Richard Henry Lee

Richard Henry Lee, prominent planter and politician, is the subject of this twentieth-century portrait, a copy of one made from life by Charles Willson Peale. The Maryland-born Peale, one of the most sought-after portraitists of his era, painted Lee in 1784, when members of the Continental Congress elected Lee president of Congress.

A nineteeth-century version of this painting by artist William Ludwell Shepherd was destroyed in a 1926 fire in the governor's mansion. Anne Fletcher of New York and Richmond was then commissioned by the state to replicate the Peale painting.