Hello I'm Warren Perry and I'm here today at the National Portrait Gallery with Dr.
Ellen Miles and portraits of George and Martha Washington which, if you are watching this,
are no longer on view.
Dr. Miles, where have these portraits gone?
They've gone to Boston for three or four years because we own the paintings jointly with
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
And how did this arrangement come about?
Well, it's an interesting question.
Stuart died in Boston in 1828 and his daughter sold the paintings to the Boston Athenaeum.
So they're known as the Athenaeum portraits.
That’s a clue.
And the Boston Athenaeum owned them until they sold them to us in 1980.
But there was a miss, a second step to that which was that from 1876 to 1979, 100 years,
they were on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
And they were always regarded as the treasures of the city of Boston in a way.
So our Director at the time, Marvin Sadik, thought it would be wonderful if instead these
national treasures could come to Washington, could be owned by the Smithsonian.
And he started to negotiate with the Boston Athenaeum to buy them.
But word got out and the Bostonians went in an uproar and were furious because they had
always regarded the portraits as, as I said, part of Boston’s cultural heritage.
And so finally it was worked out that we would share them with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
And we own them and they own them jointly.
And every…
originally the plan was that every three years they would switch and move from Boston to
Washington, from Washington to Boston, which is why now they're going back to Boston.
So these great portraits jointly held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the National
Portrait Gallery here in Washington will just go up the east coast for a few years, spend
some time there.
Yeah, in their New England home.
And then come back here, spend some more time with us.
Right.
And in the meantime we do have the Lansdowne portrait, the full-length portrait that Stuart
painted of Washington after he painted this pair.
So in a sense the Portrait Gallery does own the only what I think are the only two life
portraits of Washington by Gilbert Stuart.
And the only certainly the only one of Martha Washington by Stuart.
This is truly your area scholarship.
While we have you here, would it be possible for you to share with us some of the history
of these two portraits, the Athenaeum portraits of George and Martha?
[Laughter] I am so glad you asked.
This pair of portraits was commissioned by Martha Washington, which is not always known
to people.
When they were finished, and you can see actually that they're not finished.
This blank part, this lighter area the canvas is not yet painted.
Stuart did life studies of the heads of these two sitters and he would later have gone back
and finished the composition.
But he liked the portrait so much of Washington and people started to demand that he make
copies for them, or what we call replicas, that he asked Washington if he could keep
the portrait in his studio.
And this was actually in 1796 in Philadelphia.
Washington was about to leave the Presidency, end of his second term.
So he and Martha Washington returned to Mount Vernon in 1797.
The portrait stayed with Stuart.
Washington died.
Martha Washington died after he did.
Stuart kept the portraits, moved to Boston eventually, came other cities but then settled
in Boston, always taking the portraits with him and making copies for people.
And he made copies from 1796 until as late as the 1820s.
We think about 75 in total of the portrait of Washington.
He never copied the one of Martha because it was really the president's portrait that
people wanted a copy of.
And as we look at this image what we're also seeing is the image that the Treasury Department,
the US Mint, used to produce George Washington’s face on our dollar bill.
It’s that.
It’s also the image that at the bicentennial of Washington's birth in 1932 Congress ordered
thousands of lithographs to be distributed to all the schools across the country.
So many people may remember this actual painting in a reproduction in their school room or
in their library at their school or in a public library.
It was very, very popular.
Did Gilbert Stuart have a sense of history in that he knew that his image was going to
be the image whereby we associate George Washington?
He knew it was in demand.
I don't think he knew the degree to which it's become so well-known.
But he understood the fact that he was going to get one hundred dollars.
[Laughter] He’d be happy to know!
And actually, about the Lansdowne, there was a law case, an engraving.
When it was sent to England it was engraved with the permission of the owner by an English
engraver who didn’t credit Stuart correctly.
He called him Gabriel Stuart instead of Gilbert Stuart.
And Stuart got no benefit from it.
He didn't get any sales from the engravings.
Which is often what artists did was they would sell engravings of their portraits.
And he complained.
In fact I think there was a lawsuit in Philadelphia that…
No, he went to William Bingham who had commissioned the portrait and said I thought we agreed
that I would have control over the engravings.
And sadly, I mean, Bingham said well, we don't have a written contract.
And Gilbert Stuart…
well, he didn’t agree.
He just didn’t agree that that was the arrangement.
And Stuart said this is what I was counting on for income to support my family.
And Stuart from time to time had money problems and so this would have been important.
Stuart was not a business manager.
He could have used someone to manage his money for him.
And now Dr. Miles and I are with Gilbert Stuart's image of Martha Washington.
Can you tell us a little bit about Martha Washington and her relationship with Gilbert
Stuart and the commissioning of these works?
Well, we don't have any real documentation.
We don't have a bill.
We don't have any letters.
In fact, for this pair of portraits, we only have one comment in Washington's diary that
he and Martha rode out to Germantown to Stuart’s studio to see the portraits.
That’s pretty simple.
Pretty simple.
Was she as difficult to have sit as President Washington?
No, there are no stories.
As far as I know there aren’t the stories that there were about the Washington portrait.
But what I think is interesting is that I think if it had been up to Washington, there
would be very few portrait of him.
And Martha was the one that commissioned some other major portraits.
Not so much the public portraits of him as a general or as a leader but the more personal
portraits, including some miniatures.
So we have her to thank for some of these portraits, including this pair.
And you can see again as we saw before that this is an unfinished picture.
In fact in this case there's even less that's been completed.
He’s done the head but the rest is completely blank.
And you see that dark area around the head?
That was what painters did to be able to shape… to decide on the colors of the shadows and
highlights of the face and hair.
They had to have some color behind it to give them a sense of what the background would
look like so they could paint the volume of the portrait, of the face.
But it's never been…
Stuart never made copies of this.
As I said before he kept the pair all his life, and when he died his daughter sold them
to the Boston Athenaeum in 1831.
So Martha never had a finished portrait by Stuart.
Neither did she own one of her husband which, later on, after Washington died, a very good
friend of theirs, William Thornton, said that that was a shame that she was never able to
get the finished portraits.
So people knew about them, and they knew that Stuart was painting the pair.
But it just never came about that Stuart finished them.
And she was never able to enjoy them like she would have wanted.
She never was able to enjoy them.
Now is this the only life portrait of Martha Washington or has another artist…?
There are a few others.
The Peale family’s, Charles Willson Peale painted her.
There are some miniatures earlier on by Peale and Trumbull, John Trumbull painted her portrait.
So there are a number of portraits of her.
Not anywhere as many as there are of Washington.
And George and Martha Washington got along exceedingly well.
They were happy couple, is that correct?
They were.
The interesting thing is I know that people are…
there's someone now trying to write a biography of her because – a private biography, a
personal biography – apparently she destroyed a lot of their letters after he died and the
only ones that survived were in a desk and had fallen down behind the drawers of the
desk.
So we don't see, we don't know a lot about their relationship in terms of their exchanges.
Did she follow him to…?
She died I think about 2 years after he died.
And when….
She did go with him during the war.
That was the question, yes.
Especially around Philadelphia.
She was at I think at certainly in Philadelphia, I think in Valley Forge, not sure.
Thank you very much for talking with us about these great images we have, these fine portraits.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Well, I think people sometimes ask about our Lansdowne portrait and whether it's the one
that’s at the White House.
And there are four versions of that portrait all painted by Stuart or painted in part at
least by Stuart.
One is ours.
Ours is the first version.
There's one in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy.
The third one is in Brooklyn, and the fourth one is at the White House.
The one that Dolley Madison rescued during the War of 1812 is the one that’s at the
White House.
So that was the one that actually spent some time traveling while….
Traveling during the war, yes.
So all of these have legs have their own in some form or another, I suppose.
Definitely.
Including this pair which is as you say is about to go back to Boston.
Thank you very much again.
You're very welcome.