Frances Folsom Cleveland

Exhibition Label

Born Buffalo, New York
First Lady 1886–1889; 1893–1897

No other first lady had been a celebrity before Frances Clara Folsom Cleveland. The media coverage of her White House wedding to President Grover Cleveland excited the romantic sentiments of many Americans. Almost overnight, the twenty-one-year old bride became an icon. Her clothing choices were copied, and her likeness was used without permission or compensation in innumerable advertisements. And when her husband was re-elected to an unprecedented second, non-consecutive, term in 1892, she became the only woman to serve as first lady twice.

This elegant portrait of Frances Cleveland by Swedish artist Anders Zorn acts as a companion to Zorn’s likeness of Grover Cleveland, which hangs nearby in the America’s Presidents galleries. The painting shows the former first lady at age thirty-five, at the couple’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. She wears one of her signature looks: a lace-ruffled gown revealing her bare shoulders and arms.

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