Mary Clemmer Ames thus beautifully describes that great picture, “Westward the Star of the Empire Takes its Way.” The picture is in the stairway of the south wing:
“At the first glance it presents a scene of inextricable confusion. It is an emigrant train caught and tangled in one of the highest passes of the Rocky Mountains. Far backward spread the eastern plains, far onward stretches the Beulah of promise, fading at last in the far horizon. The great wagons struggling upward, tumbling downward from mountain precipice into mountain gorge, hold under their shaking covers every type of westward moving human life. Here is the mother sitting in the wagon front, her blue eyes gazing outward, wistfully and far, the baby lying on her lap; one wants to touch the baby’s head, it looks so alive and tender and shelterless in all that dust and turmoil of travel. A man on horseback carries his wife, her head upon his shoulder. Who that has ever seen it will forget her sick look and the mute appeal in the suffering eyes? Here is the bold hunter with his raccoon cap, the pioneer boy on horseback, a coffeepot and cup dangling at his saddle, and oxen—such oxen! it seems as if their friendly noses must touch us; they seem to be feeling out for our hand as we pass up the gallery. Here is the young man, the old man, and far aloft stands the advance-guard fastening on the highest and farthest pinnacle the flag of the United States.
“Confusing—disappointing, perhaps—at first glance, this painting asserts itself more and more in the soul the oftener and the longer you gaze. Already the swift, smooth wheels of the railway, the shriek of the whistle, and the rush of the engine have made its story history. But it is the history of our past—the story of the heroic West.”
There are pictures and busts, or full-length statues, of almost every great man of our nation. Some of them, within one hundred years, will be turned over to the man’s native State or town, with complimentary notes and speeches the inner meaning of which is: “We need the room for bigger men.”
Before leaving the Capitol plaza a word must be said of Horatio Greenough’s statue of Washington, which sits in lonely grandeur before the Capitol. Greenough was much in Rome, and the antique became his model. The statue represents Washington sitting in a large chair, holding aloft a Roman sword, the upper part of his body naked, the lower part draped as Jupiter Tonans.
This conception brings out the majestic benignity of the face of Washington, and shows to the life every muscle and vein of his magnificent form. Greenough said of his own work: “It is the birth of my thoughts; I have sacrificed to it the flower of my days and the freshness of my strength; its every lineament has been moistened with the sweat of my toil and the tears of my exile. I would not barter its association with my name for the proudest fortune that avarice ever dreamed of.”
The work, however, has met with more of criticism than of praise. A statue should represent a man in the costume of his time. Washington should have been shown either in the knee-breeches or in the full military costume of his period. We want no foreign effects in our statues. Washington had no aspiration to be either Jupiter or Mars, but he earnestly desired to be a good and useful man. As such he should be represented.
In this connection a few words in relation to the character of future paintings that shall be selected for the adornment of the nation’s great Capitol building may not be amiss.
In Paris, at the Exposition in 1900, the writer was greatly impressed by the manner in which France perpetuates historic events. The best picture of the commission which settled the Spanish-American War was painted by a Frenchman, the best picture of the Peace Commission at the Hague was also French. One picture, which will ever be valuable, represented President Carnot and his Cabinet in the Exposition of 1889 receiving the representatives of all the colonies of France.
Our country should have pictures of the inauguration of the President, with his leading men about him; also of the receptions on New-year’s day, showing faces of foreign Ministers, the Cabinet, Members of the Supreme Court, and our naval and military commanders.