Washington [513]
Gilbert Stuart, who was then painting his iconographic images of Washington, happened to stroll by as Washington sat in thrall to the busy swarm of painting Peales: “I looked in to see how the old gentleman was getting on with the picture, and, to my astonishment, I found the general surrounded by the whole family.” As Stuart walked away, he ran into Martha. “Madam,” said Stuart, “the general’s in a perilous situation.” “How sir?” “He is beset, madam—no less than five upon him at once; one aims at his eye—another at his nose—another is busy with his hair—the mouth is attacked by a fourth; and the fifth has him by the button. In short, madam, there are five painters at him, and you who know how much he has suffered when only attended by one, can judge of the horrors of his situation.”37
The two best-known portraits to emerge from these sessions tell a doleful tale of George Washington late in his second term. In the Charles Willson Peale version, a suddenly older Washington sits in a dark velvet coat, with an upturned collar and ruffled shirtfront. There is no sparkle in the immobile face, and his drooping eyelids make him appear sleepily inactive. A bag has formed under his left eye, which seems half shut, and the right eye does not open much wider. All in all the portrait depicts a weary, dispirited president, fatigued after long years in office and depleted by the battle royal over the Jay Treaty. The Rembrandt Peale portrait makes Washington seem a bit enfeebled and even more geriatric, his skin parched with age. As he stares worriedly ahead, the lips of his wrinkled mouth are tightly compressed with displeasure. Ironically, in his later years, Rembrandt Peale painted heroic portraits of Washington in his Continental Army uniform, nobly fired by youthful energy.
In many ways, it was unfortunate that Gilbert Stuart’s lasting images of Washington date from this period, when the swagger and panache of his early days had faded. Embittered by partisan feuding and feeling burdened by public life, Washington had made massive sacrifices to his country, and the luster had fled from his eye. Although Stuart captured the ineffable grandeur of the man, who sometimes seemed to float in a timeless realm, his images gave posterity a far more dour and haggard Washington than the charismatic general known to contemporaries from earlier times. Stuart was cognizant of the distortions that time had visited upon Washington. “When I painted him,” he said, “he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face.”38 To help rectify such distortions, he turned to Houdon’s bust and life mask, but Stuart’s portraits still reflect the physiognomy of the mid-1790s.
Already in the 1780s Washington had tired of artistic conventions that cast politicians in Roman togas. Averse to idealizing his subjects, Gilbert Stuart dressed them in modern clothing and took a hard, cold look at them. So Stuart, for all the antics and fast talk that may have irritated Washington, was very much to his taste as a portrait painter. Only in the so-called Lansdowne portrait, where a visionary Washington stands with a fixed gaze and stiffly outstretched arm, does Stuart resort to the props of republican power, showing copies of The Federalist and the Constitution in bound form at his feet. Perhaps the memories of a healthier and happier husband predisposed Martha Washington to criticize Stuart’s work. “There are several prints, medallions, and miniatures of the president in the house, none of which please Mrs. Washington,” John Pintard wrote when he visited Mount Vernon in 1801. “She does not think Stuart’s celebrated painting a true resemblance.”39 Stuart converted the Washington portraits into a thriving industry, stamping out copies for so many years that he laughingly referred to them as his hundred-dollar bills—that being the price he charged for each. His daughter Jane contended that he could crank out a copy in a couple of hours