TRUMBULL, JOHN

born April 24, 1750, Westbury, Conn. died May 11, 1831, Detroit, Michigan Territory American poet and jurist, known for his political satire, and a leader of the Hartford Wits (q.v.). While a student at Yale College (now Yale University), Trumbull wrote two kinds of poetry: correct but undistinguished elegies of the Neoclassical school, and brilliant, comic verse that he circulated among friends. His burlesque Epithalamium (1769) combined wit and scholarship, and his essays in the style of Joseph Addison were published in The Boston Chronicle in 1770. While a tutor at Yale he wrote The Progress of Dulness (177273), an attack on educational methods. He passed the bar examinations in 1773 and moved to Boston. His major work was the comic epic M'Fingal (177682). Despite its pro-Whig bias, its reputation as anti-Tory propaganda has been exaggerated. His literary importance declined after 1782, as he became increasingly interested in law and politics. He first held office in 1789 as a state's attorney and subsequently as a state legislator and a judge until 1819. born June 6, 1756, Lebanon, Conn. died Nov. 10, 1843, New York, N.Y. American painter, architect, and author, whose paintings of major episodes in the U.S. War of Independence form a unique record of that conflict's events and participants. Trumbull was the son of the Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull (a first cousin to John Trumbull the poet). A boyhood injury to his left eye made him virtually monocular, with the consequence that his small-scale work is finer than his large. He attended Harvard College and then taught school. During the American Revolution he served as an aide to General George Washington, achieving the rank of colonel. In 1780 he went to London via France, but, as a reprisal for the hanging by the Americans of the British agent Major John Andr, he was imprisoned there and used the time to study architecture. Released, he returned home but was back in London to study with the painter Benjamin West by 1784. At the suggestion of West and with the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson, Trumbull in about 1784 began the celebrated series of historical paintings and engravings that he was to work on sporadically for the remainder of his life. From 1789 he was in the United States, but he returned to London in 1794 as secretary to John Jay, remaining for 10 years as a commissioner for the implementation of the Jay Treaty. In 1800 he married an Englishwoman, Sarah Hope Harvey, an amateur painter. He lived in the United States from 1804 to 1808, and in 1808 he attempted portrait painting in London but with little success. From 1815 to 1837 he maintained a rather unsuccessful studio in New York City. In 1817 Trumbull was commissioned by the U.S. Congress to paint four large pictures in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington (Washington Resigning His Commission, The Surrender of Cornwallis, The Surrender of Burgoyne, and, best known of all, The Declaration of Independence; series completed in 1824) from the small and far superior originals of these scenes that he had painted in the 1780s and '90s, now in the Yale University Art Gallery. In 1831 Benjamin Silliman, a professor at Yale, established the Trumbull Gallery at Yale, the first art gallery at an educational institution in America. Trumbull gave his best works to this gallery in exchange for an annuity.