Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/884685
28 who was making a "grand tour" of European cities. They are known to have visited Versailles together but it is uncertain if Bulfinch accompanied Trumbull to Rome. 2 Trumbull settled in New York in 1815 and the follow- ing year was elected president of the American Acad- emy of Fine Arts, his goal to remake it on the model of the Royal Academy with regular exhibitions and a hierarchy of academicians. Busby arrived in New York in the early summer of 1817; between June and Septem- ber—with Trumbull's support—Busby was accepted as a member of three prestigious New York intellec- tual and artistic societies. Busby's talents, gleaned from drawings of his English buildings and his designs for a Virginia church, led the academy to name him its architectural advisor at summer's end. In late 1816 Trumbull began lobbying members of Congress for his life's ultimate goal: to hang some of his Revolutionary War paintings in the Capitol. The first was his great painting "commemorative of the Declaration of Inde- pendence," but three others were soon added, approved by Congress on 6 February 1817. One depicted another civic event, set in the Maryland statehouse in Annapo- lis: Washington resigned his commission there as gen- eral of all the armies on 23 December 1783. The two great American military victories Trumbull painted were Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga (October 1777) and Cornwallis's at Yorktown (October 1781). Trumbull had formerly done easel paintings of them all; his con- tract was to enlarge them to a monumental size suitable for the Capitol's rotunda. 3 Trumbull was in Washington on 22 January 1817, when he wrote the Capitol's architect B.H. Latrobe, who replied the same day that he was "honored in having my Walls destined to support your paintings." By early autumn Trumbull and Latrobe were correspond- ing about how to fit the paintings—by contract to be twelve feet high by eighteen feet long—into Latrobe's plan for a rotunda ninety-plus feet in diameter. Latrobe planned eight great openings, massive entrances at the four cardinal directions and equally dimensioned niches between the doorways that contained wide staircases Fig. 3. Only one pristine copy of Busby's 1823 plan of the Capitol's main floor is known to exist; it is in private hands. This image, which was scanned from a plate produced from a negative published between 1900 and 1903, is of an original copy whose current location is unknown. THE CAPITOL DOME