The National Portrait Gallery commissioning process used for the Obama portrait is fairly recent, and was only set up towards the end of George H.W. (The White House Historical Association has also raised private funds for portraits, but that’s a separate operation.) In more recent history, the money has come from private donations, usually raised by the National Portrait Gallery. Through the early 20th century, the funds for official portraits mostly came from Congress, White House Historical Association curators said in a recent podcast. Though Washington holds a sword, as a nod to the President’s successful military career, Stuart made sure that his presentation didn’t make Washington look like a monarch or a military figure, “to set the precedent that the president is a man of the people, is elected by the people, so he part of the people,” according to Lemay.Īs for First Ladies, though elite women would certainly have had their portraits painted before the 20th century, it wasn’t until around 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt’s First Lady Edith Roosevelt oversaw a renovation of the White House, that portraits of the First Ladies would start to be hung in the Vermeil Room on the ground floor of the White House. But Stuart set an important precedent for future portraits of specifically American leaders, in terms of the composition. “Pennsylvania Senator William Bingham and his wife, Anne, commissioned the painting in the spring of 1796 to celebrate the treaty and presented it to English statesman William Petty, first Marquess of Lansdowne, who as prime minister had negotiated the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.”Ĭongress bought the painting, and President Adams placed it in the President’s House, where it was famously saved from potential ruin during the War of 1812.Ĭommissioning portraits of leaders and prominent society figures was one of the many European traditions that came across the pond when the U.S.
“The composition is often thought to evoke the moment when Washington addressed Congress in December 1795 in support of the Jay Treaty, which resolved lingering tensions between Britain and the United States,” according to the book that accompanies the American Presidents exhibit. Versions of the portrait hang in the White House and the National Portrait Gallery, and you might also have a different Stuart depiction of Washington in your wallet, as he created the image that was the model for the Washington who appears on the $1 bill.
It’s almost certain that you’ve seen the portrait of George Washington that Gilbert Stuart painted in 1796. “Photographs are candids, but the portrait is a more careful, thoughtful, reading of a president and his personality,” Kate Lemay, a historian at the museum who curated the exhibition, told TIME.