Martha begged Stuart to finish the paintings, even afet Washington´s death in 1799, but he never did .
Instead, Stuart kept the two unfinished painting as models of future requests for pictures, particulary of the President. In fact, it was rumored that Washington, and himself, approved of the artist´s motives, and history shows that Stuart completed more than 60 copies of this unfinished portraid.Whenever he need cash, Stuart would paint another copy , calling them his hundred/dollar bills.
After Stuart died, most of his portraits of Washington were eventually sold to the Nation Portrait Gallery and a museum in Boston for almost five milion dollars. Although Stuart´s reasons for painting so many copies of Washington were propably not honorable, he nevertheless left the U.S. with a sizable and permanent legacy of one of the most important of our Founding Fathers.