George's Ladies

Like most males then and since, George Washington did his best to squirm out of having his picture done. It took all the prodding and blandishments of his wife Martha to make him agree to have "his likeness limned" for the first time. Giving in. Washington said: "Very well, Madam, but only if you and your children have your likenesses taken at the same time." As a result, Painter Charles Willson Peale was summoned from Annapolis in May 1772 to paint the hero of the French and Indian War, his wife and stepchildren. Peale's portrait of the 40-year-old Virginia planter in his uniform as a colonel in the Virginia militia, today hanging at Washington and Lee University, has become part of the national heritage.*

Last week the Mount Vernon Museum put on display a long-out-of-sight miniature, claiming it to be the very one that Martha Washington sat for as her part of the bargain (of the three miniatures Peale painted of Martha between 1772 and 1791, only one, at Yale University, had hitherto been known)'. Mount Vernon's small, 1 1/8-in.-by-1 1/2-in. oval likeness framed in a gold pendant (see cut) was acquired from G. Freeland Peter Jr. of Charlottesville, Va., a direct descendant of Martha Custis Washington. Tradition has it that Washington actually wore the pendant during the Revolutionary War campaigns. Said Mount Vernon Director Charles Cecil Wall: "We think this miniature should be the recognized portrait of Martha Washington--the way the American people should remember her, instead of as a grey-haired old lady with a fussy cap."

In nearby Williamsburg, Va., another lady Washington also admired (though presumably from afar) showed up last week, with the discovery in a private collection of another Charles Willson Peale portrait--this one of Actress Nancy Hallam, one of America's first glamour girls. The portrait, unidentified for more than a century, shows Actress Hallam playing the role of Imogen in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Hailed as "superfine" by a contemporary theatergoer, and not above playing the daring "breeches part" of a young man on stage, Nancy and her charms lured Washington to the theater five times in one week.

Williamsburg will hang its newly acquired picture of Nancy, who later married a church organist in Jamaica, in its Raleigh Tavern. This is fitting enough, since George dined there before going to the theater, and Nancy herself must have been no stranger.

*In later years the two men's friendship ripened. Washington sat seven times for portraits; Peale in turn made a set of false teeth for Washington, using elk's teeth set in lead.

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