First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen

FIRST "COMPUTER" PORTRAIT OF AMERICA'S FIRST PRESIDENT

Lyon, Joseph Marie Jacquard, 1856.

Silk machine-woven textile (49.8 x 42.2 cm). Mounted on old board. Edge wear, some marginal tears and losses, edge toning from mounting tape, some damp staining and wrinkling. This said, a remarkable survival.

Rare silk textile portrait of George Washington (1732-99) woven on the earliest programmable loom – the Jacquard Loom – which influenced the development of other programmable, punch-card-driven machines that in turn would lead to the early versions of IBM's digital compiler. The present work thus may plausibly be considered the first 'computer' portrait of the first President of the United States. The textile carries the monogram 'JR' and is dated 1856 from Lyon, the birthplace and home of Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), who invented his revolutionary device in 1804 to aid in the production of complex patterns of damask, matelassé and brocade.

Based on Gilbert Stuart's (1755-1828) iconic portrait, this two-color textile is inscribed with the famed line, 'First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen,' which is taken from Washington's eulogy delivered by Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee (1756-1818), a major general in the Continental Army, a member of the Continental Congress, governor of Virginia, father of the famous Civil War general Robert E. Lee, and a close friend of Washington.

Now rare, the textile was apparently well known to American audiences for decades after its initial production: A certain R. H. Thurston, for example, in his 1880 inaugural address as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, invoked history's greatest engineers, including "Jacquard, who perfected the pattern-loom, which to-day weaves with equal facility the portrait of him who was 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,' and the most beautiful and ingenious combinations of form and color of which decorative art is so wonderfully prolific" (Thurston, p. 9).

Provenance: Skinner, Fine Books and Manuscripts, 1 June 2013, lot 19.

* J. Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age; R. H. Thurston, "The President's Inaugural Address," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, vol. 1 (1880), pp. 1-16.