Viewing The Final Frame

First Couple's Portrait Gifts Mark Heartland Friends' Send-Off

It felt like a farewell.

First lady Laura Bush up there onstage, unveiling her portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and thanking the White House staffers in the audience for eight years of "support and friendship." President Bush, yuk-yukking, his shoulders bobbing, saying, "I suspected there would be a good-size crowd once the word got out about my hanging."

The first couple plans to return to Texas next month, and yesterday the Bushes showed off their oil portraits to an audience that had a distinct but muted southern plains vibe -- complete with the "y'alls" but without the cowboy hats. A group of donors from Oklahoma put together $160,000 for Bush's portrait, a lush image of him seated on a green sofa in a Western-style shirt. A wealthy Texan's foundation came up with $40,000 for a sunlit scene of the first lady reclining on her right elbow with a book propped on her lap.

In a week when donor lists are all the rage in the capital (on Thursday, after much resistance, former president Bill Clinton released the names of his foundation's donors, which include the Saudi government), the roster of Bush's artistic benefactors reads positively heartland-ish, as if ripped from an Oklahoma chamber of commerce circular. Some of the donors made their money with truck stops, others with oil rigs. There are doctors and academics, too.

Oklahoma got into the portrait game after Robert Slater, an Oklahoma City hotel entrepreneur, asked a gallery official a simple question last year while scanning the portraits in the Hall of Presidents: "What does something like that cost?"

Soon thereafter -- he could have guessed this was coming -- he got a call from the gallery. Would he be interested in raising money for the president's portrait? The figure they quoted didn't faze him.

"I thought, 'That sounds reasonable,' " he said.

It took him three weeks to reach his goal. "It was an easy sell," he said.

Funding for the first lady's portrait was even easier to come by. The Marlene and J.O. Stewart Jr. Foundation picked up the tab.

J.O. Stewart's daughter-in-law, Chia Stewart, was a babysitter for the Bush twins, Barbara and Jenna, back when the family lived in Midland, Tex., Stewart said. Stewart -- who once owned a large El Paso landfill that collected garbage from U.S. maquiladora (manufacturing plants) in Mexico -- considered it "a privilege" to donate the money. "We think so highly of the first lady," he said.

Even so, Stewart thinks that both artists should have done the work for free. "What a privilege!"

That suggestion didn't sit so well with one of the artists. "Is not a lot of money," Aleksander Titovets said in a thick Russian accent. Titovets, an emigre who lives in El Paso, had two portrait sittings with Mrs. Bush at the White House.