In the midst of World War II, Norman Rockwell spent days inside the White House, invited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary to observe the steady procession of people seeking an audience with the commander in chief.

The result was a four-panel drawing titled “So You Want to See the President!” that depicted visitors including two U.S. Senators, a Scottish military officer in tartan and Miss America. In the panels, watchful Secret Service agents stand among White House guests. Reporters gather around the press secretary, Stephen T. Early, shown with a pipe clenched in his teeth.

Those images appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943 and the original line drawings and oil on paper renderings were given by Rockwell to Mr. Early, whom Harry S. Truman described as Roosevelt’s ever-present “secretary, friend, and sagacious adviser.” Later, a family member lent them to the White House, where they were on display for 44 years, sometimes in a hallway near the Oval Office.

Now, descendants of Mr. Early are set to auction the roughly 21-by-28-inch works, the next stop for drawings whose unusual path has included a family dispute over ownership and two federal court rulings. William Nile Elam IV, a great-grandson of Mr. Early, said the family was proud of his service with Roosevelt and of the drawings that depict that period.

“It’s a bittersweet moment,” he said, of the decision to consign the works. He added that he and other family members hoped the drawings would wind up with an owner who would put them on display “where they can be seen and enjoyed.”

“So You Want to See the President!” will be offered for sale by Heritage Auctions during its Nov. 14 sale of American art in Dallas. Heritage described the panels as being among Rockwell’s “most ambitious and conceptually unified achievements,” saying they are his only known group of four interrelated works telling a single, continuous story.

Heritage estimates the drawings will fetch $4 million to $6 million, said Aviva Lehmann, a senior vice president at the auction house and its director of American art. She described them as having provided an image of the government functioning with aplomb in a perilous time. “Rockwell was sort of a celebrity, bringing news to the world,” Lehmann said. “Stephen T. Early understood all of this.”

An essay for the auction site notes symbolic representations within the panels. What is labeled the “president’s gas mask” hanging from a coat rack is a reminder of the vigilance in Washington, the essay says. It adds that by showing Senator Tom Connally, a Democrat from Texas, “shoulder to shoulder” on a couch with Senator Warren R. Austin, a Republican from Vermont, Rockwell was illustrating “bipartisan unity at the height of the war.”

After Mr. Early’s death in 1951, the Rockwell works were a cherished heirloom, displayed in the Alexandria, Va., home of the press secretary’s widow, Helen Wrenn Early, before being lent to the White House in 1978.

The ownership dispute began in 2017 when Thomas A. Early, a son of the former press secretary, was surprised to spot them on a White House wall while watching President Trump being interviewed on television, according to court papers. Some relatives later accused Early’s nephew, William Nile Elam III, of promoting his own interests by secretly sending the drawings to the White House to “launder” their ownership. The actual ownership, those relatives said, was shared among Stephen T. Early’s three children and, ultimately, their heirs.

Mr. Elam said in court papers that his mother, Helen Early Elam, received the drawings as a present from her father, the former press secretary, before his death. Ownership later passed to him, Mr. Elam said. His mother lent the drawings to The White House, Mr. Elam’s lawyers said, as a way to keep them safe.

The White House returned the drawings to the Elam family in 2022, while the disagreement continued.

In 2023 a judge in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., declared Mr. Elam to be the owner of the drawings, writing that either he or his mother had had physical possession of them for 18 years before they went to The White House. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, affirmed that decision in May.

Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the chief curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., described “So You Want to See the President!” as including themes of democracy and equality that were recurring in the artist’s work. She added: “The world that Rockwell was reflecting was one in which even the President of the United States is approachable.”