In many ways, it was unfortunate that Gilbert Stuart’s lasting images of Washington date from this period, when the swagger and panache of his early days had faded. Embittered by partisan feuding and feeling burdened by public life, Washington had made massive sacrifices to his country, and the luster had fled from his eye. Although Stuart captured the ineffable grandeur of the man, who sometimes seemed to float in a timeless realm, his images gave posterity a far more dour and haggard Washington than the charismatic general known to contemporaries from earlier times. Stuart was cognizant of the distortions that time had visited upon Washington. “When I painted him,” he said, “he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face.”38 To help rectify such distortions, he turned to Houdon’s bust and life mask, but Stuart’s portraits still reflect the physiognomy of the mid-1790s.

Already in the 1780s Washington had tired of artistic conventions that cast politicians in Roman togas. Averse to idealizing his subjects, Gilbert Stuart dressed them in modern clothing and took a hard, cold look at them. So Stuart, for all the antics and fast talk that may have irritated Washington, was very much to his taste as a portrait painter. Only in the so-called Lansdowne portrait, where a visionary Washington stands with a fixed gaze and stiffly outstretched arm, does Stuart resort to the props of republican power, showing copies of The Federalist and the Constitution in bound form at his feet. Perhaps the memories of a healthier and happier husband predisposed Martha Washington to criticize Stuart’s work. “There are several prints, medallions, and miniatures of the president in the house, none of which please Mrs. Washington,” John Pintard wrote when he visited Mount Vernon in 1801. “She does not think Stuart’s celebrated painting a true resemblance.”39 Stuart converted the Washington portraits into a thriving industry, stamping out copies for so many years that he laughingly referred to them as his hundred-dollar bills—that being the price he charged for each. His daughter Jane contended that he could crank out a copy in a couple of hours and sometimes finished two portraits in a single session.

AS PATERFAMILIAS OF THE CLAN, the president loved to shower his young wards with sage advice, especially in affairs of the heart. Despite pressing political concerns, he enjoyed playing the didactic role of the grizzled adviser. George and Martha Washington were thrilled in 1795, when Fanny Washington, widowed by George Augustine’s death, wed Tobias Lear, who had lost his wife, Polly, to yellow fever. To bind them more closely, the Washingtons bestowed upon the young couple a rent-free house and 360 acres at Mount Vernon. Since Fanny had three children from her previous marriage and Tobias Lear a little boy from his, the wedding seemed a fairy-tale solution for the grieving young couple. Then in March 1796 Lear informed the Washingtons that Fanny had fallen gravely ill, and they were stunned when she breathed her last. “Your former letters prepared us for the stroke,” the Washingtons commiserated with Lear, “but it has fallen heavily notwithstanding.”40 For Martha Washington, who had been overjoyed by the marriage, touting Lear as “a worthy man . . . esteemed by everyone,” it extended the dreadful pattern in her life of the untimely death of children, both real and substitute.41

Another young woman who preoccupied Washington’s thoughts was Elizabeth Parke Custis, Nelly’s oldest sister, an attractive brunette raised by her mother and David Stuart. The girl so adored her stepgrandfather that she was once paralyzed by nerves when he descended for a visit. “The General said that, although he thought a young girl looked best when blushing,” she recalled, “yet he was concerned to see me suffer so much.”42 When requesting a portrait from Washington, she professed herself indifferent to love: “It is my first wish to have it in my power to contemplate at all times the features of one who I so highly respect as the Father of his Country and look up to with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”43 While Washington obliged her with a miniature by Irish artist Walter Robertson, he teased her gently and inquired whether “emotions of a softer kind” did not move her heart.44

Elizabeth’s desire to join the Washington household in Philadelphia in 1795 must have filled the older couple with misgivings. However devoted she was to them, she had a fiery temper and was cursed with what one aunt called “a violent and romantic disposition.”45 That same aunt regretted that in “her tastes and pastimes, she is more man than woman and regrets that she can’t wear pants.”46 When she first came to Philadelphia, she was sulky and querulous and boycotted church and dances. Martha Washington, a confirmed believer in social duties, could not sympathize with such morbid brooding. Washington, however, enjoyed Elizabeth’s company, and she accompanied him for sittings with Gilbert Stuart. One day, as Stuart painted, Elizabeth abruptly barged into the room and, folding her arms across her chest, cast an appraising look at his work. He was so struck by this self-assured pose that he painted her in exactly this manner, holding a straw hat embellished with a red ribbon. Her sidelong glance in the portrait is proud, spirited, and obstinate, as if she refused to budge from the viewer’s glance. Elizabeth appeared indifferent to her own beauty, as if it were something too trivial to occupy her attention.

In 1796 an Englishman twice her age, Thomas Law, revealed his plans to marry her, a move that took the Washingtons by surprise, Elizabeth having concealed the courtship. After running up a fortune in India, Law had come to America to dabble in real estate and promptly bought five hundred lots in the new federal district. Even before Washington knew he would someday have a familial connection with Law, he had recoiled at the scale of these purchases. “Will it not be asked,” he inquired, “why are speculators to pocket so much money?”47 When Law apprised him of his intention to marry Elizabeth, Washington was quietly livid and must have known that he could not talk the stubborn Elizabeth out of the marriage. In replying to Law, he faulted him for the deceptive manner in which he had proceeded but did not protest the marriage outright: “No intimation of this event, from any quarter, having been communicated to us before, it may well be supposed that it was a matter of surprise. This being premised, I have only to add . . . my approbation, in which Mrs. Washington unites.”48

It was a typically shrewd response from Washington, who offered qualified support to Law while privately gathering more information about him. He confronted Elizabeth gingerly, saying that she had “more honesty than disguise” in her nature and should disclose more details of her engagement: “This I have a right to expect in return for my blessing so promptly bestowed, after you had concealed the matter from me so long.”49 Wary of Law’s motives, Washington wrote on the sly to Elizabeth’s stepfather, David Stuart, suggesting a strong prenuptial agreement that would have Law “make a settlement upon her previous to marriage, of her own fortune, if no more.”50 When the couple married in Virginia the next month, the wedding was conducted in a studiously low-key style, devoid of dancing or festivities, as if the family had no wish to invest in premature celebration. The marriage proved a misalliance, and the couple separated in 1803.

Elizabeth’s petulant nature threw into shining relief the sterling qualities of her vivacious sister Nelly, who was so varied in her interests, including horseback riding, singing, playing the harpsichord, studying French, and drawing. One smitten male visitor marveled that she “has more perfection of form of expression, of color, of softness, and of firmness of mind than I have ever seen before.”51 With keen wit she skewered her enraptured male admirers. When she heard false rumors that she was romantically involved with one young man, she admitted that he had pleasing manners but had “been told too often of his merit and accomplishments, and it has given him more affectation than is by any means agreeable.”52 She mocked another young man for his pseudoromantic babble about “hearts, darts, hopes, fears, heart-aches” and other terms related to the “tender passion.”53 With such merciless comments, Nelly murdered the hopes of many young suitors, and it seemed unlikely she would marry anytime soon.