The bridges will be closed. Bruce, Bono and Beyonce are going to play the Lincoln Memorial. Good luck getting a tuxedo, or a hotel room, anywhere inside the Beltway. Inauguration Day is coming, and Washingtonians can feel the excitement, whether they voted for the Guy Who Won or the Other Guy.
Through it all, Franklin Kelly’s political allegiance is clear: He’s a Monroe man.
“I really like James Monroe,” says the deputy director of the National Gallery of Art. “He’s a very sober-looking fellow, but I like that beautifully painted sky behind him.”
Indeed, what’s not to like about America’s fifth president? Monroe was so popular they named a doctrine after him. Five states joined the union during Monroe’s two terms, including Illinois. So: No Monroe, no Obama! (Then again, no Monroe, no Blagojevich.)
In any event, Kelly isn’t talking about Monroe’s policies, but about his portrait. Monroe is Kelly’s favorite among Gilbert Stuart’s paintings of the first five U.S. presidents, on view in the National Gallery’s West Building. And what better occasion to revisit them than the inauguration of a president whose electoral victory was marked literally by dancing in the streets?
These images have become iconic; the representations of these men from the pre-photography era that we carry in our collective consciousness. (And in our wallets: That’s a Stuart-painted George Washington on the $1 bill, though not this particular Stuart Washington.) The five pictures are collectively known as the Gibbs-Coolidge set, after the families who owned them. They’re the only complete set of portraits of the first five presidents that survive. Stuart painted another, but three of those five were destroyed in an 1851 fire.
George Gibbs, an heir to a commercial fortune and self-styled scientist born, like his country, in 1776, originally commissioned the portraits from Stuart. After Gibbs died in 1833, his heirs sold the paintings to one Joseph Coolidge. They passed through four generations of Coolidges, eventually coming into the possession of the National Gallery via a joint gift-purchase in 1979.
“Stuart was well-established as the leading portrait painter in the new republic” by 1821, when he made four of the five portraits, Kelly says. “His style has an immediacy; a sense of life.” Stuart kept his subjects engaged in conversation during the long hours they sat for him, helping the artist to capture their animated facial expressions.
Only Monroe (and possibly Thomas Jefferson, who Stuart painted from life three times during his presidency) is depicted at his current age when Stuart painted him. George Washington died in 1799; his 1821 portrait is modeled after painting-from-life Stuart did of the first president in the mid-1790s, when Washington was 63.
Stuart made more than 100 likenesses of him, despite Washington’s apparent immunity to Stuart’s affable, learned chitchat. Of his sitting with Washington, Stuart recalled, “an apathy seemed to seize him, and a vacuity spread over his countenance, most appalling to paint.”
But’s one man’s “vacuity” is another’s “informality,” which is the word Kelly prefers.
“Stuart was certainly capable of portraying his sitters, Washington particularly, in very grand style,” Kelly says. “[But in the Gibbs Coolidge portraits], there was very much the notion that they’re not kings; they’re elected officials. They’re people who serve the people.”
If you go
Gilbert Stuart’s Presidential Portraits
Where: National Gallery of Art — West Building, Main Floor, Gallery 65, Constitution Avenue between 3rd and 7th streets NW
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; nga.gov
