This portrait of Jefferson was made in the late 1780s, when he was a young widower and lived in Paris as a diplomat with his daughters and slave Sally Hemings. In 1802, a scandal erupted when a journalist charged that Jefferson had fathered several children by Hemings. DNA evidence and historical evidence of Jefferson’s whereabouts during the start of Hemings’s pregnancies make a powerful case that he did father at least some of the children. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.