As recounted by Rembrandt Peale, his father set up his own easel beside Rembrandt which "had the effect to calm my nerves." With his father painting and conversing amiably with Washington, the younger painter was able to observe both the sitter and his father's work, "affording the double chance for a likeness." It was Rembrandt's first portrait of Washington and Charles Willson's last; they were joined during the second and third sittings by Rembrandt's Uncle James and brother Raphaelle, both of whom also made portrait studies. His fifteen year old brother, Titian Ramsey Peale, was permitted to observe. The spectacle of this clannish semicircle of painters intently studying the President prompted Gilbert Stuart's quip to Martha Washington that her husband was being "Pealed all round."

While Rembrandt's easel was almost in front of his subject, his father was more to the right, resulting in a three-quarter view of the head. That is the view in the small variant now in the Department of State. The context of the sittings is quite important in discussing this handsome cabinet-size painting. Both Rembrandt and Charles Willson Peale made many replicas of their own versions, and Rembrandt copied his father's. He was candid about this; in a letter of September 24, 1860, written nine days before his death, Rembrandt stated for the record: "Besides having painted thirty-nine copies of my father's Washington, I have made seventy-nine copies of my own." In short, the numerous replicas and variants of Charles Willson Peale's 1795 Washington portrait present difficulties in attribution.

The first impression made by the Collection's portrait is a strong and lasting one: an incisive cameo of our first president in his beleaguered second term, encased in a frame of gilded splendor beneath the American bald eagle and flanked by drooping fuschia, whose downward cast suggest that this repetition may have followed the death of George Washington.