Found in Collections - A Painted Box

A couple of weeks ago I was touring a group from the Historical Society of Early American Decoration through our collections storage and came across this painted box. It was tucked away on a lower shelf next to some clocks, but it looked interesting so I pulled it out and showed it to the group. You would have thought they had seen a rock star. All of a sudden, cameras came out of nowhere and the papparazzi began clicking away.

It is a terrific box, with a stylized landscape and architectural features ala Rufus Porter. Here's another detail:

That's quite a fanciful church steeple or tower! I didn't have any information about the box but one of the group members did. She is an expert of Rufus Porter and sent me this image of a similar box erroneously attributed to him and sold at Sothebys as part of the Thayer sale in 1987. Here it is:

This box descended in a Frederick County, Maryland, family but there is no evidence it originated there. It would be nice to find more examples and determine who this artist may have been. If you've seen anything similar, you know where to find me.

Two New Hampshire Fireboards

Sometimes the simplest forms of folk art are the best and most memorable. Here is a fireboard I saw in a historical society in rural New Hampshire this spring. It could hardly be more straightforward in design and execution. The unknown artist divided his picture space into two parts with a horizon line, and filled in the broad areas of color with the strong green for the ground and a brilliant orange-red for the sky. Fences on the margins and an island in the middle ground add interest to the scene.

The piece has considerable visual appeal, however, from the next step; the artist filled the entire space with flowing, undulating trees. They are fantastical creations, and the way they spread to all areas of the picture space gives this painting the feel of an imagined, verdant paradise. 

The artist may have been Rufus Porter, the itinerant mural painter I have blogged about previously. Or he may have been one of Porter’s many followers who read his articles in Scientific American on how to execute these simple landscapes. They painted scenes like this on walls as well as on these board-and-batten fireplace enclosures called fireboards.

Compare the New Hampshire piece with the Fenimore Art Museum's famous “Bear and Pears” fireboard, also from New Hampshire. In ours, the artist also felt the need to fill the space with the trees, but used the varied heights of the trees to accomplish this. A different approach, but just as appealing in its own way. 

It is my guess that these firebaords were painted in the second quarter of the 19th century, or about 1825-1850. Imagine what they must have looked like in an interior that may have also included painted walls (with landscapes scenes, as I illustrated in my previous Rufus Porter post -- see my labels at the right), painted furniture, and family portraits. It must have been, to our eyes, a chaotic riot of color and design. It’s important to remember that the 19th century did not become austere until we made it so in the early 20th.

New England Frescoes

On a recent trip with the American Folk Art Society to New Hampshire and Maine I was privileged to see first hand a room with wall murals painted by the great 19th-century folk artist Rufus Porter (1792-1884). These walls are in a private home in Hanover, New Hampshire, and so the viewing was a rare opportunity. I was not disappointed.

Porter was a true Renaissance man of his times. He was not only a decorative painter and portrait painter but also an inventor and author. He had a huge impact on decorative painting in America with his book, A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, published in 1825, and the many essays he published as founder and editor of Scientific American in the 1840s and 1850s.

Porter was appalled at the state of decorative painting in rural America, and so he did something that no other folk artist was ever in a position to do: establish a standard for painting in appearance and technique, and make that standard available to the masses.

Focusing on mural painting, which at the time was done in oil on dry plaster as an inexpensive substitute for imported French scenic wallpaper, Porter taught would-be artisans how to lay out a room and fill in landscape details. Establishing a uniform horizon line. Using fluid brushstrokes to create trees and shade their trunks. Use pre-cut stencils to include houses and barns. Adding narrative interest with bays, inlets, and a variety of vessels, both sail and steam.

The effect is astonishing, and very evocative of the New England coast. Porter painted walls along the Maine coast and into New Hampshire, and his nephew Jonathan Poor kept up the tradition. His techniques were widely adopted, and Porter-style wall murals abound in New England and New York State. Some of the more famous walls have long been removed from their original homes and sold on the market. Many, I’m sure, were destroyed or covered with layers of wallpaper over the years as paper became less expensive and itinerant artists disappeared.

That is why standing in an original Rufus Porter painted room is a unique experience not to be missed. Porter understood, as the Hudson River school artists did, that America’s real treasure was its land. More than any other artist of his era, he succeeded in making that treasure a part of people’s daily lives.