President Biden’s personal touches in the Oval Office include replacing a portrait of Andrew Jackson and adding a bust of work icon Cesar Chavez behind the Resolute Desk, according to The Washington Post.
The new layout includes busts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy on both sides of the fireplace, as well as the bust of Chavez. Other seizures at the office include Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt.
A portrait of Jackson, the seventh president, was removed and replaced with a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Trump frequently identifies with Jackson, who was elected president on a populist platform and protested entrenched interests, while critics pointed to his brutal policies against indigenous peoples and their participation in the slave trade.
Highlighting Biden’s emphasis on national unity, paintings by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, fierce rivals in life, are close to each other as part of the redecoration. They are intended to be “marks of how differences of opinion, expressed within the Republic’s protective bars, are essential to democracy,” Biden’s office told the Post.
Directly in front of the Resolute Desk is a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, who, like Biden, took office in the midst of several crises, including the Great Depression and the clouds of World War II in Europe.
These redesigns are standard procedure for a new administration, but Biden’s Oval Office contains more representations of historical figures than the average, according to the newspaper.
“It was important for President Biden to get into an Oval that looked like America and start showing the landscape of who he will be as president,” said Oval Office Deputy Director of Operations Ashley Williams to the newspaper.