Chairs once featured in presidential photo find a new home after auction

Kyle Melnick

Julia Jones and her colleagues from Christie’s auction house looked through hundreds of items that belonged to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter - paintings, jewelry, photos, silverware and tables - while touring the family’s storage unit.

As they were leaving, Jones saw two chairs wrapped in plastic that looked familiar. After a moment, she realised where she recognised them from.

The Carters and Joe and Jill Biden gathered around the armchairs for a photo that went viral in 2021. The wide-angle lens made the room look like a dollhouse, with the Bidens appearing like giants who towered over the Carters.

The chairs humanized the Carters, Jones said, showing that even they could be caught at an odd camera angle. She selected the chairs to be auctioned, thinking someone would connect with them.

Sure enough, when collector Susan Jaffe Tane saw the chairs alongside the viral photo a few weeks ago, she said, “I knew they belonged to me.”

Tane purchased the upholstered beige skirted armchairs - which feature a muted-hued nature pattern - for $10,795 (R175 000) on Tuesday. She plans to place them in the library of her Manhattan apartment, where she keeps dozens of books related to U.S. presidents.

“I saw the picture of President Carter and his wife, and, I don’t know, it just spoke to me,” Tane told The Washington Post.

Amy Carter, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s daughter, said her family will donate some proceeds from the auction to the Carter Center, a nonprofit Jimmy and Rosalynn founded that aims to promote peace, protect human rights, prevent diseases and provide mental health resources.

“It’s just a nice reminder that my parents were meaningful to people,” Amy said about the auction, “especially since we’re, you know, in the process of grieving them.”

Tane’s passion for collecting began as a child with swizzle sticks, postcards and restaurant menus. In 1987, she began collecting books by poet Edgar Allan Poe.

At one point, Tane said, she acquired a copy of Poe’s short story MS. Found in a Bottle that President Franklin D. Roosevelt once owned. Tane has long been interested in presidents - she taught her grandchildren the names of them with flash cards when they were young - but Poe’s short story also made her intrigued by books related to presidents.

About two decades ago, she began collecting books that presidents have written, read, owned or gifted - from a copy of James Rennell’s Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan that President George Washington owned to President Donald Trump’s picture-book memoir Our Journey Together. The project became a family affair: Her grandchildren, Natalie and Spencer Flaxman, helped her.

Now, Tane has Thomas Jefferson’s annotated copy of Homer’s The Iliad, Abraham Lincoln’s signed copy of a book containing debates between him and Stephen A. Douglas, and George H.W. Bush’s childhood copy of Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington.

Tane has stored the books in the library of her roughly 2,000-square-foot apartment alongside Poe’s work. She has designated other spaces for more books she has collected, such as a closet for Walt Whitman’s books and the dining room for Mark Twain’s writings.

Tane, a former vice president of marketing for a manufacturing company, said she has spent a “small fortune” on collecting but enjoys “the chase” of finding and buying rare memorabilia and meeting fellow collectors. She has donated many of her books to libraries, she said, in hopes of sharing her interests.

Chairs, she said, are a first for her presidential memorabilia collection.

When they went viral in 2021, people joked that the photo, shot in the Carters’ home in Plains, Georgia, was taken in the worlds of The Hobbit or the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

After Rosalynn and Jimmy’s deaths, in November 2023 and December 2024, respectively, Amy Carter said she and her family began deciding what to do with their belongings.

The armchairs were in a den where her parents hosted guests, Amy said. A portrait of Amy as a child with Rosalynn hung on the wall behind the chairs, and a table by the chairs featured a star-shaped teapot Amy made for Rosalynn for Mother’s Day when she was in fourth grade.

Rosalynn wanted to keep the room clean, Amy said, so she asked her four children and husband not to track red clay soil from outside onto the blue carpet.

“When I was a kid,” Amy said, “it was the room you didn’t interrupt, you know, if something was happening in there.”

Amy and her family kept some items, gave some to the National Park Service, which now manages the property, and put some up for auction. She said she hoped the items would inspire people to be like her parents: curious, earnest, honest and ambitious.

When a Christie’s employee called Tane about the chairs a few weeks ago, Tane said, she wasn’t interested. But when Tane visited the Christie’s office in Manhattan, she said, the chairs and the viral photo gave her an intimate look at the Carters’ lives and exemplified the “warmness” Jimmy and Rosalynn carried.

Tane said she plans to read in the chairs and invite visitors to sit in them, but she doesn’t want to wear them out.

“They’re going to get the respect they deserve,” Tane said.