Auriel Bessemer Sites

The old Main Post Office in Arlington VA, opened in 1937,  contains seven New Deal murals by Auriel Bessemer in its lobby.  The mural series is titled, "Agricultural and Industrial Scenes – Sketches of Virginia."  They were commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts, painted in 1939 and installed in 1940.   Auriel Bessemer was a local artist and the panels show familiar scenes of Virginia life in the past.  The seven panels depict Indians on Analostan Island, Captain John Smith and the Indians, tobacco picking at the Lee mansion, Robert E. Lee receiving his Confederate commission in Richmond, a...

The post office contains a Treasury Section of Fine Arts mural "Life in the Mississippi Cotton Belt," painted by Auriel Bessemer in 1939 and installed in the Hazlehurst post office that same year. Bessemer was the son of Hungarian immigrants (Boszormenyi Family Tree). His accomplishments included work with the Gallery of Modern Masters in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Enzweiler, 1992). Bessemer's painting represented the Copiah County diversified economy of an earlier time: cotton industry and manufacturing (Nelson-Easley, 2007), possibly the nearby Wesson Mills. Like many of the murals under the program, it could be...

Like many New Deal post office murals, Auriel Bessemer’s oil painting, “Industrial Tapestry,” depicts a pastoral landscape, fusing the agricultural world with the industrial and perhaps portraying the influence of Roosevelt’s rural electrification programs in South Carolina's cotton and tobacco fields. The mural’s title might allude to the ways in which the textile industry was woven into the fabric of South Carolina’s sprawling farmland. In a journal entry dated 12 December 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote after seeing another post office mural: “I think these post offices are making the country more and more conscious of decorative, artistic values.”   (https://www.bethesdanow.com)