Hillary Rodham Clinton

Born Park Ridge, Illinois

A graduate of Wellesley College, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Yale Law School in 1969. There, she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and met Bill Clinton, whom she married in 1975. During her husband's three terms as governor of Arkansas, she focused on child and family issues. In 1993, as the country's first lady, she chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform and wrote the bestseller It Takes a Village. In 2000 she was elected U.S. senator from New York-the first first lady elected to Congress-and served on several important committees. In 2007 she became the first woman to seriously contest the presidential nomination in a major political party. President Barack Obama, who defeated her for the nomination and won the presidency, appointed her secretary of state in 2009.

Clinton chose Ginny Stanford, based in northern California, to create this, the Portrait Gallery's first commissioned portrait of a first lady.