George Washington van Low Profile

"George Washington" (style Low poly) inspiration from a painting by Gilbert Stuart in (ca 1796–1805)

When Gilbert Stuart put brush to canvas during George Washington’s presidency, he painted the image most recognized today.

Stuart wanted to paint Washington, for he expected that he could make a "fortune" on images of the Revolutionary War hero and American leader. At the time the president sat for Stuart, the artist apparently tried to relax his sitter, offering, "Now, sir, you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter," to which the president responded, “Mr. Stuart need never feel the need for forgetting who he is and who General Washington is.” After Stuart's initial portrait of Washington, he made more than one hundred copies for American and European patrons eager to own an image of the illustrious sitter. They were of three types: a waist-length Vaughan version showing the right side of Washington's face; an Athenaeum variant displaying the left side; and a full-length Landsdowne example. The artist promised to give Martha Washington the original canvas of the Athenaeum portrait used to make the copies but unfortunately never kept his word.

This Athenaeum-type portrait was purchased from Stuart by George Beck, a landscape artist whom Washington patronized, for Major Alexander Parker of Lexington, Kentucky. The canvas shows Washington dressed in a black velvet suit with white lace at the neck of his shirt, and his powdered hair pulled back into a queue ornamented by a sawtoothed ribbon rosette. His lips appear swollen and his mouth uncomfortable, owing to a new set of ill-fitting dentures. For a person conscious of the impression made by his outward appearance, it would likely displease our nation's first president to know that the likeness taken at a moment of' discomfort would become the best known. Indeed, the image was widely circulated through Stuart's copies as well as by painters, engravers, and lithographers who copied the original work. Stuart's painting became, and remains, "the household Washington of the world.”