There is no record of what Harvey might have died from. A little over a year before her death, she and Trumbull were visiting his relatives when his nephew records that he had never seen Harvey look so bad. Harvey’s notice of death in The Evening Post newspaper based in New York reads on Monday, April 12, 1824, “DIED- This morning in the humble hope of a happy immortality, through the merits of the Blessed Redeemer, Sarah Trumbull, the wife of Trumbull, in the fifty-first year of her age. ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors.’ The friends of the family are requested to attend the funeral, from No.27 Park Place, at five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.” In a painting of Harvey that was present for the service Trumbull unobtrusively tucked a small slip of paper. On it, the paper said, “O how much sweeter most beloved wife to remember your excellence than to mingle with others.” Curiously, Trumbull felt so strongly that her remains should not be disturbed by the inevitable growth of New York City that he specified that she was to be buried not the traditional six feet underground but a generous twelve feet underground, instead. Harvey’s body would be moved twice more by Trumbull’s wishes for their final burial space.
She is interred next to Trumbull who died two decades later. They are both laid to rest at Yale in the museum bearing her husband’s name. Completed in 1832, ten years after Harvey’s death and a decade before his own, the museum served as a lasting tribute to both his art and his personal devotion to his beloved wife, a public memorial for his personal portraiture.
ALFRED HALL, TRUMBULL GALLERY, YALE COLLEGE, 1840, UNITED STATES.
TRUMBULL GALLERY OF PAINTINGS-YALE COLLEGE, YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, UNITED STATES.
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, COL. JOHN TRUMBULL AND SARAH TRUMBULL RESTING PLACE.
The last painting of Trumbull was a miniature portrait painted in watercolor in 1840 by the female artist, Anne Hall. He was 84 years old at the time and lived in New York. Nineteen years after Harvey’s death, Trumbull died at the advanced age of 87, on November 20, 1843. He had been living in New York to be closer to his doctors. His body was transported the next day to New Haven, Connecticut, to the house of Trumbull’s good friend and relative, Professor Silliman of Yale.
ANNE HALL, JOHN TRUMBULL, 1840, UNITED STATES.
In Trumbull’s will he stipulated that he would be buried under the feet of his most famous Washington portrait, “George Washington Before the Battle of Trenton” Yale complied, even if it meant that twice the bodies of Trumbull and Harvey would need to be exhumed and reinterred as renovations of the original museum were completed.
Trumbull’s funeral was a respectful and well-attended event in New Haven. One of the nicest tributes to Trumbull was from Mr. Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code, to the Council of the National Academy of Design, who wrote, “Colonel Trumbull’s will, courage, independence, self-reliance and enterprise are fully apparent…; something more is necessary to complete our idea of him as a man. While Colonel Trumbull was sensitive, proud, of perfect integrity, it must be also admitted that he was of an excitable and even passionate temperament, which often rendered him arbitrary and dictatorial in certain public relations. Never, however, was he uncourteous or unforgiving with anybody…Of superior intelligence, wide experience, noble in aspiration, conscientious, he would defer only to those whom he knew to surpass him in these qualities.”
When Trumbull died in 1843, The New York Historical Society which Trumbull had been a member and served as Vice President, released this statement on the Trumbull family, “There has always a hung a mystery over this marriage, and the family of the lady, which perhaps the yet unopened papers of Colonel Trumbull may solve. The late Governor de Witt Clinton once told us that he believed she was the natural daughter of Lord Thurlow. But no matter; and it is probably enough to say that she died in this city in the year 1824; and never was a wife more sincerely or deeply mourned by her husband than she was, down to the last week of his life, by her surviving partner.
In his will, Trumbull stipulated that Mrs. Frederick Bull, his brother David’s granddaughter, be given “the portrait of my wife dressed in black, and a lace cap, which has hung in my bedroom.” This is the same painting that today hangs in Bayou Bend, a division of Museum Fine Arts Houston, displayed for the public to make their conclusions on the life of a woman who died over two hundred years ago.
The Evening Post Newspaper. Monday, April 12, 1824. New York New York. Pg. 2.
Brookhiser, Richard. Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution.
Sizer, Theodore. “The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull, Patriot-Artist.”.
Yale University Art Gallery. The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775. Anne Hall. “John Trumbull.”
