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Portrait of George Washington. Joseph Wright, American, (1734-1787) 1783. Joseph Wright made multiple images of George Washington in several formats and media, including paintings, sculptures, and one engraving. Wright's plaster profile of Washington was hung in the Mansion study where it is exhibited today.
- Gilbert Stuart
- The Skater
- Call Me Irresponsible
- Getting Washington to Laugh
- Washington Portraits
- Making It in America
Gilbert Stuart was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island Colony on Dec. 2, 1755 and baptized in the Old Narragansett Church. His father , Gilbert Stewart, worked in the first snuff mill in America after immigrating from Scotland. No surprise, then, that Stuart had a lifelong addiction to the stuff. His mother, Elizabeth Anthony Stewart, belonged to a ...
In 1782, at 26, Stuart painted his breakthrough work, The Skater, a large portrait of William Grant. He had never painted a full-length portrait, and people joked he couldn’t paint below the fifth button. But he agreed to paint Grant, a 32-year-old Scottish barrister, perhaps because they had much in common. When Grant arrived at the studio, he sai...
Once established in London, Stuart adopted the style of an English gentleman. His paintings commanded some of the highest prices in England. Remarkably, he painted without sketching his subject first. His philosophy was to load his pictures with color, but keep the colors separate, “No blending, tis destruction to clear & bea[u]tiful effect,” he to...
Stuart returned to the United States in 1793, hoping to paint a portrait of George Washington. He figured it would establish his reputation in the new republic. He took his growing family to New York. After a year and a half, they moved to Philadelphia, where Washington served as president of the United States. Stuart eventually persuaded Washingto...
Gilbert Stuart painted two portraits of Washington from that one sitting. The first, known as the Lansdowne portrait, was a full-length portrait intended for William Petty, Lord Lansdowne, the former British prime minister. Stuart concentrated on Washington’s face and finished the rest of it later. He made several copies of the painting, one of whi...
Stuart had made a shrewd career move. Once he painted Washington, he had no shortage of commissions. He painted the next five U.S. presidents, Horatio Gates, Aaron Burr, John Jacob Astor, King George III, John Jay and John Singleton Copley. He painted close to 1,000 portraits during his lifetime. Abigail Adams wasn’t sure she’d ever get the portrai...
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The Lansdowne portrait is an iconic life-size portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. It depicts the 64-year-old president of the United States during his final year in office. The portrait was a gift to former British Prime Minister William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne ...
Considered the foremost American portrait painter of his day, the thoughtful and highly gifted artist managed to infuse his portraits of Washington, his most famous sitter, with a dignity and ...
5 days ago · While the release of additional unstudied portraits of George Washington would have likely met public demand, in 1778 Charles Willson Peale unveiled an engraving drawn from life entitled His Excellency Gen Washington. Peale had previously painted the earliest known life portrait of Washington in 1772 to record Washington’s service as a Colonel in the Virginia Regiment during the French and ...
By 1795, Stuart was sitting down to paint George Washington (in office from 1789 to 1797). This is one of the first portraits Stuart painted, commissioned by John Vaughan as a gift for his father, who was a friend of Washington’s. It is known as the Vaughan portrait to distinguish it from the many other versions of the picture.
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Stuart painted the first five U.S. presidents, but he was much more than simply a celebrated portraitist of the Founding Fathers: he set the standard for much of the country’s national art that was to follow. George Washington, full-length oil portrait of George Washinton created in 1796 by his most famous portraitist, Gilbert Stuart.
