Qualla: Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jack E. Boucher, National Park Service, Public domain. Igor Stravinsky was too sick to come. He had tuberculosis and could not travel from Paris to Washington for the premiere of the concerto he had written, so his pupil Nadia Boulanger conducted instead. The date was May 8, 1938. The room was the renaissance-style music room of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss's estate on R Street in Georgetown, with a ceiling and floor copied from the Chateau de Cheverny and fabricated in Paris by the designer Armand Albert Rateau. Mildred Bliss had commissioned the piece for her thirtieth wedding anniversary. Stravinsky subtitled it 'Dumbarton Oaks 8-v-1938' at her request. The Concerto in E-flat is still called the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto today. The room where it premiered is still here. So is almost everything else.

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Image: Jack E. Boucher, National Park Service | Public domain

Dumbarton Oaks: From Beall to Bliss

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Passionvine at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The land was part of an early grant made by Queen Anne in 1702 to Colonel Ninian Beall, a Scottish soldier who named it the Rock of Dumbarton after the volcanic plug on the River Clyde. The first house on the property was built around 1801 by William Hammond Dorsey, and the centr...

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Image: Passionvine at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dumbarton Oaks: Beatrix Farrand's Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melissa Guadalupe Huertas, CC BY-SA 4.0. The terraced gardens that climb down the slope behind the house are the masterpiece of Beatrix Farrand, the only woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and one of the most accomplished American garden designers of the early twentieth cent...

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Image: Melissa Guadalupe Huertas | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton Oaks: The Dumbarton Oaks Conversations

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 4.0. In late August through early October 1944, delegations from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States met in the house's reception rooms and music room to draft the structure of what would become the United Nations. The official name was the Washington Co...

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dumbarton Oaks: The Bequest

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnbod, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1940 the Blisses gave Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University, Robert's alma mater. The gift included sixteen acres of garden, the house and its furnishings, the rapidly growing collections of Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, and an endowment for research fellowships. The arrange...

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Image: Johnbod | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dumbarton Oaks: Philip Johnson's Domes

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnbod, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1959 the Blisses commissioned Philip Johnson to design a separate pavilion to house the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. The result, completed in 1963, is one of Johnson's most successful small buildings: eight domed circular galleries set inside a perfect s...

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Image: Johnbod | CC BY-SA 4.0