The Kenmore Mantelpiece
- Address Labels
- Art Book Offprints
- Articles Presenting La Fontaine's Works
- Bookmark Puzzles
- Box of Chinese characters with pen and booklet
- Brain-Teaser Puzzles: Fables de Nestlé
- Broadsides
- Broadside Reproductions of La Fontaine
- Broadside Reproductions of Florian
- Brochures
- Calendars
- Cartoons
- Classroom Scroll Hangings
- Decals
- Die Cut Papers
- Dioramas
- Dust Jackets
- Encyclopedia Articles
- Engravings
- Envelopes
- Etchings
- Exhibit Guide Pages
- Fable Pages: Der Wolf und das Schaf
- Fairy Tale Stamps
- Flip-Overs
- Gift Certificates
- Christmas Tree Garlands
- Handbills
- Hangable Pictures
- Hidden Pictures/Devinettes
- Leaflets
- Linocut Print
- Lithographs
- Lottery Tickets
- Magazines
- Magazine Articles
- Magic Pads
- Maps
- Menus
- Minute Biographies
- Musical Scores
- Notebooks
- Paper Pads
- Painting Reproductions
- Photographs of Art Works
- Other Photographs
- Picture Story Albums
- Pictures to Color
- Plate Reproductions
- Poems Responding to La Fontaine
- Popper Guns
- Posters
- Prints
- Product Labels
- Receipts
- Separated Book Pages
- Sewing Patterns and Designs
- Fables in Silhouette
- Souvenir Currency
- Aesop's Fable Tags and Frames Scrapbook Paper
- Stickers
- Teacher Literature Units
- Tissage Imagé: Paper Puzzles for Weaving Together
- Woodcuts
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Kenmore's Dining Room Mantelpiece |
Over a mantel in the dining room of Kenmore, the estate of George Washington's sister Betty and Fielding Lewis, is a chimney piece known as "The Aesop's Fable" mantelpiece or chimneypiece. A booklet, postcard, photos, and brochures, gifts of Margaret Carlson Lytton, Nov., '92 and April, '97, present the delightful plaster work, done by a stucco worker whose identity is one of the great questions of American design history. Further, professional photographer Dan Fitzpatrick has taken some high-density photographs to help in investigating the visual history of the overmantel's motifs. Click on any picture below to see it in larger format.
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Black-and-White | The Fox and the Crow |
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In Color from the Side | |
Legend says that it was George Washington himself who ordered the subject of Aesop's fables for the chimney piece and even that it was he who insisted on the inclusion of FC as a reminder to his young nieces and nephews to beware of flattery. In fact, FC is the clearest fable at the center of the piece.