page_title: John Trumbull
section_title: Middle years
hierarchical_section_title: John Trumbull / Middle years
caption_attribution_description: English: General George Washington at Trenton on the night of January 2, 1777, after the Battle of the Assunpink Creek, also known as the Second Battle of Trenton, and before the Battle of Princeton.
context_page_description: John Trumbull was an American artist of the early independence period, notable for his historical paintings of the American Revolutionary War, of which he was a veteran. He has been called "The Painter of the Revolution".
  Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, one of his four paintings which hang in the United States Capitol Rotunda, was used on the reverse of the commemorative bicentennial two-dollar bill.
context_section_description: His portraits also include full lengths of General Washington (1790) and George Clinton (1791), now held in New York City Hall. New York City Hall also hangs Trumbull's portrait of Mayor Richard Varick, who commissioned the 1790 portrait of Washington. New York also bought his full-length paintings of Alexander Hamilton (1805, the source of the face on the $10 bill) and John Jay. In 1791 Trumbull was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  He painted portraits of John Adams (1797), Jonathan Trumbull, and Rufus King (1800); Timothy Dwight and Stephen Van Rensselaer (both at Yale), Alexander Hamilton (one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and one in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both taken from Ceracchi's bust), a self-portrait (1833), a full-length of Washington, held at Charleston, South Carolina; a full-length of Washington in uniform, General George Washington at Trenton, (1792, at Yale); and portraits of President and Mrs. Washington (1794), in the National Museum of American History.
  Trumbull himself was painted by Gilbert Stuart and many others.
  In 1794 Trumbull acted as secretary to John Jay in London during the negotiation of the treaty with Great Britain, which largely settled the boundary with Canada and began cotton export. In 1796 he was appointed by the commissioners sent by the two countries as the fifth member of a commission charged with carrying out the seventh article of the Jay Treaty, which mediated claims by American and British merchants and the opposing government stemming from actions which occurred during the war. Shortly after the end of Trumbull's service on this commission, he traveled to Stuttgart to pick up the completed engraving of the Battle of Bunker's Hill. On the return trip he passed through Paris and carried the first dispatch from the XYZ Affair out of France.
  Trumbull would later encounter hard times during which he was failing to sell his paintings individually. In 1831, he sold a series of 28 paintings and 60 miniature portraits to Yale University for an annuity of $1,000. After many years of trying to create income from his paintings, he had finally found a way to sustain himself from his art. This is by far the largest single collection of his works. The collection was originally housed in a neoclassical art gallery designed by Trumbull on Yale's Old Campus, along with portraits by other artists.
caption: General George Washington at Trenton, oil on canvas, 1792. Yale University Art Gallery.
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