Earlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security posted an image on its X account of an oil painting depicting a man and a woman in the Old West holding a baby inside a covered wagon. DHS added a caption: “Remember Your Homeland’s Heritage.”
The work depicted was the painting New Life in A New Land, by Morgan Weistling, an American painter who primarily creates realistic paintings of American frontier life. Prior to turning to fine art in 1998, he was an illustrator for films and video games.
But DHS did not get permission to share the image, Weistling said in a new post on his website. It reads, “Attention: The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”
A longer, since-deleted message, initially posted to his website and his social media accounts, called the usage “a violation of my copyright on the painting.”
“It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happen and what to do next,” he wrote, according to the New Republic.
While Weistling did not appear pleased by DHS’s usage of his work, he does seem to have at least some political alignment with the Trump administration. Weistling appears to have an ongoing partnership with conservative evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family—which has been one of the longest and most aggressive opponents of abortion access and LGBTQIA+ rights—to sell prints of his paintings through Focus’s online store.
One of the prints on offer is a reproduction of the painting posted by DHS. There it is titled A Prayer for a New Life, with the text noting that it “celebrates the value of life despite the many hazards a young family would have faced on their journey through the pioneer west.”
Just two weeks earlier, DHS posted a different image of a painting, which similarly showed an idyllic view of American life, this one from a different period. That was a work by Thomas Kinkade, Morning Pledge, which shows a mid-century suburban neighborhood.
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