The 3 Faces of George Washington

How Mount Vernon Rebuilt The First President
By Frederick E. Allen

Washington (born 1732) as scientists think he looked at 57, 45, and 19.

(Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.)

What did George Washington really look like? We have a lot of familiar pictures of him, but they never quite agree with one another, and more were made when he was old than when he was young. So when the people who run Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, wanted exact life-sized likenesses of him at the ages of 19, 45, and 57 for their new visitors’ center, they turned to the tools of forensic anthropology. Those tools produced arresting and utterly convincing results.

The effort was led by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has worked both in reconstructing early hominids and in a county coroner’s office. “Usually you would use bones,” he says, “but we didn’t have permission to look at Washington’s bones.” So he turned to what he calls secondary and tertiary sources of information. The secondary sources were the life mask of Washington made when he was 53 by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, as well as the bust and full-length statue made from that mask; “surviving and provenanced dentures” (George Washington’s false teeth); and clothing. The tertiary sources were portraits and letters, diaries, and other written sources.

Digital 3-D scanning of the Houdon mask and bust revealed that the bust followed the mask very accurately. “The bust became my gold standard,” he says, “because of its identity with the mask face.” The head on the Houdon statue turned out to differ from the mask and bust only in minute ways; it is more pointed, and the chin sticks out more. Schwartz concluded that Houdon made those changes not for cosmetic reasons but to compensate for the fact that once the statue was on a pedestal, the viewer would be looking at Washington’s face from below. (“The Houdon statue is like Michelangelo’s David,” he says. “Look at it straight on and it looks wrong.”) Measurements of two portraits painted by Charles Willson Peale when Washington was in his forties revealed that they agreed remarkably closely with Houdon. “The familiar Gilbert Stuart images were the least like Washington,” Schwartz says.

At 57 Washington had a pockmark on his left cheek from the smallpox he was stricken by when he was 19. He also had taut lips from holding in his dentures and a chin slightly longer on one side because of his pattern of tooth loss. Digital 3-D scans of the two Peale portraits of Washington in his forties show a slightly longer distance from nose to chin and less taut lips; this corresponds with the fact that Washington had had less bone loss then and wasn’t holding in dentures.

To arrive at a 19-year-old Washington, Schwartz had to turn the older man into one with all his teeth and then work backward. He started by finding an eighteenth-century jaw similar to Washington’s, digitally scaling it to fit into the head, digitally removing bone and teeth to match what Washington had lost, and further refining it to fit Washington’s dentures and the exact shape of his head according to the Houdon-based scans. Then he took the result and digitally restored all the teeth and lost bone. He also made adjustments because Washington “was not yet hormonally mature. The eye sockets were less deep, the brow region wasn’t fully developed, there was more fat in his cheeks, and I had to shrink the nose and ears to reduce the cartilage growth that comes with aging.”

He learned a lot from Washington’s clothing, knowing that much of it would have been custom-made and very exact-fitting but “a little loose around the waist for eating.” Washington’s clothes showed him slightly “girthier,” Schwartz says, than the Houdon statue, again probably the result of the artist’s concessions to perspective. Washington had been corseted from the age of five, in the style of the time, to develop a correct posture, and this gave him his characteristic slightly arched back and pulled-back shoulders. (“That’s why everyone in the Trumbull painting of the signers of the Declaration of Independence looks so different from anyone in the nineteenth century,” Schwartz says.)

Using all the digital data he had gathered, Schwartz had models of the head and body at the three ages he wanted (and in the postures in which they’d be set in the dioramas that would give them realistic surroundings) milled from plastic foam. He worked with a sculptor, Stuart Williamson, to give each face a lifelike expression; had an artist, Sue Day, paint the faces; and had hair implanted and clothing put on.

“I wanted the young George Washington, at 19—a surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley—to have pride in what he’s doing and the excitement of not knowing what the future holds,” he says. “At 45, at Valley Forge, I wanted to convey both his strength as a leader and his exhaustion. At 57 I wanted to get the solemnity, the importance of the moment of his inauguration as President.”

Schwartz, a mild man with a carefully trimmed gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses, was not being immodest when he recently wrote about the whole experience: “My collaborators and I have made inroads into fusing science, art, and history in ways that were hardly imaginable even a few years ago.”—Frederick E. Allen

The Buyable Past

George Nelson Clocks
By David Lander

A 1950s Spike Clock, sometimes called a Starburst.

(R 20th Century.)

George Nelson said he got into furniture design by accident, and indeed the architect didn’t actually create many of the mid-twentieth-century modernist icons synonymous with his name. The bubble lamp, the coconut chair, the sling sofa, and others he’s commonly credited with were styled by associates in his New York City office. Nevertheless, Nelson was the maestro whose baton cued their creative efforts, and his relationship with the Zeeland, Michigan– based Herman Miller Furniture Company, which employed him as design director, assured their production.

The firm’s president was an early convert to modernism, and in 1945 he coaxed Nelson into working for him in exchange for a $20 fee for every drawing the firm used plus a 3 percent royalty on each piece sold. Designs flowed in freely from Nelson, who also wooed gifted outside designers like the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames. “Make everything that Eames designs,” Nelson instructed, “and don’t show it to me. I don’t need to approve it.”

A replica of Nelson’s ball clock.

(Vitra.)

In 1947 a related Miller-family firm, the Howard Miller Clock Company, needed new models, and Nelson’s principal associate, Irving Harper, conjured up a cluster of fanciful creations. The best known are wall clocks without numerals. One, based on Niels Bohr’s planetary model of the atom, has radiating spokes terminating in balls. Another mirrors the asterisk symbol, and there’s also a sunburst, a turbine, and even a large, voluptuous sun-flower with bent plywood petals. All possess a cheerful simplicity that visually reflects the sunnier side of their era.—David Lander

Resources

A book entitled George Nelson in the Compact Design Portfolio series succinctly summarizes its subject’s career in words and pictures. Original Nelson/Harper/Miller clocks are available from dealers who focus on vintage items. One of them, Evan Snyderman of R 20th Century (www.r20thcentury.com / 212-343-7979), says prices range from less than $2,500 for the most common to the mid-five-figure range for rare ones. Replicated models are available in what Vitra (www.vitra.com), the replicas’ high-end European manufacturer, calls re-editions; they combine characteristic good looks with quality, authenticity, and the accuracy of quartz movements.

The Gettysburg Gospen

Reading America’s Most Famous Speech
By Harold Holzer

No presidential speech has been as widely analyzed, memorized, or canonized as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It has inspired more words to amplify and celebrate its mere 10 sentences than any oration since the Sermon on the Mount: articles, recitals, chapters, set pieces in films and plays, and, at last count, seven major books, most notably, until now, Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize– winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.

Yet Gabor Boritt’s new The Gettysburg Gospel (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $28.00) bears the almost defiant subtitle The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. To Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at, appropriately enough, Gettysburg College (and, to fully disclose, a longtime colleague and occasional co-author), twentieth-century politicians and historians were guilty of inappropriately viewing Lincoln’s rhetorical triumph through the prism of modern experience.

Here, Boritt argues (Wills notwith-standing), is not the speech “that remade America” at all. Here is the America that remade the speech, recasting it from the poetic pendant to the gray legalese of the Emancipation Proclamation into a chest-thumping manifesto for nationalism and interventionism. Lincoln’s masterpiece was re-invented to justify America’s expanding aspirations around the world while ignoring the shrinking rights of African-Americans at home—the people to whom the original speech had promised “a new birth of freedom.”

If the speech could justify saving democracy at home with force of arms, it could later be used to send those arms abroad. Did Lincoln so intend? No, Boritt insists; he was merely, albeit brilliantly, trying to make sense of the catastrophic domestic struggle for the Union, majority rule, and emancipation; to sustain support for the terrible war; and perhaps, too, to launch his own candidacy for re-election.

Yet Boritt’s striking chapter on shifting American memory shrewdly shows how the address’s reputation rose as national commitment to equal rights declined. In the era of Jim Crow it was far more convenient to recall Lincoln as an orator of national might, not civil rights. Boritt demands that we hear the speech as it was first heard on November 19, 1863, on the site of the largest, fiercest, bloodiest battle in the history of the hemisphere.

Along the way he gives us an unforgettably vivid picture of the village where so many soldiers fought and died—the sight, the sound, and the smell of it as it explodes in monumental fighting, rots away in the torrid heat once the armies withdraw, then returns to life in half-mournful, half-raucous celebration to welcome the President that fall. In a brilliantly researched, beautifully crafted, and ultimately deeply moving work, Boritt never lets his readers lose sight of the tragedy that inspired such bravery and sacrifice from common soldiers, and such eloquence from their Commander in Chief.

The Budapest-born Boritt, who lived through the 1956 revolution in Hungary and now makes his home on the Gettysburg battlefield, brings a viewpoint inspirited by both experiences: surviving upheaval and living within the moving lens of historical memory. Perhaps only a foreign-born American could reduce the Gettysburg Address to its simplest truth: “This is who we are.”

We can only hope. In the midst of gruesome conflict, as Boritt reminds us, Lincoln’s voice “carried no touch of stridency or self-righteousness.” The President’s notions of rebirth went “even deeper than the Christian message, if that was possible,” touching “the primeval longing for a new birth that humankind has yearned for and celebrated with every spring since time immemorial.” Here was “the rationalism of the Enlightenment combined with Protestant conscience.” Here was a plea, in the midst of a wrenching war, to achieve a just peace.

More than 40 years ago the historian David C. Mearns wrote an exasperated Gettysburg essay entitled “Unknown at This Address.” Mearns would be delighted to know that however long it has taken, the addressee has finally been found—and, even better, understood.

—Harold Holzer is co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.