WASHINGTON — Four sketches created by celebrated American illustrator Norman Rockwell, which hung on the walls of the White House West Wing for over four decades, are finally being made available for the public to see.
The drawings, created in the 1940s, spent more than 40 years displayed inside the West Wing, where every president from Jimmy Carter through Donald Trump would have passed them. Now, after a nonprofit shelled out more than $7 million to purchase them at auction, everyday Americans will get their first chance to view them in person.
The series of four sketches is titled “So You Want to See the President!” and captures a vivid cross-section of people gathered in the West Wing reception area during World War II, all waiting for an audience with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The scenes include U.S. senators, military personnel, members of the press corps, and even a Miss America contestant, all biding their time before being escorted to the Oval Office.
The White House Historical Association made the purchase to ensure the works wouldn’t disappear into a private collection and be “lost forever,” according to its president, Stuart McLaurin. He told The Associated Press the sketches will be on view through June 2027 at the association’s “The People’s House” education center located near the White House.
“And since they had been seen by the eyes of so many presidents and first ladies and senior White House staff and important visitors from around the world, we wanted the American people to see them. So we acquired them,” McLaurin said.
Rockwell, best known for his depictions of everyday American life that regularly appeared on covers of the Saturday Evening Post, originally spent hours sitting in the West Wing lobby observing the people around him, McLaurin explained. After a fire destroyed his Vermont art studio — taking his original sketches with it — Rockwell returned to the White House a second time to gather additional material.
“So it’s really a combination of his memories from that first visit, the memories of the second visit,” McLaurin said. “And it is an array of these people representing the military and White House staff and members of Congress and the press corps and all kinds of people that literally, to this day, go through that space in the West Wing.”
The first sketch opens at the entrance gate, showing photographers waiting outside on West Executive Avenue and Stephen Early — a former AP journalist who became the third White House press secretary under Roosevelt — meeting with a group of reporters. Rockwell himself appears in the scene, seated in a red leather chair with a pipe in his mouth and his legs stretched out.
The second sketch features Miss America, identified as 1941 titleholder Rosemary LaPlanche, dressed in a yellow gown and her sash, seated on a red sofa next to her publicist. A Scottish officer in a kilt sits nearby while a Secret Service agent stands watch.
In the third sketch, U.S. Sens. Tom Connally, D-Texas, and Warren Austin, R-Vt., are shown in conversation on a red couch while a U.S. Navy “WAVES” officer looks on. Generals Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell and Edwin M. “Pa” Watson are shown shaking hands for a photographer, and Roosevelt’s dog Fala is seen chasing an aide pushing the president’s lunch cart.
The fourth and final sketch shows more uniformed military figures in discussion, and ends with an aide opening the door to the Oval Office, offering a brief glimpse of the president inside.
“It’s such a little aquarium of these people and we’re like a fly on the wall as to what it was like at that particular period of time,” McLaurin said.
Rockwell originally created the sketches for Early, and after they were published in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1943, he gave them to the press secretary as a gift. Early, who passed away in 1951, had displayed them in his West Wing office. In 1978, a family member transferred the sketches to the White House, where they remained on display for more than four decades.
The legal battle over ownership began in 2017, when Thomas Early, one of the press secretary’s sons, spotted the sketches hanging on a White House wall during a televised interview with President Donald Trump, court records show. William Elam III, a grandson of Stephen Early, countered that his mother had received the drawings as a gift from her father before his death, and that ownership had since passed to him.
The sketches had been loaned to the White House in 1978 under an agreement requiring their return to Elam upon request. The White House returned the drawings in 2022. A federal appeals court resolved the dispute in May 2025, upholding a lower-court decision in favor of Elam, after which he put the sketches up for auction.
Association historians have researched the individuals depicted in the drawings, and the exhibit will feature a digital component using modern technology to animate the characters in the sketches.
McLaurin said the $7.25 million paid for the works is the highest amount the association has ever spent on a single piece of art. The privately funded organization, founded in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, receives no taxpayer funding.
“In our view, these are priceless works,” McLaurin said.
The association has not yet determined what will happen to the sketches after the exhibit closes in June 2027. They may travel to other venues and could eventually return to the White House, McLaurin said.
