Jacqueline Kennedy

Jacqueline Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York. She was educated at the Chapin School in New York, Holton-Arms School in Washington, D.C., and Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, graduating in 1947. She then attended Vassar College from 1947 to 1949, spent her junior year abroad at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne, and completed a B.A. in French literature at George Washington University in 1951.

She worked briefly as a photographer and reporter before marrying then-Senator John F. Kennedy in 1953. As First Lady from 1961 to 1963, she led a widely publicized restoration of the White House's historic furnishings and art, a project documented in a televised CBS tour that earned her a special Emmy Award in 1962. She painted as a personal hobby, and at least one of her watercolors, made in 1963 as a gift to her brother-in-law Stanislaw Radziwill, is documented in the historical record. After President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and her later marriage to Aristotle Onassis, she spent about two decades as a book editor at Viking Press and Doubleday in New York.

She died on May 19, 1994, at her apartment in New York City, from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, at age 64, and is buried beside President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.

There is no body of art criticism assessing Jacqueline Kennedy as a painter, and no major critic or outlet has published a review of her watercolors. Critical attention instead concentrates on artists who used her image as subject matter, especially Andy Warhol, whose silkscreen portraits of her before and after President Kennedy's assassination are held by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums, and whose work is discussed in connection with her as a cultural icon rather than as a fellow artist.

Jacqueline Kennedy has no conventional art market. The one documented sale of a painting attributed to her is a 1963 watercolor, made as a gift to her brother-in-law Stanislaw Radziwill, which Christie's New York sold on June 21, 2017, together with a Cartier wristwatch she had received as a gift. The combined lot brought USD 379,500 against a presale estimate of USD 60,000 to 120,000, and no separate valuation for the painting alone was recorded. That figure sits alongside a much larger 1996 Sotheby's estate sale of her personal possessions, including clothing, furniture, and jewelry, which set records for celebrity memorabilia but consisted of items she owned rather than art she made. Separately, a substantial market exists for portraits and prints depicting her, chiefly Andy Warhol's Jackie series, but those works are attributed to Warhol and recorded under his name, not hers.

Collectors should treat Jacqueline Kennedy as a historical figure with an extremely thin and largely undocumented output as a painter, rather than as an artist with a market track record. The one confirmed auction result for a work attributed to her is bundled with a piece of jewelry, so it cannot be read as a clean price for a painting, and no catalogue raisonne, gallery, or estate exists to authenticate further examples. Anyone offered an additional "Jacqueline Kennedy" painting should expect provenance, not connoisseurship, to carry the weight of any authentication claim.