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White House Treasure Up for Auction After Bitter Family Feud

The White House Historical Association would have to smash its previous record to buy the work.

Four sketches that hung in the White House for decades and became the center of a bitter family feud are expected to fetch millions at auction.

Among the anticipated bidders for Norman Rockwell’s “So You Want to See The President!” is the White House Historical Association, founded by first lady Jackie Kennedy.

The four sketches depict various people waiting to speak with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to Aviva Lehmann, a senior vice president at Heritage Auctions, they are likely to fetch between $4 million and $6 million.

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The one-of-a-kind ensemble was given to Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, by Rockwell.

Early can be seen in one of the pictures with reporters gathered around him. Harry S. Truman once described him as Roosevelt’s “secretary, friend, and sagacious adviser.”

The artwork was created in 1943 and later hung in the White House, often near the Oval Office, on loan from the Early family between 1978 and 2022.

The 21-by-28-inch panels, however, have been the focal point of a cousin-on-cousin argument over who they belong to.

The feud has extended to how the artwork ended up in the People’s House in the first place, where they would remain for 44 years.

One side alleges fraud, the other false allegations.

When Stephen Early died in 1951, his widow first displayed the artwork in their home in Alexandria, Virginia, before they ended up in the White House. It wasn’t until 2017 when Early’s son, Thomas A. Early, saw the work on TV on the wall behind Donald Trump that problems started.

Some in the family claimed that Stephen Early’s nephew, William Nile Elam III, had loaned the sketches to the White House to improve his claim on their ownership.

They said the sketches should be split evenly between the former press secretary’s three children, The New York Times reports.

Elam, however, said the pictures had been given to his mother, Helen Early Elam, by Stephen Early before he died. She then loaned them to the White House to keep them safe, she claimed.

In 2023, the year after they were handed back by the White House, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled they belonged to Elam. The ruling was upheld in May by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

The most expensive artwork the White House Historical Association, whose mission is to help the White House amass and show off works that preserve American culture, has ever purchased was for $1.5 million.

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Speaking to the Times, William Nile Elam IV said of selling the Rockwell work: “It’s a bittersweet moment.”

The opening bid is $2.5 million, and the Associated Press reports bidders are lining up.

The work goes under the hammer in Dallas, at Heritage Auctions, on Friday.

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