Unidentified artist
Eighteenth century

Overmantel from the Reverend Joseph Wheeler House, about 1787–93

Description
The Wheeler overmantel features three individually delineated properties and, on the right side of the image, a tightly compressed town center. The two-story, cream-colored house at the far left has two chimneys, a large burgundy front door, and a smaller door of the same color on the right side. The front door opens onto a yard surrounded by a decorative lattice fence. The side door leads into an open yard; the back corner of that side of the house abuts a wooden wall and a barn, both vertically clad with gray barn boards. The wall has three doors mounted with large strap hinges. The barn is nearly as tall as the house and has two large doors, also fixed with strap hinges. A split-rail fence encloses a U-shaped pasture that extends in front and to the right of the barn, behind the house and barn, and to the left of the house; it joins the ornamental fence in the front yard.

The next house over—yellow, with a hipped roof and central chimney—is obviously the focal point of the painting: it is placed near the center, is larger than the others, and is moved forward in the pictorial space. Despite significant paint loss, it is possible to see such features as dentil molding at the cornice, a pedimented entrance with an arched door, and quoins to simulate block construction at the corners. To the left are three smaller structures: a single-story yellow building with two burgundy doors (painted to match the main house) at the left and right ends of the facade and a central chimney; a smaller gray barn behind this yellow building; and a tiny yellow building with a cupola between the barn and the main house.

The third house from the left is also a two-story yellow dwelling with a pitched roof and central chimney. The burgundy front door is framed in white and opens onto a yard surrounded by a white lattice fence with a high front gate. To the left and behind the house is a barn.

At right is a dense cluster of dwellings painted in various shades of red, blue, yellow, and brown, with a white church steeple in the middle. Stretched across the front of the picture plane is a row of trees, including one stump in front of the town center at right. There are two smaller groves of trees—one behind the town and another, perhaps seedlings, to the left and behind the freestanding house on the right. The dark-green grass stretches behind the houses and town in gently rolling contours. Behind this area is another series of rolling hills, painted in a lighter green, followed by a third set of hills in blue-gray; this succession of colors is meant to suggest depth. Paint losses in the buildings reveal a dark-green first layer, demonstrating that the houses were painted over the first field of green grass. The sky consists of a creamy pink that shifts to a pale blue and then a medium blue at the top of the image. Several horizontal clouds, ranging from cigar shapes to puffy hillocks that echo the contours of the land, are modulated from dark gray on the bottom to light gray in the middle to white on top.

Biography
Joseph Wheeler, who commissioned this overmantel, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on March 18, 1735/36.1 He graduated from Harvard College in 1757.2 Wheeler then moved to Weston, Massachusetts, where he taught school and studied divinity with the Reverend Samuel Woodward.3 In 1759 he was ordained the minister for the church in the central Massachusetts town of Harvard. As part of his compensation, Wheeler was given the substantial sum of 1,000 pounds, which enabled him to purchase forty-five acres and erect a house.4 On October 21, 1761, he married Mary Greenleaf of Bolton; they had eleven children.5 Wheeler was a popular minister, but when his health failed in 1768, a council of six local churches dismissed him. When his dismissal was announced in a Boston newspaper, the church council took care to declare that "his Moral & Ministerial Character are without Exception." 6 He continued to preach on occasion; in 1771 the future U.S. president John Adams noted that he had heard Wheeler on the pulpit in Worcester.7 Wheeler made a second career for himself as a farmer and as the leading storekeeper in the town of Harvard; he was first licensed as a retailer in 1771 and operated a store until 1783.8

A patriot during the Revolution, Wheeler became involved in local, county, and state government. In 1773 he was a member of the town’s first Committee of Correspondence.9 Wheeler served as assessor (1771 and 1773), town clerk, and moderator of the regular town meeting in Harvard (1773), and he represented Harvard at the first and third Provincial Congresses in 1774 and 1775.10 In April 1775 Wheeler was among those who responded to the alarm in Lexington.11 That year, he was chosen as Harvard’s representative in the General Court of Massachusetts, serving for a time as speaker pro tem.12 In 1776 he was elected justice of the peace. In addition, he performed occasional service as special justice on the Court of Common Pleas.13 He also served as register of probate for Worcester County, a position he held until his death.14 In 1777 Wheeler was appointed to a committee of Harvard citizens to review the proposed state constitution, and in 1780 he chaired a committee with the same purpose.15

Wheeler moved from Harvard to Worcester, the seat of county government, in 1781.16 He was elected a town selectman in 1783 and appointed to the Committee of Correspondence and Safety.17 He also served as county treasurer.18 His wife died in 1783, and on May 30 of the next year, he wed Marguerita (Olivier) Jennison of Worcester.19 During Shays’ Rebellion, the political unrest that arose in 1786–87 over an excessive tax burden, Wheeler helped restore order in Worcester."20

He died in 1793, and his property and position as register of probate passed to his son Theophilus.21

Analysis
The house that this painting originally decorated was built for Joseph Wheeler in about 1787, while he was serving as Worcester County register of probate. The structure was damaged by two fires in 1883 and demolished in 1885. 22 The overmantel was first described when the house was razed; those items rescued from the house included "the panels over the fire places, on one of which is a drawing of Main Street made many years ago, but now defaced."23 The painting was a gift to the Worcester Art Museum from Charles A. Aiken, an artist. His mother, Henrietta L. P. Aiken (née Wheeler), a great-granddaughter of the Reverend Wheeler, had had the panel removed from the house. In a letter to the museum, Mr. Aiken wrote:

The panel painting had never been seen by my mother, but she had been told as a child by her mother that there was a picture under the white paint, and, as children we often amused ourselves by tracing the dim outlines of trees and houses, appearing as slight irregularities on the white surface.24

John D. Smith, a local antiquarian, restored the painting.

The Wheeler overmantel demonstrates that artists who created such landscapes often combined literal transcriptions of actual places with elements that were either stylized or imaginary. For example, the trees lining the street here appear to be stylizations to suggest an orderly thoroughfare in a prosperous town, rather than a representation of plantings in Worcester at the end of the eighteenth century. As a young minister in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, Wheeler had been impressed by a similar landscape feature on the property of his predecessor: "Fronting the house that was built by Rev. Mr. [John] Seccomb is supposed to be the longest row of elm trees in New-England, set in exact order, and leading directly toward the meetinghouse."25 This element of the overmantel also resembles the way trees were designed in embroidered samplers of the time. Such samplers occasionally served as source material for decorative painters.26 Similarly, the cluster of buildings at right reflects a hieratic division of space found in samplers between the featured property of the owner and the rest of the town.27

Figure 1. Photograph of the Reverend Joseph Wheeler House, about 1880, object file, Worcester Art Museum.

The featured estate in this overmantel is clearly supposed to be that of Joseph Wheeler, who in 1784 paid 200 pounds for one-and-a-half acres of land in Worcester.28 That property was situated on the east side of what was then called the County (or Country) Road and is today known as Main Street. On his lot, he built a house, a store and probate office, and a barn, which are represented in the painting as the second cluster of buildings from the left.29At his death in 1793, his property on Main Street was listed in the probate record as "Homestead consisting of about 1 1/4 Acres of land & buildings------------------------------£580.0.0." The appendages to the house were listed as "the New Office & New addition to the House."30 The dwelling is the most prominent structure in this group; it was photographed nearly a century after it was built looking very much as it does in the painting (fig. 1).31 The house was two stories high, had a large central chimney, a hipped roof, and at least nine rooms: a kitchen, a keeping (or sitting) room, a parlor, and a bedroom downstairs; and, upstairs, five bedchambers and a garret. The facade featured Federal symmetry and dentil moldings along the roofline and above the windows and door. The main entrance was a paneled door in an archway framed with pilasters, which was in turn framed by larger pilasters and pedimented. The ends of the house were decorated with quoins, which were alternating long and short wooden blocks that simulated stone construction.

Figure 2. Seth Wetmore parlor with overmantel and decorative painting, Middletown, Connecticut, 18th century, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund and partial gift of H. Hilliard Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Green.

The overmantel decorated the panel above the fireplace in the Wheelers’ parlor. That room was in the front of the house, to the left of the front door, and was, according to one descendant, about sixteen feet square.32 The fireplace was framed with fifteen "Dutch tiles."33 Other items in the parlor included money scales, china, four japanned salvers, a looking glass, two glass sconces, a tea tray, three flowerpots, a mahogany dining table, a small round table, a square black-walnut table, a mahogany stand, and a glass lantern. A descendant recalled that "two sides of the room [were] wainscoted to the ceiling."34 Unlike Victorian wainscoting, which consists of narrow boards, this description refers to walls that were presumably paneled like those in the Seth Wetmore parlor, now installed in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (fig. 2).

The overmantel was not listed in the probate inventory, and no paintings or other images were listed in the rooms downstairs. The beveled edges of the panel reflect the fact that such paintings were built into the rooms they ornamented, not hung on the wall. As mentioned, Henrietta Aiken had the panel removed from the parlor when the house was torn down.

Probably, the houses depicted on either side of the Wheeler property belonged to Thomas Lynde (left) and Daniel Heywood (right); Wheeler’s above-noted 1784 deed thus identifies the owners of the adjoining lots.35 To the right the artist has compressed a town center, which appears to be more a conceptual than an actual representation of Worcester in the late eighteenth century. At the heart of this cluster of buildings, however, is depicted the distinctive steeple of the First Parish (or Old South) Church, where Wheeler owned a pew. That church also is seen in Ralph Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill.

Notes
1. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 234.

2. Wheeler’s master’s thesis consisted in a negative response to the question, "An Separationibus Pastorum a Populis suis, ob Prejudicia irrationalia, Religionis Emolumentum promoveatur?" Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 234.

3. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 234.

4. Ibid., 235; Worcester History 1879, I, 560; Nourse 1894, 195.

5. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, XIV, 235; Wheeler 1903, 370; Bouley 1964, 553.

6. The church leaders noted that, due to Wheeler’s failing health, the congregation was "deprived not only of his publick Ministry, but likewise in a great measure of his private Instructions, Visiting the Sick, attending funerals, catechizing children, and Baptizing Infants." Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 236. Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, August 29, 1768.

7. Adams "heard Mr. Wheeler, late minister of Harvard, atWorcester, all day." John Adams diary, June 2, 1771, as quoted in Dresser 1972, 10.

8. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 236; Nourse 1894, 438, 441.

9. Nourse 1894, 198, 306.

10. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 236–37; Nourse 1894, 304, 311–12.

11. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors, XVI, 1907, 979.

12. Wheeler 1903, 370; Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 237; Nourse 1894, 415.

13. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 238; Nourse 1894, 423.

14. Nourse 1894, 198, 417.

15. Ibid., 123, 125.

16. Wheeler 1903, 361.

17. Worcester Records 1882, 428.

18. Worcester History 1879, I, 560; Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 238.

19. Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 238.

20. Ibid.

21. Massachusetts Spy (Worcester), February 14, 1793; Columbian Centinel (Boston), February 20, 1793.

22. Charles A. Aiken to Louisa Dresser, April 8, 1954, object file, Worcester Art Museum.

23. Wheeler Mansion 1885, 2.

24. Aiken to Dresser.

25. Joseph Wheeler to a friend (correspondent name not given), as quoted in Sibley and Shipton, XIV, 1968, 235.

26. The collector and historian of early decorative painting Nina Fletcher Little suggests that embroiderers borrowed from print sources and that decorative painters borrowed from both prints and samplers. Little 1952, 24.

27. Huish 1970, 9; Ring 1993, I, 156, 163.

28. Nathaniel and Hannah Heywood to Joseph Wheeler, April 28, 1784. Worcester County, Register of Deeds, book 92, p. 410.

29. Wheeler sold the northern portion of the property, including the "Store & Probate Office" and half of the barn to his son Theophilus in 1787. When the house was demolished in 1885, the construction date of the dwelling that the overmantel originally decorated was given as 1787. Joseph Wheeler to Theophilus Wheeler, March 24, 1787, Worcester County, Register of Deeds, book 101, p. 416. Wheeler Mansion 1885, 2.

30. Probate inventory for Joseph Wheeler, after November 10, 1794, Worcester County, Register of Probate, Series A, case no. 63434.

31. Aiken to Dresser.

32. Wheeler 1903, 378.

33. Ibid; and Joseph Wheeler probate inventory.

34. Wheeler 1903, 378.

35. In 1783 Nathan Patch bought a parcel of land from Daniel Heywood, paying 200 pounds for about three and one-half acres. That parcel abutted the Wheeler property, demonstrating that Wheeler owned land on Main Street prior to the deed recorded in 1784. Daniel Heywood, Esq,. to Nathan Patch, yeoman, May 10, 1783.

Tax-valuation lists for 1784 confirm that Lynde and Heywood each owned a house and barn in that year. Tax Valuation Lists, Massachusetts General Court, Worcester, 1784. An antiquarian publication incorrectly identifies the buildings as houses belonging to Timothy Bigelow, the Lynde family, and the Wheeler family and finally a tavern belonging to the Heywood family. But clearly, only three, not four, properties are represented. Worcester Houses 1919, 5.