The Athenaeum Portraits

George Washington’s face is complete enough to command attention, but the painting around it remains conspicuously unfinished. Pale canvas extends below the loosely indicated shirt and shoulders, and a broad dark field stops short of the edges. Gilbert Stuart made this portrait in 1796 as one of a pair commissioned by Martha Washington. Her companion portrait survives in a comparable state, its developed face surrounded by an incomplete cap, clothing and background. ^[1]

These are the Athenaeum portraits , named after the Boston institution that later owned them. Their history joins an unfulfilled family commission to the extraordinary circulation of a presidential likeness. Looking at the two whole canvases restores something that Washington’s isolated, frequently reproduced head can conceal: the scale of the intended paintings, their relationship to one another and the distance between establishing a likeness and completing a commission.

Two unfinished portraits made together

Martha commissioned portraits of herself and her husband for Mount Vernon. Their matching canvases and complementary directions belong to that shared purpose. George turns toward the viewer’s left, while Martha turns gently toward the viewer’s right. Placed with George on the right and Martha on the left, the sitters face inward. They are pendants: separate works conceived to accompany one another. ^{[1] [12]}

The pair gives Washington a different setting from the full-length Lansdowne portrait . There, Stuart surrounds the standing president with furniture, books and symbols of public authority. Here, the surviving paintings offer two heads and the beginnings of their surrounding forms. Their intended destination among family pictures makes the relationship between husband and wife as important as Washington’s identity as president. ^[1]

Neither painting is a small face study on a small support. Each canvas measures more than a metre in height. The heads occupy only part of that space, leaving room for bodies and settings that were never brought to completion. Ellen G. Miles suggests that Stuart may have envisaged seated portraits, drawing attention to the format and the slightly off-centre placement of the heads. That is a plausible reconstruction of the intended design, rather than a surviving finished arrangement. ^[12]

The unfinished condition also separates two questions. One concerns what Stuart had painted when work stopped; the other concerns why the portraits remained with him. The visible surface answers the first more directly. The second requires the history of the commission, later recollections and correspondence about delivery. The developed likeness of George became especially useful to Stuart as a model for further portraits, but that use does not fully explain the fate of Martha’s companion or the family’s continuing requests. ^[13]

The face and the expanse of canvas

Washington’s head emerges through contrasts of warm flesh, pale hair and dark surrounding paint. The eyes meet the viewer even though the head is turned. Small changes of colour across the brow, cheeks, nose and chin give the face volume without making its surface uniformly smooth. The effect depends on relationships between touches of paint: a darker passage can turn a cheek away from the light while a nearby warmer one restores its apparent fullness. ^[12]

Miles describes Stuart’s separate, unblended touches in the flesh, including changes of tone under the chin. This is a useful way to approach the face at closer range. Its convincing appearance comes from the interaction of marks that remain perceptible as paint. From farther away, those marks join into a coherent likeness; nearer the surface, their differences become part of the painting’s animation. ^[12]

The dark area around the head supplies a tonal setting against which Stuart could develop the flesh. It is broad and irregular, with visible movement in the brushwork. Lower down, the shirt and coat have received much less attention. A pale triangular passage indicates the opening at the neck, while dark paint begins to locate the shoulders. The transition between developed face and preliminary body is gradual in some places and abrupt in others.

Martha’s canvas offers a related distribution of finish. Her face is established with carefully varied lights and shadows, while the white cap remains more lightly indicated. Dark paint curves around the head, enclosing it without completing the full background. The bright passages near the cap and shoulders lead into a large pale lower field. Seen together, the paintings make the sequence of attention especially clear: the likenesses were brought much farther than their surroundings. ^[12]

The two heads also establish light differently within their pale surrounds. Washington’s white hair spreads beyond the sides of his face, contrasting with the dark field behind it. Martha’s cap makes a looser white border around the upper head, with its preliminary edges left visible. The warm colour of each face is set against those cooler, paler passages. Similar materials and a shared stage of incompletion produce two distinct encounters: changes in the turn of the head, the position of the eyes and the shape of the surrounding light keep the sitters individual within the matching format. ^[12]

The exposed areas should not be imagined as missing pieces of a digital reproduction. They belong to the whole surviving paintings. Cropping George’s portrait tightly around the head creates a compact, apparently self-sufficient image, but it removes the open space that records the work’s unfinished state. The familiar face can then seem to have been conceived as a small isolated bust, an impression the full canvas immediately complicates.

This contrast gives the originals a particular visual force. A recognizable person appears within broad material evidence of painting in progress. The viewer can move between a face and a worked surface, between illusion and the physical support carrying it. Stuart’s style and technique shows other examples of this varied finish, while the Athenaeum pair makes its consequences unusually prominent because so much of each support remains visible.

Martha as sitter and commissioner

Martha’s role begins before her image appears on the canvas. She wanted the pair for Mount Vernon and helped secure another portrait of her husband. Her own likeness establishes the commission’s domestic purpose. It was not simply an opportunity for Stuart to make a presidential model: two people were to be represented in a relationship, and both paintings were expected to become family possessions. ^[1]

Her portrait rewards attention independently. The head is turned slightly, the eyes engage the viewer and the pale cap frames the face. The unfinished surround gives the likeness an openness different from a fully described costume and interior. It would be misleading to read that appearance as proof that Martha preferred an informal sketch. Its present state and its original intended function are separate parts of the history.

The delivery story is often simplified into a generous agreement allowing Stuart to retain Washington’s portrait. Miles sets later accounts of such permission beside evidence of continuing dissatisfaction. John Neagle and Jane Stuart transmitted versions in which Washington recognized the painter’s need for the likeness and permitted its retention. Jane, born in 1812, was not an eyewitness to the 1796 sittings. Her account is later family testimony rather than a contemporary record of the exchange. ^[13]

Correspondence discussed in the catalogue shows why the matter cannot end with that anecdote. In January 1800, William Thornton complained that the Washingtons had repeatedly asked for the promised picture and that Martha’s portrait remained unfinished. On 10 March, Tobias Lear wrote on Martha’s behalf seeking delivery of her husband’s portrait and offering the customary payment. These requests were made after Washington’s death, when possession of his likeness had an additional personal significance. ^[13]

The portraits nevertheless remained with Stuart. Miles records that neither the originals nor replacement copies were delivered to the family. Their commercial usefulness to the painter and their value to Martha were therefore interests that did not resolve into a completed transaction. Keeping both in view gives the history more substance than treating the unfinished state solely as an ingenious method of generating replicas. ^[13]

Martha’s continued presence beside George also changes the way the paintings are encountered. His image later became widely detached from the circumstances of its making. Her companion returns the discussion to the person who commissioned the pair, the destination she intended and the obligations that remained unfinished along with the paint.

What the sittings and later testimony establish

The pair belongs securely to 1796, but the exact sequence of the Washington sittings has generated conflicting accounts. Miles considers evidence that the Athenaeum likeness began before the full-length Lansdowne, including Rembrandt Peale’s recollections and an early copy attributed to John Vanderlyn. Other later accounts placed it after Lansdowne. The disagreement concerns the order and circumstances of the work, not whether the two unfinished Athenaeum canvases are related. ^[14]

Vanderlyn’s connection adds a practical studio dimension. He worked with Stuart in Philadelphia, learning through observing, preparing canvases and helping with preliminary stages of portraits. A letter of April 1796, discussed by Miles, records his wish to make a Washington copy of his own. It gives evidence of the likeness’s early circulation within the studio while leaving the authorship and date of any particular surviving version to be established separately. ^[14]

Washington’s surviving letter of 11 April 1796 arranges a sitting for the following morning through Mrs. Bingham. It belongs to the Lansdowne commission. The appointment should not be transferred into an exact creation date for the Athenaeum pair, nor does one surviving appointment establish the total number of times Washington posed. The Washington portraits comparison follows the document and the distinction between the three principal types. ^[15]

Stories about Stuart entertaining Washington are similarly valuable when their dates and transmission remain visible. Miles quotes Mrs. Basil Hall’s report of visiting Stuart in Boston in 1827, when he recalled struggling to make Washington converse and trying a comic story. Other accounts turn on the president’s interest in horses. These recollections suggest the painter’s concern with expression and conversation, but they do not supply a verbatim transcript of a sitting. ^[16]

The mouth and jaw also entered later discussions of the likeness. Jane Stuart reported her father’s comments about the effect of Washington’s dentures, and Miles places that testimony beside Washington’s own complaint to his dentist about uncomfortable teeth affecting the shape of his lips. The evidence concerns physical difficulties and recollections of painting him; it cannot turn a reproduced facial expression into a precise diagnosis or a complete account of the sitter’s mood. ^[16]

These different kinds of evidence answer different questions. A letter can document an appointment, an early copy can help establish circulation, and a remembered conversation can illuminate how Stuart presented his experience. The unfinished canvases preserve the decisions made in paint. Their history becomes clearer when those sources are allowed to complement one another without being flattened into a single, perfectly recorded sitting.

An unfinished original and many completed replicas

The retained George Washington gave Stuart a likeness from which he could make further portraits. These replicas extended across his career and varied in format and handling. Miles’s 2004 catalogue estimates approximately seventy-five head-and-shoulders versions derived from the Athenaeum image. That is an estimate for this portrait family, not a count of every Washington painted by Stuart or every later copy by other artists. ^[17]

An artist’s replica does not have to reproduce every touch unchanged. The surviving versions vary in the shape of the face, the treatment of the hair, the shirt ruffle and the distribution of light and dark. A fresh canvas required Stuart to establish those relationships again. Familiarity with the model could coexist with adjustment, simplification and renewed attention to a passage such as lace or a curl of hair. ^[17]

The National Gallery of Art’s George Washington , accession 1954.9.2, supplies a useful comparison. Currently dated circa 1803–05, it is a completed portrait on a smaller canvas, 73.6 × 61.4 cm. The dark coat and background extend around the head, and a substantial lace ruffle gives the lower part of the composition a new focus. It belongs to the Athenaeum family, but it is not the unfinished 1796 original or another painting of identical dimensions. ^[18]

Looking between the two makes the difference between likeness and object tangible. The familiar turn of the head connects them, while the filled surrounding field changes the balance of the image. The replica concentrates the viewer’s attention within a finished rectangle of coat, face and background. The larger original lets the face remain surrounded by the open possibilities of an incomplete commission. Neither experience can be fully communicated by comparing two cropped heads alone.

Patrons of these versions often belonged to Stuart’s wider network. Some also commissioned their own portraits or those of relatives; others shared political or business connections with his sitters. The copies carried a national figure into particular households, but their purchases were also individual transactions within the painter’s working life. Miles emphasizes those relationships as a productive way to understand their history. ^[17]

Later claims that a replica received its own life sitting need separate examination. Miles discusses a family account attaching such a claim to the portrait now at the Clark Art Institute and rejects the supposed sitting. A plausible ownership history and a claim of direct access to Washington are different matters. Identifying the owner of a canvas cannot, by itself, establish how its likeness was obtained. ^[19]

Martha’s portrait had a different afterlife. Miles records no replicas of her likeness made by Stuart. Her original remained the companion to an image that was repeatedly adapted and sold. That unequal circulation helps explain why George’s face is often encountered on its own, although the matching canvas and original commission continue to connect the pair. ^[13]

How the pair reached the Boston Athenaeum

After Stuart’s death in Boston in 1828, the pair appeared in a memorial exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum. A subscription purchase followed in 1831, raising $1,500 for the two paintings. The institution’s historical account identifies Thomas Sully , Washington Allston and Isaac P. Davis as the committee asked to arrange preservation and framing. Their task treated the unfinished works as objects worth maintaining and presenting together. ^[20]

The collection’s name gradually became part of the paintings’ identity. “Athenaeum” describes this later ownership, not the place where Washington sat or the original purpose of the commission. The institutional history also records a temporary return of the portraits in 2006, marking their importance to the Athenaeum’s own story. That exhibition belongs to their later history rather than their present location. ^[20]

The acquisition marks a change in the works’ audience. Paintings intended for a family home became part of a public cultural collection. Their unfinished surfaces did not prevent their preservation or recognition. Instead, the compelling likenesses, their association with the Washingtons and their place in Stuart’s career gave them significance beyond the completion of the original commission.

Joint ownership and the portraits today

The National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, jointly purchased the pair in 1980. Each painting consequently has an identifier in both collections. George is NPG.80.115 and MFA 1980.1; Martha is NPG.80.116 and MFA 1980.2. The two sets of numbers identify two jointly owned paintings, rather than four different objects. ^{[2] [3]}

Those identifiers are especially useful because so many other paintings reproduce George’s head. A search for “Stuart’s Washington” can bring together an unfinished original, an artist’s replica, an engraving after a painting and a much later copy. Date, dimensions and accession number help reconnect a reproduction to its particular source. The pair’s matching measurements and separate titles also prevent Martha’s canvas from disappearing into a general account of Washington imagery.

Joint ownership is a matter of collection history, while display is a separate question. A museum’s exact object record is the appropriate place to check information about the painting, and a current exhibition listing is needed when planning a visit. The historical name alone does not establish that the works are at the Boston Athenaeum, or that both will be displayed together on any particular date.

The George Washington record and Martha Washington record provide direct routes to the owning institution’s information. Looking at whole reproductions alongside those records preserves both the individual identities and the relationship that makes the pair more than a familiar presidential head.

Fame through engraved and printed versions

Washington’s Athenaeum likeness circulated through painted copies, engravings and lithographs. The face became recognizable far beyond people who had encountered the original canvas. That expansion is part of the portrait’s achievement, but it also changes the viewer’s expectations. An image repeatedly met as a finished head can make the expanse of the original unfinished canvas seem surprising. ^[21]

Its connection with United States currency is the most familiar example. The National Portrait Gallery identifies the dollar-note likeness as a reversed adaptation of the Athenaeum image. The banknote carries the recognizable head into another design, rather than reproducing the entire painting with its preliminary passages and exposed support. It also separates George from Martha’s companion portrait and from the intended Mount Vernon setting. ^[22]

The currency dates are later than Stuart’s painting. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing records Washington’s first appearance on one-dollar notes in Series 1869 United States Notes. The first federal one-dollar notes, issued in 1862, had portrayed Salmon P. Chase. One-dollar Federal Reserve notes followed in 1963. These dates distinguish the history of the denomination from the creation of the 1796 likeness. ^[23]

An engraving constructs lines and tones through a different process from oil painting. Recognition can survive that translation even when the brushwork, colour and scale change. Returning to Stuart’s canvas therefore offers more than a chance to identify the source of a familiar design. It restores the painted face to its unfinished material setting, where separate touches establish light and form.

Martha’s portrait completes that return. Beside George, her canvas recalls a commission for two sitters and the family destination never fulfilled. Together the Athenaeum portraits hold several histories in view: an encounter with the Washingtons, a working resource retained by Stuart, objects preserved by later artists and institutions, and a likeness that travelled through many other forms. The three-type comparison places them beside the earlier Vaughan and the full-length Lansdowne , whose different purposes help clarify what is distinctive about this unfinished pair.