The Capitol Dome

PW: I am very interested in amusing the public, but the public by and large is not greatly interested in buying art and things that are for popular amusement. Someone has to buy them for the public. So therein lies the quandary of the history painter: you need a public-spirited patron or organization that really wants to bring the message or tell people what they have, to tell the public, because the public isn't going to get together and chip in and say, "what we really need is a picture of the Capitol." I mean, artists in olden times, [Samuel] Morse for instance, 4 painted huge paintings on spec [speculation], and they toured them and charged admission. But poor old Morse's The House at Night didn't make any money. If anyone ever deserved to make money off a panting, it was Morse off that one. I mean . . . the way you've got the chandelier down to light it, all the things going on in that painting. . . . It works as a painting; it's gripping. WdG: It kind of fits your definition of painting "ordinary his- tory." I mean, it's not the House in actual session. . . . PW: Yes, you have to interpret it. It's not someone giving their famous speech. Those histrionic paintings often appeal only to the person giving the speech. WdG: The "Grand Manner" of history paintings, are those days over? Is painting like that ever coming back? PW: Until irony is over a bit. We have such a distrust of great leaders, that I think a paint- ing in the Grand Manner would probably be perceived as being mocking or in some way ironic. It would be very difficult to do with a straight face. Whereas painting ordinary people, no one thinks that's ironic because ordinariness is . . . ordinary. Notes 1. Occupying an estate covering several square blocks in the heart of the Georgetown, Tudor Place is a landmark neo-classical man- sion built in 1816 by merchant-planter Robert Peter and his wife Martha Custis Peter, grand- daughter of Martha Washington, according to designs by Dr. William Thornton, the initial architect of the Capitol. The Peter family con- tinued to reside there until 1983, since which time it has been opened to the public. 2. Dada was an international movement aris- ing from the wreckage of WWI, characterized by extreme anti-bourgeois political engage- ment and the rejection of prevailing cultural standards and the elevation of nonsensical art. 3. Nathan Hale (1755-76) was a Connecticut schoolteacher who was commissioned a lieu- tenant in the Continental Army at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, but accepted an assignment spying on British troop move- ments during the campaign for New York, when he was captured and hanged. 4. Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) completed his masterpiece painting of a night session of the House in 1822, but his commercial failure as an artist led him to inventing. His other great achievement also had a vital Capitol con- nection: in 1844 he tapped out the first mes- sage on his new invention, the telegraph, from the Old Supreme Court chamber. TAD LINCOLN ON THE WHITE HOUSE ROOF, 36" x 48" oil on canvas My friend Fran White found this great story about how Tad Lincoln was given a Union uniform during the Civil war and had a fort on the White House roof, with a toy cannon to repel potential invaders. The story allowed me to recreate the bucolic landscape around the White House at that time, with the half-finished Washington Monument in the background. 40 THE CAPITOL DOME

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