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Painting on the wall behind Harrison Ford in the Oval Office


I recently watched this film and noticed that in one of the final scenes, when Harrison Ford was with the President in the Oval Office, mounted on the wall behind Harrison Ford was a large painting of a man in uniform and of some age. I think this was a full length portrait of Admiral Sir George Cockburn standing in front of the White House which he had ordered to be burnt down. The scene behind him is of the White House in flames. Does anyone know if this is correct? The reason I ask is that many years ago, as a relative of the Admiral (my great-grandmother was a Cockburn), I made a pilgrimage to the Greenwich Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London to see this painting. The Museum tells me that this painting was never loaned out to a film company but somebody, somewhere must know something about this and it's now become an obsession to find out if what I saw in that scene was, in fact, the painting of my forebear.

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[deleted]

I just looked at this scene. I believe that is a picture of Washington standing in front of the Delaware river. I think the flames that you see is a sunset.
It is a tradition for the presidents to have a picture of a past president on the that wall, above the fire place.

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It's Gen. George Washington after the Battle of Princeton in January of 1777, painted by Charles Willson Peale

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good call!


Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate

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@sallyabbott-burns For those wondering which painting was in the scene:
http://i.imgur.com/51Ekd4c.jpg

And here's the painting by Charles Willson Peale:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/George_Washington_by_Peale_1776.jpg

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It's George Washington, and wasn't he the American president who "cannot tell a lie"? I thought the symbolism there was that his painting was behind Jack who was being honest, while the current President of the United States was lying through his teeth. Jack Ryan was standing up for the principals upon which the United States was founded, and that notion was reinforced by having George Washington's painting behind him over his shoulder.

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