Experts confirm Washington portrait
Despite murky origin, rigorous analysis shows image of first president was painted by Peale
For years, there had been skepticism about the large portrait of George Washington that has long hung in the baronial Paris residence of the U.S. ambassador to France.
It had been left to the government in 1989 by an American arts patron and was described as a painting by Charles Willson Peale, the celebrated patriarch of America’s first artistic dynasty and founder of the nation’s first public museum.
The near life-size image of Washington — cast as a Revolutionary War hero after the Battle of Princeton, a blue sash adorning his chest — certainly resembled other Peale portraits.
But the painting’s provenance was murky.
Washington’s face was overpainted and “mushy looking,” one Peale expert thought.
Sotheby’s had evaluated the painting for the State Department in 2000 and would refer to it only as “attributed” to Peale.
“It didn’t look like any other portraits in the series,” said Lauren Hall, a conservator with the agency’s Office of Cultural Heritage who was put in charge of authenticating it.
But now, after rigorous analysis including lengthy scientific study of the paint materials and historical documents, experts are confident they can declare the portrait a true Peale, one of many versions of his 1779 original, which the artist painted over and over in an era when copiers did not exist and an image of Washington was thought essential to the new nation’s glorification of its sovereignty.
This portrait had been en route to the Netherlands in 1780, an intended diplomatic gift for its leadership, when the ship carrying it was captured by the British navy. By this time, Peale, who served in combat with the Pennsylvania militia, had already painted Washington from life in 1772, 1776 and 1777. He would do so again in 1783, 1787 and, finally, in 1795, when Washington was president, for a record seven original portraits from life.
Experts say it is not known how many times Peale reproduced his original 1779 image of Washington at Princeton, now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. But in addition to a handful of close copies, including the Paris version, there are many variations.
The expert findings, which were announced in time for Presidents Day and are detailed in a video, are the product of an inquiry that began in 2016, decades after the painting had been given to the U.S. government by Caroline Ryan Foulke. She was the granddaughter of Thomas Fortune Ryan, the tobacco magnate and financier who became one of the world’s richest men in part by consolidating the New York trolley-car system. She had bought it in the late 1950s or early ’60s from a New York gallery.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris, thinking the portrait was in need of conservation, ended up enlisting Hall, at what was then the State Department’s newly created cultural heritage office. Hall, initially puzzled by the work’s scant documentation, called in two experts. One was Carol Eaton Soltis, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and author of The Art of the Peales (Yale University Press, 2017). The other was Emily MacDonald-Korth, an art conservator and forensic specialist with her own laboratory, Longevity Art Preservation in Miami.
Their research was initially hobbled by the pandemic and other factors, but last spring, MacDonald-Korth used hightech equipment to study the underpainting and trace the elements of the paints used in the original in Philadelphia. The experts also analyzed similar Peale portraits of Washington that hang at Mount Vernon in Virginia and in the Senate.
Hall, meanwhile, whose work involves visiting embassies abroad, took photos of the Paris painting for the experts she had hired. Soltis, who had reviewed many a Peale painting, was shocked.
“What am I looking at?” she remembered thinking. “This horrible masklike face.” Peale’s faces, she said, were usually delicate and linear.
MacDonald-Korth figured the heavily overpainted face was a restoration, as often happens before a work changes hands. But she also was concerned about its authenticity.
Several months later, during a visit to London, Soltis called in a favor from an art dealer she knew who got her into the closed library of the National Portrait Gallery. There she found an auction catalog that confirmed the painting had been sold by Sotheby’s in 1946 to the London office of Knoedler & Co.
Further analysis revealed poke marks in the painting, some of which appeared to have been painted over around the face. MacDonald-Korth said she thought there were too many to think they had happened by accident.
It made sense to the experts. Here was an image of a military hero that had been seized by British forces and ended up in the country he defeated.