George Washington (Vaughan portrait) by Stuart, Gilbert

This is George Washington as he actually looked in 1795, at age 63, still bearing the weight of the presidency. Gilbert Stuart's Vaughan portrait, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is the first likeness he ever painted of the first president. Unlike the idealized images that followed, this one is startlingly unsparing.

Look at the mouth first. Washington's famously tight-set lips were not a stoic pose. He wore ill-fitting dentures made from hippopotamus ivory and human teeth, which pushed his lips outward and made it painful to sit still. Stuart recorded that strain without smoothing it over. Then look at the soft jowls and tired eyes, this is a face that has aged in public service, painted by an artist who believed a portrait owed posterity the truth.

Stuart was a gifted and deeply unreliable man, a notorious debtor who fled to Ireland to escape creditors and only returned when the promise of painting Washington could make him solvent. The president agreed to sit, and Stuart worked quickly, capturing the face but leaving the dark coat and shoulders loose and sketchy. He later described the highlight on Washington's forehead as capturing 'the perishable spark of a living mind.' That luminosity, set against a warm brown-red ground, became his signature.

This canvas became the source image for the portrait on the one-dollar bill, yet the original is quieter, sadder, and more human. What do you see in his eyes, exhaustion, resolve, or something else?