Artist best known for Kennedy portrait

Aaron Shikler painted other U.S. presidents

Aaron Shikler, 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 slain president eyes down and arms folded, in a pose that captured the mystique and solitude of the presidency, died Nov. 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was kidney failure, said his daughter, Cathy Shiklervan Ingen.

Shikler was for decades one of the most sought-after portraitists in the United States. In the political world, his subjects included former president Ronald Reagan and first ladies Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. Banker Robert Lehman posed for him, along with other giants in business, as did eminences of the arts, including actress Lauren Bacall.

But Shikler was most recognized as a painter of the Kennedys. After the president’s assassination in 1963, his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy hired Shikler to paint their children, Caroline and John-John. Those sessions led to Shikler’s selection as the artist who would paint the former first couple’s official White House portraits.

Shikler turned first to Jacqueline Kennedy, one of the most photographed women of her era. Millions had seen the glamorous image of Jackie with the handsome Jack and their baby daughter chewing a string of pearls. Only a few years later, millions would see the image of her as a grieving widow, veiled in black.

In the White House painting, Shikler said that he sought to reveal more than what he described as the former first lady’s “extraordinary, almost spooky beauty.”

Shikler worked on the portrait for several years. The final product, which he described as “American representational, tempered by a vast study of European tradition,” showed Jacqueline Kennedy in a floorlength peach gown. She stands in front of a fireplace whose mantle holds a bust of a child and a vase of flowers. With her characteristically elegant bearing, she looks off into the distance.

For the president’s pose, Shikler said he drew inspiration from a photograph of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, John Kennedy’s younger brother, at the president’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,” Shikler told The Post. “A thinking president is a rare thing.”

Time magazine selected Shikler to paint the cover art for the 1981 article designating Ronald Reagan, the president-elect, as man of the year. Eight years later, Shikler painted the official White House portrait of Nancy Reagan, depicting her in a full-length red gown and in a pose, not unlike Jacqueline Kennedy’s, that made her look willowy and regal.

Shikler also painted, then repainted, an official White House portrait of president Reagan that was said not to have entirely satisfied Nancy Reagan. The work was eventually replaced with a portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

“The portrait painter,” Shikler once said, “is stuck somewhere in there among the couturier, the hairdresser and the masseuse.”

Shikler’s other subjects included the Justice Department’s official portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general in his brother’s administration, first lady Lady Bird Johnson and the official portrait of former Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield.

Shikler’s private portraits commanded as much as $125,000 US. Many of his studies for the Kennedy works were auctioned after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s death in 1994, with one painting of her and her children fetching $216,000 US in 2005.