WASHINGTON — An unassuming stack of white cardboard boxes sits tucked away in a small, climate-controlled room in a makeshift office building in Georgetown. Visitors rarely pass through this corner of the historic Tudor Place estate on 31st Street NW, and those who do likely don’t think twice about the boxes’ contents.
Leslie Buehler, though, knows better than to dismiss them.
“You’re going to be amazed when you see what’s inside,” says Buehler, Tudor Place’s executive director, giddy as she opens each box.
“Amazed” isn’t quite the word that springs to mind.
Inside the boxes is a 228- year-old collection of wax figurines — a man, a woman, a nursemaid with a baby, and numerous barnyard animals. The male figurine’s head clearly has been severed and reattached. The woman is missing an arm and a leg, and a muslin slip is visible beneath a tattered silk gown. The nursemaid figurine, too, is missing a leg, and Buehler points out that its head was once bashed in.
The animals are in the best condition — just one goat has lost an ear.
The figurines are a part of a tableau set in a wood-framed box given to Martha Washington in 1783 by its creator, Samuel Fraunces, a friend of the Washington family and a man obsessed with waxwork.
Overall, the tableau looks like a comedie grotesque of a Weebles playhouse.
“When these were on display, people were either enamored or repulsed by them,” Buehler says. “Because they’re creepy.” Buehler flips a switch, and the scene becomes even creepier.
An X-ray of the male figurine — about the size of a Ken doll — lights up. Like a voodoo doll, its beeswax frame is crisscrossed with pins of varying lengths and thickness. Metallic thread, running throughout its costume, evokes a halo. The head is hollow, giving the appearance of a brain cavity. Glass beads for eyes are eerily visible in the film negative, peering out through the X-ray.
Even wax figurines in the best condition are “strange to the modern eye,” Buehler admits.
Fraunces’s scene is derived from the myth of the military hero Hector and his wife, Andromache, a couple whose story of separation during a war campaign mirrored that of George and Martha Washington’s.
The tableau of Hector and Andromache — positioned in an effusive floral grotto and decked out in fashionable 18th-century outfits of silk and lace — followed the Washingtons from New York to Mount Vernon. It was finally brought to Tudor Place after Martha Washington’s death; her granddaughter purchased it during an estate sale.
By 1954, the tableau was in pitiful shape, subjected to two centuries of heat, dust, insect maws and bumpy carriage rides — the probable explanation for Andromache’s severed limbs. Tudor Place’s owner at the time, Armistead Peter, took pains to restore the figurines but was not a trained conservator.
“He did the best he could,” Buehler says.
“I’ve watched the tableau deteriorate in just the last 10 years, especially the delicate fabric,” she says. “It got to a point where something needed to be done to stabilize it or it would just disintegrate.” An appeal last year drew the attention of a donor, who agreed to pay for the analysis of the pieces, to determine what restoration could be done. Two conservation experts were contracted, and one suggested starting off the project with a procedure normally reserved for humans who break bones or swallow unfortunate objects.
The head of radiology at Georgetown University Hospital, who is also a Civil War reenactor, eagerly took on the rare opportunity.
“Needless to say, Georgetown University Hospital,” which donated the service, “never did anything like this,” Buehler says. “They could not have been more generous.” Still, the X-rays raised more questions than they answered: Which pins are the originals? What color was Andromache’s dress? How did someone get a dowel running the length of the nursemaid’s head, neck and chest inside the wax without decapitating her? Was Hector’s mustache always so wimpy- looking?
“There’s a lot more research that needs to be done on this,” says Buehler, adding that it will be at least a year before the tableau is ready for public display.
“All of these objects tell extraordinary stories that relate the times these people lived in a visceral way,” she says. “The more one understands about the beginnings of this country — how people lived, how they spent their time — it just informs our sense of history.”
Two people, however, might have been taken aback by such modern fascination with the figurines.
“The Washingtons were very private people,” Buehler says. “Martha destroyed all her private correspondence from George. That said, I think even they would have been surprised that this particular piece has lasted so long and drawn so much interest.”
