by Flora Fraser
Mount Vernon, looking south, c. 1802. Watercolor by William Russell Birch. (Credit ins.5)
Patsy Parke Custis at about sixteen. (Credit ins.6)
Jacky Parke Custis at seventeen. (Credit ins.7)
Martha’s children, Jacky (left) and Patsy. (Credit ins.8)
John Trumbull’s depiction of Washington at Verplanck’s Point, 1782. (Credit ins.9)
The Marquis de Lafayette, 1792. (Credit ins.10)
Presidential home life by Edward Savage, 1798. (Credit ins.11)
The Hessians surrender to Washington at Trenton, 1776. Painted by John Trumbull. (Credit ins.12)
Washington resigns his commission, Annapolis, 1783. Martha, shown here in the gallery, in fact awaited him at Mount Vernon. Painted by John Trumbull. (Credit ins.13)
Martha, painted by Peale at her husband’s request, during the presidential years in Philadelphia. (Credit ins.14)
Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of 1797 shows Washington renouncing a third term. (Credit ins.15)
Washington Crossing the Delaware. Washington’s Christmas-night raid, 1776, immortalized in the mid-nineteenth century by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. (Credit ins.16)
Larry Rivers’s Washington Crossing the Delaware—a twentieth-century reimagining. (Credit ins.17)
In the twenty-first century, cartoonist Matt Feazell undercuts the grandeur of Leutze’s Crossing. (Credit ins.18)
Grant Wood alludes, in 1939, to the famous cherry-tree saga in “Parson” Weems’s Life of Washington. (Credit ins.19)
Washington’s love of dancing on show at a victory ball, 1781. Neither he nor Martha attended any such event. J. L. G. Ferris. (Credit ins.20)
Washington and Lafayette at Valley Forge. J. W. Dunsmore, 1907. (Credit ins.21)
An imaginary depiction of contented field slaves and benevolent master at Mount Vernon. Junius Brutus Stearns, 1851. (Credit ins.22)
Betsy Ross sews the American flag: an imaginary scene from J. L. G. Ferris’s late-nineteenth-century Pageant of a Nation. (Credit ins.23)
Prayer at Valley Forge. Engraving by John McRae from a painting by Henry Brueckner. (Credit ins.24)
The Prayer at Valley Forge, 1975. Painted by Arnold Friberg to mark the bicentennial of the Revolution. (Credit ins.25)
Washington on His Deathbed by J. B. Stearns, 1851. (Credit ins.26)
Martha Washington’s head has adorned numerous U.S. postage stamps, this one from 1938. (Credit ins.27)
This eight-cent stamp (1902) was the first issued to honor a woman. (Credit ins.28)
Martha was also, in 1886, the first woman represented on a silver dollar certificate. (Credit ins.29)
George and Martha dolls, c. 1946. (Credit ins.30)
The Martha Washington Doll Book by Aline Bernstein, 1945. (Credit ins.31)
Study by Constantino Brumidi, c. 1863, for The Apotheosis of Washington, fresco in the eye of the U.S. Capitol dome. (Credit ins.32)
Washington, himself a Mason, looms over President Harry Truman, who is addressing Freemasons in the George Washington National Masonic Memorial, Alexandria, Virginia, 1950. (Credit ins.33)
The Washington Monument at dusk, 2006. (Credit ins.34)
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