Trumbull's Declaration, and Ours

In November 1826 John Trumbull’s paintings of the American Revolution were installed in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC. The most famous of them is his depiction of the Declaration of Independence being presented to the Continental Congress.

Trumbull had been working on this scene, on and off, for almost forty years. He was a Revolutionary War veteran, with the rank of colonel, having served as an aide to both George Washington and Horatio Gates. After the war, he moved to London to study painting with the American émigré Benjamin West.

West had defined contemporary history painting with his blockbuster canvas depicting the death of the British General James Wolfe at Quebec. This vision of the climactic battle of the French and Indian War showed its subjects in contemporary uniforms, rather than the timeless draperies recommended by neoclassical art theorists. Such details gave West’s work the urgency of realism. 

West considered doing a series of paintings on the American Revolution, but reflected that memorializing American victories might not be popular with British audiences. His American student Trumbull took up the idea himself.

Trumbull’s first two Revolutionary War paintings showed battle scenes: the final, successful British charge at Bunker Hill and the failed American assault on Quebec. Trumbull knew these struggles personally. He had been stationed across Boston Harbor during the Battle of Bunker Hill, seeing the smoke and hearing the gunfire, and he had tallied the beaten survivors of the Quebec campaign after they had retreated to upstate New York. The two smallish paintings, 2' by 3', were finished by 1786.

Trumbull’s artistic studies then took him to Paris, where he stayed with the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, aesthete and amateur architect, loved to collect promising younger acolytes. Trumbull, for his part, introduced Jefferson to the British miniaturist Richard Cosway and his Anglo-Italian wife Maria, with whom Jefferson began an intense flirtation. The most lasting result of their acquaintance was that Jefferson suggested the Declaration of Independence as Trumbull’s third Revolutionary War subject. This represented a shift from battle scenes to politics, from action to ideas.

Jefferson sketched the floor plan of the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia where Congress had sat in 1776 (he made a mistake, showing two doors on the west wall, instead of one). Trumbull made his own first sketch of the scene he envisioned on the flip side of Jefferson’s piece of paper. He painted Jefferson and fellow signer John Adams, who was then minister to Britain, during his European sojourn and collected the likenesses of other delegates after he returned to the United States in 1789.

In the image as Trumbull finally rendered it, we the viewers are standing at the east wall, behind the dais visible in the foreground. The president of Congress, John Hancock, sits at his desk, angled so that we are not looking at the back of his head. In front of him the members of the drafting committee—Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—offer their handiwork. Jefferson, the draftsman, holds the document itself. Behind and beside them forty-two other men spread out, standing or seated, witnessing the moment.

What moment is it? July 4, as the date on the Declaration suggests? June 28, the day when Jefferson and the committee first presented their draft to Congress? Or is it the day on which the delegates began signing, which would not be until August 4? The correct answer is none of these. Trumbull has telescoped events and juggled characters. He knew that the usual practice of committees reporting an act was for one member, typically the chairman, to rise from his seat in the body of the room and offer it for consideration. Instead, Trumbull brought all five members of the drafting committee forward. He also knew that some delegates left Philadelphia early or arrived late, so that all the men he depicted were not present together at any one time.

What Trumbull gives us is not a snapshot but a comprehensive statement about the Declaration and the men who made it. Although we cannot see the words on the paper that Jefferson is holding, we see their implications in the scene before us. Battles like Bunker Hill and Quebec had been going on for over a year, but these men are all civilians, acting in command of the armies in the field. They are also equals. Robert Morris, merchant prince, is here; so is Josiah Bartlett, farmer and physician. Nothing in their dress—neither ermines, nor jewels, nor chains of office—distinguishes them. All the delegates, finally—a few small conversations aside—are paying attention. They have come to a decision, which they are about to ratify and express. These men are representatives, chosen in acts of self-rule by their neighbors, to deliberate together on their behalf.

Trumbull’s initial painting of the Declaration, like the battle scenes which preceded it, was 2' by 3'. As he finished it he began work on three more—scenes from the battles of Trenton and Princeton and the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Trumbull hoped to sell prints of these images—the typical way that eighteenth-century history painters made money, aside from selling their originals. But delays in finding an engraver pushed the timing of his first subscription offer into 1790. By then potential European buyers were preoccupied with a revolution in France, and Americans were soon to be preoccupied with the contests of the first two-party system. Trumbull’s subscription languished.

In frustration, Trumbull gave up painting for several years, turning instead to business ventures and diplomatic work. When he took up his brush again in the new nineteenth century he produced portraits, the standard moneymakers of painters. Customers paid well in flush times. In hard times, like the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, business dried up.

Trumbull’s career as a history painter was revived by an act of destruction. The British burned Washington, DC during the War of 1812. In the ruins of the Capitol Trumbull saw his opportunity. He lobbied to be commissioned to decorate the Rotunda beneath the newly built dome. His old friend Jefferson wrote a letter of recommendation. Trumbull worked with the architect, Charles Bulfinch, to ensure that he would have a space, both grand and simple, suitable for displaying his work. Congress agreed to pay for four paintings: Trumbull and President James Madison determined their size—12' by 18'—and the subjects: the Declaration, Britain’s surrenders at Saratoga and Yorktown, and Washington resigning his commission as commander in chief at war’s end.

Trumbull went to work on the Rotunda paintings in 1817. His skill had deteriorated over time—he was now in his sixties. When John Quincy Adams first saw the new, larger image of the Declaration, he thought the small original had been “far superior.” But when it and its fellows were hung in the Rotunda he changed his mind: high in a huge room, design counted more than finesse, and they appeared “far better,” Adams now wrote, “than they ever had before.” Paired with the painting of Washington resigning his commission, Trumbull’s Declaration made a narrative demonstration. The Declaration is theory. Washington the military man, obeying the civil authorities, unlike so many men on horseback before and since, is theory-in-action.

Trumbull’s Declaration still adorns the Rotunda. The small version hangs in the Yale University Art Gallery, a late-life bequest by the artist. The scene, regularly reproduced, hangs in our minds, the archetype of our founding moment.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow of the National Review Institute. His most recent book is Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution. In 2008, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush.