illustratedvancouver:

US President Harding in Stanley Park, a painting by John Innes. The subject matter is rather foreboding, as the President would fall ill and die a week after visiting Vancouver in July of 1923. Quoting John Mackie’s Vancouver Sun story from 2009,

Harding and some members of the presidential party got food poisoning from eating Alaskan crab on July 24. He managed to make it through his public events for a couple of days, but by July 30 the Vancouver World was reporting the “President’s position is acute.” Harding contracted pneumonia, and died of a heart attack Aug. 2 in San Francisco, a week after his Vancouver visit.

This came as quite a shock to the city, and as such, they tried to make amends by commissioning some fine art. 

[The Vancouver Sun’s] Publisher Robert Cromie paid “the Remington of the Canadian West,” John Innes, the princely sum of $1,000 to come up with an epic vision of Harding beguiling the masses in Stanley Park. It’s a fairly romantic scene - Harding extends his arms “in fraternal greeting” to the crowd, surrounded by a lush green forest, the North Shore mountains poking through in the background.

The painting was presented to the National Press Club in Washington on May 9, 1924, and was accepted on behalf of the United States by Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge.

Where is the painting today? Well, John Mackie did an excellent job tracking down the painting:

Trying to locate a relatively obscure painting in the Smithsonian collection is a daunting task, because the Smithsonian has a mind-boggling 137 million artifacts. But after many, many phone calls and emails, Bethany Bentley of the National Portrait Gallery found a listing for the Innes painting in the National Museum of American History.

That museum’s Melinda Machado says the Innis painting was last exhibited in Seattle in 1980, and is currently in storage.

We may not get a chance to see this painting again, but walking through the Quadrangle at SFU recently, I spotted a whole series of large scale historic canvases by John Innes. Check them out in the university’s hall of art!