(Republicaninformer.com)- According to a report, four Norman Rockwell drawings are the subject of a custody dispute between family members. One side alleges that the sketches were stolen and kept hidden at the White House for many years in an effort to establish exclusive ownership.
The artwork was created in 1943 by Norman Rockwell, who depicted troops, congressmen, and others waiting to meet then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a series of watercolors and drawings about the executive wing of the White House.
Rockwell submitted the four drawings to White House press secretary Stephen Early.
On November 13, 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published the montage “So You Want to See the President.”
The report shows the case was brought by the two sons of Early, who claim their late sister, Helen Early Elam, betrayed her pledge to save the drawings after their parents’ passing.
No one at the White House is mentioned in the complaint.
According to Elam’s attorney, David Fiske, the suggestion that Elam gave the art to the White House, a public place, to conceal them is absurd.
According to Fiske, Elam’s father, the press secretary, gave them to her in 1949 as a graduation gift. Mrs. Elam and her son did not take anything. He claimed that she, not her son, had given the White House a loan of the artwork in 1978 and that it was not made in secret.
The White House removed the drawings last summer and sent them back to Elam, who is keeping them until the family settles the custody dispute, according to reports.
Fiske, however, asserts that the White House gave the rightful owner the designs back.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings have routinely sold for eight figures at auctions, according to Art Net News.
But the market hasn’t placed as much value on his works on paper.
The artist’s study for his 1964 oil painting “The Problem We All Live With,” which shows Ruby Bridges entering her newly desegregated primary school, set the record value for one of his paper works when it sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for $854,000.
