Among the most important artists and cultural figures in American history, John Trumbull sprang from aristocratic roots in Lebanon, Connecticut, graduated from Harvard College, rose to the rank of colonel in the Revolutionary War, and moved to Boston during the war to embark on a painting career. Trumbull took several trips to England, visiting Benjamin West (see B.67.26 and B.67.25) and John Singleton Copley (see B.54.31, B.54.21, B.54.25, B.54.18, B.54.26, B.54.27, B.54.29, B.54.28, and B.54.30), both of whom advised this young, ambitious, and well-educated artist. After vigorous efforts in England and the United States to paint the most significant events of the Revolutionary War, Trumbull engaged in a brief career in diplomacy beginning in 1794 before returning to his brush in 1800, the same year he married Sarah Hope Harvey Trumbull (1774–1824), the subject of this portrait. The couple moved to New York, where they lived from 1804–8, and again from 1815 until his death in 1843. In 1817, he received the commission to paint four of the eight paintings in the Capitol Rotunda that commemorate the Revolutionary War. Trumbull served on the board of the American Academy of Fine Arts, New York, and was its president for nineteen years. His increasingly dogmatic prescriptions for the advancement of the arts alienated younger generations, and toward the end of his life, his professional disappointments and bleak financial situation prompted him to enter into an unusual but significant agreement: to donate all of his works and papers to Yale College in exchange for a lifetime annuity. The Trumbull Gallery, originally built in 1832 and now part of the Yale University Art Gallery, was the first college art museum built in this country.

Trumbull painted his wife, about whom little is known, at least thirteen times. Scholars have suggested that she was previously married to someone with the surname Harvey and that Trumbull may have found himself in a situation in which he was obliged to marry her. Evidently anxious about the reception his wife would receive at home among his aristocratic friends and family, he sent home as a kind of introduction a portrait of his bride dressed elegantly in white, clutching a cross at her breast (Sarah Trumbull in a White Dress, c. 1800, Mrs. Charles Higgins), followed by an apologetic letter to his brother Jonathan in which he provided some scant biographical information about her. He described her as “beautiful beyond the usual beauty of women!” and seems to have remained devoted to her despite her bouts of emotional instability and alcoholism.

Sarah Trumbull was almost fifty when her husband painted her here, dressed in black with a brilliant white stand-falling ruff, or layered collar, its vivid whites are echoed in her lace-edged cuffs and cap. Her narrow face, the down-turned ends of her eyes, the thin, angular nose, and pronounced curves of her lips are familiar features in the many portraits of her Trumbull painted. The portrait perhaps suggests the artist’s ideal image of his wife as a feminized, demure beauty and, in this regard, makes an interesting comparison with George Romney’s serial paintings of Emma, Lady Hamilton, which Trumbull would have known from his journey to London in the 1780s.

Related examples: The most closely related of Trumbull’s thirteen other portraits of his wife are Mrs. John Trumbull as “Innocence,” 1816–24, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Miniature of Mrs. Trumbull, private collection; and Mrs. John Trumbull in a Lace Cap, Lt. Col. Trumbull Warren, Corwhin Acres, Puslinch, Ontario. Also, a pencil sketch of Sarah as “Innocence,” c. 1816, is included in “Trumbull’s Autobiography interleaved with extra original drawings” (Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.