Furnishings in the 1933 New House Office Building (later the Longworth Building) reflected several threads in decorative taste during the period. The deepening economic depression's cost consciousness joined renewed interest in Federal-style design of the early 19th century, which in turn collided with the industrial age, resulting in a unusual result. This mirror, which likely hung in a hearing room, combines typical Federal-style decorative elements—eagle, cornucopia, fasces, swags—with the heftier proportions of the modernist realism of the 1930s.
