TRUMBULL, JOHN ( 1 7 56-1843 ), American artist, was born at Lebanon (Conn.), on June 6, 1756, the son of Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785), governor of Connecticut. He graduated at Harvard in 1773, served in the War of Independence, rendering a particular service at Boston by sketching plans of the British works, and was appointed second aide-de-camp to Gen. Washing ton and in June 1776, deputy adjutant general to Gen. Gates, but resigned from the army in 1777. In 1780 he went to London to study under Benjamin West, but his work had hardly begun when the news of the arrest and execution of Major Andre, who was deputy adjutant general in the English army, suggested the ar rest of Trumbull as having been an officer of similar rank in the Continental army; he was imprisoned for seven months. In 1784 he was again in London working under West, in whose studio he painted his "Battle of Bunker Hill" and "Death of Montgomery," both of which are in the Yale School of Fine Arts.
In 1785 Trumbull went to Paris, where he made portrait sketches of French officers for "The Surrender of Cornwallis," and began, with the assistance of Jefferson, "The Signing of the Declaration of Independence," well-known from the engraving by Asher B. Durand. These paintings, with "The Surrender of Burgoyne" and "The Resignation of Washington," were bought by the United States Government and placed in the Capitol at Washington. Trumbull's "Sortie from Gibraltar" (1787), owned by the Boston Athenaeum, is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and a series of historical paintings, the "Trumbull Gallery," by far the largest single collection of his works (more than 5o pictures), has been in the possession of Yale college since 1831, when Trumbull received from the college an annuity of $1,000.
His portraits include full lengths of Gen. Washington (1790) and George Clinton (1791), in the City Hall of New York— where there are also full lengths of Hamilton and of Jay; and portraits of John Adams (1797), Jonathan Trumbull, and Rufus King (i800) ; of Timothy Dwight and Stephen Van Rensselaer, both at Yale ; of Alexander Hamilton (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York city, and in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both taken from Ceracchi's bust) ; a portrait of him self 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. Wash ington in the National Museum at Washington. Trum bull's own portrait was painted by Stuart and by many others.
He died in New York on Nov. I o, See his Autobiography (1841) J. F. Weir, John Trumbull, A brief Sketch of His Life, to which is added a Catalogue of his Works (i9oi): and John Durand, "John Trumbull," American Art Review, vol. pt. 2, pp. 181-191 (Boston, 1880.