1835-1845

Fireboard

This fireboard, made to block a fireplace during the summer months, may have matched other interior painting in a house near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Itinerant fancy painters produced this kind of merry decoration, moving swiftly with repeated dabs of the brush. In 1846, a handbook for mural painters recommended such work: "There are a great variety of beautiful designs, which are easily and quickly produced by the brush, and which exceed nature itself in picturesque brilliancy, and richly embellish the work, though not in imitation of anything."