SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE ROOMS
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.”