Sandow Birk on John Trumbull

John Trumbull, Surrender of General Burgoyne, 1822, Oil painting, 12 ft × 18 ft, Currently at the U.S.Capitol Rotunda

In my early 20’s, when I decided I wanted to become a painter, the 19th-century American artist John Trumbull became an unlikely inspiration for me.  As I saw him at the time, Trumbull, especially in his younger years, was not so much an inherently gifted, masterful artist as one who tried his best, worked hard, and struggled with his place in the world.

In the early 1980s, I did a year of art school in Paris at the American College and at the Bath Academy of Art in England. So many of the paintings I saw and studied in the Louvre and National Gallery were awe-inspiring in size and scope, and meticulous in craft and skill. Think of David’s enormous Napoleon Crowning Josephine: vast in scale, precise in every detail, each fabric and jewel rendered with a few flicks of the brush, the composition orchestrated like a movie scene.

Those masterful and grandiose paintings made me want to be a painter; they made painting itself seem important in a way I hadn’t realized it could be. But, on the other hand, they made me not want to even try to paint, because the scale of those works, the artists’ skill and technique were just so humbling and discouraging.

Then I found John Trumbull – a stumbling American colonial painter who was also in awe of the great European painters. He was coming from a nation new to the European stage, one that wanted to be taken seriously, to be seen, not as a colony, but as a country with an important aesthetic and history of its own.

Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Oil on canvas, 12′ 10″ x 16′ 3″, Musée du Louvre, Paris

John Trumbull strived hard to paint as best he could, to render his own times and landscapes with mythic import. He made that sort of work seem possible too, not only to those early settlers but to me, starting my own explorations in painting. Initially, Trumbull’s painting was labored and wooden, rather than elegant and theatrical like in Delacroix’s The Death of Sardana. His compositions were stiff and had a self-awareness to them, as opposed to the flowing movement of figures and forms in Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. But to me, a young artist learning the building blocks of painting, that was part of their charm and allure. His themes were admirable and historical, his ideals lofty. Think of his paintings The Surrender of Cornwallis or The Signing of the Declaration of Independence (which now adorns the back of the $2 bill). They are wooden, stiff, posed, but each face is a portrait of an important person in American history and each moment a turning point for the country. No small task!

Jean Louise Theodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, Oil painting, 16′ 1″ x 23′ 6″, Musée de Louvre, Paris

These were meaningful moments and Trumbull’s works became more and more meaningful as he addressed each event—paintings that have since been incorporated into the American lexicon.  He succeeded in elevating the American experiment in the eyes of its own citizens. (That said, it should be noted that citizenship in Trumbull’s time was only extended to free white men and representations of the heroic in his work reflect that.)  

While Trumbull’s neoclassical techniques and celebratory aspirations might seem outdated in today’s art world, they were even more so in the late ‘80s early ‘90s when I was struggling to find my own footing in my studio, and when most of the art world had declared that painting is dead.  I found, in Trumbull’s work, an inspiration and an affirmation that maybe I could become an artist as well. Maybe the events of my own city, my own times were meaningful, too, and there could be value in capturing them through the mythologizing platform of painting. 

Sandow Birk, The Surrender of O.J. Simpson, 1994, Oil on Canvas, 43 x 54 inches, Private Collection

Los Angeles artist Sandow Birk’s work deals with contemporary life, including inner city violence, graffiti, surfing, skateboarding, prisons, Dante, and war. He is the recipient of many awards and has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad.