The Mona Lisa Crosses the Atlantic for Its American Debut

On the evening of January 8, 1963, President John F. Kennedy opened a one-painting exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The guest of honor was Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, lent directly to the American people by the French government and escorted across the Atlantic by France’s culture minister, André Malraux.

The loan was extraordinary. Apart from a 1911 theft that briefly carried her to Italy, the portrait had scarcely left the Louvre in centuries. Kennedy framed the gesture as a tribute between allies.

“We in the United States are grateful for this loan from the leading artistic power in the world, France.”

Hung on a baffle draped in red velvet and watched around the clock by U.S. Marines, she drew enormous crowds once doors opened to the public. Visitors queued for as long as two hours, and more than half a million people saw the painting during its Washington run before it traveled on to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.