President Obama welcomed his predecessor back to the White House on Thursday for the unveiling of the official George W. Bush and Laura Bush portraits. As we watched the two men interact graciously during the event, we could not help but wonder: Where did it come from? 
 
 Not the amity. Obama and Bush are members of the presidents’ club and have more in common with each other than with the leaders of their respective parties. We mean the picture itself. Who chooses the artists for official presidential portraits, and how? Who pays for the painting – taxpayers, private citizens, or presidents themselves? 
 
 Well, presidents choose their own painters. But it’s not an easy process. Sometimes things don’t work out – Lyndon B. Johnson picked a second artist after the first produced a painting he thought “ugly” in all ways. And there are many applicants. Portfolios flood into the White House from artists, their agents, galleries, staff members, friends, and family. 
 
 During the Clinton administration, Hillary Rodham Clinton reviewed these submissions. The first lady sought advice from the White House curator and the director of the National Portrait Gallery, according to an article by White House curator emeritus Betty C. Monkman in the journal White House History. 
 
 After Clinton won reelection, Mrs. Clinton began interviewing artists, sometimes with the president in tow. Just before leaving office Bill Clinton picked the Alabama-born Simmie Knox to produce his official likeness. After seeing the likeness – which depicts a rather formal Clinton standing in the Oval Office – Mrs. Clinton picked Knox for her official first lady portrait as well. 
 
 Taxpayers don’t foot the bill for this art. At least, not all taxpayers do. They’re paid for via private donations channeled through the nonprofit White House Historical Association. 
 
 “We have for years been underwriting the cost of official presidential portraits,” says Maria Downs, WHCA director of public affairs. 
 
 This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the historical association’s founding in 1961, there was no organized effort to produce a line of presidential and first lady portraits for the White House itself. Well into the twentieth century the commission of official portraits was a “haphazard affair,” according to former curator Ms. Monkman. 
 
 In 1800, for instance, Congress allocated $700 to purchase a portrait of the recently deceased George Washington. This paid for what has since become one of the icons of American art, indeed one of the touchstones of American history – the full-length “Lansdowne” portrait by Gilbert Stuart. 
 
 Four years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, Congress allocated funds for a Lincoln portrait competition. President Ulysses S. Grant picked the winner: a full-length portrait by Chicago artist William Cogswell. Ironically, today a losing effort from that contest is better known. It’s the famous portrait of a brooding, sitting Lincoln, produced by another Chicago painter, George P.A. Healey. Bought by Lincoln’s son Robert Todd, it eventually ended up back in the White House. Today it hangs in the State Dining Room. 
 
 Other notable official portraits include John Singer Sargent’s rendering of Theodore Roosevelt, who appears thrumming with energy, ready to bust from the stairway where he is standing, and Aaron Shikler’s posthumous painting of John F. Kennedy, his eyes downcast, against a gray background that makes him appear almost a ghost. 
 
 Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy 
 
 Presidential paintings hang at the National Portrait Gallery, and in individual presidential libraries, but it is particularly fitting that the White House itself should have the official collection, writes William Seale, editor of White House History. 
 
 “Portraits of [presidents] seem to belong there, making windows into that long history,” he writes. ||||| Former President George W. Bush had his official presidential portrait unveiled at a special ceremony at the White House today. It’s fairly standard issue: Bush stands in the Oval Office, his hands on a chair, with a look that Roland Barthes noted decades ago is typical of political portraits . (“The gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.”) You can see the new portrait over at Talking Points Memo . 
 
 One detail stands out, though: President Bush’s favorite painting, the one he kept by his desk, and the one for which he named his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep . Bush loved to regale visitors with what he thought was the story behind the painting, telling how it depicted the famous circuit riders who in the nineteenth century spread the message of Methodism across the Alleghenies. Bush, a Methodist since the 1970s, identified with the quest of the noble cowboy missionary, and visitors often noted the resemblance between Bush and the lead rider. There’s only one problem with that story: As Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg wrote in his 2008 book The Bush Tragedy , “that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting.” * Weisberg explains: 
 
 Whether or not Bush ever learned the true story behind the painting seems to be unclear, but if so, he’s sticking to his guns, unwanted ironies be damned. Indeed, President Bush seems determined to ride off with Koerner’s painting into history. 
 
 
 
 *Update, June 1, 2012: While Bush’s story of the painting’s origins still appears to be false, aspects of Weisberg’s account have also been disputed. As University of Illinois professor Cara Finnegan points out on her blog First Efforts, an illustration that ran with the horse thief story “The Slipper Tongue” in The Saturday Evening Post is actually a very similar-looking but different Koerner composition, also depicting a man working his way up a hill on a horse. The Google Books archive, similarly, shows the same similar-looking but different Koerner illustration. 
 
 
 
 Contacted about the dispute, Weisberg agreed that he may have confused the two illustrations, and explained that his photocopy of “The Slipper Tongue” may simply have been blurry. 
 
 
 
 Not disputed by Finnegan is the later appearance of the composition, also mentioned in Weisberg’s book, with the 1918 Country Gentleman story “A Charge to Keep.” Both Finnegan and Weisberg note that this illustration, now the first confirmed appearance of the painting, is not about Methodist missionaries either. As Weisberg points out, the story—about a son’s fight to keep his land, inherited from his father, from “rapacious timber barons”—may contain a different irony altogether.
– George W. Bush made a rare public appearance today—next to Barack Obama, no less. And he'll be appearing at the White House every day going forward in at least one form: The 43rd president's official portrait was unveiled in an East Room ceremony replete with jokes and laughs, reports the AP. Bush quipped that the presidents' portraits are now bookended by his own and that of George Washington, noting, "It now starts and ends with a George W." Wife Laura, George H.W. Bush, and Barbara Bush were in attendance. The Christian Science Monitor shares a bit of interesting presidential portrait trivia: Presidents pick the artist who will depict them after sorting through the avalanche of portfolios that are sent to the White House; Lyndon B. Johnson had a second painting done by a new artist after declaring his first portrait "ugly"; and you're not stuck footing the bill for these works of art—donations made to the nonprofit White House Historical Association currently fund the paintings. Click to read about "the irony lurking in Bush's portrait."