What did George Washington really look like?
We have a lot of familiar pictures of him, but they never quite agree with one another, and more were made when he was old than when he was young. So when the people who run Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, wanted exact life-sized likenesses of him at the ages of 19, 45, and 57 for their new visitors’ center, they turned to the tools of forensic anthropology. Those tools produced arresting and utterly convincing results. The effort was led by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has worked both in reconstructing early hominids and in a county coroner’s office. “Usually you would use bones,” he says, “but we didn’t have permission to look at Washington’s bones.” So he turned to what he calls secondary and tertiary sources of information. The secondary sources were the life mask of Washington made when he was 53 by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, as well as the bust and full-length statue made from
