My favourite presidential portrait: FDR by Douglas Chandor
FDR is not my favourite president, nor the one I know the most about, but this is hands down (pun absolutely intended) presidential portrait.
Background: the artist Douglas Chandor (1897-1953) initially wrote to FDR in late 1944 proposing a painting of the president, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin to memorialize the Yalta Conference. You can see the sketch of the potential painting in the bottom-left corner. Chandor completed a portrait of Churchill, which you can see in London’s National Portrait Gallery, but Stalin declined to be painted. Thus, the Yalta Conference painting Chandor envisioned never came to be.
The incompleteness of this painting is what makes it so great, in my opinion. The sketches of the hands illustrate Chandor’s creative process - each one highlighting a slightly different essence of FDR. In a strange way, the collection of hands gives the viewer a summary of FDR as a man and a politician: an intellectual, a legislator, pensive man, a diplomat. According to the National Portrait Gallery:
> Chandor believed that hands revealed as much of a person’s spirit as his or her face would, and therefore experimented with multiple configurations and gestures, scattered across the bottom of the canvas. Roosevelt, however, was dismayed by the attention Chandor paid to his hands, dismissing them as “unremarkable” and likening them to “those of a farmer.”
The hand in the bottom-left corner doing the signature is a fitting creative touch.
FDR died before the portrait could be completed.
I would love to know your thoughts on this painting, as well as your favourite presidential portraits.