National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

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

Birthday of Joseph Henry, First Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Joseph Henry was born 211 years ago today, on December 17, 1797. 

Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was a remarkable man. His interests spanned the scientific and academic world, from anthropology to meteorology, and he believed that the quest for and imparting of knowledge were central to the mission of the Smithsonian.

This photograph of Henry was taken around 1860, by the Mathew Brady Studio and produced as a carte de visite—a sort of trading card and celebrity collectable. It is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, in the American Origins exhibition, on the museum’s first floor.

In Joseph Henry's words:

The worth and importance of the Institution is not to be estimated by what it accumulates within the walls of its building, but by what it sends forth to the world. Its great mission is to facilitate the use of implements of research, and to diffuse the knowledge which this use may develop.

Henry’s work in electromagnetism was part of the collective effort that made the telegraph possible; in Henry’s honor, the scientific community calls the unit of measure of electrical inductance the henry.

In 1879, William B. Taylor wrote the following, which was read into the proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Washington after Henry’s death:

In his own pursuits Truth was the supreme object of his regard—the sole interest and incentive of his investigations; and in its prosecution he brought to bear in equable combination qualities of a high order; quickness and correctness of perception, inventive ingenuity in experimentation, logical precision in deduction, perseverance in exploration, sagacity in interpretation.

Henry was Secretary of the Smithsonian from 1846 until his death in 1878. He was also a professor at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) for sixteen years and served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1868 to 1878. Henry is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C., and a statue bearing his likeness stands in front of the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall in Washington.

For more information on Henry, see the Joseph Henry Paper’s website, created by the Smithsonian Institution Archives. 

Photograph by David Bjorgen, from Wikipedia Commons. Used via Creative Commons. 

This statue of Joseph Henry stands in front of the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall in Washington. 

Joseph Henry/Mathew Brady Studio, c. 1860/Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

John F. Kennedy Remembered: May 29, 1917 — November 22, 1963

The murder of John F. Kennedy forty-five years ago this week is one of the most tragic and memorable events in American history. Biographer Robert Dallek writes, “Kennedy’s death shocked the country more than any other event since the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. . . . Kennedy’s sudden violent death seemed to deprive the country and the world of a better future.”

The National Portrait Gallery has several portraits of Kennedy in its collections—this 1963 portrait was painted by artist Elaine de Kooning, and is on view in the "America’s Presidents" exhibition.

Although Kennedy was only slightly less than three years into his presidency when he was killed, the images of his administration have great resonance. Most Americans are familiar with at least a handful of those iconic moments—the youthful Kennedy being sworn into the presidency, the chief executive at work as John Jr. plays beneath the desk, the silhouette in the window of the Oval Office, the horrible and searing moments of the drive through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Kennedy’s tenure in office includes honor as well as debacle. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine during the Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the defining moment of his foreign policy, while the Bay of Pigs invasion always evokes the same word: fiasco. However, such institutions as the Peace Corps and the space program continue to represent his legacy. The Kennedy presidency is also defined by his commitment to America and by the commitment he wished Americans to make to their country; the summation of his inaugural speech is among the most-quoted passages in our written and spoken heritage.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy/ Elaine de Kooning,1963/ Oil on canvas/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Student Responses: Veronica Lake

This column is part of an occasional series in which Washington-area university students discuss works on display in the National Portrait Gallery.

This article is written by Maria B. Havrilla, a freshman at Catholic University of America. She writes about this 1940s “stand-up” poster of actress Veronica Lake—an advertisement for “Woodbury Matched Make-up” that was designed for drugstore windows. The poster is on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture,” on the museum’s second floor. 

My visit to the National Portrait Gallery was for a school project; I was instructed to choose a portrait I felt was significant and to discuss that portrait. Browsing through the Portrait Gallery, I found what I thought was the perfect portrait: the 1945 “Woodbury Matched Make-up” ad featuring Veronica Lake. Lake seems to display a calm seductiveness that is still sought-after in today’s commercial media. She broke some boundaries with her portrait, yet she still characterizes women of both yesterday and today.

Lake is the epitome of beauty and grace in this portrait; she draws the viewer in with her seductive and secretive stare. Her dress further hints at her sex appeal, and her complexion is flawless. Her looks are those of a good hometown girl with a flirtatious love of pushing the limits, while the blond locks framing her face give the illusion that her look is effortless. Veronica Lake depicts the ever-evolving modern woman.

Throughout history, portraits and paintings of women reflect the times. Portraits also bear some influence on the future. Women in such images as the Mona Lisa are shown to be worthy of attention and affection as well as admiration; they should not just be seen as mothers and wives. Something similar can be said for Veronica Lake; she made history by letting her hair fall about her face and by daring to show her pretty skin.

This image, from the period just after World War II, is a picture of a classic beauty who is showing her sensuous side, something not typical or always accepted for that day. Taking the standards of beauty and grace to another level, she says to the viewer that women should be confident and prepared to step out of tradition and into a bold new sensuality. Veronica Lake was an icon of her time and continues to be a legendary icon for breaking the norm, pushing women to become more interested in non-traditional roles in society.

“Woodbury Matched Make-Up” /Veronica Lake/Unidentified artist, c. 1945/Color photolithographic halftone poster stand-up/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

145 Years Ago Today at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

- President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

For more on Lincoln, visit “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln” at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition runs until July 5, 2009, and is part of a yearlong Smithsonian-wide celebration of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. 

Abraham Lincoln /Mathew Brady, 1864/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Anne Sexton’s Awful Rowing Toward Self-annihilation

                         © Rollie McKenna

Anne Sexton loved applause and hated herself. The cloak of confessional poetry was wrapped about this personality skeleton not just for Anne Sexton, but also for many of her contemporaries. Among Sexton’s published collections are To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1966), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975).

This 1961 portrait of Sexton, by photographer Rollie McKenna, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the recently opened exhibition “Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs.”   

The confessional movement arrived in the mid-1950s and in its number we count some of the great voices of the twentieth century—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne Sexton. Called “confessional” because the movement emphasized cathartic discourse, Sexton and Plath placed their fragile emotional conditions on the block from the beginning, and in their respective words there seemed to exist a race conducted to see who could die first. When Plath finally succumbed to stove gas in February of 1963, Sexton wrote:

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief!—
how did you crawl into,
crawl down into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long…

In Oedipus Anne, Diane Hume-George writes, “I feel I am overhearing a pathetic competition between suicides, one accomplished and one potential, full of petty jealousy and masquerading as an eulogy.” This quest to share in death is part of the confessional element here; however, there is also a cry for attention. Adds Hume-George, “Although Sylvia’s Death is ostensibly ‘for Sylvia Plath’ it might have been more accurately dedicated ‘for myself on the occasion of Sylvia’s death.’”

Sexton would affirm her commitment to life occasionally, as in her 1966 poem Live, where she states flatly:

The poison just didn’t take
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
Repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
The dream, the excitable gift.

These lighter moods would not last in her words, and eventually pleas for attention and themes of desperation would permeate her works. Maxine Kumin writes, “Anne basked in the attention she attracted, partly because it was antithetical to an earlier generation’s view of the woman writer as poetess and partly because she was flattered by and enjoyed the adoration of her public.” Reacting to a childhood wherein she felt rejected and unwanted, Sexton was, Kumin notes, the “intensely private individual” who “bared her liver to the eagle in public readings where almost invariably there was standing room only.”

Anne Sexton equaled Sylvia Plath in death in 1974 when she was able to coax enough carbon monoxide into her system to complete the task at which Sylvia Plath had previously succeeded.  Sexton’s poetry is monumental in its visceral and passionate exploration of the modern American feminine psyche; it is tragic because its central themes are tied to the destruction of its creator.

Listen to Anne Sexton's poems Silvia’s Death, Just Once, and Said The Poet To The Analyst as read by Jennifer Sichel, a researcher at NPG

For Further Reading:
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Diane Hume-George, Oedipus Anne (University of Illinois Press, 1987).

Anne Sexton/Rollie McKenna, 1961/Silver gelatin print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna / © 1961 Rollie McKenna

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part IV

The final installment in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

George Washington (left) won the first race for the presidency in 1789 without opposition, gaining the office with sixty-nine electoral votes; he did not claim a political party affiliation during that contest. The only other election in American history in which no candidate had party ties was in 1824. This election would eventually be decided by the House of Representatives and would result in John Quincy Adams’s sole term in office.

More presidents were born in October (six) than any other month.

More presidents were born in Virginia (eight) than any other state.

The Oval Office has only been around for a century. Designed for William Howard Taft, it brings the presidency closer to the operations of the executive offices in the west wing. President Reagan spoke to the nation about the space shuttle Challenger tragedy from the Oval Office, and President Bush addressed America the night of September 11, 2001, from there also.

According to the White House Web site, it takes 570 gallons of paint to cover the exterior of the presidential residence. Also, the White House residence has thirty-five bathrooms.

Fourteen vice presidents have become president.

All three presidents buried in Tennessee (Jackson, Polk, Andrew Johnson) were from the Carolinas.

              © The Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Co.

Richard Nixon (right) was born farther west (Yorba Linda, California) than any other president.

The strongest independent candidacy of modern times was that of H. Ross Perot in 1992. Perot received no electoral votes, but harvested more than 19,700,000 popular votes, more than half of then–President Bush’s popular vote that election; the 1992 winner, Bill Clinton, received almost 45,000,000 votes, far from a popular majority. Perot gathered almost 19 percent of the popular vote in that election. The closest non–major party candidate to that election day performance was also H. Ross Perot (he ran as the Reform Party candidate his second time out), who took more than 8,000,000 votes, or about 8.5 percent of the popular vote, in 1996.

Two dutiful early cabinet members: Joseph Habersham of Georgia served as postmaster general for George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts held three separate offices in George Washington’s cabinet—postmaster general, secretary of war, secretary of state—and then went on to serve as the first secretary of state under John Adams.

Sources:

Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/facts.html

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

Richard Nixon/Norman Percevel Rockwell, 1968/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; donated to the people of the United States of America by the Richard Nixon Foundation/© The Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Co.

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part III

The third in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Elections, the White House, and odd facts

The middle name of Warren G. Harding (right) was Gamaliel. He was named after the wise man on the Sanhedrin in Acts 5: 34–40. Unfortunately, Harding was not so wise, and he trusted corrupt individuals who eventually brought scandal and shame to his administration.

Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth President of the United States, was the only president born on the fourth of July, although three presidents have died on that day—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and James Monroe in 1831.

Before becoming president, Herbert Hoover never held an elected office except in college.

FDR succumbed to death, not in the presence of his wife of forty years, Eleanor, but in the company of one of his longtime mistresses, Lucy Mercer.

The S in Harry S Truman’s name did not stand for anything.

After being supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe and before becoming president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) was president of Columbia University.

John F. Kennedy was a best-selling author (Why England Slept) at the age of twenty-three.

Lyndon Johnson picked fruit, washed dishes, and worked as a janitor before and while earning his bachelor’s degree from Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas.

The National Archives and Records Administration maintains a Web feature as part of its site, which describes the historic meeting between Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon. It can be found here.

Gerald Rudolph Ford was named Leslie Lynch King at birth.

Rather than be inaugurated as James Earl Carter Jr., our thirty-ninth president chose to take the oath of office as Jimmy Carter.

Ronald Reagan is the only president to have been divorced.

George Herbert Walker Bush played baseball for Yale; in 1947 he played in the first College World Series.

Bill Clinton (right) won the 1992 presidential election against two left-handed men: George H. W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. Clinton is also left-handed.

Like father, like son: George W. Bush was in the Skull and Bones society at Yale, as was his father. He was also trained as a pilot. Although he never played in the College World Series, he eventually became part-owner of the Texas Rangers.

Sources:

Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss

Warren Gamaliel Harding/Margaret Lindsay Williams, 1923/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Dwight David Eisenhower/Ernest Hamlin Baker,1945/Gouache on board/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased with funds from Rosemary L. Frankeberger

William Jefferson Clinton/Nelson Shanks,2005/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of The Boeing Company, Dr. and Mrs. Ronald I. Dozoretz, Charles H. and Eleanor M. Foster, Norma Lee and Morton Funger, Sam F. and June Hamra, Frank and Marylen Mann Jacobs, S. Lee and Rosalyn H. Kling, Ambassador and Mrs. Philip Lader, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. McLarty III, Ruesch Family Foundation, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, John and Laurie Sykes, Mallory and Diana Walker

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part II

The second in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Harding through Bush 43.

Abraham Lincoln (right) is considered by many Americans to be the greatest president; it is estimated that the Emancipation Proclamation freed 3, 500,000 slaves.

Andrew Johnson was a tailor by trade.

Ulysses S. Grant’s name given at birth was Hiram Ulysses Grant; he began calling himself Ulysses Simpson Grant after a mix-up in his application and recommendation to West Point.

Rutherford Hayes was a gutsy soldier who had four horses shot from beneath him during the Civil War.

Another of the Civil War generals who went on to become president, James Garfield was a professor of Latin and Greek before serving as either politician or soldier.

Chester Arthur hired Louis Tiffany to redecorate the White House.

Grover Cleveland’s wedding to Frances Folsom (couple shown on left) on June 2, 1886, is the only wedding of a president to occur inside the White House.  Francis F. Cleveland was a beautiful woman and the marriage did much to improve Cleveland’s image; earlier, during his first run for the presidency, he had admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock.

Benjamin Harrison was the first president to put a Christmas tree in the White House and the last president to wear a beard.

The third president to be assassinated was also the second president to die in Buffalo, New York: William McKinley.  Millard Fillmore died in Buffalo after he left office.

Valentine’s Day 1884 was perhaps the most tragic day in Theodore Roosevelt’s life; both his mother and his wife died on that day.

William Howard Taft (right) is the only president other than John Kennedy to be buried at Arlington Cemetery.

Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson received his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University and taught at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan University and Princeton.  He coached football while he was at Wesleyan.

Sources:
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss
www.whitehouse.gov/president/holiday/whtree

Abraham Lincoln/Mathew Brady, 1864/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom Cleveland/Donaldson Brothers, c. 1886-1890/Chromolithograph on paper/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of John O'Brien

William Howard Taft/William Valentine Schevill, c. 1910/Oil on artist board/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of William E. Schevill

   

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part 1

The first in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Lincoln through Wilson.

The oldest known portrait of George Washington ((left) is at Washington and Lee University; it was executed by Charles Willson Peale in 1772.

Before the recent deaths of Ronald Reagan (2004) and Gerald Ford (2006), John Adams’s lifespan was greater than that of any other president. Adams was ninety years and eight months old at his death. Both Reagan and Ford died at the age of ninety-three.

Before Lucille Ball, Thomas Jefferson was this nation’s most famous redhead.

James Madison was president when the British torched the White House in 1814; one story has it that British Admiral George Cockburn stole one of Madison’s hats before leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in flames.

James Monroe was with George Washington at the Battle of Trenton.

John Quincy Adams served in Congress for eighteen years after his presidency.

Before Andrew Jackson (right) was seventeen years old, he:

• had joined the militia
• was captured and mistreated by British troops
• served time as a prisoner of war
• received a large inheritance which he spent on gambling and drinking.

The first American-born president was Martin Van Buren; the previous seven presidents had been British subjects at birth.

William Henry Harrison was in office for one month—March 4 to April 4, 1841. His inaugural speech of one hour and forty-five minutes, which he delivered in the cold and rain, cost him his life. Harrison contracted pneumonia, and upon his death, the presidency went to. . .

John Tyler. Tyler was the first vice president to ascend to the chief executive office.

The “K” in James K. Polk’s name stood for “Knox.”  Polk (left) was the youngest man to become president and, like so many men, the responsibilities of the office wore on him. He served one term in office and he died within three months of his successor’s inauguration.

Zachary Taylor never voted before running for the presidency.

Millard Fillmore was in the White House when the first bathtub was installed. Fillmore was presented to Queen Victoria in 1855 and she believed him to be the most handsome man she had ever seen.

Franklin Pierce attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

James Buchanan was the only president who never married.

Sources:
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss

 

George Washington/Charles Wilson Peale, 1772/Oil on canvas/Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

James Madison/Chester Harding, undated/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Jackson/Trevor Thomas Fowler,1840/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Knox Polk/E. B. & E. C. Kellogg Lithography Company, c. 1846-1847/Hand-colored lithograph on paper/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Presidential Politics, 1884

“As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York,” wrote Republican candidate James G. Blaine two weeks after he had lost the presidential election of 1884, “I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat.” Thanks in no small part to an explosive remark made by the Reverend Samuel D. Burchard, Democrat Grover Cleveland had carried pivotal New York by 1,049 votes and with them the 36 electoral votes that decided the election.

A week before the November 4 election, Burchard (right), minister of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church and one of a group of several hundred clergymen, greeted Blaine at his Fifth Avenue Hotel and concluded his address by calling Democrats “the party whose antecedents have been RUM, ROMANISM and REBELLION.” Blaine, looking haggard after his six-week, 400- speech tour of the West, ignored the blatant insult to Irish Catholics and expounded on the “conclusive issue” of the campaign, the protective tariff.

In high glee, the Democratic Executive Committee—which had “watching scouts” to take down every word Blaine uttered—saw Burchard’s alliterative phrase quoted in the next day’s issue of the New York World. No time was lost in splashing it on posters and handbills for distribution throughout the city.

Three days passed before Blaine (left) distanced himself from his supporter’s offensive remark. “I have refrained carefully and instinctively from making any disrespectful allusion to the Democratic party,” he protested. In a reference to his Catholic mother, he added, “I should esteem myself of all men the most degraded if under any pressure, or under any temptation, I could in any presence make a disrespectful allusion to that ancient faith in which my mother lived and died.”

It was too late. Irish Catholic voters, who tended to like the charismatic Blaine and who appreciated his propensity to “twist the tail” of the British lion, had second thoughts about straying from the Democratic fold. Blaine afterward declared that he had won “thousands upon thousands” of Irish votes in New York and would have had many more “but for the intolerant and utterly improper remark of Dr. Burchard, which was quoted everywhere to my prejudice and in many places.” He would have carried New York by ten t housand votes, Blaine insisted, “had Dr. Burchard been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or Cochin China.”

Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine/Unidentified artist, 1884/Chromolithograph/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Milton and Ingrid Rose

Samuel Dickinson Burchard/Mathew Brady Studio, undated/Glass plate collodion negative/Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Gillespie Blaine/David H. Anderson, c. 1884/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Robert L. Drapkin

William Faulkner, born September 25, 1897

Today is the 111th anniversary of William Faulkner's birth.

William Faulkner is one of eleven Americans to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In Gustaf Hellstrom’s presentation address to the Swedish Academy in 1950, he said, “Faulkner . . . is not fascinated by men as a community but by man in the community, the individual as a final unity in himself, curiously unmoved by external conditions. . . . But Faulkner has one belief, or rather one hope: that every man sooner or later receives the punishment he deserves and that self-sacrifice not only brings with it personal happiness but also adds to the sum total of the good deeds of mankind.”

In his acceptance speech, Faulkner summarized what he believed to be the condition of man:

"I decline to accept the end of man.  It is enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.  I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.  The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Faulkner’s novels include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust, novels that tell the story of the American South many decades after the Civil War.  Faulkner’s South struggles to reinvent itself as an economically and culturally viable region, and the families of his imaginary town seat of Jefferson, within the equally imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, are families whose respective sagas reflect their collective fight against poverty, change, and loss of legacy.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897, and died on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner's former home "Rowan Oak" in Oxford, Mississippi (photo by Warren Perry).

Faulkner's grave (left) in St. Peter's Cemetery, Oxford, Mississippi. He is buried next to his wife, Estelle (photo by Warren Perry).  

William Cuthbert Faulkner/Robert Vickrey,, 1964/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine   

Anne Catharine Green: A Colonial Lady at the Newspaper Helm

Precious few are the portraits of colonial newspaper editors, that blessed band who did so much to pave the way toward American independence.

Of equal rarity are images of the handful of colonial women who rated distinction on their own merit. On two counts then, Charles Willson Peale’s depiction of Anne Catharine Green (c. 1720–1775)—editor of the Maryland Gazette and public printer to the province of Maryland—is a portrait of unusual interest. This portrait is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the museum’s “American Origins” exhibition on the first floor. 

Born in Holland, Anne Catharine Hoof married former Benjamin Franklin apprentice Jonas Green in 1738. She moved with him to Annapolis, where he became printer to the province and in 1745 revived the defunct Maryland Gazette. Her husband’s printing office (the site of an archeological dig in the 1980s) was behind their dwelling, which still stands on Charles Street. Mrs. Green, in addition to bearing fourteen children (six of whom lived to grow up), was a participant in her husband’s business affairs, capable of carrying them on should the need arise.

Jonas Green died on April 11, 1767, and his widow, noting that she was “almost destitute of Support,” told subscribers to the Gazette “I flatter myself, that, with your kind Indulgence and Encouragement,” she would continue the newspaper and stood ready to print advertisements. Fulfilling her husband’s contract with the government, she saw to it that the Acts and Votes and Proceedings of the Maryland Assembly was finished, as promised, by the last day of April. (A year later, she would be awarded the contract in her own name.)

The widow Green began her tenure when the colonies were in political ferment over the Townshend duties imposed on glass, lead, painter’s colors, paper, and tea; death ended her task a month before shots rang out on Lexington Green. In addition to providing national and foreign news, she gave space to all parties in local controversies, undeterred by a threat to wreck her press. Looking beyond polemics, she instigated a “Poet's Corner” and, despite the torrent of political happenings, managed to wedge in essays on topics such as the advantage of a liberal education.

Anne Catharine Green’s obituary, published in the March 30, 1775, edition of the Maryland Gazette, identified her as the widow of the late Mr. Jonas Greene, lauding her only as a wife and mother: “She was of a mild and benevolent Disposition, and for conjugal Affection and parental Tenderness, an Example of her Sex.” But Charles Willson Peale—showing her not with a book or a flower or needlework, but rather with her newspaper in hand—indicates that she was a professional woman as well.

Anne Catharine Hoof Green by Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), oil on canvas, 1769. Gallery purchase with funding from the Smithsonian Collections Acquisitions Program and gift from the Governor’s Mansion Foundation of Maryland

Dorie Miller: Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents “Face-to-Face,” a portrait talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this regular series, NPG historian James Barber discussed a poster portrait of World War II navy hero Dorie Miller. You can see this portrait in the museum's exhibition, “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” through February 8, 2009. 

Born on Columbus Day 1919, Doris “Dorie” Miller grew up in Waco, Texas, where he played fullback on the high school football team. In September 1939, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a mess attendant, third class.  The following January he was assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia and soon became the ship’s heavyweight boxing champion. Miller was aboard the West Virginia at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. He was assigned to help carry wounded sailors on deck to safer locations before taking control of an unattended antiaircraft gun, which he loaded and fired at enemy planes until he ran out of ammunition.

For his bravery, Dorie Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, becoming the first African-American sailor to win this high honor. In 1942, he was recruited to go on tour to sell war bonds, and his name and face became well known. Miller, later a messman on the USS Liscombe Bay, was killed when the aircraft carrier sank in the Pacific in November 1943.

This 1943 poster of Miller by David Stone Martin was based on a photograph and was used by the Navy as a recruiting poster.

For more on posters visit the online exhibition for “Ballyhoo! Posters As Portraiture” and view the audio slideshow below, narrated by the exhibition’s curator, Wendy Wick Reaves. 

Dorie Miller/David Stone Martin, 1943/Color photolithographic poster with halftone/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rachel Carson: Biologist, Writer, Ecologist

In a 1962 Life magazine profile of Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the former government biologist claimed “no wish to start a Carrie Nation crusade” with the publication of her new book, Silent Spring. A private and soft-spoken individual, Carson possessed a temperament wholly different than that of the famous hatchet-wielding temperance leader.

Yet in envisioning a future where the sounds of spring are absent, Silent Spring provoked a heated controversy about the unrestricted use of chemical pesticides. Her writings—and later congressional testimony—would lead not only to the banning of DDT and other poisonous agents, but would precipitate broad changes in the public’s understanding of and appreciation for the delicate relationship between mankind and the natural environment.

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s portrait (above)—published alongside Carson’s Life profile and recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery—shows the fifty-five-year-old Carson behind a microscope at her Silver Spring, Maryland, home. Although it was her lyricism as a writer that made her books national best-sellers, Carson was always proud of her work as a scientist.

In 1936, when she accepted her first full-time job, as a marine biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she was one of only two female professionals at the agency. Throughout her career, Carson remained dedicated to field research and ever curious about the natural world around her.

Although she was an acclaimed writer before the publication of Silent Spring, having won a National Book Award in 1951 for The Sea Around Us, it was her investigation into the harm of man-made pollutants in Silent Spring that placed her at the center of a national battle between the chemical industry and a growing legion of environmental supporters.

Likening the effects of pesticides to those of atomic radiation, she stated, “I wrote the book because I think there is a great danger that the next generation will have no chance to know nature as we do—if we don’t preserve it the damage will be irreversible.” Adversaries soon lined up to contest her findings.

Despite fifty-five pages of scientific endnotes, many characterized her as a “hysterical woman” and accused her of lacking scientific credentials; a former Department of Agriculture secretary even labeled her a Communist. Yet President John F. Kennedy took notice and called for a further investigation of the issues the book raised. Before a Senate subcommittee, Carson reiterated that environmental pollution is one of the “major problems of modern life.”

A subsequent special report confirmed her findings and helped pave the way for dramatic changes in the use of pesticides. DDT—developed during World War II and widely used in domestic agriculture—was eventually banned in the United States, in 1972.

 “It’s always so easy to assume that someone else is taking care of things,” Carson reflected about her experience. “People say, ‘We wouldn’t be allowed to use these things if they were dangerous.’ It just isn’t so. Trusting so-called authority is not enough. A sense of personal responsibility is what we desperately need.”

While Carson never anticipated becoming a nationally renowned figure, her search for truth highlighted the ecological impact of new technologies and provoked others to action. Tragically, Carson died of breast cancer only eighteen months after Silent Spring’s publication.

Two of Rachel Carson’s portraits are currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery: a photograph (top) by Alfred Eisenstaedt on display in the "New Arrivals" exhibition, and a portrait bust (above) in the "20th Century Americans" gallery, by Una Hanbury.  More on Rachel Carson can be found at RachelCarson.org.

Rachel Louise Carson/Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1962/Gelatin silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rachel Louise Carson/Una Hanbury,1965/Bronze/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Everett Dirksen: Forgotten Civil Rights Champion

June 10, 1964, was a dramatic day in the United States Senate. For the first time in its history, cloture was invoked on a civil rights bill, ending a record-breaking filibuster that had consumed fifty-seven working days. The hero of the hour was minority leader Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.).

Dirksen, who had little support among Chicago’s black voters and who had been picketed at his home by rights activists, took pains to point out that he was “no Johnny-come lately” to civil rights legislation. During his sixteen years in the House of Representatives, he had voted for anti-poll-tax and anti-lynching measures. In the Senate he had sponsored or cosponsored scores of bills dealing with civil rights. But as an omnibus civil rights bill began to near passage in the House early in 1964, Dirksen, a pragmatic legislator and a consummate compromiser, realized that its provisions were too drastic for passage in the Senate.

In February, when he entered the hospital, afflicted with a bleeding ulcer, he took his dog-eared copy of the House bill with him, poring over it line by line and drawing up a list of conciliatory changes. During the spring, with the help of legal experts, he began to rewrite the bill, suggesting almost seventy amendments, many technical but others of substance. “I have a fixed pole star,” he said in April. “This is, first, to get a bill; second to get an acceptable bill; third, to get a workable bill; and, finally, to get an equitable bill.”

In the beginning, Dirksen could only guarantee that twelve to fourteen of his thirty-three Republicans would join with floor manager Hubert Humphrey’s solid forty-one Democrats, leaving the total short of the sixty-seven votes necessary to shut down the southern Democrats. “The key,” said majority leader Mike Mansfield, “is Dirksen.” Dirksen himself acknowledged, “Getting cloture is going to be as difficult as hell.” He went to his members one by one, pleading with them, appealing to their moral sensibilities, reminding them of past favors, and warning of more civil unrest, exercising his beguiling talents to their fullest effect.

By June 10, the stage was set. The Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert C. Byrd, sat down after speaking for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia summed up for the southern opposition. Senator Dirksen then took the floor. “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come,” he said, quoting Victor Hugo in his basso profundo voice. “The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”

Dirksen produced twenty-three Republican votes to make a total of sevemty—three votes beyond the necessary two-thirds to break the filibuster (the final tally was 71–29). Swift passage of the civil rights bill followed, and the House, rather than argue, accepted the Senate version. On July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law a bill that banned discrimination in public facilities, provided voting rights protection, and established equal opportunity as the law of the land.

Time magazine noted when Dirksen appeared on the cover of the June 19, 1964 issue, “it is Dirksen’s bill, bearing his handiwork more than anyone else’s.” That cover, by Robert Vickrey, the accomplished painter in egg tempera, is part of the Time collection of artwork that was presented to the National Portrait Gallery in 1978.

Everett McKinley Dirksen/Robert Vickrey, 1964/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Phelps Fever: Portrait of Michael Phelps at NPG

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. . . .It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Michael Phelps! Olympic superhero Michael Phelps accomplished what he came to Beijing to do: he became the first athlete to win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad.

His dominance was unprecedented, and even otherworldly—perhaps he was born on the planet Krypton? Well, Baltimore, actually, in 1985. Five of Phelps’s wins were in individual events, and he broke seven world records overall. Counting the six gold and two bronze he won at Athens in 2004, Phelps has now collected a total of sixteen Olympic medals.

To help celebrate this historic athletic achievement, a large chromogenic print of Phelps, taken by photographer Ryan McGinley, has been installed on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery’s north wing. McGinley photographed the members of the 2004 United States Olympic swim team for a special edition of the New York Times Magazine; this photograph of Phelps was featured prominently. It will be on view at NPG through January 2009. 

Physically, the 6’4” Phelps is unique: he has an incredibly long arm span of 6’7” that boosts propulsion, an elongated torso that eliminates drag, and size-fourteen feet-flippers that allow him to undulate through the water like a wave.

For the moment, Phelps says that “every day it seems like I’m in sort of a dream world,” but his longer goal is to continue “to raise the bar a bit more in the world of swimming.”

Michael Phelps/Ryan McGinley, 2004/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Lyndon Baines Johnson, born August 27, 1908

August 27, 2008, marks the one-hundredth birthday of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One after the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and served as chief executive during one of the more trying times of the republic.  This presidential portrait of Johnson was painted by artist Peter Hurd in 1967; it is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the "America's Presidents" exhibition. 

Known for his up-close and abrasive tactics of persuasion and administration, Lyndon Johnson’s management style was not dissimilar to his lifestyle. At his ranch in Texas, LBJ enjoyed strong-arming guests into going deer hunting; among those guests were John F. Kennedy and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, neither of whom enjoyed his outdoor excursion with the big Texan.

Late in his administration, the nation seemed to be coming apart in front of him, and Johnson decided to forego running for a second term, telling America his decision in his famous “I shall not seek, and I will not accept” speech of March 31, 1967. Johnson died at his home near Stonewall, Texas, on January 22, 1973.   

"Johnson’s legacy will continue to be a matter of historical debate. But whatever future biographers may say about him, I am confident that his impact on the country beginning in the 1930’s and lasting until the end of the 1960’s, when he left the national scene, will be remembered as considerable."

Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President

"May 18 [1961]—Kitty and I arrived in Bangkok about 4 P.M. in moist and incredible heat. . . . At six, I had a meeting with the State Department officials accompanying the Vice-President. The situation is full of despair. The Department people are at their wits’ end with Johnson. Johnson’s people are similarly furious with the Department. Johnson, in the Department’s view, won’t adhere to schedule; he identifies diplomacy with a campaign tour; and he is oblivious to the necessities and niceties expected of any visitor from abroad. In the opposite view, he has been loaded with an excessive schedule by people who are more concerned with protocol than performance, are not very efficient and do not appreciate a forthright approach to people. Evidently, I have some work cut out for me."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years

"When we arrived in Cleveland [during the presidential campaign of autumn 1964], I went up to LBJ’s room. The president was lying on one of the beds in his suite, and Jack Valenti was there as well. They were talking about how Lady Bird’s train-trip campaign swing through the Southern states was going. Something displeased the president while I was in the room, and I became an awkward witness to a scene I wouldn’t soon forget. He suddenly turned on Jack and laid him out savagely , the unpleasantness exacerbated by being delivered in front of a relative stranger. It was quite callous and inhuman, something I have never witnessed before or since. I had heard about LBJ’s temper but had never seen it in action; Jack, however, was used to these tantrums and remained unflustered while I squirmed. I escaped as quickly as possible."

Katharine Graham, Personal History

"In his address to the joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States. He revealed an amazing understanding of the depth and dimension of the problem of racial justice. His tone and delivery were sincere. He rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation. He declared that the national government must by law insure every Negro his full rights as a citizen."

Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson

"Because of Vietnam, we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. . . . Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam."

Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union Address, January 12, 1966

"The liberal distrust of LBJ’s domestic policies was not fatal. The Waterloo came over Vietnam. LBJ got the full blame for this war, although what he did was to carry out and implement the policies of his predecessor. And he got no credit for the liberal domestic programs."

Walter Trohan, Political Animals

Lyndon Baines Johnson/Peter Hurd, 1967/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist/Frame conserved with funds from the Smithsonian Women's Committee

Elvis and Isaac: The Memphis Music Legacy

On August 16, 1977 the eyes of the world turned to Memphis, Tennessee, as the news broke that Elvis Presley was dead at the age of forty-two. This portrait of Elvis is on view in National Portrait Gallery's "Bravo!" exhibition, and was painted by artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan, during the years 1976 to 1988.  In a 2006 letter to NPG, Mr. Cowan told of the portrait:

It wasn’t until the early 1960s when I was asked to open the first portrait-painting studio at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.  It was then that Elvis walked in—put his hands across the door and said, “You can’t get away from me this time. . .and I’ll wear whatever you want!” I started drawing him that night on a blank 48 inch, circular canvas that was adandoned when you told me he preferred the full-length size.  When the full-length painting was finished, Elvis came by and personally carried the four-foot by seven-foot painting across Las Vegas Blvd to his room at the Aladdin Hotel where he always stayed. . . .

After Elvis died…I was able to restore and repair the circular Elvis portrait.  As you can see, I added the red shirt and blue sky to make it different from the Graceland painting. . . .I’ve heard from clients who have seen the portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery that it gets great attention.  For that I am very happy. 

Last week, as legions of Elvis fans gathered in Memphis for the thirty-first annual candlelight vigil outside of Graceland, the world had already been reminded of the power of Memphis music with the passing of Isaac Hayes on August 10.  A multiple Grammy winner, Hayes also won an Oscar for the soundtrack of the 1971 blacksploitation film Shaft.  Most recently, he endeared himself to a new generation, voicing the role of “Chef” on the animated series South Park.   

The impact of Memphis music on the world scene cannot be overestimated; Memphis, Tennessee is to music as nineteenth-century Paris is to art.  In 2000, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History installed a permanent music exhibition in Memphis in the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum; NMAH curator Charlie McGovern noted that “it’s the first time the Smithsonian has created an entire exhibition and turned it over to the community where it began.”  The exhibition, “Rock ‘n’ Soul: Social Crossroads,” is a narrative of Memphis music history and is located at the historic corner of Beale Street and Highway 61.  A later study by the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum declared that city name Memphis is mentioned in more song lyrics than any other city on earth.    

There is no such thing as a single, stylized Memphis sound; Memphis music stretches across all the disciplines of modern music and occupies space in rock and roll, country and western, rhythm and blues, rap, hip-hop, and pop.  Among the names Memphis claims are the Box Tops, the Gentrys, Charlie Rich, Otis Redding, the BarKays, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T and the MG’s, the early Sun Studio artists, Aretha Franklin, and WC Handy.  Both Led Zeppelin and REM have recorded at Memphis’ Ardent studio, which also serves as home base for ZZ Top. 

Listen here and learn more about the Memphis sound, from NPG Researcher Warren Perry (8:30)

For more on the Rock 'n' Soul museum, be sure to see their website.

 

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

Ethel Merman: Queen of the American Musical Stage

In this blog post, Amy Henderson, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, discusses Ethel Merman, and her 1971 portrait by artist Rosemarie Sloat.  The portrait is currently on view at NPG, in the "Bravo!" exhibition, on the museum’s third floor mezzanine.

It was one of the most riveting moments of my life—the day I strolled into my office and found myself face-to-face with Ethel Merman. The Queen of the American Musical Stage was not there to visit me, needless to say, but to pay homage to the larger-than-life portrait that hung on my wall. The portrait was enormous, more than seven feet high, and depicted La Merman outfitted in fringe and toting a gun for one of her best-known roles, as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Dressed this day in a subdued suit and with her hair swirled into a light brown cloud, Merman stood enraptured by the painting.

There were tears in her eyes when she turned to me as I tiptoed into the room, trying not to interrupt—well, actually, I was trying not to jump up and down and scream “Wow!! You’re Ethel Merman!!!” Her voice was soft as she said, “I love this picture.” But it was definitely The Voice.

It was the same voice that had catapulted her to overnight stardom in the Gershwins’ 1930 Broadway musical, Girl Crazy. When she sang “I Got Rhythm” on opening night, she stopped the show: “I held a high C note for sixteen bars while the orchestra played the melodic line—a big, tooty thing—against the note. By the time I’d held that note for four bars the audience was applauding. . . .” They kept applauding, and she did several encores. “When I finished that song,” she recalled, “a star had been born. Me.”

Her vibrant personality and clarion voice reverberated through Broadway’s greatest years, and America’s leading composers adored her. Cole Porter once said, “I’d rather write songs for Ethel Merman than anyone else in the world,” and songwriters from the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne agreed. Merman thought it was because she was always true to the lyrics—“I sing honest. Loud, but honest.”

Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun was a defining role for her, providing the anthem that became her signature song, “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Opening at the Imperial Theatre on May 16, 1946, Annie Get Your Gun ran for 1,147 performances. Twenty years after Annie’s premiere, Merman starred in a highly successful revival at Lincoln Center. She became so closely identified with the role that when her portrait was painted for a 1971 Gallery exhibition, “Portraits of the American Stage,” she chose to be depicted as Annie Oakley.

Artist Rosemarie Sloat was selected to paint her, and she began by sketching Merman in her dressing room at the St. James Theatre after a matinee performance of Hello, Dolly! Sloat reported that she was extremely cooperative—“She’s a warm, wonderful woman and she talks constantly.”

For the portrait, Sloat used her palette knife to layer stars, spangles, and fringe with hills and valleys of paint. And to create the filigreed curtains and embroidery effect for the Annie costume, she squeezed swirls and gobs of acrylic directly from tube onto canvas. The three-dimensional metallic texture showcases the brassy Merman stage personality—so much so that Merman suggested the portrait be used as the cover illustration for the Annie Get Your Gun cast recording.

Indeed, Ethel Merman was so fond of this portrait that when she heard that a search was on for a donor, she bought it herself and presented it to the National Portrait Gallery. It is the only life portrait of Ethel Merman ever done.

Ethel Merman/Rosemarie Sloat, 1971/Oil and acrylic on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ethel Merman

Herein Hangs a Tale: The Bache Silhouette Book

In the 1920s, Alice Van Leer Carrick, the pioneering authority on American silhouettes, came upon an album kept by William Bache (1771–1845) as a record of his work and expressed her delight in “turning the pages of this century-old treasure-trove of nearly two thousand shadow portraits.”

There she found images of Chancellor George Wythe, President Thomas Jefferson, and Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, as well as “hundreds of other profiles of everyday people, less well-known, but equally well cut; all of them vivid and interesting.” This duplicate book of 1,846 images, which had long remained in the hands of Bache descendants, came to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Prints and Drawings Wendy Wick Reaves and was acquired in 2001.

Research on Bache—first heard from with his patented physiognotrace (a profiletracing apparatus) at Baltimore in 1803 and who subsequently traveled to Virginia, New Orleans, Cuba, and New England—is ongoing. Research on the scores of men, women, and children who seized the opportunity to have their shadows cut is also under way, and many of them have stories evocative of the era in which they lived.

Bache identifies number 361 in the album as “Col Butler"(shown on right): Thomas Butler, a Revolutionary War soldier and Indian fighter, and an officer in the U.S. Army. He was—when he gave up a few minutes of his time and one dollar to secure “four correct likenesses” of himself from Bache—in trouble because he refused to cut his hair and give up his queue.

On April 30, 1801, the commanding general of the army, James Wilkinson (Bache number 216), had issued an order requiring all military men to crop their hair, and Butler was among the many conservative officers who chose to ignore a decree that not only infringed on personal preference but also carried with it an association with the radicals of the French Revolution.

Butler, a law student before he became a professional soldier, pronounced the order “impertinent, arbitrary and illegal.” He was court-martialed in 1803, found guilty, and reprimanded. When he was subsequently transferred to New Orleans, General Wilkinson hoped that, in the interest of preventing “trouble, perplexity and further injury to the service,” Butler would “leave his tail behind him.”

Butler arrived in New Orleans on October 4, 1804, his pigtail intact. He was arrested and in February formally charged with “willful, obstinate and continual disobedience.” An indignant Butler continued to insist that he considered the order to crop his hair “an arbitrary infraction of my natural rights.”

A military tribunal was convened on July 1, 1805, and from St. Louis, Wilkinson instructed the commanding general at New Orleans to make those who would sit in judgment of Butler aware “that the President of the United States, without any public expression, has thought proper to adopt our fashion of the hair cropping.” (Bache shows Jefferson in 1804 with a dangling queue.)

On September 7, while awaiting the final outcome of his trial, Butler died at his nephew’s plantation a few miles above New Orleans. He told his friends he wanted his queue displayed at his funeral. “Bore a hole through the bottom of my coffin right under my head,” he directed, “and let my queue hang
through it,—that the d---d old rascal [Wilkinson] may see that, even when dead, I refuse to obey his orders.” There was no evidence that this was done, but thanks to William Bache, Butler’s pigtail has remained in full view down through the ages.

Various Sitters/Ledger book of William Bache, with associated pieces, c. 1803-1812/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; partial gift of Sarah Bache Bloise

Portrait of Frank O’ Hara by Larry Rivers

            © Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Early in the morning of July 24, 1966, a summertime party at a beach house on Fire Island, Long Island, began to break up. As the revelers started to drift home, the poet and art curator Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) walked out onto the beach and was hit by a speeding dune buggy. He died the next day.

Frank O’Hara’s greatest memorial is his Collected Poems, but he also quickly received an artistic homage from his friend and collaborator, artist Larry Rivers. From 1957 to 1960, Rivers and O’Hara had worked together on a project called Stones, a lithographic marriage of the visual and the verbal.

For his memorial portrait of O’Hara, Larry Rivers created this work, called Frank O’Hara Reading, which is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. The piece used a characteristic technique of collage and multimedia, verbal and visual, in way that evoked his dead friend’s own poetic technique. Rivers took his central image of the poet from Fred McDarrah’s photograph of a 1959 reading; the black-and- white picture is colored and includes images of Leroi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, and Ray Bremser, who were also at the event.

O’Hara had had some minor successes as a poet during his lifetime, but he was best known in New York City’s cultural world as an instigator: bridging the worlds of art, poetry, and society; sparking ideas; initiating projects; and stoking creative energies through his charismatic personality. A friend and collaborator of artists of the New York School, O’Hara was dubbed “the poet among painters,” but he was generally seen as only a minor figure in a circle that extended from Jackson Pollock to Larry Rivers.

Yet when O’Hara’s literary executors Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery cleaned out his apartment, they were astonished to find file after file overflowing with poems. Ashbery introduced The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara in 1971 by saying that it would surprise everyone—“and would have surprised Frank even more”—to discover a volume of nearly five hundred pages.

Ashbery accounted for this in O’Hara’s method: “Dashing the poems off at odd moments—in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people—he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.”

O’Hara was not an occasional poet or an amateur: he was deeply committed to his art, but he believed poetry was an instantaneous act, one that occurred between “two people, not two pages.” What O’Hara’s poetry needed to spark him into life was the city: the cacophony of daily life in all its ordinary glory. O’Hara made it a point to write a poem every lunch hour, based on his purposefully aimless walks around New York, and he had published a book called Lunch Poems in 1964.

Superficially, his poems were about nothing much in particular, and with characteristic modesty he called them his “I do this, I do that” poems. But O’Hara’s quirky eye for the telling detail turned these ephemeral jottings into art; his seductively deceptive lines would build to a moment of recognition or an emotional punch.

In his portrait of O’ Hara, Larry Rivers created a curving stream of words caught between two blue embankments made of construction paper. In the midst of life and art’s river, the print quotes the opening lines of “To a Poet,” a work that O’Hara wrote, with characteristic generosity, to praise an emerging writer named John Wieners.

O’Hara limns the young poet’s ecstatic discovery of his art and then his perfection of it:

Two years later he has possessed
     his beautiful style,
the meaning of which draws him further down
     into passion. . .

“Drawn down into passion”: It is almost as if O’Hara was writing about himself.

Frank O’ Hara/Larry Rivers, 1967/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/© Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

He’s in the News and He’s in the NPG Collection . . .

His records top the columns of all of the quarterback records in the almanac. He won two consecutive NFL Most Valuable Player Awards and shared a third. And he received a Super Bowl ring after leading the Green Bay Packers to victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXI in 1997. And although he has won many games with excellent passing and smart leadership during the two-minute drill, he has also blown a few playoff games with eleventh-hour interceptions.

He holds the record for consecutive starts by an NFL quarterback and has not missed a day of work since 1992; simply put, this, one of his many superlatives, places Brett Favre in the same tier as such athletes as Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripken Jr.

He is, arguably, one of the most exciting players who ever led a football team. On Monday night, December 22, 2003, he threw for four touchdowns and 399 yards against the Oakland Raiders, a day after the death of his father. This performance is considered by many to be one of the most poignant and dramatic moments in football history.

Brett Favre can be found in the National Portrait Gallery's online collection.

Brett Favre by Rick Chapman/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Gift of Rick Chapman and ESPN/ © 2001 Rick Chapman

The Forgotten Fame of Florence Mills

Florence Mills, whose name is now almost unknown, reigned over the 1920s as one of the most popular and sensational African American performers of the Jazz Age. When she sang, her beautiful, birdlike voice momentarily transcended the era’s racial barriers and left audiences of all colors enthralled.

This striking 1924 photograph of Mills, dramatically lit by a spotlight, highlights Edward Steichen’s mastery of light. Mills is wearing a costume from Dixie to Broadway, and her face is animated. A hat conceals her signature slick bobbed hair, which was imitated by Londoners and New Yorkers alike. Mills and actor and activist Paul Robeson were the only two African Americans whom Steichen photographed for full-page spreads in America’s most fashionable magazine, Vanity Fair. This original photograph, the issue of Vanity Fair in which it appeared, and other Steichen photographs are on display at the National Portrait Gallery, now through September 1 in “Edward Steichen: Portraits.”

Mills was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896. She showed talent as a toddler, made her professional debut at age seven, and soon became a fixture on the African American vaudeville circuit. The lead in 1921’s Shuffle Along brought Mills instant stardom and success in Harlem. A year later, The Plantation Revue opened on Broadway, exposing Mills’s talents to the theatrical community at large. Demand for Mills was insatiable and far-reaching, and she performed in Paris and London for the next two years.

The revue From Dixie to Broadway, starring Mills, became the first African American musical comedy to play on a Broadway stage. Next came Blackbirds, a revue written especially for Mills, which brought her immense renown throughout Europe. The Prince of Wales saw the show more than sixteen times, calling Mills “ripping.” Poet James Weldon Johnson said of “Little Twinks,” as she was affectionately known, “She could be risqué, she could be seductive; but it was impossible for her to be vulgar, for she possessed a naïveté that was alchemic. As a pantomimist and a singing and dancing comedienne she had no superior in any place or any race” (Black Manhattan, p. 199).

Sadly, Blackbirds was cut short as the thirty-two-year-old returned to Harlem to undergo surgery for appendicitis in late 1927. She died soon after the operation. Response to her death was overwhelming, with an estimated 150,000 mourners lining the streets of Harlem during her funeral procession.

Regrettably, no vocal recordings of Mills exist, and she died too early in her career to establish an ongoing legacy with students. These factors have caused the once-bright star to fade into near obscurity. The National Portrait Gallery’s curator of photographs, Ann Shumard, was immediately attracted to this lively image of Mills when she encountered it in a photography dealer’s inventory. After researching Mills’s biography, Shumard recognized the importance of adding the entertainer’s portrait to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection and was able to acquire it for the museum.

Florence Mills/Edward Steichen, 1924/Published in Vanity Fair, February 1925/National Portrait Gallery/ © The Estate of Edward Steichen/Joanna T. Steichen

Happy 212th Birthday to George Catlin!

George Catlin, born July 26, 1796, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, went west in 1830 and spent eight years painting portraits of Native Americans. The pictorial and written record of his travels constitutes one of the most remarkable archives of the Plains Indians ever assembled.

From his Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians, Catlin records:

I have visited forty-eight different tribes, the greater part of which I found speaking different languages, and containing in all 400,000 souls. I have brought home safe, and in good order, 310 portraits in oil, all painted in their native dress, and in their own wigwams; and also 200 other paintings in oil, containing views of their villages—their wigwams—their games and religious ceremonies—their dances—their ball plays—their buffalo hunting, and other amusements (containing in all, over 3000 full-length figures); and the landscapes of the country they live in, as well as a very extensive and curious collection of costumes, and all their other manufactures, from the size of a wigwam down to the size of a quill or a rattle.

Catlin then toured Europe with these paintings over the better part of the next three decades. Shortly after his death in 1872, hundreds of his works became the property of the Smithsonian Institution.

This portrait of George Catlin, painted by William Fisk in 1849, is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. It is currently on display in the neighboring Smithsonian American Art Museum, along with a gallery of Catlin's paintings. You can browse George Catlin’s landscapes, portraits, and other works on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s online collection. 

George Catlin/William Fisk, 1849/National Portrait Gallery; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of Miss May C. Kinney, Ernest C. Kinney and Bradford Wickes, 1945