TRUMBULL, John

American painter, architect and diplomat. His importance lies in his historical paintings memorialising events in the American War of Independence. Applying Benjamin West's and John Singleton Copley's realistic innovations in history paintingGLOSSARYPainting concerned with the representation of scenes from the Bible, history (usually classical history), and classical literature. From the Renaissance to the 19th century it was considered the highest form of painting, its subjects considered morally elevating. to American subjects, he created a series of images, reproduced in countless illustrations, that have become icons of American nationalism. They are also symbolic of his lifelong political and artistic identity.

Trumbull fought in the American War of Independence (for a time he was aide-decamp to George Washington) and his career was devoted mainly to depicting the outstanding events and personalities of the revolution. He was strongly influenced by Benjamin West, with whom he studied in London. In 1817 he became President of the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York, but his tyrannical attitude, especially towards young painters, led to many members leaving to set up the National Academy of Design in 1825. His pictures did not sell well, so in 1831 he assigned those in his studio to Yale University Art GalleryGLOSSARYan upper story, similar to a tribune, running along the side of a building and open on one side to the interior; in a church (basilica) above the side aisles, over the ambulatory (central-plan building) and also over the west end. The gallery was used to keep certain groups of worshippers apart (women, noblemen). in exchange for an annuity. The most famous work there, and one of the most reproduced images in American art, is The Declaration of Independence (1786-97), in which most of the portraits were painted from life. His larger works are usually fairly stodgy, but his smaller pictures and sketches can be much livelier.

Trumbull, who died an embittered old man, published an autobiographyGLOSSARYAutobiography as a distinct literary genre was one of the more original products of the Renaissance; there had been relatively little of it in antiquity and even less in the Middle Ages. The Confessions of St Augustine provided the example of an inward autobiography - the story of the author's search for God - but no imitator was able to approach its level of introspection until Petrarch's Letter to posterity and Secretum. Dante's Vita nuova - and the Comedy - are intensely autobiographical but are not autobiographies. The roots of the secular autobiography are to be found in the books of ricordanze (memoranda) kept by Italian professional and business men from the late 13th century. From bare accounts of land purchases and marriage settlements, these personal notebooks could develop into family histories which might also contain soul-searching and self examinations, like those of the early 15th century Florentine merchants Goro Dati and Giovanni Morelli, or the Zibaldone quaresimale of Giovanni Rucellai (1457-85). Records of business ventures and public offices were the starting point for autobiographies of external action: while the Cronica of Jacopo Salviati is a fairly wooden account of captaincies and embassies 1398-1411, that of Buonaccorso Pitti is a lively narrative of fortunes won and lost through trading and gambling (written 1412-22). The Commentaries of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II) similarly concentrate on events, leaving the character of the author to be deduced from his actions. The supreme example of the (apparently) unconsciously revealing autobiography is the famous Life of Cellini: of the deliberately revealing one, that of Cardano. in 1841.