Washington Winter Show 2020

58 Edward Savage, and Gilbert Stuart. Arguing that none of the existing life portraits did justice to the “true and impressive image” of Washington’s noble countenance, Rembrandt created a composite, drawing the best elements from every “Portrait, Bust, Medallion and Print of Washington that [he] could find.” 9 The result—both idealized and romanticized—most strongly evokes the bust made at Mount Vernon in 1785 by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association), considered the finest Washington likeness by both Rembrandt Peale and Gilbert Stuart. 10 Whether coincidentally or ironically, the year in which Rembrandt unveiled his “national standard likeness” was the same in which novelist John Neal published a much- quoted claim that “the only idea that we now have of George Washington, is associated with Stuart’s Washington … and, though a better likeness of him were shown to us, we should reject it…” 11 With Stuart’s death in 1828, Peale’s Pater Patriae, or “Porthole Portrait” (US Senate), proved a resounding success, disseminated via more than six dozen smaller painted replicas in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as two high- quality lithographs from 1827 and 1856 (fig. 4). 12 Victorian Inventions The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed yet another outpouring of Washington imagery; as political tensions heightened, Americans North and South sought to claim the legacy of the great Washington. Countering Rembrandt Peale’s efforts to promote a “national standard likeness,” other artists and artisans—both commercial and amateur—reveled in variety, translating historic imagery in new media. Needleworkers using graph-paper patterns created colorful, dramatic wall hangings measuring more than four feet high—monumental productions that evoked in middle-class American homes a semblance of the grand European tapestries collected by the wealthy. Replicating the Berlin work patterns’ colored squares stitch by stitch on a grid-like canvas enabled needleworkers to reproduce oil portraits with remarkable accuracy. A striking version of John Trumbull’s 1792 Washington at Trenton (Yale University Art Gallery) with dramatic accents of glass and metallic beads (fig. 5) was rescued “from a burning house in Columbia,” South Carolina, by Iowa soldiers during the conflagration of that city after its capitulation to General William T. Sherman’s Union army in February 1865. 13 Ironically, the artist’s original composition, arguably the most influential of his military portraits of Washington, was rejected by its original patron: the city of Charleston, South Carolina, preferred to commemorate the peacetime visit of President Washington in 1791—not the general’s wartime stance in a distant locale. After supplying a revised composition with an appropriate Charleston background, Trumbull retained the original canvas; when he traveled to London in 1794 as part of the American delegation sent to negotiate the Jay Treaty, he supervised Thomas Cheesman’s production of a large, lavish Fig. 8: Pattern for Washington Pen Wiper, “Amusement for the Ladies,” printed and published by E.B. & E.C. Kellogg, 1866, lithograph . The Newman S. Hungerford Museum Fund, 2010.13.0, the Connecticut Historical Society.