WASHINGTON – Never exactly a reflection of the nation’s melting pot, the Senate has lined the walls of its corridors with portraits that give new definition to the concept of diversity: aging white men with whiskers and aging white men without whiskers.

But the face that the Senate presents to visitors is about to change, at least a little. By this autumn, in a prominent spot just outside the third-floor public gallery, the Senate plans to hang portraits of former senators Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi.

Smith was one of the formidable figures of the mid-20th century: the first woman elected to the Senate without having first been appointed, the first woman nominated for the presidency at a major party convention and an early outspoken critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Bruce, born into slavery in Virginia, was elected by the Reconstruction-era state legislature of Mississippi, the first African-American to serve a full six-year term in the Senate. He crusaded for voting rights, desegregation of the Army and more humane treatment of Native Americans, according to Senate records.

The effort to bring these new faces to the Senate walls was spearheaded by Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, with assists from Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., and others.

Their idea was that, even though the Senate has had few female or minority members through history – and relatively few even today – it did have some with illustrious careers that deserve recognition in Senate artwork. Besides, they agreed, the Senate should do more to reflect the country’s diversity and its own fitful moves in that direction. The Senate now includes a record 13 women along with three men of non-European heritage (Asian, native Hawaiian and American Indian), although it currently has no black members.

By early 1999, Dodd had grown tired of seeing the disconnect between school groups that paraded through the Senate and the portraits that greeted them. And by then, as ranking Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee with a seat on the Senate Commission on Art, he was in a position to do something about it.

“You see kids who represent the great diversity of this country – blacks, Hispanics, women – and yet there is very little that they can relate to when they look at the walls in terms of race, gender or ethnicity,” Dodd said recently.

Although some women and minorities are represented elsewhere in the Capitol, the only female senator with a portrait on the Senate side is Hattie W. Caraway of Arkansas, who served from 1931 to 1945 and now looks out on a corridor not open to tourists. There are no portraits of black senators.

The portraits are to be completed this summer and displayed in the fall, according to Senate curator Diane Skvarla.