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Today the "Father of Our Country" is an elusive figure. The George Washington we know seems wooden and unreal; he is the creation of a mythologizing process that has been at work for almost all of the 200 years that have passed since his death in 1799. To cite the most dramatic example of how the mortal Washington was transformed into myth, about 1830, when Congress commissioned a major statue of the general, it received a depiction of him as Zeus, with a bare chest and a toga and as stiff as the marble out of which he was carved. In prints of the same period that depict the apotheosis of Washington, a classically clad figure is carried up to Heaven by angels. In ways like these, which seem strange to us today, Americans remembered the man who had symbolized their new nation, who had given it stability, and whose memory could be used to preserve it. Washington was made to be flawless and a kind of superbeing, devoid of the human emotions of joy and sorrow that we all experience. The real general was not a Greek god but a person. In the exhibition "George Washington: The Man behind the Myths," we set out to find him.
The show follows the lead of "Light-- Horse Harry" Lee, who said not only that Washington was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen" but also that "he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life. . .. The purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues." "The Man behind the Myths" focuses on the general's private life. This was what mattered to Washington, what motivated him and kept him going through difficult years of public service. By understanding his private life, we can...