Description:
The fireplace, center of family life in early New England, served as a source of inspiration for both professional decorative painters and amateur artists. In the 1700s, paneled fireplace walls often featured a painted landscape above the mantel. After 1790, painted fireboards (also called chimney boards) became popular for covering the unused fireplace in summer, preventing soot from entering the room. Common subjects for fireboard paintings included potted flowers, animals, historical events, and land- and seascapes, often copied from a print or book illustration. While some of the landscapes were imaginary, others were based on direct observation and rank among America's earliest town views. Fireboard with a painting of "Irish Scenery" by Catherine Wells (1805-1891) done in watercolor on paper and mounted on wood, which depicts ruins with mountains, woods, lake, sailboat, people, etc., framed by strips of period wallpaper. This was typical of work done by young girls at finishing school. The daughter of Quartus Wells (1764-1824) and Rhoda (Benjamin) Wells of Deerfield, Catherine attended Deerfield Academy in 1826 where Jane Pigeon (1793-1842) taught her the art of freehand watercolor landscape painting using a delicate stipple technique worked with a fine brush within a line drawing. This method was similar to that of embroidered pictures wrought within inked designs. Jane Pigeon herself had probably learned this painting method as a Deerfield Academy student under Jerusha Mather Williams in 1808. Catherine probably based her design, “Irish Scenery,” on an engraved print. Popular writers such as Mrs. Almira Lincoln Phelps (once a female academy teacher) particularly approved of subject matter that included architectural ruins as appropriately poetic for a young woman’s imagination. In her 1840 book, "The Fireside Friend, or Female Student," Phelps opined: "The decayed tree, the ruined building…all present to the artist, objects, which please in contemplation, and which [s]he delights to copy. …Objects [such as ruins], which to others, may be disagreeable, give rise to the finest productions of the artist. Wherever the marks of time appear, [s]he is delighted to seize upon, and immortalize, the ruins. The decayed cottage…or the dilapidated church or castle, afford more picturesque objects…than the neat farm-house, or the modern edifice." Catherine executed this painting probably to mount in a frame and hang on a wall. Later in the 19th century it was glued to wooden boards and framed with wallpaper borders to create a fireboard meant to close a fireplace opening when the fireplace was seasonally out of use. Catherine and her sister, Rhoda Benjamin Wells (1798-1883), became milliners and ran a thriving business out of their father's home. In 1849, Catherine Wells married Henry King Hoyt (1810-1863) of Deerfield, who the previous year had demolished the "Old Indian House" to build a new home for Catherine. Perhaps the fireboard was made for use in this new home. Wells' picture, either chosen by her or by an instructor, was probably based on an 18th-century engraved print, such as those by the British designer Robert Adam.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+69.0552 |
