George Washington

Gilbert Stuart had been living in Boston for about five years when, in 1810, the congressman Josiah Quincy acquired this small Washington directly from him, painted on a wooden panel after the head Stuart had studied from life in 1796. Washington had been dead for more than ten years, and in New England his face had become a party emblem. The Federalists, out of power since Jefferson's election, claimed him as their own and named their political clubs Washington Benevolent Societies. Quincy was one of the fiercest Federalists in Congress. In January 1811, in a House debate on admitting Louisiana as a state, he declared that if the bill passed the Union was virtually dissolved, and that some states would have to prepare for separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must. The portrait stayed in his family for three generations, passing to his son and grandson, until the Boston collector George Nixon Black bought it in 1896. Black left it to the Museum of Fine Arts, which received it in 1929.