The first version of this portrait of George Washington (1732–1799), titled in Latin "Patriae Pater" (“Father of Our Country”), was purchased by the US Congress in 1832. Like other posthumous portraits of America’s “founding fathers,” this work—and some seventy-five copies—both reflected and shaped the cultural forces that transformed Washington into a symbol of national identity and unity supposedly shared by all Americans.

Rembrandt Peale’s image of Washington, separated from viewers by a stone frame and silhouetted against the sky, helped promote Washington as the patron saint of a new nation that declared “all men are created equal.” This heroic version of Washington has long been undermined by the fact that he was an active enslaver for fifty-six years—a glaring betrayal of the ideals of democracy and equality that he claimed to support.