User:Coffeeandcrumbs/Portraits of George Washington by Joseph Wright

Several portraits of George Washington by Joseph Wright are known to exist, including six paintings, a drypoint etching, and a relief in plaster and another in wax.

Background and painting of life study
Joseph Wright was born in Bordentown in 1756, the son of Patience Wright, a sculptor. At around 16 years old, he moved with his mother to London, where he studied painting under Benjamin West and John Hoppner. He later went to France where he painted Benjamin Franklin. Wright traveled to the United States with a letter of introduction from Franklin to George Washington. In October 1783, Wright arrived in Rocky Hill, New Jersey, at Washington's headquarters near Princeton.

Washington sat for Wright several times for the original portrait. It is believed that a painting that belonged to Francis Hopkinson is the original study painted by Wright. Collector and writer William Spohn Baker described the pose as awkward. Washington appears in a full bust, his body turned to the left and his face fully visible. He is in Continental Army uniform with his hair short and uncovered. The piece measures 14 by and is painted on a mahogany panel.

By 1880, the painting was in Philadelphia in the possession of Anne Hopkinson Foggo, the great-granddaughter of Hopkinson. According to Baker, it was in good preservation and had remained until then in the collection of the Hopkinson family.

Mount Vernon portrait (1784)
Wright moved to Philadelphia to setup a studio.

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/artwork/life-portraits-of-george-washington/

Powel portrait (1784)
Sources often report that Washington commissioned Wright to make a replica as a gift for his friend Elizabeth Willing Powel. However, there are no documents to indicate that Washington requested its creation, and it is believed that Powel commissioned the painting herself.

One of two paintings completed

After its creation in the artist's studio in Philadelphia, the painting resided at the Powel House at 244 South 3rd Street. Following her husband's death during 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic which also killed the artist, the painting moved with Powel to her new home on Chestnut Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets. It remained there until her death in 1830 when her nephew and heir, Colonel John Hare Powel, inherited it. With Colonel Powel as its owner, the painting resided in several places including at his home at 1300 Locust Street from 1832 to 1835. The painting passed down to his son, Samuel Powel, who placed it at the new home he built on Bowery Street in Newport, Pennsylvania in 1853.

Until the 1930s, the Powel portrait had never been on public display, remaining in the private collection of several generations of the Powel family. In the early part of that decade, the painting became one of two finalists to represent the subject for the Washington Bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of his birth. A bust sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

For a time, the painting was in the collection of the Atwater Kent Museum. As of 2023, the Powel painting hung outside the tent exhibit at the Museum of the American Revolution.

Jefferson portrait (1784, 1786)
Having been appointed in May 1784 as Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris to serve alongside Benjamin Franklin and John Adams who were already in Europe, Thomas Jefferson stopped in Philadelphia on his way to Boston to board a ship to Europe. While in Philadelphia, he commissioned Wright to create an unfinished portrait of Washington. Jefferson's account books on May 28, 1784, note of a payment of $17.10 which Jefferson left in the care of Francis Hopkinson for Wright. Washington was also in the city to attend a meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati. However, Wright based it on the study of Washington he had created in Rocky Hill in October 1783.

The artist had time only to finish the face, head, and an outline of the body. Even that was not allowed to fully dry and the artist was forced to let the canvas sit in the Sun. Jefferson was in a hurry to receive the painting because he intended to take it with him to Paris to serve as a study for a statue the Virginia General Assembly was in the process of commissioning. In a letter on May 30, Hopkinson writes to Jefferson with special instructions because its dry process was accelerated and not complete.

In July 1785, Jefferson wrote to Hopkinson to ask if he was permitted have a copy of the unfinished portrait made which he considered a necessary step before allowing the piece to be completed by another artist. By then, a portrait by Charles Willson Peale commissioned by the Virginia General Assembly had reached Jefferson in Europe, also intended to serve a study for the statue. However, neither the Peale nor Wright portrait served this purpose as the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon decided to travel to the U.S. himself to measure and create a cast of Washington.

In 1786, Jefferson

The portrait was acquired by Israel Thorndike Jr. at the Harding's Gallery sale of paintings in Jefferson's estate in 1833. Two years later, it was gifted to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose collection it remains.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0018#d1e12578a1048964 https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/george-washington-painting/#fn-6

Reliefs (1784)
In 1784, Wright took a plaster cast of Washington from which he created a bas-relief in wax. Of the occasion, Washington said in an anecdote noted in Elkanah Watson's autobiography: "Wright came to Mount Vernon with the singular request that I should permit him to take a model of my face, in plaster of Paris, to which I consented, with some reluctance. He oiled my features over; and placing me flat upon my back, upon a cot, preceded to daub my face with the plaster. Whilst in this ludicrous attitude, Mrs. Washington entered the room; and seeing, my face thus overspread with the plaster, involuntarily exclaimed. Her cry excited me in a disposition to smile, which gave my mouth a slight twist, or compression of the lips that is now observable in the bust which Wright afterward made."

Etching (1790)
In 1790, Washington refused to sit for a portrait by Wright who instead made a sketch while Washington was attending church services at St. Paul's in New York. three services.

https://www.boglewood.com/washington/prints-Wright/2001-JW-H138.html

https://www-jstor-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/1180498?seq=14

https://www-jstor-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/2936933?seq=2

Cleveland "McKean" bust portrait (1790)
The painting measures 21 x.

The painting was part of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1884, McKean loaned the painting to the United States National Museum. The painting returned to Philadelphia for an exhibition in 1886 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Later replicas by other artists
"Manly Medal"

. Joseph Hiller Jr.