Wisconsin State Capitol - About This Commission
The "golden age" of Beaux-Arts
The State Capitol in Wisconsin was one of dozens of civic buildings erected in the “golden age” of Beaux-Arts architecture in America initiated by the World’s Columbia Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition's fairgrounds included an elaborate cityscape, known as the White City, with over 200 buildings constructed specifically for the event and designed to showcase for America’s cultural, agricultural and industrial contributions. The organizers recruited the best known and best regarded artists and architects in the country, many of whom had been educated in Europe and modeled their designs off of the Beaux-Arts style: monumental buildings with classical symmetry, composition and ornamentation and grand interiors embellished with decorations that accentuated the beauty of the space. In an era of rapid industrialization, mass immigration, and “the closing of the frontier,” the neoclassical architecture of the White City projected clarity of purpose and order to evoke civic pride and national patriotism among visitors. The Exposition’s success inspired a wave of municipal construction projects as government officials throughout the country rushed to erect similarly grandiose public buildings that would serve as monuments to the greatness and strength of their own cities and states. Some of the biggest commissions came from western states eager to express their civic aspirations and cultural prestige after growing from sparsely settled territories to modern, dynamic states in the decades after the Civil War. Among those commissions were massive State Capitol buildings in Minnesota (1904), Iowa (1905), and Wisconsin (1906-1917).9 Wisconsin’s former State Capitol was built during the Civil War, but had burned to the ground after a gas leak during the winter of 1904. Two years later, the State hired architect George B. Post, a veteran of the Columbia Exposition, to design a replacement. Post had a degree in civil engineering from New York University and studied architecture in the studio of Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to attend L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After working on several buildings in New York in the 1880s, including the New York Stock Exchange Building and the New York Cotton Exchange Building, Post was recruited to design the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the Columbia Exposition. He designed a massive structure that was over 230 feet tall and 1,600 feet long and housed over 40 acres of exhibition space, making it the largest enclosed space ever built. Post also commissioned several muralists to decorate the domes of the building, helping to making mural decoration a popular feature of Beaux-Arts architecture in its “golden age.”
A monument to the virtues of democracy
The Capitol Building in Madison that Post designed was equally ornate and grandiose. Echoing the nation’s capitol, Post’s structure featured a large central dome positioned at the intersection of four building wings extending to the north, south, east and west, with entrances at both the southeast and northwest axes. Like his building in the White City, the structure was massive - it rose almost three hundred feet tall, just three feet shorter than the nation’s capitol, and contained over 400,000 square feet of space. It was assembled out of forty-three types of stone from six countries and eight states, including white granite from Vermont on the exterior of the building and the dome and granites from Wisconsin in the hallways of lower three floors. It took more than a decade to complete the Capitol and cost the state $7.25 million total, but it continues to serve as monument to the virtues of democracy and the strength and power of the state.
Post recruited colleagues he had worked with at the Columbian Exposition to design decorations for the building to complement its mission, including Daniel Chester French, Kenyon Cox, and Edwin Howland Blashfield. Jean Francois Millet, a longtime instructor at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was to serve as the director of decoration and contribute works of his own, but died on the Titanic en route. Despite his absence, all of the artists stayed true to Beaux-Arts ideals: each artist created individual works that beautified the space and utilized Renaissance-inspired imagery to engender the ideals of civic responsibility, good government and State pride, complementing the mission of Post’s design. On the pediment of the west wing of the building, for example, Viennese-educated sculptor Karl Bitter created a piece entitled "Unveiling the Resources of the State" which featured a large Romanesque female figure representing the State surrounded by figures symbolizing the state’s natural resources. In his sculpture for the top of the dome, Daniel Chester French similarly portrayed the state as an enrobed female figure, pointing off into the distance in reference to the state’s motto, “Forward.” Edwin Blashfield’s tondo, “The Resources of Wisconsin,” which decorated the top of the rotunda, took the imagery even further by featuring a woman wrapped in weathered American flag surrounded by diaphanous female figures holding the state’s biggest exports. All three works used allegorical female figures to represent the values the artists believed to be fundamental to Wisconsin’s success and democratic society more broadly.
A distinct, American style
Other murals in the Capitol Building, by contrast, employed historical motifs and included real characters and events from American history rather than symbolic female ones. Albert Herter painted a series of murals for the Supreme Court Hearing Room that offered a history of the evolution of the law, including scenes from the Roman courts, the signing of the Constitution, and disputes over sovereignty in the earliest days of American settlement in Wisconsin. Charles Yardley Turner's murals in a hearing room on the North wing similarly featured pastoral scenes of Native Americans and colonists from Wisconsin’s past as well as “A Modern Transportation Scene” showcasing a vibrant harbor, railroad lines, and automobiles. As art historian Bailey Van Hook described, these historical motifs reflected a desire among some American artists to move away from the classical Beaux-Arts style and forge a distinct, national American style in mural art that would capture the dynamic changes occurring in American society at the time.10
History + allegory
Hugo Ballin received the commission to design the murals in the Executive Chamber after the artist Jean Francois Millet, originally chosen to paint them, perished in the Titanic disaster. The commission came after much of the building and its art had already been completed, allowing Ballin to model his designs off of those of the other, older and more experienced artists. In doing so, he fused the two styles that prevailed, combining allegorical and historical motifs in his works. On the ceiling, he echoed the works of Bitter, French and Blashfield by portraying “The Spirit of Wisconsin” as an enrobed female figure and using other symbolic, mostly female, figures to represent the “Virtues” of the state: agriculture, mining and lumber, commerce, the arts, wisdom, labor, charity, justice and religious tolerance. On the walls of the Chamber, he featured famous characters and episodes in Wisconsin’s history painted in a more realistic style, including Jean Nicolet’s arrival at Green Bay in 1634, Major Whistler accepting peace from Red Bird after the so-called “Winnebago War” of 1827, and a portrait of Joseph Bailey, Colonel of the Wisconsin Cavalry Regiment in the Civil War. In the largest panel on the north wall of the room, titled “Unity Making Peace After The Civil War,” Ballin incorporated both motifs, representing “Unity” as an angelic female figure standing between famous characters from Wisconsin’s history. By blending history and allegory, Ballin's murals at the Wisconsin State Capitol captured his personal quest to reconcile his love for classicism with the emerging American style of mural painting.
Unfortunately for Ballin, the murals’ commissioners preferred Ballin's allegorical pieces to his historical ones. As one of the projects’ leaders described in a letter to Ballin:
“The universal opinion among those who have expressed themselves is that your work on the ceiling is unsurpassed, that your paintings on either side of the mantel are most beautiful and that the pictures of the Surrender of Redbird and Lapham are all that they should be. The rest are regarded as unfortunate. Whether or not this is because of the choice of subject, in the execution, or in the conception of what the pictures should portray, I am not able to state.”
Ballin did not take the criticism lightly and returned to Madison a few months later to make the desired repairs and corrections. But he also defended his choices and refused to change some elements of his work and, by doing so, revealed his attitudes about art, history and representation in the early days of his career.
Conservation (1998 - 2001)
Conservators from Cunningham-Adams Fine Arts Painting Conservation cleaned and treated Ballin's murals at the Wisconsin State Capitol in 1998-2001 as part of their restoration of the East Wing of the building. They can be viewed as part of the Wisconsin State government's Capitol Tour. To learn more, visit their Virtual Tour at tours.wisconsin.gov.
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