Video feature: 'Portraits of a President'

I'm Carl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and we're here today to talk about one of the great icons of American art and one of the great treasures of Princeton University, Charles Wilson Peale's portrait of George Washington at the Battle of Princeton. The painting dates to 1784 and is a truly fascinating work on any number of levels, not the least of it, its close association with Princeton University as an institution. So the frame arrives in Princeton in January of 1761, enclosing a portrait of King George the Second. It was hung in what was then the prayer hall, it's now the faculty room, until the Battle of Princeton some 16 years later when, in 1777, the battle culminated at the back door, so to speak, of Nassau Hall. During the final stages of the battle, the American artillery, and it's known that they were led by Alexander Hamilton, though it's unclear whether he was the one that actually fired the fateful shot, but at any rate, one of those cannonballs from the American artillery entered the prayer hall and destroyed the portrait of King George the Second, originally hung in this frame. There is testimony which is accredited that the shot took off the king's head. Whether or not that's true, the portrait was destroyed, and six years later, Pale's portrait of Washington went into the very frame that had formerly surrounded that of the other George, King George the Second. So in a wonderful act of revolutionary symbolism, you have the portrait of our George, George Washington, replacing the portrait of King George the Second of England, who was the person who gave Princeton, then the College of New Jersey, its charter. We're here now in the faculty room at Nassau Hall, which is where the portrait that we just left at the Art Museum hung for more than two centuries. Happily, Princeton has in its possession another portrait of George Washington as a great hero, but done in the context of a battle that had already been won. He rests his hand very proprietarily on a captured cannon and leans almost in a jaunty pose, very much at ease, having won this great victory. And that's a very different effect from the portrait at the Art Museum, which shows the battle still raging, and the outcome is, in that case, unclear. So two portraits very similar in subject, but taking place at different times in the fictive narrative of what's being shown at the Battle of Princeton.