Martin Luther by Kemmelmeyer, Frederick

Frederick Kemmelmeyer's "Martin Luther," painted around 1800, is a fascinating object: an early American painter, working in a young republic, reaching back three centuries to depict the German theologian who split Western Christianity.

Kemmelmeyer fills the room with objects that do the explaining. Luther holds an open book, his hands carefully rendered around the text. A heavy Bible lies open on the checkerboard floor. On the desk behind him sit an inkwell and an hourglass, the tools of a life spent writing against time.

And then there is the swan. It rests on the floorboards, white and unmistakable. Luther told the story of Jan Hus, a Czech reformer burned at the stake a century before him, who is said to have declared: "You may roast a goose, but a swan will come after me." Luther believed he was that swan. Placing the bird in the portrait with him is a quiet, personal act of self-definition.

What other details in this painted room would have spoken clearly to a viewer in 1800, that we might miss today?