Norman Rockwell people-watched in the West Wing lobby. Now those sketches are on public display

WASHINGTON (AP) — For more than 40 years, sketches by American illustrator Norman Rockwell of scenes from the White House visitor’s lobby graced the walls of the West Wing, where every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump had seen them.

Now, they’re going on public display for the first time after a nonprofit organization paid a whopping sum of more than $7 million for the sketches after they ended up on an auction block following a family dispute over their ownership.

The four 1940s-era sketches titled “So You Want to See the President!” show people from all walks of life waiting to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. They depict U.S. senators, members of the military, the press and even a Miss America biding their time in the West Wing reception area, as they wait to be shown to the Oval Office.

The White House Historical Association spared no expense for the sketches to prevent them from being “lost forever,” such as to a private art collection, its president Stewart McLaurin told The Associated Press. The public will be able to see them through June 2027 at the historical association’s “The People’s House” education center near the White House, he said.

“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,” McLaurin said. “So we acquired them.”

The sketches had been put up for sale by a grandson of the White House official who received them as a gift from Rockwell.

Rockwell is famous for his scenes of American life

Rockwell, who became famous for his illustrations of everyday American life that graced covers of the Saturday Evening Post, spent hours at the White House people-watching from a chair in the West Wing lobby, McLaurin said.

But after his sketches were consumed by a fire that destroyed Rockwell’s art studio in Vermont, he went back to the White House to collect more 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 of Rockwell’s colorful sketches opens with scenes of the entrance gate, photographers waiting outside the White House entrance on West Executive Avenue and Stephen Early, a former AP journalist who became the third White House press secretary under Roosevelt, in a huddle with a group of journalists. Seated on red leather chairs and reading papers are members of the press and Rockwell, with a pipe in his mouth and legs outstretched.

The next scene shows Miss America — identified as Rosemary LaPlanche, the 1941 titleholder — in a yellow dress and her sash, sitting on a red sofa alongside her publicity man. A kilt-wearing Scottish officer also sits nearby as a Secret Service agent hovers.

U.S. Sens. Tom Connally, D-Texas, and Warren Austin, R-Vt., face each other in conversation as they sit on a red couch in the third sketch while a U.S. Navy “WAVES” officer looks on from a nearby chair. Gens. Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell and Edwin M. “Pa” Watson shake hands while being photographed, and an aide pushing Roosevelt’s lunch cart is chased by Fala, the president’s dog.

The final sketch shows more uniformed U.S military members huddled in conversation and, finally, an aide opening the door to the Oval Office, where the president is glimpsed.

“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 of the sketches.

They were a gift for Roosevelt’s press secretary

Rockwell made the sketches for Early and gave them to him after they appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in November 1943, during World War II, McLaurin said.

Early, who died in 1951, had displayed them on the wall in his West Wing office and then kept them for many years after. In 1978, a family member turned the sketches over to the White House, where they were on display throughout the West Wing for more than four decades, sometimes in a hallway between the press offices that are mere steps from the Oval Office.

The family’s ownership dispute began in 2017 when Thomas Early, one of the press secretary’s sons, saw them on a wall in the White House while watching a television interview with President Donald Trump, according to court records.

William Elam III, a grandson of Stephen Early, said his mother received the drawings as a gift from her father, the press secretary, before he died, and that ownership had later passed to him.

The illustrations had gone to the White House in 1978 under an agreement that required they be returned to Elam upon request. The White House gave back the drawings in 2022.

A federal appeals court settled the dispute in May 2025, upholding a lower-court ruling in favor of Elam, according to court records. Elam put them up for sale.

Association says the sketches are ‘priceless’

Historians at the association have researched the people in the drawings to learn their stories, McLaurin said, and the exhibit will include a digital component that uses modern technology to bring the characters in the sketches to life.

The association is still figuring out what happens to the sketches after the exhibit ends in June 2027. They may be shown in other venues, and may eventually end up back in the White House, McLaurin said.

When the association learned the sketches were for sale, “our board affirmed that this is an acquisition that we should make,” he said.

McLaurin said the privately funded association, which was founded in 1961 by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and receives no taxpayer dollars, had feared the sketches would sell for even more than the $7.25 million it paid for them. That is the most the association has ever paid for a work of art for the vast collection it holds as part of its mission to help the White House collect and display artifacts that represent American history and culture.

“In our view, these are priceless works,” McLaurin said.