Creativity Quote by John Trumbull

A sly warning hides inside that sing-song couplet: the world is full of people selling you invisible things, and you will need “sharp optics” to catch the trick. Trumbull’s phrasing is deliberately old-fashioned (“I ween”) and lightly comic, as if he’s adopting a quaint mask to deliver a modern critique. The rhyme of “ween/seen” is doing more than sounding neat; it tightens the logic into a closed loop, mimicking the circular persuasion of charlatans who promise proof of what can’t be proven.

Trumbull wasn’t just any “artist” in the loose sense. He was a painter of the American Revolution and an architect of national memory. That matters: a person who builds public images for a living knows how easily images can become authority. Read from that angle, “optics” lands as a double entendre. It’s literally about sight, but it’s also about the management of sight: how we’re trained to look, what we’re primed to miss, and how belief can be staged.

The line “to see what is not to be seen” captures a peculiarly American tension of Trumbull’s era: the hunger for revelation (religious, political, speculative) colliding with Enlightenment skepticism. The intent isn’t to mock perception itself; it’s to pressure the audience into humility about it. Trumbull implies that discernment isn’t passive. Vision is a discipline, and without it, we become easy marks for anyone skilled at turning absence into spectacle.