We suppose the subtitle to this post could be, “painting presidents,” because it’s about US presidents who took brush to palette and expressed themselves artistically.

We start with Ulysses S. Grant who, by the time he was 18,  was a practiced watercolorist. Being a cadet at West Point may have sidelined him a bit, but it wasn’t by much: He continued to study painting under the Romantic artist, Robert Walter Weir.

Jimmy Carter’s art focused on scenery and nature (think birds), and while we personally haven’t acquired a taste for his work, it sold (at least for charity).  In 2012, a Jimmy Carter original painting sold at auction for $250,000!

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t an artist, but he did sign the Arts and Humanities Bill in 1965 – but we digress and return to dipping back in time: Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t take up painting seriously until he was 58 years old, and that he did was probably a combination of orders from his physician to relieve his stress, and the influence of fellow politician, Winston Churchill (an avid painter). Over the remainder of his life, Eisenhower produced some 250 known paintings. Most of them, we suspect, might have been regarded as amateurish (though isn’t art always in the eye of the beholder?), but he tried, and he didn’t quibble about his talent. “Let’s get something straight here,” Eisenhower was once heard to say. “They would have burned this [expletive] a long time ago if I weren’t the president of the United States.”

And finally, we come to the creator of the Scottie you see here. By now, you’ve probably guessed that President George W. Bush was the artist, and this rendering of the family dog, “Barney,” appeared alongside the obituary for the Scottie in 2013.  Bush painted many dogs, but we’re inclined to think his most moving work appeared in “Portraits of Courage,” a collection of stories, 66 portraits and a four-panel mural Mr. Bush painted to honor military veterans. Check it out. The paintings weren’t bad!