Reimagining George Washington’s Portrait

George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.”Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art. As the nation’s 250th anniversary nears, the Trump administration has come up with observances that show a limited image of American history, as in its visually conventional The Story of America video series, full of yellowed parchment and tricorn hats. Other commemorations are essentially celebrations of the current president: The U.S. Mint is set to issue a commemorative gold Donald Trump coin, and one of the administration’s first observances of the anniversary year was a military parade that coincided with the president’s birthday. Such decisions, like the “sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington” on the wall, obscure the line between the nation and its leader—which, in turn, seems connected to Trump’s tendency to suggest that criticizing him is unpatriotic.But in the context of the 250th, it’s worth remembering that patriotism doesn’t have to be uncomplicated or exuberant or even easy. In a 2018 remembrance of Philip Roth, Zadie Smith recalled that after the great writer retired, he devoted himself to reading, especially about slavery: “His coffee table was piled high with books on the subject—canonical, specialist, and obscure—and many slave narratives.” For Smith, this investigation was coherent with Roth’s body of work: “He always wanted to know America,” she writes, “and to see it in the round.”[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]A similar spirit of understanding as patriotism animates the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s show “Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous Than the Truth,” which is pa