Brumidi painted in the Capitol Building throughout the entire war between the States. In the little ante-room of the Senate District of Columbia Committee Room, originally the office of the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, is his only effort to picture that conflict. This small room has four allegorical designs painted about its upper walls and one large fresco in the center of the ceiling. This fresco is signed, “C. Brumidi, 1876,” and represents “Columbia Welcoming the South Back into the Union.”
On the east wall is “Secession”—the breaking of the fasces, and the rival products of the North and South; on the south wall is war and strife; on the north wall the implements of war are exchanged for those of peace, while on the west wall the fasces are again united with the words “E Pluribus Unum.”
These two Senate Committee Rooms present a great contrast in brilliancy of color. The somber tone of the smaller room might be due to its date of execution, it having been finished only four years before the artist’s death. The larger room is said to have had a bit of restoration at one time during the two restoration periods that some of the Brumidi frescoes have had in the Capitol.
Charles Ayer Whipple was employed in 1919 to restore some of the Brumidi paintings especially in the basement corridors in the Senate Annex. This artist is recorded to have said at that time, “The Brumidi decorations are second to none in the whole world.” In 1921 Charles E. Moberly also did some restoration of Brumidi paintings but his work was chiefly in the House Committee Room where a fire had marred the side walls, and in the Reception room of the Senate where a bomb explosion in the early days of World War I damaged the walls and ceiling.
GROUND FLOOR CORRIDORS SENATE EXTENSION
The Senate Appropriations Committee Rooms earlier referred to are entered from the West Corridor on the ground floor of the Senate Extension. Above the door leading into these Committee Rooms is the Brumidi fresco of Bellona, the Roman goddess of War, with her stacked guns, flag-draped cannon and silent drum and trumpets at her feet. This West Corridor with vaulted ceiling is elaborately decorated in 15th Century style, thought to have been inspired by the Loggia of Raphael in the Vatican at Rome, that portion of the Vatican at one time said to have been restored by Brumidi. In the Capitol’s West Corridor are studies of birds, butterflies and children. Among the humming birds, cardinals, bluejays, and robins are 13 exquisite landscapes and inimitable medallion profiles of John Hancock, Francis Hopkinson, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman, John Jay, Charles Thompson, Charles Carroll and Robert Morris. In a special ceiling design are the twelve signs of the zodiac in fields of Pompeian blue.
Senator Voorhees made the following appreciative reference to Brumidi’s West Corridor designs:
“The poetry of the artist, if I may so express it, had also its field of display. To one who recalls the great forests of the West before they were swept away, the birds and the specimens of American animals with which he has adorned a portion of this Capitol must be a source of unceasing enjoyment. The birds especially are all there, from the humming-bird at an open flower to the bald eagle with his fiery eye and angry feathers. I have been told that the aged artist loved these birds as a father loves his children and that he often lingered in their midst as if a strong tie bound him to them.”
The North Corridor is equally as colorful as the West Corridor. Here we find painted on the walls, parrots and quail, lizards and chipmunks, squirrels and mice in their own habitat and color, midst every kind of flower and fruit imaginable. Children dance about the trailing arbutus, lilies of the valley, morning glories, columbine, bleeding hearts and peonies. Panels adorned with clusters and baskets of fruit—purple grapes, pineapples, peaches, plums, currants and cherries help to frame medallion profiles of Daniel Morgan, Jonathan Trumbull, Horatio Gates, Israel Putnam, Thomas Mifflin, Silas Deane, Richard Montgomery, Joseph Warren, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
In this corridor also are two large frescoes above other Committee room doors. “The Cession of Louisiana,” picturing Livingston, Monroe and Barbe-Marbois in the act of negotiating the Louisiana purchase, is at the west end of this corridor. At the east end of this corridor is “The Signing of the First Treaty of Peace with Great Britain in 1782” in which likenesses of Richard Oswald, John Adams, Henry Laurens, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin are portrayed.