Buffing up the image of George Washington

Despite what he looks like on the dollar bill, it turns out George Washington may have been kind of hot. For the first time, it's possible to see what the teenage Washington probably looked like, and though at this stage he is nude and hairless, he will be fully realized in October 2006 when he goes on display at Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens. Young George will be a life-size figure with auburn hair and gray-blue eyes, perhaps propping his foot on a stump in a manly fashion as he scans the horizon.

The folks at Mount Vernon are hoping the new George will help Americans see him as he was before he was famous, before Gilbert Stuart painted him, back when he was an "adventurous, athletic, risk-taking, courageous kind of action hero," says Jim Rees, the estate's executive director. Washington was extremely tall for his time (just over 6 feet 2), had a regal bearing and "larger than average hands and feet."

"Abigail Adams just goes on and on and on about the presence of Washington, about what it was like to be around him, which I'm sure drove her husband just crazy," Rees says.

Washington will be re-created at ages 19, 45 and 57 through the work of Jeffrey Schwartz, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has been studying bones for 35 years. Schwartz is used to forensic cases. Typically he reconstructs the faces of the dead from their bones. With Washington, he has done the opposite, reconstructing the famous man's bones based on what he looked like, and then working back to figure out what the flesh on those bones looked like when Washington was 19 and "good-looking."