Unidentified artist Eighteenth century Landscape (View of a Town), after 1753

Description
This overmantel depicts a lively, prosperous, densely settled town on the left and a quiet, bucolic scene on the right. The contrasting halves are separated by a body of water on which boats, ranging in size from rowboats to merchant vessels, move toward the distance. The town contains colorful two- and three-story houses, a church, and a long two-story structure that may be a public or commercial edifice. The houses are painted white, red, blue, yellow, and brown. In a wedge-shaped clearing in front of the town are several figures: a man and woman strolling toward the water, a man standing among a line of trees, and another man playing with a dog near the riverbank. There seem to be two more faces to the right of the man and dog, but their bodies are no longer visible. The bank is lined with tall trees that appear smaller as the water winds into the distance; smaller trees are scattered throughout the town. Two gaps in the trees open the view to a clearing in the foreground and a church, which is the largest and most prominent building in the image, as well as to a row of houses near the water’s edge. The church has a tall bell tower and steeple, surmounted by a weather vane with a rooster in profile. The corner of that building is decorated with quoins, an architectural feature designed to simulate stone-block construction. Tiny rolling hills are visible through a gap in the tree line along the horizon.

The water traces a diagonal from the bottom-left corner to just right of the center of the painting. Starting in the foreground and moving toward the distance, the eight boats on the water include one that carries three barrels and is rowed by a man; a slightly bigger boat bearing at least two faded figures and flying a single sail and a pennant; a larger vessel, carrying four men, powered by a larger sail and sporting two red pennants; and a merchant vessel flying four sails, three red pennants, and three red flags with a cross. A rowboat is docked to the right. Next is a small boat, nearly faded from view, with a canopy or cabin at its center. Near the bridge is another rowboat, with cargo at its center and a man rowing at the stern. The sails and pennants indicate that the wind is blowing gently from the left foreground to the right distance, the same direction in which the water flows. The slightly arched bridge rests on five piers; it has red sides and a drawbridge mechanism, beyond which is another single-masted vessel. Two groups of swans—one along the bottom edge near the center of the composition and another in the middle distance beside the left bank—add a picturesque note to the scene.

An irregular contour along the right bank of the river forms a small inlet. In the foreground, near the water, two women stand at either end of a bench that contains the resting figure of a man whose right arm is supported by a cane. The woman in front of the bench is feeding the swans. To the right of this trio stand a man and woman in conversation. The man gestures widely with his left hand and rests his right hand on a walking stick; the woman’s hands are folded in front of her. Two more figures dance near a short dock on the other side of the inlet. To the right is a red gable-end building with two arches visible. Slightly behind and to the left of this structure are several animals, perhaps deer, facing the water. There are many more trees on this side of the water, and they appear to be placed naturally; on the town side, however, the trees are arranged in neat rows and carefully organized groups. The sky is rose-colored near the horizon, shifting toward blue at the top.

Although most of the overlapping elements were simply painted on top of one another, a hard contour line traces the two riverbanks and suggests that the composition was thoughtfully designed before it was produced. Contour lines were drawn to delineate the buildings, bridge, hills, and tree trunks, and these areas were then filled in with solid fields of color. Various light and dark areas—in the hills and church bell tower, for instance—convey a sense of volume. The figures were drawn on top of the landscape features, which are now visible as pentimenti. The renderings of the people reflect a limited understanding of anatomy but also demonstrate an ambitious effort to capture various poses and actions. The tree foliage was applied with a sponge, a technique that eighteenth-century decorative painters used to create a texture that is distinct from the parts done with a brush.

Biography
The early owners of this panel are unknown. The house from which it was removed remains unidentified, although it presumably came from central Massachusetts because its first known ownership was by a Worcester salvage company.¹

Analysis
This overmantel demonstrates how eighteenth-century American decorative painters composed individual paintings from multiple sources, including imported prints, personal experience, and the imagination. Perspective views of towns were common subjects overmantels of that time and in engravings published in periodicals such as Massachusetts Magazine, New-York Magazine, and the Columbian Magazine. Town views tended to portray bustling places, often showing the lively commerce of port cities such as Boston, Salem, and New York. The community featured here appears to idealize a New England town, denser than any existing inland settlement in Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century. The image probably contains buildings from an actual place and projects its imagined growth into a flourishing town. The artist appropriately placed a single meetinghouse at the heart of the community. Boats of various sizes move commodities (suggesting a thriving commercial trade), and well-dressed citizens converse, dance, play with pets, and enjoy other leisure-time activities. The painting thus contrasts work and leisure, as well as town and country.

Whereas the town on the left may reflect a combination of observation and imagination, the perspective view and the right side of the painting derive in large part from a mid-eighteenth-century engraving of Stowe (fig. 1). Built in Buckinghamshire for Viscount Cobham beginning in 1720, Stowe was the model of picturesque, naturalistic landscape design and was the most famous English country estate of the eighteenth century.² It was developed by various distinguished architects and landscape gardeners, including Charles Bridgeman, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, William Kent, and Sir John Vanbrugh, and was the first English country house to which an entire guidebook was devoted: Benton Seeley’s A Description of the Gardens of Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow (1744). Stowe also was celebrated in the 1720s in Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island, in a series of engravings after drawings done about 1734 by the French artist Jacques Rigaud, and in another tour book by George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow (1750). Bickham largely plagiarized from Seeley and other sources. The estate remained a highlight of English guidebooks for the rest of the century, featured, for example, in A New Display of the Beauties of England (1776). Cobham’s nephew Gilbert West (1703–1756) paid tribute to the estate in his long poem Stowe, the Gardens of the Right Honourable Richard Viscount Cobham (1732), as did William Gilpin in his essay "A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire" (1748).

	Figure 1. George Bickham after Jean-Baptiste-Claude Chatelain, A View to the Grotto of the Serpentine River in the Alder Grove; from Sixteen Perspective Views...at Stowe, 1753, Special Collections, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. © V & A Picture Library.

The gable-end building on the right side of the painting is also from Bickham’s print of Stowe. Bickham’s guide to the estate comments on the significance of that structure and its setting:

The TEMPLE of Contemplation.

Which is a pleasant Recess, by the Banks of the River; and those Bas-Relievo, Caesars Heads it is adorned with on the Inside, are extremely good ones. And, I think, this Serpentine River, as it is called, is a great Addition to the Beauty of the Place; for Water is of as much Use in Landschape, as Blood is in a Body.⁴

The neoclassicism so evident in the building’s design and ornamentation has been largely obscured in the overmantel. A tree trunk blocks the third arch in the building, and the sculptural reliefs are completely absent. Apparently, the overmantel artist made these and other compositional changes—most notably adding the town and replacing the grotto with the bridge—in order to make the landscape more American than English in character.

Comparison of Worcester’s painting to another overmantel, found in Pennsylvania and clearly by a different artist, demonstrates the popularity that Bickham’s prints of Stowe enjoyed in America.⁵ That painting follows the print source even more closely: that is, the riverbanks are arranged as in the engraving, and the grotto and building at center-right beyond the Temple of Contemplation are retained. Interestingly, the two figures in conversation are nearly alike in both paintings, although distinct from the trio of figures in that part of the 1753 engraving. That similarity suggests that the two overmantels derive from a later edition of the print that remains to be identified. If a common source can be found, it will help refine the date of the Worcester painting.

Notes
1. Worcester and Oxford, Massachusetts, have both been suggested as places of origin for this painting. Little 1952, 134. The antique dealer Charles F. Timmins thought it had been owned by "an old Resident" on Harvard Street in Worcester, perhaps Dr. Samuel Green. Timmins to Louisa Dresser, November 19, 1948.

2. Clarke 1977, i–xiii; Hadfield 1988; Willis 1972; Hunt 1976; Hunt and Willis 1988, 215–27.

3. The print source is surmised in Little 1965, 499, and identified in Gaines 1967, 240. Little also located a print that descended in the family of the artist Mather Brown (1761–1831), perhaps an early effort by him, that represents the identical view of Stowe apparently derived from the same English source. Little 1965, 499.

The 1753 edition of Bickham’s prints was brought to the attention of the author by Stowe expert George Clarke in a letter of May 14, 1999. Those prints were reissued in several editions throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, so it is difficult to identify the precise version from which the American painter of the Worcester’s overmantel was working.

4. Bickham 1750, as quoted in Clarke 1977, 32.

5. Cummings 1952, 316; Little and Little 1969, 14.