Image below: matted illustration by Thomas Nast (1840–1902) of a seated Ulysses S. Grant (27 April 1822–23 July 1885), smoking a cigar. Watercolor on paper. 55.9 x 40.6 cm (22 x 16″) with mat. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Record ID:npg_NPG.86.227. On the mat it reads “General U.S. Grant, June 1, 1872″—on which date Grant was in the third month of his second term as 18th president of the United States). Licensed CC0 1.0 (public domain).
Smithsonian exhibition label: “It was one of General Ulysses S. Grant’s small good fortunes after the Civil War, as he began settling into the White House as the eighteenth president, to count one of the nation’s leading political cartoonists, Thomas Nast, as a friend. In part, Grant attributed his election to the presidency in 1868 ‘to the pencil of Nast’; the cartoonist was a staunch supporter of both Grant and the Republican Party. [Nast] developed a camaraderie with the president and the first family, as this watercolor drawing of Grant might suggest. On the other hand, Nast had unleashed all of his satiric talents in criticizing the former administration of President Andrew Johnson for being too lenient toward the unreconstructed former Confederate states. Yet Nast’s drawing of Grant has, in hindsight, become a caricature of his “armchair” presidency, one in which he relegated too much authority to untrustworthy subordinates, an interpretation that the artist never intended to suggest.”
