Anyone who has visited the United States Capitol’s majestic Rotunda—and any viewers of President Trump’s recent indoor inauguration—will likely remember four very large paintings. They are scenes from the American Revolution, twelve feet tall and 18 feet wide, two on either side of the Rotunda’s western portal. Arranged in chronological order, they portray the presentation of the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress by the five-man committee responsible for drafting it; the surrender of the British forces under John Burgoyne at Saratoga (which drew France into an open alliance with America); the surrender, four years later, of the British forces under Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown (which effectively ended the war); and General Washington’s resignation of his commission at Annapolis in December 1783.

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These vast canvases are the work of the Yankee patrician John Trumbull (1756–1843). Though his Declaration of Independence is the definitive image of a pivotal event in world history, and though these paintings are, in thematic and decorative terms, eminently appropriate to their setting, they are not great works of art. What, then, inspired the historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser’s fine new biography, Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution?

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