Story of the Hawley Building Murals

Upon entering the Hawley Building you immediately notice its exquisite stained glass windows. Each of the ten windows was the gift of a graduating class between the years 1910 and 1929. The windows, with their scenes of nature and mythical figures, are typical of the period in which they were created. The murals were added to the building in the 1930s by artist William Brantley Van Ingen under a WPA grant. The 23 panels cover 4,500 square feet of the building's walls. They depict scenes of the history of New York State and college life. Van Ingen was a natural choice to design, paint, and install the murals. He had already created panels for other buildings: the old Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the United States Mint in Philadelphia, and the State Capitol in Harrisburg, PA. He had been trained with the artist John LaFarge and worked in the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The murals are oil paintings on 13' x 4' canvas panels. Van Ingen painted them in his New York City studio, rolled them up, and brought them to Albany. He then attached them to the Hawley Building walls with white lead putty.