Painter

Mather Brown

Self-Portrait, 1812
American painter, active in England; 1761—1831.

John Singleton Copley

Self-Portrait, 1770—71
American painter, principally active in London after 1774; 1738—1815.

Ralph Earl

Landscape View of Old Bennington, 1798
American painter; 1751—1801.

Charles Willson Peale

Self-Portrait, 1795
American painter, soldier; created first American museum; 1741—1827.

Rembrandt Peale

Self-Portrait, 1828
American painter, son of Charles Willson Peale; 1778—1860.

Gilbert Stuart

Self-Portrait, c. 1785
American painter of quintessential portraits, including George Washington; 1755—1828.

Thomas Sully

Portrait of the Artist, 1821
British-born painter, mainly of portraits, extended the iconography of the Revolution and the Founding Fathers into the 19th century; 1783—1872.

John Trumbull

Self-Portrait, 1777
American artist, soldier at the Battle of Trenton; 1756—1843.

John Vanderlyn

Portrait of the Artist, 1800
American artist, worked in Philadelphia under Gilbert Stuart, protégé of Aaron Burr; 1775—1852.

Benjamin West

Self-Portait, 1770—76
American-born painter who moved to England in 1763; 1738—1820.

The most inadvertently prophetic words that Adams ever uttered were his last: Thomas Jefferson survives. For it was the Jeffersonian image that broke free of the aggregated anonymity, the founders or the fathers, and eventually ascended into heaven with Washington. During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jeffersonian legacy became the most adaptable and all-purpose political touchstone in American political history.

— Joseph J. Ellis
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (1993)