William Vans Murray by Brown, Mather

Mather Brown painted this portrait of William Vans Murray in London in 1787. Brown was a young American from Boston who had crossed the Atlantic to make his name. He arrived at exactly the right moment: the newly independent United States needed its first generation of diplomats, and those diplomats needed portraits that made them look like they belonged among the courts of Europe.

Look at the red drapery sweeping in from the upper right. That crimson curtain is a classical device borrowed straight from grand-manner English portraiture, a signal of power and status. But against that formality, Brown gives Vans Murray a surprisingly direct, searching gaze and a soft, slightly open mouth. The loose curls at his temple show Brown working quickly, the paint still visibly wet. The white cravat is not the stiff stock of an older generation but a billowing, fashionable linen that catches the light.

The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, part of the collection that traces America's visual identity in its earliest years. Vans Murray would go on to serve as the U.S. minister to the Netherlands, an important diplomatic post for a young nation. Brown painted other early American statesmen too, including Thomas Jefferson, but his star faded and he died in poverty in London in 1831.

An American painter and an American subject, standing together in London at the very beginning of the republic. What does it mean for a nation to invent its own image of power?