Washington Winter Show 2020

them—represent alternate ways that contemporaries saw the first pre sident. Today, digital images of Washington’s life portraits are readily accessible with a few keystrokes and an internet connection, but in his own time, relatively few people had occasion to see the original canvases. Printmakers rarely had opportunities for life sittings, but they provided vital conduits from painters’ studios to mass audiences. The latter came to know Washington through mundane articles of daily life— engravings on the parlor walls, magazine illustrations, coins and currency, household furnishings. A sampling of these wares suggests the interplay of accuracy and aesthetics, opportunity and enterprise that has shaped more than two centuries of Washington iconography. America Triumphant By 1785—just two years after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War—American Fig. 2: George Washington, Esqr. Gift of Jess and Grace Pavey Fund, 2002. This imagined portrait was issued in London in September 1775, with the caption, “Done from an Original, Drawn from the Life by Alex. Campbell, of Williamsburg in Virginia.” Neither the purported artist nor the publisher, C. Shepherd, can be otherwise identified. 55 Fig. 3: Washington Funeral Urn Medal (obverse). Jacob Perkins, Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1800. Gold. Gift of Elizabeth and Stanley DeForest Scott, 1985 . Photo by Tom Mulvaney. citizens could be found sleeping beneath images of their triumphant commander in chief. 2 British textile manufacturers, eager to retain the lucrative American trade, quickly recognized Washington’s market appeal. Technical innovations in the 1750s had made it possible to print copperplate-engraved designs onto cotton and linen, so furnishing fabrics could rival the precision and sophisticated shading of fine art prints. In one popular pattern (fig. 1), Washington drives the allegorical figure of America in a triumphal chariot pulled by a pair of leopards. Above, Benjamin Franklin and Liberty lead the procession on a winding path to the Temple of Fame. Depicting Washington in a triumphal car pulled by exotic creatures aligned him with a long artistic tradition dating back to ancient Roman murals. In Britannia Triumphant , a lavish allegory celebrating British victories in the Seven Years War, the sea-god Neptune drives a chariot carrying Britannia with a medallion portrait of George III. 3 Given that the lions passant gardant of the English royal arms were often referred to as leopards in heraldic descriptions, it is tempting to read their appearance in the copperplate print as a reference to the defeated British. The prototype for Washington’s striking figure appeared in a print published in London in January 1781, after a portrait (Metropolitan Museum