The Religious Paintings of John Trumbull: An Angol-American Experiment

Protestantism in 18th-century English-speaking America was generally hostile to images. The extension of the religious impulse from written word to painted canvas at the beginning of the 19th century was therefore of great significance. John Trumbull (1756-1843) was one of the first American-born artists to break with the past and produce a large corpus of religious paintings. This dissertation is an examination of connoisseurship, stylistic, and iconographic aspects of Trumbull's religious works. The English milieu in which he worked for so many years provides the background for the study. The Introduction establishes the parameters of the study and states the thesis, that Trumbull was a conduit for the transmission of western religious art to America. The first chapter summarizes Trumbull's life and his religious attitudes. The second chapter provides an overview of English religious painting in the eighteenth century. Chapter 3 considers the works of Trumbull's initial years in England. Chapter 4 concentrates on his use of family imagery in the years following 1800, revealing affinities with Reynolds and West and the changing sociology of the family in England. A discussion of two monumental religious canvases dating from Trumbull's final English sojourn constitutes Chapter 5. Chapter 6, devoted to Trumbull's twenty-one year career in New York City after 1815, features a survey of American religious art in the 1820s. Chapter 7 describes Trumbull's last religious paintings and his final days. The conclusion summarizes Trumbull's achievement and refutes the generally held view that American art was exclusive to Roman Catholics, Moravians and other sub-groups. Trumbull's career demonstrates that "high art" using religious subject matter was also created by members of mainstream Protestant denominations. Trumbull enlarged the repertoire of subject matter in America, and enriched Protestant iconography by appropriating subjects previously associated with Roman Catholicism. Even before the death of Trumbull, the locus of American religious art had already shifted from Scripture to nature: the wilderness itself had become "a fitting place to speak of God."