Paintings in the Green Room

As wife of the Secretary of State, Louisa Catherine Adams began posing for Gilbert Stuart in 1821; this portrait was not completed until five years later when her husband, John Quincy Adams, was President.

"Farmyard in Winter", painted by George H. Durrie in 1858, shows nostalgia for an idealized past.

Bear Lake, New Mexico, painted by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1930, is a landscape painting of an area north Taos on Taos Pueblo land. O'Keeffe went to New Mexico for her first extended visit in 1929, and for the next two decades would visit during the summer months, spending the rest of the year in New York City.

Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground, painted by George Caleb Bingham in 1847, hangs above the north door in the Green Room. This genre scene portrays flatboatmen along the Mississippi or the Missouri River.

Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (c. 1885) is one of Henry Ossawa Tanner's largest and most artistically ambitious landscape paintings. Depicted in the late afternoon light, windswept sand dunes appear before an ocean covered with a low haze that partially hides the sun. Upon close examination, one can see that Tanner incorporated sand into the paint used to create the sand dunes. Henry Tanner, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, is the first African-American artist to have a work included in the White House collection.