Legends of the Lansdowne Portrait
Some articles on the web (including its Wikipedia entry until I edited it) say that portrait was the one saved from the White House as the British army approached. But that painting was commissioned for the first Marquess of Lansdowne (formerly Earl of Shelburne) and shipped to his home in England before he died in 1805. It didn’t come back to the U.S. of A. for many decades.
Rather, Stuart painted multiple copies of his Washington portraits, which are classified in three groups, called “Vaughn,” “Athenaeum,” and “Lansdowne” after the owners of their most prominent examples. The “Lansdowne” of 1796 was a full-figure painting, obviously the most expensive.
The U.S. government bought a copy of Stuart’s “Lansdowne” pose for $800 in 1800. That went into the President’s mansion and hangs in the twice-rebuilt White House today.
However, there have been whispers that Stuart himself didn’t paint that canvas, that it’s a copy by a younger artist named William Winstanley. Stuart told a story about Winstanley copying his work and inviting him to touch the copies so they could be sold as coming (at least in part) from the more famous artist’s hand.
But Stuart had a strong reason to claim that there were unauthorized copies of his work floating around. Just three years before the U.S. government bought the White House copy (from a dealer he secretly worked with), Stuart had taken $500 from the government for a copy that he appears to have never delivered, according to this article at Revolutionary War and Beyond. So had he sold the same painting twice?
The mystery of who painted the White House portrait bubbled up again in 1975 when former National Portrait Gallery director Marvin Sadik told ARTnews that Winstanley had created that painting. Sadik didn’t appear to have new evidence; rather, his argument was based on the aesthetic judgment that the face in the portrait was “dead.” (Ironically, decades earlier authors had claimed that Stuart had painted that face but Winstanley had painted the somewhat mismatched body—also apparently based on no evidence.)
As ARTnews reported in 2004, Sadik’s comments caused the government to clean and study the White House portrait anew. Its experts agreed that it was by Stuart, though not his best example of the pose. The head and body don’t make a good match on the other “Lansdowne” portraits, either. Nevertheless, Sadik remained unconvinced. And the painting remained in the White House.
TOMORROW: Four ways to save Washington’s portrait from the British army.
