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THE CAPITOL DOME 31 the IrISh ImprInt In amerICan SCulpture In the CapItol In the nIneteenth and early twentIeth CenturIeS by Paula Murphy Renowned American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805– 73) was somewhat late in his career when he finally produced work for the Capitol. His statues of Benjamin Franklin and omas Jefferson were completed and installed in the Senate and the House respectively in the early 1860s. Powers had been credited with more than mere Irish ancestry some 10 years earlier, when, in 1851 on the occasion of the Great Exhibition in Lon- don, he was described as a "clever Irish sculptor," who had become a naturalized American. 1 In fact, Powers (fig. 1) was born and raised in America, although his Irish connections dated far back to Walter Power, who emigrated to the New World from County Waterford in 1654. However, many of his peers in the profession in America in the nineteenth century had more imme- diate Irish links and could claim Irish-American status. Some were born in Ireland and were brought to the U.S. at a young age, while others were born in America to Irish parents. e contribution of these Irish-American sculptors to the narrative of American sculpture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not incon- siderable and, as will be seen, is particularly manifest in the complex of buildings that forms the Capitol for which several of them carried out work. e range of their involvement comprises ideal sculptures, portrait work in the form of busts and statues, and architectural work including pediments, doors, and independent allegorical pieces—in marble and bronze and plaster. It might be expected that a discussion of Irish- American sculptors in the period in question would identify Irish-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848– 1907) as the most significant name among them, but in the case of work at the Capitol he must yield the position to omas Crawford (1813?–1857). Examples of Saint- Gaudens's work there, some 30 years aer Crawford, are limited to busts in the Supreme Court, but he did serve in a significant advisory capacity in connection with the sculptural work for the Library of Congress. Nonethe- less, it was Crawford, undoubtedly, who received the most important commissions—many and varied—for the Capitol, and he would likely have been in receipt of even more if he had not died at such an unexpectedly young age. Much has been written about this aspect of Crawford's oeuvre since it was put in place, and before that he himself, in his abundant correspondence, had much to say about the work in progress. However, it must be recognized that he never saw any of his work in situ on the building—not the East Front pediment of the Senate wing (fig. 2), not the bronze entrance doors, nor the allegorical figures of Justice and History inside, nor the colossal Statue of Freedom that surmounts the Dome. e extent of his involvement marks Crawford out as making a significant contribution to the aesthetic of the building, with the last of his works—Statue of Freedom—assuming iconic status. According to Lorado Ta there was probably no other American sculptor at the time "who could have done it better." 2 omas Crawford had a considerably greater claim on Irish connectedness than Hiram Powers, although published material on him only occasionally made such reference. Henry Tuckerman, for example, writing in 1867, refers to Crawford having "the ardor of an Irish temperament." 3 Both of the sculptor's parents were born in Ireland, and his father can be identified as arriving in Fig. 1. Hiram Powers, painted by Alonzo Chappel (1828–1887), engraving published c. 1874 (le)