A Boola Boola Revolution

Yale, New Haven, John Trumbull, and the American Revolution

W ee Connecticut, my birthplace and where I lived until my 30s, has not one or two or three but four nicknames. The Land of Steady Habits and the Nutmeg State are quaint and silly, even sarcastic, but the Constitution State has heft. The Fundamental Orders from 1639 is said to be the world’s first written constitution prescribing a structured democratic government and separation of powers. It’s debatable, but I’ll write about it in a couple of weeks. More to the point, Connecticut is the Provisions State. It supplied Patriot soldiers far beyond its numbers vis-à-vis the other twelve rebel colonies and was the Army’s premier supplier of food, weapons, and clothing. Connecticut also supplied Nathan Hale, hanged as a spy and the state’s official hero.

New Haven and Yale were in many ways a revolutionary hub, and what’s a memorable revolution without an image maker? Freedom-fighting America’s is John Trumbull (1756–1843), whose zestiest versions of The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, The Death of General Warren at Bunker Hill, and other war icons are at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Among Yale’s many Trumbulls are nine early, dynamic versions of his Revolutionary War pictures, the best done in the 1780s and ’90s, when the one-eyed artist could still see, nearly all about 20 by 30 inches. They’re impasto-rich and fresh, and the battle scenes are rollicking. They’re also scenes of contemporary life, with the gravity and grandeur of European history paintings.

Trumbull was a witness and a player. His father, Jonathan Trumbull, was Connecticut’s governor and the only governor among the 13 colonies to back the Patriots over the highbrow, conformist, substantially Anglican locals and the forces of King George III. His son, Jonathan II, was the postwar governor. Father Trumbull and another son, Joseph, organized the measures, earning Connecticut its place as the Provisions State. “Except for Brother Jonathan,” Washington wrote, “the war could not have been carried to a successful conclusion.”

John witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill as a war artist and served General Washington as an aide. He’d met many of the notables he portrayed and, as a Patriot, was able to develop a winning iconography. His Founding Fathers are naturally noble and serious. They have gravity and grit. His martyrs, such as General Hugh Mercer and General Richard Montgomery, die on the battlefield with savoir faire.

The Declaration of Independence, from 1817, is among the few works of art every American knows since a giant version hangs in the Capitol Rotunda. This early version anchors what’s called the Trumbull room. I look at it as a class picture of the nation’s founders. It’s static, unlike his battle scenes, because it’s stately and meant to signify order rather than blood, sweat, tears, and either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

Among the other stars in the gallery is Trumbull’s full-length portrait of Washington at Trenton from 1792. It’s splendid and, shock of shocks, we’re not told for the millionth time that Washington owned slaves. Then I saw Yale’s version of Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at the Battle of Princeton, from 1781. Princeton’s art museum has one, and in viewing it last year, I needed my scuba gear, inundated as the gallery was with tears over Washington’s slaveholding. Still, at Yale, not a word about it, which is right. Washington’s slaves are 1 percent of the story of 1776.

Trumbull’s suave self-portrait is there, as is his portrait of Alexander Hamilton, a better one than the Trumbull portrait used for the $10 bill. Trumbull’s oval miniatures, 60 of them, framed in groups of five or six, have a small space off the main Trumbull room. He painted them from the early 1790s into the 1830s, and they’re a mix of his family, famous Yalies such as slavery advocate John Calhoun — a full 175 years before Yale’s repudiation of him — political people Trumbull liked, among them John Jay, and a few Native potentates. These little things pulse with dash and sparkle.

The Declaration is a class picture, but it’s a collection of miniatures in itself. It depicts 42 of the 56 signers. Trumbull portrayed only those he’d met, so theirs is a likeness from life. In the case of Benjamin Harrison V and Rufus Hopkins, their sons modeled. Writing the Declaration wasn’t all Jefferson’s doing. In Trumbull’s painting, he stands among the other four drafting committeemen: John Adams, Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, and New York’s Robert Livingston on his right, with Benjamin Franklin on his left. Each contributed substantially. At times, Jefferson was mostly a scribe and stylist. Sherman was Yale’s treasurer, a Connecticut judge, and, from 1784 until his death in 1794, New Haven’s first mayor.

The 9-by-6-foot Bermuda Group, by John Smibert, is close to the Trumbulls. Painted in 1728 and reworked in 1739, this lively, persuasively composed portrait was at the time America’s grandest. It’s a fashion piece depicting the Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley, alongside his family and friends who were involved in his effort to establish a utopian community and seminary in Bermuda. Sun, pink sand, surf, and sweet sea breezes. Sounds utopian to me, but the place flopped in the idea stage unless we tout the St. Regis as its ultimate realization.

John Singleton Copley’s portraits of Isaac and Elizabeth Smith, Abigail Adams’s uncle and aunt; Samuel F. B. Morse’s Dying Hercules, from 1819; and Benjamin West’s Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, from 1768, make for an impressive, majestic space free of woke trash. Yankee gravity and purpose abounded, and I was pleased.

Alas, very much off-key is the gaudy Dream of Saint Joseph, by an unknown painter from Cuzco, Peru, exhibited among the Bermuda Group, Trumbull’s Hamilton, and the West. “Get this f@%&ing Peruvian thing outta here,” I thought, hating as I do the display together of South American, especially flouncy Roman Catholic art, and Yankee art simply because both can be considered American. That’s a fad now, even though they don’t play well together, thematically or aesthetically.

During the Revolution, Governor Trumbull divided his time between Connecticut’s two capital cities, Hartford and New Haven, and the War Office in Lebanon, an outbuilding on the grounds of his home in eastern Connecticut. There, in a one-and-a-half-story clapboard building with a gambrel roof, Father Trumbull and son Joseph coordinated the purchase and shipment of much of what the Army needed. It’s believed that Father hosted hundreds of strategy powwows there. Washington, Rochambeau, Lafayette, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, as well as Washington’s generals, did heavy-duty planning with the governor in the War Office, which at one point was connected to Trumbull’s house by a secret tunnel.

The War Office in Lebanon is a modest museum, as is Father Trumbull’s house, built in the late 1730s. The Colonial Georgian house is commodious at five bays and two stories. There’s a secret office upstairs where the governor worked after the Brits put a price on his head. The house has some Trumbull furnishings but not many. It and the War Office are good for ambiance. Bring a spiritualist if you want more. Impressive on its own is Lebanon’s mile-long green, the longest in New England. It was a training ground for Patriot troops and is still a grassy meadow, as were nearly all the greens in small-town and suburban Connecticut. Some 800 Lebanon men served in the Patriot military, nearly all the locals who were mobile and sensate. The town also sent William Williams, a Declaration signer.

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I was happily surprised to see Loyalists and Sons of Liberty: Two Sides of the Revolutionary War exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. Timed for America’s 250th, it’s small, engaging, and coherent. It takes two to Watusi, and until 1776, or the Treaty of Paris in 1783, we Americans were subjects of King George III, whose marble bust by John Nost III from 1764 occupies the center of the gallery.

George (1738–1820) was then a new king, young and popular. By the 1770s, even many Brits in London thought he had a tyrannical streak. Though constitutionally barred from day-to-day politics, he pushed quelling the colonial rebellion and pushed hard. Benjamin West’s portrait of his consort, Queen Charlotte, is on the wall near the bust. She’s tatting lace, staying out of trouble, as did West, who stuck to his brushes, at least in public.

Mason Chamberlain’s portrait of the handsome Joseph Nash tells us that Loyalist motives were far from pure. Here, there were elites who’d grown fat and prosperous under London’s rule. Why rock the boat? Much of the top brass and most students at Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard stayed loyal until the point of no return, but Yale was solidly Patriot, the cause boosted by Ezra Stiles, its president. The colonies, both the rebellious 13 and in the Caribbean, filled coffers in Mayfair and St. James’s, too. Nash was rich from sugar plantations, but in the portrait he holds a pamphlet written by the Reverend James Ramsay, the activist who pushed for better conditions for island slaves but not for their emancipation.

West’s 1812 portrait of John Eardley Wilmot is a bit of a clunker but instructive. In the 1780s, Wilmot oversaw the British program to resettle and compensate tens of thousands of Loyalists, including Tories and Natives, whose lives were definitively trashed after 1783. Personifications of Britain, Religion, and Justice hold a canopy over the aggrieved. I’m not the boo-hoo type. Also in the show are Joshua Reynolds’s portrait from 1763 of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration, Copley’s portrait of General Thomas Gage, who led the British military in the colonies in peace in the 1760s and during the hostilities of the 1770s as they seethed until his pyrrhic win at Bunker Hill, after which he was recalled to England. Copley was a Loyalist whose father-in-law owned the 342 crates of tea dumped in Boston Harbor in 1773.

It’s a good selection. Visitors will learn a lot, mostly about nuance, the essence of an intelligent, civilized life. Amid the tumult, people had stakes among Patriots, Loyalists, and the Brits across the Pond, either hard financial interests or sentiments or family ties. Three flubs, though. First, Loyalists and Sons of Liberty doesn’t emphasize the various and conflicting stakes, so relevant today, since even many Yale students, smart as they are, can’t seem to think deeply. Second, the exhibition is in two spots — in the gallery for paintings and sculpture, and in the print study room for works on paper like the mezzotint portrait of swaggering Colonel Tarleton, the British officer who, among other things, ordered his soldiers to shoot Patriot troops after they’d surrendered in the Battle of Waxhaws. Why not hang everything together, in a bigger gallery with dimmer lighting for works on paper? Third, in yet another flourish of museum incompetence — I see lots of them these days — Loyalists and Sons of Liberty isn’t listed on the BAC’s exhibition page, though, with digging no one could be expected to do, I found the labels. Nobody’s perfect, and I love the BAC.

Next week I’ll go colony-write and write about Hale, Roger Sherman’s pivotal role in the Declaration and the Constitution, and America’s only monument to an enemy combatant.