THE BARD OF AMERICAN SELF-RULE: Painting the Revolution. John Turnbull, whose iconic paintings of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers hang in the Rotunda of the U.S.Capitol Rotunda and in a gallery at Yale, is the subject of Glorious Lessons, a new biography by Richard Brookhiser. From Paul Beston’s review:
In the mid-1970s, Richard Brookhiser, then a Yale undergraduate, came upon the Trumbull paintings. The story they told seized his imagination, seeming to instruct him: “This is important; pay attention. These men and women are dead, but they live here. You do not know them (you do not know them yet) but they had you in mind.” This directive could describe Brookhiser’s own mission. He has devoted much of his book-writing career to compact, eloquent lives of the American Founders, preferring, like Trumbull, the compressed frame to the vast canvas. His lean biographies, defined by insight, aim to draw readers’ eyes to the most important parts of the picture and answer a perennial question: Why should we care? . . .
These are obstacles enough to appreciating Trumbull’s art. The most formidable, though, is not aesthetic but political: the defilement of American memory beneath the march of a rejectionist history of the nation and its principles. “How many Americans today sympathize with the story Trumbull tells?” Brookhiser asks. He thinks the artist lucky not to have been a sculptor, given the fates of stone monuments in America’s demonic summer of 2020 (though vandals have not spared paintings elsewhere). The question echoes concerns voiced in his 2019 book, Give Me Liberty, where he called this “the most confused historical moment I have lived in,” lamenting how “America’s national essence is being ignored, trampled, or distorted.” It’s a glimpse of the quiet passion animating his work, which has yielded a canon of moral biographies that help Americans understand the Founders by trying first to see them—not so remote from us as they appear, and struggling, as we do, to make choices in a world full of bad ones.
Trumbull is a timely addition to Brookhiser’s gallery of portraits. Who more fitting to profile, in this age of screens, than the man whose images have “flashed like an ad on the nation’s retina”? Brookhiser calls him “the bard, in pictures not words, of American self-rule,” adding: “Those who enjoy self-rule as a matter of course forget how novel and fragile the concept was and is.” This is important. Pay attention.