George Washington: Founding Father of American Art?

“First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen": those famous accolades have followed George Washington—first U.S. President and the beardless half of today’s Presidents’ Day holiday—since the very beginning of his transformation from man to myth in the American pantheon. Could Washington have been first in American art, too? In George Washington’s Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon, Joseph Manca aims to rehumanize Washington by “reassess[ing] his place in early American intellectual life,” specifically in the realm of art. Just as Washington helped America gain political independence, he helped foster an independent American art culture, knowing that there was more to being a nation beyond bills and bullets. Was George Washington the founding father of American art? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "George Washington: Founding Father of American Art?"

[Image: Gilbert Stuart. Portrait of George Washington (detail), 1795. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image source.]

[Many thanks to The Johns Hopkins University Press for providing me with a review copy of Joseph Manca’s George Washington’s Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon.]

Bicentennial Man

I read history voraciously as a kid. Growing up in Philadelphia, you couldn’t avoid all the colonial history. When the Bicentennial came around, I was one happy nine-year-old nerd, basking in all the patriotic nostalgia. I’ve worked my entire adult life just a block away from Independence Hall. Before September 11th, I would cut through the historic park area and actually walk through the opening of Independence Hall on my way to work. I liked to think I was walking on the same stones as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and all the others. No other artist pictured the American Revolutionary War for me like John Trumbull, painter of the iconic Declaration of Independence (above, from 1819). Born June 6, 1756, Trumbull actually lost the use of one eye as a child, but that never took away from the meticulous majesty of his works. The relentless realism of the multiple portraits of his Declaration of Independence somehow doesn’t seem out of place with the false drama of Jefferson delivering the document to John Hancock for his, well, “John Hancock.” Most experts agree that it didn’t happen that way, but we all want to believe that it did.

Trumbull knew this history first hand, fighting at the Battle of Bunker Hill, serving as second aide to General Washington himself, and later actually being taken prisoner in England when Major John André was captured as a spy. Trumbull’s Surrender of Lord Cornwallis (above) vividly sets the scene of the decisive battle that essentially ended the American Revolutionary War. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read cataloguing all the historical inaccuracies in this picture, but somehow I can still hear “The World Turned Upside Down” being played when I look at it. It’s really amazing how dramatic these static images can be. Trumbull puts almost no sense of movement into these paintings, but we Americans have come to accept this statue-like quality in our Founding Fathers.

No Founding Father seems more statuesque than George Washington. In General George Washington Resigning his Commission (above, from 1824), Trumbull depicts Washington at his most humble, self-effacing moment, when he could have forcefully taken over the new nation as the leader of the military but instead chose to resign his commission and allow the peaceful building of power begin, which, of course, ended with him as the first president. Even at this moment of personal humility, Washington seems godlike, the servant of his country who paradoxically excels all others in grandeur, like the suffering servant Christ himself. Washington very self-consciously sculpted the public persona we still know today. Trumbull, once Washington’s aide, certainly knew that and put much of that persona into this painting. If history is written by the winners, it’s painted by them, too. John Trumbull served his country well in creating images that helped develop a national mythology that provided Americans with something to believe in when they had little more than a dream of democracy.

Revolutionary Painter

The premier painter of the American Revolution as most Americans remember it from the textbooks they used in the school, John Trumbull entered this world on this date in 1756. His most iconic American work, The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, one of several of his works hanging in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building, appears above.

Trumbull fought for the colonists versus the British in the Revolution, rising to the rank of second aide-de-camp to General George Washington himself. He witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill and painted The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill (above) . In 1780, Trumbull traveled to England to study with Benjamin West. During his stay in England, after the capture and hanging of the spy Major John Andre, Benedict Arnold’s accomplice, the British held Trumbull captive because he held a rank similar to that of Andre. After his release, Trumbull returned to America and began documenting in paintings the people and events of the Revolution.

In The Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, we can see Trumbull’s imaginative, dramatic renderings of famous historic scenes of American history. Unfortunately, despite making every effort to draw the persons and scenes from life whenever possible, Trumbull’s depictions are full of many errors and, perhaps even worse, guilty of propagandizing in the name of the new republic. (You can find an extended discussion of the issues of imperialism and encroaching republicanism in Trumbull’s rotunda paintings, including connections to the work of Jacques-Louis David during the French Revolution, here.)

I’ve always loved Trumbull’s work for its Romantic depictions of history that always drew comparisons to the work of David in my mind. Such flair always made the dry dates and names of history in the pre-video era more palatable for me as a kid. Unfortunately, as I learned as an adult, beneath that flair lies an agenda and a mythos that can either be the embodiment of what Thomas Jefferson called “the last, best hope of man on earth” or the beginning of another chapter in the long human history of conquest and victimization. As Jefferson also said, musing on America’s “original sin” of slavery, “If God is just, I tremble for my country.”