Aaron Shikler | Renowned portraitist, 93

Aaron Shikler, 93, a court painter of American nobility whose best-known works included the posthumous official White House portrait of John F. Kennedy, a rendering that showed the president eyes down and arms folded, in a pose that captured the solitude of the presidency, died Thursday of kidney failure at his Manhattan home.

Mr. Shikler was for decades one of the nation's most sought-after portraitists, but he was most recognized as a painter of the Kennedys. After the president's assassination in 1963, his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, hired Mr. Shikler to paint their children. Those sessions led to his selection in the late 1960s as the artist who would paint the couple's official White House portraits.

For the president, Mr. Shikler said he drew inspiration from a photo of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at his brother's grave site.

"I painted him with his head bowed, not because I think of him as a martyr, but because I wanted to show him as a president who was a thinker," Mr. Shikler told the Washington Post. "A thinking president is a rare thing."

The Brooklyn-born Mr. Shikler was an Army Air Forces cartographer in Europe during World War II. He later received bachelor's and master's degrees from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. - Washington Post