Painting Revolution: John Trumbull and Artistic Exchange between America and France

Abstract

For both French and American artists, there was an initial interest in depicting the events of the American Revolution in the 1780s, followed by a later wave of art in the 1820s and ’30s. This paper examines the timeline, politics and artistic parameters shaping this art, which was both documentary and symbolic in nature, with artists building on one another’s work. For John Trumbull it was only with time and the buffer of a second war with Britain, the War of 1812, that he was able to obtain a government commission, but his later paintings of the American Revolution were essentially enlarged versions of his compositions from the 1780s. Trumbull studied in the London studio of Benjamin West and was heavily influenced by contemporary British painting. Yet French art and culture were also influential, and this relationship has not been sufficiently studied. Trumbull travelled to France a number of times, beginning in 1786, when he met Jacques-Louis David, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Antoine Houdon and other important French artists, incorporating aspects of David’s compositions into his own work. It was also in Paris that Trumbull began to compose the Declaration of Independence under the guidance of Thomas Jefferson. Like most Americans, Trumbull initially supported the French Revolution and saw parallels between it and the American Revolution. He intended to paint early scenes from the French Revolution, including the fall of the Bastille. But although he sympathized with Jefferson and the French republican philosophers, shifting politics and the violence of the French Revolution turned his opinion by 1793.