Head of Washington

In the autumn of 1795, midway through his second term as president, George Washington agreed to sit in Philadelphia for Charles Willson Peale's 17-year-old son Rembrandt. The father came along to keep the sittings easy and painted the president himself, and at later sessions his brother James and two more of his sons joined in. The painter Gilbert Stuart, happening on the scene, is said to have told Martha Washington that her husband was in danger of being Pealed all around. Peale's canvas from those sittings is now in the New-York Historical Society. Of his seven portraits of Washington from life, it is the only one in civilian dress rather than uniform. Between 1795 and 1798 he painted at least eight replicas of it, and this little head, on a panel only 19 centimetres high, was his gift to Mrs John Callahan of Annapolis in Maryland, a family he often stayed with and had painted before. It passed down through three generations of her family and was then bought by Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator best known for his fight against slavery. When Sumner died in 1874 he left 94 paintings to the young Museum of Fine Arts. Many were sold to buy plaster casts for its new building in Copley Square, and this Washington was one of the pictures kept.