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Mount Vernon, East Front.
Joachim Ferdinand Richardt; oil on canvas, c. 1876. The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association Collections, Purchase 1977, Conservation courtesy of The Founders, Washington Committee Endowment Fund [M-2726/A].
Danish landscape artist Ferdinand Richardt visited Mount Vernon in July 1858 to sketch the home of America’s first president, a site he intended to include in an illustrated travel journal celebrating the wonders of the United States. Richardt was one of many artists who made the pilgrimage to Mount Vernon that summer to document the increasingly dilapidated house and raise awareness of its growing importance as a national shrine. Over the course of two days, he made multiple pencil sketches, carefully delineating the architecture in its current state of disrepair, the flora and fauna, and views of the Chesapeake River, images he would later use to make paintings in his Brooklyn, New York studio. Richardt completed two oil paintings of Mount Vernon that winter—a view of the mansion and a view of Washington’s Tomb—yet he never realized his dream of having them engraved and published. This painting of Mount Vernon is actually a second version Richardt made many years later, sometime between 1873 and 1876, when Washington and his home were at the heart of the Centennial Celebration. Richardt took care not only to dress the three girls playing battledore on the lawn in clothing fashionable to the 1870s, but he also depicted the house in pristine condition, reflecting on the preservation efforts already enacted by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union which formally purchased the property in 1860.
