The Rayburn Room off the House floor is the setting for lots of commotion. Aides often wait there for their bosses during votes. Members of Congress use the few tables and chairs for impromptu meetings with constituents or lobbyists. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) regularly holds press conferences there.
But perhaps the most unforgettable figures cut in that room belong to a pair of five-foot, seven-inch French porcelain vases. The two yellow, green- and blue-speckled vessels practically jump out of the dark-wood paneled niches in which they sit.
{mosads}“They are very unique,” said Felicia Wivchar, the curatorial assistant in the House Office of History and Preservation. “They’re the only gift of ceramics that we have in the collection.”
Congress accepted these vases from France in September 1918 as a token of the country’s “sisterly gratitude for America’s timely help” in World War I and also for welcoming a special French delegation in 1917 for bilateral meetings, according to the House clerk’s website.
The vases were made at Sèvres, the world-renowned national manufactory for French ceramics. Sèvres became known for producing intricate and lavishly decorated porcelain pieces favored by the country’s royalty.
The House vases are Art Nouveau, a style with an organic aesthetic inspired by nature, Wivchar said, and they rival works displayed in Paris’s venerable Musée d’Orsay fine and decorative arts museum. One of the vases even represented France in the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair and has the label to prove it.
Wivchar said the vases are a great fit for the Rayburn Room because designers crafted the room to be a reception area with high-quality exhibition objects on display.
“They were trying to create a nice, formal space for the House,” she said, “and so having these historic gifts that were really closely tied with American history was a way to achieve that.”
The Senate has its own pair of Sèvres vases, which were received at the same time and for the same reason as the House’s. But those vases are for senators’ eyes only; they are located in an area off the Senate floor whose access is restricted from the public.
Kris Kitto