AFA Winter 2017

Winter 110 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Fig. 6: John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889), Residence of Washington, Mount Vernon, from The Family Magazine (New York: Redfield & Lindsay, 1837), 281. Wood engraving. Boston Athenaeum. Chapman used the subjects of the paintings commissioned by Paulding as source material for simpler illustrations in popular magazines. Magazine . Paulding praised the treatment of the building in which the ending of the Revolution was negotiated as evidence of Americans’ honest relationship with the landscape. Even though the house had hosted such a momentous event, it had been returned to its former use as a farmhouse in an actively cultivated field, just as Americans had experienced the sweet taste of victory and returned to their agrarian lifestyles. Chapman added a resting cow to the engraving that accompanied Paulding’s evocative description, emphasizing the bucolic atmosphere. Paulding’s commission launched Chapman’s career as an illustrator. The Washington biography proved popular, and in 1838, Paulding employed Chapman to illustrate his lavish A Gift from Fairy Land, published in New York in 1838 by D. Appleton & Co . The author also pushed the young artist to achieve his greatest ambition: along with Chapman’s boyhood friend and then Virginia Congressman, Henry A. Wise, Paulding helped Chapman to secure the commission for the massive Baptism of Pocahontas . But, as noted previously, the project was not to be a success. The loss of three children in two years and mounting debts led Chapman to rush to complete the project in order to collect the $10,000 commission in 1840. The painting ultimately found only lukewarm reception, as Chapman’s choice of subject lacked the drama and imagination of the others in the Rotunda. 5 Despite ultimately fa lling short of his expectations, Chapman—along with Paulding—did significantly shape the ways in which mid-nineteenth-century Americans saw their past. The Chapman-Paulding series marked a turning point for how Americans remembered historic places. They claimed that the American landscape was worthy of art and literature because of both its beauty and its history. Chapman’s images and Paulding’s words also fueled the nation’s realization of the vanishing of its material past. In a review of Chapman’s work at the National Academy, one critic wrote of the painting of Washington’s birthplace: “The house is no more!—why could it not have been preserved as a shrine of the patriotick [sic] pilgrim!”  6 In time, the romantic reverence expressed in Chapman’s works turned to activism as Americans sought not only to remember their past, but also to preserve it. First came Mount Vernon: with public concerns for the plantation’s future erupting over the state of the hero’s tomb in the 1830s, Chapman’s various depictions of the