The House of Medici patronized Michelangelo, Botticelli and da Vinci. The House of Obama patronized Nicola Green: the artist wife of David Lammy, who served as deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom until Monday. From August 2008 to January 2009, Green was offered, according to her website, “unprecedented artistic access to President Obama’s monumental campaign,” the fruit of which was In Seven Days…, a portfolio of seven abstract paintings of the new president, released in 2010.

Cockburn’s favorite is “Day Six, Sacrifice/Embrace,” which shows the head and hands of the 44th president, splayed on a sky-blue field. Sixteen years on, the pictures seem to belong to a lost world: when Barack Obama was an almost Christlike figure, when even his disembodied limbs were the objects of trembling reverence. Some of the series’ promotional copy has to be seen to be believed. “Green was unencumbered by being commissioned; she was not a journalist or press photographer,” we are told. “She spent years reflecting on what she had witnessed.”

Pity the artist who loses their patron. Caravaggio was famously dropped by his benefactors when he killed a man and had to flee Naples. The prudent creative, then, must always be on the lookout for new wealthy and powerful people to flatter with their art. Cockburn hears that Nicola Green has been doing just that. At a reception to celebrate the opening of the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, she was seen offering the full In Seven Days… treatment to virtually everyone present. According to someone who knows the business, the going rate for this kind of thing would be about $700,000.

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It is not yet known whether any of the guests took Green up on the offer. If she had no luck with the Obamas’ friends and allies, she could always tack in the other direction and use her husband’s well-documented friendship with J.D. Vance to secure a new patron in the Vice President. Vance would want something Catholic, no doubt – maybe a series about the lives of the Saints. Given the near-religious ecstasy of her Obama pictures, Green should be able to whip up something like this in no time.

ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE The Office of Administration began tests this week on the condition........

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