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State of Grace
| Article
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10733 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
2,050 Words |
| Author
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Judith K. Cox
Judith K. Cox writes on arts and fashion and resides in the
Washington, D.C, area. |
Housed behind the sleek 1960s facade of the U.S. State Department Building are some of the most sumptuous period rooms in America. The Diplomatic Reception Rooms, where visiting chiefs of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers are greeted by forty-five thousand guests annually, re-create in architecture and the decorative arts the finest interiors of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America.
For foreign dignitaries, many of whom see only airports and hotels and have little if any time to go to our museums and historic houses, a visit to these rooms is their only opportunity to see tangible evidence of our cultural heritage. For the rest of us, a tour of these reception rooms rivals a visit to the du Pont collection at Winterthur, the American collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The principal reception areas are named for diplomat Benjamin Franklin and for early secretaries of state who became presidents: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. The John Quincy Adams State Drawing Room, where the president, vide president, secretary of state, and various officials greet foreign officials and other guests in a receiving line, resembles a Philadelphia drawing room during the period of the Continental Congress. Simple raised panels and hand-carved architectural details common to mid-Georgian houses define the room. Elaborate hand carving decorates the projecting chimney breast, which is flanked by fluted pilasters with Ionic capitals.
Seventy-two-feet long and thirty feet wide, the room is furnished as series of settings for conversation around glass-topped tables. The walls are a warm ocher called Philadelphia stone that sets off the wood and brighter colors of the fabrics. One can almost picture the handsome young Jefferson listening skeptically to the intense Adams, Franklin surrounded by a group of people, George Washington already stern, unapproachable.
The greatest number of the Diplomatic Reception Room's historic objects are on view here. Chippendale sofas, echoing the prominent style of the room's furnishings, face the fireplace. Behind them, on the left, is the desk on which the Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution, was signed on September 3, 1783. In back of one sofa is a small mahogany desk that Jefferson designed in Philadelphia in June 1776. Portraits of George and Martha Washington (by Rembrandt Peale), John Jay (by Gilbert Stuart), Jefferson, Franklin, and Mr. and Mrs. John Quincy Adams grace the
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