Painterly Views: Artists, Architecture, and the Landscape

PAINTERLY VIEWS:

Artists, Architecture, and the Landscape

by RICHARD C. NYLANDER Curator Emeritus, Historic New England

Portrait of a Man, John Greenwood. Boston, c.1750, oil on canvas, 55 x 43½ inches. Gift in memory of Lawrence Park.

From its beginnings in 1910, preserving this region’s architectural heritage has been central to Historic New England’s mission. In addition to its collection of historic buildings, architectural drawings, and photographs, a less well-known collection presents another view of the region’s architecture. It comprises paintings, watercolors, and sketches illustrating the mansions, vernacular houses, farms, churches, hotels, mills, and even the fishing shacks that were part of the fabric of the New England landscape. The motivations for creating these works varied—recording a historic landmark, creating a portrait for a house-proud owner, recalling or memorializing a family homestead, capturing an image of a derelict building before it collapsed, or perhaps simply creating a pleasing composition. Some are by professional artists, others by amateurs; some are correct in every detail, others are probably idealized, but all capture something of the New England sense of place. Some of the earliest depictions of New England buildings were painted in the large panels over the fireplaces in eighteenth-century houses and as the backgrounds of early portraits. The landscape vignette that John Greenwood (1727–1792) included in his c. 1750

right John Hancock House, Charles Furneaux. Massachusetts, 1859, oil on canvas, 22½ x 16½ inches. Museum purchase. below Salem Street (Wells-Adams House), Susan Minot Lane. Boston, 1881, oil on canvas, 13 x 16 inches. Museum purchase.

portrait of an unknown man clearly places him in Boston’s North End. The towering steeple belongs to the famed Old North Church. In front of it is an impressive three-story house with a projecting front porch and a rooftop observation deck. Following eighteenth-century conventions in portraiture, the house most likely belonged to the sitter. But who is he? One suggestion is Thomas Newman, who advertised selling imported textiles “at his Dwelling House . . . near the Rev. Dr. Cutler’s Church [Old North].” Certainly, wearing such a richly brocaded waistcoat would suit a merchant dealing in expensive textiles.

Of House and Home

While many buildings were demolished to make way for new structures, others like those in the

Venerable Abodes

In the late nineteenth century “ancient” buildings like the one Greenwood depicted appealed to artists and antiquarians alike because of their great age, their character, and the stories they could tell. And none in Boston were more appealing than the relics found in the North End. Edward Griffin Porter in his Rambles in Boston, New England (1887) called the WellsAdams House on Salem Street the “largest and most complete example, both in front and rear, of a wooden dwelling of the seventeenth century, remaining in Boston.” In 1881 Susan Minot Lane (1832–1893) chose to paint the rear of the building, which Porter called “the most picturesque part of it” having “all the features of an old New England farm-house.” The painting is one of a series Lane made of North End houses in their declining years, before they were swept away a decade later for new construction in this rapidly changing section of the city.

The Hancock House has become one of Boston’s most recognized eighteenth-century buildings. Although razed in 1863, its image has been perpetuated in photographs, engravings, ceramic tiles, and calendars as the story of the attempts to preserve it continues into our own time. When the granite house was built in 1737 on the crown of Beacon Hill, it was surrounded by open fields. This painting by Charles Furneaux (1835–1913) illustrates how drastically the landscape had changed as land became more valuable and the city encroached. A typical brick Boston bowfront house now appears behind the house and the golden dome of the State House can be seen through the tree on the right. Furneaux was a drawing instructor in the Boston area who later went to Hawaii and became well known for his paintings of volcanoes. The year the Hancock House was demolished, he advertised himself as a “photograph colorist.” Indeed, this painting appears to copy many of the details of one particular photograph of the building, even to the window on the second floor that is just cracked open.

Portsmouth Street Scene, William H. Titcomb. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1854, oil on canvas, 28 x 35f inches. Gift of Ralph May.

street scene in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by William Titcomb (1824–1888) survive as a reminder that some remain vital parts of the urban landscape because they have been repurposed to adapt to changing cycles of desirability and development. The mid-eighteenthcentury gambrel-roofed Purcell House in the center became a boarding house soon after the death of the original builder. When this painting was made in 1854 the house was again a private residence, but half a century later it was threatened, and like many others at the time, was saved by the local historical society. It is known today as the John Paul Jones House after its most famous boarder, the Revolutionary War naval hero. The three-story brick mansion built for merchant Woodbury Langdon in 1793 appears on the right. Converted to a hotel in 1830, it was rebuilt as the elegant Rockingham Hotel after a disastrous fire in 1884 and is now condominiums. The 1845 Gothic Revival Glen Cottage, glimpsed through the trees on the left, has also seen many changes and as of this writing is being converted to condominiums.

Working the Land

New England’s agricultural landscape is well represented in the painting by James J. Sawyer (1813–1888) of Chandler Farm in Pomfret, Connecticut. The 114-acre farm had been passed down through several generations of the same family, each making improvements to the land and buildings. The main house is surrounded by the numerous outbuildings necessary to support every aspect of the farming operation. Wooden fences and stone walls separate gardens, pastures, the orchard, and the family cemetery. More than thirty different animals inhabit the place. While the painting depicts a successful mid-nineteenth-century farm, it may be a romanticized view. A somewhat enigmatic entry in a Chandler genealogy states that the red house with the diamond-paned windows had been “recently rebuilt in imagination” by a descendant, suggesting that what Sawyer painted may have been based on a memory of an earlier house on the site and not what he actually saw in 1858.

These are but a few of the paintings of houses of different periods in Historic New England’s collection. To see more, visit HistoricNewEngland.org, click on the Explore tab, and select Collections. You can search for “houses” or “buildings” in the Art category. You will be surprised by what you discover.

Chandler Farm, James J. Sawyer. Pomfret, Connecticut, 1858, oil on canvas, 41 x 55 inches. Gift of Mary B. Holt.