Hildreth Meière's Washington Frieze
Health and Welfare Benefits for Washington Residents
Health and Welfare Benefits for Washington Residents
Glazed terracotta frieze, 1941
Frieze modeled by Klimo and executed by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company
Art Deco muralist Hildreth Meière designed the eighty-one-foot-long frieze depicting ten scenes illustrating public health and welfare benefits available to Washington residents in 1940. According to James Goode in The Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C. (p. 216):
From left to right, a social worker is shown helping a mother with two children, while nearby a physician and nurse give medical aid to a family of six. The next scene portrays an inspector looking at agricultural products offered for sale by a Washington butcher, fruit grower, baker, and fisherman. The four central panels show three municipal hospital scenes: two chemists work in a hospital laboratory, a physician inspects two patients, and a nurse and three visitors stand before a bed talking to a patient, while a government nurse brings medicine to a group of three patients in the geriatrics ward of the hospital. The frieze terminates toward the right end with three scenes: two families apply for Social Security before a desk with two officials, an inspector watches a group of workers laying bricks with the brick kiln in the background, and a young couple apply for the adoption of a boy in front of a city official’s desk. The sculptor has created a feeling of liveliness in the forty-seven figures portrayed by designing the faces of the persons in the background in a concave design, while the persons in the foreground have faces in relief. The entire work contains bold, massive, and simple lines, which complement the solid patches of color. The subjects…are typical of the Great Depression—the benefits of government services to her people.
Even before the frieze was installed, Meière wrote to Nathan C. Wyeth, the Municipal architect, to say how pleased she was with the frieze. It was “a collaborative effort of many people.” She admired its “great beauty” and “fresh and interesting character.” She went on to describe it as “pleasant, harmonious, and subtle in color,” with “varied and interesting” glazes. To the president of Atlantic Terra Cotta, Meière wrote, “I would like to extend an artist’s deepest thanks for having made what I really think is a work of art possible. I have painted or designed a lot of work in the past nineteen years; this job I think will be among the few of which I can be really proud.”
