A Fireplace Fantasy

Okay, so blogging while also being President is harder than I thought. I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. What's even harder to believe is that, if my Followers gadget is correct, I have actually gained followers during that time. Thank you to everyone who has signed on and held on. Here's another little tidbit from the storage racks for you.

This fireboard has been in the collection since 1950, when we acquired it from Jean Lipman. That's sixty-one years, and I cannot recall it ever being on view. It's relegation to storage is probably owing to the lack of information about it, but it is intriguing onetheless and beautiful to behold.




A fireboard, in case you don't know, is an portable enclosure usually made of wood or canvas and used to cover the unsightly fireplace in the summer months. We have a number of these, the most famous of which is our great "Bear and Pears," also from Lipman.

This piece is more enigmatic, as the scene it depicts is exotic and mysterious, possibly based on a print or number of prints of foreign lands that so intrigued New Englanders in the nineteenth century.




It belonged to a Connecticut collector named Titus Geesey, who felt strongly that it was of Connecticut origin, mainly because the painted decoration along the borders resembled the painted tin designs of local decorators. Other than this theory, we have no information as to its history.

But that never stops us from speculating. As I was researching the piece for this post I came across a gem of an interpretation in an old graduate student report. Back in 1968 a student in the folkore program at Cooperstown, clearly exasperated at being unable to find any solid information on this painting and needed something to say, offered this statement for posterity:




"An attempt to interpret this particular pastiche in terms of the life of the time leads me to conclude that limners ate opium on the job; that there were lions large and relaxed roaming (or at least posing) with Amazon women near castles with Mansard roofs; that somewhere in New England there existed a culture in which people came in a variety of sizes."

I just love this interpretation. It captures the whimsey of the piece like no academic study could do. And it is a reminder that a fireboard was one of the few art forms that was always displayed at child height. What flights of fancy would have been taken in this parlor.


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The Castles of Montgomery

This is really one of the most spectacular pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection. It’s a large painting on canvas, about 41” x 55”, depicting an imaginary scene of two castles on a river. The castles have different banners flying overhead, with the one on the left looking decidedly Moorish, perhaps evoking the medieval tradition of battle scenes between Christian and Moorish knights. The title of the work comes from the prominent inscription along the top: “View of the Castle of Montgomery.”

We don’t know the source of this image (there is a Montgomery Castle in Wales but we have not found a print view of it that would be the source of this painting; besides, you would more likely find Moorish castles in Spain and Portugal), but the manner in which it was painted is the reason for its appeal. The colors are bright, bold, and solid. The castles are flattened against the picture plane in delightful patterns, and the repetition of forms such as the boats on the river, the trees on the horizon, and the birds in the sky creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. The lone fisherman on the shore adds an almost quaint, everyday mood to the piece.

Oral tradition holds that this painting was created as a fireboard, or fireplace enclosure, by the architect of the Wofford House in Woodruff, South Carolina. It was probably painted in the mid-19^th century, around 1830-35. Interestingly, a nearly identical piece exists in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia (shown here at the bottom). That piece was painted for the Moore family home in Fredonia, just seven miles from the Wofford House. That painting bears the exact same inscription as this one, referring to the enigmatic “Castle of Montgomery.”

The existence of two identical fireboards of this size and quality within seven miles of each other provides us with a tantalizing clue to the artist, who was undoubtedly local. We don’t know for sure what Montgomery refers to, but research at Colonial Williamsburg suggests that it might be local too. According to the research, the probable reason for the commission of their work occurred in 1833 when the owner of the Moore home, Dr. Andrew Barry Moore, brought his new bride home for the first time.

Her maiden name? Nancy Montgomery.