After more than half a century of delighting millions of visitors touring George Washington’s mansion, two of the first president’s landscape paintings by British artist William Winstanley, are on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Washington’s two landscapes are on view through January 2, 2014, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art adjacent to the Kaufman Collection. Purchased by Washington in 1793, these images of the Hudson River were first displayed inside the president’s house in Philadelphia and then brought to Mount Vernon upon Washington’s retirement from the presidency.
![View of the North [Hudson] River (Morning), William Winstanley, oil on canvas, circa 1793. Images Courtesy of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate.](https://thezebra.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Washington-Donaton-Morning.jpg)
With their tranquil beauty and picturesque composition, Morning and Evening were fitting images for a room in which the Washingtons received official visitors. Identified as views along the Hudson River, the luminous canvases proudly proclaimed the president’s passionate love of landscapes—both natural and cultivated—and his fervent belief that nation’s natural resources represented the key to its future greatness.
At the time when the fine arts in America were still in their infancy, Washington established a distinctive collection. During his term as president, he deliberately sought out landscape compositions, a marked departure from prevailing preferences for portraiture and history paintings (which were considered the most elevated genre). In addition to Winstanley’s Morning and Evening, he acquired a total of five other landscapes: two other river scenes by Winstanley; Moonlight, a romantic nocturnal scene by an unknown artist; and two views of the Potomac River, by another immigrant English artist, George Beck.
After Washington’s retirement from the Presidency, all seven of these paintings hung in his impressive “new room,” at Mount Vernon, making this space effectively the earliest gallery of landscape paintings in America. Not until nearly a generation later—with the art of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School—would landscape art emerge as a popular genre in America.
![View of the North [Hudson] River (Evening), William Winstanley, oil on canvas, circa 1793. Image Courtesy of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate.](https://thezebra.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Washington-Donation-Evening.jpg)
The paintings’ display in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art places them adjacent to the Kaufman Collection, which comprises one of the largest and most refined collections of early American furniture and decorative arts. The two landscapes Morning and Evening predate by decades the earliest American landscapes in the Gallery’s collection. Both paintings will return to Mount Vernon following the expiration of the temporary loan, where they will be reinstalled and on view for the unveiling of the restored large dining room, or what Washington referred to as his “new room,” in early 2014.
