On the walls of the Senate Military Committee Room--now one of the
Committee Rooms on Senate Appropriations--are to be found five large
frescoes, lunettes in shape, depicting scenes from American history.
These pictures are filled with action and American atmosphere and could
have been painted only by a lover of American liberty. The artist gave
these titles to his five American lunettes: “Boston Massacre,” “Battle
of Lexington,” “Death of General Wooster,” “Storming of Stony Point,”
and “Washington at Valley Forge.”
The frescoed ceiling in this Senate Committee Room is conventional in
design with victors’ wreaths, shields and other emblems of war
predominating. Here we have such outstanding color combinations as to
lead many Brumidi enthusiasts to vote this ceiling the Capitol’s best.
In this room also are six outstanding panels, rich in color and
different in design, displaying American arms of different periods.
Never were guns, pistols, sabers, tomahawks, and flintlock rifles
displayed with so much beauty and elegance--and the sword across the
shield in the center is said to be a copy of one owned by Washington.
(Keim attributes these panels to another Capitol artist.)
The north room used by the Senate Committee on Appropriations was
decorated for the old Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. The design is
that of a Pompeian fresco with marine gods and goddesses scattered about
the ceiling and with ancient porticoes and antique vessels adorning the
walls. Nine panels in oil with symbolic womanly figures in flowing robes
against dark blue backgrounds to represent various attributes of the
Navy finish the wall decorations.
On February 24, 1880, Senator Voorhees of Indiana referred to the
Brumidi decorations of these two rooms in these words:
“Almost every committee-room announces to the eye by historical or
allegorical paintings in fresco the duties to which it is dedicated. Who
ever passed through the room of the Committee on Military Affairs
without feeling that the very genius of heroism had left there its
immortal inspirations? Who would mistake in after ages the use to which
the room for the Committee on Naval Affairs had been devoted? The
painter has told the whole story in a silent but in an undying
language.”
An 1858 newspaper tells that the following statement was posted that
year in the Senate Committee Room on Naval Affairs for the “edification
of visitors”:
“_Senate Committee on Naval Affairs_--The decorative paintings of this
room are a specimen of the manner in which the ancient Greeks and Romans
ornamented their splendid buildings, some of which are still extant in
the precious monuments of Pompeii and the baths of Titus. America with
the sea divinities are painted on the ceiling in real fresco. These
mythological figures are delineated agreeably to the poetical
descriptions we have received of them, and they are Neptune, the god of
the seas, Amphitrite, his wife, Aeolus keeping the winds chained to the
rocks, Venus the daughter of the Sea, Oceanus with crampfish claws on
his head, Thetis, his wife, and Nereus, the father of the Nereids, drawn
by Glacus, and the Tritons by marine horses or swans, or else mounted as
sea-monsters.”