The New York Public Library draws again from its extraordinary collections to present “From Revolution to Republic in Prints and Drawings,” on view in the third-floor galleries of the 42nd Street library.

“From Revolution to Republic” divides into two sections. “Selections from the C.W. McAlpin Collection” exclusively comprises images of President Washington. This collection of about 1,700 images of Washington came to the library in 1942. As the library notes, “While many pieces in the collection were created to adorn the walls of public and private buildings, others served as currency, bonds, labels, calendars, upholstery, and book and magazine illustrations.” Washington, both as commander of Continental forces and as president, was a global celebrity.

We forget how fame could spread globally in an 18th-century world dominated by colonial great powers. The primary means by which celebrity was established was prints. The late 18th-century world was awash in images of Washington, a fact of which the viewer of “From Revolution to Republic” is left in no doubt.

One way in which 18th-century global celebrity differs from our current variety is that prints and drawings differ fundamentally from the photographic reproduction that underlies our own cult of celebrity. Prints and drawings were often based on paintings, like those of Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart, but as often were made up from whole cloth. Consequently, one of the things that strikes the viewer of these Washington images is how much they do not seem to be all of the same man.

A full-length mezzotint portrait by Valentine Green (1739–1813), after a painting by John Trumbull, shows a pleasant-faced man, with that self-possessed, pacific visage that is very much how most Americans have grown up picturing Washington. (That recognition owes more, of course, to the Stuart image that appears on the dollar bill than to the Trumbull painting.) The first bit of news for some viewers comes in Peale’s 1780 mezzotint, after his own painting, showing “His Excellency George Washington Esquire, Commander in Chief of the Federal Army.” This print was made while war still raged. Yet our commander in chief looks well-fed indeed, with his chubby, jowly face, and the buttons on his vest about to burst. The manipulation of Washington’s image can also be seen in a 1785 Green mezzotint that started out based on the Peale portrait, but in the end presented a lithebodied Washington.

The single most startling image is a print by John A. O’Neill, based on the William Joseph Williams painting that is the only official Masonic portrait of Washington made in his lifetime. Here we see Washington with a deep, deep frown, a look of such unpleasantness as to make one think he was in terrible pain. Other images show Washington classicized, a Roman emperor in a toga, and, in one affecting stipple engraving, at home with Martha and his stepchildren. A section of European prints shows images of Washington based entirely on verbal descriptions of the man, and these tend to emphasize his girth and puffiness.

A section of “Allegorical and Narrative Images of Washington” is just my cup of tea, especially the Cornelius Tiebout engraving from 1798, the year before Washington’s death. Here Washington stands on a pedestal; he is paunchy but dashing, his dangling right hand holding a copy of his farewell speech. He is set within a colossal classical enframement of fluted columns upholding an entablature and a broad curving pediment framing an American eagle. On either side of the enframement stand massive Masonic obelisks marked with “Liberty” and “Independence.” A background view of Bowling Green shows the empty plinth whence the mob toppled the statue of King George in 1776.

The other part of the show is “Dawn of the American Revolution, 1768–1776.” What it may lack in the galvanizing focus of the Washington section it more than makes up for in images of sheer delight. Here we find Amos Doolittle’s famous colored etchings of the battles of Lexington and Concord, from 1775. Beautiful miniature watercolors, after Friedrich von Germann, show us military uniforms. A colored engraving by Paul Revere shows a topographical view of Boston from its harbor in 1768. Mostarresting of all are the colored etchings by the German Franz Xaver Habermann (1721–96), depicting a New York the artist had neither seen nor, it is evident, seen pictures of.

“The Destruction of the Royal Statue in New York” is a stirring scene of the toppling of the Bowling Green statue of the king in July, 1776. It is far and away the most famous image of that great event that has come down to us. And it is wrong in almost every detail. New York is shown as though it were a mature European city, with grand and elaborate masonry edifices. The statue being toppled is a standing figure — the real statue was an equestrian work. Oddest of all, the topplers are, to a man, black —presumably slaves. So too do we see in Habermann’s stirring image of the Great Fire of September, 1776, an elegant masonry city aswirl in flame — as though what stoked the fire wasn’t the city’s preponderance of wooden structures.

The images of George Washington and of New York City that circulated the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries seldom attempted verisimilitude. Then again, in these cases the myths are part of the reality.

Until July 7 (Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, 212-592-7730).