Early next year, Christie’s will offer up an 1804 oil portrait of George Washington by artist Gilbert Stuart. The painting, commissioned by James Madison, the US’s fourth president, served as a model for the US Mint’s engraving for the one dollar bill.

The work is set to be offered with an estimate of $500,000 to $1 million at the house’s “We the People: America at 250” sale during its annual Americana week.

Stuart was an early American painter who was primarily known as a portraitist. He produced portraits of around 1,000 people, including the first six presidents, and his works have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.

Stuart’s most famous portrait, however, was an unfinished 1796 painting of Washington, dubbed the Athenaeum Portrait. That oil on canvas work, commissioned by Martha Washington, depicts America’s first president at 64 years old, just three years before his death, and helped serve as the primary inspiration for the one dollar bill.

Stuart, who had seve...