This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

In an age of television makeovers, it is perhaps inevitable that eventually Martha Washington's turn would come.

A team of historians, curators and forensic anthropologists have concluded that the first first lady - imagined by Americans for more than 200 years to be a dowdy, double-chinned and dowager-capped matron - may have actually been hot.

A computerised age-regression portrait was commissioned to peel away the age and wrinkles and reveal the slim and lively brown-haired woman in her 20s who captivated a future revolutionary hero and president.

"He was clearly sexually excited by her," Patricia Brady, the pioneer in the revisionist history of Martha told the Washington Post. "When Martha decided to marry George, she didn't marry him just to be a kind stepfather to her two children. He was a hunk, and I think she decided to make herself happy. People are just starting to see her as a real person."

Martha Washington destroyed much of the contemporaneous record about the life of the first first couple after her husband's death as was the custom then, burning her husband's letters.

Most Americans since know and care little of Martha, writing her off as the older wealthy widow George Washington married for her money. The dismissal was complete with the 1796 portrait of a crabby-looking woman in a white cap.

A mid-20th century re-evaluation of Martha Washington condemned her as short, fat and small-minded, interested in little beyond her needlework and reading the Bible.

But current historians describe a far more compelling figure.

Before her marriage to Washington - her second after being left a young widow with two young children - she was known as a capable business woman.

The future Mrs Washington oversaw five tobacco plantations, negotiating for the best available prices from merchants in London.

She also had her fair share of admirers. The Post cites a letter from a rival - much richer - suitor, Charles Carter, raving about Martha's beauty. Carter wrote his brother that he hoped to "arouse a flame in her breast."

Sadly for Carter , however, he lost out to George Washington.