George Washington's Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon

3 George Washington’s Portico

The mansion house [has] . . . a capacious open Piazza towards the water, supported by a proper number of pillars, very lofty and majestic columns. Winthrop Sargent, 13 October 1793 T he monumental portico on the east side of the house at Mount Vernon is Washington’s greatest contribution to American architecture (Figure 3.1; Plates 3 and 15). In any consideration of his aesthetic interests, it holds a chief place because of its originality, fame, and key role as mediator of house and landscape. The magnificent portico stood out for visitors as the most striking and impressive aspect of the expanded design . Viewers of the time called this porch a “portico” or “piazza,” and Washington himself also described it as a “colonnade” or “gallery.”1 The octastyle portico is in the colossal, Tuscan order. The square columns are slender, in about a 13:1 ratio of height to width, rather than the Renaissance ratio of 7:1 more commonly used for this order. Had Washington borrowed from any book on architecture that illustrated ancient Roman, Italian Renaissance, or English porticoes, or had he looked at the few American examples of the large domestic portico, he might have arrived at a more academic and mainstream design: a portico capped by a pediment covering only the central part of the building rather than the full width, perhaps with four or six columns across, the whole structure standing on a raised platform approached by stairs. But with its combination of the colossal order and the full extent across the facade, there was no other porch like it in America. We have no early drawing for the east front and no letters from Washington to his managers about the portico before its construction. As evidence that a portico was planned early on, Washington’s draft for the basement level (see Figure 2.4) shows five rooms (three of them c h a p t e r t h r e e George Washington’s Portico George Washington’s Portico ' 57 were built, with vaulting) beneath what would be the porch flooring, and the basement needed a portico overhead to help keep off rainwater. Instructions or permission for using the Tuscan order must have come from Washington, but as he was absent from the estate during the war, a craftsman or manager Lund Washington must have chosen the design source. Although Washington initially paved the colonnade with some local hard stone, he sought an even finer material and spent great effort acquiring fancy paving stones from England. He wanted them at least one foot square, but he told agent John Rumney Jr. in 1785 that the final size should depend on Rumney’s sense of the “taste of the times” in England .2 The previous year, Washington had asked wealthy Philadelphian William Hamilton for advice about cementing binder but indicated that he wanted stone or whatever “will stand the weather.” Hamilton told Washington about his own floor of variegated (probably alternating) colors, and for a while Washington sought a black and white checkered pattern, but economy and availability of stone led him to settle for one off-white color, close to the paving today (which is entirely replaced).3 When he finally got his “Flaggs” (flagstones) from England, he was unhappy that they were not as polished as the sample he had received: “The Flags came very reasonably and will answer my purposes very well though the workman did not keep to the sample in two or three respects—particularly on the thickness, and dressing of the Stones—some not being more than ¾ of an inch thick (scarcely that on one side) and none with the same polish of the pattern—enough however may be picked out of the whole to floor my Gallery which is all I wanted.” Washington was interested in having the portico’s details right, and in general he was aware of measurements and proportions, so either it was a rare case of forgetting or he wanted to impress Hamilton when he exaggerated the length by at least Figure 3.1. View of the riverfront of Mount Vernon. The view of the east facade, portico, and lawn later became a favorite of American artists. Photo: Author. 58 ' George Washington’s Eye several feet and reported that the porch was one hundred feet long and “ten or twelve” feet wide.4 The structural stability of the porch and its paving was...