Portrait of Henry Wallace by Jo Davidson

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents “Face-to-Face,” a portrait talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this regular series, NPG curator Brandon Fortune discussed this bronze bust of Henry Wallace, by Jo Davidson. You can see this portrait in the “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition on the third floor.

The Iowa-bred Henry Wallace abhorred the backroom politics of the nation’s capital. But his profound concern for the public good kept him involved in that milieu for some fifteen years.

On becoming Franklin’s Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture in 1933, Wallace told reporters that if he could not help the nation’s Depression-ridden farmers, he would “go back home and raise corn.” Wallace developed the controversial policy of limiting production, paying farmers to destroy crops and slaughter livestock. His policies failed to raise prices as high as they had been, but they achieved some success and became a model for later secretaries of agriculture. He became Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940 but was dropped from the ticket in 1944.  

Listen to Brandon Fortune's Face-to-Face talk on Henry Wallace and Jo Davidson (20:38)

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, October 23, when curatorial assistant Amy Baskette speaks about J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.