AFA Winter 2017

Antiques & Fine Art 107 2017 Fig. 2: John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889), View from the Site of the Old Mansion of the Washington Family [Ferry Farm], 1834. Oil on canvas, 21½ x 29 inches. Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association; Purchased with funds provided by Lucy S. Rhame and an anonymous donor (2017). The Rappahannock River divides the bustling City of Fredericksburg from the site of Washington’s boyhood home in the foreground. While Chapman knew the approximate appearance of the house, he chose to paint the scene and almost all others in the series in the present to emphasize the sense of romantic decay. Fig. 3: John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889), Moore’s House—Yorktown, Va., from The Family Magazine 1, no. 4 (April 1836): 121. Wood engraving, Archives & Special Collections. University of Louisville. The source painting for this engraving is one of two of Yorktown that Paulding commissioned from Chapman specifically for printing. Its mate was the frontispiece for the second volume of Paulding’s Washington biography. how Americans saw their past, if not how Chapman had intended. In a variety of ways, the series fed growing enthusiasm for America’s historic places in the decades that saw the passing of the Revolutionary generation. Through prints and illustrations derived from the works and tales that emerged from Chapman’s research for them, he made tremendous contributions to the development of a popular understanding of the history of the United States. The addition of the series to George Washington’s Mount Vernon’s nineteenth-century collections, purchased in 2017 with the generous support of Lucy S. Rhame and an anonymous donor, prompt a reappraisal of their place in the history of American art. In 1835, Chapman had every reason to believe that he would be the next great painter of the United States’ short but storied past. He was one of the first American artists trained