A Spanish Painter in the White House: Joaquín Sorolla’s Portrait of President William Howard Taft (1909)

Abstract

In April 1909 William Howard Taft posed at the White House for the only Spanish artist who has ever portrayed a president of the United States of America: Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923). The commission was a direct consequence of the overwhelming success that the painter had achieved in his first exhibition in the United States, inaugurated the previous February at the Hispanic Society of America in New York under Spanish royal patronage.