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President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will host former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on Wednesday for a ceremony revealing the Obamas’ official White House portraits. The event is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET.

The White House has put two portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush back on prominent display after former President Donald Trump had them removed, CNN reported. The portraits are now back on display in the Grand Foyer of the White House, an official told CNN, marking the return to a tradition that sees portraits of recent presidents displayed in the most prominent position.

Italian Portraiture, including Raphael, to Early Venetian Lute Music Art sleuths have created a 3D reconstruction of the face of Italian painter Raphael, solving an age-old mystery over his final resting place, Rome's Tor Vergata University said. The artist, a child prodigy and part of a trinity of Renaissance greats along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, died in 1520, aged only 37. A red rose graces his tomb in Rome's Pantheon all year round. His body was exhumed in the 19th century, at which point a plaster cast of his skull was made. But experts were not sure the...

Portraits of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush moved from prominent space to rarely used room The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago. The Clinton and Bush portraits were moved into the Old Family Dining Room, a small, rarely used room that is not seen by most visitors. Photographs of the new portrait locations were reviewed by CNN, showing the Clinton and Bush...

WASHINGTON (CNN) The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago. White House tradition calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement, in the entrance of the executive mansion, visible to guests during official events. That was the case through at least July 8, when President Donald Trump welcomed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two...

On Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ordered the removal from the Capitol Building of four portraits of former Democratic House speakers who had ties to the Confederacy. Robert Hunter of Virginia, James Orr of South Carolina, Howell Cobb and Charles Crisp of Georgia. The removal of the portraits is the latest meaningless gesture from the speaker and Democrats following the death of George Floyd. Pelosi sent a letter to House Clerk Cheryl Johnson ordering the removal of the four portraits in observance of Juneteenth, an unofficial holiday commemorating the Republican's emancipation of the last slaves in the Confederacy....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday ordered the removal of portraits in the Capitol of previous House speakers who served in the Confederacy as part of an effort to "appropriately observe Juneteenth" on Friday. Pelosi said she discovered the four portraits as she was taking inventory in the Capitol of Confederate statues, which she is also trying to remove but can't do unilaterally. "Tomorrow, Juneteenth, the clerk will oversee the removal of those Confederate speakers from the House," Pelosi announced at a press conference at the Capitol. "There's no room in the hallowed halls of this democracy, this temple of democracy,...

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) was a well-known portraitist during the Italian Renaissance, studying with a variety of artists from the age of 14. Upon receipt of a drawing she made for him, Michelangelo informally tutored her for a couple of years. A young Van Dyck visited her the year before her death at the age of 93, and wrote that she had taught him more than all of his teachers had up till then. Lost to history in the centuries since her death, the quality of her work is becoming known again. Music is from: Early Venetian Lute Music: “O Mia...

George Romney was a British portrait artist (1734-1802). The music is Beethoven's Symphony 2, D-major, Opus-36, 2nd movement, Larghetto. Performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker, Karajan conducting. Roughly chronological.

A U.K. exhibit commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz includes works by an artist more often seen in front of the camera than behind it: Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge and an avid amateur photographer. Middleton contributed two portraits to the Royal Photographic Society’s exhibit of photos of Holocaust survivors with their grandchildren... In a statement, Middleton said that she wanted to emulate Anne Frank’s “sensitive and intimate” depiction of the Holocaust. But even more visible in her portraits is the influence of the non-Jewish source from whom she took inspiration: the Dutch Baroque painter Johannes...

The tool lets users upload their photos, then view a classical-style faux watercolor, oil, or ink portrait based on the photo a few seconds later. Each one is unique. The tool’s creators at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab used generative adversarial network (GAN) models, a popular AI technique. It involves getting two neural networks to duel each other to produce an acceptable outcome: a generator, which looks at examples and tries to mimic them, and a discriminator, which judges if they are real by comparing them with the same training examples. In this case, they used 45,000 portrait images to...

Harvard University plans to remove portraits of one of its former university presidents, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, from a building named after him on campus, as two incoming faculty Deans suggest that students should not have to see photos of the former president while they’re “eating Cheerios” in the dining hall. The Lowell House will no longer be displaying portraits of former Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell and his wife Anna Parker Lowell by the time the building reopens for the fall 2019 semester, according to the school’s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

Secrets revealed about the official Obama Portraits: First: It was an unfortunate coincidence that the portraits were revealed the same week as the Westminster Dog Show.Second: They were not the first portraits done of the former First POTUS and FLOTUS. Initially Amy Sherald did a magical portrait of Barack. It was very groundbreaking. And modern.It was titled “It made sense…mostly in zer mind.” And Kahinde Wylie plied his talents on the portrait of Michelle, working title, “The Beard.” Also groundbreaking.However upon review it was determined that switching the artists out with each other would produce a better final product for the...

Full title: Barack and Michelle Obama's portraits unveiled at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Text of excerpt: Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits were unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery on Monday morning. The former president’s portrait was painted by artist Kehinde Wiley, and the former First Lady chose Baltimore artist Amy Sherald for hers. Wiley and Sherald are the first two African-American artists to ever be commissioned to paint presidential portraits for the museum.

The Smithsonian Institute has just revealed an official portrait of former President Barack Obama in Washington, DC. Just before dramatically unveiling the former president's portrait, which depicts him sitting in a garden amid green ivy, the Institute presented a portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, and it looks like it definitely left a huge impression on her. The portrait was greeted with gasps and applause. "Wow, wow," Obama said in awe once the portrait was unveiled. She gave a short speech afterward. "Can we just say wow again?" she said. "I have to tell you that as I stand...

UPDATEDOfficial says his email was ‘misrepresented,’ but it’s rather vagueYale University is trying to explain its intentions when it took down portraits of white men who served as head of a residential college ahead of a Halloween party.Stephen Davis, the current head of Pierson College, claims that an email he sent to students last week has been “misrepresented” as saying the white men’s portraits would not be put back up in the dining hall.Davis ignored two separate requests this week to provide the email he sent students before giving The College Fix a copy of the message after this article...

Former President George W. Bush is releasing a new book early next year featuring portraits he painted of nearly 100 veterans who were wounded during his tenure as commander in chief. Bush wrote on Facebook that he's spent several months painting the portraits of 98 wounded warriors "who were injured carrying out my orders."

Over the weekend, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an interview with a renowned local artist named Nelson Shanks, whose portfolio includes the official painting of Bill Clinton hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. (Sidenote: during my time as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, I learned that 43 loved to open any set of remarks where he was having his portrait unveiled with “Welcome to my hanging.” For some reason, I always found that endearing). Anyway, Shanks, who we can only presume has figured out that publicly slighting a Democratic president is basically the royal road to a Fox News contributor...

In an effort to get a glimpse of how the world thinks about beauty, the journalist Esther Honig sent out a photo of herself to graphic designers in more than 20 countries. Their task: to edit the photo to make Honig look "beautiful" — however the designer defined the term. The results are telling. Each photo represents the personal and cultural beauty standards of the designer, with the American editor giving Honig bright blue eyes and long hair, and the Israeli designer darkening her eyes and skin. You can read more about the project at Honig's website. Click below to...

There was an article by Rowan Scarborough this week in the Washington Times which claimed that the US Army War College in Pennsylvania was considering removing portraits and statues of Confederate Army leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The purported reason for the possible “purge” was depicted as being some sort of statement against the CSA. Nestled in rural Pennsylvania on the 500-acre Carlisle Barracks, the war college is conducting an inventory of all its paintings and photographs with an eye for rehanging them in historical themes to tell a particular Army story.During the inventory, an unidentified...