A light-skinned man, woman, boy, and girl, and a brown-skinned man sit and stand around a table spread with papers and a map in this horizontal portrait. The light-skinned man sits on a red upholstered chair at the table to our left, and his body faces our right in profile. His legs are crossed, and he rests his right elbow, closer to us, on the back of the chair. He has a sloping, rounded nose, dark eyes, jowls along his jawline, and his closed mouth juts forward. His left arm rests on an open pamphlet on the table next to a sword with a delicate silver hilt. To our left, the young boy stands also looks to our right in profile, next to the older man's chair. The boy wears a dusky rose-pink suit with a white lacy collar. With his right hand, he pulls back a dark green cloth covering a globe on a wooden stand along the left edge of the canvas.
   The woman sits at the right side of the table, across from the man. She has dark eyes, full cheeks, a double chin, and her pale lips are closed. She wears a voluminous ivory satin gown and petticoat with a black lace shawl, and an ivory cap with a satin bow covers her gray hair. She points to a spot on a map on the table with a closed fan held in her right hand. The young girl, wearing a gauzy white dress with a pine-green sash at the waist, stands on the far side of the table near the woman, holding the curling edges of the map. Behind the women, the brown-skinned man wears a rust-orange and gray uniform, and stands with one hand tucked into his vest in the shadows at the edge of the composition. His features are indistinct but he faces our left in profile.
   The room has a gold-and-yellow checkerboard floor, and a red cloth drapes from columns frame the scene to each side. It is unclear whether a river view at the back of the room is seen through an open window or door, or if it is a large painting behind the people.

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   This group portrait represents George Washington’s military, political, and family life. The president, in a Revolutionary War uniform, rests his hand on a plan for Washington, DC, the site for the new US capital. His wife, first lady Martha Washington, and her grandchildren join him at their Virginia plantation estate, Mount Vernon.

   Research now suggests that the figure standing just outside the family group is Christopher Sheels, an enslaved attendant to the president. Unlike the four family members, Sheels is painted in shadow. Old damage to the paint makes it even harder to see his face clearly. Sheels’s presence signals that the president’s household depended on the labor of enslaved people, as did the economy of the young nation.

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   Edward Savage's The Washington Family quickly became a veritable icon of our early national pride. In the winter of 1789–1790, President Washington and his wife posed for Savage in New York City, then the nation's capital. Mrs. Washington's grandchildren, taken in by the Washingtons after their father's death, probably also sat for their oil portraits in New York. Savage began to incorporate the separate life studies of their faces into a group portrait engraved on a copper plate. After a stay in England, he resumed the family portrait in Philadelphia—this time, however, in large format as an oil on canvas. The Washington Family was exhibited in 1796.

   Savage's catalogue states that Washington's uniform and the papers beneath his hand allude to his "Military Character" and "Presidentship" respectively. With a map before her, Martha Washington is "pointing with her fan to the grand avenue," now known as Pennsylvania Avenue. An enslaved man dressed in livery and a supposed vista down the Potomac complete the imaginary scene.

   Savage's self–taught ability to distinguish between satins, gauzes, and laces is nothing short of astonishing. However, the anatomy alternates between wooden and rubbery, and the family strangely avoids eye contact. Despite Savage's lack of experience, his huge Washington Family remains one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a federal artist.

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