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MOUNT VERNON: Americans know George Washington as the dour founding father with white hair and ponytail depicted on US currency, but most people have little idea what the nation's first president really looked like beyond this stock image.
Researchers are hoping to change that by embarking on a massive detective hunt to flesh out his appearance in every detail. Specialists at Washington's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, 25 kms outside Washington, are gathering dozens of artefacts including snippets of hair and clothing that will be analysed over the next year.
Based on that information, they will make life-size models of the former president at three different points in his life that will go on display in 2006 as part of a new $85 million education centre and museum at Mount Vernon.
Sculptures, moulds, busts, dentures, imprints and masks of Washington's face and body will be scanned with lasers. Hair samples, spectacles, personal clothes and all available written descriptions of Washington's physique, including those written by the president himself, will also be scrutinised.
"We want to show visitors the real George Washington and showing visitors how he looked is critical to that goal," said James Rees, Mount Vernon's executive director.
The scans will be merged and used to create detailed computer images that can be fine-tuned, said computer scientist and project participant Anshuman Razdan, director of Partnership for Research in Spatial Modelling (PRISM) at Arizona State University.
"We will depict Washington at three distinct phases of his life - a surveyor and young frontiersman at 19, commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War at age 45, and first president of the United States at age 57," Rees said.
WASHINGTON'S FACE: Washington, who had red hair as a young man, began losing his teeth in his 20s, said Jeffrey Schwartz, an anthropologist and forensic scientist at University of Pittsburgh.
He had several pairs of dentures, and historians believe he was portrayed with a closed month and tight lips because of the pain and embarrassment he suffered from losing his teeth and wearing them. The version that might hint at what Washington would have looked like smiling is the 19-year-old, Schwartz said.
Because of the bone loss that results from losing teeth, the shape of Washington's face probably changed dramatically over the years, he said, explaining that pinpointing those changes in the different versions of Washington will be hard.
"It's a challenge, but it's not insurmountable, and of course it's always going to be within the realm of the most reasonable combination of the information that I have at hand," Schwartz said.
Schwartz and Razdan will explore various computer-generated images of Washington with and without his dentures, and as a result will able to see how his face might have changed.
Various objects will be studied to make the most accurate depiction of Washington at 53, the age when the two well-known pieces of him were made by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon - a bust from 1785 and a marble statue between 1785 and 1791.
Using the 53-year-old model as a starting point, years will be added and subtracted with Schwartz's trained eye and the help of Razdan's PRISM computer programme. Schwartz will use "the consistency of representation of any of his features across an array of portraits and three-dimensional representations" to make his decisions on how to portray Washington. -Reuters
