As his presidency neared its end, George Washington took advantage of being in Philadelphia, the nation's commercial capital, to buy a large group of prints and frames for Mount Vernon. Many of these impressions, including Dancing Shepherds, were classical landscapes published in England in the tradition of the seventeenth-century artist, Claude Lorrain. Most hung in Mount Vernon's central passage, a broad through hall whose walls were conducive for the display of such large, fine art prints.