Pictures of george washingtons life

George Washington was born 281 years ago today, February 22, 1732

Before the presidents, before Hollywood, and even before Elvis, there was George Washington.  The United States was a disunited smear of colonies along the east coast of a mighty land mass when men from cities, farms, hillsides, and swamps gathered under George Washington to fight off foreign rule.  In other words, before we were united, he united us.

Sure, there was a Continental Congress, and sure, there was the leadership of men like John Adams of Boston and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.  Both men would go on to be presidents just like George Washington, but neither man led troops into battle and neither man had the charisma to galvanize a disparate lot of colonists and to lead an unlikely army of poorly trained provincials to victory over the mightiest army on earth.  Only George Washington did that.

George Washington is almost beyond our recognition in the twenty-first century; perhaps that is why it is so critical to view the images of him and to ponder this man’s work.  How is he beyond recognition?  Washington, after serving his nation as a soldier and after winning a great victory over the British, was asked to serve his young country by being its first president.  He did not ask; he was ASKED.  In today’s America, presidential campaigns are waged like marketing wars and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on television advertising, image branding, and candidate polishing.

George Washington did not seek the office, and after two terms—remember that only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times was a Constitutional amendment ratified limiting the terms of the executive office to two—he voluntarily stepped down from the office which he could easily have turned into a throne. 

People wanted Washington in power; many people needed Washington in power to have confidence in the newly formed government.  The early federal government was a vague and faceless ma

George Washington’s image first became popular in America around 1775, the year he was named commander in chief of the Continental army. Formal yet direct, this portrait is among many variants that Stuart based on his famous, unfinished study of President Washington done from life in 1796. Stuart’s portraits quickly became the iconic representation of Washington as statesman and founding father of the new republic, guaranteeing the artist a long and lucrative career.

Image Caption

Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, 1796–1803, oil on canvas. Clark Art Institute, 1955.16

Spring 1994, Vol. 26, No. 1

By Richard Norton Smith

© 1994 by Richard Norton Smith

In the autumn of 1787, newly returned from Constitution-making in Philadelphia, the proprietor of Mount Vernon turned his attention to more prosaic matters. George Washington needed a gardener, and he approached the job search with the same psychological insight that had so impressed his fellow delegates. At length he drew up a contract with a hard-drinking candidate, after solemnly binding him to perform his duties sober for one year "if allowed four dollars at Christmas, with which to be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter, to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide, to be drunk for two days, a dram in the morning, and a drink of grog at dinner and at noon."

It was vintage Washington: a fine medley of bemused tolerance for human frailty and the rigidly methodical demands made upon himself across a lifetime of self-improvement. Nearly two hundred years after his death, no American is more instantly recognizable to--or more remote from--his descendants. Standing in a thousand city parks, frozen in marbled veneration, the Father of His Country inspires more awe than affection. According to Newsweek, 14 percent of all American preschoolers think that George Washington is still sitting in the Oval Office. To the rest of us, Washington appears every February to sell cars and appliances before vanishing into the historical mists, the Ultimate Dead White Male.

His contemporaries were less willing to let him go. On the last night of his life, having defied the might of the British empire and planted the seeds of republican government, the old hero was invited to challenge the very laws of nature. Among those who learned of Washington's lethally sore throat was his friend William Thornton, a practicing doctor and amateur architect who had secretly designed the new Capitol building in Washington city as a fina