Johnson, for starters, was not good at the sittings. At one, he fell asleep. At another sitting, he would not sit still — he was pacing and was too busy talking with one of his...

This is a golden moment for every president, and maybe particularly for Richard Nixon, because he had been written off as a washed-up politician, and here he is president-elect in 1968. When you are president-elect,...

The reason that he got a sitting with Washington was that his father was Charles Wilson Peale, a very prominent American artist, a friend of the revolution. On the morning of the sitting, he (Rembrandt)...

You might call him a promiscuous sitter, … He would sit for just about any artist in the last 10 years of his life. He sat for … George Caleb Bingham, who was virtually an...