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.