Talk:City of Washington from Beyond the Navy Yard

Acquisition by White House
There appears to be a discrepancy in the painting’s date of acquisition. I removed mention of the 1976 acquisition from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation due to Ford Administration papers (dated January 1975) noting acquisition in 1972. However, I would note that the official archived G.W. Bush White House website matches your edit. Given this inconsistency between two, I’m inclined to side with the older primary source and have changed the page accordingly. Open to your thoughts/suggestions RyeCityRoller (talk) 14:54, 14 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry, RyeCityRoller, there is little I can add. I was just following the sources, and if I'd found more information then I'd have added it.  No doubt more and better sources are out there somewhere, that might tell us more about this work: who owned the painting between 1832 and 1972/6, for example.  There is certainly a little more that could be added about it being included in the series of 18 aquatint engravings of American cities by William James Bennett. (eg  )  Regarding the dates, we have two good sources which seem inconsistent, so all we can really do is pick one if it seems plainly right or report the inconsistency.  Perhaps one is wrong, and it was either 1972 or 1976, or perhaps there is an explanation that reconciles the two.  For example (and I am speculating wildly here: we would need more sources to say for sure) perhaps it was loaned in 1972 and bought in 1976; or perhaps it was bought using one source of funding in 1972, and then reallocated in some way in 1976 to become a gift of the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation (which has been a generous benefactor of public art in DC over the years).  And then the painting seems to have come and gone from the Oval Office from time to time (the LA Times source shows Clinton brought it back for a while, then had it removed, and then his successor brought it back again; and the photo with Shimon Peres shows Obama had it for a while but not all eight years, I think). Good luck sorting this out!  Theramin (talk) 01:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)