Two Washington portraits to be sold

NEW YORK, April 15 (UPI) -- Sotheby's will auction off two Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington, one of which was owned by Alexander Hamilton, for the New York Public Library.

The library is de-accessioning 19 works of art to raise funds for books and manuscript acquisitions, it was announced Thursday.

Paul Leclerc, president of the library, said Sotheby's would handle the sales either by public auction or privately within the near future. Sotheby's experts have estimated the works will sell for $50 million to $75 million.

"We are not a museum, and we don't have a staff devoted to paintings and sculptures," Leclerc said. "If we don't grow, we cannot maintain the claim that we are one of the greatest libraries in the world."

The Hamilton portrait, bequeathed to the library by a descendant of the first U.S. Treasury secretary, was painted in 1797 when Washington was serving his second term as president and shows him seated with a sword across his lap and a seascape in the background, rare for Stuart. The second Washington portrait is in a standing pose, painted about 1800 in the style of three other nearly identical portraits.

The library also will sell one of the icons of Hudson River School landscape art, Archer Durand's "Kindred Spirits," depicting painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant admiring a Catskill Mountain vista.