NEWSEUM

The next stop in our Washington D.C. trip was the Newseum. This museum is one of only two sites that we had to pay an entrance fee. Here is a great tip: visit the Trusted Tours website here. You can purchase tickets here at discounted prices. Tickets for the Newseum are $20.27 here versus $22.95 on their website. Your ticket is good for two consecutive days' entrance.

On display in the front of the museum are the current day's front page headlines from newspapers from each of the 50 states. More than 800 different newspapers transmit their front pages electronically to the Newseum each day.

When you enter the museum you can't help but look up:

There is an actual news helicopter hanging from the 90-foot ceiling.

There is also a replica of a broadcast satellite hanging from the ceiling.

The Newseum has a portion of the actual Berlin Wall: eight 12-foot-high concrete sections of the wall, each weighing about three tons, the largest display of unaltered portions of the original wall outside of Germany. The exhibit tells the story of how news and information helped topple a closed and oppressive society.

A portion of the mangled communications antenna from the World Trade Center...

is displayed in front of headlines from dozens of worldwide newspapers announcing the 9/11 attacks.

In a display case are the camera, bag and personal items of a photographer who died in the 9/11 attacks doing what was his passion...

Some of his photos of that day survived...

Every day journalists and photographers risk their lives to gather the news in dangerous areas of the world. On display is an armor-reinforced truck, riddled with bullet holes, used by photographers and correspondents in Yugoslavia during the 1990s conflict.

The Journalists Memorial is a soaring, two-story glass structure bearing the names of reporters, photographers, editors and broadcasters who have died in the line of work.

On the sixth floor is the outdoor terrace which gives you fantastic views of the city: Looking to the left up Pennsylvania Avenue gives you a spectacular view of the Capitol Building.

The view to your right down Pennsylvania Avenue shows some of the buildings that make up the Federal Triangle including the Federal Trade Commission, National Archives, Department of Justice and the old Post Office's clock tower.

And the view in front shows the National Gallery of Art.

This was my favorite stop of the trip. I will spend the next several blog posts showing my favorite masterpiece paintings that grace the walls of this spectacular museum.

To learn more about the Newseum visit their website here. If you are hungry when you visit the Newseum, head down to the lower level where The Source by Wolfgang Puck served up the best meal we had during our trip.

All photos in this blog post were taken by my husband and me during our visit in September, 2013.

CAPITOL ART

Of course there are other works of art in the U.S. Capitol building besides the dome fresco The Apotheosis of Washington and the Frieze of American History that I wrote about in a previous post. 

Around the perimeter of the Capitol rotunda are eight large (12 feet by 18 feet) historical paintings:

Below, to the left is Declaration of Independence, one of four paintings by John Trumbull under his 1817 commission from the U.S. Congress. This painting depicts the moment on June 28, 1776, when Thomas Jefferson, in the center, places the Declaration of Independence in front of John Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress.

The painting on the right is Surrender of General Burgoyne also painted by Trumbull in 1821. The painting shows the surrender of British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York on October 17, 1777, which was a turning point in the American Revolution, and it was the deciding factor in bringing active French support to the American cause. .

The painting above is General George Washington Resigning His Commission, painted by Trumbull between 1822 and 1824.  This painting depicts the scene on December 23, 1783, when George Washington resigned his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The action was significant for establishing civilian authority over the military, a fundamental principle of American democracy. The statue in front is of the 20th U.S. President James G

There is a lot of significant art in the photo below:

To the left is Embarkation of the Pilgrims, painted by Robert W. Weir in 1843. This painting depicts the Pilgrims on the deck of the ship Speedwell on July 22, 1620, before they departed for North America, where they sought religious freedom. The painting on the right is Baptism of Pocahontas, painted in 1839 by John Gadsby Chapman. The painting depicts the ceremony in which Pocahontas was baptized and given the name Rebecca in an Anglican church.

Two important sculptures are also in the photo: To the left is a statue of General Dwight Eisenhower, given to the Statuary Hall collection by the State of Kansas. In between the two paintings is a bronze bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., created in 1986 by artist John Wilson.

Another work of art depicting an important member of the Civil Rights Movement is the statue of Rosa Parks. The statue is close to 9 feet tall including its pedestal.

On February 27, 2013, approximately 100 years after her birth, the statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall on February 4, 1913. The bronze statue depicts Parks seated on a rock-like formation of which she seems almost a part, symbolizing her famous refusal to give up her bus seat. The statue shows Parks wearing the exact clothing she wore that day. 

Pioneers of the women's suffrage movement, which won women the right to vote in 1920, are beautifully depicted in a group bust sculpture located in the Capitol Rotunda.

Adelaide Johnson carved this sculpture from an 8-ton block of  Carrara marble. The monument features portrait busts of three leaders of the woman suffrage movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left), Susan B. Anthony (center) and Lucretia Mott (right). The statue was originally unveiled on February 15, 1921 in the Crypt (located on the first floor of the Capitol, we began our tour in this area). In May 1997, the sculpture was relocated to the Capitol Rotunda.

If you want to read more about the other paintings, sculptures and statues in the Capitol building, visit here.

All photos in this blog post were taken by my husband and me during our visit in September, 2013.

IS THERE A WHISPERING GALLERY IN STATUARY HALL ?

Yes, there is...

Our tour guide showed us. She stood several yards away and whispered into her hand, but we could actually hear her. As she walked towards us, we couldn't hear her as clear. It was very interesting.

The half-dome shape of National Statuary Hall produces an acoustical effect like a whispering gallery.

National Statuary Hall, also known as the Old Hall of the House, is the large, two-story, semicircular room next to the Rotunda. It is built in the shape of an ancient amphitheater and is one of the earliest examples of Greek revival architecture in America. Around the room's perimeter stand colossal columns of variegated Breccia marble quarried along the Potomac River. The Corinthian capitals of white marble were carved in Carrara, Italy. The lantern in the ceiling admits natural light into the Hall.

Only two of the many statues presently in the room were commissioned for display in the original hall:

Enrico Causici's neocloassical plaster Liberty and the Eagle looks out over the Hall from a niche above the colonnade...

Carlo Franzoni's 1810 sculptural clock, Car of History. The sculpture depicts Clio, the Muse of History, riding in a chariot of Time and recording events in the book she holds as they unfold in the chamber below. The car rests on a marble globe on which signs of the zodiac are carved in relief. The wheel of the chariot contains the chamber clock installed in 1837.

All photos in this blog post were taken by my husband and me during our visit in September, 2013.

INSIDE THE CAPITOL DOME

Our guided tour of the U.S. Capitol led us into the rotunda...

It was amazing to get the above photo; all around us were dozens of tourist groups. For one split second I was able to capture the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol like this. Right here some of the most famous Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Rosa Parks, have lain in state or lain in honor in the capitol rotunda. There is a difference: If a person is lying in state, the casket is guarded by members of the armed forces. If a person is lying in honor, the United States Capitol Police watches as a civilian honor guard.

We then looked up...

Here we saw the gorgeous dome with the fresco The Apotheosis of Washington by painter Constantino Brumidi. For 11 months following the Civil War, Brumidi painted the fresco while suspended 180 feet in the air. Amazingly it covers an area of 4,664 square feet.

George Washington is surrounded by 13 maidens in an inner ring with many Greek and Roman gods and goddesses below him in a second ring. Some of the painted figures are up to 15 feet tall.

Inside of the base of the dome below the windows is Brumidi's famous Frieze of American History. The frieze is a chronological, trompe-l'oeil pictorial depicting 19 scenes from American history, from the landing of Christopher Columbus to the Wright Brother's flight. The frieze is 8 feet 4 inches in height and approximately 300 feet in circumference. Brumidi started the frieze in 1878, but died in 1880. Two other artists continued painting the frieze until it was completed in 1953. The final scenes depicted in the fresco had not yet occurred when Brumidi began the frieze.

Above is a close-up of two scenes: on the left is Peace at the End of the Civil War which depicts a Confederate soldier and a Union soldier shaking hands at the end of the Civil War; to the right is Naval Gun Crew in the Spanish-American War.

Click here to learn more about scheduling a tour of the U.S. Capitol.

Click here to read more in depth about the Capitol rotunda.

In my next blog post I will continue our visit inside the Capitol and the beautiful dome.

All photos in this blog post were taken by my husband and me during our visit in September, 2013.

OUT OF MANY, ONE...OUR VISIT TO THE U.S. CAPITOL

E Pluribus Unum

Do you know what this latin phrase means? It is on all of your coins. It's on the Seal of the United States.

It means: Out of many, one. It refers to the fact that the United States was formed as one nation as a result of the thirteen smaller colonies joining together. In recent years its meaning has also come to suggest that out of many peoples, races, religions and ancestries has emerged a single nation.

This was one of the fascinating tidbits of information we learned on our visit to the U.S. Capitol building.

To visit the Capitol building, you enter through the Capitol Visitor Center...

Walking towards the visitor's center, we get our first glimpse of the Capitol Dome...

You must schedule a specific time to tour the Capitol Building. It is free, but you must book the tour in advance. We were early for our tour so we walked around the outside. It was an cloudy Saturday morning so there was hardly anyone else around.
Such beautiful detailing in the architecture...

The dome is topped with the bronze statue of Freedom. Amazingly, the statue is 19 feet 6 inches tall and weighs approximately 15,000 pounds. She stands on a cast-iron pedestal on a globe encircled with the motto E Pluribus Unum.

Ironically the man who played a key role in the creation of the Freedom statue was at the time a slave. Whether or not he saw the last piece of the Statue of Freedom put into place on December 2, 1863, Philip Reid was by that time a free man who became a master craftsman and artisan. You can read about him here.

Click here to learn more about scheduling a tour of the U.S. Capitol.

In my next blog post I will take you inside the Capitol and the beautiful dome.

All photos in this blog post were taken by my husband and me during our visit in September, 2013.