On Monday, the Washington Post had a feature story about an effort by modern historians to revisit and reinvent the image of Martha Washington. Our mental image of her, shaped mainly by the famous portrait by Charles Wilson Peale, and otherwise very little factual information, is of a grandmotherly figure quietly supporting her famous husband. But historians can’t write the same history over and over again, so our noted national characters are periodically reinvented to suit our culture’s needs, our changing mores, and the need on the part of historians to publish or perish. At the moment, the bigger lens of attention is falling on the suddenly-relevant-again Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but revisioning Martha Washington is actually an interesting subject simply because she is so little known to us today.
This portrait of a much younger Martha Washington was painted several years ago by an artist named Michael J. Deas. Deas is also noted for his re-imagining of the Columbia Pictures logo in 1993, recently featured in this post at Neatorama about the evolution of movie studio logos. The painting was originally commissioned for the cover of a book about Martha Washington written in 2005 by historian Patricia Brady (good interview with Brady at this link). The Washington Post story says that Brady took a miniature of Martha Washington to the forensic anthropology program at Louisiana State University to do an “age-regression” study to try to establish what she might have looked like at the time of her marriage to Washington. Deas used the computer image as the basis for his painting. The portrait was subsequently purchased by the Mount Vernon estate and is now on permanent display there.
Local historian J.L. Bell blogged about the portrait this morning, and he has some interesting observations. First and foremost, he is quick to point out that there is indeed a portrait of Martha Custis which was painted when she was 26 years old by an artist named John Wollaston:
Bell’s observation is that this actual portrait of young Martha doesn’t really look a whole lot like the 2005 painting by Deas. One explanation, Bell says, is the difference in the aesthetics of the portrayal of women between the mid-18th century and the early 21st. The Deas painting is clearly an object of our time in the way she is posed, in the underlying athleticism of her frame, even of our present-day interpretation of slimness and body-line definition. But, then, so is the Wollaston portrait reflective of the typical portrayal of a woman in the 1750s: more rounded face, slightly plump, with impeccable posture maintained by the confines of 18th Century dress. We are drawn to the modern portrait because it fits our model of what women *should* look like, but it is no more real-to-life than the painting made in 1757.
So, two points to J.L. Bell for getting beyond the surface of a story that most of the media have only touched on.
Personally, when I saw the Deas portrait on the Washington Post website, the first impression I had was how much he made her look like Helen Hunt. Check it out:
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