Mount Vernon, East Front
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.
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].