The Face on the Dollar

Pull out a one-dollar bill and look at the left side of the face. That image of George Washington has appeared on American currency for more than a century, and the man who painted the original was born in a small mill village in what is now North Kingstown, Rhode Island, about twenty-five miles south of Providence.

Gilbert Stuart was born on December third, seventeen fifty-five, in Saunderstown, where his father ran what was reportedly the first snuff mill in America. The family moved to Newport when Stuart was six, and it was there that he began drawing. He spent eighteen years in Britain and Ireland developing his craft, then returned to the United States in seventeen ninety-three with a strategic plan: paint enough prominent people to get access to the president.

The resulting portrait of Washington, painted in seventeen ninety-six and known as the Athenaeum Portrait, was never finished. Stuart kept it that way deliberately. From the unfinished original, he made approximately fifty copies, each selling for about one hundred dollars. The face on the dollar bill derives from that same unfinished image. Stuart understood that the portrait was worth more incomplete than complete. As long as he held the original, he held the template.

Stuart went on to paint roughly one thousand subjects, including the first six American presidents. He died in Boston in eighteen twenty-eight and was buried in an unmarked grave. Rhode Island produced the painter whose face on Washington's portrait every American carries in their pocket, and the painter died without a gravestone.