Now little-known, Elias Boudinot was the first president of the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1783. This engraving by John Wesley Paradise was based on a portrait by Samuel Lovett Waldo and William Jewett, two painters who owned a popular portrait studio in New York City in the mid-19th century. Paradise, son of a portrait painter, studied engraving in New York with the Hudson River School’s Asher Brown Durand.
