BRUSH WITH POWER.(The Talk of the Town)(painter Barbara Ernst Prey)

Longtime recipients of the annual Prey family Christmas card--fellow-parishioners of the First Presbyterian Church in Oyster Bay, Long Island; summer residents in Tenant's Harbor, Maine; the United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic--may have noticed something familiar about this year's edition. The snowy woods, the red barn, the giant wreath: it's pretty, of course, but didn't the Preys send an image just like it a few years back? Well, yes, that's Barbara's "Season's Greetings" painting from 1998. Barbara should be forgiven, though, now that the news has finally come out--after eight months of enforced secrecy, extending even to her mother-in-law--that she had been hard at work this year on a more important project: the White House Christmas Card, which last week began arriving at the homes of a record million and a half Republican Party donors and foreign dignitaries, bearing a Crawford, Texas, postmark.

Barbara Ernst Prey keeps a low profile in the art world, and yet she may be, at this moment, the most widely viewed painter in the world. Her work hangs at American Embassies in Prague, Oslo, and Monrovia. (Minsk is on the waiting list.) nasa has a Prey, and another is coming. Libby Pataki recently requested Barbara's post-9/11 work "Gallantly Streaming," of an American flag against a cloudless sky.

"I don't really do interiors--I do landscapes," Prey, who is forty-six, and a mother of two, said the other day, shortly before flying to the capital for the Christmas card's official unveiling with the First Lady. "That's why this was such a challenge." She was giving a tour of her studio, on the third floor of the family's historic Queen Anne house in downtown Oyster Bay, and pointing out mockups of the card. It depicts the fireplace in the Diplomatic Reception Room, with festive decorations and a roaring blaze. (Last year's card, by the Chinese artist Zhen-Huan Lu, featured a Steinway in the White House's Grand Foyer, and was criticized for lacking holiday spirit.) One of her other card submissions (there were five), featuring the drapes in the Blue Room, was used for the invitations to various White House Christmas parties. Another, of a mirror in the State Dining Room, ...