AFA Winter 2017

Winter 106 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com O n a warm day in May 1835, John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889) left the bright Manhattan street for the softly lit galleries of the Eleventh Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design. The show’s opening was the twenty-seven-year-old artist’s debut to the New York art world and an opportunity to define his nascent career. Chapman had carefully chosen twelve paintings to showcase his ambitions to the highest level of nineteenth-century f ine art: narrative history painting. Two of the pictures were portraits of American heroes: a bust-length President James Madison made during his retirement at Montpelier, and a life-sized portrait of Congressman Dav y Crocket t a s a Tennessee hunter. Even more impressive were seven exquisitely detailed Virginia landscapes originally commissioned by the writer James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860) depicting places intimately related to George Washington’s life: the sites of his birth and boyhood homes (both of which had long since been destroyed); the Fredericksburg house of his mother; a view of his Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon; his tomb; Yorktown seen from a distance; and a recreated view of the bedchamber in which he died. Less than a decade after John Trumbull hung his paintings of the American Revolution in the United States’ Capitol, Chapman too hoped to shape the way his fellow countrymen imagined their history. Expertly executed, well-researched, and detail-rich, the Chapman-Paulding series—the seven pictures exhibited at the National Academy and an additional two paintings presented to John Gadsby Chapman and James Kirke Paulding Fig.1: John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889), Baptism of Pocahontas, 1839. Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 feet. Courtesy, Architect of the Capitol. While Pocahontas’ rescue of John Smith would have been a more dramatic subject, Chapman chose her baptism to conform with the narrative of Native-American assimilation elsewhere in the Capitol’s decorative program. Paulding as gifts—testified to the artist’s yearning to paint the narrative of American history. At least initially, they did indeed launch Chapman into the field of history painting: two years after the National Academy exhibition, the federal government commissioned the artist to paint the monumental Baptism of Pocahontas . But when the work was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1840, it was met with mixed reviews. Ultimately, Chapman never supported himself as a history painter. Facing financial set-back after personal tragedy, the beleaguered artist spent his last decades painting and etching views of the Roman Campagna and genre scenes of Italian peasants. The Baptism of Pocahontas was his only major history painting. And yet this is not the sad story of a failed artist. The Chapman-Paulding series did make a significant contribution to by Lydia Mattice Brandt and Adam T. Erby Painting and Interpreting George Washington’s Virginia in the 1830s