Travel: Face to Face With George Washington

“This has been a massive, very expensive effort, because we’ve wanted to bring George Washington back to his rightful place as first in the hearts of his countrymen.” That’s how James Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, explains the building of the new visitor center and museum there. It opens today, October 27, after 11 years of planning and construction, $60 million of fundraising for initial costs, and another $50 million to endow future operations. The results are truly splendid.

Arriving at Mount Vernon you now will enter a handsome Ford Orientation Center, which is spacious and light and airy yet remarkably unobtrusive from without. The offerings you’ll encounter there, before heading out to visit Washington’s home itself, include a $5 million 18-minute live-action film that shows the young Washington meeting and courting his future wife, fighting in the French and Indian War, preparing to cross the Delaware in 1776, and resigning his commission in 1783—all as a way of quickly acquainting you with his life and accomplishments in the years before what Rees calls Mount Vernon’s “golden age,” the placid time between the end of the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention and Presidency. The movie is a little hokey, the way historical reenactments tend to be, but for those unfamiliar with Washington’s life story, it gives a good basic preparation for heading out to the mansion itself—and of course it’s optional. There’s also a one-twelfth-scale model of the mansion, with 700 exactly reproduced pieces of furniture. It stands eight feet high and scrupulously follows a room-by-room inventory of Washington’s possessions prepared by his executors just after his death. It was a gift to Mount Vernon from the people of Washington State in 1998.

Leaving the visitor center you quickly see how remarkably well it has been concealed from view from all the historic parts of the property. Walking up a slight rise, you soon emerge at the edge of the long lawn leading to the mansion. The tour of the house itself leads, as ever, through a large eighteenth-century home with a veranda opening out onto lawns with a sweeping unspoiled view of the Potomac, and behind it the farm lands, gardens, slave quarters, and other appurtenances of the extended domestic world of a very wealthy Virginia planter. And off to one side there’s Washington’s grave, with the slave burial ground and its memorial close by.

The best new addition on the property is not the visitor center but the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, another well-concealed new structure nearby, which you’re expected to get to after taking the tour of the house and enjoying the grounds. Part of the museum is a traditional exhibit space that will display 800 artifacts, foremost among them the great 1785 bust of Washington by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. But there’s also a string of galleries that give you a multimedia trip through Washington’s life. It includes among many other things TV monitors showing short films produced by the History Channel, a reproduction of a cabin at Valley Forge, a theater with a big-screen movie about the Revolution, and a room devoted entirely to Washington’s dentures (a painfully fascinating subject). But best of all are the three dioramas containing ultrarealistic life-size figures of Washington, at ages 19, 45, and 57, based on painstaking scientific research.

They were created under the supervision of 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. He employed advanced techniques from those experiences to get at how Washington really looked. “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 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 Washington wore in the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s. The tertiary sources were portraits for which he sat and letters and diaries and other written sources.

Digital 3D scanning of the Houdon mask and bust revealed that the bust followed the mask with surprising accuracy. “The bust became my gold standard,” Schwartz says, “because of its identity with the mask face.” Measurements of two portraits painted by Charles Willson Peale when Washington was in his forties revealed that his Washington agreed remarkably closely with Houdon’s. “The familiar Gilbert Stuart images were the least like Washington,” Schwartz says.

To arrive at a 19-year-old Washington, Schwartz had to turn the older man into a much younger one with all his teeth. 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, further refining it to fit Washington’s dentures and the exact shape of his head according to the Houdon-based scans, then adding back the teeth and bone Washington would once have had.

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.

The result: First you see Washington the surveyor, young, athletic, and confident, in a clearing in the Shenandoah Valley. Next he’s on horseback surrounded by his troops and falling snow at Valley Forge, in blue dress coat with gold epaulets and white leather breeches, looking every inch the commander. Finally he’s at Federal Hall in New York taking the oath of office as President, looking older, more like the George Washington of Gilbert Stuart and the dollar bill, but amazingly alive and real and consistent with his younger versions. You’ll come away from seeing these three Washingtons feeling you’ve gotten to know the man in a way you never before could have.

Visiting Mount Vernon has always been an inspiring experience. It has gotten even more so.

Mount Vernon is less than an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C. It’s open every day of the year, and admission is $13 for adults, $12 for senior citizens, $6 for children 6 to 11, and free for those 5 and under. For more information visit www.mountvernon.org.