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Sideboard

New Room
View of north wall with sideboard and looking glass
Spring Scenario 2014
Sideboard
New Room
View of north wall with sideboard and looking glass
Spring Scenario 2014
New Room View of north wall with sideboard and looking glass Spring Scenario 2014
Status
Not on view
Label Text

Rooms created specifically for dining became more widespread in post-Revolutionary America. They required new, specialized forms of furniture, including the sideboard. This graceful, serpentine-front sideboard is one of two that George Washington purchased from John Aitken in Philadelphia in February 1797 for his dining room, or "New Room," at Mount Vernon. With its clean, straight lines and flat surfaces decorated with delicate inlays, it exemplifies the sophisticated lightness and restrained elegance of the Federal or neoclassical style. When not being used for serving food during meals, it held linens and other dining equipage, and provided display space for knife boxes, ceramic figurines (or "images").

See M-2479 for a similar, non-Washington sideboard also attributed to John Aitken.

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Date1797
Maker (American, active 1775 - 1800)
Geography Made - United StatesRetailed - United States
DimensionsOverall: 37 5/8 in. x 71 1/8 in. x 26 11/16 in. (95.57 cm x 180.66 cm x 67.79 cm)
Credit LineGift of George Washington Custis Lee, 1908
Object numberW-94
DescriptionSerpentine-front sideboard with one long drawer above a recessed two-door cabinet at center flanked by a single-door cabinet at left and large, undivided drawer at right. Six, square, tapered legs, each with two inlaid oval paterae, stringing on their fronts and dark wood cuffs on all four sides. Drawers and doors veneered with book-matched crotch mahogany and outlined with stringing and banding. Four, stamped brass bail handles and oval backplates. Brass-lined escutcheons in each of the drawers and doors.

Top center drawer front and central cabinet doors solid; left cabinet door with seven horizontal laminations; right drawer with five horizontal laminations. No stringing along bottom front of case.
Published ReferencesCarson, Marian S. "Washington Furniture at Mount Vernon, I: The Banquet Hall," American Collector 16, no. 4 (May 1947): 7, 17, fig. 4.

Fede, Helen Maggs. Washington Furniture at Mount Vernon (Mount Vernon, VA; MVLA, 1966), pp. 60, 63-64, fig. 51.

Hornor, William M. Blue Book of Philadelphia Furniture (Philadelphia: 1935), p. 241.

Iverson, Marion Day. The American Chair: 1630-1890 (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1957), pp. 214, 224, fig. 173.

Ormsbee, Thomas Hamilton. "Thomas Shearer and Sideboards," American Collector (July 1941): 10-12.

Prime, Alfred Coxe. The Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1786-1800 (The Walpole Society: 1932), pp. 164-65.

Riggs, John Beverly. "A Memorandum on the Mount Vernon Sideboards," August 31, 1952. **88-page study done before executor's sale of MW's belongings known and now discredited. No copy in object folder

Beirne, Mrs. Rosamond R. (Vice Regent for Maryland). "The Case of President Washington's Sideboard Tables," October 13, 1952.

Wall, Charles Cecil. "The Original Mount Vernon Sideboards," March 13, 1961.

Wall, Charles Cecil. "The Sideboard in the Dining Room," March 16, 1961. **No copy in object folder

Clipping from Alexandria Gazette, July 2, 1940, reprinting notices from 1873, including repair and return of Mount Vernon sideboard
Mount Vernon's object research is ongoing and information about this object is subject to change. For information on image use and reproductions, click here.
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