“A Changing Portrait of America”

a visit to the president’s house is a visit to an exceptional museum of America’s art. Many first-time guests may actually be surprised by the extent to which the paintings that line long corridors and fill stately rooms serve as an immersion into the American experience. Comprised of approximately five hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, the White House Collection of Fine Arts chronicles the nation’s founders, leaders, and heroes, its monuments, shores, and natural wonders, and its victories, struggles, and iconic moments. The late journalist Hugh Sidey perhaps explained this best when he observed, “The White House is its own canvas, never completed nor meant to be, but a changing portrait of America . . . a constant reminder to all who walk therein of where we have been and where we are going.”

Representing evolving aesthetics and a progression of styles from classical portraiture to abstract color-fields, this body of work of a nation is also the story of America’s artists. With this issue of White House History Quarterly, we look at the lives and work of the earliest and the latest artists in the collection, we meet one of the first artists of the President’s Neighborhood, we explore president’s relationships with the art and artists of their time, and we follow the journey of a controversial painting as it is shuttled in and out of the White House.

Every new White House acquisition captures the nation’s attention, especially when presidential portraits are unveiled. We open this issue with David M. Rubenstein’s recent conversation with Robert McCurdy and Sharon Sprung, which provides a special behind-thescenes glimpse of the personal experiences of the artists commissioned to paint the new portraits of President and Mrs. Barack Obama. Looking back to the earliest White House portraitists, art historian Carol Soltis introduces us to “America’s First Family of Artists,” the Charles Willson Peale clan, who captured from life the likenesses of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well as the early White House architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

Not all presidents have embraced the avant-garde, as Matthew Algeo explains in his account of the day President Harry Truman spent with Pablo Picasso. Although modern art gave Truman nightmares, he was convinced to pay a visit to Picasso in France, and, while he might not have changed his mind about the art he found in the artist’s studio, the encounter itself made history. Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a painter himself, was delighted when the 1950s craze for painting-by-numbers resulted in a unique Christmas gift from his staff, as Troy Elkins, Jeffrey Nelson, and William Snyder reveal. Lauren McGwin demonstrates that some presidents did embrace the avant-garde as she chronicles Pop artist Andy Warhol’s friendships with the Fords, Carters, and Reagans. Creating campaign posters and presidential portraits, Warhol was a frequent White House guest for nearly a decade.

Explaining that an ongoing goal in building the White House Collection is to ensure that the diversity of American artists is well represented, Nikki Pisha tells the story of the 2020 acquisition and installation of Isamu Noguchi’s Floor Frame, the first work by an Asian American in the collection.

The study of the White House Collection sometimes yields surprises. With his article “Matthew Harris Jouett and Gilbert Stuart: Pupil and Master,” art historian Estill Curtis Pennington makes a convincing case for the reattribution of a White House portrait of Thomas Jefferson, long believed to be by Jouett, to Stuart himself.

James H. Johnston presents the story of James Alexander Simpson, a prolific artist of the early President’s Neighborhood. Though few of his paintings survive today, Simpson’s extant works document the people and places of the nation’s capital that would have been known to the early nineteenth-century presidents.

The collection has not been without controversy, as Sarah E. Fling explains in her piece on Love and Life, a painting given to the American people by the wellmeaning English artist George Frederic Watts. Banished to the Corcoran Gallery of Art by first ladies who found it inappropriate for the White House, yet openly displayed by other first ladies who appreciated its quality, the work came and went from the President’s House for half a century.

For our quarterly presidential sites feature, Ken Beckman takes us to Omaha, Nebraska, the birthplace of Gerald R. Ford. Although the grand home in which the future president spent the first few days of his life was lost to a fire, a specially designed park now commemorates the site.

Pastoral Landscape, painted by Massachusetts artist Alvan Fisher in 1854, was acquired for the White House Collection by the White House Historical Association in 1973. The tranquil mid-nineteenth century landscape captures a shepherd and his dog watching over grazing sheep and cattle.