So apparently President Bush has a favorite painting. It’s buy an early 20th century illustrator named W. H. D. Koerner, titled _A Charge to Keep_. He says it shows one of the Methodist missionaries who travelled the American west during the 19th century.

According to Slate (and a book by Jacob Weisberg, apparently), he doesn’t *quite* have that correct:

>The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

(Seen via Pharyngula and Jeff VanderMeer.)