Provenance

Possibly Miss E. Johnston;[1] Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2015 the National Gallery of Art.
[1] The Corcoran records about this bust indicate that it was not formally accessioned, as it was given an accession number "x.174," the "x" indicating that the source and year of acquisition are unknown. Despite indicating a different artist, It is possible the bust is the one mentioned in two journal entries by William MacLeod, the first Corcoran curator from 1873 to 1889:
27 June 1882: "Miss Johnston called and asked permission to place here a cast of Houdon's Washington (bust) made by Wilson McDonald... She is allowed to do so at her own risk, and will send it to-morrow."
3 July 1882: "Miss Johnston sent her cast of Washington's bust, by McDonald after Houdon's (claimed) original.
(The Corcoran Archives, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University Libraries, Washington, DC; available on-line: https://library.gwu.edu/scrc/corcoran-archives/digitalresources; accessed 12 November 2017).
"Wilson McDonald" was the sculptor James Wilson A. MacDonald (or McDonald), born in 1824 in Steubenville, Ohio, who ran away to St. Louis and eventually became a sculptor, moving to New York soon after the Civil War, where he died in 1908. His name appears in the literature in many forms, among them J. Wilson MacDonald, James W. MacDonald, James W.A. Macdonald. Both MacDonald and Clark Mills made and sold multiple copies of Houdon's original bust of Washington, which is at Mount Vernon, Virginia. See "Summary of Research Conducted on Clark Mills" by Marshall Kiker, Asst. Editor, Curator's Journals, Corcoran Gallery of Art Archives, December 2003, in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Bibliography

2011

Wikidata ID

Q63863848