Gallery 720 - Marmion Room, ca. 1756

Part of The American Wing

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This impressive, seven-sided room in The Doris and Stanley Tananbaum Galleries was the principal parlor of Marmion, a plantation house built around 1756 by the Fitzhugh family of Virginia. The room's elaborate painting was probably executed about twenty years later in the 1770s. It is the most ambitious decorative painted room to survive from eighteenth-century America. The Marmion Room has been left unfurnished so that visitors may study all the hand-painted surfaces. The painting on the room's entablature, Ionic pilasters, and dado paneling imitates Siena marble to match the fireplace, while Rococo-style ornaments embellish the paneled walls. Picturesque landscapes adorn a wall and the spaces above the fireplace and the door entrance.

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