Anna Payne Cutts

Anna Payne Cutts, the youngest sister of Dolley Madison, sits for a portrait in a fashionable French-style dress about the time of your marriage in March 1804 to Richard Cutts, a Massachusetts congressman. The renowned portraitist Gilbert Stuart created the original painting, and, according to family lore, he painted in his own profile, which included an outsized nose, in the billowing drapery behind his subject. Stuart also painted Richard Cutts about the same time.

After the deaths of both Anna and Richard Cutts, a family dispute arose between the Cutts's two sons over who would inherit the original Stuart portraits. Dolley Madison resolved the issue in an April 14, 1845, letter to both of her nephews, instructing them to have copies made of the original paintings by "the great colorist and delineator Sully" or a "more economical Artist." Charles Bird King was chosen to make the copies and each son kept one original Stuart and one copy. The portrait shown here, from the Virginia Historical Society, is the mid-nineteenth-century copy portrait painted by King.