Ernest C. Peixotto, born San Francisco, - Jumel Mansion, New York - 1898 - T-Shirt

This pen-and-ink drawing shows the Jumel Mansion in upper Manhattan, a two-storey Georgian house set high on a rise above a stone retaining wall.

Visual Elements & Composition

The house fills the centre of the sheet, its projecting middle section capped by a pedimented portico with columns. A row of windows runs along each floor, and chimneys rise at either end of the roof. A long, low stone wall follows the slope in front of the house, while a second curving wall descends through the foreground toward the lower left. Bare shrubs and slender trees line the hillside, and a small spire appears far to the right. The sky is left plain, and the grounds are drawn in loose, open strokes. The signature and the date, January 1898, sit at the lower edge of the paper.

Meaning & Symbolism

The Jumel Mansion was built in the 1760s as a country residence on high ground above the Harlem River. General George Washington used it as his headquarters in 1776 during the New York campaign of the Revolutionary War, which is why it remains one of the best-known landmarks of the colonial period. The raised position and formal portico announce the status of its original owners. Peixotto, a San Francisco-born painter and illustrator, made a series of pen-and-ink studies of historic American houses in the late 1890s, and this sheet shows his economical handling of architecture set in open ground.

Wearing a Piece of Colonial New York

Ink studies like this one are built on clean line and open space, and that suits a chest print. The house sits at the centre of the composition with room around it, so the drawing reads clearly at a glance and carries the quiet, formal mood of the original sheet. The plain sky and sparse trees give the image breathing room, letting the architecture hold the eye as it would on the page.