Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/311502
painting; a portrait of Benjamin Franklin hangs on the back wall to the left. 8 Painted in 1862, Men of Progress is exactly contemporary with Brumidi's Apotheosis of Washington. Brumidi's fresco Robert Fulton is one of three frescoed lunettes celebrating important American in- ventors-Benjamin Franklin (fig. 2A) and John Fitch (fig. 2B) are the subjects of the other two paintings. e lunettes decorate the Patent Corridor, part of the network of hallways known today as the Brumidi Corridors located on the first floor of the Senate wing of the Capitol. Brumidi and his team of assistants be- gan decorating the corridors in the late 1850s. Bru- midi himself painted the frescoed lunettes between 1873 and 1878. e overall design for the corridors, as Barbara Wolanin has explained, integrated American motifs within a classical framework, identifying the Senate as "an institution with roots in the classical world." 9 e Fulton fresco fills the lunette above room S-116 located at the east end of the north corridor. e painting's subject reflects the function of the Sen- ate committee then occupying the room, the Com- mittee on Patents. Today the Committee on Foreign Relations meets in S-116. Fulton is the largest and most accessible of the frescoed lunettes in the Brumidi Corridors, visible the entire length of the north corridor, thus providing a focal point within the decorative program for that part of the Capitol. 10 e wide lunette shows Fulton seated in his studio. On his desk sits a mechanical model, "probably a steamboat walking beam," 11 and an assortment of steamboat plans spread open for easy access; a pile of books lies at the inventor's feet. To Fulton's right the draperies are pulled back to reveal a view of the palisades of the Hudson River and his steamboat, the Clermont, to which Fulton directs the viewer's atten- tion with a gesture of his right hand. Behind Fulton, tucked into the corner of the fresco, sit his abandoned painting materials and, on the easel, an unfinished copy of Benjamin West's 1819 self-portrait, a work once owned by the Congress and now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (fig. 5). Fig. 5. Benjamin West, Self-Portrait, 1819. Oil on papeboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION Fig. 2A. Constan no Brumidi, Benjamin Franklin, c. 1873. Fresco, over the door to Senate Room 117, United States Capitol. Fig. 2B. Constan no Brumidi, John Fitch, c. 1876. Fresco, over the door to Senate Room 118, United States Capitol. 20 THE CAPITOL DOME SPRING 2014 ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL