Trumbull Called It "One of the Highest Moral Lessons Ever Given the World," As I learned at Yale, On Kings.

[NNadir]

My wife and I took Thursday off from our jobs, to go visit her sister in Massachusetts. On the way up, as it was the Fourth of July marking the founding of our dying country, I proposed we stop at the Yale University of Gallery of Art in New Haven, as I wanted to see the early American paintings, including some the famous Trumbull paintings he donated to the University.

So we went.

One of Trumbull's most famous historical paintings is "General George Washington Resigning His Commission" which hangs in the Capitol Rotunda, where happily it was not smeared with shit by the thugs sent there by the Orange Nightmare on January 6, 2021.

It is this painting:



I am, of course, familiar with this famous "Cincinnatus" painting, but I didn't realize that Trumbull had painted a smaller version, which was among the 100 paintings he donated to Yale. Nor, until seeing it at Yale, did I understand an important - a very important - feature of the painting which escaped me.

The description of the painting beside in part quotes Washington's speech to the Continental Congress at that event:

...Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission and take leave of all the employments of public life...

And here, the description of the painting continues to the part that has always eluded me:

The cloak on the chair behind Washington suggests a king's robes draped on a throne, a royal emblem on which he has turned his back. Trumbull called Washington's voluntary return to the simple life of a farmer, "one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world..."

I've seen that painting hundreds, if not thousands of times, but I missed, as familiar as I am with Washington's actions at the conclusion of the war, including the famous removal of his glasses at the Newburgh address where his soldiers were trying to organize a revolt against Congress, ready to install Washington as a monarch which he rejected telling his men...

"I have grown old in your service..."

"...in your service..."

Here was a leader rejecting his own aggrandizement to teach his followers nothing more than how to be better men dedicated to making a better world.

The contrast with our times is appalling.

This all draws, for me, even deeper, the pain of seeing ignorant, uneducated, venal thugs who are contemptuously destroying the legacy of what had been, until now, a great nation, created by its finest, maintained through centuries by men struggling to greatness, and destroyed cheaply by mindless Philistines unworthy of our history, never mind our present.

It makes me want to weep, and in fact, I did weep, just to think of it.

As an aside, The Yale University Gallery of Art, for as long as it is allowed to remain intact, is a sacred place, even beyond the historical paintings. If you are in the area, I suggest a visit. It's free...a great museum.

(The British Museum at Yale across the street is interesting if depressing, as it has so many portraits of Imperial arrogance, and reflects on how Empires thus commit suicide through unwarranted superciliousness. One of my wife's Professor friends insisted we should go, and we did, but well, if nothing else, it shows how empires smugly fall into irrelevance in a veil of criminality.)