The earliest postage stamps honoring Hamilton featured this marble bust of him aged 39, made by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi in 1794.
Ceracchi was then in Philadelphia pestering Congress to commission a Revolutionary War memorial he had designed. To curry favor, he requested that Hamilton and twenty-six other founding fathers sit for busts or medallions that he later gifted to them. When the government declined to fund his memorial—he was asking for the equivalent of about $8 million in today’s money—Ceracchi sent peevish letters to his sitters, accused them of duping him, and enclosed bills for the sculptures they had received. Hamilton sent $620, which he noted in his cash book was paid “through delicacy…as a favour to him.”
Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, displayed the bust in the parlor of her Washington, D.C. home from 1848-1854. One visitor recalled, “The old lady always paused before it … and, leaning on her cane, gazed and gazed as if she could never be satisfied.”
Multiple copies were made from the original bust. This one belonged to Levi Woodbury, one of Hamilton’s successors as secretary of the treasury. It passed to Woodbury’s son-in-law, Montgomery Blair, who was postmaster general from 1861-1864, and was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1966.
Loan from National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
