Picture Democracy: A Talk with Wolf Burchard

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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 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 of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s British Galleries. Prior to joining their European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department in 2019, he was Furniture Research Curator at the National Trust and Curatorial Assistant at the Royal Collection. He earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute, while co-curating The First Georgians at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (2014). He is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016) and curated Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts (2021) shown at The Met, the Wallace Collection, and the Huntington. He is a trustee of the Attingham Trust, sat on the executive committees of the Furniture History Society, the Georgian Group, and on advisory boards at the Château de Versailles and the Mobilier national in Paris.

This talk is part of our larger summer 2026 Revolutionary Salon Series, exploring the stories of Patriots, Loyalists, and the ideas that have shaped our nation.