Generally, official White House portraits of Presidents and First Ladies are, um, not great — unless they're painted by the matchless genius John Singer Sargent, like Theodore Roosevelt's was. Among the other acceptables are Lincoln's, FDR's and Truman's. Then there's Jerry Ford's: Geez, it doesn't even look like him.
Only a couple of First Lady paintings stand out, like Edith Roosevelt's, Grace Coolidge's (that flapper dress!), and Eleanor Roosevelt's — which, like the woman herself, is highly distinctive. But no, we've never cared for Jacqueline Kennedy's, sorry to say.
So the Obama portraits, all things considered, are pretty nice. Better than the ones at the National Portrait Gallery, in our humble opinion. It'll be interesting to see where the Bidens hang them, because zillions of tourists will want to photograph them, and often, their location is an opportunity to make a statement. (We couldn't help noticing, for example, that the portrait of Jimmy Carter is in a prominent place, on a wall just outside the East Room.) To borrow a phrase from Barack, the Obama paintings have grace, intelligence, and are fine.
But what was even better was seeing Team Obama-Biden back together again. It was fun, inspiring, eloquent (thank you, Michelle, for saying what needed to be said) — and best of all, as 44 and 46 celebrated, you could kind of pretend that 45 never happened. We cats PURR.
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