Washington Winter Show 2020

56 of Art) painted a few months earlier by John Trumbull, a Connecticut artist who served briefly as Washington’s military aide in 1775. Although painted “from memory” rather than an actual life sitting, Trumbull’s likeness had the virtue of being created by an artist who had actually known the general and who portrayed him convincingly as a dashing cavalryman—a tall, lean figure with the impossibly long, booted legs of a superb horseman and only a hint of a gentleman’s fashionable paunch. In today’s world of Instagram and Snapchat, it is hard to imagine that nearly five years into the rebellion, Trumbull’s was the first authentic oil portrait of Washington to reach London audiences. Until then, Washington had been rather like a character in a novel—described in news dispatches, discussed in coffee shops, but envisioned only in the mind’s eye. Entrepreneurial artists responded with invented likenesses given credibility by equally invented attributions (fig. 2). A Nation Mourns Washington’s unexpected death in December 1799 inspired an outpouring of grief and memorial goods. As early as January 3, 1800, Boston newspapers carried an advertisement for “funeral medals” to be worn in the grand civic procession, suspended from a green ribbon around the neck. The enterprising Jacob Perkins of Newburyport left – Fig. 4: Rembrandt Peale, George Washington , graphite on tracing paper, c. 1856. Preparatory drawing for lithograph published by Duval & Co., Philadelphia, 1856. Purchased by the A. Alfred Taubman Acquisition Endowment Fund, 2013. Photo by Mark Finkenstaedt. right – Fig. 5: Washington at Trenton , Berlin work by unknown needleworker, c. 1865, after John Trumbull (1792). Gift of Dr. Stephanie Bennett-Smith, 2016. Photo by Gavin Ashworth. offered these medals in a range of prices (for white metal, copper, silver, or gold), claiming that he could strike as many as 5,000 per day. Like photographs accompanying many modern obituaries, the medal reached back in time to depict a much younger Washington. Perkins’s model derived from the Washington profile on a 1791 copper coin that had been created in Birmingham, England, by a private mint hoping to secure a contract for the US government mint. Thomas Digges, a neighbor of Washington’s across the Potomac, described the profile on the Birmingham “eagle cents” as “a good likeness. … taken from a large medal struck at Phila[delphia].” 4 In fact, the design source was not an actual metallic medal, but a paper one in the “form of a medal,” engraved from a life portrait drawn in Philadelphia in 1779 by a Swiss-born antiquarian and artist, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière. Published in Paris two years later, Du Simitière’s “paper medals” (as he called them) offered European audiences and artists the first sophisticated profile portrait of Washington, and they were widely copied in prints, textiles, and ceramics, as well as medals and coins. 5 Celebrating Victory Many commemoratives once assumed to date to the immediate aftermath of Washington’s death are now known to have been inspired not by mourning but by American