Handsome and genteel - Mount Vernon, Virginia, US, part II A property in the care of Mount Vernon Ladies' Association

In the second of two articles, Jeremy Musson reports on the recent campaign to restore the memorable interiors of George and Martha Washington's country home

- 

WHEREAS Mount Vernon's exterior is crisp and stately, its interiors have a beguiling, intimate quality, rooted in the ordered domestic life of the Georgian era.

As we saw in last week's article, George Washington took up residence in 1754 and made numerous architectural and decorative improvements, extending the house to its current form of 21 rooms over three periods, during the mid-1750s, late 1770s to early 1780s and 1790s. His use of pattern books by Abraham Swan, William Pain and Batty Langley to serve his craftsmen as models for elegant carved detail and decoration gives an insight into the transmission of such details across the British Atlantic world.

Today, Mount Vernon S is shown as it was in the 1790s, during its preeminence as the home V of not merely a prosperous Virginian gentleman, but America's first President. Its interiors have been slowly and painstakingly returned to their state immediately before Washington’s death in 1799, although, naturally, the decoration and furnishing of these rooms was layered onto earlier schemes. This restoration has been guided by extensive research by Mount Vernon’s curatorial team. These elegant spaces exemplify the social and domestic values of 18th-century agrarian colonial landed families and are shaded with the ideals of the new republic.

The centre of the house was built in 1734, although the ground-floor rooms were improved in the 1740s and 1750s. In plan, it comprises an entrance hall, which runs east-west, the Front Parlour to the north; the dining parlour to the south and two bedchambers looking east towards the river.

The northerly bedroom became a Little Parlour in the 1780s.

The entrance hall-probably created in the 1740s by Washington's older half-brother, Lawrence is dominated by an American black-walnut staircase, installed in 1758-59, and its doors are crowned with open pediments (Fig 4). A printed wallpaper, of a French arabesque pattern, was installed in 2020.