Art: Toward the Ideal

Reporting on the U.S. of the early 1830s as seen through his shrewd Gallic eyes, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans tended in their attitude toward the arts to “put the real in place of the ideal.” That has always been true of the interior of the White House. First occupied in 1800, when the nation was still in its raw infancy, when Washington, D.C., was a muddy village with a few thousand inhabitants, the White House has, through the changing decades, served its practical functions as residence and office for the President. What was neglected was the ideal: the White House as a monument, as a symbol of the nation’s continuity under all administrations.

That is no longer true. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy conceived an ideal of what the White House ought to be and translated her vision into reality. She has redecorated the public rooms in authentic period styles and arranged in them a treasure of newly acquired paintings and sculptures by U.S. artists. She has made the White House a repository of history preserved in art (see color).

Big Cheese. What the interior of the White House reflected before Mrs. Kennedy undertook her project was the transience of its occupants. Many of the First Families that lived in the White House treated it in much the same way as temporary residents of any ordinary house, redecorating to their own tastes, with little reverence for what the previous tenants left behind.

Thomas Jefferson turned over one room to piles of animal bones sent back by the Lewis and Clark expedition. James Monroe imported great quantities of French furnishings, including the gilded Hannibal clock that still ticks away in the Green Room. Andrew Jackson, the “People’s President,” spent $50,000 removing every trace of aristocratic John Quincy Adams. Among the furnishings added by Jackson were $250 worth of spittoons. For his last reception in 1837, Jackson set out a monstrous 1,400-lb. cheese in the main entrance hall; the odor, it was said, lasted well into the next administration.

In Civil War days, citizens wandered freely through the first-floor rooms, snipping swatches from the upholstery as souvenirs. On the eve of Lincoln’s second inauguration, his bodyguard observed that the public parlors looked “as if a regiment of rebel troops had been quartered there—with permission to forage.” Ulysses S. Grant redecorated in garish Mississippi Riverboat Victorian, with a great profusion of potted palms and gaslight globes.

Chester Alan Arthur decided to modernize the White House, had 24 wagonloads of furnishings carted away; lost in the housecleaning, along with much junk, were priceless antiques dating back to Monroe. Arthur called in Louis Comfort Tiffany to redecorate in the current rage, the florid art nouveau. Among Tiffany’s contributions was a huge opalescent glass screen in the entrance hall. After Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration, he issued a brusque order to “break in small pieces that Tiffany screen.” T.R.’s special contribution to the White House decor was an extensive remodeling in the restrained neoclassical style of McKim, Mead and White, although he is more often remembered for his array of moose heads in the State Dining Room.

An Inspiring Palace. Several First Ladies made some efforts to bring a touch of history into White House interiors. Mrs. Calvin Coolidge persuaded Congress to authorize the White House to accept gifts of antiques. Mrs. Herbert Hoover recovered some pieces of furniture that had been in the White House in Monroe’s time, had replicas made of furniture in Monroe’s law office in Fredericksburg. But when the Kennedys moved in, the White House contained only a scant sprinkling of important art or authentic antiques. Most of the cabinetry dated from the 20th century. While the walls were cluttered with plenty of portraits, many of them were inferior copies of the originals. There were no landscapes at all, no still lifes, few historical scenes.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House project, oddly enough, was partly inspired by the old presidential palace in Bogota, Colombia. When the Kennedys visited Colombia in 1961, Mrs. Kennedy noted admiringly that the art and furnishings in the palace reflected the country’s history. The White House, she decided, should do no less.

The task she set for herself was to assemble a permanent White House collection of art and antiques of high quality and relevant to the White House, a collection that would be preserved and added to under future administrations.

To that end, she appointed two committees: one, headed by Antiques Expert Henry F. du Pont, to assemble period furniture, and the other, headed by New York Painter and Lecturer James W. Fosburgh, to seek out paintings and sculptures.

So as to avoid the delays, entanglements and possible criticisms involved in getting funds for the project from Congress, Mrs. Kennedy decided to rely on private donors. More than 150 works of art, or the funds to buy them, have been donated so far.

An Alien Waterfront. Mrs. Kennedy and her advisers decided to restrict acquisitions of paintings and sculptures to Americana. Under the criteria laid down, each work should ideally be by a U.S. artist and of a U.S. subject, and related in some way to the White House or the presidency, or at least to some sector of the Federal Government. But the selection committee has made exceptions to include a few foreign paintings of U.S. subjects and U.S. paintings of foreign subjects. The James McNeill Whistler oil of London’s waterfront was chosen because it is a great Whistler. Scottish Painter John Syme’s oil of John James Audubon was purchased because it is a fine portrait. An early acquisition was a pencil-and-sepia drawing, The Apotheosis of Franklin, by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Adopted from the start, and strictly adhered to since, was a decision to exclude works by living artists. The most modern paintings acquired so far are a John Marin circus scene and Childe Hassam’s Flag Day, a 1917 impressionist view of the Stars and Stripes arrayed along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

A Monroe Chair. Mrs. Kennedy’s work has touched all the public rooms of the White House. Even where she left the furnishings and décor of a room essentially as they had been, she at least added a bit of authenticity and coherence. A portrait of Andrew Jackson that Abraham Lincoln admired, for example, was transferred from the Cabinet Room to the Lincoln Room.

But the main arenas of change have been three public rooms on the first floor—the Green, Blue and Red rooms. They are of similar size, about 20 ft. square with regal 30-ft. ceilings. In each of the three rooms, the furniture and decor have been restricted to a single distinct period. The Green Room is done in the Federal style prevalent in the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the Blue Room in the French imports of the Monroe era, 1817-25, and the Red Room in the gilt and scarlet of the Empire style of the late 1830s.

The public has responded enthusiastically to Mrs. Kennedy’s project. Since it became widely known that she was looking for antiques, the White House has been drenched with offers of donations, mostly declined. Now and then, somebody offers a real treasure. A Monroe-era chair now in the Blue Room was donated by a woman in Villanova, Pa., who did not know how valuable an antique she had until she saw a newspaper photograph of a matching table rescued from the White House basement, where it was being used as a sawhorse.

Pursuit of Portraits. The paintings hung in a particular room are not necessarily, or even usually, from the narrow time period of the furniture—that would be much too confining a restriction. For the Red Room, the White House has acquired the unfinished Woodrow Wilson painted at the Conference of Versailles in 1919 by Sir

William Orpen, and A. Wordsworth Thompson’s Civil War battlescape, Cannonading on the Potomac. The Green Room’s watered-silk walls support a gallery of 15 oils, including David Martin’s reposed Ben Franklin watched over by a bust of Isaac Newton, and Henry Inman’s winsome 1842 portrait of Angelica Van Buren, President Van Buren’s daughter-in-law, with a view of Hiram Powers’ bust of the President himself in the background.

For the Blue Room, Mrs. Kennedy sought finer portraits of the first seven Presidents than the mediocre copies inherited from earlier administrations.

The prize acquisition of all is the Rembrandt Peale portrait of Thomas Jefferson, formerly in Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. Another highly valuable addition is the Monroe portrait attributed to Samuel F. B. Morse, better known as the inventor of the telegraph. An Andrew Jackson by John Wesley Jarvis, done in 1819, was acquired to supplement Ralph Earl’s Jackson, which Teddy Roosevelt’s youngest son and playmates lambasted with spitballs one afternoon. The Blue Room portraits of James Madison and John Adams, however, are still only copies.

Breaking the old monotony of statesman portraits, Mrs. Kennedy’s undertaking has brought to the White House many fine nonportrait paintings. There are still lifes by the Peales of Philadelphia, the U.S.’s first painting family. A porthole painting of Niagara Falls by John Kensett, a member of the Hudson River school, is typical of the characteristic U.S. landscape style in which the vista is distant and changeless.

A New Pride. Mrs. Kennedy has not yet by any means acquired all the paintings she wants for the White House. The collection includes no John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins. But the paintings already acquired constitute a priceless national heritage.

Unlike past renovations of the White House interiors, Mrs. Kennedy’s is likely to be lasting. Under the Kennedy Administration, the White House has, for the first time, been officially declared a national monument. Henceforth it will be illegal for anyone, even the President, to remove any White House property, except to the custody of the Smithsonian Institution. But the most important factor guaranteeing that the work done by Mrs. Kennedy will be carried on rather than undone after she leaves the White House is the U.S. public’s enthusiastic approval of her project. In giving a richer, more tasteful, more authentic look to the interior of the White House, she has given her fellow citizens a new pride in it, and in the nation’s artistic heritage. President Kennedy could speak with considerable assurance when he said of his wife’s work: “I know that those who come after us will continue to try to make the White House the center of a sense of American historical life.”