Glorious Morning: A Revolution Revealed

“Glorious Morning: A Revolution Revealed”

Director’s Statement

In order for an image to work, it has to speak to us. Every image has its own voice, distinct and singular.

The voice of an image must draw you in and ask you to pause, letting both ears and eyes consider it. I would say that this is as much true of an image created by Jackson Pollock as it is of an image created by John Trumbull. Whether it is with the calculated drip of paint on canvas or the haphazard splash of blood on a man’s chest, each message is different, and, of course, we who are alive to hear the voices of these works of art must always position our minds to context to receive the messages. Some images speak clearly and some more cryptically. Photography, the ultimate image machine, is very capable of this duality. But there was no photography when we declared our independence. Duality could only be suggested through skill of the hand. 

When we speak of the American Rebellion, we were given many images prior to the start of hostilities, and each image possessed a voice that was increasingly urgent. Images seething with discontent. Just look at John Singleton Copley’s portrait of the formidable Mercy Otis Warren from 1763. Painted ten years before the Boston Massacre. Look at what Copley captures. Isn’t it clear that the smart, perceptive, and insistent Mrs. Warren knew exactly what was coming down the pike?

It was to be war, and she knew it, and her cut-through-the-ice sideways glance demanded our preparedness for battle. Copley got everything right with Mrs. Warren.

As the Rebellion begins in earnest, Copley skips town… actually, skips country. Never to return. He remains an American, in the depths where it counts. We have evidence both hard and soft of that. But now safely in London, Copley would act more English than the English. His young son, shown fleeing from the bloodshed enveloping him and his mother in Copley’s painting “The Death of Major Peirson” would, as an adult, be ennobled.

The robe of artistic state is then handed to the painter Charles Willson Peale, who reminds us where the seat of power is most acutely perceived to be, both in geography, Philadelphia, and in person, George Washington, as American and English blood starts flowing. Peale paints at Valley Forge. He paints the miniature medallion images of men whom he knew were then fighting an inglorious battle…trying not to die of the cold, of hunger, of disease.

Despite the way they placidly gaze out at us, they waited out the cruel winter of 1778 with their Commander in Chief, as frozen bodies littered the encampment. But when these Valley Forge images spoke, they spoke of something else…they spoke to parents, sweethearts, and wives, and all with the same message: “I’ll be coming home.” Peale saw what he saw, but painted something different, because that was his job. Peale knew what he knew: that 25% of the men Washington started out with during that brutal winter would, in fact, never be coming home. Despite that, Peale paints what he paints. These men are alive, and their slight smiles betray that they believe themselves to be indominable. Valley Forge, at once the lowest and the highest point in our Rebellion. Peale, the quirky and satisfying master of the American baroque image…all chiaroscuro and suggestive, but frequently with a hint of the smile of reason on the lips of the souls he captured living through the process of rebellion. 

That rebellion comes to an end in September 1783, and only then does our Revolution begin…as anyone who has read The Federalist Papers can attest. Unlike the French with their accessible images of the birth of a new France…whether the storming of the Bastille or a French queen stripped of her false teeth on the way to have the head cut off where those dentures had once resided…we had nothing to compare visually with this crazy French revolutionary vitality. Our progress toward the definitive statement of the rights of man was slower, more deliberate, ineffable.

And so the mantle of the state of American art now gets passed to John Trumbull. And he builds us the great depictions of battle, the surrender of the British, and provides us with the most important image of all…the image of Washington abandoning his grip on absolute power by handing over a piece of paper saying just that, at noon on December 23, 1783, in Annapolis. John Trumbull painted the most powerful image in American art, and an image with a quiet voice belying the explosive force of the occasion, for the occasion was the very moment of the birth of American democracy.

We now move into Revolution and into the era of the great federalist himself, the true father of not only our nation but of the practical implementation of the concept of democracy. And again there is no space for a vacuum, for events now demand an outpouring of American imagery, and Gilbert Stewart returns to America in 1794 after 19 years of avoiding the inconvenience of the Rebellion.

He, like Copley, had bailed out before things had gotten a little too hot in America. Stuart had established himself as a dazzling talent in portraiture, first in London and then in Dublin. Being hounded continually by his creditors and realizing that John Trumbull had left New York City for Philadelphia, Stuart decided he would stake out his claim in what had been our first capital. With his escape, the crown of American painting would transfer yet again. With Stuart’s painting of the underappreciated founder John Jay, done in New York in 1794, no one would have a doubt who that crown now rightly belonged to.

Gilbert Stuart, a man who in temperament and in business practice could not be trusted with a dollar, would become the supreme master of the voices of the Revolution, capturing faces clearly now American, people filled with both the knowledge and the certainty that something was being created out of nothing every day of the week.

Take a dollar bill out of your wallet. Look at the face of Washington. It is the message Gilbert Stuart left us. The painter who couldn’t be trusted with a dollar gave us, with the face of George Washington, our most enduring symbol of trust.

In 1794, Washington was now into his second term. Stuart painted Washington more than a hundred times. The man Stuart shows us is the Washington of the steely gaze, the puffed and swollen lower jaw. Stuart presents us the man who is the voice of both rectitude and implacable will. Washington also becomes the image of revolution, American style. No heads are going to roll under Washington, rather, what will roll out, under the great man’s guidance, is the road map to the destination of human freedom. Washington the enslaver and Washington the transformative genius of a new world order…a duality of meaning leaps up once again through the means of imagery.

The cottage industry of Washington paintings created by Stuart marked the beginning of mass-produced consumerist manipulation through imagery, a concept that John Berger wrote so eloquently about in his monumental TV series “Ways of Seeing.”

And quietly behind the scenes, as these sequential transfers of artistic leadership made their way through our blazing formative years, was yet another American, Benjamin West.

The painter who had left Pennsylvania to settle in London well before everything started to unravel between Great Britain and its most troublesome investment. The American painter who was the best friend of our worst enemy…the English king who we would have hung by the neck if we had caught up with him. 

All four of these painters knew West; all had sat at his dining room table in London, sponging meals off him. All had studied with him directly, or obliquely, painting in clouds or wings on cherubs in the backgrounds of West’s gargantuan works, each painter in his own way rightly becoming one of his disciples, and all of them learning a singular thing from West: that a painting should have a voice. A voice discreet, a voice thundering with significance, a voice of such sublime wisdom that its importance is timeless. 

The images of the painters of rebellion and revolution in this film are speaking to us. If we cannot now hear or understand what they say, 250 or more years after the fact, if we cannot relate to the force of will conveyed in the faces, in the actions, it may be that the visible bravery, distinction, and strength found in these portraits makes us uncomfortable. We may avert our eyes, hoping that the solutions to the current threats to our democracy lie elsewhere, beyond the voices and the faces of these women and men who died so long ago. They do not.

– Michael Maglaras, October 15, 2026