Art: Historical Whopper

One of the eternal problems of art rose last week in the U.S. Capitol: the problem of hanging a historical picture. Since historical pictures cover a lot of space, Capitol Architect David Lynn and a special crew of workmen equipped with pulleys, rollers and winches clambered up and down the Capitol’s stairways and through its second-story windows like a swarm of hungry ants tugging at a dead grasshopper. First they removed Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s modest mural, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, size 9 by 14, from its 63-year-old place above the east Grand Stairway just off the Capitol’s lower chamber. Then to the wall they hoisted a new historical whopper: Howard Chandler Christy’s Signing of the United States Constitution, size 20 by 30.

The idea of this monumental swap had been germinating in congressional brains ever since 1935 when New York’s ubiquitous Congressman Sol Bloom, deep in plans for his 1937 Constitution sesquicentennial celebration, discovered that Washington’s Government buildings contained not a single painting commemorating the Constitution’s signing.* Dismayed, Congressman Bloom got his friend, famed Painter and magazine-cover Artist Howard Chandler Christy, a $30,000 commission to paint the subject.

For two years Artist Christy and Congressman Bloom scoured libraries and picture collections looking for likenesses and descriptions of the Constitution’s 39 signers. To make the picture as accurate as possible they gathered mountains of data on costumes and furniture. When Artist Christy actually got around to painting the picture, he knew from warts to shoe buckles how every one of his historical sitters looked, except two. He made up a face for Jacob Broom; he painted Thomas FitzSimons with his face obscured by the upraised arm of a colleague.

When Artist Christy had finished his mighty acreage of oil painting it was propped up in the Capitol’s rotunda for 16 months while a legislative commission cast about for a likely place to hang it. Likeliest places in the Capitol were already occupied by such rival historical scenes as The Battle of Chapultepec and Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way. One Capitol picture, however, Carpenter’s dignified First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, failed to fill its wall space. So the commission decided to cart it off to the old Supreme Court chamber and replace it with the space-filling Christy.

Noteworthy fact about the swap: in their new setting in the Supreme Court room, Carpenter’s emancipators looked directly across the room at the bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who handed down the anti-Negro Dred Scott decision.

* Though Washington, D. C.’s public buildings had no commemorative picture of the Constitutional Convention, other U.S. cities were better supplied. Famous examples: Thomas Prichard Rossiter’s in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall; Junius Brutus Stearns’s in Clarence Dillon’s collection in Far Hills, N. J.; Albert Herter’s in the Wisconsin State Capitol; Joseph Boggs Beale’s in Philadelphia’s Modern Galleries of Arts; John E. Froehlich’s in Harrisburg’s State Museum.