Welcome to the Murals at George Washington Hall

This text is from the display panel located in George Washington Hall’s entrance foyer.

Art Professor Emil Schnellock and Mary Washington students painted these murals in the 1940s and 1950s. They capture academic and student life at what was then a white women’s college. The range of activities depicted—from Chemistry to the Calvary Club—demonstrate how students at the time pushed against some of the boundaries of the era’s normative gender expectations. Yet, in other ways, these figures present an idealized image of what the Mary Washington student handbook referred to as “refined womanhood,” defined by restrictive beauty standards and a student code of conduct that constrained students’ freedom of movement and dress.

A black and white picture of Wallace Alsop standing in front of a depiction of himself in the George Washington Hall mural. He wears glasses, has short hair, and his dressed in a suit complete with a bow tie. In his hands he has a Meritorious Service Certificate that was presented to him at a ceremony held in honor of his retirement in 1956.
Wallace Alsop standing in front of his depiction in the George Washington Hall mural with a Meritorious Service Certificate presented to him at a ceremony held in honor of his retirement in 1956. Image courtesy of University of Mary Washington Special Collections and University Archives, and reprinted with permission from the Free Lance-Star.

During the era depicted in these murals, the opportunity to attend Mary Washington and to join the ranks of its graduates was shaped by binary gender restrictions and racial segregation at public institutions of higher education in the state of Virginia.

The racial separation that was the hallmark of this era is vividly illustrated in the figure of Wallace Alsop—senior mechanic and janitor foreman. Campus histories note that Alsop was positioned in this space because that is where he regularly stood in uniform to greet students, faculty, and guests as they entered the building for special events, but his isolation in relation to other figures on the mural also points to the more complicated legacy of racial discrimination on Mary Washington’s campus.  

Like Alsop, many of the figures in these murals were developed from photographs and preliminary sketches taken of members of Mary Washington’s campus community. 

Layout of the Murals

A map of the murals of George Washington Hall. The map shows the first floor plan of George Washington Hall with the sites of the murals highlighted in red.

Note: This content is formatted so that site visitors can navigate non-linearly, but the panels have been presented here in the order of their development and creation.

This map provides the relative location of each of the murals and the numbers associated with specific panels.

Start the Tour Here

About

This student-created digital project relies on the scholarly work of Dr. Erin Krutko Devlin, who in 2022 researched and wrote a contextualization of the murals in George Washington Hall.

A colored drawing of George Washington hall reminiscent of a postcard. The text at the top reads, "George Washington Hall, Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, Va." The number 72016 is in the top right corner.

Gallery

A picture of one of the murals above a set of doors. It depicts a scene of a graduation.
A picture of one of the murals. It contains a trio of figures representing the Music Department. Assistant Professor of Music Ronald Faulkner, the director of the band, stands behind Margaret Ann Jones ’41 holding the violin and Constance Pusey ’43 sitting with the cello. Ronald wears a suit, Margaret is in a dress with a blue/green top and a white skirt. Constance wears a blue dress with puffy sleeves. To the right is a girl in a pink dress looking at a globe. Behind them figures are waving flags as one girl in a red dress stands behind a microphone.
A black and white image of the International Relations Club. There are five women and the photo and one man. The man sits in the back left corner. To his right is a woman holding open a book and another looking at a globe. In the front two women look at the same book and to the left of them the final one sits perched in her chair.
Five women are shown working on their studies. The one to the far left is sitting down reading, next to her is a woman standing and measuring out something in a beaker. At a separate table to the right are two women standing and watching, while the woman to the far right is looking through a microscope.
Three women are shown in this part of the mural. The one in front to the left is dressed in yellow and sitting on top of the ticket box, leaning her back against the woman to her right. The woman to the right is dressed in blue and is leaning forward with her head turned to the left. Behind them stands a woman in an all white costume holding out an acoustic guitar.
A black and white photo from 1952 shows four marching women to the left holding majorette batons. To the right is a marcher in white looking ready to catch a baton that is out of range of the photograph.