Author Draws Presidents and First Ladies. And You Can, Too.
One-on-one with John Hutton, the artist who reveals the simplicity of drawing the country’s most prominent historical figures.
Drawing Jacqueline Kennedy begins with her most engaging features. Her eyes. Her beautifully shaped nose and arched eyebrows, which are slightly darker towards the middle and lighter at the edges. With short and quick swipes of a thick black Sharpie, the features swiftly come together in minutes, revealing one of the most recognized former first ladies ever.
Artist John Hutton insists during a tutorial video that crafting the illustration really is a method of identifying and drawing patterns. He begins with the framework of a simple oval sketched on a blank sheet of paper. One early piece of advice, as he goes along, is to tell yourself that you know how to draw patterns—not that you don’t know how to draw noses. Because if you do, he says, “you would just stop. And I don’t want anybody to stop.”
That is just one of Hutton’s motivations in his newly released book, How to Draw the Presidents & First Ladies, published by The White House Historical Association (WHHA). The book provides aspiring artists of any age a four-step method for drawing portraits of each of the presidents and first ladies. Inside, it includes instructions and space to practice creating 92 portraits.
“I wanted to help people have fun with drawing presidents, just like I have for 20 years,” Hutton tells East Wing Magazine in a recent phone interview.
Hutton encourages people in brief introductions of how to use the book and how to draw faces. He breaks it down step by step with tips and explains how to move on to the clothing and hairstyles of the presidents and first ladies.
Some of Hutton’s earliest memories as a child included drawing from similar how-to books. He admits he never thought he was a talented artist at a young age. What he remembers, though, are moments in elementary school when the class was told to draw.
“I liked it,” he says, noting that no one at the time told him he was especially good, yet he just kept drawing.
When Hutton was 10 years old, his grandfather passed down to him a 12-volume set of history books that told the story of the United States mostly through the men who were elected to run it. The collection called The American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans, was published in 1967 and featured the histories of the presidents through large, vivid portraits and pictures of their things. For instance, there was Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, pictured with his iconic stovepipe top hat and a pocket watch.
Later, Hutton would go on to take art classes in high school where he gained confidence. Eventually, he attended Princeton, Harvard and the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. He has fond memories during that time period of drawing and then storing his art in his closet. Sometimes, he’d sell pieces for a quarter to friends. It wasn’t until a friend decided to launch his own small publishing company that he was paid significantly for his work. That was the moment Hutton realized he could do more with his talent.
The first time he was contracted to illustrate a book for the WHHA, he remembered that American Heritage book series.
“I ran down to the basement and I found that box of books,” Hutton says, adding they were the basis of research for his first project. He is the illustrator for The White House Easter Egg Roll: A History for All Ages and a series of nine award-winning children’s books published by the WHHA.
Since 1990, Hutton has worked as a professor of art history at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. One of the classes he teaches there is drawing and that partly inspired him to create a book that teaches people how to draw presidents and first ladies for themselves. He thought long and hard about how to draw 92 different portraits of people using simple shapes people can copy and have them look uniquely individual.
“I had to learn a lot about a lot of people very quickly,” Hutton says.
Some of the most challenging subjects were figures from both ends of the spectrum—iconic women like Jacqueline Kennedy to lesser known women like Martha Jefferson, wife of Thomas Jefferson, the third president, who died before he was elected. People have big conceptions about what Mrs. Kennedy should look like, Hutton says, so he approached her with an image they would accept as being her in light of her husband’s tragic assassination.
Martha Jefferson posed a different set of challenges since there were virtually no images of her in existence. So, Hutton created a drawing that was based on images of her children and her male and female relatives.
“I made something that was very hypothetical,” he says.
When approaching all of the historic figures, Hutton made them appear younger, livelier and with smiles or slight smiles to maintain an air of positivity in the book. And during the process, he says, he learned a lot about his subjects. Pat Nixon, judging by photographs of her he says, appeared to always look so quiet. He discovered that the former first lady traveled to dozens of countries and noticed a very human side of her with the sight of her hugging children all over the world.
The book offers a natural opportunity to learn about history by learning how to draw.
“I’m hoping it opens up a world of drawing for people, giving them a place to start,” Hutton says.
And if people start drawing, Hutton hopes they take in the history by beginning to recognize more presidents and first ladies. If they start to recognize them, maybe they’ll read books about what they did and find out about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Declaration of Human Rights, or Mrs. Kennedy and her role in the founding of the White House Historical Association, or Mrs. Nixon and her international relations and triumphs working with children all over the world.
“I’m hoping [people] will open themselves up to a new activity,” Hutton says. “And if they stopped drawing when they were 10 years old, maybe they will try again, even if they’re 60 years, 70 years old. And if they’re little kids, they will naturally try it and probably not tell themselves they can’t do it.”
The drawings are simple, but so is the takeaway from this how-to book.
“We’re not all generic,” Hutton says. “It teaches us, maybe, to more closely observe the world around us, especially the people, and appreciate those differences.”