United States Capitol Complex

The United States Capitol in Washington is primarily the seat of Congress, the working home of the House and the Senate, but it is also one of the country's great rooms for history painting. In the Rotunda, under the dome, hang four large canvases by John Trumbull, a painter who had fought in the Revolutionary War and served for a time as an aide to George Washington. Congress commissioned them in 1817, and they were installed in 1826.

Declaration of Independence shows the drafting committee presenting its text to Congress in Philadelphia, a scene many Americans know from the back of the two-dollar bill. Near it hang the Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga and the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, the two great British surrenders of the war.

The House wing adds two later pictures on its staircases. On the west stairway is Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, the mural by Emanuel Leutze, the German-American painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware. He worked on it in 1861 and 1862, as the Civil War began, painting a wagon train of pioneers crossing the Rocky Mountains toward the Pacific.

On the east stairway hangs Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution, finished in 1940. It measures 20 by 30 feet, and to make room for it, workmen first took down a much smaller painting from the same wall.