Oil on canvas.
To ensure accuracy, Friberg, an American Artist, studied Washington’s actual uniform at the Smithsonian Institution and sketched during the winter near the banks of the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge, PA.
It was a cold that chilled to the bone,
he said, a cold that froze my fingers until I could no longer sketch nor even snap my camera.
For all their artistic and philosophical brilliance, the Greeks were failures at politics; Hamilton, in the Federalist, expressed horror and disgust
at the distractions with which they were agitated.
The Romans captured the American imagination because they had done what the Americans themselves hoped to do — sustain an extensive republic over a course of centuries. So the society of Revolutionary War officers called themselves Cincinnati; president,
congress,
and senate
were all Roman terms. But the Roman example was also cautionary, for when they lost their virture, they slid into empire. When Franklin said, in response to a question from Eliza Powel, that the constitutional convention had produced a republic, if you can keep it,
he and she would have remembered that the Romans had failed to keep theirs.