Portrait of George Washington

Object Details

Object Essay

Late in 1795, Charles Willson Peale asked President Washington to sit yet again for his portrait. This time, however, it was on behalf of his seventeen-year-old son, Rembrandt, who had been commissioned by the retiring head of the United States Mint, Henry William DeSaussure of Charleston, to make the likeness. There were three sittings, all on the upper floor of Philosophical Hall where the Peale family and their museum had lately taken up residence.^{1_{For the history of this sitting, see Sellers 1952, 239–41; and Hevner, 32–33. The portrait is also listed in Morgan and Fielding, 42, no. 47.}}

As recounted by Rembrandt Peale, his father set up his own easel beside Rembrandt which “had the effect to calm my nerves.” With his father painting and conversing amiably with Washington, the younger painter was able to observe both the sitter and his father’s work, “affording the double chance for a likeness.” It was Rembrandt’s first portrait of Washington and Charles Willson’s last; they were joined during the second and third sittings by Rembrandt’s Uncle James and brother Raphaelle, both of whom also made portrait studies. His fifteen-year-old brother, Titian Ramsey Peale, was permitted to observe. The spectacle of this clannish semicircle of painters intently studying the President prompted Gilbert Stuart’s quip to Martha Washington that her husband was being “Pealed all round.”      

Rembrandt’s easel was almost in front of his subject. Charles Willson stood more to the right, painting a three-quarter life-size view of the head, from which the cabinet-size variant now in the Department of State was made. Although replicas and variants of Charles Willson Peale’s 1795 Washington portrait present difficult problems of authorship, a comparison of the State Department variant with the original (now in The New-York Historical Society) supports its attribution to Charles Willson himself. 

The smaller variant is more linear in execution, but linearity is not uncommon in Peale’s portraits. Indeed, the 1787 Washington portrait destined for Peale’s Museum is described by Sellers as having “a linear hardness about it in evidence of Peale’s greater effort to secure an exact likeness, a quality which later repetitions of the picture exaggerate.”^{2_{Sellers 1952, 238, no. 939, illus. 361. The 1787 portrait is now at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.}} The relatively tight handling of the head in the small painting is thrown into relief by the wonderful blossoming frill of the shirt, which is even more vital than in the large portrait.

In the variant, the eyes are noticeably larger and the mouth narrower with pursed lips, changes that alter our perception of Washington. Nevertheless, the first impression made by the Collection’s portrait is a strong and lasting one: an incisive cameo of our first president in his beleaguered second term, encased in a frame of gilded splendor beneath the American bald eagle and flanked by drooping fuschia, whose downward cast suggests that this repetition may have followed the death of George Washington.  

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.