Detail of George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)

News from America, or the Patriots in the Dumps, 1776 Library of Congress

An advertisement about this portrait says that “the appearance of the rainbow is introduced in the background as a sign” that storms have passed. Not all Americans had expected the nation to survive under a federal government. Debates over states’ rights still simmered. But, as Washington said in his First Inaugural Address, “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people” had thus far succeeded.

General Washington’s Resignation by Alexander Lawson, 1799 Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Designers of the Great Seal used storm and light as similar symbols. They said “glory,” a heraldic term for a circle of rays, is “breaking through a cloud.” Stuart depicts the glory in a more natural form—rays of sunlight. Shining through breaks in the clouds, the rays light up dust particles in the air.

George Washington by William Clark, oil on canvas, 1800 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Washington turned to the allegory of dark clouds when he wanted to express his fears for America’s future after the Revolutionary War. In November 1786, Washington wrote to fellow Virginian James Madison, “No morn ever dawned more favorably than ours did, and no day was ever more clouded than the present.”

George Washington, standing on bunker by Laugier, engraving Library of Congress

Washington believed that the United States was not powerful enough to “bid defiance” to other nations. “My station is new; and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in a letter in 1790. He felt that the nation needed at least 20 years before it could be in that position. He saw that it was his responsibility to guide the nation through the first of those two decades.

Sacred to Patriotism, engraving by Cornelius Tiebout, 1798 The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

An advertisement about this portrait says that Stuart had surrounded Washington “with allegorical emblems of his public life in the service of his country, which are highly illustrative of the great and tremendous storms which have frequently prevailed. These storms have abated....”