The White House Historical Association has paid $7.25 million at auction to reclaim a series of Norman Rockwell sketches that once hung in the West Wing.

The White House Historical Association is hoping to reclaim a series of sketches by American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell that once hung in the West Wing.

The locations of three other missing panels remain unknown. (The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Peabody Essex Museum via AP)SALEM, Mass. The Salem-based Peabody Essex Museum organized the exhibit. AdThe 12-inch-by-16-inch (30.5-centimeter-by-40.5-centimeter) panel was found in a New York City apartment, like another painting in the series, panel 16, that was rediscovered in a different home in October. The owner, who wants to remain anonymous, inherited the panel 28 from family, who — like the figures depicted — were immigrants.

A painting by American artist Jacob Lawrence that has not been seen in public for 60 years has been found and will soon take its designated place in a 30-piece exhibit of Lawrence's work, officials at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts said Thursday. A sharp-eyed visitor to the Met had neighbors with a Lawrence painting in their collection and, suspecting it might be part of the series, encouraged the owners to contact the New York museum. The existence of the missing panel was known through a brochure that accompanied the first showing of the series in New York in 1956. The panels were exhibited again in 1958 but had not been seen together as a group until the Peabody Essex Museum's organization of the current exhibit, “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle." Even with the discovery of panel 16, four panels remain unaccounted for, according to the Peabody Essex Museum.