Agh! Where the &%#! to find presidential portraits?

[Kilometer31]

Never would have guessed this would be a challenge -- but we're striking out left and right in finding usable color portraits of all the U.S. presidents. The painting portraits, to keep consistent.

They exist. I've seen them. But all the Library of Congress and similar such sources seem to house a lot of BW crap

We're working on a presidents poster for the inauguration and this turned out to be a surprising obstacle.

Anyone out there stumbled across the right path?

[David Brauhn]

You can get a few, from Eisenhower up, at decent resolution here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

[Matt Swaney]

Here's a link to some of the portraits not sure if the size will be large enough or not http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/

[Kilometer31]

We chased and chased. Only "legit" source we came up with who had the goods was http://www.whitehousehistory.org/

They have high-rez of all the official painted portraits of every president. But even haggling, came down to $75 per prez. That ain't happening in this climate.

Isn't it "wrong" that official images of our presidents aren't available to the American people?

[Josh Trudell]

What about the Smithsonian? They house the National Portrait Gallery. Could they be contacted for images?

[Josh Trudell]

Or try these: http://www.americanpresidents.org/gallery/

Which included this note for using them:

Special Note: These portraits are the copyright of C-SPAN. For further information about their use, please contact the C-SPAN Archives at [phone].