George Washington- Unfinished Portrait

[Tom Edgerton]

Enzie--heard the story this morning. Very entertaining.

Don't know if you guys got to the Gilbert Stuart exhibition in DC last year...it was terrific.

One room held a great number--fifteen or so--of the Washington portraits, many of them full figure. A lot of the copies that Enzie refers to above. The really interesting, and hilarious, aspect of seeing so many copies of the same painting was to see how, on some days, Stuart was engaged in making a good painting, and at other times he was obviously phoning it in. Or he may have been tanked...one story on him was that he fled England to Ireland for a while, to stay ahead of his creditors--some of whom were tavern keepers with pretty healthy bartabs that Stuart had run up.

There was really interesting article on him in either American Heritage or Smithsonian around the time of the DC exhibition.

Best--TE

[Julie Deane]

I saw that exhibit - it was really eye-opening to see how many times he had copied that same picture. And all the copies were not there in the exhibit!

The original, done from life, was exhibited, as I recall. It was lifesized and "unfinished", that is, just the heads and shoulders with nothing for a background, just toned canvas. At least, that's my memory of it. And it was loads better than the copies he made later (in my opinion).