Painter of the Revolution (June 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 4)

Painter of the Revolution

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Authors: E. H. Silverman

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June 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 4

At the end of October, 1797, the year V of the French Revolution, a 41-year-old American artist named John Trumbull was stranded in Paris. The government was in peril and the capital was near chaos. With business at a standstill, poverty was general; restless, quick-tempered crowds roamed the streets. For a foreigner, the atmosphere was dangerous.

But Trumbull, though he was no stranger to Paris— in fact, he was well connected there—could not get a passport to leave. He went to see General Charles C. Pinckney, then in the city as one of the American treaty negotiators at the time of the XYZ affair, when three agents of Talleyrand (Messieurs “X,” “Y,” and “Z”) sought a bribe as the price ot doing business with the French Directory. Pinckney told him, “My friend, I know not what to advise; we have no means ot aiding you, we cannot even protect ourselves.” Next Trumbull went to Talleyrand himself, at whose home he had been a dinner guest a few days before. But Talleyrand seemed to have the impression that Trumbull had come to discuss the XYZ affair and did not even give him a chance to mention his real mission.

Desperate now, and aware that he was under police surveillance, Trumbull sought out his friend and fellow artist, the famous Jacques Louis David, whom he knew to be close to the regime. When Trumbull happened to mention that he had at his hotel his painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill, David said: “That pic- ture is worth a multitude of passports.” He told Trumbull to go and get it; together they would face the police. At the ministry of police David unrolled Trumbull’s canvas and said, “I have known Mr. Trumbull these ten years. … I answer for him; he is as good a revolutionist as we are.” Trumbull got his passport.

David had exaggerated Trumbull’s sympathy for the French Revolution; actually, its excesses had disgusted him, and he had shuddered at David’s “horrid encomium.” Hut in one sense, the Frenchman was right: 1 rumbull was a “good revolutionist.” Hc had fought honorably, if briefly, in his own country’s war tor independence. Even more important, in the years since then he had systematically set himself to portraying its great actors and re-creating its high moments in a series of canvases which even now recall the Revolution’s vigor and romance.

It is on these paintings that John Trumbull’s fame has survived l’or over 150 years. They have their limitations: Trumbull never achieved greatness as a painter, though at his creative best he approached it. Yet in such powerful, concentrated works as the Battle of Bunker’s Hill , the Declaration of Independence , and the Capture of the Hessians at Trenton , Trumbull has placed us on the spot at decisive moments, and in his portraits and miniatures he has shown us what the architects of our independence looked like. And, since he