Washington Winter Show 2020

59 Fig. 10: George Washington , by Doug Powell, American, contemporary. Up-cycled computer keys mosaic, 2019. Guarisco Gallery, Washington, DC. engraving, which served as the model for the needlework pattern. 14 Interestingly, the handful of signed Berlin work Washington portraits of the 1850s and 1860s have histories of being produced at Catholic girls’ schools—St. John’s Academy and the Sisters of the Holy Cross school in Washington, DC; St. Joseph’s Academy in Richmond, Virginia; and St. Vincent Female Orphan Asylum in Boston. Laura (Lollie) Virginia Smith stitched her copy of Stuart’s “Lansdowne” portrait of Washington (National Portrait Gallery) when she was twelve, “it took me two winters to finish it. I could not work on it in summer.” 15 Like many of the Berlin work portraits, Lollie’s has faded from overexposure to light; the unexposed reverse reveals its original brilliance (fig. 6). As an option for the less skilled or ambitious, the Ohio Practical Farmer recommended a “Geo. Washington Pen Wiper,” an ornamental novelty that could be used, as the name suggests, to wipe ink off pen nibs, or simply hung decoratively on a wall (fig. 7). 16 Miss Laura Culbertson of Erie City, Pennsylvania, sent a Washington example to President Lincoln as a “token of regard,” expressing the hope that “as you make use of the wiper day after day,” it would serve as remembrance of its “illustrious model.” 17 The Hartford, Connecticut, lithography firm of E.B. and E.C. Kellogg published a pen wiper pattern (fig. 8) based loosely on a profile portrait created in 1790 by Philadelphia artist Joseph Wright, son of Patience Wright, America’s first female sculptor and proprietor of a celebrated London waxworks. Returning to America in 1783 after several years study in London and Paris, 27-year-old Joseph won a commission from Congress to create a Washington portrait to be used as a model for a planned (but never executed) equestrian monument. Fig. 9: George Washington , by William Henry Pratt, after Gilbert Stuart Athenaeum portrait (1796). Calligraphic portrait, published by Augustus Hageboeck, Davenport, Iowa, c. 1865. Purchased with funds provided by Richard Burrus, Albert Small, Ann West, and the Broyhill Family Foundation, 2012.