Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan are still on the bench O’Connor retired in 2006.

President Barack Obama appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. After O’Connor, the next woman to receive an appointment was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a nominee of President Bill Clinton in 1993. Only men had sat on the bench of the Supreme Court until President Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981. “Representation of character is really what counts to me.” “If you can imagine a painting-no matter how facile-that doesn’t show character, something is missing,” Shanks noted in an interview with NPG. Although the logistics of bringing three active and one retired justice into his studio was challenging, Shanks prefers to draw from life, which he feels brings each sitter’s distinct presence into his work. The work is based on sittings the justices had with Shanks the two senior justices are seated and the recent appointees standing. Of the work, NPG Chief Curator Brandon Fortune noted, “The National Portrait Gallery is honored to have such an ambitious group portrait on loan to the museum.” The work is monumental it measures approximately seven feet by five-and-a-half feet (in its custom-made frame it is almost nine-and-a-half feet by eight feet) and holds the west wall of the National Historic Landmark Building’s second-floor rotunda. On October 28, 2013, the National Portrait Gallery celebrated the arrival of Nelson Shanks’s The Four Justices, a tribute to the four female justices who have served on the U.S.

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