Still more national importance attaches to JOHN TRUMBULL (1756--1843), since he was an historic as well as a portrait-painter, took part in person as an officer in the American army in many of the events of the Revolution, and was intimately acquainted with most of the heroes of his battle scenes. America enjoys in this respect an advantage of which no other country can boast--that of having possessed an artist contemporaneous with the most important epoch in its history, and capable and willing to depict the scenes enacted around him. Colonel Trumbull, the son of Jonathan Trumbull, the Colonial Governor of Connecticut, studied at Harvard, and gave early evidences of a taste for art. At the age of nineteen he joined the American army, but in 1780, aggrieved at a fancied slight, he threw up his commission and went to France, and thence to London, where he studied under West. Trumbull must not be judged as an artist by his large paintings in the Capitol at Washington, the commission for which he did not receive until 1817. To know him one must study him in his smaller works and sketches, now gathered in the gallery of Yale College, where may be seen his _Death of Montgomery_, _Battle of Bunker Hill_, _Declaration of Independence_, and other revolutionary scenes, together with a series of admirable miniature portraits in oil, painted from life, as materials for his historic works, and a number of larger portraits, including a full-length of _Washington_. As a portrait-painter, Trumbull is also represented at his best by the full-length of _Alexander Hamilton_, at the rooms of the New York Chamber of Commerce. The most successful of his large historic pieces, _The Sortie from Gibraltar_, painted in London, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Goethe, who saw the small painting of _The Battle of Bunker Hill_ while it was in the hands of Mueller, the engraver, commended it, but criticized its colour and the smallness of the heads. It is true that Trumbull's drawing is somewhat conventional, and that he had a liking for long figures. But his colour, as seen to-day in his good earlier pictures, is quite brilliant and harmonious, although thoroughly realistic. In his later work, however, as shown by the Scripture pieces likewise preserved in the Yale Gallery, there is a marked decadence in vigour of drawing as well as of colour. Owing to an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, Trumbull has not received the full appreciation which is his due, even from his own countrymen. Thackeray readily recognised his merit, and cautioned the Americans never to despise or neglect Trumbull--a piece of advice which is only now beginning to attract the attention it deserves.