George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1796. Stuart painted Washington in his early 60s.
	Digital reconstructed image of George Washington as he may have appeared at age 57, based on studies by Pitt anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz. MORE COVERAGE G.W.: Returning to the Point?

The face and jaw are a bit longer, the cheeks fuller and the nose a bit smaller than we've seen before, but the face remains familiar.

It's not George Washington, Father of our Country. But it might well be George Washington, teenager, albeit without hair, for the moment.

The computerized three-dimensional image of Washington at age 19, as well as images as he appeared as a Revolutionary War general at 45 and president at 57, are the result of a yearlong multidisciplinary effort led by University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz.

No one ever painted or sculpted a likeness of Washington when he was an unknown frontier surveyor; in fact, no portrait of him before age 40 exists. But Schwartz said the new images are as close as he could come to a forensic reconstruction of Washington, without the bones. "They look real to me," he said.

The 3-D full-body reconstructions are as yet expressionless, hairless and naked, but will serve as the basis for three full-size, lifelike models to go on display in a new museum opening in October 2006 at Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.

The 19-year-old version will be used later to sculpt a statue of the 21-year-old Washington now planned for a renovated Point State Park.

Even in their current state, "I think all the drawings show a strength and determination, if you will, that the Gilbert Stuart portrait [on the dollar bill] is lacking," said Jim Rees, executive director of the Virginia estate.

As Rees had hoped at the project's outset, Washington "comes off as stronger, more physical" than he appears in formal portraits.

"Artists throughout all time have tried to re-create him," observed Ellen Miles, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery. "I'm amazed at the variety of images that artists have come up with."

An expert on 18th and 19th century portraiture and Washington portraits in particular, Miles consulted on the project with Schwartz, primarily last spring, providing nuances regarding each portraitist's tendencies.

Last week, she begged off critiquing Schwartz's images until they have some natural coloring "and some clothes."

Building from pieces of history
Schwartz relied on an array of Washington artifacts, including portraits, statues, clothes, dentures and a life mask cast by French artist Jean Antoine Houdon when Washington was 53. Experts on computer modeling and visualization at Arizona State University scanned these 3-D and 2-D images into what became a huge database, allowing the images to be compared, measured and combined as necessary.

The life mask, a direct impression of Washington's face, served as Schwartz's starting point. The masking process adds some distortions, he said, but "how close to Washington can you get?"

Creating a digitized reconstruction of Washington at age 57 thus was not a huge feat. But working backward from the life mask and making Washington younger was a different story.

Digitally aging faces has become a staple of forensic science, said Anshuman Razdan, director of the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling at Arizona State. But not much is known about making faces appear younger.

"It was a stretch, and also exciting," he said.

Washington's dental history, as documented by a series of dentures, provided important clues. "Typically, one loses teeth in the back of the jaw before the front of the jaw," Schwartz said. And as a person loses teeth, some of the underlying jaw is resorbed, changing its shape.

Tracing Washington's history of tooth loss -- he had one remaining at age 57 -- thus provided clues about what his jaw should look like at age 19 and 45, as did making measurements of portraits of Washington at age 40 and 47 by Charles Wilson Peale.

All artists are subjective, and Miles warned that Peale tended to draw very oval faces, but measurements of those portraits showed that the distance from nose to chin got shorter as he aged, which would be consistent with a loss of front teeth. Schwartz thus interpreted those artistic measurements as confirmation of the biological reality.

The teeth and jaws were so important to the face shape, however, that Schwartz had the Arizona State staff scan in a 3-D image of a real jaw from a man of similar size to help guide the reconstruction.

Measurements of Washington's tightly fitted uniforms and other clothes provided clues about his body size and shape, as did a highly detailed statue of Washington at 53 by Houdon.

"So much of this is based on 35 years of studying humans physically, skeletally, developmentally, forensically," Schwartz said.

For instance, as people age, their skin doesn't stretch and droop so much as they lose fat around the face. Likewise, noses and ears tend to grow with age.

"Some people have floppy ear lobes at old age and others don't," he said. "I do have his ear lobes. They protrude in the life mask ... and they're not very long. So his cartilage was not growing excessively. The same thing with his nose. The tip of his nose is not really hanging over very much" in the older portraits.

Some clues came from historical records. For instance, portraits show a pockmark on Washington's left cheek, the result of smallpox contracted during a trip to Barbados when he was 19. But Schwartz's image of the 19-year-old depicts him before that trip and, thus, is unpocked.

Communication, software and colors
An anthropologist working side by side with computer visualization specialists required adjustments from both sides. "The vocabularies are different," Razdan said. "When Jeff says, 'Twist the chin 10 degrees,' what does he really mean?"

"What I have in mind is not necessarily how other people see things," Schwartz said. Working with computer models "is different than if you were sculpting with your hands. I had to learn enough about the way the software worked to communicate with people about how to do the transformations."

The face and body modeling is all but finished now. The only modeling remaining is that of the body of the 45-year-old Washington, whose likeness will be mounted on horseback and, thus, is being fitted to the dimensions of a horse.

"I think what will be interesting are the colors," Miles said of the portrait gallery. "I think a lot of people, without thinking about it, think of him as having white hair," she said, noting that powdered hair and wigs were the fashion of the time. By some descriptions, he had auburn or chestnut hair, though definitely not red hair.

Last week, Rees was at Studio EIS in New York, which will transform Schwartz's models into the finished statues, sorting through more than a dozen samples of Washington's hair. Obtaining a lock of hair from a family member or an acquaintance was quite common in the 18th century, he said, so some of Washington's hair remains.

Even so, deciding on hair color is not simple. Rees said Washington wrote about how the Revolutionary War turned his hair gray, yet the samples they examined last week from his war years didn't look particularly gray. Perhaps he grayed at the temples first.

Eye color is another issue. Miles said his eyes had been described as pale gray or blue. Stuart's portraits showed him with bright blue eyes, she said, but Stuart knew that blue was a "fugitive" color, likely to fade with age, and so made the eyes bluer than natural to compensate. But how much bluer? And how much have the portraits faded?

"I've recommended blue-gray," she said.

Just picking the right expression for the statues is tricky. Washington looks stern in many of his portraits, but Miles said that was characteristic of many 18th century portraits. "They were meant to be timeless and if you show a momentary expression, you're making it of the moment rather than a timeless image," she said.

Rees said Schwartz would consult with the Studio EIS specialists to determine the proper expressions and poses. "He had a charisma, and charisma is not just the way the face looked," Rees said, "It's how he moved, how he stood."

Schwartz will be on hand to suggest how underlying musculature and other factors would make Washington appear for a given expression.

"We don't want the science to disappear yet," Rees said.