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
MacGibeny, 2021: According to a conservator's report and Christie's, the inscription was visible under UV light but not natural light. Hills confirmed that in her examination. The painting subsequently was restored, but the inscription still was not visible under natural light.
The faintness of the inscription was a concern for L. B. Doud, who purchased the painting from Ortgies & Co. in 1894. A letter dated November 7, 1895 from Ortgies to Doud explains that the authenticity of the painting, which had been consigned by Thomas B. Clarke, had never been questioned; however, Clarke had offered to take it back to Johnson for his signature, and if the work was determined to be inauthentic, Ortgies would refund Doud's money. On December 4, 1895, Clarke wrote to Ortgies that Johnson had "boldly signed it again." It is not clear why the current signature is so indistinct.
Hills, 2019: It is a remarkable painting coming out of Johnson’s European training and focusing on an American subject. From Rembrandt and the seventeenth-century Dutch painters, Johnson learned to paint the effects of light animating shadowed interiors, but, and in advance of his time, in 1857, he pioneered the impressionistic rendering that shows the bits of moments in people’s lives, devoid of the pastel sentimentality of 1850s Salon painting. The face of the mother, who sits with her baby near the fire, melts into the background but her frock glows with spontaneous strokes. The left child, of the two sitting by her, turns to confront the viewer with a sweet face, deftly painted. That Johnson treated this family, struggling with slavery and its legacy, with the utmost respect is not surprising given his own family’s abolitionist convictions.
Hills, “Painting Race: Eastman Johnson’s Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedmen,” p. 160, n11, 1999: “The scene has an uncanny resemblance to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opening description of Uncle Tom’s cabin, in which Tom’s wife, Chloe, alternatively feeds the baby on her lap and her two small boys. Seventeen families of slaves—a total of seventy-six—lived on the estate in January 1856; see 'List of Slaves. Belonging to John A. Washington (III) Mount Vernon, January 15, 1856, taken from a Diary Kept by John A. Washington, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Mount Vernon, Virginia.’”
MacGibeny, 2021: According to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which owns a version of this painting, the interior depicted in Johnson's "Kitchen at Mount Vernon" images is actually the Servant's Hall, not the kitchen.
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