Museum accessions.

Several recent additions to the collection have allowed George Washington's Mount Vernon, in Virginia, to present an ever clearer picture of the first president's personal taste and style of life. In June a great-great-granddaughter of John Augustine Washington III, Washington's great-grandnephew and the last private owner of Mount Vernon, donated a pastel of the Virgin Mary (illustrated at right), which has been installed in the large dining room, where it was hanging when the inventory of Washington's estate was taken in 1800, shortly after his death. Also in the room hung "one likeness St. John," a pendant pastel in a private collection that has also recently been rediscovered. The importance of these images to George and Martha Washington is suggested by their placement in the room that was the most fashionable in their house. Interestingly, the inventory did not include a dining table in this room, which led to the supposition that the Washingtons did not have one there. However, recent thinking suggests that they probably did have a table but that it had been temporarily removed to allow Washington's body to lie in state. Accordingly, the museum has acquired a three-part mahogany table of about 1795 (illustrated below) representative of the stylish neoclassical furniture Washington is known to have acquired for the dining room in 1797. The latter included twenty-four chairs ordered from the Philadelphia maker John Aitken, eleven of which are now in the house (six on loan from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C.) and have recently been conserved to reflect the original upholstery and tack pattern.

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Mount Vernon has also recently put on view several important family pieces acquired at auction last year: These had descended so quietly in the family of Eleanor "Nelly" Custis Lewis, Martha Washington's granddaughter, who was raised at Mount Vernon, that their existence was unknown to Washington scholars and curators. The most important is probably the Chinese export beaker vase ...