One corner of the Portland Art Museum looks like a small shrine for the nation’s first president, George Washington. The reverential quality is part of the artist’s purpose.
The American painter Rembrandt Peale virtually made an industry out of his much-copied paintings of Washington. It was both a commercial success for him and an important force behind the growing secular cult that turned Washington into a mythic example of propriety and civic responsibility.
Peale had a special credential to paint the first president. Washington had posed for Peale when the latter still was quite young. Working from memory, Peale went on to produce 79 different versions of his George Washington paintings in various poses and different military garb — long after Washington’s death in 1799.
These likenesses have become part of the pantheon of images we now consider to be American political gospel. Here is one on those original oil-on-canvas paintings in the collection of the Portland museum, from circa 1850.
Robert Craig Waters 