George Washington (Athenaeum-Type)

A monument worthy the memory of Washington… will commemorate… a virtue, a patriotism, and a gratitude truly national, with which the friends of liberty everywhere will sympathize, and of which our country may always be proud.
-President James Madison, upon acceptance as President of the Washington Monument Society, 1835.¹

Just over thirty years prior to uttering the above words, President James Madison (1751-1836) commissioned his own, personal commemoration of Washington: A portrait of the first President by the preeminent artist of the day, Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). At the time, Madison was secretary of state in the Jefferson administration and Washington had died less than five years previously. Madison would go on to become the nation’s fourth president and this portrait, displayed prominently in Montpelier, his Virginia estate, and later his widow Dolley’s Washington home, reflects the reverence and respect given to America’s first president by those who knew him best. The portrait offered here is a magnificent display of Stuart’s virtuosity. It is also a testament to the bonds between two men instrumental in the founding of the United States and, like the obelisk now standing on the National Mall, a tribute “worthy the memory of Washington.”

Washington and Madison:
The Father of the Country and the Father of the Constitution

The accolades bestowed on the portrait’s sitter and patron speak to their foundational roles in the establishment of the United States. While one secured a nation’s victory on the battlefield, the other built the framework for its survival. The two were for much of their time together close friends and trusted allies. Madison provided Washington with continuous updates on the progress of the Constitution’s ratification process during 1787 and 1788 and the following year, Madison is thought to have provided much of the text for Washington’s first inaugural address. However, tensions between the two grew during the early 1790s as Madison aligned with Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalist faction that opposed the economic and foreign policies of the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton. The passage of the Jay Treaty in 1795 was a culmination of these differences and Washington and Madison were never as close personally. Yet, the commission of this portrait reflects Madison’s steadfast loyalty to Washington, a love for the Republic that they built, and above all, an affirmation of unity over division.

The Commission and its “Fulfillment”

Washington was known to dislike having his portrait taken. That he sat three times for Gilbert Stuart in late 1795 and early 1796 indicates the artist’s stature and well-deserved reputation as the foremost portraitist of his day. The portrait offered here is a replica of the second sitting, the so-called Athenaeum-type, and the pose favored by Stuart to ensure a steady stream of income. This portrait was commissioned in 1804 soon after Stuart’s move from Philadelphia to Washington in December 1803. There, as the nation’s foremost portraitist in the capital city, he was highly sought after by the social and political elite. Secretary of State James Madison and his wife, Dolley (1768-1849), already a celebrated hostess, were in the thick of those vying for the artist’s services. An unidentified writer, but very possibly Dolley herself, wrote on May 7, 1804 that Stuart is “all the rage, he is almost worked to death, and everybody afraid that they will be the last to be finished.”² In the same letter, the writer noted that Madison was “sitting now” and by May 20, Dolley could write to her sister, “Steward [sic] has taken an admirable picture of Mr. Madison—his & mine are finished…” (figs. 1, 2).³

It was most likely during his May 1804 sitting that Madison ordered a likeness of Washington from the artist. The portrait presents the sitter with a squared jaw, jagged hair queue, and stiff linen shirt ruffle, a combination of features seen in Stuart’s replicas from the early 1800s owned by patrons living in the mid-Atlantic region.⁴ In contrast, his earlier Philadelphia works dated to the late 1790s display more decorative lace ruffles and during his later years in Boston, his replicas portray the sitter with a rounder, more oval face. Furthermore, the delineation of the shirt ruffle, with angular and arching brushstrokes breezily rendered in the artist’s confident style, follows the same irregular contours seen on the replica owned by John Tayloe III (fig. 3); the similarities are so striking that Stuart must have worked on both canvases in close proximity or quick succession. Tayloe’s portrait, now in the Corcoran Collection at the National Gallery of Art, has a history of being painted in Philadelphia in late 1803 and brought by Stuart to Washington as a basis for future replicas.⁵ A wealthy Virginia planter who had been a close personal friend of Washington’s, Tayloe and his wife Ann (Ogle) moved in the same social circles as the Madisons. Like the Madisons, the Tayloes’ portraits were taken by Stuart in the spring of 1804 and their recently built city residence, the Octagon House, was designed by the Madisons’ next door neighbor and friend, Dr. William Thornton. It is very conceivable that Stuart used the portrait purchased by Tayloe as the basis for the example offered here.

In 1806, the artist and commentator, William Dunlap visited Mrs. Madison and was shown “Stewarts pictures of Messrs. Washington, Jefferson, Madison & herself…”⁶ If it were not for a contradictory account discussed below, it would seem that the artist fulfilled the commission in a timely manner. However, at a later date, Edward Coles (1786-1868), personal secretary to Madison during his presidential years wrote, “[Madison’s] copy of Washington, though bespoken & paid for in 1804, was not received until after I visited Boston in 1811, where at the request of Mr. M. I urged [Stuart] to fulfill his engagement.”⁷ The specificity of Coles’ notation, his intimate knowledge of Madison’s affairs, as well as his known presence in Boston in July 1811, all lend credence to his account.⁸ If his is to be believed, Stuart may have begun and made good progress on the work while it was in his Washington studio, possibly with Tayloe’s example nearby, while the painting witnessed by Dunlap in 1806 may have been a different portrait, perhaps a temporary loan to the Madisons while they awaited their commissioned work.

The Portrait’s Ownership by the Madisons

From its completion until Dolley’s death in 1849, the portrait was owned by the Madisons and graced the walls of their various residences in Washington and Virginia. If it was the one seen by Dunlap in 1806, it was first displayed in the Madisons’ F Street townhouse, located just east of the White House. By 1811, the year Coles notes he arranged for its completion, the couple were the occupants of the White House and it is very likely that it was displayed here, along with Stuart’s 1804 portraits of the Madisons and a full-length of Washington. In the summer of 1814, the British advancement upon the capital city during the War of 1812 disrupted this arrangement. As noted by Dolley, the 1804 portraits “were removed before the British entered” and as this portrait of Washington was also bust-size and their personal property, it may have accompanied these works.⁹ The full-length, however, was owned by the nation and its frame was screwed to the wall. In an oft-repeated account, Dolley famously insisted that the large picture be cut from its frame and it was saved moments before the British troops stormed the building and burned it to the ground on August 24, 1814.

For the remainder of his presidency, the Madisons lived at Tayloe’s Octagon House and one of the townhouses in the group known as the Seven Buildings, on New York Avenue and 19^th Street. By September 1816, however, the portrait can be documented at Montpelier when Baron de Montlezun-Labarthette (1762-after 1839), a French officer who had served in the Revolution, noted its presence in the drawing room, the primary entertaining room that showcased the Madisons’ art collection. Observed by the French visitor were family likenesses, other works by Stuart, such as his portraits of Jefferson, Madison and Dolley, busts of Homer and Socrates, and engravings of various subjects ranging from the Battle of Bunker Hill to a Madonna by Raphael.¹⁰ Thereafter and before Madison’s death in 1836, several visitors mentioned the work in their descriptions of the estate. According to George C. Shattuck, Stuart’s portraits of Washington and Jefferson were both considered “perfect” by Dolley Madison.¹¹

After James Madison died in 1836, Dolley Madison spent increasing amounts of her time in her Washington home on Lafayette Square just opposite the White House, before moving there permanently by the early 1840s. An inventory taken in 1842 documents the portrait’s presence in the Washington residence: “Presidents/ Washington by Stuart/ Adams (the elder) by Trumbull/ Jefferson by Stuart---/ Madison by Stuart/ Monroe by Vanderlyn/ + M^rs. Madison, by Stuart.”¹² In 1846, she and her household were featured in an article published widely throughout the nation. “Her house,” it was noted, “is a miniature museum of the fine arts” and her presidential portraits displayed in chronological order with those by Stuart noted to “fully justify Stuart’s celebrity as a portrait painter.”¹³

Despite her surroundings, Dolley Madison faced increasing debts in part due to the extravagance of her son, John Payne Todd (1792-1852) and toward the end of her life considered selling her portrait of Washington to raise funds. Focusing on her more valuable items, Dolley wrote to her son in July 1848, “What ought the large painting and those of Washington and Jefferson by Stuart, to bring in a Raffle or sale?”¹⁴ This sale did not take place and Dolley died the following year. Her son also tried to sell the Washington portrait privately after her death, but the five presidential works, and Dolley’s by Stuart, were eventually sold at public auction on March 1, 1851. In an advertisement for the sale, this work was described as “An original portrait of Washington, by Stuart” and along with the others, was noted as having been “painted expressly for Mr. Madison, and… never been out of the possession of the family.”¹⁵ The sale was well-attended with some buyers identified in the ensuing press. Edward Coles, Madison’s personal secretary during his presidential years and later Governor of Illinois, purchased Stuart’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson for $200 and that of Madison for $235. However, “the bust portrait of Washington, by Stuart, sold to a gentleman to New York, for cash $300” (fig. 4).¹⁶

William Henry Aspinwall

The New York gentleman who purchased the portrait in 1851 may have been William Henry Aspinwall (1807-1875) (fig. 5) or if not, the portrait was acquired by him soon thereafter.¹⁷ Born into a mercantile family, Aspinwall increased his inherited wealth exponentially through his savvy, as well as fortuitous, investments in international shipping. At age twenty-five, he entered the family’s shipping firm, Howland & Aspinwall, and with his cousins took over its management after the retirement of the previous generation. Aspinwall was particularly interested in developing faster ships in order to increase profits from the China trade; he played an integral role in the firm’s building of the Rainbow, hailed as the first clipper ship, and Sea Witch, vessels with novel hull shapes and large sail area that had an immediate and lasting influence on nautical design. In 1847, he won the mail contract for the Oregon-Panama passage from the west coast of America to the isthmus of Panama for his Pacific Mail and Steamship Company, a purchase that reaped dividends with the discovery of gold in California the following year. The boom created by the Gold Rush also led him to build, ahead of his competitors, the Panama Railroad that connected the Pacific and Atlantic sea routes over fifty years before the construction of the Panama canal.¹⁸

Upon completion of the Panama Railroad, Aspinwall retired from business and focused on leisurely pursuits, particularly the formation and display of his art collection. He and his wife, Anna Lloyd (Breck) (1812-1886) sailed for Europe in 1856 and spent two years acquiring furnishings and works of art. Many of these acquisitions were housed in his art gallery built by his son-in-law, the famed architect James Renwick, Jr. (1818-1896), who had recently completed the Smithsonian Institution Building (“the Castle”) and was in the beginning stages of his plans for New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The gallery was an extension of his city residence at the northeast corner of E. 10^th Street and University Place. The presence of this portrait in Aspinwall’s collection can be documented in February 1859 when the gallery was featured in Harper’s Weekly (fig. 7). Leading up to the large and small galleries was a corridor with sixteen works of both European and American subjects including “The Portrait of Washington, by Stuart.”¹⁹ The following year, Aspinwall published a catalogue of his collection and explicitly linking this portrait to the one that sold in 1851, the Stuart portrait is described as “Painted for President Madison” (fig. 6).²⁰

The portrait may have remained in the gallery while the residence remained in the Aspinwall family or it may have been one the artworks brought to Rockwood, a country estate in Tarrytown, New York that Aspinwall purchased from his business partner in 1860.²¹ For the remainder of his life, Aspinwall split his time between these two residences and applied the same energy he had previously devoted to his mercantile empire to numerous political, civic and philanthropic pursuits. During the Civil War, he used his economic might and access to shipping to provide substantial support to the Union cause.²² Following the war, he was among a small group that established the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866 and three years later, he was one of the first elected trustees of the newly formed Metropolitan Museum of Art.²³

I give to my beloved son Lloyd all my family pictures and Stuarts head of Washington. I give them to him as my eldest son and that they may be kept in the family.
--Will of William H. Aspinwall, January 11, 1864

In 1864, Aspinwall drafted a lengthy will that arranged for the dispersal of his vast fortune, land holdings, and art works.²⁴ The portrait offered here is the only work of art specifically mentioned and, grouped with his “family pictures,” it was singled out to be passed down to the next generation. This designation reveals that Aspinwall was deeply attached to it on a personal level and suggests the enduring power of the image to evoke pride and reverence for America’s first president. After Aspinwall’s death in 1875, the portrait descended as specified to his son, Col. Lloyd Aspinwall (1834-1886), and soon after to the collector’s grandson and namesake, William H. Aspinwall (1857-1910). It was under the latter’s ownership that the portrait was exhibited in the 1889 celebration of the centenary of Washington’s inauguration (fig. 8). Here, the portrait was distinguished as one of only four examples to represent the artist’s Athenaeum-type likenesses.

The Later History of the Portrait

One of the other Washington portraits by Stuart in the same exhibition, a replica of the Vaughan-type, was lent by Samuel P. Avery (1822-1904), the most prominent art dealer in late nineteenth-century New York, and perhaps through their ties as co-lenders, the younger Aspinwall sold this portrait to Avery. The signature of Avery’s son of the same name, Samuel P. Avery, Jr. (1847-1920) appears on a receipt dated April 24, 1894 documenting its sale from the Avery firm to noted collector Marsden J. Perry (1850-1935). Listing the sale price as $1,850, the receipt describes the work as: “Portrait of Geo. Washington by Gilbert Stuart/ from the [Pres^t?] Madison & W^m. H. Aspinwall collectⁿ.”²⁵

The portrait was subsequently acquired by collector James. W. Ellsworth (1849-1925), an industrialist based in Chicago with properties in his hometown of Hudson, Ohio as well as New York City, London and Florence, Italy. As recorded in stock books, Ellsworth sold the portrait to M. Knoedler & Co. for $20,000 in March 1923 and the following month, the firm sold the work to Saint Louis collector William K. Bixby (1857-1931) for $35,000.²⁶ From Bixby, the portrait was acquired by Ehrich Galleries in New York and sold to local banker Robert Livingston Clarkson (1892-1969), a direct descendant of Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Clarkson (1758-1825), who served in the Revolutionary War and was later President of the Bank of New York.²⁷ During these years, the portrait’s Madison provenance was probably unknown to its owners and was not included in published sources of the 1920s and 1930s.²⁸ Though unconfirmed, it is likely that Clarkson hired New York dealer and appraiser Augustus H. De Forest to research the work and his unpublished account, in the files of James Madison’s Montpelier, include a copy of the 1894 receipt mentioned above from Avery noting the portrait's Madison and Aspinwall history.²⁹

In 1951, Robert L. Clarkson donated the portrait in the memory of his son to Clarkson University, established in Potsdam, New York in 1896 and now one of the country’s foremost leaders in technological education and sustainable economic development. A champion of higher education and its crucial role in a democracy, Madison would have no doubt supported the University’s goals. “Throughout the Civilized World,” he wrote in 1822, “nations are courting the praise of fostering Science and the useful arts, and are opening their eyes to the principles and the blessings of Representative Government.”³⁰

Christie’s would like to acknowledge the original research performed by Dr. Lance Humphries while a consultant for James Madison’s Montpelier and thank Hilarie M. Hicks, Senior Research Historian, James Madison’s Montpelier, for sharing information on the portrait’s history from the museum’s files.

ENDNOTES

1. Cited in Frederick L. Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument and the Washington National Monument Society (Washington D.C., 1903), p. 25.
2. Transcription of unlocated letter to Anna Payne Cutts (Dolley Madison’s sister), May 7, 1804, Cutts Family Collection of Papers of James and Dolley Madison, microfilm 14326, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, cited in Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New York, 2004), p. 240, n.12.
3. Ibid. and Dolley Madison to Anna Payne Cutts, May 20, 1804, in Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison, p. 56, from the Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, cited in Barratt and Miles, pp. 259-260, n. 7.
4. Other portraits with similar characteristics have been dated to the same period and, for those whose first owners are known, were painted for patrons in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. Examples of these are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, National Portrait Gallery, London, and the White House. See Barratt and Miles, pp. 160-161, figs. 99-101.
5. The Tayloe portrait was noted in 1879 as having been painted in Philadelphia in 1803 and brought by Stuart to Washington to be used as the basis for future commissions. See George C. Mason, The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart (New York, 1879), p. 107; Barratt and Miles, cat. 42, pp. 160-161.
6. February 15, 1806 entry by William Dunlap in Diary of William Dunlap, vol. II (New York, 1930), p. 385.
7. Coles Papers, Box 3, folder 18, mss. 1458, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Edward Coles’s note was discovered by Lance Humphries, see Lance Humphries, Art consultant to Allison E. Deeds, Acting Curator, James Madison’s Montpelier, January 8, 2008, museum files, James Madison’s Montpelier. Edward Coles’ account of the portrait’s “fulfillment” in 1811 provides rare documentation of the commission and execution of one of Stuart’s Athenaeum-type portraits. Of the more than seventy-five examples of Stuart’s replicas known to survive, only about five others have early written evidence of their date of production: those painted for Charles Baring (1797; now at The Huntington), American Philosophical Society (ca. 1797; still in the APS collection), Isaac McKim (1819; now at The Huntington), Charles Brown (1820; whereabouts unknown), and Robert Gilmor Jr. (1825; now at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). See Barratt and Miles, cat. 40; Lawrence Park, Gilbert Stuart: An Illustrated Descriptive List of His Works, vol. 2 (New York, 1926), nos. 35, 49, 62, and 66.
8. Coles travelled to the northeast in the summer of 1811 and was in Boston on July 4 when he took part in the celebrations of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Stuart was then living and working on Devonshire Street in Roxbury, and it was likely in late June or July at his studio where Coles conveyed Madison’s desire to receive the painting he had paid for seven years previously. The portrait was presumably finished later that year or soon thereafter and sent to the Madisons. See “National Jubilee! Executive Celebration,” The Pittsfield Sun, July 13, 1811, p. 2.
9. Dolley Madison to Christopher Hughes, March 20, 1828, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, ed. Holly C. Shulman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2004, available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/DPM0665.
10. L. G. Moffatt and J. M. Carrière, “A Frenchman Visits Norfolk, Fredericksburg and Orange County, 1816, Part II: A Frenchman Visits President Madison,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 53 (1945): 202-203.
11. For other accounts mentioning the portrait at Montpelier, see Henry Dilworth Gilpin to Joshua Gilpin, September 16, 1827, box 8, Gilpin Family Papers, MS 238, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Gaillard Hunt (editor) and Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society: Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (New York, 1906); “From a Traveling Correspondent of the Patriot. Natural Bridge,” Baltimore Patriot, September 23, 1831, p. 2; John H. B. Latrobe to Charles Carroll Harper, August 3, 1832, box 4, John H. B. Latrobe Family Papers, MS 523, Maryland Historical Society; John Finch, Travels in the United States of America and Canada (London, 1833); James Brooks, “Correspondence of the Portland Advertiser. Visit to Mr. Madison,” Salem Gazette (Salem, MA), June 11, 1833, p. 2; “Mr. Madison. From the Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 6,” Baltimore Patriot, August 22, 1834; George C. Shattuck, Diary, 1834-1842, MS N-910, Massachusetts Historical Society; George C. Shattuck Jr. to Dr. George C. Shattuck, January 29, 1835, box 5, George Shattuck Papers, MS N-909, Massachusetts Historical Society; “Mr. Madison. (Extract of a Letter),” Salem Gazette (Salem, MA), 20 November 1835. Christie’s would like to thank Hilarie M. Hicks, Senior Research Historian, for sharing these references from the museum files of James Madison’s Montpelier.
12. Inventory, Dolley Payne Todd Madison, 15 November 1842, in The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, ed. Holly C. Shulman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2004, available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/DPM3243.
13. “Mrs. Madison, Widow of Ex-President Madison,” Alexandria Gazette, March 21, 1846, p. 2.
14. Dolley Payne Todd Madison to John Payne Todd, July 10, 1848, in The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, ed. Holly C. Shulman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2004, available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/DPM1551.
15. “Sales This Day,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington D.C.), March 1, 1851, p. 4.
16. “Sale of Mrs. Madison’s Pictures,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 5, 1851, p. 1.
17. Aspinwall may have attended the March 1, 1851 sale in person. His precise movements are not known, but he was recorded visiting Washington D.C. earlier in February. Along with other representatives of steamboat companies, he stayed at Willard’s Hotel at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue in close proximity to Dolley Madison’s Lafayette Square residence where the sale took place. See The New York Herald, February 3, 1851, p. 5. However, it is more likely that Aspinwall purchased the portrait from the New York buyer at the sale. The report of the sale noted that the purchaser of the Washington portrait also bought Madison’s portrait of John Adams by Trumbull; this second portrait does not appear to have been in Aspinwall’s collection and it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that he would have bought it in 1851 and then “deaccessioned” it by either gift or sale prior to the 1860 publication of his collection.
18. Duncan S. Somerville, The Aspinwall Empire (Mystic, Conn., 1983), pp. 16-61; Christine Mathieson, “Ambition's Apex: The Private Art Gallery of the Aiken-Rhett House” (Master’s Thesis, Clemson University and the College of Charleston, 2011), pp. 51-53, available at https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/1088.
19. “Mr Aspinwall’s Gallery,” Harper’s Weekly, February 26, 1859, p. 132.
20. William Henry Aspinwall, Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Gallery of W. H. Aspinwall (New York, 1860), p. 45. For more on Aspinwall’s gallery, see Mathieson, pp. 54-65, 230-237, figs. 18-29; John K. Howat, “Private Collectors and Public Spirit: A Selective View,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, edited by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New Haven, Conn., 2000), pp. 104-105; “Art Matters, The Private Gallery of W. H. Aspinwall, Esq.,” The American Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 17 (February 16, 1867), pp. 265-266.
21. “The Homes of America I: Rockwood,” The Art Journal, new series, vol. 1 (1875), pp. 369-370. After the death of Aspinwall’s widow in 1886, Rockwood was purchased by William Avery Rockefeller, Jr. (1841-1922), a co-founder of Standard Oil with his brother John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937), who renovated the building and enlarged the estate. It is now part of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve.
22. Somerville, pp. 70-96.
23. Somerville, pp. 99-100; Mathieson, p. 64.
24. The bulk of Aspinwall’s art collection was sold at auction in 1886. See American Art Association, Chickering Hall, New York, April 6, 1886.
25. Photocopy of receipt included in Augustus H. De Forest, “The Madison-Aspinwall Portrait of Washington,” unpublished mss., n.d., museum files, James Madison’s Montpelier. In addition to many of the sources cited in Literature above, De Forest noted that the portrait is no. 17 of the Athenaeum-type in Charles Henry Hart’s “List of Genuine Stuart Washington Portraits” and also included in Thomas B. Clarke’s “private index of Stuart Portraits.”
26. M. Knoedler & Co., Sales book 12, 1921 January – 1926 December, Knoedler Gallery Archive (Getty Research Institute), available at getty.edu.
27. “Washington Portrait by Stuart is Sold,” New York Times, 29 October 1929, p. 14; Edward Alden Jewell, “Exhibitions of Washingtonia,” New York Times, February 22, 1932, p. 22.
28. See references by Mantle Fielding, Lawrence Park, John Hill Morgan and Gustavus Eisen listed in Literature above. In these same sources, another portrait, that owned by Edward Coles, is mistakenly cited as the example previously owned by Madison as he was known to have purchased Stuart’s portraits of Jefferson and Madison in the 1851 auction (fig. 4). Coles’ own account, as recorded in the notation cited in note 7 above, clearly states that he purchased his Stuart portrait of Washington in Philadelphia “some years previous” to the sale of Madison’s pictures and “did not bid for the picture that Stuart took for Mr. Madison.”
29. See note 25 above. Upon its donation to Clarkson University in 1951, the portrait’s ownership by Madison was noted in newspaper accounts. See “Stuart Portrait Given to College,” The New York Times, February 22, 1951, p. 40.
30. James Madison to William T. Barry, August 4, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives, available at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-02-02-0480, from The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, vol. 2, 1 February 1820 – 26 February 1823, ed. David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, and Anne Mandeville Colony (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), pp. 555–558.