Steeped as a youth in the Puritan traditions of Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne found the themes for much of his fiction in that heritage. Among his most noted works were The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Emanuel Leutze painted this portrait of Hawthorne in 1862 in Washington, D.C., when the artist was at work on a mural for the United States Capitol called "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way." Hawthorne had come to the city during the Civil War, writing to his publisher James T. Fields: "I stay here only while Leutze finishes a portrait which I think will be the best ever painted of the same unworthy subject." He described his visits to Leutze's studio in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Chiefly about War Matters," characterizing Leutze's mural as "emphatically original and American."

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868)
Oil on canvas, 1862
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of Andrew W. Mellon, 1942
NPG.65.55

Enlarged image

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