Attorney General: Philander C. Knox
Philander Chase Knox was born on May 6, 1853, in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Mount Union College in 1872, entered the law office of H. B. Swope in Pittsburgh, and was admitted to the bar in 1875. He was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania from 1876 to 1877.
President William McKinley appointed Knox as Attorney General of the United States in April 1901. He continued in that office under President Theodore Roosevelt, serving until June 1904. Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker appointed Knox to fill the U.S. Senate post vacated by the death of Senator Matthew S. Quay. He took the seat in July 1904 and, in January 1905, was elected for a full term. Knox resigned his Senate seat to become Secretary of State under President William Howard Taft in 1909. Following Taft’s electoral defeat in 1912, Knox returned to Pittsburgh to practice law. He was reelected in 1916 to the Senate where he drafted legislation that created the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor and gave the Interstate Commerce Commission enhanced regulatory authority. Knox died in Washington, D.C., on October 12, 1921.
Arthur de Ferroris was born in Hungary in 1856 and spent his teenage years in Vienna and Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. In later life, he traveled throughout the world, achieving renown as a society portraitist. He painted prominent Americans to include Franklin D. Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller. His portrait of Attorney General Knox was completed in 1905. De Ferroris died in 1936.