Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, embraced Trumbull’s use of artistic license; without it, he wrote, “the talent of imagination would be banished from the art.” In fact, as the art historian Paul Stiati has written, the original painting had been Jefferson’s suggestion, which helps to explain why Trumbull made the author of the Declaration stand out, resplendent in a red vest and grasping the document in his hands. At first glance, “Declaration of Independence” seems to celebrate Jefferson as the author of America itself.

But as the historian David McCullough has pointed out, while Jefferson is prominent, it is Adams, the chief advocate of independence in the Continental Congress, who occupies the center of the canvas. Every other founder’s physique is partially obscured, while Adams can be seen in his entirety. Most great paintings give us one focal point, but this one has two.

This is appropriate, because Adams and Jefferson can be seen as the two intellectual poles of the Revolution. Jefferson was an ardent admirer of the Enlightenment and believed that the American founding would “show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs.” Adams also appreciated the power of reason, but like Edmund Burke across the Atlantic, he emphasized the importance of religious and moral tradition in preserving society.

Though Adams and Jefferson were originally close friends, their philosophical and political differences came to the fore when the French Revolution began in 1789. Jefferson praised it as the natural successor to the American Revolution, saying that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”

Adams, in contrast, was shocked by the way that France rejected religious teachings, and he predicted the tyranny to come. “Is there a possibility,” he reflected, “that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father? Is this the way to make man, as man, an object of respect?”

For Adams, only faith provided a moral guarantee for the human equality cherished by the Enlightenment philosophers. While Adams was not an orthodox Christian, he revered his Puritan ancestors and argued that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Jefferson scorned Judaism, which stressed the importance of revelation, while Adams argued that the “Hebrews had done more to civilize man than any other nation,” because Hebraic monotheism was “the foundation of all morality and all civilization.”

The enigma of which founder the painting celebrates reflects Trumbull’s own ambivalence. He had originally found Adams a bore and Jefferson a delight, but as France collapsed into tyranny, he came to see the wisdom of Adams’s perspective. “In Europe I had been on terms of confidence with Mr. Jefferson,” Trumbull reflected in his memoir, but after 1789, “my whole soul revolted from the atrocities of France, while he approved or apologized for all.”

It is therefore fitting that when Adams finally viewed the painting, his misgivings vanished. He “seemed carried back to his prime of manhood, and to the most famous scene of his life, and he gave his warm approval to the picture as a correct representation of the Convention,” in the words of an account by Edmund Quincy, who was present at the scene as a 10-year-old.

Jefferson is celebrated in Trumbull’s painting as the father of the Declaration, and rightly so. It was he who enshrined the concept of equality at the heart of the American idea: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

The Virginian slave-owner who wrote these words lived in violation of them, yet it was he who chose to transform a congressional declaration from a mere airing of grievances against George III into a sublime statement of the rights of man. Jefferson died confident that America would ultimately embrace a religion of pure reason, but it was the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, in the early 19th century, that would spur the abolitionist movement, ultimately bringing about a greater fulfillment of the Declaration’s ideals.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/painting-the-tension-at-americas-founding-moment-11625284860?mod=hp_featst_pos3