As Seen in American Furniture

The prestigious journal American Furniture includes two feature articles on George and Martha Washington’s furniture in its 2019 annual edition.

In the piece titled “‘Mostly new, and very elegant’: The Several Lives of George William and Sally Fairfaxes’ London-Made Furniture,” Mount Vernon’s curator of fine and decorative arts Adam T. Erby traces the Fairfaxes’ furniture from the London showrooms of William Gomm & Son & Company to its eventual home at Mount Vernon. Erby’s research is based on evidence uncovered in the Fairfax account book (purchased by the Washington Library in 2013), the same source that guided the recent re-creation of the furniture for Mount Vernon’s Front Parlor. The article features the most complete account of the appearance of the Fairfaxes’ Belvoir, a house that heavily influenced the building and furnishing of Mount Vernon. A transcription of the Gomm entries in the Fairfax account book makes this important resource available to the scholarly community.

Written by 2015–2016 Washington Library Fellow Amy Hudson Henderson, “French & Fashionable: The Search for George and Martha Washington’s Presidential Furniture,” reconstructs the social scene of the Washingtons in New York and Philadelphia. It definitively identifies the furnishings of the Green Drawing Room in the President’s House, a subject long debated by furniture scholars and antiquarians alike. Henderson traces the provenances of individual pieces of furniture and constructs the most complete accounting to date of the Washingtons’ furnishings as they established the roles of president and first lady of the United States.

View the annual at mountvernon.org/jaf.