Accidental Blogger

A second post on the same day about altered images – or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity.

The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only males of the species have occupied the august office. Their mates, the first ladies, have played public roles that have ranged from ceremonially ornamental to activist partners. Apparently, it irks some folks that any consort of a US president should be perceived as "frumpy," even if the woman in question has been dead for more than two hundred years. The very first First Lady, Martha Washington is the lady in question.  Her likeness in existing portraits, most of them painted in middle age, are as one historian describes it, of the double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard variety. So, armed with ultra modern technology, a few historians and museum curators embarked upon a mission to revise or rather, photo shop history. With the help of forensic anthropologists at the Lousiana State University's special project known as Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services, or FACES, a new image of a twenty five year old Martha Washington was created by working backwards from her middle aged visage. This painstaking Benjamin Buttoning of the first lady has yielded a satisfactorily attractive and lissome young woman and revamped her "dumpy" reputation.  

  This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

Take that, Sally Fairfax.

History is about to be revised.

"We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What's happening now is revisionist. But I think it's a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was."

The full story in the Washington Post here.