White House Strategy by Mort Kunstler ~ Lee, Jackson and Davis, July 13, 1862 - It was a meeting like no other. Following the Seven Days Campaign in the summer of 1862, Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson left the field to confer with Confederate President Jefferson Davis at Richmond’s Confederate White House. Meeting in the President’s upstairs office, they planned strategy to protect the Confederate capital and save the South. (At times, the President’s rambunctious five-year old son, Jefferson Davis, Jr. – dubbed “the General” by White House staff – would slip into official meetings.)

To my knowledge, no artist has ever painted the only time Lee, Jackson and Davis met together in the Confederate White House. I’m always looking for ideas that have not been painted, and this struck me as a perfect subject for an exceptional painting. That’s how White House Strategy was born.

One of the biggest challenges in preparing to do a painting such as this is finding accurate likenesses of the people involved. In this case, it was particularly difficult. There are no photos of Lee, Jackson, or Davis as I needed to position them in this painting. We see photographs of each of them often, but they’re the same small number of images – all from a certain angle. Painting Davis was especially challenging because there are no photos of him in profile. However, I’m satisfied that the painting captures his likeness as he really appeared in the summer of 1862.