![]() ![]() The coloration and painting of the hair is not unique, but is seen in many of Stuart’s works of both Washington and other sitters. The delicacy of touch in the shirt ruffle here is counterpointed by the very loose and painterly approach to the powdered hair, in shades of cream and gray. The Yale work, which is currently dated 1796-1805, also shares with H-4 a very finely painted shirt ruffle of lace. ![]() Stuart biographer Charles Mount, who viewed Mount Vernon’s portrait (H-4) in 1977, described it as a “true likeness,” and suggested it was likely painted around the time of the Yale University Art Gallery portrait. By 1803, Stuart was more typically simplifying the shirt ruffle. The extremely finely painted shirt ruffle in Mount Vernon’s example is comparable to the 1797 example at the Huntington Library. A small group of works from the late 1790s contain lace shirt ruffles, while later examples often simplify them. While Stuart never finalized the costume in the Athenaeum portrait, his completed paintings vary in their approach to costume. Beck’s paintings of the Potomac River were purchased by George Washington in 1797 and now hang at Mount Vernon Trott was one of Stuart’s pupils. Stuart’s pupil Matthew Jouett reportedly declared it “one of Stuart’s best copies of his great portrait,” and its authenticity and quality were attested to in 1804 by two other artists in 1804-the English landscape painter George Beck and the miniature portrait painter Benjamin Trott. Mount Vernon’s Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington has long been considered among the finest of these “replicas”. Though each version is clearly based on the one source, eventually owned by the Boston Athenaeum (now jointly owned by The National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), the individual works often have distinct appearances, with variations in costume and/or background. There are approximately 75 so-called “Athenaeum-type” portraits of George Washington. Instead, the painter left the life works unfinished, and used them as the source for numerous copies. Washington implored Stuart on numerous occasions to send the portraits (now known as the Athenaeum portraits) to them, he never did. Stuart's painting became, and remains, "the household Washington of the world.”įollowing the success of Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 portrait of George Washington, Martha Washington convinced her husband to sit again to the artist in 1796, for a pair of portraits of the couple. Indeed, the image was widely circulated through Stuart's copies as well as by painters, engravers, and lithographers who copied the original work. 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. His lips appear swollen and his mouth uncomfortable, owing to a new set of ill-fitting dentures. The canvas shows Washington dressed in a black velvet suit with a white lace jabot at his neck, and his powdered hair pulled back into a queue ornamented by a sawtoothed ribbon rosette. 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 artist promised to give Martha Washington the original canvas of the Athenaeum portrait used to make the copies but unfortunately never kept his word. 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. 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. 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 wanted to paint Washington, for he expected that he could make a "fortune" on images of the Revolutionary War hero and American leader. ![]()
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