Will the Real George Washington Please Stand Up?
Does the above portrait accurately portray what our nation's first president looked like. Or how about the image below? Or any of the other myriad paintings of George Washington that adorn museum galleries? Unfortunately for all concerned, Washington died before the early days of photography and so we're left with best guestimates of the exact details of his appearance. But a New Jersey Medical School professor has come up with a high-tech way to come up with a more accurate determination of the real George Washington.
According to ScienceNow, physics professor, Eric Altschuler, enlisted the help of an MIT grad student to help hunt down photographs of people whose portraits were painted by Gilbert Stuart. Then they compared measurements of between computer outlines of the figures' faces in the portraits and the photographs.
That gave them a sense of how Stuart's artistic style differed from reality. Fuller cheeks and higher eyebrows, for example, tend to mark a Stuart portrait. The duo then created a computer algorithm that took an average of the portrait and the painting. They applied the method to portraits of the presidents who lived before photography, effectively subtracting Stuart's signature changes.
Unfortunately, high-tech hasn't yet generated immediate breakthroughs. The technique, outlined in the journal Perception, only found minor differences between the portraits and the retroactive "photographs."
But the approach may yet yield results for other historical figures. The researchers, who have set up a website hope to be assisted by donations of relatives who may have keepsakes of their forebears. If there are other photographs of people painted by Stuart, the computers would have more information to help figure out where Stuart's artistic side differed from the actual contours of a face. In that way, it would thus be theoretically possible to "backwards engineer" a more accurate representation of say, a George Washington - or any other historical figure - whose likenesses we know only from paintings. To see how this might work, take a look at the photo and pictures below of ohn Collins Warren, a surgeon who also was the first person to carry out an operation using anesthesia. He was born in 1778 but lived until 1856, in time to sit in front of a camera.
