Howard Chandler Christy

Visitors climbing the east grand stairway of the House wing in the United States Capitol pass a canvas about 20 feet tall and 30 feet wide, crowded with men in knee breeches around George Washington. Howard Chandler Christy finished it in 1940, after Congressman Sol Bloom, who ran the 150th-anniversary celebrations of the Constitution, pushed for the commission. Christy hunted down period portraits by painters such as Gilbert Stuart and Charles Willson Peale and found likenesses for 37 of the 39 signers.

That job came late in a career built on magazines. Christy was born in Ohio in 1873 and first made his name drawing American soldiers in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Soon after, his pictures of a confident, sporty, well-dressed young woman became so recognisable that publishers sold them as the Christy Girl, a rival to the Gibson Girl drawn by the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.

During the First World War he turned the same figure into recruiting posters. In one, a young woman in a sailor's uniform declares that she wishes she were a man so she could join the Navy. Later he moved toward portraits and murals, and the playful nymphs he painted in the 1930s for the Café des Artistes, a restaurant on New York's Upper West Side, still cover the walls of that dining room.