Aaron Shikler was the court painter of American presidents.

Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Shikler attended the High School of Music and Art, the started at the Tyler School of Art, but was drafted into the Army Air Corps as a mapmaker. Afterwards he went straight back to Tyler, where he met his wife, Barbara Lurie. After Tyler, Shikler went to New York and studied with Hans Hofmann, “but he remained a committed realist throughout his life, under the sway of artists like Degas, Vuillard, Sickert and Sargent.” Soon he secured representation and one rich patron after another led him to the White House.

Shikler said of his position at the White House, “The portrait painter... is stuck somewhere in there among the couturier, the hairdresser, and the masseuse.” So he may not have had the artistic freedom that he may have desired in his work, but he did get to make portraits of leaders like Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Nancy Reagan. With his portrait of John F. Kennedy, Shikler had two “first and onlys.” He was the first and only artist to make an official portrait of a president after the president had died and he was the first and only artist to depict a president looking down in a way that you couldn’t see the eyes. Haters said that it was an assassination portrait, but he was just trying to heed the demands of Jackie Kennedy who wanted a portrait that wasn’t “the way everybody does him — with that puffiness under the eyes and every shadow and crease magnified.” Shikler defended himself saying, “I painted him with his head bowed, not because I think of him as a martyr, but because I wanted to show him as a president who was a thinker. A thinking president is a rare thing.” 

Shikler was also famous for his portrait of Ronald Reagan for the cover of Time Magazine’s Man of the Year issue in 1981, though his official portrait of Reagan only hung in the White House for a short time before it was replaced with another. He painted Jackie Kennedy and captured the “haunted look in her eye,” after the assassination of her husband in front of her. He painted their children, Caroline and John. He even painted Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady. He may not have oozed style like his contemporaries, but he was consistent and “he will do 90 percent of the important portraits to be done in America.”