PAINTERS OF THE REPUBLIC

A MERICA'S pioneer pairiters were not necessarily heroic -- and not always great, but they left a lively and living record of the genuine heroes and great events that led to the Republic's birth 181 years ago this week.

Among the masterpieces of the era is the portrait by Ralph Earl*of Connecticut's Roger Sherman (opposite), once a shoemaker, later a lawyer, and the only founding father to sign four historic documents of American independence: the Association of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution. Earl sat the awkward, clearheaded patriot in a Windsor chair as foursquare and unyielding as himself, threw a harsh, searching light on the stubby workingman's hands, which seem to regret having nothing to do, on the brow square-cut as a headstone, on the weary, wise button eyes, plow nose, sickle mouth, Gibraltar jaw--and painted the face of Conscience. One-eyed John Trumbull, an aristocrat who painted small pictures that could be encompassed with his limited vision, was a Fourth of July painter par excellence. He painted his famed The Declaration of Independence (see overleaf) on a canvas only 30 inches wide, compressed in the scene 48 convincingly grouped portrait figures (at the table before John Hancock stand John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin). Though the subject lacked action. Trumbull conveyed something of its drama and suppressed excitement in the jagged arrangement of the heads and the flaring banners on the wall. Unlike Trumbull's sparing canvas, the fantastic Historical Monument to the American Republic stretches out to an immense 9 by 13 feet. It was painted 100 years after the birth of the nation by a Massachusetts primitive named Erastus Salisbury Field "to get up a brief history of our country in a monumental form." The monumental form seems to combine Babel and Troy with intimations of modern Manhattan--its skyscraping towers connected at the top by railroad bridges. The history, told in statues and bas-reliefs, ranges from the rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas to the imminent assassination of Lincoln by Booth as Washington anachronistically holds up his hand to cry "Halt!"

*-No hero, shiftless, sodden Painter Earl worked for the British until the patriots began to win, then deserted his wife and two children and fled to England, where he subsequently deserted another wife and more children to return to America and drink himself to death.

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