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Young Trumbull was led to continue to paint by his sisters Faith and Mary, who went to Boston to school. This was the Copley age of art in Boston. You may see Copley’s pictures at the Art Museum, Boston, and among them the almost living portrait of Samuel Adams. When these girls returned from visits to Boston, Mary began to paint inspiring pictures and to adorn the rooms with them.

She and her brother studied the lives and works of the old masters. How? We do not know, but genius makes a way.

A thrifty farmer and merchant was Col. Jonathan Trumbull in his young days. You laugh at these old-fashioned men, but look at what this man, who could discuss Homer and Horace with his boys, and the arts of Greece with his girls, accomplished through the good judgment and private thrift in his early life. Says his principal biographer, G. W. Stuart, of the fine young farmer, who had ships on the sea, and was beginning to turn from a farmer to a notable merchant:

“So the first years of Trumbull’s life as a merchant passed in successful commerce abroad, in profitable trade at home, and with high reputation in all his contacts, negotiations, and adventures. And ‘his corn and riches did increase.’ A house and home-estate worth over four thousand pounds; furniture, and a library, worth six hundred pounds; a valuable store adjacent to the dwelling; a store, wharf, and land at East Haddam; a lot and warehouse at Chelsea in Norwich; a valuable grist-mill near his family seat at Lebanon; ‘a large, convenient malt-house;’ several productive farms in his neighborhood, carefully tilled, and beautifully spotted with rich acres of woodland; extensive ownership, too, in the ‘Five-mile Propriety,’ as it was called, in Lebanon, in whose management as committeeman, and representative at courts, and moderator at meetings of owners, Trumbull had much to do; a stock of domestic animals worth a hundred and thirty pounds—these possessions, together with a well-secured indebtedness to himself, in bonds, and notes, and mortgages, resulting from his mercantile transactions, of about eight thousand pounds, rewarded, at the close of the year 1763, the toil of Trumbull in the field of trade and commerce. In all it was a property of not less than eighteen thousand pounds—truly a large one for the day—but one destined, by reverses in trade which the times subsequently rendered inevitable, and by the patriotic generosity of its owner during the great Revolutionary struggle, to slip, in large part, from his grasp.”