courtesy of the mount vernon ladies association.2006_6_7

What did George Washington really look like? We have a lot of familiar pictures of him, but they never quite agree with one another, and more were made when he was old than when he was young. So, when the people who run Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, wanted exact life-sized likenesses of him at the ages of 19, 45, and 57 for their new visitors’ center, they turned to the tools of forensic anthropology. Those tools produced arresting and utterly convincing results.

The effort was led by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has worked both in reconstructing early hominids and in a county coroner’s office. “Usually, you would use bones,” he says, “but we didn’t have permission to look at Washington’s bones.” So, he turned to what he calls secondary and tertiary sources of information. The secondary sources were the life mask of Washington made when he was 53 by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, as well as the bust and full-length statue made from that mask; “surviving and provenanced dentures” (George Washington’s false teeth); and clothing. The tertiary sources were portraits and letters, diaries, and other written sources.

Digital 3-D scanning of the Houdon mask and bust revealed that the bust followed the mask very accurately. “The bust became my gold standard,” he says, “because of its identity with the mask face.” The head on the Houdon statue turned out to differ from the mask and bust only in minute ways; it is more pointed, and the chin sticks out more. Schwartz concluded that Houdon made those changes not for cosmetic reasons, but to compensate for the fact that, once the statue was on a pedestal, the viewer would be looking at Washington’s face from below. (“The Houdon statue is like Michelangelo’s David,” he says. “Look at it straight on and it looks wrong.”) Measurements of two portraits painted by Charles Willson Peale when Washington was in his 40s revealed that they agreed remarkably closely with Houdon. “The familiar Gilbert Stuart images were the least like Washington,” Schwartz explains.

At 57, Washington had a pockmark on his left cheek from the smallpox he was stricken with when he was 19. He also had taut lips from holding in his dentures and a chin slightly longer on one side because of his pattern of tooth loss. Digital 3-D scans of the two Peale portraits of Washington in his 40s show a slightly longer distance from nose to chin and less-taut lips; this corresponds with the fact that Washington had had less bone-loss then and wasn’t holding in dentures.

To arrive at a 19-year-old Washington, Schwartz had to turn the older man into one