National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Elvis Presley, Born 74 Years Ago Today

Q. What National Park Service memorial is most closely associated with Elvis Presley?
A. The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

On this day in 1935, Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. Many stories about the King of Rock and Roll have taken on monumental and mythical status. Most everyone who has heard of Elvis has also heard the story about the King shooting the television set, the late-night exploits of the Memphis Mafia at Graceland, or Elvis flying from Memphis to Denver to pick up a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Most everyone also has seen the photos of Elvis and President Nixon, as well; that sequence of images has its own location on the “When Nixon Met Elvis” website by the National Archives.

Elvis was the prototype for ensuing generations of rock stars. His madnesses were many and his desire to apologize was minimal; after all, he was traveling in uncharted waters. Elvis established the pattern, and fast cars, beautiful women, and fistfuls of narcotics would quickly become part of the rock and roll milieu.

Wild behavior aside, one aspect of Elvis’s personality—though out of control at times—continues to endear him to millions worldwide: he was a charitable man. For every story about the King blowing apart a television set, there are dozens of stories of Elvis helping a friend in need or buying a car for a total stranger.

In Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley, biographer Charles Ponce de Leon writes, “Always one to share his wealth, Elvis . . . became impetuously generous toward his family, friends, and business acquaintances—sometimes even perfect strangers. He bought them custom-made rings, necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. His jewelry purchases became so frequent and extravagant that his favorite Memphis jewelers were happy to fly to Las Vegas or wherever he was to take an order or make a special delivery.”

One of Elvis’s acts of benevolence will continue to benefit millions forever.  In March 1961, Elvis gave a concert in Hawaii for the benefit of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial fund. The association had struggled for years to fund the completion of the memorial at Pearl Harbor, but the end was not in sight. United States Park Service records indicate that Elvis’s charity performance at Bloch Arena in Hawaii yielded almost $55,000 toward funding the monument; the entire memorial cost approximately $516,000, meaning that the concert produced more than 10 percent of the money needed for the project.

Interestingly, without Elvis, there is no way of knowing when the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial would have opened to the public. His 1961 benefit performance was the final fiscal push needed to open the doors to the memorial.

Listen to Warren Perry’s Face-to-Face talk on Elvis Presley (25:28)

The next Face-to-Face talk is tonight (Thursday, January 8), when Anne Goodyear, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, will discuss a portrait of Cindy Sherman by photographer Martin Schoeller. This portrait is on view in the exhibition "Portraiture Now: Feature Photography." The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Elvis Aron Presley/Ralph Wolfe Cowan,1976-1988/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of R.W. Cowan   

For more on Elvis, visit the previous blog post "Isaac And Elvis: The Memphis Music Legacy." For further reading see Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley by Charles Ponce de Leon, the “When Nixon Met Elvis” website by the National Archives, and the National Park Service Arizona Memorial, FAQ's page.

NPG Acquires Shepard Fairey’s Portrait of Barack Obama

The portrait is not yet on display; it will go on view before Inauguration Day.

               ©  Shepard Fairey/ObeyGiant.com

The portrait that came to symbolize the historic campaign of President-elect Barack Obama will make its permanent home only a few blocks from the White House at the National Portrait Gallery. The piece, created by Los Angeles artist Shepard Fairey, came to the museum through the generosity of Washington, D.C., art collectors Heather and Tony Podesta, in honor of Tony Podesta’s mother, the late Mary K. Podesta.

“This work is an emblem of a significant election, as well as a new presidency,” said Martin E.Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “Shepard Fairey’s instantly recognizable image was integral to the Obama campaign. We are deeply grateful to the Podestas for their generosity.”

Fairey’s large-scale, mixed-media stenciled collage was the central portrait image for the Obama campaign and was previously distributed as a limited-edition print and as a free download. The collage will be on view at the Portrait Gallery by Inauguration Day. It will be installed on the first floor of the museum in the “New Arrivals” exhibition.

Fairey’s work is represented by the Irvine Contemporary gallery in Washington, D.C. Fairey’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2006, Gingko Press published a monograph on the artist’s career, “Obey: Supply and Demand.” A retrospective of Fairey’s work will open Feb. 6 at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.

Barack Obama/Shepard Fairey, 2008 / Hand-finished collage, stencil and acrylic on paper / Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection in honor of Mary K. Podesta / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution /
© Shepard Fairey/ObeyGiant.com

January 6, 1759: George and Martha Washington Tie the Knot

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, George Washington, a land owner and an officer in the Virginia militia, and Martha Dandridge Custis (right), a widow with two children, were wed at White House, the Custis home in New Kent County, Virginia, that Martha inherited upon the death of her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. It was not a coincidence that the date chosen for the wedding was Epiphany; Twelfth Night was traditionally a night for celebrations, and the Washington-Custis wedding was purposefully tied to this date.

In her biography Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty, Helen Bryan writes:

The wedding was probably a very robust affair. Most social occasions in the tidewater were. Martha would have known what to expect and would have made meticulous preparations in advance to feed and accommodate a houseful of guests who would be cooped up together in the house for an indeterminate number of days. Plantation weddings went on for a long time, and once guests had made the trip over bad, frozen, or snow-covered roads or up the icy Pamunkey River to White House, they would have had no inclination to go home quickly. Advance preparations must have involved making up endless sleeping pallets; preparing bedding; stocking up with firewood, extra soap, and candles; and an orgy of roasting, smoking, and baking; not to mention provisioning with cordials, brewing of beer, and ordering plenty of wine, Madeira, port, rum, brandy, and whiskey. Colonials were a notoriously hard-drinking lot. And in keeping with the custom of the time, Martha probably decorated White House with pine boughs, holly, mistletoe, and ivy.

Although George Washington entered the relationship as a property owner and a man of excellent reputation, Martha’s inheritance of property and slaves from Daniel Parke Custis’s estate would have been an attractive corollary to the establishment of this marriage. Washington was ambitious with respect to property, and he had great plans for his holdings at Mount Vernon; marrying a wealthy widow roughly his own age—Martha was born in 1731, some eight months before George’s birthday in 1732—would greatly increase his social and financial positions. As colonial law forbade Martha to own property after marriage, George immediately became responsible for the property Martha shared with her two children, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis. On May 1, 1759, George wrote to Robert Cary and Company, London merchants:

Gentlemen, the enclosed is the minister’s certificate of my marriage with Mrs. Martha Custis, properly as I am told, authenticated. You will therefore for the future please to address all your letters which relate to the affairs of the late Daniel Parke Custis, Esquire, to me, as by marriage I am entitled to a third part of that estate, and invested likewise with the care of the other two thirds by a decree of our general court which I obtained in order to strengthen the power I before had in consequence of my wife’s administration.

George and Martha would share forty years together; however, George spent a substantial portion of that time fighting to build and to administer a new nation. He died in December of 1799, and she passed away in May of 1802. Although plans were conceived within the young government to bury Washington beneath the United States Capitol, George and Martha Washington are fittingly interred together at Mount Vernon.

George Washington and Family/David Edwin, 1798, Copy after: Edward Savage/Stipple engraving on paper/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington/Rembrandt Peale, c. 1853/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of an anonymous donor

George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)/Gilbert Stuart, 1796/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery; acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation