The Painter's Chair Read online

  II.

  Friday the 13th . . . The Mansion House . . . Mount Vernon, Virginia

  THE PREVIOUS EVENING had proven uneventful, but first light revealed a landscape newly blanketed in white. Snow continued to fall throughout the morning, and three inches accumulated on the ground by midday.

  The General had awakened to the realization that a cold was upon him. He complained to Martha of a sore throat. Given the inclement weather, he agreed to forgo his usual ride around his acreage. Instead, he retired to his study to tend to the correspondence and other paperwork that always seemed to await him.

  If the Mansion House at Mount Vernon was the face he wanted the world to see, then his study at the building’s south end was the essence of the man himself. The large room with the private stair from his bedchamber above was his architectural thinking cap, a retreat from visitors and even family. The room, grandson Wash Custis explained, was “a place that none entered without orders.”3

  A tall bookpress dominated the east wall. Through its wavy glass doors could be seen most of the 884 bound volumes in Washington’s library. Like the man himself, much of his collection of books was devoted to practical matters such as military strategy, the law, geography, and agriculture. Classical authors were represented, along with such eighteenth-century contemporaries as Jonathan Swift, Robert Burns, and Adam Smith. Washington also owned a volume of Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey, its title page adorned with Washington’s signature. With a certain poetic symmetry, the tale it told was of another victorious general who required many years to make it back to his beloved home.

  On a shelf in his library was an early notebook in which the adolescent Washington had copied out 110 maxims from a book titled Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. The advisories ranged from matters of etiquette (“Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth”) and economics (“The man who does not estimate time as money will forever miscalculate”) to aphorisms about conscience, respect, composure, and affectation. Taken together, they amounted to a primer for an awkward young man trying to master the social graces in a colony where manners mattered a great deal.

  Very much later, Washington had begun his final retirement at Mount Vernon. In March 1796, having watched wordlessly at the ceremony for John Adams’s swearing-in as the second president of the United States, he had climbed into his carriage for the journey back to Virginia. As Nelly wrote to a friend shortly after their return, “Grandpa is very well, and much pleased with being once more Farmer Washington.”4She spoke the truth, but his correspondence indicates that Washington remained in intimate contact with the political world he had shaped.

  Whenever he worked in the study, he did so under the gaze of Lawrence Washington, whose portrait hung between the south-facing windows. After their father’s death, when George was eleven, Lawrence had become his half brother’s mentor, introducing the teenage George to aristocratic Virginia society. Lawrence had married a niece of Lord Fairfax, a Yorkshireman whose American holdings amounted to more than five million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. The impressionable George liked almost everything that he saw at Belvoir, the Fairfax plantation just downstream from Mount Vernon. He spent a great deal of time at the grand brick house, where foxhunting and dancing parties were commonplace. The family’s connections taught him much about the expectations of fashionable society and also launched George’s first career. The Fairfax influence played a role in his employment as a surveyor in laying out the new town of Alexandria and mapping portions of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Washington had idolized his brother. An experienced soldier, Lawrence helped inspire in the boy a desire for military glory. When George was nineteen, the brothers had traveled together on what would be the future president’s sole journey beyond the borders of the thirteen colonies. Although their 1751 trip to Barbados was intended to help cure Lawrence of his nagging cough, it served only to expose George to smallpox. Lawrence nursed him through his bout with the disease, but his own consumption advanced, and by the following year he was dead. One eventual consequence was that George inherited Mount Vernon after the premature death of Lawrence’s only heir.

  Although he had twice radically remodeled his brother’s house—the first time to welcome his wife when he and Martha married in 1759, then later during the Revolution—he honored Lawrence’s memory. When the General worked at his desk, it was Lawrence who was positioned to look over his shoulder. The painting, bearing no artist’s signature, was a poor likeness. The face was masklike, and the man’s red jacket and green waistcoat were suspended on the torso like paper-doll clothing. The painted likeness was recognizable as his brother, but, compared to other art in his house hold, its maker’s skills were primitive.

  Two other worthies peopled the study, both of them artworks of a more sophisticated kind. One was a workshop plaster cast of a bust of America’s great naval hero, John Paul Jones. The other was no copy: It was an original bust of Washington from the hand of the French master Jean-Antoine Houdon. From its perch atop a bracket, the terra-cotta head appeared to be gazing across the room, as if musing over the books on the upper shelves in the bookpress. The Washington bust had been made on these very acres during the Frenchman’s visit to Mount Vernon fourteen years earlier.

  One of the world’s greatest artists, Houdon had come to Mount Vernon at the invitation of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. After a fifteen-day stay at the plantation, Houdon returned to his Paris studio, carrying with him a plaster life mask he had made of Washington. But at Mount Vernon he left as a gift to his host his first sculpted likeness. Made of clay dug from the Virginia soil and fired in a Mount Vernon bake oven, the bust bore Houdon’s own fingerprints. The consensus among Washington’s friends and family was that the Frenchman had captured George Washington as no other artist had done.

  That December morning, just days before his century ended, the great man paid little attention to the images around him. Through a wide window he could gaze down the hillside, now covered in snow, sloping to the shore of the Potomac. Nearer at hand was a globe, one he had ordered from London, “a terrestrial globe of the largest dimensions and of the most accurate and proved kind now in use.”5As the founder of a new nation, he had helped reshape the world, yet on this day Washington’s thoughts were of a more immediate kind.

  He composed a letter to James Anderson, his farm manager. The letter was short, little more than a cover note to accompany the detailed three-year plan for his plantation. He had drafted the document earlier in the week, laying out crop rotations for Mount Vernon’s five farms. He specified plantings field by field. In some, he wished to see turnip leaves rise from the ground; at others clover, potatoes, or corn. Some were to be left as pasture. He instructed what care was to be given to the sheep, cows, mules, “horned Cattle,” and hogs. As a scientific farmer, he corresponded with the leading American and English agronomists of the day, and he wished to see the best ideas employed at Mount Vernon. His latest thinking was central to this new plan.

  When the storm ended that afternoon, he ignored the growing hoarseness in his throat. He ventured out for a time to mark some trees on his “pleasure ground,” the manicured landscape in the vicinity of the Potomac riverside where he hoped he and his guests might soon walk upon a new gravel path. In the evening he assumed a seat in the parlor, having received an afternoon delivery of newspapers from the post office. He and Martha were joined there by Mr. Lear, once again, under the gaze of family likenesses, including an anatomically awkward picture of Martha dating from her first marriage (a recent foreign visitor had thought it a poor painting, not least because it portrayed her with “her ears uncovered”).6A more sophisticated companion piece had come later. A work by Charles Willson Peale, it presented Colonel Washington, the Virginia squire, as he had appeared in 1772.

  At nine o’clock, the hour they usually retired, Martha went upstairs to sit for a time with Nelly. The General remained wit
h Lear, occasionally reading out diverting or interesting tidbits from the Pennsylvania Packet and Pennsylvania Herald. The two men discussed reports in the Virginia Gazette about the ongoing debates of the Virginia Assembly. Washington’s voice, thought Lear, was growing more gravelly by the hour, and when Washington rose to retire for the night, his friend and secretary suggested that he might take something to treat his cold.

  The General declined. “You know I never take any thing for a cold,” he reminded Lear. “Let it go as it came.”

  III.

  December 14 . . . The Washingtons’ Bedchamber . . . Mount Vernon, Virginia

  BY MORNING, THE greatest man in the world believed to a certainty that he was dying of a sore throat. Sometime after two A.M., he awakened Martha. He was very unwell, he told her, an ague (fever and chills) having overcome him. The house was cold, and, not wanting her to catch a chill, the General insisted she remain within the warm confines of their tall four-poster bed. During the quiet hours before the housemaid Caroline arrived to make a fire at daylight, man and wife huddled together in the oversized bedstead. Purpose-built for the big-boned Washington, the mahogany bed was six feet, six inches in length and a full six feet wide with the dimity hangings suspended around them.

  The General’s health had scared them before. The previous year he had had one of his periodic bouts with malaria. Back in 1790, the government and the entire city of New York had waited for his fever to break when he battled the flu and pneumonia. In 1789, a carbuncle was removed from his hip without anesthesia. Martha herself had suffered from a recurring fever, thought to be malaria, earlier in the summer of this very year when Washington’s old friend, physician Dr. James Craik, had come to Mount Vernon and prescribed “the bark.” This medicament, derived from the cinchona tree, was the only reliable treatment.

  In the past, Washington’s sturdy constitution had allowed him to fight off attacks of dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, quinsy (tonsillitis), and diphtheria. This day would be different.

  UPON HER ARRIVAL at daybreak, the slave Caroline was immediately dispatched to summon Mr. Lear. He dressed hurriedly, and, upon reaching the bedside, he found that Washington was “breathing with difficulty and hardly able to utter a word intelligibly.”7Dr. Craik was summoned, and, in the course of the daylight hours, Washington was bled four times. More than five pints of blood were taken from him.

  By mid afternoon Drs. Elisha C. Dick and Gustavus Richard Brown had also arrived. The three doctors tried everything they could think of to relieve Washington’s symptoms. He was given a mixture of molasses, vinegar, and butter to soothe his throat, but he could not swallow it. His neck was bathed with sal volatile (an ammonia salt also known as harts-horn), and his feet were soaked in warm water. A blister of Cantharides (sometimes called Spanish fly) was put on his throat. He nearly suffocated when given a gargle of vinegar and sage tea.

  By five o’clock, the man of the house had finally had enough. “Doctor,” he told Craik, who had been his friend since their days of service to King George II during the French and Indian War, “I die hard; but I am not afraid to go; I believed from my first attack that I should not survive; my breath cannot last long.”8

  Speechless with grief, Craik found a seat by the fire. The death watch had begun.

  JOHN ADAMS ONCE said of Washington that he possessed “the gift of silence.” Even as he lay dying, tossing and turning on his deathbed, the sixty-seven-year-old Virginian kept his thoughts and emotions to himself. But he was planning for those he loved.

  At Washington’s request, Lear summoned Mrs. Washington. The General asked her to bring him the two wills he had drafted. When she returned from the study and handed him the documents, he examined the two sheaves of papers. One he handed back to her, and, following his instructions, she fed the “useless” version to the fire.

  He had signed and applied his seal to the fair copy of his last will and testament just a few months earlier, on July 9. “To my dearly beloved wife Martha Washington,” he had written, “I give and bequeath the use, profit and benefit of my whole Estate, real and personal, for the term of her natural life.” There were special bequests, including the sum of $4,000 to establish a free school; sundry properties for various relatives, including an outlying farm to Nelly and Lawrence Lewis; all his books and papers, which were to go to his most trusted nephew, Bushrod Washington; and, to the surprise of almost everyone, he ordered that his slaves were to be freed after Martha’s death. After she died, he further specified, most of his land and other assets were to be sold, and the proceeds distributed to his heirs in proportions laid out in the document.9

  He had written it in his own hand. Washington was a disciplined penman, the horizontality of his lines and the slant of his script always precise. The handwriting was not overly artistic, but careful and rarely hurried. He had invested many hours in preparing the final copy of this twenty-nine-page document, and his scheme was carefully considered. He often used convoluted language to distance himself from the subject at hand, but also for clarity. This will had few ambiguities, no excesses, and little legalese (no “professional character” had been consulted). In life, this private man regarded this as the business of no other aside from himself.

  Late in the afternoon he croaked a question at Lear: When was Wash due back?

  Washington had held out high hopes for George Washington Parke Custis, who had become almost a son to him. But the boy had fallen well short of living up to the General’s hopes, just as the lad’s father before him failed to do. George Washington’s own formal education had ended early with the death of his father; that was one reason for his expectations for Wash, who had been unceremoniously dismissed from the College of New Jersey, after less than a year. Custis had performed no better in a stint at St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the months since returning to Mount Vernon—he was still only eighteen—he was under the tutelage of Mr. Lear, but no one mistook him for a serious student.

  Wash and Lawrence Lewis, Mr. Lear advised, were not due to return for several days. The General had no choice but to accept that he would see them no more.

  Washington asked a service of Lear, who immediately agreed to arrange Washington’s military letters and papers and to tend to his accounts. “He then asked,” Lear noted in his diary, “if I recollected anything which it was essential for him to do, as he had but a very short time to continue among us. I told him I could recollect nothing; but that I hoped he was not so near his end.”

  Washington smiled in response. “He certainly was” nearing his end, the General told Lear, and as that “was the debt which all must pay, he looked to the event with perfect resignation.”

  His manners faultless even at the end, he thanked the doctors. “I feel myself going,” he told them in the early evening. “I thank you for your attentions; but I pray you to take no more trouble about me, let me go off quietly; I cannot last long.”

  By ten o’clock, the dying man found speaking almost impossible, but with a great effort he managed to address Lear once more. “I am just going,” he began after a struggle. “Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” His throat constricted with emotion, Lear could not speak, but he bowed in assent.

  “ ’Tis well,” said Washington.

  He spoke no further, but his breathing seemed to ease. The General took his own pulse, and, after a while, Lear noticed that his expression seemed to change. He summoned Dr. Craik from the fireside.

  Craik put his hands over Washington’s eyes.

  From the foot of the bed where she was seated, Martha asked in a firm voice, “Is he gone?”

  When informed that he was, she echoed her husband’s last words with a surprising calm. “ ’Tis well,” she said, adding, “All is now over, I shall soon follow him. I have no more trials to pass through.10

  IN DEATH, AS in life, Washington was surrounded by images. At midnight, barely an hour after his death, his
corpse was carried down the stairs and his remains laid out in the New Room. Not far from his impromptu bier hung pre sentation proofs of John Trumbull’s two history paintings, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775 and The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775. Washington had given the engravings a place of honor in his finest room and proudly showed them to his guests as the first of a great series commemorating the events of the Revolution. In the same room hung another portrait of the General, this one painted by Trum-bull and given by the artist to Martha. The small canvas portrayed the commander in chief and his horse at a Hudson River crossing, Verplanck’s Point. It was, some thought, the most majestic portrait of the military Washington.

  His fame was an irresistible lure. Washington had sat for other artists besides Peale, Trumbull, Savage, and Houdon. A French noblewoman, the Marquise de Bréhan, had come in 1789, the year her country’s revolution began; Joseph Wright had made a bust at Washington’s headquarters at Rocky Hill, New Jersey, in 1783. British artist Robert Edge Pine took a likeness at Washington’s home in 1784. James Sharples, Walter Robertson, and even Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin had made images of Washington from life. Saint-Mémin was aided by his mechanical contrivances, the physiognotrace and pantograph, which enabled him to make a mathematically accurate outline of his subject’s head. Before his death, Washington sat for at least twenty-eight different portraitists, some of them repeatedly. Not a few of the works that resulted lived at Mount Vernon as miniatures, pastels, and other keepsakes.