From 1948 until 1953, David was the president of Columbia University in New York City. During his tenure as president of the university, David hired an artist, Thomas Stephens, to paint a portrait of his wife. As the painter worked, David, who had no previous interest in painting, became spellbound. He was fascinated that the artist could transform a blank canvas into something so beautiful. Perhaps he was biased because the subject of the painting was his wife, but David was amazed at how each brush stroke transformed the canvas from nothingness into something beautiful. David had never been interested in painting, but now he wondered if he could capture someone’s likeness on canvas as Thomas Stephens had.
David stretched a white dust cloth on the bottom of a box for a canvas and attempted to copy his wife’s portrait. When finished, David showed his painting to his wife and Thomas. David described the painting as “weird and wonderful to behold,” and added, “we all laughed heartily.” Thomas asked if he could keep David’s painting as a keepsake. In exchange, Thomas sent David a painting kit which David thought was a “sheer waste of money.” David’s true passion was playing golf, but when he was unable to play golf due to rain or other circumstances, he painted.
In a 1950 letter to Winston Churchill, David wrote, “I have a lot of fun since I took it up, in my somewhat miserable way, your hobby of painting. I have had no instruction, have no talent, and certainly no justification for covering nice, white canvas with the kind of daubs that seem constantly to spring from my brushes. Nevertheless, I like it tremendously, and in fact, have produced two or three things that I like enough to keep.” He described his portrait paintings as “magnificent audacity,” and burned most of them. Unlike Churchill who enjoyed spending hours outside painting landscapes, if the weather was good enough for David to sit outside and paint, it was good enough for golf.
When David’s tenure with Columbia University was over, David continued to paint. He had a small studio on the second floor of the house he lived in where he would paint for 10 minutes before lunch. Rather than using his paintings as a way to express his inner self, David preferred to reproduce what he saw before him. Normally, he would attach a photograph to one side of his canvas and attempt to paint what he saw.
David had no false pride in his artistic abilities, but he enjoyed painting and never gave it up. In the last 20 years of his life, he painted about 260 paintings. In 1967, when some of David’s paintings were displayed at a show in a New York art museum, David told reporter Richard Cohen, “Let’s get something straight here, Cohen. They would have burned this [expletive] a long time ago if I weren’t the President of the United States.” The house where David had the small painting studio on the second floor was the White House. In addition to being a painter, golfer, and the President of the United States, David was five-star Army general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower.
