AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 109 Fig. 5: John Gadsby Chapman (1808-1889), Distant View of Mount Vernon, 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 fishermen in the foreground are the focal points of this picture rather than the mansion, allowing Chapman to demonstrate his talents for painting the effects of light on sky and water. while his research fed Paulding’s new stories about Washington’s life. Chapman supported Paulding’s commitment to romanticized depictions of real places intended to draw the country’s “attention and its efforts to our own history, tradition, scenery, and manners, instead of foraging in the barren and exhausted fields of the old world.” 2 Both men celebrated the unique Virginia landscape in much the same way that Thomas Cole and others were beginning to interpret the Hudson River Valley. Along with each painting, Chapman generated extensive notes describing the site itself, the research process he undertook, and any anecdotes that Paulding might find useful. Unfortunately, this documentation apparently only survives in one instance: a draft retained in Chapman’s papers of an 1833 letter he sent to Paulding detailing his trip to George Washington’s boyhood home. Among the inhabitants of nearby Fredericksburg, Chapman found a man who had been raised in the house and remembered its appearance. The painter detailed his conversation with the man, who appeared ashamed of the “miserably constructed & shabby house” in which he and the great Washington had lived. 3 In Paulding’s two-volume biography, The Life of Washington , published two years later in 1835, the author transformed Chapman’s account into a lesson for his readers, believing that knowledge of Washington’s humble childhood would supplant the assumption that “rank, and birth, and wealth, and power are indispensable requisites to great virtues and glorious actions.” 4 The paintings themselves also served in the illustration of Paulding’s publications on Washington’s life. When doing so, he often added details or cropped the content to enliven the images and to relate them more directly to the text. In his engraving of his painting of Washington’s birthplace for the title page, Chapman emphasized the rising sun and inserted a plaque installed at the site by George Washington Parke Custis in 1816. Chapman’s paintings (and surely his descriptions) of Yorktown also provided the raw material for Paulding’s 1835 article in The Family