White House History Quarterly 68 "Art, Artists, and the White House"

Art, Artists, and the White House

the white house historical association

Board of Directors

chairman

John F. W. Rogers

vice chairperson

Teresa Carlson treasurer

Gregory W. Wendt secretary

Anita B. McBride president

Stewart D. McLaurin

matthew algeo is a writer and journalist. He is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming When Harry Met Pablo: Truman, Picasso, and the Cold War Politics of Modern Art.

Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Eula Adams, Michael Beschloss, Gahl Hodges Burt, Merlynn Jean Case, Ashley Dabbiere, Wayne A. I. Frederick, Deneen C. Howell, Tham Kannalikham, Metta Krach, Barbara A. Perry, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

Eula Adams, John T. Behrendt, Michael Beschloss, Gahl

Hodges Burt, Merlynn Carson, Jean Case, Ashley Dabbiere, Wayne A. I. Frederick, Deneen C. Howell, Tham Kannalikham, Metta Krach, Martha Joynt Kumar, Barbara A. Perry, Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

national park service liaison

national park service liaison

Charles F. Sams III

Charles F. Sams III

ex officio

ex officio

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Kaywin Feldman, Debra Steidel Wall (Acting Archivist of the United States), Carla Hayden, Katherine Malone-France

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Kaywin Feldman, Debra Steidel Wall (Acting Archivist of the United States), Carla Hayden, Katherine Malone-France directors emeriti

directors emeriti

John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Knight Kiplinger, Elise K. Kirk, James I. McDaniel, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

John T. Behrendt, John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Knight Kiplinger, Elise K. Kirk, Martha Joynt Kumar, James I. McDaniel, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly

founding editor

William Seale (1939–2019)

editor

Marcia Mallet Anderson

editorial and production manager

Margaret Strolle

associate vice president of publishing

Lauren McGwin

senior editorial and production manager

Kristen Hunter Mason

editorial coordinator

Rebecca Durgin

consulting editor

Ann Hofstra Grogg

consulting design

Pentagram

editorial advisory

Bill Barker

Matthew Costello

Mac Keith Griswold

Scott Harris

Joel Kemelhor

Jessie Kratz

Rebecca Roberts

Lydia Barker Tederick

Bruce M. White

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, The White House

ken beckman is an actuary, a nonprofit executive, and the founder and developer of an educational website focused on the U.S. presidents, PresidentsUSA.net.

troy elkins has worked on the curatorial team at the Eisenhower Presidential Library for eleven years. A U.S. Marine veteran, he is a PhD candidate in history at Kansas State University.

sarah e. fling is a historian at the White House Historical Association.

lauren mcgwin is the Associate Vice President of Publishing at the White House Historical Association and a frequent contributor to White House History Quarterly.

james h. johnston is a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. His books include Murder, Inc., The CIA Under John F. Kennedy and From Slave Ship to Harvard:

Met Truman, Picasso, the Cold Art associate vice president of Publishing at the White Inc., The Under John Kennedy and From Slave to

jeff nelson has been with the Eisenhower Presidential Library for six years. He has a master’s degree in history from Kansas State University and specializes in military and diplomatic history.

estill curtis pennington is an art historian who focuses on the study of painting in the South. His most recent published work is Matthew Harris Jouett (1788-1827): His Life and Work.

nikki pisha is the associate curator of fine arts in the Office of the Curator, The White House.

william snyder is a curator at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

and the of African Family Work. Rembrandt A the Arts.

carol eaton soltis is project associate curator in the Department of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the author of the first substantive catalog and exhibition on Rembrandt Peale, Rembrandt Peale: A Life in the Arts.

First Lady

Jacqueline Kennedy accepts a gift for the White House Collection from Sears, Roebuck and Company of five portraits of Native Americans painted by Charles Bird King. The gift is presented by Sears vice president, James T. Griffin, who holds up a portrait of Chief Shaumonekusse of the Oto tribe, December 6, 1962.

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PORTRAITS OF PRESIDENT AND MRS. BARACK OBAMA David Rubenstein’s Conversation with the Artists, Robert McCurdy and Sharon Sprung

THE PEALES IN THE WHITE HOUSE

WHEN HARRY MET PABLO The Strange True Story of the Day President Harry Truman Spent with Artist Pablo Picasso

PAINT-BY-NUMBERS : A Christmas Gift to President Dwight D. Eisenhower

ANDY WARHOL VISITS THE WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL SITES FEATURE

“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.

THE OFFICIAL White House

Portraits of President and Mrs. Barack Obama

David Rubenstein’s Conversation with the Artists, Robert McCurdy and Sharon Sprung

previous spread

President Barack Obama speaks to guests at an East Room ceremony held to unveil the new official portraits of himself and First Lady Michelle Obama. Following the ceremony, members of the Executive Residence operations crew hang the president’s portrait in the Entrance Hall, September 7, 2022.

throughout the white house, the walls of State Rooms, corridors, and both public and private spaces are hung with portraits of the nation’s presidents and first ladies. In recent years the collection has been built with the support of the White House Historical Association, which commissions portraits of each outgoing president and first lady to be given to the permanent collection of the White House. In keeping with tradition, the Association commissioned portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama in late 2016. On September 7, 2022, the two completed portraits were unveiled during an ceremony in the East Room.

Artist Robert McCurdy had painted the president, while artist Sharon Sprung had depicted the first lady. That evening, financier and philanthropist David M. Rubenstein moderated a lighthearted discussion with them following a dinner at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The namesake of the White House Historical Association’s David M. Rubenstein Center for White House History, Rubenstein is a generous supporter of the Association’s work and has, for nearly a decade, offered wise counsel and friendship to me.

The transcript of the conversation that follows is peppered with humor. As Rubenstein asked Sprung and McCurdy about their careers, their artistic processes, and their experiences painting the historic works of art, an unexpected banter filled the room with laughter.—Stewart D. McLaurin, President, White House Historical Association

David Rubenstein: Sharon why don’t we start with you; did you always want to be an artist when you were growing up?

Sharon: Yes, actually I did.

You didn’t want to be in private equity or anything?

Sharon: No. [laughter]

Okay. So you initially start out and you went to Cornell.

Sharon: I did.

And how many years did you last there?

Sharon: Not long. [laughter]

Not long. Okay, so you went to art schools to make sure you could be an artist?

Sharon: I actually contacted three artists whose work I loved: Aaron Shikler, Daniel Greene, and Harvey Dinnerstein, and asked them, “How do I become an artist?” I ended up at the Art Students League of New York and the National Academy.

And Aaron Shikler, whom you contacted, was the person who painted the famous Kennedy portraits that are in the White House now. I assume he inspired you to do this work.

Sharon: No. [laughter]

David

M.

Rubenstein moderates a discussion with the two artists who painted the Obamas’ official White House portraits, September 7, 2022. Robert McCurdy, seated on the left, painted the president’s portrait, and Sharon Sprung, center, painted the first lady’s portait.

Let me ask you again, did he have nothing to do with your interest in doing this work?

Sharon: His paintings are very inspiring but, no, at the time I was 19 and I just couldn’t envision this, no.

But now you do portraits full time?

Sharon: No.

What do you do?

Sharon: I paint my own paintings and have shows in New York City in Chelsea at Gallery Henoch, and I teach two mornings a week at the Art Students League and then I do my portraits.

And your studio is in Brooklyn I know. And I came to visit you one time.

Sharon: You did.

When we were looking at commissioning a portrait and you rejected me as I recall.

Sharon: That’s not exactly how I recall it. [laughter]

So when did you get the White House portrait assignment?

Sharon: It must’ve been 2016.

And did you have a meeting with President Obama and Mrs. Obama?

Sharon: We had a meeting in the Oval Office.

Wow, and at the time were you thinking you were

going to do both of them or just one of them?

Sharon: Well I thought I was just there to do Michelle Obama, but when I walked into the Oval Office, President Obama said, “Well why can’t a woman do me?” I wasn’t prepared for that, but why not?

So, you went in and you had your talking points. Sharon: I did have my talking points, and they were called talking points.

I know, but you handed out the talking points to the other people?

Sharon: I did. I handed out five copies.

Of your talking points?

Sharon: Of my talking points. And then the president just went “shwoop,” he threw them off to the side. [laughter]

Did that make you nervous?

Sharon: It made me incredibly . . . I said, “Well, what if I forget everything I wanted to say?” He said, “You’ll be fine.”

So after you had that session, when did you hear you were going to get the assignment?

Sharon: Six long months.

It took six months? So, did you think you weren’t going to get it?

Sharon: No. [laughter]

Boy you’re an optimistic person. Wow, okay. So when they called, who called you to say you got it?

Sharon: That’s not exactly what happened. Every six weeks or so I’d call them.

And what did they say? “We’ll call you?”

Sharon: Yes.

You know what that usually means?

Sharon: No. [laughter]

Usually it means “probably no,” but it worked out, right?

Sharon: It did work out.

So, who actually called you in the end?

Sharon: Well they didn’t call me, I called them, and they said, “You’ve got it.”

Really? Wow.

So, Robert, in your case, did you always want to be an artist when you were growing up?

Robert: I did, I grew up in a very small suburb in Pennsylvania that had an extraordinary school, a public school, that had an art program so I could be an art major as a high schooler.

Following the unveiling ceremony, the new portrait of Mrs. Obama was hung in the Ground Floor Corridor (opposite) where it was viewed by President Obama (left) and Mrs. Obama with the artist Sharon Sprung (below).

left

First Lady Lady Bird Johnson accepts a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt by Douglas Chandor, February 4, 1966. The painting was purchased by the White House Historical Association from the artist’s widow. Since that time the Association has continued to acquire for the White House portraits of presidents and first ladies not yet represented in the collection, with recent presidents selecting the artists to be commissioned.

below

President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter welcome President and Mrs. Gerald Ford at a ceremony to unveil their official portraits, May 24, 1978. President Ford was painted by Everett Raymond Kinstler, and First Lady Betty Ford was depicted by Felix de Cossio.

TOP: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION / BOTTOM: ALAMY

right President and Mrs. Bill Clinton stand beside their official portraits by Simmie Knox during the unveiling ceremony hosted by President and Mrs. George W. Bush, June 12, 2004.

below President and Mrs. George W. Bush unveil their new official portraits by John Howard Sanden in a ceremony hosted by President and Mrs. Barack Obama, May 31, 2012.

And so, you basically knew what you wanted to do. What type of art? Any type of art, or did you know exactly what you wanted to do?

Robert: Well, when I was quite young, it was all just a matter of sorting it out. When it finally got to a point where I could think about these things in a cohesive way, I was entering a world where minimalism and conceptualism were at their height. They say you always react to the point that you entered the art world, so those subjects still fascinate me. It took decades for me to sort out what I wanted to do with them, but that’s where it all starts, it starts with this idea of minimalism.

Eventually, you got into a kind of art that we see here, which is a “minimalist,” you would say, type of portrait. Is that how you would characterize the portrait?

Robert: It would be a way to talk about it, yeah.

You have a unique technique, which is basically that you have an elaborate camera, which you can describe, and then you take lots of pictures. In how many days do you do it? And then do you see your subjects again?

Robert: That’s right, normally the sitting lasts only an hour to two hours. But before we start shooting, I always talk to the people who are going to sit for me about what we are trying to achieve. And it’s a pretty simple story, we’re looking for a moment where there’s no time. If you were to take a string of images and lay them all on top of each other, it would virtually be the same. I didn’t want a “before” or an “after,” so nobody gestures, nobody smiles, there are no backgrounds, there are no props, we are not telling the story of the person in the painting, we’re setting up an encounter between viewer and the subject. Everybody [the subjects I paint] has to sign off on that.

You have an elaborate camera, a very expensive camera that you use.

Robert: Yes, we rent it, because it’s way too expensive to own.

And then, when the subject comes in, do you take the pictures, or does the photographer take the pictures?

Robert: I drive the camera, in the sense that the camera is in front of me, the monitors are in front of me, my fingers are on the trigger. But cameras at this

stage and at this level are far too complicated for one person to operate, so there is a digital technician who runs the other side of it.

So, with President Obama, when did you first meet him about this?

Robert: It would’ve been about the same time as Sharon’s meeting. It’s been so long ago I can barely remember.

Did you keep calling him every couple weeks saying, “What about me?” Or how did it happen?

Robert: No, we met at the Oval Office. We had this speech about what we were trying to achieve, and then eventually somebody called and said, “Okay you should go ahead with this.” And we did.

Now some of the other prominent people that you have painted are Toni Morrison and the Dali Lama. Who were some of the other very wellknown people? Did you do Warren Buffett as well?

Robert: I did do Warren Buffett. And Neil Armstrong, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Nelson Mandela, a lot of wonderful people.

So, you take the pictures, and someone has to give you an hour, two hours of their time.

Robert: They do, yeah.

So, where did you do the photos of President Obama?

Robert: We did them in a hotel across from his office, we rented a ballroom. When we shoot it is a rather elaborate setup, so we’re flying 8 × 8 butterflies and these giant lights, and we need a pretty significant setup.

Then you have all the photos, then you figure out which one you want and you destroy all the rest?

Robert: That’s right.

Why not save them for an archive or something or another?

Robert: I never wanted the photographs to compete with the painting. The photographs are disposable construct, they serve the painting. Once that’s done, we try and eliminate everything that’s not essential to what we’re doing.

The most recent official presidential portraits are traditionally hung in the Entrance Hall on the State Floor, where President Barack Obama’s portrait hangs today.

And when you get the photograph you want, you begin painting. It takes you how long to actually do something like that?

Robert: Usually about eighteen months.

And you do nothing else, professionally, during that period of time?

Robert: That’s right. [laughter]

You don’t want to be distracted by painting somebody else, a private equity person or anything?

Robert: No private equity assignments, private equity persons are a whole other thing. No, I only make these paintings. I don’t do drawings. I don’t do photographs or other support material.

So, for eighteen months, every morning, you get up and you look at what you’re painting, and you say, “I don’t like it,” or “I like it,” or how does that work?

Robert: Yes, that’s about it. I’ll get up every morning and I’ll go to work. Usually I have an area that I’ll target for the day, and I’ll concentrate on that, and then I kind of move around the painting a bit as it builds. It’s kind of a combination of really small gestures and really big gestures.

Normally if you’re painting something you might say, “I’d like your opinion,” to somebody, maybe a friend of yours. But here, you had a contract that says you can’t talk about it, so how could you show anybody what you were doing? Or were you still able to do that?

Robert: I never show anybody. Anyways, I know what I want so I just go for it. [laughter]

Your daughter is here, where is your daughter?

Robert: She’s over there.

She’s an artist as well. Did you show it to her?

Robert: [to his daughter in the audience] Did you see it?

She snuck in and looked at it from time to time. [laughter]

So, Sharon, how long did it take you to paint this picture?

Sharon: I’d say eight months.

Eight months, so you work quicker than Robert?

Sharon: It doesn’t feel that way, but yes.

So, let me ask you, the off-the-shoulder look, it’s a little risqué for a first lady, wouldn’t you say?

Sharon: No. [laughter]

You told me earlier that you’ve seen other first ladies act something like that.

Sharon: Yes. They are a little risqué, all of them, the first ladies.

Okay. So at what point did you finish this and show it to Mrs. Obama?

Sharon: Probably six or seven months after it was finished.

After it was finished?

Sharon: After it was finished.

So, for six or seven months you didn’t show it to anybody?

Sharon: No.

So why not? You didn’t want to show anybody what you’d just done?

Sharon: Well, I did show my husband.

And what did he say?

Sharon: He’s a big supporter.

So, when you showed it to Mrs. Obama, the first time, what did she say?

Sharon: She didn’t say anything, and that’s when I knew that she liked it.

Really? Okay. Well, that’s good.

Robert, when you showed the portrait to President Obama, what did he say?

Robert: I wasn’t there.

You weren’t there?

Robert: I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when he saw it.

Did he e-mail you and say “I like it”?

Robert: No. Actually, I never [got feedback] one way or another through the whole process.

Following

But when you saw him today, did he say, you know, “I didn’t tell you this, but I really do like it.” He didn’t say that?

Robert: He said, “It’s okay.”

Now it’s very stark in the sense that as you mentioned, you don’t have any books, you don’t have any props, you have nothing there, and you just have him—and that’s your standard way of doing this?

Robert: Yes, all the paintings look the same.

And when you’re finished, what do you do with that one photograph that you have? Do you destroy it?

Robert: I destroy that as well.

So, you have no photographs, you have no archives, or anything like that?

Robert: Mmhmm, nothing.

Okay, and you couldn’t tell anybody, right? So didn’t you want to tell your best friend, “Guess what? I got this great assignment!” You can’t tell

anybody.

Robert: No, I couldn’t tell anybody, that was part of the deal.

For either or both of you: Presumably when we talk about an author who’s written a book on somebody, and they’ve spent three or four years of their life on that person, usually they like the person. Usually. Because they had to spend three or four years of their life on it and usually you don’t want to do that with someone you don’t like. Could you have painted this if you didn’t like the person?

Sharon: Not as well.

Not as well. You could paint a little bit but not as well. And what about you, Robert?

Robert: Oh sure. I wouldn’t want to, but I certainly could.

So, when you, both of you, when you finish these works you have to get them down to the White House. So, do you bring them in your car?

Sharon: Well, there’s a little more to it than that.

the unveiling ceremony, President Obama poses with Robert McCurdy, the artist who portrayed him, in front of the newly hung work of art.

What do you do?

Sharon: Well, I have to know when it’s done, which is a hard decision to make. So you’re with this painting all the way, and I work very much like you do Robert, you go around the painting, you see what you want to do in the morning, what’s wrong, what the painting is saying needs work and then eventually you go in and it breathes. When you walk in the studio and the painting is breathing, you know it’s done. Then you call the shippers, and then you’re out of it.

Call the insurers as well. [laughter]

Okay, so Robert, you don’t paint anyone else when you’re doing this, for eighteen months this is what you do?

Robert: Yes.

Sharon, do you paint anybody else during the same period?

Sharon: I try to work on two paintings at a time, because otherwise I get so obsessive about one I don’t really see where the mistakes are. So it’s good to create a little distance. That’s what I’ve learned over the years. If I keep working on it I can’t see it anymore.

So, every couple weeks do you show it to your husband and you say, “What do you think today?”

Sharon: Well, our bedroom is next door, so, you know, he has occasion.

All right, so today you must’ve had a great time at the White House, meeting with the first lady and the president. Was it one of the highlights of your career?

Sharon: I think the highlight of my career was meeting them, working with Michelle Obama, and getting to know her the little that I did.

So how are you going to top that?

Sharon: I got plans. [laughter]

So, Robert, do you have something else you’re working on now that you can’t talk about?

Robert: The veil of secrecy. Yes. We just finished a piece on James Hansen who’s a climatologist and we’re working with Isabel Allende.

What do you do when you’ve finished a work, either of you, and the person who’s the subject of the work says, “Well I really don’t like it that

much.” Or “Can you touch this up?” Or “Can you change that?” Do they ever ask for changes?

Robert: Most of the people who have sat for me I don’t think have seen the paintings, because they’re not part of the . . . We don’t, I don’t actually do commissions, per se. We usually invite somebody to sit for the painting. So, we’ll contact them and ask them if they’re willing to do this. They come, we do the sitting and then eighteen months later it’s done, but we don’t have them in the studio to see it, usually it has a destiny. Many of them are over at the National Portrait Gallery now.

Let’s suppose somebody calls you and says “I’m not the Dali Lama, I’m not Warren Buffett, I have not been on the moon, I’m not president of the United States, but I can afford to pay a very large fee for a really good portrait.” Do you do those kinds of commissions?

Robert: I haven’t yet. It doesn’t mean it will never happen.

Well, you might have some people here, you never know. So just leave your number and I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to call. And what about you, Sharon, do people call you from time to time? And will you take commissions from people that aren’t famous?

Sharon: I work for fees, yes.

And your studio is where, Robert?

Robert: Chelsea, in New York City.

And, Sharon, yours is in Brooklyn, I know. Sharon: Yes, Brooklyn.

And if you had to do your career all over again, would you do anything different from what you’ve done?

Sharon: I think I would’ve stayed in school longer.

Really?

Sharon: I would’ve studied longer. You know, I was very challenged financially, so I had to work and show the paintings and get moving in that way. So, I would’ve stayed in school longer, art school.

What did your family say when you dropped out of Cornell?

Sharon: Take the car, pack up all your bags, and bring the car back when you’re done. [laughter]

Okay, well, it worked out for you.

Sharon: Worked out for me.

And what about you Robert? In your case, do you have any regrets about the career you’ve chosen, and if you could do something different, would you, do something different with your career?

Robert: No. Everything sort of had to happen in the order it did in order for me to get where I am now, and where I am now is exactly where I wanted to be. I don’t mean that to say like as a career, but the work itself is performing the way I want it to perform.

So, when you’re painting, and I’m not a painter obviously, but you’re painting, how do you avoid getting paint on your clothes and everything?

Robert: Really small brushes.

Small brushes. And do you ever paint and run out of the color you need? You have to ask somebody to go down to the drugstore or get it? Where do you get your paints?

Robert: There used to be this fabulous store in New York called New York Central, that was run by a guy named Steve. Steve knew everybody everywhere in the world, of course, and there was a point where he was starting to close and one of the things that happens in the world of course is that in the old days they used to make twenty different versions of one small brush and then the factory goes down through the hands and somebody says we don’t need to make twenty versions of this we only need to make three. So, they started discontinuing things that I used a lot, and Steve would chase around the world and buy every brush that looked like that for me in the world. So, we would buy them by the hundreds, thinking, “Okay, I’m 50 years old, I got twenty more years of this, I’m burning these up at this rate, let’s get as many as we can.” So sometimes this is not as easy as it seems. We have people make brushes, I’ll send them a brush and say, “Can you make this?”

You can’t go into some store and say, “I’m painting a picture of a president of the United States. Can I get a discount on a brush or something?” Doesn’t happen? Doesn’t work that way?

Robert: Ehh No.

And where do you get your paints? Same place he gets his?

Sharon: No, I doubt it. I use a private paint maker who makes their own paint and I’ve been using them for years.

And where do you get the canvases?

Sharon: I don’t work on canvases, I work on panel.

Panel?

Sharon: I work on wood panels. And while you, Robert, seem that you’re really neat and precise with your painting, my house is covered with paint.

At the end of the day, I mean, how do you keep paint from getting on your clothes and everything?

Sharon: I don’t. [laughter]

You don’t try to do that?

Sharon: No. I got it all out of my hair.

All right, we have about two or three minutes, anybody have a question? A burning question about this, and if you want to hire any of these artists, I guess they’re available, perhaps, I don’t know.

Audience: My question is whether you looked at the other portraits in the White House. The new portraits are so entirely different from what has gone before and that really moves that whole collection forward in some startling ways. . . . So, I just wondered whether the two of you ever walked around the White House ahead of time and thought about that context in which the portraits would be hanging.

Sharon: Yes. Aaron Shikler was a model for me. I had seen his paintings and I had been to the White House, and of course there’s books of all of them. But yes, I think I try and incorporate traditional painting values but with abstraction in the color-field and the approach. So, it does move it forward I think.

Robert: I didn’t actually, because all my paintings look the same. We’ve got a goal, and we were aiming for that.

Two portraitists are seen at work on paintings that would become a part of the White House Collection: Douglas Chandor (left) is seen in his New York studio as he captures the likeness of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 1949. Everett Raymond Kinstler (below) turns toward the camera as he stands before his easel during a sitting with President Gerald R. Ford in Vail, Colorado, c. 1977.

TOP: THE WHITE HOUSE / BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER

President and Mrs. Barack Obama are joined by the artists of the portraits made of them for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery at an unveiling ceremony, February 12, 2018.

Kehinde Wiley (far left) painted the president’s portrait; Amy Sherald (far right) painted the first lady.

Audience: We all had to wait five years to see these extraordinary paintings but in the interim we had the experience of the great reveal of Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley a year and a half ago [at the National Portrait Gallery], and the enormous response they generated because of who was being represented but also as a consequence of having two exceptional African American artists tell that story, and I wonder, as that moment occurred, how you experienced that and if you felt as if somehow your pieces would be in conversation with or in contrast to the Kehinde and Sherald narratives.

Sharon: Amy and I never saw each other’s work when it was being done, and hers was released I think after I had already finished mine; but I think they are remarkably similar. Other than being of the same person, they are similar in the pose and the way we saw Michelle. So, I think they really complement each other in that way.

Robert: I was very excited about those paintings; it was really fun to see them. I thought they were great addition to the Portrait Gallery. Again, we’re sort of working toward a plan, so I felt a little apart from everybody else’s projects, but it was fun to be in that context.

Audience: First Lady Michelle Obama is absolutely fabulous and . . . I don’t think anything is wrong with, you know, the sleeve-drop. I have just a bit of a question with the color. It’s awesome, but how did you come to just choose the whole color of the landscape?

Sharon: Well, one of the strengths of my paintings is color. I think it’s quite remarkable that so little color is done with portraits today or in the past. I mean color is who we are, how we live, how we breathe. Color tells its own story. So, when I took a tour of the White House, I loved the Red Room, but the light was terrible. So, I started to move the couch, the red couch, into the Blue Room, and she had already picked out the dress, and they work together. It’s intuitive. That’s how I came to it. She looked great.

Well, I want to say thank you both for contributing to our country in this way by giving us these magnificent portraits, which will hang, as we’ve heard, for hundreds of years, no doubt, in the White House. And I hope you’re pleased with the reception you had today. I thought it was an incredible reception not just for President Obama and Mrs. Obama and President Biden and Mrs. Biden but also for you. The works are great, and thank you for your contribution to our country.

THE

PEALES in the White House

America’s First Family of Artists

charles willson peale (1741–1827) is a patriarchal figure in the history of American art. Distinguished for recording the likenesses of individuals instrumental in the nation’s founding and development, he also instructed several of his children and his younger brother James (1749–1831) in the art of painting. The story of the Peale family is a remarkable narrative of artistic sharing in which influence and instruction radiated in all directions over many decades. Parents, siblings, children, cousins, aunts, uncles, and spouses actively taught, influenced, and assisted one another.1 The walls of the White House now display impressive portraits by Charles and his son Rembrandt (1788–1860)

as well as lush still-life pictures by James and by another of Charles’s sons, Rubens (1784–1865). All are the generous gifts of individual Americans, who sought to enrich the presidential mansion with paintings by this artistic family. Works by the Peales first entered the collection in 1962, the year after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy launched the White House Historical Association and an initiative to showcase, protect, and preserve notable examples of American fine and decorative arts in the White House. In February 1962 she opened the mansion for a televised tour. Watched by millions of Americans, the tour stimulated great interest in collecting and celebrating America’s artistic heritage.2

previous spread

The Peale Family Portrait painted from 1773 to 1809 by Charles Willson Peale, captures ten members of the large artistic family, plus Argus, the family’s dog. Included are two of the artists whose work is now a part of the White House Collection: Charles Willson Peale standing at far left with his pallet and James Peale, seated second from left.

left and opposite Paintings by the Peales are prominently displayed throughout the White House today. Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington hangs in the Diplomatic Reception Room (left) and his portrait of Thomas Jefferson hangs in the Blue Room (opposite).

CHARLES WILLSON PEALE AS WHITE HOUSE GUEST

Charles Willson Peale was a man of wide-ranging interests, talents, and enormous energy who was ambitious for himself, his family, and the new nation. In Philadelphia in 1784, in the aftermath of the Revolution, he initiated a portrait gallery designed to honor its participants. By 1786, his gallery became part of a museum founded to present an everexpanding and internationally important collection representing the natural sciences, ethnography, and the nation’s ongoing continental explorations. This was also a family endeavor, and the Peales’ communal energy, enthusiasm, and curiosity ultimately shaped the museum into a significant educational resource and place of public recreation, complete with lectures and concerts.3

It is not surprising, therefore, that Charles Peale’s activities led to friendships with many of the most influential and distinguished individuals of his day and that he was entertained at the White House during both the Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe administrations. In June 1804 he facilitated a meeting between Jefferson and the brilliant, world-renowned explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Having just completed the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson was eager to hear about Humboldt’s recent explorations in Central and South America. Peale recalled in his diary, “We had

a very elegant dinner at the Presidents, and what pleased me much, not a single toast was given or called for, or Politiks touched on, but subjects of Natural History, and improvements of the conveniences of Life. Manners of the different nations described, or other agreable conversation animated the whole company.”4 Peale’s second and third visits took place several years later, during the winter of 1818–19 when he traveled from Philadelphia to Washington to update his museum gallery with portraits of individuals he considered “influential characters,” among them President James Monroe. Charles was initially invited by the president for a quiet dinner with “one or two other gentlemen.”5 But an invitation to attend a reception in the handsomely decorated “levee-room” of the White House, hosted by First Lady Elizabeth Monroe a few days later, was remembered as a more impressive affair. The invitation included Charles’s wife, Hannah Moore Peale (1755–1821), and his niece, the miniature painter, Anna Claypoole Peale (1791–1878), who was also painting the president.6 The mansion, burned by the British during the War of 1812, was now rebuilt and newly decorated. Charles recorded the glittering scene in his diary, describing the space as

an Oval richly furnished. The Carpit cost 2000$ the Chairs & settee’s of Crimson silk with Gilt frames—Chandelier & Gerandoles of a splendid finish and all the other furniture of appropriate elegance. . . . Mrs. Monroes desired Mrs. Peale to sett by her, and during the whole of the evening paid marked attention to her—We were desired to come early that is at 7 O’clock—therefore we had the pleasure of [seeing] the company enter. . . . Amongst them I meet several of Old acquaintance some that I had known full 40 years. Coffee, tea and a variety of Cakes passed round to the Company, after wards, Punch Wine & Scrub or lemonade, Cakes &c.7

Although Peale’s portrait of Monroe does not hang in the White House today,8 one of the artist’s earliest portraits of the nation’s first president does.

PORTRAITS BY THE PEALES

George Washington never lived in the White House, but he is represented on its walls with portraits by both Charles and his son, Rembrandt. Two significantly different works, separated by more

Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) by Benjamin West, 1767–69.

George

Peale presents Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army in 1776, early in the Revolutionary War. He is seen against a smokefilled background following his successful siege of the city of Boston.

Washington by Charles Willson

than seventy years, Charles’s portrait represents Washington shortly after his first military victory of the Revolution, while Rembrandt’s work is a posthumous, mid-nineteenth-century memorial to Washington’s place in American history.

Few artists had an opportunity to paint the first president directly from life, but Charles’s early acquaintance with Washington and their ongoing cordial relationship resulted in seven distinct portraits painted in 1772, 1776, 1777, 1779, 1783, 1787, and 1795. Although the first of these was a private commission from Martha Washington prior to the Revolution, the others represent Washington at distinct moments in his career as military leader and statesman.9 Charles’s portrait, now in the White House, is his own close replica of the portrait he painted in Philadelphia in late May 1776, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.10 Representing Washington in his role as commander in chief of the Continental Army, he is seen against a smoldering landscape of war that documents his first great military success of the Revolution at Dorchester Heights, after the siege of Boston and the evacuation of British forces. Washington had been requested to travel to Philadelphia for a conference on military operations with the Continental Congress in advance of an impending attack on the

city. But Peale’s portrait was a private commission that came from the president of the Congress, John Hancock, who hoped to gain Washington’s favor. The portrait is indebted to the traditions of British and European portraiture of triumphant military leaders that Charles knew through imported prints, as well as through his direct experience of such pictures during his two years of study in the London studio of the American-born artist, Benjamin West (1738–1820).11 As a picture documenting an exceptionally newsworthy event in the ongoing American Revolution, Peale’s image captured not just American but also international interest. By 1777 the portrait was engraved and distributed along with its companion portrait of Martha Washington, also commissioned by Hancock but now lost.12 Although Peale made multiple replicas of some of his other Washington life portraits, the White House portrait appears to be his only fullscale replica of his 1776 portrait. Documenting its completion in his diary on November 25, 1776, Charles noted that he painted it for “a French gentleman.”13

Immediately after the Revolution, Charles, his brother James, and his nephew Charles Peale Polk (1767–1822) would benefit from ongoing requests for replicas or variations of Charles’s original life

The Peales’ portraits of President Washington have often been chosen by recent presidents for display in the Oval Office. Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of George Washington hangs above the fireplace in the Oval Office during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Rembrandt Peale’s “porthole” portrait of George Washington hangs above the fireplace in the Oval Office during the presidency of Barack Obama.

portraits of the new nation’s hero. But, over time, the popularity of the Peales’ Washington portraits was replaced by Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 likeness of the first president, now enshrined on the dollar bill.14

However, in February 1824, Charles’s son, Rembrandt Peale, who was known for his dramatic portraiture and ambitious exhibition pictures, asserted his claim to powerfully reconnect the Peale name with Washington by arranging for the display of his recently completed monumentally scaled Washington portrait in the U.S. Capitol. An impressive work, it was formally acquired for the Senate’s collection in 1832, on the centennial of Washington’s birth, and today hangs in the Old Senate Chamber.15 Unlike Rembrandt’s more naturalistic early portraiture, this portrait displays the sculptural neoclassical style he adopted after his visits to Paris between 1808 and 1810. It was a style well suited for creating a posthumous, idealized portrait designed to project Washington’s celebrated heroic strength of character and resolve. Painted long after Washington’s death, Rembrandt recalled that he created the portrait by studying the life portrait he had painted in 1795, at age 17, seated next to his father, as well as his father’s final life portrait of Washington, painted at the same time, and the portrait bust of Washington created

by the French neoclassical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828).16 More than a mere likeness, Rembrandt’s Washington was an icon enshrined for the ages in an honorific oval with the words, “Patriae Pater” (Father of His Country) seemingly chiseled into the stonework below him. Peale made two large replicas of this work, successfully displaying one in Europe. His public displays of the picture were typically accompanied by pamphlets explaining and promoting the image.17

In the mid-1840s Rembrandt Peale began to paint smaller-scale versions for the homes or offices of patriotic citizens. While his original Senate portrait measures 71 × 53 inches, the smaller versions, like the one in the White House Collection, measure only 36 × 29 inches. Rembrandt referred to this portrait type as the “Standard National Likeness,” a term suggesting his Washington image replaced all others. But over time these portraits came to be referred to differently, as evidenced in the letter written by its donor, Katherine F. Howells, to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962.

My family and I watched with great interest your tour of the White House on television a week ago. . . . It occurred to me that you might be interested in having another portrait of Washington. This one is called the “Porthole

Washington” and has belonged to my family for many years. . . . Of course, I do not know whether there is any space available in the White House for another portrait, but I thought I would write on the chance. If you and your Committee are interested, I would be very happy and honored to have the portrait become a permanent part of the White House Collection.18

The portrait was readily accepted and was seen in 1970 on the Sixty Minutes program, “Upstairs at the White House” with Tricia Nixon, who described it as a family favorite.19 Her family was not alone in their appreciation of the portrait, since it continued to hang in the Oval Office for decades and is currently in the Diplomatic Reception Room.

Like his larger picture, Rembrandt Peale’s smaller versions of his Washington portrait exhibit a luminous, cloud-filled background, although the elaborate stonework is reduced to a simple oval. Washington is typically shown in military uniform, although a small number of these portraits represent him in a formal black coat and white neckpiece.20 Despite their smaller size, these domestically scaled versions project a strong sense of Washington’s presence. His glowing face, intense blue eyes, and silver gray hair create a stunningly illusionistic effect that is balanced by the bold design and vivid color of his uniform.

Before his death in 1860 Rembrandt

documented painting seventy-nine such portraits. However, the demand for them continued late into the century, providing commissions for copies of this portrait type by three accomplished women artists of the Peale family, Rembrandt’s second wife Harriet Cany Peale (1800–1869) and his nieces and students, Mary Jane Peale (1827–1902) and Anna Sellers (1824–1905).21

It is hard to envision a starker contrast in Rembrandt Peale’s extensive body of portraiture than that presented by his conceptualized “Standard National Likeness” of Washington and his considerably earlier, naturalistic life portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Peale was just 22 years old when he painted the 57-year-old Jefferson between late December 1799 and mid-May 1800, in Philadelphia. This small, vibrant portrait became Jefferson’s campaign image in the presidential election of 1800. Direct, dignified, and unpretentious, this genial likeness seemed to project. Jefferson’s campaign

above Rembrandt Peale (left) was depicted by his father Charles Willson Peale in 1818. After watching First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House, Katherine Howells was inspired to donate Rembrandt Peale’s mid-1840s portrait of George Washington (right) to the White House in 1962.

slogan, “The People’s Friend.” As Albert Bush Brown noted, it is “among the earliest and most penetrating likenesses of Jefferson” and “unrivaled in having played a more significant iconographic role during Jefferson’s lifetime than any other portrait. Shortly after its completion it became the prototype of a widely distributed series of American and European engravings” and “Peale’s arresting portrait thus served as an important and convincing item of political propaganda.”22

slogan, “The People’s Friend.” As Albert Bush Brown noted, it is “among the earliest and most penetrating likenesses of Jefferson” and “unrivaled in having played a more significant iconographic role during Jefferson’s lifetime than any other portrait. Shortly after its completion it became the prototype of a widely distributed series of American and European engravings” and “Peale’s arresting portrait thus served as an important and convincing item of political propaganda.”22

Jefferson had the strongest links to the Peales of any president. He and Charles shared an interest in scientific research and the study of natural science, especially as it related to the growth and identity of the new nation.23 Both were members of the American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin, and, while serving in the Washington administration, Jefferson was head of the board of Peale’s Museum. Jefferson found

Jefferson had the strongest links to the Peales of any president. He and Charles shared an interest in scientific research and the study of natural science, especially as it related to the growth and identity of the new nation.23 Both were members of the American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin, and, while serving in the Washington administration, Jefferson was head of the board of Peale’s Museum. Jefferson found

these affiliations a valuable distraction and wrote his daughter that “Politics are such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with them. I have changed my circle . . . associating entirely with the class of science, of whom there is a valuable society here.”24 Apparently pleased with Rembrandt’s portrait, Jefferson requested a copy for a friend.25

these affiliations a valuable distraction and wrote his daughter that “Politics are such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with them. I have changed my circle . . . associating entirely with the class of science, of whom there is a valuable society here.”24 Apparently pleased with Rembrandt’s portrait, Jefferson requested a copy for a friend.25

Rembrandt Peale’s lively portrait of Jefferson did not go unnoticed by his father, who admired its style and execution and sought to emulate it in portraits he painted a few years later. His portrait of his friend Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the talented architect and engineer who shared Charles’s interest in new technologies to improve life, is one such example. Appointed surveyor of public buildings by Jefferson in 1803, Latrobe made many contributions to the new capital, including his work on the Capitol Building, St. John’s Church, the Decatur House on Lafayette Square, the East and West Terraces of the White House, and the furnishings of James Madison’s State Rooms. Also the architect of the Baltimore Cathedral, Latrobe was appointed chief engineer for the U.S. Navy and created a design for Peale’s Philadelphia Museum that, unfortunately, was never executed. Charles Peale’s portrait conveys Latrobe’s energetic and inquisitive personality through the slight inclination of his head and his intense, direct gaze that meets the viewer. The portrait’s provenance establishes its inclusion in the gallery of Peale’s Philadelphia

Rembrandt Peale’s lively portrait of Jefferson did not go unnoticed by his father, who admired its style and execution and sought to emulate it in portraits he painted a few years later. His portrait of his friend Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the talented architect and engineer who shared Charles’s interest in new technologies to improve life, is one such example. Appointed surveyor of public buildings by Jefferson in 1803, Latrobe made many contributions to the new capital, including his work on the Capitol Building, St. John’s Church, the Decatur House on Lafayette Square, the East and West Terraces of the White House, and the furnishings of James Madison’s State Rooms. Also the architect of the Baltimore Cathedral, Latrobe was appointed chief engineer for the U.S. Navy and created a design for Peale’s Philadelphia Museum that, unfortunately, was never executed. Charles Peale’s portrait conveys Latrobe’s energetic and inquisitive personality through the slight inclination of his head and his intense, direct gaze that meets the viewer. The portrait’s provenance establishes its inclusion in the gallery of Peale’s Philadelphia

above

Rembrandt Peale’s 1800 portrait of President Thomas Jefferson (left), inspired his father Charles Willson

Peale to adopt a similar style for his 1804 portrait of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (right).

BOTH IMAGES: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

Rembrandt Peale’s 1800 portrait of President Thomas Jefferson (left), inspired his father Charles Willson Peale to adopt a similar style for his 1804 portrait of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (right).

Museum, and its simple oval format is typical of many of the portraits painted specifically for the museum’s collection. In a letter to a friend in 1804, Charles noted his successful reengagement with portrait painting after several years of focusing only on museum business.26 Charles would continue to look to his son Rembrandt for artistic inspiration and guidance, and he wrote to Latrobe in 1805 that “Rembrandt has opened my Eyes to some important methods of producing fine pictures.”27

THE AMERICAN STILL-LIFE TRADITION

James Peale and his nephew Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825), who were also instructed in the art of painting by Charles Willson Peale, are the acknowledged founders of the American tradition of still-life painting. But unlike Raphaelle’s spare, carefully calibrated,

James Peale, seen (left) in a miniature by Charles Willson Peale, began his focus on still-lifes in the 1820s. His Fruit in a Chinese Export Basket (above) was painted in 1822.

and often smaller and mysterious works, James’s pictures are straightforward presentations of the celebrated bounty of American nature.28 After Charles returned from studying art in London, James became his pupil and then his studio assistant before launching an independent career. Initially dedicating himself to watercolor on ivory miniatures, oil portraiture, and small historical compositions, in the early 1820s he further distinguished himself by turning to still-life subjects, a genre of painting his brother rarely practiced.29

James’s still-life pictures may, in part, reflect Charles’s experiment in farming and gardening between 1810 and 1820 on his Germantown farm, Belfield.30 It was an endeavor detailed in his correspondence with Jefferson, then retired to Monticello, and they continually shared information and “best practices” for yielding

better crops and taking care of the land.

The two examples of James’s still-life pictures now in the White House Collection present his typical motifs and methods of composition. Both contain pieces of fine porcelain surrounded by an abundance of fruit horizontally displayed across a simple neutral tabletop and background. The reticulated bowl seen in his Fruit in a Chinese Export Basket appears in several of his compositions, as well as in those by other family members who copied James’s works, including Rubens, Mary Jane, and Harriet Cany Peale and Anna Sellers. Here, however, it is inscribed with James’s signature and a date, perhaps a genteel form of advertising. The motif of a peach or apple tentatively balancing on a narrow rim is one James often employed and also frequently copied by other Peale artists. It not only defines the shape and volume of the

James Peale’s Grapes and Apples, painted c. 1825–31, was donated to the White House Collection in 1962.

TOP: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

Rubens Peale’s Still Life with Fruit

(above) painted c. 1862, was donated to the White House Collection in 1962. In this c. 2009 photograph, it hangs in the Map Room near the portrait of Benjamin Henry Latrobe made by his father Charles Willson Peale.

individual fruit; it also suggests the possibility of motion. In both this picture and in his Grapes and Apples James includes his typical diagonal branch with leaves that sweep across the background and draw the viewer’s gaze through the picture. Not all the fruits are perfect, a fact reflecting his assimilation of the European tradition of still-life painting in which the passage of time, or transience of life, is conveyed through a fruit’s varied imperfections or potential decay. In both works the grapes are characteristically luminous, but it is James’s precision of execution, the delicacy and elegance of his outline, and the ease with which he establishes a fluid serpentine movement throughout his compositions that characterize his most exceptional work.

Charles would have been surprised to learn that twenty-five years after his death his son Rubens joined the family’s artistic enterprise. Rubens Peale

did not begin to paint until the last decade of his life, at age 71. He had dedicated his earlier years to working in and then managing the Peale museums in Philadelphia, Baltimore and, finally, New York City. When his New York museum, founded in 1825, failed following the financial Panic of 1837, he retired to his wife’s family farm in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, where he put his expertise in gardening and farming to good use. Here, in 1855, under the instruction and, sometimes, with the assistance of his daughter, Mary Jane, who had studied with his brother, Rembrandt, Rubens began to paint. Creating a small but interesting group of pictures, he chose to depict fruits and flowers, subjects that intersected with his love of gardening and farming. Focused and diligent, he recorded the dates of his pictures, their subjects, and the individuals for whom they were painted. Of his 147 recorded works, 34 were documented as gifts for family and friends. These included “copies” and variations of pictures by Raphaelle, James, and Mary Jane, as well as a few exuberant original compositions.31 Rubens’s Still Life with Fruit presents a selection of items from the compositions of both James and Raphaelle but it also represents his own distinct, less illusionistic style. Clearly enjoying his colorful selection of grapes, white watermelon, and peaches stacked in a metallic serving dish, Rubens unites their curves and angles to create a bold and active composition, well attuned to contemporary taste. The intricate compositions, high finish, and detail of James’s still-life pictures are clearly different from the less polished and less technically sophisticated style of Rubens. Yet together they perfectly represent two vital artistic traditions alive in nineteenth-century America—the academic and the vernacular.

Although the Peales learned from one another, their essential bodies of work were distinct and personal, and the works of Charles, Rembrandt, James, and Rubens are clearly stylistically diverse. I hope that more of the art of this gifted American family will be donated to the White House to further diversify its remarkable collection. A precise and brilliant still-life picture by Raphaelle Peale, a bold oil portrait by Sarah Miriam Peale (1800–1885), or a delicate miniature on ivory portrait by Anna Claypoole Peale all would be perfect additions.

Rubens Peale, seen here in an 1807 portrait by his brother Rembrandt Peale, did not take up painting until the age of 71.

notes

1. Charles married three times and had children by his first two wives, Rachel Brewer Peale (1744–1790) and Elizabeth DePeyster Peale (1765–1804). He had no children by his third wife, Hannah Moore Peale (1755–1821).

2. Mary Jo Binker, “Jacqueline Kennedy’s Televised Tour of the White House,” White House History Quarterly, no. 67 (2022): 70–83.

3. Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). This publication remains the best overview of the institution’s history. Although many of the portraits have been dispersed, there is a representative collection of them on permanent display in the historic Second Bank in Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia. For a catalog of that collection, see Doris Devine Fanelli, History of the Portraits Collection, Independence National Historical Park and Catalogue of the Collection, ed. Karie Diethorne, introd. John C. Milley (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001). The painting collection of Peale’s Philadelphia Museum was sold at auction in 1854. The other contents had been auctioned earlier in 1848. For the paintings, see Peale’s Museum Gallery of Oil Paintings: Catalogue of the National Portrait and Historical Gallery, Illustrative of American History, Formerly Belonging to Peale’s Museum, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: M. Thomas and Sons Auctioneers, 1854).

4. Charles Willson Peale, diary, first week of July 1804, in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al., 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983–2000), 2, pt. 2: 693. Charles Peale painted a portrait of Humboldt in 1804 for the Peale Museum collection, now in the collection of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia. Charles’s son Rembrandt painted Humboldt again in Paris in 1810. “Original Letter from Paris, Addressed by Rembrandt Peale to Charles Willson Peale and Rubens Peale,” PortFolio 4, no. 3 (September 1810): 278–79. This portrait is in a private collection but also was once in the collection of the Peale Museum, Philadelphia.

5. Charles Willson Peale, diary, November 12, 1818, in Selected Papers of Peale, ed. Miller et al., 3:616, 620, fig. 53.

6. Anna Claypoole Peale was the daughter of James Peale. She and her sister, Sarah Miriam Peale (1800–1885) were two of the earliest successful professional American women artists. Sarah painted oil portraits and still lifes.

7. Charles Willson Peale, diary, November 24, 1818, Selected Papers of Peale, ed. Miller et al., 3:623.

8. Peale’s portrait of President James Monroe (1818, oil on canvas, 29 × 23 inches), is in the Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site, managed by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

9. The portrait of 1772 was commissioned as a pendant to Martha Washington’s earlier portrait by John Wollaston Jr. (1705–after 1775). Washington wears his uniform from the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. These portraits are now in the collection of the Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. Peale painted several Washington family portrait miniatures at this time and would continue to paint miniatures of Washington throughout the Revolution. See Carol Eaton Soltis, The Art of the Peales in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Adaptations and Innovations (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 102–03. The White House Collection includes copies of the Peale and Wollaston portraits painted by Ernst Fisher, c. 1850–52 for Robert E. Lee and his wife; they were carried with them to military quarters and displayed and Arlington House.

10. Charles Coleman Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, pt. 1 (1952): 220–21. See also the catalog entry for Peale’s portrait of George Washington on the Brooklyn Museum’s website, www.brooklynmuseum.org.

11. Peale returned from London well versed in the traditions of European portraiture. For Peale’s experience in London, see Soltis, Art of the Peales, 13–33.

12. Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures,” 242, no. 953. For updated information on the prints of Peale’s 1776 portraits, see Wendy C. Wick, George Washington, An American Icon: The EighteenthCentury Graphic Portraits (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service for the National Portrait Gallery, 1982), 8, 9; Soltis, Art of the Peales, 103 (ill.). An engraving of Lady Washington by Joseph Hiller after a painting by Charles Willson Peale is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; see the museum’s website, https://philamuseum.org.

13. For his progress on the oil portrait for “a French gentleman,” see Charles Willson Peale, diary, November 9–25, 1776, in Selected Papers of Peale, ed. Miller et al., 1:203–06. The portrait was completed on November 25, 1776. A portrait miniature taken from the 1776 portrait is now at Mount Vernon.

14. Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington (Athenaeum Portrait), 1796, is jointly owned by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See the catalog entry at the National Portrait Gallery website, https://npg.si.edu.

15. The United States Senate website provides a detailed history of the picture: www.senate.gov/artandhistory. See also Lillian B. Miller and Carol Eaton Hevner, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778–1860 (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 142–47, 279–82.

16. Rembrandt Peale’s 1795 portrait of George Washington is in the collection of the Philadelphia History Museum, Drexel University, Philadelphia. Charles Willson Peale’s portrait is in the New-York Historical Society. For Houdon’s bust, see “JeanAntoine Houdon,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon website, www.mountvernon.org.

17. Two well documented copies of the large portrait exist. One is in a private collection and the other in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1805 Peale was a founding member of the academy, which remains a notable art school and museum of American historic and contemporary art.

18. Katherine F. Howells to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, April 1, 1962, Office of the Curator, The White House.

19. See Leslie F. Calderone, “Upstairs at the White House with Tricia Nixon: The Making of the 60 Minutes Televised Tour,” White House History Quarterly no. 67 (2022): 84–95. The “Upstairs at the White House” segment of Sixty Minutes is available on YouTube, www.youtube.com.

20. Carol Eaton Hevner, “The Washington Copies,” in Rembrandt Peale: A Life in the Arts (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1985), 88–89, see also 66, 86, 90–91.

21. Rembrandt Peale married Harriet Cany in 1840. Mary Jane was the daughter of Rembrandt’s brother Rubens and Anna a daughter of his sister Sophonisba Peale Sellers (1786–1859).

22. Alfred Bush Brown, “The Life Portrait of Thomas Jefferson,” Jefferson and the Arts: An Extended View, ed. William Howard Adams (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1976), 57. The earliest engraved copies of the portrait are by David Edwin and Cornelius Tiebout. Advertisements appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora, September 8. 1800, and February 20 and 26, 1801. The portrait appears to have remained with Rembrandt Peale as part of the collection of his Baltimore Museum, which opened to the public in 1814. In 1854 the painting was sold to Charles Getz from the remains of that museum. It was then purchased by Charles J. M. Eaton, with whom it remained until his death in 1893, when it was presented it to Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. Unlocated for many years, it was identified in 1959 as the portrait in the collection of the Peabody Institute and purchased by Paul Mellon (c. 1961), who presented to the White House in 1962.

23. Charles Peale also painted Jefferson. Fanelli, History of the Portraits Collection: Independence National Historical Park and Catalogue of the Collection, ed. Diethorne, introd. Milley, 186.

24. Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, February 11, 1800, quoted in Edward Dumbauld, “Thomas Jefferson and Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 5, no. 3 (1938): 161.

25. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, February 21, 1801, in Selected Papers of Peale, ed. Miller et al., 2, pt. 1: 297–98; Rembrandt Peale to Thomas Jefferson, March 24, 1801,

ibid., 305. The location of this copy has never been determined. In 1805, Rembrandt painted Jefferson for the Philadelphia Museum’s portrait gallery. The painting shows the president significantly aged. It was purchased by Thomas Bryan in the 1854 sale of the painting collection of Peale’s Philadelphia Museum. He later donated it to the New-York Historical Society, where it remains.

26. Charles Willson Peale to Mrs. Nathaniel Ramsay, Museum, September 7, 1804, in ibid., 2, pt. 2: 752; Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures,” 122.

27. Charles Willson Peale to Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Philadelphia, July 21, 1805, in Selected Papers of Peale, ed. Miller et al., 2, pt. 2: 869. See also Carol Eaton Hevner, “Lessons from a Dutiful Son, Rembrandt Peale’s Artistic Influence on His Father, Charles Willson Peale,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale: A 250th Anniversary Celebration, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press for the Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 103–17. Rembrandt Peale would paint Latrobe a decade later. For this portrait, see the catalog entry on the Maryland Center for History and Culture website, www.mdhistory. org.

28. For bibliography for Raphaelle, as well as a comparison of works by Raphaelle and James, see Soltis, Art of the Peales, 224–32, 321. For numerous illustrations of Raphaelle’s still-life pictures, see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988).

29. See Linda Crocker Simmons, “James Peale: Out of the Shadows,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville Press in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 203–19; Soltis, Art of the Peales, 107–112, 219–222, 232–37.

30. For Peale and Belfield, see Therese O’Malley, “Charles Willson Peale’s Belfield: Its Place in Garden History,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Miller and Ward, 267–82; Julia Sienkewicz, “Citizenship by Design: Art and Identity in the Early Republic” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009), 184–256; Soltis, Art of the Peales, 212–19.

31. For Rubens and his list of pictures, see Charles Coleman Sellers, “A Painter’s Decade,” Art Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 139–52. See also Paul D. Schweizer, “The Art of Rubens Peale, 1855–1865,” in Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, ed. Miller, 168–85.

When HARRY MET Pablo

The Strange True Story of the Day President Harry Truman Spent with Artist Pablo Picasso

MATTHEW ALGEO

when art historian alfred barr learned that Harry and Bess Truman would be going on a Mediterranean cruise in the summer of 1958, he saw a rare chance to get the former haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, interested in modern art. As the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Barr was one of the movement’s most enthusiastic evangelists in the United States. But Truman had proved an especially tough nut to crack. In May 1947, Barr sent the then-president a book about modern art. The title has been lost to history—perhaps it was the latest edition of Barr’s What Is Modern Painting?—but Truman responded with a letter that was characteristically blunt.

I appreciated very much your note of the second enclosing me a book on modern painting. It is exceedingly interesting. I still get in almost the same frame of mind as after I have a nightmare when I look at these paintings.

Some of them are all right—at least you can tell what the painter had in mind. Some of them are really the “ham and egg” style.

I do appreciate highly your interest in trying to convert me to the modern viewpoint in art but I just can’t appreciate it, much to my regret.1

Truman preferred the Old Masters to the avantgarde. “I am very much interested in beautiful things,” he wrote in 1953. “Pictures, Mona Lisa, the Merchant, the Laughing Cavalier, Turner’s landscapes, Remington’s Westerns and dozens of others like them. I dislike Picasso, and all the moderns— they are lousy. Any kid can take an egg and a piece of ham and make more understandable pictures.”2

But Alfred Barr never stopped trying to convert Truman, even after he left the White House, and when Barr found out the Trumans would be stopping in Cannes on their cruise, he decided to take another shot. Cannes just happened to be where Pablo Picasso lived. Who better to win Truman over to the wonders of modern art than the man who practically invented it? Barr also believed a meeting between the man who painted Guernica and the man who authorized the use of nuclear weapons against civilians would be of symbolic importance. Conservative Republicans in Congress had been attacking modern art for nearly a decade.

previous spread and left President

hand outside of the artist’s ceramic studio at Vallauris, France, 1958. The unlikely meeting had been arranged by art historian Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (left with Picasso’s Guernica), in the hope that the former president, who had written that modern art gave him nightmares, would actually come to appreciate the style.

Harry S. Truman shakes Pablo Picasso’s

right

Representative George Dondero of Michigan, an acolyte of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, claimed modern art was “Communist-inspired and Communist-connected” and had “one common, boasted goal—the destruction of our cultural tradition and priceless heritage.” Dondero reserved special contempt for Picasso, whom he described as “the hero of all the crackpots in so-called modern art” and “the ‘gage’ by which American modernists may measure their own radical worth.”3

Alfred Barr hoped that, by shaking Picasso’s hand, Harry Truman would send a message, not just to reactionary Republicans like George Dondero but to the whole world: modern art was not evil. And although Truman hated modern art, Barr knew he hated the people who wanted to censor it even more. Harry Truman may have been a philistine but he was certainly no fascist. “We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think,” he declared in a 1950 speech. “We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.”4

Barr just had to figure out a way to bring together the straight-talking politician from Missouri and the Cubist painter from Málaga, two men whose tastes in politics, art, and life were diametrically opposed and whose personalities were nearly as big as their influence on the twentieth century.

By early 1958, the Trumans had been out of the White House for five years and, for the first time in their twenty-seven years of marriage, were

enjoying some financial security. A book deal had netted Harry about $200,000 (nearly $2 million today), and a presidential pension bill that Congress was considering offered the prospect of permanent income.5 So the Trumans decided to splurge a little, and, with their friends Samuel and Dorothy Rosenman, they booked a cruise to Europe. Sam Rosenman was a lawyer and former New York Supreme Court justice who had been one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers and his principal speechwriter. It was Rosenman, in fact, who coined the phrase “New Deal.”6 When Truman became president, he asked Rosenman to stay on as White House counsel, and the two men formed a friendship that fully flowered after they were freed from the constraining protocols of the Oval Office. In retirement, Harry and Sam and their wives, Bess and Dorothy, formed a convivial quartet who enjoyed spending time together.

Sailing from New York in late May on the appropriately named American Export Lines cruise ship Independence, the two couples would spend three weeks touring the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and France. Unlike a trip to Europe that the Trumans had taken two years earlier, which was filled with official engagements and speeches, this one would be a strictly private affair—just two older couples (Harry and Bess were 74 and 73, Sam and Dorothy 62 and 58) enjoying a leisurely vacation.

Shortly before the couples set sail, Alfred Barr made arrangements for the Truman-Picasso summit. The go-between was probably Ralph Colin,

Seen here departing on a trip to the Far East are Harry Truman, Dorothy Rosenman, Bess Truman, and Samuel Rosenman. President and Mrs. Truman enjoyed traveling with the Rosenmans. Their 1958 trip to Europe included an afternoon visit with Pablo Picasso.

Sam Rosenman’s law partner, who was on MoMA’s Board of Directors. Maybe Barr asked Colin to ask Rosenman to ask Truman if he would be amenable to meeting with Picasso when he was in France. Truman’s reaction to this request undoubtedly would have contained “words of one syllable,” as he liked to say.7 The European vacation was supposed to be a quiet affair. Getting wrapped up in controversy was the last thing Truman wanted. And meeting with the world’s most famous communist after Khrushchev would be controversial.8 Then there was the delicate matter of the 76-year-old Picasso’s compagne, 31-year-old Jacqueline Roque. The couple lived together but were not married (though they would wed in 1961). Mmes Truman and Rosenman definitely would not be crazy about that. But, like Barr, Truman appreciated the symbolic importance of the meeting, that it would show his support for the freedom he cherished most, the freedom of speech, and it would rebuke far-right politicians like George Dondero, who had demonized artists like Picasso. Truman consented to the rendezvous.

Now Barr just had to get Picasso to agree. The artist was notoriously prickly about entertaining guests, but Barr had known him for more than twenty years and had almost single-handedly introduced his work to American collectors.9 It was time to call in a favor.

On May 26, 1958, the same day the two couples embarked the Independence in New York, Barr wrote the great artist.

Dear M. Picasso:

I enclose a copy of a letter introducing two famous gentlemen whom I believe you will find both interesting and entertaining. I hope you will be able to see them.

With my kindest regards to Jacqueline.

Sincerely,

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.10

The enclosed letter read:

Dear M. Picasso,

Very rarely do I agree to give letters of introduction to you because I know how

distracting visitors can be. Yet, I believe that you would be very pleased indeed to receive the two gentlemen to whom I have given this letter. One of them really needs no introduction, since he is the Honorable Harry S. Truman, ex-President of the United States. His companion, Judge Samuel Rosenman, was for many years a close friend and adviser to President Roosevelt and subsequently to President Truman.

These gentlemen are spending some time on the Riviera and are eager to pay you a visit. I hope that you may receive them.

My warmest greetings to you.

Sincerely,

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.11

Truman was not eager to pay Picasso a visit, of course; in fact, he would later claim that it was Picasso who had requested the meeting.12 In any event, Barr sent a copy of the letter of introduction to Ralph Colin, with instructions for him to forward it to Rosenman and Truman. He also provided instructions for calling on Picasso.

May I suggest that they phone or have someone phone Madame Jacqueline Roque at Picasso’s residence. The phone number is Cannes 9-0182, the address, the Villa Californie, Avenue Costebelle, Cannes.

The best time to phone is around eleven in the morning. Madame Roque speaks English quite well. In any case, she and Picasso have a copy of the letter as a harbinger so that they will expect the call.13

After calling in Algeciras, Spain, and Naples and Genoa, Italy, the Trumans and the Rosenmans disembarked the Independence in Cannes on Thursday, June 5, and settled into the Château du Domaine Saint-Martin, a swanky resort in Vence, a commune about 20 miles north of Cannes. Six days later, around noon on Wednesday, June 11, the two couples called on Picasso and Mme Roque. A visitor to the villa a year earlier, the art critic and journalist Carlton Lake, described the scene one encountered upon approaching the imposing residence in the hills overlooking the Bay of Cannes.

Picasso stands at the entrance to the Villa Californie, in Cannes, France, where he hosted the Trumans and Rosenmans for lunch in 1958.

La Californie was purchased by Picasso in 1955, and he lived there with Jacqueline Roque until 1961. Visitors would make their way up a winding path to the mansion.

Finally, with a certain amount of backtracking, I found Picasso’s street. I followed it slowly uphill and after climbing a couple of hundred meters came, on the right, to a villa half hidden by a high black iron fence with a wide, even higher black iron gate. Both the fence and the gate were reinforced with black metal sheeting that closed off the view. Between the wide double gate and a smaller, similarly barred doorway was a marble plaque with the single word Californie incised in it. This, I knew, was my destination. . . . The villa, as nearly as I could tell from outside the iron curtain, was a large, bulky, squarish place with a comfortable 1900 look about it. It was three stories high. The windows on the two upper stories—the only ones I could see—had wrought-iron balconies and were crowned by some rather intricately carved scrollwork.14

When Lake visited, the bell on the gate was broken, so he had to call to the concierge through the mail slot to get her attention (Picasso, a very

opposite and left

In scenes from Picasso’s years at Villa Californie, the artist relaxes with his muse, Jacqueline Roque, and feeds his pet goat Esmeralda, who is aptly perched on a likeness sculpted by Picasso, 1957.

rich man, employed a small army of domestics.) Maybe Truman, who had served in France with the American Expeditionary Forces and remembered at least a sprinkling of French, had to do the same, shouting Excusez-moi! in his Missouri twang. In any event, contact was made, the gate was opened, and the four Americans were escorted inside the mansion.

Picasso had purchased Villa Californie in 1955 and converted it into a sprawling atelier, filling the cavernous rooms with paintings, drawings, ceramics, and sculptures, all in various stages of progress. Picasso was a hoarder, much to the benefit of art historians—and his heirs, who would donate much of the contents of his homes to the French government in lieu of estate taxes. “He seldom threw anything away, even old envelopes,” his biographer John Richardson wrote, “so his hoard was constantly growing and threatening to engulf room after room.”15 And then there were the animals, a menagerie that included two dogs (a Dalmatian named Perro and a dachshund named Lump),

multiple songbirds in cages, and Picasso’s pride and joy, a goat named Esmeralda, who was given free rein of the premises, outside and in.

After a short interval—Picasso always kept people waiting; it was one of his many unattractive peculiarities—the artist and his muse appeared and introductions were made, with Jacqueline acting as the interpreter for the group, though the Rosenmans also spoke some French.

The Trumans and Rosenmans had dressed up for the occasion. Harry Truman wore a navy blue suit with a double-breasted jacket, a triangle of handkerchief poking perfectly out of the left breast pocket. Picasso, on the other hand, was casually dressed in a bright blue sport shirt with dark slacks and canvas espadrilles. The three couples had lunch at the villa. The meal was prepared by Picasso’s cook, a maid named Garance, assisted by Jacqueline. The menu is lost to history, though according to John Richardson, who dined with Picasso at Villa Californie many times, the food served at the villa was usually “simple, basic fare.”16

After lunch—or perhaps before, the timeline is unclear—Picasso gave his guests a tour of the villa. “He had a picture of a goat, and there was the real goat wandering around the yard,” Truman recalled a few months afterward. “I said to him, ‘Do you mean to say that you took this beautiful goat and turned it into this monstrosity and can say to me that they look alike?’ He turned on his heel and walked away. The Boss [Bess] was never so mad at me in her life.”17

Surely Truman exaggerates. Rather than walking away from criticism, Picasso was much more likely to challenge it. Perhaps he responded by telling Truman one of his favorite stories, about an American GI who once came to visit his studio in Paris.

Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and

admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how “It doesn’t really look like that, though,” got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, “But she’s so tiny, your wife. I didn’t realize from what you said that she was so small.” He looked at me very seriously. “Oh, she’s not really so small,” he said. “It’s just that this is a very small photograph.” [Picasso bursts out laughing.] It sounds silly, I know, but it’s true. Eh bien, it’s the same story here—[he points to a canvas]—it’s a question of optique.18

Despite their many differences, Truman and Picasso actually hit it off. Truman later described

Following lunch at Villa Californie, Picasso took his guests on a tour of the Cote d’Azur. The group is seen here during a stop at the Grimaldi Museum.

Left to right are Sam Rosenman behind Picasso, Jacqueline Roque, Bess Truman, and Harry Truman, June 11, 1958.

Picasso as a “short, jolly man,” and added: “I liked him a lot.”19

Leaving the villa, Picasso and Jacqueline guided the two American couples on a whirlwind tour of the Cote d’Azur, stopping at Poterie Madoura, his ceramics studio in Vallauris, and Château Grimaldi (now the Musée Picasso), a small museum built on the ruins of an old Roman fortress in Antibes where many of his works were on display. In Vallauris, Picasso and Truman posed for a picture in the doorway of the pottery, shaking hands and smiling, a presidential snapshot that ranks up there with Nixon and Elvis for incongruity. At the end of the day, Picasso presented the Trumans with a gift, a ceramic plate that their grandson Clifton still owns.

The next day, Thursday, June 12, Harry Truman wrote a letter to Alfred Barr to thank him for arranging the visit. “All of us had a most pleasant and instructive visit with Mr. Picasso,” he wrote. “His museum in the old Roman Fort was intriguing, especially with regard to the Roman artifacts. Picasso’s pictures and ceramics were also very interesting.”20

On July 1, the Trumans and the Rosenmans boarded the American Export liner Constitution for the return trip home. Before the ship departed, Harry met with a group of reporters in the ship’s salon. Mostly he wanted to talk about the “failures and bunglings” of the Eisenhower administration.21 But he also mentioned that he had met with Pablo Picasso while he was in the Riviera. When a reporter asked him if he had invited Picasso to visit him in the United States, Truman answered, “We do not invite Communists to visit the United States.”22

The Associated Press’s brief account of Truman’s visit with Picasso appeared in many American newspapers on July 2. The news caused only a minor stir. The report was largely overshadowed by a much bigger story in France: Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in a bloodless coup. Besides, the times they were a-changin’. A month after Truman met with Picasso, the Quarrymen, who would eventually change their name to the Beatles, recorded their first song. Cubism, now fifty years old, seemed almost quaint compared to newer movements like Abstract Impressionism. What was once avantgarde was moving into the mainstream. John F. Kennedy would invite several prominent American modernists to attend his Inauguration in 1961.

When it came to converting Truman to the

modern viewpoint in art, Alfred Barr had, alas, failed again. Shortly after his visit with Picasso, Truman received a letter from a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago asking him if he would be willing to ask Picasso to paint a mural at the school. “It seems to me,” Truman wrote in reply, “that a university named Roosevelt would try to obtain one of our able American painters for your purpose rather than a French Communist caricaturist.”23

notes

1. Harry Truman to Alfred Barr, May 7, 1947, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, I.A.605, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

2. Harry Truman, handwritten note, November 30, 1953, quoted in Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 299.

3. George Dondero, “Modern Art Shackled to Communism,” Congressional Record 95 (1949): 11584–87.

4. Harry Truman, “Address at a Dinner of the Federal Bar Association,” April 24, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1 to December 31, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1965), 272.

5. The bill, granting former presidents an annual pension of $25,000, would be signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on August 25, 1958.

6. “Samuel I. Rosenman, 77, Dies; Coined New Deal for Roosevelt,” New York Times, June 25, 1973, 1, 36.

7. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 373.

8. Picasso had joined the Communist party in France in 1945, though his commitment to the cause proved to be less than wholehearted.

9. By the 1950s even a middling Picasso would set you back about $20,000—around $200,000 in today’s money.

10. Barr to Pablo Picasso, May 26, 1958, Barr Papers, XI.C.17.

11. Ibid.

12. Harry Truman to Dale Pontius, June 15, 1958. Harry S. Truman Collection, box 12, Harry S. Truman Library Presidential Library and Museum, Personal Papers and Organizational Records.

13. Barr to Ralph Colin, May 26, 1958, Barr Papers, XI.C.17.

14. Carlton Lake, “Picasso Speaking,” Atlantic, July 1957, 35.

15. John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 235.

16. Ibid.

17. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Journals: 1952–2000 (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 56.

18. Quoted in Lake, “Picasso Speaking,” 18.

19. Quoted in Schlesinger, Journals, 56.

20. Truman to Alfred Barr, June 12, 1958, Barr Papers, XI.C.17.

21. “Adams Incident a Spark for Truman,” Kansas City Times, July 2, 1958, 15.

22. Quoted in “Truman Sees Picasso,” Kansas City Times, July 2, 1958, 1.

23. Quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013), 398.

Paint-by-Numbers: A CHRISTMAS GIFT to President Dwight D. Eisenhower

TROY ELKINS, JEFFREY NELSON, AND WILLIAM SNYDER

WHAT TO GIVE A NEW PRESIDENT FOR CHRISTMAS?

as the christmas of 1953 approached, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was concluding his first year in office. His appointment secretary, Thomas Stephens, had begun to worry about how to find the perfect gift for his boss. Perhaps one of Eisenhower’s many hobbies might provide inspiration. Gifts for the popular president had been arriving all year, however, from all over the country. Customized golf balls and golfing accessories as well as fly-fishing rods and hand-tied flies came by the dozens.

The president also enjoyed painting as a way to relax. It was a relatively new hobby, begun during his recent tenure as president of Columbia University, possibly at the urging of his good friend Winston Churchill, also a painter. Perhaps “art” would provide the answer for the gift Stephens was searching for.

and around the West Wing of the White House as a surprise for the president. Although intended for Christmas, the paintings continued to arrive over the next few years, providing a rotating “art” exhibit that often brought smiles to staff and visitors alike.

A 1950S PHENOMENON

previous spread

Detail of a canvas numbered to correspond to each numbered paint pot included in a paint-by-numbers kit and a c. 1955 advertisement flaunting the simplicity of the process. left

Thomas Stephens (far left) conceived of a plan to have White House officials, cabinet members, and friends complete a collection of paint-by-numbers projects as a gift for President Eisenhower. A painter himself, Eisenhower is seen (above) completing a landscape.

opposite

Stephens, a lawyer and World War II veteran who had been active in Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign, was the first official to see the president each morning and one of the last to see him at the end of each day. The president relied on Stephens’s ability to “diplomatically interrupt” any meeting that ran too long, but his role was much more than keeper of the president’s schedule. An astute political observer, Stephens was also one of Eisenhower’s most important advisers. It was against this background that Stephens came up with his gift idea. He secretly handed out paintby-numbers kits to cabinet members, government leaders, and visitors to the Oval Office, asking them to participate. Then he collected the resulting paintings and created a gallery of them in his office

The post–World War II economic boom, further enhanced by policies of the Eisenhower administration, resulted in a strong and growing middle class. Shorter work weeks and a thriving economy meant that millions of Americans had more leisure time and disposable income. This newfound free time and extra money were often used for new relaxation activities. One of the most popular hobbies of the 1950s was the paint-by-numbers phenomenon.

Dan Robbins, an employee of Palmer Paint in Detroit, Michigan, developed the paint-by-numbers kits as a way to expand sales. He got the idea from a method that Leonardo da Vinci had used to train new apprentices in his studio. Robbins developed kits with a printed and numbered pattern that came with brushes and paints. Sales to the public began in 1951. Six different pictures were available at first, and, as popularity grew, more kits were designed. By 1954 the Palmer Paint Company had sold more than 12 million kits under the Craft Master brand. Soon many other companies were producing similar kits, increasing competition.1

Dan Robbins, an employee of Palmer Paint in Detroit, developed the first paint-by-numbers kits as a way to expand sales and soon sold more than 12 million kits under the Craft Master brand. A selection of the popular kits is seen on display at Woolworth’s Five and Dime, c. 1955.

The paint-by-numbers kits made painting accessible to millions of Americans who would otherwise never have considered taking up painting. The fad was not without controversy, however, with many famous artists of the era deriding the kits as stifling the creative process and wondering if mere painting of numbered canvases could be considered art. In reaction to the critics Robbins said, “I never claim that painting by number is art, but it is the experience of art, and it brings that experience to the individual who would normally not pick up a brush, not dip it in paint.”2 The paint-by-numbers kits made the concept of art approachable in a way that appealed to almost everyone.

THE GIFTS

Although the exact number of kits that Stephens handed out is not known, he definitely covered all his bases with those who visited the Oval Office. Included were his former boss, now Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; special adviser to the president Nelson Rockefeller; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby; one of Ike and Mamie’s favorite band leaders Fred Waring; Governor of Colorado Daniel Thornton; and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Village on the Coast by Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. Herbert Brownell Jr. (above in 1954) practiced law and served in the New York legislature before being appointed attorney general by President Eisenhower.

Palomino by Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey

George Humphrey (below in 1954) served as Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury from 1953 until 1957.

Stag at Eve

by Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother

It is possible that Milton Eisenhower (below in 1954), knowing his brother’s fondness for painting nature scenes often including animals, chose this paint-by-numbers kit from Stephens’ s supply. Milton, the youngest of the seven Eisenhower brothers, was born in Abilene, Kansas, in 1899, the only one of the boys born in the home that now serves as the anchor for the Eisenhower Presidential Library campus. His career included service as president of both Pennsylvania State University and Johns Hopkins University as well as federal appointments and unofficial adviser roles for Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson.

Old Mill by

Ethel Merman

Known as “The Undisputed First Lady of the Musical Comedy Stage,” Ethel Merman (left in 1954) made famous many Broadway standards including “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Merman was a lifelong Republican and a good friend of President and Mrs. Eisenhower.

The

Broadway Star

Top Secret by National Security Adviser

Robert Cutler

Robert Cutler (above in 1952) was appointed by Eisenhower as his national security adviser, the first in the nation’s history. Although serious by nature, Cutler’s sense of humor shows through with his addition of “Top Secret” to this village scene.

Bulldog

by Ambassador to the United Nations

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (below in 1946) served as Eisenhower’s presidential campaign manager. He was named ambassador to the United Nations in 1953.

In January 2023, a collection of paint-by-numbers paintings given to President Eisenhower by his staff and friends went on display at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. The museum (left) is part of a complex in Abilene, Kansas, which includes the Eisenhower family home.

In January 2023, a collection of paint-by-numbers paintings given to President Eisenhower by his staff and friends went on display at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. The museum (left) is part of a complex in Abilene, Kansas, which includes the Eisenhower family home.

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / ABOVE AND OPPOSITE: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

IKE’S GIFT TO US

President Eisenhower was so touched by Stephens’s idea and by the fact that friends and associates would use their personal time to create gifts for him that, at the end of the administration, he insisted that those paintings remaining in the West Wing be sent to Abilene, Kansas, where the presidential library was under construction and the Eisenhower Museum, originally dedicated as a memorial museum to all World War II veterans, had already been completed. Although Eisenhower never used a paint-by-numbers kit himself, he wanted to make sure that these gifts were preserved and shared.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library is doing just that. The twenty paintings that now form the Thomas Stephens Collection will be on display in the museum’s special exhibits gallery for all of 2023.

notes

1. “Craft Master: The History of Paint by Numbers,” Paint by Number Museum website, www.paintbynumbermuseum.com.

2. Dan Robbins, Whatever Happened to Paint-by-Numbers: A Humorous (Personal) Account of What It Took to Make Anyone an “Artist” (Delavan, Wis.: Possum Hill Press, 1997).

The selection of paintings in the By the Numbers exhibit pictured above and right includes horses, dogs, a seascape, and Mission Church (second from top left), painted by President Eisenhower’s secretary of health, education and welfare, Nelson Rockefeller, who would later serve as vice president under President Gerald R. Ford.

ANDY WARHOL Visits The White House

LAUREN M C GWIN

perhaps best known for his campbell’s soup cans and celebrity portraits, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was synonymous with the Pop Art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. The term “Pop Art” was coined by English art critic Lawrence Alloway to describe the work of a group of artists who were inspired by images from “popular” culture and consumer society to make art relatable to everyone. It was a reaction against the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, which expressed the artist’s emotion through abstract marks, but in turn alienated the public. Pop Art was representation rather than abstraction, with everyday objects elevated to fine art. Later, in the 1970s, Warhol’s works became more political, and portraiture became more dominant.1 Other Pop artists of the time included Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, and Roy Lichtenstein, two of whose paintings—Water Lilies–Pink Flower (1992) and Water Lilies–Blue Lily Pads (1992) were added to the White House collection in 2016.2 While there are no artworks by Andy Warhol in the White House collection, his celebrity status and connections led him to be invited to the White House on seven separate occasions by three presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.

THE FORD YEARS

In 1974, Vogue commissioned Warhol to paint a portrait of President Gerald R. Ford for a feature in the magazine’s October issue, to be published two months after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency. The portrait was reproduced in full color in Vogue, along with the title “Gerald Ford: A Word of Appreciation.”3 By this time, Warhol’s many friendships and connections within the political and social scene of New York City and Washington, D.C., led to many commissions, mainly for portraits. When creating his portraits, he would either use his Polaroid camera to photograph his subjects or appropriate images from popular newspaper and media images, as he did in the 1960s for his prints of President Kennedy, November 22, 1963, and of Jacqueline Kennedy, Sixteen Jackies. He would then use a photographic silkscreen method to reproduce prints, combined with painting and graphics, to finish his portraits.4 For the Vogue portrait, President Ford is shown as having a serious expression overlayed with pink-toned skin and dashes of red and light blue paint. Two other versions of the Ford portrait can be found in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.5

Seven months after the portrait was featured in Vogue, President Ford became the first president to invite Andy Warhol to the White House. The occasion was a State Dinner on May 15, 1975, for the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, Farah Diba Pahlavi. Bob Colacello, Warhol’s friend and the editor of Warhol’s magazine Interview, which featured interviews with celebrities around the world, was also invited. He recalled Warhol being “unusually excited to attend,” and instead of wearing a tuxedo jacket with a pair of blue jeans, he actually wore the matching pants— albeit pulled over his blue jeans.6 Later, in his diary, Warhol explained this double layering was because the dress “bottoms always itch so much.”7 In a 2013 video interview, Colacello said Warhol described Farah Diba Pahlavi as “so sweet . . . and so beautiful,” but after dinner “the empress kept following him [Warhol] from room to room. He said he was running from the Green Room, to the Red Room, to the Blue Room because he was so afraid she was gonna ask him to dance! And later the empress— years later—told me [Colacello] ‘No! I just wanted to have a conversation with him about his art!’” Fortunately, she did not hold this behavior against Warhol and one year later commissioned him to do her portrait.8

On July 2, 1975, Jack Ford, having been introduced to Andy Warhol through their mutual friend Bianca Jagger, Mick Jagger’s wife, invited them both to the White House for a tour. While there, Warhol also conducted an interview for a feature on Bianca for the September issue of Interview. During the tour, White House photographer David Kennerly captured Andy Warhol photographing Jack and Bianca on the Truman Balcony with his Polaroid.9 This was Warhol’s second visit to the White House and the last during the Ford presidency. After a freelance photographer working for Warhol staged suggestive photos of Jack and Bianca in the Lincoln Bedroom, the Fords distanced themselves from Warhol.10

left Warhol is welcomed to the White House by President Ford in the receiving line for the State Dinner in honor of the shah of Iran, 1975.

opposite Warhol’s portrait of Gerald R. Ford, 1974.

top

Joined by Bianca Jagger, President Ford’s son Jack poses as Warhol takes a Polaroid on the Truman Balcony, July 2, 1975.

previous spread Left: Portraits of Andy Warhol, 1983.

Right: Andy Warhol enters the White House accompanied by model Barbara Allen, ahead of a State Dinner. It was the second dinner in honor of the shah of Iran that he had attended, 1977.

TOP: GETTY IMAGES / BOTTOM: GERALD R. FORD PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

left and opposite

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Andy Warhol visited Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, (opposite top right) to take photographs for use in creating a series of portraits that the Carter campaign used to raise funds. The third in the series, Jimmy Carter III (top right), was presented to President Carter at a White House reception on June 14, 1977, for the Inaugural Impressions exhibition (opposite top left).

The portrait Jimmy Carter I (bottom left and right) was commissioned by the Democratic National Committee as a way to align Warhol’s status as a Pop culture icon with Carter as a progressive candidate, relatable to young voters. One hundred signed prints were produced and sold by the DNC for $1,000 each.

THE CARTER ERA

In 1976, when Jimmy Carter was running for president, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) commissioned Warhol to create a print the commit tee could sell to raise funds for the campaign. They also believed his celebrity status and popularity with the younger demo graphic would show that Carter was a progressive candidate.11 Warhol agreed and made a trip to the Carter family peanut farm in Plains, Georgia, where he photographed not only Jimmy but also Rosalynn, Amy, and Lillian Carter. Warhol said of the family, “They were very normal. We got along very well. . . . Jimmy Carter gave me two big bags of peanuts which he signed. That made the whole trip worthwhile.”12

The portrait designed for the cam paign, titled Jimmy Carter I, was one of three portraits that resulted from Warhol’s trip to Georgia. In acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, it showed Carter with a serious expression. One hundred prints of Jimmy Carter I, signed by Jimmy Carter and Andy Warhol, were sold for $1,000 each by the DNC for the campaign.13

President Carter described Warhol’s visit and the success of the campaign painting in a later speech:

Andy Warhol is . . . a very good friend of mine. He came down to Plains to visit us, and when he left, I have to admit I was very disappointed. He had about a $25 camera and he was going to help us raise an enormous amount of money during the campaign . . . and it turned out to be very successful. And his first painting of mine, which was distributed in a very limited edition . . . was one of the turning points in the financing of our campaign. He did it to help me and . . . I think that his painting of me, based on that photograph, was superb. It kind of grows on you. . . . The first one was frowning and scowling and worrying because I was broke, I had lost some primaries, I didn’t know where I was going to go next, and the fact that Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol were willing to help me kind of turned the tide.14

On February 14, 1977, less than one month after Carter was inaugurated, Andy Warhol was invited

right

Peanuts packaged with a “Jimmy Carter for President” logo, saved by Warhol from his trip to Plains, are preserved in the Warhol Museum.

to the White House by the president’s assistant Mark Siegel. Warhol was allowed to bring everyone who worked at his office to have lunch at the White House Mess, and he later wrote how he loved the food since it was similar to Schrafft’s restaurant in New York. After lunch, Siegel informed the president that Andy Warhol was downstairs, and President Carter then invited Warhol up to the Oval Office. “I was really flattered. We took the elevator upstairs and I was ushered into a little office. . . . Suddenly I saw the President walking through the Rose Garden. The next thing I knew I was standing in the Oval Office.”15 President Carter greeted Warhol and thanked him for doing his portrait. Photographs show the two saying goodbye to each other just outside the Oval Office door. A month later, Warhol recalled in his diary how he wished he had spoken more with the president, but he was too nervous.16

Warhol completed two other portraits of President Carter based on photographs he took during his trip to Georgia—Jimmy Carter II and Jimmy Carter III, both portraying a smiling president. The DNC commissioned five artists, including Warhol, to create portraits for the Inauguration of President Carter in a series named Inaugural

Impressions. A limited edition of one hundred prints of each portrait was printed by United Limited Art Editions in New York and published by the DNC. Included were Jacob Lawrence’s The Swearing In; Roy Lichtenstein’s Inaugural Print; Robert Rauschenberg’s 1977 Presidential Inauguration; Jamie Wyeth’s [Plains]; and Andy Warhol’s Jimmy Carter III. All five artists were invited to the White House for a reception on June 14, 1977, to celebrate the Inaugural Impressions portfolio and present their portraits to President Carter.17 Writing of this event in his book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, he recalled, “It’s always a thrill to go to the White House. . . . My favorite thing to do at the White House is to look at the furniture. I think it’s just great to go to the house no matter who the President is.”18 Warhol’s last visit to the White House during the Carter presidency was as a guest at the State Dinner in honor of the shah of Iran on November 15, 1977.

Warhol’s relationship with the Carter family did not end with his trips to the White House. He often saw them at events in New York and Washington. On September 25, 1977, he mentions attending an award ceremony for Lillian Carter at the Waldorf Astoria in New York: “A boy took me to a small

At the conclusion of Warhol’s February 1977 visit to the White House, President Carter said good-bye to the artist just outside of the Oval Office and thanked him for making his portrait. Warhol later noted in his diary that he wished he had not been too nervous to speak more with the president.

right

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Warhol created a portrait of Ted Kennedy, who challenged Carter for the Democratic nomination. Featuring subtle coloring from the American flag and diamond dust, the original was reproduced as prints to raise funds for the Kennedy campaign. A deluxe limited edition print, with a background of red, white, and blue, was also produced for donors.

room on the side where there was a reception for Miz Lillian. . . . She was really thrilled to see me, she loved the pictures I’d done of her, and she invited me to the party in her room afterwards.”19 Warhol thought Ruth Carter Stapleton, President Carter’s sister, a “sweet person.” And he often spoke with Chip Carter at social events they were both invited to.20

For the 1980 primaries, Warhol did a campaign poster for Carter’s challenger Ted Kennedy, which is probably what ended his friendship with Carter. In his diary on March 17, 1980, Warhol mentions that they were supposed to have breakfast at the White House but it was cancelled, and he thought it was because he did the Kennedy poster.21

Warhol’s first visit to the Reagan White House was in October 1981 (above left) to interview First Lady Nancy Reagan for Interview, his magazine. He took four photographs of Mrs. Reagan (including one seen above center), which he used to create the cover of the December 1981 issue of Interview (opposite).

Ron Reagan Jr. and his wife Doria befriended Warhol during the 1980 presidential campaign and posed for a photograph for him; the gelatin silver print is seen above right. Warhol, invited by Ron Jr., is seen with his 35 mm camera at Reagan’s first Inauguration, January 20, 1981.

THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY

During Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president, Andy Warhol befriended Ron Jr. and his wife, Doria, who he thought was “really sweet and charming,”22 and he did a feature story on them in the November 1980 issue of Interview. Ron Jr. even invited Warhol to his father’s Inauguration on January 20, 1981, where they ran into each other and said all their “big hellos.”23 In February 1981, Colacello hired Doria Reagan as secretary for Interview, and for several years she worked in an office at The Factory, the name Warhol gave his New York City studio.

Warhol’s first visit to the White House during the Reagan administration was to interview First Lady Nancy Reagan and take her photograph for his magazine. The interview was set up through their connection to Jerry Zipkin, a New York socialite who was longtime friend of Nancy Reagan. Mike Deaver, White House deputy chief of staff, approved the interview because he believed it would be “helpful to have the President’s wife on the cover of a young, hip magazine.”24 Warhol described his visit with the first lady in his diary:

We were early getting to the White House, we got in and then Nancy Reagan came in and we were in the same room. And a waiter brought in four glasses of water. Doria was with us. . .

. Bob had his tape recorder and I had mine. I took four pictures. Mrs. Reagan gave Doria a piece of Tupperware, not wrapped or anything, and she gave her three boxes of socks for Ron.

Bob was telling Mrs. Reagan she was such a

good mother. He asked what they were doing for Christmas and she said they were going to stay at the White House because nobody ever stays at the White House. At 4:30 the interview was over. She and Doria talked for about fifteen minutes while Bob and I waited to the side.25

Warhol used the photographs from this interview to create the portrait of Nancy Reagan that was featured on the cover of the December 1981 issue of Interview. Colacello recalled that the first lady called him at home when the issue was released saying she liked the interview, especially the preface, which included Ron Jr. reminiscing about her.26

Warhol’s last visit to the White House was as one of the 140 guests invited to the State Dinner for President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines on September 16, 1982.27 It was one of the few State Dinners that the Reagans held outdoors in the Rose Garden, with Japanese lanterns in the trees and lights strung along the bushes. The Washington Post quoted President Marcos describing the night as the “firefly party in the White House.”28 Warhol described the night as being beautiful, even though the Reagans took a chance by not having a tent during an outdoor event. While there were lights

everywhere, there were no television cameras, so Warhol felt more relaxed, less nervous. He was seated with Vice President George H. W. Bush and Mrs. Bush, near President Reagan’s table, and he made small talk with Mrs. Bush about mutual acquaintances. In the receiving he was introduced as “Mr. World” by a nervous sergeant, who apologized to him afterward, saying it was her first event. The rest of the evening was spent around Colacello and Zipkin.29

Warhol was not invited to the White House during President Reagan’s second term, presumably after Doria Reagan and Bob Colacello no longer worked for him and so he lost that connection but possibly because his artwork became increasingly political.30 However, he greatly valued the opportunities he had to visit the White House. He said, “I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night . . . they’d just take about 500 people

Warhol often found inspiration through images he collected from newspapers and magazines. In 1985, Warhol created ten limited edition screen prints in his Pop Art aesthetic, featuring American consumer culture. Included in the series is a print of President Reagan (left) based on an advertisement Reagan did for Van Heusen Century shirts in 1953 (opposite).

a night. Everybody would just love this country because it’s so thrilling to go there. It really is.”31

a night. Everybody would just love this country because it’s so thrilling to go there. It really is.”31

In the last year of the Reagan presidency, on February 22, 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly at the age of 58 from complications following gallbladder surgery. He had achieved his goal of becoming famous through his art. His unique bipartisan relationships with, and portraits of, the late twentieth century American presidents and first ladies who embraced his style represent a special moment in American art and the unique pairing of politics and Pop culture.

In the last year of the Reagan presidency, on February 22, 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly at the age of 58 from complications following gallbladder surgery. He had achieved his goal of becoming famous through his art. His unique bipartisan relationships with, and portraits of, the late twentieth century American presidents and first ladies who embraced his style represent a special moment in American art and the unique pairing of politics and Pop culture.

notes

notes

1. World Art: The Essential Illustrated History (London: Star Fire Publishing, 2007), 49; Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol, 1928–1987: Commerce into Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), 30. See also Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando: Harcourt, 1980).

1. World Art: The Essential Illustrated History (London: Star Fire Publishing, 2007), 49; Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol, 1928–1987: Commerce into Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), 30. See also Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando: Harcourt, 1980).

2. William Kloss, “New Acquisitions Supplement,” in Art in the White House (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2019), 10.

2. William Kloss, “New Acquisitions Supplement,” in Art in the White House (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2019), 10.

3. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Gerald Ford: A Word of Appreciation,” Vogue, October 1974, 172–73.

3. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Gerald Ford: A Word of Appreciation,” Vogue, October 1974, 172–73.

4. Linda Bolton, Artists in Their Time: Andy Warhol (London: Franklin Watts, 2002), 16, 30.

4. Linda Bolton, Artists in Their Time: Andy Warhol (London: Franklin Watts, 2002), 16, 30.

5. Grace Marston, “The Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits,” posted June 4, 2021, Andy Warhol Museum website, www.warhol.org.

5. Grace Marston, “The Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits,” posted June 4, 2021, Andy Warhol Museum website, www.warhol.org.

6. Quoted and reported in Lévy Gorvy, “Warhol Women: Farah Diba Pahlavi,” posted May 8, 2019, Lévy Gorvy website, www. levygorvy.com.

6. Quoted and reported in Lévy Gorvy, “Warhol Women: Farah Diba Pahlavi,” posted May 8, 2019, Lévy Gorvy website, www. levygorvy.com.

7. Andy Warhol, diary, September 25, 1977, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Twelve, 2014), 159.

7. Andy Warhol, diary, September 25, 1977, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Twelve, 2014), 159.

8. Bob Colacello, comments in panel discussion “Iran’s Art World of the 1960s–70s,” October 22, 2013, Asia Society video, www. asiasociety.org. After meeting Empress Farah Pahlavi at the Ford State Dinner, Warhol visited her in Iran in 1976 where he took her photograph for the commissioned portrait. One year later, he produced his series of silkscreen portraits of the Empress. There are a few of these prints at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and among other collections.

8. Bob Colacello, comments in panel discussion “Iran’s Art World of the 1960s–70s,” October 22, 2013, Asia Society video, www. asiasociety.org. After meeting Empress Farah Pahlavi at the Ford State Dinner, Warhol visited her in Iran in 1976 where he took her photograph for the commissioned portrait. One year later, he produced his series of silkscreen portraits of the Empress. There are a few of these prints at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and among other collections.

9. “Art in the Archives: Andy Warhol,” posted 2017, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum website, www. fordlibrarymuseum.tumblr.com.

9. “Art in the Archives: Andy Warhol,” posted 2017, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum website, www. fordlibrarymuseum.tumblr.com.

10. Maxine Cheshire, “Pal Warhol Puts Jack Ford in Soup,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1975, F27.

10. Maxine Cheshire, “Pal Warhol Puts Jack Ford in Soup,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1975, F27.

11. Julia Ann Weekes, “Warhol’s Pop Politics,” posted October 30, 2008, Smithsonian Magazine, www.smithsonianmag.com.

11. Julia Ann Weekes, “Warhol’s Pop Politics,” posted October 30, 2008, Smithsonian Magazine, www.smithsonianmag.com.

12. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), 96, 103. The bags of peanuts Carter signed and gave to Andy Warhol were given by Warhol to Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon for her birthday. Afterward, someone stole the bags as well as artwork from her. The location of the peanuts is still unknown.

12. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), 96, 103. The bags of peanuts Carter signed and gave to Andy Warhol were given by Warhol to Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon for her birthday. Afterward, someone stole the bags as well as artwork from her. The location of the peanuts is still unknown.

13. Ibid., 96.

13. Ibid., 96.

14. Jimmy Carter, “1977 Inaugural Portfolio Presentation Remarks on Receiving the Portfolio at a White House Reception for Artists,” June 14, 1977, online at American Presidency website, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

14. Jimmy Carter, “1977 Inaugural Portfolio Presentation Remarks on Receiving the Portfolio at a White House Reception for Artists,” June 14, 1977, online at American Presidency website, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

15. Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 102–3.

15. Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 102–3.

16. Warhol, diary, March 7, 1977, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 78.

16. Warhol, diary, March 7, 1977, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 78.

17. Marston, “Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits.”

17. Marston, “Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits.”

18. Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 102.

18. Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 102.

19. Warhol, diary, September 25, 1977, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 159.

19. Warhol, diary, September 25, 1977, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 159.

20. Warhol, diary, April 11, 1978, ibid., 247.

20. Warhol, diary, April 11, 1978, ibid., 247.

21. Warhol, diary, March 17, 1980, ibid., 501.

21. Warhol, diary, March 17, 1980, ibid., 501.

22. Warhol, diary, December 6, 1980, ibid., 637.

22. Warhol, diary, December 6, 1980, ibid., 637.

23. Warhol, diary, February 18, 1981, ibid., 654.

23. Warhol, diary, February 18, 1981, ibid., 654.

24. Bob Colacello, “Dec. 1981: Nancy Reagan on the Cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview,” Warhol Stars website, www.warholstars. com; Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 453.

24. Bob Colacello, “Dec. 1981: Nancy Reagan on the Cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview,” Warhol Stars website, www.warholstars. com; Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 453.

25. Warhol, diary, October 15, 1981, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 748.

25. Warhol, diary, October 15, 1981, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 748.

26. Colacello, Holy Terror, 453.

26. Colacello, Holy Terror, 453.

27. Warhol describes his visit to the State Dinner in his diary and says he was invited to the White House because he was neighbors with Mrs. Marcos. Diary, September 16, 1982, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 827.

27. Warhol describes his visit to the State Dinner in his diary and says he was invited to the White House because he was neighbors with Mrs. Marcos. Diary, September 16, 1982, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 827.

28. Quoted in Donnie Radcliffe and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Dinner, Dancing &,” Washington Post, September 17, 1982.

28. Quoted in Donnie Radcliffe and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Dinner, Dancing &,” Washington Post, September 17, 1982.

29. Warhol, diary, September 16, 1982, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 827–28; Radcliffe and Bumiller, “Dinner, Dancing &.”

29. Warhol, diary, September 16, 1982, Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Hackett, 827–28; Radcliffe and Bumiller, “Dinner, Dancing &.”

30. Marston, “Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits.”

30. Marston, “Pop Politics of Warhol’s Presidential Portraits.”

31. Quoted in “Picasso by Persky,” Interview, September 1980. See also “Andy Warhol: Facts, Figures, and Favorite Things,” Interview, March 23, 2012, www.interviewmagazine.com.

31. Quoted in “Picasso by Persky,” Interview, September 1980. See also “Andy Warhol: Facts, Figures, and Favorite Things,” Interview, March 23, 2012, www.interviewmagazine.com.

Isamu Noguchi’s FLOOR FRAME

The First Work by an Asian American Is Acquired for the White House Fine Art Collection

NIKKI PISHA

The fine arts collection at the White House primarily consists of works by American artists. Included are those whose names were well known during their lifetimes as well as those whose work may not have received deserved attention until after their deaths. An ongoing goal in acquiring new pieces is to include examples that represent the diversity of American artists.

With this objective in mind, Floor Frame by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was acquired for the White House in 2020 with the approval of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House (CPWH) and First Lady Melania Trump, and with the financial assistance of the White House Historical Association.1 The sculpture represents the first work by an Asian American artist in the collection.

Noguchi was one of the most significant artists in the history of American art, and the inclusion of his work in the White House Collection helps to accomplish the goal of more accurately reflecting the diverse artistic landscape of this country as the collection grows.

Born in Los Angeles to Yonejiro Noguchi, a Japanese poet, and Léonie Gilmour, an American writer and editor of mostly Irish descent, Isamu Noguchi lived for a period with his mother in Japan before moving back to the United States to attend school. His studies took him around the world, notably to Paris, where he learned from famed Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.2 Noguchi became a critically acclaimed sculptor himself, and he was also well known for his garden, furniture, architecture, and set designs. The inspiration his travels brought to his work is seen in the fusion of technique, detail, and process garnered from numerous areas of the world—a melding that alludes to American culture.3

Isamu Noguchi with examples of his work in 1962 (below) and at the Noguchi Museum in 1982 (left).

Isamu Noguchi’s Floor Frame, seen beneath the magnolia tree on the east side of the Rose Garden, was unveiled on November 20, 2020, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony by First Lady Melania Trump.

right

Isamu Noguchi’s beneath tree of Garden, unveiled on November 2020 with a ribbon cutting ceremony by First Lady Melania Trump and Stewart McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association.

REFLECTIONS ON THE COVID-19 CHALLENGE

right

Only days before COVID-19 would interrupt normal life around the world, White House Associate Curator of Fine Arts Nikki

Only days before COVID-19 would interrupt normal life around the world, White House Associate Curator of Fine Arts Nikki Pisha views Floor Frame during an auction preview at Sotheby’s in New York City, March 4, 2020.

Pisha views Floor Frame during an auction preview at Sotheby’s in New York City, March 4, 2020.

“I’m not shaking hands, only elbow was met on my arrival on March days after the first case of reported York State and days before Frame slated to the Office of the Curator, D.C., with three hours House Collection to House. Noguchi Queens and had arranged

“I’m not shaking hands, only elbow bumps, you know, to be safe,” was the greeting I was met with on my arrival at Sotheby’s in New York City on March 4, 2020. It was just four days after the first case of COVID-19 had been reported in New York State and two days before Floor Frame by Isamu Noguchi was slated to be sold by auction. In my role representing the Office of the Curator, The White House, I had arrived by train from Washington, D.C., with three hours to assess Floor Frame as a possible addition to the White House Collection before returning to the White House. I had been in touch with the Noguchi Museum in Queens and had arranged to meet a curator at the Sotheby’s preview. Representatives of the museum confirmed that the sculpture would be suitable for the White House Collection and its placement in the Rose Garden appropriate from the “Noguchi perspective.”

of the museum confirmed that the sculpture would be Garden Frame a since it cast, so I also called conservator “Could That was, I By

D.C., members of the Committee for the the White House their e-mail first lady, and I had a the following day. Historical Association had agreed

Floor Frame had been displayed inside a private home since it was cast, so I also called my sculpture conservator to ask, “Could it withstand living outside?” That was, I learned, the artist’s original intent. By the time my train arrived back in Washington, D.C., members of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House had my completed acquisition proposal in their e-mail in-boxes, the chief usher had images of Floor Frame to present to the first lady, and I had a presentation outline for the following day. The White House Historical Association had agreed to fund the acquisition.

Forty-eight hours later the Noguchi

the White quickly, COVID-19

Forty-eight hours later the Noguchi sculpture went up for auction. The bidder representing the White House won quickly, easily. But within a few days COVID-19

stopped everything. A national emergency New York City was placed curatorial staff Floor Frame at Sotheby’s through summer D.C., in Rose and then

stopped everything. A national emergency was declared, New York City was placed on lockdown, and curatorial staff were quarantined in their homes. Floor Frame was stuck at Sotheby’s through summer 2020 and was transported to Washington, D.C., in late August 2020. It was installed in the Rose Garden the following month and then removed until the November 2020 unveiling.

When the sculpture was finally installed, it had a special meaning for me. I had seen, during COVID, how quickly nature seemed to take over the public and even the private spaces that humans normally occupied. Trees bloomed earlier and longer. Animals emerged onto streets emptied of cars. Noguchi’s Floor Frame works daily to show us that we are never far from a natural world that can overwhelm us unless we acknowledge that we, too, are rooted within it.

until the finally installed, seen, even the private and longer. Animals emerged cars. Noguchi’s Floor to show a can overwhelm acknowledge that we, too, within it.

THE INSTALLATION

Floor Frame was created in 1962, the year that Rachel Lambert (“Bunny”) Mellon redesigned the White House Rose Garden for President John F. Kennedy. Serendipitously, Floor Frame came to auction at the same time a restoration of the Rose Garden was nearing completion. The newly acquired sculpture was installed in the fall of 2020 on a small terrace on the east side of the Rose Garden under a large magnolia tree. Regardless of where a visitor steps into the Rose Garden, it is not immediately visible. In keeping with Noguchi’s intent that the piece be happened upon, unexpectedly, Floor Frame quietly occupies its space while also powerfully maintaining order.

The installation of the work in the garden presented a challenge, as Noguchi sculptures such as this one are not meant to reside on pedestals but to make a rooted connection to the environment. Pedestals are likely to interrupt such a grounding. The original plan for situating Floor Frame in the Rose Garden involved creating a 17 by 12 foot patio area on the same plane as the garden walkway

without steps or a raised display. Nature however had other plans. The large roots from the old magnolia tree were raised too high to keep the planned patio area in line with the walkway. So, despite the original plans, a terrace was required to accommodate the established root system and two steps leading up to a smaller 17 by 7 foot 6 inch terrace were installed. The original plan also included two stone benches, one on the north side and one on the south side. Noguchi sculptures command their own space; they organize and direct, but they need room to do so.4 CPWH members were concerned that the benches would overwhelm the sculpture and so they were removed from the plan to allow the sculpture to control the terrace area. Even though Floor Frame ultimately was placed on a form of a pedestal, the natural world drove it there. Positioning the sculpture in the midst of this setting allowed it to flourish as a bridge between the natural garden and the manufactured.

Sitting directly on the terrace, Floor Frame reaches infinitely downwards with its own roots as

A view looking east over the Rose Garden from above the Oval Office captures the new terrace where Floor Frame is installed under the magnolia tree on the east end of the garden.

Steel rods were used to secure Floor Frame to the terrace in the Rose Garden.

Photographs from the September 2020 installation capture workers marking the exact position of the sculpture on the terrace (right); drilling holes to accommodate the steel rods (bottom right); and affixing the rods to the sculpture itself (below left).

With preparation of the terrace and the sculpture complete, workers lift the approximately 80 pound sculpture and position the two pieces on the terrace with the steel rods that function to ground the work securely in place.

Matthew Harris Jouett and Gilbert Stuart

though not as well known as many of the other artists in the White House Collection, Matthew Harris Jouett (1788–1827) is of interest for his association with Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) and the conflicting attributions attending their work. Jouett was born on the Kentucky frontier and came of age during the time when Lexington’s cultural and intellectual ambitions led it to be called “The Athens of the West.”1 Transylvania University, the focal point of those ambitions, provided Jouett’s education, in preparation for a career in law. Yet from an early age he had determined that he wanted to become a portrait painter, despite his father’s objections.

Harris Jouett (1788–1827) is of interest for his association with Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) and the conflicting attributions attending their work. Jouett was born on the Kentucky frontier and came of age during the time when Lexington’s cultural and intellectual ambitions led it to be called “The Athens of the West.”1 Transylvania University, the focal point of those ambitions, provided Jouett’s education, in preparation for a career in law. Yet from an early age he had determined that he wanted to become a portrait painter, despite his father’s objections.

After graduating from Transylvania in 1804, Jouett pursued the law, married, and entered service during the War of 1812. When a batch of pay vouchers valued at more than $4000 were lost in the heat of battle, he assumed responsibility for their loss; the financial burden followed him to the end of his life. Upon his routine discharge, he returned to Lexington with the resolve to begin painting full time. Although he seems to have had some basic instruction from the painter George

After graduating from Transylvania in 1804, Jouett pursued the law, married, and entered service during the War of 1812. When a batch of pay vouchers valued at more than $4000 were lost in the heat of battle, he assumed responsibility for their loss; the financial burden followed him to the end of his life. Upon his routine discharge Upon being discharged he returned to Lexington with the resolve to begin painting full time. Although he seems to have had some basic instruction from the painter George Beck (1749–1812) during his

student days, he decided he needed further instruction. He sought advice from brothers John B. West (1786-1868) and William Edward West (1788-1827), Kentucky artists working in Philadelphia, who suggested he move on to Boston in search of Gilbert Stuart.2

Beck (1749–1812) during his student days, he decided he needed further instruction. He sought advice from brothers John B. West (1786–1868) and William Edward West (1788–1827), Kentucky artists working in Philadelphia, who suggested he move on to Boston in search of Gilbert Stuart.2 Boston,

above and opposite

By the summer of 1816, Jouett was in Boston, jotting down in a notebook the “Rude hints & observations, from repeated Conversations with Gilbert Stuart, Esqr, During the months of July, August, Septembr & Oct. 1816 under whose patronage and care I was for the time.” Not only did that encounter profoundly impact Jouett’s style, his account of Stuart’s rambling discourse, composed of gossip, snarky remarks, and richly detailed instruction on the actual craft of portrait painting, is one of the rarest documents in early American art history.3 It is also a document that gives additional insight on the Stuart portraits in the White House Collection. Jouett arrived in Stuart’s life at a time of trial and transition. Stuart’s only son had died in 1813, and “unable to bear the house where Charles Gilbert had died,” the artist moved his family to suburban Roxbury, where he sought “peace in the slow

history.

Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portraits of George and Martha Washington (above), were begun in 1796 and remained unfinished in Stuart’s studio when Matthew Harris Jouett arrived in 1816. Stuart’s c. 1805 portrait of Washington (opposite), now in the White House Collection, was based on the unfinished Athenaeum Portrait.

Portraits George (above), unfinished in Matthew Jouett (opposite), based unfinished

growth, the abundance of nature” and “insisted on having cows and pigs.” Leaning against the wall in the artist’s studio were the unfinished portraits of George and Martha Washington.

Twenty years had passed since the first president and first lady sat for Stuart in the expectation of receiving two portraits for Mount Vernon. They were never delivered. In the course of those twenty years Stuart had developed a reputation for being an erratic genius, capable of producing an amazing work of art and just as capable of insulting or brawling with his sitters, leaving work unfinished, and making a mess of his finances. He drank a great deal of brandy and dipped so much snuff that he seemed to move about in a permanent cloud of brown dust. Nor was he known to have had a very genial personality. When Jouett first appeared in his studio, Stuart inquired what he might be after and demanded an answer, “And that quickly too for I have no time to chat, Kentucky boat man.”

Whatever the response, Stuart took Jouett into his studio, where “Stuart gossiped and told tales throughout, affirming that he talked incessantly while painting.” Jouett recorded his comments as

best he could in a random, stream-of-consciousness kind of prose. As read, “Rude hints” is a dense, panoramic narrative, one in which Jouett freely admits that he has not kept the order “in which Stuart discoursed upon various subjects.” In conversations surely marked by an old man’s confidence in his abilities and a young man’s impressionable state of mind, Stuart told Jouett of his life and tastes, brilliantly limning the grand creative community of late eighteenth-century London.

Stuart liked to preen and make lofty remarks about what constituted good art. From his words, several themes can be discerned: that art should be fit, that the subject should be well placed on the planar field, and that the portrait should be true to nature, avoiding gimmicky affectation. As Jouett heard it, “fitness is very main & almost essential to a tolerable picture.” “Fit,” as defined by Dr. Samuel Johnson, Stuart’s friend and Jouett’s idol, meant “qualified, proper, able, and meet.” Like a carpenter, a good painter knows when his work is plumb, for the “first thing to be sought for in a picture is the balance of the picture then of the composition as these points are met by the artist, incorrect & false

A grouping of presidential portraits selected by President Joe Biden for the Oval Office (page 78) includes George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and a painting of Thomas Jefferson, attributed to Matthew Harris Jouett (on loan from the National Gallery of Art).

Jouett’s selfportrait c. 1817–25 (page 79 left) faces that of his mentor, Gilbert Stuart, made by John Neagle in 1825.

design is easily detected for the error will be seen if you at first discover where it is not you have gone a great way towards where it is.” To avoid false design, Stuart tells Jouett to paint what he sees, not what he imagines, for to make a good picture, the artist must understand the subject.

Stuart did not find George Washington to be an easy subject to understand. While Washington’s somewhat aloof demeanor enhanced his leadership skills, it did not make him a comfortable sitter. Stuart’s head and shoulders portrait of Washington in the White House Collection is based on the unfinished Athenaeum Portrait, which renders the sitter’s distance into a contemplative and virtually impenetrable grace. The artist had departed England, and his debt collectors, in 1793 in order to paint the first president and profit by prints made from the effort. In that pursuit he received a commission from Senator William Bingham of Pennsylvania in 1796, which resulted in the full-length grand manner portrait known as the Lansdowne Portrait for its intended recipient, the Marquise of Lansdowne.

This portrait became an iconic image, frequently copied by Stuart and by several other artists, including his daughter Jane. In 1800, the federal government bought a copy of the Lansdowne Portrait from Gardiner Baker’s museum in New York. Stuart told Jouett his version of the acquisition of the painting by the federal government, which he claimed was a pirated copy based on his original, commenting, “I did not paint it but I bargained for it.”4

Once the subject is understood, Stuart told Jouett, “let Nature tell in every part of your painting and if you cannot do this throw by the brush.” An appreciation of nature is grounded in the sublime and beautiful, that knowledge of the awesome and the lovely which incites the artist to “consult truth rather than fancy; & without reason to systematize & control the fervor of the imagination” in order that “our paintings will be like our dreams when they come to be examind cooly & philosophically.” Hold back, be fit, for “fancy without reason & good taste like declamation without sense, or a fine voice and good words & fine gestures without common reason or common arrangement” are out of plumb, unfit.

Apart from his philosophic and aesthetic observations, Stuart also offered practical advice for creating a portrait: set the head, lay in the whole picture, finish to fit. “In setting the head, paint, don’t draw, as drawing is a waste of time.” Having set

the head alla prima, he states that “there are three grand stages in a head as in an argument or plot of any sort: a beginning, middle & end: and to arrive at each of these perfect stages, should be the aim of the painter.”

As the picture is laid in, the figure must be carefully observed and distinctly managed. “Never suffer a sitter to lean against the back of the chair. It constrains the attitude, and the genl air of the person . . . after which the best head is of little avail. Observation and an attentive regard for the sitter will enhance the fitness of the painting. After understanding the subject the artist can determine at once the fit means, and go on to the composition design & lastly of the coloring of the picture, keeping in mind that colouring is . . . more closely allied to matter than intelligence, so tis of inferior importance to design.”

Once the head is set and the picture laid in, finishing begins, and that process involves color, lighting, background detail, and final effect. In keeping with the idea of fitness, Stuart advises that “equal color upon equal surfaces produce equal effects. A painter should never be sparing of colour, load your pictures, but keep your colours as seperate as you can, without blending.” Though of brief acquaintance, Stuart was generous about Jouett’s color sensibility, offering the idea that “Colouring at best is a matter of fancy & taste & tis I can plainly discern in your grasp with a little experience.”

From Stuart Jouett heard a poetic appreciation of flesh, which he found to be “like no other substance under heaven. it has all the gaiety of a silk mercers shop without the gaudiness or glare and all the soberness of old mahogany without its deadness or sadness.” But he also took away the master painter’s most profound, yet pragmatic offering on craft. “Always use spirits of turpentine in your white draperys. It assists to evaporate the oil & leaves the white a standing white, & free from the yellowness occasiond by the oil.” A bravura ability to manipulate his standing white details would prove to be one of Jouett’s greatest strengths as a painter.

An excellent example of how Stuart’s “Rude hints” are manifest in his own art is to be seen in his portrait of Dolley Madison. Set high on the planar field, she does not lean back against the chair but sits with elegant composure. Her warm flesh tones offset the cool white of her Empire gown whose neckline and sleeves are enhanced by a standing white impasto, applied with a subtle

serendipitous motion. That her setting is plumb and fit is achieved by the contrast between her very solidly composed figure and the furled drapery and atmospheric background that enhance depth and perspective and convey an otherworldly mood to this figure whose courage enabled her to survive the burning of the White House even as she scrambled to find the help necessary to assist her in saving the great Washington portrait attributed to Stuart.

Jouett left Boston to return to his own society, in which he painted sitters whose importance may

not have rivaled those Founding Fathers whom Stuart painted but whose expectations may have been no less formidable. But during the brief time he spent in Boston Jouett seems to have come to understand the subtle distinctions between a likeness and a portrait. While a likeness may capture a satisfactory representation of the sitter, a portrait is a portrayal distinguished by a creative perception of his or her identity. As Jouett considered those distinctions, he was mindful that the artist should “in privacy, digest as well as practicable the subject”

Dolley Payne Madison, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1804, is now a part of the White House Collection.

before raising his brush, so that “he should have made in his mind the necessary selection of means” to achieve his end.

Matthew Harris Jouett’s ongoing regard for Stuart’s work was doubtless a lingering affection derived from the synergy between the crusty old master and his guileless young apprentice. Stuart’s precedents clearly inform the large body of work Jouett created between 1817 and 1823, the most productive years of his brief life. A comparison between two paintings in the White House Collection illustrates Jouett’s grasp of Stuart’s hints on composition and color. Stuart’s portrait of Anna Payne Cutts, Dolley Madison’s sister, displays an upright figure, turned slightly from the planar field, her curled hair draped as a fringe above her figure, offset by an embracing shawl. Jouett’s portrait of their sister Lucy, though lacking the atmospheric background, still deploys the same subject placement, gaze, and enfolding shawl.5

Society indicates that Jouett was also authorized by Stuart to serve as an agent for selling copies of the presidential portraits as well as making additional copies for sale himself.7 He was most successful at this endeavor; upon viewing the portraits in an exhibition in 1823, a writer for the Kentucky Reporter cited “both correct likenesses and . . . executed in a bold and striking style.”8

compari fringe

But even as Jouett was creating original works in the Stuart manner, he was also painting copies of his master’s Washington and Jefferson portraits. In some accounts he painted a copy of the Jefferson portrait while in Boston and returned to Kentucky with it.6 Correspondence in the Filson Historical

The Jefferson portrait attributed to Jouett in the White House Collection has been the subject of considerable debate. It was originally attributed to Gilbert Stuart and first known as a work in the collection of Lewis Sanders. Sanders was a Kentuckian who had been apprenticed to Andrew McCalla, a prominent dry goods merchant in Lexington, in 1799. As part of his obligation he “made the trip . . . once or twice a year” to Philadelphia, “where dry goods and supplies for the store were purchased” with funds obtained from cattle sales.9 While there he met Gilbert Stuart and began a business relationship with him. According to an obscure reference in Jouett’s “Rude hints,” Stuart spoke of a “carelessness about his farm” acquired in 1796, with proceeds from the Lansdowne commission, but he did not obtain a clear title. He may have “purchased cattle from

himself. success cited correct sales. clear title.10 He may have “purchased cattle from

Dolley Madison’s sister Anna Payne Cutts (left) was painted by Gilbert Stuart in c. 1804, while Matthew Harris Jouett painted her sister Lucy Payne Washington Todd (right) in c. 1817.

Dolley Cutts was Matthew her Todd

Lewis Sanders and paid part with the two portraits of Washington and Jefferson.”

Peter’s letter to Miss Stuart is what Mason quotes from.”19

difficulty.

Major William Dallam had redeemed two of his notes of indebtedness “subject to the provisions in the deed of Trust.”14 According to Anna Parker, who wrote a book about the Saunders family, that deed established that Sanders had “given two valuable paintings and two smaller oil paintings, to Major Dallam for money that he had borrowed from him. The two large paintings were portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the work of Gilbert Stuart.”15

By 1810 Sanders had become a leading figure in Kentucky’s agrarian economy, importing breeding stock of sheep and cattle from England, and building a cotton factory outside Lexington.12 But by 1815 he found that “this transaction was more than he could sustain” and he began to experience severe financial difficulty.13 In April 1815 he began to sell real estate and personal property. Sanders received a letter dated November 12, 1815, acknowledging that Major William DallamMajor William Dallam had redeemed two of his notes of indebtedness “subject to the provisions in the deed of Trust.”14 According to Anna Parker, who wrote a book about the Saunders family, that deed established that Sanders had “given two valuable paintings and two smaller oil paintings, to Major Dallam for money that he had borrowed from him. The two large paintings were portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the work of Gilbert Stuart.”15

McGurk’s knowledge of the Jefferson portrait came from his having purchased the SandersDallam Washington portrait from the estate of Frances Dallam Peter as administered by her daughter Johanna Peter. In a signed statement, notarized by Alex Dunlap Jr. on February 27, 1915, Miss Peter swore the Washington portrait was painted for “Col. Lewis Sanders,” who gave it and “its companion, a fine portrait of Jefferson, by Stuart, to Major William Smith Dallam in recognizance of his indebtedness.” She went on to attest that Matthew Harris Jouett “a pupil of Stuart, frequented Dallam’s house, painted many portraits in the family, and . . . would have known had the picture not been genuine.”20

1868, issue of the Louisville

In time, the Jefferson portrait was inherited by Dallam’s daughter Letitia Preston Dallam Robb (Mrs. William N.). It was next heard of in the January 23, 1868, issue of the Louisville CourierJournal, which reported that “whereas it has come to the attention of the General Assembly that William M. Robb of Scott County, Kentucky is the owner of and has in his possession, an original portrait of Thomas Jefferson taken from life by Gilbert Stuart,” it was resolved to purchase that portrait from him for $1000 to place in the state capitol building “in perpetual memory of that illustrative statesman in order that it may be preserved.”16 At that time William Robb was a member of the legislature for which he had served as sergeant-at-arms. That resolution did not pass.

Instead, Letitia Dallam Robb “sold it to Congress in 1874, for one thousand dollars, through the agency of [Congressman] J. B. Beck, of Kentucky.”17 When researching his work on Stuart, Charles Mason corresponded with Johanna Peter, Letitia’s niece, who told him of “a fine portrait of Jefferson . . . obtained by my maternal grandfather Major William S. Dallam from Mr. Lewis Saunders [sic].”18 With reference to that quotation, Jonce McGurk notes that “Miss Peter informed me that in answer to an inquiry from Jane Stuart . . . in 1876 . . . she wrote her of having the portrait. At this time, Jane Stuart was collecting data for a work on her father but later turned the data over to Mason. Miss

At some point after 1879, though originally hung in the Capitol, the Jefferson portrait entered the White House Collection as a work by Gilbert Stuart.21 The Jouett attribution was proposed in a lecture to the American Philosophical Society on April 21, 1944, by museum director and Colonial Revival revisionist Fiske Kimball, who announced that he considered “this picture, which is very inferior” to the work of Gilbert Stuart he had closely studied, to be “a copy by or after Matthew Harris Jouett.”22 And so it is currently designated, despite the ironic observation Jefferson himself once made to Stuart: “I am not without a hope that you will resume the function of leaving to the world your own excellent originals rather than copies from inferior hands of characters of local value only. . . . These observations flow . . . from great personal regard, and the desire that the employment of your talents should be worthy of their dignity.”23

Subsequently the Washington portrait owned by Sanders and Dallam has been reattributed to Jouett by the Middlebury College Museum of Art curator David Meschutt. That reattribution was based on two considerations: a challenge to the veracity of Johanna Peter’s account of the portrait’s origin and provenance and a “connoisseur” assessment of the portrait’s authorship. To his eye, the portraits are “Stuartesque in appearance but weaker in execution when compared with Stuart’s originals.” As to Johanna Peter, he observes that “she could not have known Jouett . . . who died almost ninety years before she made her notarized statement. . . . Her opinion . . . cannot be taken as serious evidence.”24 He does concede that Jouett probably

made his copies under Stuart’s supervision. Acceptance of the reattribution to Jouett should take into consideration several counterpoints. Fiske Kimball based his disputation on what he regarded as a stylistic departure from Stuart’s greatest works, although several authorities from the time of Jane Stuart on have affirmed that Stuart’s variants of his own work could be erratic.25 Furthermore, as the Jefferson and Washington portraits are documented as having been in Sanders’s possession prior to 1815, a year before Jouett was in Boston with Stuart, they could not have been painted under his supervision.

Dismissing Johanna’s Peter’s account challenges the integrity of someone who was her father’s amanuensis during the years he researched and wrote his history of the Medical Department at Transylvania University, published by the Filson Club in 1905. In correspondence with Filson Club President Reuben T. Durrett regarding that publication, she

states, “In what I have done I have striven for accuracy.” That she was well regarded as an authority on local history is evidenced by her rare election, as a woman, to the Filson Club.26

Debating the artistic source of the Jefferson portrait does nothing to diminish the achievement of either artist. Indeed a review of the evidence and the many currents of taste in the art-historical stream does much to enhance them both as artists and as complex human beings. Stuart had lost a son. Jouett had a difficult father who referred to him as a “damn sign painter” who was not “a gentleman.”27 Needless to say, the most important mentoring relationship in his life was the one he shared with Gilbert Stuart. In that relationship and in his lifelong attempts to pay homage to his master are to be found the character of his achievement. Matthew Harris Jouett was a seeker, possessed of a keen visual acuity that enabled him to do far more than copy with deceptive felicity.

Long attributed to Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Jefferson, c. 1817–27, was reattributed to Stuart’s pupil Matthew Harris Jouett following an assessment made by Fiske Kimball, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in 1944.

From Gilbert Stuart, Jouett learned not only important technical rudiments of painting but the importance of applying his fine mind to the art of making a reasonable observation of his sitter. All evidence and contemporary commentary affirm his erudition and ability to engage his sitter. James Reid Lambdin, a fellow portraitist who encountered Jouett in Mississippi, felt his “well-stored mind—his astonishing powers of conversation and companionable disposition, caused his society to be constantly courted, and gave him an amount of employment never enjoyed by any other artist in the West.”28

While the White House is a historic site filled with fine and decorative art, it is also a residence and a home, not only a home to the first family but a symbolic home to the American people as well. The Stuart-Jouett-Jefferson conundrum adds resonance to it as a home, for the story of a revered teacher, his favorite pupil, and the subsequent array of patrons, collectors, historians, and genealogists who have studied them offers a fit echo for the halls in which its portraits hang.

As of this writing, research into the attribution of this portrait will be continued by the Office of the Curator, the White House, and any new findings will be included in a future issue of the Quarterly.

notes

1. Tom Eblen and Mollie Eblen, “Horace Holley and the struggle for Kentucky’s mind and soul,” in James c. Klotter and Daniel Rowland, eds., Bluegrass Renaissance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 208.

2. Estill Curtis Pennington, Matthew Harris Jouett (1788–1827): His Life and Work (Paris, Ky.: by the author, 2020).

3. Jouett’s notebook has been transcribed and annotated by Pennington for Matthew Harris Jouett, and all subsequent quotations are from this transcription, which is based on the version that William Barrow Floyd presents in his appendix to Jouett-Bush-Frazer: Early Kentucky Artists (Lexington, Ky.: no publisher listed, 1968). All subsequent quotations are taken from Pennington’s transcription, and Jouett’s curious spellings have been retained. The story of Jouett’s notebook of his “Conversations with Gilbert Stuart” reads like a romance of the Holy Grail. It was in his studio at the time of his death. An abstract from the notebook was published as a single sheet broadside by James Bogle in 1861. A rearranged abbreviation of that broadside was published by John Durand in the March 1861 issue of Crayon. Sarah Menefee told Charles Henry Hart that an artist in Madison, Indiana (probably William McKendree Snyder, who was also an antiquarian) returned the notebook to the family after viewing Jouett’s work at the Louisville Southern Expositions in the late 1880s. Sarah Menefee lent the notebook to Hart, who seems to have kept it after her death. His widow sold it to the dealer Harry McNeil Bland, who allowed the Frick Art Reference Library to make a photocopy. Bland also allowed John Hill Morgan to publish the account in his book Gilbert Stuart and His Pupils (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1939). It was that version that Floyd used as the source for his appendix, with a bibliographic note that the original manuscript was owned by the heirs of Hall Park McCullough, an antiquarian

whose papers at the Vermont Historical Society do not include the Jouett notebook. It remains unlocated.

4. Sarah Jouett Menefee, the artist’s daughter. For an account of the White House version of the Lansdowne Portrait, see Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 180–83.

5. Dolley Payne Madison’s sisters, Lucy Payne Washington Todd (1769–1846) and Anna Payne Cutts (1779–1832) were the daughters of John Payne (1740–1792) and his wife Mary Winston Cole (1743–1807). Anna was the wife of Richard Cutts (1771–1845), a congressman from Maine who later served as American comptroller general. Lucy was first married to Major George Steptoe Washington (1771–1809), a nephew of George Washington; she subsequently married Justice Thomas Todd of Kentucky, in what is regarded as the first wedding ceremony held in the White House.

6. As recorded in the notebooks of Kentucky collector Bob Noe, number 3, item 371, whose donation of the Jefferson portrait to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is noted in the Kentucky Online Arts Resource website, www.koar.org.

7. John Pratt to Matthew Harris Jouett, June 9, 1820, Sanders Family Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.

8. Kentucky Reporter, October 6, 1823.

9. Anna Virginia Parker, The Sanders Family of Grass Hills (Madison, Ind.: Coleman Printing Company, 1966), 9.

10. George C. Mason, Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart, 1879, pp. 46-47.

11. Jonce I. McGurk, The Story of the Sanders-Dallam-Peter Portrait of Washington Painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) (Riverside, Conn.: privately printed, 1917), n.p.

12. Lewis Sanders, “The History of Kentucky Cattle,” Cultivator, March 1849, 76–80.

13. William A. Leavy, “A Memoir of Lexington and Its Vicinity,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 40, no. 13 (October 1942): 354.

14. The letter is in the Catherine and Howard Evans Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington. Catherine Peter Evans was the granddaughter of Major William Dallem and the last family member to live at the home where the paintings hung.

15. Parker, Sanders Family, 24.

16. “Resolution,” Louisville Courier-Journal, January 23, 1868, 4.

17. George C. Mason, The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 109.

18. Ibid.

19. Quoted in McGurk, Story of the Sanders-Dallam-Peter Portrait of Washington, n.p.

20. Quoted in ibid.

21. Lawrence Park identified that painting as a “replica . . . painted for Lewis Sanders” in Gilbert Stuart: An Illustrated Descriptive List of His Works (New York: W. E. Rudge, 1926), 1:443, no. 447.

22. Fiske Kimball, The Life Portraits of Jefferson and Their Replicas (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1944), 521.

23. Thomas Jefferson to Gilbert Stuart, August 9, 1814, Founders Online website, www.founders.archives.gov.

24. David Meschutt, “The Middlebury College Portrait of George Washington, Reattributed,” Middlebury College Museum of Art Annual Report for 2002–2003, online at the Middlebury College website, www.middlebury.edu.

25. Jane Stuart, “The Stuart Portraits of Washington,” Scribner’s Monthly 12, no. 3 (July 1876): 370–71.

26. Reuben T. Durrett Papers, 1883–1910, Filson Historical Society.

27. Samuel Woodson Price, The Old Masters of the Bluegrass, Filson Club Publications 17 (Louisville, Ky.: J. P. Morton, 1902), 21.

28. Quoted in William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Rita Weiss (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:101.

JAMES ALEXANDER SIMPSON An Artist of the Early White House Neighborhood

JAMES H. JOHNSTON

james alexander simpson (1805–1880) was a college professor of drawing, limner, signist, landscape painter, and copyist. 1 He might have passed through history unnoticed as an artist, but he lived and worked in Georgetown, next door to the new capital of the United States. As a result, he was noticed, and hired, by the famous people who lived there. Details of his life are missing, and his most historically interesting works are lost. Yet the work of this “primitive” painter reminds us of how primitive the early years of the White House and Washington, D.C., were. His contributions were to the history of his times rather than to the history of art.

Georgetown was a rough-and-tumble tobacco port founded in 1751 until it suddenly became a prime residential community for politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers when the nation’s capital moved next door in 1800. The small but established town held the added attraction of the Jesuit’s Georgetown College.

No sooner had the politicians settled into the new capital than itinerant artists flocked in, looking for patrons and commissions. Charles Willson

Peale only visited, but Gilbert Stuart stayed for two years. And there were a few nonprofessional artists, such as the wife of the French minister, Baroness Hyde de Neuville, who left creditable works. Still, the city had a dearth of local artists, and the British burning of the Capitol and White House in 1814 was a powerful disincentive to any artist thinking of moving to the city.

Charles Bird King was the first significant artist to come to town, arriving in 1819. He had studied in England under Benjamin West. King was a firstrate painter. He and his gallery would dominate the Washington art scene for decades.2

Two home-grown artists cropped up at the same time. Labeled “primitives” because they had no formal training, they were George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of the president, and James Alexander Simpson. Custis preferred largescale, historical works. His pedigree was enough to get his paintings exhibited, but none won praise. In fact, when he hung a huge 11 × 13 foot painting of the Battle of Trenton in the Capitol Rotunda, he was asked to remove it. Apparently insulted, he ordered

A view of Georgetown looking west toward the Potomac River published by E. Sachse & Co., c. 1855, captures the growing residential community west of the White House as artist James Alexander Simpson would have known it during his lifetime.

James Alexander Simpson’s selfportrait of 1847 is preserved in the collection of Georgetown University.

right

Many artists sought work in the growing city of Washington in the early nineteenth century. Those who lived in or established themselves in the city were joined by itinerant artists. Among the many artists contemporary with Simpson were (clockwise from top left):

Self-taught artist George Washington Park Custis, the step-grandson of President George Washington, is seen here in a watercolor on ivory by Robert Field, 1824–25.

Charles Willson Peale, seen here in a self-portrait c. 1791, worked briefly in the city as did Gilbert Stuart, portrayed here c. 1825 by an unidentified artist.

Prolific portrait painter, Charles Bird King, seen here in a self-portrait of c. 1815, settled permanently in Washington in the winter of 1819–20.

it thrown in the Potomac River. His temper and the dubious quality of his works may explain why few survive. Yet, since he had inherited the large Custis estate in Arlington, now known as the Custis-Lee Mansion and Arlington Cemetery, he did not need to paint to make a living.3

Simpson did. How he learned his trade is unknown. According to Georgetown College records, he attended briefly at age 11.4 But the records are not complete, and he presumably returned for longer study when he was older. He married Julia Franzoni, daughter of one of several Italian artists whom Benjamin Latrobe hired to decorate the Capitol, and he may have learned from them as well.

Simpson’s earliest surviving work is the portrait of Yarrow Mamout. This would be the first of at least four of the artist’s paintings that depicted an African American. Yarrow (his surname) was a Fulani Muslim who had come to America on a slave ship but was free and living in Georgetown in Simpson’s day. On a visit to Georgetown in 1819,

Charles Willson Peale heard of Yarrow, painted a stunning portrait, and took it back to his museum in Philadelphia for exhibit. Three years later, Yarrow sat for 17-year-old Simpson.5

Yarrow died a few months later, but he had gained enough renown to merit newspaper obituaries not only in local papers but also in at least thirty-eight newspapers from Maine to South Carolina as well as the Times (London). The obituary in the Charleston City Gazette, reprinted from the Washington Republican, promotes Simpson more than it mourns Yarrow. Either Simpson or a friend undoubtedly wrote it.

Yarrow Dead! After living 135 years, Yarrow, a Moor, died yesterday in Georgetown. One of the best likenesses we remember to have seen of any body, was taken of this harmless old man by young Simpson, of Georgetown, a youth whose genius entitles him to the patronage of the friends of science.6

At about the same time, James Griffiths, a

Simpson’s earliest surviving work is a portrait of Yarrow Mamout (right) made in 1822 in when Simpson was just 17. Charles Willson Peale’s fine portrait of Yarrow was made in 1819 (left).

taxidermist at Peale’s Philadelphia museum, left there to move to Washington, where he opened his own museum on the Peale model with both paintings and natural history items.7 It was on Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from where the National Portrait Gallery is today. This Columbian Museum was a for-profit enterprise, like Peale’s, and predated the Smithsonian by two decades. As an enterprise, it struggled. Griffiths must have approached Simpson and asked to borrow the Yarrow portrait, for, in April 1824, he announced he was adding two of Simpson’s portraits: the one of Yarrow and one said to be of a 100-year-old woman named “Guinea Sarah.”

Hers was Simpson’s second portrait of an African American. The museum also announced new natural history exhibits, such as “one viper, preserved in spirits” from the architect of the Capitol William Thornton.8 The portrait of Yarrow has survived, but Guinea Sarah’s has been lost. This is a pity. Given “Guinea” in her name, it could be the only known oil portrait of a woman who came to America on a slave ship. Still, although the Columbian Museum was a fledgling, it was quite an achievement for 19-year-old Simpson to exhibit there. However, the museum closed before the year was out.

In the fall of that same year, General Marquis de Lafayette came to the United States for a sentimental tour of the country for which he had fought side-by-side with George Washington in the Revolution. The tour would last thirteen months. Lafayette brought with him a portrait of himself by Dutch-French artist Ary Scheffer and gave it to the American people. It was displayed in the Capitol and is now in the House of Representatives collection.9

Simpson produced a copy, which he purportedly showed the general, but whether and when this happened is uncertain.10 Simpson had the opportunity. Lafayette’s first full day in Washington began with a parade at the Capitol where cadets from Georgetown College got into a fight with those from Columbian College (now George Washington University). Georgetown lost, so Simpson commemorated the incident in a banner bearing the college’s coat of arms on one side and an eagle with a streamer in its beak reading “Nemini Cedimus” (Yield to No One) on the other side. The banner is lost, but the story of it and of the fight are recounted yet today at the university.11

The general then went to the White House to meet President James Monroe for a moving ceremony. The two men knew each other from the Revolution. When Lafayette had been wounded at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, George Washington sent Captain Monroe to check on his condition. At the White House forty-seven years later, the two veterans’ touching reunion stirred the hearts of the whole nation.12

The next day, Lafayette visited Georgetown College, where he met with the college president and faculty. It is conceivable that Simpson met Lafayette on this occasion. More likely, however, Simpson met Lafayette—if at all—when the general returned to the capital for a two-month

stay beginning in December 1824. Lafayette is known to have been entertained at Tudor Place, the Georgetown mansion of Martha Parke Custis Peter, George Washington’s step-granddaughter. The ambitious Simpson might have wrangled an invitation.

This meeting between the artist and the general was alleged in an 1831 letter by someone marketing Simpson’s copy of the Lafayette portrait. The writer boasted that the copy was better than the Scheffer original because “Simpson had the advantage of having Lafayette here when he was making the copy. It is said the old Soldier hugged him when he saw it completed and was much pleased.”13 The art historians Andrew J. Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie doubt this story because they do not believe Simpson had access to Lafayette, but as will be seen, Simpson and his paintings enjoyed remarkably good access to notables in the city. Of course, Simpson could not compete with Martha Peter’s artist brother, George Washington Parke Custis, in access to the Frenchman. When Lafayette paid his respects to George Washington’s remains at the tomb at Mount Vernon, Custis was there to hand him a ring containing a lock of the president’s hair.14

Although John Quincy Adams, who was President Monroe’s secretary of state, may not have met Lafayette in the Revolution, he was in his official capacity intimately involved with the general’s visit. He hosted a late-evening party for Lafayette after he had dined at the White House.15 Lafayette’s yearlong tour seemed to burn itself deeply into Adams’s memory because the association with the popular Frenchman may have helped him in the 1824 presidential campaign, in which he defeated Andrew Jackson.

This event did not end the matter though. Adams and Jackson squared off against each other again in the 1828 election. Jackson won the rematch. Adams was devastated. He and his father had both been defeated after a single term as president. “The sun of my political life sets in the deepest gloom,” he confided in his diary.16 With the president in such a mood, the holiday season was not a cheery one in the White House. The Adamses were probably clearing out even though Jackson would not be inaugurated until the next March.17

At this darkest of moments, James Alexander Simpson’s art briefly became the one bright spot in the Executive Mansion. According to a newspaper report, at the customary New Year’s Day

reception there, President Adams was cheerful and in “‘excellent health’ and excellent spirits,” but Mrs. Adams’s face showed a “slight shade of pensiveness.”18 However, a writer in a Baltimore paper reported the event differently: Simpson’s “large, full length portrait of Lafayette . . . was the only piece of furniture in the east-room of the President’s house, on the 1st of January 1829, and on the occasion of Mrs. Adams’s last soiree.”19 Unfortunately, while Scheffer’s original survives, Simpson’s copy is nowhere to be found.20

Simpson did not let politics get in the way of his career, however. The same writer to the Baltimore paper reported seeing Simpson in the Senate “making arrangement to sketch the Chamber as it appeared on inauguration day [of Andrew Jackson]. When finished the painting will cover a square of fifteen feet. The painter has secured a sketch of persons present, and the whole will certainly, if well executed, be an imposing group.”21

Simpson’s portrait of George Shoemaker, a flour inspector at the wharf in Georgetown, was made in 1840.

Simpson’s views of Georgetown itself include this painting of the Visitation Convent and Academy made in 1846.

This painting of Andrew Jackson’s Inauguration, if completed, is also lost.

Although Simpson began to teach drawing at Georgetown College as early as 1825, it was an on-and-off job. Drawing was not part of the curriculum; students had to pay extra for it.22 Simpson is listed in the catalog of courses in some years and not in others.23 The college was struggling for its existence, and with a faculty composed mainly of Jesuits, Simpson as a layman may have been expendable.

After a somewhat meteoric early career, Simpson settled in as an artist for hire in addition to his work at the college. By 1842, he had a studio in Georgetown on what is today P Street near Wisconsin Avenue.24 Some of his portraits, like the engaging one of flour inspector George Shoemaker at the wharf in Georgetown, give us a remarkable feel for what life was like in

mid-nineteenth-century Washington. The artist included an African American standing in the background behind Shoemaker, recording visually for history the racial diversity of everyday life in antebellum Washington.

In addition to portraits, Simpson did more banners such as one for the temperance ladies of Georgetown, showing the goddess of health standing triumphant with her right foot on a Bacchus shackled by drunkenness.25 Simpson also painted landscapes of the Georgetown College campus and of nearby Visitation Academy, both of which survive in the institutions’ possession.

The fourth portrait of an African American attributed to Simpson is that of Sandy Kenny, circa 1844. The portrait was done on commission from William Brown Wallace Sr. of King George County, Virginia, who was having the artist do several family portraits (all of which are lost). In a recollection

written eighty years later, Wallace’s granddaughter described the man as “Uncle Sandy,” “body servant in the Revolutionary War to General——.”26 Unfortunately, no certain evidence has turned up as to who this general was or how Sandy Kenny ended up on the Wallace plantation.

At this midpoint in his career, Simpson landed an important commission from Susan Decatur, widow of the naval hero Stephen Decatur. The Decaturs’ house on Lafayette Square was then a busy center of the Washington social scene and is now under the co-stewardship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the White House Historical Association, whose headquarters are next door. Just days before the commodore’s death in a duel in 1820, the couple had hosted a wedding party for President Monroe’s daughter. But once widowed, Mrs. Decatur struggled financially, finally putting the house up for sale.27 She moved to a house at a gate to Georgetown College and in 1834 gave the equally struggling college $7,000 that she had received from Congress as prize money for a ship her husband had captured many years earlier. In exchange, the college promised her an annuity of $630 for the rest of her life, which proved to be another twenty-six years.28

Mrs. Decatur may have been introduced to Simpson through Georgetown social circles, but if not, living next to the college campus probably led to an encounter with the drawing professor. In about 1845, she asked him to do some work for her. She planned to have her husband’s remains moved from the capital to Philadelphia, where his parents were buried. She also wanted to give Philadelphia a Gilbert Stuart portrait of her husband. But the painting needed touching up. In addition, she wanted the medal that the Society of the Cincinnati had honored her husband with added to the portrait. Simpson did the work. He also painted four copies of the restored and altered painting, several of which survive. Other artists, including Stuart himself, Thomas Sully, and Raphael Peale, copied the original Stuart portrait, but since those copies were done before Simpson touched up the original, they do not show Decatur with the medal.29

Simpson always seemed to struggle to make a living as an artist. For instance in 1851, he advertised he was painting portraits in the Capitol, but there are no known portraits from this effort. 30 But in 1855, fortune smiled on Simpson. Lewis William Washington asked him to copy some of

his family portraits. Washington was the grandson of the president’s half-brother Augustine and had a house in Georgetown just down the street from his step-cousin Martha Peter. He also owned the BeallAir mansion near Halltown, now in West Virginia. The Charles Town Free Press of Jefferson County reported that Simpson had been in the county, copying portraits of the Washington family. Ten were identified: the president; brother John Augustine; brother Samuel; half-brother Lawrence; sister Mrs. Betty Lewis; her son Lawrence Lewis; the president’s nephew Bushrod Washington; William A. Washington who was the son of the president’s half-brother Augustine; Hannah Washington who was Bushrod’s mother; and the president’s brother Charles after whom Charles Town is named. The report ends with the usual accolades for Simpson: This group, although taken from paintings almost 100 years old, are almost perfect. They are not only finished in superior style, but are exact likenesses of the parties. They are no fancy portraits—the characteristics of the original being strictly adhered to. Professor Simpson has given evidence of his talent, unsurpassed, after an experience of more than thirty years.31

Although the newspaper said Simpson copied ten portraits, the author of a 1977 biographical study on Simpson claimed that there were twelve

One of several surviving copies of Simpson’s 1845 portrait of naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur. Simpson copied Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Decatur at the request of Susan Decatur adding the medal awarded to her late husband by the Society of the Cincinnati.

Simpson’s c. 1855 copy of a portrait of Charles Washington, one of group of copies of Washington family portraits commissioned by Lewis William Washington, is on loan to Happy Retreat, Charles Washington’s family home in Charles Town, West Virginia.

copies and that they were “now located in private collections in Baltimore.” He promised to write about them in a second article, but he never did.32

Regardless, all but one of the ten copies have been lost. Mount Vernon owns the copy of Charles Washington and has loaned it to a restored Happy Retreat, Charles’s home in Charles Town, because the original, which had hung there, was lost in a fire years before.33 A photograph of Simpson’s copy of a Hannah Bushrod Washington portrait turned up in a scrapbook handed down by a Washington descendant in Baltimore and is identified as being painted by Jas. A. Simpson in 1855 in Halltown, Virginia.34 Interestingly enough, four years later, John Brown’s men went to Beall-Air, seized Lewis Washington, and held him hostage during the raid on Harpers Ferry.35 Washington eventually moved to Baltimore to be close to his children.

By 1865, Simpson’s first wife had died, and he had remarried. He moved to Baltimore and turned his attention to doing religious paintings for churches. He painted the Stations of the Cross for St. Martin’s Church, but the church has been deconsecrated and the paintings are gone. Simpson’s last

known work was a large Entombment of Christ for the St. Joseph Monastery of the Passionists Fathers outside Baltimore, but a fire in the chapel destroyed the painting in 1883, three years after the artist’s death.36

Simpson’s surviving paintings have an emotional appeal and historical value that make up for any lack of training or skill. He was unusual in leaving a few paintings that suggest more nuanced relationships between the races before the Civil War than is sometimes imagined. What little is known about his life shows an ambitious and struggling artist who used his position at Georgetown College to leverage himself higher. His peak came at a young age when his portrait of Yarrow Mamout was exhibited in the Columbian Museum and his copy of the Lafayette portrait lit up a dark holiday season at the John Quincy Adams White House. Through his connections in Georgetown he attracted notables such as Susan Decatur and Lewis William Washington. Simpson was not a historic artist but rather an artist who captured historic images. Had more of his work survived, his place in history might have more closely matched his press.

notes

1. A limner was a commercial portrait painter. A signist made banners. A copyist made copies of paintings. Simpson’s obituary says he was born in Frederick, Maryland. “Death of an Artist,” Baltimore Sun, May 6, 1880. See also William Warner, At Peace with All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787–1860 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1984). But he may have been the son of the James Simpson who was sheriff of Georgetown. “Runaway in Custody,” Centinel of Liberty, September 20, 1799. An archivist at Georgetown University recorded that the artist came from England, settled in Frederick, Maryland, and later moved to Georgetown. Kenneth C. Haley, “A Nineteenth Century Portraitist and More: James Alexander Simpson,” Maryland Historical Society Magazine 72, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 401. Haley mentions less reliable accounts saying Simpson immigrated from Ireland.

2. Andrew J. Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie, The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, 1800–1915 (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 56–61.

3. Ibid., 37. A smaller version of Battle of Trention survives at Arlington House.

4. Georgetown College Financial Records, Ledger D, September 14, 1813–November 1, 1830, 189. Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University Library, available online at Digital Georgetown, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu.

5. The Simpson portrait of Yarrow Mamout is in the Peabody Room of the Georgetown Public Library. A notation on the back dates it to August 1822. The Peale portrait is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum catalog lists two earlier paintings that Simpson allegedly did in 1815, but those dates are obviously in error, as Simpson would have been only 10 years old at the time. For biographical information on Yarrow, see James H. Johnston, From Slave Ship to Harvard, Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

6. “Yarrow Dead!,” Charleston City Gazette, January 29, 1823.

Yarrow came from West Africa and was not a Moor, but early Americans did not make such fine distinctions among Black people who followed Islam. See also the report in the Times (London), March 1, 1823, 3: “A New York newspaper of the 29th Jan. states, that Yarrow, a moor, died at Georgetown, Columbia, on Saturday last, aged 139!” Yarrow was in fact 83 years old, but local legend had him to be much older.

7. Charles Willson Peale to William Thornton, letter of introduction for Griffiths, December 4, 1822, Charles Willson Peale: The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, vol. 4, ed. Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and Toby A. Appel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 201.

8. “Additions and Donations, to the Columbian Museum, Since Its Commencement in This City,” Washington Daily National Intelligencer, April 13, 1824.

9. “Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette,” History, Art and Archives, United States House of Representatives website, https://history.house.gov.

10. Cosentino and Glassie, Capital Image, 58.

11. “Battalion History,” Hoya Battalion website, https://rotc. georgetown.edu; John Gilmary Shea, Memorial of the First Centenary of Georgetown College, D.C. (New York: P. F. Collier, 1891), 64–65; Lina Mann, “The Nation’s Guest, General Lafayette’s 1824–1825 Tour of the United States,” posted March 30, 2018, White House Historical Association website, www. whitehousehistory.org.

12. Adam Marshall, “Gonzaga College,” Woodstock Letters 18 (1889): 283.

13. George Templeman to the Boston Athenaeum, August 1831, quoted in Cosentino and Glassie, Capital Image, 58.

14. “General Lafayette’s Visit to the Tomb of Washington,” Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, October 27, 1824, 4.

15. “From the National Intelligencer,” Washington National Gazette, October 19, 1824.

16. Quoted in Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xv.

17. Cosentino and Glassie, Capital Image, 58.

18. Washington National Journal, January 3, 1829, 3.

19. “Extract of a Letter to the Editor,” Baltimore Patriot, March 21, 1829. Of course, the East Room was barely furnished in those days. Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families, 2nd edition (Washington, DC: White House Historical Association, 2014) 82–83. An anonymous contemporary writer complained, “[E]very man and woman, boy and girl, who was at the President’s on New Year, knows there was no furniture in the room except a few old chairs, and an old settee or two, altogether worth but a few dollars.” AntiCraft “The East Room No. 1,” Delaware Journal, (August 28, 1827) 1, emphasis in original.

20. According to Templeman, Simpson’s copy was auctioned in 1831. The artist won the auction and kept the painting. Cosentino and Glassie, Capital Image, 58.

21. “Extract of a Letter to the Editor,” Baltimore Patriot, March 21, 1829.

22. “Georgetown College,” Washington Daily National Journal, December 22, 1825, 3.

23. Georgetown University, “Georgetown College Catalogs 1850–1860” and “Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Georgetown College, District of Columbia, for the Academic Years 1860–1870,” available online at Digital Georgetown.

24. James A. Simpson notice, Georgetown Advocate, July 28, 1842, 3.

25. Washington Columbian Fountain, July 7, 1846, 3.

26. Mrs. F. W. Steptoe, note, “Given to my son Philip P. Steptoe. This typed note was handed down with the painting when purchased by Sandy Kenny known as “Uncle Sandy” and “Doctor Sandy” 1924, Dr. David Nelson. Gustavus Wallace’s uncle, also named Gustavus, fought in the Revolution, with one source saying he was sometimes called “general” although he never actually held that rank. National Register of Historic Places nomination for Rokeby, www/dhr.virginia.gov. According to Mrs. Steptoe’s note,

Kenny tended the medical needs of the African Americans on the Wallace plantation. He sometimes treated ailments with “bread pills,” which he was savvy enough to know were placebos. See also Maryland Historic Trust, “Rose Hill,” https://mht.maryland. gov.

27. Evan Phifer, “A Prominent Early White House Neighbor,” posted May 12, 2016, White House Historical Association website; James Tertius De Kay, “A Rage for Glory,” in James Tertius De Kay, Michael Fazio, Osborne Phinizy Mackie, and Katherine Malone-France, The Stephen Decatur House: A History (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2018), 129, 136–37 ; “A Fine Opportunity for Speculation!,” United States Telegraph, November 20, 1832, 3.

28. “The Decatur Cottage,” Georgetown College Journal 5, no. 7 (April 1877): 74.

29. William H. Truettner, “Portraits of Stephen Decatur by or After Gilbert Stuart,” Connoisseur 171, no. 690 (August 1969): 264.

30. “Portrait Painting, J. A. Simpson,” Washington Daily National Intelligencer, January 10, 1851.

31. Republished as “Portraits Finished,” Alexandria Gazette, October 22, 1855, 2.

32. Haley, “Nineteenth Century Portraitist,” 412.

33. Scott Vierick, “Charles Washington (1738–1799),” n.d., George Washington’s Mount Vernon website, www.mountvernon.org; Walter Washington, Happy Retreat Foundation, e-mail to the author, August 27, 2021.

34. John McDaniel, e-mail to author, August 27, 2021. McDaniel is a descendant of Lewis William Washington.

35. James H. Johnston, “Lincoln and the Washingtons,” White House History, no. 36 (Fall–Winter 2014): 103.

36. “Death of an Artist,” Baltimore Sun, May 6, 1880; Haley, “Nineteenth Century Portraitist,” 401.

Tour the White House Art Collection

Through the Pages of

Art in the White House

Art in the White House

Written by art historian William Kloss, the award-winning volume, Art in the White House, is a comprehensive catalog of the White House fine arts collection of more than five-hundred works by America’s most celebrated artists. Included are Gilbert Stuart, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Bird King, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as many modern painters, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alma Thomas.

Published by the White House Historical Association

WILLIAM KLOSS

TEMPEST IN A GILDED FRAME Love and Life At the White House

TEMPEST IN A GILDED FRAME Love and Life At the White House

SARAH E. FLING

SARAH E. FLING

throughout the nineteenth century , propriety and cost were among the considerations that informed the decor selected for the White House, and presidents and first ladies who decorated too lavishly often faced public criticism. Modesty in fine and decorative arts was an extension of this idea. For example, in refurnishing the White House following its burning by British troops in 1814, President James Monroe hired the firm Russell and La Farge to acquire fine items in Paris, and he specifically requested a mantel clock. His agents selected a gilded bronze Minerva clock but warned Monroe that they had “great difficulty of getting Pendules without Nudities, and were . . . forced to take” it “on that account.”1 Nudity was common in European neoclassical art, but the directive to find modest figures indicates that Monroe and his agents felt it had no place in the respectable home of the American president. Similar conversations about nudity and art took place in 1841 upon the completion of Horatio Greenough’s marble sculpture of George Washington, originally displayed at the

U.S. Capitol. Washington’s nude torso scandalized Americans, leading to the sculpture’s removal two years later.2

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, questions of modesty and White House art arose once more—this time on an international scale. The work in question was Love and Life, painted by renowned English artist George Frederic Watts. Watts’s paintings and portraits were in the collections of Britain’s most celebrated galleries and museums, and in 1884, he became the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3

Exemplifying the ideas of the Symbolist Movement, Watts’s metaphorical pieces drew on poetry, literature, and mythology. Love and Life, painted about 1884 and displayed to great acclaim in his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts two nude figures: one, “Love,” an angel, leads a youthful “Life” up the rocky path. As one newspaper put it, “Love sustains when otherwise the path of life was too difficult to be trod.”4

previous spread Love and Life by George Frederic Watts. below Artist George Frederic Watts is seen in the gallery at his home surrounded by many of his paintings,

In 1893, Watts sent six paintings, including Love and Life, to be exhibited in the British pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition. 5 There American visitors came face to face with nudity in art, commonplace in European works but relatively new on this side of the Atlantic. In fact, the New York Sun called these pieces “a great and startling novelty to the west.”6 Watts’s work was among these novelties, leading to both criticism and celebration—a harbinger of what was to come.

At the close of the fair, the foreign artworks returned to their countries of origin, though Love and Life remained as a gift to the American people. Letters from G. F. Watts to Henry G. Marquand, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, indicate that Watts hoped to donate the piece to the museum, but Marquand wrote: “We fear that the authorities at Washington might make some claim to have it at the seat of Government. . . . Washington is a provincial place and the centre of art is New York . . . we have eight or ten times the number of visitors yearly that Washington has.”7

Marquand was correct. Subsequent correspondence with the American embassy in London shows that the federal government, having “no connection whatever with the Metropolitan Museum of Art” instead offered to place Love and Life “in the chief room of public reception of the Executive Mansion.”8 Watts acquiesced, though he made it clear that he hoped his work could “help to form the nucleus” of a national art collection; at the time, the National Gallery of Art did not yet exist.9 Thus, on July 23, 1894, Congress officially accepted the painting, which then arrived at the White House during President Grover Cleveland’s second term.10

Immediately Love and Life created a whirlwind of controversy. Two decades earlier, in 1873, Congress had passed the Comstock Act, which banned the distribution and circulation of “obscene literature and articles of immoral use” in the United States.11 The act was part of a larger movement to combat obscenity and vice in American society, including prostitution, gambling, and pornography.12 In the midst of rapid change, as women and African Americans sought equality and political power, immigrants created new lives in American cities, and the Industrial Revolution drastically transformed the social and economic landscape, morality provided a form of cultural control.13 As a result, Watts’s portrayal of nudity in Love and Life

came under fire from reformers and commentators. When the painting arrived at the White House in the fall of 1894, Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds John M. Wilson immediately censored its exhibition. He expressed his distaste for the piece, telling reporters that “no such indecent thing should disgrace the walls, confronting the eyes of young and innocent persons and clergymen on the occasion of every White House reception.”14 First Lady Frances Cleveland concurred, arguing that the White House was not an art gallery and that the piece would not complement the presidential portraiture that graced the walls of the Executive Mansion.15 The painting remained boxed up and out of view.

Upon hearing about the acquisition in the press, an external group joined the conversation: the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). As a women’s reform organization dedicated to promoting Christian morality, the WCTU preached against alcohol consumption but also addressed labor rights, public health, education, and, in this case, art censorship.16 Members sent the first lady hundreds of letters protesting the painting and claiming that “the picture was immorally made, indecent, and an insult to art and Christianity.”17 Emilie D. Martin, superintendent of the WCTU’s Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, led these efforts. The organization had previously exerted influence over White House art during Rutherford B. Hayes’s presidency, commissioning a portrait of First Lady Lucy Hayes to thank her for banning alcohol in the White House.18 As a result, the WCTU’s platform of morality and temperance had been on display at the White House for nearly a decade when Watts’s painting came under scrutiny.

The WCTU’s sentiments were not universally shared. From England, Lady Henry Somerset, president of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote the following in an open letter: “I feel it should be made clear that the objections raised by a few women are not held by the majority of the great temperance society, which realizes that the wonderful allegorical picture has in it nothing but tender, beautiful teaching.”19 Similarly, Eliphalet Frazer Andrews, an artist who had several portraits on display in the White House, including the portrait of Martha Washington, commented: “Any other government on the face of the

earth would have reached out eager hands for it. . . . In my opinion this painting should have been brought to the White House in triumph, with the music of bands and all the honor the country could accord.”20

Nevertheless, on January 2, 1895, the nearby Corcoran Gallery of Art “received into their custody ‘Love and Life’” before it ever graced the walls of the White House; there, the painting would be displayed and cared for, only to be returned upon the request of the federal government.21 The museum’s Board of Trustees felt that the Corcoran, which “may well be considered and styled a National Gallery,” fulfilled Watts’s goal to hang the piece in such a space.22 G. F. Watts responded that he was satisfied to see the painting in “so admirable a resting place,” but emphatically wrote:

I confess I was greatly shocked to learn that there was a refusal to hang it on the score

that it was immoral! It was the first time after more than sixty years of work that any thing of mine had been so considered, and I was tempted to write and beg that the picture should be destroyed and nothing remembered excepting my object (with all humility) in presenting it.23

As one newspaper wrote, “Mr. Watts evidently did not know, what few foreigners do, that Americans are a supersensitive people, and that in matters affecting public tastes, it is plain everyday people who rule.”24 It is interesting that that same year, First Lady Frances Cleveland quietly joined the WCTU, though her reasoning is undocumented.25

However, in 1902, Theodore and Edith Roosevelt brought Love and Life back to the White House. White House Social Secretary Isabella Hagner remembered:

Sketches illustrating an article entitled “What Might Be Done to Make ‘Love and Life’ Entirely Unobjectionable,” published in the Sunday St. Louis Star Illustrated Magazine in 1902, offered creative solutions to cover the nude figures.

Left to right: A proposal to shield the couple with a decorative screen came from artist Louis Loeb; the idea of styling the woman as a typist was provided by artist Douglas Connah; artist Howard Chandler Christy, whose portrait of First Lady Grace Coolidge now hangs in the China Room, suggested the addition of formal evening wear; while author Mark Twain’s idea was simply to provide galoshes and a large umbrella.

The President and Mrs. Roosevelt felt it should be hung in the White House, and also wanted it, on account of the pleasure of its beauty. Mr. Frederick McGuire, Curator of the [Corcoran] gallery, was loathe to give it up, and laughingly told Mrs. Roosevelt he would only let it go if she promised its return on her leaving the White House. . . . To this she agreed. . . . During these intervening years it was a joy and benefaction to us all.26

Once again, newspapers latched onto the story, leading the WCTU to speak out against the painting. Emilie D. Martin released a public statement disavowing Roosevelt’s decision, writing: “It will be very disillusioning for the women who have admired him to learn that he has given a place on the walls of the White House to this vulgar nude painting of Watts. The President must have been

led astray by the great name of the artist.”27 Perhaps some of this anger stemmed from reports that the painting was to be hung in the very public State Dining Room. This was not the case, however, and Edith Roosevelt instead had the painting hung in the West Sitting Hall on the Second Floor, “where it can’t shock the multitude.”28 The painting’s fate earned so much attention that one newspaper article printed suggestions to make the work “unobjectionable.” The proposals came from famous cultural figures, including author Mark Twain and artist Howard Chandler Christy; they included adding clothing to the nude figures or covering their bodies with umbrellas, clouds, or decorative screens.29

Meanwhile, some art lovers criticized the Roosevelts, arguing that the Corcoran Gallery was a better place for the painting because it was more accessible than the White House.30 Nevertheless, Love and Life remained in the White House

through the end of Roosevelt’s presidency in 1909.31 Newspapers reported that Roosevelt “had no idea that his action would provoke notice and comment” but “doubt[ed] . . . whether any person shall dictate to him what shall adorn his home.”32

Over the next two decades, White House occupants sent the peripatetic painting back and forth between the White House and the Corcoran Gallery. The Tafts left Watts’s painting in the museum, while First Lady Ellen Wilson, an artist herself, saw the painting during a tour of the Corcoran Gallery and had it transferred to the White House in 1913. Newspapers reported that Love and Life hung in President Woodrow Wilson’s Second Floor study without protest from the public. This may be in part due to the passing of Emilie D. Martin in 1911, the modernization of political and social norms, or perhaps thanks to the private nature of the space in which the painting was displayed.33

Upon moving into the White House in March 1921, President Warren G. Harding sent the painting back to the Corcoran, but First Lady Lou Hoover borrowed it for exhibition at the White House from 1929 to 1932.34 The painting then remained with the Corcoran Gallery until it was deaccessioned and sent to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art in 1984.35 This museum deaccessioned more than forty European works and put them up for sale at Sotheby’s in 1987, including Love and Life. 36 In 1998, the painting sold again; this time, Christie’s Auction House sold it to a private collector in Japan, where it remains away from the eyes of the common man—just as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union wanted.37 To this day, the WCTU continues to promote purity and abstinence.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this controversy is that throughout this period, the White

above

George Frederic Watts’s Love and Life is seen on display on the Second Floor of the Hoover White House, c. 1931.

House was not yet an official museum. Because no curator existed at the time, activists, artists, and first families participated in conversations about the ethics of display, audience engagement, and White House visitation. Moreover, artwork could come and go without a formal process of accessioning or deaccessioning. The tug-of-war between the White House as a private and public space continues, but since the 1960s the fate of art in the Executive Mansion has been regulated by official entities like the Office of the Curator and the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, rather than public opinion.

notes

1. Joseph Russell to James Monroe, May 25, 1818, quoted in Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2014), 62.

2. Today, Horatio Greenough’s sculpture of George Washington is on display in the National Museum of American History. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 76; “Horatio Greenough’s George Washington,” Smithsonian Media Fact Sheet, posted August 1, 2017, www. si.edu.

3. Cloe Ward, “England’s Michelangelo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The G. F. Watts Exhibition, 1884–1885,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 14 no. 1 (2016): 62–75.

4. “Nude Art in White House,” Boston Globe, December 21, 1902, 6.

5. “Queen Victoria Sends Her Choicest Paintings,” in H. D. Northrup, The World’s Fair as Seen in One Hundred Days (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1893), 299–301.

6. “The Nude in Art at the Fair: It Shocks Unsophisticated Western People,” New York Sun report in the Meridien [Mississippi] Daily Republican, May 3, 1893, 4.

7. Henry G. Marquand to G. F. Watts, November 7, 1893, G. F. Watts Correspondence, Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York.

8. T. F. Bayard to G. F. Watts, January 11, 1894, ibid.

9. G. F. Watts to T. F. Bayard, January 22, 1894, ibid.

10. “Love and Life,” in William H. Holmes, The National Gallery of Art Catalogue of Collections (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 103; An Act to Authorize the Secretary of State to Accept for the United States of America a Painting by G. F. Watts, Royal Academian, entitled “Love and Life,” Statutes of the United States of America Passed at the First Session of the Fifty-Third Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 117.

11. An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, passed March 3, 1873, 42nd Cong., 3rd sess., online at A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875, Law Library of Congress, www.memory.loc.gov.

12. Alyssa Picard, “‘To Popularize the Nude in Art’: Comstockery Reconsidered,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 3 (2002): 195–224.

13. For more on morality politics, see Jim A. Marone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

14. Quoted in untitled article, Collector 6, no. 1 (November 1, 1894): 3–4.

15. Quoted in untitled article, Sioux City Journal, November 26, 1894, 4.

16. Alison M. Parker, “‘Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed’: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880–1930,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 2 (1999): 135–58. For a general history of censorship in art, see Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, Elizabeth C. Childs, editor, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

17. “Love and Life,” Los Angeles Herald, January 25, 1895, 10.

18. “Mrs. Hayes’ Memorial Portrait,” Highland Weekly News, March 24, 1881, 4; “The Portrait of Mrs. Hayes,” Washington Evening Star, March 8, 1881, 4. For more on the influence of women’s groups over White House portraiture, see Rosie Cain, “Women’s Groups and First Ladies’ Portraits,” posted April 25, 2022, White House Historical Association website, www.whitehousehistory. org.

19. Quoted in “Lady Henry Somerset Defends ‘Love and Life,’” Paducah (Ky.) Sun, January 22, 1903, 2.

20. Quoted in “Picture in the White House Cellar,” Alexandria Gazette, October 23, 1894, 2.

21. S. H. Kauffmann, Board of Trustees Agreement, January 2, 1895, copy in Office of the Curator, The White House.

22. S. H. Kauffmann to G. F. Watts, Letter, January 9, 1895, Office of the Curator, The White House. See also untitled article in Art Interchange 34, no. 1 (January 1895): 49.

23. G. F. Watts to Corcoran Gallery, January 23, 1895, copy in Office of the Curator, The White House.

24. “Capital’s Social Buzz,” Boston Evening Transcript, October 27, 1894, 6.

25. “Mrs. Cleveland,” Morning Democrat, March 17, 1895, 3.

26. Isabella Hagner, “Memoirs of Isabella Hagner, 1901–1905: Social Secretary to First Lady Edith Carow Roosevelt,” ed. Priscilla Roosevelt, White House History 26 (2010): 58. While Hagner calls Frederick McGuire curator, he was actually was the director of the Corcoran Gallery.

27. Quoted in “President Roosevelt and Nude in Art,” Literary Digest 24, no. 1 (January 3, 1903): 10.

28. Edith Roosevelt to Emily Carow, December 7, 1902, quoted in Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York: Modern Library, 1980), 245; Hagner, “Memoirs,” 58; “Comment,” Harper’s Weekly, December 27, 1902, 2019.

29. “What Might Be Done to Make ‘Love and Life’ Entirely Unobjectionable,” Sunday St. Louis Star Illustrated Magazine, December 28, 1902, copy in Office of the Curator, The White House.

30. “Comment,” Harper’s Weekly, December 27, 1902, 2019.

31. Hagner, “Memoirs,” 58.

32. “White House Art Censorship,” Washington Post, December 16, 1902, 5.

33. Stephen Graham, With Poor Immigrants to America (New York: MacMillan Co., 1914), 222; “Love and Life Back in Its Original Spot,” Knoxville Sentinel, March 26, 1913, 11; Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and ProCensorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 63.

34. “Art Works Acquired During the Year,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1921 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 47; “Notes of Art and Artists,” Washington Evening Star, April 3, 1921, 52; “Gallery Loans Returned,” in Report on the Progress and Condition of the United States National Museum for the Year Ended June 30, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 18.

35. Watts, George F.—Love and Life, undated (Cor0005.1), series 16, subseries 1, box 98, folder 103), George Washington University Special Collections, Washington, D.C.

36. Press release, April 27, 1987, record unit 439, box 10, folder 4, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC.

37. “George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. (1817–1904), Love and Life,” Christie’s website christies.com.

gerald r. ford was born leslie l. king Jr. on July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska.1 The site was the ornate mansion of his paternal grandparents, Charles and Martha King, who moved there in 1905 from Casper, Wyoming, to advance Mr. King’s many business interests.2 With much of his multimillion dollar net worth derived from the wool trade, he found the stately home at 3202 Woolworth Avenue a perfect fit. The Kings purchased it for $18,000 from Emma Patterson Bates, who had it built in 1893 for more than the cost of nearly all new houses in Omaha that year.3 The three-story, fourteen-room home offered a commanding view of the premier park in Omaha, featured a ballroom on the third floor, and had a large reception hall on the first floor.4 Its frequent use for high-society events included daughter Savilla’s wedding, described as “one of the prettiest and most elaborate” in recent memory, and daughter Marietta’s cotillion attended by the children of prominent local residents, including the future father of White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige and U.S. commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige.5

Later, while Marietta King was attending St. Mary’s School in Illinois, her brother Leslie came for a visit and met her friend Dorothy Gardner of Harvard, Illinois.6 The two quickly became engaged and married in September 1912. But on their honeymoon Leslie King repeatedly struck his new bride and called her “vile and insulting names.” The situation did not improve back in Omaha, as King even refused to allow his wife to visit her parents that Christmas. When Dorothy found herself pregnant, she gave the marriage another chance, but just days after the birth of Leslie King Jr., her husband’s verbal abuse continued even as she lay in bed with their newborn child. After Leslie threatened to shoot both his wife and mother-in-law, Dorothy escaped from the King mansion with her sixteen-day-old child and returned to Illinois.7 In December 1913, she was granted a divorce and sole custody of her son, who took the name of his stepfather, Gerald R. Ford, after her 1917 marriage in Grand Rapids, Michigan.8 Charles and Martha King left Omaha in the midst of their son’s widely publicized divorce and sold the house in 1916.9 Surviving a serious fire not long after, the structure remained a single family property until the 1940s, when it was subdivided into apartments.10

On March 19, 1971, fire struck the house again, caused by a short in a basement apartment electrical cord, resulting in one fatality.11 The damage

was beyond repair, and the structure was demolished two months later.12 While fire had eliminated a material connection between Gerald Ford and Omaha, Ford himself acknowledged it was the “bitterness” between his parents that caused the lack of any “real connections” to the city.13 However, after Ford became vice president, a positive relationship began to develop, starting with his February 1974 trip to the city. Responding to public complaints about the condition of the vice president’s birthplace, neighborhood students cleared the vacant lot of litter the day before his arrival.14 After inspecting the site, Ford quipped it looked “better than my yard at home” and detoured from his itinerary to personally thank the students at their school.15 He

above Newborn Leslie King Jr., the future president Gerald R. Ford Jr., is seen with his mother Dorothy at 3202 Woolworth Avenue when he was six days old, July 20, 1913.

Purchased by Charles and Martha King in 1905, the stately home at 3202 Woolworth Avenue was one of the grandest residences in Omaha, Nebraska, at the time. It was here that their grandson and future president was born to their son Leslie and his wife, Dorothy. Today the bust of President Gerald R. Ford welcomes visitors to the park and historic site erected where the house once stood.

right President Ford’s birthplace on Woolworth Avenue was demolished after it was gutted by an electrical fire, March 1971.

also took time to meet his Aunt Savilla and several other King relatives living in Omaha who until then had proudly followed his rise to prominence only from afar.16

When Ford became president in August 1974, the owner of the birthplace lot had a contract with an apartment developer, but community sentiment favored recognizing the historic nature of the site.17 A homemade cardboard sign was posted denoting the property as the president’s birthplace. Many people stopped by to take photographs, and some even took a scoop of dirt.18 Any plans for apartments were abandoned, and the lot owner suggested the city or state buy it to honor Ford. However, by that December the local newspaper reported that neither the city nor county had any plans to acquire the land for such a purpose and that the owner had again listed it for sale.19

Businessman Jim Paxson, who lived just blocks from the site, read the article and drove by the next day. He quickly concluded the property should be used to recognize the only president born in Nebraska and was fearful it might succumb to

commercial purposes.20 Paxson gave his legal counsel a blank check with instructions to negotiate the sale, and an agreement was signed that day for $17,250.21 In January 1975 a foundation funded by Paxson donated the property to the city of Omaha on the condition it be used as a park and historic site.22 While the city would be responsible for ongoing maintenance, the Paxson Foundation paid all design and construction costs and Paxson himself managed and was the driving force behind the site’s development.

Preparations to transform the property began immediately with a goal of finishing by the approaching Bicentennial. As only an outer stone wall and a few large trees remained from the time of Ford’s birth, the site was essentially a blank slate.23 The president wanted to avoid a “lavish or pretentious monument” and suggested a “modest marking at the site done in good taste would be most desirable,” when asked for his input by Paxson and U.S. Senator Roman Hruska.24 To develop preliminary ideas, Paxson and Hruska sponsored a design competition among University

Ahead of a visit to Omaha by Vice President Gerald R. Ford in 1974 (left), schoolchildren (above left) work to clear trash accumulated on the vacant lot where the future president’s birthplace once stood. Once Ford became president, the site attracted visitors although it was marked by only a cardboard sign. The Paxson Foundation, created to preserve the site in Ford’s honor, soon cosponsored a contest for the design of a modest landmark with Sen. Roman Hruska. The contest was won by University of Nebraska architecture student Gary Dubas, whom Ford congratulated by letter in June 1975 (opposite top right). The final design (opposite top left) was opened to the public in 1976 (opposite bottom) and features a multilevel garden, turret-shaped visitor center, curved paths, and a colonnade modeled after the South Portico of the White House.

of Nebraska architecture students, with a $1,000 first prize that attracted ninety-six entries.25 The winning submission by Gary Dubas of Omaha was a multilevel garden that outlined the footprint of the birthplace house.26 While Paxson was pleased with this concept, he also wanted a monument that would represent Ford’s time in the White House and so he acquired an additional lot north of the former King property to have sufficient space.27 To bring these two ideas together and develop a comprehensive plan for the entire expanded site, a competition among seven professional architectural firms was held. The selected design by Schlott, Farrington and Associates was personally approved by the president before construction began.28

With design elements representing both the birth home and the White House, the site is unique among presidential birthplaces.29 It symbolizes Ford’s life journey that began in Omaha and through various circumstances elevated him to the presidency. A visit to the site begins exactly as it would have in 1913—entering the property through an opening in the outer stone wall and then up two flights of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a distinctive wraparound porch that along with the other contours of the house are now marked by a series of brick walls. Within these walls, one of the most prominent features of the Victorian-era home is

represented by a turret-shaped interpretive center featuring objects and information about Ford and the house. Upon exiting what would have been the rear of the house, the visitor follows curved paths that ascend gradually to a colonnade modeled after the South Portico of the White House.30 Within the colonnade are four marble tablets inscribed with the names of all U.S. presidents centered on a larger tablet featuring a bronze medallion of Ford and his declaration upon taking office that “our long national nightmare is over.”31

While Ford would not formally dedicate the site until September 1977, construction was nearly complete when he came to Omaha for a primary campaign stop in May 1976. He described visiting the birthplace as “a very moving experience” and was “deeply honored by the thoughtfulness of the people of Omaha in preserving this site.”32 Two months later and just days after the nation’s Bicentennial, the President Gerald R. Ford Birthsite and Gardens opened to the public.33

Despite the opening, Jim Paxson’s vision for the site was not yet realized and his dedication to the project continued. Invited to a White House State Dinner on July 27, 1976, Paxson spoke directly with First Lady Betty Ford about his requests for presidential items to display at the birthplace that until then had gone unanswered by White House staff. Shortly thereafter, Paxson received a personal letter from the president with the requested items.34 The day after Ford left office, the size of the birthplace park increased substantially as Paxson purchased the last of several adjacent lots that would be developed into another symbol of the White House.35

The Ford Rose Garden, in honor of Betty Ford, features numerous types of roses, walking paths, and bronze busts of President and Mrs. Ford, who both attended its dedication in July 1980. With the assembled crowd of two thousand singing “Happy Birthday to Jerry” almost sixty-seven years to the day he was born there, Ford declared, “It’s awfully nice to be home.”36 He returned to the site a final time in September 1995 to open the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center, which was constructed north of the birthplace park on additional land acquired and donated by Paxson to the Nebraska State Historical Society.37 This facility features an exhibit about Ford, although its primary purpose is to preserve documents, paintings, and other historic objects.

Through the efforts of Jim Paxson and others,

During a visit to dedicate the Gerald R. Ford Expressway on August 20, 1982, Ford also spoke at his birthplace. Sitting behind Ford to the very far right is Jim Paxson, who was responsible for putting the site together.

an important presidential site has been preserved as a modest and unique memorial to a man who, despite his own family’s nightmare there, came to take great pride in claiming Omaha as his birthplace. The site remains a popular public space and is an integral part of a now National Historic District of well-kept century plus old homes easily accessible from Interstate 80 via the Gerald R. Ford Expressway.

notes

1. Omaha-Douglas County Health Department, Certificate of Birth for Leslie King Jr., copy in Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center, Omaha, Neb.

2. “Social Chit-Chat,” Omaha Daily Bee, October 29, 1905, 6; Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, “President Gerald R. Ford’s Roots in Omaha,” Nebraska History 68 (1987): 57.

3. The building permit in the amount of $10,000 was exceeded by only three other private residences in Omaha during 1893. “Facing the Park,” Omaha World-Herald, January 6, 1893, 6; “Building in an Off Year,” Omaha World-Herald, December 31, 1893, 11; Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 287:204, April 27, 1905.

4. “First Time Advertised: 3202 Woolworth,” Omaha World-Herald, March 12, 1939, 37.

5. “Society Gossip of a Day: Rich-King,” Omaha World-Herald, January 11, 1906, 2; “Hymeneal: Rich-King,” Omaha Daily Bee, January 11, 1906, 9; “Notes on Omaha Society: Mr. and Mrs. C. H. King Give Cotillion for Their Daughter,” Omaha Daily Bee, December 31, 1908, 5.

6. “The Society Bee-Hive,” Omaha Daily Bee, August 22, 1912, 5.

7. James Cannon, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with History (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 1–5; King v. King, Douglas County, Nebraska, District Court Divorce Decree, doc. 126, no. 247, December 19, 1913; Secretary of State, Department of Vital Records, Lansing, Mich., at FamilySearch.org, “Michigan Marriages, 1868–1925,” image 329.

8. King v. King.

9. Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 389:416A, March 2, 1914; Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 387:620, April 20, 1916; Answer of Leslie L. King in King v. King, Douglas County, Nebraska, District Court, doc. 130, no. 319, June 29, 1914.

10. “Plumber’s Candle Starts Bad Blaze in Home of Dr. Wood,” Omaha World-Herald, December 22, 1916, 1; “3202 Woolworth Ave.,” Omaha World-Herald, May 20, 1945, 48.

11. Michael Kelly, “Woman Survived Fire; Meets Death in 2nd,” Omaha World-Herald, March 19, 1971, 1; “Fire Started Below Room of Victim, 55,” Omaha World-Herald, March 20, 1971, 13.

12. “Death Building Torn Down,” Omaha World-Herald, May 25, 1971, 5.

13. Quoted in Fred Mogul, “Ford Wasn’t Born into a Happy Home,” Omaha World-Herald, September 20, 1995, 8.

14. “Youngsters Clear Ford’s Birthplace,“ Omaha World-Herald, February 15, 1974, 6.

15. Quoted in Richard L. Madden, “Ford Opposes Election Financing Bill,” New York Times, February 16, 1974, 5; “Cleanup Effort Gets Very Special Visit,” Omaha World-Herald, February 16, 1974, 1.

16. “Relatives Meet Vice President,” Omaha World-Herald, February 16, 1974, 8; Dana C. Bradford III, telephone interview by author, October 7, 2020; William H. Sutton Jr., telephone interview by author, November 3, 2020.

17. Dana Parsons ,“Ford Site Owner ‘Sells Self Short,’” Omaha World-Herald, August 9, 1974, 7.

18. John Taylor, “Who Looks at a Vacant Lot?,” Omaha WorldHerald, August 10, 1974, 1.

19. Dennis P. Hogan III, e-mail correspondence with author, October 15, 2020; “Ford’s Birthsite Draws No Nibbles,” Omaha World-Herald, December 12, 1974, 21.

20. James M. Paxson, interview by Dennis Mihelich, July 22, 1985, Oral Interview Series, no. 14, Douglas County Historical Society, Omaha, Neb.

21. Hal Daub, telephone interview by author, October 15, 2020.

22. Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 1516:597, January 16, 1975.

23. Gerald R. Ford, recording at President Gerald R. Ford Birthsite and Gardens, Omaha, Neb.

24. James M. Paxson to Gerald R. Ford, January 27, 1975; Roman L. Hruska to Ford, February 6, 1975; Ford to Hruska, February 20, 1975, all in box 50, Philip Buchen files, folder President— Personal Home—Birthplace, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Mich., available online at www.fordlibrarymuseum. gov.

25. W. Cecil Steward to Eugene L. Brailey, January 22, 1975, ibid.

26. “Student Designs Ford Birth Marker,” Lincoln Daily Nebraskan, April 11, 1975, 11; Gary Dubas, telephone interview by author, September 25, 2020.

27. Paxson requested and received architectural specifications of both the north and south porticos of the White House from the National Park Service so that the design firms would have precise measurements to work from. Paxson to Philip Buchen, May 1, 1975, June 13, 1975, Buchen files; Daub interview; Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 1524:422, July 3, 1975.

28. Richard K. Pohl, telephone interview by author, September 30, 2020; Kenneth J. Backman, telephone interview by author, October 5, 2020; Paxson to Buchen, July 16, 1975, August 25, 1975, and Buchen memo to file, September 4, 1975, Buchen files.

29. Schlott, Farrington and Associates, “Design Philosophy: Birthplace Memorial of President Gerald R. Ford,” 1975, Omaha, Neb.

30. With some changes, the basic concept of a garden that marked the footprint of the original home introduced by student designer Gary Dubas was retained in the final design by Schlott, Farrington and Associates. The professional firm added the interpretive center modeled after the house’s turret. Although the actual turret was on the east side of the house, the interpretive center was placed on the west side of the house footprint. A large flagpole was situated on the former location of the turret, maintaining the high point of the property near the corner of Woolworth Avenue and Thirty Second Street. Pohl interview; Backman interview.

31. Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks upon Taking the Oath of Office as President,” August 9, 1974, Ford Presidential Library, available online at www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov.

32. Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks of the President at the Bergan-Mercy Hospital,” May 7, 1976, White House press releases, box 25, ibid.

33. Fred Thomas, “Ford Birthsite Opens: Donor Remains a Spectator,” Omaha World-Herald, July 9, 1976, 4.

34. Paxson interview; Ford to Paxson, August 14, 1976, Buchen files.

35. Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 1532:646, November 1, 1975; Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 1533:747, November 21, 1975; Douglas County, Nebraska, Deed Book 1561:673–76, January 21, 1977.

36. Quoted in Roger Catlin, “Various Activities Make Fords’ Visit a Busy One,” Omaha World-Herald, July 13, 1980, 18; “Warm Birthday Greeting for the Fords,” Omaha World-Herald, July 13, 1980, 1.

37. At the dedication ceremony Ford said of Paxson, who had died earlier that year, “He epitomized the finest in character among all Americans.” Quoted in C. David Kotok, “Ford Hails James Paxson at Building Dedication,” Omaha World-Herald, September 22, 1995, 2.

REFLECTIONS My Top Ten

reflections

My Top Ten

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

the white house collection of fine arts is among the best in the world. As you walk from room to room on the State Floor or the Ground Floor or in the nonpublic historic spaces upstairs, hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures bring American history to life and speak to the rich and diverse heritage that is represented by, as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy said, the house that “belongs to the American people.”

the white house collection of fine arts is among the best in the world. As you walk from room to room on the State Floor or the Ground Floor or in the nonpublic historic spaces upstairs, hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sculptures bring American history to life and speak to the rich and diverse heritage that is represented by, as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy said, the house that “belongs to the American people.”

Dolley Madison from the fire of 1814, it is the only work in the collection that was in President’s House on November 1, 1800, when President Adams moved in.

Dolley Madison from the fire of 1814, it is the only work in the collection that was in President’s House on November 1, 1800, when President Adams moved in.

It is available in our Washington, D.C., shops or online at shop.whitehousehistory.org.

Washington to design a house

tieth-century first ladies, Edith Roosevelt, Grace Coolidge, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan, who were so elegantly portrayed by master portraitists.

It is a difficult task to consider one’s favorites from such an amazing collection that has been assembled since before the first occupants, John and Abigail Adams, moved in. In thinking through the works that have inspired me in various ways I share this sampling of ten favorites. My number one favorites are Liberty and Union , a pair of paintings by Constantino Brumidi, which now hang in the West Garden Room. To me the most iconic painting of all is Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington presently displayed in the East Room. Famously saved by First Lady

The White House Historical Association has published a wonderful resource that every follower of this quarterly jour nal should have.

Third on my list is a small but very special wax profile of James Hoban, the builder selected by George Washington to design a house for the presidents who would follow him.

Third on my list is a small but very special wax profile of James Hoban, the builder selected by George Washington to design a house for the presidents who would follow him.

East Room. Famously

It is a difficult task to consider one’s favorites from such an amazing collection that has been assembled since before the first occupants, John and Abigail Adams, moved in. In thinking through the works that have inspired me in various ways I share this sampling of ten favorites. My number one favorites are Liberty and Union , a pair of paintings by Constantino Brumidi, which now hang in the West Garden Room. To me the most iconic painting of all is Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington presently displayed in the East Room. Famously saved by First Lady

My list includes two important recent acquisitions made for the collection by the White House Historical Association: Jacob Lawrence’s evocative work, The Builders, was given during the years of our collaboration with First Lady Laura Bush, and Alma Thomas’s joyful Resurrection is a gift made during our years working with First Lady Michelle Obama.

It is Art in the White House by William Kloss, which includes photographs and details on more than five hundred works of art in the collection.

The grand spirited sculptural works by Frederic Remington make my list at number five. The Bronco Buster and Coming

Of course, the portraits of presidents and first ladies themselves are the backbone of the historic collection, and my favorites include four twentieth-century first ladies, Edith Roosevelt, Grace Coolidge, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan, who were so elegantly portrayed by master portraitists. The White House Historical Association has published a wonderful resource that every follower of this quarterly journal should have. It is Art in the White House by William Kloss, which includes photographs and details on more than five hundred works of art in the collection. It is available in our Washington, D.C., shops or online at shop.whitehousehistory.org.

Of course, the portraits of presidents and first ladies themselves are the backbone of the historic collection, and my favorites include four twentieth-century first ladies, Edith Roosevelt, Grace Coolidge, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan, who were so elegantly portrayed by master portraitists.

The White House Historical Association has published a wonderful resource that every follower of this quarterly journal should have. It is Art in the White House by William Kloss, which includes photographs and details on more than five hundred works of art in the collection. It is available in our Washington, D.C., shops or online at shop.whitehousehistory.org.

One

One

My list includes two important recent acquisitions made for the collection by the White House Historical Association: Jacob Lawrence’s evocative work, The Builders, was given during the years of our collaboration with First Lady Laura Bush, and Alma Thomas’s joyful Resurrection is a gift made during our years working with First Lady Michelle Obama. The grand spirited sculptural works by Frederic Remington make my list at number five. The Bronco Buster and Coming Through the Rye are powerful expressions of a bygone era on the frontier.

Through the Rye are powerful expressions of a bygone era on the frontier.

of East Room. Famously

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Constantino Brumidi’s Liberty (above), 1869 and Union (left), 1869

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT,

Washington to design a house

Constantino Brumidi’s Liberty (above), 1869 and Union (left), 1869

James Hoban by John Christian Rauschner, c. 1800

Aaron Shikler’s Portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy , 1970 and Nancy Reagan, 1987

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1797

Five

Six

Frederic Remington’s The Bronco Buster (above), cast c. 1903, and Coming Through the Rye (right), cast 1918

Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground by George Caleb Bingham, 1847

The Builders by Jacob Lawrence, 1947

Resurrection by Alma Thomas, 1966

Edith Carow Roosevelt by Théobald Chartran, 1902

Grace Goodhue Coolidge by Howard Chandler Christy, 1924

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

white house history quarterly

white house history quarterly features articles on the historic White House, especially relating to the building itself and life as lived there through the years. The views presented by the authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the White House Historical Association.

Seated before his easel in his Maryland studio, artist Simmie Knox is seen at work on the official White House portrait of President Bill Clinton. The painting was unveiled in 2004 and now hangs on the State Floor. [bruce white for the white house

front cover: Seated before his easel in his Maryland studio, artist Simmie Knox is seen at work on the official White House portrait of President Bill Clinton. The painting was unveiled in 2004 and now hangs on the State Floor. [bruce white for the white house historical association]

back cover: This northwest view of the Red Room provides a glimpse of the extensive fine art collection in the White House. [bruce white for the white house historical association]

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