For additional information about the restoration and the art and architecture of the Wisconsin State Capitol Building, click here to view the “Historic Structure Report” issued by the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Administration, Division of Facilities Development in 2004. The Wisconsin Historical Society also has a rich digital library of historic photographs of the State Capitol and its Construction which can be viewed here.

Additional information for this page provided by Bailey Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003).

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1. Kramer, William M., “Hugo Ballin, Artist and Director,” in ed. Shalom Saber, Steven Fine and William M. Kramer, A Crown for a King: Studies in Jewish Art, History and Archaeology (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House Ltd., 2000), p. 161.

2. Van Hook, Bailey, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. xvii. Details on Eaton’s life come from Carol Lowrey, “EATON, WYATT,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed June 18, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/eaton_wyatt_12E.html.

3. Details from an untitled, undated clipping that appears in a scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles Young Library, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2.

4. Quote “pre-Raphaelite” from an untitled, undated clipping that appears in a scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, UCLA, Box 29, folder 2; Quotation from coverage of Ballin’s exhibition in Buffalo (c. 1909), scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2.

5. Quotation from “Hugo Ballin” by H. St. G. unknown date, scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2. According to the painting’s current owners, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, its full title is “Sibylla Europa Prophesying the Massacre of the Innocents” (1909).

6. Ballin articulated these ideals in response to statements made by sculptor Gutzon Borglum who claimed U.S. Sculptors were “devoid of high creative ideas.” His response was recounted in a forum called “American Art -- From Different Points of View” that appeared in The New York Times October 11, 1908, and a clipping of an article entitled “Borglum Charges Divide Art Circles” by an unknown author on the same page of a scrapbook housed in the Hugo Ballin papers, UCLA Box 29, Folder 2. Ballin’s “determination to get some element of pure decorative beauty into every picture that he paints…” was noted in another review that appears in the scrapbook from an unknown author dated February 28, 1911.

7. "Wife’s Beauty Adds Charm to Artist’s Pictures” New York Herald (c. 1910), scrapbook, Hugo Ballin Papers, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2.

8. Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo, p. xx. 

9. Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo, p. 44.

10. Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo, p. xx. 

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