National Portrait Gallery

During his time, Benjamin Franklin was the most famous American in the world. He remains highly visible today as the face on the $100 bill, which used this portrait as the basis for the engraving in 1995.

During his lifetime, he was an achieved printer, an unsurpassed author of wit and wisdom, an inventor, and a scientist. After advocating and representing the interests of the colonies to England from 1757 to 1775, he was unanimously elected to represent Pennsylvania at the Second Continental Congress. He later signed the Declaration of Independence and served as a member of the Constitutional Convention.

This portrait was painted in France, where Franklin triumphed as a diplomat for a decade from 1776 to 1786. The painting was commissioned by Madame Brillon de Jouy. In a letter, she praised Franklin for his sound moral teaching and lively imagination but found his “droll roguishness” most endearing.

🖼️: “Benjamin Franklin” by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, c. 1785. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation

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4 months ago | [YT] | 7