Norman Rockwell's suite of illustrations So You Want to See The President! first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post magazine in November 1943, at the height of World War II.
The original hung in a private home, then in the White House for many years. Starting Thursday, it is open for public viewing in Washington, D.C.
In the foreground of the artwork are a string of people waiting to see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as well as the Secret Service officers watching over them. White House reporters, Miss America, a bored cameraman, a Scottish soldier, military officials and others sit on red sofas and chairs. As for FDR, he appears in a small sketch at the end of the illustration in the lower right hand corner. And that was the point. It was FDR's longtime press secretary Stephen Early who commissioned Rockwell to create the piece.
"Early wanted to show President Roosevelt as accessible, as being engaged with the American people at a time when you could only know what was going on in the White House by reading the newspaper or listening on the radio," said Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association.
To create the work, Norman Rockwell sat in the West Wing with the visitors, sketching who and what he saw, including gas masks hanging from a coat rack, a reminder that the world was at war. It's labeled 'President's gas mask.'
"So they were ready for any contingency at that time," said McLaurin.
Sketches, photographs lost in a fire
Norman Rockwell was known for using meticulous detail to draw out a range of human emotions in his vignettes of everyday life. His process included both sketching and photographing his subjects before creating full-sized works. You can see much of the raw material he used for So You Want To See The President! on the Norman Rockwell Museum's website.
After his first visit to the West Wing, he took his sketches back to his studio in Vermont. But in May of 1943, a terrible fire burned his studio to the ground. McLaurin said his work on So You Want To See The President! was completely lost, "So he very timidly wrote back to the White House and said, 'Might I come back and do it again?'" The White House said yes and back he went.
Taking artistic license
According to the White House Historical Association, Rosemary LaPlanche is the Miss America in the painting. She won the title in 1941. LaPlanche was involved in the WWII war bonds effort and, according to an article by her daughter, personally visited with the Roosevelt family in D.C. in the early 1940s.
But another family says Rockwell used their mother, Marie McIntyre, as a model to help create the Miss America in the artwork. Nee Baumer, she won beauty pageants in Washington, D.C.
"She was 17 years old when she sat for [Rockwell]," writes her son Neil McIntyre in an email to NPR. "She described his demeanor as business-like. He directed the photo shoot; his photographer took the pictures." Neil said his mother "made her own dress for the occasion, which was a print, not yellow," as shown in the painting. Rockwell also changed her hair color from blonde to red, he said.
A WWII Navy love story
Another tweak Rockwell made was changing the color of the uniform worn by Eloise English the day she visited the White House in 1943. English was a member of the WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. In the painting she's wearing white. In reality, she wore her "dress blues,'" said her daughter Meredith Davies Hadaway. Rockwell later sent English his original sketch in which she is, indeed, wearing a dark suit.
Appearing in The Saturday Evening Post changed English's life. Hadaway said that her father, a fighter pilot at the time, happened to pick up the edition of the magazine that featured Rockwell's So You Want To See The President!
"He sees a WAVE and says, 'Oh, my gosh," Hadaway recalled her father telling her and her siblings. "What he told us was, 'As soon as I get back stateside, I'm going to look her up. And that's exactly what he did. And subsequently, they got married. And that's why I'm here."
Thomas and Eloise English Davies were married for 46 years. Thomas died in 1991; Eloise died in 2015.
World War II was a time of "so much upheaval and a lot of tragedy," said Hadaway. At the time Eloise visited the White House, her father, a rear admiral in the Navy, had recently been killed in a plane crash. Hadaway said her mother told her an ex-boyfriend died in the Bataan Death March.
"I think Rockwell became symbolic of something good that came out of all that chaos," said Hadaway. "My mother was not a very sentimental person in general, but she saved both the drawing and a copy of the magazine for her whole long life."
A dispute over ownership
Rockwell gave the original paintings that make up So You Want to See The President! to Stephen Early, FDR's press secretary and the man who originally commissioned them. Early didn't have a will when he died in 1951, but his grandson William Elam said Early gifted the artwork to his daughter Helen, Elam's mother.
Elam said the paintings hung in his family's dining room, where Miss America became something of a target. "I wasn't really old enough to know that I shouldn't catapult my spoon in the direction of Miss America and splatter her with my SpaghettiOs, which I did," Elam recalled, adding that he only did that once.
Elam said his mother gifted the Rockwell paintings to him, but in 2017, other family members claimed part ownership. The dispute ended up in litigation. Last year, a federal judge ruled that Elam had sole ownership.
"It was an arduous, lengthy process," he said.
Rockwell's original paintings for his November 1943 spread spent more than four decades hanging in the White House. Last year, Elam decided to put them up for auction. The White House Historical Association was the winning bidder at $7.25 million, the most the nonprofit has ever spent on a piece of art.
Now, one block from the White House, where scores of people have waited to see the president, Norman Rockwell's paintings will be on view for the general public through June of 2027.
Meghan Collins Sullivan edited this story for radio and the web.
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