Gilbert Stuart's Athenaeum Portrait: The Unfinished Masterpiece

An Unfinished Masterpiece

In April 1796, Martha Washington commissioned Gilbert Stuart to paint a matching pair of portraits of herself and her husband, President George Washington. Stuart began the work at his studio in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He completed Martha's likeness, but Washington's face — captured in the famous oval — was left unfinished. Stuart never returned to it.

The reason was not oversight. Stuart had quickly recognized what he held: a portrait of such immediacy and authority that any further work would diminish it. Rather than deliver it to the Washingtons, he kept it as a reference, using it to produce finished copies for a growing list of clients willing to pay his fee of $100 per portrait — a substantial sum in the early Republic.

Stuart painted at least seventy-five authorized copies from the Athenaeum portrait during his lifetime. Washington, for his part, never saw the original. He died in December 1799, three years after the sittings. Martha sued Stuart in an unsuccessful attempt to recover the unfinished portrait. Stuart kept it until his own death in 1828, when it passed to his heirs.

The Athenaeum Acquisition

The portrait takes its name from the Boston Athenaeum, which purchased it from Stuart's daughter Jane in 1831 for $1,500 — a remarkable sum that recognized the work's cultural significance even three decades after the President's death. The Athenaeum held the portrait for more than 150 years, during which it became the most familiar image of an American statesman in the world.

In 1980, the Athenaeum sold the Washington portrait and its companion portrait of Martha to a partnership between the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The two museums rotate custody. As of the current agreement, the portraits alternate between the two institutions every three years.

"When I look at that face, I see America. Not America as it was, but America as Washington hoped it would be — composed, deliberate, unflinching in moral purpose."

From Life, By His Presence

What distinguishes Stuart's Athenaeum portrait from the many other images of Washington is the immediacy of direct observation. Washington was sixty-four years old when he sat for Stuart. His famous ill-fitting dentures had distorted the line of his mouth; his face had aged considerably since the Revolutionary period. Stuart captured all of it — the hollowed cheeks, the stern composure, the slightly tightened lips — with an honesty rare in eighteenth-century portraiture.

Other artists painted Washington more flatteringly. Charles Willson Peale's earlier portraits show a younger, more vigorous man. Rembrandt Peale's later "Porthole" portrait, completed from memory, gives him the idealized composure of an ancient Roman. Stuart's Washington, by contrast, is the actual man — at once mortal and monumental.

The Face of the Nation

In 1869, when the Treasury Department sought an image of Washington to place on the new one-dollar Silver Certificate, they selected Stuart's Athenaeum portrait. It has remained on every United States dollar bill since. No other American image has been reproduced on such a scale. Historians estimate that billions of printed copies of Stuart's work circulate in American wallets at any given moment.

“The face every American carries — most without knowing the artist's name.”

Gary Hendershott and the Stuart Legacy

Over five decades in the field, Gary Hendershott has handled multiple portraits by Gilbert Stuart and his studio, including authorized copies of the Athenaeum portrait painted during Stuart's lifetime. The distinction between Stuart's original studio copies and later reproductions is critical to both authenticity and value — and is a question that regularly arises in estate appraisals, museum acquisitions, and private sales.

Authentication of a Stuart portrait requires a combination of stylistic analysis, provenance research, technical examination (including X-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectography for underdrawing), and comparison to documented examples in the National Portrait Gallery, the MFA Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other institutional collections. Gary's approach to provenance and authentication draws on five decades of handling Washington-era portraiture at the highest level.

Why This Matters

A Gilbert Stuart studio portrait of Washington represents more than a painting. It is a direct line of transmission from the founding generation — from the man himself, through the artist who sat across from him, to the collector or institution that owns it today. No other American object carries quite the same symbolic weight.

For museums, such a portrait anchors an entire American art collection. For private collectors, it represents the apex of presidential collecting. And for the broader culture, it serves as the continuing face of the nation — the image every American carries in their wallet, most without knowing the artist's name.