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 First Congress faced a unique challenge, and those congressmen and senators who gathered in New York in the spring of 1789 were awed by what lay ahead of them. Not only would members of the Congress have to pass some promised amendments to the new Constitution, but they would have to fill out the bare framework of a government that the Philadelphia Convention had created, including the organization of the executive and judicial departments. Some therefore saw the First Congress as something in the nature of a second constitutional convention.

— Gordon S. Wood
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)