Junius Brutus Stearns was a painter bent on depicting George Washington in the grandest moments of his life.
The 19th-century artist captured Washington competently taking over from a dying general during the French and Indian War. He showed the Founding Father calmly presiding over the crafting of the U.S. Constitution and in three other key events.
To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s brave but wobbly beginnings, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has paired Stearns’ well-known cycle of paintings with a contemporary series that questions the truth of such paintings.
The exhibition, which opened on Valentine’s Day, is called “Titus Kaphar & Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous than the Truth.” It will be on display through July 26. Leo Mazow, curator of American art at the Richmond museum, brought in work by internationally known artist Titus Kaphar, focusing on Washington’s ownership of enslaved people.
Kaphar’s art stands out. His work is larger and bolder than Stearns’ paintings, which measure around 4 1/2 by 3 feet, and is provocative enough to stop you cold. Kaphar, who is Black, used black tar to define the face of Washington’s personal chef in a 5-foot-tall portrait.
He painted a realistic Washington astride his horse with actual canvas strips nailed to his upper body. The trailing strips attached to the 9-foot-tall canvas, titled “Shadows of Liberty," bear the names of his slaves.
The exhibition's title came from Kaphar. Mazow said, “On my very first Zoom conversation with him, I asked him, ‘Do you know these Stearns paintings?’
“‘Yes, of course. They are more famous than the truth.’”
Stearns painted his traditional, multi-figure scenes from 1849 to 1856, when a craze for all things Washington struck the still-young nation. The 50th anniversary of the first president’s death in 1849 triggered a flurry of books, articles, paintings and souvenirs.
After the Brooklyn, New York-based artist completed his series, he received a print commission to reproduce them, so the images were widely seen.
The set of five paintings, four of which are owned by the Virginia Museum, has long been seen as historically accurate. The images “helped fabricate an official but misleading story,” Mazow wrote in his essay on the show.
For example, Stearns’ “Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon” (1851) shows the president out in the fields with an overseer and a few well-fed, nicely dressed slaves, one of whom is enjoying a drink of water. They look as pleased with their lot as the children relaxing nearby.
Was slavery ever so harmonious? Those enduring life on a Southern plantation — eating poorly, working long hours, punished by whipping or worse — would say no.
“That idea in 1849 and 1850 is exactly what was being debated,” Mazow said. The rising tensions would soon lead to the Civil War.
In truth, Washington was a plantation master. The Mount Vernon website reports that in 1799, the year of his death, 317 enslaved people worked the estate’s five farms covering 8,000 acres.
“What we hope people come away with is that the telling of history is complicated and imperfect,” Mazow said.
Kaphar isn’t picking on Washington in particular, or Stearns. His work looks critically at the versions of history conveyed in such paintings.
In an era when memorials to Confederate heroes have been toppled and removed, Kaphar has a different approach.
“Is there a way for us to amend our public sculptures and our national monuments? Not erase them, but is there a way to amend them?” he said in his 2017 TED Talk.
“I think we should do it in the same way the American Constitution works.” Lawmakers can introduce an amendment that says, “This is where we were, but this is where we are right now,” he said.
Studying art history, Kaphar learned that paintings with figures are coded, he explained in his TED Talk. Clothing, objects and settings signify attributes such as social stature and achievements.
Kaphar has his own set of codes.
The artist told Mazow he was thinking of the term “tar baby” when he used tar on the face of chef Hercules Posey. The racist term has a complex history, but Kaphar said that tar appealed to him as a painting material with its own beauty.
The term also connotes a situation where it’s hard to disentangle oneself. Posey surely felt that way about being owned. Mazow wrote that the chef escaped Mount Vernon on Feb. 22, 1797, “self-emancipating on Washington’s birthday.”
For “Shadows of Liberty,” the artist copied an equestrian portrait of Washington painted around 1899. While canvas strips feature the handwritten names of enslaved people, it’s the rusty nails that stand out, suggesting a roster of cruelties.
In fact, Kaphar’s meaning came from Africa. He told Mazow he was thinking of Nkisi power figures from the Congo Basin, examples of which are in the show. Many of these figures featured nails.
Such nails can cast a curse, finalize a contract, express anger or denote laws, Mazow wrote in his essay. He added that the nails “remind us of the daily lives and extraordinary, if unrealized, potential of members of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community.”
The show is part of VA250, a statewide effort to illuminate Virginia’s role in the American Revolution. Admission is free.
A major work by Kaphar can also be seen in “Giants: Art From the Dean Collection of Swizz Beats and Alicia Keys.” That show ends March 1 at the Virginia Museum; a ticket is required for entry.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd., Richmond. vmfa.museum.
The show is part of VA250, a statewide effort to illuminate Virginia’s role in the American Revolution. WHRO Public Media is an education partner of the VA250 Commission. The partnership is not managed by the newsroom and does not influence editorial decisions related to VA250 events.