Spring Strolling

A well-dressed family heads down the curving drive of their country home to take the air.

The daughter stops to pick some berries. It is a spectacular day. The sun is just illuminating the house, which is a perfectly symmetrical structure with towers at each side connected by a portico. It differs from the other buildings in the distance, which are more typically American—a church with steeple, a farm shed in the middle ground, and a modified saltbox up on the hill.

Thomas Birch depicts Sedgeley Park, the first American home in the Greek Revival style, which was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an architect of the U.S. Capitol. James Fisher, the estate's owner at the time Birch painted this canvas, was, as vice-president of a prominent bank, a solid Philadelphia citizen and a local success story. The ordered cultivation of the estate near the Schuylkill River close to Philadelphia conveys the prosperity of a young country confidently taming the natural landscape.

Source: Amy Pastan. Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: Thomas Birch, (1779 England–1851 USA), Southeast View of "Sedgeley Park," the Country Seat of James Cowles Fisher, Esq.,about 1819, oil, 34 1/4 x 48 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.