From the portrait by John Vanderlyn, in the Capitol at Washington

This full-length portrait of our First President is the work of an artist to whom Napoleon I awarded a gold medal for his "Marius Among the Ruins of Carthage," and another of whose masterpieces, "Ariadne in Naxos," is pronounced one of the finest nudes in the history of American art. For Vanderlyn sat many other notable public men, including Monroe, Madison, Calhoun, Clinton, Zachary Taylor and Aaron Burr, who was his patron and whose portrait by Vanderlyn hangs in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nevertheless, Vanderlyn failed in achieving the success his genius merited, and he once declared bitterly that "no one but a professional quack can live in America." Poverty paralyzed his energies, and in 1852, old and discouraged he retired to his native town of Kingston, New York, so poor that he had to borrow twenty-five cents to pay the expressage of his trunk. Obtaining a bed at the local hotel, he was found dead in it the next morning, in his seventy-seventh year.