What did power look like before 1776? This is the question Wolf Burchard asks in Picture Democracy. His answer unfolds through three iconic portraits of George III, Louis XVI, and George Washington and reveals just how radical the American experiment truly was. If kings had long been portrayed through the established language of majesty, inherited authority, and divine right, how was one to portray the leader of a republic?
At the center of the book is Gilbert Stuart’s great Lansdowne portrait of Washington, a painting that helped invent a new visual language for democratic leadership. But how do you portray a president? Washington was the first of his kind, so there was no established formula comparable to that employed in the depictions of other heads of state, kings, queens, emperors, and popes. Picture Democracy is about such people of power, and how some of the supreme artistic exponents of their time tried to convey that power through portraiture. It tells the story of three likenesses of three men – George III, Louis XVI, and George Washington – who never met in person, but who for decades had almost daily interactions with one another, or were, at the very least, on each other’s minds.
Wolf Burchard is Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he joined the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2019, after holding curatorial positions at the British Royal Collection and the National Trust. Much of his work focuses on the relationship between art and power. In 2026, he co-curated Revolution! at The Met, an exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and The rediscovered Treasure of the Sun King, at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also co-organized the exhibition The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy, 1714–1760, shown at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace to mark the tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession in 2014, and published The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016). Burchard earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
