![]() ![]() He gave Trumbull, who was living in London at the time, the lowdown of what happened on June 28 and who should be included. The idea for the commemorative painting was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson, who was hosting Trumbull exactly a decade after the signing in Paris, where the Virginian was serving as a representative of the United States. (A full list of who’s in the painting can be found on the department’s website.) “ excluded those for whom no authoritative image could be found or created, and he included delegates who were not in attendance at the time of the event,” according to the Architect of the Capitol. When he couldn’t paint someone in real life, he drew upon other portraits. And that’s no coincidence: Trumbull had painted many of the delegates from life Jefferson sat for him in Paris, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were painted in London, and others were captured on a travel-sized canvas that Trumbull toted up and down the Eastern seaboard from Boston to South Carolina via carriage. That said, the people who are depicted look pretty much the way they should, according to McCullough. Most notably, the display of military trophies that decorates the back wall was entirely Trumbull’s own embellishment, as he himself said. The delegates sit in fine mahogany armchairs, not the plain Windsor chairs actually provided. Heavy draperies hang at the windows instead of Venetian blinds. The doors in the room are in the wrong place and the whole room has been made to look more elegant than it was. ![]() There are 47 portraits in the version that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda (though 56 men actually signed the Declaration), and the committee is shown presenting the declaration to John Hancock, who was the president of the Continental Congress. While the committee that presented the draft of the Declaration had only five members - John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The date Trumbull’s painting does depict is June 28, when a draft of the Declaration of Independence was ready for review. So, what actually happened on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia was a much more low-key gathering, and most of the signatories didn’t put their names on the document until Aug. On July 4, 1776, the document we know as the Declaration of Independence was sent to the printer, which is why that date appears on it. Two days earlier - on JCongress had approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution stating why the Founding Fathers were declaring independence from Britain. One major issue is the matter of when the Declaration of Independence was actually signed. ![]()
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