Eleanor Roosevelt's Favorite L.A. Artist

Mark Hilbert has acquired Milford Zornes' Canyon (1935), a watercolor view of Wall Street, to put on view in Chapman University's Hilbert Museum of California Art, Orange. Zornes (1908-2008) was one of a generation of now-lesser known L.A. artists who once had national reputations. At age 25, Zornes rated a one-artist show at the Corcoran Gallery. FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt saw that exhibition and picked out a Zornes watercolor to hang in the White House.
I'd guess Zornes might have been the first L.A. artist to have a work on view at the White House. Below is Ed Ruscha's I Think I'll… (1983), hung by the Obamas.