Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson—then the U.S. minister plenipotentiary to France—is the subject of this 1788 oil-on-mahogany portrait by the artist John Trumbull. Trumbull painted it in Paris as a gift for Angelica Schuyler Church, who wrote to Jefferson on July 21, 1788, “Mr. Trumbull has given us each a picture of you. Mrs. Cosway’s is a better likeness than mine, but then, I have a better elsewhere and so I console myself.” The portrait is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.