Oil on canvas; 93 x 58 1/2 in. (236.2 x 148.6 cm). Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.
Called the first great painting in the history of the United States
(Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists), Washington’s portrait was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Assembly for the State House (now Independence Hall) in early 1779.
By modern standards there is something unlikeable about John Hancock. His type of patriotism and charity is as obsolete as his brocaded dressing-gowns and jewelled buttons. He was one of those men who curiously go in and out of style. Once they are out they are hard to value. ‘The golden showers of guineas’ that marked his almost royal progress, his big speeches, like ‘burn Boston and make John Hancock a beggar if the public good requires it,’ do not arouse in us the same genuine enthusiasm they did in his contemporaries. Such men as Paul Revere, [Royal Governor Thomas] Hutchinson, Joseph Warren, or Sam Adams never are in style or out. Their personalities exist quite independently from the accident of their birth in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is not quite true of John Hancock.