Gilbert Stuart

Gilbert Stuart was born in 1755 in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, trained in London, and became the leading portrait painter of the young United States. He painted about a thousand people, among them each of the first six presidents. His unfinished portrait of George Washington from 1796, the Athenaeum portrait, has been the face on the one dollar bill for more than a century. He never finished it; he kept it and painted scores of copies from it to sell.

His full length Washington of the same year, the Lansdowne portrait, is the one people stand in front of longest at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, which bought it in 2001 to keep it from being sold at auction. On our Newport walk, the Colony House, Rhode Island's old state house, has a Washington by him inside, and in Philadelphia the Second Bank of the United States is a portrait gallery of the founding generation where he is well represented.