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Mount Vernon, East Front

Professional Photography
Mount Vernon, East Front
Professional Photography
Professional Photography
Status
On view
Label Text

Danish landscape artist Ferdinand Richardt visited Mount Vernon in July 1858 to sketch the home of America’s first president, a site he intended to include in an illustrated travel journal celebrating the wonders of the United States. Richardt was one of many artists who made the pilgrimage to Mount Vernon that summer to document the increasingly dilapidated house and raise awareness of its growing importance as a national shrine. Over the course of two days, he made multiple pencil sketches, carefully delineating the architecture in its current state of disrepair, the flora and fauna, and views of the Chesapeake River, images he would later use to make paintings in his Brooklyn, New York studio. Richardt completed two oil paintings of Mount Vernon that winter—a view of the mansion and a view of Washington’s Tomb—yet he never realized his dream of having them engraved and published. This painting of Mount Vernon is actually a second version Richardt made many years later, sometime between 1873 and 1876, when Washington and his home were at the heart of the Centennial Celebration. Richardt took care not only to dress the three girls playing battledore on the lawn in clothing fashionable to the 1870s, but he also depicted the house in pristine condition, reflecting on the preservation efforts already enacted by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union which formally purchased the property in 1860.

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Datec. 1876
Artist (Danish, 1819 - 1895)
Geography Possibly made - United StatesPossibly made - United States
Medium/TechniqueOil on canvas
DimensionsOverall: 22 in. × 31 3/4 in. × 2 3/4 in. (55.88 cm × 80.65 cm × 6.99 cm) Overall (M-2726/B original frame): 31 3/4 in. × 41 3/4 in. × 6 in. (80.65 cm × 106.05 cm × 15.24 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, 1977 Conservation courtesy of The Founders, Washington Committee Endowment Fund
Object numberM-2726/A-B
DescriptionOil on canvas landscape view of the mansion with the south porch and railing seen from the southeast. Three children (possibly the daughters of John A. Washington, III) wear brightly colored dresses and play battledore and shuttlecock on the open, green lawn in front of the piazza while two dogs rest in the grass nearby. The silhouettes of the girls’ dresses, cut in the polonaise style, their open-work shoes, hats and hairstyles all date from the 1860s to as late as the mid-1870s. Behind the children and to the right of the mansion’s central doorway, a woman sits on the edge of the piazza with a basket of flowers nearby and converses with a man standing next to her. To the left, behind a solitary tree, an enslaved female servant wearing a blue dress, white apron, and headdress, walks through the south colonnade carrying what may be tea equipment on a tray. Two enslaved children wearing white smock dresses stand and sit a few paces behind her, and a fourth enslaved male servant sits just inside the open doorway to the kitchen. Trees on the bowling green are visible beyond the kitchen and frame the far left of the scene. On the far right of the canvas, two horses and a building are visible through the trees. A bright blue sky with dappled white clouds frame the top of the canvas. It is signed F. Richardt in the lower right corner.

Frame: A circa 1880 American cove profile frame of gilt wood and gesso. The outer edge is made up of composition flowers and cross straps, and the cove features a stylized design of leaves, bellflowers, and additional shapes on a sand patterned background. A gamboge fillet separates the cove from an outer band of composition decoration in an arabesque pattern. Another gamboge fillet with gilded leaf corners separates the outer band from the inner one with lamb’s tongue decoration and a flat inner surface. A flat gamboge liner completes the frame. The backband is coved with a flat outer edge.

SignedF. Richardt, lower right
Published ReferencesUnited States Embassy Bern: ART in Embassies Exhibition. Washington, DC: ART in Embassies Program, 2010 [color illustration on pp. 22].

Paul D. Schweizer and Melinda Young Stuart. Ferdinand Richardt: Drawings of America, 1855-1859. Utica, NY: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art, 2007.

Melinda Young Stuart and Niels Peter Stilling. Danish Manor Houses and America: The Landscape Art of Ferdinand Richard (1819-1895). Copenhagen: Danish National Museum, 2003 [color illustration of FAMSF (de Young) acc. 37741].

Melinda Young Frye [Stuart]. “Joachim Ferdinand Richardt (1819-1895): A Danish Artist in the American Landscape, 1855-1859.” MA Thesis, George Washington University, 1993 [illustration of FAMSF (de Young) acc. 37741 on pp. 58].

Neil W. Horstman. “The Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union.” The Magazine Antiques 135 (February 1989): 454-461 [color illustration on p. 456].

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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