Richards Portrait of George Washington is currently on display in the exhibition Time Capsule (on view through December 30, 2018), alongside memorabilia, photographs, and ephemera from the Buy George campaign. In the Everson’s July 1976 Bulletin, Director Ron Kuchta proudly wrote, “Rarely has a museum acquired a painting with the public support and enthusiasm and energy that accompanied the purchase of Richards Portrait of George Washington.” Today, the painting is a favorite of Everson visitors and an enduring reminder of what a community is capable of when it works together. Ultimately, the Buy George campaign raised over $145,000, with donations ranging in size from nickels given by elementary school children to a $30,000 matching gift from Crouse-Hinds Co. By January, however, the campaign had nearly reached its goal, and the Museum held a celebratory gala on February 22 to commemorate both the end of the campaign and Washington’s 244 th birthday. The Everson originally planned to finish the fundraiser by July 4, 1976, in celebration of America’s bicentennial. Visitors were encouraged to donate “a George for George,” and within a month, nearly $13,000 had been raised. The Buy George campaign began in May when the painting first went on view at the Everson with a simple donation box placed beside the canvas.
#Washington portrait painter series#
Over the course of ten months, from May 1975 to February of 1976, the Museum worked to raise the $115,000 necessary to purchase the painting through a series of unique fundraising events and opportunities designed to engage the entire Central New York community. The Everson purchased Richards Portrait of George Washington in 1976 after a successful community-wide fundraising campaign. Richards Portrait of George Washington is one such replica, named for the Boston family who commissioned the painting around 1810, eleven years after Washington’s death. He kept the painting in his possession and used it as a model from which to make replica portraits of Washington for the rest of his career. Rather than completing this work, which came to be known as the Athenaeum Portrait and today is jointly owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Portrait Gallery, Stuart deliberately left the painting unfinished. Stuart first painted the president in 1795, and at the urging of Martha Washington, her husband again sat for a portrait a year later, in 1796.
He is best known, however, for his many paintings of the first President of the United States, George Washington. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), considered one of America’s most accomplished portraitists, painted over one thousand portraits over the course of his career.
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