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[[preprinted]]   
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
[[line]]
BOSTON . MASSACHUSETTS . 02115
Office of the President
[[/preprinted]]

-5-

You state in your letter that the Boards feel that the portraits "must be free of any absolute, binding commitment on our part that the portraits must forever be shared with any other institution." While we feel that the Museum of Fine Arts is a most appropriate place for the equity of this region to be recognized, it is not an institutional but a regional equity which is, in our judgment, created by the above history. Even in the Athenaeum proposal there is recognition of the desirability of a periodic display in Boston for the indefinite future. We believe that this is necessary in order to keep faith with those who gave the funds and initially preserved these portraits for the nation, and with the two institutions which have acted as their conservators for the last 150 years. I had understood from our luncheon that this was entirely consistent with the Smithsonian's attempt to reach out from Washington to serve the country as a whole.

You say that the people of the United States would reject a conditional ownership. But a periodic display in New England, a small but important part of these United States, where the portraits have been on display for more than one hundred years, seemed to us a way of dealing with the argument you propose for holding the portraits in Washington, the current need of the Athenaeum, and the clear equity of the people of Massachusetts and Maine, if not the whole of New England.

We are presumably being asked for our approval of your proposal that the portraits be periodically displayed here for one generation only. We do not so approve. To do so would fail, we believe, to recognize the equity of our fellow citizens here. 

We offered our help and full cooperation if a reasonable arrangement for the future can be agreed upon, it being understood that full title (with court approval) should rest in the Smithsonian, and that, if and when change were desirable for whatever reason, a court would have the power to make such a change. We continue