AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 111 Fig. 7: John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889), Residence of Washington’s Mother at Fredericksburg, Virginia, 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). Mary Ball Washington, mother of George, became an icon of republican motherhood in the early nineteenth century and her house became a site of pilgrimage. sepulcher, the house, and its famous landscape illustrated the growing interest in the place and the belief in its centrality to the formation of Washington’s character. Engraved in numerous popular histories and magazines, Chapman supplied a demand for images that climaxed in the formation of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union and its successful nationwide fundraising campaign in the 1850s to purchase the property and open it to the public. Chapman’s depiction of the Fredericksburg home of Washington’s mother prefigured efforts to save the house by sixty years. Paving the way for the Colonial Revival to come, the Chapman-Paulding series fueled the nation’s love for its own story. Lydia Mattice Brandt is associate professor of art and architectural history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. Adam T. Erby is associate curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. 1. William Dunlap recorded Chapman’s desire to “fix himself professionally at the seat of the United States government” where he could “command the attention of the public servants and national legislators.” See William Dunlap, History of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: George P. Scott and Co., 1834), 438. 2. James Kirke Paulding to Thomas W. White, March 7, 1834, in James K. Paulding, The Dutchman’s Fireside: A Tale , ed. William I. Paulding (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1868), ix. 3. John Gadsby Chapman to James K. Paulding, November 11, 1833, Chapman Family Correspondence and Other Documents, 1791–1898 (MSS 0048), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. The authors are grateful to Cassandra Good for alerting them to this collection. 4. James Kirke Paulding, The Life of Washington , vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), 19–21. The author appears to have conflated Washington’s birthplace and boyhood home, as his description of the house corresponds most directly with the description Chapman recorded of Ferry Farm, rather than the 18th-century appearance of the birthplace. 5. Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 116–124; John Gadsby Chapman, “Memoranda of Pictures & c.,” 37–79, McGuigan Collection, Milford, Pa. The authors are grateful to Mary K. and John F. McGuigan Jr. for access to the artist’s account books and other papers in their collection. 6. “Original Notices of the Fine Arts, The Artists’ Studio,” The New-York Mirror 12, no. 38 (March 21, 1835): 301.