The Face of Peter Muhlenberg

The anonymous portrait at Muhlenberg College.

The portrait now thought to be the original by John Trumbull.

​What did Peter Muhlenberg look like? The celebrated "fighting parson" has been depicted in stained glass, marble, bronze, and oil. The most frequently-seen image of the general is the oil-on-canvas portrait in the collection of the Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The gallery, however, identifies this portrait as the work of an unknown artist, created on an unknown date “circa 1800-1900.” Judging purely from that date range, there is a good chance that this familiar portrait was not made from life. Muhlenberg died in 1807.

It appears, in fact, to be a copy of another portrait made by the noted founding era portrait artist John Trumbull. Or, possibly, it is the other way around. As with many portraits of Revolutionary War figures, Muhlenberg appears in both paintings in uniform but as an older man. This is a good indicator that whichever one is the original was painted from life. Former officers often sat for portraits later in life but wished to be depicted in uniform. An artist painting an imagined portrait would probably not have paired the older Muhlenberg's face with the younger man's uniform. Muhlenberg was just twenty-nine years old when he was given his colonelcy and took command of the 8th Virginia. He was promoted to general in 1777 and breveted a major general when the army disbanded in 1783. By then he was thirty-seven. The man in the Trumbull portrait and its copy appears to be in his late forties or fifties. Muhlenberg died on his sixty-first birthday in 1807. He wears two stars on his epaulets to indicate he is a major general, a practice begun during the war in 1780.

​The second-most commonly-seen image is probably the statue that stands in the United States Capitol, one of two statues representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This statue, which was created in 1889 by Blanche Nevin, hardly resembles the Trumbull and Martin Gallery portraits. It depicts Muhlenberg as the new colonel of the 8th Virginia Regiment, removing his pastor’s robe to reveal a military uniform. It appears to be a Continental Army uniform, which would be incorrect--the 8th Virginia was a Provincial Virginia regiment for the first several months of its existence. He may, in fact, have worn the same hunting shirt that his junior officers and enlisted men wore. This statue is the prototype for countless other images of Muhlenberg as a dashing young pastor surprising his congregation by revealing a uniform under his cloak. Neither his commission nor his uniform were in fact a surprise, though there is no reason to doubt the sermon.

Directly upstairs from that statue, in the Capitol rotunda, there is another image of Muhlenberg which may be the most reliable depiction of him as a soldier. It is a partially-obscured side image of the general in Trumbull’s grand depiction of The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. According to the Architect of the Capitol, Trumbull created this giant painting “between 1819 and 1820, basing it upon a small painting … that he had first envisioned in 1785….  In 1787 he made preliminary drawings for the small painting. Although he struggled for a time with the arrangement of the figures, he had settled upon a composition by 1788.”

​“To create portraits from life of the people depicted in this and other paintings," the Capitol architect's website says, "Trumbull traveled extensively. He obtained sittings with numerous individuals in Paris (including French officers at Thomas Jefferson’s house) and in New York. In 1791 he was at Yorktown and sketched the site of the British surrender. He continued to work on the small painting during the following years but did not [immediately] complete it; nevertheless, in January 1817 he showed it and other works in Washington, D.C., and was given a commission to create four monumental history paintings for the Capitol. Surrender of Lord Cornwallis was the second of these large paintings that he completed. He exhibited it in New York City, Boston, and Baltimore before delivering it to the United States Capitol in late 1820. He completed the small painting around 1828; it is now part of the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.”

The 1889 statue by Blanche Nevin in the U.S. Capitol.

Trumbull worked hard to make his depiction of the people in his history paintings as accurate as possible. He wrote that “to transmit to their descendants, the personal resemblance of those who have been the great actors in those illustrious scenes” was one of the goals of his patriotic painting. A war veteran from a prominent Connecticut family, Trumbull knew many of his subjects personally.

This detail from John Trumbull's "Surrender of Lord Cornwallis" shows the partially obscured face of Peter Muhlenberg between Edward Hand (on his right) and Henry Knox (on his left). All three were brigadier generals in 1781.

If he even needed a sitting, Muhlenberg would not have been a hard man for Trumbull to find. The retired general served in Congress and as vice president and de-facto governor of Pennsylvania during the earlier years of Trumbull’s project. In the Yorktown painting, Muhlenberg stands between Henry Knox and Edward Hand. All of them were in their thirties in 1781 and appear so under Trumbull's brush.

Though Trumbull’s images should be considered the most reliable, it is worth taking a moment to compare the Yorktown side-image to the three-quarters view portrait. They are quite similar. In both depictions he has a long nose, slightly angled eyes, and jowly cheeks. The portrait, presumably commissioned specifically to record his image for posterity, is more flattering. The Yorktown image was painted after Muhlenberg's death and for a different purpose, and perhaps that shows.

(Updated 9/17/21)

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