Label Text: When Lindbergh sat for this portrait, he and his wife, Anne, were among the most famous people in the United States, if not the world, though the glamour of their international plane travel was by then eclipsed by the horror of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of their young son, a crime that captivated the public’s interest. Brackman, who favored still-life and nude painting, painted few commissioned portraits but made an exception for the Lindberghs because of their renown (and the high fees they offered). The press was so enthralled with the couple that even the portraits merited their own write-ups in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” The portraits were shown publicly in the United States only once before coming to the Mead, at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1938, where their celebrity treatment continued: special guards stood by to protect them and to prohibit the use of cameras, a somewhat ironic fate for an image of the world’s most photographed man. [http://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?museum=all&t=objects&type=all&f=&s=brackman&record=0]