Washington Before Yorktown

Rembrandt Peale, the son of famous American portrait artist Charles Willson Peale, painted more than seventy idealized portraits of George Washington in an effort to create a likeness that captured what Peale thought of as Washington’s heroic qualities. Around 1824 he completed his "perfect" likeness of Washington, George Washington, Patriae Pater. He used that as the basis for this work, entitled Washington Before Yorktown, which depicts Washington on a white horse, delivering orders to the Marquis de Lafayette, Henry Knox, Benjamin Lincoln, and Rochambeau. Alexander Hamilton appears on horseback on the right. Peale hoped the United States Congress would purchase this portrait to hang in the Capitol Rotunda, but this never happened. In 1873 his heirs donated it to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which hung the portrait on the west wall of the dining room at Mount Vernon.