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DADS OF DEMOCRACY
Dads of Democracy
Abraham Lincoln presided over the bloodiest conflict in American history, preserved the union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, delivered the Gettysburg Address in 272 words, and was assassinated at Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender. He is America's secular saint, the gaunt, melancholic face, the stovepipe hat, the moral gravity of 620,000 deaths carried in a single frame. Every major portraitist renders him in solemn darkness. He is almost always painted as if the weight of the country lives permanently behind his eyes. Which, for four years, it did.
DeWitt painted Lincoln in the style of Romero Britto, the Brazilian born Miami artist whose gallery on Lincoln Rd. was next door to where DeWitt worked while living in Miami. DeWitt was inspired by Britto's story and the liberating simplicity of his style. The result is Lincoln rendered in primary colored jubilation, the most shadowed face in American history given the sunniest treatment in the collection. Whether this is irony or transcendence or both is left entirely to the viewer. It is unquestionably Miami.
Andrew Jackson was a man of violent contradictions. A war hero who won the Battle of New Orleans against impossible odds, a champion of the common white man against Eastern elites, and the founder of the modern Democratic Party, he was also a slaveholder, and the architect of the Indian Removal Act, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans on the deadly Trail of Tears. He survived an assassination attempt. He destroyed the Second Bank of the United States through sheer personal will. History cannot decide what to do with him, and it probably never will.
Jackson is painted like a fire storm, electric streaks of orange, red, and yellow that read as crackling flames. His shadowed face burns with fierce, glowing eyes. DeWitt's growing boldness in the series produced a portrait equal to the subject: raw, confrontational, and impossible to look away from.
Andrew Johnson is the worst president to have held office at a pivotal moment in American history, and history has not forgiven him. Assuming the presidency after Lincoln's assassination, he wielded his executive power against the project of Reconstruction with breathtaking consistency: vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposing the Fourteenth Amendment, and systematically undermining federal protection for formerly enslaved Americans in the South. He was impeached by the House of Representatives and escaped removal by the Senate by a single vote. The damage he did to Reconstruction, and to the lives of millions of Black Americans, endured for a century.
DeWitt is explicit about his feelings: "Johnson was a president I read about and disliked. Is it apparent?" It is. This is an experiment in extreme light and shadow, no middle tones, no ambiguity: it is the visual register of a man who saw the most morally complex moment in American history in absolute, unforgiving black and white.
Barack Obama's election in 2008 was a seismic event in American history, the first Black president of the United States, elected by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years. He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, passed the Affordable Care Act (the most significant expansion of health coverage since Medicare), ordered the military raid that killed Osama bin Laden, navigated the Arab Spring, and guided the country through a slow but genuine economic recovery. His campaign was also a historic exercise in disciplined, repetitive, algorithmically sophisticated messaging, "Hope" and "Change," deployed with near mechanical consistency across every medium.
DeWitt noticed Obama's methodical, almost robotic consistency and gave him a robot bust and a metal face. The portrait draws on the visual language of machine age modernism, where the human figure is reconstructed through industrial forms. The robot wears a wig reminiscent of the Founding Fathers, the future dressed in the past's costume, a new country inhabiting old constitutional forms. With Obama's election, DeWitt says, "it felt like a new country, a new era and a new beginning for the U.S." The Founding Father's wig is not ironic. It is a lineage claim: the first Black president as heir to the republic's founding promise, finally and belatedly made real.
Benjamin Harrison won the presidency in 1888 while losing the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, then lost the popular vote and the presidency to that same Grover Cleveland four years later, becoming the filling in a Cleveland sandwich. His aides reportedly called him a "human iceberg" for his cold, formal manner. Yet his single term was genuinely productive: he admitted six states to the union in one year, signed the Sherman Antitrust Act that would later power Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting, and began the modernization of the U.S. Navy. He was also the grandson of William Henry Harrison, making theirs the only grandfather-grandson presidential pair in American history.
The aggressive, thick, and unblended brushstrokes give the portrait a sense of raw, underlying power. It moves away from Gilded Age politeness and leans into the rugged, industrial, and disruptive era that Harrison's legislation helped usher in. "Harrison was called the 'human iceberg' for his cold formal manner. I wanted the portrait to make stiffness visually interesting."
Bill Clinton presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history, balanced the federal budget, expanded NATO, passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, and navigated the post Cold War world with formidable policy intelligence. He was also impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice related to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the second president in American history to be impeached. He was acquitted by the Senate. He remains one of the most paradoxical figures in American political life: a man of extraordinary gifts and catastrophic judgment, whose political genius and personal recklessness operated at identical magnitudes.
For Clinton's portrait, DeWitt used no brushes and no palette knives. He squeezed paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, the most unmediated relationship between material and surface possible.
"Silent Cal" was famous for saying as little as possible. When a society hostess told him she had bet she could get him to say more than two words, he replied: "You lose." His philosophy of governance matched his personality, he slashed taxes, shrank the federal budget, and believed that the best thing Washington could do was get out of the way. He was the only president born on the Fourth of July, a coincidence he took as meaningful. His single voluntary act of dramatic restraint, announcing "I do not choose to run" for re election in 1928, left the door open for Herbert Hoover and the catastrophe that followed.
DeWitt's attraction to art making was inspired by the interior psychological states of surrealists. Coolidge's inner world was precisely what he refused to give the public.
Chester Arthur reportedly owned eighty pairs of trousers. He refused to move into the White House until it was completely redecorated to his standards, hiring Louis Comfort Tiffany, the era's leading decorative artist, to redesign the state rooms. He was, in short, the Gilded Age's most impeccable dandy. He was also, to nearly everyone's surprise, a genuine reformer. The man who had built his career on the corrupt spoils system of political patronage signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which destroyed that same system and replaced it with merit based federal employment. He also vetoed the Chinese Exclusion Act on constitutional grounds, though Congress overrode him. The machine politician became the reform president. No one saw it coming, least of all the machine.
DeWitt names this one of his personal favorites in the series, and his intent was explicit: capture Arthur's reputation as a sharp dresser who transformed the White House into a showpiece.
Donald Trump is the only person in American history to serve two non consecutive terms as president since Grover Cleveland, and the only president to have been impeached twice, acquitted twice, convicted of felony charges by a state court, and then elected president again. His first term was defined by tax cuts, the dismantling of regulatory frameworks, a trade war with China, an unprecedented diplomatic opening with North Korea, and a contested 2020 election whose outcome he refused to concede, culminating in the January 6th, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. His return to the White House in 2025 is the most remarkable political comeback in modern American history.
Trump was painted 10 years after DeWitt's last presidential portrait. Honoring the original intent of expanding in new directions with each painting, he used a material he had never used before: gold leaf. Gold leaf carries one of the longest and most specific lineages in art history. Trump's personal brand is built on gold: gold lobbies, gold fixtures, gold lettering, the self made iconography of conspicuous luxury.
Dwight Eisenhower defeated Nazi Germany as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and then, as president, warned the American public against the "military industrial complex", the very machine he had commanded. That farewell address is one of the most prescient speeches in American political history. He built the Interstate Highway System (partly justified as military infrastructure), sent federal troops to desegregate Little Rock's schools, oversaw the Korean armistice, and navigated the early Cold War with steadiness that his more excitable successors struggled to match. He also approved the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, a decision whose consequences are still unfolding.
DeWitt selected a palette of wheat and corn to represent Eisenhower's Kansas origins, then layered circular camouflage-like forms across the image to represent his military background. The result brings two identities into uneasy balance: the farmer and the general, the heartland and the war machine. Eisenhower spent his presidency trying to keep those forces from consuming each other.
Franklin Roosevelt served more than twelve years as president, longer than anyone before or since. He guided the United States through the Great Depression and the Second World War, both of which might have destroyed the republic. The New Deal created Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, the WPA, rural electrification, and the regulatory framework of the modern American economy. He led from a wheelchair, having been paralyzed by polio, concealing the full extent of his disability with the cooperation of the press, a fact known to Washington insiders and hidden from the public for decades. He served four terms. The 22nd Amendment, passed after his death, ensures no one ever will again.
With a move to Vietnam looming as he worked to complete the series, DeWitt ran out of time. He looked at the white, primed canvas prepared for Roosevelt's portrait, signed it and said: "That's minimalism!" He moved to Vietnam. When he returned, he reconsidered and painted a representational portrait.
Franklin Pierce is among the most personally tragic figures in the American presidency. Two months before his inauguration, his eleven year old son Bennie was killed in a train derailment before his parents' eyes, an event that shattered his wife Jane and shadowed the entire administration. Pierce was personally handsome and politically spineless. A northerner with deep sympathy for Southern slaveholders, he signed the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise and reigniting the national debate over slavery's expansion. The result was "Bleeding Kansas", a brutal, localized civil war on the plains, and the fracturing of his party. He accelerated the Civil War by a decade. Historians rank him among the worst presidents in American history.
DeWitt grew up spending summers at Pierce Lake in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Pierce's birthplace, and the personal geography seeped into the canvas uninvited. Flowing water and marshy surfaces bleed through the composition; heavy lines map a face in sickly shades of distorted green, orange, and grey. DeWitt admits Pierce appears "grizzled and slightly sinister", a direct reflection of his disappointed research. DeWitt wanted to show moral decay.
George H.W. Bush oversaw more consequential geopolitical change in a single term than most presidents manage in two. The Berlin Wall fell. Germany reunified. The Soviet Union dissolved. The Gulf War expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in a coalition military operation that was, by any military measure, precisely executed. His management of the Soviet collapse, resisting triumphalism, enabling the process without provocation, is regarded by historians as one of the finest diplomatic performances in American presidential history. Then he broke his most famous pledge. "Read my lips: no new taxes." He raised taxes to reduce the deficit. His own party never forgave him. Bill Clinton won in 1992.
Bush's portrait falls in the late phase of maximum stylistic divergence, where DeWitt was committed to making each work visually unlike its neighbors. The image presents a composed surface under pressure, cultivated confidence disrupted by flashes of unease. Bush was the last of the old Yankee Republican establishment: a decorated WWII naval aviator, Yale graduate, and consummate Cold War diplomat who found himself leading a country that was already, in 1992, moving past everything he represented. The composed surface. The changing ground beneath it.
George W. Bush's presidency was defined by a single morning: September 11, 2001. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and produced a national unity unlike anything since Pearl Harbor. Bush launched the War in Afghanistan in October 2001, toppling the Taliban government that had harbored Al Qaeda. In March 2003, citing intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that proved to be false, he invaded Iraq, a war that killed more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilized the region, and remains one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions in American history. His administration's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was widely seen as a catastrophic failure of federal competence. He left office with approval ratings near the historic low. In retirement, he took up oil painting, producing portraits of world leaders and veterans.
DeWitt describes surrounding Bush with flowers, partly to cheer him up amid intense negative press, partly with the darkly comic thought that Bush might be assassinated once out of office, "thus he'd be lying in a bed of flowers." The flowers create a double image: cheerful and funereal at the same time. They recall the long tradition of floral still life in which beauty carries a reminder of mortality.
George Washington voluntarily surrendered power twice, once after the Revolutionary War, when he could have become a military dictator, and once after two presidential terms, establishing the two term precedent that held for 150 years. Both acts were radical in an age of kings. He commanded the Continental Army through eight years of war, maintained American neutrality during the French Revolutionary Wars over fierce opposition from both his cabinet and the public, and presided over the creation of a constitutional government with no historical model to follow. His face is the most reproduced image in American history, and yet, because Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait was left deliberately unfinished (Stuart used the incomplete original to produce 130 profitable copies, never giving Washington his portrait), the face America knows best was never truly completed.
DeWitt's Washington is among the few portraits in the series without a photograph to work from. He chose to mimic Gilbert Stuart's iconic likeness directly, his first attempt at photorealistic representation, but altered the eyes. The rest is Stuart's Washington: the powdered wig, the formal bearing, the composed authority of the national symbol. The eyes are DeWitt's. In a face that has become an emblem rather than a person, the eyes are the only site of genuine seeing. DeWitt paints the myth, then gives it a gaze.
Gerald Ford is the only person in American history to have served as both Vice President and President of the United States without being elected to either office. He replaced Spiro Agnew as VP after Agnew's resignation for tax evasion, then replaced Richard Nixon after Nixon's resignation for Watergate. One month after taking office, he granted Nixon a full pardon, the most politically costly act of moral seriousness in modern presidential history. It almost certainly cost him the 1976 election. Historians have largely concluded he was right. He also presided over the fall of Saigon, signed the Helsinki Accords, and tripped once on an airplane ramp, which Chevy Chase turned into a defining parody. He described himself as "a Ford, not a Lincoln." He was right about that too.
Ford's portrait arrives at the close of the yellow period with unusual restraint. The image is direct, plain spoken, and almost deliberately untheatrical. It is the right portrait for an accidental president who governed not from ambition but from obligation, and who turned out to be more honest than the office usually allows.
Grover Cleveland was a Democrat who believed in hard money and fiscal discipline in an era when his party was moving toward populism; he vetoed hundreds of veterans' pension bills as fiscally irresponsible; and his second term was dominated by the Panic of 1893 and his refusal to embrace silver currency, which split his party and opened the door for William Jennings Bryan. He was one of the most stubborn men in the American presidency. He was also, in an age of spectacular corruption, personally honest.
DeWitt describes Cleveland as the most challenging portrait in the entire series, the only one for which he made a preliminary drawing and compositional draft before touching the canvas. Cleveland, the most laboriously principled president of the Gilded Age, received the most laboriously prepared portrait in the collection. Some subjects insist on being taken seriously.
Harry Truman made the most consequential single decision in human history: to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing approximately 200,000 people and ending the Second World War. He also recognized the state of Israel, desegregated the U.S. military by executive order, launched the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, and drew the line against Soviet expansionism that defined the Cold War for forty years. He left office deeply unpopular. History has been considerably kinder to him than his contemporaries were.
DeWitt says he was "inspired to paint Truman as if a nuclear reflection was cast upon him while he watched the atomic explosion in Hiroshima." Luminous yellow floods Truman's face in a way that is simultaneously sunlit and annihilating. The nuclear flash and the sun share a color. DeWitt makes that ambiguity the subject. No other portrait in the series carries this much moral freight in a single hue.
Before he was the face of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was one of the most admired men on earth. As a mining engineer turned global humanitarian, he organized food relief for ten million starving Europeans after World War I, an achievement that made him an international hero. The presidency destroyed that reputation almost overnight. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, Hoover's rigid faith in volunteerism and local charity over federal action left millions in tent cities that Americans mockingly called "Hoovervilles." He lost to Franklin Roosevelt in one of the most lopsided elections in history.
The Hoover portrait marked the start of the series. Rather than using naturalistic flesh tones, DeWitt allows unexpected color to become psychological pressure: a face marked by tension, instability, and experiment. The portrait wears its uncertainty honestly, a still-forming artist painting a man whose great abilities proved tragically insufficient for the scale of the crisis he inherited.
James Garfield is one of American history's great "what ifs." Born in a log cabin in Ohio, he rose from poverty to become a Civil War general, a mathematician, and a congressman before winning the presidency, a story of almost mythic upward mobility. He served only 200 days. Four months into his term, a deranged office seeker shot him at a Washington train station. Garfield lingered for 79 agonizing days, his death likely caused less by the bullet than by the unsanitary probing of his wound by doctors who refused to believe the new germ theory. His martyrdom galvanized public support for civil service reform, producing the Pendleton Act, a legacy written in someone else's ink.
DeWitt says he was "deeply attracted to the variations of opacity and translucence with expressive brush strokes" in this portrait, his own favorite quality in paint. Dense, multi layered strokes of green, blue, and white sit beside thinner passages where the face seems to fade at the edges. The painting becomes a study in emergence and disappearance. A face that solidifies and dissolves and a presidency that barely materialized.
James Buchanan is ranked last or near last on nearly every presidential survey ever conducted, and the case against him is straightforward: he watched the country dissolve and did nothing. Southern states began seceding during the final months of his administration. His constitutional interpretation was that secession was illegal, but that he lacked the power to stop it. He took no action. He passed the crisis to Abraham Lincoln and retired to Pennsylvania, where he spent the rest of his life writing a self justifying memoir. He was the only president never to marry, the only president from Pennsylvania, and the last president born in the 18th century. He left Lincoln a nation in pieces and a nearly empty treasury.
DeWitt notes that after considerable stylistic experimentation, "it occurred to me that I never saw a portrait painted to be intentionally hung upside down, so I decided to do just that." This places the work squarely in the tradition of Conceptual Art. The conceptual move is also a historical verdict: the president who turned the constitutional order upside down, who inverted his executive responsibility at the moment it mattered most, rendered accordingly and displayed accordingly.
James K. Polk entered the White House with four specific goals and left having achieved every single one of them, then kept his promise not to seek a second term. That disciplined, obsessive focus makes him one of the most effective single term presidents in American history. Driven by Manifest Destiny, his administration annexed Texas, settled the Oregon boundary with Britain, executed the Mexican American War to acquire California and the American Southwest, and established the Independent Treasury. He stretched the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific in four years. Then he went home to Tennessee and died of cholera three months later, worked to the bone.
Polk is rendered with an intensely sculpted, high contrast face and vibrant emerald green hair, his collar transformed into a dizzying web of tangled threads and restless color. DeWitt says his subconscious "galloped" into this painting after learning that Polk was America's first "dark horse" presidential candidate. A man of movement, rising to the presidency and expanding the United States to the Pacific in four years.
James Madison is the Father of the Constitution, the primary architect of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and co author of the Federalist Papers, the most brilliant defense of republican government ever written. He is the most intellectually rigorous person ever to hold the American presidency. He is also the president under whose watch the British burned Washington D.C., including the White House, in August 1814, forcing him to flee the capital on horseback. Dolley Madison famously rescued a portrait of George Washington before the flames reached the executive mansion. The gap between Madison's constitutional genius and his performance as a wartime executive is one of the most striking in American presidential history.
When DeWitt was nearly finished with this portrait, he decided the figure looked alien, so he added a small red dot representing Mars, the planet long associated with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. That strange intrusion gives the portrait its charge: a rational statesman made suddenly uncanny. A man of almost otherworldly intellectual powers, presiding over an earthly catastrophe.
James Monroe's two terms are called the "Era of Good Feelings", a moment of unusual national unity following the War of 1812, when the Federalist Party collapsed and partisan rancor briefly quieted. Monroe ran for re election in 1820 and received every Electoral College vote but one (a New Hampshire elector withheld his vote, reportedly so that only George Washington would ever be unanimous). Beneath the surface, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 revealed the fracture lines over slavery that would eventually destroy that unity. Monroe's most enduring legacy is the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a bold declaration warning European powers that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further colonization. It shaped American foreign policy for more than a century.
Monroe's portrait marks the pivotal turning point in the collection, when DeWitt abandoned party color backgrounds and moved to purple, the color produced by mixing red and blue. He painted Monroe entirely in the Cubist style: facial structure, hair, and clothing dismantled and reconstructed into sharp, interlocking geometric facets and planes, evoking the Analytical Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Where those masters rejected traditional perspective to reveal structural truth, DeWitt uses fragmented planes to show a presidency whose surface unity concealed structural tensions that no single viewpoint could fully see.
Jimmy Carter came to Washington promising moral seriousness after the disgrace of Watergate, and he delivered it, even when the country didn't want it. A naval officer and Georgia peanut farmer, he elevated human rights to a cornerstone of American foreign policy, brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt (the only lasting peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state), and told Americans the truth about the energy crisis, asking them to turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters. He installed solar panels on the White House. Reagan removed them. The Iran hostage crisis, 444 days, destroyed his re election prospects. His post presidency became the most consequential in American history: decades of Habitat for Humanity work, global disease eradication, election monitoring, and a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Against a solid Democratic blue background, Carter's famously wide grin is built from thick, heavily layered dabs of paint, mosaic fragments of green, yellow, pink, and flesh tone that push outward across his collar. The paint is physical, direct, and unpolished.
Joseph Biden entered the presidency as the oldest person ever elected to the office, carrying with him more than half a century of public life: senator, committee chairman, vice president, grieving father, party elder, and finally president. His administration was shaped by recovery and strain: the aftermath of COVID 19, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, major infrastructure investment, the war in Ukraine, inflation, political polarization, and the attempt to restore a sense of institutional steadiness after the upheaval of January 6. His presidency was defined as much by endurance as by achievement: a long public career compressed into one final act, with the burden of age becoming impossible to separate from the burden of office. Major legislative achievements included the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
DeWitt's Biden is the latest portrait in the Dads of Democracy series, built around contrast: a warmly recognizable, photographic smile against a dark field scratched with restless lines and marks from removed paint. One side of the face holds together; the other seems to dissolve into layered color and exposed process. Biden appears not as a triumphant icon, but as an accumulated figure: familiar, damaged, resilient, and partially obscured by the very history he spent his life inside. The portrait's power lies in that incompleteness. It shows a presidency still too recent to settle, and a man whose public image remains an unfinished judgment.
John Adams was one of the most brilliant and most irritating figures of the American founding. A towering constitutional theorist, an eloquent revolutionary diplomat, and the man who nominated both John Marshall to the Supreme Court and George Washington to command the Continental Army, his single presidential term was nearly undone by his own stubbornness, his willingness to sign the Alien and Sedition Acts (which criminalized criticism of the federal government), and Alexander Hamilton's active campaign to destroy him. He ended his presidency by peacefully transferring power to his political enemy Thomas Jefferson, the young republic's first test of that principle, which he passed with quiet dignity. He and Jefferson, longtime rivals turned late life correspondents, died on the same day: July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
DeWitt explicitly designates this portrait as an exploration of the Lowbrow Pop Surrealism movement, that fuses cartoon imagery, dark humor, vintage Americana, and Surrealist dream logic to puncture institutional self importance. Adams is given a smeared distorted face, a rotund cartoon torso, tiny shoes, red gloved doll arms, and a historical wig of looping tube like crescents. The formal dignity of the presidency dissolved into absurdist play for a man who was simultaneously one of America's greatest statesmen and nearly impossible to like.
John F. Kennedy served 1,036 days as president, the fourth shortest tenure in American history. In that time, he navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis (the closest the world has come to nuclear war), established the Peace Corps, committed the United States to landing on the moon, and began the legislative groundwork for the Civil Rights Act. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in the back seat of a presidential limousine. The Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Significant portions of the American public have never believed them. Kennedy's presidency exists permanently in the subjunctive, what might have been, had all the pieces been put in place.
DeWitt chose to fragment Kennedy into geometric shapes that "suggested an unfinished puzzle," his own words. With less than three years in office, he says, "we can only wonder what his legacy and impact might have been if all the pieces were put into place." The portrait turns incompletion into its central idea. This is not simply a portrait of a president. It is a portrait of an interruption. The shapes that do not connect are the point.
John Quincy Adams was arguably the most intellectually prepared man ever to hold the presidency, a diplomat fluent in seven languages, a poet, a scientist, and a diarist who kept a journal for sixty seven years. As Secretary of State, he essentially wrote the Monroe Doctrine. His presidency was another matter. Enemies branded his election a "Corrupt Bargain" with Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson's machine blocked his every initiative. He lost his re-election bid to Jackson decisively. Then he did something no former president has ever done: he went back to Congress, serving seventeen more years as a U.S. Representative, fighting against slavery with burning eloquence until he collapsed on the House floor and died at his desk in 1848.
Adams's portrait features smoothly blended, iridescent pastel tones of violet, green, and pink, overlaid with an ornamental pattern of blue and white circular textures that creep across his face, collar, and sideburns. The decorative surface for a decorated mind layered with language, diplomacy, science, poetry, and moral conviction. A man of deep complexity beneath an exterior of Yankee formality.
John Tyler became president when William Henry Harrison died after 31 days in office, and then proceeded to govern as if he had actually won the election himself. His own Whig Party expelled him within months for vetoing their banking legislation. His entire cabinet resigned, except Daniel Webster. He governed for four years without a party. When he sought a presidential nomination in 1844, both parties refused him. He annexed Texas through a joint congressional resolution, a legally creative maneuver that avoided the two-thirds Senate vote he knew he couldn't win. He spent his retirement lobbying for Virginia's secession and died in 1862 serving in the Confederate Congress, the only former president in American history to commit treason against the nation he had led.
Tyler's portrait occupies the late phase of maximum stylistic divergence, where DeWitt's formal ambition was at its most dramatic. The image feels elegant and unstable at once. That tension suits Tyler perfectly: a man who mastered the rules of succession, party politics, and constitutional procedure well enough to bend them to his will.
Lyndon Johnson's presidency contains the greatest domestic legislative achievement since Franklin Roosevelt and the greatest foreign policy catastrophe of the 20th century, on the same résumé, signed by the same hand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare. Medicaid. The Fair Housing Act. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The National Endowment for the Arts. No president has reshaped American domestic life more profoundly. He also escalated the Vietnam War from 16,000 to more than 500,000 American troops, sacrificed 58,000 American lives in a war he privately doubted could be won, and chose not to seek re election in 1968 as the country came apart. History cannot put this man in a single frame. A portrait of LBJ requires two paintings at once.
DeWitt gives him a presence that feels blunt, frontal, and historically heavy rather than intimate. Johnson, who stood six feet four and famously used his physical size to pressure senators in what became known as "the Johnson Treatment."
Martin Van Buren was the first true political operator to reach the presidency, the architect of the modern party machine who built the Democratic organization that made Andrew Jackson's victories possible before running himself. He was also the first president born as a U.S. citizen (all his predecessors were born British subjects) and the only president whose first language was not English, he grew up speaking Dutch in the Hudson Valley. His presidency was immediately overwhelmed by the Panic of 1837, the worst economic depression in American history up to that point, triggered partly by Jackson's war on the Bank of the United States. He refused to annex Texas, fearing war with Mexico and the slavery question, and was swept out of office after a single term.
DeWitt identifies this portrait as "an attempt at cross hatching", a technique with roots deep in Old Master drawing and printmaking, associated with the engravings of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn. Crosshatching builds form through accumulated directional lines: structure by repetition, volume by angle and density. There is no tonal wash, no blended shadow, only the deliberate accumulation of marks into meaning. It is the visual language of a man who understood power as architecture, who built political systems line by line, and whose greatest creation, the modern party apparatus, outlasted the disaster of his presidency by two centuries.
Millard Fillmore is the president Americans most reliably cannot name and most consistently rank among the worst. As the "accidental president" who assumed office after Zachary Taylor's death, he signed the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern citizens to return escaped enslaved people to their enslavers and effectively deputized the entire Northern population into the enforcement of Southern slavery. He believed this would preserve the Union. It delayed the Civil War while making it inevitable and destroyed his standing in the North. He later ran for president in 1856 as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party, an anti immigrant, anti Catholic nativist movement. He received 21% of the popular vote and lost badly. He then retired to Buffalo, New York, and lived another eighteen years.
Fillmore's portrait arrives surrounded by some of DeWitt's most dramatically ambitious stylistic gestures, yet it resists grandeur. A portrait that refuses to rescue its subject from historical obscurity. That refusal becomes the point. Fillmore's presidency offered the appearance of governance while delivering an inadequate response to a catastrophic moral question.
Richard Nixon opened China, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, and oversaw the moon landing. He also maintained an enemies list, approved illegal wiretapping of political opponents, secretly and illegally bombed Cambodia, obstructed justice in the Watergate cover up, and became the only president in American history to resign from office. The same man. The same presidency. History has never fully reconciled these facts, and the attempt to do so produces a different Nixon depending on which angle you approach from.
Nixon's portrait is psychologically tense. "He is an American politician. Great achievements and abuses" are shown in the same frame by smooth strokes and destructive dabs of paint.
Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood actor who became the most consequential American president since Franklin Roosevelt. He cut taxes dramatically, accelerated the Cold War arms race that arguably contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse, survived an assassination attempt with characteristic grace, and communicated with the American public with a directness and warmth that earned him the title "The Great Communicator." He was also the central figure in the Iran Contra affair, in which his administration secretly sold weapons to Iran and illegally funneled proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, a scandal that raised serious questions about how much Reagan directed versus how much operated in his name as his mental capacity declined. His doctors and family have since confirmed early signs of Alzheimer's during his presidency.
DeWitt captures Reagan's duality precisely: vivid saturated color reflecting the Hollywood story, set against a scattered background that suggests instability and mental fog. Performance and dissolution occupy the same canvas. That is the Reagan presidency in paint.
Rutherford Hayes became president through the Compromise of 1877, the most consequential backroom deal in American political history. The presidential election of 1876 was disputed in three Southern states; a special commission awarded all disputed electoral votes to Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The deal ended Reconstruction. Black Americans in the South, who had briefly enjoyed federal military protection of their civil rights, were left to the mercy of the governments and vigilante organizations that had opposed those rights with violence. The consequences endured for ninety years. Hayes served one term and kept his pledge not to seek another, retiring to Ohio where he spent his remaining years advocating for prison reform and Black education, a quietly decent man whose election had come at an indecent price.
DeWitt's intention for this portrait was pure speed: paint fast. This Alla Prima approach, wet paint into wet paint, no corrections, no second sessions, connected to a deadline DeWitt gave himself to finish the series before a move from Florida to Vietnam.
Theodore Roosevelt is the most kinetically alive figure in American presidential history. He became the youngest president in history at 42 after McKinley's assassination, charged up San Juan Hill as a war hero, won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo Japanese War, established the U.S. Forest Service, placed 230 million acres under federal protection, busted corporate monopolies with the Sherman Antitrust Act, and built the Panama Canal. In 1912, he was shot in the chest before a campaign speech. He delivered the speech anyway, bleeding through his shirt, for ninety minutes before going to the hospital. The bullet remained in his chest for the rest of his life.
DeWitt names Roosevelt as one of his personal favorites, and the portrait shows it. Roosevelt radiates in saturated yellow and orange behind his signature round spectacles, with shoulders draped in symbolism of the American flag. The painting treats Roosevelt less as a formal statesman than as an American rock star, loud, patterned, instantly recognizable, and impossible to contain.
Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" and enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime. He authored the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding charter of the University of Virginia. He doubled the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who could not legally consent. He died deeply in debt, his enslaved workforce auctioned to pay his creditors. American history does not know what to do with Thomas Jefferson, and it probably never will. Every angle of examination reveals a different and contradictory man.
"Monroe was my first crack at Cubism. I applied another principle of Cubism 30 portraits later with Jefferson." DeWitt applies the cubist method of removing the single viewpoint and forces the viewer to confront multiple, simultaneous, irreconcilable perspectives of the same subject. Jefferson's face is fragmented into interlocking planes of color and form that cannot be resolved into a single coherent image from any fixed position. You cannot see him from one angle. Every view is true. Every view is incomplete. The fractured planes are formal experiments and moral facts.
Ulysses Grant is one of the most underrated presidents in American history, and the history of his reputation's rehabilitation is ongoing. He ended the Civil War as the Union's supreme commander, then as president used federal troops to protect Black Americans in the South, suppressing the Ku Klux Klan with the Force Acts and genuinely enforcing Reconstruction policies that his successor would abandon. His administration was riddled with corruption scandals, the Whiskey Ring, Crédit Mobilier, in which he was personally honest but politically complicit through misplaced loyalty. He lost his entire fortune to a fraudulent investment scheme in his final years, then raced to finish his Personal Memoirs while dying of throat cancer, barely able to speak, producing a masterwork of American prose that Mark Twain edited and published, leaving his family financially secure. He finished the manuscript four days before he died.
Grant's portrait falls in the late phase, where DeWitt's stylistic range was at its widest. The image is bold and patterned; Grant himself is flat with somber military dignity and restraint usually attached to Grant. Instead of burying him in restraint, DeWitt surrounds him with color and visual motion, allowing the portrait to hold contradiction: soldier and president, victor and mourner, honest man and flawed executive, national savior and exhausted survivor. Grant saw more death than almost any living American and wrote about it with extraordinary clarity.
Warren G. Harding was the most personally charming president of the 20th century and the most corrupt. His administration produced the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Interior Secretary secretly leased federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes, which held the title of greatest presidential corruption scandal until Watergate. Harding died in office in 1923 under murky circumstances, possibly knowing the investigations were closing in. He also, to his credit, pardoned Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader jailed by Woodrow Wilson for opposing World War I, a genuinely courageous act that his successors refused to acknowledge.
"On the surface there are lies. Truth is often revealed in the eyes. President Harding was surrounded by scandal. The color choices for the eyes and the border represent such."
William Henry Harrison holds two records that will likely never be broken: the longest inaugural address in American history (nearly two hours, delivered hatlessly in a freezing rain) and the shortest presidency (31 days). He caught pneumonia at the inauguration and died on April 4, 1841, before accomplishing a single act of governance. His campaign, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", was the first in American history to employ modern marketing tactics: slogans, songs, merchandise, and mass rallies. He pioneered the spectacle of democratic campaigning and then disappeared before he could govern. John Tyler became president, and the Whig Party immediately regretted everything.
DeWitt was explicitly exploring Art Deco as one of his target styles, and Harrison's portrait reflects that movement's geometric elegance and decorative precision. The portrait has, he says, "a vampirish quality. A political ghost who lives on through history", a president who died before his presidency truly began, haunting American history as an almost administration. The effect is morbid, comic, and strangely appropriate, neither fully alive in the office nor fully absent from the story.
William Howard Taft holds a distinction no one else in American history can claim: he is the only person to have served as both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He reportedly hated the White House and loved the Court. Taft was also, by raw numbers, a more aggressive trust buster than his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, launching twice as many antitrust lawsuits in a single term. But his conservative constitutional instincts alienated Roosevelt's progressive wing, and when Roosevelt challenged him in 1912, the Republican Party split in two, handing the election to Woodrow Wilson.
Painted simultaneously alongside Hoover and Garfield on a shared pegboard, with DeWitt deliberately "bouncing colors and techniques" between all three canvases, this portrait carries that cross pollinating energy in its surface. The result is a president held together by tension: between progressivism and conservatism, Roosevelt's shadow and his own instincts, judicial temperament and political combat.
William McKinley's presidency looks deceptively simple from the outside. In fact, it transformed the United States from a continental nation into an overseas empire. His Spanish American War of 1898, swift, decisive, and enormously popular, delivered the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and effective control of Cuba. For the first time, America had Pacific territories and global military obligations. McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, shot twice at point blank range while shaking hands with the public. His death put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. History's hinge points are rarely announced in advance.
This portrait looks simple. It is not. DeWitt describes the brush flowing as "one continuous line that starts on the left side and ends with the signature on the right. The difficulty was entirely front loaded, resolved with pencil on paper before the brushstroke began." A single unbroken trajectory mirrors McKinley precisely, a leader whose decisions set consequences in motion that could not be undone. Taking America from continental republic to Pacific empire.
Woodrow Wilson architected the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the League of Nations, the most ambitious attempt at international collective security in history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. The U.S. Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, refused to ratify American membership in the League, destroying the institution Wilson had given his health to build. He suffered a catastrophic stroke in October 1919 and was essentially incapacitated for the final seventeen months of his presidency, during which his wife Edith managed his correspondence and access, one of the most extraordinary and constitutionally uncharted episodes in American history. He also re segregated the federal government, reversing decades of post Civil War integration, a decision that permanently stained his progressive legacy.
For Wilson, DeWitt imagined one artist tagging another artist's building. He built institutions: the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and the League of Nations. History then wrote over those structures with Senate rejection, stroke, secrecy, and the stain of federal segregation. "I used the language of graffiti and interruption because Wilson's legacy feels like architecture covered with corrections." The design and the damage cannot be separated.
Zachary Taylor was a career military general who owned more than a hundred enslaved people, and who stunned Southerners by opposing the expansion of slavery into the new territories acquired from Mexico. He threatened to personally lead the army against any Southern state that attempted secession. His presidency lasted only sixteen months. On the Fourth of July, 1850, he ate a large quantity of raw fruit and iced milk at a Washington ceremony and fell violently ill. Five days later, he was dead, possibly from typhoid fever, possibly from acute gastroenteritis, possibly, some have speculated, from something worse. Millard Fillmore was sworn in as president the following day, and the Compromise of 1850, which Taylor had blocked, was signed within weeks.
DeWitt explicitly chose Pointillism for this portrait, the technique pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the 1880s, in which the canvas is built entirely from discrete dots of pure color that the viewer's eye optically blends into coherent form. Up close: dots. Stand back: a man. A Pointillist portrait perfectly mirrors a president who defies easy categorization.