George Washington, First President of the United States

This lithograph comes from a group of half-length representations of the first five presidents of the United States. In 1821, the Boston frame maker and publisher John Doggett commissioned Stuart to replicate five earlier presidential portraits; he then exhibited them at his Market Street Repository, where contemporaries dubbed them the "American Kings." Stuart based Washington’s head on a life study he had made in Philadelphia in 1796—known today as the Athenaeum Portrait. To employ the emerging medium of lithography for the related prints, Doggett sent the paintings to Paris, where the expert draftsman Maurin transferred the images onto lithographic stones. A French pressman accompanied the stones back to Boston to oversee printing.