Great art is timeless, and speaks to us across time, culture, and space. Yet great works come from real people living real lives—whether their work was made 5 minutes or 500 years ago. Popular Smithsonian Associates speaker Paul Glenshaw returns to the Art + History series to look at great works of art in their historical context. He delves into the time of the artist, explores the present they inhabited, and what shaped their vision and creations.
Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of the nation’s founders are instantly recognizable, especially his portraits of George Washington. Anyone who has ever seen a one-dollar bill knows Stuart’s likeness of the first president. Even by that standard, Stuart’s George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait), 1796, is one of the most-recognized images in American art and history. It depicts Washington in the second term of his presidency, fully the leader of the new republic. Stuart’s image of Washington projects him as the calm, stoic center of gravity of the fraught, fractious, and partisan American experiment in self-government—always teetering on dissolution and mired in internal conflict.
It also is the result of two completely opposite personalities coming together to create the powerful image. Washington was renowned for his public persona: his reserve, self-control, serious and calm demeanor. Stuart, by contrast, was brilliant but volatile: charming, sociable, impulsive, and famously unreliable. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different—Washington was born into Virginia’s landed gentry; Stuart, the son of a Scottish immigrant, grew up in Rhode Island where his father ran a snuff mill. Washington led the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War; Stuart spent those years advancing his art career in London, carefully avoiding political entanglements.
How did these two men—so unlike in temperament, class, and life experience—come together to produce what is arguably the definitive portrait of America’s first president? Beginning with the moment the painting was completed, Glenshaw traces their individual stories—leading to their rare sittings together in 1795 in Philadelphia. Along the way, he uncovers not only Stuart’s remarkable ability to capture a subject’s inner life but also the often-overlooked complexity of Washington himself.
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