Gari Melchers took notes from his sculptor father, Julius Theodore, and learned how to win government commissions, leading to his distinctive Portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt.

While Julius Theodore had sculpted images of four French settlers for the city of Detroit, Melchers portrayed Roosevelt in all his rustic, masculine outdoorsiness. In both cases, father and son built the public image of the United States as a pinnacle of discovery and expansion: Roosevelt's not shirtless and fishing like Vladimir Putin's moments of glam, but he might as well be. As Christian Brinton wrote in Century magazine, the portrait is "replete with that virile self-reliance which is alike characteristic of subject and of artist."

Self-reliance, in this context, doesn't mean "rags to riches" or "out of nowhere"--Brinton adds that "from the very outset, Melchers's success was assured," and the artist's "birthright," as a citizen of the U.S. from birth, is an important part of the journalistic approach to his work. Brinton assures us that despite his German name and long periods of living in Europe, Melchers is neither a "foreigner," nor has he "ever had the slightest intention of expatriating himself," and the rugged manliness of this painting is proof! The "elephant in the room" doesn't seem to have lost any weight since then: yes, "we are a nation of immigrants," except for those hundreds of nations who were here before the U.S.

Three years before this work, lifelong bachelor and railroad car tycoon Charles Lang Freer wrote to Roosevelt with the intention of giving a couple of thousand pieces of his art collection to the federally-administered Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It took the government a while to agree, because Freer's conditions were unusually strict: no temporary exhibitions and no accepting donations to the permanent collection. Smithsonian director Samuel P. Langley thought these stipulations were a little much, but Freer's pal and business partner, Senator James McMillan, contended that a gift like this would make D.C. a glorious, cosmopolitan destination. Although Freer eventually paid for the construction of the gallery, it was a tough sell, and when the government finally agreed, he commissioned this Roosevelt portrait as a token of his thanks. The President and his family loved the painting. On a horseback-ride visit to a town in Virginia, Roosevelt presented the people with a "4-foot-tall monochrome print" of this painting, wrote an inscription of his journey on it, and initialed it. The long winter ride was a confrontational message to the President's critics who claimed that an executive order requiring a military fitness test was too harsh.