Visual Art in American Courthouses

Abstract

The Beaux Arts architecture of late nineteenth century, a style that embodied the idea that a building should represent its function in all aspects of its design, incorporated murals as an integral part of this message. Courthouses built in this style were filled with visual images containing messages about law and the ideals of the society that the courthouse served. Much of the visual art in courthouses was meant to instruct the populace in history and civic virtue. The most common image in the courthouse, after the ubiquitous judicial portraits, is Justice, but she is accompanied by an array of other allegorical figures (Prudence, Temperance, Rectitude, and Prosperity, among others) that few of us recognize without a helpful label. One is struck today by the frequency of depictions of the Native Americans, a subject that has faded almost completely from our popular culture though it was pervasive at the time the works were created. These murals provide us with a compelling narrative of the community’s collective memory of the indigenous peoples as they disappeared from the land and pass the land to the current inhabitants (with little of the unpleasantness that accompanied that transfer). The visual art in the courthouse contains multiple messages about the place of law in the community and the place of community in the law.