Art: Toward the Ideal

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

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

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

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

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

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