While most presidents seek to frame history, President Jimmy Carter was, at times, also seeking to frame his world on canvas. He was a hobbyist who painted throughout his lifetime — depicting natural landscapes and church steeples found throughout his home state of Georgia, as well as the occasional portrait of his wife, Rosalynn Carter.
Four of nearly 100 of his paintings are included in Christie’s auctions this month, including one opening online Tuesday. They are being offered alongside memorabilia, correspondences that include a love letter to his wife, and furniture that the former president handcrafted. A portion of the auction proceeds will benefit the Carter Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization serving causes in Sumter County, Ga., where the president, from Plains, spent most of his life.
But the lowest estimate for one of the paintings is $2,000, and the highest estimate of a painting is $12,000.
“Priced to sell” is the shorthand used inside Christie’s, and there is some strategy behind those numbers, said Julia Jones, the specialist who helped organize the auctions. “We are hoping they will establish the market for Jimmy Carter’s paintings,” she said.
For Carter’s family, the paintings were an essential part of his life, even if the public rarely caught glimpses of his art.
“He did a mail-order painting class when he was in the Navy and copied Monet paintings,” Amy Carter, the president’s daughter, said in an interview. “When he started into politics, that fell by the wayside.”
But his passion for painting reignited after the White House. He created a studio in his garage and installed an easel in his wood shop, painting with a palette made of scrapped timber. He chatted with local artists and held a special place in his heart for the Prado Museum in Madrid and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, his daughter said. Carter died at the end of 2024, at the age of 100.
“In his daily life, he was constantly thinking about really large problems that he wanted to solve,” Amy Carter said, listing topics like fair elections, poverty, women’s rights and peace in the Middle East. “None of those things are in his paintings. His paintings seem to be this quiet place of things he loved.”
There are a few other presidents who have painted, and it’s incredibly rare when one of their artworks reaches the market. Ulysses S. Grant took several drawing courses as a student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the 1840s. Several watercolor paintings from that time are preserved by the National Park Service. And despite the attention that George W. Bush received for his amateur paintings of world leaders that he started making after leaving office in 2009, none have sold commercially outside a book of reproductions that he released in 2017.
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One of the more prominent figures in this rarefied group of artists is Dwight D. Eisenhower, who painted throughout his presidency and exhibited a surprising degree of skill with a brush. In 2003, a disarming self-portrait by Eisenhower in military attire appeared in an episode of “Antiques Roadshow,” where an appraiser said it could sell for anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000; however, an updated version of the show in 2020 said the value had dropped to a range of $2,500 to $3,500. But his artistic fortunes seem to have improved in recent years. In 2023, a small auctioneer sold a 1959 oil painting Eisenhower created of Fort Mohave, Ariz., for $14,000.
Carter did find that his works made a convincing fund-raising tool. He sold an oil painting, “Monarchs and Milkweed,” for $525,000 during a 2017 charity auction for the Carter Center, his longtime nonprofit organization. In 2020, his “Cardinals” painting raised another $340,000 for the organization. He also used one of his artworks to decorate the cover of his Revolutionary War novel, “The Hornet’s Nest.”
But no U.S. president has reached the same level of artistic achievement as Winston Churchill, who started painting in 1915 at the low point of his military career but continued the practice, creating about 500 works. In 2021, the actor Angelina Jolie sold a landscape he painted as a gift to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II for $11.5 million at a Christie’s London auction.
“Churchill definitely has a more refined skill set,” said Jones, who said that Churchill had an established market of collectors who traded his paintings, which made pricing more competitive.
When it comes to these collectors, they are often more interested in the psychology of the man behind the paintings than his formal artistic talents. The years in which the artworks are executed often line up with elements of world history and personal biography.
Carter often painted with small flicks of pigment like a French Impressionist, though his finished products often looked more like the rudimentary iPad paintings of David Hockney than the shimmering waterlilies of Monet. One painting being auctioned at Christie’s depicts a still life of six glass vases and one (as the former president called it) “angry pomegranate.” Another features a shallow waterfall just a few miles east of his cabin where he would often go swimming or fishing.
“I don’t think he would have put painter on his résumé,” his daughter said, “but he was very sincere about trying, and he was really enjoying the practice.”
What draws presidents to paintings? Amy Carter has a few theories. “Part of it is that they have this curiosity about the world to begin with, so they are paying attention to people’s expressions,” she said. “Couple that with the need for personal life.”
“It is permission to relax,” she said. “My dad certainly needed that.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
The post The Man From Plains Was Also a Painter appeared first on New York Times.
