Arts & Culture
4
The portico above the front entrance pavilion honors great thinkers and writers with nine portrait busts, from left to right, of Demosthenes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Macaulay, Nathanial Hawthorne, Walter Scott, and Dante. Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford selected these figures, and Herbert Adams, Jonathan Scott Hartley, and Frederick W. Ruckstull sculpted them. Thirty-three sculpted heads encircle the building as keystone ornaments for the first-story windows, representing peoples from Arab to Zulu and reflecting one of the first efforts to use ethnological science in decorating an important public building. In 1897, Roland Hinton Perry created the fifty-foot-wide King Neptune's Fountain, then the most lavishly ornamental fountain in the country, featuring the Roman God of the Sea and his court; King Neptune is colossal in scale and would stand about twelve feet high.
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Washington, District of Columbia · United States
