Portrait of George Washington commissioned by James Madison going to auction

A portrait of George Washington commissioned by fellow Founding Father James Madison is going to auction in New York next month.

Auction house Christie’s is selling the painting on Jan. 23 as part of its “We the People: America at 250” auction.

The portrait by Gilbert Stuart was commissioned in 1804 by then-Secretary of State Madison and was finished in 1811, by which point Madison was president, per the lot listing.

Washington had sat three times for Stuart in 1795 and 1796, and the portrait now going to auction was based on the incomplete work the artist made for the second sitting, known as the “Athenaeum” portrait, named for its later place of display at the Boston Athenaeum library.

Stuart used the Athenaeum work as the basis for numerous replicas, and the work later inspired the depiction of Washington used on the dollar bill.

“We sold seven in the last 10 years, and there have been eight on the market,” Martha Willoughby, a consultant specialist in Christie’s Americana department, told art market website Artnet. Christie’s expects to get between $500,000 and $1 million for the portrait once owned by Madison.

Bids exceeding the upper range could break the $1.06 million price record for an Athenaeum Washington portrait, set in 2015, according to Artnet. The original, unfinished Athenaeum portrait is jointly owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in the nation’s capital.

After Madison’s death in 1836, the portrait going to auction was in the custody of his wife, Dolley Madison, before being sold to 19th-century businessman William Aspinwall, passing down in his family, being sold again to a number of buyers and ending up in the possession of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, in 1951.

The university is now selling the portrait at auction.

It was once the target of a prank by three Rochester Institute of Technology students who, unaware of how much it was worth, stole the portrait from a campus building in 1968. They later abandoned the painting undamaged in a church in Buffalo, and it was recovered and put on display at Clarkson, the school said in a 1995 book on its history.

Since the portrait was undamaged, the three RIT students were given suspended sentences and a fine on second-degree grand larceny charges, Clarkson said.