The White House’s wacky and inspiring history of presidential renovations

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It’s always been a fixer-upper

The White House started as a blank canvas for the new nation. Every president — and every first lady — has left a mark on it.

In 1791, George Washington scouted the location for the White House, just up the Potomac River from Mount Vernon, with the master planner Pierre L’Enfant. A year later, Thomas Jefferson tried to design the executive mansion but lost out to architect James Hoban in an anonymous competition. In 1800, Abigail Adams — the first first lady to occupy the half-finished home — hung John’s laundry in the East Room to dry. “There is not a single apartment finished,” she complained. “The great unfinished audience-room I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clothes in.”

In 1814, British troops had their own ideas for remodeling the new presidential seat of power. On Aug. 24 of that year, President James Madison observed the British advance from the front lines in the Battle of Bladensburg. He got word to First Lady Dolley that the enemy was about to take the capital. With just hours to spare, she carried out what she could and hauled it to safety. When the British reached the White House, they set fire to the mansion and burned its interior to the ground. Only the outer walls remained.

Through their acts of bravery, Dolley and others at the White House that day saved a few of its earliest treasures. Among them was Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington that she removed from its frame, rolled up, and carted away just before the flames arrived.

Today this painting represents the heart of the White House’s decorative collection. It is also the start of “Art For the White House,” the rich story of this “Changing Portrait of America” as told in a new book by the historian Leslie Greene Bowman.

“It’s huge,” Bowman says of the painting as she looks out over Lafayette Square, a block from the Executive Mansion. In 1800, a year after Washington’s death, Congress appropriated $800 for the purchase of Stuart’s 1797 portrait as the first work of art for the…

“It’…

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