# The Resolute Desk > Morant, Boyd and Blanford, designers, with William Evenden, joiner, Royal Naval Dockyard, Chatham - 1880 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/morant-boyd-and-blanford/resolute-desk-white-house/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Morant, Boyd and Blanford, designers, with William Evenden, joiner, Royal Naval Dockyard, Chatham - **Date:** 1880 - **Medium:** Oak (with, per the White House Historical Association, some mahogany) timbers from the retired Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute; tooled leather writing surface; a hinged kneehole panel of carved oak bearing the Presidential coat of arms was added in 1945 - **Dimensions:** Approximately 72 x 48 x 32.5 in (183 x 122 x 83 cm); weight reported at approximately 1,300 lb (590 kg) - **Object type:** Furniture - **Period:** British, Victorian, 1880 - **Current location:** The Oval Office, The White House, Washington, D.C. - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A double-pedestal partners' desk built in 1880 from the oak of HMS Resolute, a Royal Navy Arctic ship abandoned in the ice in 1854, salvaged by an American whaling captain, and returned to Britain by Congress as a gesture of goodwill. When the ship was finally broken up in 1879, Queen Victoria had part of her timber made into a desk and sent it back to Washington as an answering gift, presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in November 1880.For eighty years afterward it was not the Oval Office desk at all; that room did not yet exist, and once it did, other desks served it. Jacqueline Kennedy brought the Resolute desk up from ground-floor storage in 1961, and its now-famous 1945 kneehole panel, and the myth that Franklin Roosevelt ordered it to hide his wheelchair, both belong to a story the White House Historical Association has since corrected in its own archives. The desk left the Oval Office again after Kennedy's assassination, spent over a decade touring and on loan to the Smithsonian, and came back only because Jimmy Carter asked for it in January 1977.It has been the working Oval Office desk for every president since, with one term's exception under George H. W. Bush, through a brief 2025 removal for refinishing and back. It has never been sold; its entire history since 1880 is a single unbroken line of government and royal custody, which this record treats as the finding it is rather than leaving unexplained. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1850-1854** Royal Navy (HMS Resolute) `[documented]` (origin of the material) HMS Resolute, purchased and fitted out for Arctic service in 1850, served in the search for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of 1845 and was abandoned, frozen in ice, on the orders of Sir Edward Belcher, by her captain Henry Kellett, on 15 May 1854, at the position later engraved on the desk itself. This is not custody of the desk, which did not yet exist, but the origin of the material it was later built from. - **1854-1856** George Henry (American whaler, Captain James Buddington) and, following purchase, the United States Congress `[documented]` (recovery and diplomatic return) The abandoned Resolute drifted nearly 1,200 miles before being found still largely intact by the whaler George Henry off Baffin Island in September 1855. Congress purchased her for $40,000, had her refitted, and returned her to Queen Victoria as a gift of goodwill, presented at East Cowes on 13 December 1856. - **1856-1879** Royal Navy `[documented]` (continued British service) Resolute remained in Royal Navy hands for a further two decades before being paid off and broken up at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Chatham, in 1879, at which point her timbers became available for the gift furniture. - **1879-1880** Commissioned by Queen Victoria; designed by Morant, Boyd and Blanford; built by William Evenden, Chatham `[documented]` (manufacture) The desk was designed by the London firm Morant, Boyd and Blanford, upholsterers and decorators to the Queen, and physically constructed from the ship's salvaged oak by the joiner William Evenden at Chatham. - **23 November 1880-1961** White House / United States federal government `[documented]` (gift and long custody outside the Oval Office) Presented by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes; arrived at the White House on 23 November 1880. The desk remained White House property throughout this period but was not the Oval Office desk, since the room itself did not exist until 1909 and was served by other desks (the Theodore Roosevelt Desk, then the Hoover Desk) through 1961; the desk's own location within the White House across most of these eight decades is only partially documented (see open questions), though Franklin Roosevelt's use of it in his private second-floor study during his own term is specifically recorded. - **1961-1963** White House (Oval Office use begins) `[documented]` (first Oval Office use) Brought up from a ground-floor storage room and installed in the Oval Office for President John F. Kennedy by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and decorator Sister Parish during the 1961 redecoration, the desk's first use in that room in its eighty-one year history. - **1963-1977** White House storage, then Kennedy Library traveling exhibition (1964-65), then Smithsonian Institution (1966-1977) `[documented]` (removed from the Oval Office; loaned for exhibition) Following Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson chose his own desk instead; Nixon and Ford, after him, used a different desk still. The Resolute desk itself was lent to a Kennedy Library traveling exhibition in 1964-65 and then to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was displayed at the National Museum of American History from 1966 to 1977. - **January 1977-1989** White House (Oval Office) `[documented]` (returned at President Carter's request) President Jimmy Carter requested the desk's return to the White House and to Oval Office use in January 1977; President Reagan continued to use it from 1981. - **1989-1993** White House storage (desk not in the Oval Office) `[documented]` (removed for the Bush term) President George H. W. Bush used his own long-favored C and O desk in the Oval Office instead for the whole of his single term; where the Resolute desk itself was kept during these years is not documented in the sources reviewed. - **1993-present** White House (Oval Office) `[documented]` (restored to continuous use) Returned to the Oval Office by President Clinton in 1993 and used since by every president through the current administration, aside from a brief removal for refinishing reported in February-March 2025. ## Open questions - Precisely where in the White House the desk was kept and used between its 1880 arrival and Franklin Roosevelt's documented use of it in his second-floor study in the 1930s and early 1940s is not established in the sources reviewed. - Exactly when, and by whose decision, the desk moved from Roosevelt's second-floor study down to the ground-floor broadcasting room where it sat through most of the 1950s is not documented in the sources reviewed; only that it had been there roughly eight years by 1961. - Whether Franklin Roosevelt himself ever requested or even knew of the 1945 kneehole panel is disputed. The White House Historical Association's own historian argues the wheelchair-concealment story is very likely a later myth traced to a single 1962 recollection recorded seventeen years after the fact, but no source reviewed offers a confirmed alternative explanation for why the panel was added at all. - When, and under which president, the low plinth beneath the desk's legs was actually added is reported inconsistently across sources (1961 in some, a later Reagan- or Clinton-era change in others) and is not resolved in this record. - Whether the carved eagle on the 1945 kneehole panel was ever updated to match the Truman-era 1945 revision of the Presidential seal, which turned the eagle's head from the arrows toward the olive branch, or still shows the earlier orientation, is asserted in one lower-confidence source but not confirmed by the White House Historical Association material consulted. - Where the desk itself, as opposed to the substitute C and O desk, was kept or displayed during George H. W. Bush's 1989-1993 term is not documented in the sources reviewed. - What the February-March 2025 refinishing actually involved (materials used, conservator or firm engaged, scope of work) is not detailed in any source reviewed beyond President Trump's own public description of it as light refinishing. ## Sources - [1] White House Historical Association, 'What is the Resolute Desk? And Where Did it Come From?' - [2] White House Historical Association, 'Treasures of the White House: Resolute Desk' - [3] Sarah Fling for the White House Historical Association, 'A Resolute Myth: Debunking the Resolute Desk Panel' - [4] White House Historical Association, photo caption page, 'President Kennedy at the Resolute Desk' - [5] Wikipedia, 'HMS Resolute (1850)'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Admiralty or National Maritime Museum primary records. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Resolute desk'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with White House Historical Association or Smithsonian primary records where it is cited alone above. - [7] Wikipedia, 'List of Oval Office desks'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with White House Historical Association or presidential library records. - [8] Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust, 'Will Joe Biden choose the Resolute Desk?' - [9] British and Irish Furniture Makers Online (Furniture History Society), entry for 'Morant and Co.; Morant and Boyd; Morant, Boyd and Morant; Morant, Boyd and Blandford (sometimes Blanford)', including its quotation of Kelly's London Post Office Directory, 1871. - [10] Kent Online, 'The moment to look out for which links Kent to Joe Biden's inauguration' - [11] Anglo-American Almanac (blog), 'These twins stand resolute: the Anglo-American history of the Resolute Desk'. Enthusiast blog; flagged as tertiary, used only for the count and location of the three sibling desks, corroborated elsewhere. - [12] HMS-Resolute.co.uk, 'The Resolute Desks'. Enthusiast reference site; flagged as tertiary. - [13] Biography.com (A&E Television Networks), 'Jacqueline Kennedy's White House Restoration Preserved More Than Just a Building'. Magazine source; flagged as tertiary, used for the 'eight years in the broadcasting room' detail, corroborated in substance by the White House Historical Association source above. - [14] National Archives, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library blog, 'The Oval Office Roasting on a 1929 Christmas Fire' - [15] Yahoo News, 'Trump reveals he has removed the Resolute Desk used by Biden and Obama from the Oval Office', quoting President Trump's own Truth Social statement on the February 2025 refinishing. - [16] Wikimedia Commons, file and extended-metadata record for 'File:Stanley Tretick photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. in desk.jpg', consulted directly via the Commons API to confirm date, photographer and public-domain status before use. - [17] Wikimedia Commons, file and extended-metadata records for the six White House and John F. Kennedy Presidential Library photographs used as plates in this record, consulted directly via the Commons API for licensing, photographer credit and date. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.