John Trumbull, (born June 6,
1756, Lebanon, Connecticut, U.S.—died November 10, 1843, New
York, New York), American painter, architect, and author,
whose paintings of major episodes in the American Revolution
form a unique record of that conflict’s events and
participants.
Trumbull was the son of the
Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull (a first cousin to
the poet John Trumbull). A boyhood injury to his left eye
made him virtually monocular. After graduating from Harvard
College in 1773, he worked as a teacher. During the American
Revolution he served as an aide to General George Washington
and achieved the rank of colonel.
In 1780 Trumbull went to
London via France, but, in reprisal for the hanging of the
British agent Major John André by the Americans, he was
imprisoned there. Once released, he returned home but
subsequently went back to London by 1784 to study with the
painter Benjamin West.
At the suggestion of West
and with the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson, Trumbull
about 1784 began the celebrated series of historical
paintings and engravings that he was to work on sporadically
for the remainder of his life. From 1789 he was in the
United States, but he returned to London in 1794 as
secretary to John Jay. He remained there for 10 years as a
commissioner for the implementation of the Jay Treaty.
During this period, in 1800, he married Sarah Hope Harvey,
an English amateur painter. Moving back and forth between
England and the United States, in 1808 he attempted portrait
painting in London but met with little success. From 1815 to
1837 he maintained a rather unsuccessful studio in New York
City.
In 1817 Trumbull was
commissioned by the U.S. Congress to paint four large
pictures in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, D.C.:
Washington Resigning His Commission, The Surrender of
Cornwallis, The Surrender of Burgoyne, and, best known of
all, Declaration of Independence. This series, which he
completed in 1824, was based on the small and superior
originals of these scenes that he had painted in the 1780s
and ’90s. In 1831 Benjamin Silliman, a professor at Yale,
established the Trumbull Gallery at Yale, the first art
gallery at an educational institution in America. Trumbull
gave his best works to this gallery in exchange for an
annuity.
Encyclopædia Britannica |

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill
(event 1775, painted 1786)

The Declaration of Independence (1819)

Capture of the Hessians at the Battle of Trenton

The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton,
January 3, 1777 (circa 1795)

Surrender of General Burgoyne (event 1777, painted 1821)

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis (event 1781, painted 1820)

General George Washington Resigning his Commission

The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar (1789)
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