John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams 1767–1848

When John Quincy Adams posed for this portrait, he was sixteen. Having served as secretary to an American mission to Russia, he had just arrived in the Netherlands to meet his father, John, who was in Europe to help negotiate the Anglo-American treaty ending the Revolution. The work of a Dutch artist named Isaac Schmidt, the pastel likeness captured the younger Adams as he crossed the border from childhood to manhood. Speaking of the picture when he had passed the age of sixty, Adams wrote, "As a work of art, it rates too low to have any value elsewhere—And they who look at the bald head, the watery eye, and the wrinkled brow of this day, would search in vain for the strong likeness which it was said to exhibit when it was taken."