George and Martha Washington
Gilbert Stuart’s Athenæum Portraits
Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery
The Boston Athenæum
February 23 – May 13, 2006
The first portrait painted of George Washington from life was that by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), which was executed at Mount Vernon, probably at the request of his wife Martha Washington, in 1774. The painting originally hung in the parlor at Mount Vernon, descended in the Washington family, and is now at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. It depicts Washington in the uniform of a colonel of the Virginia militia, in which he served during the French and Indian War. Four years after painting this, his first life portrait of Washington, Peale returned to Mount Vernon to paint Washington again. By that time—1776— Washington was commander in chief of the Continental Army and, among other things, had recently forced the evacuation of the British from Boston. In recognition of these facts, Peale painted Washington life-size and full-length (as opposed to half-length in the earlier portrait). The General is shown wearing a new, now American uniform, and standing before a view of the city of Boston in the background.
Already learning to be a good sport in his increasingly public roles, Washington was adjusting to the tedium of sitting for his portrait, a talent that would serve him well in the coming years. By 1785, he could write to his friend Francis Hopkinson that his gradual adjustment to the ordeal of portrait-sitting was “proof among many others, of what habit & custom can effect.” “At first I was as impatient at the request,” he remembered, “and as restive under the operation, as a Colt is of the Saddle—The next time, I submitted very reluctantly, but with less flouncing. Now, no dray moves more readily to the Thill, than I do to the Painters Chair.”1
The other notable fact of Washington’s second sitting for Peale is that it gave the artist the opportunity also to paint a portrait of Martha Washington. Thus, Peale created a pair of images that John Hancock, who had commissioned them, would hang in his Boston mansion. The most famous portraits of George and Martha Washington, however, would be those painted from life by Gilbert Stuart in Philadelphia in 1796. By that time, the Washingtons had achieved international fame and even mythic status. Although Stuart’s portraits, for reasons that will be discussed below, were left unfinished and, in Stuart’s time, unframed, they eventually became and remain known as the “Athenæum Portraits,” informally named for the institution that gave them their first public exposure and that owned them for over 150 years.
The Athenæum Portraits had their genesis in a commission given by Martha Washington to Gilbert Stuart early in 1796. Stuart (1757-1828) had first studied art in the early 1770s in his native Rhode Island and, after working for a time in Newport and Boston, went to London in 1775. There he studied with Benjamin West (1738-1820), the American-born prodigy who had become an official painter to the British court. Under West’s guidance, Stuart achieved success, first in London and then in Ireland. He returned to America in 1792, settling in New York and then in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital at the time. Being in the right place at the right time, he gained the important commission from Martha Washington to paint portraits of her and her husband. In 1803, following the shifting political center, Stuart moved to Washington, D.C., and two years later, he finally settled in Boston. By then, partially due to the many connections he had made in the various cities in which he had lived, Stuart was the undisputed leader in portraiture in this country.
Martha Washington intended Stuart’s portraits for Mount Vernon; but as it turned out, Stuart never completed the paintings and the Washingtons never took possession of them.2 Stuart was notoriously slow in his work and, in this case, admitted having trouble painting certain features of the President’s face, notably his jaw, which was being somewhat distorted by a new set of false teeth. Stuart later explained that this accounted “for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part” of Washington’s face. 3
As art historian Ellen Miles has recently reiterated, the artist John Neagle (1796-1865), who evidently got his information directly from Stuart, documented what happened next. “Mrs. Washington called often to see the general’s portrait,” Neagle wrote,
and was desirous to posses the painting. One day she called with her husband, and begged to know when she might have it. The general himself never pressed it, but on this occasion, as he and his lady were about to retire, he returned to Mr. Stuart and said he saw plainly of what advantage the picture was to the painter, (who had been constantly employed in copying it, and Stuart had said he could not work so well from another;) he therefore begged the artist to retain the painting at his pleasure. Mr. Stuart told me one day when we were before this original portrait, that he never could make a copy of it to satisfy himself, and that at last, having made so many, he worked mechanically and with little interest. . . . I asked him if he ever intended to finish the coat and back-ground of the original picture? To this he replied, “No; and as this is the only legacy I can leave to my family, I will let it remain untouched.” (Meaning that it would be, as is true, more valuable as it came from his hand in the presence of the sitter, than it would be if painted upon at this late period; for by painting upon, it would be more or less altered.” 4
Shortly following the President’s death in 1799, Martha Washington made one more effort to get the paintings. But her request went unfulfilled (she died in 1802) and thus, the canvases remained in Stuart’s possession until his own death in July 1828. 5 Shortly thereafter, they were publicly exhibited for the first time as part of a large memorial exhibition of Stuart’s work at the Boston Athenæum. The paintings arrived at the Athenæum in some state of disrepair—Stuart had reportedly kept them tacked to the back of a door in his studio for years—and the artists Thomas Sully and Washington Allston joined Isaac P. Davis of the Athenæum “to do what is necessary to preserve the Washington pictures and prepare frames for the same.” 6 Having taken these steps, the Athenæum decided to raise a subscription to buy the two portraits from Stuart’s widow for $1,500. The subscribers to the fund included many of Boston’s earliest art patrons and leaders of the Athenæum such as Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Francis Calley Gray, George Ticknor, Abbott Lawrence, and Josiah Quincy. 7
Following their debut at the Athenæum in 1828, Stuart’s likenesses of the Washingtons, now known as the Athenæum Portraits, remained on view in the library for fifty years. They were often listed as part of the Athenæum’s annual exhibitions, which were held at the library from 1827 through 1874, and during these years, they were copied many times by many artists. 8 Soon after the founding of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1870, the portraits were placed on long-term loan at that institution, the establishment of which had been spearheaded by the leaders of the Athenæum. 9 The history of the portraits in the later twentieth century only increased their fame—and added a tantalizing chapter to their provenance. In the 1970s, the paintings were offered for sale to the Museum of Fine Arts, which had housed them for a century, and eventually that institution shared the purchase and subsequent ownership of the paintings with the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Since then, the two museums have alternately exhibited the paintings in Boston and Washington, two of the several cities that had played such vital roles in the career of Gilbert Stuart and the histories of his famous subjects, George and Martha Washington.
Notes:
1.Washington to Francis Hopkinson, May 16, 1785, quoted in David Meschutt, “Life Portraits of George Washington,” in Barbara J. Mitnick, ed., George Washington, American Symbol (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 25.
2.For a thorough history of the portraits, including a discussion of the interaction between Washington and Stuart and an analysis of the compositions of the images, see Ellen G. Miles’s entry on the paintings in Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 147-153.
3.Stuart, quoted in Miles, 152. Despite these problems, as Miles reports, Stuart was eventually pleased with his Athenaeum Portrait of Washington, thinking it to be his best.
4. John Neagle, quoted in William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (2 vols.; New York: George P. Scott & Co., 1834), 1: 198-199. Stuart’s daughter Jane corroborated Neagle’s story (see Miles, 153).
5.Miles, 153.
6. The historic frames selected by that illustrious committee in 1831 have survived.
7.A brief history of the paintings and their relationship to the Athenæum, including documentation of their purchase, is in Mabel Munson Swan. The Athenæum Gallery 1827-1873: The Boston Athenæum as an Early Patron of Art (Boston: The Boston Athenæum, 1940), 74-84.
8.Robert F. Perkins, Jr. and William J. Gavin III, The Boston Athenæum Art Exhibition Index 1827-1874. (Boston: The Library of the Boston Athenæum, 1980), 136. The replicas and copies of Stuart’s various portraits of George Washington are legion and have been the source of much cataloguing, discussion, and debate. See for example, John Hill Morgan and Mantle Fielding, The Life Portraits of Washington and Their Replicas (Philadelphia: Printed for the subscribers, 1931); and Gustavus A. Eisen, Portraits of Washington (3 vols.; New York: R. Hamilton & Associates, 1932). A card-file catalogue (of uncertain authorship and date) of copies of the Athenaeum Portraits in northeastern collections is in the Boston Athenæum’s archives.
9.Martin Brimmer and Charles Francis Adams, Memorandum between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenæum, March 19, 1877 (typescript, Fine Arts Committee Files, BA archives); Appleton Prentiss Clark Griffin, “Property of the Athenæum at the Museum of Fine Arts,” 1895, BA archives. Stuart’s portraits of the Washingtons were consistently listed in these and similar inventories as numbers 1 and 2 respectively. For the Museum of Fine Arts, see Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (2 vols.; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970).