Washington’s Home, Mount Vernon, 1857/1859.
Louis Rémy Mignot; oil on canvas. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association Collections, Gift of Catherine M. Redington in memory of John H. Redington of Boonton, New Jersey, 1987 [M-3108].
This luminous painting of the view to the Potomac from within Mount Vernon’s deteriorating piazza represents a key moment in Mount Vernon’s history: the period just before its acquisition by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. It was executed in 1857 or 1858 by Hudson River School painter Louis Remy Mignot following a visit to Mount Vernon with his friend and collaborator Eastman Johnson. The pair were guests of the last Washington family owner, John Augustine Washington III, for at least an evening. This work is the only extant Mignot landscape painting of Mount Vernon, and it is presumed to be the source for the view in Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (1859), executed jointly with Thomas Rossiter. Notably, this image represents the present–the decayed state of the mansion in the late 1850s—while Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 glosses the past.