Art: A forgotten painter of military history

William T. Trego's life and career unfold first as inspiration, then as tragedy, which makes the exhibition of his art at the James A. Michener Art Museum alternately fascinating and sad.

Until 2008, when a historical marker was dedicated at the house in North Wales where he lived his last 19 years, Trego (TREE-go), a native of Yardley, was a painter lost to history.

Now, through "So Bravely and So Well," his art has been recovered as well.

Trego was a remarkable person who, as the show and its accompanying book by guest curator Joseph P. Eckhardt reveal, was victimized by fate several times. Ultimately the reverses in his life and career drove him to suicide in June 1909, a few months short of his 51st birthday.

He left behind an impressive body of art in his chosen specialty, military history. He did so despite the fact that weak arms and near-total paralysis in his hands, possibly caused by childhood polio, should have precluded a career that demanded manual dexterity.

He became a painter because his artist father recognized his inherent talent early, and not only encouraged his son but also taught him rigorously. As a result, Trego became an admirably accomplished draftsman.

The exhibition's evidence for his skill is abundant. Knowing that Trego had only limited movement in his left thumb and forefinger, which he used to place his brushes and drawing materials into his frozen, clawlike right hand, one can hardly believe his ability to render detail with verisimilitude and motion with conviction.

That's the first and most engaging aspect of Trego's story. The second is the arc of his career. He began by studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, although apparently he didn't enjoy it, once complaining about the master's "sarcasm and neglect."

An extreme aesthetic conservative, he worked in a way that Renaissance masters would have recognized, making preliminary drawings, then oil studies for parts of larger compositions.

Born in 1858, he was a young child during the Civil War, so his only experience of combat was vicarious. Yet he chose to become a history painter, and became a master at depicting military action, particularly cavalry charges and battles.

This is probably because even though he couldn't ride, he loved horses. His father, Jonathan, was a superb renderer of equine anatomy, as several small paintings by him at the beginning of the exhibition indicate.

William would equal or even surpass his father in painting horses, standing still, galloping, rearing up in terror. Throughout his career his animals are consistently magnificent. Through facial contortions, they even seem to convey emotion and what might be perceived as character.

Trego's first significant painting wasn't a sturm-und-drang battle scene, however, but a somber tableau of George Washington and his troops marching to Valley Forge through a snowfall. This large multifigure composition has become perhaps the most familiar of Trego's images, even though atypical.

Beginning with Valley Forge, Trego's career peaked in the 1880s, a decade when, ironically, military images were beginning to lose their public appeal.

Beginning in 1884 with The Pursuit, which depicts Union cavalry chasing defeated Confederates after a Virginia battle, Trego produced a group of rousing military scenes, most notable Battery - Halt! of 1885, Battery, Forward of 1887, and The Pell Mell Charge, also of 1887.

By that year, Trego had earned enough from his art to pursue a dream and study in Paris at the Académie Julian. Although he had been living with his parents, in Paris he managed, despite his physical limitations, to live on his own for the first time.

In Paris his career peaked; he showed paintings about the Franco-Prussian War in the prestigious Salons of 1889 and 1890. The 1889 submission, in the Michener exhibition, is The Color Guard, in which Trego portrayed his mustachioed self leading a charge of French dragoons.

This image, perhaps, represents pure wish-fulfillment - a frail, disabled artist imagining himself astride a white charger directing a heroic military maneuver. It's a stirring image, if not a novel one.

So much for apogees. On the voyage home to Philadelphia in the summer of 1890, Trego suffered a personal disaster. In Paris he had become engaged to a woman named Leonie Emma Herpin. They arranged to sail home together, along with a Trego friend and fellow artist, James R. Fisher.

During the voyage, as Eckhardt delicately puts it, Herpin "transferred her affections" to Fisher. Trego was devastated to the point where, as Eckhardt relates, both crew and passengers watched him closely lest he jump overboard.

(Fisher and Herpin married in 1891; she would become the maternal grandmother of Marguerite Lenfest, one of the exhibition's benefactors.)

While recovering from that blow, Trego tried to become a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy. Despite the fact that the institution had supported him in the past, he was rebuffed. Eckhardt suggests that Trego's ideas about art were too conservative even for this traditional school.

He also hoped to revive his career as a military painter, but enthusiasm for that genre had faded. So he tried painting portraits and genre subjects such as Hannah's at the Window Binding Shoes, landscapes (Winter Hills Above Sellersville), religious subjects (Madonna and Child), and portraits - a likeness of his father from 1893 attests to his skill in that department.

He took on advertising commissions, illustrating jobs, and even students - anything to make a dollar, but inevitably the dollars didn't flow in sufficient quantity.

Just before the turn of the century, a final burst of energy and inspiration produced one of his finest works, a depiction of a Civil War battle involving the 104th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Fair Oaks, Va., in 1862. It was commissioned by the Bucks County Historical Society, whose president, Gen. William W.H. Davis, had led the 104th at Fair Oaks as a colonel.

The Rescue of the Colors captures a dramatic moment in the battle when the regimental flag was saved from the advancing enemy by a heroic soldier, Hiram Pursell. Trego interviewed Davis and Pursell to re-create the action as accurately as possible. He was a stickler for precision, in uniforms, weapons, and other accoutrements.

Consequently, The Rescue of the Colors is perhaps Trego's most cinematic and evocative painting; it's as moving as this kind of art can be. He expected that reproductions, promoted by a three-city tour, would earn desperately needed cash.

This didn't happen because the Historical Society wouldn't even allow the painting to be shown in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy. Final hopes for a renaissance dashed, Trego scuffled through another decade of despair before ending his life.

A century later, we can certainly admire him for his courage, determination, and perseverance against formidable odds. We can even find merit in his art, despite its valorization of military vainglory.

"So Bravely and So Well" continues at the James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, through Oct. 2. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 to 5 Saturdays and noon to 5 Sundays. Admission is $12.50 general, $11.50 for seniors, $9.50 for college students with valid ID, and $6 for visitors 6 through 18. 215-340-9800 or www.michenerartmuseum.org.

The accompanying book by Joseph P. Eckhardt, published by the museum and distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press, sells for $39.95 ($34.95 for members). The catalogue raisonné is available on the museum website.

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