Kitchen at Mount Vernon
Label Text
In the Kitchen at Mount Vernon, Eastman Johnson uses dramatic light and a dilapidated interior—peeling plaster, broken bricks, and objects strewn around the room—to introduce a romantic, melancholy mood to this domestic scene. Although Johnson portrays an African-American woman and children on the Washington plantation, who may have been enslaved, his composition harkens back to the 18th-century, European tradition of depicting peasants at work and play amidst ruins, a conceit he would have studied during his years living abroad. The Kitchen at Mount Vernon appears to be an early attempt by Johnson to find a subject matter—in this case, slave life—that captured the American scene and the mounting tensions surrounding the question of abolition with honesty and accuracy.
Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) was an American genre painter appreciated for presenting scenes of everyday life. George Washington Riggs and his wife, Janet (Sheddon) Riggs, Vice Regent for Washington, D.C. (1858-1867) commissioned this version of the Kitchen at Mount Vernon from the artist in 1864.
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Date1864
Artist
Eastman Johnson
(American, 1824 - 1906)
Geography
Probably made -
United States
Medium/TechniqueOil paint, artist’s board
DimensionsOverall (H x W x D, framed): 23 in. x 31 in. x 3 in. (58.42 cm x 78.74 cm x 7.62 cm)
Credit LineGift of Annie Burr Jennings, Vice Regent for Connecticut, 1937
Conservation courtesy of Mike and Patti Sipple
Object numberM-1001
DescriptionPainting:Oil on board genre painting of an enslaved woman sitting with three children in front of a cooking hearth. The dim interior is gently illuminated by the embers in the hearth and by sunlight coming through doors on the left and right of the scene. The architecture of the room appears dilapidated as bricks around the hearth, and the wooden laths of walls, are exposed under cracking plaster. The brick floor is broken and worn. Glass bottles and a plate rest on the mantle shelf while a metal ladle hangs to the left of the fire. A collection of cleaning tools and storage containers—a broom, shovel, basket, box, large bottle—and what may be clothing to be washed, are stacked and leaning against the wall in the far-left corner, near the open door. The enslaved woman, who wears a white headscarf, sits on a stool holding a baby while a second child sits nearby in a settle watching her and the third child gazes directly out at the viewer. The painting is framed with a wooden, gilded frame.
Frame:
The painting is housed in a 5 ¼” wide mid-19th century American neoclassical frame, likely original to the painting. The frame is composed of three mouldings: an innermost plain beveled liner; a center moulding ornamented with composition lambs longue and a sand-textured frieze; and a fluted deep cove outer moulding ornamented with composition corner leaves, composition beads and diamonds in the top frieze, and composition berries and vines on the lower outside edge. The plain surfaces of the frame are water-gilded over dark blue bole (burnishing clay); the ornamentation is finished with a combination of oil-gilding and metallic paint; and the sides of the lower outside edge are finished with casein paint and shellac over gesso. The mouldings are milled in white pine, and are assembled using the simple mitre, glue, and nail construction that is common to American frames of this period.
SignedSigned proper lower left corner “E. Johnson/ --64”. The signature was applied in brown paint in the same palette as the painting and is barely visible without direct artificial lighting.
Published ReferencesHarvey, Eleanor Jones. The Civil War and American Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2012.
McLeod, Stephen A. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association: 150 Years of Restoring George Washington’s Home, 148-149, 148 (color illus.). Mount Vernon, Virginia: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2010.
Simo, Laura B. “’The Old Mount Vernon:’ An Early View Comes Home Just in Time,” in The Annual Report of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union (2009): 30-39, 37 (color illus.).
McInnis, Maurie D. “The Most Famous Plantation of All: The Politics of Painting Mount Vernon.” In Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, ed. Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, 86-114, fig. 70 (color illus.). .). Columbia, S.C.: The University of South Carolina Press in cooperation with the Gibbes Museum of Art/ Carolina Art Association, 2008. [Hevrdejs Collection, Houston, TX].
Cadou, Carol Borchert. The George Washington Collection: Fine and Decorative Arts at Mount Vernon, 264, fig. 3 (color illus.). Manchester, Vermont and New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2006.
Vlach, John Michael. The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege & Slavery in Plantation Paintings. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Lee, Jean B. “Historical Memory, Sectional Strife, and the American Mecca: Mount Vernon, 1783-1853.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, 3 (2001): 255-300, 279 (illus.)
Carbone, Teresa A. and Patricia Hills, ed. Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 124, No. 69 (color illus.). New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli International Publications, 1999. [Hevrdejs Collection, Houston, TX].
Rasmussen, William M.S. and Robert S. Tilton. George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, 198, fig. 186 (color illus.). Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Davis, John. “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.,” The Art Bulletin 80, 1 (March 1998): 67-92 (mention p. 67).
Manthorne, Katherine E. with John W. Coffey. The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad. Washington and London: Published for the North Carolina Museum of Art by Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
Favis, Robert Smith. “Worthington Whittredge’s Domestic Interiors.” American Art 9, 1 (Spring 1995): 14-35, fig. 11 (illus.). [Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, FL].
Thistlethwaite, Mark Edward. “The Image of George Washington: Studies in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American History Painting,” 136-137, fig. 126 (illus.). Ph.D Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977.
Sotheby Parke Bernet. American 18th, 19th & 20th Century Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors & Sculpture, 12 December 1975, lot 23A. [Hevrdejs Collection, Houston, TX].
Sotheby Parke Bernet. Highly Important Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century American Paintings, 25 October 1973, lot 33. [Hevrdejs Collection, Houston, TX].
Hills, Patricia. “The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson: The Sources and Development of His Style and Themes,” 32. Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1973.
Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. “The Right Wing of My Dwelling,” in The Annual Report of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union (1970): 18-22, 21 (illus.).
Baur, John I. H. Eastman Johnson, 1824-1906: An American Genre Painter, 61, no. 30. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum, 1940.
Cheney, Seth. “Our American Artists,” in Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly of Instruction and Recreation (Dec. 1866): 4, 2 [American Periodical Series Online pg. 172].
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