Paintings In the Supreme Court Building The only paintings on public display in the Supreme Court Building are oil portraits of the justices. The East Conference Room contains portraits of the
chief justices from John
Jay to Melville W.
Fuller. Until the late nineteenth century Congress did not authorize the expenditure of public funds for such portraits. The Court thus depended upon private donors for paintings of early chief justices. On 2 October 1888, Congress initiated a policy of government purchase, appropriating fifteen hundred dollars for the acquisition of portraits of Morrison R.
Waite, then recently deceased, and two chief justices of the 1790s, Oliver
Ellsworth and John
Rutledge. These commissions enabled the Court to complete its portrait collection; Congress has continued to subsidize portraits of later chief justices.
The portrait of John Jay is the most colorful. Copied from a 1794 painting by Gilbert Stuart, it suggests the patrician style of leadership that characterized the founding period. Jay, wearing a handsome black gown trimmed in scarlet, sits thoughtfully at a desk, one hand resting on a large lawbook. Behind him a white marble column and billowing drapery recall the classical foundations of American republicanism. Jay's resplendent gown does not appear in any other judicial portrait; the justices soon adopted a plain black robe as more appropriate garb for the servants of a nominally classless society.
Classical symbolism also contributed to Rembrandt Peale's famous “porthole” portrait of John
Marshall. In this painting within a painting, Peale dispensed with the customary background props. An oval portrait bust of the chief justice in his later years appears against a plain white backdrop. The portrait in turn is embedded in a larger imagined setting. Enclosed in a wreath of sculptured laurel leaves, it forms the center of an impressive monument, with a pedestal inscribed “Fiat Justitia” and a marble head of Solon at the apex. The classical analogue is explicit: Marshall the American jurist will be remembered as a peer of the greatest lawgiver of antiquity.
With the rise of a more democratic constitutional order in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, classical allusions disappeared from judicial portraits. Some early motifs have remained constant, however, and are discernible in the paintings of twentieth‐century chief justices found in the West Conference Room. The portrait of Earl
Warren, for example, recalls in some striking ways Stuart's study of John Jay. Like Jay, Warren sits at a desk, with one hand resting on a lawbook; however, behind him stands no antique column, but a modern bookcase filled with other lawbooks. The image suggests the complexity of modern jurisprudence, while reaffirming the eighteenth‐century view of law as a prestigious intellectual pursuit. Warren's portrait is the most recent; by custom, a painting of retired Chief Justice Warren
Burger will not be hung until after his death.
Portraits of associate justices, contributed by family, friends, or former law clerks, are on display on the ground floor. The building also contains paintings of Court clerks and reporters, but these are in administrative offices not open to the public.
See also
Buildings, Supreme Court;
Sculpture in the Supreme Court Building.
Bibliography
Charles E. Fairman , Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States (1927).
Maxwell Bloomfield
