Oil on canvas; 73.4 x 59.7 cm (28 7/8 x 23 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Although the cap and shawl are from the period of 1815 when the painting was completed, Abigail’s face is from 1800, when Stuart began the dual paintings of her and John Adams.
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.