Betsy Ross

Elizabeth Griscom Ross kept an upholstery shop on Arch Street in Philadelphia, sewing curtains, bed hangings and, once the war began, flags. Her first husband, John Ross, died in early 1776 while on militia duty. The record shows that in May 1777 the Pennsylvania State Navy Board paid her for making ships' colors. The more famous story, that Washington, Robert Morris and George Ross called at her shop in 1776 and she showed them how to cut a five-pointed star with a single snip, was first made public by her grandson in 1870, and historians still argue over it.

Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in Florence around 1503 and was still working on it in France more than a decade later. The sitter turns three-quarters toward us with her hands folded and a half-smile nobody has ever settled, while behind her a landscape of water and winding road recedes into haze. That pose became the template for the Western portrait.

No portrait of Betsy Ross from life is known to survive, so the face here is imagined, and the painting seats her in Leonardo's pose: turned three-quarters, a plain white cap, a blue gown with a white kerchief crossed at the neck, her hands folded on the red and white stripes gathered in her lap. A pair of scissors and a loose thread lie on the table at her side. Through the left window a steeple rises over brick rooftops and a river; through the right, the country opens into hills, a rail fence and a winding stream.

Whoever cut the first star, every flag was sewn by someone. The picture gives that someone the most famous chair in art.