This painting depicts the moment on June 28, 1776, when the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was presented to the Second Continental Congress.
This is the first completed painting of four Revolutionary-era scenes that the U.S. Congress commissioned from John Trumbull (1756–1843) in 1817. It is an enlarged version of a smaller painting (approximately 21 inches by 31 inches) that the artist had created as part of a series to document the events of the American revolution.
When Trumbull was planning the smaller painting in 1786, he decided not to attempt a wholly accurate rendering of the scene; rather, he made his goal the preservation of the images of the Nation’s founders. He excluded those for whom no authoritative image could be found or created, and he included delegates who were not in attendance at the time of the event. In all, 47 individuals (42 of the 56 signers and 5 other patriots) are depicted, all painted from life or life portraits. Some of the room’s architectural features (e.g., the number and placement of doors and windows) differ from historical fact, having been based on an inaccurate sketch that Thomas Jefferson produced from memory in Paris. Trumbull also painted more elegant furniture, covered the windows with heavy draperies rather than venetian blinds, and decorated the room’s rear wall with captured British military flags, believing that such trophies were probably displayed there.
http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/historic-rotunda-paintings/declaration-independence
Early last century, when the sight of a woman in trousers could still cause a flap, the spectacle of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven must have aroused hairy panic.
short Scottish kilt, a brassiere made from two tomato cans tied together with green string and, hanging from her neck, a wooden birdcage — with a live, chirping canary.
her simply “the Baroness.” In the late 1910’s and early 1920’s, the Baroness reigned among the intellectual avant-garde who laughed at sexual taboos and made art their revolution. But in the wildly colorful hothouse of Greenwich Village bohemia, the Baroness was the most exotic blossom of them all. “She is not a futurist,” Marcel Duchamp said. “She is the future.”
The Misty Miss Christy 