This stereoview shows the House Chamber about a decade after the space opened in 1857. Furniture designed by Architect of the Capitol Thomas W. Walter, arranged in a semicircle, faces the white marble rostrum. The George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette portraits—the only decorative elements pictured here that remain in place today—flank the rostrum. A fresco showing George Washington accepting General Cornwallis’s suit for peace at Yorktown occupies the right-most section of the same wall. It was removed to the Members’ Dining Room in 1972.
