NEW YORK.- Portrait painter William F. Draper, 90, died at his home. He was born in Hopedale, Mass on December 24, 1912. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and at Harvard. In 1942 he joined the Navy and served as a combat artist on the Aleutian Islands and in the South Pacific.
Among his subjects were President John F. Kennedy, President Richard M. Nixon, Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, the Shah of Iran, the financier Paul Mellon, Dr. Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Terence Cardinal Cooke, the actress Celeste Holm and the New York socialite and jazz harpist Daphne Hellman.
Pbs.org website says: "Draper attended Harvard University and studied art at the National Academy of Design and in Europe. He went into the Navy at the start of WWII and painted combat in both the Aleutians and the South Pacific. Draper became a highly successful portrait artist in America after the war. His portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House; his study of Richard Nixon is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C."