28 May 2011 03:58:56
"This has a nice story. Edison came to the World's Fair in Paris in 1889. That was the fair that introduced the Eiffel Tower to the world. He had some 400 of his inventions on display and was a sensation. The crowds followed him everywhere. The electric light was already transforming Paris, let alone the world. So he hid to get away from the paparazzi and the crowds. He stayed with a friend of his (Anderson), and Anderson painted this portrait of him while he was in the studio."
He points out George Catlin's sketches of American Indians, and a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. George Healy is a special passion. McCullough marvels over Healy's portraits of fiery eyed South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun; a semi-casual Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, coat unbuttoned, hat in hand; a youthful take of Lincoln, painted in Illinois the year before he was elected president; a confident Confederate Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard, straight-backed and arms folded.
"He painted this at the time of the attack on Fort Sumter. It ran only a short while after he had painted Lincoln in Illinois," McCullough says of Healy. "The guy is like Forrest Gump. He keeps showing up wherever history is going on."
The artists he discusses share two vital qualities, McCullough says. They all spent at least some time in Paris and they all are in the same business as he is. They are historians, documenting the people, the customs and the conflicts of a given era.
McCullough believes that artists share the glory of the presidents and military leaders he has celebrated, and he honors the creative spirit in his new book, "The Greater Journey." It's a new telling of a classic American experience — living in Paris — inspired by the most dreary of American experiences, the traffic jam. McCullough was stuck a few years ago in Washington's Sheridan Circle, where he had little better to do than stare at the equestrian statue of the circle's namesake, Union general Philip Sheridan.
