 President Barack Obama sitting at the Resolute desk in 2009 | |
| Designer | William Evenden (probably from a design by Morant, Boyd, & Blanford) Kneehole panel designed by Lorenzo Winslow built by Rudolph Bauss |
|---|---|
| Date | 1880 |
| Materials | Oak timbers of HMS Resolute |
| Style / tradition | Partners desk |
| Height | 32.5 in (83 cm) |
| Width | 72 in (180 cm) |
| Depth | 48 in (120 cm) |
The Resolute desk, also known as the Hayes desk, is a nineteenth-century partners desk used by several presidents of the United States in the White House as the Oval Office desk, including the five most recent presidents. The desk was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 and was built from the oak timbers of the British Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute. The 1,300-pound (590-kilogram) desk was created by William Evenden, a skilled joiner at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, probably from a design by Morant, Boyd, & Blanford. The desk has been modified twice, with a kneehole panel added in 1945 and a 2-inch-tall (5.1 cm) plinth added to the desk in 1961.
HMS Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic while searching for Sir John Franklin and his lost expedition. The ship was found in 1855 by George Henry, an American whaling ship, repaired, and returned to the United Kingdom as a gesture of goodwill from the United States. The ship was decommissioned in 1879, broken up, and had three desks constructed from its timbers. Queen Victoria sent one of these desks to American President Rutherford B. Hayes. The Resolute desk was received at the White House on November 23, 1880, and was used in the President's Office and President's Study until the White House Reconstruction from 1948 to 1952. After the reconstruction, it was placed in the Broadcast Room where Dwight D. Eisenhower used it during radio and television broadcasts. Jacqueline Kennedy rediscovered the desk and had it brought to the Oval Office in 1961. The desk was removed from the White House after the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, and went on a traveling exhibition with artifacts of the Kennedy Presidential Library. President Jimmy Carter brought the desk back to the White House in 1977, where it has remained since.
Many replicas have been made of the Resolute desk. The first was commissioned in 1978 for a permanent display at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts, and since then five other presidential libraries and many museums, libraries, tourist attractions, and private homes and offices have acquired copies of the desk.