Catalogue Entry
During the summer months of 1857 Johnson visited the George Washington homestead at Mount Vernon, Virginia, with his friend Louis Mignot. Johnson painted one or two paintings, but returned the following summer to paint several more. During the 1850s the building and its grounds had fallen into disrepair. A new veneration of Washington, spurred on by growing sectional political conflicts between North and South, led to the formation of a committee of women to restore the site. They formed the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union. The painter Thomas Rossiter brought attention to the situation by writing a plea in The Crayon (September 1858):
The nation has permitted his tomb to crumble, the storms to despoil his mansion, the weeds to grow over his footsteps and his door-sill, with an effort to preserve the sacred domain. At last, the women of the land—God bless them! Having waited and hoped in vain for a recognition of the sanctity of Mount Vernon, moved with feminine zeal and loyalty to the noble dead, have combined, organized and purchased the estate.
[Adapted from Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, pp. 54–55]. —PH
Hills, 2022: The private collector who owned this painting in 2021 did research and discovered that the subject was likely to be the Van Ness Mausoleum, built in 1833, from designs of the architect George Hatfield. The mausoleum was commissioned by John Peter Van Ness (1769–1846) in honor of his wife, Marcia Burns (1782–1832). It originally was placed on the grounds of the Van Ness estate, on H Street NW, between 9th and 10th Streets—which also included an orphan asylum which the Van Nesses built and supported. It was moved to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. The Mausoleum was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. By email I consulted with the architectural historian Calder Loth, who replied on December 18, 2021: “I agree that the Van Ness Mausoleum is the best candidate for the building in the Johnson painting. The mausoleum's use of Greek Doric columns at once made me think it was inspired by the tholos in Delphi. However, Delphi's archaeological sites weren't 'discovered' and studied until the 1880s, so no images of the tholos would have been available for the painting or the designer of the mausoleum.
“A more likely design source for the mausoleum is the circular 'temple' designed by James Gibbs for the park at Hackwood in England. I'm not sure if it survives or was even built, but Gibbs's design was published in his A Book of Architecture (1728), a work that would have been known to most 19th-century American architects.”
See the linked image of the Mausoleum.
Although John I. H. Baur owned and annotated a copy of the catalogue of Johnson's 1907 Estate Sale, he did not include this work in his own 1940 catalogue listing; he must have obtained it after publication.
Description in Mount Vernon Ladies' Association catalogue entry for their version of Kitchen at Mount Vernon: "The study of the gateway [Mount Vernon in 1857], long believed to be a view of the porter’s lodges erected by Bushrod Washington at the west gate entrance to the estate, and the tomb scene [this painting] remain unlocated. Johnson scholar Pat Hills has traced the gateway and tomb studies to a sale at the Coleman Auction Rooms, New York (12 December 1939, sale number 2173), and the descriptions from the 1907 American Art Association catalogue clearly correspond with the images for these two paintings. However, the images match neither recognizable spaces today nor historic images of the tomb and porter’s gate at Mount Vernon, raising the question whether Mrs. Johnson [in her letter; see References] misremembered the origin or locale of these two studies. More research remains to be done on these additional scenes of Mount Vernon and their connection to Johnsons visit in 1857." (Amy Hudson Henderson)
"Signed at the lower right. E.J., 1858
Height, 12 ½ inches; length, 20 1/2 inches."
[Annotation: “80.00”]
