Save
Save chapter to my Bookmarks
Cite
Cite this chapter
Print this chapter
Share
Share a link to this chapter
Free
Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...
~In 1836, when Charles and Comfort Caverly of New Hampshire had their portrait painted by the artist Joseph H. Davis, they gave some truth to a pronouncement made by the American critic and author John Neal a few years prior, regarding the development of artistic appreciation in the...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.141-169
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280.007
View chapters with similar subject tags
In Imitation of Nature: Landscape and Still-Life Painting in Early America
STACY C. HOLLANDER
In 1836, when Charles and Comfort Caverly of New Hampshire had their portrait painted by the artist Joseph H. Davis (see below), they gave some truth to a pronouncement made by the American critic and author John Neal a few years prior, regarding the development of artistic appreciation in the young republic: “Pictures of worth are beginning to be relished—by and by they will be understood; after that, they will soon become not merely an article for the rich, a luxury for the few, but things for every body, familiar household furniture. Already are they quite as necessary as the chief part of what goes to the embellishment of a house, and far more beautiful than most of the other furniture.”1John Neal, “American Painters—and Painting,” Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, n.s., no. 1 (July 1829): 46–47.
The Caverlys were not a young couple when they commissioned this work. Comfort, at age forty-four, holds her sixth baby, Isaac, on her lap. Charles, at age fifty-two, is a farmer and blacksmith who would represent his community in the state legislature ten years later.2Robert Boodey Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, from the Year 1116 to the Year 1880, Made Profitable and Exemplified by Many a Lesson of Life (Lowell, Mass.: G. M. Elliott, 1880), 77, http://books.google.com/books?id=7fQZAQAAMAAJ. A Fancy rural landscape hangs on the wall above them. An elaborate flower arrangement on the table obliquely refers to the increasingly popular still-life tradition while speaking to the perfect love in this household through the selection of blossoms and, more explicitly, the heart outlined on the vase. There is little or no hierarchical distinction drawn between the Caverlys themselves and the rich patterning and material comforts of their home; the art, table, floor carpet—indeed, their own portraits—are all part of the furniture. The whole is designed to titillate the senses through exuberant and colorful designs, while affirming the stolidity of the Caverlys. More broadly, it demonstrates America’s growing conversance with and acceptance of an urbane market for art that held the promise of advancing beyond the “painter of fire-buckets, looking-glass tablets, or militia standards.”3Neal, “American Painters,” 47. In deriding the work of the ornamental painter, Neal refers to typical products of their artistry that satisfied a variety of purposes, including fire buckets, such as those in the Fielding Collection, and “looking-glass tablets,” rectangular mirrors that were ornamented with reverse-painted glass panels at the top showing landscapes, classical figures, and urns of flowers. The same ornamental painter might paint militia standards, the insignia associated with specific branches of the military, for a variety of purposes, including parade banners, flags, or oil on canvas to hang on a wall. As the taste for art matured, it was accompanied by a marked desire for displays of personal attainment that paralleled the growth of the nation itself. The self-taught landscape and still-life paintings in the Fielding Collection span more than two centuries, from mere notes in colonial portraits—a partial scene glimpsed through a window, a bowl of cherries spilling across a lap—to detailed renderings that situate buildings and activities in time and place. Beginning in the eighteenth century, American homes revealed a lively delight in and pocketbook for portraits of houses and lands, descriptions of place that were necessarily connected to the life of man.
~
Description: Family Portrait of Charles and Comfort Caverly and Their Son Isaac by Davis, Joseph...
JOSEPH H. DAVIS (1811–1865)
Family Portrait of Charles and Comfort Caverly and Their Son Isaac, 1836
Caverly’s Hill, New Hampshire
Watercolor, pen, and ink
Framed: 12½ × 17 in.
L2015.41.144
~
Description: Portrait of a Woman with a Bowl of Cherries
Portrait of a Woman with a Bowl of Cherries, ca. 1770–80
Connecticut or New York
Oil on panel
Framed: 28 × 23 in.
L2015.41.172
The story of American landscape painting is, in part, one of changing perspectives both literal and metaphorical. The earliest landscapes were embedded in the very architectural structures they might portray in the form of overmantels and fireboards. As time went by, the eye was raised from level gazes in personal portraits that depicted the home and those who resided within, such as the Family Mansion of David Thayer (perhaps an overstatement for his modest property and saddlery) in Bainbridge, New York, painted in 1830, to lofty and expansive birds-eye views that highlighted complexes such as the large and orderly farm belonging to Sarah and Daniel Leibelsperger in Berks County, Pennsylvania, drawn in 1882. Landscapes even functioned as a kind of precursor to photojournalism, as evidenced in John Hilling’s series of paintings relating the shocking burning in 1854 of a Catholic church in Maine as an act of religious intolerance.4A wave of anti–Irish Catholic sentiment swept the eastern United States from the 1830s to the 1850s. One nativist group opposed to Catholics and the Irish who immigrated to the United States during the potato famine was a secret society called the Know-Nothings. The paintings depict a violent attack on Bath’s Old South Church, which had been sold to Catholics, after a crowd of more than two thousand had attended night rallies over several days, listening to harangues against Catholics and foreigners. John Hilling, an English-born local sign-and housepainter, was probably an eyewitness to the event because he was also a firefighter in Bath and may have been called to the scene.
~
Description: Family Mansion of David Thayer
Family Mansion of David Thayer, 1830
Bainbridge, New York
Pencil, watercolor, and ink on paper
17 × 22⅛ in.
Inscription: “FAMILY MANSION OF DAVID THAYER BAINBRIDGE
2016.25.101
~
Description: The Property of Daniel and Sarah Leibelsperger, Fleetwood, Berks County,...
FERDINAND A. BRADER (1833–1901)
The Property of Daniel and Sarah Leibelsperger, Fleetwood, Berks County, Pennsylvania, 1882
Graphite on wove paper
30⅝ × 51 in.
Inscription: “THE PROPERTY OF DANIEL AND SARAH LEIBELSPERGER, FLEETWOOD BERKS COUNTY, PENNA: 1882!”
2016.25.98
~
Description: Before the Burning of Old South Church in Bath, Maine by Hilling, John
ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN HILLING (1822–1894)
Before the Burning of Old South Church in Bath, Maine, ca. 1854
Oil on canvas
17 × 23 in.
L2015.41.177.1
~
Description: The Burning of Old South Church in Bath, Maine by Hilling, John
ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN HILLING (1822–1894)
The Burning of Old South Church in Bath, Maine, ca. 1854
Oil on canvas
17½ × 23½ in.
L2015.41.177.2
In some sense, the paintings in the collection reveal a telling dichotomy in the American character as it developed in the years just before and following the Revolution: a push-pull between stubborn iconoclasm and the need to prove worth in European eyes. Much of the art revels in the intimate particularity of expression emerging from the self-taught genius of early American citizenry. At the same time, it also highlights the growing divergence of this popular art with the aspirations of those, like Neal, who would have American art shed the taint of artisanship associated with the self-taught and ornamental painter and instead embrace the grandeur and authenticity of America’s natural bounty: “People have done with nature. . . . The standard for landscape is no longer what we see outstretched before us, and on every side of us, with such amazing prodigality of shape and colour. We have done with the trees of the forest and the wilderness . . . and of all the painting of that master who used to be looked up to as authority in landscape—God.”5John Neal, “Landscape and Portrait-Painting,” Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, n.s., no. 3 (September 1829): 113.
ARCHITECTURAL LANDSCAPES
Overmantels and Fireboards
It was not God that the earliest painters sought in the American landscape, when colonists were “hacking and hewing” their way to settled respectability, as the nineteenth-century English travel writer Frances Trollope later observed. Rather, they looked for reminders of the life they had left behind, primarily through Dutch- and English-inflected motifs, followed by their own reflections in landscapes improved for the usefulness of man.6Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1832), 243, https://archive.org/details/domesticmannersoootroliala. As early as 1688, Samuel Sewall, the Boston diarist, noted seeing “Landscips of Oxford Colledges and Halls,” most probably engravings, while visiting a friend. Alexander Stewart advertised in Philadelphia in 1769 that he would paint “Landskips, sea pieces, perspective views of gentlemen’s country seats, &c.” for those who had “picture panels over their chimney pieces, or on the sides of their rooms, standing empty.”7Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The Beginnings of American Landscape Painting,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 11, no. 3 (1952): 93–99 at 93, 94, doi:10.2307/3258297. “Picture panels” referred to overmantels, also known as “chimney paintings” or “chimney pieces.” These were paintings on wood that were typically integrated into the surrounding architectural paneling over a fireplace, the most important feature of the room. Images were portraits of the homestead and properties; “deception paintings,” or trompe-l’oeil; or depictions based on European prints and engravings of hunting parties, pastoral scenes, prospects, and town views.
The earliest overmantel in the Fielding Collection was painted for civil engineer and surveyor Ebenezer Waters (1739–1808) in Sutton, Massachusetts.8Nina Fletcher Little, “Recently Discovered Paintings by Winthrop Chandler,” Art in America 36 (April 1948): 81–97. Chandler painted a second overmantel for the Waters residence around the same time, featuring a river view with fort. It is one of around a dozen such panels by the artist Winthrop Chandler, who is best known for more than thirty-five portraits painted for family, friends, and neighbors in Connecticut and Massachusetts.9“Winthrop Chandler, Limner of Windham County, Connecticut,” Art in America 35 (April 1947): 84, 90, 112–13, 162. Members of the Chandler family were among the founders of Woodstock, Connecticut, where the artist was born. In 1762, several years after his father’s death in 1754, young Winthrop seems to have been apprenticed, perhaps to a Boston decorative painter, as he returned to Connecticut around 1770, where he painted important portraits of Reverend Ebenezer Devotion and his wife, Martha. By 1775, Chandler had a growing family but was experiencing financial difficulties in the unrest of the impending War of Independence. His own family was divided between ardent Loyalists and members who fought on the Patriot side: Chandler carved a coat of arms of Great Britain and Ireland for his cousin Gardiner Chandler in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he painted a portrait in Woodstock of his brother Samuel Chandler, who fought in the Revolutionary War. After 1785, the artist moved to Worcester, where, in addition to painting portraits and overmantels, he kept a shop that offered house painting. He returned to Woodstock, impoverished and sick, near the end of his life. Chandler’s obituary in Worcester’s Massachusetts Spy remembers him as a house painter but notes “many good likenesses on canvas show he could guide the pencil of a limner.”
~
Description: Overmantel: Landscape with Riding and Walking Figures, a River, and a Village by...
WINTHROP CHANDLER (1747–1790)
Landscape with Riding and Walking Figures, a River, and a Village (Overmantel), ca. 1770–80
Oil on pine panel
23 × 61 × 1¼ in.
L2015.41.159
The artist had portrayed Ebenezer’s brother Samuel and his wife, Prudence, in 1779, and it is likely that the overmantel was painted between that date and his own death in 1790. It was mounted above the fireplace in the lower southwest parlor of the home, which was built in 1767, and framed by a raised molding in a room that was entirely grained and marbleized, as was the fashion after around 1750.10Little, “Winthrop Chandler,” 91. Whether Chandler was responsible for the imitative painted graining and marbleizing is not known, though he would have possessed the requisite skills to produce decorative finishes. The panel shares characteristic motifs with other overmantels painted by Chandler around this time, such as houses with white-painted corner boards, window frames, and cornices, and black-painted doors. A pastiche of figures forms a kind of panoply across the bottom foreground. This is probably derived from English prints of the period, engraved after such British artists as James Seymour (1702–1752) and John Wootton (ca. 1682–1764). The traveler with a sack over his shoulder was a familiar type from Boston needlework pictures and chimney pieces. Also featured in the scene are diverse figures (including two pairs of lovers), a grandmother holding a kerchief to her nose and walking with her little granddaughter, various animals, and several figures mounted on fine steeds, singly or in pairs. A dark-skinned figure riding a nag is of particular interest; he wears a bright red turban and an exotic and fancy suit of clothes, suggesting that the original copy source may have depicted an enslaved member of an aristocratic English household.11Sukhdev Sandhu, “The First Black Britons,” BBC Online Archives, last updated February 17, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/black_britons_01.shtml. The Waters home came into the possession of a Dr. Bullard, whose daughter Eunice was married to the famous preacher Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) in the very room with this overmantel. The homestead was graced in front by a majestic elm tree made famous in Beecher’s novel Norwood; or Village Life in New England (1868). It is perhaps the tree depicted in the left middle ground.12William Addison Benedict and Hiram A. Tracy, History of the Town of Sutton, Massachusetts, from 1704 to 1876: Including Grafton until 1735; Millbury until 1813; and Parts of Northbridge, Upton and Auburn (Worcester, Mass.: Sanford, 1878), 200, http://books.google.com/books?id=OnMNAQAAIAAJ.
The finest landscapes through the 1830s might still have adorned fireplaces or decorated the broad rectangular tablet tops of chairs and suites of furniture, even as aspiring artists struggled to gain acceptance for the genre as easel painters.13For an in-depth consideration of the struggle to make the transition from ornamental painter to easel painter, see Jessica Nicoll, “‘The Real Pioneer of Art in this City’: Charles Codman and the Rise of Landscape Painting in Portland, Maine,” in Charles Codman: The Landscape of Art and Culture in 19th-Century Maine, ed. Caroline Sloat (Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 2002), http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa654.htm. But in 1825, a revolutionary approach to landscape painting played into the Yankee love of innovation, expediency, and economy. It was introduced by the self-taught polymath Rufus Porter (1792–1884) in his publication A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments. The volume continued a legacy of manuals descended from medieval sourcebooks known as “books of secrets,” which were essentially compilations of alchemical recipes, practical crafts, medicinal and culinary recipes, magic tricks, and other esoteric lore. The lay public was not privy to the mysteries of the early painters and stainers, remnants of a European guild system designed to protect trade secrets from becoming general knowledge. By this time, however, the alluring “secret knowledge” contained in such publications was more valuable as a marketing strategy than as a source of actual forbidden wisdom.
Porter’s approach to interior mural painting brought the expansive air of the outdoors into the confined interiors of homes throughout New England. Of probably hundreds of rooms that received frescoed and drypainted decoration, most were influenced by Porter’s reductive scheme of a horizon line around the four walls of a room, with a foreground, middle ground, and distance. A proponent of the American scene, the design typically contained a body of water and forested land, and it was further enlivened by such details as sailing vessels, animals, human figures, and activities. The resulting vista displayed a neat and logical world that thrummed with productive order.
Coastal Landscape brings just such a breath of fresh air indoors. It belongs to a group of land- and seascapes by an as-yet-unidentified artist whose distinctive work is found in southern New Hampshire homes.14Linda Lefko, email message to author, November 25, 2018. I am grateful to Linda Lefko for sharing her insights into this fireboard, especially as it relates to examples of painted New England wall murals of the period. Occurring as fireboards, overmantels, and wall paintings, they notably share the composition of a central tree flanked by leaning trees that bleed off the edges of the board. The trees exhibit elegant, sweeping branches that are heavily highlighted along one side in black. Repeated elements include lighthouses, residences, and sailing vessels on choppy waters, among other motifs. Each example features a stratified arrangement of colors, including a glowing sunset that specifically recalls Porter’s instructions: “Strike a line around the room, nearly breast high; this is called the horizon line: paint the walls from the top to within six inches of the horizon line, with sky blue (composed of refined whiting and indigo, or slip blue), and at the same time, paint the space from the horizon to the blue, with horizon red, (whiting, coloured a little with orange lead and yellow ochre,) and while the two colours are wet, incorporate them partially, with a brush.”15Rufus Porter, A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments, Which Are Well Explained, and Warranted Genuine, and May Be Performed Easily, Safely, and at Little Expense (Concord, N.H.: Rufus Porter, 1825), 27–29.
~
Description: Overmantel: Coastal Landscape
Overmantel: Coastal Landscape
Early nineteenth century
Oil on pine panel
29 × 48 × ⅜ in.
2016.25.109
Although this vibrant landscape has been termed an overmantel, the breadboard ends (narrow vertical pieces adjoined to each side of the panel) are characteristic of fireboard construction. A fireboard, or chimney board, sealed the open fireplace during the warm months, when it was not in use to heat the room. The board would be cut to the exact dimensions of the opening, so that it nestled snugly on all four sides. It might have had cutouts for andirons, a wide base molding, or a turn knob at the top to stabilize it within the fireplace. The simplest construction was wooden boards battened together at the back with strips of wood and painted on the front surface. Sometimes canvas was stretched over the wooden boards, tacked around the edges, and painted; other fireboards were more like conventional paintings of stretched canvas that was painted in oils, covered with wallpaper, or embellished with paper cutout appliqués.16Nina Fletcher Little, American Decorative Wall Painting, 1700–1850 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 66.
More typical of fireboard imagery are examples that feature an urn of flowers. This trope imitated the practice of placing an actual vase of flowers in the open hearth. In 1723, Colonel John Custis of Williamsburg, Virginia, wrote to his brother in England: “Get me two pieces of as good painting as you can procure. It is to put in ye summer before my chimneys to hide ye fire place. Let them bee some good flowers in potts of various kinds. . . . Done on canvas this is the exact dimensions of ye chimneys. I send this early that the painter may have time to do them well and the colors time to dry.”17Little, American Decorative Wall Painting, 66.
A chimney board in the Fielding Collection from around 1825 represents an illusionistic space suggesting that the urn is placed within the fireplace. It combines two conventions associated with the hearth: in addition to the flowers seemingly standing inside the fireplace, it includes a border in imitation of Delft tiles. These tin-glazed faience tiles were produced in several Netherlands pottery centers by the seventeenth century, but the factories in Delft were so numerous that the tiles came to be known generally as “delftware.”18Josslyn Kay Stiner, “Piecing It Together: The Introduction of Delftware Tiles to North America and Their Enduring Legacy in Charleston, South Carolina” (MS thesis, Clemson University, 2010), https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/828.
~
Description: Fireboard
Fireboard, ca. 1825
New England
Polychrome pigment on pine with brass hardware
33¼ × 49 × 2 in.
2016.25.93
Dutch delftware tiles were exported to the American colonies in New Amsterdam and the Hudson River Valley from at least the seventeenth century; they were used, as in Europe, to surround the fireplace. They were found throughout North America by the turn of the eighteenth century, when advertisements for the sale of Dutch tiles appear in newspapers in major cities, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. By 1761, English delftware had entered the American market advertised as “English Chimney Tiles.”19Stiner, “Piecing It Together,” 49–50. The early tiles had monochromatic designs in blue and white or purple and white. Designs might incorporate Chinese- influenced motifs, portraits of famous people, soldiers, or more generic images of fruit and flowers. As tastes changed, these were replaced by landscapes, biblical scenes, and depictions of daily activities. Tiles were especially popular for encasing fireplaces in Dutch homes because they were easy to clean, reflected heat into the room, and provided a measure of fire safety. Delft-type tiles were produced in England as well, introduced through émigré Dutch potters and centered in Liverpool and Bristol. Although the earliest examples are similar to true delftware, these areas developed their own distinctive images and painting techniques over time. The Fielding Collection chimney board is one of a number of similar examples that feature a painted vase of flowers and tiles surrounding the fireplace. In each, the exact configuration of tiles and imagery used is different, though most of them display trees and some landscape elements.
Still Lifes and Ornamental Painting
Another fireboard with a flower arrangement (below) makes no attempt to simulate a real vase of flowers; instead, it is treated as a still-life painting set within a smoke-decorated and marbleized “frame.” As such, it is on trend with the growing taste for still lifes in American homes. The still life emerged from several impulses at the end of the eighteenth century. It resonated with a widespread desire to gain an understanding of God’s created world through an investigation of natural history in all its manifestations. Advances in scientific techniques and innovations in classifying the natural orders had led to a global movement to examine all geological and life forms. In botany, the sexual system of flower classification devised by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) inspired professionals and amateurs alike to inventory all the flowering plants in an area by collecting specimens in the form of herbaria.
~
Description: Fireboard
Fireboard, ca. 1825
Probably Cape Ann, Massachusetts
Polychrome pigment on pine
38½ × 60 × 1½ in.
L2015.41.133
In 1786 the American artist, patriot, and entrepreneur Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) opened the first natural history museum in his Philadelphia home on Lombard Street. In 1794 it moved to Philosophical Hall, where he displayed specimens gathered from America and around the world as well as his own portraits of prominent Americans. The following year, his son Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825) exhibited a number of paintings at the Philadelphia Columbianum, including still lifes.20The Columbianum was the first association in the United States to promote the fine arts. It was conceived in Philadelphia by Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin Rush, Joseph Ceracchi, and others as an academy of art and science, and as a platform to exhibit works of art. The first and only exhibition occurred in 1795. Despite the long history of still-life painting in the Netherlands and even more ancient representations in Greco-Roman mosaics, the form was not welcomed in America at a time when most art was held in some suspicion unless it served a practical or edifying purpose. Raphaelle Peale is credited with introducing the still life into the American art-historical canon, even as his own father derided “the painting of objects that have no motion, which any person of tolerable genius, with some application may acquire.”21Carol Troyen, “Fruit, Flowers, and Lucky Strikes: The Still Life in American Culture,” in The Art of American Still Life: Audubon to Warhol, ed. Mark D. Mitchell (Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn.: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015), 25. To the elder Peale, the elevation of such quotidian forms held no moral, enlightening, or even technically impressive implications. Yet the early still-life tradition symbolized the worth of everyman in the early American republic by examining the specificity of the humble and everyday and finding beauty and meaning in its very existence.
By 1829 John Neal was able to write “our portrait, our landscape and our still-life painters, if not too numerous to mention, are much too numerous to particularize.”22Neal, “American Painters,” 46. In part, he was responding to the proliferation of botanical and still-life prints that demanded the presence of a still-life picture in every home of refinement. The growing popularity of abundant displays of fruit and flowers had also spawned a number of painting techniques that circulated in amateur circles, including an art primarily practiced by women and known at the time as either Poonah painting, deriving from a type of brush associated with Poonah, India, or Oriental tinting, because of a Chinese technique of painting with stencils. Today it is known as theorem painting.
This type of still life was executed with the use of stencils—theorems—on paper or velvet. It was one of a number of ladies’ ornamental arts that relied on earlier techniques that were once the sole domain of the decorative painter. Stenciling was a well-established and respected method of ornamentation used in a variety of applications, from interior painting on walls and floor carpets to the embellishment of furniture, objects, and wares. It was not until it was applied to wall-hung art in the form of theorem painting that stenciling earned utter derision as an art requiring no talent. Its mechanical nature was at once deplored and extolled in such instruction manuals as The Artist, or, Young Ladies’ Instructor in Ornamental Painting, Drawing, & c (1835).23B. F. Gandee, The Artist, or, Young Ladies’ Instructor in Ornamental Painting . . . and Manufacturing . . . Articles for Fancy Fairs (London: Chapman and Hall, 1835), 126–62. This manual took the form of a conversation among a mother, daughter, and the cousin who is employed to teach the young girl a variety of arts for the benefit of contributing to fancy fairs. In the chapter on Oriental tinting, “Mamma” mentions the poor reputation held by an art that is accomplished merely by “cutting out holes in pieces of paper and then scrubbing a quantity of colour through them without any more care than a mere novice will at once bestow.” Cousin Charlotte disabuses her of this concern, pointing out that “This art may be viewed as a study of light, shade, and colour, but not of form; and when the form has once been obtained, the expedition with which the shade and colour are put on is certainly a recommendation.”24Gandee, The Artist, 128, 129–30. Nevertheless, the instructions were complex, demanding, and time-consuming, from numbering each tiny element of the composition to be copied, preparing the paper with oil and varnish, cutting and registering multiple stencils, one for each color, and even preparing the paints. The technique of pouncing, or dabbing dry powdered pigment through the hollow-cut stencil using a stiff bristle brush, required practice to give clarity and modulation to the form, and details such as veins in leaves were drawn with a fine brush.
Still Life with Fruit from around 1830 is an example of the subtle effects that could be achieved in the hands of a skilled practitioner. The transparency of the vase, the careful toning and mottling of the rounded forms of the fruit, and the balanced composition indicate a level of experience on the part of the unidentified artist. The use of stencils is betrayed by the hard, defined edge of each element, produced as the color-laden brush hit against the inside cut pattern. Although the copy print on which this composition is based has not yet been identified, the paper itself retains a stamp from the storied company of Thomas De La Rue (1793–1866), a Guernsey-born London manufacturer. This helps to date the watercolor sometime between around 1820 and 1828–32, when De La Rue turned his interests primarily to printing playing cards.25Simon Wintle, “Printing of Playing Cards,” The World of Playing Cards, last updated February 24, 2011, http://www.wopc.co.uk/cards/printing; Adam Wintle, “Thomas de la Rue: A Brief History of De la Rue’s Playing Cards,” The World of Playing Cards, last updated November 5, 2018, http://www.wopc.co.uk/delarue/index. Coincidentally, until De La Rue introduced letterpress printing, playing cards were hand stenciled and colored in watercolors, similar to theorem painting.
~
Description: Still-Life with Fruit Theorem Painting (with frame)
Still Life with Fruit Theorem Painting, ca. 1830
Stenciled watercolor on paper
Framed: 20½ × 24½ in.
Stamped: “De La Rue & Co Extra London,” a London-based paper maker
2016.25.100
Instructions in the art of Poonah painting were advertised in La Belle Assemblée as early as 1817 and continued to be offered in manuals throughout the nineteenth century.26La Belle Assemblée; Being Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, n.s., 1817. See also London Examiner, April 29, 1821, 272. As late as 1898, author William Makepeace Thackeray derided Poonah painting as a “rank villainous deception,” showing that it was an art still being practiced. Its popularity and longevity may lie in the long lineage of association between women and botanical studies, both scientific and artistic. Flowers and fruit had figured in needlework since at least the fifteenth century, based on illustrations in herbals and needlework pattern books. Baskets of flowers and fruit were common motifs in pictorial needlework, samplers, bed rugs, quilts, hearth rugs, and also in watercolor accomplishments acquired as part of a girl’s education.27The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits (London: Vizetelly, Branston, and Co., 1829) gives an idea of the full range of refinements necessary in order for a young woman to be considered truly accomplished. The chapters comprise moral deportment, botany, minerology, conchology, entomology, embroidery, writing, archery, dancing, music, and the ornamental arts, among others, calling to mind this passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.” These included original and copied compositions painted on furniture, boxes, hand screens, reticules, and albums. Botany was considered especially appropriate for the feminine sensibility, and, as a theological basis underlay much of the early consideration of natural history, it was morally apt as well. Botanical studies were offered as a regular course in a girl’s academic education, and some of the standard textbooks were written by women such as Almira Hart Phelps (1793–1884), whose Familiar Lectures on Botany went through multiple printings from 1829 to 1869.
Still Lifes and American Bounty
As the nineteenth century progressed, opulent still lifes had little to do with “humble truths,” as William H. Gerdts termed the early American still life in his seminal study, and instead assumed significance as a metaphor for American bounty and consumerism.28William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterworks of American Still-Life, 1801–1939 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1981). By this time, the interior organization of homes had expanded to include specialized private and public spaces, and rooms dedicated to taking meals. “Dining room pictures,” in the form of original oil paintings or brilliantly colored chromolithographs, displayed spectacular towers of fruit and flowers overflowing their vases, baskets, and other vessels, and spilling onto a dining table or other surface. A large and unusual example in the Fielding Collection is the highly stylized Still Life with a Basket of Fruit, Flowers, and Cornucopia, painted around 1860, probably in New York City. There is no illusionistic space; each form is sharply delineated and heavily shaded in black. Flowers and fruit stack vertically on the canvas against an undifferentiated background. Small flowers painted onto the vase metamorphose into real flowers inside the vase; there is only a mere indication of a table edge, with fruits perilously close to falling off.
~
Description: Still Life with a Basket of Fruit, Flowers, and Cornucopia by Proctor, Joseph
ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH PROCTOR (ACTIVE NEW YORK CITY AND STATE)
Still Life with a Basket of Fruit, Flowers, and Cornucopia
Mid-nineteenth century
Oil on canvas
46 × 48 in.
L2015.41.171
The painting is one of three strikingly similar still lifes, suggesting a common source for the compositions, though differences in technique and spatial manipulation indicate that two artists were at work. The still life has generally been attributed to Joseph Proctor, an African American artist born in Maryland in 1786; he married Sophia Plater, also born in Maryland, in Washington, D.C., in 1814.29District of Columbia, Marriage Records, 1810–1953, Ancestry.com. This attribution is based on oral history of a similar signed example whose present location is not known. Their whereabouts are not known until 1850, when Joseph and Sophia appear in the New York City Federal Census with a seven-year-old named George Stewart, born in New York City, as part of their household.30Year: 1850; Census Place: New York Ward 8 District 1, New York, New York; Roll: M432_541; Page: 119B; Image: 245. Proctor’s occupation is listed as “artist” or “painter,” which is how he characterized himself in the New York City directories at various addresses on Mercer, Laurens (now West Broadway), and Elizabeth Streets in Lower Manhattan from 1851 through 1856, then again from 1858 through 1862.31Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, “New York City directory,” New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e669fcd0-52b8-0134-cae4-00505686a51c. Little George is no longer listed in the 1860 census, suggesting that he died in the intervening years. After 1860, the family is no longer to be found in the New York City census records or directories.
~
Description: Fruit and Flowers
Fruit and Flowers
Mid-nineteenth century
Oil on canvas
26⅜ × 41 5/16 in.
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, GIFT OF EDGAR WILLIAM AND BERNICE CHRYSLER GARBISCH,
1966.13.7
Despite the bright colors of the fruit and flowers, a somber palette casts a melancholy pall on the composition, relating it to the early Dutch tradition of vanitas that used the still life as a contemplation on the certainty of death. The bouquet includes flowers that betoken mourning, such as morning glories and forget-me-nots; a goldfinch, sometimes associated with resurrection, perches meaningfully on a bunch of purple grapes, recalling its presence in another type of still life represented in the Fielding Collection, the posthumous portrait of Cynthia Mary Osborn, painted by Samuel Miller.
~
Description: Portrait of Cynthia Mary Osborn (1834–1841) by Miller, Samuel S.
SAMUEL S. MILLER (1807–1853)
Portrait of Cynthia Mary Osborn (1834–1841), after 1841
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Oil on canvas
49 × 26⅝ in.
L2015.41.170
In a series of articles on the art of painting that appeared in the inaugural issues of Scientific American, the publication he founded in 1845, Rufus Porter wrote that it was “neither necessary nor expedient, in all cases, to imitate nature,” lending credence to John Neal’s plaint.32Jean Lipman, “Rufus Porter 1792–1884,” in American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, ed. Tom Armstrong and Jean Lipman (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), 152. In the hands of the self-taught artist, early American landscape and still-life painting enjoyed a malleability that subscribed to no single convention. The contract between artist and viewer was not always bound to represent literal truth in art or nature but instead held a deeper truth: a growing consensus of American identity rooted in a multiplicity of experiences and expressions. This new model of unity deriving from diversity was an experiment, one that would, as observed in 1837, ultimately be judged by the “aggregate formed from the culture of individual minds.”33G. V. H. Forbes, “Female Education,” The Ladies’ Garland 1, no. 5 (July 15, 1837): 75.
 
Stacy C. Hollander is the former Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, Chief Curator, and Director of Exhibitions, American Folk Art Museum, New York.
 
1     John Neal, “American Painters—and Painting,” Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, n.s., no. 1 (July 1829): 46–47. »
2     Robert Boodey Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, from the Year 1116 to the Year 1880, Made Profitable and Exemplified by Many a Lesson of Life (Lowell, Mass.: G. M. Elliott, 1880), 77, http://books.google.com/books?id=7fQZAQAAMAAJ»
3     Neal, “American Painters,” 47. In deriding the work of the ornamental painter, Neal refers to typical products of their artistry that satisfied a variety of purposes, including fire buckets, such as those in the Fielding Collection, and “looking-glass tablets,” rectangular mirrors that were ornamented with reverse-painted glass panels at the top showing landscapes, classical figures, and urns of flowers. The same ornamental painter might paint militia standards, the insignia associated with specific branches of the military, for a variety of purposes, including parade banners, flags, or oil on canvas to hang on a wall. »
4     A wave of anti–Irish Catholic sentiment swept the eastern United States from the 1830s to the 1850s. One nativist group opposed to Catholics and the Irish who immigrated to the United States during the potato famine was a secret society called the Know-Nothings. The paintings depict a violent attack on Bath’s Old South Church, which had been sold to Catholics, after a crowd of more than two thousand had attended night rallies over several days, listening to harangues against Catholics and foreigners. John Hilling, an English-born local sign-and housepainter, was probably an eyewitness to the event because he was also a firefighter in Bath and may have been called to the scene. »
5     John Neal, “Landscape and Portrait-Painting,” Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, n.s., no. 3 (September 1829): 113. »
6     Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1832), 243, https://archive.org/details/domesticmannersoootroliala»
7     Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The Beginnings of American Landscape Painting,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 11, no. 3 (1952): 93–99 at 93, 94, doi:10.2307/3258297. »
8     Nina Fletcher Little, “Recently Discovered Paintings by Winthrop Chandler,” Art in America 36 (April 1948): 81–97. Chandler painted a second overmantel for the Waters residence around the same time, featuring a river view with fort. »
9     “Winthrop Chandler, Limner of Windham County, Connecticut,” Art in America 35 (April 1947): 84, 90, 112–13, 162. Members of the Chandler family were among the founders of Woodstock, Connecticut, where the artist was born. In 1762, several years after his father’s death in 1754, young Winthrop seems to have been apprenticed, perhaps to a Boston decorative painter, as he returned to Connecticut around 1770, where he painted important portraits of Reverend Ebenezer Devotion and his wife, Martha. By 1775, Chandler had a growing family but was experiencing financial difficulties in the unrest of the impending War of Independence. His own family was divided between ardent Loyalists and members who fought on the Patriot side: Chandler carved a coat of arms of Great Britain and Ireland for his cousin Gardiner Chandler in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he painted a portrait in Woodstock of his brother Samuel Chandler, who fought in the Revolutionary War. After 1785, the artist moved to Worcester, where, in addition to painting portraits and overmantels, he kept a shop that offered house painting. He returned to Woodstock, impoverished and sick, near the end of his life. Chandler’s obituary in Worcester’s Massachusetts Spy remembers him as a house painter but notes “many good likenesses on canvas show he could guide the pencil of a limner.” »
10     Little, “Winthrop Chandler,” 91. Whether Chandler was responsible for the imitative painted graining and marbleizing is not known, though he would have possessed the requisite skills to produce decorative finishes. »
11     Sukhdev Sandhu, “The First Black Britons,” BBC Online Archives, last updated February 17, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/black_britons_01.shtml»
12     William Addison Benedict and Hiram A. Tracy, History of the Town of Sutton, Massachusetts, from 1704 to 1876: Including Grafton until 1735; Millbury until 1813; and Parts of Northbridge, Upton and Auburn (Worcester, Mass.: Sanford, 1878), 200, http://books.google.com/books?id=OnMNAQAAIAAJ»
13     For an in-depth consideration of the struggle to make the transition from ornamental painter to easel painter, see Jessica Nicoll, “‘The Real Pioneer of Art in this City’: Charles Codman and the Rise of Landscape Painting in Portland, Maine,” in Charles Codman: The Landscape of Art and Culture in 19th-Century Maine, ed. Caroline Sloat (Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 2002), http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa654.htm»
14     Linda Lefko, email message to author, November 25, 2018. I am grateful to Linda Lefko for sharing her insights into this fireboard, especially as it relates to examples of painted New England wall murals of the period. »
15     Rufus Porter, A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments, Which Are Well Explained, and Warranted Genuine, and May Be Performed Easily, Safely, and at Little Expense (Concord, N.H.: Rufus Porter, 1825), 27–29. »
16     Nina Fletcher Little, American Decorative Wall Painting, 1700–1850 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 66. »
17     Little, American Decorative Wall Painting, 66. »
18     Josslyn Kay Stiner, “Piecing It Together: The Introduction of Delftware Tiles to North America and Their Enduring Legacy in Charleston, South Carolina” (MS thesis, Clemson University, 2010), https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/828»
19     Stiner, “Piecing It Together,” 49–50. The early tiles had monochromatic designs in blue and white or purple and white. Designs might incorporate Chinese- influenced motifs, portraits of famous people, soldiers, or more generic images of fruit and flowers. As tastes changed, these were replaced by landscapes, biblical scenes, and depictions of daily activities. Tiles were especially popular for encasing fireplaces in Dutch homes because they were easy to clean, reflected heat into the room, and provided a measure of fire safety. Delft-type tiles were produced in England as well, introduced through émigré Dutch potters and centered in Liverpool and Bristol. Although the earliest examples are similar to true delftware, these areas developed their own distinctive images and painting techniques over time. »
20     The Columbianum was the first association in the United States to promote the fine arts. It was conceived in Philadelphia by Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin Rush, Joseph Ceracchi, and others as an academy of art and science, and as a platform to exhibit works of art. The first and only exhibition occurred in 1795. »
21     Carol Troyen, “Fruit, Flowers, and Lucky Strikes: The Still Life in American Culture,” in The Art of American Still Life: Audubon to Warhol, ed. Mark D. Mitchell (Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn.: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015), 25. »
22     Neal, “American Painters,” 46. »
23     B. F. Gandee, The Artist, or, Young Ladies’ Instructor in Ornamental Painting . . . and Manufacturing . . . Articles for Fancy Fairs (London: Chapman and Hall, 1835), 126–62. »
24     Gandee, The Artist, 128, 129–30. »
25     Simon Wintle, “Printing of Playing Cards,” The World of Playing Cards, last updated February 24, 2011, http://www.wopc.co.uk/cards/printing; Adam Wintle, “Thomas de la Rue: A Brief History of De la Rue’s Playing Cards,” The World of Playing Cards, last updated November 5, 2018, http://www.wopc.co.uk/delarue/index. Coincidentally, until De La Rue introduced letterpress printing, playing cards were hand stenciled and colored in watercolors, similar to theorem painting. »
26     La Belle Assemblée; Being Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, n.s., 1817. See also London Examiner, April 29, 1821, 272. As late as 1898, author William Makepeace Thackeray derided Poonah painting as a “rank villainous deception,” showing that it was an art still being practiced. »
27     The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits (London: Vizetelly, Branston, and Co., 1829) gives an idea of the full range of refinements necessary in order for a young woman to be considered truly accomplished. The chapters comprise moral deportment, botany, minerology, conchology, entomology, embroidery, writing, archery, dancing, music, and the ornamental arts, among others, calling to mind this passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.” »
28     William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterworks of American Still-Life, 1801–1939 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1981). »
29     District of Columbia, Marriage Records, 1810–1953, Ancestry.com. This attribution is based on oral history of a similar signed example whose present location is not known. »
30     Year: 1850; Census Place: New York Ward 8 District 1, New York, New York; Roll: M432_541; Page: 119B; Image: 245. »
31     Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, “New York City directory,” New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e669fcd0-52b8-0134-cae4-00505686a51c»
32     Jean Lipman, “Rufus Porter 1792–1884,” in American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, ed. Tom Armstrong and Jean Lipman (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), 152. »
33     G. V. H. Forbes, “Female Education,” The Ladies’ Garland 1, no. 5 (July 15, 1837): 75. »
In Imitation of Nature: Landscape and Still-Life Painting in Early America
Previous chapter Next chapter