Detail of George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)

John Foster by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas, 1791 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

The portrait follows the European tradition of so-called “state” portraits: a portico-like space with a wall, columns, a curtain, and an open sky behind the figure. The foreground, an ambiguous space that is often furnished and carpeted, repeats compositions used for portraits of monarchs, bishops, admirals, or other public figures.

George Washington by Horatio Greenough, marble, 1841 Smithsonian American Art Museum

Educated Americans, schooled in Greek and Latin, saw in Washington the embodiment of such classic heroes as Jason or Ulysses, touched by a mystic call of destiny. Although private about his religious beliefs, he did see himself as touched by the divine. After escaping unhurt in an early battle, he wrote, “By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation.”

George Washington in New York The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

After the Revolutionary War, when Washington’s popularity was evolving and he was becoming an American icon, admirers in Philadelphia hung a banner celebrating his virtues: wisdom, justice, strength, temperance, faith, charity, hope, courage, religion, love, friendship, constancy. It was the beginning of a hero worship unlike any the nation was ever to know again.

Washington at Mount Vernon in 1797 by Nathaniel Currier, lithograph, 1852 The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

When Washington retired, he remained an icon, drawing poets, painters, politicians, and ordinary citizens to Mount Vernon. Even when he was young, a visitor hailed him for his “diligence, temperance, frugality, and improvement in the noble and most useful science of agriculture.”

William Bingham By Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas, 1797 ING Barings, London

Stuart relied on European precedent for such elements as classical columns and tasseled drapery. But he veered away from European sources, referring to such American pictorial elements as the Great Seal of the United States and books about American subjects.

Jacques-Benigne Bossuet by Pierre-Imbert Drevet, after Hyacinthe Rigaud, engraving likely used by Gilbert Stuart as a model for the Lansdowne portrait National Gallery of Art

Eighteenth-century American and English portrait painters often kept collections of drawings and engravings in their studios, turning to them as references when designing the overall composition of a portrait. Carpets, columns, and curtains were added as decorative elements to enhance the subject of the portrait.