WHEREAS Mount Vernon's exterior is crisp and stately, its interiors have a beguiling, intimate quality, rooted in the ordered domestic life of the Georgian era.
As we saw in last week's article, George Washington took up residence in 1754 and made numerous architectural and decorative improvements, extending the house to its current form of 21 rooms over three periods, during the mid-1750s, late 1770s to early 1780s and 1790s. His use of pattern books by Abraham Swan, William Pain and Batty Langley to serve his craftsmen as models for elegant carved detail and decoration gives an insight into the transmission of such details across the British Atlantic world.
Today, Mount Vernon S is shown as it was in the 1790s, during its preeminence as the home V of not merely a prosperous Virginian gentleman, but America's first President. Its interiors have been slowly and painstakingly returned to their state immediately before Washington’s death in 1799, although, naturally, the decoration and furnishing of these rooms was layered onto earlier schemes. This restoration has been guided by extensive research by Mount Vernon’s curatorial team. These elegant spaces exemplify the social and domestic values of 18th-century agrarian colonial landed families and are shaded with the ideals of the new republic.
The centre of the house was built in 1734, although the ground-floor rooms were improved in the 1740s and 1750s. In plan, it comprises an entrance hall, which runs east-west, the Front Parlour to the north; the dining parlour to the south and two bedchambers looking east towards the river.
The northerly bedroom became a Little Parlour in the 1780s.
The entrance hall-probably created in the 1740s by Washington's older half-brother, Lawrence is dominated by an American black-walnut staircase, installed in 1758-59, and its doors are crowned with open pediments (Fig 4). A printed wallpaper, of a French arabesque pattern, was installed in 2020.
This story is from the October 02,2024 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 02,2024 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
