Eisenhower Paintings

Gallery

1 of 6

President Eisenhower at his easel at Camp David
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA
2 of 6

Winter Birches, oil, 1955.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA
3 of 6

Snow Capped Mountains, oil, c. 1955.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA
4 of 6

Untitled waterfall, oil on canvas, 1949. Inscribed on the canvas at the lower edge, “For my friend, Howard Young, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA
5 of 6

George Washington, oil, 1954. Eisenhower’s portrait of George Washington is based upon Gilbert Stuart's “Athenaeum” portrait of Washington painted in 1796, popularly known as the “unfinished” portrait. A copy of this picture hung in tens of thousands of American schoolrooms, perhaps Eisenhower's as well, when he was boy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA
6 of 6

Eisenhower Family Home, Oil, mid-1950s, after a painting by Margaret Sandzen Greenough.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum/NARA

About this Gallery

Painting was not something Eisenhower wanted to be good at or, perhaps, thought he could be good at. Stephens sent him a complete painting kit, which Ike appreciated but thought a “sheer waste of money,” something the boy from a poor home could never accept comfortably. Maybe it was this innate frugality—the desire not to waste a gift—that spurred him to practice. Eisenhower was convinced that to become a painter, he lacked the one thing necessary, “ability."