John Trumbull - Middle Years

Middle Years

Trumbull sold a series of 28 paintings and 60 miniature portraits to Yale University in 1831 for an annuity of $1,000. 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.

His portraits include full lengths of General Washington (1790) and George Clinton (1791), in New York City Hall, where there are also full lengths of Alexander Hamilton (1805, and the source of the face on the $10 bill) and John Jay, and portraits of John Adams (1797), Jonathan Trumbull, and Rufus King (1800); of Timothy Dwight and Stephen Van Rensselaer (both at Yale), Alexander Hamilton (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both taken from Ceracchi's bust), a portrait of himself painted in 1833, a full-length of Washington, at Charleston, South Carolina, a full length of Washington in military costume (1792), (now at Yale), and portraits of President and Mrs. Washington (1794), in the National Museum of American History.

Trumbull's own portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart and by many others.

In 1794 Trumbull acted as secretary to John Jay in London during the negotiation of the treaty with Great Britain, and in 1796 he was appointed by the commissioners sent by the two countries the fifth commissioner to carry out the seventh article of the treaty.