Portrait of George Washington

Vanderlyn received the commission from the United States Congress in 1817, as part of a campaign to restore the Capitol after the British burned it in 1814. The portrait was based partly on the life masks and earlier portraits of Washington, most critically the Houdon bust and the Stuart Athenaeum likeness, since Washington had died in 1799 and no sitting was possible. Vanderlyn was among the most formally trained American painters of his generation, having studied in Paris under the Neoclassical tradition of Jacques-Louis David, and his Washington reflects that schooling directly: the severe frontal posture, the restrained palette anchored in dark tonalities, the sculptural modelling of drapery and the calculated use of architectural framing all align with the Davidian insistence on virtue made visible through pictorial order. The painting hangs today in the House of Representatives chamber at the United States Capitol, making it one of the most constitutionally embedded portraits in American history. It was completed and installed in 1834 after years of work, and its scale and gravity were intended to hold their own in one of the most imposing civic interiors in the new republic.