The Capitol Dome

17 trait of Bernardo de Gálvez was unveiled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Room (S-116). Among those who at- tended the unveiling were Teresa Valcarce, Senators Menendez and Tim Kaine (VA), Ambassador Ramón Gil-Casares, Lynn Forney Young, and myself. -Joseph W. Dooley PORTRAIT DIPLOMACY IN THE EARLY CAPITOL(S) W hen Oliver Pollock gied a portrait of his friend Bernardo de Gálvez to Congress in May 1783, he was participating in a tradition hallowed by centuries of European diplomacy. French and Spanish diplomats had sent portraits of George Washing ton back across the Atlantic to their royal masters in Europe, and Con- gress had commissioned a portrait of a French diplomat (Conrad A lexandre Gerard) for their chamber in Phila- delphia in 1779. In that same year, Congress requested the French Foreign Ministry to send companion portraits of Louis X VI and Marie Antoinette—"that, by being placed in our council chamber, the representatives of these states may daily have before their eyes the first royal friends and patrons of their cause." As this coincided with Con- gress's request for more financial assistance from France, "courtly sensibilities and monetary concerns ran on par- allel tracks." Congress did not receive the portraits until March 1784, and then it took more than a year until they were formally installed—first in New York's City Hall (soon to be Federal Hall), then in Philadelphia's Congress Hall, and finally in the new Capitol in Washington, D.C. ey had been hanging in a Senate committee room for more than a year before the British burned the Capitol in August 1814, when the portraits are thought to have been carried off and/or destroyed. Dr. Todd Larkin's research, funded in part by the U.S. Capitol Historical Society's Capitol Fellowship in 2000, posits that Congress's am- bivalent attitude towards the French royals' portraits was a casualty of "the problematics of creating an acceptable visual embodiment for the new heroes of the republic." 1 Gálvez's portrait appeared under different circumstances, but it suffered similar treatment by Congress—includ- ing an equally mysterious fate. e donor, Oliver Pollock (1737–1823), was an Irish immigrant who lived only two years in Philadelphia before becoming a trader, first in the West Indies and eventually in New Orleans, which was for- mally transferred to Spain from France in 1769. Pollock's good relations with Spanish officials over the ensuing years made him him an effective liaison when he was appointed com- mercial agent for the United States in 1777—coincidental- ly, the year Gálvez assumed office as governor of Louisiana. It was Gálvez's generous loans to Pollock, no less than his military victories over the British along the Gulf Coast, that gave Congress "so favorable an Impression of your [Gálvez's] Character and that of your Nation that they have not ceased to respect you and to wish for an intimate Connection with your Country." That acknowledgement was penned by Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris just a month aer Fig. 3. A copy of Marie-Antoinette in Ceremonial Dress, om an original painted in 1778 by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), hung in the Senate Chamber of Phila- delphia's Congress Hall until its wall space was taken up by the addition of a spectators gallery and it was moved to a nearby committee room. is reproduction, painted by Pierre-Louis Ganne in 1975, presides over the West Commit- tee Room outside the Senate Chamber on the second floor of Congress Hall. It and its companion piece, of Louis XVI, are replicas given by the French government in 1976. THE CAPITOL DOME

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