John Trumbull's sweeping historical paintings of battle scenes of the American Revolution hang in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., for all to see. This patriot-artist painted lifelike portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and he traveled around the country to capture realistic likenesses of the other Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Pore over the landmark work left by this brilliant artist and become acquainted with a man who, despite great adversity, was determined to portray in lush detail the first stirrings of the nation that would become America. The inscription on John Trumbull's memorial fittingly reads: "To his country he gave his sword and pencil."

"John Trumbull's paintings of the key events of the revolutionary war are among the most familiar and revered images in American art. In 1832 Trumbull gave to Yale College his most important history paintings and portraits. This gift established the Yale University Art Gallery, making it the first college art museum in the Western hemisphere. In celebration of this event, the Gallery has mounted the first major exhibition of Trumbull's work. The fully illustrated catalogue that accompanies the exhibition opens with a biography of Trumbull as a history painter, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque on the artist's conflicting attitudes toward portrait painting, Patricia Mullan Burnham on the religious subjects, Bryon Wolf on the landscapes, Martin Price on the literary themes, and Egon Verheyen on the Capitol Rotunda commissions. The essays are followed by extensive catalogue entries on 170 paintings and drawings"--Publisher's description.

John Trumbull, the colonial American satiric poet, is one of the most readable, and certainly one of the most amusing, of our early men of letters. His poems, with all their wit and bite, bring back to life again the days of the Revolutionary War—powdered wigs, flirting belles, political quarrels, town meetings, brawling mobs, inept generals, flaming national purpose, and all. And if the colonial period seems a long way back in time, his satiric poem on the Progress of Dulness in education will show that time—or at least time in the colleges—has not moved so fast after all. Trumbull's two long poems, so important to the beginnings of America's national poetry and to an understanding of America's literary heritage, were out of print for a number of years and had, in fact, never before been accurately reprinted from the original versions. Here they are available, complete with the original biting prefaces, in a dependable text for the scholar, annotated for the general reader interested in the literature and history of the American eighteenth century. The annotation is inclusive but kept to a minimum.