The Last Touch (Primary Title)
William D. Washington, American, 1834 - 1870 (Artist)
Seated before his canvas, an artist gauges the effect of the last touch of pigment while his muse stands behind him. The pair is engulfed by a studio of props suggestive of the international tastes of a European-trained painter—a point reiterated by his resplendent robe and slippers.
A distant relative of the first American president, Virginia-born William De Hartburn Washington resided in Richmond during the Civil War. He made his reputation with The Burial of Latané (1864), a large canvas that pictures the funeral of one of the Confederacy’s early casualties.
When submitting The Last Touch for exhibition at the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1866, he found himself in the awkward position of trying to rejoin an American art market based in New York as a southern artist. His diplomatic choice was to picture a universal subject with broad appeal: the artist at work.
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