The Artful Presidency, an online exhibition, is presented by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art to celebrate the connections between American artists and the American presidency from George Washington to the Carter administration.
This online feature complements the exhibition "The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden," at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, which opened November 15, 2000.
Included are letters to artists from Presidents Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; a handwritten poem by John Quincy Adams, extolling the wonders of sculptor Hiram Powers; photographs and printed ephemera documenting President Benjamin Harrison's Western Tour in 1891; a volume of sketches presented to Mollie Garfield in 1883, following the assassination of her father, President James A. Garfield; the diary of painter Rubens Peale recounting the news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April 1865; photographs of Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower; presidential caricatures; and letters and memoirs of presidential portrait painters such as Thomas Eakins and Greta Kempton.