“Not a Man but a God”

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait of George Washington (1796) has operated historically as a devotional cult image—an icon in the strictest sense of the word—in America’s civil religion. Patterns of dissemination and ritual display surrounding the 1932 bicentennial celebration of the birth of George Washington highlight the Athenaeum’s totemic function, symbolically linking individuals to national traditions and to one another. Consideration of this cult practice reveals how the Athenaeum was sacralized as a national icon and employed during the 1930s to assuage anxieties arising from potentially disruptive domestic threats and as an ideologically charged visual component of American foreign policy.