George Washington has long<\/span> been something of an American visual clich\u00e9. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it<\/a> \u201cnoteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God\u2019s Saints.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art. As the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary nears, the Trump administration has come up with observances that <\/b>show a limited image of American history, as in its visually conventional <\/b>The Story of America<\/i> video series, full of yellowed parchment and tricorn hats. Other commemorations are essentially celebrations of the current president: The U.S. Mint is set to issue a commemorative gold Donald Trump coin, and one of the administration\u2019s first observances of the anniversary year was a military parade that coincided with the president\u2019s birthday. Such decisions, like the \u201csacred duty to have a likeness of Washington\u201d on the wall, obscure the line between the nation and its leader\u2014which, in turn, seems connected to Trump\u2019s tendency to suggest that criticizing him is unpatriotic.<\/p>\n But in the context of the 250th, it\u2019s worth remembering that patriotism doesn\u2019t have to be uncomplicated or exuberant or even easy. In a 2018 remembrance<\/a> of Philip Roth, Zadie Smith recalled that after the great writer retired, he devoted himself to reading, especially about slavery: \u201cHis coffee table was piled high with books on the subject\u2014canonical, specialist, and obscure\u2014and many slave narratives.\u201d For Smith, this investigation was coherent with Roth\u2019s body of work: \u201cHe always wanted to know America,\u201d she writes, \u201cand to see it in the round.\u201d<\/p>\n Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian<\/a><\/p>\n A similar spirit of understanding as patriotism animates the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts\u2019s show \u201cTitus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous Than the Truth<\/a>,\u201d which is part of Virginia\u2019s state commemoration of the semiquincentennial. It juxtaposes the 19th-century artist Junius Brutus Stearns\u2019s paintings of George Washington\u2014not portraits, but imagined scenes of the president\u2019s life that circulated widely in their time and remain canonical enough to appear in those Story of America<\/i> videos\u2014with six works by the contemporary painter and sculptor Titus Kaphar. Both artists show Washington as a slaveholder, a choice that\u2019s noteworthy in Stearns\u2019s work and central to Kaphar\u2019s.<\/p>\n Kaphar is married to a descendant of Washington\u2019s, and his works in the show approach the Founding Father with the seriousness and respect one might give an older relative. Kaphar seems less interested in criticizing Washington than in bringing two often-fragmented narratives about him together\u2014that is, in inviting viewers to see him both as a once-in-a-nation\u2019s-lifetime hero and as a flawed human being who enslaved many others. As Kaphar unites these ideas, he also combines wildly varied artistic techniques. The show includes two of his sculptures, and paintings that are done not only in conventional oil on linen but also in uncommon materials such as torn fabric and sculpted tar. This mixing of media does not divert attention from Kaphar\u2019s abundant traditional skill. In fact, his oil painting is so gorgeous, and his canvases so strikingly colorful, that they eclipse all of Stearns\u2019s work.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t surprised that Stearns couldn\u2019t compete with Kaphar. Mark Thistlethwaite, an art historian who has written about Stearns extensively, described him to me as a \u201cvery competent painter,\u201d someone who\u2019s remembered largely because he was good at creating clear, accessible images. Still, it\u2019s fun to see contemporary works outshine older ones. It also creates an excellent model for honoring America\u2019s 250th; because Kaphar\u2019s art is so exciting, the show celebrates his work\u2014and therefore the present\u2014at least as much as it engages with the past. This slight elevation of new over old is its own vision of progress, one in which serious contemplation of art history leads to visually stunning and, at least in Rothian terms, meaningfully patriotic art.<\/p>\n The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts<\/span> is in Richmond, not far from Monument Avenue. Outside the museum is Kehinde Wiley\u2019s Rumors of War<\/i><\/a>, an enormous sculpture of a young Black man on horseback that Wiley conceived in 2016 as a response to the five statues of Confederate leaders then lining that street. (As of 2021, all of them had been removed.) According to the historian Lydia Brandt, those Confederate monuments, all erected decades after the Civil War, were connected by style, ideology, and sightline to the two Washington statues in Richmond\u2019s Capitol Square. At that time, Brandt writes<\/a>, Virginia\u2019s Lost Cause apologists were eager to suggest that \u201cjust as Washington was great, so too were these sons of the Confederacy\u201d\u2014and they were keen to resurrect \u201cthe idea that the Confederacy\u2019s mission had been squarely in line with the ideals of the founding fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n Stearns\u2019s Washington series holds echoes of this idea. Done in the 1840s and 1850s, around the time that the Fugitive Slave Act became law, Stearns\u2019s images were unusual in explicitly depicting Washington not just as a slave owner but as a plantation master\u2014and, in representing his enslaved subjects as healthy and content, the art historian and Yale University President Maurie D. McInnis writes<\/a>, they contributed to the myth that \u201cslavery was a benevolent and natural institution.\u201d<\/p>\n Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon<\/i>, one of the Stearns paintings included in the VMFA show, is a scene of the president managing his fields. Much of the composition is devoted to enslaved workers, and yet your eye goes directly to Washington. His face is so bright that it seems illuminated from within. Stearns used this technique in the other works that are on view too: Though they\u2019re full of people, and though his skill at portraiture wasn\u2019t great enough to make Washington\u2019s face immediately recognizable, you can always spot the president by his glow.<\/p>\n Kaphar uses light to even greater effect than Stearns did. All four of his paintings in the VMFA show have luminous backgrounds\u2014gold, lapis, candy pink\u2014and even brighter subjects. Asma Naeem, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, who previously curated a show of Kaphar\u2019s work<\/a> at the National Portrait Gallery, described him to me as \u201cincredibly erudite when it comes to the history of portraiture.\u201d His knowledge manifests in part in his ability to replicate, riff on, and sometimes\u2014as in this case\u2014exceed the styles of the era he\u2019s reacting to.<\/p>\n By subjects<\/i>, I don\u2019t mean only Washington. The VMFA show includes two of Kaphar\u2019s paintings of the Founding Father; one of his enslaved chef Hercules Posey; and one of his enslaved valet Christopher Sheels. Sheels also appears in Stearns\u2019s painting Washington on His Deathbed<\/i>, hovering at the very edge of a crowded scene; he\u2019s cast in such deep shadow that his expression is hard to read.<\/p>\n Kaphar\u2019s All That We Carry (Christopher Sheels)<\/i>, in contrast, places Sheels alone in front of an acid-trip sky, wearing white clothes that match the ones the president wears in Deathbed<\/i>. <\/i>While Stearns\u2019s fabrics are laboriously draped and bunched, Kaphar uses thick black strokes to give Sheels\u2019s clothes folds, creating dimension while also demonstrating ease. Rough streaks of white paint crackle around Sheels\u2019s body like electricity, and a white dot in each of his irises makes it seem as if he is staring directly into bright light. His face is young, resolute, and full of blue glints that match the sky behind him.<\/p>\n In interviews, Kaphar often speaks<\/a> of \u201camending\u201d art history \u201cin the same way as we do to the constitution\u201d\u2014adding and changing, but never erasing. By transforming Stearns\u2019s cramped, overshadowed Sheels into a near-celestial figure, Kaphar creates a companion image to Washington on His Deathbed <\/i>that is not a replacement or rebuttal but a demonstration of how much more humanity\u2014how much more America\u2014there is to see.<\/p>\n A more muted version of this additive ethos is visible in another Kaphar painting, George Washington\u2019s Chef<\/i>. Posey\u2019s gorgeously draped, golden-white clothing is painted with a skill that Stearns might well have envied. His face is made of carefully molded tar. Only his mouth is discernible\u2014a logical feature to highlight on a cook. Choosing to call attention to Posey\u2019s mouth, and therefore his work, chimes with the painting\u2019s title, which puts the focus on Posey\u2019s enslaver. The presentation of the chef in this context may seem at odds with Kaphar\u2019s almost joyous approach to Sheels, but Posey is rendered with a dignity that keeps this painting grounded in the legacy that it\u2019s rectifying.<\/p>\n Washington himself appears in two of the Kaphar paintings in the VMFA show\u2014but not all of him. In Shadows of Liberty<\/i>, Washington appears on his horse, his body and the bottom half of his face\u2014which Kaphar paints with pink-cheeked 19th-century perfection\u2014covered in shredded pieces of yellow-white canvas that bear the names of people Washington enslaved. They\u2019re nailed on, echoing Kongo power objects called minkisi<\/i> that are used in spiritual practice; in that tradition, the nails can signify either curses or binding contracts. In Kaphar\u2019s version, the many nails and the canvas strips they hold in place work to obscure Washington. The president becomes a slaveholder on horseback, his identity swallowed up the way Stearns\u2019s shadows eat up Sheels.<\/p>\n Another painting, In the Name of God Amen<\/i>, uses a similar concept, but its tone and mood are distinct. In it, the president glows against a gorgeously blue background. He gazes levelly into nothingness\u2014death, perhaps, or the future. The lower part of his face is hidden by golden-yellow ribbons of canvas that contain some of the text of Washington\u2019s will, which freed everyone he\u2019d enslaved, pending the death of his wife, Martha. Here, instead of letting the strips hang loose, Kaphar sculpts them into an elaborate, beautiful ruff that gives Washington a regal air. It is as if his decision, this time, has elevated him.<\/p>\n Writing about Kaphar for the Gagosian gallery\u2019s magazine, the philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, observes<\/a> that the nails in Kaphar\u2019s paintings of Washington and other presidents, in their reference to Kongo practice, are a \u201cmanifestation of Black agency in both material and technique; they are also, well, rusty nails driven into a president\u2019s face.\u201d This is technically true for In the Name of God Amen <\/i>too\u2014but it has fewer nails, and they suggest much less violence than Stanley implies, such that they seem to represent a contract, not a curse.<\/p>\n Stanley views Kaphar\u2019s work as a challenge to \u201c\u2018patriotic\u2019 art,\u201d but the transition between these two paintings\u2014and these two renditions of Washington\u2014strikes me as intensely patriotic. In one, the heroic image of Washington on horseback is buried under symbols of his commitment to slaveholding. In the other, his decision to manumit those he\u2019d enslaved gives him\u2014to use a canonically un-American word\u2014nobility. The latter painting makes clear that the show is celebrating as well as contemplating Washington.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/e5y8MBD6gAHU13XRCnrRjl--OtE=\/0x0:1918x2880\/655x984\/media\/img\/posts\/2026\/04\/2026_04_03_06_Reimagining_George_Washingtons_Portrait_2\/original.jpg\")
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