Martin Brechall
Child's Prayer of Thanksgiving

ArtistAmerican, 1757–1831, active 1783–1820
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Child's Prayer of Thanksgiving
Date1798
PlaceMaxatawny, Pennsylvania, United States
MediumRed and brown inks on laid paper
DimensionsSheet: 16 × 13 in. (40.6 × 33 cm)
Credit LineThe Bayou Bend Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg
Object numberB.60.41
Non exposé

Explore Further

Department
Bayou Bend
Description

The body of illuminated manuscripts produced by the Pennsylvania Germans, including birth and baptismal certificates, house blessings, child’s blessings, and writing samples, are generically referred to as frakturs. The term is derived from the late broken Gothic script often incorporated by the ministers and schoolmasters who produced them. The earliest, as here, are entirely hand drawn, while later examples include elements of printed design.

Martin Brechall, a Hessian schoolmaster and prolific fraktur artist active in Northampton County between 1783 and about 1820, produced many signed frakturs, most of them birth certificates. This example is extremely rare in that it represents a child’s prayer of thanksgiving for good parents, rather than the more common child’s blessing. It also seems to be a very early example of the artist’s work. Brechall’s pride in his penmanship is evident in the variety of scripts employed in the text. The vertical format relates this piece to religious texts, as opposed to the horizontal one used for the early birth certificates. 

Related examples: Weiser and Heaney 1976, no. 62, 311–20. 

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.


Provenance[Richard H. and Virginia A. Wood, Baltimore]; purchased by Miss Ima Hogg, 1960; given to MFAH, by 1966.
Exhibition History"The Family" The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston May 29–August 6, 1989

Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Inscribed at bottom: 26 February 1798 / An Philip Stambach / Geschrieben von Martin Brechall Schulmeister in Maxacany
JB watermark

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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