As the 200th anniversary of George Washington's death approaches, scholars hope to update his image, winning back the affection he has lost to more human-seeming counterparts.

George Washington stares down from the famous Gilbert Stuart painting in the San Marino gallery. Weary-looking at 63 years old and pursing his lips over ill-fitting but, no, not wooden, false teeth, he has been frozen over two centuries as the austere father of his country. This is also the white-haired Washington seen on the dollar bill. This is the Washington whose image is parodied to sell mattresses and refrigerators during today's celebrations of his 266th birthday. This is the Washington whose name was stripped from a predominantly black elementary school in New Orleans last fall because he was a slave-owner--albeit a rare 18th-century Virginia planter who arranged to free his slaves after his death. There's no way around it: "Washington here looks like the embodiment of the ultimate dead white male," said John Rhodehamel, a curator at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, gesturing toward one of the copies Stuart made of the 1795 pose.

But Rhodehamel and many other scholars and boosters of Washington are now preparing a counter-revolution on the first president's behalf. With next year's 200th anniversary of Washington's death as a focal point, they hope to use a host of museum shows, university conferences and public events to spin a more compelling image of George, and win back the attention and affection he has lost over the past several generations to the more human- and modern-seeming Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the Washington Monument, the 555-foot-high obelisk in the nation's capital, is getting a $9-million face lift. While workers repair the marble exterior and elevators over the next two years, an unusual system of scaffolding and tip-to-toe tarps will be visible to the world. Historians say the need to dust off Washington has become increasingly apparent. For many years, modern historians' ratings of presidents regularly ranked Washington second, just after Lincoln. Then in 1982, a new survey pushed Franklin Roosevelt into second place, with Washington third, Jefferson fourth and Theodore Roosevelt fifth. The number of visitors to Mount Vernon, Washington's plantation home and burial place on the Potomac River, reached a peak of 1.3 million in 1964. Attendance dropped over the next three decades to about 940,000 before climbing a bit over a million last year. Meanwhile, James Rees, the director of Mount Vernon, ruefully notes that the number of visitors to Elvis Presley's Graceland house in Memphis, Tenn., is pulling up fast, with 700,000 tourists last year. Most recently, the New Orleans school was renamed after Dr. Charles R. Drew, the black surgeon who pioneered research in blood transfusions. The symbolism stung even if Drew deserves recognition and Washington, with 400 U.S. schools in his name, does not need any more campuses. "There is no question he is pretty remote. He's gotten buried under a lot of the history in the last 100 years, and he's a victim of his own well-publicized virtues," said Rhodehamel, who is curator of "The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic," the Huntington's show of rare documents and artifacts set to open in October. "Washington was a revolutionary," he said, "even though he doesn't look like Che Guevara." During the Revolution, Gen. Washington lost more battles than he won. Still, he was the hero of his generation for holding together the Continental Army through eight years of defeats, disease and shortages. "His genius was in keeping the cause alive. It was that endurance that made him, even at that time, a legend," said Richard Norton Smith, a Washington biographer who is now director of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum and Library in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Although Washington was a booster of the new Constitution, some Americans wanted to draft him as king. Perhaps even more intriguing, Washington twice gave up power--returning to civilian life after the war and later after his second term as president, when there were no limits on reelection. By the end of his presidency, he was disgusted with the rise of partisan politics. Some of that history and Washington's reputation for honesty remain in public consciousness. Often lost is a sense of Washington's personal and physical vitality. His height, 6-foot-4, was very unusual at the time and helped mark him early on as a leader. At age 22, he led the Virginia militia during wilderness battles on the British side in the French and Indian War. Critics saw young Washington blundering for ego's sake into needless conflicts. However, with two horses shot from under him, no one doubted his bravery. Later, during the Revolution, he often was in the front lines of his army, shot at but escaping serious injury. "His life was like an 18th century GI Joe, yet people think of him as this dour-looking man," said Mount Vernon's Rees. At one point, Mount Vernon conducted focus groups and discovered that Americans knew few details about Washington. "And some, more than I would like, thought he was boring," Rees said.

Art historian and Washington expert Barbara Mitnick of New Jersey said she "would like people to think of him as a very vital person, an incredibly active person who rejected the title of king." She and others say they do not seek to hide Washington's flaws but want them judged in the context of their time--from his days as a land-hungry surveyor to his private debates about slavery. Washington was not very well educated, had money worries and sometimes faced the world with a bad temper, other times with an impenetrable reserve. Seeking a middle ground between what biographer James Thomas Flexner called "the goody-goody tradition" and harsh debunkers, the current Washington revival wants those personal flaws better known as a way to attract interest in his strengths. Their mission is challenging, because history textbooks leave less and less room for the colonial era. In addition, Washington was not as fine a writer or speaker as some other Founding Fathers. Plus there are no photographs of Washington, making him seem more inaccessible than, say, Lincoln. And the painted images may harbor some subtle hostility: By some accounts, Gilbert Stuart did not like Washington and harshly painted the president's awkward mouth clamped over those dentures.

To help counter those factors, Mount Vernon is planning a new exhibition of 100 pieces of Washington memorabilia in a restored museum hall near the house. And it is sending a "Treasures from Mount Vernon" show to five museums around the country, including the Huntington (to complement the Huntington's "Great Experiment" show). The Mount Vernon items will include one of Washington's swords from the French and Indian War and samples of his hair, which over the course of his life turned from red to gray. Officials are expecting the big draw to be those dentures, made of hippopotamus ivory and held together with wooden pins. Mount Vernon also is planning reenactments of Washington's death, at age 67, from a severe throat infection, and his funeral a few days later. Other institutions already scheduled to hold 200th anniversary events in the next two years include the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Museums at Stony Brook (Long Island, New York); the Museum of Our National Heritage (Lexington, Mass.); the American Institute of Architects; the University of Southern Mississippi, and Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

The Washington revival got a boost three months ago with the airing of "Liberty," a PBS series on the American Revolution. Ratings were excellent for a PBS special, with a 5% share of the audience. Yet, perhaps indicative of Washington's popularity compared to Lincoln's, the 1990 series on the Civil War scored nearly triple that viewer share. The "Liberty" documentary, while highlighting Washington, confronted obstacles in portraying him. Costumed actors were seen on screen as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and King George III. The actor playing Washington was only heard, not seen. The series' executive producer, Catherine Allan, said it would have been difficult to cast someone who could match the well-known portraits and statues. "Quite frankly, George Washington is a really hard character to play and a lot of actors shied away from wanting to play him. They thought that he was too much of an icon, too much the guy with the wooden teeth, that they would appear silly perhaps," she said. Today, a Washington-like figure would be "a very tough sell" as a political candidate, according to Smith, of the Gerald Ford Library. Washington's regal looks and height would serve him well on television. Yet Washington was not a great speaker and might be too concerned about his place in history to worry about Dan Rather nightly, Smith suggested. On the other hand, Louisiana State political science professor William D. Pederson is certain that Washington would have adapted to changing times. Although portraying himself as above politics, Washington was no stranger to public relations stunts: The Virginian often rode in coaches to the edge of towns and then saddled onto a charger to impress the populace.

That pull between duty and ego will be on display at the Huntington's show, which will also travel to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the source of some of the documents. In letter after letter, there is Washington's astonishingly legible handwriting. His signature stretched a full six inches across the page in his early manhood and became more restrained with age. The writings carry tantalizing hints about Washington's complexities. One 1756 letter asks a British nobleman for a commission in the royal military, a denied request that fed Washington's resentment of the British. A 1759 shopping list to London orders toys and books for his two stepchildren. (Washington, thought to have been sterile, had no children with Martha, the wealthy widow he married.) In a 1786 letter, he offers hopes that slavery "may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees." Washington, in a 1789 note, approaches his imminent presidency "with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution." Besides getting a renewed sense of the man, the public should come away with a strengthened sense of American citizenship, Rhodehamel said. "What Washington did was new and very risky," he said. "And I think we have forgotten that and may take for granted our own duties as citizens of a democratic nation."