The Crown Refused

In May 1782 a Continental officer named Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington suggesting that the army might make him king. Washington answered the same day, in the sharpest letter of his life, and told him never to raise the idea again. Eighteen months later he handed his commission back to Congress and went home to his farm. When the new Constitution called him back in 1789 he took an office with a four-year term, refused a salary at first, and left after two terms when nothing but his own judgment required him to leave.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne in 1806, two years after the coronation; it hangs in the Musée de l'Armée in Paris. The emperor sits dead center and full face, robed in ermine and crimson velvet, crowned in gold laurel, a scepter in one hand and the hand of justice in the other. Ingres borrowed the frontal pose from medieval images of God enthroned, and meant every bit of it.

Here the pose is kept and everything else is taken away. Washington sits square to us in a spindle-back Windsor chair, in black velvet with white stockings and buckled shoes, a rolled paper tied with black ribbon across his knees and his hands on the chair arms. The wall behind him is bare plaster and a chair rail; sunlight from a window at the left lays a grid on it. On the floor beside his shoe sit a jeweled crown and a gold scepter. At the right hangs the ermine-lined robe, put aside.

Ingres painted a man who took a crown. This is a man who was offered one, in effect, and left it on the floor.