This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Design & Development by Diego de Sousa
The history of painting in the United States goes back just over two centuries, to the country’s independence from Great Britain. It was then that American artists began to produce works which, while still reflecting aesthetic concerns learnt from earlier masters, sought to shape a new national artistic identity. Peace with England opened the way to a generation of local painters keen to immortalize the heroes of the Revolution and their daring feats. These virtuoso artists, though heirs to the traditional realism which had prevailed in the old country since the mid-eighteenth century, now pursued a new patriotic aim: public recognition for the men who had contributed to the birth of their nation. In these early years, official portraits of these great figures were still marked by the links which bound young art students to Europe, and particularly to England; indeed, such bonds were to last well into the nineteenth century. After all, while many budding American painters were self-taught, the old world remained the favorite destination for those wishing to train in the fine arts. Because of its history, its museums and the prestige of its official academies, American teachers still urged their students to travel to the Old Continent to further their studies. For many years, indeed, a number of veteran artists, such as Benjamin West, chose to stay there, since this option opened the way to a more international career. One new feature of their work – for all it was still underpinned by an old-world legacy, and especially by the English approach to aristocratic portraiture – was that American portraits tended to be more sober, more austere than those of their European masters, as though seeking to highlight the moral superiority of the young democracy over the old monarchies. It is also important to note that not all leading American figures commissioned their portraits from their compatriots; many politicians and diplomats took advantage of official trips to have their portraits painted by the most sought-after European artists of the time. This early gallery of the leading pioneers in the history of the United States as an independent nation included a number of eminent figures (among them Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Oliver Pollock, John Jay, Arthur Lee and George Washington) with close links to certain Spanish officers, businessmen or diplomats who – on behalf of King Charles III – helped the thirteen American rebel colonies to achieve their goals. Some were immortalized by major artists such as Benjamin West, today regarded as one of the fathers of the American school of painting. West’s fame had long since spread beyond the borders of his country. He had lived since 1763 in London, where his prestigious studio served, for almost fifty years, as a school for his fellow Americans. Other artists, including Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, embarked on their careers after the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Stuart became famous for his portraits of Washington and John Jay, while Trumbull was known not just for his portraits but also for his patriotic battle paintings.
Benjamin West, born in Pennsylvania in 1738, was the first American to choose Rome for his training. He moved to London in 1763, and in 1768 was appointed a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Britain’s leading official arts institution; later, he became the Academy’s second president. Despite his professional success, his attitude towards his fellow-Americans was always both friendly and protective; he offered them not just a place to live, but also training courses, invitations to galleries, passes to view collections and the chance to frequent the Royal Academy. His studio was the haunt of prominent artists, including Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull. In around 1783, West was commissioned to paint a picture entitled American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain, featuring a number of eminent figures, among them John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens and William Temple Franklin; because their British counterparts refused to pose, the painting was never finished. Today it hangs in the Winterthur Museum (Delaware).
One central figure in West's painting is Benjamin Franklin, an American scientist and politician committed to freeing his country from the bonds of colonization. He was one of those responsible for drafting the Declaration of Independence of 1776, an event of great historical significance immortalized by the twentieth-century American painter Jean Leon Gerome Ferris in a small canvas entitled Drafting the Declaration of Independence; the painting, now in the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, depicts the moment when the draft document is being reviewed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin himself, who is shown reading one of the papers. That same year, Franklin had traveled to Paris on being appointed commissioner to the French court by the Congress of the newly- independent English colonies in America. The purpose of his trip was to obtain commercial, financial and military aid from France, but also from Spain. Although Spain was not yet at war with England, it had for some time been providing covert aid to the American rebels; on 29 December 1776, Franklin – who had also been appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the court in Madrid – visited the Spanish embassy in Paris to meet the ambassador, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda. Aranda promptly made the necessary diplomatic arrangements to obtain the urgent aid requested by the American envoy, which were to culminate in Spain’s entry into the American War of Independence on 21 June 1779.
Franklin took advantage of his French stay to have his portrait painted by Joseph- Siffred Duplessis, a local artist with an academic training whose high-quality portraits – and particularly his widely-admired likeness of King Louis XVI – had earned him considerable renown among a Parisian clientele. Franklin’s public image became very popular for its simplicity, which clashed with the pomp and ostentation favored by the French authorities. He never wore a wig, his hair was usually tousled and his face unpowdered. The first portrait that Franklin commissioned from Duplessis was painted with pastels on a parchment support. For the sittings, which apparently took place at Franklin’s temporary residence in Passy, between Paris and Versailles, he adopted a characteristically natural pose, wearing a simple gray suit over a white shirt. Duplessis succeeded in capturing both his patient temperament and his direct, sincere expression. Months later, Franklin sat again for Duplessis, though this time the result was somewhat more distinguished, since the sitter wore a striking brown fur collar. This latter portrait in oil on canvas , exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1779, is the most iconic image of Franklin, and the painter’s most famous creation. It now hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
A further likeness of Franklin was painted in France in 1778-79, by the Parisian artist Anne-Rosalie Filleul. They both lived in Passy, and a slight friendship had grown up between them. She would lend him books, and he wanted to buy her piano and take it back with him to America. This friendship may have prompted the sitter to assume a more casual pose; Franklin, wearing an open-necked shirt and a green, fur-lined dressing gown, appears to be chatting with the painter as he gestures towards a map of Philadelphia on the table before him, on which his eyeglasses rest. The portrait is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Once the war was over, and after he had returned to America, Benjamin Franklin sat twice for portraits by Charles Willson Peale, the only major American painter of the earlier Colonial period to remain in the United States after the Declaration of Independence. During the Revolution, Peale played a highly active role in national politics: after fighting the British as a member of the Pennsylvania militia, he devoted his career to producing portraits of the heroes of the new nation. In 1779, he painted the first official portrait of George Washington, now in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Franklin and Peale had met in London in 1767, when the latter was training at Benjamin West’s studio. Years later, in 1785 – by which time Franklin was the president of the Supreme Executive Council of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – Peale was keen to paint a likeness of him for the portrait gallery at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence had been discussed and approved some years earlier. In this oval painting, Franklin is placed against a neutral background, wearing a brown suit and his hallmark eyeglasses. In 1789, he commissioned a second portrait from Peale, this time in an interior setting, seated beside a window; the painting is in the Philadelphia History Museum.
Charles Willson Peale also painted a likeness of Robert Morris, another American with close links to the Spaniards who lent support to the battle against Great Britain. In 1780, the American Congress appointed Morris – a Philadelphia businessman born and raised in Liverpool – to the post of superintendent of finance to the Continental Army, a post he held until the end of the war. He enjoyed close, direct links with a number of Spanish traders, including the Tenerife company Juan Cólogan e Hijos, with headquarters in Puerto de la Orotava, (today, Puerto de la Cruz) and the Alicante-born Juan de Miralles, a Cuba-based merchant and spy who was appointed Spain’s royal commissioner in Philadelphia, with whom Morris set up a company which opened up the trading route between Philadelphia and Havana. Some months before the end of the war, in around 1782, Peale was commissioned to paint a portrait of Robert Morris. Peale had trained in London in 1767, and during his stay in the capital must have seen the Bank of England building, dating from 1732, which at that time was being refurbished; for this is the building visible through the curtained window that provides the backdrop to the portrait of Morris, now in the New Orleans Museum of Art. The banker is seated in a leather armchair, wearing a blue suit and holding a rolled-up document. That year, Peale produced another likeness of Morris in the same attire, this time a bust-length oval portrait in which the sitter is placed against a neutral background. The painting – the pendant of a matching portrait of Morris’ wife – is now in the Independence National Historical Park. Peale painted a third picture of Morris in 1783, when the banker was appointed Minister of Finance; the other figure in this double portrait – now in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia – was Governor Morris, who was serving as his assistant at the time.
Oliver Pollock was another of the traders and financiers tasked with distributing the economic aid sent by Charles III via Spanish merchant vessels. Of Irish origin, Pollock emigrated to Pennsylvania at the age of twenty, and thence traveled to Cuba before finally settling in New Orleans, where he became a leading businessman. On the outbreak of war, he was appointed commercial agent of the United States in New Orleans. He later fought alongside Bernardo de Gálvez in the Mississippi campaigns of 1779 and the Battle of Pensacola in 1781. Gálvez Plaza, in downtown Baton Rouge, is home to what may be the only figurative representation of Pollock: a commemorative monument produced by sculptor Frank Hayden in 1979, comprising a large head of Oliver Pollock and a fountain backed by a relief featuring soldiers, civilians and cannons. A nearby bronze lectern displays a map showing the site of the 1779 Battle of Baton Rouge as a tribute to Oliver Pollock, Bernardo de Gálvez and the famous battle.
In September 1779, the New York jurist and politician John Jay was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to the Spanish court. His mission was to obtain further aid towards American independence. Jay landed in Cádiz in January 1780 and remained in Spanish territory for almost three years. During his stay in Madrid, in addition to receiving substantial sums of money and supplies, he drafted – at the request of Spanish Prime Minister Floridablanca – a treaty between Spain and the United States addressing the issue of navigation rights on the Mississippi. He was also involved in negotiating the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution. In 1784, once the war was over, John Jay – then in London – commissioned a portrait from the American artist Gilbert Stuart. Stuart had been living in England since 1775, having moved there in order to train under his fellow-American Benjamin West. His high-quality work soon led him to set up his own studio. He was even recognized by the Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited his paintings there. Of this first portrait, Stuart painted only Jay’s head, and the picture was left unfinished. Years later, between 1804 and 1818, John Trumbull composed and painted the rest of the canvas. Jay is shown seated in an armchair, a paper in his hand, against a background of drapery; his arm rests on a table bearing books and documents intended as symbols of his status and profession. Although his facial expression gives him a somewhat preoccupied appearance, the artist’s skill is evident both in the draftsmanship and in the blending of colors. The painting is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
Stuart returned to the United States in 1793, with the intention of painting a likeness of George Washington. His talents had earned him a reputation as one of the leading artists of the Revolution and as a master portraitist. Working without the aid of previous sketches, he also eschewed underdrawings, skillfully mastering and mixing colors and applying them directly to the canvas. In 1794, ten years after that first London commission, John Jay again turned to Gilbert Stuart, who painted what was soon to become his hallmark image. Stuart, who had by then lived for a year in America, decided to settle there, and spent the rest of his life between New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Jay was forty-nine years old at the time, and had been appointed the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Time constraints meant that he could only pose in the artist’s New York studio while the face was being painted. For the rest of the composition, he was replaced by his nephew, who – as well as firmly gripping a thick volume of laws – dressed in the academic robes his uncle had worn when receiving an honorary degree from Harvard in 1790. Years later, Jay’s descendants donated the portrait to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
There are other portraits of John Jay scattered throughout various American institutions and museums, including those painted by John Trumbull. One of these, a half-length likeness against a light brown background, was produced during Jay’s visit to Britain to negotiate what became known as Jay’s Treaty or the London Treaty of 1794, an international agreement between the two countries intended to resolved certain issues arising from the Revolutionary War. Trumbull accompanied him as secretary on this trip, and took advantage of the opportunity to paint this portrait. It was acquired by Jay’s son William in 1844, and is now on show at the John Jay Homestead State Historic Site in Katonah (New York).
In 1805, Trumbull produced a further portrait of Jay, which is today in the City Hall Portrait Collection in New York. In this full-length likeness, Jay is placed in a rather more Baroque setting, against a background skyscape; he stands in front of a heavy drape resting on a column, surrounded by furniture, books and papers. The staging closely resembles that used almost four years earlier by Caleb Boyle for a portrait now in Lafayette College, Easton (Pennsylvania).
John Trumbull was another American artist who had chosen to train under Benjamin West in London. The son of Governor Jonathan Trumbull, he was employed as assistant to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, and later as secretary to John Jay in London. His portraits and his history paintings featuring episodes from the Revolution earned him considerable fame. He himself fought in the 1st Connecticut Regiment in the early months of the war. His career reached its peak between 1784 and 1794. In a letter to his father in 1785, he claimed that his greatest wish was to paint his country’s history. A year later, he started one of his best-known pictures, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776; he worked on the painting for over thirty years, not completing it until 1820. It now hangs in Yale University Art Gallery.
In the 1790s, Trumbull produced a series of small oil paintings, influenced both by his teacher Benjamin West and by French neoclassical art. In 1790 he was commissioned to paint a miniature of the American diplomat Arthur Lee, who in December 1775 had been appointed by the Committee of Secret Correspondence – formed by the Continental Congress – as European agent tasked with ascertaining the views of France and Spain regarding the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Lee was received in Paris by the Count of Aranda, Spanish ambassador to France; later, in 1777, he traveled to Spain, hoping to reach Madrid, where he could meet key Spanish authorities. However, in view of the Spanish government’s refusal to officially recognize their aid to the Revolution, Lee was advised to wait in Burgos to meet the former Spanish prime minister, the Marquis of Grimaldi. In Burgos and Vitoria, the two representatives agreed – with the assistance of Diego María Gardoqui – on a secret aid program from Spain. Accordingly, in 1778 several ships set sail from the ports of Bilbao and Santander carrying supplies of all kinds. One of these meetings, held in a house in Vitoria belonging to Gardoqui's wife, is depicted in Arthur Lee's Interview with the Marquis de Grimaldi and Diego de Gardoqui in 1777 to discuss Spain's aid to the American Revolution, a painting in acrylic on paper produced in 2017 by Madrid painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente and currently in a private collection. Trumbull’s miniature portrait of Arthur Lee can be seen at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Arthur Lee was also painted by Charles Willson Peale in the late eighteenth century. In this oil-on-canvas portrait, currently in the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Lee is dressed in a brown coat, blue vest and a high-collared white shirt with lace trimmings. In the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent there is another small portrait of Lee, in enamel paint on porcelain, produced in 1795 by the English miniaturist William Russell Birch. This gallery of American figures with direct links to those Spaniards who – on behalf of King Charles III – contributed to their emancipation from England, cannot be brought to a close without a special mention of George Washington, commander in chief of the revolutionary Continental Army during the war and first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Washington was aware that the logistical and financial support of Spain was crucial to victory. He had close ties with men like Diego María de Gardoqui of Bilbao and Juan de Miralles of Alicante. Gardoqui represented Spain at Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789, and Miralles died at Washington’s home, after a sudden illness; he was attended by Martha Washington and the family’s personal physician. After his death, it was Washington himself who organized his burial, an event attended by numerous personalities from Congress and the Continental Army.
Unsurprisingly, given his importance to the history of mankind, there are countless portraits of George Washington in museums and collections all over the world: here, however, we will focus on two major pieces belonging to Spanish collections. The first is a miniature by the British artist William Russell Birch, a leading member of the English School. Having settled in Philadelphia in 1794, he soon earned a reputation there as a painter specializing in enameling, a technique with which American society was unfamiliar. He produced this miniature two years after moving to America, taking as his model a miniature painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1795. In this half-length portrait, now in Madrid’s Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Washington is placed against a reddish background, wearing a blue frock coat and white shirt. The other portrait is a large canvas hanging in the museum of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, also in Madrid. It was the work of Venetian artist Giuseppe Perovani, a major exponent of Italian Neoclassical art. It was painted in Philadelphia in 1796, over a decade after the independence of the United States, and was commissioned by the Spanish diplomat José de Jáudenes, who had come to America with Diego de Gardoqui in 1784. When Gardoqui left, Jáudenes stayed on, and took part in negotiations between Spain and the new American nation, with a view to drafting the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, which was signed in San Lorenzo de El Escorial on 27 October 1795. This treaty, also known as Pinckney’s Treaty, defined the borders between the new nation and the adjacent Spanish territories, and regulated navigation rights on the Mississippi River. In the painting, the signed treaty is visible on the table beside Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, the future American capital. The Mississippi flows past in the background, with a ship flying the United States flag. There are also a number of Masonic symbols, including the five-pointed stars on the table and the figures of Prudence and Justice. The dove of peace, depicted on the pedestal, was the President’s personal emblem. Jáudenes returned to Spain in 1796 and gave the canvas to Prime Minister Manuel Godoy, who had signed the Treaty on behalf of Charles IV of Spain. Thomas Pinckney signed on behalf of the United States, and the treaty was ratified by George Washington in Philadelphia, on 7 March 1796.
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