Art: Jefferson at 33

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The founding fathers of the U.S. make a somewhat solemn gallery in the mind. Remembered mostly from portraits painted late in their hardworking, often harsh lives, they seem austere, wrinkled and careworn. Now a miniature portrait of one of the greatest of them, Thomas Jefferson, has come to light, showing him as he really appeared in the fateful summer of 1776.

The scarred little picture has rested unidentified for more than a century in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It is the work of a minor Swiss artist named Pierre Eugène du Simitière, who settled in Philadelphia and became Jefferson's friend. Paul Sifton, an American scholar and Du Simitière expert, last week showed evidence that the picture's subject is really Jefferson, done from life at 33 at the time of the Declaration of Independence.

Fellow scholars tend to agree. The jutting jaw is there; so are the wide, clear eyes, large, firm mouth, and long, slightly turned-up nose. The features are the same as in the next earliest Jefferson portrait known, painted by Mather Brown in 1786. But that picture shows a man marked by struggle, who has come through one of the most momentous decades in human history. Seen through Du Simitière's eyes, the young Jefferson in crisis emerges as a paragon of refined and virile good looks, radiating courage—and hope.