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Article Excerpt
THE PAINTER'S CHAIR
George Washington and the Making of American Art
By Hugh Howard
Bloomsbury Press
320 pp. | $30
A quarter century after the death of George Washington in 1799, Rembrandt Peale, one of the foremost painters of his era, was still trying to create what he called a "Standard National Likeness" of the first president. Peale was a man driven. He had completed at least 16 composite likenesses of Washington, all of them praised by the picture-buying public, but he still felt like a failure. Finding him in his studio, overwrought and despairing, Peale's wife begged to know what was wrong. "When I told her," Peale recalled, "she burst into a flood of tears, & exclaimed with great emotion that Washington was my evil genius, & she wished he had never been born!"
Although Peale's obsession with Washington was extreme, he was not alone. Today, we are so familiar with images of Washington's face, from schoolroom walls to dollar bills, that it's hard to conceive of a time when most Americans had no idea what he looked like. Americans of the post-revolutionary generation not only wanted to know more about the rawboned Virginia aristocrat who had led the Continental Army to victory, they also desperately craved a symbol that could both humanize and unify their new nation. And that...
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