Christie’s will auction an 1804 oil portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, estimated at $500,000 to $1 million, during its “We the People: America at 250” sale in early 2025. The painting was commissioned by President James Madison and served as a model for the engraving on the one-dollar bill. It was recently deaccessioned by Clarkson University, a technical school in upstate New York, which decided to sell the work to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States, with proceeds supporting the university’s educational mission.
This sale matters because it involves a historically significant artwork directly tied to American iconography—the one-dollar bill—and because it continues a trend of institutional deaccessioning to raise funds. The portrait is one of 70 to 80 surviving copies of Stuart’s famous Athenaeum Portrait, and its auction will test the market for early American portraiture. The record for an Athenaeum portrait stands at $1.06 million, set in 2015, while a different Stuart portrait of Washington sold at Christie’s last year for $2.8 million.