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Senate Vice Presidential Bust Collection


A mainstay of the Senate’s fine art is the Vice Presidential Bust Collection. The Joint Committee on the Library, acting under a resolution of May 13, 1886, began commissioning busts of the vice presidents to occupy the niches in the new Senate Chamber. After the first busts filled the 20 niches that surround the Chamber, new additions were placed throughout the Senate wing of the Capitol. The collection chronicles the individuals who have served as vice president and pays tribute to their role as president of the Senate. It also provides a unique survey of American sculpture from the 19th century to the present.

The initial five commissions included busts of the first two vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and three former vice presidents then living, Hannibal Hamlin, William Wheeler, and Chester A. Arthur. As directed by the resolution of 1886, additional representations were added to the collection until the twenty existing gallery niches in the Senate chamber had been filled. The original resolution was amended on January 6, 1898, in order to provide for placement of additional vice presidential busts throughout the Senate wing of the Capitol.

The Vice Presidential Bust Collection contains works by such premier American artists as Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Franklin Simmons, and James Earle Fraser.


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John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Aaron Burr
George Clinton
Elbridge Gerry
Daniel D. Tompkins
John C. Calhoun
Martin Van Buren
Richard M. Johnson
John Tyler
George M. Dallas
Millard Fillmore
William R. King
John C. Breckinridge
Hannibal Hamlin
Andrew Johnson
Schuyler Colfax
Henry Wilson
William A. Wheeler
Chester A. Arthur
Thomas A. Hendricks
Levi P. Morton
Adlai E. Stevenson
Garret Augustus Hobart
Theodore Roosevelt
Charles W. Fairbanks
James S. Sherman
Thomas R. Marshall
Calvin Coolidge
Charles G.Dawes
Charles Curtis
John Nance Garner
Henry A. Wallace
Harry S. Truman
Alben W. Barkley
Richard M. Nixon
Lyndon B. Johnson
Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr.
Gerald R. Ford
Nelson A. Rockefeller
Walter F. Mondale
George H. W. Bush
Spiro T. Agnew
J. Danforth Quayle
Richard B. Cheney