Jackie’s Favorite Things

This is what America’s most glamorous First Lady saw every time she went to the closet in her White House dressing room after she had the place redecorated in 1962. The artist Pierre-Marie Rudelle covered a pair of ordinary white closet doors with two trompe-l’oeil paintings of treasured belongings of hers, including, at left, two flowers her sister, Lee, gave her as a child and, above them, a watercolor she herself did of the White House, and at right, a spread in Life magazine that opened with her getting thrown by her horse. The doors are showing through July 29 in the exhibit “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. From September 12 through February 28, the exhibit will be at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, where the doors will remain on display thereafter. Replicas are for sale at the Metropolitan Museum’s store.