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On his birthday in 1962, Henry deForest Webster ’48 received an unusual gift: a small tempera painting, well over a century old. The gift was from Webster’s mother, who’d inherited it from her second husband, Webster’s stepfather, who’d received it from his own father, William Augustus White, a prominent art collector.
For decades, Webster kept this 10-inch-by-15-inch painting on a wall near the kitchen door of his Bethesda, Md., home. It hung in his house as he built his career at the National Institutes of Health, which he joined as a young neurologist in 1968. It hung there as he and his wife, Marion, raised their daughter and four sons. When the couple sold their house and moved to an apartment, the painting came, too.
The painting is The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, by the poet, painter and printmaker William Blake, a towering figure, unappreciated in his lifetime, whose artwork is today concentrated in a very small number of repositories, among them the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Very few American museums own even a single Blake painting. (More common is to see his engravings in U.S. museums.)
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