George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.”
Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art. As the nation’s 250th anniversary nears, the Trump administration has come up with observances that show a limited image of American history, as in its visually conventional The Story of America 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’s first observances of the anniversary year was a military parade that coincided with the president’s birthday. Such decisions, like the “sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington” on the wall, obscure the line between the nation and its leader—which, in turn, seems connected to Trump’s tendency to suggest that criticizing him is unpatriotic.
But in the context of the 250th, it’s worth remembering that patriotism doesn’t have to be uncomplicated or exuberant or even easy. In a 2018 remembrance of Philip Roth, Zadie Smith recalled that after the great writer retired, he devoted himself to reading, especially about slavery: “His coffee table was piled high with books on the subject—canonical, specialist, and obscure—and many slave narratives.” For Smith, this investigation was coherent with Roth’s body of work: “He always wanted to know America,” she writes, “and to see it in the round.”
A similar spirit of understanding as patriotism animates the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s show “Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous Than the Truth,” which is part of Virginia’s state commemoration of the semiquincentennial. It juxtaposes the 19th-century artist Junius Brutus Stearns’s paintings of George Washington—not portraits, but imagined scenes of the president’s life that circulated widely in their time and remain canonical enough to appear in those Story of America videos—with six works by the contemporary painter and sculptor Titus Kaphar. Both artists show Washington as a slaveholder, a choice that’s noteworthy in Stearns’s work and central to Kaphar’s.
Kaphar is married to a descendant of Washington’s, 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—that is, in inviting viewers to see him both as a once-in-a-nation’s-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’s abundant traditional skill. In fact, his oil painting is so gorgeous, and his canvases so strikingly colorful, that they eclipse all of Stearns’s work.
I wasn’t surprised that Stearns couldn’t compete with Kaphar. Mark Thistlethwaite, an art historian who has written about Stearns extensively, described him to me as a “very competent painter,” someone who’s remembered largely because he was good at creating clear, accessible images. Still, it’s fun to see contemporary works outshine older ones. It also creates an excellent model for honoring America’s 250th; because Kaphar’s art is so exciting, the show celebrates his work—and therefore the present—at 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.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is in Richmond, not far from Monument Avenue. Outside the museum is Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, 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’s Capitol Square. At that time, Brandt writes, Virginia’s Lost Cause apologists were eager to suggest that “just as Washington was great, so too were these sons of the Confederacy”—and they were keen to resurrect “the idea that the Confederacy’s mission had been squarely in line with the ideals of the founding fathers.”
Stearns’s Washington series holds echoes of this idea. Done in the 1840s and 1850s, around the time that the Fugitive Slave Act became law, Stearns’s images were unusual in explicitly depicting Washington not just as a slave owner but as a plantation master—and, in representing his enslaved subjects as healthy and content, the art historian and Yale University President Maurie D. McInnis writes, they contributed to the myth that “slavery was a benevolent and natural institution.”
Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, 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’re full of people, and though his skill at portraiture wasn’t great enough to make Washington’s face immediately recognizable, you can always spot the president by his glow.
Kaphar uses light to even greater effect than Stearns did. All four of his paintings in the VMFA show have luminous backgrounds—gold, lapis, candy pink—and even brighter subjects. Asma Naeem, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, who previously curated a show of Kaphar’s work at the National Portrait Gallery, described him to me as “incredibly erudite when it comes to the history of portraiture.” His knowledge manifests in part in his ability to replicate, riff on, and sometimes—as in this case—exceed the styles of the era he’s reacting to.
By subjects, I don’t mean only Washington. The VMFA show includes two of Kaphar’s 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’s painting Washington on His Deathbed, hovering at the very edge of a crowded scene; he’s cast in such deep shadow that his expression is hard to read.
Kaphar’s All That We Carry (Christopher Sheels), in contrast, places Sheels alone in front of an acid-trip sky, wearing white clothes that match the ones the president wears in Deathbed. While Stearns’s fabrics are laboriously draped and bunched, Kaphar uses thick black strokes to give Sheels’s clothes folds, creating dimension while also demonstrating ease. Rough streaks of white paint crackle around Sheels’s 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.
In interviews, Kaphar often speaks of “amending” art history “in the same way as we do to the constitution”—adding and changing, but never erasing. By transforming Stearns’s cramped, overshadowed Sheels into a near-celestial figure, Kaphar creates a companion image to Washington on His Deathbed that is not a replacement or rebuttal but a demonstration of how much more humanity—how much more America—there is to see.
A more muted version of this additive ethos is visible in another Kaphar painting, George Washington’s Chef. Posey’s 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—a logical feature to highlight on a cook. Choosing to call attention to Posey’s mouth, and therefore his work, chimes with the painting’s title, which puts the focus on Posey’s enslaver. The presentation of the chef in this context may seem at odds with Kaphar’s almost joyous approach to Sheels, but Posey is rendered with a dignity that keeps this painting grounded in the legacy that it’s rectifying.
Washington himself appears in two of the Kaphar paintings in the VMFA show—but not all of him. In Shadows of Liberty, Washington appears on his horse, his body and the bottom half of his face—which Kaphar paints with pink-cheeked 19th-century perfection—covered in shredded pieces of yellow-white canvas that bear the names of people Washington enslaved. They’re nailed on, echoing Kongo power objects called minkisi that are used in spiritual practice; in that tradition, the nails can signify either curses or binding contracts. In Kaphar’s 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’s shadows eat up Sheels.
Another painting, In the Name of God Amen, 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—death, 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’s will, which freed everyone he’d 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.
Writing about Kaphar for the Gagosian gallery’s magazine, the philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, observes that the nails in Kaphar’s paintings of Washington and other presidents, in their reference to Kongo practice, are a “manifestation of Black agency in both material and technique; they are also, well, rusty nails driven into a president’s face.” This is technically true for In the Name of God Amen too—but it has fewer nails, and they suggest much less violence than Stanley implies, such that they seem to represent a contract, not a curse.
Stanley views Kaphar’s work as a challenge to “‘patriotic’ art,” but the transition between these two paintings—and these two renditions of Washington—strikes 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’d enslaved gives him—to use a canonically un-American word—nobility. The latter painting makes clear that the show is celebrating as well as contemplating Washington.
Such a nuanced approach to the Founding Father is a form of progress, especially compared with the canonizing images of Washington that Svinin observed. Of course, it’s also artistically exciting. Stearns’s work has the appeal of transforming the past into a clear visual story. Kaphar’s, meanwhile, sucks viewers in with its combination of beauty and intellectual complexity. It asks its audience not to change their idea of how important Washington was and remains to the country but rather to expand their notion of how many of his choices mattered.
I left the VMFA convinced that Washington’s greatest step toward liberty was the one—manumission—that he chose to delay until after the death of his wife, Martha. (Likely fearing for her life, given how many people’s freedom hinged on her dying, she ultimately chose not to wait.) What’s more, it struck me that without understanding the reluctance that this order of events indicates, it’s impossible to consider the courage of his decision. By asking viewers to consider Washington as a slaveholder, Kaphar proposes a kind of patriotism that comes with a full—and ever growing—understanding of history. By presenting his work alongside Stearns’s, the VMFA underscores this vision. It reminds visitors that taking pride in one’s country requires memory.
