Most Americans have seen the image at some point: 47 figures gathered in a Philadelphia room, poised at the moment the Declaration of Independence was presented to Congress. It is one of the most recognizable paintings in American history. What is less well known is that the original has been in New Haven for nearly 200 years.
New Haven was founded in 1638, 138 years before the Declaration of Independence was written, and by the time the Revolution came, the city was not a bystander. Roger Sherman, a New Haven merchant and lawyer, traveled to Philadelphia as Connecticut’s delegate and made history in the process. He is the only person to have signed all four of America’s founding documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution. His name is on the paperwork of a nation.
The artist John Trumbull, a Connecticut native and Revolutionary War veteran, believed it was his duty to ensure future generations could visualize the founding moment, not just read about it. In 1786, he traveled to Paris to meet Thomas Jefferson, then serving as U.S. Minister to France, and together they composed the scene. Trumbull spent over three decades completing the work, traveling the country to paint the delegates’ faces from life wherever he could find them. The result is as much document as painting: 47 figures, Sherman among them, captured at the moment thirteen colonies became a nation.
A larger version of the painting, measuring 12 feet by 18 feet, was later commissioned for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, where it hangs today and appears on the back of every two-dollar bill. Trumbull’s original, smaller work was donated to Yale University in 1832, founding what is now the Yale University Art Gallery, the first college art museum in the United States.
The painting is not the only connection New Haven has to that history. A few blocks from the Art Gallery, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds one of only 26 known surviving copies of the Dunlap Broadside, the first printed version of the Declaration of Independence, distributed across the thirteen states on the night of July 4, 1776, so communities could hear the news read aloud. The Broadside is on view now as part of the Beinecke’s America250 programming, free and open to the public through September 27.
Just north of the Beinecke, at Grove Street Cemetery, Roger Sherman is buried, a few blocks from the broadside that announced the nation he helped build and the painting that preserved him for history.
New Haven has quietly and proudly been a part of our Nation’s story for 250 years.
