouped naturally and convincingly in a manner suited to the solemn occasion. Among them, at the table before John Hancock, stand John Adams, Roger Sherman. Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The painting is a set piece, but Trumbull succeeded in conveying something of its suppressed excitement in the zigzag arrangement of heads and the winglike banners at the back.

Though Trumbull eventually turned to business and hack portraiture to support his declining years, he could well boast, in a letter to Jefferson, of “having borne personally a humble part in the great events which I was to describe.”