- I'm Tom Reinhart,
Deputy Director for Architecture
here at Mount Vernon,
and we are in the Nelly Custis bedroom,
which is our current bedroom restoration.
This room was created in its square shape
in the 1758 raising of the roof
that George Washington does to the house,
but the year before,
he's ordering wallpaper
for four bedrooms which have
an eight foot height ceiling.
This is one of those spaces,
and we know that he's
ordering before the 1758 work
because the size of the
room changes a little bit
and we're able to see that this is
a smaller, earlier version of this room.
We also found small fragments
of original plaster,
which probably dates at 1758,
when the wall was worked on.
And we found on top of the
surface of that plaster,
very small fragments, maybe
a fragment about this big,
size of a quarter or so,
of blue chintz wallpaper.
And that was very exciting
for all of us here,
especially our curatorial department.
- Well, we've known from
the Washington documents
that there would've been wallpaper
in the Nelly Custis Lewis room
and in all the second floor bedchambers
during the Washingtons' lifetime.
But, it wasn't until earlier this year
that we actually had hard evidence
of what that wallpaper looked like.
We found a number of fragments
and you're seeing here on the screen
a close-up of one of the
fragments that we found
in a corner of the room,
and we know from the
position where it was found,
based on where the plaster
and the paint lines were,
that it was from that earliest
period, circa 1757 to 1758.
The paper itself is exciting.
You can see two layers here.
You've got a white background
and then a blue wash on top of that
and we know from analysis that
the blue is a blue verditer.
That is a copper-based pigment,
and it was one of the more
difficult pigments to render
in the 18th century.
And then what you're seeing
are printed black outlines
on top of that.
And when you look at it, the overall,
you can start to trace
the outlines of leaves
or flower petals on it.
This paper is one of two
of the earliest fragments
that we have here at Mount Vernon.
What does that tell us for
the Nelly Custis Lewis room?
Well, as we look forward
to the restoration of that space,
this gives us a strong sense
of its distinctive character
within Mount Vernon.
And so we're gonna be keeping that in mind
as we go forward with the restoration
and try to recreate, uh,
recover, that ambiance.
We're looking today at a selection
of wallpaper fragments that have been
found in the mansion over
the course of the time
that the Mount Vernon Ladies Association
has owned the mansion.
And so we've got a piece of a border here
that was found in the New Room,
the largest room at Mount Vernon.
We've got a fragment that was taken
off of the Central Passage,
the main hallway at Mount Vernon.
And you can see from the
dates and inscriptions here
that this was taken
off in an early attempt
to try to recreate and
restore this wallpaper.
And then we've got two pieces,
one is a border, one is the main wallpaper
that were found in the
Washington bedchamber.
And what we're seeing in all of these
is really the introduction
of the Neoclassical style to Mount Vernon
coming in in the 1780s and the 1790s
when Washington is really trying
to update the house.
We've got a couple of
different iterations of that.
So this border that's from the New Room,
you're seeing a very formal,
a very architectural
version of the Neoclassical.
This is imitating the
type of carved ornament
you might see around a room
or that you might see, say, on a frame.
So you've got a little bit of
a indication of a leaf here,
and then a very formal beading pattern.
Then over here, in the
Central Passage design,
or at least what we can see of it,
you've got this elaborate
acanthus leaf scroll,
there's a suggestion of a
shell here and some flowers.
And when we compare
this to known patterns,
this matches up very well
with the arabesque style
that's being produced at the time.
And what they're doing is
they're looking at the
frescoes, the Roman frescoes,
coming out of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
They're seeing these very
fanciful designs on them
and trying to recreate them here.
So this would've gone
in the Central Passage.
It has sort of a yellowish background,
and these pigments would've actually been
a brighter blue and green
as well as shades of gray there.
Then some of the most interesting papers,
and the most puzzling,
are these that are coming
out of the Washington bedchamber.
You see on this border it
would've been a wide border
that would've gone at the top of the room.
You've got a partial
swag with a little tail
hanging down here,
and then some roping
of flowers and leaves,
and it's in these bright colors,
of shades of orange and black, very bold.
But again, they are
looking back to Pompeii,
and these are considered
Pompeiian palette.
So not necessarily unusual
for the very late 18th century.
Then this fragment here,
we're actually looking at the back
of a piece of paper.
And on the other side of it,
there's a later 19th century design.
But here is what was pulled off the wall
when the wet glue stuck
to the earlier pattern.
And it's hard to see here,
but when we put it under
multispectral light,
this is what we begin to see.
And you can see that
it's the suggestion of a Classical vase,
brim full with flowers and leaves,
with some little sprigs of wheat, maybe,
down there at the bottom.
That, again, is very typical.
These arabesque-style designs
that they are producing
in imitation of the Roman ones.
Again, it looks like
that it was probably done
in a very simple palette
of just shades of orange.
So very bright and very
vivid in that space.
Well, we are in the midst of a study
with all of these to
identify the pigments,
the fibers of the paper,
and then try to identify
where they're being produced
and who was doing them
and when Washington
would've installed them
in the mansion.
And we're using multispectral imaging
to look at these papers to try to bring up
more of the pattern than what we can see
with the visible eye.
We're doing pigment analysis
on the different shades,
fiber analysis on the papers themselves,
and then traditional
research into the patterns,
looking across England
and France and America
to see where these may have come from.
And we hope that these will guide
our efforts to restore
these spaces in the mansion,
Central Passage and the
Washington bedchamber.
Already we were able to identify
the full pattern for this border
and that's what you see
when you go into the New Room today,
is that restored version.
So we hope to be bringing a much brighter,
more vibrant mansion to
life in the near future.
