Edward Savage

In the late 1790s visitors paid to see George Washington's family. Edward Savage showed his big group portrait of the President, Martha Washington and her two grandchildren in his own exhibition rooms, charged admission to look at it, and in 1798 put out an engraved version for people who wanted the picture at home.

He had not trained as a painter. Savage was born in 1761 in Princeton, Massachusetts, and started out as a goldsmith and engraver. His break came with a portrait of the new President for Harvard College, painted from sittings in New York in 1789 and 1790. Those sessions also gave him the faces for the family group, which he did not finish until 1796.

In 1791 he went to London, where he studied with Benjamin West, the American-born history painter, and then travelled on to Italy before coming home in 1794. Later he ran a gallery and museum on Water Street in New York. In 1801 he completed an unfinished canvas of Congress voting for independence, begun by the English painter Robert Edge Pine, and issued it as a mezzotint. The Washington Family now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.