Ask at the front desk if the second-floor Wyeth room is open (it doubles as a function space). Around 1920, the Federal Reserve Bank Building Committee commissioned illustrator N.C. Wyeth to paint, in his words, “two mural panels in the Junior Officers’ room [that] should contain subjects commemorating two outstanding events in the history of American National Finance. That Alexander Hamilton must inevitably figure in one of these was a foregone conclusion.’’
After much research, Wyeth portrayed Hamilton, the country’s first secretary of the Treasury, meeting with President Washington and Philadelphia banker Robert Morris, an important financial backer of the Revolutionary War and the nation’s first secretary of finance. “In the dramatic grouping of the figures, there is more in the picture than actually greets the eye, to any who take the time to reflect,’’ Wyeth wrote in the April 1922 edition of Federal Reserve Society News. “One can feel the sharply contrasted natures of these men facing one another.’’ On the opposite wall, a somber President Lincoln is depicted with Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase reviewing finances at the outbreak of the Civil War.
These aren’t the hotel’s only riches. Selections from the Norman B. Leventhal collection of 16th-century maps, on loan from the Boston Public Library, are displayed in the Governor’s Rooms, the small meeting rooms-lounge areas adjacent to the Wyeth Room. Also worth viewing are 15 historical photographs from the Federal Reserve Bank’s archives, exhibited in the fifth-floor hallway. These include an image of Wyeth painting the murals and also provide a snapshot of the building’s construction and day-to-day operations during the bank’s heyday. 250 Franklin St., 617-451-1900,boston.langhamhotels.com
Drink it all in
